Abstract. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are acidifying the ocean, affecting calcification rates in pelagic organisms, and thereby modifying the oceanic carbon and alkalinity cycles. However, the responses of pelagic calcifying organisms to acidification vary widely between species, contributing uncertainty to predictions of atmospheric CO2 and the resulting climate change. At the same time, ocean warming caused by rising CO2 is expected to drive increased growth rates of all pelagic organisms, including calcifiers. It thus remains unclear whether anthropogenic CO2 emissions will ultimately increase or decrease pelagic calcification rates. Here, we assess the importance of this uncertainty by introducing a dependence of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) production on calcite saturation state (ΩCaCO3) in an intermediate complexity coupled carbon-climate model. In a series of model simulations, we examine the impact of several variants of this dependence on global ocean carbon cycling between 1800 and 3500 under two different CO2 emissions scenarios. Introducing a calcification-saturation state dependence has a significant effect on the vertical and surface horizontal alkalinity gradients, as well as on the removal of alkalinity from the ocean through CaCO3 burial. These changes result in an additional oceanic uptake of carbon when calcification depends on ΩCaCO3 (of up to 270 Pg C), compared to the case where calcification does not depend on acidification. In turn, this response causes a reduction of global surface air temperature of up to 0.4 °C in year 3500. Different versions of the model produced varying results, and narrowing this range of uncertainty will require better understanding of both temperature and acidification effects on pelagic calcifiers. Nevertheless, our results suggest that alkalinity observations can be used to constrain model results, and may not be consistent with the model versions that simulated stronger responses of CaCO3 production to changing saturation state.


The Michigan basin is widely acknowledged to be the archetype among those basins of cratonic interiors whose subsidence is dominated by flexure rather than faulting. Broadly ovate in plan over an area of some hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, with a preserved Phanerozoic sediment thickness exceeding 4 km accumulated during distinct episodes of subsidence over a 500-million year span, the basin is endowed with significant fossil-fuel resources.The basin area is crossed, from north-northwest, by a rift zone filled with mafic igneous rock and great thickness of sedimentary rock resting on Archean and Middle Proterozoic crystallines. Rifting is presumably of Keweenawan age, but the igneous rocks cannot be dated more explicitly than "older than 600 myBP". The ill-defined Grenville Front lies near the eastern basin margin. The basin area, along with the whole of the cratonic interior, suffered intensive erosion before Late Cambrian time when renewed sedimentation began; probably as a northern extension of the Illinois basin-Mississippi Embayment. Basinal subsidence conforming to the present architecture of the Michigan basin began in mid-Ordovician time, to be followed by further pulses of significant downwarp in the Middle and Late Silurian, Middle Devonian, and Middle Mississippian. Minor accumulations of Pennsylvanian, Jurassic, and Pleistocene sediments are preserved; the Pennsylvanian episode appears to have been accompanied by basement faulting during which the greater part of deformation of the basin fill occurred. Each of the major episodes of basinal subsidence is marked by changes in the geometry of the basin, such as changes in the position of the depocenters and degree of confinement of expansion of the basin interior. Episodes of more rapid subsidence of the Michigan basin, times of change in basin geometry, and intervening episodes of stability (commonly accompanied by erosion) are synchronous with similar basins of the North American and other cratonic interiors.


The experimental study of the biological effects of electromagnetic fields requires a well-defined exposure field inside the volume occupied by exposed objects. A good exposure system has to g enerate a controlled electromagnetic field h aving the same magnitude for all biological samples. A shielded exposure system of TEM cell type was built, according to the requirements for biological exposure e xperiments. To allow long-term exposure of vegetal organisms and animals, illumination and natural ventilation were provided inside the exposure system. In the case of animal exposure, the perturbation of the electromagnetic field in the location of a specific animal due to the presence of neighbor animals was eliminated b y using p lexiglas holders. Restraining animals in specific locations inside the TEM cell, planewave exposure conditions are achieved for all exposed animals. The wide band of frequencies that can be coupled to the TEM cell, up to about 400 MHz, makes it versatile and suitable for various types of experiments concerning biological exposure to RF fields.


In situations of peer disagreement there are two kinds of factors that matter. These are the factors internal to the discussion, such as evidence exposed and arguments presented by both sides and there are also factors external to the discussion, also called "independent factors". The external factors include mainly virtues and competences of the participants. There are two main theories about epistemic disagreement, "the steadfast view" and "the conciliationism", and each of them stresses the importance of one group of these factors over the other. This paper is a defense of the greater epistemic significance of independent factors over internal factors. However, it is not a defense of the conciliationism which takes independent factors to be systematically the ultimate arbiter in situations of peer disagreement. The argument in the paper goes like this. Although the steadfast view receives strong intuitive support from two cases presented by Thomas Kelly: "Right and Wrong" and "Wrong and Wronger", I argue that the view is undermined by Timothy Williamson's recent "Very Improbable Knowing" argument. This argument shows that for some basic type of evidence E when S uses it in favor of p, it is very improbable that S knows that S knows that p. Therefore, in situations of peer disagreement, S is unjustified to push her evidence in support of her side. There are arguably some exceptions, e.g. when one claims to have knowledge based on a priori evidence and on holistic evidence, but these are not sufficient to save the day for the steadfast view. In contrast to that, the reflective knowledge of one's first order competences and virtues (i.e. external factors) is not vulnerable by Williamson's argument. One reason for that is because we know about independent factors on the basis of holistic evidence. I claim that our epistemic goal in the face of peer disagreement is to end up on the side that is non-accidentally closer to truth. In accordance with achieving this goal, it is safer to stick to independent factors in resolving peer disagreement situations than to E V I D E N C E V S . V I R T U E S I N E P I S T E M I C D I S A G R E E M E N T 73 follow one's nose concerning first-order evidence disclosed by the opponents. This might seem a counterintuitive result, which makes it worthy of further discussion.


PostcardsNEAR THE START of Iain Sinclair's novel Downriver (1991), on a train out of Fenchurch Street Station bound for Tilbury, the narrator quotes: "And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth." For readers of his previous work - from his books of poems, Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979), to his first novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1988) - this characterization comes as no surprise. Lud Heat explores the energy field produced by Nicholas Hawksmoor's eight London churches, "erected over a fen of undisclosed horrors." As Phil Baker puts it, the disposition of Hawksmoor's churches represents "a sinister occult geometry" that exercises a malevolent influence "that causes violent crime" (2003,: 326, 324, or in Sinclair's own ominous words: "In this air certain hungers were activated that have yet to be pacified." He observes that "The Romans regarded east London not as a place for the living but as a necropolis for the dead" and invokes the Ratcliffe Highway murders and Jack the Ripper. Suicide Bridge takes that exploration further, firmly establishing Sinclair's distinctive territory with its mythography of gangsters and poets. White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, the trilogy's third volume, adds to that mythography the bookdealers and runners and explores the Ripper murders in greater depth: "The zone was gradually defined, the labyrinth penetrated. It was given limits by the victims of the Ripper: the Roebuck and Brady Street to the East, Mitre Square to the West, the Minories to the South, the North largely unvisited" (35). Sinclair's "zone" is not simply topography but a place permeated by historical residues. His contemplation of Dickens and the Marshalsea consciously challenges this: "The past is a fiction that absorbs us. It needs no passport, turn the corner and it is with you" (1988: 63). The spaces of the city are haunted by "the figures of fiction" and by historical figures indistinguishable from fictions. With White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Sinclair completed a trilogy of poetic projects and initiated a new career as a prose writer.The novel revisits London of the 1880s - of Sherlock Holmes's A Study in Scarlet (1886), of Joseph Merrick, "The Elephant Man", and of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1886). In the autumn of 1889, the recently-naturalized British subject, Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski, waiting for a ship, settled into Bessborough Gardens and began his first novel, Almayeris Tolly. In A Personal Record, he describes how he spent this period of enforced idleness, between reading in his Pimilico rooms, looking for work, and in "wanderings about London from West to East and back again" (7, 8). In November, he went to Brussels to be interviewed by the Societe Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du HautCongo, hoping for a captaincy in one of their steamers. When he returned from Africa in 1891, he spent March and part of April in the German Hospital, Dalston, which Downriver circles round, suffering from malaria, rheumatism, and neuralgia, and recovering from the trauma experienced in the Congo. As Sinclair puts it, he was "branded with the mark of what he had witnessed, the future" (172). During the summer, he made trips along the Thames Estuary in a yawl, the Nellie, belonging to his friend Fountaine Hope.When Marlow introduces himself into "Heart of Darkness" with the words "And this also ... has been one of the dark places of the earth" (48), he responds to the primary narrator's evocation of "the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames," with its celebration of "all the men of whom the nation is proud" who had "gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land" (47). He answers this construction of English nationhood and celebration of imperial adventure by returning to the Celtic archipelago nine centuries before the English arrived and invoking the fears and projections of the Roman soldiery as they experience "the utter savagery" of the Thames Valley. …


A scheme for two-dimensional (2D) subwavelength atom localization is proposed, in which the atom is in a four-level tripod configuration and driven by two orthogonal standing-wave lasers. Because of the spatial dependence of atom-field interaction, the spontaneously emitted photon carries information about the position of the atom in standing-wave fields. We exploit this fact to 2D atom localization conditioned on the measurement of spontaneously emitted photon at a particular frequency, and obtain a high precision and resolution in the position probability distribution. Moreover, an improvement by a factor of 2 in the detecting probability of an atom can be achieved by initially preparing the atom in the coherent population trapping state. Qualitatively, the high-precision, high-resolution atom localization can be attributed to the quantum interference effect between competitive multiple spontaneous decay channels.


The Journal of Sustainable Water in the Built Environment presents activity and research developments in water issues, challenges, and opportunities throughout the developed landscape. The scope covers sustainable stormwater management and broader water systems interactions. Subjects include urban stormwater quantity, quality, hydrology, characterization, treatability, and impacts; water harvesting; urban water ecosystem services; sustainable urban watershed management; urban streams; combined sewer overflow/stormwater interactions; urban energy/water interactions; lifecycle analysis; and related policy, implementation, and economics. All papers are encouraged to have design or regulatory implications that are applicable to moving the profession forward.


Born as a result of the community movement of the 1960s, East Wind is an intentional community located in the Missouri Ozarks. East Wind has been extremely successful by any measure. It has flourished for 30 years and its members operate several successful businesses which make the community self‐sufficient. Qualitative research performed at East Wind, including interviews with its members, portrays a society that places significant value on the individual dignity of its members, the achievement of economic justice by a sharing of resources, and emphasis on human relationships in community. In addition to its emphasis on social and economic substantive justice, it seeks to resolve disputes and affect conduct by the practice of restorative justice, thereby enabling the community and the actors to benefit mutually from the process. Restorative justice is part of the community's attempt to provide a healthy living environment for all its members.


Purpose - This paper proposes application of quality engineering in the early phase of environmentally conscious design (Ecodesign). Methodology/approach - Utilizing Kano Model and willingness to pay, it presents a framework for classification of environmental characteristics of products/services (i.e. offers) in two dimensions. The framework is connected to design management, i.e. design itself and external communication, where strategies for companies are given. The integration of the classification and the strategies is applied to three environmental characteristics against Japanese markets. Findings - The classification framework was proved to be effective as it generates much richer implication than other existing methods. In addition, it works well especially for environmental characteristics. Generation of strategies was also found to work effectively. They suggested some potential of using quality-engineering oriented methods/tools to deal with customer perception in the early phase of Ecodesign. Research limitation/implication - The results imply the needs for research on further utilizing quality-engineering approach and methods in the early stage of Ecodesign. This would be effective as how customers perceive offers has been neglected in the research and practice of Ecodesign and the focus of Ecodesign has been rather in its technical aspects. This research, in a broader sense, exists in integration of marketing and design disciplines. Originality/value - This paper has brought light into the arena where customer aspects in Ecodesign are addressed and has proved some potential for quality-engineering approach and method to tackle the aspects.


The purpose of this study was to investigate possible influences of pitch register and dynamic level on vibrato rates and widths of university and high school violin and viola players. Analysis showed that pitch register significantly affected the vibrato rates and widths of the performers. Musicians vibrated 0.32 Hz faster and approximately 26 cents wider during high pitches than during low pitches. Dynamic level also significantly affected vibrato width. Performers increased vibrato width approximately 4 cents in the forte passages when compared to the piano passages. Furthermore, violinists demonstrated a tendency to vibrate slightly faster and wider than violists, and university performers varied their vibrato width to a greater extent between the piano and forte passages than did the high school performers. These results, along with further study, can contribute to the development of a systematic method for teaching vibrato.


Rectangular hopper-rubber (Olynthian-style) and rotary (Pompeian-style) millstones were found, respectively, in the archaeological sites of Monte Bibele (4th–3th century B.C., Etruscan-Celtic Age) and Fossombrone (2nd century B.C.-6th century A.D., Roman Period). All the hopper-rubber millstones from Monte Bibele and three rotary millstones from Fossombrone were made using the leucite phonolite lavas from the same quarries which are located near Orvieto (Vulsini Volcanic District, Roman Volcanic Province; Central Italy). Since these leucite phonolites were also used in the Iron Age (pre-6th century B.C.) to produce small oval saddle-querns, a long continuous period of quarrying and production of millstones is therefore established for the Orvieto centre. Euganean Hills (Na-trachyte), Etna (hawaiite) and Iblean Mounts (tholeiitic basalt) were also identified as additional volcanic source areas for some millstones, mortars and/or worked lavas found at Fossombrone. This strongly supports the existence of a well organized millstone trade from different volcanic areas in the Roman Period.


Anger is an important driver in shaping economic activities, particularly in instances that involve strategic interactions between individuals. Here we test whether anger impairs the capacity to think strategically, and we analyze the implications of our result on bargaining and cooperation games. Accordingly, with a preregistered experiment (Experiment 1), we externally induce anger to a subgroup of subjects following a standard procedure that we verify by using a novel method of text analysis. We show that anger can impair the capacity to think strategically in a beauty contest game. Angry subjects choose numbers further away from the Nash equilibrium, and earn significantly lower profits. A structural analysis estimates that there is an increase in the share of level-zero players in the treated group compared to the control group. Furthermore, with a second preregistered experiment (Experiment 2), we show that this effect is not common to all negative emotions. Sad subjects do not play significantly further away from the Nash equilibrium than the control group in the same beauty contest game of Experiment 1, and sadness does not lead to more level-zero play.


This paper discusses verb-first conditionals (Had I known this, I would have stayed at home) with regard to the hypothesis that the construction developed from a dialogual sequence into a hypotactic structure. While plausible, independent evidence for this scenario has been scarce. An alternative account posits that questions could have been analogized with existing conditional clause types, making it possible for speakers to use questions as conditional protases. The present study assesses these two hypotheses on the basis of present-day corpus data from German and Swedish. Crucial to this approach is the notion that a reanalyzed structure retains aspects of its original source. Put simply, if the protasis of a verb-first conditional developed out of a question, it should retain some question-like characteristics, even after reanalysis. Further, if verb-first conditionals have become grammaticalized more strongly in one language than in another, the less-grammaticalized construction should display more question-like characteristics.


Tourism industry across the globe is one of the fast-growing industries starting from holiday pay package to medical tourism. It was in the last quarter of the 1900's that increased attention was paid to the desirability of holiday with pay. Up to the beginning of 20th century, tourists traveled almost exclusively by rail and steam ship. Since the beginning of 2000s medical tourism also became familiar as days passed on. In Andhra Pradesh, the Tourism Corporation was incorporated during the year 1976 in the name of Travel and Tourism Development Corporation Pvt. Ltd and became a wholly-owned Government company in March, 1980. In the year 1998, the Andhra Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation (APTDC) was a loss-making unit. There was a strong move to even close down the Corporation. In the year 2002–2005, APTDC generated revenues totaling Rs.330 million, making it one of the best State run corporations and now making a strong bid to be the top Tourism Corporation in India. In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyze the Financial Performance of APTDC, using selected financial ratios. The purpose of this paper is to assess the long-term efficiency of the corporation with which its activities are being managed as well as short-term performance in terms of its ability to meet current obligations. The study is carried out for a period of seven (07) years commencing from 2001–02 to 2008–09.


This paper analyses the impacts of ever-larger ships on location choices for new container ports and examines when relocation of a port makes sense. Most ports are located close to cities, but have difficulties expanding. A number of new container ports have been built further away from urban centres, and existing ports may at some point feel the pressure to relocate.


Tests based on regression spline are developed in this chapter for testing nonparametric functions in nonparametric, partial linear and varying-coefficient models, respectively. These models are more flexible than linear regression model. However, one important problem is if it is really necessary to use such complex models which contain nonparametric functions. For this purpose, p-values for testing the linearity and constancy of the nonparametric functions are established based on regression spline and fiducial method. In the application of spline-based method, the determination of knots is difficult but plays an important role in inferring regression curve. In order to infer the nonparametric regression at different smoothing levels (scales) and locations, multi-scale smoothing methods based on regression spline are developed to test the structures of the regression curve and compare multiple regression curves. It could sidestep the determination of knots; mean- while, it could give a more reliable result in using the spline-based method.


How low might be the resource costliness of making signals credible? Using a job market as an example, We build a signaling model to determine the extent to which a transfer from an applicant might replace a resource cost as an equilibrium method of achieving signal credibility. As long as a firm's claim to be hiring for an open position is credible, and profitability of the hiring process per se is limited to an application fee, the firm has an incentive to use the properly calibrated fee to implement a separating equilibrium. Applicant risk aversion does not necessarily discourage a monopsonist potential employer from using an application fee, but a firm hiring in a competitive labor market with risk-averse applicants may prefer a pooling equilibrium, hiring all applicants at their average productivity. Partial extension to a model with third-party assistance (a headhunter or a job board) is possible.


Building large Web sites is similar in many ways to building knowledge and database systems. In particular, by providing a declarative, logical view of a Web site's data and structure, many of a site builder's tasks, such as creating complex sites, modifying a site's structure, and creating multiple versions of a site, are simplified significantly. New systems, such aS STRUDEL, support logical views of Web sites by allowing site builders to construct a site declaratively. In this paper, we address an important problem for site builders: verifying that a Web site's structure conforms to certain constraints. Specifically, we consider the problem of verifying that a Web site created declaratively by STRUDEL satisfies certain integrity constraints, such as 'all pages are reachable from the root' and 'every organization page points to its suborganizations', etc. Our contributions are (1) formulating the verification problem as an entailment problem in a logical setting, and (2) presenting a sound and complete algorithm for verifying large classes of integrity constraints that occur in practice. Our algorithm uses a novel data structure, the site schema, which enables us to identify cases in which the general reasoning problem reduces to a decidable problem.


Sixteen patients with primary breast cancer were studied with a pancarcinoma monoclonal antibody B72.3, an IgG1 molecule directed against tumor-associated glycoprotein (TAG-72) present in several tumors. Five millicuries of 111In was used to label 0.2 mg (six patients), or 2 mg (six patients), or 20 mg using the site-directed bifunctional DTPA method (at carbohydrate moiety). Digital, planar, and SPECT images were obtained at 2, 48, 72 and 96 hr when possible. HAMA levels were obtained before the Mab infusion and at 1, 3, and 6 wk postinfusion. Fourteen of 14 known primary breast lesions were detected by imaging (100% sensitivity). Two fibrocystic lesions were negative. Seven of 14 patients had lymph node metastases by histologic methods, but all were missed by radioimmunoscintigraphy. Tumor uptake of Mab ranged 0.00054%-0.0038% of the ID/g. The tumor-to-normal breast tissue ratio was 4.3 +/- 0.91 (mean +/- s.e.m.). Lymph nodes localization of 111In-B72.3 by tissue analysis was similar for tumor-bearing and normal nodes (0.0039 +/- 0.0023 versus 0.0025 +/- 0.0019). Pharmacokinetics revealed mean plasma half-life of 33.3-41.2 hr for the different doses. There was no statistical difference between any of the pharmacokinetic parameters of different doses. HAMA was positive only in 17% of the patients. The study suggests that this antibody has 100% sensitivity for primary breast cancers, but very poor detection rate of metastatic lesions in axillary lymph nodes; thus making it of questionable value in the initial staging process of this disease.


We derive a general law for the M2 factor of any beam generated by a partially coherent Schell-model source. The fourth power of M differs from its minimum value, attained in the coherent limit, by a term proportional to the second derivative of the modulus of the spectral degree of coherence evaluated for zero argument. Examples are given for cases of practical interest.


The diminishing number of African American teachers in the field of special education continues to be a pervasive problem in education. Minority children, especially African American children, are subject to the pernicious effects (e.g., inappropriate identification, assessment, and placement) of the misperceptions and attitudes of European American teachers who tend to be discordant with these youth. A review of the existing literature relevant to the disparity between the cultures of educators and students, the subjugation of minority students into inequitable learning environments, ineffective recruiting practices, and the inability to provide pedagogically sound practices are presented. The author proposes recommendations for overcoming obstacles mitigating the potential for African American teachers to influence special education classrooms and practices. Maintaining an adequate supply of African American teachers in special and gifted education continues to be a daunting task for the field of education. The reality is that while the ethnic diversity of the school-aged population is increasing, the P-12 teaching population is becoming more homogeneous in terms of ethnicity. Nettles and Perna (1997) report that African Americans comprise 6.8% and 9.6% of elementary and secondary special education teachers, respectively. By contrast, approximately 18.4% of special education students are African American (U.S. Department of Education, 1995). This is a problem of critical magnitude. The increasing numbers of culturally diverse students in the public schools create a corresponding need for well-prepared teachers who can communicate with students within the context of their cultures and/or native languages. The literature supports that the scarcity of African American teachers in special education limits opportunities for these individuals to know and communicate in more than one culture (Dilworth, 1990). In addition, Irvine (1989) suggests African American teachers are able to serve as cultural translators, as conduits through which culturally encapsulated monocultural minority children become multicultural. African American teachers are catalysts in the academic process for bridging the gap between home and school and for providing crosscultural exposure to all students. There are approximately 52 million school-aged students in the United States; by 2008, enrollments are predicted to reach 55 million (National Commission on Teaching & America's Future [NCTAF], 1996). Approximately 35% of our school children are from linguistic or racial minority families, and that figure is expected to increase 40% in less than a decade. At the same time, demographics within the teaching profession are moving in the opposite direction. Nearly 3 million teachers work in our P-12 schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 1998). Of that number, only about 5% are from racially diverse groups (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 1990). African American teachers can be instrumental in the education of African American students as they act as role models for these children. The reality is that all children can benefit from the experience. African American teachers can influence students positively as they provide important contributions to the school, enriching both the environment and the curriculum with their diversity. In this article, the author explores the prominent issues regarding the diminishing number of African American teachers in special education. The author proposes recommendations for overcoming obstacles mitigating the potential for African American teachers to influence special education classrooms and practices. Cultural Concerns The population of educators in the United States remains primarily European American, monolingual, and female (Talbert-Johnson & Tillman, 1999), whereas the demographic profiles of students indicate they are and increasingly will be children of color and secondlanguage learners (Hodgkinson, 1985). …


We suggest that Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy (DCS) measurements of tissue blood flow primarily probe relative red blood cell (RBC) motion, due to the occurrence of multiple sequential scattering events within blood vessels. The magnitude of RBC shear-induced diffusion is known to correlate with flow velocity, explaining previous reports of linear scaling of the DCS "blood flow index" with tissue perfusion despite the observed diffusion-like auto-correlation decay. Further, by modeling RBC mean square displacement using a formulation that captures the transition from ballistic to diffusive motion, we improve the fit to experimental data and recover effective diffusion coefficients and velocity de-correlation time scales in the range expected from previous blood rheology studies.


Organic compounds having high boiling points included in inkjet inks remain in the printed media after printing. It has been said that these residual organic compounds influenced the scratch-fastness of pigment ink prints but the detailed mechanisms have not been reported. Glycerin was selected as a typical example of those organic compounds. Pyrolysis gas chromatography was used to quantify the residual glycerin in the pigment ink layer. It was found that glycerin remained in the pigment ink layer for at least 72 hours after printing. The total amount of the residual glycerin varied greatly depending on the paper samples. The discrepancy results between changes of contact angle of glycerin and the rate of glycerin absorption into various paper samples were assumed to be due to the difference in the diffusion rate of residual glycerin by extensional wetting depending on the surface properties of the various coatings of the samples. In addition, the amount of residual glycerin was inversely proportional to the scratch-fastness of the pigment ink layers. It seems that residual glycerin prevents cohesion between particles of the ink pigment. 柴谷正也, 江前敏晴, 磯貝明, "インクジェットインク含有成分の印刷物残存挙動", 日本印刷学会誌, 44(2): 32-36(2007).


Advanced cyber threats that are well planned, funded and stealthy are an increasing issue facing secure networked systems. As our reliance on protected networked systems continues to grow, the motivation for developing new malicious techniques that cannot be easily detected by traditional signature-based systems, and that make use of previously unseen zero-day vulnerabilities, continues to grow. Lack of adaptivity, extended data-collection and generalised algorithms to detect stealthy attacks is contributing to the insecurity of modern networked systems. To protect these networks, new approaches that can monitor and respond to indicators of compromise in a reflective way that considers all of the available evidence rather than individual points of data is required. This thesis presents a novel approach to intrusion detection and specifically focuses on detecting advanced persistent threats which are characteristically stealthy and evasive attacks. This approach offers a multi-agent model for automatically collecting, analysing and classifying data in a distributed way that considers the context in which the data was found. Using a context-based classification that considers the likelihood of a data-point being a false alarm or legitimate is used to decrease the prevalence of erroneous classifications and regulate continuation of the data collection process. Using this architecture, a detection rate increase of up to 20% is achieved in false alarm environments and an efficiency increase of up to 50% made over traditional monolithic intrusion detection systems. Additionally, the shortcomings of algorithms to detect stealthy attacks are addressed by providing a generalised anomaly detection algorithm for detecting the initial traces of an attack and deploying the proposed multi-agent model to investigate the attack further. The generalised algorithms can detect a wide variety of network-based attacks at an average detection rate of 85% providing an accurate and scalable way to detect the initial traces of compromise. The main novelty of this thesis is providing systems for detecting attacks where the threat model is increasingly stealthy and assumed capable of bypassing traditional signature-based approaches. The multi-agent architecture is unique in its ability, and the generalised anomaly detection algorithm is novel in detecting a variety of different cyber attacks from the network-flow layer. The evidence from this research suggests that context-based evidence gathering can provide a more efficient approach to analysing data and the generalised anomaly detection algorithm can be applied widely to detect attack indicators.


Cloud data centers are critical infrastructures to deliver cloud services. Although security and performance of cloud data centers have been well studied in the past, their networking aspects are overlooked. Current network infrastructures in cloud data centers limit the ability of cloud provider to offer guaranteed cloud network resources to users. In order to ensure security and performance requirements as defined in the service level agreement (SLA) between cloud user and provider, cloud providers need the ability to provision network resources dynamically and on the fly. The main challenge for cloud provider in utilizing network resource can be addressed by provisioning virtual networks that support information centric services by separating the control plane from the cloud infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an sdn based information centric cloud framework to provision network resourcesin order to support elastic demands of cloud applications depending on SLA requirements. The framework decouples the control plane and data plane wherein the conceptually centralized control plane controls and manages the fully distributed data plane. It computes the path to ensure security and performance of the network. We report initial experiment on average round-trip delay between consumers and producers.


Forensic odontology and anthropology provide valuable support with regard to human identification. In some cases, when soft tissue is destroyed, carbonized or absent for whatever reason, bones and teeth become the only source of information about the identity of the deceased. In human identification, anything different, such as variation from normality, becomes an important tool when trying to establish the identity of the deceased. This paper illustrates a positive identification case achieved by the diagnosis of an anomaly of tooth position, with confirmation using skull-photo superimposition. Even though forensic science presents modern techniques, in this particular case, the anomalous position of the canine played a key role on the identification, showing that the presence of a forensic dentist on the forensic team can be of great value.


Aim: This study aimed to determine if a new measure of sphericity of the femoral head, the Sphericity Deviation Score (SDS), could be estimated reliably at the stage of healing of Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease (LCPD) and to determine if the SDS at the healing stage reflects the outcome at skeletal maturity. Methods: The SDS was measured with image analysis software on radiographs of 120 children with unilateral LCPD at healing of the disease and at skeletal maturity. The reproducibility of measurement was assessed. SDS values for hips in different Stulberg classes were calculated. On the basis of SDS values at healing of 82 children, a logistic regression model was developed to determine the probability of a good outcome at skeletal maturity. The validity of the model was tested on another 38 children. Results: The SDS values at the stage of healing and at skeletal maturity were comparable. The SDS values were lowest for Stulberg Class I hips and highest for Class IV and V hips. The validated regression model showed a very high probability of a good outcome (Stulberg Class I or II) at skeletal maturity if the SDS at the stage of healing was below 10. Conclusions: A reliable estimate of the outcome of LCPD at skeletal maturity can be made by computing the SDS as soon as the disease heals.


Currently, one of the main environmental concerns is the toxicity caused by arsenic. Arsenic-polluted water can cause many human health problems including various cancerous diseases. In natural water, inorganic arsenic can be found in the forms of arsenite and arsenate, which have been found in several Iranian provinces – e.g., East Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and the city of Bijar – in high concentrations. Modern nanofiltration (NF) technology enables a wide range of water resource pollutants to be controlled efficiently. In this study, in an attempt to enhance arsenic removal (both arsenite and arsenate) from drinking water using low pressure NF, operating conditions like arsenic concentration, the trans-membrane pressure applied, and a range of different temperatures have all been considered. The highest arsenate removal achieved was 94% with an initial concentration of 500 μg/L, at 7 bar pressure, and 28 °C. The highest arsenite removal was 90%, with an initial concentration of 100 μg/L, at 5 bar pressure, and also at 28 °C. Increasing the pressure had a positive effect on the removal of both species, however, increasing the temperature had negative impacts. It was always found that arsenate removal was better than arsenite removal.


We consider the two related problems of detecting if an example is misclassified or out-of-distribution. We present a simple baseline that utilizes probabilities from softmax distributions. Correctly classified examples tend to have greater maximum softmax probabilities than erroneously classified and out-of-distribution examples, allowing for their detection. We assess performance by defining several tasks in computer vision, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition, showing the effectiveness of this baseline across all. We then show the baseline can sometimes be surpassed, demonstrating the room for future research on these underexplored detection tasks.


Background
Commercial surrogacy in India has become an increasingly controversial human rights and global health issue. Indian women living in dire poverty are the most vulnerable group in this transnational phenomenon. Reproductive tourism can be defined as the process whereby affluent people predominately from Global North countries (i.e., Canada) seek assisted reproduction in the Global South (in this case, India), to accomplish fertility and kinship formation goals while remaining oblivious to the inevitable social issues associated with this international trade.
Objective
This paper investigates how the media and academic anthropological research present current understandings of biotechnology, family, and kinship regarding commercial surrogacy. I argue that reproductive tourism is a multifaceted social issue with significant socio-cultural implications for kinship in India and the Global North, by being rooted in a gendered division of labour, culturally-specific belief systems, technological advancement, race and class stratification, capitalist structures, and globalization.
Methods
Although reproductive tourism is indeed interdisciplinary in nature, this project explicitly took an anthropological and global health approach to understanding its impacts on kinship in local and global communities. With regards to researcher positionality, I played an outsider role in understanding Indian women and the cultural context in India. I critically and reflexively analyzed diverse media sources that offered insights on reproductive tourism in India within the domains outlined in my thesis statement. These media sources were found online, and included mainstream media outlets, news articles, articles by journalists and social activists, websites for organizations of interest, corporate sources, blogs, videos, documentaries, and images. I used scholarly articles in anthropology as ethnographic evidence to support, challenge, or extend claims reported by the media. Academic sources included peer-reviewed publications, books, open access materials, grey literature, academic websites, and legal documents. I qualitatively compared and contrasted the presented narratives to conduct a secondary analysis of scholarly literature and media reports, and constructed valid arguments about the current state of reproductive tourism in India.
Results
The commodification of reproductive labour has had vast impacts on the cultural meanings of kinship in India and Global North countries. Reproductive tourism in India is evidence that culture influences biological, reproductive, and technological processes and how they are perceived in contemporary times. Technology and globalization were found to be propellers of commercial surrogacy that transcend international borders. Expectations related to family formation and gender within Western contexts, and Western forms of kinship contribute to the commercial surrogacy industry. Reproductive tourism perpetuates hierarchies along the lines of race and class, and Indian women face exploitation and serious health risks despite being paid for their reproductive labour.
Conclusion
Transnational surrogacy must be perceived by governments as a public matter rather than a private one, in order to adequately derive holistic solutions to halt the exploitation of vulnerable Indian women while balancing the desire of infertile individuals to utilize surrogacy as a means of kinship formation.
Update
This research paper was written in March 2018. As of December 2018, commercial surrogacy is illegal in India. The Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2018 is an attempt by the Indian government to control the industry and associated issues such as the exploitation of poor women and unprecedented health consequences. This law and policy shift by the Indian government affirms the importance of this research.


In this study, the use of bagasse fiber (BF) and unbleached bagasse pulp (BP) in a cement matrix, as a raw material, to produce lightweight construction materials is reported. The bagasse was used as partial replacement of cement at different levels: 0% (control cement), 1%, 2% 3%, and 4% by weight. The average size of bagasse fibers was less than 2 mm. Although a reduction in the physical and mechanical strength was observed, the incorporation of either fiber or pulp increased the water of consistency and setting time. A composite containing 4% of bagasse fibers can be used for lightweight concrete. FT-IR spectra showed that the BF or BP adversely affect the rate of calcium silicate hydrate (CSH) formation by decreasing its promotion.


Detection of road lane markings is attractive for practical applications such as advanced driver assistance systems and road maintenance. This paper proposes a system to detect and recognize road lane markings in panoramic images. The system can be divided into four stages. First, an inverse perspective mapping is applied to the original panoramic image to generate a top-view road view, in which the potential road markings are segmented based on their intensity difference compared to the surrounding pixels. Second, a feature vector of each potential road marking segment is extracted by calculating the Euclidean distance between the center and the boundary at regular angular steps. Third, the shape of each segment is classified using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). Finally, by modeling the lane markings, previous falsely detected segments can be rejected based on their orientation and position relative to the lane markings. Our experiments show that the system is promising and is capable of recognizing 93%, 95% and 91% of striped line segments, blocks and arrows respectively, as well as 94% of the lane markings.


Damming the Flood: Haiti,Aristide and the Politics of Containment. By Peter Hallward. London, New York: Verso, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-84467-106-9. 442 pp. $110.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Damming the Flood is the latest book on the travails of Haiti from the last decade of 20th century to 2007. Written by Peter Hallward, a philosophy professor at Middlesex University in the UK, Damming the Flood is an overwhelming friendly account of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas (Flood) movement's rise and fall from power. The book's central argument is that Aristide and the Lavalas epitomized the victory of the Haitian masses in politics in post-Duvalier Haiti. Such a development potentially meant that Haitian inequity in wealth ownership - one percent of the country's population ostensibly controls over half of its assets - would at last be addressed by a popular government. For Haiti's tiny elite and its foreign allies, in particular the United States but also France and Canada, this was unacceptable. Consequently, they conspired, respectively, by making spurious claims about human rights violations, corruption and election infractions under Aristide, and attempting to turn the people against Aristide through a punishing informal "embargo" that lasted from the mid-1990s to early 2004. When this strategy failed to overthrow Aristide, they fomented a "popular uprising" led by former elements of the defunct Haitian army and death squad leaders. When this effort, too, seemed unlikely to dislodge Aristide, his external enemies had to come and extricate him from Haiti. They did just that when they "kidnapped" him on February 29, 2004. In Professor Hallward's narrative, therefore, Aristide and the Lavalas were the victims of U.S. imperialism and its reactionary local allies. Thus, Professor Hallward locates events in Haiti in the larger historical context of Big Power diplomacy. More than once, he compares the Lavalas experience with that of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, among other cases. However, Professor Hallward does not despair. He sees in the denouement of Aristide's overthrow the rejuvenation of a movement less dependent on the charisma of Aristide and better able to carry on the political struggle, which is at heart, once again, a class struggle between the tiny minority of the rich and the vast majority of the poor, in which the latter is vastly outspent and outgunned. For all of the excruciating and, I must say for Professor Hallward, impressive details contained in this relatively massive book, the thesis is not new. I say impressive because Professor Hallward freely admits that he has not spent that much time in Haiti and his interest in the country is fairly recent. However, the compliment, I should hasten to add, is a double-edged sword, but I leave its trenchant side for later. Class-based analyses are one of at least nine schools of thought that have dominated Haitian scholarship practically since the morrow of independence in 1804. Haitians and non-Haitians alike, from Jacques Roumain to Randall Robinson and Noam Chomsky, have interpreted the Haitian imbroglio from a similar analytical vintage point. A book, or for that matter any work of scholarship, may be assessed on the basis of its theoretical premise and factual premise. In the first instance, it may be asked, how well does its explanation or theory stand up against other explanations or theories; in the second, how well does its purported facts, upon which it hopefully relies for developing the explanation or theory, correspond to reality? This review attempts an assessment of Damming the Flood based on both of these approaches. Lavalas, or Flood, is essentially a post-Duvalier phenomenon, as is for that matter Aristide. Long-time students of Haitian politics would be hard pressed to find use of the word Lavalas beyond its conventional meaning before 1986; it simply was not part of the Haitian political lexicon. Likewise, Aristide was not an actor on the Haitian political scene from the crucial years of 1978 through early 1986. …


Land value bears significant weight in house prices in historical town centers. An essential aim for regulating the
mortgage market, particularly in the financial and property crisis that countries such as Spain are undergoing, is to
have at hand objective procedures for its valuation, whatever the conditions (location, construction, planning).
Of all the factors contributing to house price make-up, the land is the only one whose value does not depend on
acquisition cost, but rather on the location-time binomial. That is to say, the specific circumstances at that point and at the exact moment of valuation. For this reason, the most commonly applied procedure for land valuation in town
centers is the use of the residual method: once the selling price of new housing in a district is known, the other
necessary costs and expenses of development are deducted, including those of building and the developer's profit. The
value left is that of the land.
To apply these procedures it is vital to have figures such as building costs, technical fees, tax costs, etc. But, above all, it is essential to obtain the selling price of the new housing. This is not always feasible, on account of the lack of newbuild development in this location. This shortage of information occurs in historical town cities, where urban renewal is slight due to the heritage-protection policies, and where, nevertheless there is substantial activity in the secondary market.
In these circumstances, as an alternative for land valuation in consolidated urban areas, we have the adaptation of the residual method to the particular characteristics of the secondary market. To these ends, there is the proposal for the appreciation of the dwelling which follows, in a backwards direction, the application of traditional depreciation
methods proposed by the various valuation manuals and guidelines.
The reliability of the results obtained is analyzed by contrasting it with published figures for newly-built
properties, according to different rules applied in administrative appraisals in Spain and the incidence of an eventual correction due to conservation state.


Introduction The purpose of this observational study is to assess the safety and impact of the introduction of a clinical practice guideline (CPG) recommending early discharge of infants with fever without source who are at low risk of serious bacterial infection (SBI). We hypothesise that implementation of this guideline will be associated with a rate of unplanned readmission to hospital (within 7 days of discharge) which is similar (ie, non-inferior) to that observed under previous standard practice. Methods and analysis This observational study is a prospective pragmatic, multisite safety assessment and impact project. It will evaluate the safety of a CPG which allows febrile infants fulfilling low-risk criteria to be discharged early from hospital if their blood cultures demonstrate no growth at 24 hours (compared with previous minimum 48 hours admission). This guideline has been implemented at two Western Australian metropolitan hospitals. Infants aged <3 months (chronological or corrected for premature birth before 37 weeks gestation) presenting with fever without source will be included. The primary outcome is readmission to hospital due to clinical deterioration/caregiver concern within 7 days of discharge, identified through review of electronic admission details and study-specific caregiver surveys. Secondary outcomes include rates of SBI, hospital lengths of stay compared with previous practice, clinician guideline adherence and caregiver satisfaction with the discharge process. Analysis will be within a sequential Bayesian safety monitoring framework, which incorporates new information and updates the evidence for guideline safety relative to previous practice (historical control) at prespecified interim analyses. Demographic and clinical information will be summarised. Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval and waiver of consent for data collection has been granted by the Child and Adolescent Health Service Human Research Ethics Committee (RGS0000001415). Caregivers will have the option to opt out of survey follow-up. Results will be disseminated via peer-reviewed publication. Trial registration number Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12619001010189).


An expression for the cross correlation of noise between seismic stations and the 2D Green's function is derived assuming that noise travels as 2D surface waves. The phase velocity is obtained directly from the noise correlation function with a phase shift of +π/4. Mean phase velocity dispersion curves are calculated for the TUCAN seismic array in Costa Rica and Nicaragua from ambient seismic noise using two independent methods, noise cross correlation and beamforming. The noise cross correlation and beamforming methods are compared and contrasted by evaluating results from the TUCAN array. The results of the two methods as applied to the TUCAN array agree within 1%, giving good confidence in the phase velocities extracted from noise.


Over the past two decades, there have been numerous calls worldwide for healthcare transformation and systems reform in order to meet objectives, such as the provision of collaborative, safe, patient centered care (Health Council of Canada, 2013; IOM 2012). One bold initiative to address these objectives emphasized the key function of evidenced-based/evidence-supported care, team-based care and the essential infrastructure of informatics in supporting knowledge discovery and dissemination to foster health system transformation. Committed to objective assessment and strategy development of the United States (U.S.), the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published the seminal piece The Learning Healthcare System which outlined four key characteristics of the learning healthcare system. These essential characteristics include the following: (a) science and informatics for real-time access to knowledge and digital capture of the care experience, (b) patient– clinician partnerships with engaged, empowered patients, (c) incentives aligned for value and full transparency, and (d) a leadership-instilled culture of learning and supportive system competencies (IOM, 2006; IOM, 2012). In this editorial, we discuss the need for integration between informatics and interprofessional practice and interprofessional education (IPP/ IPE) as a lead in to a themed issue on the topic. We also introduce a series of papers that comprise this themed issue.


The "money's worth" measure has been used to assess whether annuities are fairly valued and also as evidence for adverse selection in the annuity market. However, a regulated life assurer with concerns about predicting long-run mortality may price annuities to reduce these risks which will affect the money's worth. We provide a simple model of the effect of cohort mortality risk on the money's worth. We demonstrate that cohort mortality risk is quantitatively important, and show that it is not possible to identify the effect of a cohort mortality risk model from that of an adverse selection model.


Polarized emission observed by Planck HFI at 353 GHz towards a sample of nearby fields is presented, focusing on the statistics of polarization fractions p and angles ψ. The polarization fractions and column densities in these nearby fields are representative of the range of values obtained over the whole sky. We find that: (i) the largest polarization fractions are reached in the most diffuse fields; (ii) the maximum polarization fraction pmax decreases with column density NH in the more opaque fields with NH> 1021 cm-2; and (iii) the polarization fraction along a given line of sight is correlated with the local spatial coherence of the polarization angle. These observations are compared to polarized emission maps computed in simulations of anisotropic magnetohydrodynamical turbulence in which we assume a uniform intrinsic polarization fraction of the dust grains. We find that an estimate of this parameter may be recovered from the maximum polarization fraction pmax in diffuse regions where the magnetic field is ordered on large scales and perpendicular to the line of sight. This emphasizes the impact of anisotropies of the magnetic field on the emerging polarization signal. The decrease of the maximum polarization fraction with column density in nearby molecular clouds is well reproduced in the simulations, indicating that it is essentially due to the turbulent structure of the magnetic field: an accumulation of variously polarized structures along the line of sight leads to such an anti-correlation. In the simulations, polarization fractions are also found to anti-correlate with the angle dispersion function


Inflammation in the gut, caused by infection and autoimmunity, remains challenging to effectively detect, monitor, and treat. Here, we engineer a commensal mouse E. coli strain to record exposure to tetrathionate, a downstream product of reactive oxygen species generated during inflammation. Using these programmed bacteria to sense in situ levels we show that tetrathionate accompanies inflammation during Salmonella-induced colitis in mice and is elevated in an inflammatory bowel disease mouse model. We demonstrate long-term genetic stability and associated robust function of synthetic genetic circuits in bacteria colonizing the mammalian gut. These results demonstrate the potential for engineered bacteria to stably and reliably probe pathophysiological processes for which traditional diagnostics may not be feasible or cost-effective. One sentence summary Engineered bacteria record an inflammatory response in an IBD mouse model and are genetically stable during long-term growth in the mouse gut.


The term software is ubiquitous, however, it does not seem as if we as a community have a clear understanding of what software actually is. Imprecise definitions of software do not help other professions, in particular those acquiring and sourcing software from third-parties, when deciding what precisely are potential deliverables. In this paper we investigate which artifacts constitute software by analyzing 23715 repositories from Github, we categorize the found artifacts into high-level categories, such as, code, data, and documentation (and into 19 more concrete categories) and we can confirm the notion of others that software is more than just source code or programs, for which the term is often used synonymously. With this work we provide an empirical study of more than 13 million artifacts, we provide a taxonomy of artifact categories, and we can conclude that software most often consists of variously distributed amounts of code in different forms, such as source code, binary code, scripts, etc., data, such as configuration files, images, databases, etc., and documentation, such as user documentation, licenses, etc.


Pseudohalonectria miscanthicola sp. nov. is reported from senescent culms of Miscanthus floridulus (Gramineae) from Lung Fu Shan, Hong Kong. This fungus differs from other Pseudohalonectria species in having smaller ascospores which are 0-1-septate. It is described, illustrated and compared with other species in the genus. Saccardoella aquatica, first described on submerged wood in Hong Kong and South Africa, is reported here for the first time from dead terrestrial wood at Mount Nicholson, Hong Kong. We also report Massariothea themedae from senescent culms of an unidentified grass from Kudremukh National Park, Karnataka, India. This species is described and illustrated. Important morphological characters of 8 known species of Massariothea are tabulated and a key to all the species is provided. Oxydothis oraniopsis is reported on senescent fronds of Calamus sp. collected from Chorle Ghat, Goa, India. This is the first record of ascomycetous genus Oxydothis from India.


The doctrine of proportionality has existed as a definite strand in the fabric of international law for almost a century, even if the contours of that strand are not yet fully defined. This article summarizes the origins and history of the doctrine of proportionality generally, and then more specifically in the context of international human rights law, focusing on jurisprudence from the European Court of Human Rights. Next, we briefly consider the doctrine of proportionality in the context of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, focusing on jurisprudence from the World Trade Organization. We then summarize the comparatively nascent doctrine of proportionality in international investment treaty law, focusing on jurisprudence from tribunals constituted under bilateral investment treaties, multilateral investment treaties, and free trade agreements. Finally, we conclude with potential lessons for investors, states, counsel, arbitrators, activists, and academics.


In the 21st century, quality has become one of the most pressing issues in the world of business. Indeed, service quality management is a primary need for business survival. Quality management has been recognized as a comprehensive management philosophy for improving organisational performance and competitiveness. The effective adoption of an appropriate service quality management system in an organisation can facilitate the achievement of excellence in service quality. Furthermore, service excellence is a crucial factor in the achievement of a high level of customer satisfaction in service organisations like banks. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to investigate the factors affecting the excellence of service quality in the developing banking sector in Syria. The fundamental concepts of excellence of the EFQM Excellence Model have been borrowed from the literature as a theoretical framework through which to investigate the Syrian Banking Sector (SBS).
To achieve the research aim, an interpretevist philosophy has been adopted as the means of understanding in depth, the factors influencing excellence in three case study organisations, which are selected to be representative of the state-owned banks (CSOA), private banks (CSOB), and Islamic private banks (CSOC). Different sources of data collection – semi-structured interviews, direct observation, archival records, and documentation - are used to achieve triangulation of the results.
The main contribution to knowledge of this research can be summarised fundamentally as: firstly designing a theoretical framework embracing the factors affecting the excellence of service quality in the Syrian banking sector. Secondly, conducting a comparative reserch approach between the three (CSOs) investigating the factors affecting the readiness to implement EFQM excellence model in each case study. The main findings have revealed that CSOC is more likely to achieve excellence than the other two banks, since CSOC has demonstrated consistent progress towards that aim. In respect of CSOA and CSOB, it is clear that certain negative managerial practices need to be remedied before the EFQM Excellence Model can seriously be pursued.
In addition, some unique factors have emerged, such as the intensive intervention of guardian authorities for the state-owned bank, the negative effect of religion and culture on employee performance in the state-owned bank, and the lack of banking culture in Syria in general. Furthermore, the research enriches the literature through the comparative dimension highlighted in the three case studies (state-owned, private, and private Islamic banks) since there are limitations in the literature regarding the readiness to implement the EFQM excellence model in the service sector, and particularly in banks in the developing countries.


This work presents the analysis and modeling of communication network used for data transmission with multi-protocols in campus network. The designed network is based on the geographical location of communication nodes. (Colleges and centers). Network optimal backbone is first designed by Kruskal algorithm. It will be subject to reliability improvement by links addition. Tie-sets method is used to evaluate the network reliability. Communication nodes are modeled using local area network (LAN), server, links, router, switch, and Firewall. Intranet will be used as communication backbone mainly to connect different communication nodes with the Principal Communication Center (PCC) where the System Server (SS) is located. The connection of Intranet to the Internet is mad via the front-end system server (SS). Tikrit University Intranet (TUI) is taking as case study in the present research. Tikrit University sites are grouped into master communication nodes. Each node is composed from several colleges, centers, and administrative sections. © 2018 TJES, College of Engineering, Tikrit University DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25130/tjes.25.2.05 و ةكبش ميمصتو ،ةجذمن ،ليلحت ةيلاع ةيقوثوم تاذ ةحاسملا ةعسا ةسارد ةعماجل تنارتنلاا ةكبش ةلاحل ت تيرك


Pretrained transformer-based encoders such as BERT have been demonstrated to achieve state-of-the-art performance on numerous NLP tasks. Despite their success, BERT style encoders are large in size and have high latency during inference (especially on CPU machines) which make them unappealing for many online applications. Recently introduced compression and distillation methods have provided effective ways to alleviate this shortcoming. However, the focus of these works has been mainly on monolingual encoders. Motivated by recent successes in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning using multilingual pretrained encoders such as mBERT, we evaluate the effectiveness of Knowledge Distillation (KD) both during pretraining stage and during fine-tuning stage on multilingual BERT models. We demonstrate that in contradiction to the previous observation in the case of monolingual distillation, in multilingual settings, distillation during pretraining is more effective than distillation during fine-tuning for zero-shot transfer learning. Moreover, we observe that distillation during fine-tuning may hurt zero-shot cross-lingual performance. Finally, we demonstrate that distilling a larger model (BERT Large) results in the strongest distilled model that performs best both on the source language as well as target languages in zero-shot settings.


Following the success of Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Lyn Smith visits the oral accounts preserved in the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, to reveal the sheer complexity and horror of one of human history's darkest hours. The great majority of Holocaust survivors suffered considerable physical and psychological wounds, yet even in this dark time of human history, tales of faith, love and courage can be found. As well as revealing the story of the Holocaust as directly experienced by victims, these testimonies also illustrate how, even enduring the most harsh conditions, degrading treatment and suffering massive family losses, hope, the will to survive, and the human spirit still shine through.


In a wide area of Campania, characterised by mountain ridges covered by pyroclastic deposits, landslides occur after intense rainstorms that follow an accumulation of a certain amount of prestorm seasonal rainfall. Instabilities begin as soil slides, and evolve to debris avalanche-flow along steep slopes.This study extends the hydrological analyses carried out by FIORILLO & WILSON (2004) on these landslides. Further 10-years of rainfall records allow to verify a previous hypothesis on the soil moisture accumulation into the soil. Analyses have been focused in the Sarno area (P.zzo d'Alvano), where a high-elevation rain-gauge is available since 1998, which allows also to compare data with lowelevation rain gauges. Analyses show that numerous large-scaledebris flows induced by the May 1998 storm depend heavily on the antecedent rainfall distribution and on the soil moisture storage characteristics.


Summary Honey is traditionally consumed by the local Malaysian population as a nutrient, as well as for the enhancement of fertility. The decline in male reproductive health and fertility in the last 30 years has been linked to environmental toxicants including cigarette smoke (CS). In human and experimental studies, CS exposure has been associated with decreased plasma testosterone level, lower sperm count and increased percentage of abnormal sperm. The aim of this study, therefore, was to determine the possible protective role of honey against the toxic effects of CS on testicular functions in rats. Thirty-two adult Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into 4 groups (8 rats per group) i.e. control group, honey-treated group (H), cigarette smoke-exposed group (CS) and honey-treated plus CS-exposed group (H+CS). Rats in control and CS groups received oral administration of distilled water daily while rats in H and H+CS groups received honey (1.2 g/kg body weight) orally by gavage daily. Rats in CS and H+CS groups were also exposed to CS for 8 min (3 times/day). After 13 weeks of treatment, each rat was sacrificed for reproductive parameters analysis. Rats in CS group had significantly lower sperm count, daily sperm production, percentage of motile sperm and testosterone level as well as a higher percentage of abnormal sperm compared to control and H groups. However, supplementation of honey significantly improved all these parameters in H+CS group. Administration of honey significantly attenuated the toxic effects of CS on spermatogenesis and testosterone level in rats. This study suggests that honey might have a protective effect against CS-induced impaired testicular functions in rats.


An interesting problem in the field of computational social choice theory is that of elections, in which a winner or set of winners is to be deduced from preferences among a collection of agents, in a way that attempts to maximize the collective well-being of the agents. Besides their obvious use in political science, elections are also used computationally, such as in multiagent systems, in which different agents may have different beliefs and preferences and must reach an agreeable decision.
Because the purpose of voting is to gain an understanding of a collection of actual preferences, dishonesty in an election system is often harmful to the welfare of the voters as a whole. Different forms of dishonesty can be performed by the voters (manipulation), by an outside agent affecting the voters (bribery), or by the chair, or administrator, of an election (control). The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem shows that in all reasonable election systems, manipulation, or strategic voting, is always inevitable in some cases. Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick counter by arguing that if finding such a manipulation is NP-hard, then manipulation by computationally-limited agents should not pose a significant threat. However, more recent work has exploited the fact that NP-hardness is only a worst-case measure of complexity, and has shown that some election systems that are NP-hard to manipulate may in fact be easy to manipulate under some reasonable assumptions.
We evaluate, both theoretically and empirically, the complexity, worst-case and otherwise, of manipulating, bribing, and controlling elections. Our focus is particularly on scoring protocols. In doing so, we gain an understanding of how these election systems work by discovering what makes manipulation, bribery, and control easy or hard. This allows us to discover the strengths and weaknesses of scoring protocols, and gain an understanding of what properties of election systems are desirable or undesirable.
One approach we have used to do this is relating the problems of interest in election systems to problems of known complexity, as well as to problems with known algorithms and heuristics, particularly Satisfiability and Partition. This approach can help us gain an understanding of computational social choice problems in which little is known about the complexity or potential algorithms. Among other results, we show how certain parameters and properties of scoring protocols can make elections easy or hard to manipulate. We find that the empirical complexity of manipulation in some cases have unusual behaviors for its complexity class. For example, it is found that in the case of manipulating the Borda election of unweighted voters with an unbounded candidate cardinality, the encoding of this problem to Satisfiability performs especially well near the boundary cases of this problem and for unsatisfiable instances, both results contrary to the normal behavior of NP-complete problems.
Although attempts have been made to design fair election systems with certain properties, another dilemma that this has given rise to is the existence of election systems in which it is hard to elect the winners, at least in the worst case. Two notable election systems in which determining the winners are hard are Dodgson and Young. We evaluate the problem of finding the winners empirically, to extend these complexity results away from the worst case, and determine whether the worst-case complexity of these hard winner problems is truly a computational barrier. We find that, like most NP-complete problems such as Satisfiability, many instances of interest in finding winners of hard election systems are still relatively simple. We confirm that indeed, like Satisfiability, the hard worst-case results occur only in rare circumstances. We also find an interesting complexity disparity between the related problems of finding the Dodgson or Young score of a candidate, and that of finding the set of Dodgson or Young winners. Surprisingly, it appears empirically easier for one to find the set of all winners in a Dodgson or Young election than to score a single candidate in either election.


One of the most important operations in managed gardens is pruned grapes. For evaluate the effect of pruning short, medium, heavy on yield and yield components of Taif grapes, before and after the cold winter, in the years 2012 to 2013, A factorial experiment in a CRBD design with five replicates were performed on two factors. The first factor was the number of buds per stem and included the three levels of 4,8,12 buds per stem (i.e., a total of 80, 120, and 180 buds per plant). The second factor was the time of pruning with the two levels of pruning before and after winter cold. The software MSTAT-C was employed to analyze. The results showed that; pruning time on traits such as yield, cluster weight, Average weight of 50 Berry, the number of clusters per plant, and yield coefficient has a significant effect. Medium pruning had the highest number and weight of clusters per plant and then running trend. The smaller berries were affected by type of pruning and Pruning time both before and after the cold winter cannot bring on a positive or negative impact. Overall, after cooling, yield plant is higher than before the cold. Results show that the variety Tayefi responds best to eight-bud per stem pruning after winter cold under the conditions that exist in Tajikistan. This study showed also that yield was mostly affected by the weight and number of clusters than the size of the berries. The grape had the best yield in average and after cold pruning.


Carl Blegen is the most famous American archaeologist ever to work in Greece, and no American has ever had a greater impact on Greek archaeology. Yet Blegen, unlike several others of his generation, has found no biographer. In part, the explanation for this must lie in the fact that his life was so multifaceted: not only was he instrumental in creating the field of Aegean prehistory, but Blegen, his wife, and their best friends, the Hills ("the family"), were also significant forces in the social and intellectual community of Athens. Authors who have contributed to this book have each researched one aspect of Blegen's life, drawing on copious documentation in the United States, England, and Greece. The result is a biography that sets Blegen and his closest colleagues in the social and academic milieu that gave rise to the discipline of classical archaeology in Greece.


This thesis describes a further development of a building block for programmable devices in embedded systems handling real-time functionality.Embedded systems are included in a variety of products within different technical areas such as industrial automation, consumer electronics, automotive industry, and communication-, and multimedia systems. Products ranging from trains and airplanes to microwave ovens and washing machines are controlled by embedded systems.Programmable devices constitute a part of these embedded systems. Today, a programmable device can include a complete system containing building blocks connected with each other via programs written using a hardware description language. The programmable devices can be programmed and changed over and over again and this flexibility makes it possible to explore how these building blocks can best be designed in relation to system requirements, before final implementation.This thesis describes a further development of a building block for programmable devices implemented in a non-traditional way, i.e., the implementation is written using both hardware description language and traditional software languages. This new building block handles real-time functionality in a non-traditional way that enables certain benefits, such as increased performance, predictability and less memory consumption. Using a non-traditional implementation also has its drawbacks, and e.g., extensions and adjustments can be hard to handle since modifications are required in both hardware and software programming languages.The new building block was investigated in order to see how it could be facilitated when used for real-time functionality. The configurability of the block was extended which enables further customization of the building block. This leads to the possibility to use the block within a wider spectrumof applications. It is also possible to reduce the size and cost of the final product since resource usage can be optimized.Furthermore, a mathematicalmodel estimating resource usage for real-time functionality has been developed. The model enables distinctive trade-offs comparisons, and guidance for system designers, when considering what type of real-time operating system to use in a certain design.


This paper presents an analysis of what types of values, especially in regards to obedience vs. independence, families impart to their children and how these values interact with social mobility. In the model, obedience is a useful characteristic for employers, especially when wages are low, because independent workers require more incentives (when wages are high, these incentives are automatic). Hence, in low-wage environments, low-income families will impart values of obedience to their children to prevent disadvantaging them in the labor market. To the extent that independence is useful for entrepreneurial activities, this then depresses their social mobility. High-income and privileged parents, on the other hand, always impart values of independence, since they expect that their children can enter into higher-income entrepreneurial (or managerial) activities thanks to their family resources and privileges. I also discuss how political activity can be hampered when labor market incentives encourage greater obedience and how this can generate multiple steady states with different patterns of social hierarchy and mobility.


A method is described for directly measuring atmospheric winds in the 20–120-km altitude interval from a spacecraft. The principle of operation of the wind sensor is the measurement of the Doppler shift between the spectral absorption lines of a gas in a cell within the instrument and the thermal emission lines of the same gas in the atmosphere. The wind measurements are to be made with a spacecraft-borne gas correlation spectrometer viewing the limb of the atmosphere. The measurement of the wind-induced Doppler shift between the two spectra, and thence the magnitude of the wind itself, is accomplished by phase modulating the incoming thermal radiation (equivalent to frequency modulation) by means of an electrooptically active crystal to determine the frequency shift required to reestablish exact correlation between the lines in the cell and the lines from the atmosphere. Results of numerical simulations of the wind-sensor performance are presented showing the noise-equivalent-wind to be between 1 and 5 m/sec over most of the stratosphere and mesosphere.


Scholars have long recognized the transformative impact that colonialism had on Buddhist institutions, identities, thought, and practice. The period marked the rise of politicized identities linking Buddhism to anti-colonial nationalist movements alongside boisterous discussions about reforming Buddhism to its "innate" humanistic, scientific core. For many decades, histories of Buddhism under colonialism generally subscribed to a singular narrative in which colonial forces leveled such monumental changes that almost all forms of modern Buddhism were seen as derivative of ideologies introduced by Western colonial regimes. These narratives, however, only tell some of the story. Beginning in the last decades of the 20th century, scholarship has increasingly shown how Buddhists responded in a multitude of ways to colonial influence. There was resistance and collusion as well as instances where colonial systems had only minimal impact. Numerous ideas about Buddhism which for most of the 20th century were taken for granted—that the text is closer to "true" Buddhism than contemporary practice, that texts composed in "classical" languages are more authoritative than those in the vernacular, that Buddhism is not really a religion at all but more like a science of the mind or philosophy, that Buddhism is less ritualistic and more rational than other religious traditions, and so on—have their roots in the colonial encounter with Buddhism. Any student wishing to understand the place of Buddhism during the colonial period must consider the multiple trajectories and plural histories rather than singular, monolithic narratives.


New spintronics devices for GreenIT In our information-everywhere society IT is a major player for energy consumption and novel spintronic devices can play a role in the quest for GreenIT. Reducing power consumption of mobile devices by replacing volatile memory by fast non-volatile spintronic memory could also improve speed and a onememory-fits-all approach drastically simplifies the microelectronic architecture design. The best-known memory device is the magnetic hard drive and here conventional magnetic fields are used to excite spin dynamics and manipulate magnetization as necessary for switching of magnetic bits. While this approach is now reasonably well understood and widely employed, it is an energy-hungry process leading to large power dissipation. Furthermore it entails limitations for the speed of magnetic switching as intrinsically the spin dynamics is limited by the precession frequency corresponding to the magnetic field. Novel low power storage-class memory devices have been proposed, where switching by alternative means, such as spin-polarized currents is used [1]. We study the rich physics of the interaction between spin currents, photons and the magnetization [2], and we have used spin-polarized charge carriers and photons to excite spin dynamics and manipulate the magnetization on ultrafast timescales [3]. We are probing the magnetization dynamics to gauge the ultimate speed limits of spin angular momentum transfer that governs device switching speeds. Finally using electric fields instead of currents might open novel avenues to ultra-low power switching of magnetization [4].


Endovascular treatment with coils is widely used in the management of intracranial aneurysms. However, this type of treatment can be technically challenging for anatomic reasons, particularly when the neck of the aneurysm is wide or when the dome-to-neck ratio is not favorable. Previous studies described the remodeling technique for extending the indications and feasibility of the endovascular treatment to wide-neck intracranial aneurysms. In remodeling technique, a non-detachable balloon is temporarily inflated in front of the neck of the aneurysm during each coil placement. At the end of the procedure, the remodeling balloon is removed and no device is left in place in the parent vessel unless stent placement is subsequently performed. The remodeling technique can be used in all aneurysm locations but is adopted less frequently in anterior communicating and anterior cerebral aneurysms. Studies have also shown adequate aneurysm occlusion is significantly more frequent in the remodeling group. Despite the fact that aneurysms treated by the remodeling technique are different from aneurysms treated with standard coiling, the safety of both techniques is similar with a higher anatomic efficacy of the remodeling technique. Accordingly, wide use of the remodeling technique can be proposed. C O M M E N T A R Y


The South African motor industry is currently at the height of competitiveness, whether referring to new or pre-owned vehicles. The sale of new vehicles is at an all time high, and this phenomenon flows through to the remarket sector in the industry. The prices of new vehicles increased by very small margins over the past few years, and in some instances it has decreased. This leads to even more intense competition in the remarket sector, because consumers would rather purchase a new vehicle, than paying a very similar price for the exact preowned model. This study was conducted to determine on which factors a remarket dealership should focus in order to remain successful in the current fierce competitive market conditions. A literature study forms part of this study. Questionnaires were used as the measuring instrument and also filled out by 140 participants in an attempt to determine which factors the consumer considers as important when purchasing a pre-owned vehicle. Data analysis was done by means of a factor analysis, and the data reliability verified by means of determining Cronbach's Alpha coefficient. A total of seven factors were identified of which "Value for moneyJ1 and "ReassuranceJJ was the most important ones. Cumulatively the factors explained 61 % of the variance.


This paper theoretically investigates how community approval or disapproval affects school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of the community feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti- (or pro-) schooling norm. The proposed community-model continues to take aggregate and idiosyncratic poverty into account as an important driver of low school attendance and child labor. But it provides also an explanation for why equally poor villages or regions can display different attitudes towards schooling. Distinguishing between three different modes of child time allocation, school attendance, work, and leisure, the paper shows how the time costs of schooling and child labor productivity contribute to the existence of a locally stable anti-schooling norm. It proposes policies that effectively exploit the social dynamics and initiate a permanent escape from the anti-schooling equilibrium. An extension of the model explores how an education contingent subsidy paid to the poorest families of a community manages to initiate a bandwagon effect towards "education for all". The optimal mechanism design of such a targeted transfer program is investigated.


In order to accommodate a newly discovered fossil specimen related to a subset of extant needle stoneflies (Leuctridae sensu Zwick, 2000), we provide a comparative analysis of the wing venation of these insects, and of their close relatives, primarily based on extant material. A number of character states potentially supporting monophyletic taxa are identified, and are used to erect taxon names under the cladotypic nomenclatural procedure. We introduce a new standard definition in which the mention of the antonym of the defining character state is applied. The proposed taxa, and taxa inclusiveness, are as follows: Nemouromorpha > Capniida/Leuctrida/'Nemouridae s.l.', and Leuctrida > Exeleuctrida > Mioleuctrida & Eleuctrida > Collaleuctrida. This scheme allowed us to tentatively accommodate several fossil species described earlier and the new specimen, left undetermined at the genus and species levels, but assigned to Collaleuctrida. To optimize retrieval of hierarchical information, we introduce the use of 'nec' (Latin for 'but not') into the taxonomic address to indicate exclusion from a taxon. For example, Mioleuctrida nec Collaleuctrida †yehae indicates that †yehae can be assigned to Mioleuctrida but can also be conclusively excluded from Collaleuctrida. Based on the investigated case, it is finally argued that the cladotypic nomenclatural procedure is optimal regarding name use and numbers, and allows adequate treatment of homoplasy.


Starting from frequent characterizations of modern money as a fiction, the text discusses the theoretical background of the idea that money once was something "real" whereas now it amounts to no more than a fiction. The distinction has its roots in the conviction that only commodity money was (or is) something "real", whereas credit money is held to be fictitious money. However, both forms of money are social constructions, one operating with a "natural" base in the form of precious metals, the other in the context of a politically managed credit system with the central bank as the lead institution. The problem with the latter is that it is not well understood, as the article demonstrates by going through Keynes understanding of money in his Treatise and some of the recent literature. Another recently popular theoretical remedy to enlighten the public about the money it uses has been to declare that all money is credit. However this is a simplification that threatens to undermine the project of improving the general understanding of money as a prerequisite for more democratic decision-making in the wake of the financial and the Euro crises. The fiction concerning money that remains is that there can be such a thing as a monetary invariant.


In October 1998 and in May 2000 two major calving events took place at the ice front of the Filchner-Ronne-Schelfeis. The whole front of the Ronne Ice Shelf between Berkner Island in the East and the Antarctic Peninsula in the West retreated by appr. 35 km. The ice shelf area decreased by about 16,000 km2. The calving events are displayed by AVHRR satellite images received at the German base Neumayer Station. On one of the newly formed icebergs (A-38B) the German summer base Filchner drifted into the Weddell Sea and had to be recovered in the 1998/99 Antarctic field season. The tracks of all icebergs calved from Filchner-Ronne-Schelfeis since 1986 are displayed by use of data from the US National Ice Center and observations from satellite transmitters made by AWI. All calving events were expected in the framework of normal ice shelf dynamics and can not be taken as indicators of changing climate conditions. According to earlier ice core results these icebergs should partly consist of marine (formed by refreezing of underlying sea water) ice at the bottom. Therefore they will be a source of green icebergs when they break into smaller bergs and capsize.


Abstract With increasing urbanization and environmental degradation, urban landscapes are increasingly expected to provide a wide range of ecosystem services typically associated with rural areas, including biodiversity conservation and food production. Because residential landscapes constitute the largest single urban land use, domestic gardens have emerged as a topic of research interest and planning concern. The ecosystem services (or disservices) these landscapes provide, however, have not been rigorously measured, nor have tradeoffs between the services they provide been assessed. In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 59 African American, Chinese-origin or Mexican-origin households with on-lot or vacant lot food gardens in Chicago. Crop plants and cultivated ornamental plants on the lot were inventoried and mapped at the species level. A total of 123 edible plant taxa from 25 families and 288 ornamental plant species from 85 families were identified, for a combined total of 387 species from 90 families. Cumulatively, the gardens of African American households were relatively rich in ornamental plant species and families, while those of Chinese-origin households had a depauperate flora. Crop plant richness was more even across sample types. Shade trees and a developed shrub layer were absent from most gardens, possibly representing a tradeoff in ecosystem services in favor of food production. The richness of the aggregate 2.1 ha of residential property inventoried in this study was comparable with or exceeded that of a 34 ha prairie remnant west of Chicago. However, only 35 (9.6%) of the inventoried species were native to the Chicago area.


We present two digital image processing methods for image quality enhancement in Digital Holographic Microscopy (DHM). With the first method, the Fourier transform of an off-axis hologram is spatially filtered in order to eliminate the zero order of diffraction and the twin image. We show that this operation enhances the image contrast and the signal to background ratio. The second method describes an original technique to perform the apodization of the hologram with a transmission profile which follows a cubic spline interpolation. The shape of the apodized aperture can be optimized by adjusting iteratively four parameters which define entirely the transmission of the aperture. We show that this operation reduces artifacts produced by diffraction effects associated to numerical reconstruction process. (C) 1999 Optical Society of America.


Although human causal reasoning is widely acknowledged as an object of scientific enquiry, there is little consensus on an appropriate measure of progress. Up-to-date evidence of the standard method of research in the field shows that this method has been rejected at the birth of modern science. We describe an instance of the standard scientific method for modelling causal reasoning (causal calculators). The method allows for uniform proofs of three relevant computational properties: correctness of the model with respect to the intended model, full abstraction of the model (function) with respect to the equivalence of reasoning scenarios (input), and formal relations of equivalence and subsumption between models. The method extends and exploits the systematic paradigm [Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, volume IV, p. 439-498, Oxford 1995] to fit with our interpretation of it. Using the described method, we present results for some major models, with an updated summary spanning seventy-two years of research in the field.


The advancement of flow cytometry technology together with a series of novel developments in hardware and software have facilitated both phenotypic and functional characterizations of different cell types. In addition, the availability of many monoclonal antibodies and an expanding range of dye-chemistry have made multi-parameter flow cytometry possible for simultaneous measurements of large numbers of cells with better information of complex cellular networks such as the immune system. Although it has the advantage of being a fast, objective and quantitative, but running polychromatic flow cytometry is a complex process with many challenges particularly in the data analysis. The purpose of this communication is to describe several types of presentation and analysis of both univariate and multivariate datasets.