There is now unequivocal evidence that dietary behaviour is related to illness and risk of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. Attempts to improve the nation's diet are based on providing information, assuming that given more information, the pubhc will choose healthier diets. Many studies indicate, however, that nutrition knowledge has little association with dietary behaviour; but a review of the literature reveals that nutrition knowledge has been inadequately measured. In addition, dietary behaviour has been assessed in terms of food intake and not in relation to changes in, or readiness to change, food intake. Following the Introduction, this research begins, in Chapter 2, by reviewing the hterature measuring nutrition knowledge. It is found that while many studies measure knowledge, typically the measure forms only part of the study which assesses either a particular subpopulation or a particular aspect of nutrition. In consequence, questionnaires are designed for a one-off and specific purpose and little attention is paid to the psychometric properties of the instrument. Dietary behaviour is measured with one of the well-established methods of assessing intake, the problems of which are acknowledged in the literature. Chapter 3 describes these methods with their shortcomings and use in psychological research. In response to these reviews, a comprehensive nutrition knowledge questionnaire was developed (in 1994) and intake was conceptualised in terms of dietary change, in keeping with psychologists' role in nutrition. Following the development and pilot study of this questionnaire (Chapter 4), its validity and reliability were assessed further in Chapter 5, with positive results. Significant differences were found between criterion groups (dietetic and computer science students), providing evidence of construct validity. Internal consistency correlations ranged fi'om 0.50 to 0.92 and test-retest reliability correlations ranged fi'om 0.80 to 0.98. This measure was then used (Chapter 6) to assess the level of nutrition knowledge among a large representative sample of British adults in a postal survey (in 1995). Nutrition knowledge was found to be poor concerning the dietary recommendations for meat, starchy foods, fruit and vegetables; the different types of fat (saturated, polyand monounsaturated); and associations between diet and diseases, such as fruit and vegetables, heart disease and cancer. Both stages of change (using Prochaska and DiClemente's model) and consumption of fat, fruit and vegetables (to test the stages' validity) were also assessed as measures of dietary behaviour. Most respondents replied that they had been limiting their fat intake for more than 6 months, but not been thinking of increasing their fruit and vegetable intake. Multivariate anlayses showed that being female, having more educational qualifications and being in a higher socio economic class were predictive of knowing more about nutrition and having a healthier dietary behaviour. Relationships between nutrition knowledge, stages of change and dietary intake were examined in Chapter 7 and significant associations identified. In contrast to this cross-sectional research, the final study in Chapter 8 was longitudinal and examined changes in nutrition knowledge and dietary behaviour over a one-year period (from 1993 to 1994). This study aimed to provide information on the extent to which healthier changes in dietary intake are related to increases in nutrition knowledge. While changes occurred in dietary intake (fat and sugar intake decreased significantly, the increases in fiuit and vegetable consumption were insignificant), knowledge scores remained unchanged. The final chapter discusses the key findings of this research, its implications and areas worthy of future investigation. For example, the results from this research suggest that knowledge is an important factor in food choice and should not be discounted as a part of health promotion. It may also be usefiil to integrate the construct of knowledge into the social cognition models of dietary choice or indeed to develop a new model to include knowledge along with motivational constructs from the social cognition models.


In Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., the US Supreme Court dramatically restricted the scope of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), holding that the statute does not permit victims of human rights abuses to sue foreign corporations for violations of international law that took place entirely abroad. We draw on three unique characteristics of the decision to estimate its effect on companies' valuations. First, we show that extractive industry firms with headquarters abroad experienced larger cumulative abnormal returns following the ruling. By contrast, similar US-based firms—which generally remain subject to ATS liability—did not benefit from the decision. Second, we demonstrate that foreign-based firms benefited both on the final decision date and on the earlier date when the Court slated the case for reargument on the issue of extraterritoriality. Third, we show that this effect varied with the human rights records of host countries: mining firms based abroad with subsidiaries in countries with poor human rights records benefitted most. Although our results cannot resolve debates over the merit of ATS suits, we do show that the Kiobel decision mattered: for foreign firms, it decreased the cost of doing business under regimes with records of human rights violations. (JEL G14, K13, K33, K41, L72)


Iodine deficiency has multiple adverse effects in humans, termed iodine deficiency disorders, due to inadequate thyroid hormone production. Globally, it is estimated that 2 billion individuals have an insufficient iodine intake, and South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are particularly affected. However, about 50% of Europe remains mildly iodine deficient, and iodine intakes in other industrialized countries, including the United States and Australia, have fallen in recent years. Iodine deficiency during pregnancy and infancy may impair growth and neurodevelopment of the offspring and increase infant mortality. Deficiency during childhood reduces somatic growth and cognitive and motor function. Assessment methods include urinary iodine concentration, goiter, newborn TSH, and blood thyroglobulin. But assessment of iodine status in pregnancy is difficult, and it remains unclear whether iodine intakes are sufficient in this group, leading to calls for iodine supplementation during pregnancy in several industrialized countries. In most countries, the best strategy to control iodine deficiency in populations is carefully monitored universal salt iodization, one of the most cost-effective ways to contribute to economic and social development. Achieving optimal iodine intakes from iodized salt (in the range of 150-250 microg/d for adults) may minimize the amount of thyroid dysfunction in populations. Ensuring adequate iodine status during parenteral nutrition has become important, particularly in preterm infants, as the use of povidone-iodine disinfectants has declined. Introduction of iodized salt to regions of chronic iodine deficiency may transiently increase the incidence of thyroid disorders, but overall, the relatively small risks of iodine excess are far outweighed by the substantial risks of iodine deficiency.


This dissertation examines trade affordances across three different video games and one novel: The Realm Online (1995), World of Warcraft (2004), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012), and Neal Stephenson's Reamde (2011). By trade affordances, I refer to those interfaces which facilitate the transition of digital items from one player to another. While the study of online economies has an established history, the broader social impact of trade affordances remains largely unexplored despite their ubiquity. I align these aforementioned video games with an increasing automation of trade practices within contemporary multi-user online games, as well as the growing relationship between online and offline economies. In order to demonstrate these connections, I provide a summary of early trade practices collected through blogs, playthroughs, developer notes, patches, and other ethnographic sources such as interviews and forum posts. After describing these trade practices, I survey key economic, ethical, political, and social theories relevant to the act of trading and consuming in online spaces. My critique is influenced by autonomist Marxist theory regarding the automation of work and the cycles of struggle central to the relationship between labour and capital. This positions my dissertation in relation to other game studies scholars who have assessed the relationship between play and labour in video games, such as Nick Dyer-Witherford, Alexander Galloway, and McKenzie Wark. I contend that trade in online games is an increasingly capitalized act reflective of conditions of capital outside the games. In order to demonstrate this phenomenon, I provide close readings of the previously mentioned video games and novel, as well as two single-player games that directly critique the relationship between trade, capital, and play.


The applicability of two different eigenvalue algorithms coupled with an axisymmetric RANS solver to predict the eigenmodes of separated supersonic flow inside an axisymmetric convergent-divergent nozzle was investigated. These are the Arnoldi and the Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) algorithms, respectively.
The Arnoldi method relies upon an explicit linearization of the flow dynamics, a linearized flow solver, to successively build up an orthogonal Krylov projection basis to project the flow dynamics onto. A disadvantage of using the linearized flow solver is that it does not include a turbulence model. However, it has an advantage in that its equations can be formulated to detect asymmetric modes.
The DMD is a snapshot-based algorithm, which needs no explicit linearization of the flow dynamics. It can thus incorporate influence from the modeled turbulence and nonlinearities.
The results show that the frequency range of the least damped modes, in the Arnoldi analysis, was within the frequency range to which experiments and numerical simulations have shown the flow to be most sensitive.
Comparison of the DMD and Arnoldi modes showed that in some cases, the two methods provide almost identical modes, particularly in the case of the least damped modes, which are of most importance.
An investigation of a nozzle geometry known to experience transonic resonance was carried out applying the DMD algorithm to a set of URANS simulation snapshots. The results indicate that the method is capable of predicting the transonic resonance frequencies with reasonable accuracy and, as a consequence, analyzing the DMD modes provides insight into the fundamental resonance mechanism.


Most tectonic models for the Sevier Desert basin, west-central Utah, envision it as the result of large-magnitude, normal-sense slip on a regional detachment fault. That interpretation, based principally on seismic reflection data, has helped shape views on the tectonics of the northeastern Great Basin area and, in a larger sense, the historical development of ideas about low-angle normal faulting. In recent years, however, several researchers have suggested, based on rock-mechanical, field, and subsurface evidence, that the hypothesized detachment fault does not exist and that the basin must have another explanation. Even among proponents of the detach- ment model, opinion has differed regarding the hypothesized extensional fault's total displacement, estimates for which vary widely; the timing of detachment slip; and whether the hypothesized fault represents a "new" Tertiary extensional structure or an extensional reactivation of the Mesozoic Pavant thrust. A comprehensive reinterpreta- tion of available subsurface data for the basin, including several previously unpub- lished seismic profiles, suggests: (1) that slip on the hypothesized detachment must have ceased by the Miocene in the southern Sevier Desert; (2) that estimates of large-magnitude offset on the hypothesized detachment are essentially unconstrained by structural data and need to be reevaluated; and (3) that models that view the hypothesized detachment as a Tertiary extensional reactivation of a Mesozoic thrust are likely incorrect. The newly available seismic data demonstrate that reflections from the Pavant thrust do indeed closely align with reflections fromthe Paleozoic/Tertiary contact in many parts of the northern Sevier Desert basin; however, to the south these same thrust fault reflections are directly traceable to a position well above the down dip projection of the presumed detachment within the Paleozoic Cricket Mountains block. Erosional truncation of the thrust faults and the absence in the south of other reflections aligned with the Paleozoic/Tertiary contact preclude extensional back- sliding on a Mesozoic thrust fault. These interpretations, if correct, are incompatible with the detachment hypothesis and necessitate alternative explanations for the basin's origins.


Agent-based Computing addresses the challenges in managing distributed computing systems and networks through monitoring, communication, consensus-based decision-making and coordinated actuation. As a result, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems have demonstrated the capability to use intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, and other social metaphors like trust, game and institution, to not only address real-world problems in a human-like way but to transcend human performance. This has had a transformative impact on many application domains, particularly e-commerce, but also on planning, logistics, manufacturing, robotics, decision support, transportation, entertainment, emergency relief and disaster management, and data mining and analytics. As one of the largest and still growing research fields of Computer Science, agent-based computing today remains a unique enabler of inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary research.

This special issue provides a selection of papers concerning the state-of-the-art research in multi-agent systems. Although the idea was initiated at 17th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, an open call allowed any researcher working on related topics to submit a paper for review.
This special issue features four articles.

The article entitled Combining PosoMAS Method Content with Scrum: Agile Software Engineering for Open Self-Organising Systems by Jan-Philipp Steghoefer, Hella Seebach, Benedikt Eberhardinger, Michael Huebschmann, Wolfgang Reif proposes PosoMAS-Scrum, an agile agent-oriented software engineering process for developing large-scale open self-organising systems. The authors also demonstrate how this method can be applied in a development effort and compare it with existing approaches.

The article entitled Modelling Dynamic Normative Understanding in Agent Societies by Christopher Konstantin Frantz, Martin K. Purvis, Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu, Mariusz Nowostawski proposes an approach to build up normative understanding from the bottom up without using any prior knowledge. Their approach combines both existing institution representations (the structure) with a norm identification process.

The article entitled A Multi-Agent Approach for Trust-based Service Discovery and Selection in Social Networks by Amine Louati, Joyce El Haddad, Suzanne Pinson proposes an approach to use multi-agent systems to model the service discovery and selection process. The authors present a trust model for social networks which supports agents in determining trustworthy service providers and allows agents to reason about trust in their distributed decision-making process.

The article entitled Multi-Objective Distributed Constraint Optimization using Semi-Rings by Graham Billiau, Chee Fon Chang and Aditya Ghose proposes an extended Support Based Distributed Optimization algorithm to support Multi-Objective Distributed Constraint Optimization problem. The authors also demonstrate that by building a new DCOP definition using an idempotent semiring to measure the cost/utility of a solution, this approach is able to solve multiple objectives without a total pre-order over the set of solutions.

We would like to thank the editorial board of SCPE for the chance of arranging this special issue, and all the reviewers for their hard work.


Research on post-revolutionary Iranian affairs initially focused on the causes of the revolution. In the mid-1980s the focus shifted to the new republic's policies and teleology. This preoccupation with the revolution and the emerging new regime led researchers to virtually neglect the Iranian civil society.
The author argues that it is time to look at developments in Iran through a new prism. While the need to study and analyze the actions, policies and behavior of the government itself, it is imperative for a better understanding of societal forces to engage in some scholarly research on Iranian civil society and its prospect for growth. As many prominent scholars have argued and the historical developments in Eastern Europe and elsewhere have shown, sustainable democracy and economic development hinge on continuous flourishing of the institutions of civil society.
This article focuses mainly on a discussion of various dimensions of Iranian civil society including aspects of emerging political, ideological, and philosophical trends, the tendencies associated with various members of the political elite, prominent intellectual dissenters and the state of a number of important professional, economic and cultural institutions and organizations.
The article suggests that a civil society is indeed in the process of formation in iran and that its survival and growth will depend on the emergence of an equilibrium between the has come government and non-governmental sectors. It further argues that the growth of civil society coupled with fundamental reforms in government's structure and functions are key elements in the process of economic development and the establishment of a democratic society. The article, therefore, attempts to identify the forces that either hinder or encourage this process.
The author has based his analyses and arguments mostly on personal interviews with Iranians of differing social, economic, and political backgrounds. He has also drawn upon articles and discussions on social issues that have recently appeared published in Iranian print media.


Evidence suggests that there are elevated rates of alcohol-use disorders (AUDs) at each stage of schizophrenia. Although the literature examining the clinical implications of alcohol at the early stages of schizophrenia are rather sparse, findings from numerous studies suggest that comorbid AUDs in individuals with schizophrenia exacerbate psychopathology, undermine medication compliance, add to cognitive dysfunction, impaired community functioning and physical health. Although there are several clinical implications of AUDs, their inter-relationships are not well known and must be further studied to present a clearer clinical picture. Gaps in the literature and areas for future research will be discussed.


This Paper empirically investigates the impact of distortions in the banking sector on the structure and dynamics of product markets as well as on firm level outcomes. Our analysis suggests that an increase in the efficiency of the banking industry can have first-order effects not only on the lending relationship between banks and firms, but also on the structure and dynamics of product markets overall. The particular reform we consider is the deregulation of the French banking industry in the mid 1980s. This deregulation eliminated government interference in bank lending decisions and allowed French banks to compete more freely in the credit market. Post deregulation, we find that banks are less willing to bail out poorly performing firms and that these firms experience a steeper increase in the cost of capital. Subsequently, firms in the more bank-dependent industries have a somewhat higher propensity to undertake restructuring measures. At the industry-level, we observe an increase in asset and job reallocation in the bank dependent sectors, mostly due to higher entry and exit rates of firms. We also find an improvement in allocative efficiency across firms as well as a decline in industry concentration ratios. Overall, these findings are consistent with a model where distortions in bank lending create artificial barriers to entry in the real sectors of the economy. A more efficient banking sector therefore appears to play an important role in fostering a Schumpeterian process of 'creative destruction'.


This paper, a work-in-progress, uses the dining experiences of two vegetarians in Victoria, British Columbia to explore the unequal treatment they generally receive from Victoria's dining industry. Even though the participants felt that Victoria is a great place for vegetarians, findings from three interviews, four food menus, and my direct experience as a cook suggest that the restaurant industry—which is primarily geared towards non-vegetarians—treats diners in Victoria unequally, especially vegetarians. By identifying vegetarians as a distinct social group this project shows how inequality against vegetarians in Victoria operates. The thesis of the research project, however, cannot be generalized to include the larger body of vegetarians in Victoria because of the small sample group. This research project recognizes that far more interviews and further research are needed to verify its hypothesis.


Java SOA Cookbook offers practical solutions and advice to programmers charged with implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in their organization. Instead of providing another conceptual, high-level view of SOA, this cookbook shows you how to make SOA work. It's full of Java and XML code you can insert directly into your applications and recipes you can apply right away. The book focuses primarily on the use of free and open source Java Web Services technologies -- including Java SE 6 and Java EE 5 tools -- but you'll find tips for using commercially available tools as well. Java SOA Cookbook will help you: Construct XML vocabularies and data models appropriate to SOA applications Build real-world web services using the latest Java standards, including JAX-WS 2.1 and JAX-RS 1.0 for RESTful web services Integrate applications from popular service providers using SOAP, POX, and Atom Create service orchestrations with complete coverage of the WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) 2.0 standard Improve the reliability of SOAP-based services with specifications such as WS-Reliable Messaging Deal with governance, interoperability, and quality-of-service issues The recipes in Java SOA Cookbook will equip you with the knowledge you need to approach SOA as an integration challenge, not an obstacle.


There are a number of important (landmark) cases in the development of Family Law in England and Wales that deserve detailed examination and lend themselves particularly well to historical examination. Family law cases tend to raise highly controversial issues, often on striking facts, frequently provoking wider social debate and/or extensive publicity. Consequently, the landmark cases chosen for this collection provide considerable scope, not only for doctrinal analysis and explanation of the importance and impact of the decisions, but also for in-depth examination of the social or policy developments that influenced them. The stories behind the cases provide a fascinating insight into the complexities of family life and the drama that can be found in the family courts. In recent years, Family Law has seen enormous changes in law's engagement with the notion of 'family', with the enactment, for example, of the Civil Partnership Act 2004, the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and, more recently, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. As we begin to move forward into the new millennium, this is an excellent time to engage in detailed analyses and 'stock-taking' of the landmark decisions, many of which were decided in the 1970s, and which have shaped modern Family Law. This book provides a series of in-depth studies of the key leading cases, and will be of interest to students and lecturers alike.


Chronic renal failure is a progressive loss of renal function over a period of months or year and Hemodialysis is a suitable treatment which is preferably given to the chronic renal failure ernment RF) . Who are not to undergo renal transplantation therapy. This study was carried out to observe the immediate effect of oxidative stress and inflammation during hemodialysis . In the present study 30 CRF patients undergoing hemodialysis and 50 healthy controls matching in age and sex were included. In the present study prehemodialytic samples showed significant rise (P<0.001) in serum lipid peroxidation (LPO), serum homocysteine and high sensitivity C-reactive Protein (hs-CRP) as compared to controls. Mean values of serum superoxide dismutase (SOD) and serum nitric oxide (NO● )were found to be significantly reduced (P<0.001)in prehemodialytic samples as compared to controls. In post hemodialytic samples mean values of serum superoxide dismutase, serum nitric oxide and serum homocysteine were significantly reduced (P<0.001)when compared to prehemodialytic samples while mean values of serum lipid peroxidation and hs-CRP were significantly increased (P<0.001)in post hemodialytic samples as compared to prehemodialytic samples. The result of our study have been shown there is extensive oxidative stress and inflammation in patients with CRF, which is further augmented by hemodialysis, as supported by altered levels of LPO, SOD, NO●, homocysteine and hs-CRP. It may cause increased risk of cardiovascular disorder (CVD) in patients on chronic hemodialysis.


We propose a simulation method for multidimensional Hawkes processes based on superposition theory of point processes. This formulation allows us to design efficient simulations for Hawkes processes with differing exponentially decaying intensities. We demonstrate that inter-arrival times can be decomposed into simpler auxiliary variables that can be sampled directly, giving exact simulation with no approximation. We establish that the auxiliary variables provides information on the parent process for each event time. The algorithm correctness is shown by verifying the simulated intensities with their theoretical moments. A modular inference procedure consisting of Gibbs samplers through the auxiliary variable augmentation and adaptive rejection sampling is presented. Finally, we compare our proposed simulation method against existing methods, and find significant improvement in terms of algorithm speed. Our inference algorithm is used to discover the strengths of mutually excitations in real dark networks.


State-of-the-art regional climate model simulations that are able to resolve key mesoscale circulations are used, for the first time, to understand the interaction between the large-scale convective environment of the MJO and processes governing the strong diurnal cycle over the islands of the Maritime Continent (MC). Convection is sustained in the late afternoon just inland of the coasts due to sea breeze convergence. Previous work has shown that the variability in MC rainfall associated with the MJO is manifested in changes to this diurnal cycle; land-based rainfall peaks before the active convective envelope of the MJO reaches the MC, whereas oceanic rainfall rates peak whilst the active envelope resides over the region. The model simulations show that the main controls on oceanic MC rainfall in the early active MJO phases are the large-scale environment and atmospheric stability, followed by high oceanic latent heat flux forced by high near-surface winds in the later active MJO phases. Over land, rainfall peaks before the main convective envelope arrives (in agreement with observations), even though the large-scale convective environment is only moderately favourable for convection. The causes of this early rainfall peak are convective triggers from land-sea breeze circulations that are strong due to high surface insolation and surface heating. During the peak MJO phases cloud cover increases and surface insolation decreases, which weakens the strength of the mesoscale circulations and reduces land-based rainfall, even though the large-scale environment remains favourable for convection at this time. Hence, scale interactions are an essential part of the MJO transition across the MC.


We study liquidity provision by competitive high-frequency trading firms (HFTs) in a dynamic trading model with private information. Liquidity providers face adverse selection risk from trading with privately informed investors and from trading with other HFTs that engage in latency arbitrage upon public information. The impact of the two different sources of risk depends on the details of the market design. We determine equilibrium transaction costs in continuous limit order book (CLOB) markets and under frequent batch auctions (FBA). In the absence of informed trading, FBA dominates CLOB just as in Budish et al. (2015). Surprisingly, this result does no longer hold with privately informed investors. We show that FBA allows liquidity providers to charge markups and earn profits – even under risk neutrality and perfect competition. A slight variation of the FBA design removes the inefficiency by allowing traders to submit orders conditional on auction excess demand.


Among all the various existing skills needed in palliative end-of-life care, none is more important the ability to communicate effectively. Terminal ill experience is the time when patients were overwhelmed with several emotional and psychological symptoms, which need the maximum amount of care, through effective communication in the most appropriate way. Effective communication is the fundamental component to physician and patient quality relationship, which make clinician to be trusted by the patient, resulting in quality decision making for patient treatment and future diagnosis plan in the clinical practices. However, looking at the present scenario of Indian health care system, the absence of good communication is visible in most of the clinical practices, which becomes the underlying reason for terminal patient receiving unwanted life sustaining medical treatment, along with inappropriate care that goes against the patient's choices. Moreover, effective communication also plays an important role in breaking the bad news to patient and family. Thus, seeing at the urgent needs of effective communication in the clinical practices, the present study is forms through fieldwork that is follow up by an analytical study. The aim of this particular research is to inquire, how important the effective communication is in terminal care, and what are the strategies for breaking bad news effectively without hurting the feelings of the dying individual's. REVIEW THE CLINICAL ROLES OF PSYCHOLOGISTS IN END-OF-LIFE CARE: A NEW HORIZON IN INDIAN PALLIATIVE CARE Vaiphei Suantak Demkhosei, Sisodia Devendra Singh Bhupal Nobles' University, Department of Psychology, Udaipur, India


Many activities are held in a certain fixed space in our society. It becomes possible to participate in such activities from remote places. Video is one of the best media for this purpose, and it is important to consider how to image such activities. We propose a new video imaging method with multiple cameras for multiple users. Dynamic situations in an activity are defined for describing an imaging rule of each user, and they are detected by processing sensor data. Concretely, the imaging rule is described by a user with camera-works linked to each dynamic situation. With this description of the imaging rules, many users can request their own favourite camera-works, while the system mediates these requests to satisfy as many users as possible. We have built a prototype system and conducted an experiment in which several users could participate in lecture.


Monitoring biodiversity is essential to assess the impacts of increasing anthropogenic activities in marine environments. Traditionally, marine biomonitoring involves the sorting and morphological identification of benthic macro-invertebrates, which is time-consuming and taxonomic-expertise demanding. High-throughput amplicon sequencing of environmental DNA (eDNA metabarcoding) represents a promising alternative for benthic monitoring. However, an important fraction of eDNA sequences remains unassigned or belong to taxa of unknown ecology, which prevent their use for assessing the ecological quality status. Here, we show that supervised machine learning (SML) can be used to build robust predictive models for benthic monitoring, regardless of the taxonomic assignment of eDNA sequences. We tested three SML approaches to assess the environmental impact of marine aquaculture using benthic foraminifera eDNA, a group of unicellular eukaryotes known to be good bioindicators, as features to infer macro-invertebrates based biotic indices. We found similar ecological status as obtained from macro-invertebrates inventories. We argue that SML approaches could overcome and even bypass the cost and time-demanding morpho-taxonomic approaches in future biomonitoring.


In this paper, we derive a novel probabilistic model of boosting as a Product of Experts. We re-derive the boosting algorithm as a greedy incremental model selection procedure which ensures that addition of new experts to the ensemble does not decrease the likelihood of the data. These learning rules lead to a generic boosting algorithm - POE-Boost which turns out to be similar to the AdaBoost algorithm under certain assumptions on the expert probabilities. The paper then extends the POEBoost algorithm to POEBoost.CS which handles hypothesis that produce probabilistic predictions. This new algorithm is shown to have better generalization performance compared to other state of the art algorithms.


Providing fiscal or tax subsidies to try to promote additional work and saving is a relatively modern notion. These subsidies may stimulate demand by putting more money in the economy, but they are designed primarily to affect behavior through incentives. Modern industrial economies like the U.S. over time have enacted fiscal subsidy programs within three general categories: permanent capital subsidies, temporary capital subsidies, and permanent labor subsidies. Left off the table consistently has been a fourth option that logically completes the list: temporary labor subsidies. Yet during a downturn this fourth type of option might uniquely be able to provide the best combination of economic incentives for an expanding economy and a fair distribution of the stimulus benefits.


The formation of tropical storms in a low-resolution Atmospheric General Circulation model is studied over the western North Pacific region during the June—October season. The model simulates the mean annual cycle of storm number in this basin quite well. Time-dependent composites of the storms are formed and analyzed, with a focus on the temporal evolution of quantities averaged in space around the storm centers. Day zero of each composite corresponds to the time at which the disturbance passes criteria for detection. The composites depict the model storms as convectively coupled, synoptic-scale vortices whose degree of coupling to convection increases at some point, leading to intensification. Variables related to disturbance intensity have significant anomalies at day —7, indicating a finite amplitude disturbance prior to "genesis". Many of these variables show similar temporal evolution, with a local minimum two or three days before day zero, and a strong increase after that for several days, followed by an eventual decrease. The precipitation reaches its maximum on day 2, the net moist static energy forcing (surface fluxes minus net tropospheric radiative cooling, each of which has an anomaly of 20–30 W m—2 in the sense of warming the atmosphere) a day later, and dynamical variables such as vorticity and temperature still later, with broad plateaus centered around day 4 or 5. The vorticity increases at the surface at the same time as at midlevels, unlike in observed storms. The mean composite environmental vertical wind shear has a maximum amplitude on day —2 and then decreases. This could indicate a causal role of shear in limiting development, but would also be consistent with a coincidental storm motion to regions of lower shear, with development controlled by other factors. A signal in the skewness of the lower-level relative humidity distribution over the ensemble suggests that a dry lower troposphere can prevent development of a model tropical disturbance.


The female share in management positions is quite low in Germany. The higher the hierarchical level, the fewer women there are in such positions. Men have numerous role models to follow whereas women lack this opportunity: In the executive boards of the top 200 private companies in Germany, only 2.5 percent of members are female. Many studies have focused on the influence of human capital and other "objective" factors on career opportunities. In our study, we go a step further by also looking at the impact of self-reported personality traits on gender differences in career chances. We compare managers and other white-collar employees in Germany's private sector. While bivariate results based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in 2005 show that there are significant gender differences in personality traits, multivariate estimations clearly indicate that these differences cannot account for gender differences in career opportunities. Nevertheless, personality traits might indeed play a role, albeit more indirectly: Some of the stronger career effects, such as work experience, long working hours, and labour market segregation, can also reflect differences in personality traits. These might have been influenced at an early stage by a gender-biased environment. Our results strongly stress the need for a gender-neutral environment outside and inside companies in order to enforce equal career opportunities for women and men.


This paper presents three data mining techniques applied on a SCADA system data repository: NaA³ve Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbor and Decision Trees. A conclusion that k-Nearest Neighbor is a suitable method to classify the large amount of data considered is made finally according to the mining result and its reasonable explanation. The experiments are built on the training data set and evaluated using the new test set with machine learning tool WEKA.


When subjected to random background vibrations, a standard, circular-aperture Michelson interferometer with a dynamic alignment servo system has a misalignment angle that is a random function of time. Here we derive formulas for the loss in performance when the misalignment angle is modeled as a stationary stochastic time series and show how these formulas are simplified when the power spectrum is band-limited white noise.


Enter in between these two covers and experience the thrill of newfound wealth with the Johansen family. Travel with them as they move into the new town of Nottoway to make a new life for themselves, surrounded by those of the social elite, among whom they have now earned the right to stand among. Walk with the protagonist, TJ, as he meets new friends at the local academy. Know what it is like to stand among those who live in search of a new metaphysical experience, as TJ does. When TJ decides to break off on his own, find out why doing so was such a terrible mistake. Walk with him as he delves deeply into the metaphysical..for an experience that was far wilder than he had ever anticipated. As he finds his way through the heavenly maze, he enters into new realms of existence, where what he has been shown to be bad, was really good and what he had been told to be true for all of his life, was really a twisted tall tale. End up with him to share in his astonishment when he winds up right where he started on his long fantastic journey!


The Northern Sub-Saharan African (NSSA) region, which accounts for 20%–25% of the global carbon emissions from biomass burning, also suffers from frequent drought episodes and other disruptions to the hydrological cycle whose adverse societal impacts have been widely reported during the last several decades. This paper presents a conceptual framework of the NSSA regional climate system components that may be linked to biomass burning, as well as detailed analyses of a variety of satellite data for 2001–2014 in conjunction with relevant model-assimilated variables. Satellite fire detections in NSSA show that the vast majority (>75%) occurs in the savanna and woody savanna land-cover types. Starting in the 2006–2007 burning season through the end of the analyzed data in 2014, peak burning activity showed a net decrease of 2–7%/yr in different parts of NSSA, especially in the savanna regions. However, fire distribution shows appreciable coincidence with land-cover change. Although there is variable mutual exchange of different land cover types, during 2003–2013, cropland increased at an estimated rate of 0.28%/yr of the total NSSA land area, with most of it (0.18%/yr) coming from savanna. During the last decade, conversion to croplands increased in some areas classified as forests and wetlands, posing a threat to these vital and vulnerable ecosystems. Seasonal peak burning is anti-correlated with annual water-cycle indicators such as precipitation, soil moisture, vegetation greenness, and evapotranspiration, except in humid West Africa (5°–10° latitude), where this anti-correlation occurs exclusively in the dry season and burning virtually stops when monthly mean precipitation reaches 4 mm d−1. These results provide observational evidence of changes in land-cover and hydrological variables that are consistent with feedbacks from biomass burning in NSSA, and encourage more synergistic modeling and observational studies that can elaborate this feedback mechanism.


Annual topdressings of K at 0, 42, and 166 pounds per acre, applied either in spring or mid-summer, were compared with 2 alfalfas—Medicago sativa (var. 'Vernal') and M. falcata—for 3 seasons in Alaska's Tanana Valley. Stands of both alfalfas thinned rapidly during the study but stands and stand losses showed virtually no relationship to K treatments. Winterkill accounted for most of the reduction of stands and Vernal winterkilled more than M. falcata. K treatments resulted in large differences in yield. Both rates of K topdressing resulted in higher alfalfa yields than no topdressing; and 166 pounds of K per acre were superior to 42 pounds per acre. Crude protein content of forage was seldom influenced to a significant extent by K applications. Where differences existed, crude protein content was lowest with the highest rate of K application. M. falcata contained higher levels of crude protein than Vernal. K content of forage, virtually always lowest where no K was topdressed, was usually higher in alfalfa topdressed with 166 pounds of K per acre than at the lower rate. K content was lower in Vernal than in M. falcata. Highest percentage recovery in forage of applied K occurred with no topdressing. There, recovery exceeded the amount of K applied at planting. K recovery with the higher rate of topdressing was poorer than with the lower rate. M. falcata was superior to Vernal in K recovery. Amounts of available K in the soil did not differ among treatments until the third harvest season, when K levels were higher in most plots that had received the higher rate of K topdressing.


A fundamental vision driving pervasive computing research is access to personal and shared data anywhere at anytime. In many ways, this vision is close to being realized. Wireless networks such as 802.11 offer connectivity to small, mobile devices. Portable storage, such as mobile disks and USB keychains, let users carry several gigabytes of data in their pockets. Yet, at least three substantial barriers to pervasive data access remain. First, power-hungry network and storage devices tax the limited battery capacity of mobile computers. Second, the danger of viewing stale data or making inconsistent updates grows as objects are replicated across more computers and portable storage devices. Third, mobile data access performance can suffer due to variable storage access times caused by dynamic power management, mobility, and use of heterogeneous storage devices. To overcome these barriers, we have built a new distributed file system called BlueFS. Compared to the Coda file system, BlueFS reduces file system energy usage by up to 55% and provides up to 3 times faster access to data replicated on portable storage.


The gap between legislative expectations and actual outcomes is of central importance to the legal regime. Much of the work of environmental lawyers involves compliance or enforcement efforts, not rulemaking. Even in terms of the issuance of environmental rules, there can be substantial deviations between what the lawmaker expected and what actually takes place. This Article discusses two types of gaps between the statutory design and actual implementation. In some situations, something that is legally mandated simply fails to happen. Deadlines are missed, standards are ignored or fudged, or enforcement efforts misfire. The result is incomplete implementation, falling short of the statutory mandate. For this reason, environmental laws often fail to fully achieve the intended outcome. Part II of the Article is devoted to understanding the scope of this implementation shortfall and considering possible ways of controlling it. Part III turns to a different aspect of implementation: the ability of agencies and even regulated parties to devise new methods of achieving statutory goals that were not anticipated by the legislature. For instance, if the designated means of reducing emissions proves impractical, the agency may shift to an alternative mechanism. More boldly, the agency may use statutory language designed for one problem (conventional air pollution) to address another (climate change). This type of creative implementation is different in spirit than the implementation shortfalls discussed earlier. What they have in common is that both of them differ from the expectations by the statute. Mismatches between implementation and statutes produce useful results, but risk doing damage to our concept of the rule of law. Widespread noncompliance with formally binding requirements undermines the concept that good citizens -- and even more so, governmental officials -- obey the law. For this reason, although it may be socially beneficial in some of its guises, creative implementation needs to be held within a reasonable interpretation of the statutory language.


BACKGROUND
Pilomatrixoma is a benign tumor of the skin, preferentially found in children. The final diagnosis is made by biopsy. High resolution ultrasound (US) is a non invasive method for its diagnosis.

AIM
To describe the US findings in children with pilomatrixoma.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Fifty five patients with 62 clinically suspected pilomatrixomas were studied by US. All examinations were done with an ATL HDI 5000, linear 5-12 MHz transducer. Pathological study confirmed the diagnosis pilomatrixoma in 52 cases.

RESULTS
Fifty of 52 pilomatrixomas were diagnosed by US, with a sensitivity of 96%. The mean age of patients was 7.5 years. Forty seven lesions (90%) were located in the head, neck or upper extremities and their mean size was 8.5 mm. Thirty two lesions were hypodermal, 14 were dermohypodermal and 6 were dermal. In 44 lesions the contour was regular and non delineated, 44 lesions were oval, 41 lesions had an acoustic shadow, 36 were echogenic or hyperechogenic, 31 had a peripheral halo (60%), 55 had calcifications (98%), nine had perilesional vessels, 2 had intratumoral vessels and 7 had inflammatory changes. US excluded the diagnosis of pilomatrixoma in 10 lesions formulating a correct differential diagnosis in eight, with a specificity of 80%.

CONCLUSIONS
Pilomatrixomas had two US types of presentation. The first is a well defined nodule with peripheral halo partially calcified or with microcalcifications. The second is a completely calcified nodule without peripheral halo and with a strong acoustic shadow. US is a useful, sensitive and specific diagnostic method for pilomatrixoma.


This article analyses the positive reception of Katixa Agirre's novel Las madres no. In order to contextualise these considerations, we will briefly present the writer's career up to this point, and we will offer a brief narrative analysis of the novel. Finally, we will trace some possible explanations for the favourable reception of the book Las madres no among Spanish-speaking readers and critics: the originality of the text and the chosen subgenre (the crime thriller); the recent boom of publications on the topic of motherhood in Spanish and Latin-American recent literatures; and also the role played by the publishing house, Tránsito Libros, an independent and fairly young company with a strong presence in social networks which has attracted some enthusiastic followers within the Spanish readership. The combination of these different elements may explain why Las madres no has received more attention than other works by the same author, and by other Basque writers who have been translated into Spanish.


Objectives: By the end of 2004, there were 403 students infected with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) reported to Taiwan's Center for Disease Control. The objective of this study was to understand the knowledge, attitudes and practice regarding HIV-1 and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) among new entrant (freshman) university students in Taiwan. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in September 2004. Self-administered questionnaires from 11,847 students of nine universities were collected and analyzed. Results: The mean knowledge score was high-86.8. Regarding attitude, 42.2% of students would avoid contacts with HIV/AIDS patients; and 13.6% felt embarrassed if one of their family members had AIDS. The attitude scores of the students did not correlate with the knowledge scores (Pearson correlation: 0.182 and 0.074 for male and female students, respectively). Students identified both school and television as the main sources of information. The sexual orientations were 93.3% heterosexuals, 1.1% bisexuals and 0.5% homosexuals. The mean age of first sexual intercourse was 17.1 (SD ± 1.5). Among 1,179 (10%) students who had sexual experiences, only 30.9% used condoms consistently. In addition, 9.9% were alcohol consumers and 157 students (1.3%) were illicit drug users which including 10 injecting drug users. Students obtained drugs mainly from friends (58.6%), in pubs (45.2%) and at school (21.6%). This is a significant finding. Conclusions: There were knowledge gaps and many misconceptions about transmission routes of HIV-1. More AIDS education including anti-drug information should be provided to high school students in Taiwan.


This essay argues that in Henry James9s The Ambassadors (1903) Mrs. Newsome, who appears to be merely a representative of everything un-Jamesian, particularly a lack of moral and aesthetic imagination, should not be so quickly dismissed. Post-structuralist critics do not hesitate to denounce her. They typically identify Mrs. Newsome9s "book" of expectations for Strether, her emissary, and for Chad, her successor, with the closed book of logocentric tyranny; both are said to rely on unambiguous reference and to enforce the cold rationality of linear causation. Derridean readers of The Ambassadors unmistakably prefer Madame de Vionnet9s Paris, embodying as it apparently does their own essentially skeptical doctrines about representation. James, however, plays a more subtle game of balance and synthesis, suggesting that while Newsome9s book is firm against new impressions, expecting experience to submit utterly to preconceived plans and moralistic evaluations, it also successfully asserts against Parisian representational openness and mystery the viability of reasonable explanation. Her book is vindicated insofar as it stands for the persistent relevance of linear causality and for the nonabsolute grounding of speculation in the concrete world of events and consequences. Newsome9s extreme rationalism is in fact denied full authority early in the novel, whose true subject is located when extreme skepticism seems to dominate and explanation seems irrelevant. During the course of the story, time9s subtle order slowly reemerges, and James the realist steps forward from behind the post-structuralist veil.


This volume maps the watershed areas between two 'holy grails' of computer science: the identification and interpretation of affect including sentiment and mood. The expression of sentiment and mood involves the use of metaphors, especially in emotive situations. Affect computing is rooted in hermeneutics, philosophy, political science and sociology, and is now a key area of research in computer science. The 24/7 news sites and blogs facilitate the expression and shaping of opinion locally and globally. Sentiment analysis, based on text and data mining, is being used in the looking at news and blogs for purposes as diverse as: brand management, film reviews, financial market analysis and prediction, homeland security. There are systems that learn how sentiments are articulated. This work draws on, and informs, research in fields as varied as artificial intelligence, especially reasoning and machine learning, corpus-based information extraction, linguistics, and psychology.


Agencies serving the persecuted church have shown considerable interest in the idea of devising an early warning (EW) system to give advance warning of potential threats to religious freedom. After researching EW systems in various fields and discovering that no such system exists in the human rights or religious freedom worlds, I decided on a methodology comprising a list of indicators accompanied by a set of explanatory notes and a numerical rating system. These indicators are designed to be used to monitor changes on the ground in countries where there is little current trouble but where the situation could deteriorate.


A study was conducted to estimate zinc loads in the organs and tissues of Alburnus alburnus, Cyprinus carpio and Perca fluviatilis inhabiting 2 dam lakes Kardjali and Studen Kladenets, located along the Arda river (South Bulgaria). The zinc content was determined by atomic absorption spectrophotometry using a Perkin Elmer 380 B apparatus .The effect of the temporal factor was proved over a 3-year study. The highest zinc concentrations in fish organs and tissues were detected in summer and autumn. The highest zinc loads were found in the kidney and liver, and the lowest in the muscles of the 3 fish species tested. A correlation was found between the zinc levels in the water and those in the fish.


The project "Development of an Industry Test Facility and Qualification Processes for in-line inspection (ILI) technology Evaluation and Enhancements" aims to expand knowledge of ILI technology performance and identify gaps where new technology is needed. Additionally, this project also aims to provide ILI technology developers, researchers and pipeline operators a continuing resource for accessing test samples with a range of pipeline integrity threats and vintages; and inline technology test facilities at the Technology Development Center (TDC) of Pipeline Research Council International, Inc. (PRCI), a PRCI managed facility available for future industry and PHMSA research projects.
 An ILI pull test facility was designed and constructed as part of this project based on industry state-of-the-art and opportunities for capability improvement. The major ILI technology providers, together with pipeline operator team members, reviewed the TDC sample inventory and developed a series of ILI performance tests illustrating one of multiple possible research objectives, culminating in 16-inch and 24-inch nominal diameter test strings. The ILI technology providers proposed appropriate inspection tools based on the types of the integrity threats in the test strings, a series of pull tests of the provided ILI tools were performed, and the technology providers delivered reports of integrity anomaly location and dimensions for performance evaluation.
 Quantitative measures of detection and sizing performance were confidentially disclosed to the individual ILI technology providers. For instances where ILI predictions were outside of claimed performance, the vendors were given a limited sample of actual defect data to enable re-analysis, thus demonstrating the potential for improved integrity assessment with validation measurements.
 In this paper, an evaluation of the ILI data obtained from repeated pull-through testing on the 16 and 24-inch pipeline strings at the TDC is performed. The resulting data was aligned, analyzed, and compared to truth data and the findings of the evaluation are presented.


The creative industries have long been seen as an innovative sector. More recent research posits that creative occupations are also a fundamental, but overlooked, driver of innovation. Theory also suggests cities are important for both creative industries and occupations, with urban environments helping firms innovate. Yet little empirical work has considered the links between creative industries, occupations, cities, and innovation at the firm level. This paper addresses this gap using a sample of over 9000 UK SMEs. Our results stress that creative industries firms are more likely to introduce original product innovations, but not those learnt from elsewhere. Creative occupations, however, appear a more robust general driver of innovation. We find no support for the hypothesis that urban creative industries firms are particularly innovative. However, creative occupations are used in cities to introduce product innovations learnt elsewhere. The results suggest that future work needs to seriously consider the importance of occupations in empirical studies of innovation.


This work reports on sensitive and selective gas sensors based on copper ferrite (CuFe2O4) nanoparticles. The nanoparticles were produced different methods including: colloid microwave assisted hydrothermal method, and co-precipitation method. Those methods enable a precise control of nanoparticle size, The produced nanoparticles were annealed at different temperatures. Structural analysis were carried out using x-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and they revealed that the as-prepared nanoparticle exhibit cubic structure. The nanoparticles undergo crystal structure transformation to tetragonal structure upon annealing. Furthermore, the nanoparticle were found to grow in size upon annealing. The tetrahedral and octahedral absorption bands which are characteristic of the spinel ferrite were determined using Fourier Transform Infra-Red Spectroscopy (FTIR) measurements. Gas sensors were fabricate by pressing the produced nanoparticle powder into disks. The sensor device was produced utilizing capacitor structure, with the top electrode stainless steel of grid structure. The produced sensors were characterized to be sensitive to both H2S and H2 gases, with greater sensitivity to H2S at low temperatures, where these sensors could detect H2S concentrations of 10 ppm at 80 °C. The low optimal operation temperature reveals the low power requirements for sensor operation. Thus, those sensors exhibit the potential to be used for industrial applications, especially for the petrochemical industry.the Petroleum Institute under a grant number RIFP-14312 and Qatar University


Structural glued laminated timber has been successfully used as a highway bridge material in the United States for approximately 50 years. From the mid 1940's to the mid 1980's, virtually all of these bridges were longitudinal girder or arch type glulam superstructures with a nail-laminated wood deck or some form of composite concrete deck. The next evolution of these bridges occurred between the early 1970's and the late 1980's, when the large majority of these bridges were constructed using longitudinal glulam girders and transverse glulam decks or longitudinal glulam deck superstructures manufactured from conventional softwood lumber species. Recently, highway bridge applications employing glued laminated timber have been expanded to include alternative wood species and new designs utilizing the concept of stress-laminating. Additionally, current research using composite plastic materials in injunction with glulam may lead to future innovations in timber highway bridges.


This two-part case study discusses some of the key marketing decisions faced by Eric Baker and the rest of his management team immediately before and after the launch of viagogo in the United Kingdom (UK) and other European markets. Viagogo is an online marketplace where sellers and buyers can exchange live event tickets (sports, entertainment, etc.) in a legal and secure manner. The underlying business model replicated the one introduced by StubHub in the United States, a company founded by Eric Baker and a fellow Stanford MBA a few years earlier. The first part of the case is set in June 2006, just two months before the official launch of the website. At that time, the case protagonists faced important decisions with respect to the company's revenue model. In particular, they had to determine what level of commission to charge, how to split this commission across sellers and buyers, and what pricing mechanism(s) to use (i.e., fixed price, auction, and/or declining price). Eric was also considering a potential partnership with a major football club in the UK. A deal was expected to generate considerable exposure for viagogo but, on the other hand, required significant investment and likely constrained the company's promotional options. The second part of the case takes place in early 2008. Following a brief review of viagogo's initial performance, a series of new challenges are introduced: (a) how to deal with increasing competition, (b) how to improve the general perception of secondary ticketing in the marketplace, (c) and how to scale the business up from start-up to middle-sized enterprise. Overall, the case highlights common challenges when launching a new business venture. It also questions the common belief that a successful business model in one country can be easily replicated in another. Finally, the case allows for a discussion of how business models tend to change as industries "mature" and new opportunities arise.


Photography is a referent medium. While a photograph is a physical object with its own ontology, the image depicted references a moment that has already ended. The mobility of a photograph relies on the divide between presence and absence, the material and the ephemeral. This photographic essay considers the tensions and parallels of such divides in photographing and photographs of sadhus , holy men who wander throughout East Asia. Sadhus relinquish worldly possessions in the name of spiritual pursuits, surviving on whatever the divine provides. The following images illustrate both their radiant spiritual presence, and the trace of a material boundedness.


Whether a stem cell remains or egresses away from its physiological niche is a function of mechanical and soluble factors in a time-dependent manner, which implicates a `memory' of prior mechanochemical conditioning. Virtually every organ in the body contains resident stem or progenitor cells that contribute to organ homeostasis or repair. The wound healing process in higher vertebrate animals is spatiotemporally complex and usually leads to scarring. Limitations for the use of stem cells as regenerative therapy include the lack of expansion capabilities in vitro as well as materials issues that complicate traditional biochemical protocols. A minimal `scar in a dish' model is developed to clarify the kinetics of tension-sensitive proteins in mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which possess plasticity to mechanochemical changes of the microenvironment that are typical of scars. The organization and expression of such proteins implicates transcription factors that ultimately steer cell fate. In contrast to classic mechano-transducers of matrix mechanics such as actin assembly-dependent serum response factor (SRF) signaling, a novel mechanorepressive role of NKX2.5 is implicated in maintaining intracellular tension in long-term stem cell cultures on stiff matrices via nucleo-cytoplasmic shuttling — ultimately setting up a 'mechanical memory'. Core gene circuits with known roles in stem cell mechanobiology are modeled based on the 'use it or lose it' concept: tension inhibits turnover of structural proteins such as extracellular collagens, cytoskeletal myosins and nucleoskeletal lamins. This theoretical approach is tested in a variety of processes in vitro and in vivo that involve forces including cardiac development, osteogenic commitment of MSCs, and fibrosis therapy. With the sophistication of the science and technology of biomaterials relevant to stem cell biology and medicine, matrix mechanics can thus be rigorously combined with biochemical instructions in order to maximize therapeutic utility of stem cells. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering First Advisor Dennis E. Discher


This article originally appeared in the January 2012 Products' Liability Committee Newsletter. Expert witnesses play a more critical role than ever in the outcome of product liability litigation. Indeed, in many jurisdictions a sustainable opinion from a qualified expert witness is required to establish plaintiffs prima facie case. Therefore, it is increasingly important to explore issues that may challenge the credibility of an opposing party's expert witnesses. An important factor in assessing credibility is bias, and a source of bias that lawyers should carefully investigate is an opponent's expert witness fee arrangement. Some forms of expert compensation, such as contingency fees, inherently reveal a conflict-of-interest or an appearance of bias. For that reason, consider not only what an opponent's expert witness is paid, but also how the expert is paid. Uncovering an expert's financial stake in the outcome of litigation to expose bias can seriously undermine the witness's credibility. Do your homework Before deposing an expert witness, learn what you can about the expert's business relationships and history of serving as an expert witness. Begin with informal research on the internet, including the expert's own website, blogs, or discussion board posts. Then speak with your own expert, who is often familiar with others in the field and may be aware of existing alternative fee arrangements. Also check the expert's professional association for disciplinary proceedings against the expert or records of professional misconduct which may be available on the internet. Your firm's librarian can research cases in which the expert has previously worked, or research tools such as Daubert Tracker can be used to determine if the expert has ever been excluded or challenged for having a financial stake in the outcome of litigation. Your client's trade association might also track the use of experts and maintain a database of useful information about an expert witness. Some jurisdictions and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require pre deposition disclosures including a statement of an expert's compensation. (1) Use this statement as a starting point to build questions to ask about the expert's method of payment during the deposition. In some cases, serving a subpoena duces tecum with the expert's deposition notice requesting all pertinent documents may be an appropriate first step in gathering expert bias evidence if the information is needed to prepare for a deposition, but has not been disclosed by the expert or hiring attorney. Dig deep during the deposition During the deposition, vigorously question the expert regarding the terms of his fee agreement with opposing counsel. Specifically, inquire beyond the amount of compensation and determine the particular method used to calculate the expert's fee. An expert's compensation should never be conditioned upon, or measured by, the amount of the recovery in damages in the litigation. The presumption is, and research has proven, (2) that such fees naturally compromise the integrity of the testimony of the witness. (3) Note that contingent compensation can take many forms. The most obvious contingency fee is a percentage of the settlement or recovery from a lawsuit. But contingent fees may also consist of retrospective higher hourly rate payments for favorable outcomes, "success bonuses", fringe benefits, premiums, or any form of financial incentive or reward conditioned on the outcome of litigation. Another form is a split-fee arrangement whereby an expert agrees to accept a lower hourly rate than his normal rate, conditioned upon receiving a percentage of recovery in the event of successful resolution of the case. Also explore fee agreements in place prior to litigation, as an expert's activity leading to testimony should not be compensated on a contingent basis. For example, experts may be retained in an advisory role prior to litigation, and then subsequently called upon to offer opinion testimony at trial. …


HIV Dependency Factors (HDFs) are a class of human proteins that are essential for HIV replication, but are not lethal to the host cell when silenced. Three previous genome-wide RNAi experiments identified HDF sets with little overlap. We combine data from these three studies with a human protein interaction network to predict new HDFs, using an intuitive algorithm called SinkSource and four other algorithms published in the literature. Our algorithm achieves high precision and recall upon cross validation, as do the other methods. A number of HDFs that we predict are known to interact with HIV proteins. They belong to multiple protein complexes and biological processes that are known to be manipulated by HIV. We also demonstrate that many predicted HDF genes show significantly different programs of expression in early response to SIV infection in two non-human primate species that differ in AIDS progression. Our results suggest that many HDFs are yet to be discovered and that they have potential value as prognostic markers to determine pathological outcome and the likelihood of AIDS development. More generally, if multiple genome-wide gene-level studies have been performed at independent labs to study the same biological system or phenomenon, our methodology is applicable to interpret these studies simultaneously in the context of molecular interaction networks and to ask if they reinforce or contradict each other.


EXCITONIC LUMINESCENCE IN SPHERICAL CORE-MULTI-SHELL QUANTUM DOT STRUCTURES In this thesis, we studied excitonic light emission from core-multishell semiconductor hetero-nanocrystals having a spherically symmetric shape as a function of core size and shell thicknesses. Different combinations of semiconductors were considered in the core/shell/shell structure. The multilayer quantum dot structures that we considered were in A/B/A/B form, where A and B denote II-VI binary semiconductor crystals. We used method of finite differences to solve the Schrödinger equation of the confined exciton problem numerically. Several approximations including the effective mass approximation for the electron and hole masses, and treatment of Coulomb interaction as a perturbation, were employed. Normalized oscillator strengths for optical transitions and coexistence of multiple transitions from a single structure at several frequencies have been investigated. In this study, three different pairs of semiconductors are considered. One of them is (CdSe) ZnS) CdSe) ZnSe), other is (CdSe) CdS) CdSe) CdSe) and third one is (CdTe) ZnS) CdTe) ZnSe). According to our calculation, (CdSe)ZnS)CdSe)ZnSe) structure, when the core radius is 1.51 nm with some different shells combinations, has multi-color emissions from higher frequency to lower frequency in the visible spectrum. (CdSe) CdS) CdSe) CdSe) structure has multi-color emissions when the core radii are 2.02 nm and 2.52 nm yet this structure is the most inefficient structures which we analyse. Moreover, multi-color emissions are obtained from the structure (CdTe) ZnS) CdTe) ZnS) when the core radii are 1.29 nm, 1.93 nm, 2.58 nm and 3.23 nm. Also, this structure has nearly white light emission for 3.23 nm core radius with 3 ML ZnS shell and 1 ML CdTe shell, and with 4 ML ZnS shell and 1 ML CdTe shell.


It is commonly believed that higher order smoothness should be modeled using higher order interactions. For example, 2nd order derivatives for deformable (active) contours are represented by triple cliques. Similarly, the 2nd order regularization methods in stereo predominantly use MRF models with scalar (1D) disparity labels and triple clique interactions. In this paper we advocate a largely overlooked alternative approach to stereo where 2nd order surface smoothness is represented by pairwise interactions with 3D-labels, e.g. tangent planes. This general paradigm has been criticized due to perceived computational complexity of optimization in higher-dimensional label space. Contrary to popular beliefs, we demonstrate that representing 2nd order surface smoothness with 3D labels leads to simpler optimization problems with (nearly) sub modular pairwise interactions. Our theoretical and experimental results demonstrate advantages over state-of-the-art methods for 2nd order smoothness stereo.


[Abstract] This paper presents new identi…cation results for the class of structural dynamic optimal stopping time models that are built upon the framework of the structural discrete Markov decision processes proposed by Rust (1994). We demonstrate how to semiparametrically identify the deep structural parameters of interest in the case where the utility function of an absorbing choice in the model is parametric but the distribution of unobserved heterogeneity is nonparametric. Our identi…cation strategy depends on availability of a continuous observed state variable that satis…es certain exclusion restrictions. If such excluded variable is accessible, we show that the dynamic optimal stopping model is semiparametrically identi…ed using control function approaches.


Malaysian politic has been overwhelmingly dominated by the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition since 1969. In the 12th Malaysian General Election, the ruling coalition suffered a shocking moral defeat. This paper argue that the 12th Malaysian General Election is metaphorically a political volcano eruption, witnessing the rise of People Power against suppression of dissatisfactions over communal politics, deteriorating social-economic conditions (dubbed the "3Cs" factors) and continues marginalization of Indian community in Malaysia. Aspects of communal politics include (1) the issues of NEP, Ketuanan Melayu, racism and "second-class citizen" treatment to the Malaysian non-bumiputera, and (2) the issues of UMNO-putra politicizing the NEP and Malay poverty. The "3Cs" refers to dissatisfaction over increasing (1) cost of living, (2) crime and (3) corruption, taking the first letter of each to form the acronym. Meanwhile, the revolution by the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) highlighted the marginalization of Indian. Indeed, the Hindraf revolution popularized the Makkal Sakhti that means "People Power" in Tamil.


The MaxEnt software package is one of the most popular tools for species distribution and environmental niche modeling, with over 1000 published applications since 2006. Its popularity is likely for two reasons: 1) MaxEnt typically outperforms other methods based on predictive accuracy and 2) the software is particularly easy to use. MaxEnt users must make a number of decisions about how they should select their input data and choose from a wide variety of settings in the software package to build models from these data. The underlying basis for making these decisions is unclear in many studies, and default settings are apparently chosen, even though alternative settings are often more appropriate. In this paper, we provide a detailed explanation of how MaxEnt works and a prospectus on modeling options to enable users to make informed decisions when preparing data, choosing settings and interpreting output. We explain how the choice of background samples reflects prior assumptions, how nonlinear functions of environmental variables (features) are created and selected, how to account for environmentally biased sampling, the interpretation of the various types of model output and the challenges for model evaluation. We demonstrate MaxEnt's calculations using both simplified simulated data and occurrence data from South Africa on species of the flowering plant family Proteaceae. Throughout, we show how MaxEnt's outputs vary in response to different settings to highlight the need for making biologically motivated modeling decisions.


From the north side of London, the Tate Modern is best reached by walking from the traffic circle before St. Pauls Cathedral over the Thames on the new Millenium footbridge to the main doors of the museum. That seventeenth-century St. Pauls and the twenty-first century Beckmann exhibit both contain paintings of "spiritual significance," that both display religious-seeming tryptychs, makes the meander over the bridge ironically a bit of an arc across the human condition. In our war- and atrocity-ridden time, the journey seems entirely one way, towards Beckmann. A further irony might be induced from the fact that the Beckmann exhibition was running concurrently with the Aztec exhibit at the Royal Academy. The Aztec artifacts, impressive and often beautiful, still deeply underline that culture's gloomy fears and horrors. Once the Aztecs learned how to propitiate the gods with sacrifices they took no chance on any actual experience that the sun might rise the next day or the next month without offering to the event the insurance of a thousand human hearts. Beckmann's pictures also operate as enactments of propitiatory scenes. One suspects that the Aztecs might be better equipped to read them than the gentle worshippers at St. Pauls. Beckmann's genius involves a remarkable and unsettling simultaneity of the contemporary and the archaic. His images are cluttered with objects that jar anachronistically against each other. Ancient ritual swords and modern torture machines, the kind found in the cellars of the Nazis or indeed the palaces of Saddam, co-exist on the same frame of canvas. And Beckmann can deploy a remarkable sense of color and line to reinforce the point, as with the slate greens and blacks of his early The Sinking of the Titanic: Beckmann's unique strokes of color make the waves look less like water than like stony altar pieces on which the hapless, drowning victims are sacrificed to the new, heartless gods of modernity. The night sky above this scene of misfortune is rendered in the fiery reds of the burning ship, as though it were simply another morphing of implacable malevolence. While often mutedly displaying their traditional lineaments, Beckmann's more famous paintings--the tryptychs, the brazen self-portraits, the panels of mutilated and tortured figures--appear to be derived, not from the experiences of a particular religion or culture, but from a deep perpetual category of unregulated impulse that lies always beneath the veneer of culture. Very few of Beckmann's painted faces register astonishment at what they are doing or the fate that is overtaking them. Grimaces, contortions of pain, mouths open to scream are all highly stylized, looking more like ceremonial masks than actual human faces. Violence and cruelty are routinized, meted out and received with a monumental passivity. Beckmann, born in 1884, was a medical orderly on the Belgian front in the Great War. He experienced first hand the disaster's physical and human rubble. The horrors led to a nervous breakdown and found their way permanently into his work. The faces, the flayed and torn bodies, and the clutter of ominous ritual objects, fill, as he wrote in 1914 on the brink of the hostilities, "infinite space, which one must constantly pile with any kind of junk, so that one will not see behind it the terrible depth." For Beckmann, that "terrible depth" is the very space of the human arena, a seething ground of aggression and passion which can momentarily be tied up in the symbology of religion and culture but is ultimately not susceptible to the curbs of reason. A graph of Beckmann's state of mind can be tracked in the self-portraits, master works of that genre, as Beckmann seems to surrender his own psychic health to the "depths" he insisted on depicting. His vulnerabilities are poignantly displayed in the 1917 Self Portrait with Red Scarf, painted after his breakdown. A tense, haggard Beckmann is pinioned at the window of his studio, his right arm pushing against the picture frame, the left bent at the elbow in a ninety-degree angle that mimics the entrapping, boxed-in effect of the lower right side corner of the canvas. …


Several learning applications require solving high-dimensional regression problems where the relevant features belong to a small number of (overlapping) groups. For very large datasets and under standard sparsity constraints, hard thresholding methods have proven to be extremely efficient, but such methods require NP hard projections when dealing with overlapping groups. In this paper, we show that such NP-hard projections can not only be avoided by appealing to submodular optimization, but such methods come with strong theoretical guarantees even in the presence of poorly conditioned data (i.e. say when two features have correlation $\geq 0.99$), which existing analyses cannot handle. These methods exhibit an interesting computation-accuracy trade-off and can be extended to significantly harder problems such as sparse overlapping groups. Experiments on both real and synthetic data validate our claims and demonstrate that the proposed methods are orders of magnitude faster than other greedy and convex relaxation techniques for learning with group-structured sparsity.


The high rate of dropout is a serious problem in E-learning program. Thus it has received extensive concern from the education administrators and researchers. Predicting the potential dropout students is a workable solution to prevent dropout. Based on the analysis of related literature, this study selected student's personal characteristic and academic performance as input attributions. Prediction models were developed using Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Decision Tree (DT) and Bayesian Networks (BNs). A large sample of 62375 students was utilized in the procedures of model training and testing. The results of each model were presented in confusion matrix, and analyzed by calculating the rates of accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. The results suggested all of the three machine learning methods were effective in student dropout prediction, and DT presented a better performance. Finally, some suggestions were made for considerable future research.


Background: Surrogate markers of colorectal inflammation are increasingly being recognized as important in differentiating organic from functional intestinal disorders. Fecal calprotectin (FC) can be easily measured in the stool, being released by leukocytes in inflammatory conditions. Aim: We evaluated FC as an index of inflammation in consecutive outpatients referred for colonoscopy for chronic, nonbloody diarrhea. Methods: Stool specimens of 346 outpatients with chronic, nonbloody diarrhea, referred for colonoscopy, were measured for FC levels. The proportion of patients correctly diagnosed with the test and the relationship with endoscopic and histologic findings were measured. Results: Abnormal endoscopic findings were detected in 104 patients (30.1%). Histologic findings included 142 patients (41.0%) with inflammation and 204 (59.0%) without inflammation. Fecal excretion of calprotectin significantly correlated with the finding of inflammation at endoscopy and histology (P<0.0001). When 150 mcg/g of stool was used as the upper reference limit, FC showed 75.4% sensitivity and 88.3% specificity, with 81.7% positive and 83.7% negative predictive values for histologic inflammation. Conclusions: In outpatients referred for colonoscopy a measurement of FC is accurate to identify those with histologic inflammation. Assay of FC may be a reliable and noninvasive screening tool to identify inflammatory causes of chronic, nonbloody diarrhea.


There is a broad consensus about the great importance that transport and mobility have on the citizens' welfare. Infrastructures and transport services contribute to this objective in a great variety of forms: for example improving on the one side population's access to services and
labour and on the other increasing our countries productivity. Must be said that not all the different projects and initiatives have to be executed, only those which can resolve accessibility problems and contribute with benefits must be financed, because opportunity costs in the field
of infrastructures are particularly relevant when the public economic resources are shrinked; that's why in the actual situation to priorize investments has to have much more importance.
Moreover, the need to include private capital in the infrastructure's financing through PPP's or concessions requires strict evaluation of the projects involved, even though it isn't an easy task The growing concern at all levels of society about environmental issues urgently asks for better
evaluating techniques of the external costs and investments, so that efficient transport
strategies can be implanted to internalise externalities equitatively and also to save resources.
Moreover, the improvement of evaluation techniques of transport initiatives will allow the political responsible to give the stakeholders better, objective and systematic explanations.
This master thesis has dealt with the social costs and benefits evaluation that an strategy can provide, to this end a great number of methodologies have been selected with the intention of evaluating not only the operating costs of the different transport modes, but also other aspects
that sometimes are forgotten or remain little known. In addition, different methodologies have been applied to know the potential of reduction of the external costs that accumulate four different practical cases: the flexible carpooling implementation with the aid of a HOV lane, the bus lane creation by reducing the general purpose lanes width, the dynamic speed fixation and the optimal social speed of travel on highways obtaining. It has been verified that the great complexity of these methodologies requires of strict technical practice not to fall in doublecountings
(normally by counting yet internalised external costs) and of great computation
capacity, as the road system has lots of actors and variables that are intimately related.


This article addresses the question of policy circumvention in federal courts by examining how legal actors have differentially adapted their adjudicatory practices after U.S. v. Booker (2005) rendered the federal sentencing guidelines advisory rather than mandatory. By linking two distinct bodies of scholarship — the courts-as-communities scholarship that assesses and explains locale-based variations in criminal court operations and the socio-legal "law and organizations" scholarship that addresses how organizational actors translate and implement top-down legal policy reforms — this article argues that law-as-practiced is always temporally and spatially contingent. Expanding on prior quantitative research that addresses district-specific adaptations to Booker, this article re-ports on findings from a qualitative study recently conducted by the author of four federal districts. Based on these findings, this article examines within-district changes and between-district variations in: (1) legal actors' perceptions of whether the Booker policy change impacted local practices and outcomes, and if so, the extent of its impact; (2) how legal strategies and practices have changed at three stages of the criminal process: charging, pre-conviction plea negotiations, and formal sentencing; and (3) interviewees' perceptions about whether Booker contributed to greater racial or other disparities in case out-comes. Findings indicate that a dynamic, proactive adaptation process is taking place, conditioned by local norms but not fully dictated by those norms. They also make clear that changes in sentencing outcomes in the post-Booker period are not simply the result of liberated judges exercising their discretion, but rather are jointly produced by courtroom workgroup members through both contestation and cooperation. This inquiry is especially timely given both ongoing and proposed changes in federal sentencing policy that aim to maintain severity in punishment, re-impose constraints on legal actors, and threaten to exacerbate racial and ethnic inequalities in the federal criminal system.


Glyphosate is a weak acid herbicide and can bind with calcium in the spray carrier. Diammonium sulfate is commonly used as an adjuvant with glyphosate to enhance phytotoxicity and overcome antagonistic effect of these cations. Most postemergence herbicides are also weak acid herbicides. Data is limited for other weak acid herbicides and the effect of diammonium sulfate in enhancing herbicide activity and overcoming antagonism. Field studies were conducted with aminopyralid, tembotrione, dicamba plus diflufenzopyr, and glufosinate to determine if (1) these weak acid herbicides are enhanced by ammonium, (2) if they are antagonized by calcium and magnesium in the spray solution, (3) if diammonium sulfate overcomes salt antagonism, and (4) if a previously published equation for the amount of ammonium sulfate required to overcome salt antagonism of glyphosate based on cation concentration in spray water correctly predicts to other weak acid herbicides. The activity of the four weak acid herbicides increased with the addition of ammonium to the spray solution, all were antagonized by calcium and magnesium, and diammonium sulfate overcame the antagonism. The previously published equation to calculate the amount the diammonium sulfate needed to overcome 500 and 1000 ppm hardness was accurate and can be used for these herbicides and possibly other weak acid herbicides.


The harmonisation of work health and safety legislation began to come into effect in Australia in January 2012 and is part of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG 2008) National Reform Agenda. This paper reviews the meaning of and adherence to the due diligence requirements of Section 27 and the definition of consultation in sections 48 and 49 of legislation enacting the Model Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (WHS Act) to determine whether off the shelf safety systems are compliant under the new legislation. These requirements include provision of safe systems of work (Section 19(1)) that is the result of consultation with all workers. Some businesses in Australia purchase off the shelf safety systems with completed safe work procedures and operational manuals. Little or no consultation occurs with workers as to whether these documents are a correct account of their daily work tasks. Communication is limited to tool box and safety meetings. The paper questions whether pre-developed safety systems that have limited consultation and development between staff and management comply with Sections 27 (5) and 47-49 of the WHS Act. Cite this article as: Bahn, S., (2012), Work Health and Safety Act "due diligence": Will our current safety systems be compliant?, J Health & Safety Research & Practice, 4(2), 8-13


'This volume describes in detail my impression of specifically how to understand and to interpret in an analytic session. The reader will note that I present clinical sessions in stenographic detail and display complete sessions. It will be noted that I do not include past history but do make reference to it when it is necessary to understand the text. In the sessions of my own analysands and in those of others, I go to great lengths to detail my private observations, reveries, and countertransferences as well as my thinking about how, when, and what should be interpreted.' - From the Introduction


Human gaze is essential for various appealing applications. Aiming at more accurate gaze estimation, a series of recent works propose to utilize face and eye images simultaneously. Nevertheless, face and eye images only serve as independent or parallel feature sources in those works, the intrinsic correlation between their features is overlooked. In this paper we make the following contributions: 1) We propose a coarse-to-fine strategy which estimates a basic gaze direction from face image and refines it with corresponding residual predicted from eye images. 2) Guided by the proposed strategy, we design a framework which introduces a bi-gram model to bridge gaze residual and basic gaze direction, and an attention component to adaptively acquire suitable fine-grained feature. 3) Integrating the above innovations, we construct a coarse-to-fine adaptive network named CA-Net and achieve state-of-the-art performances on MPIIGaze and EyeDiap.


This paper describes TANOR, an automated framework for designing hardware accelerators for numerical computation on reconfigurable platforms. Applications utilizing numerical algorithms on large-size data sets require high-throughput computation platforms. The focus is on N-body interaction problems which have a wide range of applications spanning from astrophysics to molecular dynamics. The TANOR design flow starts with a MATLAB description of a particular interaction function, its parameters, and certain architectural constraints specified through a graphical user interface. Subsequently, TANOR automatically generates a configuration bitstream for a target FPGA along with associated drivers and control software necessary to direct the application from a host PC. Architectural exploration is facilitated through support for fully custom fixed-point and floating-point representations in addition to standard number representations such as single-precision floating point. Moreover, TANOR enables joint exploration of algorithmic and architectural variations in realizing efficient hardware accelerators. TANOR's capabilities have been demonstrated for three different N-body interaction applications: the calculation of gravitational potential in astrophysics, the diffusion or convolution with Gaussian kernel common in image processing applications, and the force calculation with vector-valued kernel function in molecular dynamics simulation. Experimental results show that TANOR-generated hardware accelerators achieve lower resource utilization without compromising numerical accuracy, in comparison to other existing custom accelerators.


In order to analyse the diet of Schizodon intermedius Garavello & Britski, 1990, captures were made every season during the period of April/1990 to February/1991, using gillnets of different mesh size at Sertanopolis, a region of Parana State. An analysis of stomach fullness degree was made upon 76 individuals (including young ones). A sample of 20 adult specimens was chose to compare the morphology of the digestive tract with the diet found. It was concluded that S. intermedius is a grazer herbivore whose principal diet consists of leaves and stalks of two monocotyledonous plants: Poaceae and/or Cyperaceae. This species shows quanlitative, but not qualitative feeding seasonal variations. It was verified that intestinal quotient of the species is X = 1.34, the variation of gill rakers number is 18-23 and of the pyloric caeca number is 15-25. These morphological characteristics found in this species are typical of herbivore fishes.


Recent results show that both TAG and Minimalist grammars can be enriched with rational constraints without increasing their strong generative capacity, where a constraint is rational iff it can be computed by a bottom-up tree automaton. This raises the question which aspects of syntax can be adequately formalized using only such constraints. One of hardest phenomena commonly studied by syntacticians is binding theory. In this paper, we give a high-level implementation of (the syntactic parts of) binding theory in terms of rational constraints, and we argue that this implementation is sufficiently powerful for natural language. This conclusion is backed up by data drawn from English, German, and American Sign Language.


This report covers an overview of the origins of the carbon trading market and the mechanics involved in trading carbon emission units. The report seeks to analyse the carbon trading market in Europe and Australia. The carbon trading market is reviewed with an overall concern for the role government regulation plays in the market, as well as the impact of introducing an emission trading scheme on businesses in general. A summary of the current initiatives to climate change management in Europe and Australia is presented in this paper, including a review of the different types of schemes proposed under carbon trading and also the concept of carbon tax. The emissions trading scheme in Australia is turning into a hot topic, and the purpose of this paper is to analyse different trading schemes, and provide an economic analysis of the trading scheme and its implementation issues.