Corporate tax levels have fallen substantially in Europe during the last decades. A broad literature has identified tax competition as one reason for this decline in corporate tax levels. However, none of these studies explicitly asks the question whether tax competition within regions is different from tax competition across regions, e.g. due to global regionalism of foreign direct investments. This is a crucial question to answer in order to discuss the desirability of tax harmonization in a distinct region, for example, within the European Union. Therefore, the study aims to give hints on the question whether the decline in corporate tax levels in Europe is mainly driven by tax competition between EU member states or by pressure from other world regions. The results of this study, which makes use of tax reaction functions, indicate that there is evidence for tax competition within Europe, whereas there is no robust evidence that European countries compete with countries from other world regions.


This political biography of Phillip Burton (1926-1983) is the riveting story of one of the most brilliant, driven, and productive legislators of his--or indeed any--era of American politics. A ruthless and unabashed progressive, Burton terrified his opponents, ran over his friends, forged improbable coalitions, and from 1964 to 1983 became one of the most influential Representatives in the House. He also acquired more raw power than almost any left-liberal politician ever had. Moving from grassroots campaigns to epic battles in the California state capital, and finally to the very pinnacle of power on Capitol Hill, John Jacobs's inside account of Burton's life shows how politics really works. He demonstrates the exercise of power in the hands of a superb strategist and shows an unheralded master going about his life's work during the glory years of postwar American liberalism. Burton was an unforgettable, uncontrollable figure whose relentless day-and-night politicking distilled the raw essence of American politics. Jacobs brings to life Burton's seething, perpetual sense of outrage, gargantuan appetites, and dedication to the disenfranchized. Animated by a sometimes frightening drive for power--his only modern counterpart is Lyndon Johnson--Burton played a pivotal role in California and U.S. politics, championing welfare and civil rights, landmark labor legislation, environmentalism and congressional reform. His achievements included the groundbreaking black lung bill for miners and their families; Supplemental Social Security for the aged, blind, and disabled; and helping to secure America's extensive national park system. Burton's failures were equally dramatic: in 1976, at the height of his power, he lost, by one vote, the chance to become House Majority Leader. Had he won this critical political fight, he no doubt would have become Speaker of the House. Jacobs's account is based on Burton's personal papers and hundreds of interviews with people at every stage of his life, including four Democratic Speakers of the House. The result is a book that brilliantly demonstrates how one person can make a difference in public life.


This paper describes the renovation of Grenoble University's library. It is the main inter-university documentary cooperation service (SICD2) network in Grenoble, which serves two Universities: Stendhal and Pierre Mendes France. Administratively it is attached to the latter. After the 1989 Micquel Report, which was a severe appraisal of France's university libraries, the state showed its intention to upgrade them by preparing the U2000 programme. The objectives were to create more working places, unrestricted access to documentation, improve user comfort, and change the image of the libraries. In June 1994, replying to representations by the President of Grenoble's Universite Pierre Mendes-France (UPMF) on safety problems at the Law and Humanities Library, the Construction and Maintenance Department at the Ministry of Education requested an "all-encompassing approach to upgrading work, covering safety and refurbishment to as-new standard", and stipulated that "this policy review should be conducted as part of the preparation of the new establishment contract". This context gave rise to the rehabilitation and restructuring of the library. In 1995, the universities and the SICD set themselves an ambition: to turn the 1960s library into a documentary resource for the 21st century, making it the lynchpin of the SICD library network and providing suitable premises. The project symbolically called "Doc2000" was created. After a long gestation period, during which funding was gradually secured, the project entered the execution phase. The relevance of the project was tested by numerous twists and turns: a fruitless invitation to tender and shifting project ownership; three university presidents; two SICD directors and one interim-director, who also directed the university library; and the involvement of two project leaders. I intend to show how hard it is for the library, at the end of the process chain, to reconcile and align the scheduling of the works, the scheduling of the service changes and structural organisation, and the works themselves. I'll outline the basic economics of the project, which combines an obsolete building with thoughts on the necessary evolution of its services. Then, I'll attempt to show how we tried to develop the existing building to cater for evolving services. Lastly, I'll explain why execution of the works was like sailing down a long tempestuous river.


Many classification tasks require estimation of output class probabilities for use as confidence scores or for inference integrated with other models. Probability estimates derived from large margin classifiers such as support vector machines (SVMs) are often unreliable. We extend SVM large margin classification to GiniSVM maximum entropy multi-class probability regression. GiniSVM combines a quadratic (Gini-Simpson) entropy based agnostic model with a kernel based similarity model. A form of Huber loss in the GiniSVM primal formulation elucidates a connection to robust estimation, further corroborated by the impulsive noise filtering property of the reverse water-filling procedure to arrive at normalized classification margins. The GiniSVM normalized classification margins directly provide estimates of class conditional probabilities, approximating kernel logistic regression (KLR) but at reduced computational cost. As with other SVMs, GiniSVM produces a sparse kernel expansion and is trained by solving a quadratic program under linear constraints. GiniSVM training is efficiently implemented by sequential minimum optimization or by growth transformation on probability functions. Results on synthetic and benchmark data, including speaker verification and face detection data, show improved classification performance and increased tolerance to imprecision over soft-margin SVM and KLR.


Natural gamma spectral (NGS) log motifs and cluster analysis were used to characterize outcropping sandstone bodies formed in braided and high-sinuosity streams of the Tertiary Tórtola fluvial system of the Loranca Basin (Spain). Five coarse-grained lithofacies comprise these deposits and determine distinct NGS log motif. Cross-plots and cluster analysis of NGS log data of the lithofacies suggest three distinct clusters. These clusters reflect distinct values for sandstones with small sets of ripple lamination, cross-stratification, and conglomerates and pebbles. Ripple-laminated sandstones show the most variability in NGS signature, whereas conglomeratic sandstones show the most uniform signature. Such cluster analysis may be used to assign NGS log data points of unknown origin to a specific fluvial lithofacies under conditions of equal rock provenance and diagenetic history. A sedimentaclastic (i.e. sedimentary parent rock) origin of sediments appears to be the main control on detrital composition that, in turn, varies with grain size.


Susan Niditch's commentary on the book of Judges pays careful attention to the literary and narrative techniques of the text and yields fresh readings of the book's difficult passages: stories of violence, ethnic conflict, and gender issues. Niditch aptly and richly conveys the theological impact and enduring significance of these stories. The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.


Nigerian Pidgin is a popular informal communicative code in Nigerian social, economic and political experience. It is sometimes spoken in formal situations in the hospital setting when participants find it pragmatically convenient. Despite its communicative significance, little research has been carried out on the use of Pidgin in conversational interactions in Nigerian hospitals, a gap this study fills by investigating how Pidgin is used in constructing emotions relating to social and medical conditions in hospitals. Seventy five (75) interactions between doctors and clients in Nigerian Pidgin were sampled; the data analysis was based centrally on relevance theory. Nigerian Pidgin evokes negative and positive emotions. Negative emotions manifest as pain and fear, while positive emotions appear as excitement and relief. Doctors and clients gain access to each other's intentions through their shared knowledge of Pidgin, their co-construction of ailments, and their contextually based local interactional resources. They thus negotiate emotions as cue-dependent variables that are steered with the help of cognitive processes.


On the eve of the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War on 11 October 1899, the British Army had no comprehensive strategy for the war in South Africa. In this article the reasons why no detailed strategic planning was done, are discussed. The limited strategic planning that was done is analysed, and it is pointed out that in the run-up to the war, British planning was influenced by geographic factors in the potential war zone, by the position of the Orange Free State (would that Boer republic side with the Transvaal or stay neutral?), and by matters pertaining to the defence of Natal and of the Cape Colony. Finally, it is indicated what line of advance was eventually decided upon; albeit that after Gen. Sir Redvers Buller had arrived in South Africa, he decided to deviate from the original plan.


Policymakers in Nigeria are aware of the importance of sustained economic growth as a macroeconomic policy. The paper is aimed at examining the effects of stabilisation policy instruments on economic growth. We used modern econometric techniques and the empirical results based on annual data spanning the period 1981-2010. Econometric results show that fiscal policy instrument had a negative impact on GDP growth. CEF took a negative sign in all the three models. All monetary policy variables except PRM had a positive impact on GDP growth. Nominal exchange rate growth had a positive impact on growth except in model 1. All three models had a good fit. This study recommends that expansionary fiscal policy measures be pursued with caution not to worsen inflationary trend in the economy. A less volatile interest rate regime would increase reliability and confidence of investors in the economy. It is also relevant for monetary authorities and other players in the economy to encourage economy-wide international trade competitiveness so as to maintain positive growth in exchange rate of the naira which will contribute to bringing about the desired GDP growth in the Nigerian economy and other developing economies.


Efficient exploration is an unsolved problem in Reinforcement Learning which is usually addressed by reactively rewarding the agent for fortuitously encountering novel situations. This paper introduces an efficient active exploration algorithm, Model-Based Active eXploration (MAX), which uses an ensemble of forward models to plan to observe novel events. This is carried out by optimizing agent behaviour with respect to a measure of novelty derived from the Bayesian perspective of exploration, which is estimated using the disagreement between the futures predicted by the ensemble members. We show empirically that in semi-random discrete environments where directed exploration is critical to make progress, MAX is at least an order of magnitude more efficient than strong baselines. MAX scales to high-dimensional continuous environments where it builds task-agnostic models that can be used for any downstream task.


Effects of UV-light irradiation and water spray on the mechanical strength and surface characteristics of untreated and pretreated Scots pine sapwood samples were studied. The specimens were treated with parsley seed oil, pomegranate seed oil, linseed seed oil, nigella seed oil, canola oil, sesame seed oil, and soybean oil. The compositional changes and surface properties of the weathered samples were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR-ATR) spectroscopy and color and surface roughness measurements. The results showed that all vegetable oils provided lower color changes than the control group after 600 h of exposure in a weathering test cycle. The least color change was found on the Scots pine surface pretreated with pomegranate seed oil. The vegetable oil treatment retarded the surface lignin degradation during weathering, indicating that the surface roughness values of pine wood treated with vegetable oils decreased with irradiation over time compared with those of control samples. The effect of artificial weathering on mechanical strength was determined with a compression strength test. It was observed that the compression strength values of Scots pine samples treated with vegetable oils was higher than that of untreated samples after 600 h of weathering exposure.


To gain insight into the problem of fluid convection below the solar photosphere, time-dependent magnetohydrodynamic convection is studied by numerical simulation of the magneto-anelastic equations, a model appropriate for low Mach numbers. Numerical solutions to the equations are generated on a two-dimensional Cartesian mesh by a finite-difference, predictor-corrector algorithm. The thermodynamic properties of the fluid are held constant at the rigid, stress-free top and bottom boundaries of the computational box, while lateral boundaries are treated as periodic. In most runs the background polytropic fluid configuration is held fixed at Rayleigh number R=5.44 times the critical value, Prandtl number P=1.8, and aspect ratio a=1, while the magnetic parameters are allowed to vary. The resulting dynamical behavior is shown to be strongly influenced by a horizontal magnetic field which is imposed at the bottom boundary. As the field strength increases from zero, an initially unsteady "singleroll" state, featuring complex time dependence, is replaced by a steady "traveling-wave" tilted state; then, an oscillatory or "sloshing" state; then, a steady two-roll state with no tilting; and finally, a stationary state. Because the magnetic field is matched onto a potential field at the top boundary, it can penetrate into the nonconducting region above. By varying the magnetic diffusivity, the concentrations of weak magnetic fields at the top of these flows can be shown to be explainable in terms of an advection-diffusion balance.


Abstract. Stratospheric ozone recovery in the Southern Hemisphere is expected to drive pronounced trends in atmospheric temperature and circulation from the stratosphere to the troposphere in the 21st century; therefore ozone changes need to be accounted for in future climate simulations. Many climate models do not have interactive ozone chemistry and rely on prescribed ozone fields, which may be obtained from coupled chemistry-climate model (CCM) simulations. However CCMs vary widely in their predictions of ozone evolution, complicating the selection of ozone boundary conditions for future climate simulations. In order to assess which models might be expected to better simulate future ozone evolution, and thus provide more realistic ozone boundary conditions, we assess the ability of twelve CCMs to simulate observed ozone climatology and trends and rank the models according to their errors averaged across the individual diagnostics chosen. According to our analysis no one model performs better than the others in all the diagnostics; however, combining errors in individual diagnostics into one metric of model performance allows us to objectively rank the models. The multi-model average shows better overall agreement with the observations than any individual model. Based on this analysis we conclude that the multi-model average ozone projection presents the best estimate of future ozone evolution and recommend it for use as a boundary condition in future climate simulations. Our results also demonstrate a sensitivity of the analysis to the choice of reference data set for vertical ozone distribution over the Antarctic, highlighting the constraints that large observational uncertainty imposes on such model verification.


The two-photon absorption coefficient and the intensity-dependent refractive index associated with it are calculated for semiconductor quantum wells and quantum wires. It is shown analytically that in the limit of large dimensions the nonlinear response of quantum-confined structures becomes isotropic and approaches the nonlinear response of the bulk semiconductor despite the different gauges used in the calculations. The theoretical results are compared with the experiment, and the practical implications are discussed.


During last years, wind generation has experienced a great expansion due to concern about climate change, the greenhouse effect caused by air pollution and scarcity of fossil resources. In this context, research efforts on new wind generators have increased new power converters topologies and its control strategies. Much of these resources done by innovation centers are focused on high-power (>100 kW), leaving to a second place lower power applications mainly applied in isolated applications. However, these kinds of systems are really important considering a rural or isolated electrification framework. The present master's project aims to contribute the study and development of electrical systems for micro-wind generation in off-grid systems. It has been designed an AC/DC converter with the capability of extracting the maximum power of the wind turbine. This is possible thanks to a maximum power point system based on disturbance based on perturb and observe algorithm, which does not require parameterization of the wind turbine, as usual. This last alternative involves a time and cost spending which is not justifiable in low power applications. In order to validate the converter and maximum power point search system, the present project has designed and implemented an experimental platform able of emulating real operation conditions of a wind system, too. In Chapter 3, it's done the study of the state of art about the more relevant electrical systems of isolated low power wind applications. It has been fixed a group of needs and requirements of the electrical system, as well as a proposed power converter structure. Once the converter is proposed, Chapter 4 details its design considerations. First, the topology of Ac/DC converter is selected the chosen alternative consists in a three-phases rectifier diode bridge, a buck-boost converter and a current output filter for batteries. Then, has been chosen the design criteria and the components of the converter have been dimensioned. Then Chapter 5 develops a small-signal average model of the power converter getting the transfer functions necessary for control design. The control of the converter is managed by a "Observe & Perturbe" MPPT algorithm with fixed step followed by two cascaded PI controllers. This control allows working in a maximum power point with rectified voltage changes avoiding sudden changes in battery current. Once validated the control and the design of the converter through simulations, it has been implemented on an experimental platform for verify the prototype under various test proposed in Chapter 6. It has been also developed a wind turbine emulator able of generating a real operation environment by the wind system platform (Generator, AC/DC converter and batteries). Finally, Chapter 7 ends the work with some conclusions on the developed prototype and its design. This chapter allows extracting that the converter meets the aforementioned objectives. The system works on the maximum power point and the platform is able to emulate the operation of a wind turbine. Chapter 8 details some future work ideas to improve the current performance.


Reperfusion limits ischaemic tissue damage. Paradoxically, reperfusion can cause additional tissue injury and contribute to a composite phenomenon known as ischaemia reperfusion (IR) injury. Therapeutic interventions aimed at reducing IR injury have the potential to improve outcomes in the management of ischaemic conditions. Protective procedures such as ischaemic preconditioning (IPC), ischaemic postconditioning (PostC), remote preconditioning (RIPC) and remote postconditioning (RPostC) have all been shown in animals and humans to be effective in reducing IR injury. Experiments in this thesis sought to determine tractable aspects of the mechanisms underlying these protective phenomena with a view to validating potential pharmacological targets in humans. IR induced endothelial dysfunction in the forearm of healthy volunteers was characterised by vascular ultrasound and venous occlusion plethysmography.
IPC, PostC, RIPC and RPostC all protected against IR-induced endothelial dysfunction. Oral inorganic nitrates in the form of beetroot juice or potassium nitrate (KNO3) also protected against endothelial IR injury. The magnitude of protection from IR injury was similar.
The mechanism of PostC was investigated in detail. Protection by PostC was blocked by glibenclamide, a non selective KATP channel blocker, suggesting that activation of these potassium channels was necessary for PostC-induced ischaemic protection. Selectivity of KATP channels was evident because glimepiride (a selective KATP channel blocker) did not affect the protective effect of PostC. A role for the mitochondrial permeability transition pore (mPTP) was suggested by the effect of ciclosporin (blocker of the mPTP) to mimic PostC-induced protection. These aspects of the mechanism of PostC resemble previously identified mechanisms of IPC and RIPC in the human forearm.
Studies were undertaken to explore the mechanism whereby protection spreads systemically. Systemic protection by RIPC from ischaemic injury to the endothelium was blocked by the opioid receptor antagonist, naloxone without any effect on protection conferred by IPC or RPostC These data implicate the opioid receptor pathway in the facilitation of RIPC, and is likely to involve a haematogenous mechanism. Conversely, the alpha adrenergic receptor antagonist phentolamine, blocked systemic protection from RPostC but had no effect on RIPC. This highlights a role of a component of the autonomic nervous system in the mediation of RPostC.
Ischaemic protection in humans is mechanistically a complex process but results in this thesis contribute to the validation of pharmacological targets as a prelude to drug development.


Digital technology has had profound impacts on political communication. This article focuses on one digital technology – Twitter. It is part of a broader technology trend called Web 2.0 which harnesses the Web in a more interactive and collaborative manner. Many authors have argued that Web 2.0 is closely related to e-democracy and stress the importance of enhancing the role of internet users. E-democracy strives to involve cyber-citizens in the political process, new Web 2.0 applications can augment their impact on the democratic system. This paper argues that though many Canadian politicians are using Twitter, it is mostly used to broadcast official party information. Their use of Twitter so far shows little evidence of embracing the characteristics of Web 2.0.


Among the many client services they perform, accounting firms often handle client funds in the performance of various services provided to both individuals and businesses--bookkeeping, investment advisory, family office, and more. Imagine what might happen if a firm employee steals or otherwise misappropriates funds from a client: The firm would likely face a malpractice claim and have to deal with the damage to its reputation. While historically only a small percentage of claims experienced by the AICPA Professional Liability Insurance Program have involved an allegation of theft or fraud perpetrated by an employee of an accounting firm, this is more prevalent in firms that provide bookkeeping services to small, closely held client businesses. One step a firm can take to help mitigate the risk of a bad hiring decision is to conduct, or hire someone to conduct, a criminal background check on applicants for employment. These routine checks are valuable in decreasing the risk of negligent hiring claims---such as those that may result if, for example, it were later discovered that an individual who had recently been convicted of theft or fraud was hired to handle client funds and subsequently stole from a client after being hired. A firm may decide that an individual with a conviction for any criminal offense is ineligible for employment by the firm, in any position. However, not all crimes are considered equal in the eyes of the U.S. judicial system--some convicted criminals are penalized with fines, while others are punished with extended prison time. So, why should all offenders be equally unacceptable in the eyes of employers implementing policies against employing individuals with criminal conviction records? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) says they should not. EEOC ENFORCEMENT GUIDANCE Issued in April 2012, EEOC Enforcement Guidance No. 915.002, Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000e et seq., warns that blanket policies and practices that exclude from employment all individuals with any type of criminal conviction, regardless of the particular job duties of the position, may be discriminatory and violate Title VII. When criminal background checks are combined with blanket policies that prevent employing individuals with criminal records, these checks can lead to unintended consequences. For example, a decades-old marijuana possession conviction could keep a perfectly capable, reformed, 40-year-old applicant from working as a staff accountant, a job in which he or she may excel. EMPLOYMENT POLICIES AND THE SCREENING PROCESS Blanket policies may result in what the EEOC calls "disparate impact discrimination," when a facially neutral policy or practice has a discriminatory effect on a protected class or classes, even though no intent to discriminate exists. Notably, the EEOC references research indicating certain protected classes, such as African-American and Hispanic men, have higher rates of criminal convictions. Thus, disqualifying an individual based upon a criminal conviction could have a disparate impact on those protected classes and will violate Title VII unless an employer can prove that its policy is "job related and consistent with business necessity." Background checks remain legal and critical to the hiring process. Rather than a blanket policy against employing individuals with conviction records, the EEOC encourages employers to develop narrowly tailored policies and targeted screens based upon each particular job to ensure exclusions are job-related and consistent with business necessity The screening process, according to the EEOC, should focus on: * The nature and dangers of the crime in question. * The time elapsed since the crime was committed. * The nature and risks of the particular job. …


The Haiti earthquake of January 12, 2010 provided a unique opportunity to further our knowledge concerning "mass invacuation" planning processes. No systematic research assessment has been undertaken to look at how host communities manage the process of receiving evacuees, providing immediate mass care, and resettling displaced individuals. This research focuses on the initial phase of the evacuation/invacuation process of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, from the day after the earthquake (January 13, 2010) through April 2011. The data has been collected as part of an NSF-RAPID grant, a collaborative proposal between the University of Delaware and the University of North Texas, organizations are the units of analysis, and we have used qualitative interview techniques as our data collection method. Reviewing our data has highlighted the challenges faced by public sector emergency managers as they interacted with and attempted to integrate unconventional emergency response organizations into the Incident Command System. Lindell and Perry (2007) state that in order for planning and preparedness for emergencies to be effective, stakeholders at every level need to be included. Further findings may suggest how alternative emergency response organizations can plan and train for mass evacuation events or how conventional emergency responders can integrate them within the ICS modular structure. Thus, organizations that seldom play a role in disaster events may be better integrated into disaster response functions when necessary. Overall, disasters are likely to occur more often in the future, leading to more mass evacuations and increasingly complex responsibilities for organizations that, in the past, may not have played a role (Quarentelli 1990). In order to meet the needs of future invacuees/evacuees, public, private, and nonprofit stakeholders need to find new solutions towards collaboration and training while simultaneously meeting current NIMS and ICS requirements.


Calcium ions (Ca2+) that enter a cell through L-type voltage-activated channels (LTCs) are linked to expression of certain genes involved in key neuronal functions, whereas Ca2+ entering the cell by other means can exert different effects. Dolmetsch et al. (Perspective by Ikeda) use a clever strategy to explore this perplexing aspect of specificity in cell signaling. They first engineered an LTC that is resistant to a channel inhibitor and then expressed and analyzed it in cultured primary neurons that were treated with the inhibitor to eliminate endogenous channel function. A calmodulin-binding region of the LTC is essential for Ca2+-induced activation of the transcription factors CREB and MEF-2. Thus, the Ca2+ entering though LTCs is apparently sensed by calmodulin molecules already positioned at the mouth of the channel. This activation of calmodulin is required for sustained activation of the p42 and p44 mitogen-activated protein kinases, which in turn convey the signal on into the nucleus. R. E. Dolmetsch, U. Pajvani, K. Fife, J. M. Spotts, M. E. Greenberg, Signaling to the nucleus by an L-type calcium channel-calmodulin complex through the MAP kinase pathway. Science 294, 333-339 (2001). [Abstract] [Full Text] S. R. Ikeda, Calcium channels--link locally, act globally. Science 294, 318-319 (2001). [Summary] [Full Text]


Previous research suggests that physicians are no more prone to suicide than people in general, but most studies suffer from major methodological problems. We reviewed death certificates in California from 1959 to 1961 and found that physicians, and health care workers as a group, are twice as suicide prone as the general population. Among physicians, divorce and old age are associated with the highest suicide rates, but physicians seem to be more sensitive to these factors than the general population. Sex, race, and specialty area—such as psychiatry—appear to have no effect on suicide rates; however, more data are needed to clarify this point. Drugs are the most common method of suicide. Physicians should recognize the existence of this problem and be more sensitive to a colleague's "cry for help."


Breast density is a recognized strong and independent risk factor for developing breast cancer. At present, breast density is assessed based on the radiological appearance of breast tissue, thus relying on the use of ionizing radiation. We have previously obtained encouraging preliminary results with our portable instrument for time domain optical mammography performed at 7 wavelengths (635–1060 nm). In that case, information was averaged over four images (cranio-caudal and oblique views of both breasts) available for each subject. In the present work, we tested the effectiveness of just one or few point measurements, to investigate if tissue heterogeneity significantly affects the correlation between optically derived parameters and mammographic density. Data show that parameters estimated through a single optical measurement correlate strongly with mammographic density estimated by using BIRADS categories. A central position is optimal for the measurement, but its exact location is not critical.


The avifauna of the Emily Bay settlement site, Norfolk Island, southwest Pacific, is described. Most of the remains, which consisted of nearly 10,000 identifiable bones (mostly fragmentary) and several thousand unidentifiable elements and fragments, were of several species of petrel and shearwater (Procellariiformes) and boobies (Sulidae), but some land birds were also represented in small numbers. Two species of migratory wading bird (Charadriiformes) were identified in the deposits, but no terns, which are dominant members of the present avifauna. The taphonomy of the remains indicates intensive use of birds as food, but some material of other than cultural origin was also present. Remains were not distributed evenly throughout the excavated parts of the site, and were concentrated in areas where other evidence such as post holes and fires scoops indicated points of occupation. Some species that are present on the island and palatable were not represented in the collections: possible reasons for their absence are canvassed. An estimate of the biomass is presented, with the proviso that the variation in density of deposition made extrapolation to the remainder of the site problematic. The size of the sample, the preservation of elements such as vertebrae of small petrels, and the good condition of material of apparent natural (non-cultural) origin indicate that the collection represents a good sample of the avifauna used as food by the Polynesian inhabitants of Emily Bay.


IUCN Bangladesh has established a methodology to assess wetland biodiversity and its management and written this manual in Bengali, which will be helpful for the target audience (mainly local fishermen, farmers and other stakeholders). This book contains easy methodologies to assess fish production, species richness and wildlife diversity as well as to assess biodiversity management and habitat health by monitoring indicator species (fish, dolphin, birds, herpetofauna, etc.).


This article compares the work of Jakob von Uexkull and Charles S. Peirce to elucidate two contrasting yet connected images of ecosemiotics. The intent is not simply to oppose their work, but to explore a tension which has implications for the ethical dimension of this emerging discipline. Uexkull's functional cycle is associated with the image of a circle, which, while emphasizing the integration of organism and environment, is shown to invoke solipsism, and an overly deterministic depiction of ecological relations. Peirce's drawing of a labyrinth is taken to represent a maze, which, while exemplifying the evolutionary play of ecosystems, may entail a level of unpredictability that is catastrophically chaotic. The root of these diverging depictions is identified with the role of subjectivity in engendering semiotic relations in the work of both Uexkull and Peirce. Where the more regressive aspects of Uexkull's theoretical biology are mitigated by a teleological interpretation of life's underlying causality, orientating agency within Peirce's work depends upon attention to the idea of the self in his philosophy of signs. In conclusion, Eduardo Kohn's conception of an 'ecology of selves' is cited, and the status of the organism as a living symbol of its environment is reaffirmed.


Two of the challenges facing Africa in the 21 st Century are effective use of restricted water resources and ensuring food security especially for poor communities. In line with these aims, the eThekwini municipality has introduced a multi-tier system of water supply ranging from full pressure reticulated systems along with flush toilets to standpipes and dry toilet systems. In the latter case, it was soon recognized that the disposal of greywater presented a problem. Bearing in mind that South Africa is already a water scarce region, research was initiated into finding means of using this water as a resource rather than as a waste. Initial on-site trials using the greywater to irrigate crops proved popular and it was then regarded as necessary to test the possible health effects on the communities of such a system. A controlled field trial using pot plantings of a selected range of edible vegetables was initiated at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Crops were tested both internally and externally for a range of indicator and potentially pathogenic organisms. Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) techniques were used to assess the health risk to communities from growing and eating the greywaterirrigated vegetables. Although there was a health risk related to most of the activities, especially the handling of the greywater itself, the risks could be brought within the World Health Organisation guidelines of less than one case of disease per 10 000 people per year by the implementation of simple barrier interventions. The greywater irrigated crops themselves, did not present a statistically higher risk of infection than the crops irrigated with either hydroponic solution or tap water. These findings show the importance of applying QMRA to each case to determine health risk. This would allow the productive use of greywater and other water sources in the correct circumstances, thus providing food sustainability for people who currently do not have access to the levels of high purity water currently recommended for agriculture.


A separation of spinach chloroplasts in vitro into fractions according to size (volume) and activity (light-dependent shrinkage and NADP reduction) has been achieved by stable-flow free boundary sedimentation-electrophoresis. The salient features of this chloroplast study are: (a) separation is achieved within 30 min; (b) only small density gradients are required, thus minimizing osmotic effects; (c) the fractions are collected continuously, with size fractionation being evidenced; and (d) particles are separated into fractions of higher and lower activities as compared with the control population.


I had been rehearsing my speech for days, but I was still stressed out. I was in the first year of my Ph.D., and my previous public speaking experiences had not exactly been successful. The first one, a presentation to a jury of experts for doctoral funding, had ended in a rush because it was too long; I didn't get the funding. During the second one—the defense of my master's project in front of familiar, benevolent professors—I had been unable to control my shaking voice, which gave the impression that I was about to burst into tears. Now, I was a few hours away from giving my first oral presentation at a conference, practicing the relaxation exercises I had learned for the occasion and hoping I could get through this one without incident.

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ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER

> "I never would have thought I would someday be so eager to give presentations."

When my turn to speak finally came, I focused on time. I would have to speak fast to present all the information I had planned. Fifteen minutes later, I finally relaxed, proud of finishing on time and speaking with a steady voice. I had no idea whether the audience had learned anything, and I did not really care, because it was over.

I continued to view my talks this way until about a year later, when I made a presentation to a nonscientific audience. Their questions made it clear that they had not gotten the message I wanted to convey. Suddenly, I realized these people probably felt the same way I did after watching a disappointing presentation: The speaker was not engaged with the audience at all. And I realized that I didn't want to be that speaker. I wanted to do better.

Instead of trying to bombard the audience with as much information as possible, I began to care about what people would take away from my presentations. I sought advice, added pictures and animations to my slides, removed text, wrote a script to use as a roadmap, and rehearsed—a lot.

My efforts rapidly paid off. My audiences started to appear energized and invested in what I was saying, and their questions showed that they had learned something. My confidence grew. Receiving positive feedback from audience members inspired me to continue building my presentation skills and trying new things. Giving talks became invigorating instead of a chore.

Now, 6 years after that first conference talk, I welcome opportunities to give oral presentations. Although I still feel some stress, I enjoy each minute of my talks. I never would have thought I would someday be so eager to give presentations, but some practical tips helped me get here.

CURATE. To keep your audience tuned in, keep your presentation focused on one main message. Each slide, each word, should be carefully chosen to convey that message. You can always prepare additional slides for questions and discussion.

SHOW, DON'T WRITE. Having all your text written on your slides may make you feel more comfortable, but it doesn't help the audience. Think about what holds your attention in a presentation. Most people like hearing stories, seeing interesting findings in the forms of graphs or meaningful pictures, and being guided through a slide with thoughtful animations. We don't get much from walls of text.

PREPARE. Telling the story of your research requires preparation. Design your visuals carefully and practice your speech and transitions. Find a friendly audience for rehearsals to discover what works and what doesn't. Being well prepared means you will have the time to tell your story, and that will help to reduce stress considerably.

LEARN FROM OTHERS, BUT FIND YOUR OWN STYLE. Take inspiration from the presentations you like to improve your style, experimenting with new approaches to the extent you feel comfortable. When you want to try something new, rehearse with supervisors or colleagues and ask for feedback.

Successful presentations aren't just a matter of talent. Most good speakers work hard to prepare talks that stand out. No matter how uncomfortable you may feel at a lectern, you can stand out by working on your presentation skills, too.

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Purpose – This paper aims to explore the alignment of Corporate Real Estate (CRE) strategies of Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) with the developments in higher education.Methodology/approach – The paper first illustrates the key developments in higher education learning and teaching, and relevant CRE management literature. Subsequently, it presents two studies that examine the CRE strategies of large Dutch UAS, to align their CRE with current and potential future developments. These are explored based on interviews and scenario analysis with experts in the field of higher education and CRE management.Findings – The findings of the two studies show that CRE in the short term is well aligned with recent and current developments in higher education. Yet, in the long term, CRE-managers in general doubt the probability of some developed scenarios and are not sufficiently prepared for disruptive developments due to inflexibility of the CRE portfolio.Originality/value –There is still limited understanding of how to optimally align school buildings to education. Furthermore, the future is unclear. The two studies in this paper contribute to insights about strategies of CRE-managers in the education sector to translate current and assumed developments into future proof accommodations. The presented frameworks and the scenario approach are applicable in other sectors as well


Traditional still camera-based facial image acquisition systems in surveillance applications produce low quality face images. This is mainly due to the distance between the camera and subjects of interest. Furthermore, people in such videos usually move around, change their head poses, and facial expressions. Moreover, the imaging conditions like illumination, occlusion, and noise may change. These all aggregate the quality of most of the detected face images in terms of measures like resolution, pose, brightness, and sharpness. To deal with these problems this paper presents an active camera-based realtime high-quality face image acquisition system, which utilizes pan-tilt-zoom parameters of a camera to focus on a human face in a scene and employs a face quality assessment method to log the best quality faces from the captured frames. The system consists of four modules: face detection, camera control, face tracking, and face quality assessment before logging. Experimental results show that the proposed system can effectively log the high quality faces from the active camera in real-time (an average of 61.74ms was spent per frame) with an accuracy of 85.27% compared to human annotated data.


The official journal of the Schock Society, the European Shock Society, the Indonesian Shock Society, the International Federation of Shock Societies, and the Official and International Journal of the Japan Shock Society, SHOCK®: Injury, Inflammation, and Sepsis: Laboratory and Clinical Approaches includes studies of novel therapeutic approaches, such as immunomodulation, gene therapy, nutrition, and others.


In recent years, several studies have shown the relationship between snoring and obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS). Besides time domain analysis of snoring signal, the spectral features and shapes of snores can be used to discriminate simple snorers and OSAS patients. In this study, we propose a method to classify simple snorers and OSAS patients based on spectral envelope estimation of snoring signals. The formant frequencies and corresponding bandwidths are computed for both group, and the variation and consistency of the formant distributions are computed. A total of 1400 snoring episodes from 7 simple snorer and 7 OSAS patients were analyzed. Significant differences are found in the formant frequencies of both groups. The results are discussed from the view point of patho-physiological aspect.


While there are certainly cases where new theories are needed, we have not yet taken full advantage of existing theories. As one example, our team has recently been taking a strong theory-driven approach in looking at how to apply ideas from social psychology to improve cybersecurity. Past research investigating the human side of cybersecurity has treated people as isolated individuals rather than as social actors acting within a web of social influence. In our research we are (a) investigating how social influence can and does affect cybersecurity, and (b) developing and evaluating novel social influence techniques to improve people's awareness and knowledge of cybersecurity, as well as motivation to act securely. We use our experiences as a lens for discussing the ongoing role of theory in HCI.


This paper investigates the position of social democratic parties (SDPs) towards antitrust (competition) policy. Given their traditional state-interventionist attitude and their ties with organized labour, SDPs have long been considered as not supportive of antitrust policy. However, antitrust policy's goal of granting consumers lower prices is beneficial to salary earners. Hence, it is not surprising that SDPs' support for antitrust policy varies considerably. To account for such variation, this paper hypothesizes that SDPs' support for antitrust policy depends on: (a) the influence of trade unions; (b) the electoral system; and (c) the degree of coordination of the economy. Analysing in depth 16 party manifestos of West European SDPs from 2002 to 2013, we check the plausibility of our hypotheses with seven paired comparisons. Our analysis supports the hypothesis that the influence of trade unions affects SDPs' support for antitrust policy, while the impact of electoral system and economic coordination appears less evident.


Activating integrin signaling may be an effective strategy for developing therapeutics to reduce leukocyte recruitment during inflammation. This Podcast features a conversation with the senior author of a Research Article published in the 6 September 2011 issue of Science Signaling. During the inflammatory response, leukocytes migrate out of circulation and into injured or infected tissues. Although some inflammation is important for healing and fighting infection, chronic inflammation may cause tissue damage and disease. The integrin CD11b/CD18 is required for leukocytes to migrate to sites of injury, but efforts to reduce recruitment by inhibiting signaling through this integrin have not been successful in clinical trials. Vineet Gupta discusses his group's finding that activating signaling through CD11b/CD18 reduced leukocyte recruitment to sites of injury in mice and may be an effective strategy for developing human therapeutics.


We overview the Arabic Ontology, an ongoing project at Sina Institute, at Birzeit University, Palestine. The Arabic Ontology is a linguistic ontology that represents the meanings (i.e., concepts) of Arabic terms using formal semantic relationships, such as SubtypeOf and PartOf. In this way, the ontology becomes a tree (i.e., classification) of meanings of the Arabic terms. To build this ontology (see Fig.1), the set of all Arabic terms are collected; then for each term, the set of its concepts (polysemy) are identified using unique numbers and described using glosses. Terms referring to same meaning (called synsets) are given the same concept identifier. These concepts are then classified using Subsumption and Parenthood relationships. The Arabic Ontology follows the same design as WordNet (i.e., network of synsets), thus it can be used as an Arabic WordNet. However, unlike WordNet, the Arabic Ontology is logically and philosophically well-founded, following strict ontological principles. The Subsumption relation is a formal subset relation. The ontological correctness of a relation (e.g., whether "PeriodicTable SubtypeOf Table" is true in reality) in WordNet is based on whether native speakers accept such a claim. However, the ontological correctness of the Arabic Ontology is based on what scientists accept; but if it can't be determined by science, then what philosophers accept; and if philosophy doesn't have an answer then we refer to what linguistics accept. Our classification also follows the OntoClean methodology when dealing with, instances, concepts, types, roles, and parts. As described in the next section, the top levels of the Arabic Ontology are derived from philosophical notions, which further govern the ontological correctness of its lower levels. Moreover, glosses are formulated using strict ontological rules focusing on intrinsic properties. Figure 1. Illustration of terms' concepts and its conceptual relations Why the Arabic Ontology It can be used in many application scenarios such as: (1) information search and retrieval, to enrich queries and improve the results' quality, i.e., meaningful search rather than string-matching search; (2) Machine translation and term disambiguation, by finding the exact mapping of concepts across languages, as the Arabic Ontology is also mapped to the English WordNet; (3) Data Integration and interoperability in which the Arabic Ontology can be used as a semantic reference to several autonomous information systems; (4) Semantic web and web 3.0, by using the Arabic Ontology as a semantic reference to disambiguate meanings used in web sites; (5) Conceptual dictionary, allowing people to easily browse and find meanings and the differences between meanings. The Arabic Ontology Top Levels Figure 2 presents the top levels of the Arabic Ontology, which is a classification of the most abstract concepts (i.e., meanings) of the Arabic terms. Only three levels are presented below for the sake of brevity. All concepts in the Arabic Ontology are classified under these top-levels. We designed these concepts after a deep investigation of the philosophy literature and based on well-recognized upper level ontologies like BFO, DOLCE, SUMO, and KYOTO. Figure 2. The Top three levels of the Arabic Ontology (Alpha Version)


Tannins are oligomeric and polymeric polyphenols that are produced by many plants. The study of their biological activities is of interest because they can generate valuable nutritional, veterinary and environmental effects in ruminant livestock production [1]. Isolated tannin fractions from sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia), which is potentially a very useful animal feed, were characterised by MALDI-TOF MS and thiolytic degradation with benzyl mercaptan. Condensed tannins were analysed and characterised in more than different 40 sainfoin varieties to provide guidelines for future plant breeding programmes. Several different techniques were used to study these complex tannin mixtures.


Emotion is considered to be a core element in performances. In computer animation, both body motions and facial expressions are two popular mediums for a character to express the emotion. However, there has been limited research in studying how to effectively synthesize these two types of character movements using different levels of emotion strength with intuitive control, which is difficult to be modeled effectively. In this work, we explore a common model that can be used to represent the emotion for the applications of body motions and facial expressions synthesis. Unlike previous work that encode emotions into discrete motion style descriptors, we propose a continuous control indicator called emotion strength by controlling which a data‐driven approach is presented to synthesize motions with fine control over emotions. Rather than interpolating motion features to synthesize new motion as in existing work, our method explicitly learns a model mapping low‐level motion features to the emotion strength. Because the motion synthesis model is learned in the training stage, the computation time required for synthesizing motions at run time is very low. We further demonstrate the generality of our proposed framework by editing 2D face images using relative emotion strength. As a result, our method can be applied to interactive applications such as computer games, image editing tools, and virtual reality applications, as well as offline applications such as animation and movie production.


Innovation is key to boosting economic growth in the face of a rapidly ageing population. While Japan spends heavily on education and R&D, appropriate framework conditions are essential to increase the return on such investments by strengthening competition, both domestic and international, and improving resource allocation. Upgrading corporate governance would encourage firms to maximise profits and invest their large cash reserves. To promote open innovation in a global framework, it is necessary to improve universities and expand their role in business R&D, while increasing international collaboration in R&D from its current low level. Venture capital-backed firms and start-ups should play a key role in commercialising innovation. To make venture investment a growth driver, it is important to expand the role of business angels and foster entrepreneurship. SMEs, which account for 70% of employment, should contribute more to innovation.


In this project the concept of middle school teaming was explored with the purpose of assessing how the teams are currently functioning and how the daily teaming time can be improved. For the purpose of this study, teaming is described as a small group of teachers who teach various subjects to the same group of students and who share a common meeting time. Attitudes regarding teaming in general were assessed before and after attending a training workshop about teaming. In this training, individual working styles were explored, group norms were discussed, a mission statement was developed and goals were set.


There is no doubt that a diet high in saturated fats causes changes in lipid metabolism that can lead to atherosclerosis. However, the mechanisms by which this process is controlled are not well understood. Therefore, Lin et al. set out to characterize changes in gene expression in mice fed on a diet rich in saturated fats. Gene expression arrays revealed that the expression of key regulators of lipid metabolism in the liver was increased. One such factor was SREBP (sterol regulatory element-binding protein), and another was the transcriptional coactivator PGC-1β. In transfected hepatoma cells, the authors showed that PGC-1β enhanced expression of SREBP-responsive genes. PGC-1β was also detected by chromatin immunoprecipitation on promoters of endogenous SREBP target genes. Adenoviral expression of PGC-1β in rat liver stimulated expression of numerous genes involved in regulation of lipid metabolism. SREBP appeared to be necessary for these effects, because a dominant negative mutant of SREBP reduced such effects of PGC-1β. The physiological effects of PGC-1β are similar to those of liver-X receptor, and PGC-1β enhanced ligand-dependent expression of a reporter gene with LXR binding sites. In cultured cells, RNAi to PGC-1β reduced the expression of genes regulating lipogenesis. In vivo administration of RNAi to PGC-1β to mice decreased the expression of key lipogenic enzymes in the liver in mice fed on a high-fat diet. Thus, increased expression of PGC-1β appears to be an important event in mediating the effects of a high-fat diet on lipid metabolism. The authors note that PGC-1β is therefore a potentially effective therapeutic target to reduce the deadly effects of overindulgence in dietary saturated fats. J. Lin, R. Yang, P. T. Tarr, P.-H. Wu, C. Handschin, S. Li, W. Yang, L. Pei, M. Uldry, P. Tontonoz, C. B. Newgard, B. M. Spiegelman, Hyperlipidemic effects of dietary saturated fats mediated through PGC-1β coactivation of SREBP. Cell 120, 261-273 (2005). [PubMed]


Complex histories of chronic and acute sea surface temperature (SST) stresses are expected to trigger taxonand location-specific responses that will ultimately lead to novel coral communities. The 2016 El Niño-Southern Oscillation provided an opportunity to examine largescale and recent environmental histories on emerging patterns in 226 coral communities distributed across 12 countries from East Africa to Fiji. Six main coral communities were identified that largely varied across a gradient of Acropora to massive Porites dominance. Bleaching intensity was taxon-specific and was associated with complex interactions among the 20 environmental variables that we examined. Coral community structure was better aligned with the historical temperature patterns between 1985 and 2015 than the 2016 extreme temperature event. Additionally, bleaching responses observed during 2016 differed from historical reports during past warm years. Consequently, coral communities present in 2016 are likely to have been reorganized by both long-term community change and acclimation mechanisms. For example, less disturbed sites with cooler baseline temperatures, higher mean historical SST background variability, and infrequent extreme warm temperature stresses were associated with Acropora-dominated communities, while more disturbed sites with lower historical SST background variability and frequent acute warm stress were dominated by stress-resistant massive Porites corals. Overall, the combination of taxon-specific responses, community-level reorganization over time, geographic variation, and multiple environmental stressors suggest complex responses and a diversity of future coral communities that can help contextualize management priorities and activities.


The translabyrinthine approach is familiar to most neurosurgeons and neuro-otologists and is frequently used to remove acoustic neuromas. Some of the complications associated with this surgery include cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leaks, meningitis, and rarely fat graft prolapse. The authors report a 60-year-old woman who underwent a translabyrinthine approach and microsurgical resection of a right-sided 1-cm acoustic neuroma. Initially, she was discharged home after an uneventful postoperative course. Four days later, she sought treatment in the emergency room complaining of headaches, dizziness, and lethargy. A computed tomographic (CT) scan showed a large right-sided subdural hygroma and right temporal lobe edema. The patient underwent burr hole evacuation of the collection and placement of a subdural drain, after which the edema in the temporal lobe and hygroma resolved. We speculate that the underlying mechanism was the result of inadvertant damage to the venous drainage and an arachnoid tear that was not appreciated during surgery. Neurosurgeons and neuro-otogists should be aware of this unusual complication of translabyrinthine surgery and its possible underlying mechanisms.


Objective: Infants higher on negative reactivity and lower on regulation, aspects of temperament, have increased obesity risk. Responsive parenting (RP) has been shown to impact the expression of temperament, including the developing ability to regulate negative emotions. The aim of this analysis was to test the effects of the INSIGHT study's RP intervention designed for the primary prevention of obesity on reported and observed infant negativity and regulation. Methods: The sample included 240 mother-infant dyads randomized 2 weeks after birth to the RP intervention or a safety control intervention. Both groups received 4 home visits during the infant's first year. In the RP group, nurses delivered RP guidance in domains of sleep, feeding, soothing, and interactive play. At 1 year, mother-reported temperament was measured by a survey, and a frustration task was used to observe temperament in the laboratory. Effects of the RP intervention were tested using general linear models. Results: The RP intervention reduced overall reported infant negativity, driven by lower distress to limitations (p < 0.05) and faster recovery from distress (p < 0.01) in the RP group versus controls. There were no intervention effects on reported regulation or observed negativity. The intervention did increase observed regulation, particularly the use of self-comforting strategies (p < 0.05) during the frustration task. Discussion: An RP intervention designed for early obesity prevention affected reported infant negativity and observed regulation, outcomes that have been linked with subsequent healthy development. Interventions grounded in an RP framework have the potential for widespread effects on child health and well-being.


A prior birth confers a strong protective effect against preeclampsia, whereas a prior abortion confers a weaker protective effect. Parous women who change partners in a subsequent pregnancy appear to lose the protective effect of a prior birth. This study (Calcium for Preeclampsia Prevention Trial, 1992-1995) examines whether nulliparous women with a prior abortion who change partners also lose the protective effect of the prior pregnancy. A cohort analysis was conducted among participants in this large clinical trial of calcium supplementation to prevent preeclampsia. Subjects were nulliparous, had one prior pregnancy or less, delivered after 20 weeks' gestation, and were interviewed at 5-21 weeks about prior pregnancies and paternity. Women without a history of abortion served as the reference group in logistic regression analyses. Women with a history of abortion who conceived again with the same partner had nearly half the risk of preeclampsia (adjusted odds ratio = 0.54, 95 percent confidence interval: 0.31, 0.97). In contrast, women with an abortion history who conceived with a new partner had the same risk of preeclampsia as women without a history of abortion (adjusted odds ratio = 1.03, 95 percent confidence interval: 0.72, 1.47). Thus, the protective effect of a prior abortion operated only among women who conceived again with the same partner. An immune-based etiologic mechanism is proposed, whereby prolonged exposure to fetal antigens from a previous pregnancy protects against preeclampsia in a subsequent pregnancy with the same father.


The tradition of tossing a coin to decide who bats first in a cricket match introduces a randomly-assigned advantage to one team that is unique in sporting contests. In this paper we develop previous work on this issue by examining the impact of the toss on outcomes of day-night one day international games explicitly allowing for relative team quality. We estimate conditional logit models of outcomes using data from day-night internationals played between 1979 and 2005. Other things equal, we find that winning the toss and batting increases the probability of winning by 31%. In contrast, winning the toss does not appear to confer any advantage if the team choose to bowl first.


In this thesis we scrutinize and improve theoretical models of the two helium burning stages of low-mass (less than about 8 solar masses) stellar evolution – the core helium burning (CHeB) and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phases. Accurate stellar models of these phases are essential for the understanding of the physics of stars, the chemical evolution of galaxies, and astrophysics more generally, where the observation of starlight is paramount.

In this study we use new models and observational data to investigate two particular important uncertainties during the CHeB and AGB stages that have compounding effects on the evolution. In CHeB models, feedback from convective overshoot can lead to the development of a 'semiconvection' zone outside the convective core that can extend the lifetime of the phase by up to a factor of two. In the later thermally pulsing-AGB phase, accounting for the opacity increase due to in situ composition changes can increase the stellar radius, and therefore mass loss rate, truncating the evolution.

We compute a grid of CHeB stellar models with four different treatments of convective boundaries using the Monash University stellar evolution code MONSTAR. Theoretical non-radial adiabatic pulsations for these models are then compared with recent asteroseismic observations from the Kepler telescope. Next, we infer the horizontal branch and AGB lifetimes of globular cluster stars from star counts in HST photometry and compare these with predictions from evolution sequences with the different mixing schemes. Finally, for models of the thermally-pulsing AGB phase we incorporate into MONSTAR new low-temperature molecular opacity data that accounts for changes in the surface abundance of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. The effect of this update is tested by computing a grid of low-metallicity AGB models that experience the third dredge-up.

We identify two distinct CHeB structures that can simultaneously match the globular cluster and asteroseismic observations: those with (i) a slowly mixing region outside the convective core that traps oscillation modes, or (ii) the largest possible convective core, requiring a novel scheme for convective overshoot. We may be able to discriminate between these two possibilities with further work, including the analysis of biases in the observed sample and multi-dimensional simulations.

The inclusion of composition-dependent low-T opacity in low-metallicity models shortens the AGB lifetime, increases the mass threshold for hot bottom burning, and radically affects chemical yields. By computing initially metal-free models, we demonstrate that if the third dredge-up occurs, there is no metallicity below which composition-dependent low-T opacity may be neglected. The reduced nitrogen yield from models with the new opacity may help explain the observed numbers of carbon- and nitrogen-enhanced metal-poor stars: this should be confirmed with binary population synthesis calculations.


Here we present a comprehensive study of oxygen-deficient double perovskites PrBa1-xCo2O5+δ (x = 0.00, 0.05, 0.10) to exploit their potential use as cathode materials for intermediate-temperature solid oxide fuel cells (IT-SOFCs). Special attention is paid to the structure, oxygen concentration and oxygen-ion transport properties, which are key factors related to the electrochemical performance. Based on results obtained from a series of high-resolution structural analysis techniques, such as XRD, SAED, and HR-TEM, these double perovskite oxides possess tetragonal lattice symmetry and a stable crystal structure. According to the information obtained from iodometric titration, TGA, and O2-TPD measurements, an increase in oxygen vacancy concentration in the lattice with an increasing Ba cation deficiency (x value) is demonstrated. Additionally, oxygen permeation flux and electrical conductivity relaxation (ECR) measurements illustrate an improved oxygen ionic conductivity, chemical bulk diffusion coefficient (Dchem) and chemical surface exchange coefficient (Kchem) with the introduction of Ba deficiency, likely due to the increase in the concentration of oxygen vacancies. Tests at 700 °C of the electrochemical performance based on symmetrical cells show area specific resistances (ASRs) of 0.046, 0.042, and 0.038 Ω cm2 for PrBa1-xCo2O5+δ with x = 0.00, 0.05, and 0.10, respectively. These results are extremely promising; consequently, these oxides are worthy of further study and optimization as cathode This is the Pre-Published Version.


The incremental diffusion of machine learning algorithms in supporting cybersecurity is creating novel defensive opportunities but also new types of risks. Multiple researches have shown that machine learning methods are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that create tiny perturbations aimed at decreasing the effectiveness of detecting threats. We observe that existing literature assumes threat models that are inappropriate for realistic cybersecurity scenarios, because they consider opponents with complete knowledge about the cyber detector or that can freely interact with the target systems. By focusing on Network Intrusion Detection Systems based on machine learning, we identify and model the real capabilities and circumstances required by attackers to carry out feasible and successful adversarial attacks. We then apply our model to several adversarial attacks proposed in literature and highlight the limits and merits that can result in actual adversarial attacks. The contributions of this article can help hardening defensive systems by letting cyber defenders address the most critical and real issues and can benefit researchers by allowing them to devise novel forms of adversarial attacks based on realistic threat models.


Do today's retirees have sufficient income to meet their needs? One common way to address this question is to determine a household's "replacement rate." The replacement rate gauges the extent to which retirement income allows workers to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living. In the U.S. retirement income system, Social Security is the single most important source for most people. It provides a basic level of replacement, upon which individuals can build through additional saving. This brief addresses the question of how much pre-retirement income Social Security replaces for current recipients. Subsequent briefs will provide a more comprehensive evaluation of replacement rates by including income from employer-sponsored pensions, other savings, and housing equity, as well as Social Security. The first section of this brief explains the concept of a replacement rate and discusses how much people need for a comfortable retirement. The second section describes how Social Security replacement rates are constructed for this analysis and then reports results for individuals and households. The final section summarizes the key findings.


The problem of revising a belief database is treated in many classical works. We will consider here the problem of merging two belief databases (BDBs for short) Ψ1 and Ψ2, operation that will be denoted by Ψ1 Ψ2, and whose result will be a new BDB. Since belief not necessarily reflects the actual state of the world (as opposed to knowledge), both BDBs could be incompatible. The goal is to construct a new BDB trying to retain as much as possible of the original beliefs of Ψ1 and Ψ2.


The Green Bank North Celestial Cap (GBNCC) pulsar survey will cover the entire northern sky (δ > −40°) at 350 MHz, and is one of the most uniform and sensitive all-sky pulsar surveys to date. We have created a pipeline to reanalyze GBNCC survey data to take a 350 MHz census of all pulsars detected by the survey, regardless of their discovery survey. Of the 1413 pulsars in the survey region, we were able to recover 670. For these we present measured signal-to-noise ratios (S/N), flux densities, pulse widths, profiles, and where appropriate, refined measurements of dispersion measures (DMs) (656 out of 670) and new or improved spectral indices (339 out of 670 total, 47 new, 292 improved). We also measure the period-pulse width relation at 350 MHz to scale as . Detection scans for several hundred sources were reanalyzed in order to inspect pulsars' single pulse behavior and 223 were found to exhibit evidence of nulling. With a detailed analysis of measured and expected S/N values and the evolving radio frequency interference environment at 350 MHz, we assess the GBNCC survey's sensitivity as a function of spin period, DM, and sky position. We find the sky-averaged limiting flux density of the survey to be 0.74 mJy. Combining this analysis with PsrPopPy pulsar population simulations, we predict 60/5 nonrecycled/MSP discoveries in the survey's remaining 21,000 pointings, and we begin to place constraints on population model parameters.


Malaria still claims a heavy human and economic toll, specifically in sub-Saharan Africa. Even though the causality between malaria and poverty is presumably bi-directional, malaria plays a role in the economic difficulties of the region. This article provides an analysis of the economic consequences of malaria (with an emphasis on human capital accumulation and productivity), and a discussion of policies aimed at reducing its incidence. A major initiative has been the distribution of insecticidal bed-nets at a highly subsidized price. An economic-epidemiology model is used to explain why such policy is doomed to fail in presence of a very high poverty incidence, as observed in the African region.


Since the appearance of ,,Age and Area" by Dr. J. C.Willis in 1922 the progress in this matter has not been so great as before. From the contribution of a few chapters by some well-known biologists, and from many approving remarks by others quoted throughout the book one might derive that the theory of origin and evolution of species, etc., presented in it, had already a remarkable success. But there is also a whole chapter in the book, containing the diversified objections, to which Dr. Willis makes head. The "very strong evidence based upon definite facts, not upon a priori reasoning", however, required by Willis (p. 233), has turned out to be more of a repetition of the same statements with more or less different materials than of the discovery of conclusive facts. The situation seems to us best characterized by quoting Dr. Ph. P. Calvert's (1923) statement: "..., I fail to find the key to the origin and evolution of species with the ease which Dr. Willis's commendation of Age and Area would lead me to expect, and which I would welcome if the key but turned in the lock". It is of no use trying to entangle all the controverses to which the theory gives cause: they are almost without exception of the nature of putting one probable explanation against the other. Dr. Willis could easily refute them, because the objections were so fragmentary. Therefore the only way promising results in finding the real meaning of Willis's statements must consist in the analytical examination of them. The most striking result and attribute of Willis's considerations, of course, is the "hollow curve", which we propose to term the "Williscurve". It is a representation of the frequency-distribution of systematic


Wash: That sounds like something out of science fiction!
Zoe: You live in a spaceship, dear.
Wash: So?
'Objects in Space' Episode 14, Firefly, 2002

The interior of the International Space Station has become familiar to millions through the 2013 Youtube video of Canadian astronaut Commander Hadfield singing a cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity. The video showed a space station interior densely populated with cables, switches, screens and the technical paraphernalia, with only Hadfield's guitar and his tiny padded bunk showing any hint of the crew's personal or domestic lives. Many film and television visualisations of life in space focus on military space craft, with the domestic living arrangements modelled on existing military crew quarters, paying little attention to either private or domestic spaces for small groups. However, this paper will consider one vision of how we might live a future mobile existence in space, based on the interior of the spaceship Serenity, the main set for the short-lived American 'space western' TV series Firefly (2002) and the subsequent film Serenity (2005). The Serenity is a rickety, patched-up multi-purpose Firefly-class cargo transport, running dodgy goods between colonised planets in a future where the authoritarian 'Alliance' has recently won a war of unification. As well as the science fiction genre conventions of bridge, crew quarters, med-bay and cargo hold, the Serenity also contains a number of communal leisure spaces which function as kitchen, dining room and sitting room for the small group of crew and passengers, reflecting the long term nature of their residence on the ship.

This paper will look at the evidence of active home-making processes at work in Serenity's communal interior, particularly in relation to the transient, precarious existence of the crew. The paper will consider the communal domestic spaces in relation to both the Early American decorating styles and the visions of American homes shown in the Western genre, as well as the attempts to incorporate Asian elements into the design, to reflect the projected American-Chinese governmental alliance. As well as the visual references to other modes of transport such as submarines and airplanes, it considers the influence of mid-century American mobile homes on the design of the space ship itself, providing another layer of cultural context to the show and film. It also looks at the incorporation of mid-century modern design elements into the production design, particularly modernist furniture and layouts influenced by California Modern, and the added layers of meaning that they add to this vision of the future. In analysing the furnishing and decoration of these communal spaces, as well as the way that they are presented on screen, the paper considers production designer Carey Meyer's efforts to portray a comforting, cosy American domesticity based on the past, and past visions of the future, while also critiquing the way in which these heroic visions have turned into a reality of static mobile homes and a single crowded space station.


Cross-cultural research provides exceptional insights into the hopes and fears of dealing with people different to ourselves. In Australia, such research suggests that Australian Muslims have surpassed Asians as one of the country's most marginalised religious and ethnic groups. Muslims and people from the Middle East are thought to be unable to fit into Australia, with more than 50% of Australians preferring their relatives did not to marry into a Muslim family. Yet this statistic masks diverse interpretations of interfaith relations and cultural harmony present across Australia today. In 12 essays Us and Them offers truths about interfaith relations as they are believed and expressed by Muslim and non-Muslim Australians. The essays are interdisciplinary and varied in topic, and seek to challenge the images of Islam held by both xenophobic Westerners and extremist Muslims. Drawn from a variety of research projects over past years, including results from a national survey on attitudes towards Islam and Muslims among Australian secondary students, they also raise thematic questions, such as: Will any dialogue lead to a rapprochement between the Muslim and mainstream communities? What is Christian-Muslim diversity? Why does it matter? Can we really learn how to manage diversity in the workplace? Can the Shari'a law coexist with the Australian legal system on issues including polygamy, marital status and dress? This book is essential reading for all students - secondary through to tertiary and postgraduate - requiring an introduction to Christian Muslim relations and attitudes in Australia .


Theodosiadis P, Grosomanidis V, Touroutoglou N Neurolytic celiac plexus block (NCPB) is a useful technique for pain control in patients with intra-abdominal tumors or pain secondary to chronic pancreatitis that does not respond to other therapeutic modalities (not interventional). The anterior approach for NCPB has been considered a relatively safe approach, with a low rate of complications and little risk of neurologic injury secondary to the spread of a neurolytic agent. This is the first national case report of successful NCPB using the anterior approach under CT guidance.


Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficiently. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models.
The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.


In recent years the census of known satellites in our own Local Group and in nearby galaxy groups has increased substantially due to sensitive wide-area surveys. In the Local Group these surveys have more than doubled its galaxy content and extended the galaxy luminosity function to very faint total magnitudes. Deep ground-based imaging and spectroscopic observations as well as high-resolution imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope have revolutionized our understanding of the chemical evolution and star formation histories of the satellites. We often find long-lasting star formation episodes with low star formation efficiencies. There is evidence for localized, stochastic enrichment, and recent searches are now beginning to uncover even extremely metal-deficient stars. In many satellites evidence for two or more distinct stellar subpopulations is found. Differing fractions of old populations have been detected in all satellites studied in sufficient detail so far. Kinematic measurements support a picture in which satellites are dark-matter dominated, although recent results indicate that the proposed common mass scale may not hold for very low-mass satellites. When considering satellite ensembles, we find global morphology–distance and gas-content–distance relations in all groups studied thus far, but individual star formation histories seem to also strongly depend on a given satellite's intrinsic properties.


IZA DP No. 11966 NOVEMBER 2018 Monopsony in Labor Markets: A MetaAnalysis* When jobs offered by different employers are not perfect substitutes in the minds of workers, employers gain wage-setting power; the extent of this power can be captured by the elasticity of labor supply that each employer faces. Estimates of this parameter reported by the literature vary broadly. We collect 801 estimates from published studies, record 20 aspects of each study's design and perform Bayesian Model Averaging to show that this observed variation is systematic and can be attributed to four groups of factors. First, estimates depend on methodologies used by the researchers: different specifications produce systematically different results that are also affected by whether the study employs an identification strategy; the choice between linear and non-linear estimation techniques also matters. Second, estimates vary with the underlying data: labor markets seem to be more competitive in Europe, and less competitive in developing countries compared to the US, Canada and Australia. The market for medical workers appears to be more monopsonistic compared to others. Third, there is evidence of publication bias in parts of the literature, which results in negative estimates of supply elasticities receiving lower probability of being reported, and a (slightly) exaggerated mean. Fourth, estimates seem to vary with study quality, with top journals publishing higher estimates and studies using larger data sets producing more evidence of competitive behavior. JEL Classification: J42, C83


Single plate shear tab connections are a simple means to connect beams to their supporting members. The tab is fillet-welded to the supporting column in the fabrication shop, and then field bolted to the beam web on the construction site. Sit-uations may arise on site in which the bolt holes do not align. Instead of reaming holes or refabricating the connection, a cost efficient alternative is to use a weld-retrofit connection between the beam web and the shear tab. The AISC recommends that this retrofit approach not be taken due to concerns with the rotational ductility of the connection; however, no test-based performance evaluation was available for the weld-retrofit connection. The intent of the paper is to summarize the laboratory phase of a research project in which various weld-retrofit schemes of shear tab con-nections were evaluated. The connection performance is compared with nominally identical bolted shear tab connections.


series of benzohydrazide derivatives plays a vital role owing to their range of biological and physiological activities. Some new benzohydrazide derivatives have been successfully prepared by the condensation reaction in the present study. The reaction has been carried out at various conditions. The synthesized compounds have characteristic functional groups in the molecules are confirmed through Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FTIR), Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (1H-NMR) and Carbon 13 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (13C-NMR). Mass spectrometry provides information pertaining to the structures and molecular weight of the some selected compounds. All the compounds were screened for their antibacterial and antifungal activity in Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) levels. The antioxidant activity of Schiff base containing benzohydrazide moiety and its derivatives were investigated using 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging method. Further, to exemplify the key structural features of the compounds, a molecular docking analysis was performed at Mycobacterium tuberculosis enoyl acyl carrier reductase InhA protein.


Reconciliation is being urged upon people who have been bitter and murderous enemies, upon victims and perpetrators of terrible human rights abuses, and upon groups of individuals whose very self-conceptions have been structured in terms of historical and often state-sanctioned relations of dominance and submission. The rhetoric of reconciliation is particularly common in situations where traditional judicial responses to past wrongdoing are unavailable because of corruption in the legal system, staggeringly large numbers of offenders, or anxiety about the political consequences of trials and punishment. But what is reconciliation? How is reconciliation to be achieved? And under what conditions should it be sought? The notable lack of answers to these questions prompts the worry that talk of reconciliation is merely a ruse to disguise the fact that a "purer" type of justice cannot be realized–that, in being asked to focus on reconciliation rather than on punishment, victims of past wrongdoing are having to settle for the morally second best. By mining our pretheoretical understandings of reconciliation, the essay arrives at a core concept of reconciliation as narrative incorporation that at the same time suggests a way in which reconciliation might be pursued and grounds a response to moral qualms provoked by the use of an unanalyzed conception of reconciliation.


The present research was designed to explore the relationship between sexual harassment and coping strategies used by domestic female workers. The research also aimed to explore the differences based on different demographic variables (i.e., age, marital status, working status of family, religion, and residence) in relation to variables. Respondents included 100 female domestic workers, from different slum areas of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Age range of the domestic female workers was from 12-43 years (M = 23.43, SD = 5.85). Convenient sampling technique was used to collect data by using Sexual Harassment Experiences Questionnaire (Kamal and Tariq, 1997) and Coping Strategies with Harassment (Kamal and Tariq, 1997). Results indicated that gender harassment and unwanted sexual attention were the most common experienced types of sexual harassment. The results provided evidence of negative relationship of sexual harassment with internal coping strategies and positive relationship with avoidance as external coping strategy. Age was found to be negatively related to the internal focused coping strategies and positively related with the external focused coping strategies. Married female domestic workers were experiencing higher frequency of sexual harassment as compared to unmarried female domestic workers.


ABSTRACT The COVID-19 crisis presents a unique opportunity to study how public opinion towards the redistributive role of the state reacts to a major economic shock. The pandemic and the measures taken to stop it exposed citizens to both increased fiscal constraint and heightened redistributive capacity: historical drops in GDP (and fiscal revenue) coincided with unprecedented increases in public spending on healthcare provisions and social policy, as well as staggering amounts of financial liquidity provided to hard-hit economic sectors. How did this affect citizens' attitudes towards redistribution and their assessments of the capacity of the state to intervene? To tackle these questions, we rely on a two-wave panel survey fielded in Germany, Sweden and Spain in late 2018 and June 2020. While preferred levels of redistribution have remained largely stable, our results indicate major shifts and growing ideological polarization around perceptions of welfare state efficiency and capacity, fiscal constraint and political trust. Hence, the COVID-crisis has so far neither led to a left- nor a right-wing shift in citizens' desired level of state intervention, but to an increasingly polarized context of (re)distributive politics, which is likely to imply heightened conflict over economic and social policy in the future.


Disease etiology may be better understood through the study of gene expression in four dimensional (4D) experiments that consist of measurements on multiple individuals, genes, tissues and under multiple conditions or through time. We have developed a sparse Bayesian four dimensional tensor decomposition method aimed at uncovering latent components or gene networks that could be linked to genetic variation. We used a Variational Bayes algorithm to fit the model which provides fast and accurate analysis. In this brief note we illustrate the utility of the method using simulated datasets, and show that when 4D data is available our method shows improved performance in estimating the true structure in the dataset, when compared to using a 3D method on a single slice of the 4D dataset. We also compare the results of the 4D method to that of the 3D method on a suitable unfolding of the dataset, demonstrating that similar performance is observed in this case, while the 4D method accurately recovers the additional structure in the data. We provide software that implements the method in R.


Collaborative learning, in the context of Learning Management Systems (LMSs), is becoming an important factor in the e-Learning process. LMSs such as Blackboard, Sakai, allow various forms of collaboration between students. Moreover, LMSs allow a high degree of reuse by relying on e-Learning standards. Nevertheless, LMSs lack adaptation and personalization facilities. Adaptive Hypermedia environments allow for adaptation, but do not usually allow for collaboration, and only seldom use standards. In this paper, we present our work towards combining adaptation, standards, and typical LMSs, to achieve personalization in collaborative environments. In particular, we use MOT (My Online Teacher), an authoring system for adaptive hypermedia, IMS Question and Test Interoperability (IMS QTI) and IMS Content Packaging (IMS CP), and the Sakai LMS. In We demonstrate how e-Learning materials based on standards can be augmented; in order to achieve personalization, and adaptive collaborative support, using collaborative adaptive strategies. Thus, this work describes a significant step towards the little explored avenue of adaptive collaborative systems, based on extant learning standards and popular LMS.


Research by Nagamune et al. has revealed that the plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) acts in the human parasite Toxoplasma gondii. In the protozoan parasite T. gondii, calcium release from intracellular stores (which has been implicated in various processes that involve calcium-mediated protein secretion) is regulated by the second messenger cyclic ADP ribose (cADPR). Noting that, in plants, ABA regulates calcium release from intracellular stores by means of cADPR, Nagamune et al. exposed T. gondii to ABA and found that it increased both their cADPR content and the calcium-dependent secretion of the adhesin MIC2 (microneme protein 2). Biochemical analyses indicated that ABA was present in T. gondii lysates, and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay indicated that its concentration was decreased by treatment with the herbicide fluridone (which inhibits ABA synthesis in plants). There was a spike in the intracellular concentration of ABA before parasite egress from infected cells, and, whereas fluridone failed to prevent invasion of host cells, it inhibited T. gondii exit from infected human foreskin fibroblasts. Instead, it promoted differentiation of the parasites into tissue cysts. Exogenous ABA stimulated early egress of parasites from host cells and enabled egress in the presence of fluridone. Fluridone also decreased parasite burden in infected mice and markedly improved survival of mice inoculated with T. gondii. The authors thus conclude that a plantlike ABA-mediated calcium-signaling pathway is present in the protozoan T. gondii and that disruption of ABA signaling may provide a therapeutic approach against toxoplasmosis. K. Nagamune, L. M. Hicks, B. Fux, F. Brossier, E. N. Chini, L. D. Sibley, Abscisic acid controls calcium-dependent egress and development in Toxoplasma gondii. Nature 451, 207-210 (2008). [PubMed]


In addition to the established problem of road safety in developing countries such as Indonesia, the agencies responsible for road safety often lack personnel with professional training in road safety. In Indonesia this is compounded by a need for more effective collaboration between agencies. In 2009, CARRS-Q was commissioned under the Indonesia Transport Safety Assistance Package to provide professional training in road safety for middle-level officers in Jakarta, the province of Jawa Barat, and the cities of Bandung, Bogor and Sukabumi, aimed at developing action plans and fostering collaboration between agencies. This was achieved through a workshop, which was followed up by a second workshop with the same participants. The course was very well received, action plans were successfully prepared during the first workshop, and most had progressed well by the time of the second workshop. Good cooperation among agencies was also evident. There would be considerable benefits in extending modified workshops more widely in Indonesia.