We calculate global m = 1 modes with low pattern speed corresponding to introducing a nite ec- centricity into a protoplanetary disc. We consider disc models which are either isolated or contain one or two protoplanets orbiting in an inner cavity. Global modes that are strongly coupled to inner protoplanets are found to have disc orbits which tend to have apsidal lines antialigned with respect to those of the inner protoplanets. Other modes corresponding to free disc modes may be global over a large range of length scales and accordingly be long lived. We consider the motion of a protoplanet in the earth mass range embedded in an eccentric disc and determine the equilibrium orbits which maintain xed apsidal alignment with respect to the disc gas orbits. Equilibrium eccentricities are found to be comparable or possibly exceed the disc eccentricity. We then approx- imately calculate the tidal interaction with the disc in order to estimate the orbital migration rate. Results are found to deviate from the case of axisymmetric disc with near circular protoplanet orbit once eccentricities of protoplanet and disc orbits become comparable to the disc aspect ratio in magnitude. Aligned protoplanet orbits with very similar eccentricity to that of the gas disc are found to undergo litle eccentricity change while undergoing inward migration in general. However, for signicantly larger orbital eccentricities, migration may be signicantly reduced or even reverse from inwards to outwards. Thus the existence of global non circular motions in discs with radial excursions comparable to the semi-thickness may have important consequences for the migration and survival of protoplanetary cores in the earth mass range.


Objective: To examine the natural history, survival, and prognostic factors in a sample of Turkish MS patients. Method: This multicenter study included 1,259 definite MS patients diagnosed according to the criteria of Poser et al. Actuarial analysis of selected disability levels of 3, 6, 8, and 10 achieved with the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS); a multivariate Cox regression analysis for prognostic factors related to time to reach EDSS ≥ 6; and Pearson's correlation coefficient for individual factors were performed. Results: The survival (±SE) at 15 years from onset was 94.6 ± 2.9%, and at 25 years was 89.0 ± 5.8%. The disability reached by 15 years was EDSS ≥ 3 in 66.4%, EDSS ≥ 6 in 41.2%, EDSS ≥ 8 in 10.5%, and EDSS = 10 in 5.4%. The most significant unfavorable prognostic factors were progressive course (relative risk [RR], 3.73; CI, 2.71 to 5.13) and sphincter symptoms at onset (RR, 1.86; CI, 1.23 to 2.82), followed by male sex, motor symptoms at onset, and a high attack frequency within the first 5 years. Primary progressive disease was correlated positively with male sex (r = 0.0895, p = 0.001), older age (r = 0.1807, p = 0.000), and motor (r = 0.1433, p = 0.000) or sphincter symptoms (r = 0.1001, p = 0.000) at onset, unlike relapsing-remitting and secondary progressive disease. Conclusions: Although a slightly better prognosis is observed in the Turkish MS population, early prognostic factors are similar to most of the previous Western series. Primary progressive disease, mostly seen in older men with motor and sphincter involvement at onset, has a worse prognosis and may represent a distinct behavioral variant of MS.


Topological data analysis (TDA) is an active field of mathematics for quantifying shape in complex data. Standard methods in TDA such as persistent homology (PH) are typically focused on the analysis of data consisting of a single entity (e.g., cells or molecular species). However, state-of-the-art data collection techniques now generate exquisitely detailed multispecies data, prompting a need for methods that can examine and quantify the relations among them. Such heterogeneous data types arise in many contexts, ranging from biomedical imaging, geospatial analysis, to species ecology. Here, we propose two methods for encoding spatial relations among different data types that are based on Dowker complexes and Witness complexes. We apply the methods to synthetic multispecies data of a tumor microenvironment and analyze topological features that capture relations between different cell types, e.g., blood vessels, macrophages, tumor cells, and necrotic cells. We demonstrate that relational topological features can extract biological insight, including the dominant immune cell phenotype (an important predictor of patient prognosis) and the parameter regimes of a data-generating model. The methods provide a quantitative perspective on the relational analysis of multispecies spatial data, overcome the limits of traditional PH, and are readily computable.


A requirement or preference for contractors to pay workers involved in the delivery of public contracts a wage above the legal minimum can be seen as part of socially responsible public procurement. However it may also be seen as a restriction on the free movement of goods and services, inasmuch as it erodes the cost advantages of contractors based in lower wage areas. As the United Kingdom prepares to leave the European Union, there is a need both to state EU law on this question and to consider the scope for the UK, its constituent jurisdictions or individual contracting authorities to take a different approach. The 2014 procurement directives, the Bundesdruckerei and RegioPost cases and the Commission's proposed revisions to the Posted Workers Directive all attempt to reconcile free movement with social protections relating to wages - however none of these directly address living wages which are not set out in legislation, collective agreements or administrative provisions. This paper analyses these developments in order to draw conclusions regarding the scope for living wages to be included in public contracts both before and after Brexit.


This study correlated the floristic composition of grassland communities with environmental variation in the Western Romanian Carpathians, focusing on the effect of grazing. Grasslands were sampled using 231 plots each 0.25 km in area. Vascular flora, altitude, aspect, slope, bedrock and grazing intensity were recorded for each plot. Data were processed using direct gradient analyses (CCA) and a generalized linear model. The results revealed three distinct communities associated with bedrock, landscape topography and grazing intensity. Grazing changes the floristic composition of grasslands on limestone more than on other types of bedrock. Specifically the floristic composition of the limestone-area plots subjected to low grazing pressure differ significantly from that of the plots of grassland on flysch and volcanic bedrock. When intensively grazed, the floristic composition of chalk grassland does not differ from that of the lightly grazed vegetation growing on flysch or volcanic bedrock. The reasons for this pattern and implications for management are discussed.


This study aims at evaluating the impact of an On Site Electro Chlorination (OSEC) device, a system for the sodium hypochlorite production, on the improvement of health and hygienic standards in Mesoamerica focusing on Chiapas-Mexico and Costa Rica, as well as in Africa, Western Sahara (Refugees Camp) and Tanzania. The threat of infectious diseases and the importance of cleaned and treated water with the consequent high impact on the vulnerable population have been studied in each of the above countries. In this framework the production of low cost sodium hypochlorite through a stand-alone system powered by PV solar source could be a good starting point in improving sanitation conditions, assuring the disinfection of water and clothes, and improve food safety. The cost analysis shows that producing sodium hypochlorite with an OSEC solar system could lead to 10 to 15 times saving with respect to the purchasing of it at market price, above all in developing countries. Furthermore, the LCA study highlights the low environmental impact of the on-site production of sodium hypochlorite through qualitative and quantitative data that demonstrate how this system has pollutant emissions from 14 to 56 times lower than the equivalent industrial process (N factor). The paper describes as well possible practical applications of the sodium hypochlorite in the African and Latin American context. Additionally, it demonstrates the potential to create an impact on the social context and microenterprises specialised in the production of hygiene and sanitation products, managed by local people selling at affordable prices and reaching the poorest villages of developing countries.


Continuum mechanics is used to model the mechanical behaviour of concrete structures subjected to high rates of loading in defence applications. Large deformation theory is used and an isotropic elastic-plastic constitutive equation with isotropic hardening, damage and strain rate dependent loading surface. The hydrostatic pressure is governed by an equation of state. Numerical analysis is performed using the finite element method and the central difference method for the time integration. Projectile penetration is studied and it is concluded that it is not suitable to use material description of the motion of both the target and the projectile together with an erosion criterion. Instead, the material description should be used only for the projectile and the spatial description for the target. In this way the need for an erosion criterion is eliminated. Also, in the constitutive model used it is necessary to introduce a scaling of the softening phase in relation to the finite element size, in order to avoid strain localization. Drop weight testing of reinforced concrete beams are analysed, where a regularisation is introduced that renders mesh objectivity regarding fracture energy release. The resulting model can accurately reproduce results from material testing but the regularisation is not sufficient to avoid strain localization when applied to an impact loaded structure. It is finally proposed that a non-local measure of deformation could be a solution to attain convergence. The third study presents the behaviour of a concrete constitutive model in a splitting test and a simplified non-local theory applied in a tensile test. The splitting test model exhibits mesh dependency due to a singularity. In the tensile test the non-local theory is shown to give a convergent solution. The report https://www.diva-portal.org/liu/webform/form.jsp#paper0is concluded with a discussion on how to better model concrete materials.


The goal of this thesis work was to develop responsive surface grafted brushlayers for control of surface properties and to gain insights in the molecular mechanisms that control these properties. Three types of grafted layers were investigated, as outlined below. In the first system studied, poly(AAc) was synthesized by a grafting from approach, utilizing a photopolymerization reaction from a macroinitiator cast onto QCM substrates. The responsiveness in terms of frequency change, Δf, of the resulting brushes to changes in bulk pH was studied with QCM. Further, the friction properties of poly(AAc) was elucidated with colloidal probe AFM as a function of pH and counterion valency. High friction (μ=0.27) was found in presence of CaCl2 at high pH (7.5), but not under any other condition explored. It was concluded that the high friction was due to intralayer COO--Ca2+--OOC bridges. QCM-D was utilized for studying viscoelastic properties of growing poly(AAc) films during in situ photopolymerization. By Voigt modeling, the thickness, shear elasticity and shear viscosity were extracted. These parameters were observed to undergo sudden transitions at a critical thickness, and from this thickness the grafting density of the growing poly(AAc) layers was determined. In addition, the sensitivity to changes in Δf and ΔD with respect to the thickness of the poly(AAc) films was investigated, and the results showed that high sensitivity in ΔD is retained at higher film thicknesses than for Δf, and that the sensitivity with respect to noise can significantly alter the thickness that is best suited forthe study of viscoelastic changes in sensor applications. The work with QCM-D also involved the detection of structural variations within a thick brush layer of poly(AAc). Since lower overtones have higher penetration depth, these frequencies sense polymer segments further out in the brush. It was found that the apparent pKa of the poly(AAc) was higher for lower overtones, indicating therelative ease of acid dissociation in segments further out in the polyelectrolytebrush. In the second system studied, phenylethylamine (PEA) was electrografted to flatsurfaces of glassy carbon (GC). The nanomechanical properties, such as topography, deformation, adhesion and dissipation, were investigated using PeakForce quantitative nanomechanical mapping (QNM). One main finding is that globular domains of 40 to 50 nm indiameter appear in the electrografted PEA layer. They are assigned to clusters of PEA formed due to less rapid reactions between radicals and the GC surface compared to reactions with already grafted PEA. The interactions between the PEA layer and a silica sphere were further investigated by surface force measurements. A main finding is that the PEA surfaces were heavily charge regulated due to the limited net charge of the PEA layer compared to that of silica. In the third system studied, the mechanical response of polyelectrolytes as a function of applied load, probing angle and pH was investigated with PeakForce QNM. The used polyelectrolyte was poly(2-dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate)(PDMAEMA) with pKa of 6.5 to 7.5 and grafted to silica nanoparticles. While most research on polyelectrolyte brushes is conducted by employing flat and smooth surfaces, with a roughness on the nanometer scale, real surfaces are rarely ever ideally flat but rather they possess topographic irregularities on nano- and micro-scales, which locally imparts high curvatures. The spherical geometry of the core-shell nanoparticles serves as a model for real surfaces with respect to topographical irregularities of real surfaces. The nanoscale brushes were probed with an ultrasharp AFM tip, providing nanoscale resolution of topography, deformation, adhesion and dissipation. It was found that the mechanical response of the polyelectrolyte corona is dependent on the applied load and the polar angle of the tip-brush interaction. All nanomechanical data show a non-monotonic variation with horizontal position, and the peak values are shifted in magnitude and position as a function of peak force. The effect of pH on deformation was further investigated. The results showed that the brush is more resistant against compression over the centre than it is to deflection at larger horizontal positions, and this effect is amplified by charging the brush. This work provided understanding of the direction dependence of the mechanical properties and is relevant for the design of brush boundary lubricating agents for rough surfaces, where the polymer chains are both being bent and compressed under the influence of load and shear.


Handling hundreds of thousands of files is a major challenge in today's digital forensics. In order to cope with this information overload, investigators often apply hash functions for automated input identification. Besides identifying exact duplicates, which is mostly solved running cryptographic hash functions, it is also necessary to cope with similar inputs (e.g., different versions of files), embedded objects (e.g., a JPG within a office document), and fragments (e.g., network packets). Thus, the essential idea is to complement the use of cryptographic hash functions, to detect data objects with bytewise identical representation, with the capability to find objects with bytewise similar representations.
Unlike cryptographic hash functions, which have a wide range of applications and have been studied as well as tested for a long time, approximate matching algorithms are still in their early development stages. More precisely, currently the community is missing a definition, an evaluation methodology and (additional) fields of application.
Therefore, this thesis aims at establishing approximate matching in computer sciences with a special focus on digital forensic investigations. One of our firsts step was to develop a generic definition for approximate matching, in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which is applicable to the different levels approximate matching, e.g., bytewise and semantic. A subsequent detailed analysis of both existing approaches uncovers different strengths and weaknesses, therefore we present improvements. To extend the range of algorithms, this work introduces three of our new algorithms, that are based on well-known techniques of computer sciences.
A core contribution of this thesis is the open source evaluation framework called FRASH which assesses tools on different criteria. Besides traditional properties (borrowed from hash functions) like generation efficiency and space efficiency (compression), we conceive methods to determine precision and recall rates based on synthetic as well as real world data.
Since digital investigations are often time critical, we improve the performance of automated file identification by a mechanism we call prefetching. Compared to a straight
forward analysis, the performance increases by almost 40% without additional hardware. In this context we also discuss the impact of different hashing/approximate matching algorithms for digital investigations and conclude that it is absolutely reasonable to apply crypto hashing as well as bytewise/semantic approximate matching algorithms in a prosecution.
To extend the fields of application, this thesis demonstrates the capabilities of applying approximate matching on network traffic analysis and biometric template protection. Our research shows that approximate matching is perfectly suited for data leakage prevention and can also be applied for biometric template protection, biometric data compression and efficient biometric identification.


In reflection upon the worthy work of Professor Shinya Konaka and his colleagues, this contribution discusses the idea of "Localization of Humanitarian Assistance". Several critical questions arise from a humanitarian situation where the needs are assessed: we have to know what people need and what they don't need. We need to determine coping mechanisms that need not substituted but rather facilitated. To not undermine and further marginalize we need to know what resources, skills and social capital East African pastoralists have and how they are activated, where and when. The discussion is organized in observations from on one hand, archaeological and heritage perspective and on the other, personal experience of refugees and IDP life in the East Africa. It concludes that people do not only need food and shelter to survive and that cultural heritage is a basic human need too. Without the traditional skills and coping mechanisms that are inherent in the cultural values that glue people together, it is difficult for East African pastoralists to survive. Violence and neglect against people and environment are related to the destruction and neglect of cultural and natural heritage, which are people's means of livelihood and sources of identity and dignity.


Climate change has already been altering lives on our planet for a generation: the critically acclaimed Forecast shows, through Stephan Faris' vivid on-the-ground reporting, that there are unanticipated and surprising effects - some catastrophic and some positive - right around the corner. Global warming will spur the spread of many diseases. The warming world will shift huge populations and potentially redraw political alliances around the globe, driving environmentalists into the hands of anti-immigrant groups. America's coasts are already more difficult places to live as increasing insurance rates make the Gulf Coast and other gorgeous spots prohibitively expensive. Crops will fail in previously lush places and thrive in some formerly barren zones, altering huge industries and remaking traditions. Water scarcity has the potential to inflame and draw the United States into multiple conflicts. Told through the narratives of current, past, and future events, the result of astonishingly wide travel and reporting, "Forecast" is a powerful, gracefully written account that opens our eyes about this most urgent issue and how it has altered and will alter our world.


This article explores the role of the heart in emotional experience, as well as how learning to shift the rhythms of the heart into a more coherent state makes it possible to establish a new inner baseline reference that allows access to our heart's intuitive capacities and deeper wisdom. The nature and types of intuition and the connection between intuition and compassionate action are discussed. It is suggested that increased effectiveness in self-regulatory capacity and the resultant reorganization of memories sustained in the neural architecture facilitates a stable and integrated experience of self in relationship to others and to the environment, otherwise known as consciousness. The implications of meeting the increasingly complex demands of life with greater love, compassion, and kindness, thereby lifting consciousness, are considered.


Abstract. Advances in microbolometer long-wave infrared (LWIR) detectors have led to the common use of infrared cameras that operate without active temperature stabilization, but the response of these cameras varies with their own temperature. Therefore, obtaining quantitative data requires a calibration that compensates for these errors. This paper describes a method for stabilizing the camera's response through software processing of consecutive images of the scene and images of the camera's internal shutter. An image of the shutter is processed so that it appears as if it were viewed through the lens. The differences between the scene and the image of the shutter treated as an external blackbody are then related to the radiance or temperature of the objects in the scene. This method has been applied to two commercial LWIR cameras over a focal plane array temperature range of ±7.2°C, changing at a rate of up to ±0.5°C/min. During these tests, the rms variability of the camera output was reduced from ±4.0°C to ±0.26°C.


Due to the ever growing presence of data streams, there has been a considerable amount of research on stream mining algorithms. While many algorithms have been introduced that tackle the problem of clustering on evolving data streams, hardly any attention has been paid to appropriate evaluation measures. Measures developed for static scenarios, namely structural measures and ground-truth-based measures, cannot correctly reflect errors attributable to emerging, splitting, or moving clusters. These situations are inherent to the streaming context due to the dynamic changes in the data distribution. In this paper we develop a novel evaluation measure for stream clustering called Cluster Mapping Measure (CMM). CMM effectively indicates different types of errors by taking the important properties of evolving data streams into account. We show in extensive experiments on real and synthetic data that CMM is a robust measure for stream clustering evaluation.


For decades, economists and energy policy analysts have noticed the existence of an "energy efficiency gap" – a significant underinvestment in energy efficiency measures whose benefits outweigh their costs – among residential consumers. Promoting energy efficiency is generally the most cost-effective manner to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to meet future energy demand, while simultaneously promoting economic growth and reducing poverty. Economists have attempted to explain the energy efficiency gap by applying theories of market failures that retain the underlying assumption that consumers generally act as economically rational actors. These theories partly explain the energy efficiency gap, but because they fundamentally misconstrue the reality of human behavior, traditional economic theories alone fail to adequately account for the energy efficiency gap. Social psychologists have discovered a number of predictable behavioral tendencies that contradict the rational actor assumption of economists. Many of these behavioral tendencies serve as significant cognitive barriers to investments in energy efficiency. Because traditional economists' explanations for the energy efficiency gap are incomplete, their public policy solutions to close the gap are likewise insufficient. Specifically, most traditional economists reject forms of public policy they deem paternalistic. The article describes a number of general factors that should be considered when determining whether a market intervention is justified and applies these factors to some specific policies designed to promote residential energy efficiency. The article finds that a suite of market interventions – such as financial subsidies and mandatory minimum energy efficiency standards for buildings, appliances, and electronic devices – is justified to address the energy efficiency gap.


A study was carried out on the assessment of lead in the organs and tissues of domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) in Ibadan from August to October 2015. Ten (10) chickens (layers and broilers) expressed as samples 1-10 were purchased from different retailer markets (Bodija, Ojoo and Sango) within Ibadan City. The chickens were dissected to remove the intestine, liver, kidney, blood, feathers and muscles were oven-dried at 220°C. The pulverized organ and tissues samples were aciddigested and analyzed for the heavy metal lead (Pb) using Buck Scientific Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer (AAS). The results showed that the highest Pb concentrations in parts per million (ppm) were recorded in the liver (2.940 ± 0.040), intestine (3.9800 ± 0.500), kidney (3.6600 ± 0.6000), feather (3.5900 ± 0.06000), and muscle (3.400 ± 0.4000) in sample 10, while the lowest concentration was recorded in the kidney (0.150 ± 0.0300) in sample 1 all at Bodija Market. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed significance of the Pb metal in the organs and tissues of chickens at P<0.05. Less than half of the samples had Pb concentration that exceeded the permissible limit of 0.1 ppm set by FAO/WHO. The study shows that meat from the chicken organs and tissues in Ibadan are relatively safe for human consumption.


Article history: Received August 21, 2016 Received in revised form October 24, 2016 Accepted 21 November 2016 Available online 21 November 2016 Crosslinked poly(vinylalcohol) (PVA) hydrogel composites based on algerian hydrophilic natural Na-montmorillonite (Na-MMT) nanoclay named Maghnite-Na (Mag-Na) were prepared in aqueous media, without utilization of chemical crosslinking agents, by repeated cycles of freezing and thawing. The morphology of hydrogel composites and their swelling in water at different amount of Mag-Na were investigated. The characterization of obtained hydrogel composites by X-ray diffraction (XRD) showed a remarkable increase of the basal distance of Mag-Na in PVA hydrogels. Therefore, Intercalated and exfoliated morphology was observed for prepared composites hydrogels of PVA. The infra-red (FTIR) characterization results showed that some interactions have been developed between the hydroxyl groups of PVA chains and Mag-Na in composite hydrogels. Introducing Mag-Na into PVA hydrogel affected their swelling. Increased amount of Mag-Na decreased the equilibrium degree of swelling and equilibrium water content. © 2017 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


The ontogeny of larval body density and the morphological and histological events during swimbladder development were investigated in two cohorts of yellowtail kingfish Seriola lalandi larvae to understand the relationship between larval morphology and body density. Larvae <3 days post hatch (dph) were positively buoyant with a mean ± s.d. body density of 1.023 ± 0.001 g cm(-3). Histological evidence demonstrated that S. lalandi larvae are initially transient physostomes with the primordial swimbladder derived from the evagination of the gut ventral to the notochord and seen at 2 dph. A pneumatic duct connected the swimbladder to the oesophagus, but degenerated after 5 dph. Initial swimbladder (SB) inflation occurred on 3 dph, and the inflation window was 3-5 dph when the pneumatic duct was still connected to the gut. The swimbladder volume increased with larval age and the epithelial lining on the swimbladder became flattened squamous cells after initial inflation. Seriola lalandi developed into a physoclist with the formation of the rete mirabile and the gas-secreting gland comprised low-columnar epithelial cells. Larvae with successfully inflated swimbladders remained positively buoyant, whereas larvae without SB inflation became negatively buoyant and their body density gradually reached 1.030 ± 0.001 g cm(-3) by 10 dph. Diel density changes were observed after 5 dph, owing to day time deflation and night-time inflation of the swimbladder. These results show that SB inflation has a direct effect on body density in larval S. lalandi and environmental factors should be further investigated to enhance the rate of SB inflation to prevent the sinking death syndrome in the early life stage of the fish larvae.


This paper provides experimental evidence that individuals have difficulty valuing annuities, and this difficulty – rather than a preference for lump sums – can help explain observed low levels of annuity purchases. Although the median price at which people are willing to sell an annuity is close to median actuarial values, this masks notable heterogeneity in responses including substantial numbers of respondents whose responses are difficult to reconcile with optimizing behavior under any reasonable parameter assumptions. We also discover that people are willing to pay substantially less to buy a larger annuity, a result not due to liquidity constraints or endowment effects. Strikingly, we also learn that individual responses to the buy versus sell decisions are negatively correlated, an effect that is stronger for the less financially sophisticated. Our findings are consistent with boundedly rational consumers who adopt a "buy low, sell high" heuristic when faced with a complex trade-off. Moreover, at the margin, subjective valuations vary nearly one-for-one with actuarial values but are uncorrelated with utility-based measures designed to measure the insurance value of annuities. This supports the hypothesis that people use simplifying heuristics to think about annuities, rather than engaging in optimizing behavior. Results also underscore the difficulty of explaining the cross-sectional variation in annuity valuations using standard empirical models. Our findings raise doubt about whether most consumers can make optimal decisions about annuitization.


Rationale : Child maltreatment, which includes both child abuse and child neglect, is widely regarded as a serious social and public health problem that affects large numbers of children in the United States. In 2012, U.S. state and local child protective services received an estimated 3.4 million referrals of children being abused or neglected. There is increasing evidence that exposure to child maltreatment can lead to many emotional, behavioral, and physical health problems. However, little is known about whether child maltreatment has a significant influence on the victim's educational attainment, and whether child maltreatment mediates the effects of family background factors on the victim's educational outcomes. This study is motivated by the high prevalence of child maltreatment in the United States and our limited knowledge about the long-term consequence of maltreatment on children's human capital accumulation. Our central question is whether preventing child maltreatment helps reduce the number of high school dropouts. We focus on high school dropout because it poses one of the greatest threats to the nation's economic growth and competitiveness. About 2,500 American high school students drop out every day. Dropouts are far more likely to spend their lives periodically unemployed, on government assistance, or cycling in and out of the prison system. Dropouts are far more likely to spend their lives periodically unemployed, on government assistance, or cycling in and out of the prison system. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average annual income of a high school dropout was about $22,000, while a person with a high school diploma averaged $33,000; that's a difference of $11,000 a year. The economic consequences of leaving high school without a diploma are severe. Objective: The objective of this study is to use a nationally representative longitudinal sample of adolescents to examine the effects of family background factors and three forms of child maltreatment (neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse) on the risk of high school dropout, allowing for the potential endogeneity of experiencing child maltreatment. Methodology: Data describing family background characteristics from Wave I of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) study (1994 – 1995) were matched with retrospective reports of child maltreatment during Wave III (2001 – 2002) of the Add Health study and the exit statuses from high school appearing on Wave III respondents' transcripts. The study sample included 6,422 participants who were in grades 7 through 10 during Wave I survey and reinterviewed in Wave III survey, and whose official high school transcripts were collected by the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study, an extension study of the Add Health study. A behavior decision model, which related high school dropout to child maltreatment and family background characteristics, was developed to guide our empirical analyses. A maximum simulated likelihood approach for a multivariate probit model was used to estimate a recursive system of equations for high school dropout, child maltreatment and family background. The estimations under other specifications of the empirical model—propensity score matching estimations, linear probability model specifications with instrumental variables, and models with alternative definitions of child maltreatment—were used to test the robustness of our findings. Results: Controlling for other variables, family size, family structure (two biological parents or not), parental education, and family poverty are all significantly associated with high school dropout. Hyperactivity/impulsive symptoms and low IQ also significantly predict high school dropout. The associations between family background characteristics and child maltreatment vary by type of child maltreatment experienced. Living with both biological parents is significantly associated with the lower risk of maltreatment for all three types of child maltreatment. Family poverty is only significantly associated with childhood neglect, while family size is only significantly associated with childhood physical abuse. Allowing for endogeneity, childhood neglect and physical abuse contributes significantly to the risk of high school dropout, while childhood sexual abuse is not significantly associated with the risk of high school dropout. Experiencing childhood neglect and physical abuse increase the probability of high school dropout by 7% and 6%, respectively. The estimations under other specifications of the empirical model indicate that the results regarding the significant effects of neglect and physical abuse are robust. Conclusions: The findings shed light on how parents' attitudes and behaviors toward children influence their long-term human capital accumulation outcomes. Preventing childhood neglect and physical abuse in economically disadvantaged and/or non-two biological parent families may help significantly reduce the high school dropout rate.


The dynamics of current global challenges—like food and nutrition security, environmental degradation, climate change, and emergencies—reduce the availability of and/or access to natural resources, and thereby underline the urgency of achieving transformational changes in the governance of tenure. This is increasingly required to bring the greatest good to the most people, in line with human rights. The globally applicable "Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security" (VGGT) were developed to promote responsible tenure governance. The importance of instituting effective monitoring for the implementation of the VGGT at the country level in order to ensure that they have an impact on the ground is well accepted. However, little progress has been made to date. This paper explores plural perspectives on monitoring by the different stakeholders involved because of the multi-dimensional nature of the VGGT implementation, and because tenure governance is a complex system. Allowing space for multiple views means leaving no one's view behind. It is proposed to map the multiple pathways of change to achieve responsible tenure governance in a causal framework using the concept of theories of change. A pluralistic approach will entail different theories of change operating simultaneously, which will provide an inclusive and comprehensive tool for monitoring by showing the preferred pathways of progress on the ground, and by contributing to future trajectories.


The objective of this study was to examine the influence of ACE (I/D) genotypes on recognized risk variables for hypertension and Metabolic Syndrome in two ethnic population samples from Slovakia. A total of 150 Romany subjects (68 males and 82 females) and 167 Slovaks (45 males and 122 females) were examined. They were interviewed during a medical examination and they were investigated with respect to a variety of aspects such as medical, anthropometrical and life-style. The studied subjects were defined as hypertensive if the blood pressure was > or = 140/90 mm Hg and Metabolic Syndrome (MS) was defined according to criteria of the National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III-(NCEP ATPIII). ACE (I/D) polymorphism was subsequently determined by PCR amplification of the ACE gene sequence. In the entire sample, the frequency of the mutant D allele was higher in the Slovak subjects (D = 0.527) than in the Romany subjects (D = 0.447), but the difference was not significant (p = 0.053). Neither the Slovak nor the Romany normotensive and hypertensive subjects differed significantly in the distribution of the three ACE genotypes (Slovak p = 0.169, Romany p = 0.116). In both ethnic samples hypertensive men prevailed (Slovak 51.1% vs. Romany 44.1%). The features of Metabolic Syndrome were identified in both samples; they occurred in 33.3% of Slovak men and 14.8% Slovak women vs. 42.9% of Romany men and 32.4% Romany women. Regression analysis showed no association between ACE genotypes and hypertension nor between ACE genotypes and MS in these Slovak population samples.


Much of the literature on children's participation distinguishes sharply between "informal" and "formal" forms of participation, which although analytically convenient, may limit possibilities for theorising. This paper examines tensions and links between children's informal and formal participation, and looks at how participation is constituted in and by different social spaces in South Africa. Some of the ways in which children have participated in public matters prior to and following the advent of democracy in South Africa are examined, e.g. through public protest, school governance, law and policy development and service delivery. Shifts in the political landscape since apartheid are shown to have both opened and closed spaces and opportunities for children to influence decision making. Ultimately, a shrinking of informal spaces and the limited functioning of formal spaces due to popular attitudes and socio-economic factors has resulted in a constrained participation environment. Small shifts, however, in acknowledgement of the multiple ways that children collectively and individually contribute to the unfolding of everyday life, the emergence of new informal spaces and a broadening of the focus of participation initiatives, may herald an opportunity to move beyond often formulaic "formal" participation in governance to a broader inclusion of children in decision making.


The transition from a regime dominated by drift instabilities to a regime dominated by pure interchange instabilities is investigated and characterized in the simple magnetized toroidal device TORPEX [TORoidal Plasma EXperiment, A. Fasoli et al., Phys. of Plasmas 13, 055906 (2006)]. The magnetic field lines are helical, with a dominant toroidal component and a smaller vertical component. Instabilities with a drift character are observed in the favorable curvature region, on the high field side with respect to the maximum of the background density profile. For a limited range of values of the vertical field they coexist with interchange instabilities in the unfavorable curvature region, on the plasma low field side. With increasing vertical magnetic field magnitude, a gradual transition between the two regimes is observed on the low field side, controlled by the value of the field line connection length. The observed transition follows the predictions of a two-fluid linear model.


We show that a planar waveguide filled with a nonlinear liquid can act as a polarization switch. Strong energy transfer from TM to TE polarization occurs at an intensity threshold that depends on the geometrical dimensions of the waveguide and on the nonlinear liquid selected. The stimulated scattering generated in these liquids plays a role in polarization switching. For further applications the nonlinear waveguide can be modeled as a quadripole for which the input quantities are the TE and the TM entrance powers that can lead to the achievement of such optical functions as control of an intense light beam by a weak beam, power limiting, and or gates.


CC-BY 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not. ABSTRACT Human perception is increasingly described as optimal. This view reflects recent successes of Bayesian approaches to perception but ignores an extensive literature documenting suboptimal performance in perceptual tasks. Here we review several classes of suboptimal perceptual decisions, including improper placement, maintenance, and adjustment of perceptual criteria, inadequate tradeoff between speed and accuracy, and inappropriate confidence ratings. We examine suboptimalities in the cue combination literature, which has often been taken as evidence for optimality in perception. We further discuss how findings regarding visual illusions, adaptation, and appearance relate to the concept of optimality. We extract a number of principles that account for suboptimal behavior across all of these studies. Finally, we outline an " Objectives-Constraints-Mechanisms " approach for guiding future investigations and discussions of optimal and suboptimal perception. In this approach, findings of optimality or suboptimality are not ends in themselves but serve to characterize the perceptual system's objectives (i.e., what it aims to achieve), constraints (i.e., what costs it incurs), and mechanisms (i.e., what processes it uses to trade off the objectives and constraints). We suggest that this conceptual framework, more than a focus on optimality per se, can advance our understanding of perception.. CC-BY 4.0 International license peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not .


The genome is traditionally viewed as a time-independent source of information; a paradigm that drives researchers to seek correlations between the presence of certain genes and a patient's risk of disease. This analysis neglects genomic temporal changes , which we believe to be a crucial signal for predicting an individual's susceptibility to cancer. We hypothesize that each individual's genome passes through an evolution channel (The term channel is motivated by the notion of communication channel introduced by Shannon 1 in 1948 and started the area of Information Theory ), that is controlled by hereditary, environmental and stochastic factors. This channel differs among individuals, giving rise to varying predispositions to developing cancer. We introduce the concept of mutation profiles that are computed without any comparative analysis, but by analyzing the short tandem repeat regions in a single healthy genome and capturing information about the individual's evolution channel. Using machine learning on data from more than 5,000 TCGA cancer patients, we demonstrate that these mutation profiles can accurately distinguish between patients with various types of cancer. For example, the pairwise validation accuracy of the classifier between PAAD (pancreas) patients and GBM (brain) patients is 93% . Our results show that healthy unaffected cells still contain a cancer-specific signal, which opens the possibility of cancer prediction from a healthy genome.


We present multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) based broadband power line communication (BPLC) using antenna and fading diversity. We evaluate the proposed MIMO-OFDM system over multi-conductor power line channels, with or without cross-talk between the antenna paths. The proposed scheme employs maximum ratio combining (MRC) that effectively combines both the multiple antenna diversity gain and the multipath fading diversity gain over 3phase (2 2 MIMO, outdoor) power line channels. Simulation results prove that the proposed scheme improves the bit error rate performance over the existing schemes, irrespective of whether cross-talk exists. KeywordsMIMO; OFDM; broadband power line communication (BPLC); maximum ratio combining (MRC)


The long wavelength edge of the major chlorophyll absorption feature in the spectrum of a vegetation canopy moves to longer wavelengths with an increase in chlorophyll content. The position of this red-edge has been used successfully to estimate, by remote sensing, the chlorophyll content of vegetation canopies. Techniques used to estimate this red-edge position (REP) have been designed for use on small volumes of continuous spectral data rather than the large volumes of discontinuous spectral data recorded by contemporary satellite spectrometers. Also, each technique produces a different value of REP from the same spectral data and REP values are relatively insensitive to chlorophyll content at high values of chlorophyll content. This paper reports on the design and indirect evaluation of a surrogate REP index for use with spectral data recorded at the standard band settings of the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS). This index, termed the MERIS terrestrial chlorophyll index (MTCI), was evaluated using model spectra, field spectra and MERIS data. It was easy to calculate (and so can be automated), was correlated strongly with REP but unlike REP was sensitive to high values of chlorophyll content. As a result this index became an official MERIS level-2 product of the European Space Agency in March 2004. Further direct evaluation of the MTCI is proposed, using both greenhouse and field data.


The authors analyze the fault-tolerance properties of several bounded-degree networks that are commonly used for parallel computation. Among other things, they show that an N-node butterfly containing N/sup 1- epsilon / worst-case faults (for any constant epsilon >0) can emulate a fault-free butterfly of the same size with only constant slowdown. Similar results are proved for the shuffle-exchange graph. Hence, these networks become the first connected bounded-degree networks known to be able to sustain more than a constant number of worst-case faults without suffering more than a constant-factor slowdown in performance. They also show that an N-node butterfly whose nodes fail with some constant probability p can emulate a fault-free version of itself with a slowdown of 2/sup O(log* N)/, which is a very slowly increasing function of N. The proofs of these results combine the technique of redundant computation with new algorithms for routing packets around faults in hypercubic networks. Techniques for reconfiguring hypercubic networks around faults that do not rely on redundant computation are also presented. These techniques tolerate fewer faults but are more widely applicable since they can be used with other networks such as binary trees and meshes of trees.<<ETX>>


It has been recently suggested that hydroxide ions can be formed in the electrolyte of molten carbonate fuel cells when water vapor is present. The hydroxide can replace carbonate in transporting electrons across the electrolyte, thereby reducing the CO 2 separation efficiency of the fuel cell although still producing electricity. In this work, we obtain the equilibrium concentration of hydroxide in five molten alkali carbonate salts from molecular simulations. The results reveal that there can be a substantial amount of hydroxide in the electrolyte at low partial pressures of CO 2 . In addition, we find that the equilibrium concentration of molecular water dissolved in the electrolyte is over two orders of magnitude higher than that of CO 2 . Increasing the size and polarizability (or in other words reducing the " hardness " ) of the cations present in the electrolyte can reduce the hydroxide fraction, but at the cost of lower-ing ionic conductivity.


The use of an InP epitaxial layer grown at low temperatures before the growth of a step-graded InAsP metamorphic buffer has been shown to provide a large improvement in the crystal quality of the final metamorphic layer. The improvement is evidenced by over an order of magnitude increase in photoluminescence intensity as well as a large reduction of the mosaic spread and the overall tilt of the relaxed layers.


The Indian Peak volcanic field is representative of the more than 50,000 km 3 of ash-flow tuff and tens of calderas in the Great Basin that formed during the Oligocene-early Miocene "ignimbrite flareup" in southwestern North America. The field formed about 32 to 27 Ma in the southeastern Great Basin and consists of the centrally positioned Indian Peak caldera complex and a surrounding blanket of related ash-flow sheets distributed over an area of about 55,000 km 2 . The field has a volume on the order of 10,000 km 3 . A cluster of two obscure source areas and four calderas comprise the ∼80 x 120 km caldera complex. Only minor volumes of rhyolite and two pyroxene andesite lavas were extruded episodically throughout the lifetime of the magma system that formed the field, chiefly during its youth and old age. Six ash-flow sequences alternate between rhyolite and dacite in a volume ratio of about 1:8, and a culminating seventh is trachytic. The first, fourth, and sixth tuff units are of rhyolite that contains sparse to modest amounts of phenocrysts, chiefly plagioclase and biotite, and abundant lithic and pumice lapilli; these deposits are confined within the caldera complex and form multiple and compound cooling units that are normally zoned with respect to bulk chemical composition and crystal type, content, and size. The second, third, and fifth tuff sequences are of crystal-rich dacite that forms extensive simple cooling-unit outflow sheets and partial caldera fillings of compound cooling units. Each dacite unit contains similar amounts of plagioclase, biotite, hornblende, quartz, two pyroxenes, and Fe-Ti oxides; trace amounts of sanidine and titanite also occur in the youngest. Cognate inclusions in the dacites show only slight intra- and inter-unit differences in bulk chemical composition. The seventh eruptive sequence consists of several cooling units of trachydacite tuff containing small to modest amounts of plagioclase and two pyroxenes. These dominantly high-K calc-alkaline rocks are a record of the birth, maturation, and death of a large, open, continental magma system that was probably initiated and sustained by influx of mafic magma derived from a southward-migrating locus of magma production in the mantle. The small volumes of chemically diverse andesitic rocks were derived from separately evolving magma bodies but are modified representatives of the mantle power supply. Recurrent production of very large batches (some greater than 3,000 km 3 ) of quite uniform dacite magmas appears to have required combination of andesite magma and crustal silicic material in vigorously convecting chambers. Compositional data indicate that rhyolites are polygenetic. As the main locus of mantle magma production shifted southward, trachydacite magma could have been produced by fractionation of andesitic magma within the crust.


New scanning electron microscope (SEM) and light microscope data and illustrations are presented in order to compare hydraulic adaptations of non-gnetalean conifers and angiosperms to relevant wood features of Gnetales. Gnetales have essentially all of the adaptations of both groups, yet have not competed well, despite predating angiosperms in origin and radiation. Angiosperms may be advantaged more by life cycle abbreviation and by heterochronic possibilities than by wood features. Wood features of Gnetales that relate to conduction (torus-margo differentiation of tracheid pit membranes, distribution of tori within the wood, perforation plate simplification, growth rings, vesturing, helical thickenings, and axial parenchyma) are reviewed in the light of recent work that demonstrates the physiological significance of these features in angiosperms. The various xylary adaptations of Ephedra, Gnetum, and Welwitschia are analyzed in terms of conductive efficiency versus conductive safety, and in turn, compared to the habitats of the three genera, respectively: Ephedra and Welwitschia survive in rather extreme habitats, whereas Gnetum competes in mesic forest by what may be minor shifts among basically similar niches. Gnetales have essentially all of the wood anatomical advantages of angiosperms, except for ability to shift degrees of wood anatomical juvenilism or adulthood—an important angiosperm advantage. The relatively lengthy life cycle of Gnetales, requiring female gametophyte formation prior to embryo formation (vs. simultaneous endosperm and embryo development in angiosperms) and the related requirement for at least several years' growth prior to seed formation are probably the prime reasons for lack of gnetalean success. Wood features should be interpreted as adapted to the present-day ecology of a woody species, and ideas that evolutionary flexibility to shift into more seasonal conditions is hindered by rigid wood formulas (which actually can change rather rapidly) should be questioned. Wood evolution of Gnetales, like that of angiosperms, can be regarded as a series of shifts in the trade-offs between conductive efficiency and conductive safety.


Studies of the predictive ability of the Federal Reserve's Beige Book for aggregate output and employment have proven inconclusive. This might be attributed, in part, to its irregular release schedule. We use a model that allows for data sampling at mixed frequencies to analyze the predictive power of the Beige Book. We find that the Beige Book's national summary and District reports predict GDP and aggregate employment and that most District reports provide information content for regional employment. In addition, there appears to be an asymmetry in the predictive content of the Beige Book language. Copyright (c) 2009 The Ohio State University.


In multidisciplinary medical services (e.g. Intensive Care Units or Pain Management Centers), Case-Based Reasoning systems require good case representations. When multiple disorder cases must be stored in the same case memory, a highly flexible representation is required. The use of ontologies can provide a top level formal description on case structure, and the capability of reasoning. Th is work proposes a case representation ontology for medical domains, covering aspects related to the flexibility of case structure and the importance of the temporal dimension. Finally, this paper shows the possible benefit of the proposal by presenting a case-retrieval system based on this ontology for Intensive Care Unit domains.


Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that the GDPR will legally mandate a 'right to explanation' of all decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In contrast to the right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive meaningful, but properly limited, information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a 'right to be informed'. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the 'right not to be subject to automated decision-making' contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged 'right to explanation' stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative and policy steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018.


Purpose of the study The current study was designed to examine changes in falls efficacy and physical activities among oldest-old and young-old participants in a falls risk-reduction program called a matter of balance/volunteer lay leader model. Design and methods An oldest-old group (aged 85 years and older; n = 260) and a young-old group (aged between 65 and 84 years old; n = 1,139) in Texas with both baseline and post-intervention measures were included. Changes in Falls Efficacy Scale scores and weekly physical activity levels were examined from baseline to post-intervention. Repeated measures analysis of covariance were employed to assess program effects on falls efficacy. Results Results showed significant changes in falls efficacy from baseline to post-intervention, as well as a significant interaction effect between time (baseline and post-intervention) and physical activity on falls efficacy. Implications Findings from this study imply the effectiveness of evidence-based programs for increasing falls efficacy in oldest-old participants. Future implications for enhancing physical activities and reducing fear of falling for oldest-old adults are discussed.


In current academic literature hostels have frequently been identified as the primary mode of accommodation for young budget travellers, most notably in the form of backpackers. Although typically identified as a rite de passage for many middle-class Westerners, a need to challenge contemporary backpacker typologies was identified as potential travellers from Eastern Europe, Russia, China and Southeast Asia had become increasingly mobilised. Research has focused predominantly outside of Europe and has centred mainly in three regions – India, Southeast Asia, and Australasia. This geographically 'Eastern-centric' research orientation has thus created a regional-based definition which has been used to describe a global phenomenon. Moreover, these typologies have also neglected the motivations of travellers from non-conventional demographic backgrounds and have frequently overlooked those visiting destinations which are deemed unconventional or non-exotic. Backpacker motivations have become heavily stereotyped and rigid, yet many academics have persisted in romanticising their behavioural performances, frequently portraying their journeys as highly mobile, fluid sojourns which are built upon strong desires to attain new cultural experiences and to immerse oneself into the unknown. Building upon the research of Hannam and Ateljevic (2007), Edensor (2007) and Muzaini (2006), this thesis challenges many fundamental definitions and explores the notion that many backpackers may indeed search for the banal as opposed to maintaining its avoidance. Moreover, the role of mobility, which has been neglected from a significant proportion of academic literature on backpackers, is critically observed in order to assess its significance and validity in the overall
6
experience of backpacking-orientated vacations. While backpackers are frequently identified as highly mobile travellers, the thesis critically examines this notion and suggests that many may be far less mobile than originally perceived. A multi-method qualitative study was developed and undertaken between April 2008 and September, 2009 which details the accounts and experiences of 59 interviewees and additionally documents the findings from several participant observations at a total of 24 different hostels in Southern and Western Norway. The findings of this thesis suggest that the hostel user is a highly versatile character who exhibits a wide spectrum of different motivations, many of which differ considerably from observations in more typical research settings. Moreover, the accounts of many hostel users reveal that mobility is an intrinsic feature to the overall experience of their holidays, while those exhibiting similar characteristics to the conventional backpacker typology frequently opted to perform in significantly different and more immobile ways. The thesis therefore represents a genuine contribution to knowledge on a subject which has often failed to escape an academic obsession with creating definitions and a need to oversimplify the large diversity of motivations used to characterise them.


We address the numerical approximation by finite-element methods of an optimal design problem for a two phase material in one space dimension. This problem, in the continuous setting, due to high frequency oscillations, often does not have a classical solution, and a relaxed formulation is needed to ensure existence. On the contrary, the discrete versions obtained by numerical approximation have a solution. In this article we prove the convergence of the discretizations and obtain convergence rates. We also show a faster convergence when the relaxed version of the continuous problem is taken into account when building the discretization strategy. In particular it is worth emphasizing that, even when the original problem has a classical solution so that relaxation is not necessary, numerical algorithms converge faster when implemented on the relaxed version.


The Drosophila ventral nerve cord (VNC) receives and processes descending signals from the brain to produce a variety of coordinated locomotor outputs. It also integrates sensory information from the periphery and sends ascending signals to the brain. We used single-cell transcriptomics to generate an unbiased classification of cellular diversity in the VNC of five-day old adult flies. We produced an atlas of 26,000 high-quality cells, representing more than 100 transcriptionally distinct cell types. The predominant gene signatures defining neuronal cell types reflect shared developmental histories based on the neuroblast from which cells were derived, as well as their birth order. Cells could also be assigned to specific neuromeres using adult Hox gene expression. This single-cell transcriptional atlas of the adult fly VNC will be a valuable resource for future studies of neurodevelopment and behavior.


This research evaluated the effectiveness of powder and oil extracts of Zingiber officinale against larva and adult stages of Anopheles mosquito. Water sample was obtained from stagnant pool of water within the environment of University of Lagos and adult female Anopheles mosquitoes were allowed to lay eggs after which was transported to the laboratory where the larva and the adult stages of the mosquito emerged. Rhizoids of Z. officinales was obtained from farm in Ondo town, Ondo West Local Government Areas of Ondo State and transported to the Entomology Research Laboratory Federal University of Technology, Akure Ondo State where they were processed into fine powder. Oil extraction was carried out using absolute ethanol in a soxhlet extractor and redistilled using rotary evaporator. Different concentrations of the oil extract (2 %, 4 %, 6 %, 8 % and 10 %) and plant powder (1 g-5 g) of Z. officinale were prepared after which larval and adult stages of Anopheles mosquito were exposed to the treatment for the period of 30 min, 1 hour, 1 hour 30 min and 2 hours. The result obtained showed that the oil extract of Z. officinale at all concentrations had significant effect on larvae and adult mosquito at both contact and fumigant toxicity with percentage mortality range of 70-100% within 120 min of exposure period (P<0.05). The aqueous extract of Z. officinale was relatively ineffective against the larval stage of the mosquito at all levels of concentration however, the fumigant effect of the powder was also effective against the adult stage of the mosquito which invoked 73-90% mortality at 4g and 5g concentrations (P<0.05). The result of this study revealed that oil extract of Z. officinale as both contact and fumigant were very effective against both larvae and adult stages of Anopheles mosquito, thus can serve as an to synthetic insecticides which could pose serious health hazard to human.


Abstract Chlorite (C)-corrensite (Co)-smectite (S) seriesminerals occur as vein constituents in the two epithermal ore veins, the Chuetsu and Shuetsu veins of the Todoroki Au-Ag deposit. The characteristics of the C-Co-S seriesminerals indicate that the clays may be products of direct precipitation from hydrothermal fluids and subsequent mineralogical transformations during and/or after vein formation. The minerals from the Chuetsu vein are characterized by 'monomineralic' corrensite showing an extensive distribution throughout the vein, and trioctahedral smectite occurring locally. The Shuetsu vein minerals are characterized by C-Co series minerals which can be divided into three different types: a I type including discrete chlorite with minor amounts of S layers, a II type comprising interstratified C/Co and discrete chlorite, and a III type characterized by segregation structures of C and Co layers. The C-Co series minerals show slightly different spatial distributions in the Shuetsu vein. Different epithermal environments during the vein formations and possible kinetic effects may have played a role in the formation and conversion of Co-C series at the Shuetsu vein and S-Co series at the Chuetsu vein.


This paper proposes a novel active boundary loss for semantic segmentation. It can progressively encourage the alignment between predicted boundaries and ground-truth boundaries during end-to-end training, which is not explicitly enforced in commonly used cross-entropy loss. Based on the predicted boundaries detected from the segmentation results using current network parameters, we formulate the boundary alignment problem as a differentiable direction vector prediction problem to guide the movement of predicted boundaries in each iteration. Our loss is model-agnostic and can be plugged in to the training of segmentation networks to improve the boundary details. Experimental results show that training with the active boundary loss can effectively improve the boundary F-score and mean Intersection-over-Union on challenging image and video object segmentation datasets.


This document defines a set of ways to identify a thing (a digital
object in this case) using the output from a hash function. It
specifies a new URI scheme for this purpose, a way to map these to
HTTP URLs, and binary and human-speakable formats for these names. The
various formats are designed to support, but not require, a strong
link to the referenced object, such that the referenced object may be
authenticated to the same degree as the reference to it. The reason
for this work is to standardise current uses of hash outputs in URLs
and to support new information-centric applications and other uses of
hash outputs in protocols.


IseCrack is a high performance implementation of rainbow tables on nVidia graphics cards (GPUs). It explores the limits of current technology in password cracking, and demonstrates the vulnerability of non-salted passwords to high speed GPU-accelerated attacks, using commercial off the shelf hardware. Passwords are by far the most common authentication method for users, and many users utilize the same password in multiple places. Many systems, including all current Microsoft operating systems, utilize non-salted passwords. If these passwords are vulnerable to attack, a user's encrypted files and online accounts can be accessed. IseCrack demonstrates that very high speed attacks against non-salted hashes are feasible, and highlights the necessity for salted password stores. IseCrack achieves a 100x speedup over existing implementations on inexpensive easily available hardware, and is designed to scale to large clusters.


Many software applications consist of a number of interdependent steps and are executed under the supervision of a human administrator or operator. The administrator responds to error conditions and checks to see that the dependencies between steps has been satisfied before allowing the application to continue. AI planning systems, because they have the capability of responding to a dynamically changing environment by replanning, are an excellent candidate for automating such applications. We report on a project that uses AI planning technology as part of the solution in automating a corporate data mining application.


BACKGROUND
Progesterone is essential for a healthy pregnancy. Several small trials have suggested that progesterone therapy may rescue a pregnancy in women with early pregnancy bleeding, which is a symptom that is strongly associated with miscarriage.

OBJECTIVES
(1) To assess the effects of vaginal micronised progesterone in women with vaginal bleeding in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. (2) To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of progesterone in women with early pregnancy bleeding.

DESIGN
A multicentre, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomised trial of progesterone in women with early pregnancy vaginal bleeding.

SETTING
A total of 48 hospitals in the UK.

PARTICIPANTS
Women aged 16-39 years with early pregnancy bleeding.

INTERVENTIONS
Women aged 16-39 years were randomly assigned to receive twice-daily vaginal suppositories containing either 400 mg of progesterone or a matched placebo from presentation to 16 weeks of gestation.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
The primary outcome was live birth at ≥ 34 weeks. In addition, a within-trial cost-effectiveness analysis was conducted from an NHS and NHS/Personal Social Services perspective.

RESULTS
A total of 4153 women from 48 hospitals in the UK received either progesterone (n = 2079) or placebo (n = 2074). The follow-up rate for the primary outcome was 97.2% (4038 out of 4153 participants). The live birth rate was 75% (1513 out of 2025 participants) in the progesterone group and 72% (1459 out of 2013 participants) in the placebo group (relative rate 1.03, 95% confidence interval 1.00 to 1.07; p = 0.08). A significant subgroup effect (interaction test p = 0.007) was identified for prespecified subgroups by the number of previous miscarriages: none (74% in the progesterone group vs. 75% in the placebo group; relative rate 0.99, 95% confidence interval 0.95 to 1.04; p = 0.72); one or two (76% in the progesterone group vs. 72% in the placebo group; relative rate 1.05, 95% confidence interval 1.00 to 1.12; p = 0.07); and three or more (72% in the progesterone group vs. 57% in the placebo group; relative rate 1.28, 95% confidence interval 1.08 to 1.51; p = 0.004). A significant post hoc subgroup effect (interaction test p = 0.01) was identified in the subgroup of participants with early pregnancy bleeding and any number of previous miscarriage(s) (75% in the progesterone group vs. 70% in the placebo group; relative rate 1.09, 95% confidence interval 1.03 to 1.15; p = 0.003). There were no significant differences in the rate of adverse events between the groups. The results of the health economics analysis show that progesterone was more costly than placebo (£7655 vs. £7572), with a mean cost difference of £83 (adjusted mean difference £76, 95% confidence interval -£559 to £711) between the two arms. Thus, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of progesterone compared with placebo was estimated as £3305 per additional live birth at ≥ 34 weeks of gestation.

CONCLUSIONS
Progesterone therapy in the first trimester of pregnancy did not result in a significantly higher rate of live births among women with threatened miscarriage overall, but an important subgroup effect was identified. A conclusion on the cost-effectiveness of the PRISM trial would depend on the amount that society is willing to pay to increase the chances of an additional live birth at ≥ 34 weeks. For future work, we plan to conduct an individual participant data meta-analysis using all existing data sets.

TRIAL REGISTRATION
Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN14163439, EudraCT 2014-002348-42 and Integrated Research Application System (IRAS) 158326.

FUNDING
This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment programme and will be published in full in Health Technology Assessment; Vol. 24, No. 33. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.


The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a review of the literature into pain and older people. The funded study was part of the development of an annotated bibliography published in August 2005. The review included all major databases and involved the collection of 214 papers between the dates of 1995 and 2005. The papers were divided into several major themes, which include experiences, management (pharmacological and non-pharmacological), assessment, and attitudes. Within this paper, the results of the review into pain assessment will be discussed, which includes 42 of the collected papers. The other sections will be published later. The paper will discuss issues pertaining to the development of specific tools for older people, a discussion of tools already available, comparisons of staff versus older people's perceptions of pain scales, and articles with cognitive impairment as a focus. Recommendations for further study are made.


This paper evaluated consumers' perceptions of Brazilian Home Broker services in the online environment. Based on the model suggested by Balasubramanian, Konana and Menon (2003), the effects of relevant online consumer behavior constructs on customer satisfaction with the service were analyzed. Constructs such as perceived operational competence, willingness to trust and perceived environmental security were employed, in a model fully mediated by trust. A questionnaire with scales previously used in literature was employed to measure the relevant constructs and structural equations applied to analyze the relationships found. Results show a strong relationship between perceived environment security and perceived operational competence, indicating that trust formation precedes satisfaction in online financial services transactions within the Brazilian context.


In the assessment of pipeline transportation systems is very important for the assessor to analyze how market value is influenced by the size of corrosion. It is also interesting to analyse the interdependence of corrosion, physical depreciation and market value. Evaluation of special construction assets like pipelines is a complicated process that does not use traditional approaches to evaluation, but rather a mixture of evaluation methods because each pipeline is unique in its own way, but also because its value is influenced by many factors.This paper present how varies size of corrosion, physical depreciation and market value and the corrosion is influenced by several factors. The corrosion process is a complex mechanism that occurs during operation of all equipment and technological equipment in the refineries or pipelines systems or found in petrochemical installations and is done at oscillating temperature and pressure (high/low), in the presence of some work environments (type: crude oil, compressed gases, petroleum and petrochemical products, etc.). Corrosion is defined as the destruction, in a certain span of time, of metals and metal alloys as a result of chemical and/or electrochemical actions of the technological environments and surrounding or due to physical dissolutions. From the point of view of the assessor-engineer whose aim is to determine the assessment of pipeline transportation for petroleum products one is able to highlight the influence of corrosion within its depreciation.The quantitative implementation of corrosion for the estimation of market value of technological pipelines is an ongoing concern of evaluators as engineers have been determining the existence of corrosion for a long time now, yet this could not be found in a mathematical relation that was to show the interdependence between corrosion, depreciation and the market value. The relation between depreciation and corrosion by means of this factor is very useful for assessors in predicting depreciation. The emphasizing of corrosion within the estimation of market value through the influence of the factor of depreciation due to corrosion is a first step in a broader process of research which is meant to mathematically highlight the dependence of impairment due to corrosion on the characteristics of the material which the pipe is made of.


Archaeologists in the Caribbean have long recognized the utility of shell-based analysis in environmental and dietary reconstructions. Increasingly, however, researchers are expanding the role of shell artifacts in their investigations of prehistoric societies. This research examines the ornamental and/or symbolic (O/S) use of marine shell in Amerindian Aruba. Of particular interest is the potential of museum collections to assist archaeological interpretations of the past. An investigation of marine shell artifacts in the collections of the Archaeological Museum of Aruba (AMA) provides insights into the archaeology of Aruba's Amerindian cultures, and suggests pathways toward an increased understanding of past utilization of Aruba's marine shell resources and the cultural value of these among the island's Amerindian inhabitants. Drawing on ethnohistoric, archaeological, and other anthropological sources, this study considers the socio-cultural and/or political implications of observed spatial and temporal variation in the ornamental, ceremonial and/or symbolic use of marine shell resources.


In recent years, it has become increasingly evident that post-transcriptional control mechanisms are the principal source of gene regulation for a large number of prokaryotic genetic pathways, particularly those involved in virulence and environmental adaptation. Post-transcriptional regulation is largely governed by RNA stability, which itself is determined by target accessibility to RNase degradation. In most Firmicutes species, mRNA stability is strongly impacted by the activity of two recently discovered RNases referred to as RNase J1 and RNase J2. Little is known about RNase J1 function in bacteria and even less is known about RNase J2. In the current study, we mutated both RNase J orthologues in Streptococcus mutans to determine their functional roles in the cell. Single and double RNase J mutants were viable, but grew very slowly on agar plates. All of the mutants shared substantial defects in growth, morphology, acid tolerance, natural competence and biofilm formation. However, most of these defects were more severe in the RNase J2 mutant. Phenotypic suppression results also implicate a role for RNase J2 as a regulator of RNase J1 function. Unlike Bacillus subtilis, RNase J2 is a major pleiotropic regulator in S. mutans, which indicates some fundamental differences from B. subtilis in global gene regulation. Key conserved residues among the RNase J2 orthologues of lactic acid bacteria may hint at a greater role for RNase J2 in these species.


We introduce, analyze and quantitatively compare a number of surface simplification methods for point-sampled geometry. We have implemented incremental and hierarchical clustering, iterative simplification, and particle simulation algorithms to create approximations of point-based models with lower sampling density. All these methods work directly on the point cloud, requiring no intermediate tesselation. We show how local variation estimation and quadric error metrics can be employed to diminish the approximation error and concentrate more samples in regions of high curvature. To compare the quality of the simplified surfaces, we have designed a new method for computing numerical and visual error estimates for point-sampled surfaces. Our algorithms are fast, easy to implement, and create high-quality surface approximations, clearly demonstrating the effectiveness of point-based surface simplification.


Soil organic matter (SOM) plays a crucial role in soil quality and can act as an atmospheric C-CO2 sink under conservationist management systems. This study aimed to evaluate the long-term effects (19 years) of tillage (CT-conventional tillage and NT-no tillage) and crop rotations (R0-monoculture system, R1-winter crop rotation, and R2- intensive crop rotation) on total, particulate and mineral-associated organic carbon (C) stocks of an originally degraded Red Oxisol in Cruz Alta, RS, Southern Brazil. The climate is humid subtropical Cfa 2a (Koppen classification), the mean annual precipitation 1,774 mm and mean annual temperature 19.2 oC. The plots were divided into four segments, of which each was sampled in the layers 0-0.05, 0.05-0.10, 0.10-0.20, and 0.20-0.30 m. Sampling was performed manually by opening small trenches. The SOM pools were determined by physical fractionation. Soil C stocks had a linear relationship with annual crop C inputs, regardless of the tillage systems. Thus, soil disturbance had a minor effect on SOM turnover. In the 0-0.30 m layer, soil C sequestration ranged from 0 to 0.51 Mg ha-1 yr-1, using the CT R0 treatment as base-line; crop rotation systems had more influence on soil stock C than tillage systems. The mean C sequestration rate of the cropping systems was 0.13 Mg ha-1 yr-1 higher in NT than CT. This result was associated to the higher C input by crops due to the improvement in soil quality under long-term no-tillage. The particulate C fraction was a sensitive indicator of soil management quality, while mineral-associated organic C was the main pool of atmospheric C fixed in this clayey Oxisol. The C retention in this stable SOM fraction accounts for 81 and 89 % of total C sequestration in the treatments NT R1 and NT R2, respectively, in relation to the same cropping systems under CT. The highest C management index was observed in NT R2, confirming the capacity of this soil management practice to improve the soil C stock qualitatively in relation to CT R0. The results highlighted the diversification of crop rotation with cover crops as a crucial strategy for atmospheric C-CO2 sequestration and SOM quality improvement in highly weathered subtropical Oxisols.


dNutrient loads to the Baltic Sea have increased during the last century, and primary production has probably also risen. However, the evidence of such a rise is circumstantial, and most of the available findings concerning primary production cover only brief time periods. A more appropriate type of data in this area is Secchi disk measurements. We present the results of trend tests applied to Secchi depth values recorded during two discrete time periods: 19 19-l 939 and 1969-l 99 1. We performed a step trend test to compare the data from the two periods and applied a monotonic trend test to the later series. Both tests showed that Secchi depth decreased by -0.05 m yr-' during both periods. Calculations of changes in chlorophyll concentrations suggest a yearly increase of - 1%. Extending the calculations to represent primary production indicates an increase of slightly < 1% yr- l. These calculations, however, are unreliable due to substantial uncertainty regarding the relationships between Secchi depth and chlorophyll concentration and chlorophyll and primary produclion.


This book investigates why, when, and how ordinary human beings hold some individuals guilty of crimes, but others less so or not at all. Why, for example, do the emotions of the accused sometimes aggravate a murder, making it a heinous crime, whereas other emotions might mitigate that murder to manslaughter, excuse a killing ("by reason of insanity"), or even justify it ("by reason of self-defense")? And what emotions on the part of jurors come into play as they arrive at their decisions? The authors argue persuasively that U.S. law is out of touch with the way that jurors' "commonsense justice" works and the way they judge culpability. This disconnect has resulted in some inconsistent verdicts across different types of cases and thus has serious implications for whether the law will be respected and obeyed. Problems arise because criminal law has no unified theory of emotion and culpability, and legal scholars often seem to misunderstand or ignore what psychologists know about emotion. The authors skillfully show that the law's culpability theories are (and must be) psychological at heart, and they propose ways in which psychology can help inform and support the law.


This study presents the development of a new scale for measuring mediation of children's noninteractive and interactive media use by their caregivers. Comprising two subscales, this 16-item measure was tested in a pilot study and then included in an online survey of 356 grandparents. The mediation constructs had good internal homogeneity, significant interconstruct correlations, and high loadings on a single latent factor for each subscale. Scores were well distributed along the range. A concurrent validity test indicated a significant negative association between attitudes toward media and restrictive mediation. These findings suggest that the new scale is reliable and useful.


Motion classification using accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors have been an important area of exploration for the past decade. Mostly studied in the context of health related applications, the implications of accurate inertial-magnetic motion classification span from continuous daily activity monitoring and remote assessment of patients recovery to athlete optimization and entertainment applications. While much has been done to optimize classification and segmentation algorithms, very little is understood of the effect sensor selection and motion representation has on overall system performance. In this paper, three sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, orientation), seven motion representations and six classification techniques (K Nearest Neighbor, Artificial Neural Networks, Random Forests, Support Vector Machines, Naive Bayes) are compared. In addition to traditional time domain motion representations, a novel space domain representation is put forth which results in a two order of magnitude reduction in computational complexity. A case study dataset is created from 11 individuals performing 10 repetitions of 10 different upper body exercises. A single bicep mounted smart phone is used for data collection and both action classification and non-action rejection ability are studied.


We consider the automated recognition of human actions in surveillance videos. Most current methods build classifiers based on complex handcrafted features computed from the raw inputs. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a type of deep model that can act directly on the raw inputs. However, such models are currently limited to handling 2D inputs. In this paper, we develop a novel 3D CNN model for action recognition. This model extracts features from both the spatial and the temporal dimensions by performing 3D convolutions, thereby capturing the motion information encoded in multiple adjacent frames. The developed model generates multiple channels of information from the input frames, and the final feature representation combines information from all channels. To further boost the performance, we propose regularizing the outputs with high-level features and combining the predictions of a variety of different models. We apply the developed models to recognize human actions in the real-world environment of airport surveillance videos, and they achieve superior performance in comparison to baseline methods.


This dissertation describes the occurrence of pumping-induced earth fissures associated with quaternary faulting using numerical simulations. The Eglington Fault located in Las Vegas valley has been selected as the prototype fault described herein. The finite-element software program ABAQUS is used for the numerical simulations. The Eglington fault area is chosen because it represents one of the best examples displaying the complex relationship between fissuring, faulting and pumping-induced stress. This fault is known to influence both the vertical and horizontal deformation patterns through the accumulation of stress in its vicinity. The result is that fissures are observed on both sides of the fault and in close proximity to the fault plane. In addition to the complex fault-fissure connection, a thick caliche-rich vadose zone with weak mechanical strength allows for the initiation and propagation of fissures. The numerical analysis a) investigates the geometrical and hydromechanical features of the zone of influence surrounding the Eglington Fault; b) identifies the zones of accumulated stress on the surface and at depth that can lead to fissuring; and c) simulates the onset and propagation of tensile-induced fissures. Three-dimensional numerical simulations of this fault indicate that a 100-meter wide fault-zone composed by sand-like material best reproduces the conditions of stress that may lead to fissuring in the vicinity of the fault. Additionally, two-dimensional models reveal that two main mechanisms promote the accumulation of stress in the vicinity of the fault zone: one is the counterclockwise rotation of the unsaturated portion of the fault zone; the other is the differential compaction caused by the difference in the accumulated thickness of compressible layers. Tensile stress is concentrated on the surface in the hanging wall, but maximum shear stress zones are simulated to occur on both sides of the fault at the contact between the saturated aquifer and the vadose zone. A final analysis of the initiation and propagation of tensile-induced fissures demonstrates that fissures commence and propagate only within the vadose zone, and that the propagation path is influenced by the mechanical properties of the medium and the location of the main load, which in this case is pumping.


The aim of this article is to examine the economical aspects of Finnish foreign tourism in Soviet Estonia during the course of the Cold War, when the two neighboring states and nations were separated by the so-called Iron Curtain. Concentration on Finland is not a random choice; it was the Finnish tourists who made up the majority of all foreign tourists from the capitalist countries visiting Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. The work covers the years from 1965 until 1980, because during this period the number of Finnish tourists grew rapidly which was accompanied by the expansion of foreign currency incomes. This article is based on hitherto little studied and known Estonian archival materials.
Already after the end of WW II, Western European countries noticed that foreign tourism had become an important tool which enabled governments to acquire and expand the inflow of foreign currency. More foreign tourists visiting one's country meant more foreign money flowing into the state budget. These positive developments did not go unnoticed by the Soviet Union (USSR), and soon it defined foreign tourism as an important tool for growing its own foreign exchange reserves. Moscow was keen on earning foreign money because the Soviet ruble was non-convertible currency that had no real value in the world market and could be used only for domestic transactions. One of the most important economical functions of foreign tourism was to obtain much needed foreign currency for the Soviet state budget.
Until the mid-1960s, the number of Finnish tourists in Soviet Estonia remained low, and first and foremost among them were members of official delegations who, in contrast with ordinary, fun-seeking tourists, had to stick to timetables and participate in previously arranged meetings. As a result, Finnish delegations did not spend many Finnish marks in Tallinn,
and the expected inflow of foreign currency remained modest. In 1965, a direct ferry connection was opened between Tallinn and Helsinki, which considerably increased the number of Finnish tourists in Soviet Estonia: from 9,000 people in 1965 to 53,400 in 1975. By the early 1970s, Tallinn had already become one of the most popular foreign turism destinations in the USSR and ranked third among the Soviet cities most visited by foreign tourists.
Growing interest among Finnish tourists to visit Estonia provided Moscow with a good opportunity to earn foreign currency from them. Three organizations on the ground were responsible for fulfilling this important task: the local branch of Intourist (the monopolistic state travel agency), an Estonian shipping company working under the Ministry of Merchant Marine, and the network of currency shops under the Ministry of Trade and Commerce.
Intourist was responsible for the accommodation and catering of foreign tourists and helped to organize excursions within and outside of Tallinn. In addition, Intourist offered foreign tourists a wide range of additional services – these were extras not included in the tour package and cost extra.
The Estonian shipping company operated the Tallinn-Helsinki ferry line and sold ferry tickets via Intourist to the passengers. Similar to Intourist, the shipping company also offered tourists additional services, included snacks and alcoholic beverages in the ship's restaurant and bar. The local Intourist office saw the Estonian shipping company as its major competitor threatening to minimize its annual foreign currency inflows.
Currency shops offered tourists a wide variety of commodities, from clothing and souvenirs to alcohol and canned meat. As these chain stores were better equipped and prices there were a bit cheaper than in Intourist's bars and restaurants, the Tallinn branch of Intourist must have seen them also as competitors in earning foreign currency.
To summarize, the lion's share of foreign currency revenue came from the Finnish tourists who made up the majority of foreign tourists in Soviet Estonia. Considering Soviet Estonia's relative geographical and political smallness in comparison with bigger Soviet Republics, it earned a considerable amount of foreign currency for Moscow over the years. How and where this money was spent remains, however, an unsolved question.

KEYWORDS: Cold War, foreign tourism, Soviet Estonia, Finland, currency.


We explore empirically the theoretical prediction that optimism or pessimism have aggregate effects, in the context of monetary policy. First, we quantify the tone conveyed by FOMC policymakers in their statements using computational linguistics. Second, we identify sentiment as the unpredictable component of tone, orthogonal to fundamentals, expectations, monetary shocks and investors' sentiment. Third, we estimate the impact of FOMC sentiment on the term structure of private interest rate expectations using a high-frequency methodology and an ARCH model. Optimistic FOMC sentiment increases policy expectations primarily at the one-year maturity. We also find that sentiment affects inflation and industrial production beyond monetary shocks.


Asymmetric supercapacitors (ASCs) with carbon nanotube@nickel hydroxide nanosheet (CNT@Ni(OH)2) core–shell composites as positive electrodes and three-dimensional (3D) graphene networks (3DGNs) as negative electrodes were reported in aqueous KOH electrolyte. The CNT@Ni(OH)2 core–shell composites were prepared through a facile chemical bath deposition method, while 3DGNs were obtained by freeze-drying of graphene hydrogels. By virtue of their unique microstructures, superb electrochemical properties were achieved in a three-electrode system, e.g., 1136 F g−1 at 2 A g−1 for the CNT@Ni(OH)2 electrode within 0–0.5 V and 203 F g−1 at 1 A g−1 for the 3DGN electrode within −1–0 V. Benefiting from these merits, the as-fabricated CNT@Ni(OH)2//3DGN ASC showed a maximum energy density of 44.0 W h kg−1 at a power density of 800 W kg−1 and even retained 19.6 W h kg−1 at 16 000 W kg−1 in the voltage region of 0–1.6 V.


We analyze changes in portfolios of pension funds since the start of current low interest rate environment. We find that they have on average decreased the allocation to equity and increased the allocation to fixed income, which is inconsistent with the literature on strategic asset allocation. Next, more generally, we empirically investigate the relationship between variables that predict asset returns and portfolio allocation in levels as well as changes. We find that dividend-price ratio shows the strongest relationship among other variables. However, we find a negative relationship as opposed to a positive one predicted by the literature. Overall, the results suggest that pension funds are unable to incorporate predictive information in their strategic asset allocation, but they take active decisions by under or over-weighting their portfolio relative to the stated strategic portfolio to benefit from time-varying investment opportunities.