Hydrological modeling is a practical means to quantify responses of river discharge to climate change and human management. However, there are uncertainties in both the model input (e.g., atmospheric variables) and the models (e.g., model structures and model parameters), that can affect the model accuracy and the conclusions. Focusing on different uncertainty sources, this thesis reviews the past studies and provides new approaches for estimating and comparing the uncertainties with their applications concentrated over China. This thesis first proposes a three-dimensional variance partitioning approach that estimates the uncertainty among multiple precipitation products with different types. The new estimation uses full information in temporal and spatial dimensions and thus is a more comprehensive metric for uncertainty assessment especially for multiple datasets. This thesis then proposes a ORCHIDEE-Budyko framework that helps attribute the discharge bias between model simulation (provided by land surface model ORCHIDEE) and observations to uncertainty sources of atmospheric variables and model structure. The framework qualifies the possibility of different uncertainties with physical-based Budyko hypothesis and support of related literatures. This thesis finally reviews the human activities and their impact on river discharge over China regions as well as the related approaches that used for the quantification. The human impact that quantified as the difference between observed river discharge and the naturalized ones is then compared with multi-model simulations driven by different forcing inputs. Results show that the uncertainty in atmospheric variables (e.g., precipitation) is large especially for General Circulation Models (GCMs). Precipitation uncertainty is very likely larger than that of the model uncertainty. The uncertainty in the modeled discharge with different forcing is larger than the magnitude of human impact for most of the regions especially in south China, which impedes the credibility of human impact quantification for those regions. This understanding of uncertainties in the natural water cycle and the management humans impose on it is a prerequisite before attempting to model the anthropogenic pressures.


Patients with human papillomavirus (HPV+)-associated head and neck cancer (HNC) show significantly improved survival outcome compared with those with HPV-negative (HPV-) tumors. Published data examining this difference offers conflicting results to date. We systematically investigated the radiation sensitivity of all available validated HPV+ HNC cell lines and a series of HPV- HNC cell lines using in vitro and in vivo techniques. HPV+ HNCs exhibited greater intrinsic radiation sensitivity (average SF2 HPV-: 0.59 vs. HPV+: 0.22; P < 0.0001), corresponding with a prolonged G2-M cell-cycle arrest and increased apoptosis following radiation exposure (percent change 0% vs. 85%; P = 0.002). A genome-wide microarray was used to compare gene expression 24 hours following radiation between HPV+ and HPV- cell lines. Multiple genes in TP53 pathway were upregulated in HPV+ cells (Z score 4.90), including a 4.6-fold increase in TP53 (P < 0.0001). Using immortalized human tonsillar epithelial (HTE) cells, increased radiation sensitivity was seen in cell expressing HPV-16 E6 despite the effect of E6 to degrade p53. This suggested that low levels of normally functioning p53 in HPV+ HNC cells could be activated by radiation, leading to cell death. Consistent with this, more complete knockdown of TP53 by siRNA resulted in radiation resistance. These results provide clear evidence, and a supporting mechanism, for increased radiation sensitivity in HPV+ HNC relative to HPV- HNC. This issue is under active investigation in a series of clinical trials attempting to de-escalate radiation (and chemotherapy) in selected patients with HPV+ HNC in light of their favorable overall survival outcome.


In this paper, we present Forum Crawler Under Supervision (FoCUS), a supervised web-scale forum crawler. The goal of FoCUS is to crawl relevant forum content from the web with minimal overhead. Forum threads contain information content that is the target of forum crawlers. Although forums have different layouts or styles and are powered by different forum software packages, they always have similar implicit navigation paths connected by specific URL types to lead users from entry pages to thread pages. Based on this observation, we reduce the web forum crawling problem to a URL-type recognition problem. And we show how to learn accurate and effective regular expression patterns of implicit navigation paths from automatically created training sets using aggregated results from weak page type classifiers. Robust page type classifiers can be trained from as few as five annotated forums and applied to a large set of unseen forums. Our test results show that FoCUS achieved over 98 percent effectiveness and 97 percent coverage on a large set of test forums powered by over 150 different forum software packages. In addition, the results of applying FoCUS on more than 100 community Question and Answer sites and Blog sites demonstrated that the concept of implicit navigation path could apply to other social media sites.


Cyber security is moving from traditional infrastructure to sophisticated mobile infrastreless threats. We believe that such imminent transition is happening at a rate exceeding by far the evolution of security solutions. In fact, the transformation of mobile devices into highly capable computing platforms makes the possibility of security attacks originating from within the mobile network a reality. All recent security report emphasize on the steadily increase of malicious mobile applications. Trend Micro, in their last security report, shows that the number of malicious application doubled in just six months to reach more than 700000 malwares in June 2013. This represents a major issue for today's cyber security in the world and particularly in the middle east. The last Trend Micro report shows that the United Arab Emirates has "by far" the highest malicious Android application download volume worldwide. Moreover, Saudi Arabia, another middle eastern country, register the highest downloads of high-risk applications. We believe that today mobile devices are capable of initiating sophisticated cyberattacks especially when they coordinate together forming what we call a mobile distributed botnet (MobiBot). MobiBots leverage the absence of basic mobile operating system security mechanism and the advantages of classical botnets which make them a serious security threat to any machine and/or network. In addition, MobiBot's distributed architecture (see attached figure), its communication model, and its mobility make it very hard to track, identify and isolate. While there has been many android security studies, we find that the proposed solutions can not be adopted in the challenging MobiBot environment due to its de-centralized architecture (figure). MoBiBots bring significant challenges to network security. Thus, securing mobile devices by vetting malicious tasks can be considered as one important first step towards MobiBot security. Motivated by the trends mentioned above, in our project we first investigate the potential for and impact of the large scale infection and coordination of mobile devices. We highlight how mobile devices can leverage short range wireless technologies in attacks against other mobile devices that come within proximity. We quantitatively measure the infection and propagation rates within MobiBots using short range wireless technology such as Bluetooth. We adopt an experimental approach based on a Mobile Device Cloud platform we have build as well as three real world data traces. We show that Mobibot infection can be really fast by infecting all nodes in a network in only few minutes. Stealing data however requires longer period of time and can be done more efficiently if the botnet utilizes additional sinks. We also show that while MobiBots are difficult to detect and isolate compared to common botnet networks, traditional prevention techniques costs at least 40% of the network capacity. We also study the scalability of MobiBots in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses of these malicious networks. We based our analysis on a dataset that consists of multiple disjoint communities, each one is a real world mobility trace. We show that MobiBots succeed on infecting up to 10K bots in less than 80 minutes.


In the period 1998—2001 the JET tokamak was operated with the MkII Gas Box divertor. On two occasions during that period a number of limiter and divertor tiles were retrieved from the torus and then examined ex situ with surface sensitive techniques. Erosion and deposition patterns were determined in order to assess the material erosion, material migration and fuel inventory on plasma facing components. Tracer techniques, e.g. injection of 13C labelled methane and tiles coated with a low-Z and high-Z marker layer, were used to enhance the volume of information on the material transport. The results show significant asymmetry in the distribution of fuel and plasma impurity species between the inner (net deposition area) and the outer (net erosion) divertor channels. No significant formation of highly hydrogenated carbon films has been found in the Gas Box structure. The important processes for material migration, and the influence of operation scenarios on the morphology of the deposits are discussed. Comparison is also made with results obtained following previous divertor campaigns.


The cycling of carbon (C) in terrestrial ecosystems is closely coupled with the cycling of water. An important mechanism connecting ecological and hydrological processes in terrestrial ecosystems is lateral flow of water along landscapes. Few studies, however, have examined explicitly how consideration of water routing affects simulated water and C dynamics in terrestrial ecosystems. The objective of this study is to explore how consideration of water routing in a process-based hydro-ecological model affects simulated water and C dynamics. To achieve that end, we rasterized the regional hydro-ecological simulation system (RHESSys) and employed the rasterized RHESSys (R-RHESSys) in a forested watershed. We performed and compared two contrasting simulations, one with and another without water routing. We found that R-RHESSys was able to correctly simulate major hydrological and ecological variables regardless of whether water routing was considered. When water routing was considered, however, soil water table depth and saturation deficit were simulated to be greater and spatially more heterogeneous. As a result, water (evaporation, transpiration, and evapotranspiration) and C (forest productivity, soil autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration) fluxes also were simulated to be spatially more heterogeneous compared to the simulation without water routing. When averaged for the entire watershed, the three simulated water fluxes were greater while C fluxes were smaller under simulation considering water routing compared to that ignoring water routing. In addition, the effects of consideration of water routing on simulated C and water dynamics were more apparent in dry conditions. Overall, the study demonstrated that consideration of water routing enabled R-RHESSys to better capture our preconception of the spatial patterns of water table depth and saturation deficit across the watershed. Because soil moisture is fundamental to the exchange of water and C fluxes among soil, vegetation and the atmosphere, ecosystem and C cycle models therefore need to explicitly represent water routing in order to accurately quantify the magnitude and patterns of water and C fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.


Abstract The messaging application WhatsApp is often adopted in urban neighbourhoods to distribute and discuss information as part of neighbourhood watch programmes. In this context, certain notions of information sharing and the cherishing this implies, are often entangled with ideals of protection in the neighbourhood. Using the case study of an enclosed neighbourhood in Johannesburg, this essay draws on theories of affect and mobility to introduce the concept of affective mooring. That is, that a neighbourhood WhatsApp group constitutes an affective mooring-an established practice and point of fixity-that generates a sense of being held in a community through feelings of collective presence and safety. Notably, these feelings of presence and safety are hinged on acts of resistance and alienation towards strangers. In this way, WhatsApp as an affective mooring in the neighbourhood is also a site for negotiating ideals of belonging.


Objective To explore the role of the novel cardiac output response to stress (CORS), test in the current diagnostic pathway for heart failure and the opportunities and challenges to potential implementation in primary care. Design Qualitative study using semistructured in-depth interviews which were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data from the interviews were analysed thematically using an inductive approach. Setting Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Participants Fourteen healthcare professionals (six males, eight females) from primary (general practitioners (GPs), nurses, healthcare assistant, practice managers) and secondary care (consultant cardiologists). Results Four themes relating to opportunities and challenges surrounding the implementation of the new diagnostic technology were identified. These reflected that the adoption of CORS test would be an advantage to primary care but the test had barriers to implementation which include: establishment of clinical utility, suitability for immobile patients and cost implication to GP practices. Conclusion The development of a simple non-invasive clinical test to accelerate the diagnosis of heart failure in primary care maybe helpful to reduce unnecessary referrals to secondary care. The CORS test has the potential to serve this purpose; however, factors such as cost effectiveness, diagnostic accuracy and seamless implementation in primary care have to be fully explored.


Both deterministic and stochastic volatility models have been used to price and hedge options. Observation of real market data suggests that volatility, while stochastic, is well modelled as alternating between two states. Under this two-state regime-switching framework, we derive coupled pricing partial differential equations (PDEs) with the inclusion of a state-dependent market price of volatility risk (MPVR) term. Since there is no closed-form solution for this pricing problem, we apply and compare two approaches to solving the coupled PDEs, assuming constant Poisson intensities. First we solve the problem using numerical solution techniques, through the application of the CrankNicolson numerical scheme. We also obtain approximate solutions in terms of known BlackScholes formulae by reformulating our problem and applying the Cauchy-Kowalevski PDE theorem. Both our pricing equations and our approximate solutions give way to the analysis of the impact of our state-dependent MPVR on theoretical option prices. Using financially intuitive constraints on our option prices and Deltas, we prove the necessity of a negative MPVR. An exploration of the regime-switching option prices and their implied volatilities is given, as well as numerical results and intuition supporting our mathematical proofs. Given our regime-switching framework, there are several different hedging strategies to investigate. We consider using an option to hedge against a potential regime shift. Some practical problems arise with this approach, which lead us to set up portfolios containing a basket of two hedging options. To be more precise, we consider the effects of an option going too far inand out-of-the-money on our hedging strategy, and introduce limits on the magnitude of such hedging option positions. A complementary approach, where constant volatility is assumed and investor's risk preferences are taken into account, is also analysed. Analysis of empirical data supports the hypothesis that volatility levels are affected by upcoming financial events. Finally, we present an extension of our regime-switching framework with deterministic Poisson intensities. In particular, we investigate the impact of time and stock varying Poisson intensities on option prices and their corresponding implied volatilities, using numerical solution techniques. A discussion of some event-driven hedging strategies is given.


An adaptive polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) compensation system has been developed to cancel the effects of first-order PMD by producing a complementary PMD vector in the receiver. Control parameters for the PMD compensation system comprised of a polarization controller and a PMD emulator are derived from the nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) signal in the channel to be compensated. Estimates of the link's differential group delay (DGD) and principal states of polarization (PSPs) based on this signal are reliable when the signal power is equally split between the link's two PSP's; however this condition cannot be assumed. To meet this requirement, we scramble the state of polarization (SOP) of the input signal at a rate much greater than the response time of the PMD monitor signal so that each sample represents many different SOP alignments. This approach allows the effective cancellation of the first-order PMD effects within an optical fiber channel.


Measures to decrease early retirement are underway in many countries to increase the working population and lower costs. Sick leave is the normal pathway to early retirement and methods to enable persons on sick leave to return to work (RTW) earlier and at a higher rate are in focus. Using the term "RTW", a search in PubMed resulted in about 300 papers, of which more than half have been published after 2008 and 20% during the last year alone.

RTW has been the focus of many papers recently submitted to and published in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health (eg, 1, 2, 3). In this issue, Aust and coworkers (4) describe a large randomized Danish study to investigate if support by a trained staff will increase RTW. It is probably the largest ongoing RTW evaluation at the moment. The design is similar to studies of pharmaceutical drugs in phase III, involving a multicenter approach, evaluation committee, cost–benefit analyses, trial registration, and a huge budget. In contrast to most previous studies, it does not focus on a single diagnosis but on estimated prognosis. Established after a literature review, the intervention method is described as "biopsychosocial" (5). Compared to most other studies in this area, the Aust et al study (4) has a high power. A recent systematic review of community and work-based measures to reduce sick leave among persons with musculoskeletal disorders found that the published literature consisted of rather small studies of limited quality. Furthermore, the effect was overestimated through biased publishing of positive studies (6).

Modifications to work and contacts with the employer are often emphasized as important for RTW. Decreasing working time and changing work tasks increased RTW in a Finnish controlled study of persons with musculoskeletal disorders (7), and stress management at work decreased absenteeism in a Danish study (8). Furthermore, a randomized study of persons with severe psychiatric illness involving six countries found that individual support involving contact with the employer increased the chance for RTW (9). In contrast, contact with healthcare doctors seem to be of limited importance for RTW (10). In fact, a small controlled trial where less experienced doctors were trained by more senior colleagues actually increased the sick leave (11).

It would be of great interest to understand better the mechanistic aspects of contacts with employers for RTW. One cause may be modification of the workplace or tasks, but it can also be that the employer is persuaded to accept a lower productivity. It is probable that people on sick leave have lower productivity and the decrease may persist also when returning to work. Persons who returned to work from sick leave for low-back pain were found to have a lower productivity still 12 months after the sick leave ended (12).

While there is a high interest to increase RTW, there are few studies of the adverse effects of too early RTW. In 1955, when sick leave was granted to the entire population in Sweden through a government-financed system, a major argument was to protect the sick worker from further impairment due to harmful factors at work and enable a more rapid recovery (13). In a recent report, even the OECD acknowledged the need for people to be on sick leave and argued "cutting benefit entitlements for people who are already suffering from ill-health and forcing them to undergo training or even seek work is both highly unpopular and not fair for some groups" (14). However, they did not define the "groups" that should be on sick leave. Adverse effects may be through presenteeism (ie, coming to work when sick) or unemployment.

Presenteeism is a predictor of impaired health at least in some circumstances (15). A sick person may be susceptible to harm from occupational factors that normally do not harm healthy persons. A study by Kivimaki et al (16) found that severe coronary events were more common among unhealthy persons without sickness absence compared to unhealthy persons with sickness absence. The Viikari-Juntura et al study (7) indicated no adverse effects of early RTW as interruption of part-time sick leave due to exacerbation of symptoms or in symptom severity. It is argued that work is good for mental health (14), while a study found that disability pension seemed to improve mental symptoms especially among those with chronic diseases (17). There are probably people on sick leave whose health is improved by being on sick leave, individuals whose health is impaired by being on sick leave, and individuals whose health neither improves nor declines. An ideal method for the evaluation of RTW should be able to identify those whose health is impaired by too early RTW.

Unemployment may be an adverse effect of RTW as there are indications that unemployment per se impairs health (18). It is uncertain if RTW is a benefit to everyone who moves from being patients on sick leave to clients in job centers. From a work labor perspective, it is often argued that unemployment is better than sick leave as the latter may lead to permanent withdrawal from the work force due to disability pension (14). Adverse effects occurring after several years are especially difficult to study, but the Nordic countries have probably better chances to conduct such studies due to their good data registers.

RTW programs may strongly depend on context. Programs that work in countries and time periods in which there is a shortage of manpower may work differently under other circumstances. While good pharmaceutical studies usually are considered to have a strong external validity, RTW studies with a good external validity have to focus on a variable context.

There is a need to develop effective methodologies for evaluation of RTW. Just copying the corresponding methodologies for pharmaceutical drugs is not enough. Studying adverse effects and contextual factors and understanding mechanisms are often a greater challenge in RTW studies over and above difficulties relating to blinding and randomization. The Danish study is a step forward and will probably set a new standard, but there is always room for progress.


Disruptions of the p53, retinoblastoma (Rb), and RAS signaling pathways and activation of human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) are common in human ovarian cancer; however, their precise role in ovarian cancer development is not clear. We thus introduced the catalytic subunit of hTERT, the SV40 early genomic region, and the oncogenic alleles of human HRAS or KRAS into human ovarian surface epithelial cells and examined the phenotype and gene expression profile of those cells. Disruption of p53 and Rb pathway by SV40 early genomic region and hTERT immortalized but did not transform the cells. Introduction of HRASV12 or KRASV12 into the immortalized cells, however, allowed them to form s.c. tumors after injection into immunocompromised mice. Peritoneal injection of the transformed cells produced undifferentiated carcinoma or malignant mixed Mullerian tumor and developed ascites; the tumor cells are focally positive for CA125 and mesothelin. Gene expression profile analysis of transformed cells revealed elevated expression of several cytokines, including interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6, and IL-8, that are up-regulated by the nuclear factor-κB pathway, which is known to contribute to the tumor growth of naturally ovarian cancer cells. Incubation with antibodies to IL-1β or IL-8 led to apoptosis in the ras-transformed cells and ovarian cancer cells but not in immortalized cells that had not been transformed. Thus, the transformed human ovarian surface epithelial cells recapitulated many features of natural ovarian cancer including a subtype of ovarian cancer histology, formation of ascites, CA125 expression, and nuclear factor-κB-mediated cytokine activation. These cells provide a novel model system to study human ovarian cancer.


Oral care and oral hygiene in hospitalized patients. A survey of nurses in medical ward In this study, we assessed whether an educational program for nurses in a medical ward could enhance their knowledge, attitude and documentation level of oral care procedures. We collected quantitative data before and after the educational program, using a questionnaire. The findings indicate an increase in the nurses' assessment of the elderly's oral status and need for oral care. The nurses became more conscious about common oral practice, and the need for proper equipment. Nurses' attention to oral care was low when workload was high, and their documentation of oral case was generally insufficient. The study concludes that improving nurses' oral care practice would be beneficial for patients, and that nurses' knowledge, attitude and documentation can be influenced through educational programs. Based on these findings, we recommend that mouth care programs be developed and followed up by quality assurance processes and scientific studies.


Predation is widely believed to be the main threatening process for many native vertebrates in Australia. For 25 years, predator-baiting experiments have been used in the Western Australian Central Wheatbelt to control red fox predation on rock-wallabies and other endangered marsupial prey elsewhere. We review here the history of a series of baiting experiments designed to protect rock-wallaby colonies by controlling red foxes with 1080 poison baits. We continue to support the conclusion that red foxes can reduce or exterminate rock-wallaby populations in Western Australia. Research trials from 1990 to 2008 have uniformly shown a dramatic recovery of rock-wallaby populations once red foxes are baited. Baiting experiments are often black boxes and their success should not blind us to their weaknesses. Ideally, what we would like to measure are the functional responses of predators to prey abundance directly. As a contribution towards this goal, we describe new technology that enables one to determine which predator killed which prey, at exactly what time, with improved research and management outcomes.


Abstract Paralic environments, deltas, estuaries and shoreline-shelf systems respond sensitively to changes in sea-level and sediment supply, commonly by shifts in facies belts across sequence stratigraphic surfaces. As a result, they are often interleaved in highly layered successions. Layering and a wide range of associated sandbody types control the distinctive nature of paralic oil and gas fields. Layering results in stacked reservoirs. Thick extensive sandstones have structurally defined spill points, large aquifers and good reservoir properties. Such sands have high recovery, good reservoir performance and form primary completion targets. By contrast, thin, laterally restricted, isolated sandstones have low recovery factors and poor performance. Each isolated sand may have its own hydrocarbon contacts and a distinct outline that reflects both structural and stratigraphic trapping. Such sands form secondary completion targets. Fault compartmentalization is a recurring risk. Sealing faults increase the number of reservoir compartments and may decrease performance and recovery. They can also generate traps. Sedimentology is pivotal in describing heterogeneity in paralic reservoirs at all scales. Established techniques are likely to be complemented in the future by forward stratigraphic modelling, integration with palynology and more studies of surveillance data to show how sedimentological variability controls fluid movement in real reservoirs.


The effects of mental skills training in youth sport have been well documented (Efran, Lessor, & Spiller, 1994; Li-Wei, Qi-Wei, Orlick, & Zitzelsberger, 1992; Wanlin, Hrycaiko, Martin, & Mahon, 1997). This investigation focused on understanding why mental skills training information is not being used by junior tennis coaches and identifying better ways to convey this information to coaches. Focus-group interviews were conducted with 20 elite junior tennis coaches. Results revealed a need for more mental skills training coach education on content information. Understanding how to teach mental skills was also emphasized, as was the need for coaches to become more comfortable with this process. Coaches suggested that mental skills training information could be made more user-friendly through development of hands-on concrete examples and activities, increased mental skills training resources (particularly audio and video formats), and involvement in mental skills coach education efforts.


For families with children, employment comes at a price. They must subtract from their wages the cost of someone else caring for their child. Their wage minus the costs of obtaining child care, transportation, and other expenses that may be generated by employment is generally referred to as the effective wage. The Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) child care subsidy voucher, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and the Child and Dependent Care Credit (CDCC) are all intended to increase the effective wage of parents to support them entering and staying in the workforce. This paper explores the trade-offs between employment and effective wage that parents must make through the lens of three hypothetical North Carolina families facing promotion, bonus, and employer relocation opportunities. Through their eyes we understand why it would be rational to turn down these opportunities due to the potential loss of thousands of dollars in benefits. These situations demonstrate the weaknesses of the current system, where the needs of employers and employees become increasingly opposed as families approach the income eligibility threshold and the portability threshold. This paper proposes a policy to better align the needs of employers and employees by restructuring the incentive system to phase out benefits gradually, guarantee help to anyone who is eligible, make support sensitive to regional changes in child care prices, and administer it through the tax system rather than local social services offices throughout the country. While this paper focuses on the child care benefit system, the framework used to explore the issues of reversed incentives at the eligibility threshold can be applied to any social policy with income eligibility requirements.


Hole transport matertial (HTM) as charge selective layer in perovskite solar cells (PSCs) plays an important role in achieving high power conversion efficiency (PCE). It is known that the dopants and additives are necessary in the HTM in order to improve the hole conductivity of the HTM as well as to obtain high efficiency in PSCs, but the additives can potentially induce device instability and poor device reproducibility. In this work a new strategy to design dopant‐free HTMs has been presented by modifying the HTM to include charged moieties which are accompanied with counter ions. The device based on this ionic HTM X44 dos not need any additional doping and the device shows an impressive PCE of 16.2%. Detailed characterization suggests that the incorporated counter ions in X44 can significantly affect the hole conductivity and the homogeneity of the formed HTM thin film. The superior photovoltaic performance for X44 is attributed to both efficient hole transport and effective interfacial hole transfer in the solar cell device. This work provides important insights as regards the future design of new and efficient dopant free HTMs for photovotaics or other optoelectronic applications.


Mass transportation systems and specifically bus systems are a key element of the national transportation network. Buses are one of the safest forms of transportation. Nonetheless, bus crashes resulting in occupant injuries and fatalities do occur. Each year, more than 5,800 children die, nearly 120,000 are permanently disabled, and more than 14 million are hurt seriously enough to require emergency medical care due to unintentional injury. Therefore, effort is needed to improve the performance of bus interior and structure. Child Safety is a continuing effort to improve the safety of children in mass transit buses. This project provides an overview of the implementation of two types of attachment systems Child Restraint Systems (CRS) in a mass transit buses. A series of sled tests were conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the Child Restraint Systems for typical frontal, side and rear crash scenarios. The results of the test indicate that the implementation of ISOFIX or LATCH attachments in transit bus seats mitigates the risk of severe injuries to the 12 monthold, and 3 year-old occupants; while not increasing the risk of severe injuries due to CRS interactions to other unrestraint adult passengers. In the next phase of this research, results from these sled tests were validated using the multibody analysis tool MADYMO to evaluate the performance of child safety in mass transit buses using the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS 208) injury criteria. The Kinematics of sled tests are closely matching with that of simulations. Injury values for sled tests and simulations are well below injury criteria. The results form this study shows the 20 % variation in injury signals. This study concludes that interior for mass transit bus with child seats and restraint can be utilized in mass transit buses to improve the safety performance of childern.


We describe a high-rate energy-resolving photon-counting ASIC aimed for spectral computed tomography. The chip has 160 channels and 8 energy bins per channel. It demonstrates a noise level of ENC =214 electrons at 5 pF input load at a power consumption of <; 5 mW/channel. Maximum count rate is 17 Mcps at a peak time of 40 ns, made possible through a new filter reset scheme, and maximum read-out frame rate is 37 kframe/s.


Adopting Children with Developmental Disabilities: A Long-Term Perspective* Long-term maternal adjustment to the adoption of children with developmental disabilities was studied in a sample of 123 adoptive families using multiple measures of adjustment including depression, marital satisfaction and others. Conclusions were that adjustment was generally positive over an approximately 11-year period, regardless of family demographic or child characteristics. Moreover, adjustment to subsequently-adopted children was comparable to adjustment to earlier adopted children. These results suggest that adoption policy and practice should promote the adoption of children with developmental disabilities, and be flexible with regard to family and child characteristics, including placing multiple children with disabilities in the same home. Key Words: adoption, developmental disabilities, family adjustment longitudinal research, multiple adoptions. Tommy was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. During the first 2 1/2 years of his life, he was removed from and returned to his birth mother several times. Despite repeated attempts to stay sober, her alcoholism led her to neglect Tommy; she frequently left him at home, alone and unattended. The Thompsons were the last in a series of relatively short-term foster placements. Tommy did well in their care and they enjoyed having him. When Tommy's mother's parental rights were terminated, the Thompsons informed their social worker of their interest in adopting him. Jill was born with Down syndrome to birth parents who were married and had two other children. Jill was diagnosed almost immediately after birth. Her birth parents did not feel adequately prepared for raising a child with special needs, but they were concerned for Jill's welfare and contacted an adoption agency themselves. They were pleased to learn that the agency had several families interested in and waiting to adopt a child with Down syndrome. They were instrumental in choosing the family who adopted their daughter, wanting her to be reared in a loving and stable environment. The adoptive parents picked Jill up from the hospital as soon as she was ready for release. [Case studies with names changed]. Tommy and Jill are examples of special-needs children with developmental disabilities. Developmental disabilities are physical, sensory, and/or cognitive impairments that are severe enough that the individuals who have them are expected to need lifelong support services-educational, residential, occupational, and/or medical (Coleman, 1993). Data on the adoption of children with developmental disabilities is scanty, just as are data on most aspects of adoption. Nonetheless, estimates are that in the United States, approximately 50% of children who are legally free and are awaiting adoption have at least one developmental disability (Knoll, 1995; National Adoption Center, 1997). Many of these children spend years and even their entire childhoods in substitute care, with ensuing emotional and behavioral problems as a consequence (Kramer & Houston, 1998). Historically, children with developmental disabilities were frequently considered to be unadoptable (Bohman, 1970; Kornitzer, 1952; Wolkomir, 1947). However, with changing ideology and practice in social work, and the decreasing availability of healthy young children for adoption, increasing numbers of placements of children with developmental disabilities began to be made and evaluated. The results of these evaluations demonstrated marked success and satisfaction with the placements. Different investigators, using methodology varying from large sample case record evaluation to smaller sample face-to-face interview, generally came to the same conclusion. There were few disruptions or dissolutions, and parental satisfaction with the adoptions was high (Coyne & Brown, 1985; Glidden, 1989, 1991; Glidden & Cahill, 1998; Glidden & Johnson, 1999; Glidden & Parsley, 1989; Glidden, Valliere, & Herbert, 1988; Goetting & Goetting, 1993a, 1993b, 1994; Lightburn & Pine, 1996; Marx, 1990; Nelson, 1985; Rosenthal & Groze, 1990, 1992; Rosenthal, Groze, & Aguilar, 1991; Todis & Singer, 1991). …


The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. "Coon songs," with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of blues and jazz. In Ragged but Right, now in paperback, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff investigate black musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and itinerant tented minstrel shows. Ragtime history is crowned by the "big shows," the stunning musical comedy successes of Williams and Walker, Bob Cole, and Ernest Hogan. Under the big tent of Tolliver's Smart Set, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and others were converted from "coon shouters" to "blues singers." Throughout the ragtime era and into the era of blues and jazz, circuses and Wild West shows exploited the popular demand for black music and culture, yet segregated and subordinated black performers to the sideshow tent. Not to be confused with their nineteenth-century white predecessors, black, tented minstrel shows such as the Rabbit's Foot and Silas Green from New Orleans provided blues and jazz-heavy vernacular entertainment that black southern audiences identified with and took pride in.


The tumor microenvironment presents physical, immunologic, and metabolic barriers to durable immunotherapy responses. We have recently described roles for both T cell metabolic insufficiency as well as tumor hypoxia as inhibitory mechanisms that prevent T cell activity in murine tumors, but whether intratumoral T cell activity or response to immunotherapy varies between patients as a function of distinct metabolic profiles in tumor cells remains unclear. Here, we show that metabolic derangement can vary widely in both degree and type in patient-derived cell lines and in ex vivo analysis of patient samples, such that some cells demonstrate solely deregulated oxidative or glycolytic metabolism. Further, deregulated oxidative, but not glycolytic, metabolism was associated with increased generation of hypoxia upon implantation into immunodeficient animals. Generation of murine single-cell melanoma cell lines that lacked either oxidative or glycolytic metabolism showed that elevated tumor oxygen consumption was associated with increased T cell exhaustion and decreased immune activity. Moreover, melanoma lines lacking oxidative metabolism were solely responsive to anti-PD-1 therapy among those tested. Prospective analysis of patient sample immunotherapy revealed that oxidative, but not glycolytic, metabolism was associated with progression on PD-1 blockade. Our data highlight a role for oxygen as a crucial metabolite required for the tumor-infiltrating T cells to differentiate appropriately upon PD-1 blockade, and suggest that tumor oxidative metabolism may be a target to improve immunotherapeutic response.


In this article, Professor Marc Galanter challenges the notion that increases in the caseload of the federal courts reflect a general increased litigiousness on the part of the American public. He examines civil filings in federal district courts in six categories of cases that he calls the 'Big Six': civil rights, prisoner petitions, social security, recovery (mainly recovery of overpayments of veterans' benefits and of defaulted student loans), other contracts, and torts. He finds that the increase in litigation is not general over these areas; instead, the incidence of some kinds of cases is growing while that of others is falling. Professor Galanter suggest that different subpopulations of cases respond to specific conditions rather than to global changes and that control of the federal court caseload requires study of these conditions and of the effects on litigation that the cases themselves have.


In this paper, we report on the methodological challenges involved in conducting collaborative mobile computing. We investigated two social navigation studies in which pairs of participants were collaborating together over small, mobile, devices. Both of these studies took place in the field, in outdoor and unstructured environments. We reflect on the difficulties identified in previous literatures in addition to new obstacles we encountered. Collaborative mobile computing in the field presents several methodological challenges by combining the problems of many research areas (ubiquitous and mobile computing, and co-located collaboration). However, this avenue of research has many potential benefits to significantly impact real life.


The famed 1914 edition of this classic is one of the small handful of works that deserve to be read by Americans to understand the 1980s. Indeed, the final three chapters, describing the decline of will and consensus in late Victorian England, stand as a stark, unmistakable reminder that such national decline can happen again. Dicey was the most influential constitutional authority in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Modern politicians have often invoked the phrase "rule of law." So commonplace has it become that few recognize its source in the work of Dicey. Law and Public Opinion in England is written with simplicity, wit and a sense of purpose that marks it as a book apart. It did much more than fortell the decline of empire, it developed the forms in which such decline comes about. In many ways this book represents a pioneering statement on the libertarian tradition as a consequence of rather than rebellion against the legal norms of an advanced civilization. This is a central book for students of society and politics alike.


Changing to alternative protein sources supports production of more economic aquafeeds. Two isocaloric (3.06 kcal/g) and isonitrogenous (40% db) experimental feeds for juvenile yellow perch were formulated with incorporation of fermented soybean meal (FSBM) and soy protein concentrate (SPC), each of which were at two levels (0 and 20% db), along with constant amounts of high protein distillers dried grains (DDG) (30% db), and appropriate amounts of other ingredients. Using a pilot scale twin-screw extruder, feed production was performed in two replications for each diet at conditioner steam levels of 0.11 to 0.16 kg/min, extruder water of 0.11 to 0.19 kg/min, and screw speeds of 230 to 300 rpm. The effects of SPC and FSBM inclusion on extrudate physical properties were compared with those of a control diet (which contained 20% fishmeal and 30% DDG). Inclusion of 20% FSBM and 20%SPC resulted in a substantial decrease in unit density by 9.2 and 24%, but an increase in lightness, greenness, yellowness, and expansion ratio of the extrudates by 7, 27, 14, 7, 17, 34, 15, and 16.5%, respectively. SPC inclusion led to a considerable increase in water absorption, thermal resistivity, and thermal diffusivity by 17.5, 6.3, and 17.6%, respectively, whereas no significant change was observed for these properties with incorporation of 20% FSBM. Additionally, all extruded products had high durability. Taken together, using 30% DDG with20% FSBM or20% SPC as alternative protein sources resulted in viable extrudates with properties appropriate for yellow perch production. A future study investigating the effect of extrusion processing conditions on the production of complete vegetable-based protein feeds for yellow perch species would be appropriate.


There is ample historical data to suggest that log returns of stocks and indices are not independent and identically distributed Normally, as is commonly assumed. Instead, the returns of financial assets are skewed and have higher kurtosis. To account for skewness and excess kurtosis, it is necessary to have a distribution that is more flexible than the Gaussian distribution and uses additional information that may be present in higher moments.

The federal government's Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) is the largest defined contribution retirement savings and investment plan, with nearly 3.6 million participants and over $173 billion in assets. The TSP offers five assets (government bond fund, fixed income fund, large-cap stock fund, small-cap stock fund, and international stock fund) to U.S. government civilian employees and uniformed service members. The limited choice of investments, in comparison to most 401(k) plans, may be disappointing from a participant's perspective; however, it provides an attractive framework for empirical study.

In this study, we investigate how the optimal choice of TSP assets changes when traditional portfolio optimization methods are replaced with newer techniques. Specifically, the following research questions are posed and answered:

 (1) Does use of a non-Gaussian factor model for returns, generated with independent components analysis (ICA) and following the Variance Gamma (VG) process, provide any advantage in constructing optimal TSP portfolios?

 (2) Can excess TSP portfolio returns be generated through rebalancing to an optimal mix? If so, what frequency of rebalancing provides benefits that offset increased computationalal and administrative burden?

 (3) How does the use of coherent risk and portfolio performance measures, in place of variance as the traditional the measure for risk and Sharpe Ratio as the usual portfolio performance measure affect TSP portfolio selection?

We show through simulation that some of the newer schemes should produce excess returns over conventional (mean-variance optimization with Normally-distributed returns) portfolio choice models. The use of some or all of these methods could benefit the nearly 4 million TSP participants in achieving their retirement savings and investment objectives. Furthermore, we propose two new portfolio performance measures based on recent developments in coherent measures of risk.


Laser-induced detection of fluorescent labeled PCR products and multi-wavelength detection (i.e., multicolor analysis) enables rapid generation of mtDNA sequencing profiles. Traditionally, polyacrylamide slab gels have been used as the electrophoretic medium for mtDNA sequencing in forensic analyses. Replacement of slab gel electrophoresis with capillary electrophoresis (CE) can facilitate automation of the analytical process. Automation and high throughput can be further enhanced by using multicapillary electrophoretic systems. The use of the ABI Prism 3100 Genetic Analyzer (ABI 3100, Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA) as well as the ABI Prism 310 Genetic Analyzer (ABI 310, Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA) were evaluated for mtDNA sequencing capabilities and compared with sequencing results obtained on the platform currently in use in the FBI Laboratory (the ABI Prism 377 DNA Sequencer, ABI 377, Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA). Various studies were performed to assess the utility of the ABI 3100, as well as the ABI 310 for mtDNA sequencing. The tests included: comparisons of results obtained among the ABI 3100, the ABI 310 and the ABI 377 instruments; comparisons of results obtained within and between capillary arrays; evaluation of capillary length; evaluation of sample injection time; evaluation of the resolution of mixtures/heteroplasmic samples; and evaluation of the sensitivity of detection of a minor component with reduced template on the ABI 3100. In addition, other studies were performed to improve sample preparation; these included: comparison of template suppression reagent (TSR, Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA) versus formamide; the use of Performa DTR Gel Filtration Cartridges (Edge BioSystems Inc., Gaithersburg, MD) versus Centri-Sep Spin Columns (Princeton Separations, Adelphia, NJ) for product purification after cycle sequencing; and sample stability after denaturation. The data support that valid and reliable results can be obtained using either capillary electrophoresis instrument, and the quality of sequencing results are comparable to or better than those obtained from the ABI 377 instrument.


Review Number: 1710 Publish date: Thursday, 15 January, 2015 Author: Conrad Rudolph ISBN: 9781107037052 Date of Publication: 2014 Price: £75.00 Pages: 626pp. Publisher: Cambridge University Press Publisher url: http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/history-ideas-and-intellectual-history/mystic-arkhugh-saint-victor-art-and-thought-twelfth-century Place of Publication: Cambridge Reviewer: Karl Kinsella


The study contributes in analytical description of spatial diffusion of fertility, in particular, influenced by labour movements of people between places of residence and work. It is assumed that the labour market has externality on the marriage market due to commuting, which, in turn, affects fertility. A model of spatial diffusion of fertility is based on assumption of global and local spillover effects. The global spillover effect, as shifts in fertility norms, is motivated by increasing variance of social interactions of an individual, when places of work and residence are different. One local spillover effect is in response to flows of earnings across space. Another mechanism is related to expected changes in probabilities to find a partner affected by differences in day and night population. The analytical model, in which the effects on fertility of the cited spillovers are decomposed, is constructed in the paper on the base of a model of the demand for children, spatial stock-flow model of a market, and a matching model with a sex imbalance or spatial mismatch as the probability of matching. Three sex imbalances, namely of night-, day-time population and an adjusted to sex imbalance of commuters to residents are empirically tested. Empirical evidence on municipal Swedish data for the period 1994–2008 does not provide any strong evidence of spatial diffusion of fertility. However, there are externalities of labour mobility on fertility due to changes of gender structure of population.


There is a lively debate about the extent to which private providers of educational services can contribute to the achievement of Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals. There is evidence that in some poor countries private provision has been growing especially at the secondary level. The reasons for this are not simple but include excess demand (more applicants than places), differentiated demand (preference for alternatives to existing public schools), and the opportunities created for entrepreneurs by newly liberalised regulatory frameworks for educational services. This paper identifies a range of constraints and contextual realities that will shape future development. The first section draws attention to the diversity of non-government private provision and some fundamental issues that shape its likely contribution to enhanced access to schooling. Second, estimates are presented of the numbers of children currently out of school and their location in Sub-Saharan Africa. Third, data is discussed which illustrates the extent to which exclusion is related to wealth, location and gender, focusing on economic constraints. Fourth, costs related to teachers are modelled to indicate likely minimum operating costs for unsubsidised schooling. Fifth, an analysis is offered of the underlying demographic realities of expanded enrolment to reinforce the need to understand the magnitude of the task of achieving the MDGs and the need to identify mechanisms that expand services to large numbers of school-age children drawn from the poorest households. Finally some concluding remarks draw together the arguments.


Deltas are very sensitive environments and highly vulnerable to variations in water discharge and the amount of suspended sediment load provided by the delta-forming currents. Human activities in the watershed, such as building of dams and irrigation ditches, or river bed deviations, may affect the discharge regime and sediment input, thus affecting delta growth. Underwater currents create deeply incised canyons cutting into the delta lobes. Understanding the sedimentary processes in these subaquatic canyons is crucial to reconstruct the fluvial evolution and human impact on deltaic environments, and to carry out a geological risk assessment related to mass movements, which may affect underwater structures and civil infractructure. Recently acquired high-resolution multibeam bathymetry on the Rhone Delta in Lake Geneva (Sastre et al. 2010) revealed the complexity of the underwater morphology formed by active and inactive canyons first described by Forel (1892). In order to unravel the sedimentary processes and sedimentary evolution in these canyons, 27 sediment cores were retrieved in the distal part of each canyon and in the canyon floor/levee complex of the active canyon. Geophysical, sedimentological, geochemical and radiometric dating techniques were applied to analyse these cores. Preliminary data show that only the canyon originating at the current river mouth is active nowadays, while the others remain inactive since engineering works in the watershed occurred. However, alternating hemipelagic and turbiditic deposits in the easternmost canyons, evidence underflow processes during the last decades. Two canyons, which are located close to the Rhone river mouth, correspond to particularly interesting deeply incised crevasse channels formed when the underwater current broke through the outer bend of a meander in the proximal northern levee. In these canyons, turbidites were observed in the sediment record indicating ongoing sediment dynamics during whether extreme flood events or mass-movements due to deltaic scarp failures. The active canyon shows a classic turbiditic system with frequent spillover processes in the canyon floor/levee complex. Geotechnical measurements, a decrease in the frequency of turbidites and a fining upward sequence along the levee suggest that erosion dominates sedimentation in the canyon floor, while sedimentation dominates in the rapid levee building-up process, with sedimentation rates that exceed 2.5 cm/yr in the proximal areas. Therefore, mechanisms controlling the sedimentary evolution on the active canyon represent a complex interplay between erosion and sedimentation.


Background: Older adults are more susceptible to colorectal cancer (CRC). Psychosocial constructs in the Health Belief Model are targets for interventional studies. No tool to measure these beliefs of older Chinese people has been validated. Objective: The present study aimed to examine the preliminary psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Colorectal Cancer Perceptions Scale (CRCPS). Methods: The CRCPS was translated to Chinese language, validated by an expert panel, and tested. Interviewer-administered surveys were carried out with a convenience sample of 219 community-dwelling Chinese adults 60 years or older and were included in the analysis. Results: Six factors were retained, with items on susceptibility and benefits remaining as designed, whereas those on severity formed 2 factors, labeled severity–fear and severity–life impact, and those on barriers again formed 2 factors, labeled psychological barriers and knowledge barriers. Cronbach's &agr; values ranged from .74 to .88, and test-retest reliability correlations ranged from .38 for psychological barriers to .69 for knowledge barriers. Respondents who had undergone CRC screening had significantly lower mean scores on severity–fear, severity–life impact, psychological barriers, and knowledge barriers compared with those who had not. Conclusions: The results provide preliminary support for the reliability and validity of the Chinese version of the CRCPS. Further psychometric testing is recommended. Implications for Practice: The survey provides a useful tool to assess CRC health beliefs, which interventions should address to improve screening rates among older Chinese adults.


From the moment of transcription, up through degradation, each RNA transcript is bound by an ever‐changing cohort of RNA binding proteins. The binding of these proteins is regulated by both the primary RNA sequence, as well as the intramolecular RNA folding, or secondary structure, of the transcript. Thus, RNA secondary structure regulates many post‐transcriptional processes. With the advent of next generation sequencing, several techniques have been developed to generate global landscapes of both RNA–protein interactions and RNA secondary structure. In this review, we describe the current state of the field detailing techniques to globally interrogate RNA secondary structure and/or RNA–protein interaction sites, as well as our current understanding of these features in the transcriptome of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. WIREs RNA 2017, 8:e1426. doi: 10.1002/wrna.1426


Integration of optical functions promises to be an important new technology, with applications in telecommunications, datacommunications, and sensing. Controlling the polarization in integrated circuits is needed to fully benefit from the use of light. Integrated polarization converters are required for this, but devices proposed so far have suffered from tight fabrication tolerances. It is shown here what the root of this intolerance is and how critical fabrication errors can be compensated in a two-section polarization converter. The new device leads to doubling of the fabrication tolerances and wavelength range and promises conversion efficiencies above 99% over a wide range of fabrication and operation parameters.


This paper addresses the issue of terms, namely Latin American, Hispanic and Latino, whose definitions are affected by social, economic, historical and ideological factors and which are at the crossroads of two or more disciplines. Definitions will be provided, using the Merriam-Webster for American English, the Oxford Dictionary for British English, and the Diccionario de la Real Academia for Spanish. The concept of ethnicity, introduced by the US Census Office in the 1970s to identify the Hispanic minority, will also be dealt with. The next section will examine the preferred choices of usage in academic journals in two broad areas, the Social Sciences on the one hand, and the Medical and Nursing professions on the others. It covers a total of 58 academic papers from two distinct periods, 2000–2005 and 2006–2010, in order to establish whether the terms are used consistently in the two broad areas, and whether there are major differences in use in the two time spans. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the findings, a reference to other activities that can be affected by the ambiguities of the definitions, and suggestions for further research.


Ear mushroom ( Auricularia auricula (Hook) Underw.) were produced by cultivating the fungus on logs of kayu afrika ( Maesopsis eminii Engl.). The logs of 60 cm long having a diameters of 19-25 cm were first solar dried for two months and subsequently soaked in water for three days. Thereafter, they were inoculated with the fungus by placing the inocula in the 3-4 cm deep holes made by boring the superficial part of the logs and then the inoculated logs were incubated in the room by wrapping with black polyethylene sheet for 18 days. The experiment of the cultivation was carried out with the treatment of the incubated logs as follows: i) logs placed on the forest floor and covered with black polyethylene sheets (0.3 mm thick), ii) logs were placed on the forest floor and covered with sisal sacs, iii) logs were hanged on the tree stem and covered with black polyethylene sheets, and iv) logs were hanged on the tree stem and covered with sisal sacs. Similar conditionings and treatments were also given to fresh logs (without solar drying). The experiment was also designed to find out whether cultivating the logs under laboratory conditions affect the growth and the formation as well as the development of the fruiting bodies of the fungus. Fruiting bodies were formed on dried logs 24 days after inoculation or 6 days after cultivation, whereas none was formed on fresh logs placed in the forest stand, also, fruiting bodies was not formed on all logs placed in the laboratory. There after, every 6 days, harvesting of the mushrooms could be carried out for as long as one month (5 times harvestings). The largest mushroom production proved to be on logs hanged on the tree stem and covered with the sisal sacs.


GPUs have been widely used to accelerate computations exhibiting simple patterns of parallelism -- such as flat or two-level parallelism -- and a degree of parallelism that can be statically determined based on the size of the input dataset. However, the effective use of GPUs for algorithms exhibiting complex patterns of parallelism, possibly known only at runtime, is still an open problem. Recently, Nvidia has introduced Dynamic Parallelism (DP) in its GPUs. By making it possible to launch kernels directly from GPU threads, this feature enables nested parallelism at runtime. However, the effective use of DP must still be understood: a naïve use of this feature may suffer from significant runtime overhead and lead to GPU underutilization, resulting in poor performance. In this work, we target this problem. First, we demonstrate how a naïve use of DP can result in poor performance. Second, we propose three workload consolidation schemes to improve performance and hardware utilization of DP-based codes, and we implement these code transformations in a directive-based compiler. Finally, we evaluate our framework on two categories of applications: algorithms including irregular loops and algorithms exhibiting parallel recursion. Our experiments show that our approach significantly reduces runtime overhead and improves GPU utilization, leading to speedup factors from 90x to 3300x over basic DP-based solutions and speedups from 2x to 6x over flat implementations.


The purpose of this paper is to explore the issues that may affect the integration (i.e., the relationships) between the different actors that comprise a supply chain. Whist the theoretical part of the paper can be referred to any supply chain, the empirical part is focused on the UK barley to beer supply chain. The main motivation behind the topic is that improvements in the relationships amongst the different segments of a chain can enhance its efficiency and effectiveness, (e.g., through improvements in coordination and cooperation), and therefore, its competitiveness and long term sustainability. The paper is based on two complementary analyses: the first one consisted of a structural equation model (SEM) to determine those factors that affect the sustainability of relationships in the chain. The model is estimated based on a survey of 69 chain stakeholders. The second analysis comprised an in-depth case study based on an important malting-barley- to-beer supply chain in Eastern England, and had the purpose of providing further understanding of those aspects that were highlighted by the SEM. The overall results pointed out to five factors affecting the relationships in the malting barley to beer agri-food supply chain: communication, compatibility of aims in the supply chain, contractual relationships backed by professional regard and personal bonds; high levels of trust exist between the chain participants and a willingness to resolve any problems; and commercial benefit.


Background: Chronic heart failure (CHF) patients with elevated depression symptoms are at greater risk of morbidity and mortality. The mechanisms linking symptoms of depression with disease progression in CHF are unclear. However, research studies have found evidence of alterations in immune activity associated with depression symptoms that may influence heart function. The present study sought to determine the relationship between depression symptoms and chemotaxis of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) in CHF patients, both at rest and in response to moderate exercise. Methods and Results: Sixty-five patients diagnosed with CHF (mean age, 59.8 6 14.5 years) and 45 non-CHF control subjects (mean age, 52.1 6 11.6) completed the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) before undergoing a moderate 20-minute bicycle exercise task. Chemotaxis of PBMCs was examined in vitro to a bacterial peptide f-met leu phe (fMLP) and a physiologic chemokine, stromal cell derived factor-1 (SDF-1) immediately before and after exercise. CHF patients had reduced chemotaxis to SDF-1 (P 5 .025) compared with non-CHF subjects. Higher BDI scores were associated with reduced baseline chemotaxis to SDF-1 in both CHF and non-CHF subjects (P 5 .027). In contrast, higher BDI scores were associated with increased chemotaxis to fMLP (P 5 .049) and SDF-1 (P 5 .018) in response to exercise in the CHF patients. Conclusion: The present study suggests a shift in immune cell mobility in CHF patients with greater depression symptom severity, with reduced chemotaxis to a physiologically specific chemokine at rest but increased chemotaxis to both nonspecific and specific chemical attractants in response to physical activity. This could have implications for cardiac repair and remodeling in CHF patients and therefore may affect disease progression.


The relative preference for a target product over a competitor can be increased by providing a third alternative (a decoy) that is clearly inferior to the target but is not necessarily inferior to the competitor. We investigated how these "decoy" effects are influenced by the presence or absence of brand name information and the level of consumer brand knowledge. A field experiment was conducted with three hundred and twenty married females. Results indicated that overall, inclusion of a decoy in the choice set significantly increased the relative preference for the target (i.e., a decoy effect). However, identifying alternatives with real brand names eliminated this effect when participants possessed an extensive amount of knowledge about the brands, but it did not when participants had relatively limited knowledge. These results were generally consistent with implications of the category-based processing view about brand name information.


This Article argues that the ethics of responsibility should be hailed as an intrinsic value undergirding copyright law. It considers how and why copyright law should be reformed to embrace a strong vision of copyright holders' responsibilities. To this end, it calls for a more dynamic vision regarding the nature of copyrighted works. A copyrighted work, as the Article shows, is not only the embodiment of its author's thought and personality, but also a social initiative in sharing intangible resources to promote creativity, shaping people's cultural power, and pursuing the quest for justice. These social values inherent in all copyrighted works provide the ethical justification for introducing responsibility into copyright and enforcing it as another core function of copyright law. Following the ethics of responsibility, copyright law should function to grant exclusive rights to copyright holders and also to impose social responsibilities on them.


Making peace in the long-troubled Middle East is likely to be one of the top priorities of the next American president. He will need to take account of the important lessons from past attempts, which are described and analyzed here in a gripping book by a renowned expert who served twice as U.S. ambassador to Israel and as Middle East adviser to President Clinton. Martin Indyk draws on his many years of intense involvement in the region to provide the inside story of the last time the United States employed sustained diplomacy to end the Arab-Israeli conflict and change the behavior of rogue regimes in Iraq and Iran. Innocent Abroad is an insightful history and a poignant memoir. Indyk provides a fascinating examination of the ironic consequences when American naivete meets Middle Eastern cynicism in the region's political bazaars. He dissects the very different strategies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to explain why they both faced such difficulties remaking the Middle East in their images of a more peaceful or democratic place. He provides new details of the breakdown of the Arab-Israeli peace talks at Camp David, of the CIA's failure to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and of Clinton's attempts to negotiate with Iran's president. Indyk takes us inside the Oval Office, the Situation Room, the palaces of Arab potentates, and the offices of Israeli prime ministers. He draws intimate portraits of the American, Israeli, and Arab leaders he worked with, including Israel's Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon; the PLO's Yasser Arafat; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak; and Syria's Hafez al-Asad. He describes in vivid detail high-level meetings, demonstrating how difficult it is for American presidents to understand the motives and intentions of Middle Eastern leaders and how easy it is for them to miss those rare moments when these leaders are willing to act in ways that can produce breakthroughs to peace. Innocent Abroad is an extraordinarily candid and enthralling account, crucially important in grasping the obstacles that have confounded the efforts of recent presidents. As a new administration takes power, this experienced diplomat distills the lessons of past failures to chart a new way forward that will be required reading.


An interesting thing about contemporary media is just how much of it is factual. From journalism to social media, YouTube to reality TV we are surrounded by media that claims to be true. Often this content has a definite agenda; it wants to persuade us, make us click, join in and pass it on. How can we understand our changing relationship to factual media? And why is documentary scholarship well placed to help us do so? Kate Nash explores new interactive dimensions to documentary that may encourage wider engagement.


We present a method for detecting and segmenting aneurysms in blood vessels that facilitates the assessment of risks associated with the aneurysms. The detection and analysis of aneurysms is important for medical diagnosis as aneurysms bear the risk of rupture with fatal consequences for the patient. For risk assessment and treatment planning, morphological descriptors, such as the height and width of the aneurysm, are used. Our system enables the fast detection, segmentation and analysis of single and multiple aneurysms. The method proceeds in two stages plus an optional third stage in which the user interacts with the system. First, a set of aneurysm candidate regions is created by segmenting regions of the vessels. Second, the aneurysms are detected by a classification of the candidates. The third stage allows users to adjust and correct the result of the previous stages using a brushing interface. When the segmentation of the aneurysm is complete, the corresponding ostium curves and morphological descriptors are computed and a report including the results of the analysis and renderings of the aneurysms is generated. The novelty of our approach lies in combining an analytic characterization of aneurysms and vessels to generate a list of candidate regions with a classifier trained on data to identify the aneurysms in the candidate list. The candidate generation is modeled as a global combinatorial optimization problem that is based on a local geometric characterization of aneurysms and vessels and can be efficiently solved using a graph cut algorithm. For the aneurysm classification scheme, we identified four suitable features and modeled appropriate training data. An important aspect of our approach is that the resulting system is fast enough to allow for user interaction with the global optimization by specifying additional constraints via a brushing interface.


As the oldest and largest human intervention in nature, the science of agriculture is one of the most intensely studied practices. From manipulation of plant gene structure to the use of plants for bioenergy, biotechnology interventions in plant and agricultural science have been rapidly developing over the past ten years with immense forward leaps on an annual basis. This book begins by laying the foundations for plant biotechnology by outlining the biological aspects including gene structure and expression, and the basic procedures in plant biotechnology of genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics and proteomics. It then focuses on a discussion of the impacts of biotechnology on plant breeding technologies and germplasm sustainability. The role of biotechnology in the improvement of agricultural traits, production of industrial products and pharmaceuticals as well as biomaterials and biomass provide a historical perspective and a look to the future. This title includes sections addressing intellectual property rights and sociological and food safety issues that round out the holistic discussion of this important topic. It also includes specific emphasis on the inter-relationships between basic plant biotechnologies and applied agricultural applications, and the way they contribute to each other. It provides an updated review of the major plant biotechnology procedures and techniques, their impact on novel agricultural development and crop plant improvement. It takes a broad view of the topic with discussions of practices in many countries.


In this article, we introduce the concept of 'the imagined scientist'. It inverts previous discussions of the public as an imagined community with a knowledge deficit, to examine imagined scientists representing an actor (or group of actors) with deficits in knowledge or concern about social issues. We study how Norwegian science policymakers, on the one hand, and biotechnologists and nanotechnologists, on the other, articulate and engage with social responsibility. The article identifies what we call 'deficit trouble', when there is poor alignment of the deficits of different imagined scientists, which may lead to a stalemate in the communication between science policymakers and scientists. We argue that 'the imagined scientist' can function as sensitizing concept for further studies of science governance across a range of topics, bringing into view how different deficit logics operate in science policy.


[1] Synoptic-scale polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) have been measured with an aircraft-borne lidar south of Spitsbergen in early February 2000. The PSCs of moderately depolarizing stratified layers extended from near the tropopause (10–11 km) up to 20 km altitude. Their internal structure in backscatter ratio reflects the variability of the particles' concentration rather than manifold sizes and phases of different optical efficiency. Actually, their size distribution was nearly monodisperse. According to T-matrix calculations, low backscatter ratios (γ < 3), color ratios of 1–1.5, and moderate depolarization ratios (δa ≈ 0.15–0.2) indicate that the observed layers were composed of aspherical nitric acid trihydrate (NAT) particles larger than 2 μm. During three turning point missions into the cold vortex core a significant settling of the particle layers was observed between aligned outgoing and incoming legs. Low stratospheric winds and quasi-Lagrangian flight heading minimized horizontal drifts between the probed volumes. A NAT particle sedimentation velocity of 69 ± 14 m/h is derived by cross-covariance analysis of corresponding pairs of two-dimensional backscatter sections of the layers. This implies a particle size of rp ≈ 7–8 μm and a mixing ratio of condensed HNO3 near 2 ppbv. The downward NOy flux below 19 km altitude amounts to j ≈ 3 ppbv km/d. Based on particle back trajectory analysis, this flux, derived from the observations in different regions of the Northern European Ice Sea, has a significant denitrification potential.


We consider a novel sub-class of log-location-scale models for survival and reliability data formed by restricting the density of the underlying location-scale distribution to be log-concave. These models display a number of attractive properties. We particularly explore the shapes of the hazard functions of these, LLSLC, models. A relatively elegant, if partial, theory of hazard shape arises under a further minor constraint on the hazard function of the underlying log-concave distribution. Perhaps the most useful LLSLC models are contained in a class of three-parameter distributions which allow constant, increasing, decreasing, bathtub and upside-down bathtub shapes for their hazard functions.


If we compare Livy's account of king Servius Tullius with the one reported by the other sources, some oddities stand out. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero and Zonaras/Cassius Dio, Servius seized the power thanks to a plebiscite and against the senate's will; in Livy, Servius begins to reign voluntate patrum and the election by the people is delayed until the end of the reign. Moreover Lucius Tarquinius' charge against Servius (non auctoribus patribus […] regnum occupasse) seems to clash with the voluntas patrum. In this essay, we shall try to find a proper explanation for these apparent 'contradictions'. On the one hand, Livy places the 'moderate element' of the voluntas patrum at the beginning of his account; on the other hand, the distribution of the land, the plebiscite and the senatorial dissent are postponed and linked to the discredited character of Tarquinius the Proud. Therefore Livy does not remove the 'irregularity' that, according to the tradition, characterized the reign of Servius Tullius, but he finds an effective way to dissimulate it. Consequently, whereas the other main sources show a sort of evolution of Servius from demagogy to moderation, in the Ab urbe condita we can recognize a 'total absolution' of the king who laid the foundations of the Roman Republic. Taking the cue from a thorough inquiry into the meaning of the delayed election and from a new contextualisation of it (see D.H. IV, 37), the Livian 'stratagems' that make this absolution possible are here analysed. email@example.com


The birth of the European Union involves not only the construction of a new supranational institutional architecture, but also a new conception of law and relations between State and Communitarian bodies. While legislative and policy levels are a classic key to the process of community law integration, relations between judges - European and national - recently consolidated through the participation of the constitutional courts, are developed according to an identitarian tone which covers constitutional and civil far-reaching issues, following a new grammar, substantially hermeneutical criteria-based. The traditional critical integration points between the community legal system and national systems (primacy, direct effectiveness and State liability principles) tinge recently in a lively new axiological coloring, regardless of the rambling intergovernmental negotiations. The depth of issues, including social ones, recently addressed by the European Court of Justice needs a higher degree of judicial support both from ordinary judges and from constitutional courts, which leads to rebuild main principles of this silent judicial dialogue. The Court of Justice emphasizes, for example, the principle of consistent interpretation for the ability to save - shape national discipline in the direction indicated by European rules. This criterion also serves to break the traditional internationalist verticality of relations between supranational rules and citizens, gradually introducing thanks also to the development of European constitutional super-principles as the criterion of equality and non-discrimination, the possibility of extending the legal situations between private Community Law rules intended exclusively for States: the European directives. The traditional demarcation line between public and private law in the 19th and 20th century constitutions, are increasingly intertwining through the wire of judge-Weaver. In the process of review of judicial relations, European and national judges are called to weave a new suit- the Harlequin one- for the body of Community law, not based on the much classic hermeneutical methodology of the simple implementation of resolutions adopted by the legislator, but on the ability to critically combine Community Law with national systems. The above mentioned principles of the process of integration, therefore, gradually change their initial intrinsic structure towards a dialogic model, completely in(ter)dependent from the Constitutional Treaty, the Lisbon Treaty or the Draft of Common Frame of Reference. The role of comparative science is essential for the dialectical conjugation of two systems.


Given a single outdoor image, we present a method for estimating the likely illumination conditions of the scene. In particular, we compute the probability distribution over the sun position and visibility. The method relies on a combination of weak cues that can be extracted from different portions of the image: the sky, the vertical surfaces, and the ground. While no single cue can reliably estimate illumination by itself, each one can reinforce the others to yield a more robust estimate. This is combined with a data-driven prior computed over a dataset of 6 million Internet photos. We present quantitative results on a webcam dataset with annotated sun positions, as well as qualitative results on consumer-grade photographs downloaded from Internet. Based on the estimated illumination, we show how to realistically insert synthetic 3-D objects into the scene.


With the explosive growth of wireless data, mobile edge caching has emerged as a promising paradigm to support mobile traffic recently, in which the service providers (SPs) prefetch some popular contents in advance and cache them locally at the network edge. When requested, those locally cached contents can be directly delivered to users with low latency, thus alleviating the traffic load over backhaul channels during peak hours and enhancing the quality-of-experience (QoE) of users simultaneously. Due to the limited available cache space, it makes sense for the SP to cache the most profitable contents. Nevertheless, users' true valuations of contents are their private knowledge, which is unknown to the SP in general. This information asymmetry poses a significant challenge for effective caching at the SP side. Further, the cached contents can be delivered with different quality, which needs to be chosen judiciously to balance delivery costs and user satisfaction. To tackle these difficulties, in this paper, we propose an optimal auction mechanism from the perspective of the SP. In the auction, the SP determines the cache space allocation over contents and user payments based on the users' (possibly untruthful) reports of their valuations so that the SP's expected revenue is maximized. The advocated mechanism is designed to elicit true valuations from the users (incentive compatibility) and to incentivize user participation (individual rationality). In addition, we devise a computationally efficient method for calculating the optimal cache space allocation and user payments. We further examine the optimal choice of the content delivery quality for the case with a large number of users and derive a closed-form solution to compute the optimal delivery quality. Finally, extensive simulations are implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed optimal auction mechanism, and the impact of various model parameters is highlighted to obtain engineering insights into the content caching problem.


Plants, notably the Poaceae, often accumulate large amounts of silicon (Si) from the soil. Si has multiple functional roles, particularly for alleviating abiotic and biotic stresses (e.g., defence against herbivores). Recent evidence suggests that environmental change, including temperature changes, can diminish Si accumulation which could affect functions such as herbivore defence. Using a field warming experiment, we grew a pasture grass (Phalaris aquatica) that was either supplemented or untreated with Si (+Si and −Si, respectively) under ambient and elevated (+2.8°C above ambient) air temperatures. We quantified soil water, plant growth rates, Si accumulation, leaf biomechanical properties and in situ relative growth rates of a herbivorous global insect pest (Helicoverpa armigera). Si supplementation promoted shoot and root biomass by c. 48% and 61%, respectively under ambient temperatures, but these gains were not apparent under warmed conditions. Warmer temperatures reduced Si uptake by −Si plants by c. 17%, potentially due to the lower levels of soil water content in warmed plots. Si supplementation, however, increased Si accumulation in leaves by c. 24% in warmed plots restoring Si levels to those seen under ambient temperatures. Si supplementation enhanced biomechanical properties in the leaves, but this was only statistically significant under ambient temperatures; leaves of +Si plants required 42% more force to fracture and were 30% tougher at the midrib than leaves of −Si plants. The relative growth rates of H. armigera declined by 56% when feeding on +Si plants under ambient temperatures, and while Si supplementation caused a trend towards declining herbivore growth rates under warmer conditions, this was not statistically significant. We conclude that climate warming may mitigate the beneficial effects of Si on Phalaris aquatica in the short term, potentially by reducing Si uptake. While Si uptake can be restored with Si supplementation, Si‐enhanced biomechanical defences against a global pest may not be fully restored under warmer temperatures. A plain language summary is available for this article.


While there is growing attention to climate policy, effective coordination, design and implementation of policy require attention to institutional design for climate governance. This paper examines the case of India, organized around three periods: pre-2007; 2007–2009 and 2010-mid-2014, providing institutional charts for each. Several key themes emerge. First, the formation of climate institutions have frequently been driven by international negotiations, even while filtered through domestic context. Second, once established, institutions tend not to be stable or long-lasting. Third, while various efforts at knowledge generation have been attempted, they do not add up to a mechanism for sustained and consistent strategic thinking on climate change. Fourth, coordination across government has been uneven and episodic, reaching a high point with a specialised envoy in the Prime Minister's Office. Fifth, the overall capacity within government, in terms of specialised skills and sheer numbers of personnel remains limited. Sixth, capacity shortfalls are exacerbated by closed structures of governance that only partially draw on external expertise. Seventh, institutional structures are not explicitly designed to enable India's stated objective of climate policy in the context of development, which implies specific attention to co-benefits and mainstreaming.


We analyze the shear flow of dense granular materials composed of circular particles immersed in a viscous fluid by means of Molecular Dynamics simulations interfaced with the Lattice Boltzmann Method. A homogeneous flow of the suspension is obtained through periodic boundary conditions and by directly applying a confining pressure on the granular phase and shearing the fluid phase. The stead-state rheology can be described in terms of effective friction coefficient and packing fraction of the suspension as a function of the ratio of viscous shear stress to confining pressure (frictional description), on one hand, and in terms of normal and shear viscosities of the suspension as a function of the packing fraction (viscous description), on the other hand. We show that the simulation data are consistent with both descriptions and in close agreement with the corresponding scaling laws observed in recent experiments.


We address classification problems for which the training instances are governed by an input distribution that is allowed to differ arbitrarily from the test distribution---problems also referred to as classification under covariate shift. We derive a solution that is purely discriminative: neither training nor test distribution are modeled explicitly. The problem of learning under covariate shift can be written as an integrated optimization problem. Instantiating the general optimization problem leads to a kernel logistic regression and an exponential model classifier for covariate shift. The optimization problem is convex under certain conditions; our findings also clarify the relationship to the known kernel mean matching procedure. We report on experiments on problems of spam filtering, text classification, and landmine detection.


Visual tracking is challenging as target objects often undergo significant appearance changes caused by deformation, abrupt motion, background clutter and occlusion. In this paper, we propose to exploit the rich hierarchical features of deep convolutional neural networks to improve the accuracy and robustness of visual tracking. Deep neural networks trained on object recognition datasets consist of multiple convolutional layers. These layers encode target appearance with different levels of abstraction. For example, the outputs of the last convolutional layers encode the semantic information of targets and such representations are invariant to significant appearance variations. However, their spatial resolutions are too coarse to precisely localize the target. In contrast, features from earlier convolutional layers provide more precise localization but are less invariant to appearance changes. We interpret the hierarchical features of convolutional layers as a nonlinear counterpart of an image pyramid representation and explicitly exploit these multiple levels of abstraction to represent target objects. Specifically, we learn adaptive correlation filters on the outputs from each convolutional layer to encode the target appearance. We infer the maximum response of each layer to locate targets in a coarse-to-fine manner. To further handle the issues with scale estimation and re-detecting target objects from tracking failures caused by heavy occlusion or out-of-the-view movement, we conservatively learn another correlation filter, that maintains a long-term memory of target appearance, as a discriminative classifier. We apply the classifier to two types of object proposals: (1) proposals with a small step size and tightly around the estimated location for scale estimation; and (2) proposals with large step size and across the whole image for target re-detection. Extensive experimental results on large-scale benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art tracking methods.


Innovations in cloud and service-oriented architectures continue to attract attention by offering interesting opportunities for research in scientific communities. Although advancements such as computational power, storage, networking, and infrastructure have aided in making major progress in the implementation and realization of cloud-based systems, there are still significant concerns that need to be taken into account.Principles, Methodologies, and Service-Oriented Approaches for Cloud Computing aims to present insight into Cloud principles, examine associated methods and technologies, and investigate the use of service-oriented computing technologies. In addressing supporting infrastructure of the Cloud, including associated challenges and pressing issues, this reference source aims to present researchers, engineers, and IT professionals with various approaches in Cloud computing.


In this paper we describe a lightweight framework for fast image segmentation on embedded systems, based on superpixels, which leverages on convolutional and graph-convolutional neural networks. In particular, we analyzed different superpixel representation looking for the best tradeoff between the efficiency of the system and richness of the description. Similarly, we analyzed different network sizes, balancing the number of filters used and the prediction accuracy. We also compared two different convolutional architecture, one based on the classical encoder-decoder paradigm and one based on graphs, to guarantee a most accurate representation of the image structure. The architecture was tested on the KITTI dataset using an embedded system with CUDA capabilities.


There has been strong empirical evidence that demand variability increases as one moves up the supply chain (from the retailer to the raw materials supplier), a phenomenon called bullwhip effect. This paper examines the bullwhip effect and in particular one of its main causes, demand forecasting. Key observations for the studies that deal with the impact of forecasting on the bullwhip effect are that: (1) all allow negative demands as well as negative orders for analytical tractability and (2) none considers the best exponential smoothing forecast without a prefixed smoothing constant. This paper validates the main findings in the literature when negative demands and negative orders are not allowed, using simulation. The main contribution is the inclusion of 'best' exponential smoothing as a forecasting method. This method is shown to explain some structural differences in bullwhip effect that have been observed in comparisons between naive exponential smoothing and optimal forecasting. Therefore, it provides an important alternative to naive smoothing for use in practice, especially as it is included in some of the more modern Demand Planning Systems.