Wireless communication systems and handset devices are showing a rapid growth in consumer and military applications. Applications using wireless communication standards such as personal connectivity devices (Bluetooth), mobile systems (GSM, UMTS, WCDMA) and wireless sensor network are the opportunities and challenges for the semi-conductor industry. The trend towards size and weight reduction, low power consumption and increased functionalities induces major technological issues. Today, the wireless circuit size is limited by the use of lots of external or "off-chip" components. Among them, quartz crystal, used as the time reference in any wireless systems, is the bottleneck of the miniaturization. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is an emerging technology which has the capability of replacing the quartz. Based on similar technology than the Integrated Circuit (IC), MEMS are referred as electrostatically, thermally or piezoelectrically actuated mechanical structures. In this thesis, a new MEMS device based on the hybridization of a mechanical vibrating structure and a solid-sate MOS transistor has been developed. The Resonant Suspended-Gate MOSFET (RSG-MOSFET) device combines both advantages of a high mechanical quality factor and the transistor intrinsic gain. The physical mechanisms behind the actuation and the behavior of this device were deeply investigated and a quasi-static model was developed and validated, based on measured characteristics. Furthermore, the dynamic model of the RSG-MOSFET was created, taking into account the non-linear mechanical vibrations of the gate and the EKV model, used for MOSFET modeling. Two fabrication processes were successfully developed to demonstrate the proof of concept of such a device and to optimize the performances respectively. Aluminum-silicon (Al-Si1%) and pure silicon-based RSG-MOSFETs were successfully fabricated. DC and AC characterizations on both devices enabled to understand, extract and evaluate the mechanical and MOSFET effects. A specifically developed RF characterization methodology was used to measure the linear and non-linear behaviors of the resonator and to evaluate the influence of each polarization voltages on the signal response. RSG-MOSFET with resonant frequencies ranging from 5MHz to 90MHz and quality factor up to 1200 were measured. Since MEMS resonator quality factor is strongly degraded by air damping, a 0-level thin film vacuum packaging (10-7 mBar) process was developed, compatible with both AlSi-based and silicon-based RSG-MOSFET. The technology has the unique advantage of being done on already released structure and the room temperature process makes it suitable for above-IC integration. In parallel, a front-end compatible process was defined and major build blocks were developed in industrial environment at STMicroelectronics. This technology is based on the Silicon-On-Nothing technology, originally developed for advanced transistor, and therefore making the MEMS resonator process compatible with CMOS co-integration. DC characterizations of SG-MOSFET had shown interesting performances of this device for current switch and memory applications. Mechanical contact of the gate with the MOSFET channel induces a current switching slope greater than 0.8mV/decade, much better than the theoretical MOSFET limit of 60mV/decade. Maximum switch isolations of -37dB at 2 GHz and -27dB at 10GHz were measured on these devices. A novel MEMS-memory has been demonstrated, based on the direct charge injection to the storage media by the mechanical contact of the metal gate. Charge injection and retention mechanisms were investigated based on measured devices. Cycling study of up to 105 cycles were performed without noticing major degradations of the electrical behavior neither mechanical fatigue of the suspended gate. The measured retention time places this memory in between the DRAM and the FLASH memories. A scaling study has shown integration and compatibilities capabilities with existing CMOS.


This volume presents what is presently known about the links between Africa and America before the age of Columbus. It makes a convincing case for pre-Columbian contacts between Africa and America before the era of the slave trade. The contributors draw upon the evidence of cultures in private collections and findings from excavations, and evidence of ancient African mathematics, astronomy, map-making, scripts, navigations, trade routes, pyramidal structures, linguistic connections, and technological and ritual complexes. The volume is profusely illustrated. Many readers will find the evidence presented here startling.


A number of researchers have proposed several Bayesian methods for portfolio selection, which combine statistical information from financial time series with the prior beliefs of the portfolio manager, in an attempt to reduce the impact of estimation errors in distribution parameters on the portfolio selection process and the effect of these errors on the performance of 'optimal' portfolios in out-of-sample-data. This thesis seeks to reverse the direction of this process, inferring portfolio managers probabilistic beliefs about future distributions based on the portfolios that they hold. We refer to the process of portfolio selection as the forward problem and the process of retrieving the implied probabilities, given an optimal portfolio, as the inverse problem. We attempt to solve the inverse problem in a general setting by using a finite set of scenarios. Using a discrete time framework, we can retrieve probabilities associated with each of the scenarios, which tells us the views of the portfolio manager implicit in the choice of a portfolio considered optimal. We conduct the implied views analysis for portfolios selected using expected utility maximization, where the investor's utility function is a globally non-optimal concave function, and in the mean-variance setting with the covariance matrix assumed to be given. We then use the models developed for inverse problem on empirical data to retrieve the implied views implicit in a given portfolio, and attempt to determine whether incorporating these views in portfolio selection improves portfolio performance out of sample.


ABSTRACT
Sensory quality of fish meat is influenced by many parameters prior to slaughter. In the present study, it was examined if previous infections or damages in the muscle tissue influence product quality parameters in fish. Fillets from rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) reared in seawater at a commercial fish farm were sensory evaluated for more than a year after recovery following physical tissue damage or infection by the bacterial pathogens Yersinia ruckeri and Vibrio anguillarum. The effect of vaccination was also included as some fish were vaccinated before bacterial challenge. The fish fillets were sensory examined as heat-treated and cold-smoked. Heat-treated fillets from nonvaccinated fish previously infected by V. anguillarum had changed textural characteristics and were less flaky, had a lower oiliness and a higher toughness and fibrousness in comparison with control fish. This article was the first to describe a correlation between previous infections in fish and changes in sensory-quality parameters.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
This work contributes with knowledge about sensory-quality parameters of fish meat after recovery from infections and physical-tissue damage. Because the results demonstrate an influence on the texture from previous disease, the practical potentials of the results are valuable for the aquaculture industry. In order to minimize the effects of previous diseases on the sensory quality regarding the texture, these fishes should be processed as cold-smoked instead of being sold as raw meat. The established correlation between disease history stresses the importance of disease prevention in aquaculture production, e.g., vaccination of the fish.


Provable security is a fundamental concept of modern cryptography (see, e.g., Katz and Lindell; Introduction to Modern Cryptography, Chapter 1, 2007). In order to argue about security, we first require a precise and rigorous definition of what security means (e.g., a definition of secure encryption). Such a security definition, in particular, contains a description of the capabilities of an adversary, i.e., a model of the adversary which tries to come as close to reality as possible. Given a security model, the provable security approach is to provide a mathematical proof that a given construction achieves the desired level of security. In other words, we prove that no (efficient) adversary can break the security with good probability given that it behaves as defined within the security model. Typically, proofs reduce the security of a construction to an unproven cryptographic hardness-assumption---we show that the existence of an adversary violates an assumption---which, preferably, is as simple as possible. Furthermore, any assumption needs to be stated precisely. Examples of cryptographic hardness assumptions can be complexity-theoretic assumptions, such as, P vs. NP, the assumed existence of objects, such as, one-way functions, or long standing open problems from number theory, such as, factoring large integers or computing the discrete log in certain groups.

A widely used technique for the construction of cryptographic schemes is the so-called random oracle methodology, introduced in 1993 by Bellare and Rogaway (CCS, 1993). As before, we start with a precise model of security which is extended to include a uniformly random function which may be evaluated by any party (including the construction and adversary). As a random function has a huge, if not infinite description, parties cannot be given its code but, instead, are provided with black-box access to an oracle which evaluates the function for them. This oracle is called the random oracle. Then, as before, a mathematical proof is given that a construction is secure as per definition relative to the random oracle. Finally, to implement the scheme in practice, the random oracle is replaced by a cryptographic hash function (such as SHA-3).

No mathematical model can fully capture reality and, thus, cast in the framework of provable security, we may consider a random oracle security model as being somewhat further away from reality than a standard security model: in addition to the abstractions of the standard security model it is assumed that adversaries do not make any use of the code of a hash function; it is assumed that they do not even evaluate the hash function on their own but use an external device for the evaluation (i.e., black-box access). Now, if we trust schemes that are designed according to the provable security approach, should we then also trust schemes devised via the random oracle methodology?

This question has lead to a huge debate within the cryptographic community and has been discussed for more than two decades. The discussion is fueled by results showing that the extension of security models to include a random oracle may produce provably secure schemes that cannot be securely implemented. In 1998, Canetti, Goldreich, and Halevi (STOC, 1998) showed that schemes exist that are inherently insecure but which should be secure according to the random oracle methodology. In more detail, they present a public-key encryption scheme which an adversary can trivially attack when given the code of the hash function that was used to replace the random oracle. Note that this differs from, e.g., side-channel attacks: while here also the attack is successful because it is outside the model, implementations can, potentially, protect against these attacks and, thus, secure implementations may exist. With the scheme presented by Canetti et al., on the other hand, there is, provably, no secure implementation although the scheme is secure in the random oracle model.

Despite these negative results, many of the schemes that we trust on a daily basis---examples include the standardized public-key encryption scheme RSA-OAEP as well as the standardized signature schemes RSA-PSS and DSA---only have proofs in the random oracle model. Similarly, for many advanced cryptographic concepts, including IND-secure deterministic public-key encryption, correlated-input secure hash functions, universal hardcore functions, and many others, we (so far) only have constructions in the random oracle model. One reason for the success of random oracles is that they allow to design very efficient and natural schemes. Furthermore, the power of random oracles enables us to realize concepts which we would not know how to implement without random oracles.
A third, and very compelling argument in favor of the random oracle methodology is that the random oracle heuristic seems to be a good one: no random oracle scheme which was not designed to portrait inconsistencies of the random oracle model has been attacked due to the use of random oracles. However, if a scheme is, indeed, secure, should we then not be able to understand and pinpoint the underlying source of hardness?

In this thesis we study random oracles with the help of program obfuscation (in particular indistinguishability obfuscation and point-function obfuscation).
The study of obfuscation has a long tradition in computer science, and specifically in cryptography, but only recent advancements gave rise to the first candidate constructions of provably secure general-purpose indistinguishability obfuscators (Garg et al.; FOCS, 2013). Intuitively, a program obfuscator takes as input a program and produces a functionally equivalent but unintelligible program, i.e., the obfuscated program hides how it operates. Conceptually, this is very close to one of the fundamental abstractions made within the random oracle model where hash functions do not have an explicit and efficient description but can be evaluated only via black-box access to the random oracle. While an obfuscated hash function still has an explicit and efficient description, the description should hide the way the function works and, thus, intuitively, should be of no help to any adversary.

Using obfuscation-based techniques we show how to instantiate the random oracle in various cryptographic constructions. Amongst others, we obtain the first standard model (i.e., without random oracles) candidate construction for a universal hardcore function with long output, a q-query correlated-input secure hash function, and q-query IND-secure deterministic public-key encryption. We obtain our positive results by instantiating various forms of universal computational extractors. The universal computational extractor (UCE) framework
was introduced by Bellare, Hoang, and Keelveedhi (CRYPTO, 2013) to provide (very strong) standard-model notions of hash functions that allow instantiating random oracles in a wide range of applications. Intriguingly, even though obfuscation allows us to show how to replace random oracles in certain situations, it also allows us to show limitations of the random oracle methodology as well as of UCEs. Using obfuscation-based techniques, we prove that several concrete UCE assumptions (including all originally proposed assumptions) cannot hold in case indistinguishability obfuscation exists. (We note that these negative results inspired the weaker UCE notions that lay at the core of our positive constructions.) Assuming the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation also allows us to extend the uninstantiability techniques of Canetti et al. (STOC, 1998) and show that a large class of random-oracle transformations are not sound. This affects the Encrypt-with-Hash transformation (Bellare et al.; CRYPTO, 2007) to construct deterministic public-key encryption, as well as the widely used Fujisaki--Okamoto transformation (Fujisaki, Okamoto; CRYPTO, 1999) which transforms weak public-key encryption schemes into strong public-key encryption schemes.

An often repeated criticism of random-oracle uninstantiability results is that the schemes only fail to be secure because they are designed to do so and, furthermore, their artificial design conflicts good cryptographic practice (see, for example, Koblitz and Menezes; Journal of Cryptology, 2007). Similar criticism can be voiced also for our counterexamples to the general applicability of the above mentioned random-oracle transformations. While this does not refute the mathematical validity of such uninstantiability results, we do, however, also present a very different counterexample to the soundness of the random oracle methodology: we show that if indistinguishability obfuscation exists, then a strong variant of point-function obfuscation (which can be similarly interpreted as a strong form of symmetric encryption) cannot be achieved without the help of random oracles while at the same time there are simple and elegant constructions in the random oracle model. We note that the same holds also for our negative results for UCEs.

In summary, we develop techniques to work with obfuscation which allow us to show that the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation implies that various random oracle techniques may lead to insecure schemes. Our results suggest, once again, that we should be careful with random oracle proofs and we hope that they spark further research to overcome the necessity to use random oracles in the first place. Concerning the latter, we make first steps by proposing new and widely applicable UCE notions together with standard-model candidate constructions showing that UCEs may, indeed, be a viable alternative to the use of random oracles.


We consider noncollinear interaction among three amplitude-modulated plane waves in a uniaxial crystal under type I phase-matching conditions. If one among the interacting fields can be taken as undepleted during the interaction, the remaining two fields are holographic replicas of each other: the undepleted field acts as the reference field in holography. We develop a general method to calculate the holographic wave front generated by a nonplane object wave front and a plane reference wave front. We present experiments in which a holographic image of an object consisting of a pointlike light source is obtained by choosing the object- and reference-field frequencies among ω1,ω2, and ω3 (with ω3=ω1+ω2) in any of the possible combinations.


The Planck satellite provides a set of all-sky maps at nine frequencies from 30 GHz to 857 GHz. Planets, minor bodies, and diffuse interplanetary dust emission (IPD) are all observed. The IPD can be separated from Galactic and other emissions because Planck views a given point on the celestial sphere multiple times, through different columns of IPD. We use the Planck data to investigate the behaviour of zodiacal emission over the whole sky at sub-millimetre and millimetre wavelengths. We fit the Planck data to find the emissivities of the various components of the COBE zodiacal model -- a diffuse cloud, three asteroidal dust bands, a circumsolar ring, and an Earth-trailing feature. The emissivity of the diffuse cloud decreases with increasing wavelength, as expected from earlier analyses. The emissivities of the dust bands, however, decrease less rapidly, indicating that the properties of the grains in the bands are different from those in the diffuse cloud. We fit the small amount of Galactic emission seen through the telescope's far sidelobes, and place limits on possible contamination of the CMB results from both zodiacal and far-sidelobe emission. When necessary, the results are used in the Planck pipeline to make maps with zodiacal emission and far sidelobes removed. We show that the zodiacal correction to the CMB maps is small compared to the Planck CMB temperature power spectrum and give a list of flux densities for small Solar System bodies.


With the aim of providing objective, reliable and comparable information on air pollution models, the European Topic Centre on Air Quality (ETC/AQ) has developed a concept for an air quality Model Documentation System (MDS) to be accessible on the internet. The aim of the system is to include adequate information on the individual models, their application areas, and their status with respect to evaluation and validation. Thus, a user may obtain guidance in the selection of the most appropriate model for their application. A pilot version of the MDS had been installed on the world wide web in 1997, while an updated operational version was launched in the spring of 1998. The present paper summarises the main features of the upgraded version of the MDS. Apart from fulfilling its main functional goal, i.e. to provide information on air quality models, the MDS structure also fulfils the main design goals, which are to create a lightweight, easily portable application that works through the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and requires minimal changes in the configuration of the http server and the system files.


Toxicoproteomic samples are rich in posttranslational modifications (PTMs) of proteins. Identifying these modifications via standard database searching can incur significant performance penalties. Here, we describe the latest developments in TagRecon, an algorithm that leverages inferred sequence tags to identify modified peptides in toxicoproteomic data sets. TagRecon identifies known modifications more effectively than the MyriMatch database search engine. TagRecon outperformed state of the art software in recognizing unanticipated modifications from LTQ, Orbitrap, and QTOF data sets. We developed user-friendly software for detecting persistent mass shifts from samples. We follow a three-step strategy for detecting unanticipated PTMs in samples. First, we identify the proteins present in the sample with a standard database search. Next, identified proteins are interrogated for unexpected PTMs with a sequence tag-based search. Finally, additional evidence is gathered for the detected mass shifts with a refinement search. Application of this technology on toxicoproteomic data sets revealed unintended cross-reactions between proteins and sample processing reagents. Twenty-five proteins in rat liver showed signs of oxidative stress when exposed to potentially toxic drugs. These results demonstrate the value of mining toxicoproteomic data sets for modifications.


Long‐term data from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire show that air temperature has increased by about 1 °C over the last half century. The warmer climate has caused significant declines in snow depth, snow water equivalent and snow cover duration. Paradoxically, it has been suggested that warmer air temperatures may result in colder soils and more soil frost, as warming leads to a reduction in snow cover insulating soils during winter. Hubbard Brook has one of the longest records of direct field measurements of soil frost in the United States. Historical records show no long‐term trends in maximum annual frost depth, which is possibly confounded by high interannual variability and infrequency of major soil frost events. As a complement to field measurements, soil frost can be modelled reliably using knowledge of the physics of energy and water transfer. We simulated soil freezing and thawing to the year 2100 using a soil energy and water balance model driven by statistically downscaled climate change projections from three atmosphere‐ocean general circulation models under two emission scenarios. Results indicated no major changes in maximum annual frost depth and only a slight increase in number of freeze–thaw events. The most important change suggested by the model is a decline in the number of days with soil frost, stemming from a concurrent decline in the number of snow‐covered days. This shortening of the frost‐covered period has important implications for forest ecosystem processes such as tree phenology and growth, hydrological flowpaths during winter, and biogeochemical processes in soil. Published in 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


This paper examines the validity of the effective mass concept used in the CRASH 3 damage analysis equations. In this study, the effective mass concept is described, the simplifying assumptions that it entails are detailed, and the accuracy of the concept is tested by comparing ∆Vs calculated from the CRASH 3 equations to results of numerical simulations with a non-central impact model. This non-central impact model allowed the effective mass concept to be tested in isolation from other assumptions of the CRASH 3 program. The results of this research have shown that the effective mass concept accurately models the effects of collision force offset when certain conditions are met. These conditions are discussed, along with their implications for damage interpretation. This paper also presents an analytic expression that relates damage energy to closing speed (initial relative velocity) for the general case of non-central collisions. Equations relating damage energy to closing speed for the case of central collisions have been discussed extensively in the literature. However, a comparable equation for the general case of vehicle-to-vehicle noncentral impacts has not been reported. The effective mass concept is used to generalize the relationship between closing speed and damage energy.


BACKGROUND & AIMS
Caregivers of children with chronic diseases included in a home enteral nutrition (HEN) programme are at risk of experiencing a feeling of burden, high level of anxiety and psychological distress. The aims of this study were: first, to examine the prevalence of symptoms of anxiety-depression in caregivers of children with neurological diseases requiring HEN by gastrostomy tube (GT); second, to compare the characteristics of caregivers with high or low risk of exhibiting symptoms of anxiety-depression; and third, to investigate possible associations to child disease severity and nutrition support mode.

METHODS
A cross-sectional observational study was performed in 58 caregivers of children (31 boys, aged 0.3-18 years) with neurological diseases and GT feeding. The characteristics of caregivers with high or low risk of presenting symptoms of anxiety-depression were compared regarding the following variables: socio-demographic characteristics, the primary caregiver's intrapsychic factors, anthropometric parameters of the child, length of HEN, type of nutrients delivered by GT and infusion regime.

RESULTS
All primary caregivers were mothers. Fifty-three per cent of them showed high risk of exhibiting symptoms of anxiety-depression. Mothers with high or low risk of presenting symptoms of anxiety-depression were comparable in age and family socio-economic status. They were also similar in terms of age, anthropometric conditions and length of HEN in their children.No differences were found between the two groups of mothers according to the level of the child's motor function impairment, type of nutrients delivered by GT and infusion regime. Higher levels of psychological distress and perception of burden overload were found in mothers with high risk of exhibiting symptoms of anxiety-depression.

CONCLUSIONS
This study found a high prevalence of symptoms of anxiety-depression, perception of burden overload and psychological distress in caregivers of children with HEN. Thus, greater practical and emotional support is required for these families.


GAIN VARIATION AND NOISE FIGURE DEGRADATION IN BALANCED AMPLIFIERS Akif Alperen Coşkun Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Advisor: Abdullah Atalar July 2017 Although using balanced amplifiers in modern wireless communication systems has many advantages, the output and the noise response of the balanced amplifiers may vary from the expected value considerably due to the imperfections in the amplifier and the divider/combiner sections. First, we analyze the variation in the total gain of the balanced amplifiers using 2-way 0◦ power dividers and 90◦ couplers. In this context, mathematical analyses are made and analytical expressions are obtained to compare the two topologies. Analytical expressions show that the uncertainty in the total gain is more if the 90◦ coupler is used in the balanced structure as opposed to a 2-way 0◦ power divider for the same return loss/isolation values. Then, we present exact and approximate analytical results for the noise figure and noise parameters of the balanced amplifier in divider topology by using the noise waves. By the help of the noise wave approach, the output noise powers generated by each element in the balanced amplifier are derived. Y-parameters are used to determine the noise waves and the correlation matrix of the divider whereas the noise parameters are used to write the noise waves of the amplifier. Balanced amplifiers suffer in the noise figure performance in comparison to a stand-alone amplifier even with an ideal input divider. The noise parameters degrade further with an imperfect divider. Not only the nonzero return loss and the isolation but also the ohmic loss, amplitude and phase imbalances are considered. Besides, non-zero optimal source impedance affects the noise parameters of the balanced amplifier. Measurement results are also presented as a verification.


The Pictet-Spenglerasestrictosidine synthase (STR) has been characterized as the central enzyme in the biosynthesis of around 2000 monoterpenoid indole alkaloids in plants. In the light of a high therapeutic value and huge scaffold diversity these alkaloids represent, STR as an enzyme has attracted great attentions in recent years, intending to be utilized in the formation of new interesting alkaloids with unusual substitution pattern or even with novel scaffolds. For outlining the application potential that STR possesses, together with insight into the reaction mechanism catalyzed by STR, strategies and methods for exploring the applicability of STR have been updated in this article by taking R. serpertina STR(RS-STR) and C. roseus.STR (CR-STR) as representative models, followed by introducing the latest released complex structures of RS-STR with new substrates. Examples provided here, including substrate scaffold tailoring, X-ray crystal complex structure comparison, protein engineering and biosynthetic pathway reprogramming, pave the way to finally construct novel alkaloids libraries by chemo-enzymatic approaches.


Convolutional Neural Networks are extremely efficient architectures in image and audio recognition tasks, thanks to their ability to exploit the local translational invariance of signal classes over their domain. In this paper we consider possible generalizations of CNNs to signals defined on more general domains without the action of a translation group. In particular, we propose two constructions, one based upon a hierarchical clustering of the domain, and another based on the spectrum of the graph Laplacian. We show through experiments that for low-dimensional graphs it is possible to learn convolutional layers with a number of parameters independent of the input size, resulting in efficient deep architectures.


In this chapter we discuss a number of recent studies that demonstrate the use of rational analysis (Anderson, 1990) and cognitive modelling methods to understand complex interactive behaviour involved in three tasks: (1) icon search, (2) graph reading, and (3) information retrieval on the World Wide Web (WWW). We describe the underlying theoretical assumptions of rational analysis and the adaptive control of thought-rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998), a theory of cognition that incorporates rational analysis in its mechanisms for learning and decision making. In presenting these studies we aim to show how such methods can be combined with eye movement data to provide detailed, highly constrained accounts of user performance that are grounded in psychological theory. We argue that the theoretical and technological developments that underpin these methods are now at a stage that the approach can be more broadly applied to other areas of Web use. © 2009, IGI Global.


INTRODUCTION
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a chronic disorder that requires long-term treatment. Escitalopram has previously been shown to be effective and well tolerated in the acute treatment of GAD.

METHOD
Three 8-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of nearly identical design were conducted of escitalopram in moderate-to-severe GAD (DSM-IV criteria). Patients completing these trials were given the option of entering a 24-week, open-label, flexible-dose trial of escitalopram (10-20 mg/day). Data were collected from September 20, 2000, to August 15, 2002.

RESULTS
Two hundred ninety-nine (56.8%) of 526 patients completed 24 weeks of open-label treatment. The mean Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety (HAM-A) score at baseline of open-label treatment was 13.1. Long-term escitalopram treatment led to continuing improvement on all anxiety and quality-of-life (QOL) scores. Of those completing 24 weeks of treatment, 92.0% were responders (Clinical Global Impressions-Improvement scale score < or = 2), and the mean HAM-A score in the completed analysis was 6.9; using the last observation carried forward (LOCF), 75.9% were responders, and the mean HAM-A score in the LOCF analysis was 9.2 at endpoint. Insufficient therapeutic response and adverse events led to withdrawal of 4.2% and 9.9% of patients, respectively. Mean increase in weight from baseline was 3.0 lb. No clinically notable changes in mean laboratory, vital sign, or electrocardiographic values were observed.

CONCLUSION
These results support the long-term tolerability and effectiveness of escitalopram in the treatment of GAD.


There are approximate more than 100 viruses comes under human Papillomavirus family and 40% of them are easily transmitted through sexual contact, from skin and mucous membrane of infected people. E6 protein of HPV mainly acts as an oncoprotein by stimulating the destruction of many host cell key regulatory proteins. The main aim of present study is to identify the potential natural inhibitors against E6 protein. Through literature search 28 inhibitors were selected and analyzed molecular descriptor properties, applied Lipinski's rule of 5 to select only druglikeness ligands, thus 12 inhibitors remain. The docking was performed by Auto Dock and calculates lowest binding energy to select top hits. Curcumin and Dihydroisocoumarin bind more efficiently to target protein. Therefore, the outcomes of present study may provide new insights in understanding of selected twelve natural inhibitors which can be potential candidates against oncoprotein (E6).


Background: Rosacea is a common chronic inflammatory dermatosis that affects about 10% of the population. Although various environmental stimulants and endogenous factors have been shown to stimulate the innate immune response and abnormal neurovascular signaling in the etiology, the variety of clinical forms leads to a poor understanding of the pathophysiology of rosacea. Objectives: In this study, we aimed to determine the relationship between rosacea disease and the intestinal microbiome. Methods: For this purpose, 20 patients with clinical diagnosis of rosacea in the Education and Research Hospital of Sakarya University and 10 healthy volunteers with age and sex matched to the control group were included. 16s ribosomal RNA sequence and metagenomic analyses were performed from fecal samples. Results: We determined the relationships between various changes in the rosacea clinic and intestinal microbiome. According to the results of metagenomic DNA analysis in rosacea patients according to healthy volunteers, Lachnospira, Lachnoclostridium, Roseburia, and Roseburia intestinalis were found to be higher and Coriobacteriaceae, Ruminococcaceae, Butyricimonas virosa, and Clostridiales bacteria were found to be higher. Conclusion: These differences were thought to be related to indirect dysbiotic pathways with rosacea clinic. Since only one study examining the relationship between rosacea and intestinal microbiome can be reached in the literature, it is needed to have more and more sampling studies in order to make sense of the microorganisms that stand out.


Learning generalizable policies that can adapt to unseen environments remains challenging in visual Reinforcement Learning (RL). Existing approaches try to acquire a robust representation via diversifying the appearances of in-domain observations for better generalization. Limited by the specific observations of the environment, these methods ignore the possibility of exploring diverse real-world image datasets. In this paper, we investigate how a visual RL agent would benefit from the off-the-shelf visual representations. Surprisingly, we find that the early layers in an ImageNet pre-trained ResNet model could provide rather generalizable representations for visual RL. Hence, we propose Pre-trained Image Encoder for Generalizable visual reinforcement learning (PIE-G), a simple yet effective framework that can generalize to the unseen visual scenarios in a zero-shot manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on DMControl Generalization Benchmark, DMControl Manipulation Tasks, Drawer World, and CARLA to verify the effectiveness of PIE-G. Empirical evidence suggests PIE-G improves sample efficiency and significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of generalization performance. In particular, PIE-G boasts a 55% generalization performance gain on average in the challenging video background setting. Project Page: https://sites.google.com/view/pie-g/home.


There have been quite a few studies regarding the development of intercultural competence through online exchanges (Helm 2009, Chun 2011, Schenker 2012, Kitade 2012, etc.). Most of these exchanges, however, are between native speakers and learners of that language. The benefit of such exchanges may be maximized if both parties are learning the same foreign language and have the opportunity to utilize the language they are learning during the interaction. As defined by Byram (1997) and Liaw (2006), 'intercultural competence' is not just learning about the target culture, but also about becoming aware of one's own culture, and connecting students from different countries who are studying the same target language and culture would be an ideal setting in order for the students to evaluate both their own and target cultures critically.It is often said to be difficult or almost impossible for students in distance courses to develop intercultural competence because of the lack of opportunity to study abroad or the lack of an international atmosphere in the classroom (Tyberg 2009). Thus another goal of this study is to investigate the possibility of providing opportunities for all students, regardless of their circumstances, to develop intercultural competence.During the spring semester 2012, a group of fourth level (intermediate to advanced level) Japanese students from Gettysburg College in the United States and from Hogskolan Dalarna (Dalarna University) in Sweden took part in a study of how Japanese learners from different countries benefit from communicating with each other in Japanese. Throughout the term, the students exchanged ideas and views regarding the topics surrounding the issues of "identity" via blogs and joint-seminars using an online video conferencing system. The topic "identity" was selected since both parties can discuss the issue from different perspectives such as 'foreigners in Japan', 'foreigners in the U.S./Sweden', 'Japanese people living in the U.S./Sweden', as well as from the students' 'own identities.'The student survey showed that the students from both Sweden and the United States found the project to be fun, interesting and a new and positive experience. One student epitomized the comments from the majority of the participants. – "We were actively discussing identity with students raised in another culture in a class setting, which lends an air of understanding and interest to the discussion."The results from this study suggest that through interactions with university students from other countries who study Japanese at the same level, the students can gain not only Japanese skills, but expand their horizons and deepen their understanding of another culture as well as the topics discussed during the meetings. Not everyone has an opportunity to study abroad, but today's technology allows every student to be a part of the internationalization process, develop his/her cultural-literacy and reflect on his/her identity.In this session, the process, benefits, and limitations of our online exchanges will be discussed and some suggestions on how one should conduct and what are required for in ordered to have a successful international online exchanges will also be presented based on our experiences.The target audience of this session are teachers and educators as well as administrators who recognize the importance of acquisition of intercultural competence, not limited to but especially, in language education, and those who are considering the possibilities of allowing students to participate in the internationalization process without traveling abroad.References:Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.Byram, M., Gribkova, B., & Starkey, H. (2002). Developing the intercultural dimension in language teaching: A practical introduction for teachers. Strasbourg, France: Council of Europ.Chun, D. M. (2011). Developing Intercultural communicative competence through online exchanges. CALICO Journal, 28 (2), 392-419.Helm, F. (2009). Language and culture in an online context: what can learner diaries tell us about intercultural competence. Language and Intercultural Communication, 9 (2), 91-104.Hogskoleverket. (2008). En hogskola i varlden: internationalisering for kvalitet. Hogskoleverkets rapportserie 2008:15R.Kitade, K. (2012). An exchange structure analysis of the development of online intercultural activity. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 25 (1), 65-86.Liaw, M-L. (2006). E-learning and the development of intercultural competence. Language Learning &Technology, 10(3), 49-64.Schenker, T. (2012). Intercultural competence and cultural learning through telecollaboration. CALICO Journal, 29(3), 449-470.Tyberg, E. (2009). Internationalisering: perspektivbyte, forhallningssatt och fredsprojekt. In Martin Stigmar, (Ed.). Hogskolepedagogik: att vara professionell som larare i hogskolan, Chapter 12. Stockholm: Liber.


The attention mechanism is an important part of the neural machine translation (NMT) where it was reported to produce richer source representation compared to fixed-length encoding sequence-to-sequence models. Recently, the effectiveness of attention has also been explored in the context of image captioning. In this work, we assess the feasibility of a multimodal attention mechanism that simultaneously focus over an image and its natural language description for generating a description in another language. We train several variants of our proposed attention mechanism on the Multi30k multilingual image captioning dataset. We show that a dedicated attention for each modality achieves up to 1.6 points in BLEU and METEOR compared to a textual NMT baseline.


Nuisance law offers unrivalled instruction about the formal structure and substantive morality of strict liability in tort, and by so doing challenges the dominant theories of tort. On the one hand, the structure and substance of nuisance law do not conform to the economic thesis that tort is a law concerned with the efficient management of externalities. Nuisance law does indeed address harmful spillovers caused by the productive use of land but its governing aim in addressing those spillovers is to reconcile equal, but conflicting, rights. The right to the reasonable use and enjoyment of land is the touchstone of nuisance law and the primary concern of nuisance law is not the broad class of all externalities associated with the use of land, but a circumscribed class of harms that are also rights-violation. Nuisance law attempts to make equal— but conflicting— rights to the reasonable use and enjoyment compatible. Nuisance is a law of harms and rights, not costs and benefits, and it aims to reconcile competing claims fairly, not efficiently. On the other hand, the law of nuisance confounds the corrective justice conception of tort as a realm of conduct-based wrongs. Negligence liability is a conduct-based wrong par excellence; it predicates responsibility to repair on conduct which unjustifiably inflicts injury. Modern American nuisance law, however, is constructed around a distinction between unreasonable conduct and unreasonable harm, and it insists on reparation for harm justifiably done. Nuisance faults not the primary conduct responsible for doing harm, but a secondary failure to make reparation for harm reasonably done. Nuisance is a canonical "strict liability wrong" and strict liability is, in its most characteristic form, a conditional wrong whose essence lies in failing to volunteer reparation for harm justifiably done. Strict liability in nuisance supposes that an injurer does wrong when it fails to step forward and repair harm rightly inflicted. It is premised both on the principle of fairness that those who benefit from the infliction of harm should also shoulder its burdens, and on the perception that leaving the cost of such harm on the victims who suffer it shows insufficient respect for the victims' rights. Nuisance law has both a coherent overarching structure and tangled, elusive details. Much of this paper is therefore devoted to untangling those details. I try to show that impact— not conduct— is the essence of nuisance, and that the distinctiveness of the field as a form of tort liability lies in its imposition of strict liability on justified, intentional conduct. The explication and reconstruction of nuisance law leads through a thicket of doctrines which construct nuisance as a realm of reciprocal right and mutual benefit and develop the distinction between unreasonable conduct and unreasonable harm. The paper then takes up perhaps the most important of modern American nuisance cases—Boomer v. Atlantic Cement. The great achievement of Boomer is to clarify the morality of both unreasonable conduct and unreasonable harm, thereby giving a clear representation of nuisance as a strict liability wrong. Boomer takes harmful conduct to be unreasonable when the harm inflicted might feasibly be avoided— when it might be eliminated without ending or crippling the activity responsible for its infliction. Reasonable harm, by contrast, is harm that should be inflicted; it is the unavoidable side effect of some productive use that we are not prepared to forego. Strict liability in Boomer is thus a morality of responsibility for unavoidable harm, a morality of responsibility for the harmful effects not of wrongful agency but of agency itself. Fairness, Boomer asserts, requires that unavoidable harm be borne by those who inflict it and reap its benefits. The last part of the paper argues that Boomer's least appreciated lesson is a lesson about the significance of harm for the law of torts. Corrective justice theorists have stressed the importance of wrongful conduct for the law of torts, casting tort as a law of conduct-based wrong. They have been concomitantly uneasy with strict liability in tort, because strict liability is not predicated on wrongful conduct. Boomer illuminates the competing basis of strict liability in tort. In Boomer, it is the infliction of harm—the serious impairment of agency— not the infliction of harm through wrongful agency, that gives rise to responsibility and reparation. Strict liability challenges negligence because it insists that responsibility for harm done is not at an end when harm is justifiability done. Harm done to others is, in and of itself, a matter of moral concern and legal responsibility.


As population aging has become increasingly acute in many countries, the debate over how to reform often creaking public pension systems has gathered momentum. In many cases, this debate has become politicized and the focus on some of the underlying economic issues has been lost. This volume hopes to redress some of this imbalance. It begins by examining the rationale behind why public pension systems were introduced originally - out of fear that individuals do not adequately save for retirement. It then systematically examines different aspects of reforming these systems. It covers the fiscal repercussions of reform, the implications of the baby boom on asset returns in the years ahead, the political economy of the reform process, and finally the risk-sharing implications that are inherent in reform. An important additional goal of this volume is to make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible: students, academics, and policy makers.


She's had four number one hits in the UK in the past fourteen months. She took home two Grammy awards in 2010. She's sold out shows in the UK, North America, Australia, Europe, and Japan. She's a global phenomenon, and one of the most powerful female artists in the world. But just like every girl in the world, she loves to dress up! From glitter skeleton corsets and white pleather go--go boots to bubble dresses and chain mail hoods, Lady Gaga exploded on the international fashion scene almost as quickly as she burst onto the music scene. In this lavishly illustrated style guide, Lizzy Goodman, a music and fashion writer for Rolling Stone, Elle and New York Magazine, explores the fashion chameleon that is Gaga. Loaded with 120 brilliant colour and black and white images, you'll see the many faces of Lady Gaga and the impact of her style on art and fashion. With chapters covering everything from her dabble in the burlesque and bondage chic to her penchant for architectural and origami-inspired outfits, Gaga has never shied away from exposing herself. And since fashion is never just about the clothes, there are gorgeously illustrated chapters that cover her hair and nail art, make--up, shoes, accessories and tattoos-all of which play an essential role in the Haus of Gaga. So who is the girl fishing in 8--inch heels? Who is the singer in the blood-drenched bodysuit? Who is the woman behind the sunglasses? Now is your chance to find out.


Background: Health claims regarding the cholesterol-lowering effect of soluble fiber from oat products, approved by food standards agencies worldwide, are based on a diet containing ≥3 g/d of oat β-glucan (OBG). Given the number of recently published randomized controlled trials (RCTs), it is important to update the findings of previous meta-analyses. Objective: The objective was to quantify the effect of ≥3 g OBG/d on serum cholesterol concentrations in humans and investigate potential effect modifiers. Design: A meta-analysis was performed on 28 RCTs comparing ≥3 g OBG/d with an appropriate control. Systematic searches were undertaken in PubMed, AGRICOLA, and Scopus between 1 January 1966 and 6 June 2013, plus in-house study reports at CreaNutrition AG. Studies were assessed with regard to inclusion/exclusion criteria, and data were extracted from included studies by reviewers working independently in pairs, reconciling differences by consensus. Estimates of the mean reduction in serum cholesterol from baseline between the OBG and control diets were analyzed by using random-effects meta-analysis models and meta-regression. Results: OBG in doses of ≥3 g/d reduced low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and total cholesterol relative to control by 0.25 mmol/L (95% CI: 0.20, 0.30; P < 0.0001) and 0.30 mmol/L (95% CI: 0.24, 0.35; P < 0.0001), respectively, with some indication of heterogeneity (P = 0.13 and P = 0.067). There was no significant effect of OBG on high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol or triglycerides and no evidence that dose (range across trials: 3.0–12.4 g/d) or duration of treatment (range: 2–12 wk) influenced the results. LDL cholesterol lowering was significantly greater with higher baseline LDL cholesterol. There was a significantly greater effect for both LDL and total cholesterol in subjects with diabetes compared with those without (although based on few studies). Conclusions: Adding ≥3 g OBG/d to the diet reduces LDL and total cholesterol by 0.25 mmol/L and 0.30 mmol/L, respectively, without changing HDL cholesterol or triglycerides.


ABSTRACT This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of 'the disenchantment of the world'. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.


Induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPSC) are adult somatic cells genetically reprogrammed to an embryonic stem cell-like state. Due to their autologous origin from adult somatic cells, iPSCs are considered a tremendously valuable tool for regenerative medicine, disease modeling, drug discovery and testing. iPSCs were first obtained by introducing specific transcription factors through retroviral transfection. However, cell reprogramming obtained by integrating methods prevent clinical application of iPSC because of potential risk for infection, teratomas and genomic instability. Therefore, several integration-free alternate methods have been developed and tested thus far to overcome safety issues. The present chapter provides an overview and a critical analysis of advantages and disadvantages of non-integrating methods used to generate iPSCs.


This paper addresses the interference management in a MIMO interference channel (MIMO-IC) by proposing a decentralized transmit and receive beamformer optimization using improper (or circularly asymmetric complex) Gaussian signaling. For the ease of exposition, the downlink (DL) of a cellular network is considered. In order to generate improper Gaussian signals, widely linear precoding (WLP) is adopted at transmission, while at reception we consider that users might apply either widely linear estimation (WLE) or linear estimation. The coordination between transmitters for WLP design is attained by taking into account the received signal in the uplink (UL), provided that propagation channel reciprocity can be assumed and that transmit filters in the UL are appropriately designed. In this way the estimation of the interfering channels is avoided, while we can take advantage of both DL transmit coordination to adjust transmit power and beamformers and the use of improper Gaussian signaling to exploit the real and imaginary dimensions of the MIMO channel. Simulations show that the proposed decentralized technique allows reducing the mean square error (MSE) and increasing user throughput in highly interfered scenarios.


To better understand agricultural carbon fluxes in California, USA, we estimated changes in soil carbon and woody material between 1980 and 2000 on 3.6 x 10(6) ha of farmland in California. Combining the CASA (Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach) model with data on harvest indices and yields, we calculated net primary production, woody production in orchard and vineyard crops, and soil carbon. Over the 21-yr period, two trends resulted in carbon sequestration. Yields increased an average of 20%, corresponding to greater plant biomass and more carbon returned to the soils. Also, orchards and vineyards increased in area from 0.7 x 10(6) ha to 1.0 x 10(6) ha, displacing field crops and sequestering woody carbon. Our model estimates that California's agriculture sequestered an average of 19 g C x m(-2) x yr(-1). Sequestration was lowest in non-rice annual cropland, which sequestered 9 g C x m(-2) x yr(-1) of soil carbon, and highest on land that switched from annual cropland to perennial cropland. Land that switched from annual crops to vineyards sequestered 68 g C x m(-2) x yr(-1), and land that switched from annual crops to orchards sequestered 85 g C x m(-2) x yr(-1). Rice fields, because of a reduction in field burning, sequestered 55 g C x m(-2) x yr(-1) in the 1990s. Over the 21 years, California's 3.6 x 10(6) ha of agricultural land sequestered 11.0 Tg C within soils and 3.5 Tg C in woody biomass, for a total of 14.5 Tg C statewide. This is equal to 0.7% of the state's total fossil fuel emissions over the same time period. If California's agriculture adopted conservation tillage, changed management of almond and walnut prunings, and used all of its orchard and vineyard waste wood in the biomass power plants in the state, California's agriculture could offset up to 1.6% of the fossil fuel emissions in the state.


We are anchored to the world because we are bodies. For us, the world means human society based upon nature. Nature is an essential constituent. For human being is bodily existence: social relationships are basically formed through the contact between these bodily existences, one with another, and the cultural space, that is, the city, is based on matter and surrounded by nature. Hence the possibility and the necessity of anchorage. An inanimate object is simply thrown into the sea of matter. Human bodies, on the contrary, do not only belong to this material texture in a passive way but can also live in it in an active way and constitute it as world. Modern civilization has severed our anchorage to the world. It is expected and very often believed that the aesethetic moderates and even mediates this opposition. I am convinced that all our creative activities in our actual situation of civilization after modernity should originate in and be based on our Being-on-the-Earth.


BACKGROUND
Advancements in tumor profiling have identified multiple molecular biomarkers that influence tumor growth and behavior. Molecular biomarkers provide clinical prognostic and predictive information, which guides treatment decisions and forms the backbone of precision oncology.

OBJECTIVES
This article identifies key predictive and prognostic molecular biomarkers used in the treatment of colorectal cancer and provides greater understanding of their biologic significance and usefulness in guiding treatment decisions.

METHODS
A review of the literature and professional guidelines was performed to evaluate approved molecular biomarkers, targeted agents, and tumor testing modalities used for the management and treatment of colorectal cancer, with an emphasis on treatment decision making.

FINDINGS
Genomic biomarkers are increasingly used for the prevention, diagnosis, prognostication, and management of colorectal cancer. The introduction of targeted agents and advancements in tumor profiling technologies have increased treatment opportunities and improved clinical outcomes for patients with colorectal cancer.


From the Publisher:
Today's increased use of digital sound and video makes data compression crucial to computer technology because of its vast storage and transmission requirements. The question in many applications is now not whether to compress data, but what compression method should be applied.
Most data compression books have been written for professionals and require a strong background in data compression techniques as well as an understanding of algorithms based on sophisticated mathematical models. This book is one of a handful of textbooks to present Data Compression for students in an academic environment. This is not a simple task since most of the widely used algorithms rely on sophisticated mathematical models. ELEMENTS OF DATA COMPRESSION addresses the needs of students who will use these techniques on a daily basis. The author accomplishes this through the use of elementary-level representative methods of text, audio, and video compression. Drozdek presents these methods with pseudocode, tables, diagrams, and many worked out examples, all the while employing commonly used techniques that build upon the mathematics students have been exposed to in earlier courses.


This is the definitive collection of Shirley Jackson's short stories, including 'The Lottery' - one of the most terrifying and iconic stories of the twentieth century, and an influence on writers such as Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. "Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written". (Donna Tartt). In these stories an excellent host finds himself turned out of home by his own guests; a woman spends her wedding day frantically searching for her husband-to-be; and in Shirley Jackson's best-known story, a small farming village comes together for a terrible annual ritual. The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these tales of wasted potential and casual cruelty by a master of the short story. Shirley Jackson's chilling tales have the power to unsettle and terrify unlike any other. She was born in California in 1916. When her short story The Lottery was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the greatest American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by five more: Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. Shirley Jackson died in her sleep at the age of 48. "An amazing writer ...if you haven't read any of her short stories ...you have missed out on something marvellous". (Neil Gaiman). "Her stories are stunning, timeless - as relevant and terrifying now as when they were first published...'The Lottery' is so much an icon in the history of the American short story that one could argue it has moved from the canon of American twentieth-century fiction directly into the American psyche, our collective unconscious". (A. M. Homes).


MANET is a self-organized and self-configurable network, where the mobile nodes move arbitrarily. The mobile nodes could receive and forward packets as a router or gateway. This paper is analysis the performance of the protocols like AODV, DSR and OLSR protocols. We compared three routing protocols i.e. AODV, DSR and OLSR. Our simulation tool will be OPNET modeler. The performance of these routing protocols is analyzed by three metrics: delay, network load and throughput. All the three routing protocols are explained in a deep way with metrics and OLSR protocol is among the best out of said protocols. The OLSR protocol is a variation version of the traditional link state protocol. An important aspect of OLSR is the introduction of multipoint relays (MPRs) to reduce the flooding of messages carrying the complete link-state information of the node and the size of link-state updates.


Marian is determined to be ordinary. She lays her head gently on the shoulder of her serious fiancee and quietly awaits marriage. But she didn't count on an inner rebellion that would rock her stable routine, and her digestion. Marriage a la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can't stomach ...The Edible Woman is a funny, engaging novel about emotional cannibalism, men and women, and desire to be consumed. 'Margaret Atwood not only has a sense of humour, she has wit and style in abundance ...a joy to read' Good Housekeeping 'Written with a brilliant angry energy' Observer 'A witty, elegant, generous and patient writer' Punch


This paper explores community-engaged scholarship as a framework to support the learning objectives of a sociological deviance course taught at the University of Guelph. This teaching methodology concretizes and humanizes members of groups socially defined as deviant and allows students to step outside of traditional academic methodology and to actively engage in scholarship. While there are myriad ways to implement community-engaged techniques, the use of community partners as guest speakers will be explored in this paper. Throughout a one-semester sociological deviance course, speakers were brought in from various community organizations to share either lived or professional experiences in fields relating to groups socially defined as deviant.  Reflections by students and speakers are presented herein, as a means of demonstrating the utility of using community engaged scholarship in the teaching of sociological deviance and enriching the knowledge schemas and capacity for action on the part of students, community partners and professors. One of the primary benefits of community-engaged work is its ability to give voice to community partners, a voice which may be largely ignored in traditional academic endeavors. The technique also creates a bridge between theory and practice and has the potential to improve student-learning outcomes, build the sociological imagination among students and professors, and mobilize knowledge beyond the walls of the classroom. As a result of engaging in active learning about social deviance, students report feeling better connected to the community as a whole, reinforcing the social and civic responsibility and partnership facets of community engaged scholarship.


Abstract. We address the synthesis of distributed control policies to enable a swarm of homogeneous mobile sensors to maintain a desired spatial distribution in a geophysical flow environment, or workspace. In this article, we assume the mobile sensors (or robots) have a "map" of the environment denoting the locations of the Lagrangian coherent structures or LCS boundaries. Using this information, we design agent-level hybrid control policies that leverage the surrounding fluid dynamics and inherent environmental noise to enable the team to maintain a desired distribution in the workspace. We discuss the stability properties of the ensemble dynamics of the distributed control policies. Since realistic quasi-geostrophic ocean models predict double-gyre flow solutions, we use a wind-driven multi-gyre flow model to verify the feasibility of the proposed distributed control strategy and compare the proposed control strategy with a baseline deterministic allocation strategy. Lastly, we validate the control strategy using actual flow data obtained by our coherent structure experimental testbed.


This paper discusses coordination failures, their relevance to developing countries, and the circumstances under which they occur, arguing that that clusters can be seen as agglomerations of firms and organizations in related economic activities among which coordination failures are likely to arise. In other words, clusters provide opportunities for microeconomic interventions that promote coordination and collective action to improve productivity. Subsequently presented is a model of a small economy plagued by sector or cluster-specific coordination failures, which demonstrates that policy should foster cooperation in sectors where the economy already shows comparative advantage. In regard to innovation, general policies that aim to increase innovation across the board are likely to be inferior to policies that take a more selective approach by trying to induce the development of innovation clusters in areas of comparative advantage. The paper concludes with suggestions on how an understanding of coordination failures and clusters can form the basis for a set of effective microeconomic interventions for middle-income countries.


In Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Court reaffirmed the long-standing equal protection doctrine that government actors can only be held liable for discriminatory conduct when they purposefully rely on a forbidden characteristic, such as race or gender, in promulgating policy; to simply know that minorities and women will be adversely affected by the law does not deny these groups equal protection under the law. This Essay interrogates this doctrine by taking a closer look at Iqbal and Feeney, the thirty-year-old precedent the majority cited as the source of its antidiscrimination standard. Because Feeney was cited in neither of the lower court opinions, its reappearance in Iqbal signals the Court's reluctance to intervene in matters (even tangentially) related to national security even if the government's allocation of burdens and benefits perpetuates societal racial and gender privileges. In Feeney, the Court upheld a Massachusetts law granting benefits to war veterans, even though the state legislature was aware that less than two percent of the veterans at the time were women, owing in part to women's exclusion from military service; thirty years later, the Iqbal Court dismissed constitutional claims against two high ranking federal officials responsible for orchestrating modern-day round-ups of noncitizens from so-called terrorist-breeding states, even though these officials knew their policies would disproportionately burden individuals of a certain racial, religious, and citizenship background. Both cases illustrate the inertia that has befallen the Court as it appears unwilling to engage in the traditional balancing of government interests against individual rights on the theory that the disaffected minorities must essentially prove that lawmakers bore them the equivalent of ill will or animus - in Feeney's words, reiterated verbatim in Iqbal: that the decisionmakers chose a course of action "because of, not merely in spite of, [the action's] adverse effects upon an identifiable group." By taking a closer look at the challenged laws in Feeney and Iqbal, by examining the Court's choice to defer to the political branches' decisions to press ahead despite the laws' effects upon minority groups, and by reminding ourselves of times when the Court's imagination and innovative thinking stretched beyond the confines of formal rational basis review, this Essay explores the limits inherent in deferring to political actors, especially when we know they are consciously perpetuating privilege, furthering discrimination by default. Even in matters that arguably relate to national security and foreign policy, the Court should never shirk its responsibility to closely scrutinize discriminatory governmental policies that were deliberately adopted.


There is scant information concerning the chemical composition of the mud-water interface in shallow, aerobic, eutrophic bodies of water. A little more is known of this region in deep eutrophic lakes with periodically anaerobic hypolimnions. The object of this paper is to compare the composition of the mud-water interface in two such limnological systems and to demonstrate the effect this region exerts on the chemical life of lakes. The shallow lake used as an example is the preserve of Lake Huleh, Israel, which is hypereutrophic and rarely contains water to a depth greater than 35 cm but has an area of 46.9 ha (116 acres). Linsley Pond, Connecticut, will be used as an example of a deeper (14.6 m) eutrophic lake which is thermally stratified except for the autumnal and vernal isothermal periods. In a shallow aerobic pond such as the Huleh Preserve, elements that are sorbed by the mud fall into two groups: those that are sorbed and retained by the organic matter, and those that move in concert with the ferric hydroxide complex. Under anaerobic conditions such as those present in Linsley Pond much of the year, those same elements diffuse from the mud into the hypolimnion. Those elements held most strongly in the surface waters, as contrasted to the mud-water interface in shallow aerobic systems such as the Huleh Preserve, diffuse from the reduced mud surface in anaerobic systems such as Linsley Pond. Some elements diffuse from a reduced mud surface and under aerobic conditions attain equilibrium. These are rubidium, lithium, and aluminum. Sodium, boron, silicon, chromium, nickel, and chlorine do not diffuse from a reduced mud surface. In aerobic systems chlorine attains equilibrium, while in the shallow Huleh Preserve the sodium concentrates in the surface water. Boron, silicon, chromium, and nickel in shallow systems become enriched in surface waters in contrast to the liquid or solid portion of the mud-water interface. All elemental concentrations reported in this study represent the total amount detected. Speciation is not addressed. The cyclical nature of elemental concentrations noted in this study should provide a much-needed background for sediment quality criteria.


Placed within the realms of Human Computer Interaction, this thesis contributes towards the goals of Ubiquitous Computing, where mobile devices can provide anywhere, anytime support to people's everyday activities. With interconnected computing devices distributed in our habitat, services relevant to any situation may be always available to address our needs. However, despite the enhanced capabilities of mobile phones, users had been reluctant to adopt any services other than calls and messaging. This has been changing more recently, especially since the launch of the iPhone, with users getting access to hundreds of services. The original question motivating the research presented in this thesis "How can we improve mobile service usage?" is in the interest of enthusiasts of mobile services as well as slow adopters. We propose the concept of 'mobile service awareness' and operationalise it through the more focused research question: "How can we design for non-intrusive yet informative auditory mobile service notifications?" We design and conduct a series of surveys, laboratory experiments and longitudinal field studies to address this question. Our results, also informed by literature on context-aware computing, awareness, notification systems and auditory interface design, produce two distinct major contributions. First, we provide a set of conclusions on the relative efficiency of auditory icons and earcons as auditory notifications. Second, we produce a set of design guidelines for the two types of notifications, based on the critical evaluation of the methodologies we develop and adapt from the literature. Although these contributions were made with mobile service notification in mind, they are arguably useful for designers of any auditory interfaces conveying complex concepts (such as mobile services) and are used in attention demanding contexts.


RATIONALE
The development of lung cancer (LC) is accompanied by field changes in the airway mucosa that may have prognostic importance.

OBJECTIVES
To compare patients with prevalent LC to control subjects regarding their histologic dysplasia scores and chromosomal aneusomy as measured by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH).

METHODS
The most advanced bronchial histology lesion was assessed from each of 44 LC cases and 90 cancer-free control subjects using a four-color FISH probe set encompassing the chromosome 6 centromere, 5p15.2, 7p12 (epidermal growth factor receptor), and 8q24 v-myc myelocytomatosis viral oncogene homolog (MYC) sequences. Histology grades were coded as dysplasia (moderate or severe) or carcinoma in situ (CIS).

MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS
CIS was the highest histologic grade for 32 subjects, and dysplasia was the highest grade for 102 subjects (54 moderate, 48 severe). Chromosomal aneusomy was seen in 64% of the LC cases, but in only 31% of the control subjects (odds ratio [OR], 4.68; 95% confidence interval [CI]. 1.97-11.04). Among those with any level of dysplasia, the OR for positive FISH and LC was 2.28 (95% CI, 0.75-6.86). Among those with CIS, the OR for positive FISH and LC was 5.84 (95% CI, 1.31-26.01).

CONCLUSIONS
Chromosomal aneusomy is associated with LC. Prospective examination of aneusomy as a precursor lesion that predicts LC is needed.


Introduction National BCSP screening for all 60–69 year olds commenced in 2006, and was extended to 60–74 year olds in 2010. The first site open was in Wolverhampton in July 2006. Previous trials had demonstrated the efficacy of population screening with the use of faecal occult blood test. We have previously shown that in the first two years of the BCSP downstaging of colorectal cancer in the screened group was demonstrated (45.3% Dukes A and 21.7% Dukes B).1 Method Retrospective analysis of data from the first 7 years of the programme (August 2006 to December 2013) included demographics, screening outcomes (neoplasia and adenoma detection), pathological staging of cancers and colonoscopy quality indicators. Surveillance outcomes were reported on those patients eligible in the study period. Results During the study period (2006–13) 4506 colonoscopies were undertaken (63.4% Male; n = 2855). Mean caecal intubation rate was 97.1% and mean withdrawal time for normal procedures was 7.3 min. 355 cancers were detected (65.3% Male; n = 232). 62.5% of cancers were 'early' (23% Dukes A, 31.5% Dukes B) and 71.5% were left-sided (28% rectal, 37.4% sigmoid). 3699 adenomas were detected and the mean number of adenomas per procedure was 0.82. 37% (n = 1366) of these were 1 cm. The mean adenoma detection rate per colonoscopist was 43.25%. The high risk (n = 420) and intermediate risk (n = 768) adenomas were surveyed as per national guidance. In those high risk surveillance cases (n = 420) the detection of adenoma was seen in 31.4% (n = 132) of which 13.6% (n = 18) of them had adenomas greater than 1 cm. 0.47% (n = 3) of surveillance cases were found to have cancer suggestive of a potential post colonoscopy missed cancer. Conclusion These data confirm that a high quality screening colonoscopy service has been maintained since inception of the BCSP. Despite high quality indicators for endoscopic performance, surveillance has demonstrated missed adenoma and cancer still occur. Cancer staging data suggest a diminished benefit in the latter 5 years of the BCSP. Disclosure of interest None Declared. Reference Ellul P, Fogden E, Simpson CL, et al. Downstaging of colorectal cancer by the national bowel cancer screening programme in England: first round data from the first centre. Colorectal Dis. 12:420–422


A fractal is an object or a structure that is self-similar in all length scales. Fractal geometry is an excellent mathematical tool used in the study of irregular geometric objects. The concept of the fractal dimension, D, as a measure of complexity is defined. The concept of fractal geometry is closely linked to scale invariance, and it provides a framework for the analysis of natural phenomena in various scientific and engineering domains. The relevance of the power law scaling relationships is discussed. Fractal characteristics of porous media and the characteristic method of the porous media are also discussed. Different methods of analysis on the permeability of porous media are discussed in this chapter.


A new generation of vaccines containing multiple protein components that aim to provide broad protection against serogroup B meningococci has been developed. One candidate, 4CMenB (4 Component MenB), has been approved by the European Medicines Agency, but is predicted to provide at most 70–80 % strain coverage; hence there is a need for second-generation vaccines that achieve higher levels of coverage. Prior knowledge of the diversity of potential protein vaccine components is a key step in vaccine design. A number of iron import systems have been targeted in meningococcal vaccine development, including the HmbR and HpuAB outer-membrane proteins, which mediate the utilization of haemoglobin or haemoglobin–haptoglobin complexes as iron sources. While the genetic diversity of HmbR has been described, little is known of the diversity of HpuAB. Using whole genome sequences deposited in a Bacterial Isolate Genome Sequence Database (BIGSDB), the prevalence and diversity of HpuAB among Neisseria were investigated. HpuAB was widely present in a range of Neisseria species whereas HmbR was mainly limited to the pathogenic species Neisseria meningitidis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Patterns of sequence variation in sequences from HpuAB proteins were suggestive of recombination and diversifying selection consistent with strong immune selection. HpuAB was subject to repeat-mediated phase variation in pathogenic Neisseria and the closely related non-pathogenic Neisseria species Neisseria lactamica and Neisseria polysaccharea but not in the majority of other commensal Neisseria species. These findings are consistent with HpuAB being subject to frequent genetic transfer potentially limiting the efficacy of this receptor as a vaccine candidate.


There are a huge number of features which are said to improve Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accuracy. Practical testing of combinations of such features on large datasets, and theoretical justification of the result, is required. Some features operate on certain models exclusively and for certain problems exclusively, or only for small-scale datasets; while some features, such as batch-normalization and residual-connections, are applicable to the majority of models, tasks, and datasets. We assume that such universal features include Weighted-Residual-Connections (WRC), Cross-Stage-Partial-connections (CSP), Cross mini-Batch Normalization (CmBN), Self-adversarial-training (SAT) and Mish-activation. We use new features: WRC, CSP, CmBN, SAT, Mish activation, Mosaic data augmentation, CmBN, DropBlock regularization, and CIoU loss, and combine some of them to achieve state-of-the-art results: 43.5% AP (65.7% AP50) for the MS COCO dataset at a realtime speed of ~65 FPS on Tesla V100. Source code is at this https URL


Abstract. Climate change is predicted to affect water resources infrastructure due to its effect on rainfall, temperature and evapotranspiration. However, there are huge uncertainties on both the magnitude and direction of these effects. The Pong reservoir on the Beas River in northern India serves irrigation and hydropower needs. The hydrology of the catchment is highly influenced by Himalayan seasonal snow and glaciers, and Monsoon rainfall; the changing pattern of the latter and the predicted disappearance of the former will have profound effects on the performance of the reservoir. This study employed a Monte-Carlo simulation approach to characterise the uncertainties in the future storage requirements and performance of the reservoir. Using a calibrated rainfall-runoff (R-R) model, the baseline runoff scenario was first simulated. The R-R inputs (rainfall and temperature) were then perturbed using plausible delta-changes to produce simulated climate change runoff scenarios. Stochastic models of the runoff were developed and used to generate ensembles of both the current and climate-change perturbed future scenarios. The resulting runoff ensembles were used to simulate the behaviour of the reservoir and determine "populations" of reservoir storage capacity and performance characteristics. Comparing these parameters between the current and the perturbed provided the population of climate change effects which was then analysed to determine the uncertainties. The results show that contrary to the usual practice of using single records, there is wide variability in the assessed impacts. This variability or uncertainty will, no doubt, complicate the development of climate change adaptation measures; however, knowledge of its sheer magnitude as demonstrated in this study will help in the formulation of appropriate policy and technical interventions for sustaining and possibly enhancing water security for irrigation and other uses served by Pong reservoir.


The SEC adopted Rule 10b5-1 to define what it means to trade securities "on the basis of" material nonpublic information. This was to address decisions and commentary that found no insider trading violation of Rule 10b-5 where the defendant did not "use" inside information in deciding to trade, even if one "possessed" the information when the decision was made. Rule 10b5-1 specifies exclusive affirmative defenses for one charged with trading on the basis of material nonpublic information, the essence of which are that there is no violation if the trade was made pursuant to a pre-arranged plan, even if the seller or buyer later became aware of the information before the trade was made. There is, however, a substantial argument that the SEC exceeded its powers in adopting exclusive criteria for what it means to trade "on the basis of" material nonpublic information, rather than creating a safe harbor. Non-use of inside information in deciding to trade remains a defense even if the trade was not made pursuant to a Rule 10b5-1 plan. Although the SEC abandoned a proposal to require detailed disclosure of some Rule 10b5-1 plans, other SEC rules require disclosure of a plan in some circumstances, although compliance may be deficient. Irrespective of mandated disclosure, there are reasons both for and against voluntary disclosure of a Rule 10b5-1 plan. Some have suggested that Rule 10b5-1 is being misused in that executives establish such plans, know when a trade will occur under the plan and then, in order to maximize their profits when the trade is made, delay or accelerate disclosure of corporate news that would affect the stock price. In most situations, any such timing of corporate disclosure would not violate the securities laws.


The University of Massachusetts Medical School's two year preclinical curriculum is organized by organ system and controlled by the basic science departments. It is followed by two years of required and elective clinical clerkships. An evaluation of cancer teaching in the preclinical curriculum using criteria derived from the Cancer Education Objectives for Medical Schools was conducted. Deficiencies in cancer teaching were documented and the need for an organized cancer education program established. The administration then allotted 18 hours for cancer teaching spread over the two years of the preclinical curriculum. Supported by an R25 Cancer Education Grant, the Longitudinal Cancer course (LCC), was developed in an attempt to effectively utilize the scattered class time to meet a significant number of American Association for Cancer Education Objectives. In addition, interdisciplinary teaching of the more common cancers was facilitated and faculty were supported in their use of cancer related examples to illustrate relevant materials in the basic sciences. Evaluation of the LCC after a three-year trial has shown that, without strong administrative support, it is a very inefficient method of cancer teaching. While students appreciated class content and met a significant number of course objectives, they found the longitudinal format of the course unsatisfactory and recommended that the course be consolidated into a block. R25 grant support was being sought to implement a proposal to consolidate cancer teaching when the R25 program was suspended. Without external support, implementation will be difficult because it will require serious disruption of an established course. Such a change will require resources that are not readily available in this era of fiscal constraint.


Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has disproportionately affected certain vulnerable populations. Studies noted higher rates of certain comorbidities such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in patients infected with COVID-19 with severe disease.1 Additionally, areas with more racial/ethnic minorities and higher rates of poverty have been shown to have higher rates of COVID-19 hospitalization and death.2 After adjustment for comorbidities, age has been independently associated with increased mortality due to COVID-19.3 However, limited attention has been given to children, who appear to have lower risk of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection and mortality. In this issue of JAMA, Bunyavanich et al4 identify a possible factor that may be related to lower rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children. The authors evaluated gene expression in nasal epithelial samples collected as part of a study involving patients with asthma from 2015 to 2018. The nasal epithelium is one of the first sites of infection with SARS-CoV-2, and the investigators probed for the expression of the cell surface enzyme angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which has been proven to bind to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and promote internalization of the virus into human cells.5 Among a cohort of 305 patients aged 4 to 60 years, older children (10-17 years old; n = 185), young adults (18-24 years old; n = 46), and adults (≥25 years old; n = 29) all had higher expression of ACE2 in the nasal epithelium compared with younger children (4-9 years old; n = 45), and ACE2 expression was higher with each subsequent age group after adjusting for sex and asthma. Numerous studies have highlighted the low rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children compared with adults. Children have been shown to have fewer and less severe symptoms compared with adults.6,7 This leads to the question of whether low rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children are due to low rates of testing in children, or if children are less susceptible to infection. An evaluation of 1286 close contacts of index cases in China found that infection rates in children were comparable with or slightly higher than in younger adults (aged 30-49 years) but were significantly lower than in older patients (aged ≥60 years).8 This finding suggests that children seem to have similar rates of becoming infected compared with middle-aged adults following close contact with a person infected with SARS-CoV-2. In contrast, a targeted screening approach in Iceland found SARS-CoV-2 in 6.7% of children younger than 10 years old (n = 564) compared with in 13.7% of people aged 10 years or older (n = 8635). A population-wide screening approach not restricted to people at risk of disease in the same study found no positive cases of SARS-CoV-2 among children under 10 years old, whereas 0.8% of people older than 10 years were positive for SARS-CoV-2.9 Although the true rate of acquiring SARS-CoV-2 infection among children of different age groups in the United States remains unclear, initial studies have suggested a lower incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in US children.7 While ACE2 binds to the receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV-2, a serine protease, TMPRSS2, is shown to cleave SARS-CoV-2 S protein, allowing for cell membrane fusion and endocytosis of the virus and subsequent viral replication. To better understand expression of these 2 key proteins, a number of single-cell RNA sequencing experiments have mapped them to various human cell types. One study using human and nonhuman primate tissue found ACE2 expression in the secretory cells of the nasal epithelia (upper respiratory tract) and in the type II pneumocytes of the lower respiratory tract.10 In fibrotic human lung tissue, only 1.4% of type II pneumocytes expressed ACE2, and 0.8% of type II pneumocytes expressed both ACE2 and TMPRSS2. In human ethmoid sinus surgical specimens representing upper respiratory epithelia, 1.3% of all secretory cells expressed ACE2 while 0.3% expressed both ACE2 and TMPRSS2 but were further enriched in secretory goblet cells.11 The spatial resolution offered by single-cell RNA sequencing highlights the limited number of cells in the respiratory tract that express ACE2. Further evaluation of ACE2 expression at the single-cell level in children could help explain whether a lower percentage of ACE2-expressing cells or a decrease in expression in ACE2 expression per cell is related to lower ACE2 expression in nasal epithelium, as noted in children identified by Bunyavanich et al.4 ACE2 has an important role in counterbalancing the effects of ACE. Angiotensin II, a product of ACE cleaving angiotensin I, can cause vasoconstriction, inflammation, and fibrosis by signaling through angiotensin II type 1 receptors. ACE2 can cleave angiotensin II to angiotensin 1-7, which can suppress inflammation and fibrosis and generate vasodilation by binding to the Mas receptor. Previous studies have found ACE2 to play a protective role in severe lung injury in ACE2 knockout mice.12 If ACE2 can mitigate lung injury but serves as a receptor for viral entry, then is more ACE2 or less ACE2 expression protective for children? In the nasal epithelium of the upper airway, lower ACE2 expression could be helpful in decreasing acquisition of SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, in the lower respiratory tract, it appears that decreased ACE2 expression could portend a higher risk of developing severe acute respiratory distress and lung injury. Related article Opinion


In late February 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in PPL Corp. v. Commissioner. The Court took that case, which involves a claim by a U.S. corporation for foreign tax credits for taxes paid in accordance with the 1997 U.K. Windfall Profit Tax Act, in order to resolve a conflict between the Third Circuit, which denied the credit in PPL, and the Fifth Circuit, which allowed the credit in Entergy Corp. v. Commissioner. Nominally, the U.K. Act imposed a tax on recently privatized regulated companies of 23 percent of the difference between their estimated market value and the price at which they were sold to the public. The Act calculated each company's market value by multiplying average earnings over a period of up to four years by 9 (a multiplier described as a conservative estimate of the market capitalization rate for such companies). The Fifth Circuit allowed the credit on the grounds that the substance of the tax imposed by the Act is a tax on the four prior years' earnings, albeit at an effective rate higher than the statutory rate. In contrast, the Third Circuit denied the credit on the ground that the Act imposed a tax on a difference in values, not on income, as required by the Code and the applicable Treasury Regulation for the foreign tax to be creditable. This essay examines the economic and legal arguments that have been raised in PPL.


Performance funding in higher education ties state funding directly to institutional performance on specific indicators, such as rates of retention, graduation, and job placement. One of the great puzzles about performance funding is that it has been both popular and unstable. Between 1979 and 2007, 26 states enacted it, but 14 of those states later dropped it (though two recently reestablished it). To shed light on the causes of this unstable institutionalization of performance funding, we examined three states that have experienced different forms of program cessation — Illinois, Washington, and Florida. For our analysis of the factors leading these three states to abandon performance funding systems, we drew upon interviews and documentary analyses that we conducted in these states. Our interviews were with state and local higher education officials, legislators and staff, governors and their advisors, and business leaders. The documents we analyzed included state government legislation, policy declarations and reports, newspaper accounts, and analyses by other investigators. We inevitably found that factors unique to one or another state played a role in the demise of performance funding. Nonetheless, we also found several common features: The final section of this paper discusses the implications of these findings for advocates of performance funding.


Abstract The first generation of a hydrogen isotope separation process called the thermal cycling absorption process (TCAP) has been in service for tritium separation at the Savannah River Site since 1994. To prepare for replacement, a next-generation TCAP process has been developed. This new process simplifies the column design and reduces the equipment requirements of the thermal cycling system. An experimental 12-m column was fabricated and installed in the laboratory to demonstrate its performance. This new design and its initial test results were presented at the Eighth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology and are published in the proceedings, Fusion Sci. Technol., Vol. 54, No. 2, p. 399 (2008). We have since completed the start-up and demonstrated the separation of protium and deuterium in the experimental unit. The unit has been operated for more than 200 cycles. A feed of 25% deuterium in protium was separated into two streams, each with better than 99.7% purity.


Economics and management literatures advocate that senior company executives should be remunerated on the basis of the financial performance of the firms they manage. This helps align the interests of management with those of stockholders. There are, however, problems in implementing pay for performance schemes and these, along with other factors, may lead to there being no empirical relationship between compensation and stockholder returns. This study set out to explore the determinants of chief executive compensation in Norwegian stock exchange listed firms. To date there have been very few studies on this topic using data from Norway; most previous research has employed American data. The results show a positive relationship between CEO pay and corporate size but there was no significant association between remuneration and corporate financial performance as measured by accounting profitability and as measured by stock returns. Estimates of the value added by companies were significantly related to chief executive pay. There was also a positive and significant relationship between a CEO's compensation and the average wage level of the company. This association may be due to the unique characteristics of Norway's social and economic structure.