A methodology is introduced for generating three-dimensional hybrid meshes for turbomachinery airfoils. This method creates a volume mesh by stacking layers of area meshes along the blade spanwise direction. The area meshes are hybrid meshes composed of a structured O-grid around the airfoil and an unstructured grid in the rest of the domain. Each layer of the stacked mesh is mapped from a single 'source' mesh. Optimization-based smoothing is applied to the mapped area mesh to increase mesh quality. The optimization-based smoothing is also applied to the periodic boundaries to optimize the placement of the grid points. Further enhancement of grid quality is obtained by edge swapping and node insertion. Edge swapping reduces the dependency of mesh quality on the choice of the source mesh. The meshing algorithm is tested on a challenging turbine rotor airfoil whose stagger angle varies approximately 88 degrees from hub to tip.


This edited volume, Excellent MSc Dissertations 2019, is the forth in the series that brings a selection of five postgraduate dissertations, written by the students who undertook the MSc degree in Media and Com- munication at Lund University, in Sweden and graduated in June 2019. All five texts published in this edited volume were originally presented and evaluated as part of the final thesis exams in May 2019, in which they were awarded top grades. During the autumn of 2019, they were revised and edited for publication in the publication series Fortjanstfulla examensarbeten i medie och kommunikationsvetenskap (FEA), which was launched in 2008 to bring attention to and reward student work of a particularly high quality.With this publication, we hope to inspire future students writing dis- sertations, and contribute to debates inside and outside of academia on media, communication and cultural studies. In particular, the work in this book asks us to critically reflect on media's role in challenging patriarchy and gender inequalities, as well as people's civic engagement and concern over democracy, political and environmental crises; and human's relationships with media, technology and AI. All of the issues brought up in this book make us think, question and understand our- selves within the socio-cultural, and mediated environment we live in. (Less)


This thesis investigates the Hindu Shahi dynasty in Lower Dir, Malakand Agency, Swat and Buner Districts (the study region) in north-western Pakistan through systematic landscape survey to gain insights into their activities and political position of the study region. The archaeology of the Hindu Shahi period has received little attention and their knowledge is limited to few partisan historical accounts and understandings of temples' architecture and excavations of few sites. Previous archaeological research in the study region has brought to light considerable Hindu Shahi evidence, representing their retreat to the region after the fall of the Vale of Peshawar to the Ghaznavids. The present survey resulted in the documentation of 225 Hindu Shahi sites in the study region, comprising a single Hindu temple, two wells and 222 settlement sites (including 140 sites with watchtowers). Most of these sites, with multiple watchtowers, bastions and storage pits, are distinctly visible defensive structures, situated on high altitudes and prominent landscape features, such as hilltops and high slopes. Majority of these sites are linked with inter and intra-valley trade and access routes, major and minor passes and Swat and Panjkora Rivers. These sites give clues to the defensive strategy of the Hindu Shahi of protecting the study region and hindering Ghaznavids attacks from the neighbouring regions, particularly from the Vale of Peshawar. Mayar valley was the most naturally and geographically protected area of the study region. The analyses of Hindu Shahi settlements and pottery assemblage suggest it to be the core Hindu Shahi activity area. The present study argues for the study region to be their first and most densely populated known region with significant highly defensive architecture, representing a significant activity, including retreat, of Hindu Shahi Dynasty and Mayar valley, as the most well-defended territory, possibly as their last political centre or seat of power.


Background Plague is endemic within the central highlands of Madagascar, where its main reservoir is the black rat, Rattus rattus. Typically this species is considered susceptible to plague, rapidly dying after infection inducing the spread of infected fleas and, therefore, dissemination of the disease to humans. However, persistence of transmission foci in the same area from year to year, supposes mechanisms of maintenance among which rat immune responses could play a major role. Immunity against plague and subsequent rat survival could play an important role in the stabilization of the foci. In this study, we aimed to investigate serological responses to plague in wild black rats from endemic areas of Madagascar. In addition, we evaluate the use of a recently developed rapid serological diagnostic test to investigate the immune response of potential reservoir hosts in plague foci. Methodology/Principal Findings We experimentally infected wild rats with Yersinia pestis to investigate short and long-term antibody responses. Anti-F1 IgM and IgG were detected to evaluate this antibody response. High levels of anti-F1 IgM and IgG were found in rats one and three weeks respectively after challenge, with responses greatly differing between villages. Plateau in anti-F1 IgM and IgG responses were reached for as few as 500 and 1500 colony forming units (cfu) inoculated respectively. More than 10% of rats were able to maintain anti-F1 responses for more than one year. This anti-F1 response was conveniently followed using dipsticks. Conclusion/Significance Inoculation of very few bacteria is sufficient to induce high immune response in wild rats, allowing their survival after infection. A great heterogeneity of rat immune responses was found within and between villages which could heavily impact on plague epidemiology. In addition, results indicate that, in the field, anti-F1 dipsticks are efficient to investigate plague outbreaks several months after transmission.


The evolving concept of 'Smart Cities' (SC) is today gaining global momentum in scientific and policy arenas. With the rising potential for jobs and improved lifestyle, these fast-growing cities are witnessing an ever-increasing concentration of populations and economic activities. However, the core aspect of sustainability is often overshadowed in SC by the components of economic growth. In view of the rising water, energy, and food (collectively referred to as WEF) demands in cities and the interlinkages between WEF systems, this study aims to highlight the role of SC in enhancing WEF resource efficiency from a nexus perspective. To study the current trends of SC developments first, a specific case of proposed Nagpur smart city (India) is reviewed based on document analysis and preliminary discussions with local government officials. Thereafter, bibliometric analysis (based on Scopus data) is conducted to establish a comprehensive understanding of existing SC research in varying domains of interlinked WEF systems. While the proposed Nagpur smart city is observably focused on city-centric goals with a high emphasis on infrastructure development, this study underlines the need for environmental resource conservation at a transboundary level. The key opportunities for optimizing the WEF nexus in Nagpur are then highlighted in reference to the bibliometric analysis.


If there's something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? EIS!

In the early 1950s, Alexander Langmuir, an epidemiologist for the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, warned that pathogenic microbes could be used as agents of biological warfare. To counter the threat, he advised the federal government to establish a ready response team at CDC. This advice was prescient: when Korean hemorrhagic fever virus infected 25,000 American troops in June 1951, killing 3,000, funding was provided to establish the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). The two-year program trained young epidemiologists not only to look out for biological warfare, but to respond quickly to unintentional epidemics.

Despite the success of EIS in producing the world's disease detectives, the history of the organization has never been told. Neither does Mark Pendergrast tell the history of EIS in Inside the Outbreaks — although it is a compelling collection of dozens of vignettes that cover many of the most interesting disease outbreaks of the past 60 years. If you are a microbe geek like I am, you will love reading about how EIS officers travel the world to quell lethal threats to global health.

All of the well-known infectious disease stories are here: pandemic influenza, the eradication of smallpox, the "Cutter incident" involving contaminated polio vaccine, and the first outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in Philadelphia, to name just a few. But there are many other less well-known incidents that established disease etiologies. An example is the finding by the EIS in 1955 of the importance of Staphylococcus aureus in hospital-acquired infections.

Inside the Outbreaks is divided into three sections: "The Grand Adventures of Dr. Langmuir's Boys" covers 1951–1970; "The Golden Age of Epi" continues to 1982; and "Complex Challenges" takes us to the present. Each section is composed of individual chapters that are further broken down into outbreak stories, such as "Mystery in Tuba City," "Profuse Diaphoresis in Infants," and "An Exhausting Disease." While I found this approach appealing, it does have weak points. Because of the focus on outbreaks, there is no overall view of the history of the EIS. Furthermore, character development is minimal: there are few memorable individuals, with the exception of Dr. Langmuir. This book is about outbreaks, not people. While EIS officers obviously play important roles in each story, we quickly forget them as we move on to the next problem.

There are so many riveting stories in Inside the Outbreaks that I had difficulty identifying one that conveyed the book's atmosphere. One of my favorites is "Health-Conscious Sprout Eaters," which describes outbreaks with Salmonella or E. coli O157:H7 caused by alfalfa sprouts. The sprouts, consumed uncooked, are difficult to sterilize because the bacteria may be internalized in the inner plant tissues. Sprouts contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 were tracked to Idaho farms, where deer droppings may have been the source of the bacteria. EIS officer Roger Shapiro concluded, "Raw sprouts are inherently dangerous. They are the only food I stopped eating as a result of my EIS experience."

I finished Inside the Outbreaks while traveling, and as I looked for a snack in the airport, I had difficulty identifying food that would be safe. The yogurt looked terrific, but it contained berries, and I had just read about outbreaks of infections in Texas and Florida with the parasite Cyclospora, caused by raspberries from Guatemala. There were also lovely sandwiches, but who knew what lurked in the salad greens — perhaps E. coli O157:H7, which caused gastroenteritis in Illinois when it contaminated mesclun from California. Reading Inside the Outbreaks will cause you to suspect nearly every food or food supplement, as well you should. The global economy and the demand for fresh food throughout the year have led to many opportunities for traveling microbes.

The list of former EIS officers is a Who's Who of significant figures in science and medicine. Some individuals I was surprised to find in this program include D.A. Henderson and William Foege, architects of the smallpox eradication program; Neal Nathanson, a prominent virologist; current CDC Director Tom Frieden; former CDC Director Julie Gerberding; and WHO Assistant Director-General Keiji Fukuda. Neither had I known that Lawrence Altman, the well-known New York Times science writer, had been an EIS officer.

You'll have to read Inside the Outbreaks to learn how an EIS trainee learns the craft of disease epidemiology. Perhaps Alexander Langmuir's approach is the most informative: he would send only one or two EIS officers to an outbreak. "We'll get them on an epidemic as fast as we can. Throw them overboard. See if they can swim, and if they can't, throw them a life ring; pull them out and throw them in again."


Possible explanations are sought for the distribution patterns of platystomatid genera in Pacific Oceania, with special reference to those of New Caledonia. A key to the eleven known genera of New Caledonia (including the Loyalty Islands) is given. Five of these genera are endemic to this province of the Australasian Region. A key to the known Australasian species of Naupoda is given. Dayomyia molens n.gen. and n.sp., Eumeka koghii n.sp., Pogonortalis monteithi n.sp., Sors wrightae n.gen. and n.sp., and Naupoda (Gonga) burwelli n.sp. are described from New Caledonia (Grande Terre). Abrasion of part of the antenna in D. molens is apparently due to some unexplained behavioural trait.


We present a Stamp&Extend time-stamping scheme based on linking via modified creation of Schnorr signatures. The scheme is based on lazy construction of a tree of signatures. Stamp&Extend returns a timestamp immediately after the request, unlike the schemes based on the concept of timestamping rounds. Despite the fact that all timestamps are linearly linked, verification of a timestamp requires a logarithmic number of steps with respect to the chain length. An extra feature of the scheme is that any attempt to forge a timestamp by the Time Stamping Authority (TSA) results in revealing its secret key, providing an undeniable cryptographic evidence of misbehavior of TSA. Breaking Stamp&Extend requires not only breaking Schnorr signatures, but to some extend also breaking Pedersen commitments.


The objective of this analysis is to simulate the difference between national and state-specific individual insurance markets on take-up of individual health insurance. This simulation analysis was completed in three steps. First, we reviewed the literature to characterize the state-specific individual insurance markets with respect to state regulations and to identify the effect of those regulations on health insurance premiums. Second, we used empirical data to develop premium estimates for the simulation that reflect case-mix as well as state-specific differences in health care markets. Third, we used a revised version of the 2005 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) to complete a set of simulations to identify the impact of three different scenarios for national market development. (National market estimates are based on the simulation model with competition among all 50 states and moderate impact assumptions.) We find evidence of a significant opportunity to reduce the number of uninsured under a proposal to allow the purchase of health insurance across state lines. The best scenario to reduce the uninsured, numerically, is competition among all 50 states with one clear winner. The most pragmatic scenario, with a good impact, is one winner in each regional market.


We present a simple and efficient feature modeling approach for tracking the pitch of two speakers speaking simultaneously. We model the spectrogram features of single speakers using Gaussian mixture models in combination with the minimum description length model selection criterion. Furthermore, the mixture maximization (MIXMAX) interaction model is employed to yield a probabilistic representation for the mixture of both speakers. Finally, a factorial hidden Markov model is applied for tracking. We demonstrate experimental results on two databases, and show the excellent performance of the proposed method in comparison to a well known multipitch tracking algorithm based on correlogram features.


Although private enterprises make great contributions to the national economy and employment, tax and fee burden restricted their development and quality even erode their capital. Through analysis of private enterprises, state-owned enterprises and foreign enterprises tax burden differences, tax burden of private enterprises is heavy which can be summarized with methods of comparison, judgment and reasoning etc. Then select the data from 2008 to 2013, combine with the government expenditure optimal principle, and use Cobb - Glass model and regression analysis method to calculate China's macro tax burden level which is 15.29%. Finally, according to sales revenue, cost, expenses, valueadded taxes etc, measure and verify that private enterprises reasonable tax and fee burden should be 14.7%-16.24%, which coincides well with the national macro tax burden level.


Abstract. The modelling of aerosol radiative forcing is a major cause of uncertainty in the assessment of global and regional atmospheric energy budgets and climate change. One reason is the strong dependence of the aerosol optical properties on the mixing state of aerosol components, such as absorbing black carbon and, predominantly scattering sulfates. Using a new column version of the aerosol optical properties and radiative-transfer code of the ECHAM/MESSy atmospheric-chemistry–climate model (EMAC), we study the radiative transfer applying various mixing states. The aerosol optics code builds on the AEROPT (AERosol OPTical properties) submodel, which assumes homogeneous internal mixing utilising the volume average refractive index mixing rule. We have extended the submodel to additionally account for external mixing, partial external mixing and multilayered particles. Furthermore, we have implemented the volume average dielectric constant and Maxwell Garnett mixing rule. We performed regional case studies considering columns over China, India and Africa, corroborating much stronger absorption by internal than external mixtures. Well-mixed aerosol is a good approximation for particles with a black-carbon core, whereas particles with black carbon at the surface absorb significantly less. Based on a model simulation for the year 2005, we calculate that the global aerosol direct radiative forcing for homogeneous internal mixing differs from that for external mixing by about 0.5 W m−2.


The present investigation was undertaken to determine the effect of in vivo Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Delta-9-THC) treatment on immune responsiveness to secondary exposure to herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV2) antigens in vitro. A splenocyte proliferative assay, employing HSV2-infected mouse embryo fibroblasts as target cells, was used to measure immune responsiveness. Administration of 50 mg/kg or 100 mg/kg Delta-9-THC to B6C3F1 mice in concert with HSV2 infection resulted in suppression of the proliferative response to HSV2 cell-surface antigens expressed on virus-infected mouse embryo fibroblasts. Similarly, in vitro treatment of HSV2-infected cells with Delta-9-THC (10(-7) M to 10(-5) M) resulted in a dose-dependent suppression of proliferative responsiveness of splenocytes of non-drug-treated HSV2-sensitized mice. These results suggest that Delta-9-THC inhibits immune responsiveness of B6C3F1 mice to homotypic challenge with HSV2. This inhibition may be resultant of drug action on both effector immunocytes and target HSV2 antigen-bearing cells.


In the last 20 years, developed countries have struggled with what seemed to be an ever-rising tide of asylum seekers, a trend that has now gone into reverse. This paper examines what happened and why. How have oppression, violence and economic conditions in origin countries shaped worldwide trends in asylum applications? And has the toughening of policy towards asylum seekers since 2001 reduced the numbers? What policies have been effective and which host countries have been most affected? This paper surveys the trends in asylum seeking since the 1980s and the literature that it has generated and it provides new regression estimates of the determinants of asylum applications up to the present. The key findings are first, that violence and terror can account for much of the variation across source countries and over time but it cannot fully explain the original surge in asylum applications during the 1980s. And second, while tougher policies did have a deterrent effect, they account for only about a third of the decline in applications since 2001.


Article 4 of the UNESCO Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights (2005) is explained as being an ethical principle and right aimed at the health environment. Benefit is defined as good deeds towards people within the medical environment and is accepted as part of universal ethics. This principle means that the person on the one hand has a right to benefit, while on the other hand has the duty to show benefit. To display benefit to mankind is to confirm the dignity of man. From a Christian perspective, the right and ethical principle of benefit is grounded in the creation, re-creation and eschatology. Man as the image of God - as a changed man in Christ - is led by the Spirit to show benefit as love to all people within the health environment.


Tiebreakers are familiar tools for decision-making. Ready examples include penalty shootouts in soccer matches and vice presidents breaking tie votes in the Senate. However, we lack a precise understanding of the concept and a normative theory for the use of tiebreakers. This Article strictly defines a tiebreaker as a kind of lexically inferior decision rule and then builds justifications for tiebreaking decision structures. Concentrating on situations in which ties are considered intolerable, the Article suggests methods for either preventing ties or designing sensible tiebreakers. As to the latter, tradeoffs are identified for the use of random variables, morally relevant variables, and double counted variables within a lexically inferior decision rule. Finally, the Article applies its conceptual and normative lessons to three problems: the best design for affirmative action programs, the proper interpretive method for legal texts, and the core function of adjudication. The closing sections evaluate law and adjudication as one large tiebreaker for the rest of social life, with contrasts and comparisons to other major theories for the mission of the court system in the United States.


Background The aim of this study was to assess reperfusion and clinical outcome of treatment with the self-expanding retrievable Separator 3D in revascularization of acute ischemic stroke. The three-dimensional (3D) device secures thrombus with direct aspiration and supports debulking of the clot. Methods At two centers, 129 consecutive stroke patients with National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) scores ≥5 were treated with mechanical thrombectomy using the Separator 3D as a component of the Penumbra System within 8 h of symptom onset; modified Treatment in Cerebral Infarction (mTICI) revascularization scores, NIHSS score on admission and discharge, mortality rates, and modified Rankin Scale (mRS) outcomes at 90 days were evaluated. Results A total of 129 vessels in 129 patients were treated. Occlusions were located in the middle cerebral artery (MCA, 48%), internal carotid artery (ICA, 33%), cervical ICA–MCA (3%), and vertebrobasilar arteries (16%). Intravenous thrombolytic therapy with recombinant tissue plasminogen activator was given to 78% of patients. Median NIHSS was 15 prior to treatment. Reperfusion to mTICI 2b or 3 was successful in 96/129 (74%) target arterial lesions, with more than half of cases (51%) achieving mTICI 3. The mean time from arterial puncture to revascularization was 65 min. At 90 days, the symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage rate was 4%, all cause mortality was 32%, and 43/99 patients (43%) achieved functional independence with an mRS score of ≤2. Conclusions The results suggest that the Separator 3D enables safe and effective revascularization of occluded large arteries in acute stroke intervention, leading to a high rate of functional independence at 90 days.


Contemporary global crime and cross-border law enforcement cooperation have multiplied "foreign affairs prosecutions," cases that encompass foreign apprehension, evidence gathering, and criminal conduct, as well as cases that implicate foreign nations' criminal justice interests. Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, the fugitive Edward Snowden, and the cross-border crimes of FIFA and El Chapo all exemplify such foreign affairs prosecutions. This Article argues that foreign affairs prosecutions represent a consequential shift in U.S. criminal law, offering the promise of closing global impunity gaps. At the same time, however, such cases risk defendant interests at home and U.S. foreign policy abroad. This Article calls for greater congressional engagement and judicial oversight to minimize such risks while still promoting accountability for cross-border, cyber, and international crime.


How and to what extent do managerial control benefits shape the efficiency of the takeover market? We revisit this question by estimating both the dark and bright sides of managerial control benefits in an industry equilibrium model. On the dark side, managers' private benefits of control distort firms' takeover incentives and hinder the reallocation role of the takeover market. On the bright side, fear of a takeover induces underperforming managers to exert more effort and enhances the disciplinary role of the takeover market. Our estimates suggest that the bright-side effect increases the value created by an active takeover market by 21%, comparable in magnitude to the dark-side effect. It is also important to account for this bright-side effect in explaining certain features of the takeover market, including a low takeover-performance sensitivity.


Background: People with spinal cord injury (SCI) are exposed to the development of comorbidities secondary to a decreased ability to exercise and pathological complications. Aerobic exercise has been advocated as a means of preventing the development of these illnesses. Previous research has indicated that functional electrical stimulation (FES) provides an appropriate aerobic stimulus in an SCI population to provide cardiovascular fitness gains. However, FES devices are time consuming for both clients and medical staff in a rehabilitation and home setting with devices often expensive. Our research group have developed a novel neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) system which may provide an alternative to FES and elicit a similar response. Methods: A 40 year old male with a T6 incomplete SCI, undertook 6 weeks of NMES training for one hour, five days per week. Pre and post intervention measures include a treadmill VO2 peak test, a DXA scan and subjective feedback regarding the NMES device and training stimulus. Results: Improvements in VO2 peak, heart rate and exercise tolerance were observed with minor decreases in total body fat mass. The participant reported that the NMES was an acceptable form of cardiovascular training. Conclusion: Our pilot case study has indicated that our NMES system is capable of eliciting an aerobic training effect in people with SCI, which could potentially improve their cardiovascular fitness. Further study with a greater number of participants is warranted in this population using a similar training program.


Abstract:The controversy surrounding Growing Up Greek (2014), a reality show produced by the American cable and satellite television channel MTV, raises issues of boundaries, power, normativity, and vulnerability in the making of ethnicity. The show's portrayal of Greek America raises the issues at stake when an ethnic group engages in a social struggle to safeguard its norms. The collective mobilization, ultimately effective, to cancel the show and remove it from the airwaves, as well as the advocacy that arose in defense of the show, is indicative of a larger power struggle to constitute the public representation of Greek America. Growing Up Greek, its critics, and its supporters respectively constructed conflicting boundaries of ethnicity, and the controversy manifested in a series of ideological paradoxes and clashes. While protesting the MTV show as symbolic violence, Greek America itself exercises its own violence on its internal and external Others via the narrative of model ethnicity, revealing through this irony a pressing need to reconfigure Greek America's dominant identity narrative.


Among the principal assumptions of major portions of philosophy in recent decades have been: (1) That philosophy somehow consists of (some sort of) logic, and (2) that logic is a study of and theory about (some sort of) language. There, of course, follows from these a third assumption: (3) That philosophy is a study of and theory about (some sort of) languagethough this implication should not be taken as representing any phase of the historical development of recent philosophizing. Instead of listing these three points as assumptions, it would probably be more correct to regard them as categories or complexes of assumptions; or perhaps, more vaguely still, as 'tendencies' or proclivities of recent philosophical thinking. But precision of these points need not be put in issue here, as this paper does not seek any large-scale resolution of the problem area in question. The aim here is to examine only one proposition which plays a role in the clearly existent tendencies referred to: Namely, the proposition that we think in or with language . I hope to show, first, that we do not always think in or with language; and then, second, that the very conception of thinking in or with language involves an absurdity. What implications this has for broader philosophical assumptions or tendencies will not be dealt with here, though the implications in question seem to me to be extremely important ones. That human beings think in language is explicitly stated in such diverse places as ordinary newspapers, the more sophisticated popular magazines and journals, and serious discourse in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as in the technical writings of philosophers. To prove this broad range of consensus would be idle; but, in order to have the philosophical context clearly before us, we may give a few brief quotations:


This dissertation proves lower bounds on the inherent difficulty of deciding flow analysis problems in higher-order programming languages. We give exact characterizations of the computational complexity of 0CFA, the kCFA hierarchy, and related analyses. In each case, we precisely capture both the expressiveness and feasibility of the analysis, identifying the elements responsible for the trade-off.
0CFA is complete for polynomial time. This result relies on the insight that when a program is linear (each bound variable occurs exactly once), the analysis makes no approximation; abstract and concrete interpretation coincide, and therefore program analysis becomes evaluation under another guise. Moreover, this is true not only for 0CFA, but for a number of further approximations to 0CFA. In each case, we derive polynomial time completeness results.
For any k > 0, kCFA is complete for exponential time. Even when k = 1, the distinction in binding contexts results in a limited form of closures, which do not occur in 0CFA. This theorem validates empirical observations that kCFA is intractably slow for any k > 0. There is, in the worst case—and plausibly, in practice—no way to tame the cost of the analysis. Exponential time is required. The empirically observed intractability of this analysis can be understood as being inherent in the approximation problem being solved, rather than reflecting unfortunate gaps in our programming abilities.


Background/objectives: To compare the resting energy
expenditure (REE) and the REE/Fat-free-mass (FFM)
quotient in children with constitutional leanness (CL) and
children with normal body weight, and to describe the
within-family clustering of CL.
Subjects/methods: We have studied 18 children and
teenagers with CL, 10 girls and 8 boys, and 18 gender and
age matched normal controls, with the same pubertal
stage. All were recruited from the outpatient pediatric
clinic nutrition unit. None of the children with CL showed
symptoms of chronic illness, they had normal laboratory
results, they had a normal caloric food intake, and they
did not agree with the DSM-IV-TR criteria for anorexia
nervosa. We describe the body mass index (BMI) of children
and their parents. The children were classified
according to Cole's recently published BMI cut-offs for
thinness: under 18.5 points in CL group, stable at least in
the last year, and between 18.5 and 25 cutt-offs in the control
group. The body composition was calculated by
anthropometric methods (skinfold thickness measurements).
In addition REE was measured using fasting indirect
calorimetry.
Results: The CL group had a higher mean percentage
of FFM, and a mean FM significantly less, relative to
controls (p < 0.001). The average absolute REE was significantly
lower in the CL group (1,106.55 ± 240.72 kcal)
than the control group (1,353.33 ± 270.01 kcal/dia) (p <
0.01). However, the REE adjusted for FFM showed a
mean significantly greater in the CL group (41.39 ± 2.26
kcal/kg FFM) (Mean confidence interval (CI) 95 %:
40.33-42.45) than the controls (37.37 ± 3.06 kcal/kg
FFM) (Mean CI 95 %: 35.93-38.81) (p < 0.001). Finally,
in the family study, the mean BMI of fathers of CL
group was significantly lower (p < 0.01), but there were
not any differences in the mean BMI of mothers. Among
parents with BMI known, 8 of 35 parents of CL group had an BMI lower 18.5, and only 2 of 36 parents in the
control group (p < 0.05).
Conclusions: This increased energy expenditure-to-
FFM ratio differentiates between CL and controls. These
metabolic differences are probably genetically determined.


Abstract Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for psychosis (CBTp) is a recommended treatment in several international guidelines for schizophrenia and psychosis. CBTp is an adaptation of traditional cognitive behavioural therapy for emotional disorders, modified for the specific needs of people with psychotic symptoms. This chapter will give a practical introduction on the key elements and principles of CBTp, illustrative examples of its use, and a brief summary of the current evidence base, including discussion of efficacy, effectiveness, effect size, and treatment targets. It will highlight key issues, including the importance of fidelity to treatment protocols, agreement on shared goals between client and therapist, and a normalising approach to psychotic experiences. Challenges to implementing CBTp, at scale, and in routine clinical practice will also be discussed.


Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have emerged as an area of interest for both industry and researches because they have become an essential part of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). Many applications in VANET require sending a message to certain or all vehicles within a region, called geocast. Sometimes geocast requires that the message be kept alive within the region for a period of time. This time-stable geocast has a vital role in some ITS applications, particularly commercial applications. This study presents a novel time-stable geocast protocol that works well even in too sparse networks. Moreover, since commercial applications sometimes make it necessary to change the duration of the stable message within the region, the dynamic nature of a geocast protocol should allow this time to be extended, reduced, or canceled without any additional cost. Therefore, we call it a dynamic time-stable geocast, DTSG, protocol. It works in two phases (the pre-stable period and the stable period), and the simulation results show that it works well in its performance metrics (delivery ratio and network cost). In addition, these results validate the protocol prediction of its performance metrics. Moreover, with the informed time of zero, all the intended vehicles will be informed as soon as they enter the region. The fact that the protocol is independent of the networks' density, the vehicles' speed, and the vehicles' broadcasting range, makes it more robust than others that fail in sparse networks or in high-speed nodes.


We present one approach to achieve safe navigation in an indoor dynamic environment. So far, there have been various useful collision avoidance algorithms and path planning schemes. However, those algorithms possess fundamental limitations in that the robot can avoid only ldquovisiblerdquo ones among surrounded obstacles. In a real environment, it is not possible to detect all the dynamic obstacles around the robot. There are many occluded regions due to the limited field of view. In order to avoid collisions, it is desirable to exploit visibility information. This paper proposes a safe navigation scheme to reduce collision risk considering occluded dynamic obstacles. The robot's motion is controlled by the hybrid control scheme. The possibility of collision is dually reflected to path planning and speed control. The proposed scheme clearly indicates the structural procedure on how to model and to exploit the risk of navigation. The proposed scheme is experimentally tested in a real office building. The experimental results show that the robot moves along the safe path to obtain sufficient field of view. In addition, safe speed constraints are applied in motion control. It is experimentally verified that a robot safely navigates in dynamic indoor environment by adopting the proposed scheme.


The results of a detailed fluid inclusion study of a zone of auriferous quartz vein in the Clogau-St Davids goldmine, North Wales are presented. These show that both aqueous and an immiscible pair of H2O-CH4 fluids were present during the mineralizing event. Compositions of the immiscible fluid pair are estimated from Laser Raman and bulk inclusion volatile analysis data. Thermometry and barometry using these fluid compositions shows that the ores were formed at c. 300–320°C and c. 1.8 kbar. A model is developed which is consistent with both the fluid inclusion data and other considerations. This involves the introduction of aqueous fluid into the graphitic shales hosting the mineralized veins which proceeds to react with graphite in the wall-rocks to produce H2O–CH4 fluids. As H2O is consumed to produce CH4, an increase in salinity is observed in the residual aqueous inclusion fluids. Deposition of gold is ascribed to destabilization of either AuCl−2 or Au(HS)−2 complexes in the incoming fluid as a result of interaction with graphite. Auriferous zones within the veins are defined by high CH4 values and low CO2/CH4 ratios in bulk inclusion analyses. These effects are thought to be the result of increased fluid-rock interaction in these zones, related to structural features in the wall-rocks.


The performance of microprocessors has increased exponentially for over 35 years. However, process technology challenges, chip power constraints, and difficulty in extracting instruction-level parallelism are conspiring to limit the performance of future individual processors. To address these limits, the computer industry has embraced chip multiprocessing (CMP), predominately in the form of multiple high-performance superscalar processors on the same die. We explore the trade-off between building CMPs from a few high-performance cores or building CMPs from a large number of lower-performance cores and argue that CMPs built from a larger number of lower-performance cores can provide better performance and performance/Watt on many commercial workloads. We examine two multi-threaded CMPs built using a large number of processor cores: Sun's Niagara and Niagara 2 processors. We also explore the programming issues for CMPs with large number of threads. The programming model for these CMPs is similar to the widely used programming model for symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs), but the greatly reduced costs associated with communication of data through the on-chip shared secondary cache allows for more fine-grain parallelism to be effectively exploited by the CMP. Finally, we present performance comparisons between Sun's Niagara and more conventional dual-core processors built from large superscalar processor cores. For several key server workloads, Niagara shows significant performance and even more significant performance/Watt advantages over the CMPs built from traditional superscalar processors.


Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether transformational leadership affects auditor objectivity. Design/methodology/approach - The investigation is based on a field survey of 198 practicing auditors employed by audit firms operating in Sweden. Findings - This study finds that transformational client leadership negatively affects auditor objectivity and that the effect is only partially mediated by client identification. Given these results, suggesting that auditors are susceptible to influence by their clients' perceived exercise of transformational leadership, leadership theory appears relevant to the discussion of auditor objectivity in the accounting literature. Originality/value - Previous accounting research has applied the social identity theory framework and found that client identification impairs auditor objectivity. However, the effect of transformational client leadership on auditor objectivity, which reflects an intense auditor-client relationship, has been neglected before this study.


Americans spend more than $100 billion a year to buy weapons, but no one likes the process that brings these weapons into existence. The problem, McNaugher shows, is that the technical needs of engineers and military planners clash sharply with the political demands of Congress. McNaugher examines weapons procurement since World War II and shows how repeated efforts to improve weapons acquisition have instead increased the harmful intrusion of political pressures into that technical development and procurement process. Today's weapons are more complicated than their predecessors. So are the nation's military forces. The design of new systems and their integration into the force structure demand more care, time, and flexibility. Yet time and flexibility are precisely what political pressures remove from the acquisitions process. In a series of case studies and conceptual discussions, McNaugher tackles concerns at the heart of the debate about acquisition--the slow and heavily bureaucratic approach to development, the preference for ultimate weapons over well-organized and trained forces, and the counterproductive incentives facing the nations defense firms. He calls for changes that run against the current fashion--less centralization or procurement, less haste in developing new weapons, and greater use of competition as a means of removing the development process from political oversight. Above all, McNaugher shows how the United States tries to buy research and development on the cheap, and how costly this has been. The nation can improve its acquisition process, he concludes, only when it recognizes the need to pay for the full exploration of new technology.


AIM: The scaphoid resection with four-corner fusion is an effective procedure for treatment of postraumatic and degenerative wrist osteoarthritis. Few studies that evaluated the functional and workers compensation results are available in the literature. We presented the results of 4-corner fusion on active heavy labour workers. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A prospective study to evaluate 38 patients (37 male and 1 female) who underwent 4-corner fusion, between 2002 to 2005, with an average of 24 months of follow-up (range, 12–48 months) were made. The mean age of the patients were 32 years (range, 25–48 years). All patients were heavy-labour workers. The aethiology in 77% of the patients was SNAC wrist. Dominant limb was involved in 65% of the patients. All patients were immobilised in a cast for 4 weeks after surgery. Patients were assessed clinically and radiographically. Functional analysis of grip and pinch strenght were performed. RESULTS: Consolidation was obtained in all cases at 10 weeks. Pain evaluation score was 77 at pre-op and 19 on post-op time. The range of flexion – extension movement postoperative was 57°. Average lost of pinch strength was 25%. All patients return to work, 80% to the same activity level and 20% to a different work performing less strenuous activities. After surgery, the range time to return to work was 160 days. CONCLUSION: The four-corner fusion allows an effective stabilization, maintaining the bone stock and eliminate wrist pain. This technique permit a fast return to work with a great level of satisfaction and preserve a functional range of motion with a minimum lost of force in heavy labour workers.


Dealing with computationally-intensive calibration processes is still common in distributed hydrological modelling despite the computing power growth. Computational time for one single distributed hydrological simulation may easily consume more than one minute, and the calibration process can require thousands of simulations. The use of surrogate models that are low-cost and representative of the calibration problem is an interesting avenue to reduce the calibration computational time. The first part of this study explores three possibilities to construct reduced-fidelity surrogate models from the HYDROTEL model, a computationally-intensive hydrological model. The relevance of these three types of surrogates and their combination within a calibration process is evaluated according to the best compromise between representativeness and a decrease of CPU time. In a second paper, surrogate models are implemented within an existing efficient calibration process to significantly reduce the computational time.


Sustainability in production processes is mandatory in the manufacturing environment due to restrictions such as legislation. Conventional Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) don't really support environmental sustainable goals but are actually the most suitable background for an extension towards sustainability monitoring, control and assessment. This paper introduces a new MES generation which is enhanced with interoperable data acquisition, analysis and optimization in line with sustainability goals. A harmonization work on metrics and indicators, aligned with the Triple Bottom Line, is presented based on an analysis of industrial users' requirements within machining process context. Also, a framework for sustainability evaluation through a specific architecture is introduced. Based on an industrial use case, the given approach is set in the context of the FoFdation project which also addresses the integration among manufacturing IT systems towards overall lifecycle management.


With video conferencing becoming extremely popular in wired and wireless network, efficient utilization of the network bandwidth is important to achieve Quality of Service (QOS). Internet Protocol (IP) multicast is a routing technique that allows IP traffic to be sent from one source or multiple sources and delivered to multiple destinations. Instead of sending individual packets to each destination, a single packet is sent to a multicast group, which is identified by a single IP destination group address. In this paper it is proposed to compare the performance of video conferencing using unicast and multicast communication using Protocol Independent Multicasting – Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) modes.


The cloth edition of Assia Djebar's Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, her first work to be published in English, was named by the American Literary Translators Association as an ALTA Outstanding Translation of the Year. Now available in paperback, this collection of three long stories, three short ones, and a theoretical postface by one of North Africa's leading writers depicts the plight of urban Algerian women who have thrown off the shackles of colonialism only to face a postcolonial regime that denies and subjugates them even as it celebrates the liberation of men. Denounced in Algeria for its political criticism, Djebar's book quickly sold out its first printing of 15,000 copies in France and was hugely popular in Italy. Her stylistically innovative, lyrical stories address the cloistering of women, the implications of reticence, the connection of language to oppression, and the impact of war on both women and men. The Afterword by Clarisse Zimra includes an illuminating interview with Djebar.


Human beings are intrinsically meaning seeking beings. We readily accept and absorb a proposition or even a legal stipulation, if it is meaningful. This human trait coupled with law's ability to create, select and infuse meaning ensures that in case of conflict between rights, those rights that are perceived to be 'more meaningful' triumph over those that are viewed to be less so. Hence, it is important to study the relationship between meaning and law and its impact on rights and identity of an individual. In order to do so, we need to address the following questions-What is the meaning of meaning? How is it constructed? How is one meaning adopted to the exclusion of all others? What is the role played by law in construction and adoption of meaning? What is the effect of grant of legal sanction to a particular meaning? Why does this meaning remain unchallenged? Does the role of law in creation of meaning change depending upon the right in question? I address these questions on the basis of three strands of classical theory of meaning, constitutional jurisprudence and few landmark cases that I have had the privilege to be part of. This paper begins by exploring the meaning of meaning and then examines a few models to better understand the role played by law in construction of meaning. I then study the conflict between plurality of meaning of public interest and singularity of meaning of individual rights and the resultant effect on the identity of an individual. The paper's final assertion lies in envisaging scenarios where singularity of meaning of individual rights can triumph over plurality of meaning of public interest.


'Nutrition communication' can be defined as the process by which nutrition knowledge is converted into dietary change. Nutrition communication then includes nutrition education--the process by which people are informed, and sometimes empowered by, nutrition information--but also other actions taken to improve peoples' diets such as restricting misinformation about nutrition or manipulating the composition, availability or price of foods. Dietary goals for populations and food-based dietary guidelines for individuals constitute the starting point for nutrition communication, and if these could be more evidence-based we would be in a much stronger position to develop more effective nutrition communication. A population-based approach to nutrition communication is complementary to an individualistic approach in theory, but in practice they compete for attention in food policy making circles.


Disability assessment processes are complex and stressful, with claimants finding it challenging to prepare an effective account of their disabilities to support their claim. This project focuses on a disability benefit called Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which is received by millions of people with disabilities in the UK. We present a multi-stage exploratory investigation into how lifelogging could help address the challenges claimants have in accessing disability benefits. In the first study, benefit advisors participated in interviews and workshops to inform the design of PIP Kit, a highly customisable prototype elicitation diary to help disability claimants articulate their experiences. In the second study, PIP Kit was trialled by benefit claimants whilst making their actual PIP claims. We found that PIP Kit helped empower claimants in understanding the claim process and assisted in building arguments for their claims. We also have identified clear principles for supporting disability benefit claimants with technological interventions.


This investigation is aimed to develop and validate a high-performance thin layer chromatography method for quantitative determination of serum zonisamide levels. Chromatographic separation was carried out on a silica gel 60F254 plate using a mixture of ethyl acetate:methanol:toluene (4:1:5) as the mobile phase. Densitometric detection was carried out at 254 nm. The method was validated for linearity, precision, selectivity, limit of detection, limit of quantification and accuracy. Linear calibration curves in the range of 5 to 80 µg/band gave a correlation coefficient of 0.991. The intra-day (n=6) and inter-day (n=18) precision, expressed as the relative standard deviation were in the range of 2.83 to 3.27 % and from 2.09 to 4.39 %. The limits of detection and quantification were found to be 1.07 and 3.15 µg/band, respectively. Accuracy was calculated as percent recovery and was found to be 97.52 and 115.23 %. Theophylline was used as an internal standard, which gave a well separated peak at Rf 0.36 without interfering with zonisamide. The method was found to be specific with no matrix interference. Thus, the method developed for the estimation of serum zonisamide level is simple, cost-effective and reliable for therapeutic drug monitoring.


In the rapidly expanding information society, intellectual property law plays an increasingly important role in the production, distribution and use of creative material. As a consequence, it faces new possibilities and challenges. One of the most troublesome is connected with the development of the Digital Rights Management Systems and Technological Protection Measures applied to control the distribution and use of electronic works. In this framework, the anti-circumvention provisions enacted at the American, European and international level to safeguard digital content from uncontrolled distribution and unlawful use could have perverse effects and serious implications for the consumer community. When these provisions are applied and embedded to media products, they can erode some fundamental rights of consumers and can restrict traditional usages. This paper analyzes whether and to what extent the consumer rights are negatively affected by digital terms and conditions enforced with technology and contract law. To balance this inequity the research speculates on the application of consumer protection law as a possible contributory instrument to reduce imbalance between parties.


Previous research has emphasised social media adoption by students and the implementation of social media by educators, yet few studies have explored whether students are using it to facilitate engagement in offline environments with peers within university communities. Studies suggest engagement in educational communities and extra-curricular activities can reduce student attrition. This study surveyed 106 undergraduate students to investigate whether students using social media to interact online with their university felt: (i) connected to the broader university community, and (ii) social media helped them engage offline by meeting up with peers and attending university events. The results indicated that the majority (82%) never or rarely used the technology to facilitate offline engagement within their academic communities. Fourth year students were most likely to use social media to engage offline (66.7%). However, more than half of students (52.8%) felt that university social media profiles helped them to feel part of their academic community.;


Today, the process by which we license digital music is both cumbersome and complex. The problem has been exacerbated by the growing prevalence of illegal music sharing online, as well as the multiplicity of new ways to distribute music electronically. The music industry remains in turmoil despite infringement actions brought on behalf of copyright owners attempting to combat the effects of illegal music distribution. Thus, many in the industry have recognized the need to effectively compete with illegal distribution technologies instead of simply fighting to shut them down. Acquiring the legal rights necessary to broadcast and distribute music on the Internet, however, has proven to be a difficult endeavor. Those seeking to obtain music licenses argue that the current music licensing structure is inefficient and requires reform in order to establish a healthy digital music marketplace. This paper seeks to reconcile the existing music licensing structure with new technologies by positing a novel method of digitally licensing music copyright – an online music licensing clearinghouse, made up of all current (and future) music copyright licensors. Today, consumers regularly rely on sites like Expedia and Travelocity to fulfill a wide variety of travel needs, including flight bookings, hotel reservations, and car rentals. The interests of disparate travel licensors are centrally managed, but not combined. Such an arrangement provides the benefits of "one-stop shopping" while avoiding collusion concerns. In much the same way, an online music clearinghouse would provide a central location for obtaining music copyright permissions without the anti-trust concerns which have plagued industry joint ventures in the past. An online clearinghouse promises to preserve the valuable, divided music-licensing infrastructure and lower transaction costs for industry and consumers alike. When the process of obtaining music licenses is streamlined, obstacles are removed, and the legal distribution of music online can flourish.


Interband cascade lasers are promising candidates to cover a wide spectral range in the mid infrared spectral region with high performance devices. In this paper, we report on lasers where the cladding layers consist of quaternary bulk material (AlGaAsSb) instead of InAs/AlSb superlattices. The bulk claddings provide efficient mode confinement due to their low refractive index, comparable heat conductivity and a reduced current spreading. Broad area devices fabricated from laser layers with 5 cascades showed threshold current densities of 220 A/cm2 and narrow ridges operated up to 45 °C in continuous wave mode.


Introduction Information Retrieval is a well defined discipline with solid foundations in mathematics and other sciences. The tools utilized for Information Retrieval are created and developed from mathematical equations and scientific methods gracefully employed from analysis, trigonometry, geometry, statistics and probabilities. Mathematics is not the only science which contributes elements to Information Retrieval. Computer Science, Information Science and Library Science also contribute elements to Information Retrieval. The tools utilized for Information Retrieval are typically developed in conjunction with very powerful computers such as clusters and very large databases of corpora. Furthermore, with the proliferation of the Web the scope of Information Retrieval is broadened to address ubiquitous sources of information, mobile computing devices and users, as well as multiple formats of information beyond documents, i.e. biological, musical, visual and various technological formats such as XML. The basic aim of text retrieval, a more traditional sub-field of Information Retrieval, is to match user queries to documents. In its' purest form Information Retrieval serves a higher level objective, a more general aim, to assist the searcher in locating the information she seeks. This general aim can be served by roughly dividing the work into two substantial tasks. The first task is assisting the searcher to express her information need in the most lucid way, clearly understandable for both the human user as well as the machine computer. The second task is to match the searcher's clearly defined query to the most relevant information available. The second task is machine related and typically involves matching and retrieval algorithms resident in the information retrieval system internals. The first task is user related and typically involves human computer interaction strategies to enhance the information retrieval process. From this first user centered task a new research field has sprung called Exploratory Search (White, Drucker, Marchionini, Hearst, & Schraefel, 2007). The definition of Exploratory Search is elucidated by the IR methods which synthesize human computer interaction strategies to elicit and illuminate user search requests, semantic meanings, preferences, explicit and implicit relevance feedback to enhance information retrieval search quality. Informing Science is an emerging trans-discipline which transcends a large variety of fields, from computer science, engineering, information systems, library science, social work, technology, communications, design, journalism in all its forms, to education. From a teleological point of view Informing Science researchers gracefully utilize information technology with epistemologies drawn from all the aforementioned fields in order to best inform their clients (Cohen, 1999). Also from a teleological point of view, one facet of Informing Science, the process of elucidating the best methods of informing inquiring clientele, is served by user-centered exploratory search and human-computer interaction strategies (Petratos, 2007). Herein a comparative study is presented of three leading IR systems, Google, Yahoo and Live Search. A team of human subjects is selected according to diverse and balanced criteria. The human factors method presented herein serves the IR search quality enhancement by providing a gold standard. A collective of human-computers is syllogistically designed to serve as a cooperating framework for the IR experiments. The tasks that are better suited to humans are assigned to the participants and the tasks that can be automated are assigned to the machines. A series of IR experiments is conducted to investigate whether there is overlap exact as well as partial among the selected IR systems, how it can be quantified, how it is distributed and also how search quality can be enhanced. …


The paper examines the notion that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have affordances that epitomize the features of our late modern age (Giddens, 1991) and explores whether these affordances (Salomon, 1993, p. 51) can be used to facilitate particular approaches to educational practice. It argues that a clear articulation of these affordances would enable us to understand how these technologies can be most effectively used to support learning and teaching. We believe that any one affordance can be considered to have both positive and negative connotations and the paper draws on social and educational theory to provide an initial taxonomy of these affordances.


While current mobile devices detect the presence of surrounding devices, they lack a truly spatial awareness to bring them into the user's natural 3D space. We present Tracko, a 3D tracking system between two or more commodity devices without added components or device synchronization. Tracko achieves this by fusing three signal types. 1) Tracko infers the presence of and rough distance to other devices from the strength of Bluetooth low energy signals. 2) Tracko exchanges a series of inaudible stereo sounds and derives a set of accurate distances between devices from the difference in their arrival times. A Kalman filter integrates both signal cues to place collocated devices in a shared 3D space, combining the robustness of Bluetooth with the accuracy of audio signals for relative 3D tracking. 3) Tracko incorporates inertial sensors to refine 3D estimates and support quick interactions. Tracko robustly tracks devices in 3D with a mean error of 6.5 cm within 0.5 m and a 15.3 cm error within 1 m, which validates Trackoffs suitability for cross-device interactions.


"Cadavers, camera, action!" (The New York Times Book Review). From the advent of photography in the 19th and into the 20th century, medical students, often in secrecy, took photographs of themselves with the cadavers that they dissected: their first patients. Featuring 138 of these historic photographs and illuminating essays by two experts on the subject, Dissection reveals a startling piece of American history. Sherwin Nuland, MD, said this is "a truly unique and important book [that] documents a period in medical education in a way that is matched by no other existing contribution." And Mary Roach said Dissection "is the most extraordinary book I have ever seen--the perfect coffee table book for all the households where I'd most like to be invited for coffee."


Cities are once again on the rise and have become the site of major public debates, from income inequality and immigration policy to where and how Americans should live. While municipal leaders are often eager to fill the void in political leadership left by Congress and state elected officials, they are often hamstrung by state home rule laws, which define the powers states grant to municipalities. These laws limit, among other things, municipal taxing authority. Recently, local government scholars have wrestled with whether and how to grant municipalities more fiscal authority, but such scholarship has not provided a unified theory of municipal taxing authority.

This Article considers in detail whether and how to expand city taxing authority. It argues that state law should grant municipal governments "presumptive taxing authority." This presumptive taxing authority would parallel municipal regulatory authority and be similarly subject to state preemption law. Such reform would open the door to more municipal revenue innovation, while ensuring that the state can vindicate its weighty policy interests.


Every, James Bradford. Equity and Charter Schools in Public Education. Published Doctor of Education dissertation, University of Northern Colorado, 2012. There is a void in current research and literature critically analyzing how charter schools and their leaders provide equal access to all students. The language used in both federal and state legislation (in the 40 states that have passed charter school legislation) providing a legal basis for the establishment of charter schools explicitly identifies historically disadvantaged students as being a focus for charter school development as an alternative choice to other traditional public non-charter schools. The charter school movement began as an effort whose purpose was to provide more choices to parents and their students especially those who were concurrently enrolled in underperforming public schools. This qualitative study focused on the measures taken by leaders of charter schools that promote equity within their respective schools. Using a grounded theory approach to study the central phenomenon in question, 7 themes emerged which must be considered by policy writers, legislators, and leaders of all public schools. The first six themes apply specifically to the policies and operation of individual schools: 1) parent choice and influence, 2) enrollment process and outreach/marketing, 3) mission and curriculum, 4) academic accountability and interventions, 5) discipline and behavioral expectations, and 6) transportation and physical access. The seventh theme that emerged identified the responsibility of charter schools within the context of all iii


Severe but silent coronary artery disease may rarely exist in young patients with a low-risk profile but with a family history of coronary artery disease. We describe the case of a 33-year-old Caucasian male with progressive shortness of breath caused by a huge left atrial myxoma who was diagnosed to have significant coronary artery disease in the preoperative assessment. After investigations, the patient underwent resection of the left atrial tumor and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) with a successful outcome. Even in the case of a young male, it may be prudent to investigate silent coronary artery disease in the presence of cardiovascular risk factors and family history of coronary artery disease. The learning objective of this case is to debate about the usefulness of a preoperative coronary study even in the young population with cardiac nonischemic pathologies (ie, valve pathology, cardiac tumors, etc.).


The R add-on package FDboost is a flexible toolbox for the estimation of functional regression models by model-based boosting. It provides the possibility to fit regression models for scalar and functional response with effects of scalar as well as functional covariates, i.e., scalar-on-function, function-on-scalar and function-on-function regression models. In addition to mean regression, quantile regression models as well as generalized additive models for location scale and shape can be fitted with FDboost. Furthermore, boosting can be used in high-dimensional data settings with more covariates than observations. We provide a hands-on tutorial on model fitting and tuning, including the visualization of results. The methods for scalar-on-function regression are illustrated with spectrometric data of fossil fuels and those for functional response regression with a data set including bioelectrical signals for emotional episodes.


Class actions face a crisis of governance. The form of governance provided by Rule 23, governance by representative parties, is both vague in theory and ignored in practice. Instead, by a combination of procedural rules, judicial interpretation and common practice, the class is governed by a regime of attorney dictatorship with limited judicial oversight. This regime neither reflects the basic insight that the class and attorney do not have a traditional attorney-client relationship nor performs the task of transforming the inchoate collectivity of the class into an organization that protects and is responsive to the will of class members. This Article proposes an alternative regime of governance for 23(b)(3) small claims class actions that accomplishes both these things, based on four fundamental principles: mandatory disclosure of material information, an actively adversarial process, expertise of decision-makers and independence of decision-makers from influence and self-interest.


Daytime use of adaptive optics (AO) at large telescopes is hampered by shot noise from the bright sky background. Wave-front sensing may use a sodium laser guide star observed through a magneto-optical filter to suppress the background, but the laser beacon is not sensitive to overall image motion. To estimate that, laser-guided AO systems generally rely on light from the object itself, collected through the full aperture of the telescope. Daylight sets a lower limit to the brightness of an object that may be tracked at rates sufficient to overcome the image jitter. Below that limit, wave-front correction on the basis of the laser alone will yield an image that is approximately diffraction limited but that moves randomly. I describe an iterative registration algorithm that recovers high-resolution long-exposure images in this regime from a rapid series of short exposures with very low signal-to-noise ratio. The technique takes advantage of the fact that in the photon noise limit there is negligible penalty in taking short exposures, and also that once the images are recorded, it is not necessary, as in the case of an AO tracker loop, to estimate the image motion correctly and quickly on every cycle. The algorithm is likely to find application in space situational awareness, where high-resolution daytime imaging of artificial satellites is important.


Web services have had a tremendous impact on the Web for supporting a distributed service-based economy on a global scale. However, despite the outstanding progress, their uptake on a Web scale has been significantly less than initially anticipated. The isolation of services and the lack of social relationships among related services have been identified as reasons for the poor uptake. In this paper, we propose connecting the isolated service islands into a global social service network to enhance the services' sociability on a global scale. First, we propose linked social service-specific principles based on linked data principles for publishing services on the open Web as linked social services. Then, we suggest a new framework for constructing the global social service network following linked social service-specific principles based on complex network theories. Next, an approach is proposed to enable the exploitation of the global social service network, providing Linked Social Services as a Service. Finally, experimental results show that our approach can solve the quality of service discovery problem, improving both the service discovering time and the success rate by exploring service-to-service based on the global social service network.


Large scale smuggling of illegal goods is a long-standing problem, with $1.4b and thousands of agents assigned to protect the borders from such activity in the US-Mexico border alone. Illegal smuggling activities are usually blocked via inspection stations or ad-hoc checkpoints/roadblocks. Security resources are insufficient to man all stations at all times; furthermore, smugglers regularly conduct surveillance activities. This paper makes several contributions toward the challenging task of optimally interdicting an illegal network flow: i) A new Stackelberg game model for network flow interdiction; ii) A novel Column and Constraint Generation approach for computing the optimal defender strategy; iii) Complexity analysis of the column generation subproblem; iv) Compact convex nonlinear programs for solving the subproblems; v) Novel greedy and heuristic approaches for subproblems with good approximation guarantee. Experimental evaluation shows that our approach can obtain a robust enough solution outperforming the existing methods and heuristic baselines significantly and scale up to realistic-sized problems.


Since 2010 the RSA and its partners at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) and the London School of Economics (LSE) have been working with communities in seven locations in England to research and strengthen relationships within communities. The vision of 'Connected Communities' is one in which people are embedded within local networks of social support; in which social isolation is reduced and people experience greater wellbeing and other benefits from the better understanding, mobilisation and growth of 'community capital' in their neighbourhoods. The Connected Communities programme explored this vision by surveying residents in ward-sized localities, analysing this data for insight into local social networks and wellbeing, and then working with local people to build projects that support social connections. In the wake of severe austerity in public services and no sign of a more generous public funding settlement on the horizon, policymakers are increasingly looking to communities to play a bigger role in contributing to public life. From the Big Society to the NHS Five Year Forward View, the UK government has expressed the desire to see resilient communities that are better able to support themselves and reduce pressures on public services. The Connected Communities programme demonstrates that community-led action and targeted interventions can indeed strengthen local communities, and that substantial benefits can be derived as a result. The process of achieving these benefits, outlined in this report, is difficult and cannot be assumed to arise spontaneously. Instead we call for a strategic approach on the part of public service providers and others who have an interest in developing resilient communities. Furthermore the effects of social networks and the results of intervening to strengthen them are locally specific, unpredictable and non-linear. Overly idealistic or one-size-fits-all approaches will achieve little; but deliberative, intelligent and participatory engagement with communities can generate significant advantages for all involved. Context is key, and bespoke local engagement is required to successfully facilitate the growth of community capital. Social relationships have a value. The activities and research presented in this report demonstrate that through working with communities this value can be grown by connecting people to one another in their local areas. We argue that investing in interventions which build and strengthen networks of social relationships will generate four kinds of social value or 'dividend' shared by people in the community: 1. A wellbeing dividend. Social relationships are essential to subjective wellbeing and life satisfaction – indeed, our research suggests that social connectedness correlates more strongly with wellbeing than social or economic characteristics such as long term illness, unemployment or being a single parent. In the course of our primary research we found increases in the wellbeing of participants who strengthened their social networks through community-led initiatives. In a survey of 2,840 people, the variable most consistently associated with having higher subjective wellbeing was 'feeling part of a community', and the variables most negatively associated with wellbeing were identifying something or somewhere locally that you avoid or something that stops you from taking part in a community. 2. A citizenship dividend. There is latent power within local communities that lies in the potential of relationships between people, and it can be activated through the methods that we advocate in this report. However, access to this power is uneven, and many people do not enjoy the full benefits of active citizenship: for example 60 percent of people we surveyed at the beginning of our research could not name anybody they knew who had the power or influence to change things locally. Conversely, our method of working with people to reflect upon their social relationships and the under-used assets in their communities and social networks has led to substantial positive effects on personal empowerment, higher levels of civic participation and individual and collective agency. 3. A capacity dividend. Concentrating resources on networks and relationships, rather than on the 'troubled' individual as an end-user can have beneficial effects which ripple out through social networks, having positive effects on people's children, partners, friends and others. This 'positive contagion' has been evidenced in those activities which increase the capacity of social interventions to create greater benefits. In all areas there are certain individuals – our previous work has called such people 'ChangeMakers' – who are particularly adept at influencing change through networks. Interventions that identify and target these individuals and seek to work strategically with networks around them can generate greater efficiency and carry positive effects through a population more quickly than would less strategic approaches. 4. An economic dividend. Researchers at LSE have supported our research by analysing the economic impact of several of our interventions, quantifying the potential of social relationship-based interventions for notional savings in public finances as well as contributions to the wider economy. There is evidence that investing in interventions which build social relationships can improve employability, improve health (which has positive economic impacts) and create savings in health and welfare expenditure. These dividends can be derived by a managed approach to unleashing the value of community capital. Like other forms of capital, community capital can be increased, reserves of it can be unlocked, and putting it to use can bring about great social, economic and personal benefits. All communities, social networks, and individuals have assets that can help to create community capital and generate social dividends. Here we present models of engagement that can help funders, civil society, public service providers and all those trying to drive social change to utilise these assets to the benefit of people and their communities.


Strawberries in southern California have shown decline symptoms during the last 2 years. More than 70% of plants tested in California were infected with two newly identified criniviruses that infect strawberry (Strawberry pallidosis and Beet pseudo-yellows). Strawberry cultivars are usually symptomless when infected with one virus, and testing for other strawberry viruses is performed to identify any other viruses that may be involved in the symptomatology. Primers SLRSV F (5' CCTCTCCAACC-TGCTAGACT 3') and SLRSV R (5' AAGCGCATGAAGGTGTAACT 3') that amplify a 497-bp fragment of RNA 2 of Strawberry latent ringspot virus (SLRSV) were developed and utilized for reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) detection. SLRSV belongs to the family Sequiviridae and is transmitted by nematodes of the genus Xiphinema. The virus has a broad host range (4) and is usually symptomless in strawberries. Strawberry plants from commercial fields in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, Canada were tested. SLRSV was identified in 17% of plants tested from California and 4% of plants tested from British Columbia, while all samples from Oregon and Washington tested negative. The fragment amplified (GenBank Accession No. AY461735, isolate from British Columbia, Canada) shares 84% nucleotide and 94% amino acid sequence identity with the previously published sequence of SLRSV from strawberry (GenBank Accession No. X77466) (3). The virus was transmitted mechanically from strawberry samples from Canada to Chenopodium quinoa, and the infected C. quinoa plants tested positive for SLRSV with RT-PCR, while no amplicons were obtained from noninoculated control plants. To our knowledge, this is the first report of SLRSV in strawberry in North America, although it has been previously reported in a single cherry tree in Ontario, Canada (1) and in an imported seed lot of parsley in California (2). The number of plants that tested positive as well as the geographic distribution of the virus indicates that the virus is widespread in California, but further testing is needed to identify its distribution in other states. References: (1) W. R. Allen et al. Phytopathology 60:1262, 1970. (2) C. M. Hanson and R. N. Campbell. Plant Dis. Rep. 63:142, 1979. (3) S. Kreiah et al. J. Gen. Virol. 75:2527, 1994. (4) K. Schmelzer. Phytopath. Z. 66:1, 1969.


Immigration has once again become a highly charged issue in American politics. Primarily using experimental data, many scholars have attributed the intensity and nature of public opinion on immigration to the framing and priming power of the media. Yet, in order to estimate the extent of these and other potential effects, we must first understand the nature and complexities of this media coverage. Thus, in this paper which will be an opening chapter in my dissertation on immigrant specific information and its effect on immigration policy preferences, I take a step back and address the question: How has the national media covered immigrants? I employ a content analysis on articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today from January 1 2009 to August 31, 2010 to address this question. The descriptive account of immigration coverage in the media will not only build upon previous studies of immigration and race coverage in the news, but will also identify future areas of inquiry for media effects.


Reef islands are unique landforms composed entirely of sediment produced on the surrounding coral reefs. Despite the fundamental importance of these ecological-sedimentary links for island development and future maintenance, reef island sediment production regimes remain poorly quantified. Using census and sedimentary data from Vakkaru island (Maldives), a sand-dominated atoll interior island, we quantify the major sediment-generating habitats, the abundance of sediment producers in these habitats, and the rates and size fractions of sediment generated by different taxa. The estimated annual sediment production is 685,000 kg (or 370 m 3 ), ∼75% of which is produced on the narrow outer reef flat, despite composing only 21% of the total platform area. Approximately 65% of the platform acts solely as a sediment sink. Census data identify parrotfish as the major sediment producers, generating >85% of the 5.7 kg m –2 of new sand-grade sediment produced on the outer reef flat each year. Halimeda (macroalgae) produce a further 10%, most as gravel-grade material. Comparisons between production estimates and sedimentary data indicate that reef ecology and island sedimentology are tightly linked; reef flat and lagoon sediments are dominated by coral and Halimeda , although fine- to medium-grained coral sand is the dominant (∼59%) island constituent. The generation of sediment suitable for maintaining this reef island is thus critically dependent on a narrow zone of high-productivity reef, but most especially on the maintenance of healthy parrotfish populations that can convert reef framework to sand-grade sediment.


Abstract Controversy exists regarding the relation between visual perceptual ability and mathematics. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not poor mathematics achievement was related to performance on tests of visual discrimination and visual memory. A masked investigation of visual perception and academics in 171 second through sixth grade children (mean age = 10.08 years) from a middle class, primarily white, elementary school near Columbus, Ohio was performed. Visual perceptual skills were assessed using the VMI Supplemental Developmental Test of Visual Perception (VP) and a new test of Visual Memory. The California Achievement Test-5 (CAT) and the Test of Cognitive Skills-2 were administered by the school and the scores were used as measures of mathematics achievement and cognitive ability, respectively. Age and verbal ability were controlled in all regression analyses. Logistic regressions revealed that poor visual perceptual skill was significantly related to poor mathematics ability (Visual Memory (aOR = 0.855, p = 0.039) and Visual Perception (aOR = 0.971, p = 0.048)). However, a logistic analysis that included both visual perceptual areas, revealed a significant relation for only the new test of Visual Memory (p = 0.039). Poor visual perceptual ability should be considered to be amongst the skills significantly related to poor mathematics achievement. ********** Introduction Visual perception refers to the process of interpreting and organizing visual information (Kavale, 1982). Visual perceptual skill is often subdivided into areas such as visual discrimination and visual memory. Visual discrimination involves the ability to attend to and identify a figure's distinguishing features and details, such as shape, orientation, color and size. Visual memory refers to the ability to remember a visual image. It is reasonable to think that a relation may exist between visual perceptual skill and mathematical ability. For example, good visual discrimination/analysis skills could assist children in discriminating between numbers, differentiating between arithmetic signs, and breaking down problems into manageable components. In addition, good visual discrimination and visual memory skills would be helpful when spatially organizing calculations or solving geometry and word problems. Furthermore, good visual memory skills could also be instrumental when learning multiplication tables, retaining what has been read in a word problem, and copying assignments from the board to the paper. In another light, while simultaneous visual processing skills should be helpful when solving geometry problems that must be solved by looking at the problem as a whole, sequential visual processing skills should be instrumental when solving word problems and organizing calculations that must be solved in a sequential fashion. In fact, a significant relationship between visual perceptual skill and mathematics abilities has been previously reported (Kulp, 1999; Solan, 1987). Furthermore, even authors who have expressed a difference of opinion have reported a difference in visual perceptual skill between good and poor readers (e.g., on a test which involved copying geometric figures, a "draw a bicycle" test (p Therefore, this was a masked investigation of the ability of visual discrimination and visual memory scores to predict currently reduced mathematics achievement. …


It is commonplace to equate the arrival of a new conservative administration in Washington, DC, with the "rolling back" of the federal activities. We disagree with this conventional perspective, and seek to demonstrate that the equation of conservative Republicanism and retrenchment elides a critical change in the relationship between party politics and State power—a relationship that Donald Trump seems determined to nurture. Drawing on primary research, we argue that partisanship in the United States is no longer a struggle over the size of the State; rather it is a contest to control national administrative power. Since the late 1960s, conservative administrations have sought to redeploy rather than dismantle or roll back state power. Through "redeployment," conservative presidents have sustained previous levels of State spending or State activity, but in a way reflecting a new administration's ideology.


Effective schools or improving schools are fashionable terms in the rhetoric of recent education movements, yet the heart of these movements is often more to do with teaching quality than with school practice. This book takes a holistic view of teacher development, examining the contexts and conditions of teaching: school leadership and culture; teachers' lives and histories; change; teacher learning, competence and expertise; and the moral purposes of teaching. Day looks at the conditions under which teacher development may be enhanced, and brings together research and other information, from the UK and overseas.


We propose and demonstrate the concept of transversally chirped microstructured opti- cal fiber and its application for the development of new platforms for sensing and tele-communications devices. First, the feasibility of the structure is demonstrated through two different techniques of manufacture. Based on the proposed structure, a novel mode-converter device is numerically studied. It is found that the mode conversion between LP 01 and LP 11 modes can be continuously tuned by temperature changes from 25 to 75°C. And that, the coupling efficiency in the wavelength range between 1.2 μm and 1.7 μm is always higher than 65%. Consequently , the proposed mode converter can oper- ate in the E + S + C + L + U bands. Finally, a similar structure was used to design a new sensing architecture, which consisting of a dual-core transversally chirped microstruc - tured optical fiber for refractive index sensing of fluids. We show that by introducing a chirp in the hole size, the microstructured optical fiber can be a structure with decoupled cores, forming a Mach–Zehnder interferometer in which the analyte directly modulates the device transmittance by its differential influence on the effective refractive index of each core mode. We show that by filling all fiber holes with analyte, the sensing structure achieves high sensitivity (transmittance changes of 302.8 per RIU at 1.42) and has the potential for use over a wide range of analyte refractive index.


This Article represents the culmination of over two-years of historical research, but it arrives at an odd moment, right in the middle of one of the largest financial crises in Western capitalism. In one sense, it is bad timing because the central premise of the Article is that most people today believe that the market is the most efficient mechanism to allocate resources. The federal bailouts of 2008 challenge this central premise and are forcing the American people to reexamine the need for the regulation of the free market. In another sense, the timing is, sadly, perfect. Perfect because the purpose of this Article is to question the meaning of the phrase the need for the regulation of the free market and to suggest that it is precisely the belief in the duality of those two terms - regulation and free market - that is one of the greatest problems we face today. The terms, as well as their companion expressions, market efficiency, natural order, self-adjusting markets, etc., are misleading categories that fail to capture the individual distinctiveness of different forms of market organization. These categories are responsible, first, for facilitating our growing penal sphere, and, second, for naturalizing and thereby masking the redistributive consequences associated with different methods of organizing markets. This Article asks the question, what work do these categories of natural order and market efficiency do for us? The story begins very far in time and place, in the Parisian markets of the eighteenth century, with the establishment of the lieutenant generale de police du Chatelet de Paris and the police of bakers, grain merchants, and markets.


In order to reap the benefits of Lean Construction, construction companies should integrate, empower and enable all personnel involved in the construction process whether on or off site. As such, construction workers need to be trained on lean construction concepts and principles. The purpose of this paper is to develop a tool to assess the workers' understanding of Lean concepts in construction. In this paper, the lean construction concepts are categorized into eight main areas: planning and control, standardization, pull production, wastes, kaizen, site organization, quality and safety. A lean construction worker knowledge profile was formulated based on the aforementioned categories. This profile encompasses all the knowledge, information, and lean background that a construction worker should distinguish, utilize and harness on the construction site. This lean profile formed the basis for a survey tool conducted on different construction sites in Lebanon to test its efficacy in identification areas of weaknesses in understanding lean principles as the lever of consruciton workers. Out of the eight categories, the workers lacked mainly the required acquaintance in pull production and waste. As a result, training exercises and games are recommended to instill lean construction concepts in the everyday behaviour, practice and job performance of construction workers.


We combine two methods to enable the prediction of the order in which contacts are broken under external stretching forces in single molecule experiments. These two methods are Gō‐like models and elastic network models. The Gō‐like models have shown remarkable success in representing many aspects of protein behavior, including the reproduction of experimental data obtained from atomic force microscopy. The simple elastic network models are often used successfully to predict the fluctuations of residues around their mean positions, comparing favorably with the experimentally measured crystallographic B‐factors. The behavior of biomolecules under external forces has been demonstrated to depend principally on their elastic properties and the overall shape of their structure. We have studied in detail the muscle protein titin and green fluorescent protein and tested for ten other proteins. First, we stretch the proteins computationally by performing stochastic dynamics simulations with the Gō‐like model. We obtain the force–displacement curves and unfolding scenarios of possible mechanical unfolding. We then use the elastic network model to calculate temperature factors (B‐factors) and compare the slowest modes of motion for the stretched proteins and compare them with the predicted order of breaking contacts between residues in the Gō‐like model. Our results show that a simple Gaussian network model is able to predict contacts that break in the next time stage of stretching. Additionally, we have found that the contact disruption is strictly correlated with the highest force exerted by the backbone on these residues. Our prediction of bond‐breaking agrees well with the unfolding scenario obtained with the Gō‐like model. We anticipate that this method will be a useful new tool for interpreting stretching experiments. Proteins 2008. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


A behavioral economic approach to understanding the relative value of alcohol may be useful for advancing medication development for alcoholism. Naltrexone is a heavily researched and moderately effective treatment for alcohol dependence making it a good candidate for a proof-of-concept study of behavioral economics and alcoholism pharmacotherapy. This study examines naltrexone efficacy and pharmacogenetics in terms of the relative value of alcohol, assessed via demand curve analysis. Participants were 35 heavy drinking (AUDIT ≥8) Asian Americans. A within-subjects cross-over medication design was used along with an intravenous alcohol challenge completed after 4 days of both naltrexone and placebo. At baseline and BrAC = 0.06g/dl, participants completed an Alcohol Purchase Task, which assessed estimated alcohol consumption along escalating prices. Behavioral economic demand curve analysis yielded measures of intensity, elasticity, maximum expenditure (O(max)), proportionate price insensitivity (P(max)) and breakpoint. Compared to placebo, naltrexone significantly reduced intensity, O(max) and breakpoint. There were also trend-level medication effects on P(max). BrAC was associated with increases in P(max) and breakpoint. A significant naltrexone × OPRM1 genotype interaction was observed for intensity of demand. The present study extends the literature on naltrexone's mechanisms through the application of a novel behavioral economic paradigm. These results indicate that naltrexone reduces several indices of demand for alcohol. This preliminary report provides further evidence for the effectiveness of naltrexone and supports the utility of a behavioral economic approach to alcoholism pharmacotherapy development.


The great historian of science I. B. Cohen explores how numbers have come to assume a leading role in science, in the operations and structure of government, in marketing, and in many other aspects of daily life. Consulting and collecting numbers has been a feature of human affairs since antiquity-taxes, head counts for military service-but not until the Scientific Revolution in the twelfth century did social numbers such as births, deaths, and marriages begin to be analyzed. Cohen shines a new light on familiar figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Dickens; and he reveals Florence Nightingale to be a passionate statistician. Cohen has left us with an engaging and accessible history of numbers, an appreciation of the essential nature of statistics.