The GAGA protein of Drosophila was first identified as a stimulatory factor in in vitro transcription assays using the engrailed and Ultrabithorax promoters. Subsequent studies have suggested that the GAGA factor promotes transcription by blocking the repressive effects of histones; moreover, it has been shown to function in chromatin remodeling, acting together with other factors in the formation of nuclease hypersensitive sites in vitro. The GAGA factor is encoded by the Trithorax-like locus and in the studies reported here we have used the maternal effect allele Trl13C to examine the functions of the protein during embryogenesis. We find that GAGA is required for the proper expression of a variety of developmental loci that contain GAGA binding sites in their upstream regulatory regions. The observed disruptions in gene expression are consistent with those expected for a factor involved in chromatin remodeling. In addition to facilitating gene expression, the GAGA factor appears to have a more global role in chromosome structure and function. This is suggested by the spectrum of nuclear cleavage cycle defects observed in Trl13C embryos. These defects include asynchrony in the cleavage cycles, failure in chromosome condensation, abnormal chromosome segregation and chromosome fragmentation. These defects are likely to be related to the association of the GAGA protein with heterochromatic satellite sequences which is observed throughout the cell cycle.


Robert Agnew proposed a new version of strain theory in 1992. In this article, Agnew argued that strain is not only a result of the blocked opportunity to achieve goals as Merton had argued, but that strain also results from the removal of positively valued stimuli and the presence of negative stimuli. With such a theory, criminologist had focused on how this may explain juvenile delinquency. Yet very little attention was given to how this may affect adult criminality as well. Similarly, Hirschi (1969) presented social control theory as a means of describing the causes of juvenile delinquency. While these theories have been repeatedly tested and supported with respect to delinquency, they have rarely been used to describe adult criminality. This paper intends to compare the utility of Agnew's general strain theory and Hirschi's control theory in explaining the criminal behavior of fathers. For general strain theory, it is predicted that fathers who have either high contact and low relationship quality or who have low contact and high relationship quality will have significantly higher criminal activity than those who have high contact and relationship quality or low contact and relationship quality. Conversely, social control theory predicts that fathers who have low relationship qualities with their children are more likely to commit criminal acts. This paper aims to ascertain which of these hypotheses is more accurate.


A new and effective unique two-phase reaction system is investigated for the high yield production of tri(furyl)methane from furfural and furan. This strategy includes the use of an acidic aqueous phase (water + –SO3H functionalized IL) and furan phase, which significantly suppresses polymer formation, thereby increasing the yield of tri(furyl)methane. Furan serves as a reactant as well as an extraction solvent for the recovery of the condensation products. For comparison, different –SO3H functionalized ionic liquids are prepared and their performances evaluated for the condensation of furan and furfural. The ionic liquids with alkyl chain linkers are found to be more effective and acidic than those with imidazolium linked N-sulfonic acids. In addition, an increase in carbon chain length between imidazole/tri-ethylamine/pyridine and –SO3H, increases the catalytic activity of the respective ionic liquids. Among the several prepared ionic liquids, the strongly acidic imidazolium based butylsulfonic acid 6 shows the best activity with a maximum condensation product yield of 84%. This strategy offers a significantly high yield of the condensation products of furan and furfural compared to the traditional mineral acid route. The activity and stability of the –SO3H functionalized 6 is confirmed from seven successful recycles, in which there is no reduction in its activity. Finally, this new strategy is successfully extended for the condensation of furan derivatives (e.g. furan and 2-methylfuran) with several different aldehydes, ketones and alcohols.


This research investigated the ways in which optimism, grit and resilience are related to academic success and athletic participation for college students after they have gone through a significant negative event in their sport. Participants between the ages of 18 to 25 were evaluated on grit, optimism, resilience and coping strategies through the Grit Scale, the Life Orientation Test, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, and the Ways of Coping questionnaire. All individuals had been either cut from or left a collegiate sports team. Respondents also completed an informational demographics questionnaire assessing age, college grades, any ongoing participation in a sport, and appraisal of and attributions about the experience of leaving their team. It was predicted that individuals with higher levels of optimism, grit and resilience, as well as better coping skills, would achieve similar or better grades after than before leaving the team and would continue to participate in their chosen sport (in some role) following the experience of being cut. Results indicated that continued participation in sport was not associated with any of the proposed predictor variables, and assessment of changes in grades, unfortunately, could not be analyzed. In contrast, multiple significant relationships were found between resilience and coping mechanisms, in addition to aspects of attributional style. Furthermore, both resilience and a combination of resilience and grit, but not optimism, predicted adaptive coping strategies in participants. This study may help to further determine what helps individuals succeed after hardship, and also could help confirm the importance of both preparing sports participants for failure experiences and also supporting their subsequent efforts at success.


Video communication over lossy packet networks such as the Internet is hampered by limited bandwidth and packet loss. This paper presents a system for providing reliable video communication over these networks, where the system is composed of two subsystems: (1) multiple state video encoder/decoder and (2) a path diversity transmission system. Multiple state video coding combats the problem of error propagation at the decoder by coding the video into multiple independently decodable streams, each with its own prediction process and state. If one stream is lost the other streams can still be decoded to produce usable video, and furthermore, the correctly received streams provide bidirectional (previous and future) information that enables improved state recovery for the corrupted stream. This video coder is a form of multiple description coding (MDC), and its novelty lies in its use of information from the multiple streams to perform state recovery at the decoder. The path diversity transmission system explicitly sends different subsets of packets over different paths, as opposed to the default scenarios where the packets proceed along a single path, thereby enabling the end- to-end video application to effectively see an average path behavior. We refer to this as path diversity. Generally, seeing this average path behavior provides better performance than seeing the behavior of any individual random path. For example, the probability that all of the multiple paths are simultaneously congested is much less than the probability that a single path is congested. The resulting path diversity provides the multiple state video decoder with an appropriate virtual channel to assist in recovering from lost packets, and can also simplify system design, e.g. FEC design. We propose two architectures for achieving path diversity, and examine the effectiveness of path diversity in communicating video over a lossy packet network.


This article describes a university science course that integrates physics, education, and community outreach. The class both improves student mastery of science and teaching as well as addresses the university's mission to pursue research, education, and community service. The structure, implementation, and effectiveness of the course are discussed to present one approach or model for science education.


In this pathbreaking study of three of the most familiar texts in the Chinese tradition—all concerning stones endowed with magical properties—Jing Wang develops a monumental reconstruction of ancient Chinese stone lore. Wang's thorough and systematic comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese literature.

Bringing together Chinese myth, religion, folklore, art, and literature, this book is the first in any language to amass the sources of stone myth and stone lore in Chinese culture. Uniting classical Chinese studies with contemporary Western theoretical concerns, Wang examines these stone narratives by analyzing intertextuality within Chinese traditions. She offers revelatory interpretations to long-standing critical issues, such as the paradoxical character of the monkey in The Journey to the West , the circularity of narrative logic in The Dream of the Red Chamber , and the structural necessity of the stone tablet in Water Margin.

By both challenging and incorporating traditional sinological scholarship, Wang's The Story of Stone reveals the ideological ramifications of these three literary works on Chinese cultural history and makes the past relevant to contemporary intellectual discourse. Specialists in Chinese literature and culture, comparative literature, literary theory, and religious studies will find much of interest in this outstanding work, which is sure to become a standard reference on the subject.


T HE -SAME GROUPING of subject fields is being followed for the lists of references in the February and March numbers of the School Review as has been used in the cycles of lists published during 1933-50, inclusive. The concept of "instruction" is also the same and includes curriculum, methods of teaching and study and supervision, and measurement. In each subject field the list includes items published during a period of approximately twelve months since the preparation of the list appearing last year.


We report a microfluidic approach for one-step fabrication of polyelectrolyte microcapsules in aqueous conditions. Using two immiscible aqueous polymer solutions, we generate transient water-in-water-in-water double emulsion droplets and use them as templates to fabricate polyelectrolyte microcapsules. The capsule shell is formed by the complexation of oppositely charged polyelectrolytes at the immiscible interface. We find that attractive electrostatic interactions can significantly prolong the release of charged molecules. Moreover, we demonstrate the application of these microcapsules in encapsulation and release of proteins without impairing their biological activities. Our platform should benefit a wide range of applications that require encapsulation and sustained release of molecules in aqueous environments.


This study aims to analyze the common elements in the mental models of cultural entre- preneurs in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, as well as to contribute to the expansion of public policies that enable the development of such enterprises. The theoretical framework of this study addresses entrepreneurship and the mental models of entrepreneurs in the creative economy sector. The Brazilian government has showed concern with the development of the creative economy sector, considering its importance in the national and international scenario. There is a lack of information and data that describes the specific characteristics and issues of the creative economy. Thus, it is important not only to present a statistical data on the sector, but also qualitative data that can broaden and deepen the knowledge of the sector and its professionals.


The Caledonian thrust belts of NW Scotland exhibit many features typical of foreland fold-and-thrust belts. The major structures propagated westwards towards the foreland, the thin carapace of Cambro-Ordovician sediments being accreted in imbricate and duplex zones beneath the major thrust sheets. On a broad scale, the rules of thrust geometry are obeyed but many local anomalies are found, particularly in the Assynt region. In Assynt, several large fault-bounded gravity-spreading structures, surge zones, have been identified. Extensional faults have been traced into strike-slip and then contractional faults. There are zones of extensional and contractional imbricate faults and extensional and contractional ductile flow. Similar structures have been found along the length of the Moine thrust belt, suggesting that gravity spreading was an important mechanism during the later stages of movement. Within the main Caledonian fold belt there are several major tectonic slides, which are recognized by a local increase in intensity of deformation. The majority are NW-verging and were originally gently dipping. In the Highlands SE of the Great Glen there are early major SE-verging recumbent folds associated with considerable crustal thickening reflected in high pressure (~12kbar) metamorphism. Many of the major slides may have formed by spreading away from this thickened crust. The Caledonian deformation and metamorphism occurred later in the Moines and Moine thrust zone than in the Dalradian and Grampian Moines to the SE of the Great Glen. This may reflect different levels of deformation; alternatively, it may argue for a large strike-slip displacement on the Great Glen fault, juxtaposing crustal blocks which had experienced different ages of Caledonian deformation and metamorphism. The late movement on the Moine thrust involved spreading from an area of thickened Caledonian crust formed either by the stair-step trajectory of the basal thrust to the Moines and, or, by thickening due to intrusion of large masses of late Caledonian granites


The GameStop saga and meme stock frenzy have shown the pathway to the most disruptive revolution in corporate governance of the millennium. New generations of retail investors use technologies, online forums, and gaming dynamics to coordinate their actions and obtain unprecedented results. Signals indicate that these investors, whom we can dub wireless investors, are currently expanding their actions to corporate governance. Wireless investors' generational characteristics suggest that they will use corporate governance to pursue social and environmental causes. Their engagement with corporate governance has the potential to spark a social movement. The movement would be based on disintermediation of investments and aimed at bringing business corporations to serve their original partly-private-partly-public purpose. This article discusses premises, architecture, and characteristics of the movement that would cause business corporations to re-marry their partly-private-partly-public purpose. If such a movement proves successful, the paradigm shift that finally makes corporations serve the welfare of a broader range of stakeholders would happen at the hands of shareholders.


Background. Depersonalization has long been considered a syndrome but there is poor agreement on its constituent symptoms. Method. In order to establish whether different symptoms of depersonalization represent the expression of a single or several underlying dimensions, an exploratory factor analysis on the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS) was carried out on 138 consecutive patients diagnosed with depersonalization disorder. Results. Four well determined factors accounting for 73·3% of the variance were extracted. These were labelled 'Anomalous Body Experience'; 'Emotional Numbing'; 'Anomalous Subjective Recall' and 'Alienation from Surroundings'. Conclusions. Symptoms of depersonalization belong to distinct but related psychopathological domains.


The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) launched this week. The initiative calls on scholarly publishers to make the abstracts of their publications openly available. More specifically, publishers that work with Crossref to register DOIs for their publications are requested to include abstracts in the metadata they deposit in Crossref. These abstracts will then be made openly available by Crossref. 39 publishers have already agreed to join I4OA and to open their abstracts...


Illumination changes cause challenging problems for video surveillance algorithms, as objects of interest become masked by changes in background appearance. It is desired for such algorithms to maintain a consistent perception of a scene regardless of illumination variation. This work introduces a concept we call BigBackground, which is a model for representing large, persistent scene features based on chromatic self-similarity. This model is found to comprise 50% to 90% of surveillance scenes. The large, stable regions represented by the model are used as reference points for performing illumination compensation. The presented compensation technique is demonstrated to decrease improper false-positive classification of background pixels by an average of 83% compared to the uncompensated case and by 25% to 43% compared to compensation techniques from the literature.


If the sheer number of references to human rights in media headlines or government statements is of any guidance, human rights concerns now appear virtually at the center of the framework of the norms, principles, and obligations that shape relations within the international community both among and within states. That political journey began, perhaps arbitrarily, on 10 December, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly (UN-GA) embraced and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a ringing endorsement and advocacy of the notion that regardless of race, religion or nationality, all men and women, everywhere in the world are entitled to the human rights and fundamental freedoms simply because they are human. The Historical Dictionary of Human Rights covers the history of the Human Rights movement through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 1000 cross-referenced entries on terminology, conventions, treaties, intergovernmental organizations in the United Nations family or regional bodies, and the constantly expanding universe of non-governmental organizations, as well as some of the pioneers and defenders. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Human Rights movement.


Abstract
Purpose
This chapter proposes that social clauses within International Investments Agreements shall explicitly refer to the Global Compact initiative to be more effective at engaging foreign investors with the sustainable development policies of recipient States. Therefore, it analyzes the interaction between investment treaties and sustainability, evidencing an ongoing trend aimed at including corporate social responsibility provisions into these instruments, in order to address social goals from the perspective of foreign investors and Transnational Corporations.

Design/methodology/approach
The argument of this chapter relies mostly on literature review, but it also takes into account evidence provided by some selected International Investment Agreements. It is out of these sources that I infer that the Global Compact initiative can contribute the most to engage investors with the promotion of sustainable development goals within States recipient of Foreign Direct Investment.

Findings
The main finding of this chapter is that labor and environmental provisions in International Investment Agreements should make explicit reference to the U.N. Global Compact initiative. Certainly, because of its universality, legitimacy, and flexible implementation, this initiative constitutes the best approach for helping host States to achieve their sustainable development goals without losing their allure for foreign investors.

Practical implications
Although there are some International Investment Agreements whose labor and environmental clauses call for the voluntary adoption of corporate social responsibility provisions among foreign investors and Transnational Corporations, none of them makes explicit reference to the U.N. Global Compact initiative nor reflects the universal scope of its 10 principles. Thus, this chapter could serve as a departing point to discuss the inclusion of the U.N. Global Compact principles within International Investment Agreements.

Originality/value of the chapter
Even though there is literature about the inclusion of instruments of corporate social responsibility in International Investment Agreements, the originality of this chapter consists in approaching this subject matter from the perspective of the U.N. Global Compact initiative.


This valuable book shows second language researchers how to use the statistical program SPSS to conduct statistical tests frequently done in SLA research. Using data sets from real SLA studies, A Guide to Doing Statistics in Second Language Research Using SPSS shows newcomers to both statistics and SPSS how to generate descriptive statistics, how to choose a statistical test, and how to conduct and interpret a variety of basic statistical tests. The author covers the statistical tests that are most commonly used in second language research, including chi-square, t-tests, correlation, multiple regression, ANOVA and non-parametric analogs to these tests. The text is abundantly illustrated with graphs and tables depicting actual data sets, and exercises throughout the book help readers understand concepts (such as the difference between independent and dependent variables) and work out statistical analyses. Answers to all exercises are provided on the book�s companion website, along with sample data sets and other supplementary material.


Increasing accuracy of broiler diet formulation based on amino acid digestibility in comparison to application of total amino acids could lead to more feed efficiency and productivity. This experiment was conducted for determination of sampling site (excreta and ileum) and recognition of the effects of a commercial enzyme (Grind ® ; Danisco, Finland) on metabolizable energy, protein and amino acid digestibility of barley. This study was modulated by a marker in 21-day old Arbor Acres chickens. Corn-soybean meal was used as a control diet and, in the other two treatments, barley (at a level of 40%) with and without enzyme as the test ingredient were supplemented to the basal diet. Chromic oxide was included in all diets (0.5%) as an indigestible marker. Apparent metabolizable energy (AME), corrected by nitrogen (AMEn) and apparent digestibility of aspartic acid, glutamic acid, serine, glycine, alanine, tyrosine, valine and methionine were significantly (p<0.05) higher in feces than ileum. Protein digestibility of diet and barley was significantly (p<0.05) higher in the ileum than in feces. Apparent digestibility of tryptophan, proline, methionine, phenylalanine and lysine was increased significantly (p<0.05) by enzyme supplementation. In contrast, no response was observed in AME, AMEn, and protein digestibility of the diet and barley by enzyme supplementation. The results of this study have shown that AME and amino acid digestibility were increased in feces, in contrast an adverse effect was observed for protein digestibility of the diet and barley.


With the advent of real-world quantum computing, the idea that parametrized quantum computations can be used as hypothesis families in a quantum-classical machine learning system is gaining increasing traction. Such hybrid systems have already shown the potential to tackle real-world tasks in supervised and generative learning, and recent works have established their provable advantages in special artificial tasks. Yet, in the case of reinforcement learning, which is arguably most challenging and where learning boosts would be extremely valuable, no proposal has been successful in solving even standard benchmarking tasks, nor in showing a theoretical learning advantage over classical algorithms. In this work, we achieve both. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical reinforcement learning model using very few qubits, which we show can be effectively trained to solve several standard benchmarking environments. Moreover, we demonstrate, and formally prove, the ability of parametrized quantum circuits to solve certain learning tasks that are intractable for classical models, including current state-of-art deep neural networks, under the widely-believed classical hardness of the discrete logarithm problem.


ABSTRACT This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious symbols to childcare. Controversies over 'veiled nannies' serve as points of departure for investigating laïcité – French secularism – through which religion is regulated. The investigation is based on fieldwork among Muslim women in Marseille and on the analysis of legal decisions, official documents, and media. The debates on whether to legislate on religious symbols in the domain of childcare reveal how the line between religion and politics, and private and public is continuously redrawn through state efforts to cultivate and govern (secular) Republican selves. Drawing on Agrama's [2012a. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] conceptualisation of secularism as a 'problem-space', I argue that legal regulation of religious symbols institutionalises a 'secular suspicion' at the heart of efforts to imagine and govern French society and its future, a future in which Muslims increasingly find it difficult to imagine themselves.


This paper proposes a power flow control strategy based on theory of symmetrical components for implementing bi-directional power flow between the utility grid and local PV array. The system includes a three phase bidirectional inverter with a battery bank at the input interfaced through a boost converter with solar arrays. The battery bank operates in discharge mode when power is fed to the grid and charges from the grid during low demand period. For grid synchronization, principle of phase locked loop (PLL) is implemented in dq synchronous rotating frame (SRF) and PI controller has been used in the feedback loop for the necessary control. The PLL block is implemented using the concept of instantaneous symmetrical component theory. The active and reactive power flow in the grid is controlled by changing the value of reference dc voltage at the input side of inverter. The system has been simulated in PSIM software for a 1kVA inverter. This simple scheme of bi-directional power flow is useful for connecting remote areas with abundant solar energy to the local grid.


There is not much research done on the socio-legal aspects related to the Armed Forces in India. The author in this book has given detailed analysis on some of the legal issues of concern to the Armed Forces of India. The book is a compilation of the presentations made by the author at various forums including USI, academic institutions and Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence. The author in the book has touched upon issues related to Redress of Grievances, Armed Forces Tribunal Act, Laws on Weaponry, Command Responsibility in Armed Conflict, need for a Common Code for the Armed Forces, International Criminal Court, Human Rights and Armed Forces Special Powers Act. An important issue related to the Stress Management in the Armed Forces and discussed in the Parliament has also been discussed. The recommendations based on the presentation made to the Parliament Standing Committee on Defence has also been elaborated. The book is aimed at providing useful information about our military legal system to unit officers, formation commanders. Legal professionals and public in general.


In this book Youngil Lim explores the process by which the poverty-stricken agrarian economy of South Korea was transformed over the past three decades into a semi-industrial urban economy. The chief questions Lim addresses are: Where did South Korea's technological knowledge come from? What did the government and market do to nurture such rapid learning? Will a continuation of current policy enable South Korea to catch up with other OECD countries? What is the appropriate role of the National Research and Development Program within the framework of the National System of Innovation? Because they defy quantitative measurement, institutional and organizational skills are often neglected in mainstream economic analyses. Lim shows how institutional and organizational skills help to explain the fast pace of learning and of upgrading technological capability and productivity. After discussing neoclassical views of the South Korean experience as well as the views of economists emphasizing institutional aspects of industrialization, Lim offers his own synthesis and speculates on South Korea's technological future.


Background: Despite rapid growth, Latino communities' mental health needs are unmet by existing services and research. Barriers may vary by geographic locations, but often include language, insurance coverage, immigration status, cultural beliefs, and lack of services. Objectives: The aim of this research was development of a cross-sectional instrument to assess the mental health status, beliefs, and knowledge of resources among rural and urban Latinos residing in a Midwestern state. Methods: The purpose of this article is to describe the community-based participatory research (CBPR) process of instrument development and lessons learned. Results: A culturally relevant, 100-item bilingual survey instrument was developed by community and academic partners. Lessons Learned: Community-based participatory research methods are salient for sensitive health topics and varied research objectives, including instrument development. To ensure cultural and social relevance of research, community participation is crucial at all stages of research, including developing the research question and instrument.


This paper develops and implements a method to monetize the impact of moderate social distancing on deaths from COVID-19. Using the Ferguson et al. (2020) simulation model of COVID-19's spread and mortality impacts in the United States, we project that 3-4 months of moderate distancing beginning in late March 2020 would save 1.7 million lives by October 1. Of the lives saved, 630,000 are due to avoided overwhelming of hospital intensive care units. Using the projected age-specific reductions in death and age-varying estimates of the United States Government's value of a statistical life, we find that the mortality benefits of social distancing are about $8 trillion or $60,000 per US household. Roughly 90% of the monetized benefits are projected to accrue to people age 50 or older. Overall, the analysis suggests that social distancing initiatives and policies in response to the COVID-19 epidemic have substantial economic benefits.


Dear Editor: We recently encountered the case of a woman who died in an atypical way as a result of coping with a breast mass by denial and avoidance. The patient, aged 48 years and white, lived at home with her husband and 2 young children. For 4 to 6 weeks preceding her death, she isolated herself from her family in the basement, explaining that she had personal issues that she was handling alone. She continued to work at her job, where her coworkers noted that she had become withdrawn. She was later found dead in the basement, surrounded by blood-soaked, foulsmelling clothing and gauze. There was a penetrating injury of the right breast and chest wall. An autopsy revealed that the injury was from a large ulcerated breast carcinoma, which eroded the chest wall and opened a large artery. There was no evidence of metastasis, which is the most common cause of death from breast cancer (1,2). Death owing to hemorrhage occurs in only approximately 9% of breast cancer patients (1,2) and is usually a complication of progressive disease. Death from a localized and usually curable primary tumor such as this one is most unusual. We believe the patient's denial and avoidance of her disease were psychosocial factors leading to this atypical mechanism of death from breast cancer. Denial can impede a woman's willingness to undergo screening examination (3). A substantial number of women may not recognize a breast abnormality on their own, before it is found by screening (4,5). They may use avoidant coping mechanisms that prevent them from checking for potential disease (4). Women who experience denial prior to disease identification are also more likely to maintain that denial later in the course of disease (5). After a diagnosis of breast cancer, a woman may experience denial based on fear of changes in self-image or sexuality or on concerns about the effect of the disease on her relationships with her partner or children (6). Coping strategies after diagnosis tend to assume a proactive character (3,7,8), however, and may include such activities as acceptance, positive reframing, use of religion, expressing emotion, adopting a fighting spirit, seeking support, asserting self-control, or diverting energy to other matters (7-9). While proactive coping strategies may seem to caregivers to be more productive in dealing with a serious disease, denial is not inherently a poor coping strategy. It can provide relief of psychological distress during difficult periods of treatment (3,7) and may be associated with remaining recurrence-free or experiencing prolonged duration of survival in women with local disease (3,10,11). …


The purpose of the present study was to examine the grammatical morphology and sentence imitation performance of two different groups of children with language impairment and to compare their performance with that of children learning language typically. Expressive use of tense-bearing and non-tense-related grammatical morphemes was explored. Children with specific language impairment (SLI), with Down syndrome (DS), and with typical language development (TL) were matched on mean length of utterance (MW). Performance was compared primarily on composite measures of tense, tense inflections, and non-tense morphemes, as well as on the Sentences subtest of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R; D. Wechsler, 1989). Exploratory analyses were completed on a set of 11 individual grammatical morphemes as a follow-up to the principal analyses. As predicted, the children with SLI performed significantly more poorly than the children with TL on all three composite measures. In addition, the DS group exhibited significantly weaker performance than did the TL group on the tense inflections and non-tense morpheme composites. Although there were no statistically reliable differences between the SLI and DS groups on any morpheme measure, the groups were not comparably weak in their use of the regular post, -ed; the irregular third person singular morphemes (e.g., has, does); the present progressive, -ing; or the use of modals. The SLI and DS groups both performed more poorly than did the TL group on the sentence imitation task.


The research presented here is firmly embedded within the broad area of design of channels of distribution, and in particular, the functional perspective of the subject matter. The conceptual foundations of the research can be found in the model developed by Rangan et al. (1992) (referred to in the thesis as the RMM model) and the prioritisation methodology proposed by Barich and Srinivasan (1993). Rangan and his co-authors posit that the design of channels of distribution for new industrial products can be based on the following eight determinant functions: product information, product customisation, product quality assurance, lot size, assortment, availability, after-sales service and logistics (these functions formed the dependent variables of this study). They go on to suggest that an appropriate channel structure can be predicted by examination of the importance of these functions as specified by industry experts, and weighted by their level of confidence in their estimates. Barich and Srinivasan (ibid.) used conjoint measurements in developing a methodology designed to offer guidelines as to the prioritisation of managerial actions.

The main aim of this research has been the development of a normative model for the design of distribution channels in the UK trade of WBPs. Because of the wide range of wood-based panels (WBPs) traded in the UK market, a calibration method has been developed that, based on two boundary defining panels (i.e. standard-grade OSB and exterior-grade MDF), allows the interpolation of the functional profile of all other panels. A third WBP, namely particleboard, has been used to test the predictive powers of the model. Examination of actual flows of distribution lead to the specification of the following two independent variables: type of WBP (studied at three levels - OSB, MDF and particleboard) and type of channel intermediary (also studied at three levels - overseas manufacturers, domestic manufacturers and endusers).

In order to fulfil the research aim eight hypotheses have been formulated and presented under the following conceptually related headings:
• Justification for Weighting the Data
H [sub]A: There is no association between expert respondents' 'level of confidence in response' and 'type ofWBP'.
H[sub]B: There is no correlation between the pattern of solutions obtained from weighted and unweighted data .

• Predictive Powers of the RMM Model
H[sub]e: There is no significant difference in predictive accuracy between MDF and OSB as the base of the calibration method.
H[sub]D: There is no significant difference in predictive accuracy between unweighted and weighted data.

• Model Stability
H[sub]E: There is no correlation between the rank order of channel function importance ratings obtained from the RMM model and the conjoint measurement approach.
• Explanatory Powers of the RMM Model
H[sub]F: The main effects of the 'type of expert respondent' variable are not significant in explaining variation in the importance placed on the eight channel functions (either collectively or individually).
H[sub]G: The main effects of the 'type of WBP' variable are not significant in explaining variation in the importance placed on the eight channel functions (either collectively or individually).
H[sub]H: The interactions between 'type of expert respondent' and 'type of WBP' are not significant in explaining variation in the importance placed on the eight channel functions (either collectively or individually).
Data were collected through a series of four cross-sectional surveys of industry experts, and analysed using a variety of classical inferential statistics and conjoint analysis. On the strength of the results, all ofthe above hypotheses were rejected.

The research findings cast doubt on the use of weighted data in the design of channels of distribution for established products. In addition, it is indicated that when predicting channel structures, the level/degree of similarity between the base and predicted products is an important consideration, thus justifying the use of boundary defining products in the development of the proposed model. Furthermore, during the development of the final model, the analysis has provided evidence to suggest that some of the function-related heuristics specified in the literature are context-specific, thus questioning their generalisability. Finally, the findings are synthesised into a normative model and a method designed to enable providers to prioritise adjustments to channel structures if proposed.

Finally, it is believed that the research presented in this thesis contributes to the general understanding of issues related to the design of channel structures by: (a) offering empirical evidence that questions some of currently accepted principles, such as functional heuristics, (b) modifying and, at least partially, validating the RMM model, (c) making suggestions as to calibration methods that may be used to interpolate channel structures, (d) proposing a new method of predicting channel structures based of the functional requirements of endusers, and (e) offers guidelines as to the prioritisation of adjustments that need to be made in existing channel structures in order to bring them in line with endusers requirements.


This paper reports on the experimental and theoretical studies of a light-driven micromotor, which is a "light mill" that rotates by absorbing photon energy. This light mill has four curved blades to form an axially asymmetric geometry. Upon lateral irradiation, the shape of the light mill induces an asymmetric photon heating to the surrounding gas molecules, leading to a gas convection that forces the light mill to rotate. The light mill was applied to actuate a scanning mirror for a laser beam. Using a Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) model, we investigated the working principle behind the operation of the light mill. The DSMC simulation yielded results consistent to our experimental data. The simulation results were used to explain the heat-induced light-mill rotation, in which the mean free path of the surrounding gas takes an important role.


New data, chiefly from drilling and palynology, refine age determinations of thick sequences of uppermost Cretaceous, Paleocene, and lower Eocene sedimentary rocks, and indicate types of Laramide crustal movements that occurred in and around the margins of structural basins in central Wyoming. The movements began with extensive downfolding of the basins, which continued to be tectonically active through early Eocene time. Subsidence of large segments of some basins equalled, or exceeded, the uplift of bordering mountains. Vertical movements of adjoining crustal blocks in central Wyoming during Laramide time (latest Cretaceous through early Eocene) are: Subsidence: Wind River basin, 16,000 ft (N.-central); Wind River basin, 14,000 ft (E.-central); and Great Divide basin, 12,000 ft (N.). Uplift: Owl Creek mountains, 17,500 ft; Casper Arch, 7500 ft; and Granite Mountains, 20,000 ft. These relations suggest that Laramide tectonic movements in this region were more vertical than horizontal, despite observed low dips on the shallow parts of many marginal reverse faults.


Recent advancement in cognitive science and software development enables new kinds of decision support tools avoiding the collapse of the grand rationalist planning ideals of the 1960's. The older versions of decision support was directed mainly towards the reduction of epistemic uncertainty. They focused on the inference processes of reasoning. New generations of decision support tools will focus also on more pressing conceptual uncertainty. Conceptual uncertainty is at the root of so called "wicked problems" and conflicts related to "essentially contested concepts", e.g. the notion of "sustainability". The paper shows that conceptual uncertainty is a problem for Swedish environmental decision making. The paper argues that such uncertainty cannot be dealt with by decision support tools for reducing epistemic uncertainty. The paper shows that dialectic inquiry in the tradition of Arne Naess and Stephen Toulmin and multi party negotiations are ways of managing conceptual uncertainty. The paper also introduces two kinds of software packages, Athena Standard and Athena Negotiator, supporting dialectic inquiry and negotiations, respectively. Such low budget tools with low user threshold and wide applicability may help us avoid some obvious and possibly costly or disastrous failures in social reasoning and decision making.


As I worked through the revisions of this paper I realized that I was to a great extent returning to the dominant themes from one of the first books I ever published. This was Can Government Go Bankrupt?, written with Richard Rose and published in 1978. That book and this paper both deal with the authority of governments and their capacity to govern. Dror (2001) provides a very detailed analysis of governance capacity, but much of that analysis will actually come down to the presence of legitimacy for the governing system, and the capacity to use steering instruments effectively to reach desired collective goals. The issues to be raised in this paper are concentrated primarily on governance questions at the level of central governments and multi-level interactions, rather than of the international system, but much of the same logic of sovereignty/authority is in operation.


Since the 1970s, American society has provided especially fertile ground for the growth of the Christian right and its influence on both political and cultural discourse. In Stations of the Cross political theorist Paul Apostolidis shows how a critical component of this movement's popular culture—evangelical conservative radio—interacts with the current U.S. political economy. By examining in particular James Dobson's enormously influential program, Focus on the Family —its messages, politics, and effects—Apostolidis reveals the complex nature of contemporary conservative religious culture.

Public ideology and institutional tendencies clash, the author argues, in the restructuring of the welfare state, the financing of the electoral system, and the backlash against women and minorities. These frictions are nowhere more apparent than on Christian right radio. Reinvigorating the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt School, Apostolidis shows how ideas derived from early critical theory—in particular that of Theodor W. Adorno—can illuminate the political and social dynamics of this aspect of contemporary American culture. He uses and reworks Adorno's theories to interpret the nationally broadcast Focus on the Family , revealing how the cultural discourse of the Christian right resonates with recent structural transformations in the American political economy. Apostolidis shows that the antidote to the Christian right's marriage of religious and market fundamentalism lies not in a reinvocation of liberal fundamentals, but rather depends on a patient cultivation of the affinities between religion's utopian impulses and radical, democratic challenges to the present political-economic order.

Mixing critical theory with detailed analysis, Stations of the Cross provides a needed contribution to sociopolitical studies of mass movements and will attract readers in sociology, political science, philosophy, and history.


Although poverty can hardly be desirable by anyone the world over, population, on the other hand, is one phenomenon very much desired, especially by Africans. This love for excessive procreation invariably leads to over-population. The thesis of this paper, however, is that taken together, these social twin are sure channels to hunger in sub-saharan Africa. Our forebears procreated profusely in their attempt to have enough hands to work on the land. With the change in the general trend of children preferring education and other endeavours to farming, agriculture has generally been relegated to the background and more and more farmers are opting for other more profitable means of livelihood. Many governments have shouted themselves hoarse trying to sensitize the masses that the less the population, the better our chances in tackling poverty and hunger that have become the unfortunate trademarks of the African continent. To conquer hunger and poverty, Africans mist reduce their population growth-rate. SOPHIA: An African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 9 (1) 2006: pp. 112-115


The Permafrost Young Researchers Network (PYRN) is an international organization fostering innovative collaboration, seeking to recruit, retain and promote future generations of permafrost researchers. PYRN was founded in November 2005 at the International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP II) and is steadily growing, reaching around 1500 early career permafrost researchers and engineers, many of them from non-permafrost countries. It builds partnerships with large organizations such as the International Permafrost Association (IPA) and the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS). The IPY 2007/2008 has emphasized the importance of including the young generation of polar researchers in its activities. PYRN and APECS are a direct legacy of the IPY. Under a joint Memorandum of Understanding, PYRN together with the IPA and APECS work closely together on a bi-polar perspective bringing together natural and social scientist, engineers and humanities for a better understanding of cryospheric processes for society and the elaborate representation of these processes in climate models.
PYRN is guided by an Executive Committee but run through its members that organize themselves in an international Council, national communities, thematic groups and several groups of interest. Over the past years, PYRN hosted workshops during the regional and international permafrost conferences. It is increasingly present with sessions and social network events on large conferences like the European and American Geophysical Union (EGU, AGU).
During the EUCOP4, PYRN will host a workshop to maintain an active, dynamic and growing early career scientific network on permafrost. Organized together with APECS, PAGE21, and ADAPT, this workshop is kindly sponsored by the IPA, the Climate and Cryosphere (CliC) project and the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC). One major workshop focus is to elaborate the future avenues of permafrost research from a young researchers' perspective. One of the key outcomes will be a young researcher contribution to the IPA strategy for ICARP III issued as a "Permafrost Priority Sheet" summarizing the discussions from the forum. This document is envisioned to contribute to an assessment of research priorities from an early career researcher perspective. It will feed into the final ICARP III meeting in Japan 2015, together with contributions from other initiatives.
The 11. International Conference on Permafrost in 2016 (Potsdam, Germany) will provide a forum for many young researchers getting involved in a plethora of activities. PYRN has been involved in the conference planning from the very beginning to effectively integrate PYRN members in the process of ICOP2016 organization as well as young researchers activities in the overall conference program (e.g. workshop, PYRN awards, social program). The conference logo has been found through an international competition organized by PYRN and will be presented in Evora.


Quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) is the method of choice for specific and sensitive quantification of nucleic acids. However, data validation is still a major issue, partially due to the complex effect of PCR inhibition on the results. If undetected PCR inhibition may severely impair the accuracy and sensitivity of results. PCR inhibition is addressed by prevention, detection and correction of PCR results. Recently, a new family of computational methods for the detection of PCR inhibition called kinetics outlier detection (KOD) emerged. KOD methods are based on comparison of one or a few kinetic parameters describing a test reaction to those describing a set of reference reactions. Modern KOD can detect PCR inhibition reflected by shift of the amplification curve by merely half a cycle with specificity and sensitivity >90%. Based solely on data analysis, these tools complement measures to improve and control pre-analytics. KOD methods do not require labor and materials, do not affect the reaction accuracy and sensitivity and they can be automated for fast and reliable quantification. This review describes the background of KOD methods, their principles, assumptions, strengths and limitations. Finally, the review provides recommendations how to use KOD and how to evaluate its performance.


Over thirty years of legislation since the Copyright Revision Act of 1976 has redefined how academic library professionals view their responsibilities regarding copyright oversight of their print and digital collections, as well as how they have disseminated intellectual property information to their constituencies. This article presents a qualitative evaluation of how copyright information is disseminated on twenty ARL websites -including how sampled sites communicate copyright leadership roles on campus and webpage "best examples". Sampled websites were also searched separately by the author and an undergraduate student to gauge how easily accessible the information was to a "novice user" and "experienced user". A comprehensive literature review is included in the article.


Anthropogenic Marine Debris (AMD) in the SE Pacific has primarily local origins from land-based sources, including cities (coastal and inland), beach-goers, aquaculture, and fisheries. The low frequency of AMD colonized by oceanic biota (bryozoans, lepadid barnacles) suggests that most litter items from coastal waters of the Humboldt Current System (HCS) are pulled offshore into the South Pacific Subtropical Gyre (SPSG). The highest densities of floating micro- and macroplastics are reported from the SPSG. An extensive survey of photographic records, unpublished data, conference proceedings, and published studies revealed interactions with plastics for 97 species in the SE Pacific, including 20 species of fish, 5 sea turtles, 53 seabirds, and 19 marine mammals. Sea turtles are most affected by interactions with plastics, underlined by the fact that 4 of the 5 species suffer both from entanglement and ingestion. Reports gathered in this review suggest that interactions along the continental coast are mostly via entanglement. High frequencies of microplastic ingestion have been reported from planktivorous fish and seabirds inhabiting the oceanic waters and islands exposed to high densities of microplastics concentrated by oceanic currents in the SPSG. Our review also suggests that some species from the highly productive HCS face the risk of negative interactions with AMD, because food and plastic litter are concentrated in coastal front systems. In order to improve the conservation of marine vertebrates, especially of sea turtles, urgent measures of plastic reduction are needed.


This reference volume is the definitive guide to the economics and politics of the Middle East. It provides clear definitions detailing terms, concepts, names and organizations used in relation to current economic or political affairs in the Middle East. Entries define, explain and give further relevant information on countries, regions, ethnic groups, political parties, organizations, policies and disputes.


Research on leadership has extended throughout social sciences in recent years and is becoming more and more relevant. In this regard, the online higher education institutions are not an exception. This paper aims to do an analysis of the evolution of the studies on leadership by reviewing the articles on this topic since 1950s, and to propose a multi-disciplinary perspective. Since the subject is so wide, we have chosen three areas within the social sciences: business, politics, and education, which account for about 45% of the articles in the web of science. First, we do a quantitative analysis of the output in politics, business and education. Second, we proceed to study which concepts relate to leadership in each area from a qualitative perspective hoping to extract trends and target opportunities in order to improve training on this topic in universities and business schools.


In the discovery of useful theorems or formulas, experimental data acquisition plays a fundamental role. Most of the previous discovery systems which have the abilities for experimentation, however, require much knowledge for evaluating experimental results, or require plans of common experiments which are given to the systems in advance. Only few systems have been attempted to make experiments which enable the discovery based on acquired experimental data without depending on given initial knowledge.

This paper proposes a new approach for discovering useful theorems in the domain of plane geometry by employing experimentation. In this domain, drawing a figure and observing it correspond to making experimentation since these two processes are preparations for acquiring geometrical data. EXPEDITION, a discovery system based on experimental data acquisition, generates figures by itself and acquires expressions describing relations among line segments and angles in the figures. Such expressions can be extracted from the numerical data obtained in the computer experiments. By using simple heuristics for drawing and observing figures, the system succeeds in discovering many new useful theorems and formulas as well as rediscovering well-known theorems, such as power theorems and Thales' theorem.


Correlation filters (CFs) are a well-known pattern classification approach used in biometrics. A CF is a spatial-frequency array that is specifically synthesized from a set of training patterns to produce a sharp correlation output peak at the location of the best match for an authentic image comparison and no such peak for an impostor image comparison. The underlying premise when using CFs is that this correlation output peak behavior on training data ideally extends to testing data. Yet in 1:1 verification scenarios, where there is limited training data available to represent pattern distortions, the correlation output from an authentic comparison can be difficult to discern from the correlation output from an impostor. In this paper we introduce Stacked Correlation Filters (SCFs), a simple and powerful approach to address this problem by training an additional set of classifiers which learn to differentiate correlation outputs from authentic and impostor match pairs. This is done by training a series of stacked modular CFs with each layer refining the output of the previous layer. Our basic premise is that since correlation outputs have an expected shape, an additional CF can be trained to recognize such shape and refine the final output. As previous works with CFs have only focused on individual filter design or application, which assumes the CF to provide a sharp peak, this is a new CF paradigm that can benefit many existing CF designs and applications.


In section fifteen of the poem The Walls Do Not Fall author Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) address her audience and articulates the purpose of the poet in the following lines: "we are the keepers of the secret,/ the carriers, the spinners/ of the rare intangible thread/ that binds all humanity/ to ancient wisdom,/ to antiquity;/...every concrete object/ has abstract value, is timeless/ in the dream parallel" (Trilogy 24). H.D. mined her own life for charged relationships which she then, through writing, connected to the mythic characters of antiquity whose tales embodied the same struggles she faced. Reading concrete objects as universal symbols which transcend time, her mind meshed the 20th century with previous cultures to create a nexus where the questions embedded in the human spirit are alive on multiple planes. The purpose of this research project is not to define her works as "successful" or "unsuccessful," nor to weigh the works against each other in terms of "advancement." Rather it is to describe the way she manipulates this most reliable of tools, mythic metamorphosis, in works stretching from her early Imagist poetry, through her long poem Trilogy, and finally into her last memoir End To Torment, taking note of the way she uses this tool to form beauty from harsh circumstances and help heal her shattered psyche.


The research work described in this thesis has two studies on processes that may lead to adipic acid production through hexanoic acid synthesis pathway by the anaerobic bacterium Megasphaera elsdenii and its subsequent utilisation by Pseudomonas strains. The first part of the research described was concerned with the ability of Pseudomonas putida (syn P. oleovorans) to convert hexanoic acid to adipic acid. However, despite a sustained effort the research was unable to confirm the formation of adipic acid in these strains and this line of research was not pursued further. The research however, did show for the first time that these Pseudomonas strains could produce octanoic acid from n-octanol vapours in the presence and absence of n-hexanoic acid and has thus led to important new information. The second line of research pursued and which constituted the major research effort was concerned with an investigation on regulation and production of the metabolic intermediates and end-products during glucose and lactate metabolism in M. elsdenii. A number of wild type strains were studied as well as mutants isolated as resistant to 3-fluoropyruvate were used to investigate end-product inhibition and the biochemical pathways used for fermentation. Small volume cultures and controlled fermenters were used to investigate the fatty acid end-products during glucose, lactate and mixed substrates and to optimise the effect of pH on growth and metabolism. An important finding was that the mutant ME5 produced relatively more valeric and hexanoic acid compared to its parental strain ATCC 25940 in mixed substrates. While in the presence of glucose, the proportion of valeric acid produced by strain ME5 was higher than seen for its parental strain ATCC 25940 and mutant ME7. Another important finding was that pH control improved the yield of acids compared with uncontrolled fermentation. The work described in this thesis was also concerned with the recovery of fermentation products to obtain higher productivity and more efficient recovery of the products by adsorption to anion exchange resins. Initially, Amberlite IRA-93 (weak base anion-exchange resin) and Amberlite IRA-400 (strong base anion-exchange resin) resins were tested for their ability to adsorb and desorb butyric and hexanoic acids from water and peptone-yeast-glucose media. It was observed that both resins adsorbed more n-hexanoic acid than n-butyric acid, which suggested that the VFA chain length might affect the degree of adsorption. Both acids were desorbed more effectively by esterification from Amberlite IRA-93 resin. This indicated that Amberlite IRA-93 might have some attractive features above Amberlite IRA-400 in terms of product recovery in the form of esters. Further studies were carried out on the adsorption and desorption of both acids on the fermentation level in peptone-yeastglucose media under pH controlled and uncontrolled pH conditions. Results indicated that using the Amberlite IRA-93 had an advantage in that it did not release a counter ion on binding of anions so that it exerts a buffering effect on the fermentation broth, thus reducing the degree of pH control needed and the amount of alkali used to maintain the optimum pH. The outcome of this finding is that better yields and better recovery of products can be achieved. Another line of research was concerned with the key enzymes involved in the fermentation and the genes coding for them. The research detected pyruvate dehydrogenase (PDH) in strain ATCC 25940 for the first time and showed that the activity of this enzyme was significantly lower in the mutant ME5. However, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) activity in ME5 was significantly higher compared with ME7 and the parent ATCC 25940. It was also shown that enzyme expression was highest in exponential growth. It was concluded that the relative changes in PDH and LDH in ME5 were responsible for the changes in carbon flow to acid end-products. The final component of the research was concerned with a preliminary investigation of the molecular biology of the enzymes leading to the formation of hexanoic acid. The sequence of the short-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase (SCAD) in ATCC 25940 and mutants ME5 and ME7 were obtained and compared. However, no changes were seen which could explain the altered end-products. Likewise a minor change in the sequence of the electron-transferring flavoprotein was unlikely to affect the metabolic activity. An attempt to design PCR primers from related sequences of lactate dehydrogenase to investigate the LDH genes was unsuccessful.


The mechanisms of resistance to macrolides in 51 erythromycin-resistant clinical isolates of Streptococcus pyogenes collected from 1997 through 2003 in Seoul, Korea were evaluated. They were characterized by their antimicrobial susceptibility, phenotype (using triple-disc and induction tests), resistance genotype, emm genotyping (M typing) and phylogenetic analysis. Erythromycin resistance was observed in 23% of isolates. Inducible phenotype was the most common (iMLS, 51%, 26 strains), followed by the constitutive phenotype (cMLS, 31%, 16 strains) and the M phenotype (18%, 9 strains). Eight of twenty-six iMLS isolates exhibited the iMLS-C phenotype. The remaining 18 isolates gave small inhibition zones (<12 mm) around all three discs, and mild blunting of the spiramycin and clindamycin zones of inhibition proximal to the erythromycin disc. They showed remarkable inducibility in erythromycin and clindamycin resistance. The MIC90 of erythromycin and clindamycin rose from 8 to >128 microg ml-1 and from 0.5 to >128 microg ml-1, respectively. Their resistance characteristics did not fit into any known iMLS subtype reported so far in the literature. So, it was named as an iMLS-D, new subtype. All of these iMLS-D strains harboured the erm(B) gene, demonstrated the emm12 genotype, except one, and formed a tight cluster in a phylogenetic tree, with 89.2 to 100% sequence homology, suggesting that they are closely related. Nine of sixteen cMLS strains had the emm28 genotype, which had been reported to be associated with multiple drug resistance.


A method for remote sensing of total precipitable water vapor using water vapor absorption band at 0.94 µm was previously developed for continental regions. Here we apply a similar technique for ocean areas over the glint region. The glint, or oceanic specular reflection, has a high value of surface reflectance and thus, can work as well as or better than applications over land regions. The method is applied for glint regions measured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro‐radiometer (MODIS) simulator, an imager flown on the NASA ER‐2 research aircraft and simulating the expected measurements from the MODIS instrument on board the Earth Observing System (EOS)‐Terra satellite. The measurements are made for the Atlantic coast of the United States during the Tropospheric Aerosol Radiative Forcing Observational Experiment (TARFOX). The remote sensing technique is compared with measurements of water vapor column by the Lidar Atmospheric Sensing Experiment (LASE) Differential Infrared Absorption Lidar (DIAL) lidar system also on board the ER‐2. Water vapor was derived with an error of ±5 mm PW (precipitable water vapor). Most of the errors are associated with the limitations of an experiment that was not originally designed for this purpose. Much better performance is expected from the actual MODIS instrument.


In recent years, the interdisciplinary nature of global health has blurred the lines between medicine and social science. As medical journals publish non-experimental research articles on social policies or macro-level interventions, controversies have arisen when social scientists have criticized the rigor and quality of medical journal articles, raising general questions about the frequency and characteristics of methodological problems and the prevalence and severity of research bias and error. Published correspondence letters can be used to identify common areas of dispute within interdisciplinary global health research and seek strategies to address them. To some extent, these letters can be seen as a "crowd-sourced" (but editor-gated) approach to public peer review of published articles, from which some characteristics of bias and error can be gleaned. In December 2012, we used the online version of The Lancet to systematically identify relevant correspondence in each issue published between 2008 and 2012. We summarize and categorize common areas of dispute raised in these letters. The five concerns most frequently cited in correspondence letters are as follows: measurement error (51% of papers); omitted variables and confounding (45%); implausibility and lack of external validity (43%); missing or low-quality data (32%); and lack of transparency of methods (30%). We recommend better documentation of areas of potential bias with checklists and guidelines to facilitate more rigorous peer review, drawing on experts with econometric expertise as reviewers, and explicitly and thoroughly linking all correspondence letters to the original articles in The Lancet. Most importantly, we recommend The Lancet adopts the replication standard, whereby the data and the coding used to produce the estimates are provided at least to the journal, for reviewers to analyze and replicate the estimates reported by the authors.


With the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million (YFCC100m) dataset, a novel dataset was introduced to the computer vision and multimedia research community. To maximize the benefit for the research community and utilize its potential, this dataset has to be made accessible by tools allowing to search for target concepts within the dataset and mechanism to browse images and videos of the dataset. Following best practice from data collections, such as ImageNet and MS COCO, this paper presents means of accessibility for the YFCC100m dataset. This includes a global analysis of the dataset and an online browser to explore and investigate subsets of the dataset in real-time. Providing statistics of the queried images and videos will enable researchers to refine their query successively, such that the users desired subset of interest can be narrowed down quickly. The final set of image and video can be downloaded as URLs from the browser for further processing.


The standard etymological dictionaries of Greek mention two possible etymologies for the word σeιρήν 'siren': a relationship either with σeιρά 'cord, rope', or else with Σeίριος 'Sirius, the dog star'. Neither of these is very convincing on semantic and morphological grounds. The Mycenaean word se-re-mo- shows that the lexeme was originally an m-stem, and both
the scarcity of m-stems in Greek and Indo-European and the presence of an initial s- that has not become an aspirate point to a non-Indo-European origin of the word. In the past, some scholars proposed that it must be a Semitic loanword related to the root of Hebrew sir 'sing', but these explanations suffered from certain flaws in the detail. Meanwhile, Ugaritic srm, a dual or plural of the word sr 'singer', appears to be a good candidate as the source of Gr. σeιρήν. This assumption also suits the cultural and chronological context in which speakers of Greek in the second millenium BC are expected to have adopted the word.


Developmental robotics focuses on how to endow robots with adaptive capabilities. Even though embodiment has been recognized as an essential factor for understanding development, there is yet not much work that investigates how the morphology of sensors and actuators shapes adaptivity and learning processes. Moreover, these studies are largely at an intuitive and qualitative level. In this paper, we address the issue by studying how in an active vision system sensor morphology and bodily features affect a behavior such as vergence. Specifically, we present an information-theoretic analysis of two experiments showing how adequate sensor morphology influences statistical dependencies in the sensorimotor loop. The results show that an appropriate morphology reduces the amount of input without disrupting the information structure in the sensorimotor loop. The second result shows how the later morphology under the vergence behavior increases the information structure among the motor actions and the pixels. We also speculate on the implications of our results for attention, reaching and grasping.


Large-scale antipoverty programs have achieved significant and positive results in many developing countries around the world in the past decade. This paper explores the challenges of scaling up small-scale antipoverty programs - taken here to mean the processes by which successful efforts to raise the incomes of the poorest citizens in developing counties are expanded in coverage over time and across geography. In particular, I advocate supplementing approaches that highlight resource and program constraints with an expanded focus on the political dynamics involved in expanding pro-poor policies. Thus, greater emphasis should be placed on understanding the political factors that limit the expansion and survivability of antipoverty programs. A broader view along these lines highlights the bargaining strength of beneficiaries, the need to secure public support, the potential for political misuse of antipoverty programs, and how institutional fragilities affect their sustainability. Antipoverty programs can be effectively scaled up if attention is paid to addressing these political and institutional challenges. An agenda for future research is also identified.


Introduction: Coronary heart disease is a chronic disease that requires long-term treatment, care and monitoring to prevent disease progression and its complications. The financial and social burdens of the disease in the society are too high to have made researchers look for effective solutions for reducing the side effects in order for patients to have qualitative lives. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of care model implementation so as to reduce the complications and improve the quality of life for these patients. Materials and Methods: This study was a randomized clinical trial. The study population included 58 patients with coronary artery disease who were hospitalized in intensive care units of NAJA Vali-Asr and 502 AJA hospitals during February to June 2016. These patients were divided into intervention and control groups according to the inclusion criteria and the specific block method. Then, collaborative care model in the test group was administered for three months and Nottingham quality of life questionnaire was used to collect information. The data were analyzed with SPSS 22 software and independent t-test, t-test and Fisher›s exact test. Results: Statistical analysis between the experimental and control groups showed no significant difference in demographic characteristics. Quality of life mean scores before the intervention were 141.59 ± 137.23 and 209.12 ± 144.52 in the experimental and control groups, respectively. Independent t-test showed no significant difference in quality of life between the two groups before the intervention (P = 0.073). However, the quality of life scores decreased in experimental and control groups (76.11 ± 80.97 and 167.78 ± 151.98 respectively), indicating a significant difference after three months of intervention (P < 0.05). Comparing the mean scores of four times of observation showed a significantly decreasing trend (P < 0.05) in both groups after the intervention. The significant difference in the level of effectiveness was average. Discussion and Conclusion: Care models have important roles in enhancing the quality of care for patients, especially in chronic diseases. Collaborative care model is effective for the care of heart disease, and training of this model is recommended for critical care nurses.


Thermal emission from beam splitters in Fourier transform infrared spectrometers causes spectral amplitudes that are in quadrature to those of radiation from the field of view or from the detector port. Beam-splitter emission is described as a superposition of radiation of electromagnetic dipoles with angular polarization correlation taken into account for the real refractive index. Surface emission shows characteristic differences compared with volume emission. Numerical data are given for experimental conditions adapted to those of the airborne limb sounder MIPAS-FT.


Diabetes Mellitus is a life-long chronic metabolic disease, requiring continuous follow-up and therapy, it reduces the quality of life of patients with acute and chronic complications, mortality, and its economic burden is high. Cancer is the second cause of death, according to the data from World Health Organization. Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in the developed world and the second leading cause of male cancer-related death. As with the other cancer types, metastasis is an essential problem that we are facing and it is not clear whether a tumor will metastasize or not in localized state. It has been reported that there are high levels of voltage-gated sodium channels in metastatic prostate cancer cases. Cancer, ever growing with diabetes, is a major health problem. Studies have shown that diabetic patients have higher cancer rates than those of non-diabetics. Metformin is the drug of choice for the treatment of diabetes. Recently, there are studies in the literature regarding metformin reducing the risk of cancer besides its effect on diabetes This review will explain the possible role of the metformın on the three dimensional relationship of prostate cancer, diabetes and ion channels, and provide a significant contribution to clinical trials.


Despite the ever-growing interest in trend following and a series of publications in academic journals, there is still a great shortage of theoretical results on the properties of trend following rules. Our paper fills this gap by comparing and contrasting the two most popular trend following rules, the Momentum (MOM) and Moving Average (MA) rules, from a theoretical perspective. Our approach is based on the return-based formulation of trading rules and modelling the price trends by an autoregressive return process. We provide theoretical results on the similarity between various trend following rules and the forecast accuracy of trading rules. Our results show that the similarity between the MOM and MA rules is rather high and increases with increasing trend strength. However, as compared to the MOM rule, the MA rules have a more robust forecast accuracy of the future direction of price trends. As a result, under uncertain market dynamics the MA rules tend to gain an advantage over the MOM rule. Overall, the results reported in this paper help traders to understand more deeply the properties of trend following rules as well as the differences and similarities between them.


In 2011, the American Medical Association published the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Work Ability and Return to Work (AMA's Return to Work), Second Edition, which began with a review of consensus statements attesting that, in general, work is good for a person's health and well-being. Since publication of AMA's Return to Work, the Australian Royal College of Physicians has issued a consensus statement about the negative health consequences of becoming unemployed and the health benefits of returning to work. Key points include: for most individuals, working improves general health and well-being and reduces psychological distress; even musculoskeletal and mental health conditions attributed to work can benefit from activity-based rehabilitation and an early return to suitable work; long-term work absence is harmful to physical and mental health and well-being; the negative effects of remaining away from work include stress on the worker's families, including children. Of the potential consequences of unemployment in mid-adult life, the worst is premature death. In causation research, unlike medical treatment studies, individuals cannot be randomly assigned to a group that is forced to remain at work and a group that is forced to be unemployed. Even so, causation research has found strong evidence for a protective effect of employment on depression and general mental health. In performing evaluations, physicians must accurately assess work ability and recognize the healthy benefits of work.


This paper is based on a study of users experiences and practices of meeting potential new partners online through the use of the mobile dating service Tinder. The aim of the study is to explore how users experience design features and functionalities for online dating practices. By exploring the use of functionalities and features in the location-based mobile application Tinder, we offer a broad understanding of the relationship between designed functionalities and dating practices that users experience through these features. The empirical material presented in the paper is drawn from a study based on a mixed method approach, combining an initial observational study, an online survey, with focus group interviews. Four specific designed functions are highlighted in our empirical data: the connection with Facebook, the profile cards of users, the swipe-centered mutual match function, and geographical proximity. These functions contribute to the specific user experiences of control and reward. Our findings indicate that online dating practices are formed by an inseparable interplay of design functionalities, users attitudes and the use of specific mobile applications that taken together contributes to the overall online dating experiences.


The traditional desertification paradigm focuses on the losses of ecosystem services that typically occur when grasslands transition to systems dominated by bare (unvegetated) ground or by woody plants that are unpalatable to domestic livestock. However, recent studies reveal complex transitions across a range of environmental conditions and socioeconomic contexts. The papers in this Special Issue illustrate how an improved understanding of these dynamics is generating more robust paradigms, where state changes and regime shifts occurring within the context of changes in land use and climate are modified by landform and antecedent conditions. New and emerging technologies are being used to characterize and evaluate processes and outcomes across various scales and levels of organization. At the same time, developments in education are taking advantage of these new perspectives to improve the ecological literacy of future generations, and to better inform land-management decisions. A framework that integrates these perspectives provides a more comprehensive approach for understanding and predicting dryland dynamics.


The cover art of this compact book brilliantly encapsulates its subject matter: on the front, two leering GIs carrying cameras wade through a jungle swamp, while on the back a scantily clad woman reclines against a palm tree. Similarly the subtitle, "Searching for Dorothy Lamour," suggests the disjunction between Hollywood's image of the South Pacific and the experience of most service personnel posted there during World War II. Lamour became famous as the "Sarong Girl" in a series of movies set in the South Seas during the 1930s and 1940s. It appears that many Allied soldiers naively took Lamour's impersonation of a South Seas maiden literally and suffered considerable disillusionment as a result.

As Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon explain, their study is placed at the intersection of cultural history and military experience. Influenced by Hollywood, military personnel posted…


The Thiobacilli are an important group of autotrophic bacteria occurring in nature linking the biogeochemical cycles of sulfur and nitrogen. Betaproteobacterial Thiobacilli are very likely candidates for mediating the process of nitrate-dependent anoxic iron sulfide mineral oxidation in freshwater wetlands. A Thiobacillus denitrificans-like bacterium was present in an enrichment on thiosulfate and nitrate, derived from an iron-sulfide- and nitrate-rich freshwater environment. Preliminary FISH analysis showed that the 16S rRNA gene-based bacterial probe mix showed great variation in intensity under different culture conditions. Furthermore, the widely applied 23S rRNA gene-based probe set BET42a/GAM42a incorrectly identified the T. denitrificans-like bacterium as a member of the Gammaproteobacteria. To circumvent these problems, the 23S rRNA genes of two T. denitrificans strains were partially sequenced and a new 23S rRNA gene-based probe (Betthio 1001) specific for betaproteobacterial Thiobacilli was designed. Use of this new probe Betthio 1001, combined with field measurements, indicates the involvement of Thiobacilli in the process of nitrate-dependent iron sulfide mineral oxidation.


Child care is a necessary work support for many American families, but can be prohibitively expensive for those with low incomes. The federal government provides assistance through direct child care subsidies, but only a fraction of eligible families are in receipt. One factor that may limit access to child care assistance is work schedule. Research suggests that mothers with nonstandard work schedules use relative care more and day care centers less than those with standard work schedules. Research also shows that child care subsidies are disproportionately used for day care centers. This suggests that mothers who work nonstandard schedules are less likely to receive child care assistance, but little empirical work addresses this question directly. Using data from a cohort of urban mothers, this study explores the direct and indirect relationship between work schedule and receipt of child care assistance. The findings suggest that nonstandard work schedules reduce the odds of receiving child care assistance; a relationship mediated entirely by less day care center use among nonstandard schedule workers. The results imply that more flexibility is needed in the child care assistance system, which better meets the needs of mothers who work nonstandard schedules.


On 6 October 1764, Adriaan Vroeg sold his collection of birds, insects and a few other animals by auction. The sales catalogue was published anonymously, but contained several scientific names of birds, which have nomenclatorial standing. Only three copies of this catalogue are known. The appendix entitled "Adumbratiunculae" has previously been attributed to Peter Simon Pallas, who is quoted as author of the new names of birds. In the present note, the main text is credited to Arnout Vosmaer, on the basis of contemporary references. Where the species names proposed by Vosmaer are synonyms of those published by Pallas in the same volume, the latter are selected, because some names have been validly used before with Pallas as the author.


This thesis contains a description of the technique used to measure the optical linear polarisation of the Orion Nebula and the nebula, M43, and the results obtained from these measurements. This work was undertaken while the author was a member of the Durham University Astronomy Group. The first chapter is an outline of the differing states of polarisation and the method used to describe these states via the Stokes Parameters. A short review of the mechanisms producing linear polarisation of the optical radiation from astronomical objects is included. Chapter 2 describes briefly the mechanisms producing plane polarisation and dust scattering and also contains a description of Rayleigh and Mie Scattering. Chapter 3 contains a brief account of the design and operation of the Durham University nebular polarimeter used to detect and measure optical linear polarisation, along with a short description of the electronographic camera used as a recording device. Also, the technique for the reduction of the data, from its initial electronograph to the final extraction of the Stokes parameters for over 8550 points in the Orion Nebula is described. The next chapter contains an account of gaseous nebulae, particularly the Orion Nebula, where a review of the present properties of this object and some general remarks on M43 are made. In Chapter 5 of this thesis, the technique employed to measure the optical linear polarisation of these nebulae, together with a final map of the polarisation for each of them, and a comparison of the results obtained by the present method for the Orion Nebula with those measurements of Hall (1974) and Pallister et al (1977) are described which confirm the success of the present technique. In the following chapter, some interpretation of the results and the geometry of the Orion Nebula and M43 are described. Also a simple model of the Orion Nebula as a spherically symmetric dust cloud with 0(^1)ori at the centre is presented. A comparison between his model considering the constant dust density case, and the polarisation measurements, is made in this chapter and some possible causes of the disagreement between this model and observational results are presented. In conclusion, the success of the technique is confirmed for the production of high resolution, accurate polarimetric measurements.


The author's right to intellectual property is both historically conditioned and highly qualified by the interests of others. In common with most laws, those governing intellectual property necessarily entail a balancing of competing rights, specifically the claim of publishers to a fair return on their investment on the one hand and, on the other, the benefit to readers from open access to and enjoyment of printed materials. Furthermore, the right to intellectual property is not absolute. Its development is enmeshed with the history of print culture and the growing dissemination of books in Britain and abroad, and it was far from uncontested. Although London publishers were the first to lay claim to intellectual property rights, their exclusive control over printed matter was challenged by "pirates," independent reprint publishers who acted to break a monopoly that distorted the literary marketplace. Assertions of authors' rights came comparatively late in this process. An author's claim to ownership over the fruits of his or her labours began to be conceptualized only after the middle of the eighteenth century, and only in the first decades of the nineteenth century did authors attempt to implement it. Our modern conception of authorship was formed within the relationships among publishers, the changing literary marketplace, and Regency writers like Byron and Jane Austen. It was constructed at the intersection of socio-economic practices and artistic creativity. The Romantic construction of the author as autonomous genius has been called into question by study of the social and economic contexts in which the real "work" of art was actually done. Jerome McGann long ago warned against accepting Romanticism's self-representations at face value and elsewhere draws attention to the distortions inherent in "a Romantic conception of literary production" (Critique 8). Pointing the way to "a socialized concept of authorship," he argues that a literary work of art is "fundamentally social rather than personal," a process that inevitably entails interchanges with other writers, with editors and publishers, and ultimately with readers and the institutions that support their activities (Critique 8, 44). McGann's views have a strong kinship with D. F. McKenzie's reinscription of bibliography as a "sociology of texts," in which a book is not merely an object but a social product whose history must include both its making and use. (1) Authorship in the Romantic era was formed within these exchanges, and its genius in large measure was subject to material conditions. Any adequate understanding of authorship, then, must take into account the commercial environment in which it operates, because the circulation of texts occurs within a literary economy governed by structures of law, financial interests, and social practice. Copyright vs. Authors For much of the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the firm of Jacob Tonson was one of the foremost publishers of literary texts in England. Asked which author had earned him the greatest profits, Tonson replied without hesitation, "Milton." (2) But at the time authors seldom enjoyed the economic benefits of their work to the same extent that the booksellers did. Copyright began as a legal device to protect the interests of those involved in the book trade and to provide printers and publishers with a return on their capital investment. Authors sold their work to a publisher, and it was the publisher who exercised copyright, which they regarded as their own property as recognized at common law. On that basis, publishers claimed the right in perpetuity to copy the works they had acquired, to make as many editions as they chose, and to sell off their copyright in a work to the highest bidder. Samuel Johnson, who took a close interest in the conditions under which books were produced, tells in detail how Milton contracted to sell Paradise Lost to Samuel Simmons for 20 [pounds sterling]. …


Much research has shown that having a better class of degree has significant payoff in the labour market. Using administrative data from Ireland, we explore the performance in college of different types of students. We find that post-primary school achievement is an important predictor: Its relationship with college performance is concave for college completion, approximately linear for the probability of obtaining at least second class honours, upper division, and convex for the probability of obtaining a first class honours degree. We find that females do better in college than males, even after we account for their greater prior achievement, and this is true in both non-STEM and STEM fields. Disabled students, students from disadvantaged schools, and students who qualify for means-tested financial aid are less likely to complete and less likely to obtain first class honours or a 2.1 degree. However, once we control for post-primary school achievement, these students actually perform better in college than others. We also find that, conditional on prior achievement, students from private exam-oriented "grind" schools and from Irish-medium schools are less likely to finish a degree and less likely to perform well in college, possibly because their school exam results are high relative to their abilities. Our results suggest that current college policies that lower entry requirements for disabled students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds may be justified on efficiency as well as equity grounds. They also suggest that college performance might be improved by increasing entry requirements for students who come from school types that convey advantages in the post-primary exams that determine college entry.


Abstract The phylogeographical evolution and the consequent changing distribution and diversity of rhynchonelliform brachiopods through the Ordovician are linked to the dynamic palaeogeography of the period. The Early Ordovician (Tremadocian and Floian) is characterized by globally low-diversity faunas with local biodiversity epicentres, notably on the South China Palaeoplate; low-latitude porambonitoid-dominated faunas with early plectambonitoid and clitambonitoid representatives, as well as high-latitude assemblages mostly dominated by orthoids, can be recognized, but many taxa are rooted in Late Cambrian stocks. The Early Ordovician displays a steady increase in rhynchonelliformean biodiversity, which was mostly driven by the increasing success of the Porambonitoidea and Orthoidea, but the billingsellids and early plectambonitoids also contributed to this expansion. During the Early to Mid Ordovician (Dapingian–Darriwilian), marine life experienced an unprecedented hike in diversity at the species, genus and family levels that firmly installed the suspension-feeding benthos as the main component of the Palaeozoic fauna. However, this may have occurred in response to an early Darriwilian annihilation of existing clades, some of which had been most successful during the Early Ordovician. New clades rapidly expanded. The continents were widely dispersed together with a large number of microcontinents and volcanic arcs related to intense magmatic and tectonic activity. Climates were warm and sea-levels were high. Pivotal to the entire diversification is the role of gamma (inter-provincial) diversity and by implication the spread of the continents and frequency of island arcs and microcontinents. The phylogeographical analysis demonstrates that this new palaeogeographical configuration was particularly well explored and utilized by the strophomenides, especially the Plectambonitoidea, which radiated rapidly during this interval. The porambonitoids, on the other hand, were still in recovery following the early Darriwilian extinctions. Orthides remained dominant, particularly at high latitudes. Biodiversity epicentres were located on most of the larger palaeoplates, as well as within the Iapetus Ocean. Provincial patterns were disrupted during the Sandbian and early Katian with the migration of many elements of the benthos into deeper-water regimes, enjoying a more cosmopolitan distribution. Later Katian faunas exhibit a partition between carbonate and clastic environments. During the latest Katian, biogeographical patterns were disrupted by polewards migrations of warm-water taxa in response to the changing climate; possibly as a consequence of low-latitude cradles being developed in, for instance, carbonate reef settings. Many clades were well established with especially the strophomenides beginning to outnumber the previously successful orthides, although this process had already begun, regionally, in the mid to late Darriwilian. At the same time, atrypoid and pentameroid clades also began to radiate in low-latitude faunas, anticipating their dominance in Silurian faunas. The Hirnantian was marked by severe extinctions particularly across orthide-strophomenide clades within the context of few, but well-defined, climatically controlled provincial belts. Supplementary material: The individual localities and a reference list for the data sources are provided at: http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18667