In practice it is impossible to distinguish between advertising that is intended to be persuasive and advertising that is intended to be informative. Persuasive advertising normally has information content and even basic information provided by a company about its products will normally be intended to make consumers more interested in the product.Advertising is more likely to reduce, rather than increase, costs and prices. Advertising increases the extent of the markets in which companies are able to operate, therefore leading to greater economies of scale. This is confirmed by the empirical evidence.Advertising effectively subsidises the press and broadcast media.It is a mistake to regard advertising as a waste of resources which, if it were regulated, could be eliminated. Businesses have to transmit information about products in one way or another. If they did not advertise, they would have to find other – probably more expensive – ways to do this.There is no evidence that advertising creates monopolies. Indeed, if anything, advertising increases competition by improving information to consumers.Advertising is less of a reflection of corporate power than of corporate vulnerability. Advertising tends to be used by established companies as a way of building brand loyalty.The evidence suggests that advertising is not manipulative in any meaningful sense. It is not an important determinant of consumer behaviour, though it can help build brand loyalty. Certainly, advertising does not effectively contrive 'wants' in the way suggested by critics such as J. K. Galbraith.All serious studies of the advertising of alcohol and tobacco suggest that it has the same impact on the overall consumption of these products as on the consumption of any other product: none. This is a conclusion that is at odds with the assertions of political campaigners.An attack on advertising is, in effect, an attack on free speech. While commercial free speech may not be valued as highly by some as other forms of free speech, it should, nevertheless, be defended as an important principle.Ironically, though it is politicians who are responsible for any prohibition or limitation of advertising, it is advertising by politicians themselves that Harris and Seldon found to be systematically and incorrigibly dishonest.


This study assesses crop residues in the EU from major crops using empirical models to predict crop residues from yield statistics; furthermore it analyses the inter‐annual variability of those estimates over the period 1998‐2015, identifying its main drivers across Europe. The models were constructed based on an exhaustive collection of experimental data from scientific papers for the crops: wheat, barley, rye, oats, triticale, rice, maize, sorghum, rapeseed, sunflower, soybean, potato and sugarbeet. We discuss the assumptions on the relationship between yield and the harvest index, adopted by previous studies, to interpret the experimental data, quantify the uncertainties of these models, and establish the premises to implement them at regional scale –i.e., NUTS level 3– within the EU. To cope this, we created a consolidated sub‐national statistical data along with an algorithm able to aggregate (figures are provided at country level) and disaggregate (production at 25 km grid is provided assupplementary material) estimates. The total lignocellulosic biomass production in the EU28 over the review period, according to our models, is 419 Mt, from which wheat is the major contributor (155 Mt). Our results show that maize and rapeseed are the two crops with the highest residue yield, respectively 8.9 and 8.6 t ha‐1. The spatial analysis revealed that these three crops, which, according to our results, are feedstocks highly suitable a priori for second generation biofuels in the EU and are unevenly distributed across Europe. Weather fluctuation was identified as the major driver in residue production from cereals, while, in the case of starch crops and oilseeds – which are predominant in northern Europe – corresponded to the marked production trend likely influenced by the agricultural policies and agro‐management over the review period. Our results, among others, could help to understand and quantify the ecological boundaries of the bioeconomy from agriculture.


THE TERM GROWL TYPICALLY REFERS TO LOW-PITCHED, rough sounds uttered by animals. Humans occasionally use growl-like voices to express excessive emotions. Acoustically characterized by loud dynamics and low values of the harmonic-to-noise ratio, growl-like sounds usually express anger and excitement associated with aggression. We propose a biomechanical model relating the aggressive characteristic of the growl-like timbre to the motor mechanisms underlying growl production in humans, highlighting how an abdominal muscle contraction enhances spine stability, which plays a critical role in physical attacks. This model was supported by the experimental data of activation of the deepest abdominal muscle during resting, singing, and growling. We found a significant positive correlation between the abdominal muscle activity associated with producing voice and the perceived aggressiveness intensity of voice. The cognition of growl-like sounds is discussed from the perspectives of biomechanics, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science.


Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) are new materials of emerging technological importance. As SWCNT are introduced into the life cycle of commercial products, their effects on human health and environment should be addressed. We demonstrated that pharyngeal aspiration of SWCNT elicited unusual pulmonary effects in C57BL/6 mice that combined a robust but acute inflammation with early onset yet progressive fibrosis and granulomas. A dose-dependent increase in the protein, LDH, and gamma-glutamyl transferase activities in bronchoalveolar lavage were found along with accumulation of 4-hydroxynonenal (oxidative biomarker) and depletion of glutathione in lungs. An early neutrophils accumulation (day 1), followed by lymphocyte (day 3) and macrophage (day 7) influx, was accompanied by early elevation of proinflammatory cytokines (TNF-alpha, IL-1beta; day 1) followed by fibrogenic transforming growth factor (TGF)-beta1 (peaked on day 7). A rapid progressive fibrosis found in mice exhibited two distinct morphologies: 1) SWCNT-induced granulomas mainly associated with hypertrophied epithelial cells surrounding SWCNT aggregates and 2) diffuse interstitial fibrosis and alveolar wall thickening likely associated with dispersed SWCNT. In vitro exposure of murine RAW 264.7 macrophages to SWCNT triggered TGF-beta1 production similarly to zymosan but generated less TNF-alpha and IL-1beta. SWCNT did not cause superoxide or NO.production, active SWCNT engulfment, or apoptosis in RAW 264.7 macrophages. Functional respiratory deficiencies and decreased bacterial clearance (Listeria monocytogenes) were found in mice treated with SWCNT. Equal doses of ultrafine carbon black particles or fine crystalline silica (SiO2) did not induce granulomas or alveolar wall thickening and caused a significantly weaker pulmonary inflammation and damage.


Simple expressions are given for the halfwidth and finesse of a Fabry-Perot interferometer fringe broadened by defects. The expressions are unrestricted as to defect magnitude and have good accuracy for most practical forms of defect. The results are applicable to mirror surface defects, parallelism errors, angular dispersion of illumination, finite spectral linewidth, and fluctuations in interferometer spacing as well as most combinations of two or more types of broadening defect. An experimental investigation of broadening due to parallelism errors confirms the theory.


This study applies concepts and methods from the domain of Implicit Social Cognition to examine language attitudes toward foreign and U.S. accented speech. Implicit attitudes were measured using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) that incorporated audio cues as experimental stimuli. Explicit attitudes were measured through self-report questionnaires. Participants exhibited a pro-U.S. accent bias on the IAT measure but a pro-foreign accent bias on explicit measures. This divergence supports the conclusion that implicit and explicit attitudes are separable attitude constructs resulting from distinct mental processes and suggests that language attitudes research—which has traditionally measured only explicit attitudes—would benefit by incorporating indirect measures. The Associative-Propositional Evaluation Model is proposed as a comprehensive and consistent theory to explain the cognitive processing of language attitudes.


A mail survey was conducted of all Institute of Chartered Accountants of New Zealand accredited Tertiary Education Institutions and 300 randomly selected New Zealand companies to ascertain the views of management accounting academics and practitioners on the contents of management accounting courses and the skills and competencies of recent graduates. The results show that practitioners placed an emphasis on traditional management accounting techniques, while academics placed an emphasis on contemporary techniques. Both groups were in agreement on the skills and characteristics required of recent graduates. An interesting finding was the emergence of negative comments on the arrogance of new graduates and an increased need for graduates to be work ready. These two aspects were not a feature of previous studies. The implications of the results are that academics cannot ignore the teaching of traditional management accounting techniques and may need to increase the coverage of the issues involved in implementing contemporary management accounting techniques.


The water and energy cycles are major elements of the Earth climate. These cycles are especially active in the intertropical belt where satellites provide the most suitable observational platform. The history of Earth observations of the water cycle and of the radiation budget viewed from space reveals that the fundamental questions from the early times are still relevant for today's research. The last 2 decades have seen a number of milestones regarding the documentation of rainfall, mesoscale convective systems (MCS), water vapour and radiation at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). Beyond dedicated missions that provided enhanced characterizations of some elements of the atmospheric water cycle and field campaigns that allowed the gathering of validation data, the advent of the long record of meteorological satellites lead to new questioning on the homogenisation of the data time series, etc. The use of this record to document the tropical climate brought new results of the distribution of humidity and reinforced the understanding of some robust features of the African monsoon. Challenges for the immediate future concerns the deepening of the understanding of the role of cloud systems in the monsoon circulation, the downscaling of the documentation of the water and energy cycle at the scale of these cloud systems, the research of better adequation between the users and the satellite estimate of rainfall and finally a much needed methodological effort to build exploitable time series for the estimation of climatic trends in the water and energy cycle in the Tropics. The required observations to address these challenges are rapidly presented with emphasis on the upcoming Megha-Tropiques (MT) mission.


Vaccines are one of the safest medical interventions in history and can protect against infectious diseases and ensure important health benefits. Despite these advantages, health professionals and policymakers face significant challenges in terms of vaccine rollout, as vaccine hesitancy is a global challenge, and varies greatly with context, i.e., place, time, and vaccines. The internet has rapidly become a widely used information source for health-related issues, and a medium where misinformation in relation to vaccines on social media can spread rapidly and influence many. This research models the impact of vaccine confidence on the transmission of infectious diseases. This involves two interacting contagion models, one for the disease itself, and the other for the public's views on vaccination. Sensitivity analysis and loop impact analysis are used to explore the effects of misinformation and vaccine confidence on the spread of infectious diseases. The analysis indicates that high vaccine confidence has a reinforcing effect on vaccination levels and helps to reduce the spread of an infectious disease. The results show that higher vaccine confidence can mitigate against the impact of misinformation, and by doing so can contribute to the enhanced control of an infectious disease outbreak.


Highly complex enterprise software packages have become a standard way of competing in many industries. By the late 1990s, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems had enabled Fortune 500 firms to present one face to their customers via integrated cross-functional business processes, centralized databases, and point-and-click access to real-time operational data across the business. Today, enterprise systems for supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) are following in the steps of ERP, and, in many cases, providing a foundation for e-business. Supplier relationship management systems are on the horizon. Based on our ERP research, we have identified five factors for successful implementation: (1) top management is engaged in the project, not just involved; (2) project leaders are veterans, and team members are decision makers; (3) third parties fill gaps in expertise and transfer their knowledge; (4) change management goes hand-in-hand with project planning; (5) A satisficing mindset prevails. Furthermore, we found that a projects position on the maturity curve (early adopter, early majority, or late majority) can influence the implementation route. These five success factors and three maturity curve positions are illustrated in three anonymous cases. The result is lessons for managing the complexities of the next wave of enterprise systems.


ABSTRACT In this article, we demonstrate the relevance of eye-tracking experiments in social and environmental accounting (SEA) research. Up to now, this type of design has been used in some areas within accounting research, but SEA has been neglected. If one is to adopt a user perspective [Merkl-Davies, D. M., and N. M. Brennan. 2007. "Discretionary Disclosure Strategies in Corporate Narratives: Incremental Information or Impression Management?" Journal of Accounting Literature 27: 116–196; 2011. "A Conceptual Framework of Impression Management: New Insights from Psychology, Sociology and Critical Perspectives." Accounting and Business Research 41 (5): 415–437], the investigation and the understanding of the way social and environmental information affects user perceptions and decisions requires, among other tools, the use of eye-tracking setups. We discuss the need for eye-tracking experiments in SEA research and provide some preliminary evidence on their usefulness by conducting an illustrative experiment.


The majority of existing algorithms for learning decision trees are greedy---a tree is induced top-down, making locally optimal decisions at each node. In most cases, however, the constructed tree is not globally optimal. Even the few non-greedy learners cannot learn good trees when the concept is difficult. Furthermore, they require a fixed amount of time and are not able to generate a better tree if additional time is available. We introduce a framework for anytime induction of decision trees that overcomes these problems by trading computation speed for better tree quality. Our proposed family of algorithms employs a novel strategy for evaluating candidate splits. A biased sampling of the space of consistent trees rooted at an attribute is used to estimate the size of the minimal tree under that attribute, and an attribute with the smallest expected tree is selected. We present two types of anytime induction algorithms: a contract algorithm that determines the sample size on the basis of a pre-given allocation of time, and an interruptible algorithm that starts with a greedy tree and continuously improves subtrees by additional sampling. Experimental results indicate that, for several hard concepts, our proposed approach exhibits good anytime behavior and yields significantly better decision trees when more time is available.


The IFRS for SMEs was developed to address the reporting needs of SMEs worldwide. SMEs however do not necessarily have a global focus. Furthermore, SMEs from different parts of the world are exposed to different conditions and environments. Although the IFRS for SMEs was not intended for a specific user group, the majority of the respondents to the Exposure Draft on IFRS for SMEs were from Europe and other developed countries while only limited respondents from Africa and developing countries were involved. This study considered the relevance of the contents of the IFRS for SMEs in the South African environment based on user requirements. Since SMEs do not necessarily have functional accounting departments and because they rely on external accountants to compile financial statements, we included accounting practitioners and trainee accountants from the SME sector in our survey. As a result we classified the contents of the IFRS for SMEs, from a South African perspective, into different levels of importance or relevance.


In the digital era, historians are embracing information technology as a research tool. New technologies offer investigation and interpretation, synthesis and communication tools that are more effective than the more traditional study methods, as they guarantee a multidisciplinary approach and analyses integration. Among the available technologies the best suited for the study or urban phenomena are databases (DB), the Geographic Information System (GIS), the Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the multimedia tools (Video, APP) for the dissemination of results.
The case study described here concerns the analysis of part of Venice that changed its appearance from 1516 onwards, with the creation of the Jewish Ghetto. This was an event that would have repercussions throughout Europe, changing the course of history. Our research confirms that the exclusive use of one of the systems mentioned above (DB, GIS, BIM) makes it possible to manage the complexity of the subject matter only partially. Consequently, it became necessary to analyse the possible interactions between such tools, so as to create a link between an alphanumeric DB and a geographical DB. The use of only GIS and BIM that provide for a 4D time management of objects turned out to be able to manage information and geometry in an effective and scalable way, providing a starting point for the mapping in depth of the historical analysis. Software products for digital modelling have changed in nature over time, going from simple viewing tools to simulation tools.
The reconstruction of the time phases of the three Ghettos (Nuovo, Vecchio, and Nuovissimo) and their visualisation through digital narratives of the history of that specific area of the city, for instance through videos, is making it possible for an increasing number of scholars and the general public to access the results of the study.


Downes, Jeremy. The Female Homer: An Exploration of Women's Epic Poetry. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. Downes is one of those rare scholars writing from a position where competing interests intersect--The Classical Tradition, Genre Studies, Feminist Criticism and Theory, English and American Literature Studies, and Creative Writing. Living a double existence as a creative writer and an academic, Downes is well-suited to offer a much-needed redefinition of the epic as a genre in literature, especially in light of much contemporary poetry, and to uncover a women's hidden epic tradition. His tasks, which he finds personally fulfilling, are to identify or create (vis a vis Judith Shakespeare) the female progenitor of woman's epic poetry, Anyte, the Female Homer; uncover the multiple lineages of women's epics; and identify the consistencies and mutual "affinities" in these varied works. The chapters that follow one another do not fail to inform on Downes' seemingly straightforward thesis, but they demonstrate and perform the fragmented, sometimes chaotic nature of such an open, experimental approach as reconsidering Eastern and Western, oral and written, prehistoric and dated narratives in three hundred pages. But certainly, this too is part of Downes' thesis: for contemporary scholars and writers of epic to seek a history of women's epic writing on their own--without a trailblazer--is to hazard such an arduous journey that they risk never engaging the genre or the tradition at all. The organization of The Female Homer is provocatively experimental, and its twenty-two chapters contain discussions that move backward and forward in time and that shift from setting to setting (from Sumerian prehistory to American modernity). Moreover, because the chapters are more like strands in an intricate braid, picking up and dropping discussion as though Downes were weaving, a traditional summary of the chapters will not do for this review. While its chapters seem random, The Female Homer consistently offers two critical practices for scholars: first, viewing a "difference" in the traditional elements used in women's epic, and second, attending to new elements that crop up in women's epics. Examples of "difference" in women's use of traditional elements include a hero's descent into hell but with the difference of her eventual rebirth(s), and correspondingly, an emphasis not on linear time but on cyclical and even monumental time; a focus on war but from the vantage point of the domestic sphere; an epic hero who values communal interdependence over solitary independence and who occasionally shares the spotlight with other "heroes," a quest that privileges love over war and produces a hero's interior growth as well as her community's social growth; and contemporary epics' intertextual appropriation of not merely earlier epics but fore-mother epics. More exciting are the new elements Downes considers representative of women's epics. For instance, women writers' familiarity with textiles means studying the degree to which a figurative "quilting" influences construction of epic, the augmented role of clothing (rather than battle gear) in epic, and a reconsideration of how quilts, tapestries, and fascicles are themselves epics. Also fresh is Downes's attention to paternal and maternal influences over the creation of women's epics. A character's ambivalence over father-figures often parallels her writer's ambivalence over a real father who initially may have supported then stymied he daughter's creative efforts (161). Maternal influence means attending to how later writers like HD. are writing through their literary foremothers by redeploying, for example, Aurora Leigh's structure or point of view or turning to Psyche's quest to recover Cupid as an ur-narrative. Finally, attention to the way many women writers make material the body in epic as well as the body of their work is a welcome "new" reading practice. …


www.feedthefuture.gov Aflatoxins are fungal metabolites—mainly produced by Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus living in soil—that contaminate crops throughout growth, harvest, storage, transportation, and processing. Aflatoxin B1 is not only the most potent natural carcinogen known, but also the most commonly produced toxic strain. As of 2010, roughly 5 billion people worldwide were estimated to be exposed to high levels of aflatoxins. High consumption levels can result in aflatoxicosis, which is often fatal. Habitual consumption at lower levels causes liver cancer and immune suppression, and is strongly associated with stunting. Of 315 cases of aflatoxicosis in Kenya in 2004, 125 people died. Consumption of aflatoxins is cumulative: they are not eradicated through standard cooking processes, and the body is unable to destroy or excrete them. This policy note examines what aflatoxins are; how they are linked to gender, climate change, and nutrition; and how they can be controlled and managed effectively.


Earlier claims that pensions serve as severance pay are corroborated by a new data set drawn from the 1980 Banker's Trust corporate pension plan study. A model is developed that shows how pension values which vary with the age of retirement make both workers and firms better off by moving the equilibrium in the direction of a perfect-information, first-best optimum. This requires that pension values decline with the age of retirement beyond a certain point. Evidence from the 1975 and 1980 data sets supports this claim. To the extent that any significant change has occurred between 1975 and 1980, most important is that the ratio of early retirement pension value to normal retirement pension value has increased.


The history of mental health reform is largely the history of changing public attitudes. This is not to imply that reform came only in response to mass pressures, but rather that governments have always shown themselves particularly sensitive to public opinion in this connection and been careful to ensure that the law never moved far ahead of it. It is equally true that reforms have themselves affected and influenced public opinion in a liberal direction. This seeming paradox derives from the
fact that there are in any social context at least two distinct aspects of public opinion which are sometimes in conflict. First there is the collective or majority view of comparatively small groups who show interest in a particular subject and take the trouble to inform themselves. These are sometimes called opinion-formers and very often they will have their spokesmen in positions of influence in and around government. Such minority groups are apt to speak with a voice, and weild an influence, greater than their numerical strength might justify. It is from this kind of group that pressures for mental health reform in
the past has usually come. Then there is, on the other hand, the mass public opinion, largely subjective and emotional in character, and far harder to distinguish. In the context of mental disorder, it has been made up chiefly of ignorance, deep seated if irrational fears and age old prejudices. These are the mass attitudes that have in the past governed reform, acting as a brake upon it. At the same time, mass opinion tends gradually to change as a direct result of reform, once reform is brought about.


The phrase "tell China stories well" ( jianghao zhongguo gushi ) is an important guide to China's approach to public diplomacy. Uttered by Chinese president Xi Jinping in 2013, this phrase is an encouragement to use China's own communication channels to promote and testify to official Chinese views and opinions and to strengthen the international influence of China. While social media diplomacy in China is still in its infancy, the Chinese government has launched a few diplomatic Twitter accounts to develop its public diplomacy network and to post stories about China for a global audience. Using a mixed-methods approach (i.e., manual coding, computer-assisted content analysis, network analysis, and discourse analysis), we examined how the Chinese government has mobilized a small number of diplomatic Twitter accounts to build a communication network and pursue the external propaganda goals of the Communist Party of China.


The HyperDrone is an instrument that generates acoustic waves taken from the data generated by seismic sensors across the surface of the entire globe. The data here is supplied by the Atomic Weapons Establishment Blacknest, Reading UK, which is part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) which monitors the ground for nuclear-scale explosions. This data is now contributing to other systems, such as early warning earthquake and tsunami alerts data.The entire network acts as a 'hyper' object, that is, a form which is too large (in scale of space/time etc), or too small in scale (of visibility etc), to be perceived by humans without the use of scientific systems. Data is arranged to be played back to generate resonance - a hyper 'drone' through the radome panel itself. The panel has been developed to work with a resonating geometric 'tensegrity' structure which was designed and made from aluminium and steel by Rob Smith during his artist residency at Wysing, where the Hyper Drone is currently located. The project was conceived by Neal White of Office of Experiments and developed with Rob Smith and Anna Troisi. The project extends research undertaken into the global techno-scientific sites, from labs to observatories that support advances in human development; experimentation, scientific instruments, supercomputing advances etc. Using the deep geometry of data, the abstractions of science and other forms of human interpretations of the natural world, a scientific belief system, the work challenges the viewer to consider their own scale and sense of place in relation to unfolding 'hyper' events and their ability now and in the future, to understand events such as climate change – events beyond their own temporal register or senses. Aesthetically speaking, the HyperDrone draws on minimalism and the geometric language of modernism, from Buckminster Fuller to Donald Judd. It reworks the spiritual dimensions of modern experimental sound through the use of audio drones citing the works La Monte Young and John Cage, among others. Conceptually, it intends to keep to no specific language, historic, relational or systemic. However, it is materially and technologically de-centred from its own site and place and in this respect draws from the work of artists concerned with an expanded field of sculpture,such as Robert Smithson, Mary Miss and Richard Long. Thinking of what might happen next experimentally, we are considering the incidental role of artist in the trajectory of science, using art to question the rational thinking of scientists and instead to place temporality, resonance and time in the frame. This experiment is potentially only one node of a massive scale sensing artwork. The project has therefore been conceived as modular and scalable, and we are exploring the potential for creating multiple nodes. In this scenario, the aim would be to work with artists, architectural, scientific or social groups so we are able to construct hyper drones together as a way of discussing issues in relation to human perception of time, scale and event.


The aim of this paper is to propose and discuss a psychiatric practice carried on in Italian mental health services and conceived as a psychodynamic psychotherapy. The author analyzes how the practice has been conducted with the methodology based on the Human Birth Theory formulated by Massimo Fagioli. This represents an organic scientific theory which formulates a healthy birth and development and at the same time the possibility to treat mental illness through the cure of human mental reality.The article highlights on one hand what could be the contrasting elements in relation to the setting and organization of public mental health services and on the other what is the enormous potential and resources offered by the National Health Service. These could allow to restore social, political and cultural value to psychiatric and psychotherapeutic practice.


The number of scientific publications continues to rise exponentially, especially in Computer Science (CS). However, current solutions to analyze those publications restrict access behind a paywall, offer no features for visual analysis, limit access to their data, only focus on niches or sub-fields, and/or are not flexible and modular enough to be transferred to other datasets. In this thesis, we conduct a scientometric analysis to uncover the implicit patterns hidden in CS metadata and to determine the state of CS research. Specifically, we investigate trends of the quantity, impact, and topics for authors, venues, document types (conferences vs. journals), and fields of study (compared to, e.g., medicine). To achieve this we introduce the CS-Insights system, an interactive web application to analyze CS publications with various dashboards, filters, and visualizations. The data underlying this system is the DBLP Discovery Dataset (D3), which contains metadata from 5 million CS publications. Both D3 and CS-Insights are open-access, and CS-Insights can be easily adapted to other datasets in the future. The most interesting findings of our scientometric analysis include that i) there has been a stark increase in publications, authors, and venues in the last two decades, ii) many authors only recently joined the field, iii) the most cited authors and venues focus on computer vision and pattern recognition, while the most productive prefer engineering-related topics, iv) the preference of researchers to publish in conferences over journals dwindles, v) on average, journal articles receive twice as many citations compared to conference papers, but the contrast is much smaller for the most cited conferences and journals, and vi) journals also get more citations in all other investigated fields of study, while only CS and engineering publish more in conferences than journals.


Leonard Cohen, one of the most admired performers of the last half century, has had a stranger-than-fiction, roller-coaster ride of a life. Now, for the first time, he tells his story in his own words, via more than 50 interviews conducted world-wide between 1966 and 2012. In this book -- which includes a foreword by singer Suzanne Vega and eight pages of rarely seen photos -- the artist talks about "Bird on the Wire", "Hallelujah", and his other classic songs. He candidly discusses his famous romances, his years in a Zen monastery, his ill-fated collaboration with producer Phil Spector, his long battle with depression, and much more. You will find interviews that first appeared in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, but also conversations that have not previously been printed in English. Some of the material here has not been available until now in any format, including the many illuminating reminiscences that contributors supplied specifically for this definitive anthology.


Persistent cloaca (PC) is the most intricate anorectal malformation. Contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) is safe for hepatic, renal, splenic, vascular, and intracavitary assessment in children, but it is little applied for cloacal malformation. Our results demonstrate that CEUS can not only display the uterine, vagina, bladder, urethra, rectum, and rectovaginal fistula, but also measure the length of the common channel, bladder neck to the common channel, and distal urethra to the perineum. To our knowledge this may be the first report of preoperative evaluation by CEUS in an infant with PC.


Now that the first wave of the coronavirus is behind us, what will the future bring? As governments reopen society following lengthy stay-athome orders, they must strike a difficult balance. If the return to normalcy is too abrupt, infections could spike again in just a few months, creating a death toll as high as it might have been with no quarantine at all.1 An effective removal of quarantine orders, then, must ensure that the return to normalcy is appropriately paced. But how can we best plan to put our economy back together without jeopardizing public health?

In this paper, we examine the growth of predictive policing, which similarly treats some individuals differently based on the likelihood that they will either commit or be the victim of a crime. If such surveillance does not lead to detention, incursion on the right to travel, or other loss of freedom, we believe such efforts to be constitutional, even though not always wise. Use of data to prioritize law enforcement efforts poses no insuperable constitutional obstacles. But deployment of predictive analytics can result in infringement on the right to liberty, as we relate. In Part II, therefore, we apply the lessons from the predictive policing context to assess current and potential expansion of public health surveillance in the midst of the pandemic. As with predictive policing, if the government focuses its data collection efforts on those most likely to contract the virus, no constitutional issue arises. But, if the government imposes a quarantine on those with the virus, a detention has occurred, and if the government then restricts the freedoms of those who are likeliest to catch the virus thereafter, then the rights to work and travel have been undermined. Courts then must balance the government's public health interest against the constitutional infringement on the fundamental rights of work3 and travel.4 Based on the limited precedents to date, the government must demonstrate that any two-track system is highly critical to protect the community and also provide those in the lower class some limited opportunity to challenge the government's classification, which would leave them stripped of the right to travel and possibly their ability to pursue a livelihood. Given that the balance between governmental power and individual rights tips towards the government in times of crisis, we end in Part III by suggesting the constraints that the government should respect when casting such a wide surveillance net.


It is an open question how well tensor network states in the form of an infinite projected entangled pair states (iPEPS) tensor network can approximate gapless quantum states of matter. Here we address this issue for two different physical scenarios: i) a conformally invariant $(2+1)d$ quantum critical point in the incarnation of the transverse field Ising model on the square lattice and ii) spontaneously broken continuous symmetries with gapless Goldstone modes exemplified by the $S=1/2$ antiferromagnetic Heisenberg and XY models on the square lattice. We find that the energetically best wave functions display {\em finite} correlation lengths and we introduce a powerful finite correlation length scaling framework for the analysis of such finite-$D$ iPEPS states. The framework is important i) to understand the mild limitations of the finite-$D$ iPEPS manifold in representing Lorentz-invariant, gapless many body quantum states and ii) to put forward a practical scheme in which the finite correlation length $\xi(D)$ combined with field theory inspired formulae can be used to extrapolate the data to infinite correlation length, i.e. to the thermodynamic limit. The finite correlation length scaling framework opens the way for further exploration of quantum matter with an (expected) Lorentz-invariant, massless low-energy description, with many applications ranging from condensed matter to high-energy physics.


SOA is being exploited in many various business domains. One of them is industrial maintenance. In this paper, we outline an eMaintenance Platform (eMP) for maintaining complex technical systems. This platform is part of the eMaintenance Management Framework (eMMF). Our primary goal is to explore how SOA can be exploited within industrial maintenance. Our secondary goal is to provide eMP as an effective tool for organizations to conduct their maintenance and support.


This paper reviews recent literature concerning effects of climate change on agriculture and its agricultural adaptation strategies, climate change impacts on Chepang communities and their maize farming. Climate change is perhaps the most serious environmental threat to agricultural productivity. Change in temperature and precipitation specially has greater influence on crop growth and productivity and most of these effect are found to be adverse. Climate change has been great global threat with global temperature rise by 0.83 °C and  global sea level rise by 0.19 m. Poor countries of the world are more vulnerable to changing climate due to different technological, institutional and resource constraints. In context of Nepal, practices like tree plantation, lowering numbers of livestock, shifting to off farm activities, sloping agricultural land technology (SALT) and shifting cultivation are most common coping strategies. Chepang, one of the most backward indigenous ethnic groups of Nepal are also found to perceive change in the climate. Perception  and adaptation strategies  followed by different farmers of world including Chepang  is mainly found to be effected by household head's age, size of farm, family size, assessment to credit, information and extension service, training received and  transportation. Maize is second most important crop in Nepal in which increase in temperature is favorable in Mountain and its yield is negatively influenced by increase in summer rain and maximum temperature. Local knowledge of indigenous people provides new insights into the phenomenon that has not yet been scientifically researched. So, government should combine this perceptive with scientific climate scenario and should conduct activities in term of adoption strategies and policies to insist targeted and marginalized farmers.


This Thesis presents a GFSK Modem implementation on a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) platform applied to mobile communications. It is the beginning of a future implementation of a complete Software-radio setup. The project presents an analysis of the most used digital modulations in wireless communications, a detailed analysis of GFSK modulation based on Matlab simulations and the implementation in a TMS320C5416 Texas Instruments DSP. Within this Thesis, it is analyzed, simulated and implemented: a FSK continuous phase modulator, low pass and Gaussian filters, a non-coherent FSK demodulator and an IaD (Integrate and Dump) decision algorithm. Finally the analysis of the implementation at high rates with available ADCDAC is presented together with the comparison between the simulated system and the implemented system.


Medium-voltage direct-current (MVDC) technology has been widely considered as a key enabler to generate, convert and dispense electrical power with enhanced connectivity, security and quality. However, with the significant deployment of power electronics converters with high-switching frequency in MVDC systems, accurate analysis of system dynamic behavior such as harmonic distortions have become a computationally intensive task. To address these challenge average models of converters have been proposed to facilitate faster computation. However, these models only capture the steady-state characteristics of the system. To this end, in this paper, three types of time-domain based converter models: detailed, average and switching average models are presented for harmonic studies. The suitability of the modelling fidelity in reducing substantial simulation time has been validated with a practical converter topology used for the first MVDC link in Europe. Simulation based on the switching average model is shown to provide all relevant information as obtained from the detailed switching model while consuming considerably less computation time than the latter.


Title of dissertation: Aero-Assisted Spacecraft Missions Using Hypersonic Waverider Aeroshells Jeremy Knittel, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Mark J. Lewis Professor Department of Aerospace Engineering Dr. Kenneth H. Yu Associate Professor Department of Aerospace Engineering This work examines the use of high-lift, low drag vehicles which perform orbital transfers within a planet's atmosphere to reduce propulsive requirements. For the foreseeable future, spacecraft mission design will include the objective of limiting the mass of fuel required. One means of accomplishing this is using aerodynamics as a supplemental force, with what is termed an aero-assist maneuver. Further, the use of a lifting body enables a mission designer to explore candidate trajectory types wholly unavailable to non-lifting analogs. Examples include missions to outer planets by way of an aero-gravity assist, aero-assisted plane change, aero-capture, and steady atmospheric periapsis probing missions. Engineering level models are created in order to simulate both atmospheric and extra-atmospheric space flight. Each mission is parameterized using discrete variables which control multiple areas of design. This work combines the areas of hypersonic aerodynamics, re-entry aerothermodynamics, spacecraft orbital mechanics, and vehicle shape optimization. In particular, emphasis is given to the parametric design of vehicles known as "waveriders" which are inversely designed from known shock flowfields. An entirely novel means of generating a class of waveriders known as "starbodies" is presented. A complete analysis is performed of asymmetric starbody forms and compared to a better understood parameterization, "osculating cone" waveriders. This analysis includes characterization of stability behavior, a critical discipline within hypersonic flight. It is shown that asymmetric starbodies have significant stability improvement with only a 10% reduction in the lift-to-drag ratio. By combining the optimization of both the shape of the vehicle and the trajectory it flies, much is learned about the benefit that can be expected from lifting aero-assist missions. While previous studies have conceptually proven the viability, this work provides thorough quantification of the optimized outcome. In examining an aero-capture of Mars, it was found that with a lifting body, the increased maneuverability can allow completion of multiple mission objectives along with the aero-capture, such as atmospheric profiling or up to 80◦ of orbital plane change. Completing a combined orbital plane change and aero-capture might save as much as 4.5 km/s of velocity increment while increasing the feasible entry corridor by an order of magnitude. Analyzing a higher energy mission type, a database of maximum aero-gravity assist performance is developed at Mars, Earth and Venus. Finally, a methodology is presented for designing end-toend interplanetary missions using aero-gravity assists. As a means of demonstrating the method, promising trajectories are propagated which reduce the time of flight of an interstellar probe mission by up to 50%. Aero-Assisted Spacecraft Missions Using Hypersonic Waverider Aeroshells


Although extant career theories provide important conceptual insights into the content and process of the school-to-work transition, they have not addressed 2 questions that need to be considered in future theoretical and research agendas. These questions, which are addressed in this article, are (a) why are career theories not developed to account for the school-to-work process? and (b) are the career theories proposed here complete in their explanation of the schoolto-work process? In their analyses of specific career theories, the authors included in this issue have reminded the reader that, as Lent and Worthington ( 1999) suggest in the first article, the theories offer a vantage point from which to understand and facilitate the school-to-work transition and have the potential to bring a coherent conceptual base to the evolution of school-to-work programming efforts. The introductory article by Lent and Worthington ( 1999) makes other assertions that deserve consideration. One is that none of the four theoretical positions examined in the articles-social learning, person-environment fit, developmental, and social cognitive-were developed to account for the school-to-work process. This is a critical issue that raises two major questions: (a) why are career theories not developed to account for the school-to-work process? (b) are the theories proposed here complete in their explanation of the schoolto-work process? Although there are other questions that could be asked, it may be useful to look briefly at these two important questions to stimulate further deliberation about elements of a future theoretical and research agenda related to the school-to-work transition process. WHY ARE CAREER THEORIES NOT DEVELOPED TO ACCOUNT FOR THE SCHOOL-TO-WORK PROCESS? There are undoubtedly many answers to this question. One possibility has to do with the principal subjects of the school-to-work transition and the principal subjects for career theory. In the first instance, most of the subjects of the school-to-work transition are high school students who are employment- not college-bound after graduation. In contrast, much of the conceptual work underlying extant career theories has focused on college student populations of convenience or socioeconomic groups that have been educationally advantaged. Under the rubric of neglected diversity, Savickas ( 1994) has suggested that current career theories have addressed the influences on career choices and the acting out of work behavior of limited segments of the workforce, primarily those who enjoy the privilege of anticipating and planning for promotion and advancement, for whom personal and psychological assertiveness or action, rather than sociological circumstances, allow them to forge a career as they navigate through the educational and occupational opportunity structure. For many people who have a job or seek one, but who do not have a sense of career, career theories tend to be largely silent and, perhaps, irrelevant. These people include youth and adults who, because of limited opportunity or support, a lack of personal mentoring or access to information about possible expanded horizons in their choice of work options, or social oppression or discrimination, limit their choices to reactive responses to a narrow band of opportunities currently visible and known to them. They are not proactive or systematic planners but, rather, are swept into available jobs after little exploration or evaluation of their options. In this sense, current career theories tend, in the aggregate, to focus on attitudes, skills, and characteristics that are defined and favored by the middle and upper socioeconomic classes (e.g., independence in choice, decisiveness, systematic exploration of opportunities, an internal locus of control, connecting the present to the future in planning), not those in the lowest socioeconomic classes. Current career theories largely ignore the work experiences of persons for whom a job is cast in economic, not psychological, terms; the contextual differences in the development of "career" behavior; or the reality that, just as different cultures do, different socioeconomic strata reinforce different types of indicators of career maturity. …


We use a novel approach to identify economic developments that drive exchange rates in the long run. Using a panel of six quarterly U.S. bilateral real exchange rates – Australia, Canada, the euro, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom – over the 1980-2007 period, a dynamic factor model points to two common factors. The first factor is driven by U.S. shocks, and cointegration analysis points to a long-run statistical relationship with the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio, relative to all other countries in our sample. The second common factor is driven by commodity prices. Incorporating these relationships directly into a state-space model, we find highly significant coefficients. Then, we decompose the historical variation of each exchange rate into U.S. shocks, commodities, and a domestic component. We find a strong role for economic fundamentals: Changes in the two common factors, which are driven by the (relative) U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio and commodity prices, can explain between 36 and 96 per cent of individual countries' exchange rates in our panel.


Psychiatric and neurological disorders are mostly associated with the changes in neural calcium ion signaling pathways required for activity-triggered cellular events. One calcium channel family is the TRP cation channel family, which contains seven subfamilies. Results of recent papers have discovered that calcium ion influx through TRP channels is important. We discuss the latest advances in calcium ion influx through TRP channels in the etiology of psychiatric disorders. Activation of TRPC4, TRPC5, and TRPV1 cation channels in the etiology of psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, fear-associated responses, and depression modulate calcium ion influx. Evidence substantiates that anandamide and its analog (methanandamide) induce an anxiolytic-like effect via CB1 receptors and TRPV1 channels. Intracellular calcium influx induced by oxidative stress has an significant role in the etiology of bipolar disorders (BDs), and studies recently reported the important role of TRP channels such as TRPC3, TRPM2, and TRPV1 in converting oxidant or nitrogen radical signaling to cytosolic calcium ion homeostasis in BDs. The TRPV1 channel also plays a function in morphine tolerance and hyperalgesia. Among psychotropic drugs, amitriptyline and capsazepine seem to have protective effects on psychiatric disorders via the TRP channels. Some drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine also seem to have an important role in alcohol addiction and substance abuse via activation of the TRPV1 channel. Thus, we explore the relationships between the etiology of psychiatric disorders and TRP channel-regulated mechanisms. Investigation of the TRP channels in psychiatric disorders holds the promise of the development of new drug treatments.


The characterisation and assessment of hydromorphological conditions (physical habitat) is a key stage in the evaluation of the ecological status of streams and rivers required by the EU Water Framework Directive. In addition to identifying the presence or absence of habitat types, there is a need to reflect the quasi-discrete nature of hydraulic habitats and assess their spatial distribution (composition and configuration) and temporal dynamics across a range of discharges. However current approaches to physical habitat classification and assessment are limited in this respect.

This research aims to develop a quantitative approach to assess spatio-temporal habitat dynamics. High resolution point measurements of depth and streamwise velocity were collected at four discharges in a 56m reach of the River Arrow (Warwickshire, UK). Fuzzy cluster analysis was used to delineate five hydraulic habitats and characterise the transitional zones between them. Spatial metrics, computed using FRAGSTATS, were used to quantify the composition and configuration of the habitat mosaic at each flow. Spatial metrics were compared using multivariate statistics to assess temporal habitat dynamics. Preliminary results indicate that intermediate flows support maximum diversity of habitat composition and configuration.


Mobile technologies and services create a wide spectrum of business opportunities. Despite the availability of technologically advanced mobile devices, mobile banking services have not been widely accepted by bank customers. The purpose of this study is to examine the major factors that contribute towards customer's intention to adopt mobile banking. In addition, the study aims to examine the direct and indirect effects of perceived value on behavioural intention. This research uses primary data and the unit of analysis is individuals who are nonuser of mobile banking services. The study questionnaires were distributed to samples throughout Saudi Arabia with emphasis on major cities. Four hundred and three valid responses were received and analysed through multivariate analysis process using Structural Equation Modelleing (SEM) via Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) software. The findings of the research demonstrate four main results. First, mobile phone experience and awareness of service have a strong positive influence on benefit factors (performance expectancy, effort expectancy). Second, the findings show that benefit factors have significant and positive impact on perceived value. Third, the results also reveal that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, perceived risk and perceived value are significant predictors of intention to use mobile banking in the initial adoption stage. Fourth, the findings indicate that perceived value significantly mediates the relationship between benefit factors (performance expectancy, effort expectancy) and behavioural intention. Several managerial and policy implications for Saudi commercial banks and Saudi Arabia Monetary Agency are presented which affect their on-going campaigns about information security of banking transactions through electronic banking channels. The study shows that mobile phone experience and awareness of service are critical in the comprehension of the technology and the related functionality and benefits while the lack of knowledge and information maximize the perception of risk. The principal conclusion is that mobile banking services have to demonstrate to the bank customer its uniqueness compared to other competing services in the same category (electronic banking services). Differentiation can be achieved by having more benefit factors than sacrifice factors (perceived cost, perceived risk) that can create perceived value for adopting mobile banking services in the future. Once the bank customers assess the mobile banking services based on their perceptions of what is received and what is given, they start to make decision that will influence behavioural intention to adopt or not to adopt mobile banking services.


The performance of distributed fiber sensors based on spontaneous Brillouin scattering is largely determined by the peak power governed by nonlinear thresholds that can be launched into the sensing fiber. Our investigations show that, in long-range (>20-km) sensors that use a standard single-mode fiber operating at 1.5 µm, modulation instability can limit the acceptable pulse power to below 100 mW. Using a nonzero dispersion-shifted fiber with negative dispersion we can avoid this problem and obtain a ninefold increase in launched power.


Indonesia has agreat variety of roosters, either indigenous type as well as exotic and cross breed. The purpose of this experiment was to study the characteristics of semen from three types of Indonesian local roosters such as Merawang, Kampung and crosses Sentul Kampung with Kedu (SK Kedu). A total of 15 roosters consist of  Merawang roosters,  Kampung, and SK Kedu roosters were 5 each. The semen was collected 3 times a week by dorso-abdominal and cloaca massage method. The parameters evaluation was macroscopic characteristics consist of volume, color, consistency, and pH. Microscopic evaluation of semen such as a mass movement, sperm motility, live sperm, sperm abnormality and sperm concentration. Results of this experiment showed that semen volume of  Merawang  (0.40±0.26 mL) was higher (p<0.05) compare to Kampung (0.24±0.12 mL) or  SK Kedu (0.16±0.10 mL) but no difference on semen color, consistency and semen pH. There were no difference in the mass movement, sperm motility and live sperm as well as on sperm abnormality among three types of roosters.  Sperm  concentration of Merawang (4490 million mL-1) was significantly higher than Kampung (3245 million mL-1) and the SK Kedu roosters (3751 million mL-1). Its was conclude that Merawang roosters had good semen quality better than Kampung and SK Kedu roosters


Comparison of modeling results with observed subsidence patterns from the West Siberian Basin provides new insight into the origin of the Siberian Traps, and constrains the temperature, size, and depth of an impacting mantle plume head during and after the eruption of the Siberian Traps at the Permian-Triassic boundary (250 Ma). We compare subsidence patterns from one-dimensional conductive heat flow models to observed subsidence from backstripping studies of wells in the basin. This results in a best-fit scenario with a 50-km-thick initial plume head with a temperature of 1500 °C situated 50 km below the surface, and an initial regional crustal thickness of 34 km, in agreement with published values. Backstripping and modeling results agree very well, including a 60–90 m.y. delay between the rifting phase and the first regional sedimentation. Regional subsidence patterns indicate that the plume head was present across a minimum area of ∼2.5 × 106 km2. These results re-emphasize the viability of a mantle plume origin for the Siberian Traps, provide important constraints on the dynamics of mantle plume heads, and suggest a thermal control for the subsidence of the West Siberian Basin.


Objectives To report on the disease-related quality of life of patients living with diabetes mellitus in Rwanda and identify its predictors. Design Cross-sectional study, part of the baseline assessment of a cluster-randomised controlled trial. Setting Outpatient clinics for non-communicable diseases of nine hospitals across Rwanda. Participants Between January and August 2019, 206 patients were recruited as part of the clinical trial. Eligible participants were those aged 21–80 years and with a diagnosis of diabetes mellitus for at least 6 months. Illiterate patients, those with severe hearing or visual impairments, those with severe mental health conditions, terminally ill, and those pregnant or in the postpartum period were excluded Primary and secondary outcome measures Disease-specific quality of life was measured with the Kinyarwanda version of the Diabetes-39 (D-39) questionnaire. A glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) test was performed on all patients. Sociodemographic and clinical data were collected, including medical history, disease-related complications and comorbidities. Results The worst affected dimensions of the D-39 were 'anxiety and worry' (mean=51.63, SD=25.51), 'sexual functioning' (mean=44.58, SD=37.02), and 'energy and mobility' (mean=42.71, SD=20.69). Duration of the disease and HbA1c values were not correlated with any of the D-39 dimensions. A moderating effect was identified between use of insulin and achieving a target HbA1c of 7% in the 'diabetes control' scale. The most frequent comorbidity was hypertension (49.0% of participants), which had a greater negative effect on the 'diabetes control' and 'social burden' scales in women. Higher education was a predictor of less impact on the 'social burden' and 'energy and mobility' scales. Conclusions Several variables were identified as predictors for the five dimensions of quality of life that were studied, providing opportunities for tailored preventive programmes. Further prospective studies are needed to determine causal relationships. Trial registration number NCT03376607.


A free form surface reconstruction method based on least square support vector regression is presented. Firstly in order to eliminate noise points, some sample points are chosen from the measured data to construct LS-SVM model. Thus a LS-SVM model to approximate the measured points is obtained. And the distribution probability of the approximation error is figured out. In result, the noise points are eliminated when their error probability is less than the specified threshold value. Then the boundary points are extracted. Lastly the surface model is reconstructed by use of the measured points from which noise points have been eliminated. The results indicate that the reconstruction precision can satisfy the demands of engineering application.


This building biography examines how architectural preservation was used to legitimize Soviet rule in central Asia, focusing on the Gur-i Amir mausoleum of the Timurids in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. It argues that the Soviets forged a distinctive path in the region's traditional politics of custodianship at this politically symbolic site, using preservation to elevate Soviet rule over the tsars and to instantiate Soviet rule among the indigenous population by demonstrating benevolence toward local culture and sacred structures—despite the general Soviet attack on Islam—and by providing archeological legitimacy to the project of Uzbek nation building. In the postwar era, the Gur-i Amir, like other Timurid structures, formed part of a broad didactic landscape against which to demonstrate the imminent arrival of Communism. However, the site's potency ensured an instability of meaning, exemplified by the so-called "curse of Tamerlane," an anti-Soviet ghost story that emerged to explain the Nazi invasion as a punishment for disturbing the tomb. And despite their efforts to the contrary, the significance placed on the Gur-i Amir and the aesthetic judgments of Soviet preservationists demonstrated the many ways in which they resembled their tsarist forebears.


BACKGROUND
The efficacy of calcium with vitamin D supplementation for preventing hip and other fractures in healthy postmenopausal women remains equivocal.

METHODS
We recruited 36,282 postmenopausal women, 50 to 79 years of age, who were already enrolled in a Women's Health Initiative (WHI) clinical trial. We randomly assigned participants to receive 1000 mg of elemental [corrected] calcium as calcium carbonate with 400 IU of vitamin D3 daily or placebo. Fractures were ascertained for an average follow-up period of 7.0 years. Bone density was measured at three WHI centers.

RESULTS
Hip bone density was 1.06 percent higher in the calcium plus vitamin D group than in the placebo group (P<0.01). Intention-to-treat analysis indicated that participants receiving calcium plus vitamin D supplementation had a hazard ratio of 0.88 for hip fracture (95 percent confidence interval, 0.72 to 1.08), 0.90 for clinical spine fracture (0.74 to 1.10), and 0.96 for total fractures (0.91 to 1.02). The risk of renal calculi increased with calcium plus vitamin D (hazard ratio, 1.17; 95 percent confidence interval, 1.02 to 1.34). Censoring data from women when they ceased to adhere to the study medication reduced the hazard ratio for hip fracture to 0.71 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.52 to 0.97). Effects did not vary significantly according to prerandomization serum vitamin D levels.

CONCLUSIONS
Among healthy postmenopausal women, calcium with vitamin D supplementation resulted in a small but significant improvement in hip bone density, did not significantly reduce hip fracture, and increased the risk of kidney stones. (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00000611.).


The following presentations summarize various titles and sections of the 2008 Farm Bill and provide The following presentations summarize various titles and sections of the 2008 Farm Bill and provide program details and mechanics of the new legislation as well as potential impacts of the new programs. The presentations were delivered at the 2008 Farm Bill Education Conference and serve as both an outline of the new programs as well as a working template for further education and analysis. The conference was organized by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln along with Auburn University, The University of Georgia, and Oklahoma State University. The conference was sponsored through grants from the Farm Foundation and the North Central Risk Management Education Center along with support from the Southern, Western, and Northeastern risk management education centers and the Digital Center for Risk Management Education, home of the national Ag Risk Education Library.


This article examines the history of faith based groups and individuals in Australia who claim to have had their religious or spiritual beliefs aggrieved seeking standing (also known as locus standi) to challenge the decisions of public body authorities through the judicial system. These applicants are described in this article as the 'aggrieved faithful.' The main issues that have given rise to applications for standing by the aggrieved faithful include public decisions pertaining to the areas of abortion, blasphemy and in-vitro fertilisation. These concerns are not unique to Australia, but are also issues that have been raised in Canada and the United Kingdom. This article also briefly considers applications for standing by Indigenous Australians who claim to have had their spiritual beliefs aggrieved. It is argued that the current restrictive test for standing should be liberalised to improve the operation of the rule of law in Australia.


Disentangling conversations mixed together in a single stream of messages is a difficult task, made harder by the lack of large manually annotated datasets. We created a new dataset of 77,563 messages manually annotated with reply-structure graphs that both disentangle conversations and define internal conversation structure. Our data is 16 times larger than all previously released datasets combined, the first to include adjudication of annotation disagreements, and the first to include context. We use our data to re-examine prior work, in particular, finding that 89% of conversations in a widely used dialogue corpus are either missing messages or contain extra messages. Our manually-annotated data presents an opportunity to develop robust data-driven methods for conversation disentanglement, which will help advance dialogue research.


Intervertebral disc extrusion (IVDE) is one of the most common neurologic problems encountered in veterinary clinical practice. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide an overview of the literature related to treatment of acute canine thoracolumbar IVDE to help construct a framework for standard care of acute canine thoracolumbar IVDE where sufficient evidence exists and to highlight opportunities for future prospective veterinary clinical research useful to strengthen care recommendations in areas where evidence is low or non-existent. While there exist a number of gaps in the veterinary literature with respect to standards of care for dogs with acute thoracolumbar IVDE, recommendations for standard care can be made in some areas, particularly with respect to surgical decompression where the currently available evidence supports that surgery should be recommended for dogs with nonambulatory paraparesis or worse. While additional information is needed about the influence on timing of decompression on outcome in dogs that are deep pain negative for longer than 48 h duration, there is no evidence to support treatment of the 48 h time point as a cut off beyond which it becomes impossible for dogs to achieve locomotor recovery. Surgical decompression is best accomplished by either hemilaminectomy or mini-hemilaminectomy and fenestration of, at a minimum, the acutely ruptured disc. Adjacent discs easily accessed by way of the same approach should be considered for fenestration given the evidence that this substantially reduces future herniation at fenestrated sites. Currently available neuroprotective strategies such as high does MPSS and PEG are not recommended due to lack of demonstrated treatment effect in randomized controlled trials, although the role of anti-inflammatory steroids as a protective strategy against progressive myelomalacia and the question of whether anti-inflammatory steroids or NSAIDs provide superior medical therapy require further evaluation.


Over the past decade, the political ground beneath the Middle East has shifted. Arab nationalism the political orthodoxy for most of this century has lost its grip on the imagination and allegiance of a new generation. At the same time, Islam as an ideology has spread across the region, and "Islamists" bid to capture the center of politics. Most Western scholars and experts once hailed the redemptive power of Arabism. "Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival" is a critical assessment of the contradictions of Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, and the misrepresentation of both in the West.The first part of the book argues that Arab nationalism - the so-called Arab awakening - bore within it the seeds of its own failure. Arabism as an idea drew upon foreign sources and resources. Even as it claimed to liberate the Arabs from imperialism it deepened intellectual dependence upon the West's own romanticism and radicalism. Ultimately, Arab nationalism became a force of oppression rather than liberation, and a mirror image of the imperialism it defied. Kramer's essays together form the only chronological telling and the at fully documented postmortem of Arabism. The second part of the book examines the similar failings of Islamism, whose ideas are Islamic reworkings of Western ideological radicalism. Its effect has been to give new life to old rationales for oppression, authoritarianism, and sectarian division."Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival" provides an alternative view of a century of Middle Eastern history. As the region moves fitfully past ideology, Kramer's perspective is more compelling than at any time in the past-in Western academe no less than among many in the Middle. This book will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, economists, and Middle East specialists.


Description: Utilizes an encyclopedic approach to cover the developments in polyolefins and styrenics during the last decade This book focuses on common types of polymers belonging to the class of polyolefins and styrenics. The text is arranged according to the chemical constitution of polymers and reviews the developments that have taken place in the last decade. A brief introduction to the polymer type is given and previous monographs and reviews dealing with the topic are listed for quick reference. The text continues with monomers, polymerization, fabrication techniques, properties, application, as well as safety issues. Providing a rather encyclopedic approach to polyolefins and styrenics, The Handbook of Engineering and Specialty Thermoplastics: Presents a listing of suppliers and commercial grades Reviews current patent literature, essential for the engineer developing new products Contains as extensive tradenames index with information that is fairly unique Concludes with an index of acronyms The Handbook of Engineering and Specialty Thermoplastics: Polyolefins and Styrenics provides a comprehensive reference for chemical engineers and offers advanced students with a textbook for use in courses on chemically biased plastics technology and polymer science.


September 2002 (Revised October 2002). Executive Summary: The current debate over cost-benefit concerns in agencies' evaluations of government regulations is not so much whether to consider costs and benefits at all but rather what belongs in the estimated costs and benefits. Overlaid is the long-standing belief that the distribution of costs and benefits needs some consideration in policy evaluations. In a recent article in the University of Chicago Law Review, Robert Frank and Cass Sunstein proposed a relatively simple method for adding distributional concerns to policy evaluation that enlarges the typically constructed estimates of the individual's willingness to pay for safer jobs or safer products. One might pay more for safety if it were the result of a government regulation that mandated greater safety across-the-board. Frank and Sunstein argue, that the reason for enlarging current estimates is that someone who takes a safer job or buys a safer product gives up wages or pays a higher price, which then moves him or her down in the ladder of income left over to buy other things. Alternatively, a worker who is given a safer job via a government regulation will have no relative income consequences if all workers have lower pay. We show that when considering the core of the Frank and Sunstein proposal carefully one concludes that current regulatory evaluations should be left alone because there is no reason to believe that relative positional effects can be well identified quantitatively, are important to personal decisions in general, or are important to well constructed cost-benefit calculations of government regulations. One of the practical problems with trying to consider relative position of income and consumption when estimating willingness to pay is that there is no unique way to ascertain, from a statistical model, the person's actual social reference group. A researcher must specify ex ante a reference group and then net out the behavioral effects of a possibly incorrectly attributed reference group's behavior on the individual. There is no well-established result from survey data for a typical person's economic reference group. Moreover, the econometric literature generally finds that reference group or social interaction effects are unlikely to be identified uniquely or are small and easily ignored, perhaps because the relative positional effects of workplace or product safety offset possible reference group effects on income. To some extent, Frank and Sunstein's recommended increase in the value of willingness to pay for safety used in current regulatory evaluations is already considered. Regulatory evaluations often include a pessimistic and an optimistic value of likely benefits, and Frank and Sunstein's suggested revised value of willingness to pay is still below the optimistic case that carefully formulated cost-benefit studies use. It is easy to show that almost doubling the estimated value of a statistical life would have an inconsequential effect on the economic desirability of a broad set of regulatory policies. Finally, we argue that the most important refinements one could make in the area of regulatory evaluation would be for agencies involved to adhere more to the framework of what is generally considered a carefully done cost-benefit study and for agencies to make greater actual use of appropriately done cost-benefit studies when recommending regulations.


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As the activation of Articles 8bis, 15bis and 15ter of the ICC Rome Statute (RS) is drawing ever nearer, the debate over the prosecution of the crime of aggression has taken off again with renewed vigour. While various flaws and imperfections of the Kampala resolution have attracted scholarly attention, the present paper focuses on one particular source for concern, viz. the implications which the activation of the Court's jurisdiction may have for the legal regime governing the use of force between States. It is assumed at the outset that, even if investigations into alleged crimes of aggression may not occur on a frequent basis, sooner or later the ICC will inevitably be called upon to apply Article 8bis RS. Indeed, even if the majority of situations dealt with by the Court pertain to non-international armed conflicts, there have also been a number of situations involving an international/inter-State element. In essence, each such situation potentially raises jus contra bellum concerns, and may accordingly lead to allegations that the crime of aggression has been committed. Even if the lion's share of these allegations is unlikely to make it past the preliminary examination or investigation phases, the way in which the ICC Prosecutor and the Pre-Trial Chambers play their role as gatekeepers with regard to the crime of aggression is bound to have strong repercussions for the interpretation and compliance pull of the law on the use of force.
The present paper first addresses the possible impact of the ICC's jurisdiction over the crime of aggression on the recourse to, and acceptance of, unilateral humanitarian intervention (Section 2), before addressing other ways in which it may influence the international legal framework governing the use of force (Section 3). Section 4 concludes.


A few weeks ago, our class went on a guided tour of the library, which taught us about what goes on in the library, how resources are used, and basically how the library operates. From our tour, we saw many problem areas that could use improvements. One of these areas is the library's use of electricity. Our group focused on the computers, printers, copiers, lights, and elevators in the library and how the library could use their electricity more efficiently. We have found that the library is not always using electricity effectively and efficiently. There are lights on when nobody is around and there are computers on when students are not using them. Our group examined the library's electric bill and the electronics that are using up this energy and money. We have discovered that the Library could have the most immediate and far-reaching reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by switching their electricity to GreenStart electricity. We have also found the library could save money and energy by turning electronics off or using power saving options when available.


Introduction Stigma is a mark of disgrace or discredit that sets a person aside from others. It is a term of prejudice based on negative stereotyping. It is based on the perception of a difference which is ultimately linked to negative traits. The stigma of severe mental illness exacerbates the patients' burden caused by the illness. It plays a negative role at every stage of the illness from presentation and diagnosis to treatment and outcome. It makes many people reluctant to seek help and less likely to cooperate with treatment and slows recovery. Because of this, The Mental Health act (1989) established The Kenya Board of Mental Health to among other objectives, address mental health related stigma. Objective To obtain information on the current level of knowledge, attitude and practices regarding mental health in the general population in Kenya. This study aims at generating information in this field with special focus on stigma in the general population to fill the current knowledge gap, compare results with similar studies and make appropriate recommendations. Setting. The study was conducted at Kamburu sublocation in Central Province, Kenya. Sampling: The sublocation was divided into eight clusters and four of them were randomly selected. Consecutive sampling was done till the minimum sample size per cluster was attained. Methodology: The study design was crossectional descriptive in nature targeting 384 male and female household heads who consented to participate in the study. Data was collected using a researcher designed social demographic questionnaire and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) questionnaire on perceptions about mental illness. (vii) Data handling: Data was edited, coded and entered into a computer. It was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social sciences version 12 programme and the results were presented in form of descriptive statistics and tables. Results: Three hundred and eighty four respondents were interviewed. Their ages raged from 18 years to 74 years The mean age was 40 years, median age of 37 years, and the mode and standard deviation were 35 and 14 respectively. One hundred and nighty four (50.5%) were males while 49 5% were females. The male to female ratio was 1:1.Majority of the respondents were Catholics (50%) Protestants were 48% while the rest were either Muslims (0.5%)or had no religious inclination(l%).Majority of the respondents were married(95%) while the rest were either widowed(2%) separated(l%), divorced(l%)or were cohabiting(0.3%).Most respondents had attained secondary school level of education(42%) while the rest had primary school level(29%),tertiary level(9%) and 19% of them had no formal education Almost half of the respondents knew some one in their neighborhood who had mental illness(43%).They described the character of these people by the nature of speech(34%), abnormal behavior(34%), violence(23%) and grooming (9%). Very few of the respondents (13%) had lived with a mentally ill person. Majority had never had mental health related information (65%) and the few who had (35%) got it from radio (47%), health worker (36%), newspapers (15%) and from school (2%).Most respondents thought that mental illness is caused by psychoactive substances (44%).Majority of those interviewed thought medical treatment is necessary for the mentally ill while 48% thought prayers could treat mental illness. Negative attitudes towards mentally ill people were highly prevalent since 60% thought that these people are dangerous, unpredictable (56%) and hard to talk to (58%). Respondents in the over sixty years age group were more likely to seek help in religious facilties or from traditional healers. (v i i i ) The same trend was observed in the respondents' attitude that the mentally ill are processed by demons. There was no statistically significant difference between the various age groups on their attitude that the mentally ill are dangerous while those with post primary education were less likely to believe so. Those who had lived with a mentally ill person held more positive opinions about mental illness and were also more likely to have had information on mental health issues. Those who had had such information were less likely to hold negative opinion on mental illness. Conclusion: Mental health related stigma is prevalent in the population that was studied. Most people in this community have never had information on mental health related issues. The health seeking behavior in this population is influenced positively by age, level of education, and whether one had been enlightened on mental health issues. Recommendations: It is necessary to increase public education on mental health to reduce stigma towards mental illness and to influence mental health seeking behavior in the community positively. Health workers should be more proactive in educating their patients and also use other fora to impart this information to the public.


Mobile IPv6 is an IP-layer protocol that is designed to provide mobility support.It allows an IPv6 node to arbitrarily change its location in the IPv6 network while maintaining the existing connection by handling the change of addresses at the Internet layer. Route optimization is standard in Mobile IPv6 to eliminate inefficient triangle routing. Several methods were proposed to secure route optimization. Return routability was adopted by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) with its security protocol based on RFC 3775. Return routability is an infrastructureless, lightweight procedure that enables a Mobile IPv6 node to request another IPv6 node to check and test the ownership of its permanent address in both home network and current visited network. It authorizes a binding procedure by the use of cryptographically token exchange. However, return routability protocol in route optimization is to protect messages and is not able to detect or prevent an attacker which tampers against data. In this thesis, focus is given on Mobile IPv6 route optimization test-bed with enhanced security in terms of data integrity. The proposed method can be performed on top of the return routability procedure to detect and prevent Man-In-The-Middle attack by using encryption if any attack is detected. This also eliminates the additional delay compared to using encryption from the beginning of a connection. A real-time experimental test-bed has been set up, which is comprised of hardware, software and network analysis tools to monitor the packet flow and content of data packets. The test-bed consists of four computers acting as Mobile Node, Home Agent, Correspondent Node, and Router, respectively. To ensure the accuracy and integrity of the collected data, the Network Time Protocol (NTP) was used between the packet generator (Mobile Node) and packet receiver (Correspondent Node) to synchronize the time. The results show that the proposed method is able to work efficiently, maintaining 99% data security of route optimization in Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) networks. The overall data integrity (by means of security) is improved 72% compared to existing MIPv6 by at a cost of 0.1 sec added overall delay, which is within the tolerable range by the network.


Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to develop a proposal for a new conceptual framework for management control systems (MCS) in R&D units. Design/methodology/approach - The paper is a descriptive study that reviews the control literature and proposes an MCS framework in the light of four key elements: desired ends, actors, control implementation, and control tools. Findings - The study found two sub-elements of desired ends (directional and yardstick) to be complementary in a low level of uncertainty, while directional should be emphasized more in a high level of uncertainty. Five sub-elements of actors are used differently along the levels of uncertainty. The timing and use of formal and informal control types are found to be different regarding the level of uncertainty. Finally, the dimension and the value of control tools are used differently in those two distinctive situations. Research limitations/implications - The paper is limited to a descriptive study that may have further implication for research by using the framework to investigate the MCS applied by R&D units. Practical implications - The four key elements of MCS may be used in practice by developing a detail measure of each element to suit the condition of the unit. Originality/value - The paper is a new way of looking at MCS, broadening the comprehension, and introducing new MCS key elements.


Abstract Background: The objective was to compare the body composition of black stunted, and non-stunted, children, from two rural communities in South Africa, and investigate whether increased total and central adiposity is found in stunted children. The design was a cross-sectional study. The setting was two study populations of children in rural South Africa. The subjects were 351 children aged 10–15 years old [Transition and Health during Urbanisation of South Africans (THUSA BANA) study], and 1 760 children aged 6–13 years old [Ellisras Longitudinal Growth and Health Study (ELS)]. Method: The body mass index (BMI), BMI for age z-score, sum of triceps and subscapular skin folds (SSF), waist circumference (WC), waist:height ratio (WHtR) of stunted, and non-stunted, children, were compared. Results: Almost 10% (n = 203) of children were stunted, and 34% had a BMI for age z-score below -2. After adjustment for age, non-stunted children had significantly higher values for BMI and WC, in both boys and girls. SSF was similar in stunted and non-stunted boys, but tended to be greater in non-stunted, rather than stunted girls. In the ELS, stunted boys and girls had significantly higher WHtR than non-stunted children, while similar results were found in the THUSA BANA study, although the difference was not significant in the girls. All stunted groups had a WHtR greater than 0.41, proposed as a cut-off point due to its association with increased risk for high blood pressure in children. Conclusion: More research needs to be carried out on anthropometric indices for the distribution of body fat, independent of age, race, gender, and sexual maturation, in children and adolescents. This study showed inconsistent results, and highlights the complexity of using various adiposity measures in stunted and non-stunted children.


This Article consciously employs both a dignity rights-based framing and methodology. Dignity rights are those rights that are based on the Kantian assertion of "inalienable human worth."29 This framework for defining rights spans across a number of disciplines, including medicine and human rights law.30 Disciplinary sanctions like solitary confinement or forced medication might be described as anathema to human dignity because of their degrading effect on an individual's emotional and social well-being.

This Article relies on first-person oral histories where possible. Bioethics scholar Claire Hooker argues that including narratives in work on dignity rights "is both a moral and an aesthetic project." Using oral histories in this way—requesting, offering, and receiving narrative—is important for two reasons. First, it is crucial for developing a shared understanding of the context surrounding the event, such as the position, setting, and social order. First-person narratives reveal the human experience behind legal rules. Secondly, the methodology is significant to dignity rights scholarship since it respects and augments the idea of a right to dignity by recognizing that the people who are primarily affected by an event are the people best informed about the dynamics of the harm they have endured. The precise influences that lead an individual to articulate her rights cannot be conveyed through court records or opinions. That process occurs before, beside, and in the aftermath of litigation. Traditional forms of scholarship—those based on highly bureaucratic processes such as court decisions and filings—may even be considered dignity-violative. For women of color or poor women, those indignities are often rendered invisible by supposed "neutral" applications of law and summarization of harms in court decisions. In this way, marginalizing individual narratives can be dignity-corrosive. To examine the role of women in the development of prisoners' rights litigation, I conducted oral history interviews with three individuals involved in the lawsuits from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in the 1970s.


Tissue engineering is a field of regenerative medicine [6] that integrates the knowledge of scientists, physicians, and engineers into the construction or reconstruction of human tissue. Practitioners of tissue engineering seek to repair, replace, maintain, and enhance the abilities of a specific tissue or organ by means of living cells. More often than not stem cells [7] are the form of living cells used in this technology. Tissue engineering is one of the disciplines involved in translating knowledge of developmental biology into the clinical setting. One focus that this field has taken is the understanding of tissue and organ development during embryogenesis [8], as this knowledge will open avenues to new applications of this technology.


Commercially available arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) products were applied at an operational rate to eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana L.) nursery beds and containers to evaluate seedling growth and colonization responses. A field study at the Augusta Forestry Center in Crimora, VA, and a companion container study were initiated in the fall of 2012. MycoApply® Endo products containing the same four species of AM fungi were applied as a liquid, granular, or seed treatment. The field application of AM products did not result in early root colonization by AM fungi. By November 2013, seedlings were colonized by naturally occurring AM fungi and seedlings did not differ in size among treatments. A winter rye cover crop treatment tested in conjunction with the AM treatments in the container study did not significantly affect AM colonization. AM colonization of seedling roots was very low in container seedlings from all treatments and no growth response could be attributed to AM fungi. This paper was presented at a joint meeting of the Northeast Forest and Conservation Nursery Association and Southern Forest Nursery Association (Williamsburg, VA, July 21–24, 2014).


In recent years, questions about when police officers should activate (or not activate) their body-worn cameras during police-public encounters have risen into the foreground of public and scholarly debate. Understanding how officers perceive body-worn cameras and policies surrounding activation (and how they view these as impacting their ability to make discretionary choices while on the job) can provide greater insight into why, when, and how officers may attempt to exercise their discretion in the form of resistance or avoidance to body cameras, seen as technologies of accountability. In this Article, we examine officer attitudes about how much discretion they ought to have about when (or when not) to activate their cameras, what concerns they have about overbroad, overly punitive, or ambiguous activation policies, and their perceptions about how frequently cameras ought to be activated in specific circumstances (i.e., general police-public interactions, arrest situations, domestic violence calls, traffic stops, when taking statements from witnesses or victims, and when responding to calls inside homes and medical facilities). These findings are drawn from a multi-year and mixed-methods study of police officer adoption of body-worn cameras in two municipal police departments in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States from 2014 to 2018.


In most problem-solving activities, feedback is received at the end of an action sequence. This creates a credit-assignment problem where the learner must associate the feedback with earlier actions, and the interdependencies of actions require the learner to either remember past choices of actions (internal state information) or rely on external cues in the environment (external state information) to select the right actions. We investigated the nature of explicit and implicit learning processes in the credit-assignment problem using a probabilistic sequential choice task with and without external state information. We found that when explicit memory encoding was dominant, subjects were faster to select the better option in their first choices than in the last choices; when implicit reinforcement learning was dominant subjects were faster to select the better option in their last choices than in their first choices. However, implicit reinforcement learning was only successful when distinct external state information was available. The results suggest the nature of learning in credit assignment: an explicit memory encoding process that keeps track of internal state information and a reinforcement-learning process that uses state information to propagate reinforcement backwards to previous choices. However, the implicit reinforcement learning process is effective only when the valences can be attributed to the appropriate states in the system – either internally generated states in the cognitive system or externally presented stimuli in the environment.