Despite considerable progress, smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death in the United States, responsible each year for 435 000 deaths1 and $157bn (£79bn; €103bn) in health related losses.2 Each pack of 20 cigarettes leads to $3.45 in medical expenditures and $3.73 in lost productivity.2 When Maciosek et al recently prioritised 25 preventive interventions, factoring in burden of disease and cost effectiveness, tobacco control was tied for the top priority, and better screening followed by brief intervention yielded a greater benefit in quality adjusted life years than the next 10 interventions combined.3 Similarly, the Institute of Medicine recently identified improving treatment for tobacco use as one of the top 20 healthcare priorities.4 5

No clear guidance exists for improving the performance of a healthcare system to the goals set by Maciosek.3 The Public Health Service guidelines suggest that providers focus on five steps, outlined in figure 1⇓,6 and these are also relevant for healthcare systems. Systems that more consistently deliver these "5 A's" to patients are providing better quality care for smoking cessation. The guidelines also include recommendations for healthcare systems (every clinic should implement a system to identify tobacco users, for example), but these are individual items rather than an approach to improve organisational performance. The task for healthcare systems is how to increase delivery of the five steps.

Fig 1 "Five A" model guiding providers' behaviour with smokers

In this article I use the VHA's experience with large scale quality improvement and system change in tobacco control to create a framework for how organisations approach tobacco control, moving through four increasingly complex stages, from no system for tobacco control to a system that provides tailored smoking cessation care to the entire population. By anticipating these stages and approaching the …


The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate the flow rate, spray pattern, and droplet spectra characteristics of an actively controlled variable-orifice nozzle at constant carrier pressures. A commercially available variable-orifice nozzle (VariTarget) was modified to allow for direct electromechanical control of the metering stem. The modified system was tested at five carrier pressures ranging from 138 to 414 kPa and five metering stem (and thus orifice) positions. The metering stem position range was chosen because it provided a linear response in flow rate at each carrier pressure. Flow rate testing indicated a turndown ratio of 2.4:1 at each carrier pressure, with a total turndown ratio of 4.8:1 across the range of carrier pressures using the selected metering stem positions. Spray pattern testing indicated acceptable coefficients of variation for the metering stem positions and carrier pressures for nozzle spacings of 38.1 and 51.0 cm. Droplet spectra test results showed that the particle sizes remained in the range of extremely coarse to ultra coarse for all metering stem positions and carrier pressures. Orifice control using the modified system resulted in slightly larger droplet sizes compared to the original spring-actuated nozzle; however, the potential for spray drift would be reduced. The results of this study show that active control of the VT nozzle metering stem could provide potential for improvements in pesticide application. Nozzle flow rates could be controlled via the proposed system with little negative effects on spray pattern or droplet spectra. In addition to compensating for sprayer ground speed changes, a system consisting of these nozzles could potentially be used to solve application errors generated from sprayer turning movements.


The prevalance of digital information raised issues regarding the suitability of conventional library tools for organizing information. The multi-dimensionality of digital resources requires a more versatile and flexible representation to accommodate intelligent information representation and retrieval. Ontologies are used as a solution to such issues in many application domains, mainly due to their ability explicitly to specify the semantics and relations and to express them in a computer understandable language. Conventional knowledge organization tools such as classifications and thesauri resemble ontologies in a way that they define concepts and relationships in a systematic manner, but they are less expressive than ontologies when it comes to machine language. This paper used the controlled vocabulary at the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) as an example to address the issues in representing digital resources. The theoretical and methodological framework in this paper serves as the rationale and guideline for converting the GEM controlled vocabulary into an ontology. Compared to the original semantic model of GEM controlled vocabulary, the major difference between the two models lies in the values added through deeper semantics in describing digital objects, both conceptually and relationally.


Green roofs are a new and growing field in North America. Along with the need for innovation in design, research on green roof systems and performance is necessary to capture and improve the way in which green roofs function. Green roof performance and benefits have traditionally been measured by their ability to capture storm water, cool the building below it by means of shading and evaporative cooling, and their ability to successfully support plant life. Currently, green roofs design is dominated by shallow, light weight substrates and extremely drought tolerant plants, often from the Crassulaceae. This design predilection is based upon the limiting factors of building loading limits and installation costs. However, this design negates most of the benefits green roofs are expected to provide. Water holding capacity, and thus the green roof's ability to retain significant volumes of storm water, is contingent on the depth of the substrate. By selecting plant species which are highly drought tolerant, the evapotranspiration rates are reduced. Additionally, many members of the Crassulaceae have an inverted stomatal rhythm wherein stomates are open at night to permit gas exchange with the atmosphere when transpirational demand is low and when cooling of the building is less needed. Therefore, a shift in focus is necessary, in which the design of green roofs is based on optimizing the performance of desired benefits. While limitations in cost and loading must be accounted for, they should not be the driving force of green roof design. In response to this issue, this thesis examines an alternative approach to conceptualizing and designing green roofs. The following research presents a green roof system that held all storm water to the point of full saturation. Additionally, plant species capable of withstanding both drought and flooding were placed in a green roof setting. Evapotranspiration rates were recorded for Solidago canadensis and Spartina alterniflora during the summer of 2005, applying measured volumes of water to test the system's ability to hold large volumes of water as well as the rate at which this water could be used by the plants. Full capacity of the substrate averaged approximately a 2-year return frequency storm for New York City, at 3 inches of water over a 24 hour period. Both plant species were capable of consuming enough water to shift from saturation to no levels of standing water within 4 days, suggesting the system's ability to withstand several rain events in succession. The rates of evapotranspiration slowed as less water was present in the substrate, suggesting that the plant species could survive a prolonged period of drought by adjusting water usage. By storing greater volumes of water within the substrate, larger volumes of water were made available to the plant, reducing the need for more frequent rainfalls. Ultimately, this system exhibits a tolerance of drought and flooding and provides greater opportunity for plant survival, as compared to a freely draining, more drought-prone green roof design approach. While the studies conducted were for small units embedded within a larger green roof, and data was collected for a short period, the results suggest that this approach has immense potential in improving green roof benefits, and warrants further study.


This study seeks to better understand the most important influences over household energy choices, in order to identify practical ways to support communities shifting to cleaner energy use.Globally, 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity and an estimated 2.7 billion rely on traditional biomass – wood, charcoal, animal waste and agricultural residues – for cooking and space heating. Roughly one third of this population lives in rural India. Over the past two decades, considerable efforts have been made to introduce improved cookstoves and/or cleaner cooking fuels in India, but as in other countries, these interventions have largely failed to bring about a large-scale transition towards cleaner, more "modern" cooking technologies.It has been argued that a central problem with most efforts has been that they paid too little attention to users' needs and cultural contexts, but rather over-emphasised technical factors such energy efficiency and emissions reductions.The authors use a qualitative "generative" research methodology to investigate energy use and dynamics in four villages in Haryana State. They find a range of social, cultural and financial factors that influence the way people make decisions about energy and cooking, including the availability and flexibility of traditional fuels, the type of dishes prepared, the taste of food, problems with smoke, the aesthetic appeal of stoves, and how users perceive alternatives. These findings have implications for efforts to design effective cookstove interventions, most notably the Indian Government's ambitious National Biomass Cookstove Initiative, which aims to provide all Indian households currently using inefficient stoves with "next-generation" biomass stoves.


Silicon Carbide (SiC) is an excellent candidate for high temperature electronics applications, thanks to its wide bandgap. SiC power BJTs are commercially available nowadays, and it is demanding to drive them efficiently. This paper reports on the design, layout specifics, and measurements results of a SiC drive integrated circuit (IC) designed for driving SiC power BJTs. The circuit has been tested in different loading conditions (resistive and capacitive), at switching frequencies up to 500kHz, and together with a commercial power BJT. The SiC drive IC is shown to have a robust operation over the entire temperature range from 25 °C to 500 °C.


D'Souza et al. report the identification of a relationship between PAM (protein associated with Myc) and tuberin, a subunit of the tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) in axon guidance. D'Souza et al. analyzed zebrafish mutants for defects in axonal pathfinding in the retina and identified the gene esrom, encoding the zebrafish homolog of PAM. Esrom has multiple domains, including a RING finger domain, and the C-terminal portion of Esrom had autoubiquitinating activity in vitro. Esrom was present as punctate structures in retinal neurons, and retinal transplantation experiments confirmed that Esrom was required in the retinal neurons and not in the target brain region, the tectum. Analysis of the distal regions of retinal axons showed that phosphotuberin was enriched in the esr mutants--tuberin is inhibited by phosphorylation. Thus, D'Souza et al. propose that Esrom participates in a pathway involving TSC that interprets retinal growth cone cues. J. D'Souza, M. Hendricks, S. Le Guyader, S. Subburaju, B. Grunewald, K. Scholich, S. Jesuthasan, Formation of the retinotectal projection requires Esrom, an ortholog of PAM (protein associated with Myc). Development 132, 247-256 (2005). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Design Space Exploration is the task of identifying optimal implementation architectures for an application. On the front-end, it involves multi-objective optimization through a large space of options, and lends itself to a multitude of algorithmic approaches. On the back-end, it relies extensively on common capabilities such as model refinement, simulation and assessment of parameters like performance and cost. These characteristics present an opportunity to create an infrastructure that enables multiple approaches to be deployed using generic back-end services. In this work, we describe such a framework, developed using the System-on-Chip Environment, and we demonstrate the benefits and feasibility of deploying a variety of design space exploration approaches built on top of this basic infrastructure.


This report is the third (and final) report in a series that addresses issues related to hydrologic uncertainty assessment at decommissioning sites. Analyses in the first two reports in this series emphasized the application of relatively simplified models of subsurface flow and transport. Because of their relative computational speed, such simplified models are particularly attractive when the impact of uncertainty in flow and transport needs to be evaluated. These same simplifications, however, have the potential to provide unrepresentative estimates of dose and its uncertainty. Such misrepresentation may have important consequences for decisions based on the dose assessments. The significance of this concern was evaluated by comparing results from uncertainty assessments conducted on a test case using a simplified modeling approach and a more complex/realistic modeling approach. The test case used a three-dimensional domain with a U-234 source in the near surface, a 5-m-thick aquifer 7 m below the surface, and a small well pumping directly downstream, on the boundary of the contaminated zone. Exposure was assumed to occur through the drinking water pathway only, with all drinking water originating from the pumped well. A series of Monte Carlo simulations of flow and transport were performed using STOMP as the complex model and RESRAD as the simplified model. Hydraulic conductivity and air entry were modeled as random fields in STOMP using geostatistics from the Las Cruces Trench site. Random distributions for hydraulic parameters in the RESRAD simulations were based on both site-specific data and generic distributions. Sensitivity analyses were conducted on both codes using a combination of Monte Carlo simulation and single parameter variation. Peak doses predicted by the simplified model were several times higher than peak doses predicted by the complex model. This difference was attributed to the lack of dispersion in RESRAD and differences in aquifer mixing. The RESRAD concentration breakthrough curves exhibited a sharp peak with essentially no contaminant in the well until the time of the peak while STOMP predicted a much earlier arrival of contaminants in the well. Which code provided conservative results thus depended on whether the RESRAD peak occurred before the 1000-year regulatory criterion. The random field characterization of the subsurface for the complex model used all available site data. Uncertainty in predicted dose was correspondingly small, with the peak dose coefficient of variation being 30%. When the variances of parameters in the simplified model were based on a generic dataset, the uncertainty in predicted peak dose was much larger; the coefficient of variation was 52% in this case. When the variances of parameters in the simplified model were based on the extensive site-specific data, the coefficient of variation for the peak dose was reduced to 22%. In this case, however, the mean peak dose was actually less similar to the STOMP results than the generic case. For the RESRAD Monte Carlo simulations involving random soil hydraulic properties, the variability of peak dose was entirely attributed to variability in the aquifer hydraulic conductivity. Sensitivity to other parameters was examined by varying one parameter at a time. These results indicated that the recharge rate, the aquifer gradient, and the depth of penetration of the well were significant contributors to uncertainty in peak dose and the time of the peak dose. RESRAD predicted peak dose was more sensitive to the parameter values than was the STOMP predicted peak dose for the aquifer hydraulic conductivity, aquifer gradient, and depth of well penetration. Sensitivity to the recharge rate appeared to be comparable for the two codes. Stochastic predictions of mean dose over time for the complex model were relatively insensitive to the geostatistical parameters. Ensemble mean peak dose predicted by the complex model was sensitive to the ensemble mean hydraulic conductivity. For a given ensemble mean hydraulic conductivity, however, the complex model showed no correlation between the spatial geometric mean aquifer conductivity of individual realizations and the resulting peak dose. This was in contrast to the simplified model in which the dose from individual realizations was strongly correlated with the aquifer conductivity. This result has implications for the value of hydraulic conductivity data. Adopting the homogeneous parameterization of RESRAD leads to a conclusion that reducing the uncertainty in the value of the aquifer hydraulic conductivity parameter will have a significant impact on the uncertainty in peak dose. Looking at the individual realization results from the STOMP model suggests that characterization of the average aquifer hydraulic conductivity is relatively unimportant in reducing uncertainty in peak dose. Characterizing the pattern of aquifer heterogeneity is likely to be more important than obtaining a value for the spatial mean hydraulic conductivity.


An important characteristic of seismicity is the distribution of magnitudes of earthquakes. Fluid injection in rocks, aimed to create enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), can sometimes produce significant seismic events (e.g., Majer et al., 2007). This is rarely the case in hydraulic fracturing of hydrocarbon reservoirs. However, in any case the behavior of the seismicity triggering in space and in time is controlled by the process of stress relaxation and pore-pressure perturbation that was initially created at the injection source. This relaxation process can be approximated by pressure diffusion (possibly a nonlinear one) in the pore fluid of rocks (e.g., Shapiro and Dinske, 2009). At some locations the tectonic stress in the Earth's crust is close to a critical stress, causing brittle failure of rocks. Increasing fluid pressure in such a reservoir causes pressure in the connected pore and fracture space of rocks to increase. Such an increase in the pore pressure consequently causes a decrease of the eff...


The effect of magnetic shear and shear flow on local buoyant instabilities is investigated. A simple model is constructed allowing for an arbitrary entropy gradient and a shear plasma flow in the Boussinesq approximation. A transformation to shearing magnetic coordinates achieves a model with plasma flow along the magnetic field lines where the coordinate lines are coincident with the field lines. The solution for the normal modes of the system depends on two parameters: the Alfvén Mach number of the plasma flow and the entropy gradient. The behavior of the unstable normal modes of this system is summarized by a stability diagram. Important characteristics of this stability diagram are the following: magnetic shear is stabilizing, and the entropy gradient must exceed a threshold value for unstable mode growth to occur; flow acts to suppress mode growth in a substantially unstable regime as expected, yet near marginal stability it can lessen the stabilizing effect of magnetic shear and enhance the growth rates of the instability; and, as the Alfvén Mach number approaches 1, the instability is completely stabilized. Analytical work is presented supporting the characteristics of the stability diagram and illuminating the physical mechanisms controlling the behavior of the model. A derivation of the stability criterion for the case without shear flow, asymptotic solutions in the limit that the Alfvén Mach number approaches 1 and in the limit of zero growth rate, a complete WKB solution for large growth rates, an exactly soluble bounded straight field case, and energy conservation relations are all presented. The implications of this work for astrophysical and fusion applications and the potential for future research extending the results to include compressibility are discussed.


Abstract Lactic acid is an important platform chemical for producing polylactic acid (PLA) and other value-added products. It is naturally produced by a wide spectrum of microbes including bacteria, yeast and filamentous fungi. In general, bacteria ferment C5 and C6 sugars to lactic acid by either homo- or hetero-fermentative mode. Xylose isomerase, phosphoketolase, transaldolase, l- and d-lactate dehydrogenases are the key enzymes that affect the ways of lactic acid production. Metabolic engineering of microbial strains are usually needed to produce lactic acid from unconventional carbon sources. Production of d-LA has attracted much attention due to the demand for producing thermostable PLA, but large scale production of d-LA has not yet been commercialized. Thermophilic Bacillus coagulans strains are able to produce l-lactic acid from lignocellulose sugars homo-fermentatively under non-sterilized conditions, but the lack of genetic tools for metabolically engineering them severely affects their development for industrial applications. Pre-treatment of agriculture biomass to obtain fermentable sugars is a pre-requisite for utilization of the huge amounts of agricultural biomass to produce lactic acid. The major challenge is to obtain quality sugars of high concentrations in a cost effective-way. To avoid or minimize the use of neutralizing agents during fermentation, genetically engineering the strains to make them resist acidic environment and produce lactic acid at low pH would be very helpful for reducing the production cost of lactic acid.


Emotion plays a vital role in medical research and interpersonal communication. Essentially feeling can be communicated verbally like discourse or non-verbally like outward appearance and physiological signals. A human emotion is complex physiological state which involves a physiological response, a person's experience and behavioral change. EEG measures electric current that are generated due to neuronal activities in the human brain. This paper provides an overview of comparative study of various techniques of emotion recognition from EEG signals. Our analysis is based on extracted features and classification methods of emotion recognition. We intended that, this study will be useful for newly researchers those entering in the field of emotion recognition.


Objective To characterise empirical instances of Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus term strings in a large clinical corpus, and to illustrate what types of term characteristics are generalisable across data sources. Design Based on the occurrences of UMLS terms in a 51 million document corpus of Mayo Clinic clinical notes, this study computes statistics about the terms' string attributes, source terminologies, semantic types and syntactic categories. Term occurrences in 2010 i2b2/VA text were also mapped; eight example filters were designed from the Mayo-based statistics and applied to i2b2/VA data. Results For the corpus analysis, negligible numbers of mapped terms in the Mayo corpus had over six words or 55 characters. Of source terminologies in the UMLS, the Consumer Health Vocabulary and Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine—Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) had the best coverage in Mayo clinical notes at 106 426 and 94 788 unique terms, respectively. Of 15 semantic groups in the UMLS, seven groups accounted for 92.08% of term occurrences in Mayo data. Syntactically, over 90% of matched terms were in noun phrases. For the cross-institutional analysis, using five example filters on i2b2/VA data reduces the actual lexicon to 19.13% of the size of the UMLS and only sees a 2% reduction in matched terms. Conclusion The corpus statistics presented here are instructive for building lexicons from the UMLS. Features intrinsic to Metathesaurus terms (well formedness, length and language) generalise easily across clinical institutions, but term frequencies should be adapted with caution. The semantic groups of mapped terms may differ slightly from institution to institution, but they differ greatly when moving to the biomedical literature domain.


The European Tripartite Group, (ESA – EC – EUROCONTROL) has implemented, via the EGNOS project, the European contribution to the first generation of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS1). The European Space Agency (ESA) has been in charge of the system design, development and qualification of an Advanced Operational Capability (AOC) of the EGNOS system (also known as EGNOS V1). In summer 2005, EGNOS has reached two major program milestones through the formal technical qualification process (known as ORR, Operational Readiness Review) and the start of its initial operations. These two events mark a successful completion of more than 8 years of intensive work by ESA and European industry. In parallel to the start of EGNOS operations, EGNOS is planning a modernization plan to cope with GPS modernization, service extension, standard evolutions and the anticipation of some future Galileo missions. In this context, the availability of free bandwidth enables systems like EGNOS to broadcast additional communication messages. These messages could be, the broadcast of • Warnings or instructions on the occurrence of natural disasters, calamities, dangers for the safety of life within areas with poor telecommunication infrastructure • Search and Rescue Return Link Messages. • Warnings or instructions on limitations in the use of SBAS for specific applications (e.g. aviation) • Other uses. We refer to these, in general, as the Communication Function of EGNOS. Of these, this paper will focus mainly on the first two. The ESA ALIVE concept, (Alert interface via EGNOS) is concerned with the provision of early warning messages to citizens or governmental/local authorities in the event of a major event or disaster. The authors consider the ESA ALIVE a meaningful and viable concept, which may be implemented in a reasonable short time frame, contributing to save lives in the event of disasters.


METHODS AND METRICS FOR HUMAN CONTROL OF MULTI-ROBOT TEAMS Jeffrey David Anderson Department of Mechanical Engineering Master of Science Human-controlled robots are utilized in many situations and such use is becoming widespread. This thesis details research that allows a single human to interact with a team of robots performing tasks that require cooperation. The research provides insight into effective interaction design methods and appropriate interface techniques. The use of team-level autonomy is shown to decrease human workload while simultaneously improving individual robot efficiency and robot-team cooperation. An indoor human-robot interaction testbed was developed at the BYU MAGICC Lab to facilitate experimentation. The testbed consists of eight robots equipped with wireless modems, a field on which the robots move, an overhead camera and image processing software which tracks robot position and heading, a simulator which allows development and testing without hardware utilization and a graphical user interface which enables human control of either simulated or hardware robots. The image processing system was essential for effective robot hardware operation and is described in detail. The system produced accurate robot position and heading information 30 times per second for a maximum of 12 robots, was relatively insensitive to lighting conditions and was easily reconfigurable. The completed testbed was utilized to create a game for testing human-robot interaction schemes. The game required a human controlling three robots to find and tag three robot opponents in a maze. Finding an opponent could be accomplished by individual robots, but tagging an opponent required cooperation between at least two robots. The game was played by 11 subjects in five different autonomy modes ranging from limited robot autonomy to advanced individual autonomy with basic team-level autonomy. Participants were interrupted during the game by a secondary spatial reasoning task which prevented them from interacting with the robots for short periods of time. Robot performance during that interruption provided a measure of both individual and team neglect tolerance. Individual robot neglect tolerance and performance did not directly correspond to those quantities at the team level. The interaction mode with the highest levels of individual and team autonomy was most effective; it minimized game time and human workload and maximized team neglect tolerance.


In October 1998, General Augusto Pinochet, former dictator of Chile, was arrested in London. He had been charged with crimes against humanity by a Spanish magistrate, but over the 16 months that Pinochet was detained, equally intriguing questions went unanswered about his links with Britain. Why was Margaret Thatcher so keen to defend the General? Why was Tony Blair's usually cautious government prepared to have him arrested? And why was Britain the General's favourite foreign country? Andy Beckett offers a compound of history, investigation and travelogue that unravels this strange story.


Using the yeast two-hybrid system, we screened for proteins interacting with presenilin 2 (PS2) and cloned DRAL. DRAL is an LIM-only protein containing four LIM domains and an N-terminal half LIM domain. Previously DRAL has been cloned as a co-activator of the androgen receptor and as a protein interacting with a DNA replication regulatory protein, hCDC47. Our yeast two-hybrid assay showed that DRAL interacted with a hydrophilic loop region (amino acids 269-298) in the endoproteolytic N-terminal fragment of PS2, but not that of PS1, although the region 269-298 of PS2 and the corresponding PS1 sequence differ by only three amino acids. Each point mutation within this region, R275A, T280A, Q282A, R284A, N285A, P287T, I288L, F289A and S296A, in PS2 abolished the binding. This suggests that DRAL recognizes the PS2 structure specifically. The in vitro interaction was confirmed by affinity column assay and the physiological interactions between endogenous PS2 and DRAL by co-immunoprecipitation from human lung fibroblast MRC5 cells. Furthermore, in PS2-overexpressing HEK293 cells, we found an increase in the amount of DRAL in the membrane fraction and an increase in the amount of DRAL that was co-immunoprecipitated with PS2. The potential role of DRAL in the cellular signaling suggests that DRAL functions as an adaptor protein that links PS2 to an intracellular signaling.


Exposure is very unevenly distributed within the area of the Institute of Geological Sciences Sheet 128 as there are large areas of peat and sea. However, the aeromagnetic map shows a complex pattern of anomalies covering the whole area. Ground traverses with a magnetometer show that most of the positive anomalies are caused by rocks which crop out but are very poorly exposed. The outcrops were delineated with the aid of magnetometer traversing. The occasional exposures reveal that the rocks causing these anomalies are magnetite-rich schists of pelitic and greenschist types and serpentines. Ground traversing with a magnetometer shows that the magnetic schists form narrow bands which act as marker horizons in poorly exposed areas. The pattern of aeroanomalies caused by the magnetic schists and the non-magnetic rocks with which they alternate continues over the sea and enables predictions to be made about the geology of the sea areas.


Abstract It can hardly be denied that play is an important tool for the development and socialisation of children. In this article we argue that through dramaturgical play in combination with pedagogical tools such as the Community of Inquiry, in the tradition of Philosophy for Children (P4C), students can creatively think, reflect and be more aware of the impact their gestures have on others. One of the most fundamental aspects of the embodied human life is human interaction that is based on expressions, what Schmid calls gestures. Through self-reflection, one's set of gestures can be developed into a deliberate 'life-performance'—a conscious, selected and coherent work of art. Drawing on Nietzsche's idea of living artistically, we explore how Schmid's philosophy of the art of living, P4C and the liberal arts, with a focus on drama education, can work together to help children develop their own art of living while respecting and supporting the development of the good and beautiful life of others.


Conceptualization strengthens intelligent systems in generalization skill, effective knowledge representation, real-time inference, and managing uncertain and indefinite situations in addition to facilitating knowledge communication for learning agents situated in real world. Concept learning introduces a way of abstraction by which the continuous state is formed as entities called concepts which are connected to the action space and thus, they illustrate somehow the complex action space. Of computational concept learning approaches, action-based conceptualization is favored because of its simplicity and mirror neuron foundations in neuroscience. In this paper, a new biologically inspired concept learning approach based on the probabilistic framework is proposed. This approach exploits and extends the mirror neuron's role in conceptualization for a reinforcement learning agent in nondeterministic environments. In the proposed method, instead of building a huge numerical knowledge, the concepts are learnt gradually from rewards through interaction with the environment. Moreover the probabilistic formation of the concepts is employed to deal with uncertain and dynamic nature of real problems in addition to the ability of generalization. These characteristics as a whole distinguish the proposed learning algorithm from both a pure classification algorithm and typical reinforcement learning. Simulation results show advantages of the proposed framework in terms of convergence speed as well as generalization and asymptotic behavior because of utilizing both success and failures attempts through received rewards. Experimental results, on the other hand, show the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method in continuous and noisy environments for a real robotic task such as maze as well as the benefits of implementing an incremental learning scenario in artificial agents.


Extended endoscopic endonasal approaches have allowed for a minimally invasive solution for removal of a variety of ventral skull base lesions, including intradural tumors. Depending on the location of the pathological entity, various types of surgical corridors are used, such as transcribriform, transplanum transtuberculum, transsellar, transclival, and transodontoid approaches. Often, a large skull base dural defect with a high-flow CSF leak is created after endoscopic skull base surgery. Successful reconstruction of the cranial base defect is paramount to separate the intracranial contents from the paranasal sinus contents and to prevent postoperative CSF leakage. The vascularized pedicled nasoseptal flap (PNSF) has become the workhorse for cranial base reconstruction after endoscopic skull base surgery, dramatically reducing the rate of postoperative CSF leakage since its implementation. In this report, the authors review the surgical technique and describe the operative nuances and lessons learned for successful multilayered PNSF reconstruction of cranial base defects with high-flow CSF leaks created after endoscopic skull base surgery. The authors specifically highlight important surgical pearls that are critical for successful PNSF reconstruction, including target-specific flap design and harvesting, pedicle preservation, preparation of bony defect and graft site to optimize flap adherence, multilayered closure technique, maximization of the reach of the flap, final flap positioning, and proper bolstering and buttressing of the PNSF to prevent flap dehiscence. Using this technique in 93 patients, the authors' overall postoperative CSF leak rate was 3.2%. An illustrative intraoperative video demonstrating the reconstruction technique is also presented.


Wrist injuries are a common and frequent health issue requiring rehabilitation. Occupational and physical therapists create individual exercises for their patients, which include both ambulatory/stationary and home exercises. Practice and literature show, however, that autonomously performed exercises are likely not carried out accurately and may endanger progress of rehabilitation. We propose the design of WristDroid - an Android-based serious game to leverage execution of home exercises and deliver enjoyable therapeutic progress in a motivational environment that patients can thrive on. Two occupational and eight physical therapists were interviewed to identify requirements for such an application and aided in refinement of various prototypes. Preliminary evaluation results by physical therapists suggest that WristDroid supports wrist rehabilitation and offers a motivating and empowering way to recover from wrist injuries.


The writer has been working in the field of getechnical engineering since 1984, along the way he has seen a number of deep excavation failures, some with minor casualties, others involving a huge amount of economic loss, some cost no human life, others with a number of fatalities. This paper tries to discuss what could be the causes of those failures, from the possible technical to the non-technical reasons. It also tries to extract what can be learnt from those failures, starting from the lack of reliable soil investigation data, inadequate geotechnical design knowledge, poor execution, to poor quality control. The non technical reasons, such as: the lowest bid win policy and its implication are also discussed. Finally, steps to minimize geotechnical failures are suggested.


Potter's work has systematically returned to the enigmatic relationship between objects and memory; Love from Berlin traces her first encounter with The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin). Regretting that she did not taking an impression from a 'heart-shaped hole' in the surface of one of the 2711 concrete blocks, Potter returns two years later and painstakingly retraces her steps, summoning the embodied experience of the physical monument. Potter is later able to replicate the void in gold: a 'souvenir' of a pilgrimage to a moment of lost opportunities, retrieved and restored through the process of making.

Matter is used here to embody traces of cultural forgetting and absence, as well as mobilising the poetics of gold as a metaphor for concern and care. The trivialisation of love is referenced in the title; indicating that the difficulty of concern lies in the powerful mechanism of forgetting. Tracing her subjective journey – remembering, feeling, returning, making and recording – Potter transforms the 'object' from a heart-shaped piece of gold, into a channel for the viewer's own processes of remembering and oblivion.

UK craft is internationally recognised and Potter's work consistently questions the values embodied by the idea of 'British Craft'. In 2011 Love from Berlin was awarded a Jerwood Contemporary Makers prize, having been selected by renowned artists Hans Stofer, Freddie Robins, Richard Slee. This piece offered the Jerwood Contemporary Makers audience an opportunity to consider the meaning of cultural tourism and journeys of historical significance, whilst also challenging the perception of jewellery as an insular (constrained) preoccupation.

The exhibition toured the Jerwood Space (London), Naughton's Gallery (Belfast), Innovative Craft (Edinburgh) and The National Craft Gallery (Ireland). It featured in Crafts (July/August 2010), The Independent (29th June 2010) and Design Week (27th May 2010).


Many high school students do not practice healthy eating and exercise habits. According to the National Center for Disease Control, 18% of adolescents ages 12-18 are currently overweight (National Institutes of Health, 2006). Many are not aware of consequences associated with unhealthy lifestyles. To improve students' eating and exercise behaviors, students must acquire knowledge, skills, and attitudes associated with healthy practices. One venue for addressing this need is through nutrition education in the Family and Consumer Sciences classroom. The question of this study asks: Does nutrition education in the Family and Consumer Sciences classroom promote healthy eating and exercise behaviors? Findings of this study indicate that an increase in nutritional knowledge alone does not result in immediate changes of eating or exercise behaviors.


Out of the Ivory Tower: Feminist Research for Social Change Edited by Andrea Martinez and Meryn Stuart (Toronto: Sumach Press, 2003) (360 pages; $26.95 paper, Canada; $22.95 paper, U.S.) The collected essays in Andrea Martinez and Meryn Stuart's anthology, Out of the Ivory Tower; Feminist Research for Social Change, are intended for women's studies faculty and students beyond the Canadian border as well as for social arid political activists, nurses, policymakers, and educators in the broader feminist community. Out of the Ivory Tower seeks to build bridges among disciplinary traditions at the University of Ottawa to promote the dissemination of feminist knowledge beyond the walls of the university's Institute of Women's Studies (IWS). Additionally, the editors hope to raise awareness of feminist work being done within the University of Ottawa and how this work can gain voice outside the academic sphere in order to support political agendas that are significant to the IWS. The book chapters are an eclectic collection of essays featuring a diverse array of methodologies and scholars. They are concerned with women's relationships to their bodies, history, public and private spheres, and new technologies. In the spirit of feminist epistemology that rejects an essentialist attitude, the essays reflect the diversity of women's issues across the globe with a keen eye toward practical recommendations. The introduction lays out the book's organizing framework. Four sections are embedded in the following research themes: (1) recovering histories and meanings (Chapters 1 to 4); (2) the language of sexuality and negotiating the female body (Chapters 5 to 8); (3) shaping equity for women in public spaces (Chapters 9 to 11); and (4) the intersection of gender, class, language, and ethnicity in Cyberspace (Chapters 12 to 14). Each theme interlocks with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, social class, language, age, and sexual orientation. The essays successfully explore socially constructed binary opposites of masculinity and femininity, public and private spheres, the home/work divide, control and resistance of the body, hetero- and homo-sexuality, and equity and inequity. Each chapter centralizes the deconstruction of these binary opposites. Of particular interest to scholars of nursing history are Parts 1 and 2. In the first chapter, Sharon Cook critically investigates the silence surrounding young women smokers and the failure to view smoking as a gendered behavior. Through a content analysis of educational texts as well as film and television, Cook found that only in the past two decades has the public begun to include women in the discussion about the dangers of smoking. In Chapter 4, Cynthia Toman examines military nurses during World War II in Canada and how they experienced "sexualization of their bodies within the hegemonic male military hierarchy" (p. 14). She successfully deconstructs the binary opposites of femininity and masculinity as they relate to the gendered nursing profession. Also, she analyzes the image of the uniform to explore the tension between caring and combat as well as the power imbalances embedded in a gendered workplace. Using archival resources, professional literature, and oral histories, Toman argues that the military "reinforced gender status through relative rank, restrictions on nurses' power of command and denial of professional status and rank to male nurses" (p. 110). Part 2 introduces the reader to the abuse of women's bodies. Aoua Bocar discusses female genital mutilation and how this ritual was brought to North America from Africa. Her essay concludes with practical strategies developed by the African women's movement, and serves as a concrete example of how social change can be obtained beyond the ivory tower. …


Scalable video coding is emerging as an efficient alternative to simulcast encoding to distribute the same video content simultaneously to many users having different terminals and network conditions. In order to select the best combination of video scalability options for a given network condition and content, the availability of objective metrics that can reliably predict the video quality of scalable video sequence is crucial. In this paper, we propose a performance evaluation study of a set of state of the art Full-Reference and No-Reference metrics, considering a public database of test video sequences and related subjective quality annotations. The results demonstrate that most of the considered metrics show lack of robustness as predictors of subjective quality when both spatial and temporal quality distortions occur.


The prediction of the Earth's climate system is of immediate importance to many decision-makers. Anthropogenic climate change is a key area of public policy and will likely have widespread impacts across the world over the 21st Century. Understanding potential climate changes, and their magnitudes, is important for effective decision making. The principal tools used to provide such climate predictions are physical models, some of the largest and most complex models ever built. Evaluation of state-of-the-art climate models is vital to understanding our ability to make statements about future climate. This Thesis presents a framework for the analysis of climate models in light of their inherent uncertainties and principles of statistical good practice. The assessment of uncertainties in model predictions to-date is incomplete and warrants more attention that it has previously received. This Thesis aims to motivate a more thorough investigation of climate models as fit for use in decision-support. The behaviour of climate models is explored using data from the largest ever climate modelling experiment, the climateprediction.net project. The availability of a large set of simulations allows novel methods of analysis for the exploration of the uncertainties present in climate simulations. It is shown that climate models are capable of producing very different behaviour and that the associated uncertainties can be large. Whilst no results are found that cast doubt on the hypothesis that greenhouse gases are a significant driver of climate change, the range of behaviour shown in the climateprediction.net data set has implications for our ability to predict future climate and for the interpretation of climate model output. It is argued that uncertainties should be explored and communicated to users of climate predictions in such a way that decision-makers are aware of the relative robustness of climate model output.


The Paris climate goals and the Glasgow Climate Pact require anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to decline to net zero by mid-century. This will require overcoming carbon lock-in throughout the energy system. Previous studies have focused on 'committed emissions' from capital investments in energy-consuming infrastructure, or potential (committed and uncommitted) emissions from fossil fuel reserves. Here we make the first bottom-up assessment of committed CO2 emissions from fossil fuel-producing infrastructure, defined as existing and under-construction oil and gas fields and coal mines. We use a commercial model of the world's 25 000 oil and gas fields and build a new dataset on coal mines in the nine largest coal-producing countries. Our central estimate of committed emissions is 936 Gt CO2, comprising 47% from coal, 35% from oil and 18% from gas. We find that staying within a 1.5 °C carbon budget (50% probability) implies leaving almost 40% of 'developed reserves' of fossil fuels unextracted. The finding that developed reserves substantially exceed the 1.5 °C carbon budget is robust to a Monte Carlo analysis of reserves data limitations, carbon budget uncertainties and oil prices. This study contributes to growing scholarship on the relevance of fossil fuel supply to climate mitigation. Going beyond recent warnings by the International Energy Agency, our results suggest that staying below 1.5 °C may require governments and companies not only to cease licensing and development of new fields and mines, but also to prematurely decommission a significant portion of those already developed.


The overarching goal of the current thesis is to pave the road towards a comprehensive solution to the decades old problem of integrating databases and programming languages. For this purpose, we propose a record calculus as an extension of an ML-style functional programming language core. In particular, we describe: (1) a set of polymorphic record operations that are expressive enough to define the operators of the relational algebra; (2) a type system together with a type inference algorithm, based on the theory of qualified types, to correctly capture the types of said polymorphic record operations; (3) an algorithm for checking the consistency (satisfiability of predicates) of the inferred types; (4) an algorithm for improving and simplifying types; and (5) an outline of an approach to explaining type errors in the resulting type system in an informative way.


Details of abortifacient patent medicines and a study of the social history of their use by women to terminate unwanted pregnancies during the Victorian era are presented. Many commentators have theorised as to causes for the decrease in births throughout the Western world from the mid-nineteenth century and consideration must be given to factors such as the economy, growing secularism, the rise in feminism and the use of contraceptive methods. However, little attention has been given to patented chemical abortifacients as one of these causal factors and it is contended that the rise of patent medicines in the 'golden age' (1865-1907) matched the fall in the birth rate and was, in part, responsible for this decline. The story that unfolds is complex. Its primary focus lies in ascertaining the effects of abortifacients on the agency of Victorian women. Pregnancy and birth, the realm of female healers and midwives throughout history had become a subject of public accountability, and the body of a woman (a permissible topic in polite conversation only in terms of nurturing) was subjected to medical and state intervention. While juridical authorities commenced the task of the management of pregnancy by the introduction of laws making abortion illegal, irrespective of the considerations of women, an orchestrated campaign by the male-dominated medical profession insured that doctors successfully replaced midwives in pre- and post-natal matters. This disruption to female networks previously used to disseminate knowledge of tried and tested chemical abortifacients to terminate unwanted pregnancies should have resulted in the loss of reproductive control for Victorian women, but apparently this did not occur. The manufacturers of patent medicines intervened to provide a range of abortifacient products of varying toxicity and result. The demise of patent medicines, including abortifacients, early in the twentieth century, through the demonstrated power of white, Anglo-Saxon males in the law-making and medical professions, evidently resulted in a reduction in women's reproductive options. For archaeology, the presence of abortifacient containers, as a component of assemblages in Victorian-era sites, can provide significant insights into life (or death) choices of individuals from that period, as well as a good indication of the dating of historical archaeological sites.


In this paper, we study the problem of content-based social network discovery among people who frequently appear in world news. Google news is used as the source of data. We describe a probabilistic framework for associating people with groups. A low-dimensional topic-based representation is first obtained for news stories via probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA). This is followed by construction of semantic groups by clustering such representations. Unlike many existing social network analysis approaches, which discover groups based only on binary relations (e.g. co-occurrence of people in a news article), our model clusters people using their topic distribution, which introduces contextual information in the group formation process (e.g. some people belong to several groups depending on the specific subject). The model has been used to study evolution of people with respect to topics over time. We also illustrate the advantages of our approach over a simple co-occurrence-based social network extraction method.


The diet of two sympatric owl species, the long-eared owl (Asio otus) and the little owl (athene noctua) was investigated in an arid area of southern Mongolia using pellet analysis. In total 334 pellets of long-eared owl and 52 pellets of little owl were analysed, revealing the presence of five small mammal species (Dipodidae, three Muridae and one Soricidae), small birds and invertebrate fragments. Accumulative composition plots indicated a batch size of 35-60 pellets was sufficient to reveal representative diet composition. Small mammals comprised the largest component of the diet of long eared owls with four species recorded, Phodopus was the most frequently occurring (85%) followed by Meriones (33%). Bird and invertebrate remains were also found in long-eared owl pellets but comprised less than 2%. In contrast, invertebrates were the highest occurring component of the diet of little owls (35%), with small mammals occurring in only 40% of pellets. Meriones was the most frequently recorded small mammal in owl pellets (23%) and contributed the greatest in terms of overall rodent biomass. There was a highly statistically significant difference in the diet of the two species (÷2 = 2043, d.f. = 4,P<0.001). Levin's measure of niche breadth was greater for little owls (0.71) than long-eared owls (0.51), but overall the two species had low niche overlap using Levin's index (0.22). These results are discussed in relation to previous findings of these two species.


Ultrasound imaging or echography is a very important and competitive medical diagnostic tool, due to its low cost, short acquisition time, and non-invasive nature. However, ultrasound images are inherently difficult to analyze due to their echo texture, speckle noise, low contrast and weak edges.
Measurement of the fetal head biparietal diameter (BPD) and head circumference (HC) is crucial for estimation of fetal age. Due to the noisy nature of ultrasound images and variation in image acquisition and measurement techniques, manual measurements of these parameters are subject to inter and intra-observer variability.
The aim of this work is to develop a fully automated technique for efficient and accurate detection and estimation of the gestational age of a fetus by measuring the biparietal diameter of the head. The head was assumed to have an elliptical shape. No user input or size range of the head was required. The proposed technique based on a method called direct least squares fitting of an ellipse. This method combines several advantages: It is ellipse-specific so that even bad data will always return an ellipse, it can be solved naturally by a generalized eigensystem, and it is extremely robust, efficient and easy to implement.
The process goes through three steps: image preprocessing (contrast enhancement, smoothing, and intensity enhancement), object extraction (sharpening, morphological reconstruction and skeletoning) and fitting an ellipse to the resultant shape and measuring its parameters.
The proposed fully automatic technique was tested and evaluated on about 20 images of fetal heads. The images had a combination of noise and low contrast. Excellent linear correlation r = 0.997 between manual and automatic measurement was obtained, which verifies the reliability of the proposed automatic approach.


Vasopressin expression in the brain is under the control of different molecular mechanisms. For example, vasopressin (VP) expression in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and medial amygdaloid nucleus (MeA) critically depends on estrogen stimulation, but VP expression in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) and paraventricular and supraoptic nucleus (PVN and SON) proceeds in the absence of gonadal hormones. Possibly related to this, virtually all VP-expressing neurons in the BNST and MeA express estrogen receptor alpha (ERα) whereas VP-expressing neurons in other areas express little or no ERα. Thus, ERα may mediate estrogen effects on VP transcription in the BNST and MeA perhaps by acting directly on the VP gene. Previous work using artificial reporter assays had indeed indicated that there is a putative estrogen response element (ERE) in the control region of the VP gene. Here, we use chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) to compare ERα binding to the VP gene in brain tissue that includes the BNST or SCN. We also included cortex tissue, in which no VP expression has been demonstrated. We observed ERα binding specifically to the VP gene in tissue that included the BNST but not in tissue samples that included SCN or cortex. Preliminary results suggest that binding is strongest at the start site of transcription. Our findings therefore suggest that gonadal hormones influence VP expression in the BNST directly, by transactivation of the VP gene through ERα.


This thesis examines the relationship between Chief Executive Officer (CEO) origin and performance consequences in a New Zealand (NZ) setting. The NZ setting is unique because previous research on this topic is from the United States (US) and in one instance the United Kingdom (UK); and the NZ setting is intriguing because it has four important institutional differences: NZ directors hire outsiders much more frequently than their US and UK counterparts; NZ has no discernible trend in the frequency of outsider appointments over time, whereas the US has a marked upward trend; average CEO tenure in NZ is much shorter than that observed in the US or globally; and CEO succession occurs in relatively small firms. These four differences suggest that the NZ CEO market has some unique dynamics and perhaps unique performance consequences. This thesis fills a gap in our knowledge of executive and director practice in NZ and contributes to the CEO origin debate by analysing a new setting. Using a hand collected sample of 162 CEO appointments from NZ firms between 1991 and 2008, I find some significant performance differences between insider and outsider CEOs. Outsiders elicit a higher abnormal return around the appointment announcement: the 1-day and the 3-day differentials are approximately 1.2% and 1.7% respectively. In contrast, insiders create more shareholder wealth during their first three years in charge: insiders increase the appointing firm's market-to-book ratio by approximately 27 percentage points more than outsiders. I also discover that insiders are around 37 percentage points more likely to last at least three years in the job. The main difference between these findings and those from the US and UK is that insiders easily outperform outsiders in the medium term. Also, I document an intuitive finding for grey insiders: grey insiders by definition possess a blend of insider and outsider attributes and perform between insiders and outsiders on all three performance measures. These findings are robust to various controls and subsamples, and there is also some evidence that the market-to-book finding is robust to selection bias.


Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in India are the outcome of globalization and liberalization. The factors that have triggered the volume of M&A are various economic factors like competitive environment, growth in gross domestic product, higher interest rates, and fiscal policies. Mergers and acquisitions have gained significance in the corporate world as an important growth strategy for both acquirer and target companies. M&A have mushroomed in almost all sectors like manufacturing, mining, construction sector, financial services, and services other than financial. M&A has also played an active role in the electricity sector in India. In this paper, we explore the current scenario of M&A in the Electricity sector and the factors driving the M&A. In particular, we investigated related and unrelated M&A deals, Public & Private companies gone for the deal, year wise deals, and group affiliation deals in the electricity sector. We also focused on the regulatory aspect of M&A in the electricity sector. The period of study is from 1st January 1990 to 31st December 2011. Our finding suggests that M&A in electricity is highly regulated and thus deals are made to survive in this regulated environment even though much deals are not done if compared to other sectors.


BACKGROUND Understanding the issues delaying hospital discharges may inform efforts to improve hospital throughput. OBJECTIVE This study was conducted to identify and determine the frequency of barriers contributing to delays in placing discharge orders. DESIGN This was a prospective, cross-sectional study. Physicians were surveyed at approximately 8:00 AM, 12:00 PM, and 3:00 PM and were asked to identify patients that were "definite" or "possible" discharges and to describe the specific barriers to writing discharge orders. SETTING This study was conducted at five hospitals in the United States. PARTICIPANTS The study participants were attending and housestaff physicians on general medicine services. PRIMARY OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Specific barriers to writing discharge orders were the primary outcomes; the secondary outcomes included discharge order time for high versus low team census, teaching versus nonteaching services, and rounding style. RESULTS Among 1,584 patient evaluations, the most common delays for patients identified as "definite" discharges (n = 949) were related to caring for other patients on the team or waiting to staff patients with attendings. The most common barriers for patients identified as "possible" discharges (n = 1,237) were awaiting patient improvement and for ancillary services to complete care. Discharge orders were written a median of 43-58 minutes earlier for patients on teams with a smaller versus larger census, on nonteaching versus teaching services, and when rounding on patients likely to be discharged first (all P < .003). CONCLUSIONS Discharge orders for patients ready for discharge are most commonly delayed because physicians are caring for other patients. Discharges of patients awaiting care completion are most commonly delayed because of imbalances between availability and demand for ancillary services. Team census, rounding style, and teaching teams affect discharge times.


CultureShock! Denmark is the only guide you will need to live and work in this land where the people come across as being homogeneous and which has its own distinct set of rules and regulations. Find out how the Danes' reserved nature and the welfare system affect their views on life and why they strongly believe in the idea of equality. The spirit of do-it-yourself thrives and you will learn tips on how to manage chores and other maintenance work without the assistance of tradesmen. Discover also what it is like to live in an andelsbolger, to get around by cycling, and why Danish children become independent from an early age. Let CultureShock! Denmark initiate you into this beautiful land where nature thrives so you can make the most out of your stay in the country.


Abstract : The key to defeating the jihadi movement is identifying its strengths and weaknesses so that the former may be countered or co-opted and the latter exploited. In this article we argue that the people who know these strengths and weaknesses best are the jihadis themselves; one just needs to know where (and how) to look for their insights. Jihadi leaders are surprisingly frank when discussing the vulnerabilities of their movement and their strategies for toppling local regimes and undermining the United States. Their candor is, in large part, a consequence of struggles for leadership within the movement; thus, a leader of one group will publish his strategic vision in order to gain more recruits and achieve a reputation as a serious scholar worthy of respect. It is also a consequence of the United States success in destroying jihadi training camps and denying safe havens jihadi leaders have had to put their writings online so as to provide continuing guidance to a very decentralized following. In a sense, members of the jihadi movement have put their team's playbooks online. By mining these texts for their tactical and strategic insights, the United States will be able to craft effective tactics, techniques, and procedures to defeat followers of the movement. In what follows, we will demonstrate the efficacy of this approach by highlighting the insights we have gleaned from the works of four prominent jihadi ideologues.


Privatization, and particularly privatization of services, is a worldwide trend that has grown tremendously over the past 25 years. This growth has been particularly pronounced in developing countries in recent years. Prison services is one of many sectors that has contracted with the private sector, however, until South Africa outsourced the design, construction, finance, and operation of two maximum security prisons to the private sector for a period of 25 years, private prison companies were only involved in some developed countries. Many argue that the sector's involvement in South Africa signals its intention to expand throughout the developing world, and undoubtedly, South Africa's experience will be influential in the future growth of this sector in such countries. This paper aims to explore the experience of South Africa's public-private partnership (PPP) prisons thus far, within a context of international and domestic service privatization, in'order to identify key trends and issues which may be relevant to future private sector involvement in prisons and other service sectors. Research was conducted qualitatively, with a total of 12 interviews carried out telephonically and in person. Respondents included members of the government, PPP prison administrations, and members of civil society in order to gain as wide a perspective as possible. An extensive review of the literature, as well as relevant government sources, was also undertaken. While these prisons have certainly brought benefits to South Africa's correctional service, a number of key concerns about private sector involvement in service provision were identified through this research. Firstly, the whole experience, starting with the initial decision, has lacked transparency and debate. Although contracting with the private sector was supposed to lead to increased efficiency and reduced cost, the prisons have, in fact, led to unexpected high costs and risks for the DeS. Furthermore, private sector involvement has led to a tiering of prison services, with PPP prison services generally much better than the public sector. Finally, the research indicates that there are serious questions to be raised about the effectiveness of the regulation of this sector and whether PPP prison companies are truly being held accountable by government.


In the Abriachan-Dochfour-Moniack, Rosemarkie and Foyers areas near Inverness, Moine metasediments and gneisses, amphibolites, Caledonian granitic rocks, and meta-limestones of uncertain age are veined or replaced by metasomatic assemblages of blue fibrous magnesio-riebeckite (crocidolite), green aegirine-rich pyroxene, albite, calcite, hematite, and anatase. The field characteristics, textures and parageneses of these assemblages duplicate those of classical fenites around igneous carbonatite complexes. In the Abriachan granite, the chemistry of metasomatism also recalls classical fenitization in correlating removal of SiO2, K2O and Rb with addition of Na2O, Fe, MgO, CaO, F, Zn, Zr, Ba, Ce and CO2, while sums of cations such as [Si + Na] and fSi + A1 + Fe + Mg + Ca] remain virtually constant. At Moniack and near Rosemarkie, the fenites border calcitic veins, whose high contents—especially of Sr, Nb, Ba, REE, and Mn—ally them with late-stage carbonatites rather than with limestones or hydrothermal carbonates. Associated dykes of ffuidized, often carbonate-rich breccias, and bodies of brick red, sometimes radioactive albitites, also have close analogues in carbonatite complexes. The fenites are distinguished by petrology, field relationships and age from other Scottish alkali metasomatized rocks. All these rocks are believed to have formed broadly coevally, during the emplacment of at least one carbonatite mass deep into the Great Glen Fault zone, most probably during early Devonian (c. 390 Ma) fault movements.


[THIS ARTICLE APPEARED PREVIOUSLY AS TWO SEPARATE PAPERS: "CAPITAL AS POWER: TOWARD A NEW COSMOLOGY OF CAPITALISM" (2010) AND "DIFFERENTIAL ACCUMULATION" (2011)]

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists think of capital as an economic entity that they count in universal units of utils and abstract labor, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious: they can be neither observed nor measured. They don't exist. And since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital.

This breakdown is no accident. Every mode of power evolves together with its dominant theories and ideologies. In capitalism, these theories and ideologies originally belonged to the study of political economy -- the first mechanical science of society. But the capitalist mode of power kept changing, and as the power underpinnings of capital became increasingly visible, the science of political economy disintegrated. By the late nineteenth century, with dominant capital having taken command, political economy was bifurcated into two distinct spheres: economics and politics. And in the twentieth century, when the power logic of capital had already penetrated every corner of society, the remnants of political economy were further fractured into mutually distinct social sciences. Nowadays, capital reigns supreme – yet social scientists have been left with no coherent framework to account for it.

The theory of Capital as Power offers a unified alternative to this fracture. It argues that capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. Capital has little to do with utility or abstract labor, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Most broadly, it represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape -- or creorder -- their society.

This view leads to a different cosmology of capitalism. It offers a new theoretical framework for capital based on the twin notions of dominant capital and differential accumulation, a new conception of the state of capital and a new history of the capitalist mode of power. It also introduces new empirical research methods – including new categories; new ways of thinking about, relating and presenting data; new estimates and measurements; and, finally, the beginning of a new, disaggregate accounting that reveals the conflictual dynamics of society.


Questions about the status, identity and legitimacy of business schools in the modern university system continue to stimulate debate amongst deans, educational policy makers and commentators. In this book, three world experts share their critical insights on management education and new business school models in the USA, Europe and Asia, on designing the business school of the future, and how to make it work. They look at how the business school is changing and focus in particular on emergent global challenges and innovations in curricula, professional roles, pedagogy, uses of technology and organisational delineations. Set within the context of a wider discussion about management as a profession, the authors provide a systematic, historical perspective, analysing major trends in business school models, and reviewing a wealth of current literature, to provide an informed and unique perspective that is firmly grounded in practical and experimental analysis.


Nowadays, engineering manufacturing industry and advance manufacturing has been influenced by Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM). This evolution spark-up new computer software to assist the industry needs such as Computer Aided Design (CAD), CAM and Virtual Computer Numerical Control (V-CNC) software. Numerical Control (NC) plays the major role in attaining command for NC machine in manufacturing industry. The usage of NC machine in fabricating engineering product is increased because it can develop any sophisticated product. In manufacture any engineering product, wasted raw material and high capital cost become the main concern in producing a product prototype. So, this project is mainly to optimize parameter values in fabricating Sport Rim product using Unigraphics NX2 software. Microsoft Office Excell 2003 software is used to analyze data pertaining in descriptive statistics that is the change of machining parameter versus to time, in order to get the optimized parameter. At the end of this project, the result using Unigraphics NX2 will be compared with Mastercam 8.1.1 software based on same data and design. The last output is simulation of machine process, Sport Rim machining animation using sUnigraphics NX2 software and the prototype product with full machining process using the design specification. From this research, it is hoped that future manufacturing engineer can identify the crucial optimized parameters in order to obtain high quality product in minimum time frame.


A contention manager is a shared memory abstraction that boosts progress of obstruction-free algorithms. In this paper, we study the problem of the overhead of non-blocking and wait-free contention managers which use the minimal possible information about failures. More specifically, we show that ensuring non-blockingness can be achieved with no overhead and that this is not possible when wait-freedom is to be guaranteed. We prove that ensuring wait-freedom has an inherent overhead that, however, can be made arbitrarily small. This shows an interesting "efficiency gap" separating non-blocking and wait-free implementations. To support our claims we present two modular contention manager implementations, both using the minimal possible information about failures: one that ensures non-blockingness with no overhead, and one that ensures wait-freedom and which overhead can be arbitrarily reduced. Interestingly, these contention managers can be used only as a last resort, and can themselves be combined with more pragmatic ones that provide good average case performance. At the heart of our cost-effective contention managers lies the notion of an intermittent failure detector, which we believe is interesting in its own right. Strictly speaking, this is not a failure de tector in the classical sense, but rather an oracle that provides processes with information about failures (only) in certain executions. In particular, in executions with no contention, and when failure detection is not needed, its overhead is not incurred. We consider two such abstractions, which we show can be implemented with little system synchrony, and describe how they help implement our cost-effective contention managers.


Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life-they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat-however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.


For most of the century and a half that began roughly with the later works of John Stuart Mill, the most important divide within liberal political thought was that between classical (or market, or libertarian) liberalism and welfare (or new, or redistributionist) liberalism. The questions that were important to the socialist/liberal debate also became important for debates within liberalism: What is the relationship between property and freedom? Between free trade and freedom? Is freedom of commercial activity on a moral par with other sorts of freedom? Is the alleviation of poverty or material need a more important political goal than freedom? How do freedom and equality fit together in a liberal understanding of justice? What degree of state economic planning, or state taxation and expenditure, is compatible with liberal freedom?


Understanding how Medicare+Choice (M+C) plans manage their drug benefits may generate important lessons for Medicare. This report, based on interviews with both national and regional managed care firms, provides an in-depth look at how plans have managed their M+C outpatient pharmacy benefits in recent years. Findings show that plans rely on a number of cost management strategies to constrain the growth in drug spending including formularies, tiered-copayments, mail-order benefits, and fixed caps or dollar limits on drug benefits. When spending begins to spiral and Medicare capitation rates do not increase commensurately, plans may revert to more certain methods for controlling drug costs, like capping drug benefit levels, which helps limit their financial exposure but shifts risk onto beneficiaries.


Background and Purpose Further recovery from stroke can occur late, long after the end of the apparent evolution of pathological changes. This observation and evidence obtained from functional imaging for altered patterns of activation after brain injury suggest that cortical reorganization may contribute to recovery. Here, we have tested for potentially adaptive reorganization in the primary sensorimotor cortex. Methods We used functional MRI to study brain activation with dominant hand movement in right-handed healthy control subjects (n=20) and in patients after subcortical ischemic infarcts causing mild to moderate right hemiparesis (n=8). The numbers of pixels activated above threshold and the geometric centers of activation clusters were determined. Results Although random-effects analysis identified some differences in activation maxima, similar regions of the brain were activated with sequential finger tapping in the patient and control groups. However, consistent with the heterogeneity in the locations, sizes, and times after the infarcts, patterns and magnitudes of activation showed some heterogeneity between patients. Nonetheless, for the group as a whole, there was a decreased motor cortex lateralization index (−0.1±0.7 in patients and 0.7±0.3 in control subjects, P =0.05). The geometric center of activation of the primary sensorimotor cortex activation cluster contralateral to the affected hand in patients was also shifted posteriorly (mean 12 mm, P <0.04) relative to that of the control subjects. To confirm the latter observation, the activation response with a simple hand-tapping task was examined in some of the subjects. With this task, there was also a trend (mean 10 mm, P =0.07) toward a more posterior activation in patients. Conclusions These results confirm altered patterns of activation in the contralateral and ipsilateral primary sensorimotor cortices after recovery from strokes causing hemiparesis. These (and other changes) suggest that modulation of widely distributed parts of the cortical network for motor control may contribute to adaptations leading to functional recovery after stroke.


One of the most dramatic chapters in the history of nineteenth-century Europe, the Commune of 1871 was an eclectic revolutionary experiment that held power in Paris across eight weeks between 18 March and 28 May. Its brief rule ended in 'Bloody Week' - the brutal massacre of as many as 15,000 Parisians, and perhaps even more, who perished at the hands of the provisional government's forces. By then, the city's boulevards had been torched and its monuments toppled. More than 40,000 Parisians were investigated, imprisoned or forced into exile - a purging of Parisian society by a conservative national government whose supporters were considerably more horrified by a pile of rubble than the many deaths of the resisters. In this gripping narrative, John Merriman explores the radical and revolutionary roots of the Commune, painting vivid portraits of the Communards - the ordinary workers, famous artists and extraordinary fire-starting women - and their daily lives behind the barricades, and examining the ramifications of the Commune on the role of the state and sovereignty in France and modern Europe. Enthralling, evocative and deeply moving, this narrative account offers a full picture of a defining moment in the evolution of state terror and popular resistance.


Since the financial crash of 2008, the strategy of occupation has been widely deployed as a means of expressing and mobilizing political dissent. Within legal studies, responses to this mode of protest have remained wedded to a statist perspective that fails to assess the normative commitments immanent to occupations themselves. Rather than examining the strategy of occupation through a legalistic lens, this article approaches a recent occupation through the theoretical apparatus of the 'nomosphere'. This term – originally coined by David Delaney but substantially expanded here – allows for an assessment of the spatial, narrative and atmospheric orderings of the Umbrella Movement, a pro-democracy campaign that sustained a 79-day occupation in Hong Kong's city centre in late 2014. This 'nomospheric inquiry' assesses the forms of ordering that animated the movement from within and seeks to foreground the lived and felt reality of the occupation rather than focus on its legalistic or constitutional significance alone.


English Linguistics Research (ELR) would like to acknowledge the following reviewers for their assistance with peer review of manuscripts for this issue. Many authors, regardless of whether ELR publishes their work, appreciate the helpful feedback provided by the reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were of great help to the authors in improving the quality of their papers. Each of the reviewers listed below returned at least one review for this issue.


Goal-directed behavior in a complex world requires the maintenance of goal-relevant information despite multiple sources of distraction. However, the brain mechanisms underlying distractor-resistant working or short-term memory (STM) are not fully understood. Although early single-unit recordings in monkeys and fMRI studies in humans pointed to an involvement of lateral prefrontal cortices, more recent studies highlighted the importance of posterior cortices for the active maintenance of visual information also in the presence of distraction. Here, we used a delayed match-to-sample task and multivariate searchlight analyses of fMRI data to investigate STM maintenance across three extended delay phases. Participants maintained two samples (either faces or houses) across an unfilled pre-distractor delay, a distractor-filled delay, and an unfilled post-distractor delay. STM contents (faces vs. houses) could be decoded above-chance in all three delay phases from occipital, temporal, and posterior parietal areas. Classifiers trained to distinguish face versus house maintenance successfully generalized from pre- to post-distractor delays and vice versa, but not to the distractor delay period. Furthermore, classifier performance in all delay phases was correlated with behavioral performance in house, but not face, trials. Our results demonstrate the involvement of distributed posterior, but not lateral prefrontal, cortices in active maintenance during and after distraction. They also show that the neural code underlying STM maintenance is transiently changed in the presence of distractors and reinstated after distraction. The correlation with behavior suggests that active STM maintenance is particularly relevant in house trials, whereas face trials might rely more strongly on contributions from long-term memory.


$^{*}$The research was made possible by support extended Harvard University by the Office of Naval Research under ONR Contract Nonr 1866, Task Order XIV.


The phrase "the criminal justice system" is ubiquitous in discussions of criminal law, policy, and punishment in the United States — so ubiquitous that almost no one thinks to question the phrase. However, this way of describing and thinking about police, courts, jails, and prisons, as a holistic "system," dates only to the 1960s. This essay contextualizes the idea of "the criminal justice system" within the rise of systems theories more generally within intellectual history and the history of science. The essay first recounts that more general history of systems thinking and then reconstructs how it converged, in 1967, with the career of a young systems engineer working for President Johnson's Crime Commission, whose contributions to the 1967 report The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society launched the modern and now pervasive idea of "the criminal justice system." Throughout, the essay reflects upon the assumptions and premises that go along with thinking about any complex phenomenon as a "system" and asks whether, in the age of mass incarceration, it is perhaps time to discard the idea, or at least to reflect more carefully upon its uses and limitations. For instance, one pernicious consequence of "criminal justice system" thinking may to be distort appellate judges' interpretations of Fourth Amendment doctrine, because they imagine their rulings to be hydraulically connected in a "system" with crime rates.


This paper provides some important indicators of non-tariff measures in Indian textiles and clothing exports. The paper identifies major trading partners and HS codes to study the impact of Non Taiff Measures (NTMs) on Indian exports. First, using count measures i.e. frequency and coverage ratios, suggests that more than 60% of export value is affected by the NTMs in USA, EU-25 and Canada at various points in time. Second, it calculates Ad-Valorem Equivalents using price differential methods which are imposed in the SMART model under the partial equilibrium framework to know the trade impact of NTMs. A total trade loss of about billion 2.34 US$ (16.8% of base trade value) is estimated, while the zero tariff gains are roughly billion 1.36 US$ thats 9.8% of base trade. Also this paper develops the framework for the primary research in the field of Non-Tariff Measures.


This UNU‐WIDER special issue of the Journal of International Development comprises a set of papers on the theme of aid and gender equality. While the topic of aid effectiveness has been examined in this journal and elsewhere, the focus on how well development assistance to countries and non‐governmental organizations promotes gender equality and empowers women is relatively new. This special issue is the first to marshal quantitative evidence and case studies on several themes: (1) macroanalyses of aid effectiveness and gender equality; (2) the determinants of aid for gender equality and women's empowerment; and (3) gender issues related to aid for education, health, land administration, fragile states and climate finance. © 2016 UNU‐WIDER. Journal of International Development published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


OBJECTIVE Due in large part to effective pharmacotherapy, mortality rates have fallen substantially among those with diabetes; however, trends have been less favorable among those of lower socioeconomic status (SES), leading to a widening gap in mortality between rich and poor. We examined whether income disparities in diabetes-related morbidity or mortality decline after age 65 in a setting where much of health care is publicly funded yet universal drug coverage starts only at age 65. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study using administrative health claims from Ontario, Canada. Adults with diabetes (N = 606,051) were followed from 1 April 2002 to 31 March 2008 for a composite outcome of death, nonfatal acute myocardial infarction (AMI), and nonfatal stroke. SES was based on neighborhood median household income levels from the 2001 Canadian Census. RESULTS SES was a strong predictor of death, nonfatal AMI, or nonfatal stroke among those <65 years of age (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 1.51 [95% CI 1.45–1.56]) and exerted a lesser effect among those ≥65 years of age (1.12 [1.09–1.14]; P < 0.0001 for interaction), after adjusting for age, sex, baseline cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes duration, comorbidity, and health care utilization. SES gradients were consistent for all groups <65 years of age. Similar findings were noted for 1-year post-AMI mortality (<65 years of age, 1.33 [1.09–1.63]; ≥65 years of age, 1.09 [1.01–1.18]). CONCLUSIONS Observed SES differences in CVD burden diminish substantially after age 65 in our population with diabetes, which may be related to universal access to prescription drugs among seniors.


This volume presents state of the art theories, new developments, and important applications of Partial Least Square (PLS) methods. The text begins with the invited communications of current leaders in the field who cover the history of PLS, an overview of methodological issues, and recent advances in regression and multi-block approaches. The rest of the volume comprises selected, reviewed contributions from the 8th International Conference on Partial Least Squares and Related Methods held in Paris, France, on 26-28 May, 2014. They are organized in four coherent sections: 1) new developments in genomics and brain imaging, 2) new and alternative methods for multi-table and path analysis, 3) advances in partial least square regression (PLSR), and 4) partial least square path modeling (PLS-PM) breakthroughs and applications. PLS methods are very versatile methods that are now used in areas as diverse as engineering, life science, sociology, psychology, brain imaging, genomics, and business among both academics and practitioners. The selected chapters here highlight this diversity with applied examples as well as the most recent advances.


Blogging stickiness and motivations have become a frequently studied topic in blogging research for several years. Yet few research pay attention to the difference between the initial motivation and current motivations. This study proposes to investigate and understand bloggers behaviors through specifying the intrinsic and extrinsic components of their motivations. Two major questions were raised and explored in this study: 1. what the reasons that promote students to initiate blogs are; 2. how the blogging motivations and behavior patterns interact in blog maintaining. Based on a survey of 186 bloggers among City University of Hong Kong, it is found that: three major motivations (practicing a new type of diary, curiosity and thoughts on following the crowd) are the most important motivations in initiating blogging. In maintaining a blog, the hypothesis that social connection motivation is positively related to interaction-oriented behavior while emotion pouring motivation is positively related to self-restriction behavior in expression is supported.


The purpose of the investigation was to determine the effects of music on self reported vividness of movement imagery. Eighty-four undergraduate kinesiology
majors (42 males; 42 females) were subjects. Based on identical perceptions of precategorized music (classical and jazz), selected subjects were randomly assigned to one of three music treatment conditions (sedative, stimulative, and control) and
administered the Vividness of Movement Imagery Questionnaire. A 3 x 2 x 2 (Treatment x Gender x Perspective) ANOVA with repeated measures on the last factor was employed. The results revealed that the two music conditions significantly enhanced the vividness of internal and external imagery perspectives when compared to the no music condition, and that music facilitated the vividness of males and females equally.


UNIX-derived operating systems have traditionally have a simplistic approach to process synchronization which is unsuited to multiprocessor application. Initial FreeBSD SMP support kept this approach by allowing only one process to run in kernel mode at any time, and also blocked interrupts across multiple processors, causing seriously suboptimal performance of I/O bound systems. This paper describes work done to remove this bottleneck, replacing it with fine-grained locking. It derives from work done on BSD/OS and has many similarities with the approach taken in SunOS 5. Synchronization is performed primarily by a locking construct intermediate between a spin lock and a binary semaphore, termed mutexes. In general, mutexes attempt to block rather than to spin in cases where the likely wait time is long enough to warrant a process switch. The issue of blocking interrupt handlers is addressed by attaching a process context to the interrupt handlers. Despite this process context, an interrupt handler normally runs in the context of the interrupted process and is scheduled only when blocking is required.


In 1993, Amira Hass, a young Israeli reporter, drove to Gaza to cover a story-and stayed, the first journalist to live in the grim Palestinian enclave so feared and despised by most Israelis that, in the local idiom, "Go to Gaza" is another way to say "Go to hell." Now, in a work of calm power and painful clarity, Hass reflects on what she has seen in the Gaza Strips's gutted streets and destitute refugee camps."Drinking the Sea at Gaza" maps the zones of ordinary Palestinian life. From her friends, Hass learns the secrets of slipping across sealed borders and stealing through night streets emptied by curfews. She shares Gaza's early euphoria over the peace process and its subsequent despair as hope gives way to unrelenting hardship. But even as Hass charts the griefs and humiliations of the Palestinians, she offers a remarkable portrait of a people not brutalized but eloquent, spiritually resilient, bleakly funny, and morally courageous.Full of testimonies and stories, facts and impressions, "Drinking the Sea at Gaza" makes an urgent claim on our humanity. Beautiful, haunting, and profound, it will stand with the great works of wartime reportage.


The resource package Quantum Leaps, distributed to all primary schools in 2002, is a comprehensive resource package that provides support for teachers in the implementation of dance in the primary curriculum. This section of the PDHPE web site is designed to assist primary school teachers develop learning programs that incorporate dance as part of PDHPE and Creative Arts.


Money and its underlying function as a medium of exchange play a central role in determining the course of macroeconomic activity. However, many of the models used to evaluate fundamental questions relating money and monetary policy to economic activity simply assume currency is valued and overlook the important properties of money that influence the way it is used and how its supply affects the economy. ; Search and matching models of money identify the characteristic assumptions for motivating the use of money in carrying out transactions by explicitly capturing the trade frictions that cause money, rather than some form of barter, to be used. This article summarizes some of the recent literature on search models of money and their successful application to issues such as currency substitution and the impact of money's quantity and growth rate on inflation and economic activity. ; This promising class of models, the author concludes, does indeed shed light on these topics and has an enormous potential to address an even broader range of issues. To date, the results of most of these applications have been qualitative. In future work, a quantitative analysis would explore not only how well these models explain the empirical facts regarding money and economic activity but might also provide guidelines for the operation of monetary policy.


For many enterprises, sustainable success is closely linked to information systems (IS) and information technologies (IT). Despite significant efforts to improve software project success, many still fail. Current literature indicates that most of the software project problems are related to management, organizational, human, and cultural issues—not technical problems. This paper presents results of a survey of 36 software owners/sponsors, contractors/suppliers, and consultants on 12 projects. The empirical results address answers to questions related to success, performance metrics, and project business drivers. A lack of alignment on these critical issues emerge consistently by phase as well as across the entire project. The results of this study also are compared with others that span seven additional industry sectors. As a result, the authors have developed an approach that links project critical success factors (CSFs) to corporate strategy, and project metrics to the CSFs. An important finding of this study is the critical need to identify and manage realistic expectations of the stakeholders to achieve perceived project success.