The total suspended particle (TSP) concentration, dry deposition and wind speed were measured with a PS-1 sampler, a dry deposition plate and a Weather Monitor II (#7440), respectively, at the Experimental Farm of Thunghai University in Taiwan. Taiching Industrial Park, Taichung Cong Road (traffic) and a hospital incinerator are close to the sampling site. The sampling time was from August 2001 to December 2001. The average dry deposition flux, the TSP concentration, dry deposition velocities, average wind speed and maximum wind speed were recorded as 617.7 ± 281.4 mg/day/m², 117.5 ± 17.6 µg/m³, 5.9 ± 2.2 cm/s, 2.7 ± 1.3 m/s and 7.6 ± 2.3 m/s, respectively, at this sampling site. Good correlation coefficients (R) of the TSP concentration and the dry deposition flux with wind speed were found, with values of 0.46 and 0.50, respectively. The concentrations and dry deposition of the total metallic elements were also obtained. The results indicated that the concentrations of anthropogenic elements (Pb, Mn, Cd, Ni, Cr and Zn) were mostly higher than those obtained in other studies around the world. The average dry deposition fluxes and TSP concentrations for Zn and Pb were 0.45 and 0.42, respectively. The same phenomenon was also observed for Fe and Mg (R = 0.59 and 0.65). The results indicate that these elements were all coming from the same emission sources at the farm sampling site.


We provide the first large‐scale empirical evidence of banks functioning as tax planning intermediaries. We posit that some banks specialize in assisting corporate clients with tax planning. In this role, banks make use of their centrality in financial relationships; access to private information; and ability to structure, execute, and participate in tax planning transactions for clients. We measure bank‐client relationships using loan contracts and measure client tax planning using either the cash effective tax rate or the unrecognized tax benefit balance. Using a difference‐in‐differences design, we find that firms experience meaningful tax reductions when they begin a relationship with a bank whose existing clients engage in above‐median tax planning. The effects of pairing with such tax intermediary banks are concentrated in relationships with larger or longer maturity loans, clients with foreign income or greater credit risk, and when the bank is an industry specialist or has above‐median investment banking activities. Finally, we find that potential clients are more likely to choose tax intermediary banks than nontax intermediary banks, suggesting that tax intermediary banks benefit by attracting new business. Collectively, our results suggest that some banks act as tax planning intermediaries, a role beyond the traditional one of financial intermediary.


In human body there are cells that can proliferate and differentiate into various kinds of adult cells known as "Stem cells". These cells express a membranous protein known as "Prominin-1" or "CD133". CD133 exhibits 7 isoforms, distributed in different tissues of the body. The isolation and understanding of these cells helped develop an innovative and new kind of therapeutic approach called "Stem Cell Therapy". Mutations in Prominin-1 gene are known to cause genetic disorders like Stargardt disease and retinal macular dystrophy. On the other hand, in clinical trials, CD-133+ cells are being used to treat certain diseases. These clinical trials are targeted for variety of diseases such as Duchenne muscle dystrophy, severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome, degenerative diseases like Asherman's syndrome, cerebral palsy, liver cirrhosis and cardiovascular diseases like ischemia and myocardial infarction. CD133+ cells, owing to their stem cell properties, not only help in regenerating the damaged tissues, but also enhance the healing process via decreased inflammatory reactions and slowing down of apoptotic processes. CD133+ has a significant role in cancer studies. In cancer cells, a subpopulation that express CD133 is termed as cancer stem cells (CSCs). These CSCs are rare, proliferative and resistant to chemotherapy and can survive drug treatments, resulting often in relapse of the disease. Many studies have reported the presence of CD133+ cells with the decreased survival rate in cancer patients. Hence, CD133+ cells play an important role in prognosis and outcome of cancer treatment.


Long ice cores from Greenland yield records of annually resolved climate change for the past ten to twenty thousand years, and decadal resolution for one hundred thousand years or more. These cores are ideally suited to determine the rapidity with which major climate changes occur. The termination of the Younger Dryas, which marks the end of the last glacial period, appears to have occurred in less than a human lifetime in terms of oxygen isotopic evidence (a proxy for temperature), in less than a generation (20 years) for dust content and deuterium excess (proxies for winds and sea-surface conditions), and in only a few years for the accumulation rate of snow. Similarly rapid changes have been observed for stadial-interstadial climate shifts (Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles) which punctuate the climate of the last glacial period. These changes appear to be too rapid to be attributed to external orbital forcings, and may result from internal instabilities in the Earth's atmosphere-ocean system or periodic massive iceberg discharges associated with ice sheet instability (Heinrich events). In contrast, the Holocene climate of the Arctic appears to have been relatively stable. However, the potential for unstable interglacials, with very rapid, shortlived climatic deteriorations, has been raised by results from the lower part of the GRIP ice core. These results have not been confirmed by other ice cores, notably the nearby GISP2 core. Evidence from other records of climate during the Eemian interglacial have yielded mixed results, and the potential for rapid climate change during interglacial periods remains one of the most intriguing gaps in our understanding of the nature of major Quaternary climate change.


Nova eruptions, thermonuclear explosions on the surfaces of white dwarfs (WDs), are now recognized to be among the most common shock-powered astrophysical transients. We present the early discovery and rapid ultraviolet (UV), optical, and infrared (IR) temporal development of AT 2019qyl, a recent nova in the nearby Sculptor Group galaxy NGC 300. The light curve shows a rapid rise lasting ≲1 day, reaching a peak absolute magnitude of M V = −9.2 mag and a very fast decline, fading by 2 mag over 3.5 days. A steep dropoff in the light curves after 71 days and the rapid decline timescale suggest a low-mass ejection from a massive WD with M WD ≳ 1.2 M ⊙. We present an unprecedented view of the early spectroscopic evolution of such an event. Three spectra prior to the peak reveal a complex, multicomponent outflow giving rise to internal collisions and shocks in the ejecta of an He/N-class nova. We identify a coincident IR-variable counterpart in the extensive preeruption coverage of the transient location and infer the presence of a symbiotic progenitor system with an O-rich asymptotic-giant-branch donor star, as well as evidence for an earlier UV-bright outburst in 2014. We suggest that AT 2019qyl is analogous to the subset of Galactic recurrent novae with red-giant companions such as RS Oph and other embedded nova systems like V407 Cyg. Our observations provide new evidence that internal shocks between multiple, distinct outflow components likely contribute to the generation of the shock-powered emission from such systems.


Isonitrile 1 due to its carbene-like reactivity serves generally as a one-carbon synthon in a diverse set of organic transformations. We report in this article that the isocyano group can also act as a polarized triple bond to undergo, as a two-atom synthon, heteroannulation with primary propargylamines 15. In addition, we serendipitously discovered that the reaction pathways can be modulated by simply changing the catalyst loading. In the presence of 0.1 equiv of Yb(OTf)3 or TfOH, the reaction between 1 and 15 afforded exclusively imidazoles 16 by a formal [3+2] cycloaddition. At a higher catalyst loading (Yb(OTf)3 (0.4 equiv) or TfOH (0.5 equiv)) under otherwise identical conditions, the same reaction furnished 1,6-dihydropyrimidines 17 in good to excellent yields by way of a formal [4+2] cycloaddition process. Mechanistic investigations indicated that both annulations went through an amidine intermediate resulting from the insertion of the isocyano group to the NH bond of the primary amine. Subsequent catalyst-loading-dependent 5-exo-dig or 6-endo-dig cyclization provided selectively the two heterocycles, respectively.


'He's great, Vera,' said Angie. When Viktor Sarav takes a job at Ballantine's, Angie and her brother Don - the young owners of the New York fashion company - are pleased. But Angie and Don's parents died in an unusual plane accident, and other strange deaths in the company follow. Is there a vampire at work at Ballantine's? Vera Donato, a company director with secrets to hide, is against Viktor. But Ed Valdemar, the company lawyer, trusts him. Who is right? And what happens to Viktor, Angie, Don, and Vera in the end?


This paper summarizes the closely coordinated engineering and construction planning associated with the design and construction of a reinforced concrete containment model. Designed at 1/6 scale to the ASME Section III, Division 2 Code, this is the largest and most complex model of its kind. Details of the integrated design and construction are provided as they relate to concrete mix design, forming techniques, concrete placing and consolidation, reinforcement splicing, installation templates and zone preassemblies and line installation sequencing. A brief description of the tested capacity and mode of failure is also provided.


The vocal fold (VF) mucosa confers elegant biomechanical function for voice production but is susceptible to scar formation following injury. Current understanding of VF wound healing is hindered by a paucity of data and is therefore often generalized from research conducted in skin and other mucosal systems. Here, using a previously validated rat injury model, expression microarray technology and an empirical Bayes analysis approach, we generated a VF-specific transcriptome dataset to better capture the system-level complexity of wound healing in this specialized tissue. We measured differential gene expression at 3, 14 and 60 days post-injury compared to experimentally naïve controls, pursued functional enrichment analyses to refine and add greater biological definition to the previously proposed temporal phases of VF wound healing, and validated the expression and localization of a subset of previously unidentified repair- and regeneration-related genes at the protein level. Our microarray dataset is a resource for the wider research community and has the potential to stimulate new hypotheses and avenues of investigation, improve biological and mechanistic insight, and accelerate the identification of novel therapeutic targets.


This investigation concerns an analysis of the effect, on the rate of resonance energy transfer between a pair of chromophores (the donor and acceptor), of a third chromophore species in their vicinity. Particularly when it is polar, the third body can exert an electrostatic influence on the energy-exchanging species that may result in a significant increase or decrease of their transfer rate. Furthermore it is shown how the presence of the third species can effectively "switch on" the energy transfer process, under circumstances where conventional energy transfer is forbidden due to orientational effects or on symmetry grounds. For example it is indicated that it is possible to instigate energy transfer when the salient acceptor or donor transitions are one-photon forbidden. In addition to results for structurally rigid systems, a rotationally averaged result applicable to fluids or disordered systems is presented.


Tribological problems are particularly difficult to comprehend. Different physical mechanisms (including the environment, plastic deformation, third body interactions, phase transformations, recrystallization) interact at disparate length and time scales. Here, we will present some of our recent attempts to understand the origins of wear mechanism at the atomistic level. Macroscopically, the wear process, in terms of debris formation, is well described by the well-known Archard model [1]. As suggested, the wear rate is linearly proportional to the ratio of the applied force to the material hardness with a constant factor called wear coefficient which represents the probability of wear debris formation. This coefficient is the most important yet least understood parameter in the field of tribology. Since the physical origins of the debris formation process are still unclear, this coefficient cannot be estimated theoretically and must be only determined experimentally. In order to understand the physical origins of the debris formation process, we have performed a systematic set of molecular dynamics simulations employing a new family of interatomic potentials. These potentials allow us to independently modify physical properties such as hardness and surface energy where other parameters remains constant. Using that, we will discuss different wear mechanisms at the asperity level ranging from a gradual smoothing to a debris formation. Additionally, we elaborate the steady-state sliding regime in terms of frictional force, debris size and surface roughness and explore several influencing parameters such as applied load, sliding velocity and inter-facial adhesion [2]. The proposed framework opens up a new research path to implicitly model and explore the wear process and revisit classical models.


Although genetic resources have strong public-goods characteristics, public genebanks often have struggled for adequate funding. A review of economic literature on the value of plant genetic resources indicated that more information is needed about germplasm use. The data compiled in this paper examine patterns of germplasm use for one of the world's largest national genebank networks, the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS). Data on 10 major crops, gathered directly from within the NPGS and from end-users, revealed patterns of usage for germplasm during the period from 1995 to 1999. Data were collected describing the characteristics of NPGS users, the types of germplasm requested, the purpose of requests, and, when applicable, the specific traits sought. From these findings, we estimated the utility of distributed materials, their secondary use, and projected future demand for NPGS resources. To explore relationships between the usefulness of germplasm samples and accompanying data in a more systematic fashion, we estimated a linear regression. The regression model suggests that accompanying data make germplasm more useful. We conclude that demand for NPGS resources was substantial and came from broad range of users. Utilization rates were higher than suggested by past studies. Countries with developing economies made greater use of NPGS resources, relatively speaking, than did countries with high-income economies. Finally, demand for NPGS resources is likely to increase, especially among users in countries with developing economies.


This article analyses and elucidates the factors involved in the animated reappearance of the Legend of the White Snake in Japan in the 1950s. Driven by the multiple demands of a new post-Second World War era in East and Southeast Asia, where the business of making new images was more urgent, profitable and competitive than ever before, the tale served both micro and macro purposes. Since the legendary tale was well known in the Chinese-speaking world and was initially a joint film project between Japan and Hong Kong, one would have expected the producers (Toei Animation Studio) to envisage the animated tale as primarily for Chinese audiences. However, the Japanese producers had, or later discovered, a wider hidden agenda in making the film that promised more lucrative and geopolitical rewards. Using the concept of 'performativity', this article interprets the course of the animated performance within several dimensions, and traces the history of the foundational role of Toei Animation Studio and its dream-making enterprise.


INTRODUCTION There are Good Men in America, but All Are Very Ignorant of Africa--and Its Muslims (1) Lamine Kebe 1835 You may close your Supreme Court against the black man's cry for justice, but you cannot, thank God, close against him the ear of a sympathizing world, nor shut up the Court of Heaven. All that is merciful and just on earth and in Heaven will execrate and despise this edict of Taney. (2) Frederick Douglass May 1857 The two quotes above by Lamine Kebe, an African Muslim enslaved in the United States in antebellum America, and Frederick Douglass, a Native American son, of sorts, also enslaved in antebellum times, captures the essence of the Blackamerican (3) struggle for freedom, justice, equality, and recognition in a hostile land endured by them and their descendants up to the present day. This paper seeks to provide an historical analysis of the Blackamerican struggle to fight oppression, and their efforts to contribute towards the common good on various fronts. The popular image of Islam and its relationship to the struggle of urban Blackamericans in the collective effort to prevent and combat terrorism in the United States of America is one that has characterized both Islam and Blackamericans as being other than what they have stood for--the security of people and the preservation of our freedoms and civil liberties. Among the American population in the United States the general perception of Islam, Blackamericans, and Muslims is often a biased and distorted one. Muslims, and the religion of Islam, like African-Americans throughout much of the history of the U.S., are not credited much for the progressive efforts and contributions that they have made to America and the world. Muslims, especially, are perceived and charged by a substantial number of Americans as being religious fanatics, Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic extremists, Islamic terrorists, Islamic radicals, foreign spies, black radicals, narrow-minded, and, thus, people who cannot be fully trusted. Although such terms are frequently used by the haters to describe these people, very seldom are they defined by the people who use them, and, likewise, very seldom do the few who attempt to define them, do so in a way that accurately describes Muslims and what their faith, Islam, teaches. This unfortunate state of affairs has resulted in Muslims being unjustly relegated to a status where they and their faith have been placed on trial, as they, more often than not, are characterized as a people who represent a subversive threat from within to our core American values. If that was true, then suspecting policy makers would be justified in their determination to protect us from such people. But, fortunately it is not true and so policy makers have a responsibility to defend their fellow citizens from slander. To fully appreciate my concern, one only has to consider the dismal Peter King trials aimed at American Muslims, and the recent political attacks initiated by the republican representative, Michelle Bachman, against representatives Huma Abidin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Keith Ellison, a democratic representative from Minn.; and others who have been unfairly branded as foreign spies simply because of their adherence to their Islamic faith. Of course, such anti-Islamic propaganda and attitudes are as offensive to Muslims as they are un-American, and seems to have resulted in grave misconceptions within America about the nature, history and goals of the Islamic movement. According to the sentiments of many leading Muslim-American organizations: among them, the Islamic Society of North American (ISNA), the Islamic Circle of North American (ICNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), The Mosque Cares (Ministry of Imam W. Deen Mohammed), The Nation of Islam (NOI), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)--it is this irresponsible use of language and position that has contributed most, over the years, to the climate of anxiety, fear, and trepidation now prevalent amongst the American people and others throughout the world. …


"Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions" Lisa L. Moore, Joanna Brooks and Caroline Wigginton (Eds.) Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 2012 Book Review by Alexandra Petrescu Postdoctoral Researcher Affiliated with the "Sexuality and Gender Studies" Research Network, University of Birmingham, UK Submission: January 23rd, 2013 Accepted: April 11th, 2013As feminist scholars of the eighteenth century English and American literature, the authors of this anthology want to know how transatlantic movements of peoples impacted women's lives, ideas, imaginations, hopes, and fears (p. 7). Furthermore, they want to know how transatlantic movements and encounters with women from other countries and continents affected the way women thought about themselves in a time of political revolution (p. 7).Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions includes speeches, letters, essays, petitions, poetry, court transcripts, religious tracts, excerpts from novels and polemic pamphlets. As L. Moore, J. Brooks and C. Wigginton observe, the word "feminism" originated in England in the late nineteenth century, but the texts collected in this book prove that the feminist ideas existed in Europe as early as the fifteenth century, and around the Atlantic world from the sixteenth century. Women's English language writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth century influenced massively the Anglophone feminism which consolidated around three major issues: the nature and source of sexual difference, the institutionalized injustice of heterosexual marriage, and women's access to education (p. 8). L. Moore, J. Brooks and C. Wigginton define the "Age of Revolutions" as the culmination of centuries of radical change around the Atlantic world in a concentrated period of organized revolution to advance human freedom (p. 9). This period of radical transformation didn't bring any advancement for the rights of women because they were excluded from any form of political deliberation. Thus, the authors of this anthology can ask themselves if women had an age of Revolutions. The answer is yes if we take in consideration the example of American women such as Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren who can be considered revolutionary because they expressed their views about the status of women in society, demanding, as Abigail Adams in 1776, the end of the tyranny of men over women. Women participated in debates about revolution and liberation, and the texts collected in this anthology are a living proof of this commitment: fifty-nine feminist voices (many of women, but also of men) are brought together in this volume, some well-known, some anonymous, but all very similar. They constitute the main corpus of this book (pp. 35-371). These voices echo in chronological order, starting with Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1591-1643) and continuing with Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793), Mary Wollstonecraft(1759-1797) etc.Presenting the historical background of the age of Revolutions, L. Moore, J. Brooks and C. Wigginton stress the fact that the American and French revolutions were incomplete for women. Even though the French revolution concluded with a declaration of rights for citizens, women were not included in this declaration, which sparked the dissatisfaction of feminists such as Olympe de Gouges who published in 1791 the "Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizen", and Mary Wollstonecraftwho addressed "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" to Talleyrand, the minister of education. …


Abstract The Miocene–Quaternary Trans-Mexican Volcanic arc is thought to have grown southwards (i.e. trenchward) since the Pliocene. This theory is mainly supported by roughly N–S-directed polygenetic volcanic ranges along which volcanic activity migrates southwards with time. We investigated the eruptive history of one of these ranges, the Sierra Nevada (east boundary of Mexico City basin), by compiling literature ages and providing new K–Ar dates. Our K–Ar ages are the first ones for the northernmost Tláloc and Telapón volcanoes and for the ancestral Popocatépetl (Nexpayantla). The obtained ages reveal that the four stratovolcanoes forming the range worked contemporaneously during most of the Middle to Late Pleistocene. However, taking into account the onset of the volcanic activity, a southward migration is evidenced along the Sierra Nevada: volcanism initiated at its northern tip at least 1.8 Ma ago at Tláloc volcano, extended southwards 1 Ma ago with Iztaccíhuatl and appeared at its southern end 329 ka ago with the Nexpayantla cone. Such a migration would be most probably primarily driven by Cocos slab roll-back and steepening rather than by regional crustal tectonics, which played a secondary role by controlling the apparent alignment of the volcanoes.


By using time-depth recorders to measure diving activity and the doubly-labelled water method to determine energy expenditure, the relationship between foraging behaviour and energy expenditure was investigated in nine Antarctic fur seal females rearing pups. At-sea metabolic rate (MR) (mean of 6.34 ± 0.4 W· kg": 4.6 times predicted BMR) was positively correlated to foraging trip duration (mean of 4.21 ± 0.54 days; r 2 = 0.5, P < 0.04). There were no relation ships between MR and the total number of dives, the total time spent diving or the total vertical distance travelled during the foraging trip. There was, however, a close negative sigmoidal relationship (r = 0.93) between at-sea MR and the proportion of time at sea spent diving. This measure of diving behaviour may provide a useful, inexpensive means of estimating foraging energy expenditure in this species and possibly in other otariids. The rate of diving (mh-1) was also negatively related to at-sea MR (r = 0.69, P < 0.005). Body mass gain during a foraging trip had a positive relationship to the time spent at sea (r = 0.58, P < 0.02) and the total amount of energy expended while at sea (r = 0.72, P < 0.004) such that, while females undertaking long trips have higher metabolic rates, the energetic efficiency with which females gain mass is independent of the time spent at sea. Therefore, within the range of conditions observed, there is no apparent energetic advantage for females in undertaking foraging trips of any particular duration.


A growing body of research has challenged the commonly accepted view that multinationals have evolved into globally integrated networks, demonstrating instead that such organizations are sites of conflict between competing rationalities emerging from distinctive national institutional contexts. However, this research has neglected professional service firms (PSFs) in spite of them often being held as exemplars of the integrated network model. This article redresses this imbalance by focusing, in particular, on how PSFs seek to coordinate the horizontal flow of their human resources as a mechanism of inter-unit knowledge sharing. Drawing upon interviews in four PSFs, I show that these organizations have developed resource management systems that cannot simply be reduced to national institutional contexts. However, I also demonstrate that the process of resource management is subject to inter-unit conflicts that undermine its raison d'être. I argue that these tensions are symptomatic of both the Anglo-American model of multinational management and cross-national differences in market conditions.


ABSTRACT Induction programmes including assessments of suitability were introduced in Sweden 2011 and were in use for three years. The purpose of this study is to examine the conditions for and the consequences of giving the induction programme a gatekeeper function to the teaching profession. The empirical basis consists of a web-based survey, which involves approximately 100 school principals and preschool heads. The study shows that the conditions for a fair assessment of suitability were not established. The assessment task was complex; those responsible for the assessments were not sufficiently prepared. The induction employments varied in coherence and in demands. The results support bringing the gatekeeper-function back into teacher education and focusing the induction programme on support and development.


Abstract This work presents the use of terahertz reflection imaging for nondestructive evaluation of packaged microelectronics. Power MOSFETs and SRAM devices are placed in a pulsed terahertz imaging system in the reflection mode with an incident angle of 30°. From the received signal at each point on the sample under test, the internal structure of the device can be clearly seen. For transistors, terahertz nondestructive imaging has been successful in determining die size and location as well as the bond wire size, number, and connections. High-pass frequency filters are utilized to enhance the image quality for viewing the bond wires. In addition, the terahertz B-scans are used to determine additional information including the vertical position of the bond wires and the die inside the packaged device. For the SRAM, the terahertz nondestructive imaging shows similar effectiveness in defining the layout of the metal connections inside the package and the wire positions. Thus terahertz imaging is shown to ...


The National Health Service will spend around £17,000 million in the UK in 1984 - it employs more than 1.2 million full-time and part-time staff. Thus as well as being very probably the nation's most popular major institution (Iglehart 1983, 1984), it is also its largest. The NHS today utilises around 6 per cent of the country's gross national product and a similar proportion of its manpower resources. This is not far short of double the share enjoyed by the health sector in the years immediately after 1948. Yet alongside growth and frequent acclaim the last three to four decades have brought the service many new challenges. For example, the ageing of the population has required more of its energies to be focussed on the difficult health problems associated with the chronic, disabling diseases of later life. Whilst the gradual emergence of a less controlled, more individualistic social environment has meant that British health care consumers have become less tolerant of inconvenient or inadequate patterns of service than they were in the 1950s. Such trends, together with the tensions like those associated with the NHS industrial disputes of the 1970s and early 1980s and the 1974 and 1982 structural reorganisations, have led a number of commentators to believe that the NHS has reached a crisis point. Some even suggest that it is near to collapse. The analysis on which this paper is based offers little to support such views. Nevertheless, this is not to say that the efficiency or quality of current provisions could not be improved, or to deny the existence of a relatively high level of critical debate on the NHS. The widespread desire for better 'customer care', particularly in contexts such as waiting for hospital appointments; certain unacceptable failures to match service levels offered elsewhere, as in the case of renal dialysis for older patients; and talk of 'gross NHS overmanning' on the one hand (see, for instance, Howell 1983) and of 'life threatening' financial cuts on the other. All are examples of the type of issue about which there is genuine concern. Against this background the primary goal of this paper is, in addition to updating previous Office of Health Economics guides to the organisational structure of the NHS in England1 (OHE 1974, 1977X to provide a balanced picture of the continuing evolution of the health care system and of the possibilities for its future progress. The paper does not seek to question the fundamental principle that the NHS exists to provide comprehensive health care for everyone in the population, regardless of their wealth or social status. Rather, it attempts to identify the ways in which a health care system based on the ideal of universal welfare can most efficiently achieve its aims, given both the environment in which the NHS operates in the 1980s and the fresh difficulties it will have to face in the 1990s. To this end particular attention is paid to the problems of health service management and the issues raised by the 1983 NHS Management Inquiry — the 'Griffiths' report. Also, the implications of recent decisions regarding the administration of the family practitioner services (FPS) are examined. These last, which include the general medical and the community pharmaceutical services, are run independently of the hospital services (HCHS) and arguably embody some of the most distinctive and desirable facets of the British system. Indeed, despite criticisms from some quarters, the concepts underlying the FPS may one day come to serve as a general model for the future development of the entire health service. For potentially they may permit a more pragmatic combination of national planning and, where appropriate, economic competition between providers than can the current structure of the NHS hospital service.


The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of reducing the crude protein (CP) with the use of amino acids in diets with the same amount of calories anddifferent levels of soybean oil (SO) for finishing pigs kept in two different ambient temperatures. A total of 120 barrows (initial weight of 68.0±1.9 kg) were utilized for the experiment. The design was of randomized blocks in a 2 × 3 × 2 factorial arrangement (two levels of CP, 16.2 and 13.7%; three levels of SO, 1.5; 3.0 and 4.5%; and two ambient temperatures, 19 and 31 oC), totaling twelve treatments with five replicates for thirty days. The heat reduced feed intake (FI) of the animals, regardless of the levels of CP and SO used, and reduced weight gain (WG) in diets with reduced CP and SO or higher SO. The increased level of CP and SO improved feed conversion (FC) when the animals were kept in thermoneutral environment and given a diet with higher protein content. The reduction in CP increased FI only in the thermoneutral environment. In the heat, WG increased in diets with higher levels of SO, without influencing FC. The manipulation of diet and temperature did not affect most carcass traits. The SO reduced backfat thickness (BT) only in diets with high CP and animals kept in thermoneutral environment. The reduction of CP increased the BT only in diets with high content of SO, both in hot and thermoneutral environments. Heat reduces FI and the inclusion of SO does not improve performance or carcass characteristics in these conditions. The reduction in CP improves WG only in diets with high oil content; however, it increases BT. In thermoneutral environment, increasing the SO is beneficial for performance and carcass characteristics, except when diets with reduced CP are used. The reduction in CP improves performance only in diets with low oil content.


Fairness preferences fundamentally affect individual behavior and play an important role in shaping social and political institutions. However, people differ both with respect to what they view as fair and with respect to how much weight they attach to fairness considerations. In this article, we study the role of family background in explaining these heterogeneities in fairness preferences. In particular, we examine how socioeconomic background relates to fairness views and to how people make trade-offs between fairness and self-interest. To study this, we conducted an economic experiment with a representative sample of 14- to 15-year-old and matched the experimental data to administrative data on parental income and education. The participants made two distributive choices in the experiment. The first choice was to distribute money between themselves and another participant in a situation where there was no difference in merit. The second choice was to distribute money between two other participants with unequal merits. Our main finding is that there is a systematic difference in fairness view between children from low-socioceconomic status (SES) families and the rest of the participants; more than 50 percent of the participants from low-SES families are egalitarians, whereas only about 20 percent in the rest of the sample hold this fairness view. In contrast, we find no significant difference in the weight attached to fairness between children from different socioeconomic groups.


A description of the first six months of a project to convert to machine readable form the entire shelf list of the Libraries of the State University of New York at Buffalo. IBM DATATEXT, the on-line computer service which was used for the conversion, provided an upper- and lower-case typewriter which transmitted data to disk storage of a digital computer. Output was a magnetic tape containing bibliographic information tagged in a modified MARC I format. Typists performed all tagging at the console. All information except diacriticals and non-Roman alphabets was converted. Direct costs for the first six months were $.55 per title.


n ABSTRACT: Drawing on a study of Shi'i ritual lamentation in Lebanon, this article examines how religious actors and pious publics employ literary, recitational, theatrical, and socio-technological methods to cultivate imaginal engagements with the other-worldly. These methods are analyzed, demonstrating how they locate pious Shi'is in religious meta-narratives that transcend the linearity of time, taking place simultaneously in the Elsewhere and in the here-and-now. I argue that this produces transposable and lasting dispositions that constitute the Shi'i self, immerses subjects in this-worldly-oriented modes of religiosity, and bestows upon Shi'i politics and the imagined community a profound emotional legitimacy. I posit that cultivated engagements with the Elsewhere are constitutive experiences in modes of religiosity that emphasize a symbiosis between human action and metaphysical intervention, thus complicating the question of agency and intentional action.


This paper focuses on the question of how higher education is being transformed as a consequence of social processes broadly understood as 'marketization'. It is engaged in mapping the broad terrain of changes, on the one hand, and takes a series of case studies to explore the different actors, projects and outcomes for higher education as a sector, on the other. I propose a categorisation of actors that are part of market-making in the higher education sector, which serves as a useful heuristic in bringing specific processes to the fore. The category of the changing university reveals that it acts as a seller as well as a buyer of services and goods. A variety of actors strategically work to change the status of a service, from one that is not commodified to one that is. These actors are constantly seeking the means through which they are moving over, and making the boundary (understood as a particular mode of structural selectivity of institutedness that frames the university as a public good space) between the university and the wider commercial world, more porous so as quicken the pace and thicken the space of market exchanges. Next category – PPP (private-public) partnerships) – refers to a situation when a public university and a private company form new structural arrangements in order to together create and expand their markets. Brokers are actors who are forging (market) relations between buyers (who are normally universities) and sellers (who are normally companies). Brokers' role in re-sectoralisating higher education is to bring in and broker other markets and actors into the higher education sector. Enhancers are actors who provide structures and forms which enable actors to speed up the processes of instituting markets. Extractors are extracting value out of the higher education sector by building competition and structured exchange, but without monetary transaction. These cases together illuminate the spatial, temporal, social and political dynamics at play in the processes of global education 'market-making' at macro, meso and micro levels. They are also fruitful for reflecting upon existing theoretical learnings.


In wireless sensor networks, the reliability of message delivery is low because its wireless medium has a high packet loss rate and some nodes frequently may not work because each node uses a small amount of battery power. In addition, if single path routing protocol is used, the load is placed on some particular node, causing congestion. As a result, this degrades the overall network performance, as well as increases delays. In contrast, if the routing protocol provides multiple paths, not only does it guarantee fault tolerance, but also improves reliability by broadcasting messages using multi paths. In addition, by distributing the load that is being focused on a particular node, it reduces incidence of congestion and increases the network's life time and reliability. Therefore, multipath routing is one of several techniques being studied to solve the issue in the wireless sensor network. However, the multi-path routing protocols that have been proposed so far either have too much message overhead for finding the multi-path or use a less efficient multi path to reduce this overhead. In addition, as the number of nodes in the network grows, the routing table size is enlarged; making it unsuitable for sensor nodes with a small amount of memory. This thesis proposes a highly reliable and load-balancing routing protocol for the wireless sensor network through finding multiple node-disjoint paths and through removing the intermediate node's routing table overhead by computing the entire path from the sink to the destination.


This paper reviews the progress on nano-aperture vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs). The design, fabrication, and polarization control of nano-aperture VCSELs are reviewed. With the nano-aperture evolving from conventional circular and square aperture to unique C-shaped, H-shaped, I-shaped, and bowtie-shaped aperture, both the near-field intensity and near-field beam confinement from nano-aperture VCSELs are significantly improved. As a high-intensity compact light source with sub-100-nm spot size, nano-aperture VCSELs are promising to realize many new near-field optical systems and applications.


PURPOSE
To evaluate the characteristics of ocular injuries among elderly patients admitted to an urban level I trauma center because of major trauma from 2008 to 2015.

METHODS
A retrospective chart review was conducted of patients aged >65 years admitted with ocular injuries that were identified with ICD-9 codes. Tabulated data were analyzed using the Student's paired t-test, the chi-squared test, and regression analysis using STATA/MP-12 software. Significance was set at p<0.05.

RESULTS
Of a total of 861 patients, 221 (25.7%) admitted for major trauma and ocular injuries were elderly. The mean age of these patients was 80.3 years (median =79.2 years; interquartile range=63.8-94.6 years). Of these patients, 40.7% were males and 59.3% were females. The males were younger than the females (mean age, 77.3 vs. 82.4 years, respectively, p<0.001). Race was documented as white (30.8%), black (13.6%), and "other" (54.3%), with 67.5% of the "other" group (36.7% overall) identified as Hispanic. The most frequent injuries were contusion of the eye/adnexa (68.2%), orbital wall fractures (22.2%), and an open wound of the ocular adnexa (18.1%). Males had a 2.64-fold greater risk of orbital wall fractures (95% confidence interval [CI]=1.38-5.05, p<0.003). Patients with orbital wall fractures had higher injury severity scores than those without (95% CI=14.1-20.9 vs. 6.8-8.6, respectively, p<0.001). The most common injuries were falls (77.8%) and pedestrian/motor vehicle accidents (6.8%). Falls occurred mostly at home (51.7%), on the street (13.9%), and in hospitals/nursing homes (12.2%). Those falling at home were older than those falling at other locations (95% CI=81.8-85.4 vs. 77.0-80.6 years, respectively, p<0.002).

CONCLUSIONS
Ocular injuries in elderly Bronx patients most commonly occurred in females due to falls in the home/nursing home setting. Public health measures addressing identifiable individual and environmental risks in these common locations would be most beneficial in reducing the incidence of ocular injuries in this population.


Forecasting ability of several parameterizations of ACD models are compared to benchmark linear autoregressions for inter-trade durations. The estimation of parametric ACD models requires both the choice of a conditional density for durations and the specification of a functional form for the conditional mean duration. Our results provide guidance for choosing among different parameterizations and for developing better forecasting models to predict one-step-ahead, multi-step-ahead, and the whole density of time durations. For evaluating density forecasts, we propose a new constructive test, which is based on the series of probability integral transforms. The choice of the conditional distribution for inter-trade durations does not seem to affect the out-of sample performances of the ACD at short, as well as longer, horizons. Yet, this choice becomes critical when forecasting the density.


Despite growing interests in sustainable urban development, planning lacks unifying themes or directives for achieving sustainability in cities. While professional rating systems provide some guidance, they can be context-specific by country and may at best target weak sustainability as their intended outcome. The United Nations' New Urban Agenda attempts to offer a singular vision for urban sustainability, and its language appears flexible enough to apply across contexts. In this research, we explore the extent that emergent themes from the New Urban Agenda can guide urban planning for sustainability, specifically in the United States (U.S.). We develop inductive codes from the New Urban Agenda and compare these emergent themes to the content of Asheville, North Carolina's (U.S.) comprehensive plan, Living Asheville as well as to the STAR Community rating system (Sustainability Tools for Assessing and Rating Communities). We ask how well the New Urban Agenda can align with conventional U.S. planning processes and whether it offers value beyond the contributions of industry-standard practices like STAR Communities. We find that the New Urban Agenda voices common urban sustainability goals while making some new contributions, particularly in areas such as equity and governance. We conclude that in contexts like the U.S., the New Urban Agenda might be best carried out by integrating it into already existing frameworks like STAR, which have already been widely implemented. These conclusions are based on a reading of one case study city, and future research should analyze and compare themes of the New Urban Agenda and STAR and analyze case studies of multiple certified cities.


Detailed information on the anaesthetic and cardiorespiratory effects of drug combinations used for the chemical immobilization of Kinkajous (Potos flavus) is scarce.  This study assessed the effects of ketamine (2.5mg/kg), xylazine (1mg/kg) and midazolam (0.5mg/kg) combination in P. flavus.  Five clinically healthy adult Kinkajous of both sexes were included.  Heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure and body temperature were recorded at five-minute intervals for 25 minutes.  Then, animals received 0.125mg/kg of yohimbine by intramuscular injection.  Anaesthetic depth was assessed based on stimulus response and muscle tone.  Induction, immobilization, and recovery periods were recorded and qualitatively assessed based on the absence of adverse effects.  The durations of the induction, immobilization, and recovery periods were 9.42±1.73, 33.33±2.16, and 31.37±5.82 minutes.  All periods showed good quality and adequate anaesthetic depth was achieved.  Mean heart and respiratory rates were 99±20 beats/minute and 44±9 breaths/minute.  Both parameters decreased over the duration of the anaesthesia but they did not reach levels suggesting either bradycardia or bradypnea.  Mean body temperature was 37.1±1.5 0C and it also showed a decreasing trend over the duration of the anaesthesia.  Mean oxygen saturation was 92±6% and it showed a mildly increasing trend over the duration of the anesthesia.  Mean blood pressure was 129±23 mmHg and mild to moderate hypertension was observed.  No mortality occurred and no adverse effects were observed in any of the individuals during the three months following immobilization.  The assessed anaesthetic combination effectively immobilized the P. flavus individuals, provided good quality and acceptable duration of both induction and recovery periods.  It should, however, not be used in Kinkajous with either known hypertension record or pre-existing target organ disease (e.g., renal failure, retinopathy).


We present a synthesis of the land-atmosphere carbon flux from land use and land cover change (LULCC) in Asia using multiple data sources and paying particular attention to deforestation and forest regrowth fluxes. The data sources are quasi-independent and include the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization-Forest Resource Assessment (FAO-FRA 2015; country-level inventory estimates), the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGARv4.3), the 'Houghton' bookkeeping model that incorporates FAO-FRA data, an ensemble of 8 state-of-the-art Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVM), and 2 recently published independent studies using primarily remote sensing techniques. The estimates are aggregated spatially to Southeast, East, and South Asia and temporally for three decades, 1980–1989, 1990–1999 and 2000–2009. Since 1980, net carbon emissions from LULCC in Asia were responsible for 20%–40% of global LULCC emissions, with emissions from Southeast Asia alone accounting for 15%–25% of global LULCC emissions during the same period. In the 2000s and for all Asia, three estimates (FAO-FRA, DGVM, Houghton) were in agreement of a net source of carbon to the atmosphere, with mean estimates ranging between 0.24 to 0.41 Pg C yr−1, whereas EDGARv4.3 suggested a net carbon sink of −0.17 Pg C yr−1. Three of 4 estimates suggest that LULCC carbon emissions declined by at least 34% in the preceding decade (1990–2000). Spread in the estimates is due to the inclusion of different flux components and their treatments, showing the importance to include emissions from carbon rich peatlands and land management, such as shifting cultivation and wood harvesting, which appear to be consistently underreported.


OBJECTIVE
To describe the clinicopathological features in necrotizing fasciitis with evaluation of its clinical presentation, diagnostic criteria and mortality rate.

DESIGN
A case series, observational study.

PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY
Kasturba Medical College Hospital, Manipal, India, from January 2003 to May 2005.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
All patients meeting clinical and/or histopathologic criteria for necrotizing fasciitis were included. Patients were studied with particular importance to the mode of presentation, associated co-morbid conditions, relevant investigations, histopathological report, modalities of treatment and final outcome.

RESULTS
A total of 38 patients were studied. The major cause of infection was idiopathic/primary. The average duration of symptoms at presentation was 10.07 days. The specific signs such as bullae and blistering were seen in 18 patients (47.3%). Of the infections, 19 (50%) were monomicrobial and 15 (39%) were polymicrobial. The most common complication seen was systemic sepsis with 9 patients (23.6%), of which 4 patients (10.5%) developed septicemic shock, 3 patients (7.8%) developed acute renal failure, 1 patient (2.6%) consolidation with pleural effusion and 2 patients (5.2%) had acute myocardial infarction. The mortality was 21%.

CONCLUSION
The successful treatment of necrotizing fasciitis lies in early diagnosis and aggressive surgical debridement. Diabetes mellitus and other pre-morbid conditions increase the risk of mortality. The presence of bullae and blistering, foul smelling discharge and discolouration of skin raised the suspicion of necrotizing fasciitis. Findings at surgical exploration and skin biopsy are the only reliable means of diagnosis.


Description: Inspiring lessons on business and life from Frank Savage Frank Savage's is an unlikely success story. Raised in segregated Washington, DC, by his mother, a hairdresser and entrepreneur with little formal education, Savage's career has taken him around the world as a globetrotting financier. From his first banking job at Citibank to his current position as Chairman Emeritus of Howard University, The Savage Way shares the life and business lessons he learned along the way. This memoir relates the many starts and stops, successes and failures in his long career, from his involvement in the collapse of Enron, to his experience investing in Africa, to his days as a competitive yachtsman—always guided by the wisdom of the mother who taught him to transcend all limits. A powerful memoir of an inspiring business leader Savage is the current Chairman of his alma mater, Howard University, and the CEO of the global financial services company Savage Holdings LLC A rare and inspiring story of personal and professional challenge and ultimate triumph, The Savage Way is a memoir that offers powerful inspiration and wisdom for tomorrow's business leaders.


The road pollutant emissions, above all in urban context, are correlated to many infrastructural parameters and to traffic intensity and typology. The research work on road junction geometry, carried out in European research centres, has recently allowed to design new road intersection types which are of undoubted interest, especially in terms of traffic functionality and safety, like the turbo roundabouts (in which right-turn manoeuvres do not conflict with the circulating flow). The main objective of this paper is to propose a model for the estimation the performances and the pollutant emissions into turbo roundabouts. A comparative analysis between conventional roundabout and turbo roundabout has been carried out in terms of CO, CO2, CH4, NO, PM2,5 and PM10 vehicular emissions, evaluated by mean of COPERT Software which is developed as a European tool for the calculation of emissions from the road transport sector.


Uncertainty and unpredictability faced by low-income households increase their vulnerability making poverty even more unbearable. India's National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD)-initiated Self-Help Group (SHG) program, which is currently the largest and fastest growing microfinance program in the developing world, has been aggressively promoted as a way of combating poverty. This paper investigates whether or not SHG participation results in reducing poverty and vulnerability. A theoretical framework is developed to examine the mechanisms through which the pecuniary and non-pecuniary effects of the SHG program on the beneficiaries' earnings and empowerment, influence their households' ability to manage risk. Going beyond the traditional poverty estimates, we use a vulnerability measure which quantifies the welfare loss associated with poverty as well as different types of risks like aggregate and idiosyncratic risks. Applying this measure to an Indian panel survey data for 2000 and 2003, we find that SHG members have lower vulnerability as compared to a group of non-SHG (control) members. Furthermore, we find that the poverty contributes to about 80 percent of the vulnerability faced by the household followed by aggregate risk.


Carbonate mineralogies have oscillated between aragonite and calcite seas through geological time, proposed to be due mainly to secular variation in the magnesium/calcium ratio driven by changing rates of ocean crust production. A quantitative compilation of inorganic and biominerals from the onset of biomineralization (late Ediacaran–Middle Ordovician) reveals a correspondence between seawater chemistry and the first adopted mineralogy of skeletal clades. Ediacaran–Tommotian skeletons and inorganic precipitates were composed exclusively of aragonite or high-Mg calcite, but these were replaced by low-Mg calcite mineralogies during the early Atdabanian, implying the onset of a calcite sea. This transition is empirically constrained by fluid inclusion data. Late Atbadanian–Botoman inorganic precipitates returned to aragonite, with high-Mg calcite echinoderms and solitary tabulaconids and massive aragonitic tabulaconids originating during this interval. Middle Cambrian–Ordovician inorganic precipitates were low-Mg calcite, and the Ordovician radiation in skeletal expression was due mostly to groups with low-Mg calcite mineralogies. These short-lived transitions can be most parsimoniously explained by minor oscillations of mMg:Ca around ~2 during this period, possibly combined with the progressive onset of greenhouse conditions during the mid-Late Cambrian.


In order to evaluate the long-term wind conditions and energy resources in the Southern Bârlad Plateau, the WINDATLAS method has been applied, using the numerical software programs WindPRO 2.7 and WAsP 9. For this purpose, 2 years (2008 – 2010) of in-situ wind measurement data from two locations were used. These time series have been adjusted to a 30-year longterm period (1981-2010), using NCAR global weather analyses data, and validated with the monthly means of the wind speed recorded at Galați meteorological station (1981-2010). On the basis of the new generated long-term time series, local wind statistics have been obtained, which were used for wind conditions assessment and energy yield calculations within the study area. The average wind speed, the Weibull parameters for the vertical wind profile, as well as the expected wind energy resources have been determined. The Southern Bârlad Plateau is characterized by high wind energy potential demonstrated by long-term averaged wind speeds larger than 7 m/s (at 120 m a.g.l.), similar to Dobrogea region, and by corresponding wind energy values of more than 3000 kWh/m at hill top positions. Another key issue is that the energy potential of this area is relatively constant at multi-annual scale, with prevailing winds from northern and southern directions, making it highly suitable for the development of Multi-Megawatt wind farms. The results obtained by applying this complex methodology can be practically valorized by being further integrated in energy production estimates and feasibility studies for wind farms.


One crucible for theories of religion is their ability to predict and explain the patterns of belief and disbelief. Yet, religious nonbelief is often heavily stigmatized, potentially leading many atheists to refrain from outing themselves even in anonymous polls. We used the unmatched count technique and Bayesian estimation to indirectly estimate atheist prevalence in two nationally representative samples of 2,000 U.S. adults apiece. Widely cited telephone polls (e.g., Gallup, Pew) suggest U.S. atheist prevalence of only 3–11%. In contrast, our most credible indirect estimate is 26% (albeit with considerable estimate and method uncertainty). Our data and model predict that atheist prevalence exceeds 11% with greater than .99 probability and exceeds 20% with roughly .8 probability. Prevalence estimates of 11% were even less credible than estimates of 40%, and all intermediate estimates were more credible. Some popular theoretical approaches to religious cognition may require heavy revision to accommodate actual levels of religious disbelief.


Flood management and control are essential to reduce economic and human life losses and to maintain the ecological condition. The intensity of occurrence of flood disasters constitutes a persistent and serious problem all round the world. Floods are growing in intensity and frequency year by year, producing adverse effects on the socioeconomic conditions of the country in question. This is particularly true for Pakistan since its birth. Serious scarcity of water in one season and disastrous floods in the other is a common observation. Vast rural and urban areas have to undergo a great disaster year by year. It seems that while some areas become less productive due to the deficiency of water. In the absence of any control measures a large amount of water is uselessly drained out in the sea. During the years when the river does not flow above the "fair irrigation level" for a sufficient time, canals are cut off from their water supply sooner and the entire irrigation system suffers. The arena of problems like correct assessment, proper storage, reliable control and judicious distribution of existing water masses among the provinces of Pakistan can be properly handled only by proper scientific research. For the prevention of major property damages and great agricultural losses, a detailed river flow study based on long-term predictions is very essential. For the study of uncertainty involved in real-time estimation and forecasting for the Pakistan's rivers this paper stressing on the role of local climatological parameters on the IRS flow as these parameter influence the river flow extreme events (floods) and their management and control. For this purpose this paper giving a plan to design an early warning system and flood management and control plan.


Students often have information needs while carrying out a multitude of learning activities at universities. When information is needed for investigating a problem, the student may interrupt the work and switch to an information seeking task. As Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous, searching information has been routinized and integrated in the learning experience. However, information needs are not always fully recognized, or they can not be well articulated. A MOOC student may perceive a video to be difficult, but fails to express what information can be helpful. Sometimes it is improper to interrupt the learning task for searching information, especially when social factors are concerned, e.g. in a seminar talk. These situations create research potentials for making ambient information cues, hereafter referred to as contextual information scent (CIS), available to address students' situational information needs in learning activities. The CIS is designed to combine context-awareness with information seeking, ambient interaction as well as serendipitous encounter. In this thesis, we investigate the CIS mainly in collaborative learning activities. We explore three different contexts: conversation, groupware interaction and video content for MOOC learning. RaindropSearch investigates capturing conversational words as CIS for building search queries, while the TileSearch triggers Web searches based on group discussions and retrieved image and Wikipedia results as CIS for serendipitous interactions. These two explorations both focus on conversation context and provide initial insights into the CIS design practice. Next, we present MeetHub Search, which includes three CIS components based on text interactions in a groupware. Our last prototype, the BOOC Player employs textbook pages as CIS and links them to MOOC videos during the course of collaborative video viewing. All prototypes show how we manipulated design parameters to reduce distraction, increase relevance and ensure timeliness. The studies also exhibit the influence of group dynamics on the use of CIS. We finally extend our research scope to individual MOOC learning and summarize the design insights obtained from MOOC analytics. The contributions of this thesis are summarized as (1) a dedicated research framework derived from both research literature and requirement analysis for recognizing the design challenges, design principles and design space of CIS. The framework lays the foundation for us to explore different contexts in this thesis, where we generated (2) design implications that identify the key attributes of CIS. Last but not least, we employed (3) a variety of evaluation methodologies in this thesis for assessing the usability as well as the benefit and appeal of CIS.


Photoinduced charge separation and recombination in a carotenoid-porphyrin-fullerene triad C-P-C(60)(1) have been followed by multifrequency time-resolved electron paramagnetic resonance (TREPR) at intermediate magnetic field and microwave frequency (X-band) and high field and frequency (W-band). The electron-transfer process has been characterized in the different phases of two uniaxial liquid crystals (E-7 and ZLI-1167). The triad undergoes photoinduced electron transfer, with the generation of a long-lived charge-separated state, and charge recombination to the triplet state, localized in the carotene moiety, mimicking different aspects of the photosynthetic electron-transfer process. Both the photoinduced spin-correlated radical pair and the spin-polarized recombination triplet are observed starting from the crystalline up to the isotropic phase of the liquid crystals. The W-band TREPR radical pair spectrum has allowed unambiguous assignment of the spin-correlated radical pair spectrum to the charge-separated state C(.+)-P-C(60)(.-). The magnetic interaction parameters have been evaluated by simulation of the spin-polarized radical pair spectrum and the spin-selective recombination rates have been derived from the time dependence of the spectrum. The weak exchange interaction parameter (J = +0.5 +/- 0.2 G) provides a direct measure of the dominant electronic coupling matrix element V between the C(.+)-P-C(60)(.-) radical pair state and the recombination triplet state (3)C-P-C(60). The kinetic parameters have been analyzed in terms of the effect of the liquid crystal medium on the electron-transfer process. Effects of orientation of the molecular triad in the liquid crystal are evidenced by simulations of the carotenoid triplet state EPR spectra at different orientations of the external magnetic field with respect to the director of the mesophase. The order parameter (S = 0.5 +/- 0.05) has been evaluated.


This study investigates condom use intentions and their psychological and socio-demographic correlates among forced male bachelors in rural China, based on the theory of planned behavior. Data are derived from a cross-sectional survey entitled "Older males' reproductive health and family life survey in rural China" which was conducted by the Institute for Population and Development Study at Xi'an Jiaotong University in China's JC district, Anhui province in 2008, in collaboration with INED in Paris. Results indicate that condom attitudes, stronger sexual partner norm, and greater perceived behavior control, are positively associated with increased condom use among rural forced male bachelors. Condom use at first sexual intercourse is a significant predictor of the condom use intentions. Younger forced bachelors are more likely to use condoms in the future. These results may help to better understand condom use among forced male bachelors in rural China and also provide theoretical support for HIV/AIDS and STI interventions that encourage condom use at early stages of the sexual life course. Qunlin ZHANG, PhD student, School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China. E-mail: email@example.com . Isabelle ATTANE, PhD demographer and sinologist, INED,133, Boulevard Davout, 75980 - Paris, Cedex 20, France. E-mail: email@example.com . Shuzhuo LI, Professor, Institute for Population and Development Studies, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China. E-mail: email@example.com . Xueyan YANG, Associate professor, Institute for Population and Development Studies, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China. E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com


Many medical centers lack access to the parallel-computing capability that is now needed for large-scale, genetic diagnostic information. Such enhanced computer resources are also needed for recent diagnostic physiological model simulations, and for enhancements in medical imaging. Increases in classical parallel processing capability are incremental and expensive. Quantum computing is the only new computing method that promises a very-large increase in parallel-processing capability. The reason is that the classical-computing unit of information, the 0-bit, or the 1-bit, is replaced by the quantum qubit unit which can be superposed as multiple strings of 0's and 1's. Medical-center research units may also need enhanced parallel computing ability for genome research, protein structure prediction, and the use of new simulations of physiological models. It is suggested that health-research funding and collaboration needs to be directed towards the final development of large-scale quantum computing.


We explore natural and calm interfaces for configuring ubiquitous computing environments. A natural interface should enable the user to name a desired configuration and have the system enact that configuration. Users should be able to use familiar names for configurations without learning, which implies the mapping from names to configurations is many-to-one. Instead of users learning the environment's command language, the system simultaneously learns common configurations and infers the keywords that are most salient to them. We call this the SNAC problem (Simultaneous Naming and Configuration). As a case study, we design a speech interface for workspace lighting control on a large array of individually-controllable lights. We present an approach to the SNAC problem and demonstrate its applicability through an evaluation of our system, Illuminac.


This paper presents a methodology to construct travel related activity schedules for individuals in a synthetic population. The resulting list of activity schedules are designed as an input into a micro-simulator for urban transport dynamics analysis. The methodology involves two main steps. The first step generates a synthetic population based on census data sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The second step assigns individuals in the synthetic population activity schedules using Household Travel Survey (HTS) data related to the geographical area of interest (in this case, the Sydney Greater Metropolitan area). Each individual is assigned an ordered set of trips, travel purpose, travel mode, departure time and estimated trip time. The significance of the methodology is twofold in that it generates a synthetic population aligned with area demographics, as well as generating activity schedules that realistically represent how the population uses existing transport infrastructure. The methodology also preserves the inter-dependencies (in terms of the sequence, travel times and purpose of trips) of individual's daily trips, in contrast to many trip generators for transport micro-simulation purposes. A case study of Randwick area in southern Sydney is presented where the proposed methodology is applied. Case study data is validated against real world results and the scalability and applicability to other urban areas are discussed.


Genomics education in the UK is at an early stage of development, and its pace of evolution has lagged behind that of the genomics research upon which it is based. As a result, knowledge of genomics and its applications remains limited among non-specialist clinicians. In this review article, we describe the complex landscape for genomics education within the UK, and highlight the large number and variety of organisations that can influence, direct and provide genomics training to medical professionals. Postgraduate genomics education is being shaped by the work of the Health Education England (HEE) Genomics Education Programme, working in conjunction with the Joint Committee on Genomics in Medicine. The success of their work will be greatly enhanced by the full cooperation and engagement of the many groups, societies and organisations involved with medical education and training (such as the royal colleges). Without this cooperation, there is a risk of poor coordination and unnecessary duplication of work. Leadership from an organisation such as the HEE Genomics Education Programme will have a key role in guiding the formulation and delivery of genomics education policy by various stakeholders among the different disciplines in medicine.


Born into one of the best families of Baton Rouge, Sarah Morgan was not yet twenty when she began her diary in January 1862, nine months after the start of the Civil War. She was soon to experience a coming-of-age filled with the turmoil and upheaval that devastated the wartime South. She set down the Remarkable events of the war in a record that remains one of the most vivid, evocative portrayals in existence of a time and place that today make up a crucial chapter in our national history. Sarah Morgan herself emerges as one of the most memorable nineteenth-century women in fiction or nonfiction, a young woman of intelligence and fortitude, as well as of high spirits and passion, who questioned the society into which she was born and the meaning of the war for ordinary families like her own and for the divided nation as a whole. Now published in its entirety for the first time, Sarah Morgan's classic account brings the Civil War and the Old South to life with all the freshness and immediacy of great literature.


Abstract. "Learning algorithms" are a class of computational tool designed to infer information from a data set, and then apply that information predictively. They are particularly well suited to complex pattern recognition, or to situations where a mathematical relationship needs to be modelled but where the underlying processes are not well understood, are too expensive to compute, or where signals are over-printed by other effects. If a representative set of examples of the relationship can be constructed, a learning algorithm can assimilate its behaviour, and may then serve as an efficient, approximate computational implementation thereof. A wide range of applications in geomorphometry and Earth surface dynamics may be envisaged, ranging from classification of landforms through to prediction of erosion characteristics given input forces. Here, we provide a practical overview of the various approaches that lie within this general framework, review existing uses in geomorphology and related applications, and discuss some of the factors that determine whether a learning algorithm approach is suited to any given problem.


Most of the existing GNNs can be modeled via the Uniform Message Passing framework. This framework considers all the attributes of each node in its entirety, shares the uniform propagation weights along each edge, and focuses on the uniform weight learning. The design of this framework possesses two prerequisites, the simplification of homophily and heterophily to the node-level property and the ignorance of attribute differences. Unfortunately, different attributes possess diverse characteristics. In this paper, the network homophily rate defined with respect to the node labels is extended to attribute homophily rate by taking the attributes as weak labels. Based on this attribute homophily rate, we propose a Diverse Message Passing (DMP) framework, which specifies every attribute propagation weight on each edge. Besides, we propose two specific strategies to significantly reduce the computational complexity of DMP to prevent the overfitting issue. By investigating the spectral characteristics, existing spectral GNNs are actually equivalent to a degenerated version of DMP. From the perspective of numerical optimization, we provide a theoretical analysis to demonstrate DMP's powerful representation ability and the ability of alleviating the over-smoothing issue. Evaluations on various real networks demonstrate the superiority of our DMP on handling the networks with heterophily and alleviating the over-smoothing issue, compared to


Background Climate change has been described as 'the biggest global health threat of the 21st century'. Taxation based on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a potential mechanism for internalising the wider costs of climate change to society. We ask whether such a tax on UK food and drink would have a positive impact on climate change and UK population health, and what revenue it would raise. Methods and Findings The Living Costs and Food Survey (LCF) is used to derive baseline UK consumption data and food prices. Food specific GHG emissions are taken from a World Wildlife Fund report; cross- and own-price elasticities derived from LCF data are used to model changes in consumption following application of taxes. Health outcomes are modelled by a comparative risk assessment model. Two tax scenarios are modelled, where taxation levels are based on a UK governmental agriculture marginal abatement cost curve: (a) a tax of £2.72/tonne carbon dioxide equivalents (tCO2e)/100g product applied to all food and drink groups with above average emissions. (b) as with scenario (a) but food groups with emissions below average are subsidised to create a tax neutral scenario. Scenario (a) results in 6,750 (95% credible intervals: 6,150 to 7,350) deaths averted and a reduction in GHG emissions of 18,800 (14,700 to 23,000) ktCO2e per year. Annual revenue generated from this tax scenario is £2.03 (1.98 to 2.07) billion. Scenario (b) results in 3,720 (2,980 to 4,460) extra deaths and a reduction in GHG emissions of 16,100 (12,000 to 20,400) ktCO2¬e per year. Conclusions Incorporating the societal cost of greenhouse gases into the price of foods could save nearly 7,000 lives in the UK each year, reduce food-related GHG emissions, and generate substantial tax revenue. The revenue neutral scenario (b) demonstrates that sustainability and health goals are not always aligned.


Shift your strategy downstream. Why do your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors? If you think the answer is your superior products, think again. Products are important, of course. For decades, businesses sought competitive advantage almost exclusively in activities related to new product creation. They won by building bigger factories, by finding cheaper raw materials or labor, or by coming up with more efficient ways to move and store inventory--and by inventing exciting new products that competitors could not replicate. But these sources of competitive advantage are being irreversibly leveled by globalization and technology. Today, competitors can rapidly decipher and deploy the recipe for your product's secret sauce and use it against you. "Upstream," product-related advantages are rapidly eroding. This does not mean that competitive advantage is a thing of the past. Rather, its center has shifted. As marketing professor Niraj Dawar compellingly argues, advantage is now found "downstream," where companies interact with customers in the marketplace. Tilt will help you grasp the global nature of this downstream shift and its profound implications for your strategy and your organization. With vivid examples from around the world, ranging across industries and sectors, Dawar shows how companies are reorienting their strategies around customer interactions to create and capture unique value. And he demonstrates how, unlike product-related advantage, this value is cumulative, continuously building over time. In an increasingly customer-centered world marketplace, let Tilt serve as your guide to shifting your strategy downstream--and achieving enduring competitive advantage.


Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), being a staple food crop, is an important nutritional source providing protein and minerals. It is important to fortify staple cereals such as wheat with essential minerals to overcome the problems associated with malnutrition. The experiment was designed to evaluate the status of 11 micronutrients including grain iron (GFe) and zinc (GZn) in 62 wheat cultivars released between 1911 and 2016 in Pakistan. Field trials were conducted over two years and GFe and GZn were quantified by both inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES) and energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrophotometer (EDXRF). The GZn ranged from 18.4 to 40.8 mg/kg by ED-XRF and 23.7 to 38.8 mg/kg by ICP-OES. Similarly, GFe ranged from 24.8 to 44.1 mg/kg by ICP-OES and 26.8 to 36.6 mg/kg by EDEXR. The coefficient of correlation was higher for GZn (r = 0.90), compared to GFe (r = 0.68). Modern cultivars such as Zincol-16 and AAS-2011 showed higher GFe and GZn along with improved yield components. Old wheat cultivars WL-711, C-518 and Pothowar-70, released before 1970, also exhibited higher values of GFe and GZn; however, their agronomic performance was poor. Multivariate analysis using eleven micronutrients (Fe, Zn, Al, Ca, Cu, K, Mg, Mn, Na, Se and P) along with agronomic traits, and genome-wide SNP markers identified the potential cultivar with improved yield, biofortification and wider genetic diversity. Genetic gain analysis identified a significant increase in grain yield (0.4% year−1), while there was negative gain for GFe (−0.11% year−1) and GZn (−0.15% year−1) over the span of 100 years. The Green Revolution Rht-B1 and Rht-D1 genes had a strong association with plant height and grain yield (GY), while semi-dwarfing alleles had a negative effect on GFe and GZn contents. This study provided a valuable insight into the biofortification status of wheat cultivars deployed historically in Pakistan and is a valuable source to initiate a breeding strategy for simultaneous improvement in wheat phenology and biofortification.


This paper will analyse the restrictive media analysis of postpartum psychosis to a defence narrative in criminal cases of infanticide. From the media's perspective postpartum psychosis only has currency, and therefore newsworthiness, when it is seen as essential to a reading of the court narrative of a mother defending a charge of infanticide or child murder.
Postpartum depressive illnesses are not uncommon – postpartum depression affects more than one in 10 women and one in every 600 women experience a psychosis (Buist, 2002). Women are more vulnerable to psychosis in the post birth period than at any other time during the female life cycle. In the first 30 days after birth, a woman is 21.7 times more likely to develop psychosis than in the two-year period prior to childbirth" (Wisner, et al, 2003). Because postpartum psychosis frequently represents a bipolar spectrum disorder, mood stabilisation and antipsychotic intervention are often necessary. It is associated with hallucinations and delusional beliefs about the infant and is a psychiatric emergency requiring hospitalisation. The mother must be evaluated and the family informed of the potential dangers of infanticide impulses. (Brockington et al, 1982). This is the personal drama that plants the seed of sensationalised journalism. In media terms the cogent fact that the majority of women suffering from postpartum psychosis do not harm their children is from here on in ignored.
Despite considerable research there is still no clear medical consensus on what causes postpartum psychosis and how it should be treated" (Kleiman, 2002). Add to this a dearth of references for the legal and medical professions on the subject of mothers with postpartum psychosis who kill their children (Spinelli, 2002) and the way is left open for the news media to restrict its discourse to judicial and infanticide narratives of the "Mad Mother Kills Baby" paradigm and to speculate and posit opinion as fact. Media attention rarely moves beyond sensationalised infanticide reportage and while there is no doubt that the high profile media cases of Andrea Yates, Melissa Drexler ("The Prom Mum"), Caroline Beale and others in recent years have increased the public awareness, the focus continues to be on the high drama of infanticide and judicial discourses.


ABSTRACT
 The occurrence of visuospatial neglect acts as a key predictor of recovery outcome following stroke. However, the specific behavioural profiles associated with various neglect subtypes are not well understood. This study aims to identify real-world functional impairments associated with neglect, to determine whether functional impairment profiles differ across patients with egocentric and allocentric neglect, and to investigate how neglect severity predicts functional impairments. Notes from 290 stroke patients' occupational therapy functional assessments were qualitatively and quantitatively analysed in the context of neglect type and severity as reported by the OCS Cancellation Task. Overall, neglect patients had more references to having difficulty initiating tasks, finding items, exhibiting spatial inattention, and having difficulty using both arms than patients without neglect. The proportion of theme references did not differ significantly across patients with egocentric and allocentric neglect. The quantitative severity of egocentric neglect was acted as a significant predictor of reference occurrence over and above stroke severity within difficulty finding items, spatial inattention, body inattention, and upper limb use. This study expands on previous findings by identifying real-world functional impairments differentiating patients with and without neglect. This data provides novel insight into the impact of neglect on functional abilities.


The development of information technology in the international world impacts to the use of cyberspace which covers all aspects of national life. Faced to this condition, Indonesian government needs to understand the state of cyber security and build it so that able to address any kind of threat which comes through cyberspace. In addition to internal conditions, the scope of the external noteworthy to be considered due the nature of cyber threats are transnational, cross the line of sovereignty, and has been seen as a common threat by the countries of the world. ASEAN has become a forum for Indonesia's to achieve national interests in order to support national security in the cyber field. Through the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) on cybersecurity initiatives, defense diplomacy strategy directed to increasing mutual trust (confidence building measures) between states and reduce any potential threats that may result from the external sphere. Those efforts, resulted in an agreement in the form of point of contacts between states and a shared vision for continuous training of cybersecurity in the form of seminars and workshops to build the capacity of human resources. Strategies and efforts are analyzed through a qualitative approach and primary data were collected through interviews with 15 informants from various government agencies. In addition, literature, journals, and related documents are also used as supporting data.


Despite the popularity of drones and their relatively simple operation, the underlying control algorithms can be difficult to design due to the drones' underactuation and highly nonlinear properties. This paper focuses on position and orientation control of drones to address challenges such as path and edge tracking, and disturbance rejection. The adaptive function approximation technique control method is used to control an underactuated and nonlinear drone. The controller utilizes reference attitude signals, that are derived from a proportional derivative (PD) linear feedback control methodology. To avoid analytic expressions for the reference attitude velocities, we employ a continuous-time Kalman filter based on a model of the measurement signal — which is derived by passing the reference attitude position through a low-pass signal differentiator — as a second-order Newtonian system. Stability of the closed loop system is proven using a Lyapunov function. Our design methodology simplifies the control process by requiring only a few tuning variables, while being robust to time-varying and time-invariant uncertainties with unknown variation bounds, and avoids the requirement for the knowledge of the dynamic equation that governs the attitude of the drone. Three different scenarios are simulated and our control method shows better accuracy than the proportional-derivative controller in terms of edge tracking and disturbance rejection.


Baroreceptors modulate arterial blood pressure through neural control of cardiac output and peripheral vascular resistance. Hyperthermia reduces tolerance to central hypovolemia, however hyperthermia itself does not alter baroreflex control of heart rate or muscle sympathetic nerve activity. The combined influence of hyperthermia and profound central hypovolemia on baroreflex function remains unknown. This study tested the hypothesis that baroreflex sensitivity (as indexed from ∆ heart rate /∆ blood pressure) would be reduced in hyperthermia compared to normothermia during central hypovolemia. Twelve healthy males (32 ± 5 y) underwent central hypovolemia to pre-syncope, which was induced via progressive lower body negative pressure (LBNP), during normothermia and, on a separate day (randomized, counter balanced) during hyperthermia (+1.2 ± 0.1°C increase in internal temperature). Baroreflex sensitivity was assessed during the final full stage of LBNP completed, and during a 30 second period immediately preceding any bradycardia prior to pre-syncope. LBNP during hyperthermia reduced tolerance by ~58% relative to LBNP during normothermia (normothermia: 72mmHg ±20 vs hyperthermia: 42mmHg± 13; P<0.001). During the final full LBNP stage, baroreflex sensitivity was not different between thermal conditions (hyperthermia: 1.9 ± 1.6 bpm/mmHg, normothermia: 2.4 ± 1.5 bpm/mmHg, p=0.46). Likewise, just prior to pre-syncope baroreflex sensitivity between thermal conditions was not different (hyperthermia: 1.0±1.3 bpm/mmHg, normothermia: 1.5±1.1 bpm/mmHg; p=0.10). These data indicate that during profound central hypovolemia baroreflex control of heart rate is unaffected by hyperthermia. Thus, reductions in the capacity to tolerate central hypovolemia while hyperthermic is not related to altered baroreflex control of heart rate. Funded in part by DOD: W81XWH-12-1-0152 and NIH: HL61388.


Atherosclerosis, a chronic vascular disease, is the underlying cause of over half the deaths in the United States each year. Variations in local vascular hemodynamics predispose select sites in the vasculature to atherosclerosis, and the atherosclerotic lesions, in turn alter the biomechanical functioning of the local microenvironment, the consequences of which are not well understood on a molecular level. Further progress in the field of atherosclerosis will require an understanding of the relationship between biomechanics, the tissue microenvironment, and the cellular and molecular response to these factors. This review summarizes this field, particularly within the context of the vascular smooth muscle cell.


My research intends to explore the ongoing path of contemporary painting through the lenses of architecture, literature, and techne in terms of both methodology and the filter of Eastern philosophical ideas, such as a void and relationships, as expressed in cultural history. In academics, I initially studied English Literature with passionate academic enthusiasm (I learned many poems and read multiple theses pertaining to architecture while attending classes in architecture, French literature, and German literature). As MoMA provides opportunities for studying architecture, fashion and literature, I want to explore the different ways in which certain new trends in the visual arts are now erasing the definite lines between fine art and art of daily life, painting and other mediums, Eastern and Western, and North Korea and South Korea. My trial to amalgamate all visual and aural language is inspired by my denial of the proposition "This is not a painting", which I believe is both a preposterous and a controversial idea. The process includes the grafting of painting on different characters. After Clement Greenberg's dogma era, painting was no longer a matter of trends or story subject matter. The form of painting changes for each generation; however, the content still stresses humanity. For example, Rene Magritte drew a pipe and captioned it, "This is not a pipe". There are two seminal ideas here in Rene Magritte's image of a pipe. The first refers to the relationship between painting and language. The second refers to the relationship between painting and artistic representation. Painting starts from language, but it then evolves to become a visual expression. Thus, a painting can become a mirror image interpreted by its painter's eyes and ideas, not an actual representation of reality. An expansion of the visual language of contemporary painting is not a problem of image content, but rather it is a problem emanating from "a way of seeing", "a way of thinking", and the lens or filter that is employed to "interpret" that image thusly. As Magritte believed, the linguistic assumption that one paints to expand the territory of pictorial language, but then asserts that this image is not a painting, is an attempt to engender different things by adding, dividing, multiplying, and subtracting other visual idioms, thereby stressing the correlation between other visual language and the act of painting. However, that change is a form of painting after all. This view is meaningful in that it is an attempt to discover the possibility of integrating painting with other mediums to rediscover the indispensable, eternal value of painting through a contradictory process wherein the denial of a preposition after all turns new attention to the affirmation of that same preposition. This Is Not a Painting Post Modernism and Painting: For the Humanity by Sunyoung Lee B.F.A., Hong-ik University, 2015 B.A., Pusan National University, 2007 Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Painting Syracuse University May 2018 What has changed in this painting is not the content or theme, but its form. The mission of post-modern painting was indeed to change its form. Painting is not simply an expression of one-sided thought and emotion completed by individual artists. Viewers are expected to see painting from integration rather than judging that painting's specificity which has been shattered in contemporary art. Paradoxically, through the processes of hybridizing, different stage setting, I suggest that the essence of painting is the revival of humanity. The zeitgeist (spirit of the times) yearns for a Renaissance (rebirth). It is a Re-Renaissance that is needed for especially for postmodern people who crave humanity. This paper is of significance in that it is an exploration of painting's identity and new orientation. That is, it is intended to explore the nature and value of painting through a comparative, amalgamative study into other forms of visual and aural language. This is also to consider what new perspectives can be employed to figure out painting's peculiarity as a medium in terms of cultural history, and how painting assumes the role of a precursor couched in different visual languages in terms of form. Copyright © Sunyoung Lee May 2018 All Rights Reserved


This article aims to discuss the possible actors that can determine public policies, and the influence of new decisional arenas on politics. This theoretical work presents the evolution of different models of producing public policies, to the transformations taking place with the adoption of the governance model. Using empirical evidence from the Italian case, the study of new decisional arenas for the determination of public policies shows that there are still several problems to be addressed. Such problems are connected, above all, with the uncertain democratic nature of these arenas, as well as with the impossibility to clearly attribute political responsibility to the choices adopted in these spaces. These are issues and future research questions to be resolved, limiting the analysis to specific case studies, preferably related to the local sphere.


Over the last decade the number of operational incidents responded to, has the UK Fire and Rescue Service has diminished by approximately 40% (Knight, 2013). This reduction in incident number and consequential experiential learning opportunities has resulted in a deterioration of incident evaluation skills by the incident commanders. This paper will detail the application of the 'Introspect model' in conjunction with the use of XVR simulation software, within Oxfordshire Fire & Rescue Service (OFRS). The model has been applied in development sessions and during competence assessment over the last 6 years. In 2009, only 45% of those candidates assessed, demonstrated the desired level of competence, compared to over 70% in 2014. The 'Introspect model' focuses on the understanding of decision rationale, striving towards a state of unconscious competence within the crisis decision maker at the incident, to effectively compensate for the skill fade or inexperience, due to diminished incident exposure.


The leadership strategies used in the new knowledge economy paradigm are more speed to time critical which accelerates the response to new challenges. The way in which these leaders respond to hyper-competition is inextricably tied to the values, vision and attitudes of leadership. It is rather the quality of leadership that determines whether the talents, potential and commitment of knowledge workers will be expressed as innovation competency and creative ideation in the future organisation.


This document and its related chapters also in this issue of E Law constitute a review and assessment of several taxes levied by the State of Western Australia, but which are common in many other jurisdictions. They include land tax, stamp duty, financial institutions tax and debits tax, payroll tax, business franchise licence fees (imposed on tobacco, petroleum and alcohol) and betting taxes. The review is particularly concerned with issues of equity, efficiency and simplicity in the imposition of the taxes reviewed. Criticisms are made on the basis of these characteristics of an ideal tax. Many recommendations are made for the improvement of the method of taxation and assessment. Statistics and graphics included in the original work are not reproduced here due to technological constraints but can be obtained from the author.