Conflicts of interest is a subject that has dramatically increased in importance to practicing lawyers. Indeed, it is now one of the most litigated areas of professional responsibility, where the remedies for a lawyer's failure to avoid impermissible conflicts go beyond professional discipline to include disqualification, fee forfeiture and lawsuits for breach of fiduciary duty. This article analyzes the law of lawyer conflicts in the context of a largely favorable review of the conflicts chapter of the American Law Institute's Restatement (Third) of the Law Governing Lawyers. Noting that a restatement's objectives are to clarify the law, help resolve contested cases, and serve as an educational reference tool, the article applauds the extent to which the conflicts chapter achieves its objectives by: underscoring the legal status of modern lawyer codes, demonstrating how conflicts rules are derived from both the agency and fiduciary law, and emphasizing the frequent availability of remedies other than lawyer discipline. In addition, the author explains how the actual presentation of the doctrine is far superior to either the Model Code or the Model Rules. The remainder of the article addresses the substance of the doctrine itself, covering topics such as: identification of potentially impermissible conflicts; determination whether a conflict is "non-consentable"; clarification of the relationship between Rule 1.7 (the general conflicts rule) and other rules, such as Rules 1.8(a) and 2.2; and resolution of ambiguities involving positional conflicts and affiliated organizations. It concludes with an analysis of such highly contested issues as the extension of screening of former client conflicts and payment and direction of a lawyer by a third-party such as an insurance company.


This case puts the student in the shoes of the recently appointed treasurer of Polaroid Corporation, who must consider several matters concerning the firm's debt policy. An immediate concern is the company's outstanding $150 million 7.25% notes, due to mature in several months. Although investment bankers interested in doing business with Polaroid have been trying to present proposals for refunding the issue, the new treasurer believes that any refunding decision should be part of a larger review of the firm's financial policies. Accordingly, he has undertaken a review of the firm's overall debt policy, focusing primarily on the mix of debt and equity and on the maturity structure of the debt. The case asks students to consider how much flexibility Polaroid's business will require in future years and to pick a target debt ratio that provides the necessary flexibility. Students must evaluate, in addition to internal demands for funds, the role of bond ratings and investment-grade status in maintaining ongoing access to capital markets.


In operational forecasting, many indices are used to assess the stability of the atmosphere and predict the likelihood of severe thunderstorm development. One of the shortcomings of many of these indices is that they are mainly based on observations from the southern Plains. Severe thunderstorms can occur in the northeastern United States in conditions which significantly differ from those expected in the Plains. Few attempts have been made to modify these indices for thunderstorms in the Northeast. A new set of values specifically for use in the Northeast are computed. The stability indices examined are the Showalter index, lifted index, SWEAT, K index, total totals, CAPE, CIN, and equilibrium level pressure. Thunderstorms which occurred between the months of June through August during 19982007 are used in this analysis. Upper air data from radiosondes at eight sites in the Northeast are used to calculate the new index values. These data are analyzed with respect to the presence or absence of severe thunderstorms within 150 km and ± 3 hours of a sounding. Using these criteria, there are 423 soundings which contained severe thunderstorms and 13,012 soundings which do not. Forecast skill is calculated for each index. The best predictor in most cases is the LI, with CAPE a close second. For most indices, the threshold which result in the best forecast indicate less instability than what is typically required in the Plains. Probability density functions and scatter plots are created to visualize the data for all soundings.


Libraries face shrinking budgets, increased use, and user demand for trendy resources. This makes it difficult for librarians to find the time to keep current with innovative library trends, such as technological tools and social media developments. The Special Projects Library Action Team (SPLAT) offers a new model for enhancing library services. SPLAT is a group supported by the Idaho Commission for Libraries (ICFL), the state agency responsible for assisting libraries. The members of SPLAT are innovation representatives who search and experiment with social media trends and online tools, and share the best ways to integrate them into services at all types of libraries. SPLAT members have developed SPLAT 101, an online class geared towards teaching library staff new Web technologies. Members also present about trends at conferences, blog relevant content, and engage in peer-to-peer education--all meant to demystify and exploit emergent technologies. These efforts have yielded enhanced library services, encouraged changes to policies, and increased positive user experiences. In this article we summarize how SPLAT works, explain how SPLAT has helped Idaho's libraries experiment with evolving services, analyze the success of SPLAT as a model for other states, and discuss future steps.


The judgment of the Court of Appeal in what appears to be the latest in a series of significant decisions concerning the former opposition leader Mr. J.B. Jeyaretnam contains pronouncements which have important but disturbing implications for the interpretation and development of the freedom of speech in Singapore and, more generally, for the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore. This note does not hope to deal directly with the law of defamation but with how that branch of tort law is and should be affected by the constitutional entrenchment of the freedom of speech in Singapore. The High Court judgment in this litigation took the position that the constitutional right of free speech was consistent with the common law rules of defamation. More specifically, the implication to be drawn from that first instance judgment seems to be that the common law defences of justification and fair comment sufficiently guarantee the freedom of speech concerning the conduct of public officials in Singapore.


A major challenge in contextual bandits is to design general-purpose algorithms that are both practically useful and theoretically well-founded. We present a new technique that has the empirical and computational advantages of realizability-based approaches combined with the flexibility of agnostic methods. Our algorithms leverage the availability of a regression oracle for the value-function class, a more realistic and reasonable oracle than the classification oracles over policies typically assumed by agnostic methods. Our approach generalizes both UCB and LinUCB to far more expressive possible model classes and achieves low regret under certain distributional assumptions. In an extensive empirical evaluation, compared to both realizability-based and agnostic baselines, we find that our approach typically gives comparable or superior results.


Prior consultation is an increasingly accepted instrument internationally for guaranteeing the rights of indigenous peoples. Conceived of theoretically as a means for conflict resolution, in practice it lies at the heart of social conflicts all over Latin America. Using concepts from the "contentious politics" approach, we take a closer look at Peru – where indigenous mobilizations would lead to the only Latin American consultation law enacted to date. We also critically analyze the content and formulation of its regulating norm. We argue that this new legislation will not help to turn such consultations into a tool for conflict resolu tion as long as the normative framework itself is contested and the necessary basic conditions are not in place. The most important conditions that we identify for implementing effective prior consultation are impartial state institutions capable of justly balancing the diverse interests at stake, measures that reduce power asymmetries within consultations, and joint decision-making processes with binding agreements.


This chapter presents conflicts as a central unit of analysis in investigations of online social mediasharing. Social media sharing services generate interesting sociotechnical problems as they often makesocial structures explicit, resulting in observable user experience conflicts. As such, they also presenta genre of services where theories of social structure become highlighted and, at times, challenged.Three examples of conflicts, from three different types of networks, are presented. The conflicts wereelicited through online, ethnography-inspired, methods. It is argued that the conceptual conflicts helpresearchers and designers to postulate, find and examine concerns and intentions of users who try toresolve the conflict or move from one end of the conflict to the other. Thechapter also demonstrates threeviable ways to communicate analytical conflict insights, intended to inform interaction design, namelyuse qualities, analytical dimensions and design patterns.


We present analytical results on the polarization-mode dispersion characteristics of single-mode birefringent fibers based on statistical properties of the backscattered signal. In particular, we calculate exactly the relationship between polarization-mode dispersion characteristics in forward propagation with respect to round-trip propagation in terms of dynamical equations, differential group delays, correlation lengths, and second-order effects. The theory applies to fibers affected by superposition of linear and circular birefringence in both the short-length and the long-length regimes.


Music is a crucial component of the multivalent discourses of gender operating within the 1940s Hollywood crime film, and it engages with interrelated storylines of crime and romance both to create and to contain agency in the problematic figure of the amateur 'working girl' investigator. The soundtrack is used to position characters within archetypes that reflect anxieties about gendered roles and identities in American society, not only drawing attention to the professional activity and associated sleuthing opportunities of the female lead, but also evoking notions of musical ownership that act primarily to reassert more traditional hierarchies of control. Both conventional 'classical' scoring and pre-existing library cues are shown to be significant within the crime film's exploration of issues of justice, criminality, romance and identity; music engages explicitly with character subjectivity and textual mobility in ways that support and subvert other aspects of cinematic narrative. The following films are discussed in detail: Stranger on the Third Floor (Boris Ingster, 1940), Two O'Clock Courage (Anthony Mann, 1945), Deadline at Dawn (Harold Clurman, 1946), and The Big Steal (Don Siegel, 1949).


Although there is increasing evidence for a relationship between courses that emphasize student engagement and achievement of student deep learning, there is a paucity of quantitative comparative studies in a biochemistry and molecular biology context. Here, we present a pedagogical study in two contrasting parallel biochemistry introductory courses to compare student surface and deep learning. Surface and deep learning were measured quantitatively by a study process questionnaire at the start and end of the semester, and qualitatively by questionnaires and interviews with students. In the traditional lecture/examination based course, there was a dramatic shift to surface learning approaches through the semester. In the course that emphasized student engagement and adopted multiple forms of assessment, a preference for deep learning was sustained with only a small reduction through the semester. Such evidence for the benefits of implementing student engagement and more diverse non‐examination based assessment has important implications for the design, delivery, and renewal of introductory courses in biochemistry and molecular biology. © 2014 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 42(6):474–479, 2014.


The economic cost of fungal infection and its mortality associated with multidrug resistance remain unacceptably high. Recent understanding of the transcriptional regulation of plasma membrane efflux pumps of modest specificity provides new avenues for the development of broad-spectrum fungicides. Together with improved diagnosis and indirect intervention via inhibition of the energy supply for drug efflux, we envisage multifunctional azole analogs that inhibit not only ergosterol biosynthesis and drug efflux-pump activity but also activation of the transcriptional machinery that induces drug efflux-pump expression.


Abstract Objectives: We describe the methods used to develop and score a 17-item 'screener' designed to estimate intake of fruit and vegetables, percentage energy from fat and fibre. The ability of this screener and a food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ) to measure these exposures is evaluated. Design: Using US national food consumption data, stepwise multiple regression was used to identify the foods to be included on the instrument; multiple regression analysis was used to develop scoring algorithms. The performance of the screener was evaluated in three different studies. Estimates of intakes measured by the screener and the FFQ were compared with true usual intake based on a measurement error model. Setting: US adult population. Subjects: For development of instrument, n = 9323 adults. For testing of instrument, adult men and women in three studies completing multiple 24-hour dietary recalls, FFQ and screeners, n = 484, 462 and 416, respectively. Results: Median recalled intakes for examined exposures were generally estimated closely by the screener. In the various validation studies, the correlations between screener estimates and estimated true intake were 0.5–0.8. In general, the performances of the screener and the full FFQ were similar; estimates of attenuation were lower for screeners than for full FFQs. Conclusions: When coupled with appropriate reference data, the screener approach described may yield useful estimates of intake, for both surveillance and epidemiological purposes.


This essay is a reply to "The Implausibility and Low Explanatory Power of the Resurrection Hypothesis—With a Rejoinder to Stephen T. Davis" by Robert Greg Cavin and Carlos Colombetti. In it, I establish what natural laws are, what a miracle is, and how "naturalism" and "supernaturalism" differ as worldviews. Cavin and Colombetti argue that if the Standard Model of particle physics (SM) is true, then the resurrection of Jesus did not occur and physical things can only causally interact with other physical things. I argue that neither point follows.


The capacity of the brain in maintenance of task-relevant information over a short period of time is known to be crucial for performing a wide range of activities from low-level perception-action routines in lower animals to high-level intellectual tasks in human. "Working memory" is the common term that has been used among different communities to refer to the manifestation of this feature across different domains. However, despite this common agreement, dominant theoretical paradigms for describing working memory management systems in the domains of low-level/perception-action and high-level/intellectual functions follow drastically different principles: embedded and distributed in the low-level domain, disembodied and centralized in the high-level domain. Given that the human cognitive system functions at both levels in different contexts simultaneously this question arises whether indeed there are two types of working memory systems running in parallel under two different operational principles in human brain or, a more parsimonious account can explain all different manifestations of working memory in all domains.
In attempt to achieve a more parsimonious account, a theory is developed for functioning of working memory in the context of high-level and intellectual domain which accounts for information management during those tasks that feature symbolic information processing. This effort was partially motivated by theoretical inconsistencies and biological/evolutionary implausibility of standard models of working memory in cognitive psychology with centralized executive paradigm.
The proposed framework demonstrates how novel assemblage of embedded schemas in existing sensorimotor systems may supply a system for management of symbolically represented sensory and motor information serving intellectual tasks. In the proposed framework, strategic and evolutionarily-constrained reuse of sensorimotor resources for management of respectively spatially-organized and temporally-sensitive information support random access and serial access schemas for management of symbolic information. Through grounding access schemas for management of symbolic information in sensorimotor systems we are able to predict ramifications of working memory management during the performance of mental tasks at behavioral and neural levels. A detailed example in applying this methodology in well-studied cases of forward and backward recall tasks will be presented with additional computational modeling and the results of simulations.
Our systematic approach in mapping spatial/temporal characteristics of sensorimotor systems onto access modes provides a symbolic interface to other frameworks and architectures for describing the symbolically-intelligent mind. Proposed framework provides for the first time a neurally-grounded and sensorimotor-based account for management of symbolic information with embodied cognition prospects with opportunities for experimental validations and applications.
Proposed theory offers ample opportunities for experimental validations and predicts novel sources of working memory for symbolic tasks. Moreover, through providing a mechanistic account for management of working memory, the proposed theory, defines a practical framework for optimization of working memory resources for performing mental tasks which has potential educational consequences in measuring IQ and optimal designing of mental operations.
Mechanistic specifications of the model about details of interactions between functioning of visuospatial systems as the main supplier of random access to symbolic working memory in normal subjects has allowed a number of predictions that are validated in experimental studies. Four chapters in part of this dissertation report the results of experimental studies under four different experimental paradigms. These studies have been able to generate significant result in support of proposed theory.


The definition of noise models suitable for hyperspectral data is slightly different depending on whether whiskbroom
or push-broom are dealt with. Focussing on the latter type (e.g., VIRS-200) the noise is intrinsically non-stationary
in the raw digital counts. After calibration, i.e. removing the variability effects due to different gains and offsets
of detectors, the noise will exhibit stationary statistics, at least spatially. Hence, separable 3D processes correlated
across track (x), along track (y) and in the wavelength (?), modelled as auto-regressive with GG statistics have
been found to be adequate. Estimation of model parameters from the true data is accomplished through robust techniques
relying on linear regressions calculated on scatter-plots of local statistics. An original procedure was devised
to detect areas within the scatter-plot corresponding to statistically homogeneous pixels. Results on VIRS-200 data
show that the noise is heavy-tailed (tails longer than those of a Gaussian PDF) and somewhat correlated along and
across track by slightly different extents. Spectral correlation has been investigated as well and found to depend both
on the sparseness (spectral sampling) and on the wavelength values of the bands that have been selected.


This article proposes eight broad criteria for assessing learning material for distance education institutions such as the University of South Africa (Unisa) where learning material in print format is the main teaching method. To this end, the article analyses and evaluates the major trends in the international and national fields of learning and appraises the main elements of a typical learner profile. The criteria have implications for, inter alia, the accessibility and relevancy of learning material, the language of tuition, the
intended outcomes of the learning process, the responsiveness of learning material to societal interests and needs, the quality of learning, race and gender issues, and assessment strategies.


This paper looks into the modeling of information transmission over cognitive interrogator-sensor networks (CISNs), which represent a novel and important class of sensor networks deployed for surveillance, tracking, and imaging applications. The crux of the problem is to develop a channel model that allows for the evaluation of the sensing channel capacity and error rate performance in CISNs, for which the sensing link is overlaid by the communication link. First, the layered discrete memoryless channel and finite-state Markov channel models are identified as useful tools to capture the essence of information transfer over the communication and sensing links in CISNs. Two different sensor encoding strategies, namely, 1) the amplify-modulate-and-forward (AMF) and 2) decode-modulate-and-forward (DMF) schemes, are considered. Subsequently, the concepts of double-directional channel capacity azimuth spectrum (CCAS) and Chernoff information azimuth spectrum (CIAS) are proposed to facilitate network-level assessment of the communication and sensing link reliability. A study case considering a typical CISN for environmental monitoring, conditioned on different wireless propagation and sensing conditions, is then presented to demonstrate the steps to derive the various model parameters. Finally, the potential applications of the proposed analytical framework in cognitive sensing, network performance assessment, and simulation are briefly discussed.


In 2008 a joint German-Russian project POLYGON was proposed as potential contribution to the APEX research network (Jakobsson et al. 2008). Here, we present the project outline whose realisation will hopefully start in summer 2009.Permafrost regions are more strongly affected by ongoing global warming than regions elsewhere on this planet. Polygon ponds, mires and cryosols in wetland landscapes underlain by permafrost are common components of the Arctic Siberian lowlands. The landscapes of the polygonal tundra wetlands are sensitive to environmental and climate change, but such research suffers by large uncertainties in observations. However, permafrost degradation leads to changes in element and energy fluxes, affects relief and hydrology, and has a tremendous ecological impact.A proposed joint German-Russian project aims on investigating polygonal tundra wetlands in a gradient transect comprising three representative sites across the northeast Siberian lowlands in the Lena Delta (72 °N, 126 °E), and in areas of the lower Indigirka river (70 °N, 147 °E) and the lower Kolyma river (68 °N; 161 °E). Using an interdisciplinary approach, modern, sub-recent, and fossil environments will be characterised and compared in order to understand temporal and spatial environmental dynamics in relation to climate change.The proposed POLYGON project aims at answering three interrelated questions:(i) How do polygon ponds, cryosols, and permafrost in the polygonal tundra of the northeast Siberian Arctic lowlands interact and how have they reacted on climate change on seasonal, annual, decadal, centennial, and millennial time scales?(ii) Does the biotic and abiotic states and interactions in polygonal wetlands differ along the climatic gradient from the Lena River region to the Kolyma River region?(iii) How will the components of the polygonal tundra wetlands change when permafrost degrades due to climate change?Cryological, limnological, pedological and ecological features will be combined to link past, present and future environmental dynamics in Polar Regions. Present day environmental conditions and their main forcing parameters will be thoroughly assessed, faunal and floral communities in ponds, mires and cryosols as major parts of the polygonal patterned ground will be described and cryogenic processes affecting these structured landscape units will be observed and evaluated. Species and ssemblages that are indicative for modern ecosystem conditions will be identified and used as indicators to reconstruct Quaternary climate variations and their ecosystem reactions.Based on interdisciplinary research that combines modern and past environmental records, the proposed project will contribute to the understanding of small-scale variations of the climate sensitive permafrost landscapes units and allow a differentiation between external climate impact and internal polygon dynamics.The obtained results will be used for explaining and forecasting future environmental dynamics in permafrost regions. The project will bring together German and Russian permafrost expertise complemented by international partners.


Abstract. Aerosol optical depth (AOD) product retrieved from MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) measurements has greatly benefited scientific research in climate change and air quality due to its high quality and large coverage over the globe. However, the current product (e.g., Collection 6) over land needs to be further improved. The is because AOD retrieval still suffers large uncertainty from the surface reflectance (e.g., anisotropic reflection) although the impacts of the surface reflectance have been largely reduced using the Dark Target (DT) algorithm. It has been shown that the AOD retrieval over dark surface can be improved by considering surface bidirectional distribution reflectance function (BRDF) effects in previous study. However, the relationship of the surface reflectance between visible and shortwave infrared band that applied in the previous study can lead to an angular dependence of the AOD retrieval. This has at least two reasons. The relationship based on the assumption of isotropic reflection or Lambertian surface is not suitable for the surface bidirectional reflectance factor (BRF). However, although the relationship varies with the surface cover type by considering the vegetation index NDVISWIR, this index itself has a directional effect and affects the estimation of the surface reflection, and it can lead to some errors in the AOD retrieval. To improve this situation, we derived a new relationship for the spectral surface BRF in this study, using 3 years of data from AERONET-based Surface Reflectance Validation Network (ASRVN). To test the performance of the new algorithm, two case studies were used: 2 years of data from North America and 4 months of data from the global land. The results show that the angular effects of the AOD retrieval are largely reduced in most cases, including fewer occurrences of negative retrievals. Particularly, for the global land case, the AOD retrieval was improved by the new algorithm compared to the previous study and MODIS Collection 6 DT algorithm, with the increase of 2.0 and 4.5 % AOD retrievals falling within the expected accuracy envelope ±(0.05 + 15 %), respectively. This implies that the users can get more accurate data without angular bias, i.e., more meaningful AOD data.


Embryonic development of the pancreas is marked by an early phase of dramatic morphogenesis, in which pluripotent progenitor cells of the developing pancreatic epithelium give rise to the full array of mature exocrine and endocrine cell types. The genetic determinants of acinar and islet cell lineages are somewhat well defined; however, the molecular mechanisms directing ductal formation and differentiation remain to be elucidated. The complex ductal architecture of the pancreas is established by a reiterative program of progenitor cell expansion and migration known as branching morphogenesis, or tubulogenesis, which proceeds in mouse development concomitantly with peak Pdx1 transcription factor expression. We therefore evaluated Pdx1 expression with respect to lineage-specific markers in embryonic sections of the pancreas spanning this critical period of duct formation and discovered an unexpected population of nonislet Pdx1-positive cells displaying physical traits of branching. We then established a 3D cell culture model of branching morphogenesis using primary pancreatic duct cells and identified a transient surge of Pdx1 expression exclusive to branching cells. From these observations we propose that Pdx1 might be involved temporally in a program of gene expression sufficient to facilitate the biochemical and morphological changes necessary for branching morphogenesis.


IT HAS BEEN OVER A DECADE since the appearance of John Haldane's essay, "Thomistic Ethics in America," first delivered as a lecture at the University of Notre Dame and subsequently published in the pages of Logos. Haldane's essay is in part an encomium to those thinkers and institutions that, in the latter half of the twentieth century, reinvigorated academic moral debate in the United States with arguments inspired by the thought of Aquinas. But Haldane's essay is also a plea for greater promotion of Thomism beyond the walls of academia. The essay urges what Haldane calls the "restoration of serious moral thinking in American public life and in the culture more widely." (1) Haldane diagnoses a cultural degeneracy in American life, rooted in a pervasive and crippling moral skepticism. How to combat it? "With the truth," is Haldane's reply, "and not just any truth but that which matters most; the set of general truths about the structure of reality and about the human condition." (2) It is not that such truths had not been reproposed and defended in the Thomistic revival Haldane praises. But even this revival was not immune from controversy. Debate throughout the 1980s and 1990s between the so-called "new" natural-law theorists and "classical" natural-law theorists drew attention to the question of how the facts of human nature may or may not be related to our moral obligations. The old debates about fact's relation to moral value returned in a dispiriting Thomistic reprise. In his essay Haldane offers his own reasons why we should reject the disassociation of fact and value, yet he does so not merely to score an academic point. For Haldane, the recovery of the idea of moral value's dependency upon the facts of human nature is the key to the restoration of a truly serious moral culture. By identifying the roots of modern skepticism in the divorce of moral value from fact, Haldane indicates that the cure for our cultural ills lies in resources other than the ones commonly available in our postmodern world. What is needed is a revival of forms of pre-modern moral understanding. The general strategy Haldane offers is that of presenting "ethical claims in terms that show their ground in commonly known facts about human nature." Yet he concedes: "It is part of the cultural problem that those facts have themselves become somewhat obscured." So what to do? Haldane submits: "I think the effort to render [facts about human nature] vivid in phenomenological consciousness is best pursued by those possessed of literary and artistic imagination, rather than by philosophers." (3) Haldane's suggestion is that works of literary and artistic imagination are the most persuasive means of showing a degenerate culture the grounding of a Thomistic ethics in the facts of human nature. In short, Haldane proposes a retrieval of what Jacques Maritain calls "poetic knowledge." By poetic knowledge, we should understand a kind of knowledge that comes about via engagement with "poetic" imitations of reality. The term "poetry" is here used in the Aristotelian sense, as including all narrative art and lyric, though we might extend it even further to include music, painting, and dance, understanding with Aristotle that all of these arts are in their various modes mimetic of human character. The promise of poetic knowledge is that it makes a claim to real knowledge, a knowledge that cannot be substituted for by more purely conceptual, analytic modes of knowing. In this article, I would like to explore the rich relationship poetic knowledge enjoys with moral philosophy in the Thomistic tradition--how it first makes possible and even, in a sense, helps complete our moral understanding. I also want to explore the ways in which poetic knowledge can help make Thomistic ethics an even more potent force of cultural renewal in our time. The poetry I will consider in what follows is the poetry I know best: works of narrative fiction. Nonetheless, what I argue has, I believe, intriguing implications also for drama in all its forms, lyric poetry, music, painting, and dance. …


In this paper, to support more precise Chinese Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) term detection and Part-of-Speech (POS) guessing, a unified mechanism is proposed and formulated based on the fusion of multiple features and supervised learning. Besides all the traditional features, the new features for statistical information and global contexts are introduced, as well as some constraints and heuristic rules, which reveal the relationships among OOV term candidates. Our experiments on the Chinese corpora from both People's Daily and SIGHAN 2005 have achieved the consistent results, which are better than those acquired by pure rule-based or statistics-based models. From the experimental results for combining our model with Chinese monolingual retrieval on the data sets of TREC-9, it is found that the obvious improvement for the retrieval performance can also be obtained.


Inhibition of eicosanoid formation in larvae of the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta, using specific inhibitors of phospholipase A2, cyclooxygenase, and lipoxygenase, severely weakened the ability of larvae to clear the bacterium Serratia marscescens from their hemolymph. The reduced capability to remove bacteria is associated with increased mortality due to these bacteria. There is a dose-dependent relationship between the phospholipase A2 inhibitor dexamethasone and both the reduced bacterial clearance and increased larval mortality. The dexamethasone effects on larval survival were reversed by treatment with arachidonic acid. Maleic acid, a nonspecific antioxidant, did not interfere with the insects' ability to remove bacterial cells from hemolymph. The larvae were shown to contain all of the C20 polyunsaturated fatty acids necessary for eicosanoid biosynthesis and to be capable of converting radioactive arachidonic acid into several primary prostaglandins. These results strongly suggest that eicosanoids mediate transduction of bacterial infection signals into the complex of cellular and humoral responses that comprise invertebrate immunity.


Document Type Article Publication Date 2014 Journal Information Research Volume 19 Issue 2 Abstract Introduction. This paper considers the practices of information creation in personal information management by studying the work of keeping track in everyday life, e.g., creating lists and calendars. Method. We interviewed ten participants from two Canadian provinces about how they keep track and we observed and photographed the physical spaces and the documents they created and used. Our data set consists of fourteen hours of interviews, 330 photographs and 500 pages of interview transcripts. Analysis. We used the qualitative technique of constant comparison within an abductive framework of relational and discourse analysis to study a) how the domestic work of keeping track hooks into the requirements of organizations such as schools and workplaces, and b) how talk about keeping track relates to participants' presentations of themselves as good workers, parents, citizens, etc. Results. The work of keeping track functions in terms of Dorothy Smith's concept of the ideological code. A managerial imperative pervades this work, even in domestic contexts, and participants made use of workplace genres and conventions. Conclusions. Even in households, the work of keeping track is embedded within organizational contexts. Managerialism is produced and reproduced as an ideological code that shapes participants' information creation and their talk about it. Notes The first author would like to acknowledge the support of an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This paper is based on a presentation at the Information: Interactions and Impact (i3) Conference. This biennial international conference is organised by the Department of Information Management and Research Institute for Management, Governance and Society (IMaGeS) at Robert Gordon University. i32013 was held at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK on 2528 June 2013. Further details are available at http://www.i3conference.org.uk/  Download


Environmental concerns and energy crisis of the world has led to the search of alternate to the fossil fuel. FAME (Fatty Acid Methyl Ester) is environment friendly, alternative, and non-toxic, safe; biodegradable has a high flash point and is also termed as Bio-Diesel. The growing economic risk of relying primarily on fossil fuels with limited reserves and Increasing prices has increased the interest on alternative energy sources. Clean and renewable biofuels have been touted as the answer to the issue of diminishing fossil fuels. INDIA the largest producer of palm oil has committed to focus interest on biofuels, namely palm biodiesel. Since palm oil has a high fossil energy balance, it is a key source of raw material for biodiesel production. This paper presents palm biodiesel as an alternative source of green renewable energy through a survey conducted from previously researched findings. In this experimental study testing of emission characteristics and performances test of palm Bio-diesel at various ratios form (B25%, B 50%, B75%, B100%) of Bio-diesel. As we compared with fossil fuel (diesel) and palm bio-diesel on base of various emission elements (CO, CO2, NOx, O2, and HC).


This thesis aims to investigate the role of water as a home-making practice in the everyday domestic activities of first generation Burmese migrant households in metropolitan New South Wales, Australia. Investigating domestic water is both an urgent and timely matter. Firstly, this is due to the increasing pressures from climate change, population growth and rising affluence that are reducing the coping abilities of water security networks, particularly in Australia. Secondly, urgency arises from the volume of water that is consumed by Australian households. By focusing on Burmese households, this thesis considers how ethnic minority groups can bring with them 'imaginative capacities' in order to use resources, such as water, more sustainably. The conceptual framework this thesis adopts follows an approach which understands water as an embodied homemaking practice, considers the relationships within the household and pays attention to not only practices, but the reciprocal relationships between users and water. Empirical data was sourced through semi-structured interviews and home insights. The results are presented in vignette-style chapters, which provide in-depth understandings of lived experience. Attention is then given to the drinking and personal hygiene practices across all narratives, exploring how water is used to (re)create sense of home and self. The conclusion argues that whilst many Burmese migrants change their practices following the comfort and convenience of Australian life, certain waterrelated practices are retained to maintain roles and responsibilities and to make spaces of the home feel 'right'. Additionally, the findings point to how through more intimate connections with water, migrants are more mindful and responsible surrounding water use. This may have implications for Australian household sustainability policies. III


Communication is the very essence of life for humans. This is made possible by the highly complex neurophysiological mechanisms governing humans. Any disturbance to this system can result in impairments of communication. HIV infection is one such disease. In India, the management of such individuals is usually restricted to life sustenance. Little importance is given to their communication problems, which play a vital role in day-to-day functioning. It is with this background that this study was conducted. Eight HIV-infected individuals participated in the study. They were subjected to assessment procedures that included the following tests: Western Aphasia Battery, Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment, Standard Articulation test, Fluency test, and subjective assessment of vocal parameters by a speech language pathologist. The results of the study reveal that individuals with HIV-1 infection show a varied picture of affected parameters of voice, swallowing, and oral motor functioning


The purpose of the paper is twofold. Firstly, to formulate a definition of a university's social responsibility that takes into account social expectations from this institution and its internal determinants. The final result of this research is a definition built on two concepts. On the one hand, it is a stakeholder policy, on the other hand, a whistleblower policy. These are the criteria of responsibility, i.e., the rules that make an institution transparent and open to social criticism. Secondly, the article poses the question whether a university in Poland (treated as a dominant institution of knowledge) is rightly seen as an irresponsible partner of civil society? From the business ethics perspective, the more responsible a university is, the more intense are its ties with the social environment represented by stakeholders and whistleblowers. When they fail to play their parts properly, the relationships should be considered dysfunctional. Additional explanation of this problem may be found in the theory of management. Using the concept of the final customer, public opinion can discover if it really is the main interlocutor of the university. The social partners of the university focus their attention on politicians and public administration as the alternative final customer of the academic product.


A series of reduced scale emulations of standard fires in a 2 m3 enclosure have been
developed for studies at laboratory scale enabling useful comparison and correlation
with full scale EN54/7 and UL268 test fires. This makes study of standard test fire
conditions and products substantially more accessible. The reduced scale test fire
emulations have smoke obscuration characteristics matched to the fire standards and
show acceptable matching of experimental CO levels
Sensor, fire detector, and analytical studies have been carried out on test fires in the
2 m3 enclosure and in a full scale test room. Protocols were developed for capture of gas
and vapours from fires on absorbent media and their subsequently desorption and
analysis by GC/MS techniques. A data set of GC chromatograms has been generated for
full and reduced scale test fires and for a number of non standard fire or false alarm
related process including overheating of cooking oils and toasting bread. Analysis of
mass spectrometry ion fragmentation spectra has been carried out and a wide range of
products identified. Products occurring for a range of different fires include propene,
benzene, and some polyaromatics.
The value of the scaled test fire emulations has been demonstrated by monitoring
response of a range of sensors, detectors and instruments including electrochemical gas
sensor, experimental and conventional light scattering smoke detectors, and ion
mobility measurement equipment (FAIMS).
The study has provided information on fire characteristics and products to inform future
research and development on fire detection technologies.


Regulation of the heat- and capsaicin-activated Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) channel by phosphoinositides is controversial. In a recent cryoEM structure, an endogenous phosphoinositide was detected in the vanilloid binding site, and phosphoinositides were proposed to act as competitive vanilloid antagonists. This model is difficult to reconcile with phosphatidylinositol 4,5- bisphosphate [PtdIns(4,5)P2] being a well established positive regulator of TRPV1. To resolve this controversy, we propose that phosphoinositides regulate TRPV1 via two functionally distinct binding sites. Our molecular dynamics simulations show that phosphatidylinositol (PtdIns) is more stable in the vanilloid binding site, whereas a distinct site responsible for activation is preferentially occupied by PtdIns(4,5)P2. Consistently, we show that in the presence of PtdIns(4,5)P2 in excised patches PtdIns partially inhibited TRPV1 activity induced by low, but not high capsaicin concentrations. In the absence of PtdIns(4,5)P2 on the other hand, PtdIns partially stimulated TRPV1 activity presumably by binding to the activating site. Overall, our data resolve a major controversy in the regulation of TRPV1.


Objective: Pronator quadratus plays an important role in movement and stabilization of radius and ulna in distal radio-ulnar joint and used as a flap in traumatic injuries of the distal part of the forearm. Aim: The aim of this study was to delineate the morphology of pronator quadratus muscle. Material and methods: A total of 60 forearms (Rt30; Lt-30) from 30 Indian cadavers were evaluated. Careful dissection of each forearm was done and extent of radial and ulnar attachments of pronator quadratus, width of proximal and distal borders of it was taken. Also, observed additional heads, attachment of origin and insertion of pronator quadratus muscle. Results: Width of proximal and distal borders of pronator quadratus were 28.6mm and 30.2mm respectively on right side and on left it was 28.7mm and 30.1 mm respectively. It had a single head in 33.33%, double heads in 60.00% and three heads in 06.66%. Extents of its radial and ulnar attachments were 45.1 mm and 45.4 mm on right side and 45 mm and 45.5mm on left side respectively. Conclusion: These observations have significant value and are applicable to plastic surgeons, clinicians, anatomists and this study will provide additional information for them.


International intellectual property (IP) protection is increasingly governed by a network of bilateral and regional treaties. Most of these contain obligations on the protection and enforcement of IP that set significantly higher standards than those of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), commonly referred to as 'TRIPS-plus'. Human rights bodies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and academic commentators often criticise these standards for undermining flexibilities available under TRIPS. Such policy space, however, is critical to design national IP laws in light of domestic needs. This chapter makes a case for the continued relevance of the TRIPS Agreement as an overarching, multilateral framework. My argument is based on the role treaty law affords to the object and purpose expressed in Articles 7 and 8 TRIPS. They have not only been recognised as essential for promoting access to medicines in the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health. As integral objectives and principles of TRIPS, Articles 7 and 8 limit the ability of World Trade Organization (WTO) Members to modify their IP-related treaty obligations inter se. Based on their negotiation history and common understandings expressed by WTO Members, I argue for an enhanced role of TRIPS' object and purpose as a loose constitutional frame for IP commitments in bilateral and regional treaties.


Although natural resources, such as water or soil, may seem inexhaustible, in many cases the reality is quite the opposite. Long-term devastation, significant changes in the environment or a natural disaster can fundamentally affect the lives of the inhabitants of a given area and thus deprive them of vital natural resources, housing or livelihood. People in such affected areas are forced to leave their homes and seek their livelihood elsewhere. And this is how the process of environmental migration arises. The effects of climate change increase the likelihood of environmental migration, creating growing challenges for human development and planning. Such vulnerable people have less opportunity to adapt to avoid these risks. Migration thus often seems to be their last resort or strategy. Climate change is a growing driver of internal migration in particular, and there is a presumption that migration due to climate change will intensify over the next few decades and could accelerate even more after 2050. The international overlap of climate migration can be identified as a fairly likely risk for a smaller country and region more severely affected by the effects of climate change, war conflicts and economic and social crises. Recent estimates show that by 2050, climate change will force 143 million people to migrate internally. A recent study estimating the number of people affected by the floods by 2100 states that, according to new sea level rise models, it will affect 190 million people for low greenhouse gas emissions, or 630 million people for high greenhouse gas emissions. Migrants can be expected to migrate from less viable areas with lower water availability and crop productivity (e.g. Sahel, inland China, etc.), or from areas affected by rising sea levels and severe storms (e.g. small low-lying islands, coastal areas) to urban centers. Here they will have to settle in the poorest parts of the cities (slums) with all the negatives that result from it. Robert Stojanov Faculty of Business and Economics, Mendel University in Brno e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com www.chytramigrace.cz


Extracted from text ... 14 Management Today August 2006
Leadership:
why do people choose a
specific person to lead them?
I
Seen at A Leadership Opus, a joint study initiative by the Wits Business School and
Change Partners, were from left Conrad Viedge, senior lecturer in human resources,
Tessa Murray, case writer in the Case Study Department, both of the Wits Business
School, Prof Patrick Fitzgerald, dean of commerce, law and management at Wits,
Andy Johnson, managing partner of Change Partners and author of this article, and
Dr Anthony Stacey, senior lecturer in analytical methods at the Wits Business School.
It is human ..


This statement details Elia Vargas's hybrid research art practice and examines alternative histories of crude oil through the social practice of "Art Inspector" Danielle Siembieda. Using art inspection as a creative framework for understanding the entangled nature and culture of the product Crudoleum, invented by American mystic Edgar Cayce, Siembieda evaluates Vargas's crude oil art practice through an assessment of its environmental impacts. The performative inspection speculatively and empirically examines assumptions about the materiality of oil. The purpose of this statement is twofold: to analyze the constitution of Crudoleum, contextualizing it within a history of other petropractices, and to continue Vargas's ongoing critique of the perspective that fossil fuels are ontologically determinate by humans.


Abstract Introduction. Society of British Neurological Surgeons (SBNS) meetings are important national events which allow for the presentation of current academic work. The publication rate of presented abstracts is considered a proxy marker of the scientific strength of a conference. We aimed to determine the publication fate of presented abstracts at SBNS meetings over a 5-year period. Methods. A retrospective review of SBNS conference proceedings between 2001 and 2005 was performed. To ascertain whether an abstract resulted in peer-reviewed publication, a range of databases (PubMed, Google Scholar, Medline and Ovid) were interrogated. Abstracts published in full were subsequently assessed for journal impact factor (IF), time of publication and number of citations received (per Google Scholar). Results. A total of 494 abstracts were presented. Of these, 181 abstracts were subsequently published in full, giving the conference a publication rate of 36.6%. The mean time to publication from presentation was 22 months (range 35 months pre-presentation to 133 months afterwards). The top three journals for publication were the British Journal of Neurosurgery (23.2%), Neurosurgery (7.7%) and Journal of Neurosurgery (7.7%). The IF of journal destinations ranged from no IF to 38.28 (median = 1.97). Number of citations ranged from 0 to 963 (median = 22). Abstracts with positive results were significantly more likely to be published in full compared to those with negative results (p = 0.0001). Conclusions. SBNS conferences have a respectable publication rate. Those abstracts that are published in full have gone on to gain a considerable number of citations reflecting their scientific relevance. However, studies presented at SBNS are susceptible to positive outcome bias.


Reliability is vital for safe and efficient operation of systems. Decisions about the configuration and selection of parts within a system, and the development activities to prove the chosen design, will influence the inherent reliability. Modelling provides a mechanism for explicating the relationship between the engineering activities and the statistical measures of reliability so that useful estimates of reliability can be obtained. Reliability modelling should be aligned to support the decisions taken during design and development. We examine why and how a reliability growth model can be structured, the type of data required and available to populate them, the selection of relevant summary measures, the process for updating estimates and feeding back into design to support planning decisions. The modelling process described is informed by our theoretical background in management science and our practical experience of working with UK industry.


This paper investigates the static and dynamic performance of current sense methods, which exploit the resistive voltage drop across the current carrying copper trace. This approach promises very low cost since no dedicated shunt resistor is required, no additional power losses occur and no extra space on the printed-circuit-board (PCB) is necessary. A microcontroller can be used to calibrate the copper trace resistance and implement a temperature drift compensation by means of a temperature sensor. Given that today almost every electronic device has at least one microcontroller that can provide the small computation power required for this current sensing technique, the additional cost of such a technique is small.While the proposed technique appears straightforward, theoretical modeling and hardware experiments revealed two unexpected obstacles. First, the thermal resistance between the busbar and the temperature sensor notably alters correction for the temperature drift. We found that it is possible to rectify this behavior by implementing a more sophisticated temperature compensation method inside the microcontroller. Second, it is demonstrated that the self-inductance of the busbar arrangement is not important for the dynamic behavior (frequency response) of this measurement method, and the response is determined by the mutual inductance between main loop and sense loop. Based on simulation and measurements, we demonstrated that a simple RC-compensation network can significantly improve the frequency response.


Abstract From 2001 to 2004, field studies were conducted to evaluate the effect of the ecorational insecticides SpinTor (spinosad), BotaniGard (Beauveria bassiana), Neemix (azadirachtin), and Surround (kaolin) against crucifer flea beetle on canola,Brassica napus L., at the cotyledon stage. The ecorational treatments were compared with a standard foliar chemical insecticide, Capture (bifenthrin), and the chemical seed treatment insecticide Helix XTra (thiamethoxam). This study indicated that flea beetle injury was lower for Helix XTra, Capture, and the ecorational insecticide SpinTor. SpinTor was less effective when flea beetle populations were relatively high (200–300 per trap-week). Yields for chemical insecticide treatments were always greater than SpinTor, with differences being the smallest (68–374 kg/ha) at low levels of flea beetle feeding injury. Differences were greatest when canola seedling injury was high (775–1,364 kg/ha). Yield differences between the conventional insecticides and BotaniGard, Neemix, and Surround were 119–439 and 61–2,248 kg/ha at low and high flea beetle feeding injury, respectively. Although yield differences between SpinTor and chemical insecticides were relatively small at lower levels of flea beetle injury, net losses ranged from $47 to $151/ha when SpinTor was used as an alternative to a standard chemical seed treatment, Helix XTra. This suggests that SpinTor would not be a viable alternative to the chemical insecticide. Net losses ranged from $30 to $266/ha when BotaniGard, Neemix, and Surround were used as alternatives to the seed treatment.


Service-Oriented Computing enables the composition of loosely coupled services provided with varying Quality of Service (QoS) levels. Selecting a near-optimal set of services for a composition in terms of QoS is crucial when many functionally equivalent services are available. As the number of distributed services, particularly in the cloud, is rising rapidly, the impact of the network on the QoS keeps increasing. Despite this, current approaches do not differentiate between the QoS of services themselves and the network. Therefore, the computed latency differs from the actual latency, resulting in suboptimal QoS. Thus, we propose a network-aware approach that handles the QoS of services and the QoS of the network independently. First, we build a network model in order to estimate the network latency between arbitrary services and potential users. Our selection algorithm then leverages this model to find compositions with a low latency for a given execution policy. We employ a self-adaptive genetic algorithm which balances the optimization of latency and other QoS as needed and improves the convergence speed. In our evaluation, we show that our approach works under realistic network conditions, efficiently computing compositions with much lower latency and otherwise equivalent QoS compared to current approaches.


Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2015. In conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT.


Elpida Kyriakou University of Cyprus, 2012 Context is an important aspect to computing, especially in mobile computing. The context can be used to adapt the user interaction with an application, or provide general services and information to the user. Computers cannot offer this kind of information regarding the conditions, in which the communication act occurs, which means they cannot think in context. For this reason, context-aware application becomes important. The introduction of powerful mobile devices has raised the potential of building novel context-aware applications. Such applications let the users enjoy a better experience by sensing their context and automating tasks that would otherwise require significant user attention. This thesis presents a context-aware application, built on top of a presented middleware system. By describing the development steps, we reveal how development of a context-aware application using middleware system becomes easier for developers; relieving them from having to develop and mesh such code in their apps. It is shown that this approach reduces the required development and maintenance effort and thus lowers the associated cost.


Qualitative and quantitative aspects of macrozoobenthic fauna in Edremit Bay were studied. Benthic samples were collected from 20 stations at depths ranging from 1 to 30m in October 2002. Salinity of sea water varied between 35.3 and 38.6psu, temperature between 18.8 and 21.6°C, dissolved oxygen between 2.6 and 8.9mg/l, and silt-clay percentage of sediment between 1.6 and 94.1. A total of 139 macrozoobenthic taxa were identified, of which Polychaeta was the dominant group (44.6% of species. 42.7% of specimens). Shannon-Weaver's Diversity Index (H'), Pielou's Evenness Index (J'), Soyer's Frequency Index (F), Bray-Curtis similarity measure and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient were applied to the presence and abundance of the benthic fauna. Medium diversity index values (between 2.7 and 4.8) but high evenness index values (between 0.75 and 0.98) were determined in the area. The cluster and nMDS analysis showed that there were 6 distinct species assemblages in the area. A positive correlation was determined between silt-clay percentage. and number of individuals, number of species and diversity index value. The number of specimen is also positively correlated with depth.


Abstract:A seismic shift in the racial landscape of the United States occurred in 2016. The prevailing discourse about a "postracial America," though always, in the words of Catherine Squires a "mystique," was firmly and finally extinguished with the election of Donald J. Trump. Race, in the form of racial prejudice, erupted in Trump's political rhetoric and in the rhetoric of his supporters. At the same time, the continued significance and consequences of racial division in America were also being asserted for politically progressive ends by the increasingly prominent #blacklivesmatter movement and by the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, DC, not far from the White House. This article tracks the resurgence of race in the US cultural landscape against the racially depoliticized myth of the "postracial" by focusing first on the HBO television series Westworld, which epitomizes that logic. The museum, which opened its doors against the backdrop of the presidential campaign, lodges a scathing critique of the very notion of the postracial; in fact, it signals the return of race as an urgent topic of national discussion. Part of the work of the museum is to materialize race, to move race and white supremacy to the center of the American national narrative. This article points to the way the museum creates what Jacques Rancière calls "dissensus," and thus becomes a site of possibility for politics. The museum, in its very presence on the Mall, its provocative display strategies, and its narrative that highlights profound contradictions in the very meaning of America, intervenes in what Rancière calls "the distribution of the sensible" and thus creates the conditions for reconfiguring the social order. In part, it achieves this by racializing white visitors, forcing them to feel their own race in uncomfortable ways. The article suggests that this museum, and the broader emerging discourse about race in both film and television, offers new ways to think about the political work of culture.


Understanding the sociological process by which innovations are developed and adopted provides an interesting challenge for managers and marketers. In practical terms, recognizing the various intangible social influences that modulate innovation development and uptake requires a flexible framework which enables the variable stakeholder contributions to be taken into account. Research into the Australian biotechnology industry has provided valuable insight into the social processes in the development and integration of these innovations. Evidence from the industry reveals integration was a dynamic social process directed by the multiple agendas of participating stakeholders. The social foundation of integration activities was strongly reliant on established research and professional associations. Additional networking activities were also in evident through recognised and historic patterns of research and professional associations. The adoption of a sociological framework enables these interpersonal interactions and negotiations to be strategically interpreted for maximum uptake and market leverage. We present a model which recognizes the socio-cognitive framework of stakeholders in innovation adoption as enacted in the acceptance and integration of emerging technologies in the Australian biotechnology industry. By recognizing the key processes in such a framework activities can be developed that are conducive to innovation integration, technology adoption and biotechnology uptake.


Stacked-stacked bar graph is the working title of a visualization which builds on the strengths of a stacked bar graph. Where a stacked bar graph allows for a visual comparison of the parts to the whole, our proposed visualization further divides the parts to allow for additional points of comparison. A pilot study compared our visualization with a stacked bar graph using an identical data set and found that while users expressed some uncertainty regarding how to read the stacked-stacked bar graph, they indicated a preference for this visualization. The study also highlighted the need for additional qualitative and quantitative analysis.


One of the main debates within journalism research during the last decade has been the role of citizens as contributors or, conversely, as threats to the practice of journalism. While participation has been explored from many different theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives, one perspective remains noticeably underexplored – the perspective of the citizens themselves. Using social contract theory as a backdrop, this study draws on a representative survey (N = 2091) and focus groups (N = 82) in Sweden. The results show that although citizens do not bring up participation as an important element of journalism, they become more skeptical the more participation affects journalism. Furthermore, they expect journalists to moderate citizen contributions according to established journalistic standards. From the perspective of social contract theory, participation in journalism appears to be more of a problem than a benefit to citizens.


With the Landslide Tracker mobile app's launch to track landslides through a crowdsourcing model during the monsoon season of 2020, we learned several important lessons that may help us improve the data quality, volunteer participation, and participation from institutions. The 'Landslide Tracker' mobile application allows tracking the landslides and details such as GPS location, date & time of occurrence, images, type, material, size, impact, area, geology, geomorphology, and comments. This app is available on Google Play Store for free, and at http://landslides.amrita.edu, with software conceived and developed by Amrita University in the context of the UK NERC/FCDO funded LANDSLIP research project (http://www.landslip.org/). The Landslide tracker app was released during the 2020 monsoon season, and more than 250 landslides were recorded through the app across India and the world.

Due to the nature of crowdsourcing, we have seen test entries, duplicate entries, entries with apparent mistakes such as the wrong location. In many cases, these entries were deleted by the administrator through proactive verification. To sustain the removal of invalid entries with continued usage, we can allow users to mark a landslide for verification. The administrator can remove invalid entries or approach the original contributor to update the data with minimum effort. Currently it takes under three minutes to record a landslide. To reduce the time further, it is requested to make a single page form to record date, location, images and few questions. To improve volunteer participation for contributing and validating landslide entries, we can implement digital rewards such as points, badges, titles, leader boards, etc. Additionally, allow users to like, comment, and share the landslide entries to improve the engagement. To improve the participation of universities, disaster management authorities, district authorities, and other governmental and non-governmental agencies for contributing and using landslide information, we can implement the institutional management functionality. It allows the institution to configure the staff and manager user. The manager can review, update, delete entries from the team, get reports on the contribution of the staff, and download and share the landslides contributed by the whole institution.


A methodology based on the worst-case approach is proposed for solving the tolerance analysis and tolerance allocation problems for optical systems. Compared with existing methods, the proposed tolerance allocation method has two principal advantages, namely, (1) it is based on an optical geometry gradient matrix and therefore provides means of obtaining the allowable tolerance limits, and (2) it yields the allowable tolerance limits of all the independent variables in the optical system simultaneously. The validity of the proposed methodology is demonstrated using a Dove prism for illustration purposes.


Crop growth models can provide helpful input to the complex process of on-farm irrigation decision making. The use of crop models in irrigation management will likely expand due to improved modeling capability, better data availability, and continued emphasis on water conservation and water quality. With regard to pre-season water management, the results of simulation modeling can aid in selecting crops, allocating water to those crops, and evaluating general irrigation strategies. Within a given irrigation season, crop models can provide a tool for analyzing the yield impacts associated with real-time irrigation scheduling decisions. Limitations associated with these modeling applications are related to model incompleteness and uncertainty, spatial variability in the field, and the difficulty in projecting the final yield response to a series of individual irrigation decisions.


John Gribbin's "In Search of the Multiverse" takes us on an extraordinary journey through the most fundamental questions in science, exploring the frontiers of reality itself. What are the boundaries of our universe? Could there be other worlds - do we actually live in a multiverse? Will we meet another 'us' in a different reality? Or are alternative worlds parallel but separate? John Gribbin guides us through the different theories about multiverses, along the way explaining the every latest thinking about gravity, about time and multiple dimensions, about quantum theory, about matter itself - and even the mind-bending possibility that one day we may be creating universes ourselves. John Gribbin is the best guide to the big questions of science. And there is no bigger question than our search for the multiverse. "The master of popular science writing". ("Sunday Times"). "In this universe at least, it's brilliant". ("BBC Focus"). "Numerous books on the subject have appeared in the past few years, but Gribbin's stands out for succinctness and readability. Long renowned as one of Britain's finest popular science writers, Gribbin combines expert knowledge with straightforward, no-frills exposition". ("Scotland on Sunday"). John Gribbin is one of today's greatest writers of popular science and the author of bestselling books, including "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat", "Stardust", S"cience: A History" and "Deep Simplicity". Gribbin trained as an astrophysicist at Cambridge University and is currently Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex.


A text only Instant Messaging (IM) built on the IETF open standard SIP/SIMPLE has been developed in line with our proposed introduction of a user-defined text Hotkey feature. These act as an onclick Affective Gesture (AG): in similitude to Face-toFace (F2F) expressive gesture-like abilities. Given that text communication possesses expressive discourse with some presence level, we seek to show that one-click textgesture fast-tracking enhances text communication further. For this study, we are taking a hybrid quantitative and qualitative approach. Initial Pre-trial results have shown that an AG approach is more likely to improve IM chat spontaneity/response rate. Further experimental trials are being undertaken. Mobile devices and networks are becoming more data-centric (evident in Japanese I-mode) even as mobile network voice Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) are declining, new stream of data services are required which must take cognisance of handhelds features albeit their small screen estate and input/output limitation. Given that IM is entrenched in the social space, especially among teenagers and gaining wide adoption in the business place, we believe extensions are required for IM steep uptake in the mobile world, much as SMS has gained prominence. Enhanced input mechanisms for handheld IM system are expected to increase co-presence between handheld users and their desktop-based counterparts while in a synchronous discussion.


The cognitive prognosis of acquired brain injury (ABI) patients is a valuable tool for an improved and personalized treatment. In this paper, we explore the task of automatic cognitive prognosis of ABI patients via machine learning techniques. Based on a set of pre-treatment assessments, distinct classifiers are trained to predict whether the patient will improve in one or any of three cognitive areas: attention, memory, and executive functioning. Results show that variables such as the age at the moment of the injury, the patient's etiology, or the neuropsychological evaluation scores obtained before the treatment are relevant for prognosis and easily yield statistically significant accuracies. Additionally, the prognostic relevance of these and other variables is studied by means of standard feature selection methodologies. The outputs of the present paper add to the discussion on current cognitive rehabilitation practices and push towards the exploitation of existing technologies for improving medical evaluations and treatments. Keywords—machine learning; brain injury; prognosis; classifiers; cognitive rehabilitation; neuropsychological evaluations.


Almost 30 million taxpayers who itemized their federal deductions for the 2017 tax year switched to the standard deduction for 2018. The provisions of the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act ("TCJA") that led to this shift were intended to simplify the individual income tax system. This Article's empirical study of federal and state tax filing data, however, demonstrates that the TCJA's simplifying effect varied state-to-state depending on whether a state obligated its taxpayers to make the same choice for state tax purposes (i.e., to itemize deductions or take the standard deduction) as the taxpayer made for federal purposes. In states that obligated taxpayers to make the same choice, taxpayers experienced at least some simplification, and tax administration by the IRS and state tax authorities became materially easier, although the IRS's simplification benefit was dampened to some degree. In states that allowed taxpayers to make state tax choices that differed from their federal choices, the TCJA's simplifying effect for many taxpayers was largely illusory, state income tax administration actually became more complex, and some tax enforcement costs were, in effect, shifted from the IRS to state tax authorities. Thus, this Article's study reveals that state-level rules about tax choices undermined the federal policy goal motivating the TCJA's itemization-related changes.
A taxpayer's choice whether to itemize is just one of many tax elections explicitly provided to taxpayers. Accordingly, this Article's study of taxpayers' itemization choices also serves as an example that illustrates a broader point—state-level rules about whether taxpayers must make uniform federal and state tax elections create important, but previously underappreciated, interactions between the federal and state tax systems. Policymakers cannot fully understand the policy implications of many federal tax law changes unless they appreciate these federal/state interactions. This Article helps policymakers do so.


Active networks accelerate network evolution by permitting the network infrastructure to be programmable, on a per-user, per-packet, or other basis. This programmability must be balanced against the safety and security needs inherent in shared resources.This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of a new type of network element, an Active Bridge. The active bridge can be reprogrammed "on the fly", with loadable modules called switchlets. To demonstrate the use of the active property, we incrementally extend what is initially a programmable buffered repeater with switchlets into a self-learning bridge, and then a bridge supporting spanning tree algorithms. To demonstrate the agility that active networking gives, we show how it is possible to upgrade a network from an "old" protocol to a "new" protocol on-the-fly. Moreover, we are able to take advantage of information unavailable to the implementors of either protocol to validate the new protocol and fall back to the old protocol if an error is detected. This shows that the Active Bridge can protect itself from some algorithmic failures in loadable modules.Our approach to safety and security favors static checking and prevention over dynamic checks when possible. We rely on strong type checking in the Caml language for the loadable module infrastructure, and achieve respectable performance. The prototype implementation on a Pentium-based HP Netserver LS running Linux with 100 Mbps Ethernet LANS achieves ttcp throughput of 16 Mbps between two PCs running Linux, compared with 76 Mbps unbridged. Measured frame rates are in the neighborhood of 1800 frames per second.


»Tiere im Krieg: Der Status von 'Tier-Soldaten' im humanitären Völkerrecht«. In February 2014 the Taliban revealed the capture of a British military working dog in Afghanistan and posted a video of their captive on the internet. Taking this recent incident as a starting point, the contribution aims to evaluate some aspects relating to the issue of a possible incorporation of "animal soldiers" into the scope of application of international humanitarian law. For this purpose, the analysis proceeds in four main steps. In the first part, it is argued that international humanitarian law – although so far largely neglected in the respective discourses – is for a variety of reasons a particularly suitable research object from the perspective of a political theory of animal rights. Subsequently, a brief overview will be given of the current status – or rather nonstatus – of animals in the realm of the ius in bello. The third part addresses and discusses some of the chances resulting from as well as in particular also conceptual challenges arising in connection with a potential recognition of animals as international legal subjects having the status of combatants under the law of armed conflict. Finally, I sketch the probabilities of and possible conditions for a successful implementation of this approach in practice.


[1] Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aerosol products have been used to address aerosol climatic issues in many parts of the world, but their quality has yet to be determined over China. This paper presents a thorough evaluation of aerosol optical depth (AOD) data retrieved from MODIS collections 4 (C004) and 5 (C005) at two AERONET sites in northern and southeastern China. Established under the aegis of the East Asian Study of Tropospheric Aerosols: An International Regional Experiment (EAST-AIRE) project, the two sites, Xianghe and Taihu, have distinct ecosystems and climate regimes, resulting in differences in retrieval performance. At the rural northeastern site (Xianghe), MODIS C004 retrievals generally overestimate AOD at 550 nm during clean days, with the largest errors occurring during winter. In the warm and humid regions of southeastern China (Taihu), MODIS C004 retrievals overestimate AOD throughout the year. The systematic error at Xianghe is primarily due to the fixed surface reflectance ratio, while as the error at Taihu is mainly caused by the choice of the single scattering albedo (SSA) for the fine model aerosols. Both problems are alleviated considerably in the C005. The comparisons between C005 retrievals and AERONET data show much higher correlation coefficient, lower offset and a slope closer to unity. Also, the variability of AOD retrieval among neighboring pixels is reduced by several factors. The strong overestimation problem at small AOD values was fixed by using dynamic reflectance ratios that vary with the vegetation index and scattering angle. However, significant uncertainties remain because of the use of highly simplified aerosol models.


This paper examines the relevance of the Technology Acceptance Model for e-Government websites at federal government level in the United States through an exploratory research study. Various unfunded government mandates over the past several years have required agencies to create websites, put services on the sites, and make them accessible to citizens, and the federal e-Government now includes tens of thousands of sites. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, for example, was passed to ensure e-Government sites would be accessible to persons with disabilities. By studying the implementation of the requirements of Section 508 through a number of data collection techniques and in terms of the Technology Acceptance Model, this paper seeks to use this particular law as an example through which to better understand the processes by which government agencies adopt e-Government requirements and the actions that government managers can take to improve the implementation of such adoption.


Selayar, an island off the coast of Southwest Sulawesi and belonging to the Makassarese-Buginese realm, is dry and rocky, with a fragile subsistence economy. Yet in the late colonial period its economy prospered, as it became an important supplier of copra, or dried coconut, extensively used in the Western oil and fats industry as a raw material for soap and margarine. In the 1920s, the heyday of copra trade, many Selayarese converted their profits from the copra trade into gold teeth and hard cash. Copra thus earned the reputation of 'green gold'. In this book the author analyses the socio-economic history of Selayar between 1600 and 1950 from an Asiacentric perspective. This is linked to wider socio-economic and political developments, including peripheralization, integration into the world market, and colonial incorporation. The themes discussed are of interest to anyone studying the development of maritime societies: commercialization necessitated by a fragile agricultural system, export specialization, trading networks, migration and the unifying role of Islam.


The question on educational identity was, and still is, a paramount question in the South African educational context. An analysis of some of the important issues, as it pertains to the current discourse inside and outside the education sphere, suggests that there is a fundamental need to (re-)define our understanding and conceptualisation of educational identity. The search for new symbols and symbolic meaning, debates about the significance of africanisation, afrocentric identity, and indigenisation of education represent some of the markers in the education debate. A shared notion of educational identity can be ensured if certain conditions, such as a balanced approach to indigenisation, can be adequately met.


Background: Alcohol advertising should be prepared with an appropriate sense of responsibility to the consumer public. In Ethiopia, some aspects of alcohol advertising practices contravene with standards. Objectives: To document alcohol advertising practices and explore perceptions about them in Ethiopia. Methods: A qualitative study was carried out in 2010, in the relevant institutions selected purposively from Addis Ababa: private media/advertising agencies, the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH)/ Food, Medicine and Health Care Administration and Control Authority, Ethiopian Public Health Association (EPHA), Ethiopian Medical Association (EMA), the Ethiopian Youth and Sports Ministry (MYS), Addis Ababa University (AAU), Addis Continental Institute of Public Health (ACIPH), the Ethiopian Broadcast Authority (EBA) and a brewery. Data were generated using indepth, face-to-face interviews with 18 professionals from the nine institutions. Slightly differing interview guides were used according to nature of institutions; thematic analysis of the data on transcribed interviews was performed. Results: Alcohol advertising practices in Ethiopia contravene with fundamental principles of marketing for alcoholic beverages. Advertisers use misleading information about alcoholic drinks, employ people with questionable legal age and use imagery that could be particularly appealing to young audiences. Lack of audience segmenting mechanisms in the media coupled with other forms of promotion such as sponsorships expose, even the very young, to alcohol advertisements. Conclusions: The existing practice of alcohol advertising in the country is against the interest of the public. All concerned stakeholders should be considered in alcohol related policy formulation, implementation and monitoring.


This paper reports on a study which formed part of a multi-perspective evaluation of an Intentional Peer Support scheme within an adult acute psychiatric inpatient setting. The objectives of the evaluation were twofold. Firstly, to explore the experience of Peer Support Workers (PSW) in their new role and, secondly, to examine the extent to which peer support may contribute towards recovery-based practice within the context of the NHS.
PSWs were recruited by a mental health charity for the purpose of the scheme within an inner city borough. The study employed a qualitative methodology. Two focus groups were conducted with PSWs. The findings highlighted that participants described both positive aspects, such as personal growth and adaptation, and challenges in relation to their new role as PSW. Initial challenges, particularly around working relationships with staff, were subsequently overcome during the study period. These findings contribute towards developing an evidence base for the value of the Intentional Peer Support services within the context of recovery-based NHS mental health services.


When in 1808 members of the Portuguese royal entourage arrived in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of a colony most had previously known only through administrative reports and balance sheets, they encountered a hostile and dangerous population that included a large number of African slaves. One of the institutions they brought from Lisbon was the General Intendancy of Police, which was the foundation on which the city's police institutions were built. The government met the challenge of bringing the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro under control with a repressive apparatus that grew along with the problem it was created to solve. Policing Rio de Janeiro is a history of one of the fundamental institutions of the modern world through which the power of the state intrudes on public space to control and direct behavior. It is also a study of the way people resisted the repressive arm of the state, including heretofore unreported cases of slave rebellion as well as forms of everyday resistance. The author shows how the historical development of the police of Rio de Janeiro, through a dialectic of repression and resistance, was part of a more general transition from the traditional application of control through private hierarchies to the modern exercise of power through public institutions. Using the rich records - which include internal correspondence and official reports - of the police system and its civilian counterparts the judicial and jail systems, the author explores the point at which repression and resistance collided, on the squares, streets, and back alleys of Brazil's capital city. The resulting disturbances served as a catalyst for the formation of institutions and procedures that provided a veneer of modernity over traditional attitudes and relationships, protecting and strengthening them. In a conceptual context that includes the ideas of Foucault, Weber, and Gramsci, the author goes beyond institutional history to examine the changing social conditions of Rio de Janeiro and the exercise of power by its elites.


This paper explores the hypothesis that first-order linguistic activities are better understood in terms of ecological, values-realizing dynamics rather than in terms of rule-governed processes. Conversing, like other perception-action skills (e.g., driving) is constrained by multiple values, heterarchically organized. This hypothesis is explored in terms of three broad approaches that contrast with models of language which view it as a cognitive system: (1) conversing as a perceptual system for exploring dialogical arrays (Hodges 2007a); (2) conversing as an action system for integrating diverse space-time scales (Van Orden 2007); and (3) conversing as a caring system for embodying the context-sensitivity and interdependency necessary to realize values (Hodges 2007b). Approaching language as a caring action-perception system leads to a reconsideration of cognitive dimensions of linguistic activities, including consciousness, pragmatics, suffering, and hope.


This paper presents an equilibrium explanation of the interand intrasectoral mobility of workers. Analyses of our samples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth show that, other things being equal, the initial wage decline is greater for intersectoral movers than for intrasectoral movers. Intersectoral movers, however, enjoy higher wage growth in subsequent years on postunemployment jobs than intrasectoral movers do, and hence are compensated for their initial wage decline. Our estimates suggest that, other things being constant, the additional short-term wage loss associated with sector shifts is overturned in no more than four years by the greater wage growth of intersectoral movers in subsequent years. The findings in the current study clearly show that the true economic costs of intersector mobility tend to be overstated in existing studies and are significantly lowered in the long-term perspective. Calibration of a simple lifetime utility model demonstrates that interand intrasectoral movements of workers are quantitatively consistent with an equilibrium framework, at least for a major group of workers who move with longer term perspectives. Evidence also shows that job seekers consider not only the initial wage rate but also the subsequent wages received from the postunemployment job when deciding whether to recommence employment or switch sectors.


According to recent studies, scientists and trend researchers are both quite confident that changes within the next two decades will be much more extensive and pioneering than the changes during the past 20-25 years. Thus, and having all the emerging technological trends and visions in mind (e.g., artificial intelligence or the IoT platform), the complexity will assume an entirely new dimension within our knowledge-based society. In order to be successful in future, however, engineers or actually young aspirants need to change their learning behavior to overcome these new issues in complexity management. Hence, cooperative and application-oriented learning including an exchange of knowledge and experience is increasingly gaining in importance, especially in view of the abstract and holistic thinking within the field of systems engineering.

To deal with this future complexity but also difficulty, freshmen have already to get in the topic of a systematical and methodological procedure to develop comprehensive product systems. Thus, systems design theory and construction serves as the basis for a prospectively integrated view of product design, material and technology selection. Nevertheless, this knowledge transfer can be extremely tedious. For this reason, our education research include an innovative manner of transferring knowledge in a practice-oriented way within the subject "systems design methodology" for first semester bachelor students.

In doing so, and besides the fundamental knowledge sharing in theory and the regular exercises towards its further deepening, a parallel and term-accompanying practical project about "mousetrap-powered vehicles" is implemented within the lecture in a focused manner. Herein, all phases are discussed from the initial product planning (simplified market, competition, technology, and product analysis), to the task clarification as well as conceptual, embodiment, and detail design (fundamental technical drawings as well as 3D-CAD models), through to a prototypical realization. In this way, diverse physical basics such as motion and energy aspects, mechanical principles, as well as surface and fluid friction are put into context of modifications in design, function or technology, which serves as an inevitable engineering basic. Moreover, on the one hand, the students learn how to work on a future typical workflow of temporary project-based activities coupled with its challenges regarding an agile and tight project management (on-time completion, unassisted but efficient concept development and responsibility, and agreement on joint solutions). On the other hand, and based on the selection of a low budget, but no less complex and visual project task of a prototypical conception of a funky, small mousetrap-powered vehicle, an ultimate weak-point analysis, carried out on the self-constructed engineering solution, enables a further educational process due to well-motivated redesign thoughts driven by ambition.

Based on this partly innovative procedure of knowledge mediation, initially a mousetrap car followed by a boat, glider and - at present - amphibian was/is built by all students as precondition for admittance to the exam. To sum up, and due to the great success and feedback of the last years' students, this contribution presents the integrated learning procedure based on an appropriate mix between a step-by-step theory and practical "learning-by-doing" approach.


Experts' views and commentary have been highly respected in every discipline. However, unlike traditional disciplines like medicine, mathematics and engineering, Information System (IS) expertise is difficult to define. Despite seeking expert advice and views is common in the areas of IS project management, system implementations and evaluations. This research-in-progress paper attempts to understand the characteristics of IS-expert through a comprehensive literature review of analogous disciplines and then derives a formative research model with three main constructs. A validated construct of expertise of IS will have a wide range of implications for research and practice.


From Rwanda to Afghanistan, from Sudan to Iraq, this brilliantly written and at times blackly funny work of reportage shows how the humanitarian aid industry, the media and warmongers the world over are locked in a cycle of mutual support. Drawing on her decades of first-hand experience, Linda Polman's gripping narrative introduces us to the key players in this twisted game, to the aid-workers and the warlords themselves. Among many others, there is the Bible-bashing one-man NGO who rescued two Sierra Leonean girls from life in an amputee camp - only to change his mind and try to send them back again; the director of the World Bank in Kabul who estimates that 35-40 per cent of all aid in Afghanistan is looted or lost; and the rebel soldier who explains that war does not mean fighting: 'W.A.R. means Waste All Resources. Destroy everything. Then you people will come and fix it.' "War Games" is an urgent and riveting account from the front lines of the humanitarian aid industry by one of the most intrepid and brilliantly incisive journalists of our times.


The conversion of carbohydrates from wood to make biofuels such as ethanol is a topic of widespread interest. A promising approach is the removal of the hemicellulosic wood component by extraction with subsequent conversion to biofuels while continuing to produce forest products. The impact of extraction on wood strands for use in strand-based composites was investigated. One tree of red maple ( Acer rubrum L.) was used to create strands 10.2 cm long with a thickness of 0.9 mm. Three hot water extraction procedures at 160°C, corresponding to severity factors (SF) of 2.71, 3.54, and 3.81, were used resulting in an average weight loss of 5.7, 16.9 and 18.1%, respectively. Scanning electron microscopic imaging of selected wood strands showed that pores in the cell wall increased as SF increased. The distribution and size of the cell-wall pore structure showed up to a 22.2% increase. The sessile drop method, using distilled water, diiodomethane, and ethylene glycol, indicated more pronounced liquid wetting and penetration as SF increased. Inverse gas chromatography led to the finding that dispersive surface-free energy and acid-base characteristics increase with SF. The extraction procedures should be kept below a SF of 3.54 to minimize changes in adhesion performance.