The Xinanjiang model, a conceptual rainfall-runoff (CRR) model with distributed parameters, has been successfully and widely applied to flood forecasting of large basins in humid and semi-humid regions of China. With an increasing demand for timely and accurate forecasts in hydrology, how to obtain more appropriate parameters for CRR models has long been an important topic. These models have a large number of parameters which cannot be directly obtained from measurable quantities of catchments characteristics. In this study, three different optimization methods are used to calibrate the Xinanjiang streamflow model: genetic algorithm (GA), shuffled complex evolution of the University of Arizona (SCE-UA) and the recently developed shuffled complex evolution Metropolis algorithm of the University of Arizona (SCEM-UA), using streamflow data of the Shuangpai Reservoir in China. Two different time steps of 1 and 3 hr are used in the analysis. The results indicate that the SCEM-UA algorithm can infer the most probable parameter set and furnish useful information about the nature of the response surface in the vicinity of the optimum. Moreover, there is larger uncertainty for 1 hr forecasting than for 3 hr forecasting. This is significant in assessing risks in likely applications of Xinanjiang models.


Understanding as well as rapidly screening the interaction of nanoparticles with cell membranes is of central importance for biological applications such as drug and gene delivery. Recently, we have shown that "striped" mixed-monolayer-coated gold nanoparticles spontaneously penetrate a variety of cell membranes through a passive pathway. Here, we report an electrical approach to screen and readily quantify the interaction between nanoparticles and bilayer lipid membranes. Membrane adsorption is monitored through the capacitive increase of suspended planar lipid membranes upon fusion with nanoparticles. We adopt a Langmuir isotherm model to characterize the adsorption of nanoparticles by bilayer lipid membranes and extract the partition coefficient, K, and the standard free energy gain by this spontaneous process, for a variety of sizes of cell-membrane-penetrating nanoparticles. We believe that the method presented here will be a useful qualitative and quantitative tool to determine nanoparticle interaction with lipid bilayers and consequently with cell membranes.


Carbon (C) saturation theory suggests that soils have a limited capacity to stabilize organic C and that this capacity may be regulated by intrinsic soil properties such as clay concentration and mineralogy. While C saturation the- ory has advanced our ability to predict soil C stabilization, few biogeochemical ecosystem models have incorporated C saturation mechanisms. In biogeochemical models, C and ni- trogen (N) cycling are tightly coupled, with C decomposi- tion and respiration driving N mineralization. Thus, changing model structures from non-saturation to C saturation dynam- ics can change simulated N dynamics. In this study, we used C saturation models from the literature and of our own design to compare how different methods of modeling C saturation affected simulated N mineralization dynamics. Specifically, we tested (i) how modeling C saturation by regulating ei- ther the transfer efficiency (", g C retained g 1 C respired) or transfer rate (k/ of C to stabilized pools affected N min- eralization dynamics, (ii) how inclusion of an explicit mi- crobial pool through which C and N must pass affected N mineralization dynamics, and (iii) whether using " to imple- ment C saturation in a model results in soil texture controls on N mineralization that are similar to those currently in- cluded in widely used non-saturating C and N models. Mod- els were parameterized so that they rendered the same C bal- ance. We found that when C saturation is modeled using ", the critical C : N ratio for N mineralization from decompos- ing plant residues (rcr/ increases as C saturation of a soil increases. When C saturation is modeled using k, however, rcr is not affected by the C saturation of a soil. Inclusion of an explicit microbial pool in the model structure was neces- sary to capture short-term N immobilization-mineralization turnover dynamics during decomposition of low N residues. Finally, modeling C saturation by regulating " led to simi- lar soil texture controls on N mineralization as a widely used non-saturating model, suggesting that C saturation may be a fundamental mechanism that can explain N mineralization patterns across soil texture gradients. These findings indicate that a coupled C and N model that includes saturation can (1) represent short-term N mineralization by including a micro- bial pool and (2) express the effects of texture on N turnover as an emergent property.


We sought to examine racial/ethnic differences in deliveries by caesarean section (CS) over time, particularly among women at low risk for this procedure. To do so, we conducted a retrospective cohort study at the University of California, San Francisco, a tertiary care academic centre. Births occurring between 1980 and 2001 were included in the analyses. Women with multiple gestations, fetuses in other than the cephalic presentation or with other known contraindications to vaginal birth were excluded. A total of 28 493 African American, Asian, Latina and White women were studied. Risk-adjusted models were created to explore differences in CS risk by race/ethnicity. We also performed analyses of subgroups of women at relatively low risk of CS, and explored changes in observed disparities over time. The overall CS rate was 15.8%. The absolute rate was highest among Latinas (16.7%) and lowest among Asians (14.7%). After adjustment for known risk factors, African American women had a 1.48 times greater odds of having a CS than did White women [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.31, 1.68], and Latina women had a 1.19 times greater odds [95% CI 1.05, 1.34]. Stepwise adjustment for confounders showed that this variation is not entirely explained by known risk factors. These differences exist even for women at low risk of CS, and have persisted over time. We conclude that racial and ethnic disparities in CS delivery exist, even among women presumed to be at lower risk of CS; rates have not improved with time. Disparities in risk-adjusted CS should be considered as a quality metric for obstetric care, whether at the national, state, hospital or provider level.


This work shows how to decrease the complexity of modeling flexibility in proteins by reducing the number of dimensions necessary to model important macromolecular motions such as the induced fit process. Induced fit occurs during the binding of a protein to other proteins, nucleic acids or small molecules (ligands) and is a critical part of protein function. It is now widely accepted that conformational changes of proteins can affect their ability to bind other molecules and that any progress in modeling protein motion and flexibility will contribute to the understanding of key biological functions. However, modeling protein flexibility has proven a very difficult task. Experimental laboratory methods such as X-ray crystallography produce rather limited information, while computational methods such as molecular dynamics are too slow for routine use with large systems. In this work we show how to use the Principal Component Analysis method, a dimensionality reduction technique, to transform the original high-dimensional representation of protein motion into a lower dimensional representation that captures the dominant modes of motions of proteins. For a mediumsized protein this corresponds to reducing a problem with a few thousand degrees of freedom to one with less than fifty. Although there is inevitably some loss in accuracy, we show that we can approximate conformations that have been observed in laboratory experiments, starting from different initial conformations and working in a drastically reduced search space. As shown in this work, the accuracy of protein approximations using this method is similar to the tolerance of current rigid protein docking programs to structural variations in receptor models.


The efficiency of the Pigouvian tax suggests that price-based regulation is the proper benchmark for efficient regulation. However, results due to Carlton and Loury (1980, 1986) question this; when harm depends on scale effects a pure Pigou tax is inefficient regulation in the long run. In this note we make precise that there is an efficient tax scheme for controlling harm as long as social optimum exists. In particular, the efficient tax scheme is based on a tax rate equal to marginal harm. Hence, price regulation is the right benchmark for regulation even in the presence of scale effects in the harm function.


In this study we genotyped 14 microsatellites to assess genetic diversity, population stratification and demographic dynamics using Egyptian local goats (Zaraibi, Baladi, Saidi and Barki) and the Shami (Damascus) goat from the Middle East and West Asia close to the geographic center of goat domestication. We observed high levels of allelic and genetic diversity that was partitioned into six gene pools. Cluster analyses separated Zaraibi and Shami, which were identified with independent gene pools of potential ancestral backgrounds. The analyses provided further evidence for extensive sharing of genetic variation, revealing, varying levels of admixture among the study populations. This finding was supported by AMOVA analysis, which indicated that the proportion of genetic variation due to differences among populations was 7.06%. Our results most likely indicate that multiple waves of introduction of diverse gene pools and recent flock intermixing has created and maintained a unique set of caprine biodiversity in Eastern North Africa emphasizing the importance of the region as one of the hotbeds of African animal biodiversity.

 Key words: Admixture, Bayesian clustering, bottleneck, expansion, Egypt.


This thesis consists of three essays related by the themes of networks and macroeconomics. The first essay examines the role of networks in workers' search for employment. Unemployed workers gain employment by sending resumes directly to employers, and indirectly through employed friends. I find that the amount of search effort a worker undertakes is related to how many employed friends it has, and whether networks are substitutes or complements in search. When search costs are linear I find that complementary networks cause those with the most friends to search, while substitutable networks cause search effort to be independent of an individual's network position. Finally, I examine the role of aggregate links on aggregate matching. The second essay examines the impact of networks on aggregate labour market variables, such as unemployment and unfilled vacancies. It is concluded that networks lead to wage heterogeneity, increased unemployment volatility, and higher autocorrelation of vacancy rates. The conclusions follow analytically using an approximation method, and quantitative magnitudes are discussed using numerical simulations. Finally, issues of network formation and multiple equilibria are addressed. The final essay analyzes the role of imitation on firm pricing decisions. A generalization of Calvo pricing is developed. It is shown that price dynamics are much different in a model with imitation. I demonstrate analytically that sticky inflation i can arise. I partially characterize equilibrium prices and inflation. I finish the chapter by generalizing the network effects.


This article is concerned with the interpretation of a cycle of fifteenth-century wall paintings in the parish church of Pickering, North Yorkshire. Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Pickering was a Saxon foundation, but the earliest phases of the present building date to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with substantial additions of the fourteenth and fifteenth. In 1853 restoration work revealed a series of wall paintings on the north and south walls of the nave. Despite a local and national outcry, the paintings were subsequently whitewashed, and only rediscovered and restored in 1876-8. The images within the cycle vary in terms of their scale and subject matter (figs. 3-6). Some occupy the full height of the wall, but others are much smaller and form part of horizontally banded narrative scenes. They include popular saints such as George, Christopher, John the Baptist, Edmund, Thomas a Beckett and Catherine, narrative scenes from the Passion and the Death of the Virgin and moral subjects such as the Corporal Acts of Mercy. They have been dated on stylistic grounds to c.1450. Although the basic structure and iconography of the scheme survived the events of the nineteenth century, much of the original detail and pigment was destroyed by the whitewashing of 1853 and restoration of 1876-8. This has meant that the cycle has been largely overlooked by art historians. This paper attempts to reassert the importance of the Pickering wall paintings in the light of an ongoing programme of archaeological research on the church. The article seeks to explore not only the iconographic content of the scheme, but also the rigid disciplinary divisions between art history, architectural history and archaeology which often results in the inter-relationship of medieval artistic decoration, architectural structure and social space being overlooked.


In the decade following World War I, newly blurred boundaries between male and female created fears among the French that theirs was becoming a civilization without sexes. This new gender confusion became a central metaphor for the War's impact on French culture and led to a marked increase in public debate concerning female identity and woman's proper role. Mary Louise Roberts examines how, in these debates, French society came to grips with the catastrophic horrors of the Great War. In sources as diverse as parliamentary records, newspaper articles, novels, medical texts, writings on sexology, and vocational literature, Roberts discovers a central question: how to come to terms with rapid economic, social and cultural change and articulate a new order of social relationships. She examines the role of French trauma concerning the War in legislative efforts to ban propaganda for abortion and contraception, and explains anxieties about the decline of maternity by a crisis in gender relations that linked soldiery, virility, and paternity. Through these debates, Roberts locates the seeds of actual change. She shows how the willingness to entertain, or simply the need to condemn, non-traditional gender roles created an indecisiveness over female identity that ultimately subverted even the most conservative efforts to return to traditional gender roles and irrevocably altered the social organization of gender in postwar France.


Abstract The United States of America's establishment of the Africa Command (AFRICOM) is one of the practical indications of the post-9/11 discourse of 'securitisation' of Africa under the discourse of war on terror. Within the post-9/11 Western and American thought there was a shift from seeing Africa as a humanitarian case into a new conception of Africa as a zone of conflict within which terrorists would launch their activities. Confronted with this situation, African states should act together and formulate unified foreign policy options if Africa would survive the scourge of securitisation of the continent. In this article we examine the security terrain within which AFRICOM was established and reasons why there was a push for it to be established on the African continent. We see it as part of American hegemonic drive to maintain surveillance over the continent under the guise of monitoring terrorist activity. We also raise the often ignored issue of existence of weak states that is not only used as justifications for such phenomenon as the AFRICOM as well as proliferation of private security companies, but also that inhibits and limits the African foreign policy options. The justification is that African security situation marked by poorly policed borders makes the continent a zone of conflict that has dangerous spill-over to affect the Western and American zones of comfort and peace. Introduction In the current securitisation discourse the interactions between the powerful nations of the North and Africa are marked by shifting politics within which the African continent is approached as a terrain of risk, fear and threat to global peace and stability. This thinking has the danger of reviving the dangerous argument of seeing Africa as offering nothing but chaos, risk and threats to the supposed 'peace zones' of North America and Europe. The open indicator of the securitisation of Africa came in the form of establishment of the United States Africa Command (USAfrican or Africom) on the 1st of October 2007. This was defined as a new unified combat command of the United States Department of Defence to be responsible for USA military operations in and military relations with fifty-three African nations in the exception of Egypt. The justification for this interventionist move was containment of terrorism. The end of the Cold War in general and the 9/11 terrorist incident in particular had far reaching impact on global power politics and shaping of global security architecture. This article analyses how Africa has featured within this shifting global politics and in the evolving global security architecture. Since the end of the Second World War and Truman's speech of 1949, Africa featured mainly in global politics as emerging from colonialism and as part of the underdeveloped world that needed humanitarian rehabilitation. But the dynamics of the Cold War particularly the 'proxy wars' made Africa feature into East-West global security calculations and the West's drive to contain communism. It was during the Cold War that securitisation of Africa began as Soviet imperialism contended with Western imperialism in the centre of Africa in such places as Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, Congo and many other Cold War theatres of war. The securitisation partly took the form of shipments of arms of war into the African continent and partly competition between the West and East to sponsor warring factions within the continent. The liberation struggles against colonialism offered the East and the West outlets to intervene in Africa with the Soviet Union backing many African liberation movements like Movement for Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in Angola, Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU in Zimbabwe, African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa and many others in its bid to paint the continent red. At the end of the Cold War securitisation of Africa took new forms characterised by proliferation of specialised private companies offering military and police services that were previously the preserve of the state. …


Most today's students are comfortable and proficient in searching information using network-based electronic tools. Yet, our experience led us to believe that the majority of these students lacked the skills to effectively use the library to perform independent literature searches, correctly estimate the credibility of different information sources, or properly write scholarly literature reviews. To address this problem, we attempted to teach scholarly literature review (SLR) techniques as part of a computer science graduate course. Our preliminary results showed that with a few carefully designed SLR modules and assignments, CS graduate students could quickly and effectively learn to use proper literature review techniques in their research projects. The improvement in student learning was obvious, while the amount of class time spent on the SLR activities led by the librarian instructor was modest


We present a computable general equilibrium model properly modified to analyse the potential role of the European forestry sector within climate mitigation. Improvements on database and modelling frameworks allow accounting for land heterogeneity across and within regions and for land transfers between agriculture, grazing, and forestry. The forestry sector has been modified to track carbon mitigation potential from both intensive and extensive forest margins, which have been calibrated according to a forest sectoral model. Two sets of climate policies are simulated. In a first scenario, Europe is assumed to commit unilaterally to reduce CO2 emissions by 20% and 30%, by 2020. In a second scenario, in addition to the emissions quotas, progressively higher forest sequestration subsidies are paid to European firms to foster the implementation of forestry practices. Results show that including forest carbon in the compliance strategy decreases European policy costs and carbon price, while it does not lead to significant reductions in carbon leakage. We conclude that while European forests can reinforce other mitigation measures, their contribution as a stand-alone abatement strategy results insufficient to comply with emissions reduction targets. Additionally, carbon sinks provided by European temperate forests do not offer considerable mitigation potential if compared with other forest biomes around the world. A much higher forest mitigation would require other regions to take part in a climate stabilization agreement, especially those where old-growth forests exist.


Two syntypes of T graminum were examined, one of which is designated as lectotype and is described in detail. The synonymy between T graminum and T. incarnata, as currently supported, seems doubtful. The white basidiomata and the presence of conidiomata with sympodulospores on the sclerotia were not reported by Berthier and Remsberg, who studied the original material of T graminum, nor for T. incarnata. A review of the history of T graminum is made and the synonymy is fully discussed. T. berthieri sp. nov. is proposed for T. graminum sensu Berthier. Berthier (1976) used the name T. graminum for a species growing on Molinia and with striate epidermoid layer, and therefore excluding the type of T. graminum. The holotype and an isotype are selected amongst the collections cited by Berthier. All the materials agree with Berthier's description, except for the presence of scarce clamps and for a cuticle of up to 8 mu m thick in old sclerotia, two characteristics not mentioned by Berthier.


This paper presents a novel delay aware synchrophasor recovery and prediction framework to address the problem of missing power system state variables due to the existence of communication latency. This capability is particularly essential for dynamic power system scenarios where fast remedial control actions are required due to system events or faults. While a wide area measurement system can sample high-frequency system states with phasor measurement units, the control center cannot obtain them in real-time due to latency and data loss. In this work, a synchrophasor recovery and prediction framework and its practical implementation are proposed to recover the current system state and predict future states utilizing existing incomplete synchrophasor data. The framework establishes an iterative prediction scheme, and the proposed implementation adopts recent machine learning advances in data processing. Simulation results indicate the superior accuracy and speed of the proposed framework, and investigations are made to study its sensitivity to various communication delay patterns for pragmatic applications.


Background: Research suggests that high sedentary behaviour ('sitting time') has significant deleterious effects on cardio-metabolic and musculoskeletal health, independent of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Adults average about 60% of their waking time and 70-80% of their working time sedentary. Epidemiological and occupational health research provides143support that reducing sitting behaviour and promoting standing and light movement enhances health and wellbeing. However, studies have yet to examine the relationship between occupational sitting and work performance. As a first step to understanding the relationship between occupational sitting and work performance, this study examined whether occupational sitting time was associated with work engagement and job demands.Method: Survey data was analysed from the 2012 STORMONT cohort study. This is a new study tracking a large cohort of employees through and beyond their career with the Northern Ireland Civil Service. 5,235 office-based employees participated in the first wave of data collection focusing on self-report health, wellbeing and working conditions. For this study, individual data on measures of occupational sitting, work engagement and job demands (Management Standards Indicator Tool) were extracted. Occupational sitting time was categorised into Tertiles of low (0-360 minutes), moderate (361-420 minutes) and high sitting time (421-720 minutes). Separate constructs of work engagement were also categorised into Tertiles of low, medium and high work engagement. For job demands, ratios were calculated for high strain, low strain, active jobs and passive jobs. Logistic regression was used to examine the association between moderate occupational sitting time (against low occupational sitting time) and the selected variables, and high occupational sitting time (against low occupational sitting time) and same variables, controlling for age, BMI, physical activity and occupational group. Data were analysed separately for men and women.Results: For men, those who did not meet physical activity guidelines, were smokers, reported low vigour, low dedication, high job strain and passive jobs were more likely to have high occupational sitting times than low occupational sitting times. After controlling for occupational group, only low vigour remained significant. For women, those with low vigour and high absorption were more likely to have high occupational sitting times. After entering control variables into the model, no findings remained significant.Conclusions: The findings suggest that high sitting times are associated with negative work outcomes. This study adds to the sparse literature on occupational sitting time and work performance.


A gas-kinetic solver is developed for the ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations. The new scheme is based on the direct splitting of the flux function of the MHD equations with the inclusion of "particle" collisions in the transport process. Consequently, the artificial dissipation in the new scheme is much reduced in comparison with the MHD Flux Vector Splitting Scheme. At the same time, the new scheme is compared with the well-developed Roe-type MHD solver. It is concluded that the kinetic MHD scheme is more robust and efficient than the Roe-type method, and the accuracy is competitive. In this paper the general principle of splitting the macroscopic flux hmction based on the gas-kinetic theory is presented. The flux construction strategy may shed some light on the possible modification of AUSMand CUSPtype schemes for the compressible Euler equations, as well as to the development of new schemes for a non-strictly hyperbolic system. Key words, magnetohydrodynamics, flux splitting, gas-kinetic scheme Subject classification. Applied Numerical Mathematics


On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, former IRSS Editor John Sugden, one of the foremost scholars to advance a critical sociology of sport and to apply its tenets to Sport for Development (SDP) programmes, reflects on a key question about how the sociology of sport has and can inform social and political activism that engages sport. Noting a 'new orthodoxy that dominates the SDP sector', there is a pressing need for a more critical sociology of sport in engaging strategies, and understanding the limits, of sport in the service of conflict reduction and peace making in divided societies. Building on the tenets of Wright Mills and his notion of 'the sociological imagination' and the work of Brewer connecting it to the ending of violence, Sugden calls on the sociology of sport community to bring critical engagement to the advancement and refinement of using sport as a mechanism to bring about changes in social relations and in the reduction of conflict in divided societies. While it is noted that sport cannot be a panacea for development and conflict reduction, it can play an important role in practical interventions aided by a critical sociology of sport.


Smart surfaces with tunable wettability have aroused much attention in the past few years. However, to obtain a surface that can reversibly transit between the lotus‐leaf‐like superhydrophobic isotropic and rice‐leaf‐like superhydrophobic anisotropic wettings is still a challenge. This paper, by mimicking microstructures on both lotus and rice leaves, reports such a surface that is prepared by creating micro/nanostructured arrays on the shape memory polymer. On the surface, the microstructure shapes can be reversibly changed between the lotus‐leaf‐like random state and the rice‐leaf‐like 1D ordered state. Accordingly, repeated switch between the superhydrophobic isotropic and anisotropic wettings can be displayed. Research results indicate that the smart controllability is ascribed to the excellent shape memory effect of the polymer, which endows the surface with special ability in memorizing different microstructure shapes and wetting properties. Meanwhile, based on the smart wetting performances, the surface is further used as a rewritable functional platform, on which various droplet transportation programmes are designed and demonstrated. This work reports a superhydrophobic surface with switchable isotropic/anisotropic wettings, which not only provides a novel functional material but also opens a new avenue for application in controlled droplet transportation.


A distinctive and widespread belemnite-bearing shale of the Tethyan region is well exposed in the Trans-Indus Salt Range as the Chichali Formation, where it contains two workable ironstone seams. Facies analysis indicates a pronounced deepening in the Upper Oxfordian and Kimmeridgian followed by two regressive cycles marked by a transition from glauconitic–phosphatic shales to glauconitic silts and sands and finally to winnowed and oxidized glauconitic sandy ironstones. The first cycle ends in Berriasian belemnite-rich beds; the second cycle, which has few belemnites, extends into the Valanginian, and is followed by deltaic sediments of the Lumshiwal Formation. Comparison with other areas indicates that the source area for the clastic components was the Indian Shield to the east and south. The increased clastic supply in the Upper Jurassic–Lower Cretaceous is thought to result from tectonic uplift in this source area rather than from climatic change. The ironstone beds are distinctive in being pelletal glauconites compared with the oolitic chamosite and goethite so typical of the Jurassic elsewhere. Enrichment of the glauconite to commercial grade was by winnowing and oxidation on the seafloor. The absence of oolitic chamosite and goethite could be related to generally deeper water and an overall Eh in the environment too high to allow iron to migrate in appreciable quantities as Fe2+.


Assessment of Vulnerability to Natural Hazards covers the vulnerability of human and environmental systems to climate change and eight natural hazards: earthquakes, floods, landslides, avalanches, forest fires, drought, coastal erosion, and heat waves. This book is an important contribution to the field, clarifying terms and investigating the nature of vulnerability to hazards in general and in various specific European contexts. In addition, this book helps improve understanding of vulnerability and gives thorough methodologies for investigating situations in which people and their environments are vulnerable to hazards. With case studies taken from across Europe, the underlying theoretical frame is transferrable to other geographical contexts, making the content relevant worldwide. * Provides a framework of theory and methodology designed to help researchers and practitioners understand the phenomenon of vulnerability to natural hazards and disasters and to climate change* Contains case studies that illustrate how to apply the methodology in different ways to diverse hazards in varied settings (rural, urban, coastal, mountain, and more)* Describes how to validate the results of methodology application in different situations and how to respond to the needs of diverse groups of stakeholders represented by the public and private sectors, civil society, researchers, and academics


 Abstract—In this paper, we propose a simple and effective queue management scheme to provide fairness and differentiated drop precedence at the same time, that is, Dynamic Swapping and Marking (DSM). The DSM dynamically swaps the counts of current queue length between both packets according to their drop precedence within the same flow. In addition, the DSM selectively marks a resided packet with the maximum count among competing flows. Simulation results show that DSM achieves good fairness and sufficient differentiated drop precedence under various traffic conditions.


This paper describes experimental results of applying Subspace Gaussian Mixture Models (SGMMs) in two completely diverse acoustic scenarios: (a) for Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) task over (well-resourced) English meeting data and, (b) for acoustic modeling of underresourced Afrikaans telephone data. In both cases, the performance of SGMM models is compared with a conventional context-dependent HMM/GMM approach exploiting the same kind of information available during the training. LVCSR systems are evaluated on standard NIST Rich Transcription dataset. For under-resourced Afrikaans, SGMM and HMM/GMM acoustic systems are additionally compared to KL-HMM and multilingual Tandem techniques boosted using supplemental out-of-domain data. Experimental results clearly show that the SGMMapproach (having considerably less model parameters) outperforms conventional HMM/GMM system in both scenarios and for all examined training conditions. In case of under-resourced scenario, the SGMM trained only using indomain data is superior to other tested approaches boosted by data from other domain.


Growth and survival of juvenile greenlip (39.03 (SD 3.80) mm (n=524)) and blacklip (31.92 (SD 4.19) mm (n=531) abalone were investigated at high dissolved oxygen levels (95 to 120% saturation) between 17 and 19 C. Abalone were fed the same artificial diet and each species was contained in groups of approximately 30 individuals within triplicate tanks for each of six treatments and were exposed to flow through water adjusted to give experimental conditions for up to 75 days. Blacklip abalone held at 16.9 C and 97% oxygen saturation grew in shell length significantly faster than all other treatments of blacklip abalone held at 19 C, and significantly faster than blacklip abalone maintained at 111% oxygen saturation and 17.5 C. Both temperature and oxygen saturation significantly affected the survival of this species. Blacklip abalone held at 19 C had significantly lower survival for both 96% oxygen saturation and 120% oxygen saturation, compared with blacklip abalone maintained at either 110% oxygen saturation and 19 C, or for any 17 C treatment. No significant differences were noted for greenlip abalone within the range tested in terms of growth rate, food consumption rate or survival, indicating that greenlip abalone tolerated these conditions better than did blacklip abalone.


A health literate health care organization is one that makes it easy for people to navigate, understand, and use information and services to take care of their health. This chapter explores the journey that a growing number of organizations are taking to become health literate. Health literacy improvement has increasingly been viewed as a systems issue, one that moves beyond siloed efforts by recognizing that action is required on multiple levels. To help operationalize the shift to a systems perspective, members of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine Roundtable on Health Literacy defined ten attributes of health literate health care organizations. External factors, such as payment reform in the U.S., have buoyed health literacy as an organizational priority. Health care organizations often begin their journey to become health literate by conducting health literacy organizational assessments, focusing on written and spoken communication, and addressing difficulties in navigating facilities and complex systems. As organizations' efforts mature, health literacy quality improvement efforts give way to transformational activities. These include: the highest levels of the organization embracing health literacy, making strategic plans for initiating and spreading health literate practices, establishing a health literacy workforce and supporting structures, raising health literacy awareness and training staff system-wide, expanding patient and family input, establishing policies, leveraging information technology, monitoring policy compliance, addressing population health, and shifting the culture of the organization. The penultimate section of this chapter highlights the experiences of three organizations that have explicitly set a goal to become health literate: Carolinas Healthcare System (CHS), Intermountain Healthcare, and Northwell Health. These organizations are pioneers that approached health literacy in a systematic fashion, each exemplifying different routes an organization can take to become health literate. CHS provides an example of how, even when the most senior leadership drives the organization to become health literate, continued progress requires constant reinvigoration. At Intermountain Healthcare, the push to become a health literate organization was the natural consequence of organizational adoption of a model of shared accountability that necessitated patient engagement for its success. Northwell Health, on the other hand, provides a model of how a persistent champion can elevate health literacy to become a system priority and how system-wide policies and procedures can advance effective communication across language differences, health literacy, and cultures. The profiles of the three systems make clear that the opportunities for health literacy improvement are vast. Success depends on the presence of a perfect storm of conditions conducive to transformational change. This chapter ends with lessons learned from the experiences of health literacy pioneers that may be useful to organizations embarking on the journey. The journey is long, and there are bumps along the road. Nonetheless, discernable progress has been made. While committed to transformation, organizations seeking to be health literate recognize that it is not a destination you can ever reach. A health literate organization is constantly striving, always knowing that further improvement can be made.


In 1743, sitting quietly with pen in hand, Sarah Osborn pondered how to tell the story of her life, how to make sense of both her spiritual awakening and the sudden destitution of her family. Remarkably, the memoir she created that year survives today, as do more than two thousand additional pages she composed over the following three decades. Sarah Osborn's World is the first book to mine this remarkable woman's prolific personal and spiritual record. Catherine Brekus recovers the largely forgotten story of Sarah Osborn's life as one of the most charismatic female religious leaders of her time, while also connecting her captivating story to the rising evangelical movement in eighteenth-century America. A schoolteacher in Rhode Island, a wife, and a mother, Sarah Osborn led a remarkable revival in the 1760s that brought hundreds of people, including many slaves, to her house each week. Her extensive written record-encompassing issues ranging from the desire to be "born again" to a suspicion of capitalism-provides a unique vantage point from which to view the emergence of evangelicalism. Brekus sets Sarah Osborn's experience in the context of her revivalist era and expands our understanding of the birth of the evangelical movement-a movement that transformed Protestantism in the decades before the American Revolution.


Lt;emgt;Achievement of exclusive breast milk both in Indonesia as well as in West Java still has not yet reached the target of 80% expect. One of the barriers in the achievement of breast milk exclusively i.e., working moms, working moms because it does not give breast milk directly to the baby. Breast milk can be a solution proven dairy mom in giving breast milk. Based on the data coverage in Cimahi Tengah lowest Clinics at area Clinics compare Cimahi, one of the factors in breast feeding dairy. only 49 infants (3.01%) caused the majority of working moms. The purpose of this research is to know the relationship of knowledge of nursing mothers who are working on exclusive breast feeding breast milk dairy with education in working area Clinics Cimahi Tengah in July 2016.lt;/emgt;

lt;emgt;This research aims to know the relationship, the population numbered 49 using total sampling technique. Data collection techniques using primary data i.e. questionnaires, whereas the analysis done in a univariate and bivariate with test chi square.lt;/emgt;

lt;emgt;The results showed of the 49 respondents most knowledgeable good as much as 28 respondents (57,1%), and almost the majority of junior high school education as much as 25 respondents (50.1%).lt;/emgt;lt;emgt; The results of the P value (0.036) lt; 0.05) there is means a significant relationship between knowledge mothers about breast milk dairy with the education mother.lt;/emgt;

lt;emgt;Expected midwives can provide to increase education health and give motivation on mother in giving breast milk.lt;/emgt;


This article discusses the relationship between social justice and social work in a theoretical framework which is structured in the basis of the empowerment approach. It is emphasized that as an academic discipline and also a profession, the primary objective of social work is to ensure social justice. Throughout its development process from beginning to this time, connectedness of social work with social justice is analyzed through critical thinking. In every practice setting, both psychosocial improvement and development focus on the micro level and social change and policy practice focus on the macro level, social work requires a paradigm change to ensure the objective of social justice. To satisfy this requirement, both in an individual's subjective life, and in the process of meeting the needs of large part of a society, the paradigm of empowerment mainly focuses on solutions rather than problems and sees people as actors in their own lives and solutions. Consequently, it is emphasized that, in various practice settings, from individual, group and family level to societal and policy practice level, professional practices which are structured in the basis of empowerment approach will directly serve the objective of social justice.


Abstract Engineers often face the general question of which approximations are appropriate for a given analytical task. In particular, when is a simpler model useful if a more complex model also exists? This paper explores this question in the domain of radiotoxicity relative to geologic disposal performance dose assessments. Criterion 1 requires that the simpler approach, radiotoxicity, must be calculated correctly. The concept of ingestion radiotoxic inventories is analogous to the inventory of toxic chemicals in other industries. From a decision analysis perspective, it is also somewhat analogous to the nuclear reactor safety concept of "passive safety." This paper explains some of the issues in calculating radiotoxicity, motivated by the author's observations of errors in the literature: not accounting for radioactive progeny, misunderstanding natural "ore," and focusing on transuranic (TRU) isotopes without adequate attention to actinide decay products. For example, Th/233U fuel cycles do have lower amounts of TRU isotopes than U/239Pu fuel cycles, but that does not necessarily mean lower long-term hazard. Criterion 2 requires that the uncertainties in the more complex approach, performance dose assessments, must raise issues for the assessments' intended purposes - in which case, radiotoxic inventory may be of assistance until those issues are resolved. Performance dose assessments were developed for, and are legally the way to show, compliance with regulations, but the uncertainties are large. Less obvious is the degree to which dose assessments are applicable to other purposes - comparing fuel cycle options prior to site selection and showing the safety of a fuel cycle and waste management approach to the public. In the last sense especially, performance dose assessments are analogous to probabilistic risk assessments for nuclear reactor safety. The United States lacks a selected consensus site, selected fuel cycle approach (direct disposal versus recycling), and selected waste form. Thus, the paper does not intend to discuss all the issues with performance dose assessments but rather intends to focus on only those performance dose uncertainties that raise issues when comparing fuel cycles. Uncertainties associated with whether a generic geological environment is attractive or a specific location meets requirements are beyond the scope of this paper. Ingestion radiotoxicity correlates with heat, gamma, and inhalation radiotoxicity. Thus, options that are relatively high in ingestion radiotoxicity tend to be high in other parameters. Therefore, reduction in ingestion radiotoxicity means both that the potential source term for release is lower but also that one driving force for release (heat) is also lower. However, the most important time frames differ as heat is mainly an issue in decades and centuries after reactor discharge, but ingestion radiotoxicity is mainly an issue during longer time periods. Ingestion radiotoxicity points to the importance of actinides in long-term waste management, followed by specific fission products such as 99Tc, 129I, 93Zr, 135Cs, and 79Se. TRU isotopes were important in four of five generic geologic environments recently studied independently with used fuel disposal experts as were the same fission products as noted from radiotoxicity - in part because waste assessments must include multiple exposure pathways including human intrusion and drilling into the waste. Dose calculations that were made for used fuel disposal may be misleading if extrapolated to disposal of only the remnants of used fuel separation because the chemistry of waste will differ. Radiotoxicity can be misleading if used to strictly rank order among individual isotopes if a specific disposal option is well known. Hybrid approaches that incorporate radiotoxicity and features of full performance assessments may have value.


Palestine Betrayed. By Efraim Karsh. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 342 pp. $32.50. The Israeli war of independence may have ended with a decisive victory on the battlefield in early 1 949, but the war over the war still rages in academic circles. For more than twenty years, a furious debate has raged in Israel between the so-called "New Historians" and, for lack of a better label, "traditionalist historians." In a nutshell, the New Historians consider the Jewish state to be the villain of the drama while traditionalist historians lay the blame on the Arab world. Now Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London and the first traditionalist historian to systematically rebut the New Historians in his earlier book, Fabricating Israeli History,1 has put the most devastating nail yet in the revisionists' coffin. In this well researched and well written work, based almost entirely on Israeli, Arab, and British documents, Karsh places special emphasis on the Arab side of the story. Through extensive use of Arab primary sources, an approach rarely employed by the New Historians, Karsh paints a picture in which the Arabs are no longer reduced to ing the part of passive "objects" of history, powerless to influence their own destiny but rather become its active "agents," shaping their own future for better or worse. Karsh's sweeping history begins in the decades of the British Mandate, highlighting the massive socioeconomic benefits obtained by the Palestinian Arabs as a consequence of the prestate Jewish community or yishuv's steady development and assistance. In contrast to the latter's willingness to reach a reasonable political compromise on the basis of the mutual recognition of national rights - witness its endorsement of the 1937 Peel partition proposal, which would have created a tiny Jewish state alongside a much larger Arab one in western Palestine^ - the intransigent, self-serving leadership of the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states would not reconcile themselves to Jewish sovereignty in any part of the territory, all the while fanning the flames of conflict with calls to panArab and Islamist ambitions. While Karsh does examine the leading events of the war of independence, Palestine Betrayed focuses mainly on the collapse of Palestinian Arab society, a process, he makes clear, begun well before the actual end of the British Mandate. In doing so, he also offers a compelling rebuttal of two central New Historian myths, namely that the Zionist leadership formulated and then acted upon a policy of "ethnically cleansing" the Palestinian Arab population and that it collaborated with Transjordan to deny the Palestinian Arabs a state of their own. In regard to the first contention, Karsh demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that the dispersion of the Palestinian Arabs constituted a self-inflicted calamity. For starters, during the mandate period, the Palestinian Arabs, in contrast to the Jewish community, utterly declined to develop those national institutions that are so vital to sustaining any population during wartime (e.g., health and welfare organizations), so the masses had no system of support when hostilities began. Additionally, while Palestinian Arab leaders, epitomized by the "Nazi mufti," Hajj Amin el-Husseini, pressed the masses to join the war, sometimes even threatening recalcitrant individuals or reluctant villages, they themselves promptly fled the fighting for safer havens, often not even waiting for battles to start. As one might expect, the masses followed suit. Karsh goes on to trace in considerable depth how both the Palestinian Arab leadership and neighboring Arab states deliberately orchestrated the flight of the populace on numerous occasions, particularly in the cases of the mixed cities of Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. Palestine Betrayed makes clear that most of those Arabs who would become refugees actually began their self-imposed exile either before the Jewish community took the offensive in April 1 948 or before Jewish forces approached their homes. …


Abstract The sixth edition of the Polish Soil Classification (SGP6) aims to maintain soil classification in Poland as a modern scientific system that reflects current scientific knowledge, understanding of soil functions and the practical requirements of society. SGP6 continues the tradition of previous editions elaborated upon by the Soil Science Society of Poland in consistent application of quantitatively characterized diagnostic horizons, properties and materials; however, clearly referring to soil genesis. The present need to involve and name the soils created or naturally developed under increasing human impact has led to modernization of the soil definition. Thus, in SGP6, soil is defined as the surface part of the lithosphere or the accumulation of mineral and organic materials permanently connected to the lithosphere (through buildings or permanent constructions), coming from weathering or accumulation processes, originated naturally or anthropogenically, subject to transformation under the influence of soil-forming factors, and able to supply living organisms with water and nutrients. SGP6 distinguishes three hierarchical categories: soil order (nine in total), soil type (basic classification unit; 30 in total) and soil subtype (183 units derived from 62 unique definitions; listed hierarchically, separately in each soil type), supplemented by three non-hierarchical categories: soil variety (additional pedogenic or lithogenic features), soil genus (lithology/parent material) and soil species (soil texture). Non-hierarchical units have universal definitions that allow their application in various orders/types, if all defined requirements are met. The paper explains the principles, classification scheme and rules of SGP6, including the key to soil orders and types, explaining the relationships between diagnostic horizons, materials and properties distinguished in SGP6 and in the recent edition of WRB system as well as discussing the correlation of classification units between SGP6, WRB and Soil Taxonomy.


Evidence is presented of a general increase in river flows in four catchments in the West of Scotland in the last 30 years. The increase has been significantly higher than the increase in rainfall over the same period. It is postulated that the more than proportionate increase is due to changes in the distribution and pattern of rainfall events although changes in evapotranspiraiion rates are also considered.


Abstract.
 As paleontological studies are generally distorted by gaps and biases in the fossil record, it is important to assess its completeness. Here we address the fossil record of Parareptilia, a Permian—Triassic amniote clade, applying two measures of specimen completeness: the skeletal completeness metric (SCM) and the character completeness metric (CCM). The SCM quantifies how much of the skeletal material of a taxon is preserved, whereas the CCM measures the amount of phylogenetic information available. The latter was implemented using two different approaches. In this study, we compare three completeness metrics. Two CCM implementations show a strong correlation with each other, but only the second implementation of the CCM correlates significantly with the SCM, possibly due to character selection in phylogenetic data sets. There is no correlation between diversity of parareptiles and their completeness, implying that the observed fluctuations in diversity are not driven by the completeness of the fossils. The mean completeness of parareptiles through time is consistently high compared with previously studied tetrapod clades, suggesting that most parareptile taxa are based on reasonably complete specimens. Clade-specific differences reveal no link between body size and completeness. However, the analyses confirm the impact of ecology, with aquatic mesosaurids being better preserved than terrestrial taxa.


The use of a packet's Time to Live (TTL) (IPv4) or Hop Limit (IPv6) to protect a protocol stack from CPU-utilization based attacks has been proposed in many settings (see for example, RFC 2461). This document generalizes these techniques for use by other protocols such as BGP (RFC 1771), Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP), Bidirectional Forwarding Detection, and Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) (RFC 3036). While the Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM) is most effective in protecting directly connected protocol peers, it can also provide a lower level of protection to multi-hop sessions. GTSM is not directly applicable to protocols employing flooding mechanisms (e.g., multicast), and use of multi-hop GTSM should be considered on a case-by-case basis.


Clustering is a key technique within the KDD process, with k-means, and the more general k-medoids, being well-known incremental partition-based clustering algorithms. A fundamental issue within this class of algorithms is to find an initial set of medians (or medoids) that improves the efficiency of the algorithms (e.g., accelerating its convergence to a solution), at the same time that it improves its effectiveness (e.g., finding more meaningful clusters). Thus, in this article we aim at providing a technique that, given a set of elements, quickly finds a very small number of elements as medoid candidates for this set, allowing to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of existing clustering algorithms. We target the class of k-medoids algorithms in general, and propose a technique that selects a well-positioned subset of central elements to serve as the initial set of medoids for the clustering process. Our technique leads to a substantially smaller amount of distance calculations, thus improving the algorithm's efficiency when compared to existing methods, without sacrificing effectiveness.  A salient feature of our proposed technique is that it is not a new k-medoid clustering algorithm per se, rather, it can be used in conjunction with any existing clustering algorithm that is based on the k-medoid paradigm. Experimental results, using both synthetic and real datasets, confirm the efficiency, effectiveness and scalability of the proposed technique.


The current healthcare system requires nurses to utilize innovations and effective leadership to achieve positive health outcomes for their patients. Public health nurses (PHNs) are in a unique position to utilize leadership and advocacy to increase the overall health and well-being of their clients. Domestic violence (DV) is a serious and widespread public health issue and PHNs have a crucial role in providing a preventative and coordinated approach to identifying and responding to DV. This article describes the process through which a group of front line PHNs took an active role in leading the development and implementation of a pilot project to address DV within their practice area. Through the development of a working group, a foundation for guidance was established to reinforce the role of the PHNs in advocating for the need to shift the focus of DV interventions from a reactive to a proactive approach. The DV assessment pilot project is an example for practice and a motivator for nurses to be leaders for change within their practice areas.


The sodium iodide symporter (SLC5A5/NIS) as theranostic gene would allow for non-invasive imaging of functional NIS expression and therapeutic radioiodine application. Genetically engineered mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), based on their tumor-homing abilities, show great promise as tumor-selective NIS gene delivery vehicles for non-thyroidal tumors. As a next step towards clinical application, tumor specificity and efficacy of MSCs were investigated in an advanced genetically engineered mouse model of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Syngeneic murine MSCs were stably transfected with a NIS-expressing plasmid driven by the CMV-promoter (NIS-MSC). In vivo 123I-scintigraphy and 124I-PET revealed significant perchlorate-sensitive NIS-mediated radioiodide accumulation in PDAC after systemic injection of NIS-MSCs. Active MSC recruitment into the tumor stroma was confirmed using NIS immunohistochemistry (IHC). A therapeutic strategy, consisting of three cycles of systemic MSC-mediated NIS delivery, followed by 131I application, resulted in a significant delay and reduction in tumor growth as compared to controls. Furthermore, IHC analysis of α-SMA and Ki67 revealed differences in the amount and behavior of activated fibroblasts in tumors of mice injected with NIS-MSCs as compared with saline-treated mice. Taken together, MSCs as NIS gene delivery vehicles in this advanced endogenous PDAC mouse model demonstrated high stromal targeting of NIS by selective recruitment of NIS-MSCs after systemic application resulting in an impressive 131I therapeutic effect. Implications: These data expand the prospect of MSC-mediated radioiodine imaging-guided therapy of pancreatic cancer using the sodium iodide symporter as a theranostic gene in a clinical setting.


This paper examines the derivation of two types of A′-dependencies — relative clauses and Left-Dislocation structures — in the framework of Minimalist Program based on Mandarin data. Relatives and LD structures demonstrate many distinct syntactic and semantic properties when they contain a gap and a resumptive pronoun respectively. A thorough study of the relevant data reveals that when a gap strategy is adopted, island effects and crossover effects are always observed, irrespective of whether the relevant gap is embedded within a relative clause or within an LD structure; on the contrary, when the resumptive strategy is adopted, a sharp distinction is observed between these two structures. A resumptive relative clause gives rise to island effects and crossover effects systematically; by contrast, a resumptive LD structure never gives rise to these effects. In the Minimalist Program, island effects and crossover effects are not exclusively used as diagnostic tests for movement since the operation Agree is also subject to locality constraints. I will argue that a relative clause containing either a gap or an RP and an LD structure with gap are derived by Agree and they are subject to the locality condition whereas a resumptive LD structure is derived by Match that is an island free operation and it is not subject to the locality constraint. Multiple Transfer and multiple Spell-Out are possible in an Agree chain, but not in a Matching chain. The choice of the derivational mechanism depends on the interpretability of the formal features attached to the Probe and to the Goal in the relevant A′-dependencies.


The global financial crisis has exposed the complexity of modern financial markets. One of the primary drivers of this complexity has been financial innovation. From sub-prime mortgages, securitization and credit default swaps to sophisticated quantitative models for measuring and managing risk, the footprints of financial innovation can be found at almost every step along the road to the Great Recession. More broadly, complexity and innovation have combined to generate significant asymmetries of information and expertise between public regulators and private actors, thereby exacerbating the agency problems which pervade financial markets. At the same time, the pace of innovation has left regulators and regulation chronically behind the curve. This paper examines the desirability of 'more principles-based' regulation (MPBR) as a response to the challenges stemming from the complexity and innovativeness of modern financial markets. This paper advances the scholarly and public policy debates surrounding the optimal approach toward financial regulation in three ways. First, it re-conceptualizes the theoretical core of MPBR and demonstrates how this core transcends the now stale 'rules versus principles' debate within which the debate over MPBR has been historically mired. Second, using over-the-counter derivatives markets as a case study, it illuminates the pervasiveness and significance of asymmetries of information and expertise and agency problems within complex, innovative financial markets and how MPBR manifests the potential to address many of the attendant regulatory challenges. Finally, it moves the debate beyond the structure, perimeter and even substance of regulation and toward the examination of the optimal philosophy of regulation given the complexity and innovation exhibited within modern financial markets.


This book provides a first synthetic view of an emerging area of ecology and biogeography, linking individual- and population-level processes to geographic distributions and biodiversity patterns. Problems in evolutionary ecology, macroecology, and biogeography are illuminated by this integrative view. The book focuses on correlative approaches known as ecological niche modeling, species distribution modeling, or habitat suitability modeling, which use associations between known occurrences of species and environmental variables to identify environmental conditions under which populations can be maintained. The spatial distribution of environments suitable for the species can then be estimated: a potential distribution for the species. This approach has broad applicability to ecology, evolution, biogeography, and conservation biology, as well as to understanding the geographic potential of invasive species and infectious diseases, and the biological implications of climate change. The authors lay out conceptual foundations and general principles for understanding and interpreting species distributions with respect to geography and environment. Focus is on development of niche models. While serving as a guide for students and researchers, the book also provides a theoretical framework to support future progress in the field.


The objective of this study is to review published literature on bladder augmentation in children and young adults (C&YA) with a neuropathic bladder following a neural tube defect or spinal cord injury to inform nursing practice and patient education. Medline, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO and the British Nursing Index were systematically searched to identify studies. The papers reviewed were case studies and medical note review in single centres regarding outcome and post-operative complications. This limits the generalisability of the findings surrounding outcome and risk of bladder augmentation surgery in C&YA. Evidence suggests irrigation has a role in ongoing bladder management to reduce complications such as bladder calculi. However, data are sparse regarding both appropriate irrigation solutions and the frequency of irrigation necessary to minimise calculi formation. A statistically significant increase is noted in the risk of perforation following bladder augmentation when associated with bladder neck surgery at the time of primary surgery. Limited evidence exists regarding longer term systemic implications of bladder augmentation, such as malignancy or impact on bone mineral density. None of the studies demonstrated an overall improvement in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) following bladder augmentation. Discrepancies exist between parental and children's HRQoL scores. Bladder augmentation is clinically the standard surgical treatment used to manage refractory neuropathic bladder. However, current evidence demonstrates no improvements to HRQoL following surgery and also describes various complications. Future research in this area is necessary to explore standards of care and most importantly long-term outcome measures from the patient and professional perspective.


Purpose: Against the backdrop of a new governance regime of schools in Austria, which combines policies of decentralisation and school autonomy with an accountability program of standardised outcome control, this article explores how the so called "agents of change" – teachers and headteachers – take up these ideas and corresponding governance instruments and frame them on grounds of moral considerations. The aim is to present a theoretical framework for analysing – at the individual level – moments of critical evaluation and affirmative justification of more general political actions as well as of every day's work practices.Approach: Drawing on the concept of orders of justification and the pragmatist theory of conventions, a qualitative, interview-study with 15 teachers and head teachers in Austrian middle schools was conducted with the intention to discover a repertoire of educational conventions applied by the actors to criticise or justify reform-based decisions, expectations and subjective claims to work.Findings: Besides presenting seven conventions, the article puts a special focus on arguments and corresponding conventions that – on one hand – characterise an economic perspective on schools and education (the market, industrial and flexible convention) and are thus important in deciding whether the new education governance regime is supported by an 'economised' constellation of frames that teachers and head teachers use to interpret their actions as well as others. One the other hand, the role of the civic convention receives special attention in relation to the aforementioned ones to include a further aspect into the diagnosis of an economisation of educational practices.


The remarkable movement known as Solidarity recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in Poland. This essay provides a theoretical appreciation of the values and principles that guided and undergirded the movement, which greatly contributed to the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. This systematic overview of the ethic of the Solidarity movement fills a lacuna in the field of ethics because ethicists who are interested in the concept of solidarity have largely overlooked the Polish experience of the 1980s. This essay attempts to describe the key ingredients of the Polish ethic of solidarity by analyzing both Polish treatises on the subject and accounts of events on the ground. It elaborates conceptual categories and describes characteristic features of the movement in order to provide a phenomenological account of the nature of solidarity embodied in Poland during this era. These categories and characteristics include unity among differences, the foundation of hope at the movement's roots, self-sacrifice and heroism, promoting the equality and dignity of all, the centrality of participation, the affirmation of "bread and freedom," an option for the poor, and the insistence on life in truth. Although this essay does not attempt to demonstrate the relevance of this "thick" ethic of solidarity to capitalist, democratic societies today, by way of conclusion it raises questions pertaining to the contemporary significance of the Polish ethic of solidarity.


The aim of this working paper is to inform researchers of the availability of ethnicity data in
 population based datasets which are available for use in epidemiological and social science research.
 The paper begins by introducing the concept of ethnicity and problems associated with definition
 and classification. Secondly, the paper charts the evolution of ethnicity recording in the UK census
 and how this has been incorporated across the NHS. Thirdly, the paper focuses down on to the
 relationship between ethnicity and health and describes electronic NHS databases in which routinely
 collected ethnicity data are available for research purposes. Finally, the paper briefly reviews existing
 work on ethnicity and health which has been undertaken using population wide data from the ONS
 Longitudinal Study and NHS databases.


Although it has often been reduced to the issue of the reunification of the two German states, the so-called German question continued to be a multi-dimensional phenomenon after 1945. This is most obvious in relation to the politics of homeland that is intrinsically linked to German-Czech and German-Polish relations to the present day. After outlining the major developments in relation to the formation, ascent and marginalisation of expellee organisations in the Federal Republic, German government and expellee policies towards Poland and the Czech Republic and the remaining ethnic Germans in both countries are examined as they have evolved over the past 12 years since German reunification. In doing so, the article analyses the new opportunities that have arisen for a process of constructive reconciliation between Germany and its two eastern neighbours since the end of the Cold War, but also points out that the legacy of the past and the different and selective ways in which it has been, and is being, dealt with in all three countries is a factor that has retained its significance for bilateral and international relations in Central and Eastern Europe.


The field of structured P2P systems has seen fast growth upon the introduction of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) in the early 2000s. The first proposals, including Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, were gradually improved to cope with scalability, locality and security issues. By utilizing the processing and bandwidth resources of end users, the P2P approach enables high performance of data distribution which is hard to achieve with traditional client-server architectures. The P2P computing community is also being actively utilized for software updates to the Internet, P2PSIP VoIP, video-on-demand, and distributed backups. The recent introduction of the identifier-locator split proposal for future Internet architectures poses another important application for DHTs, namely mapping between host permanent identity and changing IP address. The growing complexity and scale of modern P2P systems requires the introduction of hierarchy and intelligence in routing of requests. Structured Peer-to-Peer Systems covers fundamental issues in organization, optimization, and tradeoffs of present large-scale structured P2P systems, as well as, provides principles, analytical models, and simulation methods applicable in designing future systems. Part I presents the state-of-the-art of structured P2P systems, popular DHT topologies and protocols, and the design challenges for efficient P2P network topology organization, routing, scalability, and security. Part II shows that local strategies with limited knowledge per peer provide the highest scalability level subject to reasonable performance and security constraints. Although the strategies are local, their efficiency is due to elements of hierarchical organization, which appear in many DHT designs that traditionally are considered as flat ones. Part III describes methods to gradually enhance the local view limit when a peer is capable to operate with larger knowledge, still partial, about the entire system. These methods were formed in the evolution of hierarchical organization from flat DHT networks to hierarchical DHT architectures, look-ahead routing, and topology-aware ranking. Part IV highlights some known P2P-based experimental systems and commercial applications in the modern Internet. The discussion clarifies the importance of P2P technology for building present and future Internet systems.


Wim Wenders (born 1945) started taking photographs at the age of 7. By the age of 12 he had equipped himself with his own darkroom, and by 17 he had acquired his first Leica. A few years later he was to emerge as a leading light in the New German Cinema movement of the late 1960s, making his feature-length directorial debut with Summer in the City (1970). Throughout his subsequent global acclaim as a director, Wenders has doggedly maintained his life as a photographer. In fact, the two careers have served each other well, as many of his photographs are created while location-scouting for films. His image repertoire of neglected industrial buildings, vacant lots, cemeteries, dilapidated urban niches and courtyards express a mixture of bemusement, melancholy and dislocation. "When you travel a lot, and when you love to just wander around and get lost, you can end up in the strangest spots," Wenders says. "It must be some sort of built-in radar that often directs me to places that are strangely quiet, or quietly strange." These strange and quiet color photographs are accompanied by poetical captions, some of which elucidate what is depicted, others of which lightly supplement with an anecdote (one characteristically deadpan caption accompanies an image of a cowboy clown standing at a rodeo: "It is amazing how many different ideas of 'fun' co-exist in this world" ). Places, Strange and Quiet gathers photographs from 1983 to 2011 in a full panorama of Wenders' photography to date.


Countries often enter into double taxation treaties in order to alleviate double taxation. However, a country's treaty network can be exploited by residents of a non-treaty country in order to obtain treaty benefits that are not supposed to be available to them. This is often referred to as 'treaty shopping', which entails the interposing of a conduit company in one of the contracting states so as to shift profit out of those states. This results in tremendous loss of tax revenue for the countries party to the treaty.
Despite the fiscal disadvantages of treaty shopping, not much attention has been given to this problem in South Africa. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development suggests that one of the means that contracting parties can use to curb treaty shopping is by inserting a 'beneficial ownership' provision in their tax treaties. In this article, treaty shopping and its fiscal disadvantage are discussed. The limitations of the 'beneficial ownership' provision are analysed and recommendations are provided to ensure the effectiveness of this provision in curbing treaty shopping from a South African perspective. The article also addresses the validity of contentions that certain aspects of South Africa's legislation create loopholes that may render this provision ineffective in curbing treaty shopping.


The keynote for the International Conference, Writing for Liberty, held in Cape Town in 2017 is a response to the contradictory demands made on writers: to respond to the suffering in the world and to refrain from appropriating the pain of the marginalised. Taking a cue from Isaiah Berlin's analysis of the two kinds of liberties: liberty to be free and liberty from interference with freedom, an argument is made for the freedom of a writer to write what she wants. This freedom is radically tempered in a reading of some novels by JM Coetzee. Here I explore the quality of skill, anguish and powerlessness to which a writer has to submit within the structure of her text.


This study sought to investigate the relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction in Mwalimu National Sacco Society; specifically it focused on employee training and development, motivational level as well as employee work life conflicts and their influence or effect on customer satisfaction at the Sacco. The study concentrated on the employees and members of the Sacco who are the customers. Descriptive Survey method was used to conduct the study as it involves specific predictions with narration of facts and, characteristics concerning the individuals. The target population was 169 employees of Mwalimu National Sacco and their 4572 members in Nairobi County. Stratified random sampling method was used on the employees to get a sample of 50 employees and 145 customers. The study design used two questionnaires as the research instrument. One of the questionnaire was used for the employees while the other for the customers of the Sacco. The data was analyzed using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS).Data presentation was in form of descriptive statistical such as means, standard deviations, frequency tables, pie charts and bar graphs. Inferential statistics was also included through the Pearson correlation coefficient between employee satisfaction and customers to detect linear relations. Subsequently, the tables of means, standard deviations and the appropriate correlation matrix were constructed from the results. The major findings were that there was a statistically significant strong relationship between the dependent variable customer satisfaction and independent variables of training and development, motivational level and work-life conflicts ... , which represented employee satisfaction. The strongest relationship existed betwee~~'the employee work-life conflicts and customer satisfaction followed by training/and development and employee motivational levels respectively. The study recommends that the satisfaction index of both employee and customer should be given the same measure of attention as there is a statistically significant relationship between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. The research findings provided useful information to the Management of the . Sacco, Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies and future researchers in the field.


Motivation in educational institutions is among the things to be taken in to
consideration so as to achieve the goals and objectives of education in any country.
This study examined the perception of teachers on motivation in learning. It
addresses the strategies that teachers use to create, maintain and protect motivation.
The study focused on the factors that affect motivation in classroom settings. Mixed
methods were used to observe 100 teachers in four secondary schools at Kinondoni
Municipal council. It was found that, majority of teachers viewed motivation as of
paramount importance for students' performance. The study also found that teachers
use various strategies to create, maintain and protect motivation in classroom
settings. Among these strategies includes providing room for open exchange of
ideas, accepting mistakes as normal part of learning, and creating encouraging and
supporting environment for students to learn and grow. The study also found several
factors that affect motivation in the classroom. These included mastery of subject
matter on the part of the teacher which constrained the classroom discussion and
constructive feedback. Other factors included large number of students in one
classroom, which impeded quality discussion forcing teachers to resort to lecture
method. Lack of teaching aid was also found to be a factor affecting motivation in
classroom. The study suggested that teachers should be supported academically to
acquire adequate mastery of subject matter and classroom management to help them
teach and use appropriate teaching methodologies and classroom management
techniques. The Study recommends also that Ministry of Education and Vocational
Training should see to it that the number of students in the classroom is manageable
to allow effective teaching and raise students learning.


A 70-year-old male with CAD, DM and HTN presented with progressive symptoms of angina and was found to have an aortic murmur. Cardiac catheterization revealed severe calcified triple vessel coronary artery disease with aortic stenosis. He underwent Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting with aortic valve replacement. Five days after the procedure, he developed thrombocytopenia with greater than 50% reduction in platelet count. His right fingertips developed thrombosis and skin necrosis ( Figures 1,2 ). There was strong suspicion for heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) given his high 4T score. He was started on fondaparinux. Anti-platelet factor 4 antibodies and serotonin release assay (SRA) were sent and resulted positive. Gradually, his platelet counts began to increase with fondaparinux. Once they were greater than 50,000, he was taken for angiogram and thrombectomy to the right radial artery with improved circulation. He will continue on fondaparinux for a month and follow up with Hematology as an outpatient.


Very high resolution radar measurements were performed in the troposphere and lower stratosphere by means of the PROUST radar. The PROUST radar operates in the UHF band (961 MHz) and is located in St. Santin, France (44 39' N, 2 12' E). A field campaign involving high resolu- tion balloon measurements and the PROUST radar was con- ducted during April 1998. Under the classical hypothesis that refractive index inhomogeneities at half radar wavelength lie within the inertial subrange, assumed to be isotropic, kinetic energy and temperature variance dissipation rates were es- timated independently in the lower stratosphere. The dis- sipation rate of temperature variance is proportional to the dissipation rate of available potential energy. We therefore estimate the ratio of dissipation rates of potential to kinetic energy. This ratio is a key parameter of atmospheric turbu- lence which, in locally homogeneous and stationary condi- tions, is simply related to the flux Richardson number, Rf .


The theory of core competence has drawn a large amount of attention in the academic field as well as of practitioners in the corporate world. Theory asserts that long-term value creation and competitiveness of the corporation relies on full-scale exploitation and timely development of company Core Competences; business strategies should be built around the core competencies of a firm. Identification and exploitation of Core Competences as well as essential elements comprising Core Competences have been for some time topics for academic research and are now well-described in literature. The process of Core Competence development – the focus of our study - still lacks detailed understanding, knowledge is fragmented, and roles of individual mechanisms and relationships between them are still to be investigated. In this study, we enhance the understanding of the Core Competence development mechanisms and come up with an empirically validated Hybrid model, which accommodates the whole entanglement and hierarchy of different Core Competence development processes and accounts for their mutual relationship. It becomes evident that both dynamic capabilities represented by multiple continuous routines and ad hoc processes represented by actions resulting from ―burning platforms‖ can be clearly identified to play role in corporate Core Competence development process. The Hybrid model formulated in our study enhances theoretical understanding of practical implications of Core Competence development process. In practice, understanding the entanglement of Core Competence development mechanisms as described by the Hybrid model will allow for strategy formulation to optimally address core competence development process under the conditions of current fast changing and challenging business environment.


In UK policy circles, there is a growing recognition that mediating the interface between policy making and the public through local government led initiatives is one way through which to provide a practicable means to deliver carbon reduction at an individual, household, and community level. Following on from the aims of Local Agenda 21 in creating the space for a more bottom–up policy infrastructure, the 2007 UK Energy White Paper is one of the latest political statements to highlight the way in which reaching UK targets on CO2 emissions will continue to involve a greater local response to climate change. This emphasis was given further weight through the introduction of a new local performance framework in April 2008. This new set of 198 national performance indicators (PIs) for local government and other local bodies are now the only PIs which Central Government will use to assess local government performance. Importantly, they include three PIs that specifically cover the issue of climate change and carbon reduction (CLG 2007a). For many years, local authorities in the UK have played a role in encouraging more community led sustainable development objectives. However, what Giddens (2000) describes as the 'modernization' of local governance, has often proved to be inherently problematic, not least in developing the 'civic engagement' aspect of this model of governance. The article traces these problems in relation to the increasing responsibilities of local government in developing local community led responses to climate change. Although the UK Government continue to highlight the opportunities for this type of political framework in addressing the bottom–up complexities of climate change, we consider why some of the issues raised in three case study examples are indicative of wider problems in expanding this form of governance in the UK. The article concludes that difficulties encountered with regard to the implementation of LA 21's central objectives have extended through to the more recent focus for action in combating the specific challenge of climate change. More broadly, innovation in the sense of fostering an effective level of civic engagement in sustainable development objectives, continues to remain problematic.


ABSTRACT Understanding the mechanisms by which soil geochemical anomalies form is extremely relevant to exploration for buried mineral deposits. Most mechanisms proposed in the geological literature are based on abiotic processes such as physical transport, hydrodynamic dispersion, or immobilization along chemical (e.g. redox) gradients. However, trace elements could also become locally enriched in soils above ore bodies as a result of the activity of plants and soil organisms. In this work, we review literature on trace element cycling in arid and semi-arid terrestrial ecosystems, and develop a conceptual model of trace element biogeochemical cycling. This model incorporates the biogeochemical fluxes of elements expected to affect the formation of soil anomalies through biological means. A simplified mass-balance calculation, based on the conceptual model, was used to evaluate the likelihood of forming soil anomalies solely through plant uptake. The existence of soil geochemical anomalies depends on the balance between ecosystem net primary productivity and trace element losses through soil erosion and leaching. The calculation predicts that accumulation in soils should be favoured for more bioavailable elements, since the plant:soil concentration ratio affects the relative sizes of uptake and erosion fluxes. We suggest that soil geochemical anomalies are transient geological features, forming and dispersing as a result of the relative sizes of the accumulative and loss fluxes. Due to the complexity of trace element biogeochemical cycles, the simple mass-balance approach that we used is insufficient to account for the interaction between fluxes. This work provides the groundwork for a more complex model of trace element biogeochemical cycling that would include rate expressions and simulate the balance between multiple interacting fluxes.


© 2017 CSIRO. The demand for catalysts that are highly active and stable for electron-transfer reactions has been boosted by the discovery that [Pt(NH3)4](TCNQF4)2 (TCNQF4≤2,3,5,6-tetrafluoro-7,7,8,8-tetracyanoquinodimethane) is an efficient catalyst. In this work, we prepare and characterize the two related [Pt(NH3)4] 2+ complexes, [Pt(NH3)4](TCNQ)2·(DMF)2 (1) and [Pt(NH3)4] (TCNQ)2 (2). Reaction of [Pt(NH3)4](NO3)2 with LiTCNQ in a mixed solvent (methanol/dimethylformamide, 4:1v/v) gives [Pt(NH3)4] (TCNQ)2·(DMF)2 (1), whereas the same reaction in water affords [Pt(NH3)4](TCNQ)2 (2). 2 has been previously reported. Both 1 and 2 have now been characterized by single-crystal X-ray crystallography, Fourier-transform (FT)IR, Raman and UV-vis spectroscopy, and electrochemistry. Structurally, in 1, the TCNQ1-anions form infinite stacks with a separation between adjacent anions within the stack alternating between 3.12 and 3.42A. The solvated structure 1 differs from the non-solvated form 2 in that pairs of TCNQ1-anions are clearly displaced from each other. The conductivities of pressed pellets of 1 and 2 are both in the semi-conducting range at room temperature. 2 can be electrochemically synthesized by reduction of a TCNQ-modified electrode in contact with an aqueous solution of [Pt(NH3)4] (NO3)2 via a nucleation growth mechanism. Interestingly, we discovered that 1 and 2 are not catalysts for the ferricyanide and thiosulfate reaction. Li+ and tetraalkylammonium salts of TCNQ1-/2-and TCNQF41-/2-were tested for potential catalytic activity towards ferricyanide and thiosulfate. Only TCNQF41-/2-salts were active, suggesting that the dianion redox level needs to be accessible for efficient catalytic activity and explaining why 1 and 2 are not good catalysts. Importantly, the origin of the catalytic activity of the highly active [Pt(NH3)4](TCNQF4)2 catalyst is now understood, enabling other families of catalysts to be developed for important electron-transfer reactions.


An updated edition of David Lu's acclaimed "Sources of Japanese History", this two volume book presents in a student-friendly format original Japanese documents from Japan's mythological beginnings through 1995. Covering the full spectrum of political, economic, diplomatic as well as cultural and intellectual history, this classroom resource offers insight not only into the past but also into Japan's contemporary civilisation. This volume covers up to the late 18th century. Three major criteria used in the document selection were that: the selection avoids duplication with other collections - 75% of the documents presented here are newly translated; a document accurately reflects the spirit of the times and the life-styles of the people; and emphasis is on the development of social, economic and political institutions.


Religious and spiritual struggles are expressions of conflict, question, and doubt regarding matters of faith, God, and religious relationships. They can take three main forms: (1) supernatural struggles, (2) interpersonal struggles, and (3) intrapersonal struggles. Empirical studies have consistently linked these struggles to poorer health and well-being. The findings of these studies highlight the clinical relevance of religious and spiritual struggles, suggesting that health care providers, who strive to deliver effective and religiously and spiritually sensitive treatment, cannot avoid this potentially influential aspect in the lives of their clients. This article aimed to assist mental health professionals in understanding and addressing this phenomenon. Toward this end, the authors summarized the empirical findings in this area, proposed a conceptual framework to explicate these findings, and suggested five recommendations that can be applied to address religious and spiritual struggles in treatment. The authors hope that this article serves as a valuable guide for health care providers interested in this stimulating yet challenging area of research and practice.


This Glossary (191 pages of definitions and 13 pages of references) provides abbreviations, explanations, and recommendations for use of information system security terminology. The intent is to improve the comprehensibility of writing that deals with Internet security, particularly Internet Standards documents (ISDs). To avoid confusion, ISDs should use the same term or definition whenever the same concept is mentioned. To improve international understanding, ISDs should use terms in their plainest, dictionary sense. ISDs should use terms established in standards documents and other well-founded publications and should avoid substituting private or newly made-up terms. ISDs should avoid terms that are proprietary or otherwise favor a particular vendor, or that create a bias toward a particular security technology or mechanism versus other, competing techniques that already exist or might be developed in the future.


Title of Document: ENSEMBLE ASSIMILATION OF GLOBAL LARGE-SCALE PRECIPITATION Guo-Yuan Lien, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professor Eugenia Kalnay, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Professor Takemasa Miyoshi, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Many attempts to assimilate precipitation observations in numerical models have been made, but they have resulted in little or no forecast improvement at the end of the precipitation assimilation. This is due to the nonlinearity of the model precipitation parameterization, the non-Gaussianity of precipitation variables, and the large and unknown model and observation errors. In this study, we investigate the assimilation of global large-scale satellite precipitation using the local ensemble transform Kalman filter (LETKF). The LETKF does not require linearization of the model, and it can improve all model variables by giving higher weights in the analysis to ensemble members with better precipitation, so that the model will "remember" the assimilation changes during the forecasts. Gaussian transformations of precipitation are applied to both model background precipitation and observed precipitation, which not only makes the error distributions more Gaussian, but also removes the amplitude-dependent biases between the model and the observations. In addition, several quality control criteria are designed to reject precipitation observations that are not useful for the assimilation. Our ideas are tested in both an idealized system and a realistic system. In the former, observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs) are conducted with a simplified general circulation model; in the latter, the TRMM Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) data are assimilated into a low-resolution version of the NCEP Global Forecasting System (GFS). Positive results are obtained in both systems, showing that both the analyses and the 5-day forecasts are improved by the effective assimilation of precipitation. We also demonstrate how to use the ensemble forecast sensitivity to observations (EFSO) to analyze the effectiveness of precipitation assimilation and provide guidance for determining appropriate quality control. These results are very promising for the direct assimilation of satellite precipitation data in numerical weather prediction models, especially with the forthcoming Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) sensors. ENSEMBLE ASSIMILATION OF GLOBAL LARGE-SCALE PRECIPITATION