The development of highly accurate and computationally efficient modeling software based on Gibbs energy minimization (GEM) makes it possible to thermodynamically simulate geochemically realistic subsurface fluid-rock interaction processes. This involves consideration of non-ideal multicomponent-multiphase systems that include dilute to concentrated aqueous electrolyte solutions, mineral solid solutions, supercritical fluids, silicate and metal melts, and sorption and ion exchange phases. Predicting the stability and thermodynamic properties of non-ideal solution phases over wide ranges of pressures and temperatures requires that theoretically sound and sufficiently accurate equation of state and activity models are used within the GEM framework. The variety of such models calls for a novel, flexible, and computationally efficient code architecture that supports a wide range of models of non-ideal mixing with different mathematical structures and input data. Here, we introduce the TSolMod C++ class library for equation of state and activity models, implemented within the GEMS3K solver of geochemical equilibria as part of the GEM-Selektor code package (http://gems.web.psi.ch). Essential features of the TSolMod library include a generic and flexible model parameter setup, computationally efficient data exchange with the GEM algorithm, and a straightforward extensibility with any new models of mixing. The current version of TSolMod features a comprehensive selection of fluid, gas, liquid, and solid solution models of interest for geochemical, petrological, material science, and chemical engineering applications.


An important component of asset allocation decisions is the future correlation structure of equity returns. Other studies have found that correlations change through time. Examination of the changing cross-country correlations in the G-7 countries provides clues as to why they change. Equity cross-correlations are related to the coherence between business cycles in the respective countries. Correlations are higher during recessions than during growth periods. Correlations are low when two countries' business cycles are out of phase. A semicorrelation metric differentiates equity comovements in bull and bear markets and provides a method for forecasting multiperiod equity correlations. Two applications are investigated: out-of-sample global portfolio allocation and derivative instruments.


In an optical accessible 4-stroke engine laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) imaging measurements of fuel tracer (3-pentanone) and formaldehyde were performed during the compression stroke and combustion. Formaldehyde (HCHO) is intermediately present at high concentrations within the cool flame and is burned later on when the "hot" combustion proceeds. It can be used as an internally generated tracer to observe the boundaries of the hot combustion zones. Despite the fact that a frequencytripled Nd:YAG laser excites only weak transitions in the HCHO molecule, the high concentration (several thousands ppm) provide for sufficient signal intensity when detecting fluorescence above 395 nm. Using formaldehyde LIF, auto-ignition (occurring close to 356°ca) and the further development of combustion were observed. Combustion was completed within the field of view by 360°ca in most observed engine cycles. 3-pentanone which has been used frequently for fuel-concentration imaging in spark ignited engines was of limited use in the CAI engine due to laser and signal attenuation prior to top dead center as a result of tracer destruction during and UV absorption by cool-flame intermediates.


This article will address the issue of the feasibility, desirability and need for a constitutional amendment in Canada to enshrine victims' rights (hereinafter the VRA or Victim's Rights Amendment). Amending the Constitution can be a politically dangerous exercise. The durability of a constitutional right, and the unpredictability of judicial interpretation of that right, suggests that constitutional amendments should be reserved for public policy objectives that cannot be achieved through legislative and administrative reforms. Clearly we have reached the stage in the victims' rights movement where a reasonable observer would conclude that the ordinary channels for effective law reform have failed and that this failure should prompt discussion and consideration of a VRA. However, the failure of current law reform measures is only a necessary condition for the consideration of a constitutional amendment - in itself it cannot be a sufficient reason for resorting to the rather extraordinary measure of amending the "Supreme Law of the Land".


There has been an alarming and dramatic decline in small to medium sized native mammal species in northern Australia over the past 20 years. The causes of this decline are currently under investigation. There is limited historical and/or current information on health and disease in northern Australian mammal species and it is not known what role disease may be playing in the decline of mammals in northern Australia.

The project objective is to investigate the potential role of disease in the declines of mammal species in northern Australia, focussing on the Top End of the Northern Territory. If species declines continue, then mammal populations will become more isolated; genetic diversity of species will diminish and faunal communities will change. Under these circumstances, the negative impacts of disease will increase. It is therefore vital to understand not only the role that disease may be playing in mammal declines at present, but also to gain understanding of the likely impacts of disease into the future.

The disease investigation project will focus field research efforts on four main sites within the Top End: Kakadu National Park, Bathurst Island, Garig Gunak Barlu National Park on the Cobourg Peninsula and peri-urban areas around Darwin. Other potential study sites include remote islands, west Amhern Land and collaborative northern quail study sites in Kakadu NP. Logistics dictate an initial focus on one species from each major taxonomic group undergoing decline:
Brush-tailed possum (Trichosurus vulpecula); Northern brown bandicoot (Isoodon macrourus); Northern quail (Dasyurus hallucatus ); Brush-tailed rabbit-rat (Conilurus penicillatus).

Golden bandicoots (Isoodon auratus) may be targeted however sample size is likely to be limited. Feral species such as black rats (Rattus rattus) and cats (Felis catus), as well as abundant native species, will also be tested including fresh carcasses. Compromised individuals of any native species will be sampled, including post mortem examination of carcases.

Animals will be trapped during routine fauna surveys and examined and sampled. A wide range of biological samples will be collected (generally under field anaesthesia) and submitted for health and disease screening. This is a strongly collaborative project drawing on support from a wide range of researchers across Australia. Results of the first two surveys (Cobourg Peninsula July 2013 and Bathurst Island September 2013) will be presented.


To provide a more robust context for personalization, we desire to extract a continuum of general (long-term) to specific (short-term) interests of a user. Our proposed approach is to learn a user interest hierarchy (UIH) from a set of web pages visited by a user. We devise a divisive hierarchical clustering (DHC) algorithm to group words (topics) into a hierarchy where more general interests are represented by a larger set of words. Each web page can then be assigned to nodes in the hierarchy for further processing in learning and predicting interests. This approach is analogous to building a subject taxonomy for a library catalog system and assigning books to the taxonomy. Our approach does not need user involvement and learns the UIH "implicitly." Furthermore, it allows the original objects, web pages, to be assigned to multiple topics (nodes in the hierarchy). In this paper, we focus on learning the UIH from a set of visited pages. We propose a few similarity functions and dynamic threshold-finding methods, and evaluate the resulting hierarchies according to their meaningfulness and shape


The largest gaps in the human genome assembly correspond to multi-megabase heterochromatic regions composed primarily of two related families of tandem repeats, Human Satellites 2 and 3 (HSat2,3). The abundance of repetitive DNA in these regions challenges standard mapping and assembly algorithms, and as a result, the sequence composition and potential biological functions of these regions remain largely unexplored. Furthermore, existing genomic tools designed to predict consensus-based descriptions of repeat families cannot be readily applied to complex satellite repeats such as HSat2,3, which lack a consistent repeat unit reference sequence. Here we present an alignment-free method to characterize complex satellites using whole-genome shotgun read datasets. Utilizing this approach, we classify HSat2,3 sequences into fourteen subfamilies and predict their chromosomal distributions, resulting in a comprehensive satellite reference database to further enable genomic studies of heterochromatic regions. We also identify 1.3 Mb of non-repetitive sequence interspersed with HSat2,3 across 17 unmapped assembly scaffolds, including eight annotated gene predictions. Finally, we apply our satellite reference database to high-throughput sequence data from 396 males to estimate array size variation of the predominant HSat3 array on the Y chromosome, confirming that satellite array sizes can vary between individuals over an order of magnitude (7 to 98 Mb) and further demonstrating that array sizes are distributed differently within distinct Y haplogroups. In summary, we present a novel framework for generating initial reference databases for unassembled genomic regions enriched with complex satellite DNA, and we further demonstrate the utility of these reference databases for studying patterns of sequence variation within human populations.


Today's number of reputable academical publishers is dominated by few key players. This imbalance of supply and demand in publishing academic work makes the entire process inefficient. EUREKA is a blockchain-based scientific publishing platform, developed to address this imbalance. It offers the opportunity of a fair reward distribution for all contributors and immediate ownership rights to authors of an article. For the demonstration, the platform including the back-end and frontend integrated into the Ethereum blockchain is shown, and the interaction processes of users i.e., authors and reviewers are presented.


Despite the abundance of research on the perception of information presented as graduated or proportional circles on static maps, such experiments have been rare for animated map displays. However, such experimental results might be beneficial for selecting optimal methods for depicting temporal change on graduated circle maps. In the present experiment, participants judged whether a greater number of circles in an n x n array increased or decreased during a 1500-millisecond (ms) observation interval. The variable n represented values of 6, 8, and 10, and all circles changed size (some larger, some smaller) from a common starting size either in a discrete shift (static condition) in the middle of the observation interval, or in a smooth, apparently continuous shift (animated condition) over the same interval. In addition, the size changes were relatively small, moderate, or large. The proportion of "more bigger" judgments, plotted against the actual proportions of enlarged circles, produced an ogive function (a cumulative normal) with similar slopes in all conditions. However, the bias towards "bigger" judgments increased with the size discrepancies between the initial and final circle diameters, and the bias towards "bigger" judgments was greater for animated than for static circle diameter changes. The results are interpreted in terms of attentional precedence for larger items and also for those that appear to be continuously increasing in size (looming). These results have implications for the presentation of information on static and animated graduated circle maps.


Background: Heart failure (HF) is a common condition requiring self-care to maintain physical stability, prevent hospitalization, and improve quality of life. Symptom perception, a domain of HF self-care newly added to the Situation-Specific Theory of HF Self-Care, is defined as a comprehensive process of monitoring and recognizing physical sensations and interpreting and labeling the meaning of the sensations. Objective: The purpose of this integrative review was to describe the research conducted on HF symptom perception to further understanding of this new concept. Method: A literature search was conducted using 8 databases. The search term of HF was combined with symptom, plus symptom perception subconcepts of monitoring, somatic awareness, detection, recognition, interpretation, and appraisal. Only peer-reviewed original articles published in English with full-text availability were included. No historical limits were imposed. Study subjects were adults. Twenty-one studies met the inclusion criteria. Each study was categorized into either symptom monitoring or symptom recognition and interpretation. Results: Although daily weighing and HF-related symptom–monitoring behaviors were insufficient in HF patients, use of a symptom diary improved HF self-care, symptom distress and functional class, and decreased mortality, hospital stay, and medical costs. Most HF patients had trouble recognizing an exacerbation of symptoms. Aging, comorbid conditions, and gradual symptom progression made it difficult to recognize and correctly interpret a symptom exacerbation. Living with others, higher education, higher uncertainty, shorter symptom duration, worse functional class, and an increased number of previous hospitalizations were positively associated with symptom recognition. Conclusions: Existing research fails to capture all of the elements in the theoretical definition of symptom perception.


The paper provides an analysis of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine within the multilateral attempt to manage or resolve the conflict in the Donets' Basin (Donbas). It aims to tentatively assess the SMM's influence on the de-escalation of the conflict during the Presidency of Petro Poroshenko, as a relatively closed political period. We explore the Mission's mandate, various evaluations of its operations and effectiveness, as well as the conflict participants' interaction with the Mission. The nature and dimension of the conflict have posed an, in its dimension, novel, yet, in its nature, not untypical challenge to the consensus-based OSCE. Despite the challenges of the Mission's specific scope and the limits placed on it by both Russian sabotage and a lack of resources, the SMM nevertheless managed, in 2014-2019, to contribute to de-escalation in the Donbas. Determinants of the net positive contribution of the SMM include its continued and large presence on the spot, the improvement of its reports on the situation in the conflict zone, as well as the development of more sophisticated monitoring methodologies and technologies over time.


Ocean activities are rapidly expanding as Blue Economy discussions gain traction, creating new potential synergies and conflicts between sectors. To better manage ocean sectors and their development, we need to understand how they interact and the respective outcomes of these interactions. To provide a first comprehensive picture of the situation, we review 3187 articles to map and analyze interactions between economically important ocean sectors and find 93 unique direct and 61 indirect interactions, often mediated via the ocean ecosystem. Analysis of interaction outcomes reveals that some sectors coexist synergistically (e.g. renewable energy, tourism), but many interactions are antagonistic, and negative effects on other sectors are often incurred via degradation of marine ecosystems. The analysis also shows that ocean ecosystems are fundamental for supporting many ocean sectors, yet 13 out of 14 ocean sectors have interactions resulting in unidirectional negative ecosystem impact. Fishing, drilling, and shipping are hubs in the network of ocean sector interactions, and are involved in many of the antagonistic interactions. Antagonistic interactions signal trade-offs between sectors. Qualitative analysis of the literature shows that these tradeoffs relate to the cumulative nature of many ecosystem impacts incurred by some sectors, and the differential power of ocean sectors to exert their rights or demands in the development of the ocean domain. There are also often time lags in how impacts manifest. The ocean governance landscape is not currently well-equipped to deal with the full range of trade-offs, and opportunities, likely to arise in the pursuit of a Blue Economy in a rapidly changing ocean context. Based on our analysis, we therefore propose a set principles that can begin to guide strategic decision-making, by identifying both tradeoffs and opportunities for sustainable and equitable development of ocean sectors.


Since the 20th century with the birth of feminism, gender studies have undergone analysis in many areas of knowledge. Special attention has been paid to the theory of androcentricity in the English language and the deficiency of female images in speech. In this article, the images of men and women presented by English proverbs and anti-proverbs are analyzed. The objective of this research is to find out if proverbs are androcentric and present male mindsets and world views. The other aim is to check whether anti-proverbs reflect the changing role of women in society. To fulfill these purposes, proverbs with gender components (man/woman, wife/husband, he/she etс.) were selected and underwent a semantic analysis. In order to reveal the evolution of the images of men and women we compared the images of men and women illustrated in proverbs with those shown in anti-proverbs with the same gender components. As a result, we came to the conclusion that both proverbs and anti-proverbs are androcentric; however, in anti-proverbs female opinions are more representative when compared to proverbs. To sum up, it is obvious that the role of women is changing and the changes are reflected in the language.


This dissertation is concerned with the fatigue cracking of bituminous paving mixtures. It considers both the life to crack initiation and the life for crack propagation, including the development of a method for calculating the number of wheel load applications to either critical or failure condition.

The development and subsequent validation of the Indirect Tensile Fatigue Test (ITFT) are described. Both the repeatability and reproducibility of the method are examined as well as its correlation with two other fatigue test methods. The test is shown to be a suitable method for measuring the life to crack initiation of bituminous paving mixtures as well as being an economically viable test.

Poisson's ratio for bituminous paving mixtures is examined showing that, provided at least 500 conditioning pulses are used in order to achieve steady state conditions, 0.35 is an appropriate value. Prior to these early load applications Poisson's ratio is shown to be variable and often in excess of 0.50, an explanation of which is given in detail.

Crack propagation was experimentally simulated using beams of material with a crack initiated on the underside. The work shows that the rate of crack propagation can be described by a power relationship between the stiffness of the mixture and the number of cycles to failure, which is mixture and binder dependent. A general equation is developed which allows the critical and failure lives of bituminous pavements to be calculated and these are compared to two traditional pavement design methods, giving equivalent results for unmodified mixtures but, giving more realistic results for polymer modified mixtures. Image analysis of the cracks demonstrates that they propagate around coarse aggregate trying to separate it from the matrix and that they travel in the straightest line possible between the point of crack initiation and the point of applied load.


This article provides a geological framework for the study of the cut-stone and concrete masonry of ancient Rome that yields important new insights into the many uses of native volcanic rock—tuffs, pozzolane, and lavas—in the development of Roman architecture. Geological maps and field observations of building stones in existing monuments, along with experimental and petrographic measurements of the physical and material characteristics of the Roman tuffs and travertine, offer a scientific basis for the examination of descriptions of Roman stone construction by Vitruvius. The appendix gives a full geological description of each stone and a gazetteer of extant Roman buildings using that stone. These data form a thorough and precise foundation for tracing the provenance of various volcanic rocks and for appreciating the Romans' empirical understanding of their diverse and distinctive characteristics. Our geological reassessment corrects misconceptions in previous archaeological scholarship that depend on a faulty nomenclature for Roman stone building materials based, in part, on mistranslations of the original Latin terms used by Vitruvius. The updated geological maps included here will make possible accurate studies of the transport of stone from quarries and the economy of urban construction, with a view to documenting the human capacity to transform the landscape of Rome and its surroundings both geomorphologically and architecturally over many centuries. A better understanding of the geological characteristics of Roman stone masonry can guide us in the archaeological preservation of the ancient monuments.


Cannabidiol (CBD) has been traditionally used in Cannabis-based preparation, however historically, it has received far less interest as a single drug than the other components of Cannabis. Currently, CBD generates considerable interest due to its beneficial neuroprotective, antiepileptic, anxiolytic, antipsychotic, and anti-inflammatory properties. Therefore, the CBD scaffold becomes of increasing interest for medicinal chemists. This review provides an overview of the chemical structure of natural and synthetic CBD derivatives including the molecular targets associated with these compounds. A clear identification of their biological targets has been shown to be still very challenging.


Cross-Strait economic activities are no longer unidirectional. The Taiwanese government opened the doors to Chinese investment in 2009. This paper addresses the following crucial question: What is the impact of Chinese investment on Taiwan's high-technology industrial development? Two further questions immediately follow: Will Chinese investment put Taiwanese industrial development at risk? Will an influx of Chinese investment lead to a turning point for Taiwanese industry? The paper first reviews Chinese investment in Taiwan under the framework of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) and then explains why we have chosen to focus here on the high-technology industry in Taiwan. It then outlines the main elements of Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) before seeking to answer the above research questions. Fieldwork for this paper was conducted from December 2014 to March 2016. Interviewees include Chinese investors, along with consultants from a Taiwanese institute created to promote industrial development.


The present book contains much more materials than the author's previous book The Science of Financial Market Trading. Spectrum analysis is again emphasized for the characterization of technical indicators employed by traders and investors. New indicators are created. Mathematical analysis is applied to evaluate the trading methodologies practiced by traders to execute a trade transaction. In addition, probability theory is employed to appraise the utility of money management techniques. The book identifies the faultiness of some of the indicators used by traders and accentuates the potential of wavelets as a trading tool; describes the scientific evidences that the market is non-random, and that the non-randomness can vary with respect to time; demonstrates the validity of the claim by some traders that, with good money management techniques, the market is still profitable even if it were random; and analyzes why a popular trading tactic has a good probability of success and how it can be improved.


Oxidative stress appears to be important in the pathogenesis of Barrett's esophagus (BE) and esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC). Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of antioxidant enzyme genes may play a part in determining individual susceptibility to these diseases. The Factors Influencing the Barrett's Adenocarcinoma Relationship (FINBAR) study is a population-based, case-control study of BE and EAC in Ireland. DNA from EAC (n = 207), BE (> or =3 cm BE at endoscopy with specialized intestinal metaplasia on biopsy, n = 189) and normal population controls (n = 223) were analyzed. Several SNPs spanning the genes for glutathione S-transferase P1 (GSTP1), manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) and glutathione peroxidase 2 (GPX2) were genotyped using multiplex polymerase chain reaction and SNaPshottrade mark. The chi(2) test was used to compare genotype and allele frequencies between case and control subjects. Linkage disequilibrium between SNPs was quantified using Lewontin's D' value and haplotype frequency estimates obtained using Haploview. Eleven SNPs were genotyped (six for GSTP1, three for MnSOD and two for GPX2); all were in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. None was significantly associated with EAC or BE even before Bonferroni correction. Odds ratios for EAC for individual SNPs ranged from 0.68 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.43-1.08] to 1.25 (95% CI 0.73-2.16), and for BE from 0.84 (95% CI 0.52-1.30) to 1.30 (95% CI 0.85-1.97). SNPs in all three genes were in strong linkage disequilibrium (D' > 0.887) but haplotype analysis did not show any significant association with EAC or BE. SNPs involving the GSTP1, MnSOD and GPX2 genes were not associated with BE or EAC. Further studies aimed at identifying susceptibility genes should focus on different antioxidant genes or different pathways.


American Muslim youth struggle with a flux of developmental, social, cultural, and religious factors that can propel them toward negative attitudes and behavior that impede their development. This paper explores the challenges identified by American Muslim youth, namely the lack of support experienced, issues of identity ad acculturation, difficulties maintaining religious beliefs, and struggle with gender relations. The Positive Youth Development (PYD) model is explored within the context of American Muslim youth. Finally, recommendations are provided to government and community agencies, educational institutions, youth organizations, and the Muslim religious community, in order to better meet the needs of American Muslim youth and promote their positive development.


The modern needs of the electro-optical market for small low-power and light-weight IR systems are impelling research and development of High Operating Temperature (HOT) IR detectors, requiring development of dedicated "HOT" cryocoolers. The development of cryocoolers with emphasis on the "SWAP3" configuration means small size, low weight, improved performance, low power consumption and low price, in order to optimize IDDCA for future hand held thermal sights. This paper will present the development and the progress made with the new "HOT" cryocooler, including customer data after the evaluation process, performances achieved using a common cold finger, test results update on a large series of production coolers, life and qualification test update and acoustic noise reduction. All the above mentioned information relates to the FPA temperature range of 130 - 200K for various cryocooler models based on rotary and linear design concepts. The paper will also review the progress with the latest development activities implemented in the cryocoolers and the electronic control modules in order to improve reliability and minimize regulated power consumption.


This study compared different theories on the knowledge sharing behaviour of sport professionals and considers the differences according to occupation. A questionnaire was distributed to professionals in physical education and sport in Taiwan. The subjects were targeted using a stratified random sampling method. Structural equation modelling was used to perform data analysis on 666 valid questionnaires. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) explained the behavioural models regarding their interpretation of knowledge sharing behaviour and intentions. The findings indicated that such behaviour indirectly, but positively, impacted by subjective norms, shared attitudes, perceived behavioural control and shared intentions. Knowledge sharing behaviour differed significantly among sport professionals employed in academia and industry, with the intention to share exerting the greatest influence. Attitude was the most influential, followed by subjective norms and perceived behavioural control. In the industrial model, perceived behavioural control was most consequential, followed by attitudes and subjective norms. The results confirm that the theory of planned behaviour not only has good explanatory power, but also effectively predicts such behaviour among physical education and sport professionals in general. Key words: Theory of Planned Behaviour, Professionals of Physical Education and Sport, Knowledge Sharing Behaviour, Model Comparison.


The objective of this study was to evaluate the cultivation of cassava and the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) under different systems and plant arrangements. The experiment was carried out in Coimbra MG, Brazil, on the experimental campus of the Departamento de Fitotecnia da Universidade Federal de Vicosa. A randomized block design was adopted, with seven treatments and four replications. The treatments consisted of the following arrangements: a single row of cassava monoculture; a single row of cassava with a row of beans; a double row of cassava monoculture; a double row of cassava with a row of beans, a double row of cassava with two rows of beans; a double row of cassava with three rows of beans, and bean monoculture. The following variables were evaluated for the beans: grain yield, number of pods per plant, number of seeds per pod and 1,000 seed weight. Evaluated for the cassava, were root production, shoot mass, harvest index, number of roots per plant, root length, root diameter, root dry matter, starch content and area-equivalence index. Conclusions from the results showed that efficient land-use was observed in the intercropping arrangements of single rows of cassava with one row of beans, and of double rows of cassava with two or three rows of beans, and these are therefore recommended. Bean-plant productivity is reduced regardless of the system used when compared to monocultures, and there was no reduction in cassava yield when intercropped with beans.


This paper reviews integration among the eight African Regional Economic Communities by comparing their characteristics and progress with three other South–South Regional Integration Arrangements. Three conclusions emerge: (i) slow progress towards meeting overly ambitious objectives; (ii) small changes in the destination of trade across all Regional Economic Communities, indicative of persistent high trade costs and few new manufactures products destined for geographically close markets; and (iii) compared with other South–South Regional Integration Arrangements, the Regional Economic Communities include a high number of provisions not covered in Word Trade Organization negotiations, but these have low legal enforceability. Reasons for this slow progress are explored in the paper.


IS A SCHOOL-BASED EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM EFFECTIVE IN CHANGING KNOWLEDGE REGARDING THE PREVENTION OF SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME? Margaret K. Stelzel, R.N., M.S.N. Marquette University, 2009 Shaken baby syndrome (SBS) involves physiological and neuropsychological sequelae secondary to parental or caregiver handling of an infant or young child (Goldberg & Goldberg, 2002). According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (APA) (2001), non-accidental head injuries are the leading cause of traumatic death and cause of child abuse fatalities. The prognosis is extremely poor with a death rate of 26-36% and up to 78% of the survivors suffer long-term disability (Barlow & Minns, 2000). According to Prevent Violence Against Children Act, 2005 Wisconsin Act 165; SECTION 7.121.02(1)(L)6 educational SBS requirements are mandated, effective school year 2007-2008. Two instrument development studies were completed to examine reliability and validity of the USBS-13 instrument. Tenth grade students (N=260) were randomly assigned by classroom to intervention and control groups. The intervention included a 50 minute interactive class with a SBS SimulatorTM developed by Realityworks® (2009). The intervention group had significantly higher knowledge on post-test compared with the control group (p=.000). The intervention was found to be equally effective with males, which is of importance, since they are more often the perpetrator in SBS (Lazoritz, Baldwin & Kinney, 1997; National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, 2009).


Roel van der Veen. What Went Wrong with Africa? A Contemporary History. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers/Stylus Publishing, 2004. 377 pp. References. Bibliography. Country index. $39.95. Paper. A historian by training, Roel van der Veen became a development specialist in the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and moved from the Asia to the Africa desk in 1995. Frustrated by the fact that he could not find "a rapid introduction to Africa's recent history and problems," he decided to write "a general review of contemporary African history for all those with an interest in the continent" (5). Evidently, the author is not familiar with Basil Davidson's Modern Africa: A Social and Political History (Longman, 2nd ed., 1989), or Elikia M'Bokolo's L'Afrique au XXeme siecle (Editions du Seuil, 1985), both excellent brief introductions to Africa's contemporary history up to the 1980s. Using modernization as a theoretical framework, van der Veen wonders why sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world that has been left out of the worldwide rise in prosperity over the past fifty years. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective combining history, political science, economics, sociology, and cultural studies, he focuses on what he sees as Africa's main problem: state failure in general, and the failure of African leadership in particular. In broad strokes and through 370 dense pages of text organized thematically-the cold war, economic decline, democratization, renaissance, state disintegration, war, globalization, population, and poverty and aid-he paints a vivid and dismal picture of Africa and its people, mired in disease, poverty, hunger, debt, and conflict. In essence, the author attributes the failure of Africa's development to a failure to realize the continent's potential for modernization. This work is commendable on several counts. First, it is arguably one of the most ambitious syntheses of contemporary African history and politics to date, combining the study of internal and external factors, usually treated separately in the literature under the rubrics of African politics and African international relations. Furthermore, van der Veen adopts a unique multidisciplinary perspective, as well as a long-term historical perspective, rightly arguing that "in order to understand Africa's present-day situation, we must look not only at outside influences but also at long-term, indigenous African elements" (351). Following Basil Davidson (The Black Man's Burden, Times Books, 1992), the author rightly argues that the African neocolonial state is an unreformed European construct that has been left intact by the African politico-bureaucratic elite which took over the reins of government after independence-hence the divorce between the African elites and their people. The Africanization of the colonial state thus "culminated in general dysfunctions, along with financial and moral bankruptcy" (355). Van der Veen is also correct when he observes that contemporary Africa is characterized by a poverty of ideology. Neverdieless, he concludes his book on an optimistic note, predicting that in the foreseeable future Africa will not become more unstable than it is at present, that African states will survive violent conflict, that Africans will obtain more say in running their countries, and that modern African states will eventually emerge. This being said, this work suffers from a number of major deficiencies of both form and substance. First, the audior generally fails to support his argument with adequate factual and statistical evidence, and whole sections of the book are devoid of references. Furthermore, a work of this magnitude requires, in addition to a country index, a thematic index as well as an index of the names of personalities and authors. Another major problem has to do with van der Veen's arbitrary and unjustifiable exclusive focus on sub-Saharan Africa, dubiously characterized as "a natural unit" (19). …


We demonstrate a 120 GHz 3-dB bandwidth on-chip silicon photonic interleaver with a flat passband over a broad spectral range of 70 nm. The structure of the interleaver is based on an asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) with 3 ring resonators coupled to the arms of the MZI. The transmission spectra of this device depict a rapid roll-off on the band edges, where the 20-dB bandwidth is measured to be 142 GHz. This device is optimized for operation in the C-band with a channel crosstalk as low as -20 dB. The device also has full reconfiguration capability to compensate for fabrication imperfections.


Dynamic mutations in human genes result from unstable trinucleotide repeats which are expanded within the genome. These expansions of trinucleotide repeats have been shown to be the etiological factors in various neuropsychiatric diseases and other genetic disorders. This hypothesis is supported by various independent studies showing large expansion of trimeric repeats, such as CAG/CTG/CCG/CGG/AAG, in patient DNA samples. These repeats are also identified in other disease loci not clearly related to particular diseases, which indicates that such expansions are one of the general forms of evolution occurring throughout the human genome. The trinucleotide repeat expansions occur during meiosis and are generally irreversible. Accumulation of these repeats over generations eventually ends in a deficiency of replication. There is evidence that certain ethnic groups in the human population have predispositions for expanded repeats related to neuropsychiatric diseases. It is likely that racial/ethnic differences reflect variations, which suggests the possibility of an underlying complex biological process. The present review highlights the importance of repeat expansions in some neuropsychiatric diseases, such as spinal and bulbular atrophy (SBMA), spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), Huntington's disease (HD), schizophrenia, myotonic dystrophy (DM) and fragile-X syndrome.


An Interactive Approach That Complements Todays Highly Technological Teaching Environment Updated to conform to Mathematica 7.0, Introduction to Probability with Mathematica, Second Edition continues to show students how to easily create simulations from templates and solve problems using Mathematica. It provides a real understanding of probabilistic modeling and the analysis of data and encourages the application of these ideas to practical problems. The accompanying CD-ROM offers instructors the option of creating class notes, demonstrations, and projects. New to the Second Edition Expanded section on Markov chains that includes a study of absorbing chains New sections on order statistics, transformations of multivariate normal random variables, and Brownian motion More example data of the normal distribution More attention on conditional expectation, which has become significant in financial mathematics Additional problems from Actuarial Exam P New appendix that gives a basic introduction to Mathematica New examples, exercises, and data sets, particularly on the bivariate normal distribution New visualization and animation features from Mathematica 7.0 Updated Mathematica notebooks on the CD-ROM After covering topics in discrete probability, the text presents a fairly standard treatment of common discrete distributions. It then transitions to continuous probability and continuous distributions, including normal, bivariate normal, gamma, and chi-square distributions. The author goes on to examine the history of probability, the laws of large numbers, and the central limit theorem. The final chapter explores stochastic processes and applications, ideal for students in operations research and finance.


Introduction Today in Australia, university degree programs provide the education pathway into the paramedic profession reflecting a more than 50-year process of transition from on-the-job first aid training. The formal organisation of paramedic education began in the early 1960s with the establishment of ambulance service training centres. The factors that contributed to this transition are poorly described when compared with that of paramedics in other parts of the world such as the United States and England. The history of Australian paramedic education is important to capture for the benefit of the profession in Australia and to situate it within a global context of modern emergency medical services. This paper examines the peer reviewed and grey literature to chart the transition of Australian paramedic education from vocational to higher education and uncovers signposts of change leading to this transition. Methods Following a systematic search of MEDLINE and CINAHL Plus databases, the university library collection, Google and the websites of Australian ambulance services, Paramedics Australasia (PA) and the Council of Ambulance Authorities (CAA), 31 reports, 12 journal articles and three texts are included in this review. Results Advances in emergency medicine, vocational education training sector reform in the 1970s and 1980s, reviews into ambulance services, health workforce reform and the efforts of PA and CAA contributed to the transition to university-based education, development of university paramedic program accreditation standards and, ultimately, progression towards registration and professionalisation. These signposts of change that chart developments in Australian paramedic education however, proved difficult to uncover in the literature. Conclusion Unexpectedly, this review finds peak Australian ambulance and paramedic professional bodies perceive difficulty in influencing policy direction that impacts the profession. Absence of thorough and detailed accounts of Australian paramedic education keeps hidden a unique and important history. We invite further research to preserve the history of paramedic education in Australia within the public domain, to assist the profession to understand what went before and to inform its future directions.


Using an extended LHARG model proposed by Majewski et al. (2015, J Econ, 187, 521–531), we derive the closed‐form pricing formulas for both the Chicago Board Options Exchange VIX term structure and VIX futures with different maturities. Our empirical results suggest that the quarterly and yearly components of lagged realized volatility should be added into the model to capture the long‐term volatility dynamics. By using the realized volatility based on high‐frequency data, the proposed model provides superior pricing performance compared with the classic Heston–Nandi GARCH model under a variance‐dependent pricing kernel, both in‐sample and out‐of‐sample. The improvement is more pronounced during high volatility periods.


It has been proposed to supply heat and power to Snohvit Train II (STII) from onsite heat generation based on natural gas and power import from the power grid. Without carbon capture and storage, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the combustion of natural gas in furnaces make a considerable contribution to the global warming potential (GWP) of this energy system. Depending on the interpretation of marginal power consumption, the power import also contributes to and increases this system's GWP. A recent SINTEF report claimed that European CO2 emissions are reduced with additional renewable power production in Norway, and it has been suggested to invest in wind power in order to completely offset the GWP of the STII energy system. This paper provides investment analyses for the proposed energy system. A scenario approach was used, with six different scenarios covering two dimensions. The first dimension is the origin of the grid power, with three different interpretations of marginal power representing Cases A, B and C. The other dimension is the STII train size, with two different sizes being analyzed, namely 50 % and 70 % of the Snohvit Train I design capacity. The proposed energy system was also analyzed with respect to security of supply. Improved reliability and transmission capacity, together with a stable, positive power balance, make a good foundation for security of power supply. The power demand of the two train sizes was estimated to 101 MW and 141 MW, with corresponding heat demand of 94 MW and 131 MW. These estimates were based on a combination of HYSYS simulations and data provided by StatoilHydro (SH), and provided input for both the GWP analysis and the investment analysis. The GWP impact of each scenario determined the share of power import from the grid that would have to be replaced by energy harnessed from wind. The applied capacity factor was 39.6 %, and the rated wind power requirement for the six different scenarios ranged from 101 MW for the A.50 scenario to 257 MW for the C.70 scenario. The break even (BE) energy prices were calculated for each of the six scenarios analyzed. If the power consumption is based solely on power import, with zero StatoilHydro (SH) share of grid reinforcements and no SH development of wind power, the BE power price would be 466 NOK/MWh. The inclusion of wind power development as part of the investment will increase the BE power price by up to 33 NOK/MWh. The additional SH share of grid reinforcement will add 86 NOK/MWh for the 50 % STII or 62 NOK/MWh for the 70 % STII. It was shown that the investment in wind power to offset the GWP of the energy system might also be a reasonable way of hedging against increases in the market price of electricity. It was found that the share of STII power demand that is provided by wind power is one of the parameters that have the least influence on the project's net present value (NPV). A high share of wind power is an inexpensive investment in improving reputation and predictability of energy price.


Counselor educators must consider the possibilities associated with technology-enhanced counselor training and research. The focus of this article was to identify the technology competencies that should be acquired by graduate students who successfully complete the counseling programs. The counselor educators have an opportunity to model efficient, meaningful and educationally sound use of technology. According to a survey by the American College Teacher (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1999), among 33, 785 faculty members at 378 colleges and universities, the aging of the faculty plays into several trends--like the fact that older faculty report being more stressed by information technology even though they aren't using it as much as younger faculty. Keeping up with information technology was a source of stress for 67 per cent of the academics--more so for women than for men, and for older professors than for younger ones. Age also affected how professors use computers. More than 90 per cent of those less than 45 years old communicated via Email at least twice a week, compared with 67 per cent of those 65 or older. Among professors fewer than 35.61 per cent used a computer at least twice a week to "conduct scholarly writing," and 45 per cent to do research using the Internet. For professors in the 55-64 age group, the proportions for those activities were 48 per cent and 28 per cent respectively (The American College Teacher, 1999). ACES' (Association for Counselor Education and Supervision) Technology Interest Group Network report has recommended ten technical competencies (T. Hohenshil, Personal communication via E-mail to The Education Trust, April, 1998). However, recently, the Network has recommended twelve technical competencies for counselor education students (T. Hohenshil, 2000). At the completion of a counselor education program, all students should: 1. Be able to use productivity software to develop web pages, group presentations, letters, and reports. 2. Be able to use such audiovisual equipment as video recorders, audio recorders, projection equipment, video conferencing equipment, and playback units. 3. Be able to use computerized statistical packages. 4. Be able to use computerized testing, diagnostic, and career decision-making programs with clients. 5. Be able to use E-mail. 6. Be able to help clients search for various types of counseling-related information via Internet, including information about careers, employment opportunities, educational & training opportunities, financial assistance/scholarships, treatment procedures, and social and personal information. 7. Be able to subscribe, participate in, and sign off counseling related listservs. 8. Be able to access and use counseling related CD-ROM data bases. 9. Be knowledgeable of the legal and ethical codes which relate to counseling services via the Internet. 10. Be knowledgeable of the strengths and weaknesses of counseling services provided via Internet. 11. Be able to use the Internet for finding and using continuing education opportunities in counseling. 12. Be able to evaluate the quality of Internet information. According to a survey by the ACES' Technology Group Interest Network (Myers & Gibson, 1999), counselor educators and students lack a uniformly high level of competencies in each of the 12 areas. More research is needed to determine the technology competencies in counselor training and preparation. For this study, the researcher sent a modified survey to ascertain the perceptions of counselor educators and counselors regarding the technology competencies that should be incorporated into the counselor education curriculum. The survey contained a set of 15 technology competencies that counselor education graduates should have at the completion of their counseling program. …


Evapotranspiration (ET) estimates are particularly needed for monitoring the available water of arid lands. Remote sensing data offer the ideal spatial and temporal coverage needed by irrigation water management institutions to deal with increasing pressure on available water. Low spatial resolution (LR) products present strong advantages. They cover larger zones and are acquired more frequently than high spatial resolution (HR) products. Current sensors such as Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) offer a long record history. However, validation of ET products at LR remains a difficult task. In this context, the objective of this study is to evaluate scaling properties of ET fluxes obtained at high and low resolution by two commonly used Energy Balance models, the Surface Energy Balance System (SEBS) and the Two-Source Energy Balance model (TSEB). Both are forced by local meteorological observations and remote sensing data in Visible, Near Infra-Red and Thermal Infra-Red spectral domains. Remotely sensed data stem from Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) and MODIS sensors, respectively, resampled at 100 m and 1000 m resolutions. The study zone is a square area of 4 by 4 km2 located in a semi-arid irrigated agricultural zone in the northwest of Mexico. Wheat is the dominant crop, followed by maize and vegetables. The HR ASTER dataset includes seven dates between the 30 December 2007 and 13 May 2008 and the LR MODIS products were retrieved for the same overpasses. ET retrievals from HR ASTER products provided reference ET maps at LR once linearly aggregated at the km scale. The quality of this retrieval was assessed using eddy covariance data at seven locations within the 4 by 4 km2 square. To investigate the impact of input aggregation, we first compared to the reference dataset all fluxes obtained by running TSEB and SEBS models using ASTER reflectances and radiances previously aggregated at the km scale. Second, we compared to the same reference dataset all fluxes obtained with SEBS and TSEB models using MODIS data. LR fluxes obtained by both models driven by aggregated ASTER input data compared well with the reference simulations and illustrated the relatively good accuracy achieved using aggregated inputs (relative bias of about 3.5% for SEBS and decreased to less than 1% for TSEB). Results also showed that MODIS ET estimates compared well with the reference simulation (relative bias was down to about 2% for SEBS and 3% for TSEB). Discrepancies were mainly related to fraction cover mapping for TSEB and to surface roughness length mapping for SEBS. This was consistent with the sensitivity analysis of those parameters previously published. To improve accuracy from LR estimates obtained using the 1 km surface temperature product provided by MODIS, we tested three statistical and one deterministic aggregation rules for the most sensible input parameter, the surface roughness length. The harmonic and geometric averages appeared to be the most accurate.


A growing body of literature suggests that excessive sedentary time may have deleterious health consequences, particularly among inactive individuals. Given that older adults are the least physically active and most sedentary of any demographic group, research on active, healthy aging must consider both the cause and the consequences of prolonged time spent sitting. Current evidence suggests that reducing sedentary time may be beneficial to older adults and allow them to better maintain their functional capacity and autonomy, but more research is needed to enable the development of evidence-based behavioral goals that will improve health outcomes. There is also a need to consider sedentary behavior from an organizational and societal perspective that moves beyond workplace and school settings to be inclusive of older adults, the fastest growing population in the world.


In present research work , 2-aminobenzothiazole is condensed with different aromatic aldehydes in ethanol to yield corresponding Schiff bases. The Schiff bases were cyclised with chloroacetyl choride in triethyl amine to yield the corresponding 2-Azetidinones. The structures of synthesized compounds were confirmed by elemental and spectral analysis such as IR, NMR, Mass, GC-MS. The compounds were evaluated for their antimicrobial properties against microorganisms such as S. aureus , B. substilis., B megatherium, E. coli, S. typhie, P.aeruginosa.


Knowledge of population distribution and movement is crucial for the conservation and management of shark species occurring in coastal waters. From 1984 to 2009, 641 scalloped hammerheads Sphyrna lewini, 1 342 smooth hammerheads Sphyrna zygaena and 1 352 unspecified hammerheads Sphyrna spp. were tagged and released along the east coast of South Africa, with recapture rates of 1.9%, 1.5%, and 0.7% respectively. Maximum and average distance moved was 629 km and 147.8 km (95% CI = 33.0–262.7 km) for S. lewini and 384 km and 141.8 km (95% CI = 99.1–184.5 km) for S. Zygaena respectively. The majority of sharks (68% S. lewini, 74.1% S. zygaena and 33.5% Spyrna spp.) were tagged in the Transkei region, with the largest number tagged in Port St Johns. Across regions, most tagged sharks were >50–100 cm precaudal length (PCL), except in Transkei where more sharks >100–150 cm PCL were tagged. In the Western Cape, Southern Cape and Eastern Cape, few sharks were tagged during the autumn/winter months, whereas in KwaZulu-Natal and Transkei sharks were tagged throughout the year. Large-scale directional movements observed may have been migrations in response to seasonal sea surface temperature changes. We identify coastal locations in Transkei that are of importance to juvenile and subadult hammerhead populations year-round.


Histamine is a ubiquitous brain neurotransmitter. Estrogen hormones have been shown to increase histamine effects on neurons located in the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus (VMN) (Kow et al, 2005a). This study has been set up to find candidate pathways to explain the mechanism(s) by which estradiol does this enhancement. Therefore, we decided to look at which histamine receptors are involved in histamine-induced depolarization. Previous studies (Zhou et al, 2007) showed that in mice only the histamine receptor H1 (H1-R) is involved in histamine actions on VMN neurons. It seems however that in rats the mechanism includes more than one receptor. By using histamine agonists (betahistidine and dimaprit) in whole cell patch clamp experiments we revealed that both H1-R and histamine receptor H2 (H2-R) coexist and can mediate opposite actions of histamine on individual VMN neurons. To refine our pharmacological study histamine antagonists were used too. The blocking of both these two receptors revealed that a histamine response is the sum of the depolarization and hyperpolarization by H1-R and H2-R, respectively. Colocalization of H1-R and H2-R on the same cells was therefore suggested and will be evaluated by Immunohistochemistry.


Since September 1982, Shatila and Sabra refugee camps have carried an ominous meaning throughout the world. That month, hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people were slaughtered in a massacre that lasted several days. Their only "crime" was that they were Palestinians or, in the case of many poor Lebanese Shiite refugees from South Lebanon, thought to be Palestinians. Before the massacres, the two camps on the southwestern fringes of Beirut were home for some thirty thousand refugees from northern Palestine. Most had lived there since 1948 when the camps were established by the UNRWA on land leased from two large Beiruti families, the Shatilas and the Sabras. The author, a Palestinian from the Haifa region, was born and brought up in Shatila camp. The following account of the massacre of September 1982 was originally written in Arabic, soon after the event. It constitutes the author's attempt to make sense of what happened, and to bring to life again, if only fleetingly, some of those people he had known all his life and who perished during those black days. The events, places and persons described in this account are real. Only in the case of people still living have names been changed for their personal safety. However, the full story remains buried in the graves of those who perished in Sabra and Shatila.


This thesis contains a market analysis of fresh berries in United States. Specifically, it addresses strawberry, blueberry, blackberry and raspberry markets during 2008-2011. A double log model and the Almost Ideal Demand model are used to gain insight into the demand side of the market. An equilibrium displacement model is used to develop suggestions for producers and decision makers. The results demonstrate that retail demand for berry crops is elastic and that the different berries are substitutes for one another. The equilibrium displacement model is used to predict producer surplus changes to industry wide efforts aimed at both production efficiencies and promotion of berries to consumers. There are positive spillovers from one berry market to another in the case of promotion.


Mapmaking has always been a serious business, whether surveying property limits, marking international boundaries or plotting lines of travel. Yet cartographers of all periods had a sense of humour, and mapmakers often used their artistic talents to create maps not for strictly geographical purposes but for the pleasure and entertainment of others. In this book, an expert cartographic researcher uncovers 100 curious, entertaining maps, drawn mainly from the unrivalled map collection in the British Library. Many of the maps depict countries in human or animal form, among them the famous 'Leo Belgicus' - the Low Countries in the shape of a lion. Many of the maps featured here were created for recreational play, with the secondary purpose of educating through enjoyment, including some of the very earliest cartographical game-maps, jigsaws, playing-card maps and even a jigsaw globe.With advances in printing techniques, publishers found they could affix maps to all manner of objects, often commemorative, such as the tankard celebrating Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in 1805. There are also maps on cups and saucers, tea towels, umbrellas, scarves and commemorative medals. Through images of these maps and many more, this amusing and unusual book reveals the little-known playful side of mapmaking.


Offshore software development (OSD) is a leading business sector in the global IT marketplace, and vendors in different countries are opening software development centres to take advantage of new business opportunities. However, software development is both a technical and a social process in which various software modules are integrated, requiring ongoing interaction and synchronisation of activities between distributed stakeholders. Knowledge management (KM) strategies are applied to create knowledge consistent with client requirements, project specific features and chosen design methodologies. Building on existing KM theories with empirical evidence from ten case studies in the Asia Pacific region, within two country contexts (New Zealand and India), this research reveals the KM initiatives for enabling knowledge transfer in the OSD process at the operational, design and strategic level. The paper offers insights on how software vendors build organisational knowledge repositories as they streamline distributed tasks in different country contexts. Country-specific contexts reveal that New Zealand vendors are engaged more in project and product management and have further outsourced software development tasks to other low cost countries. The Indian vendors are involved in software construction, development of technical specialist skills and use of more formal processes. These findings emphasise implications of various sociological, cultural and technical perspectives of KM initiatives in OSD.


BACKGROUND
Hematocrit (HCT) is significantly higher in newborns than in adults, but this fact is not usually considered when performing coagulation tests in newborns. We studied 71 healthy full-term newborns and compared them to 100 healthy adults to test the hypothesis that correcting the anticoagulant-to-blood ratio for neonatal HCT would reduce the differences among the two populations.

METHODS
PT, PTT, fibrinogen, platelets and factors II, VII, IX, X, V, VIII were measured in 71 healthy full-term newborns and 100 healthy adults. An anticoagulant-blood ratio corrected for HCT was used. In 16 newborns, a non corrected value was also used and results were compared with the corrected ratio.

RESULTS
A significant difference was observed between newborns and adults in all tests with the exceptions of fibrinogen and factor V. In the 16 newborns from whom blood was collected without correcting in the anticoagulant, a significant difference was also found in all parameters but fibrinogen. A weak correlation linked the different variables.

CONCLUSIONS
After correction for HCT, neonatal PT and factors V, VII, VIII and IX were much closer to adult values; neonatal PTT and factors II and X were still definitely lower.


This paper investigates second-order representations in the sense of Kawamura and Cook for spaces of integrable functions that regularly show up in analysis. It builds upon prior work about the space of continuous functions on the unit interval: Kawamura and Cook introduced a representation inducing the right complexity classes and proved that it is the weakest second-order representation such that evaluation is polynomial-time computable. The first part of this paper provides a similar representation for the space of integrable functions on a bounded subset of Euclidean space: The weakest representation rendering integration over boxes is polynomial-time computable. In contrast to the representation of continuous functions, however, this representation turns out to be discontinuous with respect to both the norm and the weak topology. The second part modifies the representation to be continuous and generalizes it to Lp-spaces. The arising representations are proven to be computably equivalent to the standard representations of these spaces as metric spaces and to still render integration polynomial-time computable. The family is extended to cover Sobolev spaces on the unit interval, where less basic operations like differentiation and some Sobolev embeddings are shown to be polynomial-time computable. Finally as a further justification quantitative versions of the Arzel\`a-Ascoli and Fr\'echet-Kolmogorov Theorems are presented and used to argue that these representations fulfill a minimality condition. To provide tight bounds for the Fr\'echet-Kolmogorov Theorem, a form of exponential time computability of the norm of Lp is proven.


A seismic refraction and low-fold reflection survey, known as the Los Angeles Region Seismic Experiment (LARSE), was conducted along a transect (line 1) extending from Seal Beach, California, to the Mojave Desert, crossing the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley basins and San Gabriel Mountains. The chief result of this survey is an interpreted cross section that addresses a number of questions regarding the crustal structure and tectonics of southern California that have been debated for decades and have important implications for earthquake hazard assessment. The results (or constraints) are as follows. (1) The maximum depth of the Los Angeles basin along line 1 is 8–9 km. (2) The deep structure of the Sierra Madre fault zone in the northern San Gabriel Valley is as follows. The Duarte branch of the Sierra Madre fault zone forms a buried, 2.5-km-high, moderately north dipping buttress between the sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the San Gabriel Valley and the igneous and metamorphic rocks of the San Gabriel Mountains. (For deeper structure, see following.) (3) There are active crustal decollements in southern California. At middle-crustal depths, the Sierra Madre fault zone appears to sole into a master decollement that terminates northward at the San Andreas fault and projects southward beneath the San Gabriel Valley to the Puente Hills blind thrust fault. (4) The dip and depth extent of the San Andreas fault along line 1 dips steeply (∼83°) northward and extends to at least the Moho. (5) The subsurface lateral extent of the Pelona Schist in southern California is as follows. Along line 1, the Pelona Schist underlies much, if not all of the San Gabriel Mountains south of the San Andreas fault to middle-crustal depths. North of the San Andreas fault, it is apparently not present along the transect.


Abstract. The main idea of this particular study was to validate if the new FOVEON technology implemented by sigma cameras can provide better overall results and outperform the traditional Bayer pattern sensor cameras regarding the radiometric information that records as well as the photogrammetric point cloud quality that can provide. Based on that, the scope of this paper is separated into two evaluations. First task is to evaluate the quality of information reconstructed during de-mosaicking step for Bayer pattern cameras by detecting potential additional colour distortion added during the de-mosaicking step, and second task is the geometric comparisons of point clouds generated by the photos by Bayer and FOVEON sensors against a reference point cloud. The first phase of the study is done using various de-mosaicking algorithms to process various artificial Bayern pattern images and then compare them with reference FOVEON images. The second phase of the study is carried on by reconstructing 3D point clouds of the same objects captured by a Bayer and a FOVEON sensor respectively and then comparing the various point clouds with a reference one, generated by a structured light hand-held scanner. The comparison is separated into two parts, where initially we evaluate five separate point clouds (RGB, Gray, Red, Green, Blue) for each camera sensor per site and then a second comparison is evaluated on colour classified RGB point cloud segments.


Quantifying and assessing the value of an organization's design department can be problematic. The tools traditionally used by auditors are usually insufficient to 'measure' either the value of design projects or their influence within an organization. This book demystifies the design development and design management process, scrutinising it against a new set of auditing principles which illuminates its true value in a contemporary context.
Featuring a series of international case studies, Design Management: Exploring Fieldwork and Applications argues that assessment of the design function within any organization must incorporate both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The book explores a number of key themes, such as new product development, risk in design and corporate identity. Moreover, by drawing on a range of techniques from the social sciences, the authors rigorously develop means by which design may be understood accurately.
This book represents an important and timely contribution to our knowledge of the management of product and service innovation. It will be an invaluable text for students and researchers working in design and management.


The method of projections on convex sets is a procedure for signal recovery when partial information about the signal is available in the form of suitable constraints. We consider the use of this method in an inner-product space in which the vector space consists of real sequences and vector addition is defined in terms of the convolution operation. Signals with a prescribed Fourier-transform magnitude constitute a closed and convex set in this vector space, a condition that is not valid in the commonly used l2 (or L2) Hilbert-space framework. This new framework enables us to construct minimum-phase signals from the partial Fourier-transform magnitude and/or phase information.


Notch proteins are transmembrane receptors that are activated by their ligands, members of the Jagged and Delta-like families, which are present on the surfaces of adjacent cells. After ligand-binding, Notch proteins are processed by the γ-secretase complex, which releases the Notch intracellular domain (ICD), allowing it to translocate to the nucleus and activate gene transcription. Notch signaling is important in the control of cell fate during development, but Hilton et al. investigated a role for Notch in the regulation of mesenchymal progenitor cells, the precursors of osteoblasts, in the bone marrow. Mice in which deletion of Notch1 and Notch2 was restricted to the limb mesenchyme (PNN mice) had, when 8 weeks of age, shorter long bones and increased bone radiodensity, as analyzed by x-ray radiography, than did wild-type mice. This skeletal phenotype was also observed in mice in which the γ-secretase complex catalytic subunits presenilin-1 and presenilin-2 were absent from the limb mesenchyme (PPS mice). The increased radiodensity in PNN and PPS mice was due to the presence of bone within the marrow cavity, which correlated with an increase in the number of active osteoblasts compared with that in wild-type mice. Similar defects were found in the embryos of PNN and PPS mice. Further experiments showed that, whereas mesenchymal progenitor cells were present in the bone marrow of wild-type mice, they were undetectable in PNN mice. This lack of progenitor cells correlated with a progressive loss of bone density in the PNN mice as they aged. These data suggest that Notch signaling helps to maintain a pool of progenitor cells in the bone marrow by inhibiting their differentiation into osteoblasts. M. J. Hilton, X. Tu, X. Wu, S. Bai, H. Zhao, T. Kobayashi, H. M. Kronenberg, S. L. Teitelbaum, F. P. Ross, R. Kopan, F. Long, Notch signaling maintains bone marrow mesenchymal progenitors by suppressing osteoblast differentiation. Nat. Med. 14, 306-314 (2008). [PubMed]


The present communication unites in a novel model of the etiology of cancer very diverse contributions to oncology made since discovery of the Warburg effect. The model proposes a unitarian understanding of acquired malignancy as a neo-lamarckian adaptive disorder whereby a cell escapes organism and tissue regulatory controls to adapt to a condition of energy starvation (embodied in a variety of oncogenic pressures that are hypoxic or hypoxia-like in their effects), by abandoning its normal aerobic metabolism and by altering its growth-factor responses to support hyperplastic and neoplastic proliferation, and block normal differentiation. The multifactorial role of oxygen in normal metabolism is underlined by the biological and biophysical effects of its chronic lack in the initiation and promotion of oncogenesis: via the hypoxia-inducible factors (and especially HIF-1), hypoxia activates glycolysis and shuts down oxidative phosphorylation; and it adversely affects not only the oxygen transport roles of hemoglobin and myoglobin, but also their thermal dissipation of absorbed radiant energy, an essential contribution to temperature regulation in homotherms. Nonhypoxic factors may have similar hypoxia-like effects. Lack of vitamin C and iron can block progression of the Krebs cycle, and shut down aerobic respiration. Copper, according to our model of the respiratory chain, may actually work in vivo as a respiratory poison. Altered growth factor regulation (eg decreased plasma concentrations of erythropoietin) or enzymic defects (eg lack of citrate synthase) may also induce hypoxia-like effects. Moreover, according to the analysis we present here, poor oxygenation prevents absorption of the radiant energy needed to inject into the respiratory chain. We propose that absorption of solarsourced radiant energy in the terrestrial environment with an ambipolar energy spectrum of 28 to 79 keV is a key modulating function of biological systems involved in the normal activities of hemoglobin, myoglobin, the cytochrome c oxidase complex, skin production of vitamin D3 and the differential radiant energy sensors of pinealocytes. It provides the energy thermally dissipated by hemoglobin and myoglobin, as well as the activation energy needed to initiate and terminate the respiratory chain, and thus the kinetic energy of the electrons and protons shuttled across mitochondrial membranes. Insufficient absorption of ambipolar energy is tied in to the causation of acquired cancer and, as suggested by the present etiological model, also connected to the deregulation of the Pasteur effect that permits manifestation of the Warburg effect. However, the latter is far from being a universal trait of cancer cells. Recent results by Jacques Sonveaux's group have shown that neoplastic phenotypes are distributed inside a tumor according to an oxygen gradient between lactic fermenters and lactic respirers, with their association being symbiotic. Our model suggests that this is best understood as functions of a unitarian auto-oncogenic vector of cumulative transformations for acquired cancers, and that this vector repeatedly invokes a recursive cell-regulatory circuit, the IGF (insulin-like growth factor) axis, in its effort to de-stabilize the autonomic control of the cell cycle. At initiation of cancer, aerobic respiration is shut down substantially or entirely, and glycolysis is activated along with lactate dehydrogenase A (LDHA)-driven fermentation, to sustain hyperplastic proliferation and block differentiation. These metabolic shunts are brought about by the HIF axis (in particular by HIF-1) and modulated by the IGF axis (in particular by IGF-I, its binding proteins and its receptor, IGF-IR). They likely involve specific hypersensitive growth factor responses modulated by the IGF axis, including IGF-I hypersensitivity itself as found in Polycythemia vera. Such responses involve both epigenetic and post-adaptive alterations. With progression of the auto-oncogenic vector from hyperplasia to neoplasia, something akin to a differentiation of malignantly transformed states takes place which appears to require, in either case, changes in the IGF axis that render its operation independent from physiological control by its ligands, in particular from control by IGF-I, so that the orthosympathetic signals of the IGF axis become permanently turned on and the cell now exerts an organism-independent control over its own cycling. At this juncture, the oncogenic vector undergoes a split. The Pasteur effect coupling glycolysis to aerobic metabolism is severed in both instances of "neoplastic differentiation", but while the more aggressive neoplastic cells to which the Warburg effect applies rely solely on further acceleration of lactate production, other neoplastic cells adapt to the acidification of tumors and blood by turning on LDHB to employ the lactate as substrate, via conversion to pyruvate, for their mitochondrial Krebs cycle and respiratory chain. In solid tumors, the lactic respirers activate vascular endothelial growth factor production (controlled by the IGF axis) to stimulate tumor angiogenesis and thus acquire direct access to oxygen from the blood. Ultimately, the lactate fermenters become the highly-tumorigenic metastatic elements of terminal cancer. We also suggest that serious clinical investigation with properly staged cancer patients should henceforth target the use of novel, or heretofore improperly-tested, non-cytotoxic treatments based on the presently proposed aetherometric model of auto-oncogenesis. Journal of Biophysics, Hematology and Oncology, Vol. 1, 5:1-93 May 2010 2 © Akronos Publishing, Canada, 2010 ISSN 1920-3799


Spurious resolution is a byproduct of optical defocus whereby sinusoidal image components are reversed in sign: light stripes become dark and vice-versa. Such contrast-reversal effects are readily apparent in defocused projected images, and in subjective visual experience while viewing targets closer than the near point of the eye. Mathematically, spurious resolution is due to negative zones in the optical transfer function. Such zones appear in the transfer functions that correspond to blurring by convolution with a uniform disk (as in geometrical optics), and in those implied by physical optics for a defocused eye limited only by diffraction. What happens if these spurious negative zones are re-inverted, restoring the original contrast signs? The answer for both geometrical and physical optics is that the pointspread function is greatly re-sharpened. Since sign correction is purely a phase operation, this means that substantial deblurring can be produced by a simple phase-correcting filter that entails no amplitude restoration at all. In principle such a filter could be inserted at any point between a target (e.g., printed text) and its retinal image, by convolving the image at that stage (e.g., on the page) with the inverse Fourier transform of the sign of the blur transfer function.


This monograph directed not only to medical and paramedical personnel but to sterilization seekers as well touches upon all aspects of voluntary sexual sterilization. The history of sterilization is follwed by a review of female and male anatomy and physiology and of present available and reversible methods of contraception. All surgical laparoscopic tubal electrocoagulation culdoscopic or hysteroscopic methods of female sterilization are described and results including morbidity and mortality complication rates side effects and failure rates are presented. This part of the monograph is illustrated with clear and schematic drawings. Problems related to demand for reversal of sterilization are discussed. The same is done for male sterilization its techniques and complications. The monograph discusses the ever increasing demographic problem in the world and the role and the extent of voluntary sexual sterilization in industrialized countries and in third world countries stressing the efforts of those international agencies such as WHO IPPF the Population Council the European Council UNFPA and the World Federation of Associations for Voluntary Sterilization which promote sterilization around the world and offer sterilization services. The authors then investigate the role of the physician in the decision to recur to sterilization as a permanent contraceptive method and in deciding the proper surgical technique. A special chapter discusses the psychological conflicts related to sterilization especially those which arise before the intervention and which may very well represent the strongest contraindication to sterilization. A final chapter is devoted to France and to the sociocultural aspects which make sterilization more or less acceptable the existing legislation and the professional problems linked to sterilization interventions.


Abstract This study investigates whether style characteristics exhibit different properties across the major JSE industry sectors. Using monthly data on a broad sample of non-thinly traded JSE shares over the period July 1990 to June 2000, it is observed that a large proportion of financial ratios exhibit right skewness that is related to a lower bound of zero on their values. Financial ratios that incorporate levels of debt are markedly higher in the financial sector. It is argued that, as deposit-taking institutions, the market interprets leverage differently for these companies. Stock returns are regressed cross-sectionally on lagged style characteristics in each month using a dummy variable to indicate sector membership. The results show that, to varying degrees, small size and several interrelated measures of 'value' exhibit a positive relationship with equity returns within all industry sectors. However, the value effects tend to be stronger in the financial and industrial sectors than in the resource sector. In contrast to the other sectors, financial stock returns are positively rewarded for high debt-to-equity ratios. Notwithstanding the above, it is concluded that, a size and price-earnings style-based model of expected returns is broadly representative of the entire JSE Securities Exchange.


Learning long-range behaviors on complex high-dimensional agents is a fundamental problem in robot learning. For such tasks, we argue that transferring learned information from a morphologically simpler agent can massively improve the sample efficiency of a more complex one. To this end, we propose a hierarchical decoupling of policies into two parts: an independently learned low-level policy and a transferable high-level policy. To remedy poor transfer performance due to mismatch in morphologies, we contribute two key ideas. First, we show that incentivizing a complex agent's low-level to imitate a simpler agent's low-level significantly improves zero-shot high-level transfer. Second, we show that KL-regularized training of the high level stabilizes learning and prevents mode-collapse. Finally, on a suite of publicly released navigation and manipulation environments, we demonstrate the applicability of hierarchical transfer on long-range tasks across morphologies. Our code and videos can be found at this https URL.


The goal of this thesis was to explore and find ways to implement touch gestures in the context of process automation, with the limitation to one specific use case found suitable for touch interaction for ABB's distributed control system called System 800xA. The typical way to handle the data in System 800xA today is to show and control it through the so called process graphics. It is possible to do this on a touch device today, but the current graphical user interface focus on mouse and keyboard interaction. Because of this some of the common design elements and interaction cues that are in use right now are less suitable when running the system on a touch device. Important characteristics for the process graphics to have for an efficient and delightful user experience when interacting with the system on a touch device were therefore also investigated. To understand if, and if so when and how, an industrial process control system could benefit from touch interaction a PACT analysis was done as a first step. This PACT analysis was then used as a basis for how 15 use cases and their suitability for touch were evaluated. A combination of two out of these 15 use cases were found to be a suitable aim for a prototype that was created. These two use cases involved navigation and controlling of the system and were found suitable for several reasons, including the fact that they are common use cases for when touch interaction with the system is used today. Therefor these two use cases in combination was chosen as the target use case. To find which gestures that were suitable for this use case, an exploratory test was performed where the participants were allowed to show what gestures they perceived as suitable for different tasks that the use case could involve. The findings from these user tests were that the gestures should be kept simple, often only require one hand and one finger usage. Based on these findings, a high-fidelity prototype was implemented on a tablet called Surface Pro. As a way to evaluate the implementation of the high-fidelity prototype an assessment test was conducted. The results from the assessment test indicates that while it is important to adjust the system for touch interaction, by for example use elements in suitable sizes and provide functions adapted for touch interaction, it is also important to replicate the current system where it is possible.


Wavefront shaping through multimode fibers has many interesting applications, such as micromanipulation and endoscopy, where the small diameter of fibers is an advantage in terms of miniaturization. However, pattern projection can suffer from deleterious interference effects depending on the measurement conditions. We experimentally demonstrate the projection of high quality patterns through a multimode fiber by correcting for phase drifts while measuring the transmission matrix, and by controlling both the amplitude and the phase of the wavefront sent to the fiber. We also use the matrix in the reverse direction by reconstructing a distal image from a proximally measured speckle field. This opens up new possibilities for imaging through a multimode fiber by decoding wavefronts travelling both ways along the fiber.


Tongkat Ali (Eurycoma longifolia Jack) is one of the most popular medicinal
plants and is gaining greater recognition in Malaysia. Currently, E. longifolia is
being over-exploited due to its high popularity as a potential herbal medicine
and high demand in the market. Thus, this study on the species site preferences
of E. longifolia is necessary to ensure successful conservation of the species.
There have been no studies reported on the ecological requirements, vegetative
association, microclimate and site-suitability of E. longifalia. The objectives of
this study are to identify the vegetative association and tree species composition
of E. longifolia in its natural habitat; to determine the relationship between these
plant associations and the soil characteristics and to determine the relationship
between foliar nutrient concentrations and density of E. longfolia.
The study was carried-out in a heath lowland forest, located in Compartments 6
and 10 of Menchali Forest Reserve, Rompin, Pahang. A total of 20 vegetation
samples (relevk), each with the size of 30 m x 30m (900m2) were established in
Compartment 6 (secondary forest) and Compt. 10 (primary forest) and were
classified into four groups based on coverage density of E. longifolia vis, rare
(El), low (E2), moderate (E3) and high (E4). This study is basically a
phytosociological study using the design primarily based on the Braun
Blanquett Method (1964). A quantitative study of the vegetation layer namely
dominant (TI), understorey (T2), shrub (S) and Herbs (H)) were recorded from
900m2 releves to include species composition , association , diversity and plant
communities of this area. The environmental variables viz soil temperature,
moisture content, pH, bulk density, particle density, soil nutrients, organic
matter, soil micronutrients, light intensity and altitude were also analyzed and
recorded for each relev&. In addition, foliar analysis of E. longfolia and shrub
species was also done.
The results revealed that there are 207 species of trees, shrubs, herbs, ferns and
herbaceous plants representing 74 families and 155 genera. It also found that
there are seven types of life forms in Menchali Forest Reserve, namely woody
plant, ferns, moses, climbers, palms, herbaceous and ephiphytes, whereas the
woody plants are the most abundant constituting of 53.2% by family 62% by
genera and 61% by species.Eurycoma longifolia, Brackenridgea palustris, Garcinia
nigrolineata, Syzygium syzygioides, Diospyros styraciformis, Ardisia crenata,
Dipterocarpus chartaceus, Calophyllum canum, Psydrax maingayi, Memecylon edule,
Shorea materialis, Vatica pauciflora, Champereia manillana, E ythroxyllum cuneatum,
Guioa pleuropteris, Tetracera indica, Syzygium campanulatum and Licuala spinosa
were among the common species in the study area. These were differentiated
into two differential communities of Vitex pinnata-Bouea macrophylla and
Xanthophyllum wrayi-Bromhaedia finlaysoniana. The two communities constituted
sixteen sub-communities which represent the association species of E. longifolia.
The results of soil analysis showed that most of the soil physical and chemical
properties were significantly different ( ~ ~ 0 . 0a5m)o ng the cluster groups such
as total nitrogen (N), total phosphorus (P), calcium (Ca), sodium (Na),
magnesium (Mg), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn) and soil pH. -The correlation analysis
between the soil parameters and density of E. longifolia showed that the soil
parameters influenced the distribution of this species are moisture content, soil
pH, Total P, Ca, Cu, Zn, Mn and Fe. Foliar nutrient concentrations are not
significantly different among the cluster groups except for Mn and Zn. Light
intensity in Group El recorded the highest value in light intensity (4012 lux)
while the lowest value was in Group E4 (1651.71 lux). The light intensity was
significantly different (P10.05) among the cluster groups. This indicates that the
distribution of E. longifolia was mainly as understorey growth and is considered
as a shade-tolerant species.
Relationship between species and environmental variables showed that light
intensity, soil moisture content, pH, texture (%), total P, calcium, copper and
zinc were among the important factors in the distribution of the vegetation in
Menchali forest. This implies that the site preferences and density of E. longifolia
was also influenced by these factors. The results of this study also showed the
usefulness of phytosociological study in the development of community
association of similar species growing in heath lowland forest. It is useful to
develop association community of E. longifolia in the heath lowland forest, and
to provide valuable information for rehabilitation, conservation and restoration
of E. longifolia.


In recent years in Kazakhstan, as well as in all countries, we have been talking not only about the professional stress, but also professional Burnout Syndrome of employees. Burnout is essentially a response to chronic emotional stress – manifests itself in the form of chronic fatigue, despondency, unmotivated aggression, anger, and others. This condition is due to mental fatigue among teachers as a sort of payment for overstrain when professional commitments include the impact of "heat your soul", emotional investment. The emergence of professional Burnout among teachers is due to the system of interrelated and mutually reinforcing factors relating to the various levels of the personality: individually-psychological level is psychodynamic special subject characteristics of valuemotivational sphere and formation of skills and habits of selfregulation; the socio-psychological level includes especially the Organization and interpersonal interaction of a teacher. Signs of the Burnout were observed in 15 testees, and virtually a symptom could be observed in every teacher. As a result of the diagnosis 48% of teachers had the signs of stress (phase syndrome), resulting in a sense of anxiety, mood, heightened emotional susceptibility. The following results have also been got:-the fall of General energy potential – 14 pers. -Psychosomatic and psycho vegetative syndrome – 26 pers. -emotional deficit-34 pers. -emotional Burnout Syndrome-6 pers. The problem of professional Burnout of teachers in the current conditions should become not only meaningful, but particularly relevant. The quality of education of the younger generation depends on professional development; teachers' training level, and how "healthy" teachers are. That is why the systematic maintenance of pedagogic-professional development for teachers (including disclosure of professional Burnout Syndrome factors) takes on a


This review surveys and divides the ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories: the cultural politics of digital media, the vernacular cultures of digital media, and the prosaics of digital media. Engaging these three categories of scholarship on digital media, I consider how ethnographers are exploring the complex relationships between the local practices and global implications of digital media, their materiality and politics, and their banal, as well as profound, presence in cultural life and modes of communication. I consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where, and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience.


The rapid adoption of social networking sites (SNSs) raises important questions about the social implications of such usage. Drawing on unique longitudinal data, surveying a representative sample of Norwegian online users (N = 2,000, age 15–75 years) in 3 annual waves (2008, 2009, and 2010), this study found a significantly higher score among SNS users in comparison to nonusers in 3 out of 4 social capital dimensions: face-to-face interactions, number of acquaintances, and bridging capital. However, SNS-users, and in particular males, reported more loneliness than nonusers. Furthermore, cluster analyses identified 5 distinct types of SNS users: Sporadics, Lurkers, Socializers, Debaters, and Advanced. Results indicate that Socializers report higher levels of social capital compared to other user types. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


Abstract In the United States, there has been tremendous growth in a form of third-party litigation financing where investors buy pieces of lawsuits from plaintiffs. Many scholars believe that this new financing helps to balance the risk tolerance of plaintiffs and defendants and thereby facilitates the resolution of litigation in a way that more closely tracks the goals of the substantive law. In this Article, I ask whether these risk-balancing virtues of claim investing carry over into class action cases. This is a question that has not yet been addressed by scholars because many think it is not possible for financiers to buy pieces of class action lawsuits in the United States. But I show that such investments are neither impractical nor unethical; indeed, it appears that they are already here. It is therefore worth considering whether the investments confer the same social benefits they do in other cases. I argue that although class members do not need a risk transfer device in class action cases because they are almost always risk-neutral in light of their small losses, their lawyers do need such a device. Although this does not necessarily mean that claim investing is socially desirable overall in class actions, the social costs that have thus far been identified with claim investing seem modest compared to the benefits.


In any industrial assembly process, there are a number of sources of variation. Variation in the manufacturing process leads to component variation, which, together with fixture variation and variation stemming from the joining process, propagates to the final product. In order to analyze and diminish the effect of variation, it is important to identify and be able to simulate the phenomena contributing to final variation. In this paper, the focus is variation in welding distortion arising from non-nominal components that are joined. In the welding process, it has been shown that variation in components and in fixtures influences the size and distribution of weld-induced distortion. Hence, in order to accurately simulate geometric variation of an assembly joined by weld joints, variation simulation and welding simulation need to be performed in combination. Previous research that focused on the combination of variation simulation and welding simulation has not considered components that are clamped. Instead the components were treated as rigid bodies at non-nominal positions prior to welding. In many industrial applications, clamps are used when assemblies are welded, and it is therefore important to quantify the influence that clamping has on welding of non-nominal components. In this paper, we simulate the combination of variation in components and fixtures with welding, considering that the components are clamped prior to welding. Although clamps will force the components closer to their nominal positions along the weld joint, they also introduce a stress field in the structure, which together with the welding process may cause additional distortion. Two case studies are performed and analyzed: a T-weld joint and a butt-weld joint. The results show that welding distortion depends on fixture error even in the presence of clamps.