Te purpose of research was identifying the relationship between achievement motivation and efficiency of agricultural faculty staff, Islamic Azad University Shoushtar Branch. The method of research was a descriptive-correlative. The sample size was agricultural faculty staff (n=45). A fivepoint Likert-type scale was used as the instrument to gather data in order to measure the achievement motivation. A quantitative analysis using data gathered by the survey questionnaire and Likert scale was used. Data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).Questionnaire reliability was estimated by calculating Cronbach's alpha and it was appropriate for this study (Mean Cranach's alpha 0.82). Te result of research revealed that the correlation between achievement motivation, responsibility adoption, activity rate, goal oriented and efficiency of staff at the level of 0.05 was significant. Liner regression was used to predict changes in efficiency by different variables. Based on the results achievement motivation, activity rate, responsibility adoption and goal oriented may well explain for 33.8% changes (R 2 = 0.338) in efficiency of staff.


In September 2011, the US Environmental Protection Agency asked 12 economists how the benefits and costs of regulations should be discounted for projects that affect future generations. This paper summarizes the views of the panel on three topics: the use of the Ramsey formula as an organizing principle for determining discount rates over long horizons, whether the discount rate should decline over time, and how intra- and intergenerational discounting practices can be made compatible. The panel members agree that the Ramsey formula provides a useful framework for thinking about intergenerational discounting. We also agree that theory provides compelling arguments for a declining certainty-equivalent discount rate. In the Ramsey formula, uncertainty about the future rate of growth in per capita consumption can lead to a declining consumption rate of discount, assuming that shocks to consumption are positively correlated. This uncertainty in future consumption growth rates may be estimated econometrically based on historic observations, or it can be derived from subjective uncertainty about the mean rate of growth in mean consumption or its volatility. Determining the remaining parameters of the Ramsey formula is, however, challenging.


At a deciduous forest in the southeast United States (Walker Branch Watershed, Oak Ridge, Tennessee), as at other sites with tall vegetation and/or complex terrain, it is difficult to temporally integrate eddy covariance data to obtain long-term estimates of net ecosystem exchange of carbon dioxide (NEE), primarily because of suspected systematic nocturnal errors. Therefore, although eddy covariance data can be invaluable, additional tools such as empirical gap-filling methods, independent measurements of CO2 flux using chambers, and simulations using canopy process models are often necessary to obtain reliable annual carbon uptake estimates. Two independent approaches for estimating annual NEE using these tools at the Walker Branch site are discussed. One approach is to cumulatively sum the full set of eddy covariance measurements over time. The second approach is to sum the output of NEE from a biophysical canopy exchange model (CANOAK). CANOAK incorporates independent chamber measurements on leaves, soil, and stems and is driven using the observed canopy architecture, meteorology, soil water content, and soil temperatures to predict NEE. Both methods estimate similar trends and magnitudes of daytime (daylight hours) soil respiration and NEE over 5 years. Both methods also suggest similar differences among years (interannual variability). These two estimates of NEE are used to address possible measurement bias errors at this site and to provide plausible estimates of annual NEE. The estimated mean annual NEE at this site is −574 g C m−2 yr−1 between 1995 and 1999, ranging from −470 g C m−2 y−1 (1995) to −629 g C m−2 yr−1 (1999) (negative NEE indicates uptake by forest).


The intention behind this study is to find out if learning disabled children who are physically included in a normal school are being included socially and academically. I wanted to investigate to what degree the students were included, and what happens to students who get a lot of education outside of the classroom. The political ideal in Norway is one where schools are a learning arena for all students, regardless of dysfunctions, and every student is to be included. Both the Law of Education and White Papers stress the importance of including every student in the lectures and the social aspects of school, but the closer one gets to the classroom, the less is said about what measures to take to include all the students.I could only find one scientific article where the researcher had been in the classroom to observe what was being done. I also found national and international studies, where questionnaires where the most common method. I wanted to go more in dept on what happens in the classroom which includes or segregates students from the teaching. In order to do that, I chose to observe seven students, each for one week. For additional information, I interviewed the teacher closest to the students.The paper is built up by one theoretical part and one empirical part. The theory consists of the sections of the Law of Education that concern students with general learning difficulties, previous research, the method I have chosen, and relevant theory on including. The empirical part consists of my findings from previous research on including students academically and socially, my observations and my interviews.My most important finding was that for the student to be academically included, the entire team around the student has to work together. Good planning and cooperation ensures that the student is prepared for the lecture, and thereby able to understand the theme when the class discusses it. Good planning also gives the teachers a better understanding of how to assist the student. A student who is academically included also has a better chance of becoming socially included. One reason for this is that they learn social codes by participating in the normal lectures, which gives them the opportunity to become a natural part of the class.To be socially included does not get the same priority as being academically included. Generally, it seems that academically and social including becomes more difficult the older the students get. Despite the political goals, it is not to be taken for given that students who are physically included in a school are included academically and socially.


Background: Silver nanoparticles have excellent medical and nonmedical properties and application compared with other metallic nanoparticles. In the present study, fresh leaves of Syngonium podophyllum have been used for synthesis of silver nanoparticles. Objectives: In this study, we evaluated the anticandidal activity of S. podophyllum and the synthesized nanoparticles. Materials and Methods: In this study, simple and economical procedure was adopted for silver nanoparticles synthesis. S. podophyllum leaf was processed to obtain aqueous extract as a biological material for nanoparticles production. Synthesized nanoparticles were characterized by ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and atomic force microscopy. Results: The progress of silver nanoparticles biosynthesis from leaf extract of S. podophyllum was observed by UV-visible spectroscopy. The peaks maxima were observed at 455 nm for silver nanoparticles synthesized from the leaf extracts of S. podophyllum. XRD diffractogram showing Bragg peaks of face-centered cubic crystalline elemental silver confirming the formation of silver nanoparticles. The minimal inhibitory concentration values of aqueous extracts of S. podophyllum leaf were estimated by broth dilution method and found that the extracts exhibited antifungal activity against Candida albicans. The antifungal activity was also determined using disk diffusion method by measuring the diameter for zone of inhibition. Conclusion: S. podophyllum leaf extract shows strong antifungal activity against C. albicans. S. podophyllum could be applied in the fields of medical and pharmaceuticals for formulation of new drugs. Abbreviation used: AgNO3: Silver nitrate, MIC: Minimum inhibitory concentration, MTCC: Microbial type culture collection, SPR: Surface plasmon resonance, UV: Ultraviolet, XRD: X-ray diffraction


The oral health of the elderly is lost or weakened due to economic poverty and systemic diseases. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the satisfaction toward elderly scaling and to identify factors that affect scaling satisfaction in improving the oral health of the elderly. This survey was conducted between Feb. 11th to Dec. 23th 2016, and the subjects in this study were 202 elderly people who received scaling in the public health center. The respondents are generally female (70.8%), have an occupation (14.4%), and have health insurance (67.8%). In terms of health, the respondents have hypertension (33.25%), experience inconvenience in mobility (3.5%), have diabetes (18.8%), and are afflicted with other diseases (42.1%), and, in oral health, the number of remaining teeth at 22-28 was the largest among the elderly. Also, the elderly responded positively toward mobility (90.6%), necessity of scaling (61.9%), and use of dentures (43.6%). Tooth brushing was most frequent after breakfast, but the least frequent before bedtime. The elderly who received scaling was mostly satisfied with it (96.5%). The satisfaction toward elderly scaling was significantly associated with insurance application (p<0.05). Largely, the elderly is in favor of participation (99.5%) As a result, the elderly who received scaling in public health centers were satisfied with the program. Therefore, a public oral health project can be implemented continuously and developmentally to promote elderly oral health.


The research was conducted on emitter testing bench established in Irrigation laboratory, Suleyman Demirel University, Isparta, Turkey. In the study, discharge equations (q= kHx), standard temperature discharge index (TDI, standard temperature is 20 oC) and uniformity parameters such as coefficient of manufacturing variation (CV), standard uniformity (Us), Christiansen uniformity (Cu) and emission uniformity (CUE) of in-line emitters with different discharges (D1: 2.4 L h-1 and D2: 4.0 L h-1), types (TB: Pressure compensating, TT: Non-pressure compensating) and distances (A1: 20 cm, A2: 33 cm and A3: 50 cm) under different water temperatures (20, 30, 40 and 50 oC) were determined. Effects of different pressures (from 80 to 200 kPa) on discharge of the emitters were also investigated. Discharges of non-pressure compensating emitters were increased by increasing pressure (r≈ 0.99). Although discharge was stable under high or recommended pressure in pressure compensating emitters, there was an increasing trend in emitter discharge under low pressure like non-pressure compensating emitters. Linear regressions were obtained between discharge and water temperature in non-pressure compensating and pressure compensating emitters (r≈ 0.99). Emitter discharge increased due to water temperature increase approximately 5 and 3% in non-pressure compensating and pressure compensating emitters, respectively. TDI values of non-pressure compensating emitters increased between 0.04 and 0.06 with increasing water temperature. In pressure compensating emitters, TDI values decreased 0.02 in D1A1TB emitter, did not change in D1A2TB emitter, and increased between 0.01 and 0.02 in other four emitters with increasing water temperature. Cv, Us, Cu and CUE values of the emitters under different water temperatures ranged between 0.023-0.044, 95.6-97.7%, 96.6-98.1% and 89.3-96.0%, respectively. Significant differences were obtained for each of these parameters in different water temperatures, emitter types and emitter distances. Generally, uniformity parameters improved in high water temperatures and the highest values of uniformity parameters were obtained from A2 emitter distance in the tested emitters (P<0.01).


Changepoints are abrupt variations in the generative parameters of a data sequence. Online detection of changepoints is useful in modelling and prediction of time series in application areas such as finance, biometrics, and robotics. While frequentist methods have yielded online filtering and prediction techniques, most Bayesian papers have focused on the retrospective segmentation problem. Here we examine the case where the model parameters before and after the changepoint are independent and we derive an online algorithm for exact inference of the most recent changepoint. We compute the probability distribution of the length of the current ``run,'' or time since the last changepoint, using a simple message-passing algorithm. Our implementation is highly modular so that the algorithm may be applied to a variety of types of data. We illustrate this modularity by demonstrating the algorithm on three different real-world data sets.


An analysis of nadir reflectivity spatial Fourier power spectra and autocorrelation functions for solar wavelengths and cloudy conditions is presented. The data come from Landsat thematic mapper (TM) observations, while Monte Carlo (MC) simulations are used to aid the interpretation of the observations and to examine sensitivity to various factors. We show that shortwave radiative processes produce consistent signatures in power spectra and autocorrelation functions. Power spectra take a variety of shapes not shown or explained in previous observational studies. We demonstrate that TM spectra can potentially be affected by radiative "roughening" at intermediate scales (∼1–5 km) and radiative "smoothing" at small scales (<1 km). These processes are wavelength-dependent, with systematic differences between conservative (for cloud droplets) TM band 4 (∼0.8 μm) and absorbing band 7 (∼2.2 μm). Band 7 exhibits more roughening and less smoothing than band 4 and faster decrease in autocorrelation. Roughening is more prevalent at large solar zenith angles due to optical and/or geometrical side illumination and shadowing. MC spectra illustrate that scale invariant optical depth fields can produce complex power spectra that take a variety of shapes under different conditions. Radiative roughening increases with decreasing single scattering albedo and increasing solar zenith angle (as in the observations). For low solar zenith angles, there is a clear shift in the radiative smoothing scale to smaller values as droplet absorption increases. Power spectra also show stronger decorrelations between optical depth and reflectivity when cloud top variations are more pronounced. Finally, it is shown that power spectral analysis is a useful tool for evaluating the skill of novel optical depth retrieval techniques in removing three-dimensional radiative effects. New techniques using inverse nonlocal independent pixel approximation and normalized difference of nadir reflectivity yield optical depth fields which better match the scale-by-scale variability of the true optical depth field.


Music exhibits structure at multiple scales, ranging from motifs to large-scale functional components. When inferring the structure of a piece, different listeners may attend to different temporal scales, which can result in disagreements when they describe the same piece. In the field of music informatics research (MIR), it is common to use corpora annotated with structural boundaries at different levels. By quantifying disagreements between multiple annotators, previous research has yielded several insights relevant to the study of music cognition. First, annotators tend to agree when structural boundaries are ambiguous. Second, this ambiguity seems to depend on musical features, time scale, and genre. Furthermore, it is possible to tune current annotation evaluation metrics to better align with these perceptual differences. However, previous work has not directly analyzed the effects of hierarchical structure because the existing methods for comparing structural annotations are designed for "flat" descriptions, and do not readily generalize to hierarchical annotations. In this paper, we extend and generalize previous work on the evaluation of hierarchical descriptions of musical structure. We derive an evaluation metric which can compare hierarchical annotations holistically across multiple levels. sing this metric, we investigate inter-annotator agreement on the multilevel annotations of two different music corpora, investigate the influence of acoustic properties on hierarchical annotations, and evaluate existing hierarchical segmentation algorithms against the distribution of inter-annotator agreement.


While Paul McCold's intent to clarify the compatibility of restorative justice and community justice conceptual frameworks is laudable, his effort provides as much confusion as clarity (McCold, 2004, this issue). This piece identifies some of the conflicts inherent in the roots of the development and growth of restorative justice. It also raises concerns regarding how restorative justice theoreticians and practitioners consider community, the role of strangers, empowerment, prevention, and punishment within restorative frameworks. The authors of this piece conclude that, while it remains important to safeguard the underlying principles of restorative justice, it is also necessary to remain open to new possibilities and to new ideas.


Summary The Falkland Islands (las Islas Malvinas) are a group of islands situated in the South Atlantic Ocean. They are mainly covered by grassland grazed by sheep. Attempts to improve the quality of the forage using legumes have been limited by the lack of native pollinating insects in order to ensure adequate seed production. From the 1940s onwards, various attempts to introduce the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) have been made, but have proved unsuccessful due to a shortage of suitable forage plants, the harsh winds experienced and the difficulties of queen mating. More recent introduction of legume forage plants have mainly been of self fertile varieties not requiring insect pollination.


Abstract. The new mission concept of microwave and infrared-laser occultation between low-Earth-orbit satellites (LMIO) is designed to provide accurate and long-term stable profiles of atmospheric thermodynamic variables, greenhouse gases (GHGs), and line-of-sight (l.o.s.) wind speed with focus on the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS). While the unique quality of GHG retrievals enabled by LMIO over the UTLS has been recently demonstrated based on end-to-end simulations, the promise of l.o.s. wind retrieval, and of joint GHG and wind retrieval, has not yet been analyzed in any realistic simulation setting. Here we use a newly developed l.o.s. wind retrieval algorithm, which we embedded in an end-to-end simulation framework that also includes the retrieval of thermodynamic variables and GHGs, and analyze the performance of both stand-alone wind retrieval and joint wind and GHG retrieval. The wind algorithm utilizes LMIO laser signals placed on the inflection points at the wings of the highly symmetric C18OO absorption line near 4767 cm−1 and exploits transmission differences from a wind-induced Doppler shift. Based on realistic example cases for a diversity of atmospheric conditions, ranging from tropical to high-latitude winter, we find that the retrieved l.o.s. wind profiles are of high quality over the lower stratosphere under all conditions, i.e., unbiased and accurate to within about 2 m s−1 over about 15 to 35 km. The wind accuracy degrades into the upper troposphere due to the decreasing signal-to-noise ratio of the wind-induced differential transmission signals. The GHG retrieval in windy air is not vulnerable to wind speed uncertainties up to about 10 m s−1 but is found to benefit in the case of higher speeds from the integrated wind retrieval that enables correction of wind-induced Doppler shift of GHG signals. Overall both the l.o.s. wind and GHG retrieval results are strongly encouraging towards further development and implementation of a LMIO mission.


This article analyzes how the perceived effectiveness of intellectual property protection and competitive pressure affect firms' innovation strategy choices, concretely, whether to abstain from innovation, to introduce products that are known in the market but new to the firm (imitation) or to introduce market novelties (innovation). Using a sample of 1253 German firms from manufacturing and services sectors I show that the perceived effectiveness of patent protection positively affects firms' propensity to imitate and to innovate. Having a small or a medium number of competitors positively affects firms' propensity to imitate and to innovate as compared to being a monopolist or having a large number of competitors. However, this effect varies with the perceived patent protection effectiveness. If the perceived patent protection effectiveness is low or medium, both innovation and imitation are enhanced, whereas if it is high, only innovation is enhanced.


Flavan-3-ols such as (—)-epicatechin and (+)-catechin are found in significant concentrations in red wine, green and black teas and cocoa. The radiolabelling of flavan-3-ols for feeding studies would require a short high-yielding route from the point of introduction of the label. (E)-1,3-Diarylpropenes had been key intermediates in previous syntheses of flavan-3-ols and so the modified Julia alkenation reaction between a labelled aryl aldehyde and a 2-(2'-arylethylsulfonyl)benzothiazole was proposed as the key step in the preparation of radiolabelled (E)-1,3-diarylpropene. A low molecular weight poly(ethyleneglycol)-monomethyl ether (MPEG, average MW 550) support would be used to improve the efficiency of isolating radiolabelled product after each reaction.

The light MPEG support was attached to the starting aryl bromide by protecting the phenolic hydroxyl group with a new light MPEG α,α'-dioxyxylyl protecting group, introduced by reaction with light MPEG-supported benzylic bromide, to give supported aryl bromide. The aryl bromide was reacted with copper (I) cyanide to give MPEG-supported nitrile. In theory, 14C-labelled cyanide could be used in this step. Reduction and hydrolysis gave the aldehyde. Throughout the sequence MPEG solid-phase extraction (M-SPE) was used to assist purification.

Several approaches to the synthesis of 2-(2'-arylethylsufonyl)benzothiazole were then investigated using a variety of model 2-arylethyl sulfones. The novel addition of phenylcopper to phenyl vinyl sulfone gave 2-phenethyl phenyl sulfone in good yield, but the reaction was less effective for sterically hindered arylcoppers and unsuccessful for the preparation of 2-(2'-arylethylsufonyl)benzothiazoles. Alkylcopper reagents were also suitable substrates for this novel coupling. Heck reaction between aryl iodide and phenyl vinyl sulfone, and reduction of the resulting alkene gave 2-arylethyl phenyl sulfone but the Heck reaction failed with benzothiazolyl analogues. Lithiated 2-(methylthio)benzothiazole reacted with aryl aldehydes to give β-hydroxy sulfides, but reduction to 2-arylethyl derivatives failed, even after oxidation of the sulfide to the sulfone or elimination to give a vinyl sulfide or sulfone. The same problem was encountered when lithiated 2-(trimethylsilylmethylthio)benzothiazole was use to make vinyl sulfides directly. However, alkylation of lithiated 2-(methylthio)benzothiazole with benzyl bromide gave 2-(2'-phenylethylsufonyl)benzothiazole in good yield. Unfortunately, the reaction could not be used to prepare phloroglucinol-derived benzothiazole.

Finally, the benzothiazoles underwent modified-Julia alkenation reaction with electron-rich benzaldehydes to give (E)-1,3-diarylpropenes in high yield.


Segmentation of prostate and related anatomic structure, such as transitional zone, in medical images facilitates prostate cancer detection, as well as a number of other clinical practices. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic local ROI-specific atlas-based segmentation (LABS) method to segment prostate gland and transitional zone in diffusion magnetic resonance images. Inspired by a sequential registration-based segmentation method, the proposed method further reduces the amount of user intervention and focuses on the vicinity of prostate for atlas matching and atlas-to-target registration by specifying the bounding boxes of prostate gland on key slices of volume images. We evaluated the method on an atlas database with the 100 cases by performing a leave-one-out study. Our proposed method produced favorable outcomes with an average Dice similarity coefficient of 0.85±0.03 for prostate gland and 0.77±0.06 for transitional zone segmentations, which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method and its potential to be used in relevant clinical applications.


"When countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) achieved their independence, formal social protection schemes established by former colonial powers were, to varying degrees, assimilated or mimicked by the State, particularly pension systems for government and formal-sector workers. These systems, however, have proven to be highly subsidised and regressive in terms of income distribution in the face of large segments of the population engaged in the informal sector (or rural work), who have remained excluded from formal social protection unless eligible for some social assistance programmes, mostly with lower coverage and benefits. In fact, a significant share of the social expenditure with a social protection function in most of these countries was assigned to universal or quasi-universal subsidies of fuel and staple foods". (...)


Since the overthrow of the fascist dictatorship, the Philippine left's main contingent, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the force that set the pace for the country's broad progressive movement in the Marcos era has had serious difficulties. The party and its organizations - the National Democratic Front (NDF), the New People's Army (NPA), and various mass formations - have visibly lost political momentum and initiative. By all indications, the CPP is in the midst of a leadership crisis rooted in unresolved theoretical issues. The malaise reflects itself in increasing fragmentation, cadre attrition, and the undeniable erosion of considerable influence and prestige among the masses, particularly among the so-called middle sectors.


BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Aneurysm hemodynamics has been associated with wall histology and inflammation. We investigated associations between local hemodynamics and focal wall changes visible intraoperatively. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Computational fluid dynamics models were constructed from 3D images of 65 aneurysms treated surgically. Aneurysm regions with different visual appearances were identified in intraoperative videos: 1) "atherosclerotic" (yellow), 2) "hyperplastic" (white), 3) "thin" (red), 4) rupture site, and 5) "normal" (similar to parent artery), They were marked on 3D reconstructions. Regional hemodynamics was characterized by the following: wall shear stress, oscillatory shear index, relative residence time, wall shear stress gradient and divergence, gradient oscillatory number, and dynamic pressure; these were compared using the Mann-Whitney test. RESULTS: Hyperplastic regions had lower average wall shear stress (P = .005) and pressure (P = .009) than normal regions. Flow conditions in atherosclerotic and hyperplastic regions were similar but had higher average relative residence time (P = .03) and oscillatory shear index (P = .04) than thin regions. Hyperplastic regions also had a higher average gradient oscillatory number (P = .002) than thin regions. Thin regions had lower average relative residence time (P < .001), oscillatory shear index (P = .006), and gradient oscillatory number (P < .001) than normal regions, and higher average wall shear stress (P = .006) and pressure (P = .009) than hyperplastic regions. Thin regions tended to be aligned with the flow stream, while atherosclerotic and hyperplastic regions tended to be aligned with recirculation zones. CONCLUSIONS: Local hemodynamics is associated with visible focal wall changes. Slow swirling flow with low and oscillatory wall shear stress was associated with atherosclerotic and hyperplastic changes. High flow conditions prevalent in regions near the flow impingement site characterized by higher and less oscillatory wall shear stress were associated with local "thinning" of the wall.


We revisit the problem of learning from untrusted batches introduced by Qiao and Valiant [QV17]. Recently, Jain and Orlitsky [JO19] gave a simple semidefinite programming approach based on the cut-norm that achieves essentially information-theoretically optimal error in polynomial time. Concurrently, Chen et al. [CLM19] considered a variant of the problem where $\mu$ is assumed to be structured, e.g. log-concave, monotone hazard rate, $t$-modal, etc. In this case, it is possible to achieve the same error with sample complexity sublinear in $n$, and they exhibited a quasi-polynomial time algorithm for doing so using Haar wavelets.
In this paper, we find an appealing way to synthesize the techniques of [JO19] and [CLM19] to give the best of both worlds: an algorithm which runs in polynomial time and can exploit structure in the underlying distribution to achieve sublinear sample complexity. Along the way, we simplify the approach of [JO19] by avoiding the need for SDP rounding and giving a more direct interpretation of it through the lens of soft filtering, a powerful recent technique in high-dimensional robust estimation. We validate the usefulness of our algorithms in preliminary experimental evaluations.


Background Kenya was identified as one of the ten priority countries in the WHO led UN Decade of Action for Road Safety (2011–2020) that aimed at reducing global road crash injuries and mortality by at least 50%, through a systematic road safety campaign by 2020. The Road safety campaign in 10-countries or RS-10 as the campaign was known, targeted ten worst hit countries that together accounted for about 50% of global road crash fatalities. The Kenyan project dubbed Road Safety Kenya (RS–K) identified the highway towns of Thika and Naivasha as the 5-year pilot implementation sites. The project started in the year 2010, and one of the interventions was the campaign to promote the wearing of helmets by motor cycle (MC) riders and their passengers. Helmets have been shown to reduce mortality and severity of head injuries among MC riders. The objective of this study was to assess the impact of road safety campaign targeting MC riders since the year 2010 in Naivasha, Kenya. Methods Cross sectional observational study in which MC road safety compliance as evident in use of protective helmets by rider and passengers, use of reflective clothing by rider and passenger as well as the use of daytime riding lights was directly observed by the roadside. Results A total of 9280 motor cycles were observed from the 6 study centres during the 7-day data collection period. Of these only 18% (1752) complied with all the three road safety measures of wearing helmet by passenger and rider, reflective jacket and one pillion passenger at any single time. Helmet compliance was 42% (3,850) among the riders and only 9% (402) passengers wore helmet while riding. Males were twice likely to wear helmets than the female counterparts. Luminous clothing were widely used by riders (76.2%) while only 349 (3.8%) rode with the headlight on at daytime. Conclusion Despite the road safety campaign conducted in Naivasha between 2010 and 2014, the compliance with road safety measures among motor cycle riders remain low particularly among the passengers. It is probable that passengers were poorly targeted in this campaign due to logistical challenges or simply that the strategies that have been successful elsewhere are not applicable in this environment. It should be useful to establish from a hospital and mortuary based research if females have a higher percentage of mortality and severe head injuries due to poorer compliance with helmet use.


Abstract. Record breaking loss of ozone (O3) in the Arctic stratosphere has been reported in winter–spring 2010/2011. We examine in detail the composition and transformations occurring in the Arctic polar vortex using total column and vertical profile data products for O3, bromine oxide (BrO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), chlorine dioxide (OClO), and polar stratospheric clouds (PSC) retrieved from measurements made by SCIAMACHY (Scanning Imaging Absorption SpectroMeter for Atmospheric CHartography) on-board Envisat (Environmental Satellite), as well as total column ozone amount, retrieved from the measurements of GOME-2 (Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment) on MetOp-A (Meteorological Experimental Satellite). Similarly we use the retrieved data from DOAS (Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy) measurements made in Ny-Alesund (78.55° N, 11.55° E). A chemical transport model (CTM) has been used to relate and compare Arctic winter–spring conditions in 2011 with those in the previous year. In late winter–spring 2010/2011 the chemical ozone loss in the polar vortex derived from SCIAMACHY observations confirms findings reported elsewhere. More than 70% of O3 was depleted by halogen catalytic cycles between the 425 and 525 K isentropic surfaces, i.e. in the altitude range ~16–20 km. In contrast, during the same period in the previous winter 2009/2010, a typical warm Arctic winter, only slightly more than 20% depletion occurred below 20 km, while 40% of O3 was removed above the 575 K isentrope (~23 km). This loss above 575 K is explained by the catalytic destruction by NOx descending from the mesosphere. In both Arctic winters 2009/2010 and 2010/2011, calculated O3 losses from the CTM are in good agreement to our observations and other model studies. The mid-winter 2011 conditions, prior to the catalytic cycles being fully effective, are also investigated. Surprisingly, a significant loss of O3 around 60%, previously not discussed in detail, is observed in mid-January 2011 below 500 K (~19 km) and sustained for approximately 1 week. The low O3 region had an exceptionally large spatial extent. The situation was caused by two independently evolving tropopause elevations over the Asian continent. Induced adiabatic cooling of the stratosphere favoured the formation of PSC, increased the amount of active chlorine for a short time, and potentially contributed to higher polar ozone loss later in spring.


Locally weighted projection regression (LWPR) is a new algorithm for incremental nonlinear function approximation in high dimensional spaces with redundant and irrelevant input dimensions. At its core, it employs nonparametric regression with locally linear models. In order to stay computationally efficient and numerically robust, each local model performs the regression analysis with a small number of univariate regressions in selected directions in input space in the spirit of partial least squares regression. We discuss when and how local learning techniques can successfully work in high dimensional spaces and compare various techniques for local dimensionality reduction before finally deriving the LWPR algorithm. The properties of LWPR are that it i) learns rapidly with second order learning methods based on incremental training, ii) uses statistically sound stochastic leave-one-out cross validation for learning without the need to memorize training data, iii) adjusts its weighting kernels based only on local information in order to minimize the danger of negative interference of incremental learning, iv) has a computational complexity that is linear in the number of inputs, and v) can deal with a large number of possibly redundant inputs, as shown in various empirical evaluations with up to 50 dimensional data sets. For a probabilistic interpretation, predictive variance and confidence intervals are derived. To our knowledge, LWPR is the first truly incremental spatially localized learning method that can successfully and efficiently operate in very high dimensional spaces.


Wireless communication systems more and more become part of our daily live. Especially with the Internet of Things (IoT) the overall connectivity increases rapidly since everyday objects become part of the global network. For this purpose several new wireless protocols have arisen, whereas 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) can be seen as one of the most important protocols within this sector. Originally designed on top of the IEEE802.15.4 standard it is a subject to various adaptions that will allow to use 6LoWPAN over different technologies; e.g. DECT Ultra Low Energy (ULE). Although this high connectivity offers a lot of new possibilities, there are several requirements and pitfalls coming along with such new systems. With an increasing number of connected devices the interoperability between different providers is one of the biggest challenges, which makes it necessary to verify the functionality and stability of the devices and the network. Therefore testing becomes one of the key components that decides on success or failure of such a system. Although there are several protocol implementations commonly available; e.g., for IoT based systems, there is still a lack of according tools and environments as well as for functional and conformance testing. This article describes the architecture and functioning of the proposed test framework based on Testing and Test Control Notation Version 3 (TTCN-3) for 6LoWPAN over ULE networks.


Drawing on a systemic functional linguistics genre paradigm, this article examines model writing texts in two types of English teaching and learning materials for high school students in Japan: public and commercial textbooks. A corpus of 73 texts was created. This article aims to identify what genres are provided as model texts to teach and learn English writing in these textbooks. It further aims to identify the schematic structures of the genres identified. It was found that, in the commercial textbooks, only a limited range of genres was provided while, in the public textbooks, a variety of genres such as Information reports, Everyday procedures and Sequential explanations was included. In relation to text structures, different ways of constructing the Argument stage in argumentative genre texts were found in the two types of textbooks. Pedagogical implications for English writing instruction in Japanese high schools are suggested.


Many of the assumptions of Labovian sociolinguistics are based on results drawn from US and UK English, Latin American Spanish and Canadian French. Sociolinguistic variation in the French of France has been rather little studied compared to these languages. This volume is the first examination and exploration of variation in French that studies in a unified way the levels of phonology, grammar and lexis using quantitative methods. One of its aims is to establish whether the patterns of variation that have been reported in French conform to those reported in other languages. A second important theme of this volume is the study of variation across speech styles in French, through a comparison with some of the best-known English results. The book is therefore also the first to examine current theories of social-stylistic variation by using fresh quantitative data. These data throw new light on the influence of methodology on results, on why certain linguistic variables have more stylistic value, and on how the strong normative tradition in France moulds interactions between social and stylistic variation.


In translocation OY321 of Neurospora crassa, the nucleolus organizer is divided into two segments, a proximal portion located interstitially in one interchange chromosome, and a distal portion now located terminally on another chromosome, linkage group I. In crosses of Translocation X Translocation, exceptional progeny are recovered nonselectively in which the chromosome sequence has apparently reverted to Normal. Genetic, cytological, and molecular evidence indicates that reversion is the result of meiotic crossing over between homologous displaced rDNA repeats. Marker linkages are wild type in these exceptional progeny. They differ from wild type, however, in retaining an interstitial block of rRNA genes which can be demonstrated cytologically by the presence of a second, small interstitial nucleolus and genetically by linkage of an rDNA restriction site polymorphism to the mating-type locus in linkage group I. The interstitial rDNA is more highly methylated than the terminal rDNA. The mechanism by which methylation enzymes distinguish between interstitial rDNA and terminal rDNA is unknown. Some hypotheses are considered.


Buffalo  has  anatomical  similarity with  cattle, such as  rument  and  body frame. The objective of this study were to body measurement and percentage of carcass and non carcass of swamp buffaloes and PO cattles in the feedlot system. Six heads male of Swamp Buffalo (218 kg) and eight heads male of PO Cattle (217 kg) were maintained in the feedlot system for 10 weeks. The body size was measured during the maintenance and percentage of carcass and non carcass were taken from the calculations of carcass/non carcass weight per live weight ×100%, data was analyzed using t-test method. The results showed that various parts of the body measurement was significant (P 0.05).


In the early 1990s, forty to fifty thousand Iranians came to Japan as foreign workers. Now, only about ten thousand currently reside here with the remainder having returned to Iran. Since most of them were considered "illegal" workers, they did not have the opportunities to share their stories about their experiences in Japan. Tomoko Yamagishi, an assistant professor of Meiji University, and I went to Iran in 2000 and interviewed several of these returnees. This paper discusses our findings and the resulting implications. Many of those interviewed were lower middle class city dwellers or Turks, one of the minority groups in Iran. They had various reasons for coming to Japan. Many of them came for work, some to change their lives, and some to escape Iran. After they came to Japan, however, the images that Japanese held of Iranians changed for the worse. They had a very difficult time because of stereotypes and prejudices. In spite of their hard experiences in Japan, many of those interviewed say that they still like Japan and would come to Japan again, if they had the opportunity. In addition, some Iranians married Japanese women. Now they can speak Japanese and are accustomed to the Japanese culture. They have become Japanese cultural carriers to Iran.


Background Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) is one of the most widely-used vaccines worldwide. BCG primarily reduces the progression from infection to disease, however there is evidence that BCG may provide additional benefits. We aimed to investigate whether there is evidence in routinely-collected surveillance data that BCG vaccination impacts outcomes for tuberculosis (TB) cases in England. Methods We obtained all TB notifications for 2009–2015 in England from the Enhanced Tuberculosis surveillance system. We considered five outcomes: All-cause mortality, death due to TB (in those who died), recurrent TB, pulmonary disease, and sputum smear status. We used logistic regression, with complete case analysis, to investigate each outcome with BCG vaccination, years since vaccination and age at vaccination, adjusting for potential confounders. All analyses were repeated using multiply imputed data. Results We found evidence of an association between BCG vaccination and reduced all-cause mortality (aOR:0.76 (95%CI 0.64 to 0.89), P:0.001) and weak evidence of an association with reduced recurrent TB (aOR:0.90 (95%CI 0.81 to 1.00), P:0.056). Analyses using multiple imputation suggested that the benefits of vaccination for all-cause mortality were reduced after 10 years. Conclusions We found that BCG vaccination was associated with reduced all-cause mortality in people with TB although this benefit was less pronounced more than 10 years after vaccination. There was weak evidence of an association with reduced recurrent TB. Highlights Found evidence of an association between BCG vaccination and reduced all-cause mortality in TB cases. Weaker evidence of an association between BCG vaccination and reduced repeat TB episodes in TB cases. There was little evidence of an association with other TB outcomes. We explored the identified associations by age and time since vaccination.


A building is designed for one set of typical climatic conditions. In the context of expected climate change, substantial numbers of existing and new buildings are expected to survive long enough to experience perceptible shifts in climate 'normals' (averages). This is problematic for predicting building performance, largely because the exact nature of climate change is hard to predict with certainty. Thus an optimal design is not only tuned to the original design conditions, but is also robust to changes in climatic conditions in the sense of a low sensitivity of its performance. To predict a building's response to changes in typical weather, two inputs are required: weather data representing this change, and suitable metrics to compare building performance across different climate normals. This report presents initial work on a proposed method for assessing the sensitivity of new or existing buildings to climate change. This method begins with a selection of weather files to represent climate change, then quantifies a building's passive performance in those climates using an enthalpy-based metric, and ends with a graphical analysis of the performance of the building in different climates to assess its robustness. In this report, we propose an objective performance metric based on the extent to which a building creates indoor conditions passively, i.e. without auxiliary systems. Initial work suggests that the performance assessment carried out here is reproducible and applicable for indoor environment design and evaluation in different ranges of climate change. This approach enables a comparison of building performance without the bias introduced by inherent differences in climatic conditions.


Background: Today, with the increasing pressures of life and, consequently, increasing stress, mental health is endangered. In this regard, the style of personality and mental toughness is noted that is effects on mental health. The aim of this study was to investigate the predictive role of psychological toughness in mental health both directly and indirectly through the mediation of personality dimensions.
Material and Methods: In a cross sectional study 273 students at Allameh Tabataba'i University Campus in the 2014-2015 school year with cluster sampling were selected. Variables assessments were done by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), Personality Assessment Inventory short form (NEO) and Kalaf mental toughness questionnaires. Data were analyzed by the path analysis modeling method and using SPSS-21 and LISREL software.
Result: Chi-square theoretical model of this study was equal to 2.47; the measure is insignificantly according to significant level of 0.116 which at first glance may suggest that the model is appropriate and representative of the society. Other fitness indicators, including indicators of GFI=0.98, NFI=0.97, CFI=0.97, AGFI=0.93 & RMSEA=0.06 which is accepted according to the model offered.
Commitment, live control and self confidence in interpersonal relation indirectly predicted mental health (p<0.05). Excitation control and self confidence in interpersonal relation directly predicted mental health (p<0.05).
Conclusion: Some features of mental toughness regardless of the effect of the character can cause mental health that According to the findings, emotional control and self-confidence are more important. It is suggested that these items be taught to improve mental health. Keywords: Mental health, Personality dimensions, Mental toughness


"The Austrian Bregenzerwald (Bregenz Forest) is a region dear to Bernardo Bader
because of both personal and cultural reasons, often used as reference in his work.
His familiarity with the region creates an understanding of and a commitment to
the needs of the local population and the requirements of everyday life, to which
his office provides architectural answers. The Bregenzerwald is well known for its
craftsmanship: tried and trusted methods are held in high regard – they convey a
sense of tradition, combined with a spirit of experimentation and innovation. In his
architecture, Bernardo Bader transforms the impulse to achieve perfect craftsmanship
through a methodological and conceptual openness towards workmanship.
His is a true "stance", i.e., an attitude towards people and things.
Bernardo Bader's stance is sincere and authentic. It relates to the regional and personal
context – the context of the village, the neighbourhood, the living conditions
of the users, the surroundings, – and the underlying cultural, political and economic
conditions. At the same time, his stance goes beyond, it dares to take a broader
perspective in order to create buildings that are meant to last. The aim of his architectural
study is to produce elements for everyday use that are long-lasting, thereby
unpretentiously replacing the term "sustainability", eventually creating an atmosphere,
a mood, a form of echo.
The aim of Bernardo Bader's architecture is to produce spaces that create an echo,
that inspire our senses – and through our senses, our minds and behaviour. Each
decision matches a gesture. These individual decisions are considerate and careful
in producing a coherent unity with a lightness that shows in its single elements and
as a whole.
Working together means that high quality standards are expected, but also that the
effort, knowledge and responsibility of many individuals is needed. However, cooperation
is also the basis for further development and the establishment of a culture
of criticism that is constructive rather than self-serving. Better solutions are created
when colleagues exchange ideas: this makes them invaluable and a source of joy
for all participants, including clients, users and the overall building culture."


Crystallisation starts off with nucleation, which is rather poorly understood. However, over the last few years there have been important quantitative experiments at constant supersaturation, and the modelling of this data has also advanced. Experiments in which the supersaturation is varying, e.g., those at constant cooling rate, are important but hard to interpret. This review focuses on the state of the art in quantitative studies of nucleation at constant supersaturation. We can now test reliably for heterogeneous nucleation and somewhat less reliably for the rarer case of homogeneous nucleation. In the case of heterogeneous nucleation, we can also obtain at least some information on what is responsible for nucleation. We also now have (unfortunately currently untested) predictions for the scaling of nucleation timescales with system size. These predictions may prove important both for scaling up from small droplets to larger volumes, and for scaling down to crystallisation at the nanoscales relevant for nanotechnology applications. Finally, it is worth noting that in many experiments the dynamic range of nucleation times is too large to be measured. This is presumably due to highly variable impurities, and this problem may need to be addressed in future work.


For a ring with 1, we show that every proper kernel functor generates a proper torsion radical if and only if the ring is a finite subdirect product of strongly prime (also called ATF) rings. This is equivalent to every essential right ideal containing a finite set whose right annihilator is zero. We use this characterization to quickly prove a number of properties of rings satisfying this condition, and apply the results to the problem: when is every kernel functor a torsion radical.


Insulin is an essential hormone with key roles in energy homeostasis and body composition. Mice and rats, unlike other mammals, have two insulin genes: the rodent-specific Ins1 gene and the ancestral Ins2 gene. The relationships between insulin gene dosage and obesity has previously been explored in male and female Ins2−/− mice with full or reduced Ins1 dosage, as well as in female Ins1−/− mice with full or partial Ins2 dosage. We report herein unexpected hyper-variability in circulating insulin and physiological responses to high fat feeding in male Ins1−/−:Ins2+/− mice. Two large cohorts of Ins1−/−:Ins2+/− mice and their Ins1−/−:Ins2+/+ littermates were fed chow diet or high fat diet (HFD) from weaning and housed in specific pathogen-free (SPF) conditions. Cohort A and cohort B were studied one year apart. Contrary to female mice from the same litters, inactivating one Ins2 allele on the complete Ins1-null background did not cause a consistent reduction of circulating insulin in male mice. In cohort A, HFD-fed males showed an equivalent degree of insulin hypersecretion and weight gain, regardless of Ins2 dosage. In cohort B, Ins1−/−:Ins2+/− males showed decreased insulin levels and body mass, compared to Ins1−/−:Ins2+/+ littermates. While experimental conditions were held consistent between cohorts, we found that HFD-fed Ins1−/−:Ins2+/− mice with lower insulin levels had increased corticosterone. Collectively, these observations highlight the hyper-variability and range of phenotypic characteristics modulated by Ins2 gene dosage, specifically in male mice.


This study was triggered by a 2015 documentary film directed by Sophia Luvara, Inside  the Chinese Closet , which depicts the plight of two homosexual individuals in present-day Mainland China. Upon further reading into the film text, the discourse of the protagonists' sexual orientation is downplayed; rather, the issues of their singlehood seem to be more of a concern, and pervasive. The paper first discusses singlehood in relation to traditional Chinese culture. There is no doubt that Confucian philosophy and 'face' are correlated with the fact that the family-kinship in China has a pervasive influence on the public perception of singlehood. Yet, as the self-combed women have demonstrated, singlehood is not consistently problematized by the Chinese culture. Thereafter, the discussions move into the discourse of contemporary China, suggesting that state-backed media have been encouraging marriage and stigmatizing those who do not adhere. Unmarried women are not the only victims, though they seem to experience the stigmatization more often than men. Chinese bachelors, too, fall prey to stigmatization. In recent years, there also seems to be a continual normalization of homosexuality due to gay consumerism and the increase of the legalization of same-sex marriage. At the end of the day, be it for heterosexuals or homosexuals, marriage seems to be an important end point to singlehood. At last, the paper questions the need to look at singlehood as the binary opposition to marriage.


There are over twenty million Muslims in China today. From the mountainous borders with Afghanistan to the tropical island of Hainan, the ethnicities and cultures of China's Muslims are as diverse as China herself. They come from at least ten different ethnic groups, including the Persianate Tajiks in the Pamir Mountains, Kirgiz eagle hunters in the west, and the Chinese speaking Hui living in Canton. In recent years the world's attention has been drawn to the clashes between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang Province. But how does a Muslim minority in the People's Republic of China live today? After decades of communist rule, and now under the onslaught of commerce and consumerism, what pressures do the different communities and their heritages face? Wong How Man, a renowned Chinese explorer and Adel Awni Dajani, with his Muslim background, come together to explore the regions of the Asian borderlands where the traditions of Islam and China interact. Their collaboration has resulted in this lavishly illustrated book which gives us a glimpse of the rich diversity of life on the Islamic frontiers of China.


At present, a very important aspect that is present in the rivers and / or channels that transport superficial water is the dispersion that the chemical compounds can have in the superficial water flow. In general, the analysis of the dispersion of a pollutant in the field studies are the costs, for this reason the development of techniques for the analysis of the dispersion of a contaminant in the surface water flow in an open channel through the processing of digital images can also reduce the costs of this type of analysis, have various applications ranging from specific studies to the validation of numerical models. Analysis of the dispersion of the contaminant can afford the fate that the compounds in the water may have. Therefore, this work develops a method of analyzing the behavior of a tracer through its concentration without having to involve processes of mathematical modeling, where the dispersion of a contaminant in the water flow of an open channel through a mobile solid, using digital image processing. This work concluded that the effects of the dispersion on a tracer intensified the interposition of a solid with the movement in its path up to 93.3%, promoting the disorder in its molecules and the process of mixing with the medium.


Abstract Swedish long-term soil fertility experiments were used to investigate the effect of texture and fertilization regime on soil electrical conductivity. In one geophysical approach, fields were mapped to characterize the horizontal variability in apparent electrical conductivity down to 1.5 m soil depth using an electromagnetic induction meter (EM38 device). The data obtained were geo-referenced by dGPS. The other approach consisted of measuring the vertical variability in electrical conductivity along transects using a multi-electrode apparatus for electrical resistivity tomography (GeoTom RES/IP device) down to 2 m depth. Geophysical field work was complemented by soil analyses. The results showed that despite 40 years of different fertilization regimes, treatments had no significant effects on the apparent electrical conductivity. Instead, the comparison of sites revealed high and low conductivity soils, with gradual differences explained by soil texture. A significant, linear relationship found between apparent electrical conductivity and soil clay content explained 80% of the variability measured. In terms of soil depth, both low and high electrical conductivity values were measured. Abrupt changes in electrical conductivity within a field revealed the presence of 'deviating areas'. Higher values corresponded well with layers with a high clay content, while local inclusions of coarse-textured materials caused a high variability in conductivity in some fields. The geophysical methods tested provided useful information on the variability in soil texture at the experimental sites. The use of spatial EC variability as a co-variable in statistical analysis could be a complementary tool in the evaluation of experimental results.


Objective:Lobectomy is the standard of care for stage IA lung cancer. Some small retrospective studies have suggested similar results after limited resection for tumors ≤2 cm in size. The objective of the study was to compare survival after lobectomy and limited resection among Medicare patients with lung cancer. Methods:Using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results registry, linked to Medicare records, we identified 1165 cases of stage I lung cancer ≤2 cm in size that underwent lobectomy or limited resection (segmentectomy or wedge resection). We used logistic regression to determine propensity scores for undergoing limited resection based on the patients' preoperative characteristics. Overall and lung cancer-specific survival of patients treated with lobectomy or limited resection was compared after adjusting for their propensity score. Results:Overall, 196 (17%) patients underwent limited resection. For the entire sample, the adjusted hazard ratio for all cause mortality (1.09; 95% confidence interval: 0.85–1.40) or lung cancer-specific death (hazard ratio: 1.39; 95% confidence interval: 0.97–2.01) for patients undergoing limited resection were not significantly different from those having lobectomy. Similarly, we found no significant differences in overall or lung cancer-specific survival for patients treated with limited resection compared with lobectomy when data was analyzed stratifying and matching patients by their propensity scores. Conclusions:These results suggest that survival of patients >65 years of age undergoing limited resection or lobectomy for stage IA tumors ≤2 cm appears to be similar. Although these findings should be confirmed in prospective trials, our results suggest that limited resection may be an effective therapeutic alternative for these patients.


Journal articles, conferences, TV programs and books are now flooding the academic and popular market about additive manufacturing, commonly labelled 3D printing. In the context of product design, as distinct from engineering, this paper focuses on design issues when considering using additive manufacturing technology in new product development or improving existing products. Offered is a detailed scope of the designer's role in product development using additive manufacturing technology. This is realised (1) as representations (prototypes, mock-ups, scaled-models, etc.); (2) through manufacturing (tools, jigs, stencils, etc.); and (3) as manufactured artefacts (sunglasses, etc.). In addition, an approach to designing for both new product development and improvement of existing products is presented. This approach, called Adapt, Integrate, Compensate, Elongate (AICE), is elaborated and exemplified, giving guidelines to designers, engineers and makers. The paper closes by reflecting on the implications of such an approach for the further development of design-centred perspectives on additive manufacturing, moving dominant disciplinary discourses towards product design, development and analysis to complement the burgeoning attention to tools, material and production.


By serving as a key revenue source for online content providers, online advertising has been instrumental in the development of innovative websites. Continued innovation among content providers, however, depends critically on the competitive provision of online advertising. Suppliers of online advertising provide three primary inputs - (1) advertiser tools, (2) intermediation services, and (3) publisher tools. Certain suppliers such as Google provide a platform that combines the inputs into one integrated service. In this paper, we focus on the overlapping products sold to advertisers by Google and DoubleClick - namely, the supply of advertiser tools. Because the supply of advertiser tools is highly concentrated, Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick raises important questions for antitrust authorities. Proponents of this acquisition argue that Google and DoubleClick do not compete - that is, buyers of search-based or contextual-based advertising (the two advertising channels in which Google participates) do not perceive graphic-based advertising (the advertising channel in which DoubleClick participates) to be substitutes. Thus, they conclude that the proposed acquisition would not lead to higher prices.In this paper, we examine economic evidence and legal precedent to help identify the relevant antitrust product market for Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick. According to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Horizontal Merger Guidelines, product markets are defined by the response of buyers to relative changes in prices. To inform how buyers - in this case, online advertisers - would respond to relative changes in price across the three online advertising channels (search, contextual, and display), we analyze the results of a survey of online retailers. The survey suggests that (1) a significant share of online advertisers would substitute among the three channels in response to relative changes in prices, and (2) a significant share of DoubleClick customers would turn to Google before any other supplier in response to an increase in the price of DoubleClick's advertiser tools. In particular, the survey indicates that a combined Google-DoubleClick would likely have a greater incentive to increase the price of DoubleClick's advertiser tools relative to a stand-alone DoubleClick offering.


This paper finds that betting biases in the NFL market go beyond preferring to bet on the favorite team and the over. The results show that as more bettors place wagers, the percentage of wagers on the favorite team increases. Additionally, bettors have a preference to bet against the line movement to receive better betting odds in the point spread market. Moreover, bettors prefer betting on the favorite when the away team has lost recent games and on the over when the home team has been covering the over in recent games. Furthermore, bettors have a nonlinear preference in the point spread betting, as they are less likely to wager on the favorite when the spread is small or large. Finally, economically profitable strategies are put forth based upon the percentage of bettors betting on the favorite or over by using a contrarian strategy when 50% to 60% of bettors place the same wager. These results have important implications as they can be used by the sportsbook to create betting lines to maximize profit.


ABSTRACT This article analyses the role of pension principles of funding and benefit provision for the development of the Swedish pension system. Focusing on four major public pension reforms in the twentieth century, it discusses why certain pension principles were used and under what circumstances they were more or less likely to change. The analysis shows that change was implemented to a large extent as a response to the previous pension system failing to fulfil its intended purpose in terms of financial stability, work incentives and redistribution.


The ability to non-invasively monitor cell biology in vivo is one of the most important goals of molecular imaging. Imaging procedures could be inter-subject performed repeatedly at different investigating stages; thereby need not sacrifice small animals during the entire study period. Thus, the ultimate goal of this study was to design a stereotactic image-guided system for small animals and integrated it with an automatic robot arm for in vivo tissue biopsy analysis. The system was composed of three main parts, including one small animal stereotactic frame, one semi-automatic imaging-fusion software and an automatic robot arm system. The system has been thoroughly evaluated with three components; the robot position accuracy was 0.05±0.02 mm, the image registration accuracy was 0.37±0.18 mm and the system integration was satisfactorily within 1.20±0.39 mm of error. From these results, the system demonstrated sufficient accuracy to guide the micro-injector that mounted on the robot arm from the planned delivery routes into practice. The entire system accuracy was limited by the image fusion and orientation procedures, due to its nature of the blurred PET imaging obtained from the small objects. The primary improvement is to acquire as higher resolution as possible the fused imaging for localizing the targets, which will be our next goal for study.


International economic organisations are increasingly coming under the scrutiny and criticism of the international community. They have often been accused of not being able to fulfil the promise of what they stand for and guilty of even of world's worst outcomes. This paper challenges this viewpoint by proposing a new role for international organisations in Africa and developing countries in general. The paper suggests that a country's structural programme and domestic economic policies should be planned in concert with domestic authorities and experts.


A simulation program to study various laser dynamics has been written. It explore all main equations of laser physics. The students, playing around with the laser parameters such as pump power, cavity losses and population dynamics can visualize the different behaviors of the laser output power, spectrum and time evolution.


In this paper, the formation of liquid
crystal structure in preparation of emulsion and the change of those liquid crystal
structures during storage
and usage were studied. Besides, the rheological and moisturizing property of the
liquid crystal
structure emulsion was investigated as well. The results show that the liquid
crystal structure at oil-water interface in the emulsion forms gradually with
cooling process after homogenization. The liquid crystal structure doesn't change significantly during the
storage within 12 months. And after emulsion being stored for 18 months, the
crystal structure starts to decompose. Upon application on the skin, the liquid
crystal structure of emulsion was found to transform into other form with
rubbing, although the liquid crystal structure still remains. The rheological
data shows that liquid crystal emulsion exhibits solid-like (elastic) property during storage, which
is favorable for good stability. On the other hand, liquid crystal emulsion
shows typical shear-thinning property upon usage, which leads to an excellent
skin sensory feeling. And the improved moisturizing properties of such emulsion
may be attributed to the liquid crystal structure.


In this paper, we present a language-independent method for the automatic, unsupervised extraction of non-content words from a corpus of documents. This method permits the creation of word lists that may be used in place of traditional function word lists in various natural language processing tasks. As an example we generated lists of words from a corpus of English, Chinese, and Russian posts extracted from Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia Wikitalk discussion pages. We applied these lists to the task of authorship attribution on this corpus to compare the effectiveness of lists of words extracted with this method to expert-created function word lists and frequent word lists (a common alternative to function word lists). hLDA lists perform comparably to frequent word lists. The trials also show that corpus-derived lists tend to perform better than more generic lists, and both sets of generated lists significantly outperformed the expert lists. Additionally, we evaluated the performance of an English expert list on machine translations of our Chinese and Russian documents, showing that our method also outperforms this alter-


This thesis explores two central questions: one, why does the field of Aboriginal philosophy remain largely unestablished?; and two, what shape might Aboriginal philosophy take? The first two chapters of the paper will address the first question. Value structures that are biased towards western philosophies will be identified as a key reason for the relative absence of Aboriginal philosophies compared to European and American philosophies taught and researched in Australia at present. A Nietzschean analysis of these value structures will demonstrate that the lack of value attributed to Aboriginal philosophy in Australia at present is unwarranted; it will also provide a platform from which a revaluation of competing narratives can take place. The exploration of a number of Aboriginal Dreaming stories will emphasise that such stories contain complex understandings of the world that are of equal value to any other philosophy the world has produced; neither 'folk' philosophy nor 'myth' nor any additional descriptions that suggest an inferior, simplistic worldview. The last chapter will address the second question by providing an exploratory step towards Aboriginal philosophy. The aim of this thesis is to provide a basis for further research into what Aboriginal philosophy or philosophies may look like, and the development of a dialogue between Aboriginal philosophy and mainstream philosophy as valued, respected, equal fields of intellectual knowledge.


Several recent works have focused on harvesting HTML tables from the Web and recovering their semantics [Cafarella et al., 2008a; Elmeleegy et al., 2009; Limaye et al., 2010; Venetis et al., 2011]. As a result, hundreds of millions of high quality structured data tables can now be explored by the users. In this paper, we argue that those efforts only scratch the surface of the true value of structured data on the Web, and study the challenging problem of synthesizing tables from the Web, i.e., producing never-before-seen tables from raw tables on the Web. Table synthesis offers an important semantic advantage: when a set of related tables are combined into a single union table, powerful mechanisms, such as temporal or geographical comparison and visualization, can be employed to understand and mine the underlying data holistically.

We focus on one fundamental task of table synthesis, namely, table stitching. Within a given site, many tables with identical schemas can be scattered across many pages. The task of table stitching involves combining such tables into a single meaningful union table and identifying extra attributes and values for its rows so that rows from different original tables can be distinguished. Specifically, we first define the notion of stitchable tables and identify collections of tables that can be stitched. Second, we design an effective algorithm for extracting hidden attributes that are essential for the stitching process and for aligning values of those attributes across tables to synthesize new columns. We also assign meaningful names to these synthesized columns. Experiments on real world tables demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.


Research has shown that Latino adolescents report higher levels of depressive symptoms compared to youths from other ethnic backgrounds (Twenge & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2002; Kessler et al., 1994). Despite these risks, there is consensus in the literature that the endorsement of familial cultural values (e.g., strong attachment to family, reciprocated loyalty and obligation, and deference for adults) serves as a protective factor and predicts positive outcomes in Latino youths and their families (Stein et al., 2014). Some research studies, however, have highlighted that familial cultural value endorsement can also act as a potential risk factor for Latino youths within high-risk contexts (Zayas, Kaplan, Turner, Romano, & Gonzalez-Ramos, 2000). Although familial cultural values are critical in understanding risk and resilience processes in Latino youths, few studies have investigated the emotional mechanisms through which they promote positive or negative outcomes. The present study examined the relation between the endorsement of familial cultural values and depressive symptoms testing whether shame served to mediate this relation in the context of low grades and high levels of externalizing symptoms. As hypothesized, results demonstrated a negative association between familial cultural values and depressive symptoms. Contrary to hypotheses, however, academic achievement and externalizing symptoms failed to moderate the relationship between familial cultural values and depressive symptoms. Further, shame failed to mediate this relationship. Understanding the emotional underpinnings of these crucial cultural values has implications for the development of prevention and intervention programs aimed at fostering resilience in Latino youths. Implications and future directions are discussed.


THIS COMMUNICATION presents a study of infant rhesus monkeys rendered athyroid by I131administration. Its justification rests upon the premise that a better understanding of the effects of thyroidectomy in infant catarrhine primates might broaden our understanding of human cretinism. Aberrations in growth and development and correlated metabolic changes following thyroid ablation are reported. This report is one of a series on the growth and development of normal and thyroid-ablated infant rhesus monkeys.1 Previously reported studies on effects of thyroidectomy in the young rhesus monkeys are limited to those of Fleischmann and co-workers.2They observed that while no other physical effects were seen, one of the two rhesus animals which they surgically thyroidectomized at 8 months (the other of which died within a few days following surgery) showed no appreciably significant growth during a 21-week survival period. Earlier reports upon the effects of (surgical) thyroidectomy in adult rhesus


We explore training an automatic modality tagger. Modality is the attitude that a speaker might have toward an event or state. One of the main hurdles for training a linguistic tagger is gathering training data. This is particularly problematic for training a tagger for modality because modality triggers are sparse for the overwhelming majority of sentences. We investigate an approach to automatically training a modality tagger where we first gathered sentences based on a high-recall simple rule-based modality tagger and then provided these sentences to Mechanical Turk annotators for further annotation. We used the resulting set of training data to train a precise modality tagger using a multi-class SVM that delivers good performance.


In this research we developed an object tracking algorithm suitable for perceptual encoding. Object based bit allocation can result in significant improvement in the perceptual quality of relatively low bit-rate video. However, a particularly computationally challenging aspect in the process is the video object tracking. This is because traditional algorithms are based on classical object detection techniques. In this thesis we present an algorithm particularly designed for perceptual video coding. The algorithm is optimized for minimum decoding and uses only motion information and detail case analysis that accounts for variety of cases that arise in motion vector coding due to relative scene and camera movements. The result is a fast yet highly effective perceptual region tracking algorithm that can operate in stream rate and track regions of perceptually significant object despite camera movements such as zoom, panning and translation. We have implemented this algorithm into a live MPEG-2 perceptual transcoder. We also share the performance of its MPEG-2 compliant real implementation. This fast object aware video rate transcoder is particularly suitable for live streaming and can convert a regular coded video into an object-based perceptually coded video stream.


Reconstructing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in the Galactic plane is extremely difficult due to the dominant foreground emissions such as dust, free-free or synchrotron. For cosmological studies, the standard approach consists in masking this area where the reconstruction is insufficient. This leads to difficulties for the statistical analysis of the CMB map, especially at very large scales (to study for instance the low quadrupole, integrated Sachs Wolfe effect, axis of evil, etc.). We investigate how well some inpainting techniques can recover the low-l spherical harmonic coefficients. We introduce three new inpainting techniques based on three different kinds of priors: sparsity, energy, and isotropy, which we compare. We show that sparsity and energy priors can lead to extremely high-quality reconstruction, within 1% of the cosmic variance for a mask with a sky coverage larger than 80%.


CORRIGAN, JAMES W. JR. (7 Apr. 1880-23 Jan. 1928), who inherited the Corrigan-McKinney Steel fortune, was born in Grybow, Polish Austria, the son of Capt. James C. and Ida Allen Corrigan. He was educated at the Michigan Military Academy at Orchard Lake, Mich., and Case School of Applied Science. Corrigan's father, with STEVENSON BURKE, founded the Corrigan-Ives Steel company in the early 1890s. Price McKinney became a partner in 1894. Young James left for the west after his mother and 3 sisters drowned 7 July 1900 when their yacht capsized during a storm. He attended Falkenou's School of Asseying & Mill Tests in San Francisco, worked for a telegraph office in Goldfield, Nev., and later supervised Corrigan-McKinney properties in Mexico. When his father died in 1908, James received $15,000 in cash and 40% of the Corrigan McKinney stock to be held in trust until he reached age 40. McKinney, who was trustee of James's stock, received a 30% stock interest of his own giving him majority ownership of the company. Hostilities between James and Price McKinney surfaced in 1917 when McKinney dropped the name Corrigan from the firm. Corrigan ousted him as a trustee and took control of his interest but did not try to take over the company. He had married Laura Mae McMartin 2 Dec. 1916 in New York and opted instead to support her efforts to break into society (see LAURA MAE CORRIGAN). After buying another 13% of the McKinney Steel Company stock, he returned to Cleveland from abroad in May 1925 and with his 53% majority, took over the presidency from McKinney. In charge of the renamed Corrigan-McKinney Steel, he ran the company until his untimely death. He is buried in LAKE VIEW CEMETERY.


The disconnect between the resource-level interface exposed by today's cloud providers and tenant goals hurts both entities. Tenants are encumbered by having to translate their performance and cost goals into the corresponding resource requirements while providers suffer revenue loss due to uninformed resource selection by tenants. We explore this disconnect in the context of data analytics applications and present Bazaar, a system that enables predictable performance for such applications in multi-resource, multi-tenant datacenters. Bazaar allows tenants to express high-level goals and predicts the resources needed to achieve them. Since multiple resource combinations may achieve the same goal, Bazaar chooses the combination most suitable for the provider. Using large-scale simulations and deployment on a small testbed, we demonstrate that Bazaar enables a symbiotic tenant-provider relationship. Tenants achieve their performance goals. At the same time, holistic resource selection benefits providers in the form of increased goodput.


This thesis presents an empirical study of the effects of Customer Ren Orientation on Harmony, Business Relationship, Service Quality and Loyalty in the context of Chinese culture. Ren is a deeply embedded Chinese value in Chinese society. Actually, using Ren to deal with conflicts in various situations in the Chinese community is common. Nowadays, Chinese culture of Ren seems to emerge as a genuine gap that needs to be further investigated for the following reasons. Ren tends to affect business relationships between customers and service providers and consumers' evaluations of these relationships. Clearly, the research gap is not about having a new model for cultural values but about understanding the identified Chinese cultural value of Ren that affects business practice.

This study attempts to attain two objectives. The first objective is to construct a scale for Customer Ren Orientation as a tool for measuring the concept of Customer Ren Orientation because it is not available in the business-to-customer context. The second objective of the study is to develop a conceptual model of Customer Ren Orientation that conceptually correlates Customer Ren Orientation with Harmony, Business Relationship, Service Quality and Loyalty. This model comprises five constructs. The independent variable of Customer Ren Orientation and four dependent variables are used in the study. In other words, Customer Ren Orientation serves as an antecedent of Harmony, Business Relationship and Service Quality.

This study starts with a review of the previous literature on the concept of Ren with a specific emphasis on Chinese literature related to the research topic, followed by the discussion of the conceptual model of Customer Ren Orientation and other related constructs such as Harmony, Business Relationship, Service Quality and Loyalty.

In addition, a two-stage research design was adopted to gather relevant data using qualitative research and quantitative research. A two-stage research design was used. In the first stage, qualitative research included focus group discussions and expert opinions. In the second stage, quantitative research included the following activities: quasi-experimental design, sampling, questionnaire design, data collection and scale development. A total of 384 respondents successfully completed the interview.

The reliability and the validity of the measurement scales used in this research are considered reasonably good quality. The data fit the business model of Customer Ren Orientation well. GFI, CFI, SRMR, RMSEA and normed chi-square (X²/df) showed that the data fit reasonably well with the hypothesised model. The results of the data analysis indicate that all proposed eight hypotheses were supported. In this study, both AMOS and SmartPLS were adopted, and the latter is to deal with the interaction effect and the quadratic effect that cannot be dealt with by AMOS.

Finally, this study makes the following important contributions: firstly, there is a strong triangular relationship among Customer Ren Orientation, Harmony and Business Relationship. In other words, without Harmony and Business Relationship, the effect of Customer Ren Orientation on Loyalty will be greatly reduced. Secondly, Harmony has a quadratic effect on Service Quality, and Harmony is a nonlinear form has a direct effect on Service Quality. Thirdly, there is an interaction effect of Customer Ren Orientation and Business Relationship on Service Quality. That is the relationship between Business Relationship and Service Quality which is moderated by Customer Ren Orientation. Lastly, a Customer Ren Orientation scale and a business model of Customer Ren Orientation have been developed on the basis of extant literature review and empirical research.


This introductory chapter provides readers not only with a basic foundation to
appreciate and understand this unique kinship with all living creatures but also to
discover the roots to the overwhelming growing interest in animal-assisted intervention
(AAI). The chapter should also help solidify and clarify how the benefits
witnessed within this unique bond have prompted numerous professionals to become
more curious about the advantages of animal-assisted interventions.
It is apparent that dogs have been bred to coexist with their human counterparts
and have filled many roles including herding, guarding, hunting, fishing and being our
best friend (Clutton-Brock, 1995). Dogs have also been widely used as service
animals, supporting the quality of life of people in need. There have been increasing
insights into science's current understanding of dog behavior and cognition. Perhaps
one of the strongest insights that she discusses pertains to dogs' ability to understand
our behaviors (Hare, 2007; Hare et al., 2002). Horowitz (2009) explains that dogs'


On June 13, 2013, the Supreme Court placed its imprimatur on a principle that has been gathering force within patent law for several decades: human beings constitute unpatentable subject matter. In Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., the court answered the question it had posed itself — "Are human genes patentable?" — decisively in the negative. Synthetic DNA sequences, designed by humans, were excluded from this prohibition, but the invalidation of patents claiming human genes wiped out vast amounts of private investment and was a body blow to the biotechnology industry. Nevertheless, this legal result was predictable, given a careful reading of the entrails of judicial decisions, congressional bills, executive branch pronouncements, and decisions in other countries about patents claiming human-related inventions, all of which have echoed the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment by proscribing property rights — including intellectual property rights — in human beings. To understand how patent law has evolved toward this result, one may trace the legal treatment of patents claiming human embryonic stem cells, chemical products of human physiology, human thought, and now, human genes. Woven together, these strands of evidence led inexorably toward the ultimate rejection of human gene patents by the Supreme Court, and placed a decisive judicial exclamation mark on the unpatentability of human beings and human bodily structures and functions.


Abstract This essay argues that, although it is tempting to view Russian policies through a revived Cold War paradigm, this is a problematic and ultimately misguided approach. Such an approach ignores the significant sources of discontinuity and rupture between the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. The essay presents an alternative framework for understanding and conceptualising Russia's engagement with the Middle East. This has three dimensions and takes an 'inside-out' approach. First, there are the domestic drivers for Russian engagement which is linked to the perceived need to counter the threat of secessionism in the North Caucasus and the potential broader radicalisation of Russia's Muslim population. Second, there are the more strictly economic interests in the Middle East, which include increasingly important trading relations with moderate pro-Western states in the region. And, third, there are the geopolitical considerations which certainly include potential competition with the West but also incorporate Russian ambitions to promote its credentials as a responsible great power supporting international norms, such as the principle of non-proliferation and a settlement of the Arab–Israeli conflict. The tension and conflict between these two strands of Russian policy making have been notably present in Moscow's responses to the Arab Spring.


Notions of "good practice" exist for many aspects of a programmer's work. They are intended to bring benefits on a variety of dimensions from the most concrete and measurable, such as program speed, to more subjective characteristics such as readability. This research addresses programmer practices good or bad in any part of their professional work but considers them from the perspective of a single outcome: impact on the productivity of fellow programmers. The findings are now being applied in an experimental new framework for professional development.


We explore the idea that large N , non-supersymmetric conformal field theories with a parametrically large gap to higher spin single-trace operators may be obtained as infrared fixed points of relevant double-trace deformations of superconformal field theories. After recalling the AdS interpretation and some potential pathologies of such flows, we introduce a concrete example that appears to avoid them: the ABJM theory at finite k, deformed by ∫ O, where O is the superconformal primary in the stress-tensor multiplet. We address its relation to recent conjectures based on weak gravity bounds, and discuss the prospects for a wider class of similarly viable flows. Next, we proceed to analyze the spectrum and correlation functions of the putative IR CFT, to leading non-trivial order in 1/N . This includes analytic computations of the change under double-trace flow of connected fourpoint functions of ABJM superconformal primaries; and of the IR anomalous dimensions of infinite classes of double-trace composite operators. These would be the first analytic results for anomalous dimensions of finite-spin composite operators in any large N CFT3 with an Einstein gravity dual. ar X iv :1 70 9. 09 15 9v 2 [ he pth ] 4 O ct 2 01 7


We investigate numerically the spectrum of plasmon resonances for metallic nanowires with a nonregular cross section, in the 20‐50 nm range. We first consider the resonance spectra corresponding to nanowires whose cross sections form different simplexes. The number of resonances strongly increases when the section symmetry decreases: A cylindrical wire exhibits one resonance, whereas we observe more than five distinct resonances for a triangular particle. The spectral range covered by these different resonances becomes very large, giving to the particle-specific distinct colors. At the resonance, dramatic field enhancement is observed at the vicinity of nonregular particles, where the field amplitude can reach several hundred times that of the illumination field. This near-field enhancement corresponds to surface-enhanced Raman scattering~SERS! enhancement locally in excess of 10 12 . The distance dependence of this enhancement is investigated and we show that it depends on the plasmon resonance excited in the particle, i.e., on the illumination wavelength. The average Raman enhancement for molecules distributed on the entire particle surface is also computed and discussed in the context of experiments in which large numbers of molecules are used.


Magnetic hollow glass microspheres (HGM) were prepared by electroless plating technique. Morphology, composition, structure, infrared radiation and magnetic property of hollow glass microspheres before and after platingwere characterized by SEM, EDS,XPS,XRD, IRandVSM, respectively. The results showed that Ni-P plating, composed of particles of 1~2 im diameters, was uniformly coated on surfaces of HGM. Because of the existence of Ni-P plating, peak intensity of the plated HGMin IR and XRD were lower than those before. Since the plated HGM own anti-infrared radiation and magnetic property, they are useful in some special areas.


This study presents the initial step towards a thorough analysis of the difficulty to reproduce a crash using searchbased crash reproduction. Traditionally, code size and complexity are considered representative indicators of the difficulty for search-based approaches, like search-based unit test generation, to generate tests. However, unlike unit test generation, crash reproduction does not seek to cover a set of behaviors but instead to generate one or more tests exercising a specific behavior reproducing a given crash. In this context, there is no guarantee that the indicators used for unit testing are still valid for crash reproduction. In this study, we seek to identify such indicators by considering various code metrics, code smells, and change metrics. We report our effort to collect those metrics for JCRASHPACK, a state-of-the-art crash reproduction benchmark, and an initial assessment by considering metrics individually. Our results show that although JCRASHPACK is larger than benchmarks used in previous studies, additional crashes should be added to improve its diversity and representativeness, and that no individual metric can be used to characterize the difficulty to reproduce a crash.


In this paper, we propose a computational model that provides an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) with the ability to generate verbal other-repetition (repetitions of some of the words uttered in the previous user speaker turn) when interacting with a user in a museum setting. We focus on the generation of other-repetitions expressing emotional stances in appreciation sentences. Emotional stances and their semantic features are selected according to the user's verbal input, and ECA's utterance is generated according to these features. We present an evaluation of this model through users' subjective reports. Results indicate that the expression of emotional stances by the ECA has a positive effect oIn this paper, we propose a computational model that provides an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) with the ability to generate verbal other-repetition (repetitions of some of the words uttered in the previous user speaker turn) when interacting with a user in a museum setting. We focus on the generation of other-repetitions expressing emotional stances in appreciation sentences. Emotional stances and their semantic features are selected according to the user's verbal input, and ECA's utterance is generated according to these features. We present an evaluation of this model through users' subjective reports. Results indicate that the expression of emotional stances by the ECA has a positive effect on user engagement, and that ECA's behaviours are rated as more believable by users when the ECA utters other-repetitions.n user engagement, and that ECA's behaviours are rated as more believable by users when the ECA utters other-repetitions.


Background: OSHA evaluates State Occupational Safety & Health (OSH) enforcement annually through the Federal Annual Monitoring Evaluation (FAME) process. This process is used to determine whether Kentucky OSH (KY OSH) is meeting or exceeding OSHA performance. The FAME report for KY OSH based its evaluations on only 14.5% of the total number of cases in 2015 and did not test for statistical significance. Objective: Determine the statistical significance of the 2015 FAME report deficiencies in the KY OSH program. Method: The OSHA dataset consists of case detail for all inspections conducted from 1970 to present (updated daily). ANOVA (analysis of variance) regressions were performed to test the FAME trends for significance. The SAS 9.4 computer program was used for all statistical analysis. Results: The models are either quadratic or linear regression trends from 1970 to 2016. Total, health, and safety inspections decreased in federal OSHA and KY OSH. Federal and KY number of violations for all safety or construction inspections decreased. Federal and KY number of violations per health inspection decreased. Federal and KY lapse time for all health inspections decreased per year. There was a decrease in willful violations cited by KY, not federal. The adjusted R-squared values explained from 0.3% to 59% of the variance, model power estimates varied from 50% to >99.9%, and the p-values ranged from <0.014 to <0.0001. Conclusion: Overall, this study did not concur with the FAME Report. Since the OSH Act, effective enforcement may have led to decreased un-programmed activity through increased compliance.