Measurements of nutrient concentrations and physicochemical parameters were carried out monthly between March 2005 and March 2006 along a transect between the Nyanza Gulf and the open waters of Lake Victoria to evaluate spatial and seasonal variations in nutrient fluxes and ecosystem metabolism. Nutrient concentration gradients were observed between the deep and seasonally stratifying main lake basin and the large, shallow river‐influenced Nyanza Gulf, which are connected by the relatively deep and narrow Rusinga Channel. Nutrient gradients were steepest in the Rusinga Channel where there was always a strong gradient in electrical conductivity. A mixing‐box model used to quantify nutrient fluxes and ecosystem metabolism along the gulf and the channel showed that nutrients entering the gulf through river inflows and municipal sources were largely retained in the gulf, with only a small fraction transferred into the main lake. In contrast, the main lake was a net exporter of dissolved inorganic phosphorus to the gulf (110 mg P m−2 yr−1), which is in contrast to the paradigm that the gulf is a major contributor to the increasing nutrient enrichment and, hence, eutrophication of the greater Lake Victoria. The channel had net regeneration of dissolved nutrients indicating net heterotrophy; whereas in the gulf, there was net consumption of dissolved nutrients, resulting in high estimates of net ecosystem production (570 mg C m−2 d−1) and, hence, net autotrophy. Nitrogen balance ranged from +3 to +15 mg N m−2 d−1, indicating dominance of nitrogen fixation over denitrification in both the gulf and the channel, which are both well‐oxygenated.


This paper focuses on major issues related to the data reliability and network performance of 20 broadband (BB) stations of the Czech (CZ) MOBNET (MOBile NETwork) seismic pool within the AlpArray seismic experiments. Currently used high-resolution seismological applications require high-quality data recorded for a sufficiently long time interval at seismological observatories and during the entire time of operation of the temporary stations. In this paper we present new hardware and software tools we have been developing during the last two decades while analysing data from several international passive experiments. The new tools help to assure the high-quality standard of broadband seismic data and eliminate potential errors before supplying data to seismological centres. Special attention is paid to crucial issues like the detection of sensor misorientation, timing problems, interchange of record components and/or their polarity reversal, sensor mass centring, or anomalous channel amplitudes due to, for example, imperfect gain. Thorough data quality control should represent an integral constituent of seismic data recording, preprocessing, and archiving, especially for data from temporary stations in passive seismic experiments. Large international seismic experiments require enormous efforts from scientists from different countries and institutions to gather hundreds of stations to be deployed in the field during a limited time period. In this paper, we demonstrate the beneficial effects of the procedures we have developed for acquiring a reliable large set of high-quality data from each group participating in field experiments. The presented tools can be applied manually or automatically on data from any seismic network.


This study identifies U.S. consumers' use of food nutrition labels on wheat-based foods; consumer attitudes toward the importance of taste, price, and nutrition in choosing wheat-based snack foods; and consumer knowledge of Middle-Eastern wheat-based foods. A survey of U.S. primary grocery shoppers indicated that most respondents believed it was important that their diets contained wheat-based food products. A majority of respondents indicated that fat content was the most important item on food nutrition labels when making a wheat-based food purchase decision. A majority of respondents indicated that taste was the most important factor when making wheat-based snack food purchases. Most respondents were not familiar with Middle-Eastern wheat-based foods.


A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards is an instructional performance piece based on a corporate manual from 1960. The pamphlet is focused on the time necessary for the accomplishment of minute labour procedures in the office, from the depressing and releasing of typewriter keys to the opening and closing of filing cabinet drawers. In the performance, seven costumed performers represent the different levels of management and employment while performing the actions described in the guide, accompanied by a live musical score.

There has been much discussion of the changes to work in the west following the decline of post-Fordist service sector jobs. These increasingly emphasise the specificity of employees' knowledge and cognitive skill. However, this greater flexibility and creativity at work has been accompanied by an opposite trajectory. The proletarisation of white collar work has given rise to more bureaucracy, target assessment and control for workers in previously looser creative professions, from academia to the arts.

The midcentury office is the meeting point of these cultures, where the assembly line efficiency management of the factory meets the quantifying control of the knowledge economy. A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards explores the survival of one regime into its successor following the lines of combined and uneven development that have turned the emancipatory promise of immaterial labour into the perma-temp hell of the cognitariat. The movement is accompanied by a score of guitar, bass and drums, the componenets of the rock 'n' roll music that rose from the car factories of the motor city and the cotton fields of the southern states to represent the same junction of expression and control.


The extent of agricultural foreign trade (AFT) of the Czech Republic (CR) increased markedly after accession to EU. The first part of this article is devoted to the trends during the period of 2004 – 2008. Detailed analysis of the CR AFT has been carried out for all 24 items of the basic food goods during the same period for the assessment of competitiveness of individual commodities. The Balass indicator RCA (Revealed Comparative Advantage) was used for this analysis, as well as the Michaely index that shows the specific measure of specialization for export. The method of logarithmic decomposition, which makes it possible to determine the effect of prices and quantities to net export has also been used. This paper was processed within the framework of the Research Project of MSM 6046070906 "The economics of Czech agricultural resources and their effective use in the frame of multifunctional agri-food systems".


As a significant cost and externality to economic efficiency, congestion is partly caused by traffic incidents. For more systematic, planned and coordinated incident management, quantifying a primary incident's impact on secondary incidents is crucial and challenging. Many thresholds have been suggested in defining the secondary incidents, but there is no universal acceptance of a definition and corresponding set of measurement parameters. Static threshold methods cannot consider the actual representation of prevailing traffic conditions when the incidents took place. On the other hand, dynamic methods have disadvantages because necessary traffic detector data may not be available, and replication of the incidents using a simulation package can be time consuming. The novelty of this study rests in the attempt of a probe vehicle technique for capturing the dynamics of traffic evolution during the primary-crash incidents. Compared to the previous thresholds which have many errors, proposed speed contour map from Traffic Message Channel codes provides accurate feasible area for identification of secondary incidents.


Our study focuses on modeling wildfire damage in the State of Florida. The approach is to evaluate wildfire risks in a spatio-temporal framework. A block bootstrapping method has been proposed to construct a statistical model accounting for explanatory variables while adjusting for spatial and temporal autocorrelation. Although the bootstrap (Efron 1979) method can handle independent observations well, the strong autocorrelation of wildfire risks brings about a major challenge. Motivated by bootstrapping overlapped blocks methods in an autoregressive time series scenario (Kunsch 1989) and block bootstrapping method of dependent data from a spatial map (Hall 1985), we have developed a method to bootstrap overlapping spatio-temporal blocks. By selecting an appropriate block size, the spatial-temporal correlation can be eliminated. With our saptio-temporal block bootstrapping approach, impacts of environmental factors on SPB outbreaks and implications of pine forest management are assessed. Almost all the explanatory variables, including climate factors, forest ecosystem and socio-economic conditions have been detected to have significant impacts. Consequently, our method offers a way to forecast the future burning risks, given the current influential information of a county.


What one decides fit for appearance through writing and speech bears a political signifi cance that risk being distorted through both language, reception in the public, and through calls for gendered representations. How can work of female philosophers be interpreted as a concern for the world from that of having to respond to a male-dominated discourse through which speech becomes trapped into what one might represent as 'other'? In this paper, I explore the public reception of two female thinkers who question, in diff erent ways, the dominant notion of the author or philosopher as a male subject; what kind of limitations does the relative notion of 'female' pose political action, and how can privilege constitute a hindrance to feminist solidarity?


The Supreme Court's 2012-2013 Term likely will be remembered best for the Justices' landmark ruling in United States v. Windsor, striking down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, and for the jurisdictional ruling in Hollingsworth v. Perry that helped to reopen the door for same-sex marriages in California. Many will also long remember Shelby County v. Holder, invalidating Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act and thereby freeing a number of states and localities from the pre-clearance requirements under which they had operated for decades. Crowded behind those headline-dominating decisions are a host of other broadly consequential rulings, on issues ranging from racial preferences in higher education, to ratcheting up the requirements for voter registration, to seeking standing in federal court on the basis of anticipated injuries. Commissioned by the American Judges Association for an audience of state and federal judges and for readers with an interest in the work those judges do, this paper briefly reviews the Court's most noteworthy civil decisions of the Term.


In a lucid, colorful account, Stanley Meisler brings alive the personalities and events of the first fifty years of the United Nations. It is a story filled with action and heartbreak. "Stanley Meisler tells the story of the United Nations, its promise and its problems, with clarity and authority. He brings to life the history of the world organization and a half-century of America's hopes for and frustration with world government . . . . You will learn why China is almost by chance one of five permanent members on the Security Council, how the Council's veto power was adopted at Stalin's demand, why Adlai Stevenson left his post as U.S. ambassador in lonely despair, how Kurt Waldheim hid his past to become Secretary General, how the Bush administration maneuvered the United Nations into supporting Operation Desert Storm, and much, much more. This is the definitive account of the United Nations for a general audience, told by a master." -- Jim Hoagland, chief foreign correspondent, The Washington Post


Among the many outstanding teachers, the author acknowledges the extraordinary efforts of Sterling Wallace, an uppergrade school teacher, and Mr. Sanders and Ms. Hope, my high school chemistry and physics and algebra-geometry teachers, respectively. With little to no financial resources, the author initially attended Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) as a five-year "work-study" student and subsequently transferred to Miles College, a small historically black college in Birmingham. This multiyear experience, along with excellent professors in organic chemistry, biochemistry, genetics, classical structural studies, and histology, afforded the author a productive and enjoyable undergraduate tenure. The author had the distinct pleasure to join the laboratory of Fred Neidhardt as a graduate student, and his research focused on the regulation of amino acid and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase synthesis in Escherichia coli. This was a rare opportunity to learn microbial genetics, biochemistry, and physiology under the supervision of an intellectually demanding, professionally sophisticated, and seasoned mentor. In the spring of 1969, the author joined the faculty of Atlanta University. In a very short period of time, he was soon mentoring a very large pool of graduate students. The most important of the activities in which we engaged was the creation of an intellectual ambiance that was nurturing to the students who came with different preparations, different interests, and different perceptions of their self-worth—they were placed in an environment that simply disallowed those differentials.


Immigrating to the United States, Italians, like all others arriving on America's shores, were made to fill out a standardized immigration form. In the box for race, they faced two choices: North Italian or South Italian. On the line requesting information on color, they wrote simply "white." By World War II, the only option they had for race and color questions was "white." This identification is suggestive of the many ways in which Italians became white on arrival in the United States, as Thomas A. Guglielmo demonstrates in this prize-winning book. While many suffered from racial prejudice and discrimination, they were nonetheless viewed as white, with all the privileges this color classification bestowed, in the corridors of American power-from judges to journalists, from organized labor to politicians, from race scientists to realtors. Taking the mass Italian immigration of the late 19th century as his starting point and drawing on dozens of oral histories and a diverse array of primary sources in English and Italian, Guglielmo focuses on how perceptions of Italians' race and color were shaped in one of America's great centers of immigration and labor, Chicago. His account skillfully weaves together the major events of Chicago immigrant history-the "Chicago Color Riot" of 1919, the rise of Italian organized crime, and the rise of industrial unionism-with national and international events-such as the rise of fascism and the Italian-Ethiopian War of 1935-36-to present the story of how Italians approached, learned, and lived race. By tracking their evolving position in the city's racial hierarchy, Guglielmo reveals the impact of racial classification-both formal and informal-on immigrants' abilities to acquire homes and jobs, start families, and gain opportunities in America. Carefully drawing the distinction between race and color, Guglielmo argues that whiteness proved Italians' most valuable asset for making it in America. Even so, Italians were reluctant to identify themselves explicitly as white until World War II. By separating examples of discrimination against Italians from the economic and social advantages they accrued from their acceptance as whites, Guglielmo counters the claims of many ethnic Americans that hard work alone enabled their extraordinary success, especially when compared to non-white groups whose upward mobility languished. A compelling story, White on Arrival contains profound implications for our understanding of race and ethnic acculturation in the United States, as well as twentieth-century immigration, urban, and political history.


Abstract. We present a sensitivity study of the direct fitting approach to retrieve total ozone columns from the clear sky Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment 2/MetOp-A (GOME-2/MetOp-A) measurements between 325 and 335 nm in the period 2007–2010. The direct fitting of the measurement is based on adjusting the scaling of a reference ozone profile and requires accurate simulation of GOME-2 radiances. In this context, we study the effect of three aspects that introduce forward model errors if not addressed appropriately: (1) the use of a clear sky model atmosphere in the radiative transfer demanding cloud filtering, (2) different approximations of Earth's sphericity to address the influence of the solar zenith angle, and (3) the need of polarization in radiative transfer modeling. We conclude that cloud filtering using the operational GOME-2 FRESCO (Fast Retrieval Scheme for Clouds from the Oxygen A band) cloud product, which is part of level 1B data, and the use of pseudo-spherical scalar radiative transfer is fully sufficient for the purpose of this retrieval. A validation with ground-based measurements at 36 stations confirms this showing a global mean bias of −0.1 % with a standard deviation (SD) of 2.7 %. The regularization effect inherent to the profile scaling approach is thoroughly characterized by the total column averaging kernel for each individual retrieval. It characterizes the effect of the particular choice of the ozone profile to be scaled by the inversion and is part of the retrieval product. Two different interpretations of the data product are possible: first, regarding the retrieval product as an estimate of the true column, a direct comparison of the retrieved column with total ozone columns from ground-based measurements can be done. This requires accurate a priori knowledge of the reference ozone profile and the column averaging kernel is not needed. Alternatively, the retrieval product can be interpreted as an effective column defined by the total column averaging kernel. This interpretation relies much less on the a priori knowledge of the reference ozone profile; however, for its validation, measurements of the vertical ozone distribution are needed. The different manners of data interpretation are demonstrated for simulated and real measurements using on-ground ozone column and ozonesonde measurements for validation.


Excerpt] Discussions of the impact of immigration policy on the population and labor force of the United States typically center on why the nation has such a policy (i.e., the national interests that are involved) and what are the specific policy elements that are used to accomplish those ends. Far less attention is given to the process issues as to who administers those policies and how is the policy actually implemented and enforced. But answers to the who and the how questions are of equal importance when it comes to understanding policy outcomes. This is because the administrative processes provide the means to the ends. They determine the way in which policy priorities are established and they provide the mechanisms by which resources (both dollars and manpower) are assigned to accomplish policy objectives. No matter what the national interests sought or what are the laws, rules, regulations, and guidelines enacted to achieve them, the degree to which they are accomplished depends largely on the importance assigned to the issue and the material support devoted to reaching those ends.


This article examines the Proper Purpose Rule and the Exercise of Directors' Power in the recent JKX case as decided by the UK Supreme court. The decision of the JKX case now represents the leading Common law authority on the interpretation and application of the Proper Purpose Rule (the Rule or the PPR) in the Context of a Takeover Battle. As codified in section 171(b) of the UK Companies Act 2006, the Rule requires directors to exercise their powers only for the purposes for which the powers are conferred, either by statutory documents or by corporate constitutional documents. The decision makes clear that the PPR is pervasive and should be considered whenever a board is exercising the powers conferred upon it. The decision is also significant in re-affirming the conventional approach of an English takeover regime towards restricted power of a target board of directors when a company becomes the subject of a corporate raid, or a hostile takeover; an approach adopted also by many European Union (EU) countries following the transposition of the Takeover Directive 2004/25/EC.


The goal of this thesis is to analyze the possibility of using early-type galaxies to place evolutionary and cosmological constraints, by both disentangling what is the main driver of ETGs evolution between mass and environment, and developing a technique to constrain H(z) and the cosmological parameters studying the ETGs age-redshift relation.
The (U-V) rest-frame color distribution is studied as a function of mass and environment for two sample of ETGs up to z=1, extracted from the zCOSMOS survey with a new selection criterion. The color distributions and the slopes of the color-mass and color-environment relations are studied, finding a strong dependence on mass and a minor dependence on environment. The spectral analysis performed on the D4000 and Hδ features gives results validating the previous analysis. The main driver of galaxy evolution is found to be the galaxy mass, the environment playing a subdominant but non negligible role. The age distribution of ETGs is also analyzed as a function of mass, providing strong evidences supporting a downsizing scenario.
The possibility of setting cosmological constraints studying the age-redshift relation is studied, discussing the relative degeneracies and model dependencies. A new approach is developed, aiming to minimize the impact of systematics on the "cosmic chronometer" method. Analyzing theoretical models, it is demonstrated that the D4000 is a feature correlated almost linearly with age at fixed metallicity, depending only minorly on the models assumed or on the SFH chosen. The analysis of a SDSS sample of ETGs shows that it is possible to use the differential D4000 evolution of the galaxies to set constraints to cosmological parameters in an almost model-independent way.
Values of the Hubble constant and of the dark energy EoS parameter are found, which are not only fully compatible, but also with a comparable error budget with the latest results.


Contemporary endodontics has seen an unprecedented advance in technology and materials. This article aimed to review some of the challenges and advances in the following sections: (1) endodontic imaging, (2) root canal preparation, (3) root canal disinfection, (4) root canal filling, and (4) regenerative endodontic procedures (REPs). Jointly, these advances are aimed at improving the state of the art and science of root canal treatment.


Green infrastructures play an essential role in urban planning, namely with their potential to reduce the impact from air pollution episodes together with extreme weather events. This chapter focuses on the assessment of green infrastructures' benefits on current and future microclimate and air quality patterns in Porto's urban area (Portugal). The effects of green infrastructures on flow dynamics are evaluated for the baseline scenarios by means of numer - ical and physical simulations, using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model VADIS and the wind tunnel of the University of Aveiro. The baseline morphological (BM) scenario focuses on the current morphological characteristics of Porto's urban area, while a baseline green (BG) scenario comprises the replacement of built-up areas by green areas and parks. In addition, the benefits of green infrastructures on air quality are assessed for the baseline and under future climate scenarios. The air quality simulations focus on particulate matter, one of the most critical air pollutants with severe impacts on human health. For the BM scenario, the simulated concentrations are compared with hourly averaged PM10 concentrations mea - sured during a weekday at the air quality station located within the study domain.


The success of contemporary society in producing knowledge serves to highlight the breakdown between knowledge production and its use. New Orleans and Katrina offer one example of this breakdown. All the knowledge necessary for acting beforehand was available; the problem was not one of knowledge but of will. Geoaesthetics, appropriating the erotic nature of our relationship to the land, is offered as an interand transdisciplinary means for making disciplinary knowledge more pertinent.


Protected Landscapes (IUCN Protected Area Category V) are lived-in working landscapes. In the past, there has been a tendency to see them as a rather Eurocentric approach to protected areas but increasingly the category is being designated in other parts of the world, including in a number of developing countries. The Guidelines include sections on the background and on the planning of such areas, and chapters on the principles, policies, process and the means for their management. The text includes more than 20 case studies from more than 15 countries in every region of the world.


Introduction
Often in clinical practice radiation oncologists encounter patients who require treatment to the spine commonly in the setting of metastatic disease. These metastases usually cause pain, immobility, or neurologic deficits mandating expedited therapy to alleviate the suffering of our patients. Spine radiosurgery techniques have been used extensively for palliation purposes; however, given the patients' deteriorating condition or pain and inability to tolerate anesthesia the radiation oncologist is often left with the conundrum of how to best set up his or her patient in preparation for radiosurgery if supine is not a viable option. In the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center several patients have been treated successfully in the lateral decubitus position to overcome this set-up issue. In this report, the feasibility of the lateral decubitus set-up for patients who benefit from radiosurgery to the spine when and if they cannot tolerate standard supine position is explored.

Objective
To report on a retrospective case series of three patients with a total of four lesions who were treated with radiosurgery for spinal metastases while set up in the lateral decubitus position.

Methods and materials
This is a retrospective case series of 3 patients who were treated with radiosurgery to the spine for palliation of painful metastatic foci. Patients were treated in the lateral decubitus position in 1-5 fractions in order to be eligible for this retrospective case series. Their set-up data, and clinical outcomes were then compared with historic controls.

Results
Patients who were treated in the lateral decubitus position were set up reliably and reproducibly. Additionally clinical outcomes on routine follow-up and imaging, and toxicity profiles also corroborated the utility of this treatment set-up.

Conclusions
Routinely employing optical surface tracking during patient setup followed by KVCBCT prior to treatment delivery along with intra-fractional monitoring is safe and effective while utilizing the lateral decubitus position for the treatment of spinal metastases for patients who cannot tolerate the supine position. Finally the patient follow-up also corroborated that treatments were successful thus lending credence to the safety, ease, effectiveness, and feasibility of this patient set-up.


Global politics has changed with unaccustomed swiftness since the end of the Cold War. Eastern Europe is free; the Soviet Union has broken up; China presses free market economic reform; and the United States and Russia have declared a joint commitment to end nuclear war. The force of these changes has created a new agenda for global politics and security policy. This does not mean that nuclear weapons have lost their centrality. Nuclear development programs continue in the major holders of advanced weapons. In Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran nuclear intentions are subject to widespread speculation and scrutiny. Negotiations for renewal of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty remind us that the treaty requires serious efforts to abolish nuclear weapons. Nuclear Choices points out that the Cold War's end has not banished mistrust. Instead, it has opened the door to frank conversation about the usefulness of force and the need to address common fears. States now face a global choice among alternative nuclear futures. If they desire to avoid runaway nuclear development, the choices come down to three: the status quo, disengagement, or abolition. Larkin argues that if they chose the status quo, they elect a world in which only terror and self-restraint keep devastation at bay, a world in which instant destruction is possible. This study focuses on the nuclear weapons programs of Great Britain, China, and France, because they may be less familiar to students of international affairs. Each of these countries has developed a substantial nuclear capability that could decisively shape the result of coming global nuclear decisions. Larkin concludes that these three minipowers could conclude that nuclearism serves their interests, refuse disengagement, and encourage proliferation. If they are prepared to abandon nuclearism, they have tremendous political leverage on Russia, the United States, and also on undeclared and aspiring nuclear weapons states. For now, only the United Kingdom, France, and China maintain sufficient warhead inventories and production capabilities to have strong effects on how the United States and Russia view their own strategic capabilities. Nuclear Choices asserts that governments, polities, and parties today do not know how to guarantee themselves against weapons of mass destruction. They must either acquire the political and social means to achieve such guarantees or accept a world in which nuclearism will continue to cast its shadow over all aspects of nation building. It will be of interest to political scientists, policymakers, military analysts, and those interested hi the nuclear issue.


The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is particularly useful for studying heterotrimeric GTP-binding protein (G protein) function, because of its comparative genetic simplicity: C. elegans has only 2 Gγ and 2 Gβ subunits, compared to mammals, which have 12 Gγ and 5 Gβ subunits. Furthermore, sensory perception can be analyzed with simple behavioral assays for chemotactic response. Jansen et al. generated Gγ (gpc-1) knockout and Gγ-overexpressing worms and established an adaptation assay for water-soluble compounds, or taste sensation. Altering GPC-1 by either deletion or overexpression did not change initial chemotactic responses to volatile (smell) or water-soluble (taste) attractants or repellants. However, worms lacking GPC-1 did not adapt to continued presence of salts, such as sodium chloride, sodium acetate, or ammonium chloride. Adaptation responses to volatile agents were normal. Taste adapation was also impaired in mutants of adp-1 and osm-9, two genes implicated in adaptation to odorants. Thus, adaptation to particular smells and tastes may involve common signaling mechanisms. GPC-1 was not expressed in the neurons responsible for salt detection (ASE neurons), but instead was expressed in the ASI neurons, which are synaptically coupled to the ASE neurons. Thus, the role of Gγ in adaptation may be to alter ASE neuron activity through changes in the synaptic activity of ASI. G. Jansen, D. Weinkove, R. H. A. Plasterk, The G-protein γ subunit gpc-1 of the nematode C. elegans is involved in taste adaptation. EMBO J. 21, 986-994 (2002). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Background & Aims: To date, it has been well known that high body weight, weather in adulthood or in growing ages, is related to some serious medical conditions. So, this study tried to investigate the body weight status among urban high school girl students of Urmia, Iran. Material and Methods: In this cross sectional study, we measured weight, height and BMI of 956 girl students. Then a questionnaire was completed based on their dietary habits and behaviors related to their physical activity. Results: Underweight prevalence in the studied population was 8.47% (95% CI: 8.3%-8.9%). The prevalence of overweight and obesity among the studied students were 14.33% (95% CI: 13.46%-15.2%), and 5.02% (95% CI: 4.4%-5.6%) respectively. Factors that are significantly correlated with the participants' body weight, are the frequency of high energy foods intake time during a week(P<0.001), duration of computer use per day(P<0.01), educational state of their mothers (P<0.01), feeding pattern in the infancy (breastfed or non-breastfed) (P<0.05) and the kind of their schools (P<0.05).No significant association was found between other studied dietary variables (such as the time spent for eating over 24-hours, and breakfast eating times per week) and overweight / obesity. Conclusion: In this study, we have shown there were two changeable parameters (i.e. the number of times for intake of high energy foods during a week, and working with computers) which influence the high schoolgirls' body weight in the region of study.


We present new observations from an experimental investigation of the classical problem of the crown splash and sealing phenomena observed during the impact of spheres onto quiescent liquid pools. In the experiments, a 6 m tall vacuum chamber was used to provide the required ambient conditions from atmospheric pressure down to $1/16\text{th}$ of an atmosphere, whilst high-speed videography was exploited to focus primarily on the above-surface crown formation and ensuing dynamics, paying particular attention to the moments just prior to the surface seal. In doing so, we have observed a buckling-type azimuthal instability of the crown. This instability is characterised by vertical striations along the crown, between which thin films form that are more susceptible to the air flow and thus are drawn into the closing cavity, where they atomize to form a fine spray within the cavity. To elucidate to the primary mechanisms and forces at play, we varied the sphere diameter, liquid properties and ambient pressure. Furthermore, a comparison between the entry of room-temperature spheres, where the contact line pins around the equator, and Leidenfrost spheres (i.e. an immersed superheated sphere encompassed by a vapour layer), where there is no contact line, indicates that the buckling instability appears in all crown sealing events, but is intensified by the presence of a pinned contact line.


BACKGROUND: There is considerable push to improve value in health care by simultaneously increasing quality while lowering or containing costs. However, for diseases that are best treated with comparatively expensive treatments, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), there could be tension between these aims. In this study, we measured geographic variation in quality, access, and cost for patients with RA, a disease with effective but costly specialty treatments. OBJECTIVE: To assess the geographic differences in the quality, access, and cost of care for patients with RA. METHODS: Using large claims databases covering the period between 2008 and 2014, we measured quality of care metrics by metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for patients with RA. Quality measures included use of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) and tuberculosis (TB) screening before initiating biologic DMARD therapy. Access to care measures included measured detection and the share of patients with RA who visited a rheumatologist. Regression models were used to control for differences in patient demographics and health status across MSAs. RESULTS: For the 501,376 patients diagnosed with RA, in the average MSA 64.1% of RA patients received a DMARD, and 29.6% of RA patients initiating a biologic DMARD appropriately received a TB screening. Only 17% (73/430) of MSAs comprised the top 2 Medicare Advantage star ratings for DMARD use. Measured detection was 0.59% (IQR = 0.47%-0.71%; CV = 0.355) on average, and 57.6% (IQR = 48%-69%; CV = 0.341) of RA patients visited a rheumatologist. MSAs with the highest DMARD use spent $26,724 (in 2015 U.S. dollars) annually treating patients with RA, $5,428 more (P < 0.001) than low DMARD-use MSAs, largely because of higher pharmacy cost ($5,090 vs. $7,610, P < 0.001). However, MSAs with higher DMARD use had lower RA-related inpatient cost ($1,890 vs. $2,342, P = 0.024). CONCLUSIONS: There were significant geographic variations in the quality of care received by patients with RA, although quality was poor in most areas. Fewer than 1 in 5 MSAs could be considered high quality based on patient DMARD use. Access to specialist care may be an issue, since just over half of patients with RA visited a rheumatologist annually. Efforts to incentivize better quality of care holds promise in terms of unlocking value for patients, but for some diseases, this approach may result in higher costs.


This study evaluates patient classification for scheduling and sequencing appointments for patients differentiated by their mean and standard deviation of service times, no-show, and walk-in probabilities. Alternative appointment systems are tested through simulation using a universal Dome rule and some of the best traditional appointment rules in the literature. Our findings show that the universal Dome rule performs better in terms of reducing the total cost of patient's waiting time, doctor's idle time, and overtime, and its performance improves further with the right sequencing of patient groups. Although it is a challenge to find the best sequence, we propose a heuristic rule that successfully identifies the best sequence with an accuracy level of 98% for the universal Dome rule. Sensitivity analyses further confirm that our findings are valid even when assumptions on patient punctuality and service time distributions are relaxed. To facilitate the use of our proposed appointment system, an open source online tool is developed to support practitioners in designing their appointment schedules for real clinics.


Objectives National guidelines for the management of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) recommend that psychological therapies should be considered, but their relative efficacy is unknown, because there have been few head-to-head trials. We performed a systematic review and network meta-analysis to try to resolve this uncertainty. Design We searched the medical literature through January 2020 for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) assessing efficacy of psychological therapies for adults with IBS, compared with each other, or a control intervention. Trials reported a dichotomous assessment of symptom status after completion of therapy. We pooled data using a random effects model. Efficacy was reported as a pooled relative risk (RR) of remaining symptomatic, with a 95% CI to summarise efficacy of each comparison tested, and ranked by therapy according to P score. Results We identified 41 eligible RCTs, containing 4072 participants. After completion of therapy, the psychological interventions with the largest numbers of trials, and patients recruited, demonstrating efficacy included self-administered or minimal contact cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) (RR 0.61; 95% CI 0.45 to 0.83, P score 0.66), face-to-face CBT (RR 0.62; 95% CI 0.48 to 0.80, P score 0.65) and gut-directed hypnotherapy (RR 0.67; 95% CI 0.49 to 0.91, P score 0.57). After completion of therapy, among trials recruiting only patients with refractory symptoms, group CBT and gut-directed hypnotherapy were more efficacious than either education and/or support or routine care, and CBT via the telephone, contingency management, CBT via the internet and dynamic psychotherapy were all superior to routine care. Risk of bias of trials was high, with evidence of funnel plot asymmetry; the efficacy of psychological therapies is therefore likely to have been overestimated. Conclusions Several psychological therapies are efficacious for IBS, although none were superior to another. CBT-based interventions and gut-directed hypnotherapy had the largest evidence base and were the most efficacious long term. Trial registration number The study protocol was published on the PROSPERO international prospective register of systematic reviews (registration number CRD 42020163246).


The aim of the current preliminary research was to examine the relationship between aquatic motor activities and language abilities. Our hypothesis suggests that changing the environment to water may improve motor and linguistic abilities. The study included 94 children between the ages of four and six. Thirty-one children who participated in aquatic motor activities were compared to 41 children who participated in on-land motor activities and to 21 children who participated in non-motor activities. Developmental-functionality tests, including gross and fine motor, time estimation and language tests, were used to diagnose participants' abilities before and after six months of intervention. We found significant improvement in gross motor, fine motor and time estimation abilities for the aquatic motor activities group. Moreover, improvement in gross motor and time estimation abilities moderated the association between aquatic motor activities and children's naming ability, suggesting the positive effect of aquatic motor activities on language abilities. Based on these novel findings, child-development professionals can have a better understanding of relation between language abilities and motor abilities, possibly leading to an improvement of intervention methods with early-childhood patients. Early childhood intervention could aid in reducing primary differences between children in motor abilities, and especially in motor-development disorders, which in turn are thought to lead to additional learning disabilities.


This article compares the situation in which an individual with diminished mental capacity is prosecuted for a criminal offence in England and Wales and in the Netherlands, with a particular focus on the role of the expert medical witness.

It is not unreasonable to assume that, whatever the jurisdiction, the existence of a condition affecting the mental capacity of the defendant may affect how the culpability of the accused is assessed by the courts and translated into a verdict. By comparing culpability in the context of the role of experts, consideration will be given to how substantive and procedural law hang together in the different jurisdictions. A comparison between England and Wales (as an example of a common law jurisdiction) and the Netherlands (as an example of a civil law jurisdiction) may reveal very different outcomes with regard to the verdict and the way it is reached that have far-reaching consequences for the person involved. This article will examine why such differences may occur, in particular whether they are the result of the common law's reliance on just two possible reasons for the absence of culpability in such cases (insanity or automatism, or, conceivably, diminished responsibility if murder is the charge), while the civil law is based on a theoretically underpinned doctrine that allows for a greater range of defences with regard to culpability (and its relative absence) in general.

The topic not only has possible practical implications, but could also contribute to the growing body of comparative scholarship: comparisons of substantive criminal law, unlike its many procedural aspects, are few and far between. One of the reasons is that substantive law is shot through with moral considerations that are very difficult to ascertain and muddy the comparative waters considerably. In this case, however, the issue is not the offence itself, but whether and how a mental condition may affect culpability. While it could be said that the recognition of such conditions is also contingent on their social and moral connotations, the effect of this is likely to be much less than in a comparison of (perpetrators) of sexual offences per se.


We explore whether the choice of broad versus specialized university curricula affects subsequent labor market outcomes, as measured by earnings, full-time permanent employment, and unemployment six months after university graduation. We exploit a unique episode in the history of the National University of Singapore, in which a university-wide revision in graduation requirements in 2007 prompted students in one of the largest faculties to read a narrower, more specialized, curriculum. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we compare changes in the labor market outcomes of graduate cohorts from the affected faculty, before-and-after the curriculum revision, to changes in the labor market outcomes of graduate cohorts from the other faculties. We do not find evidence that curriculum breadth matters for these labor market outcomes. Similar conclusions are obtained using regression-control strategies and rich administrative data on student characteristics and academic ability for the broader population of undergraduates at NUS.


We give a self-contained presentation and comparison of two different algorithms to explicitly solve quantum many body models of indistinguishable particles moving on a circle and interacting with two-body potentials of 1/ sintype. The first algorithm is due to Sutherland and well-known; the second one is a limiting case of a novel algorithm to solve the elliptic generalization of the Sutherland model. These two algorithms are different in several details. We show that they are equivalent, i.e., they yield the same solution and are equally simple.


Let us begin by assembling some signs of the present philosophical situation. On the one hand, the most important living French philosopher, Alain Badiou, calls for a "return to Plato," despite the movement of anti-Platonism that dominated French and German thought in the 20 th century. On the other hand, the present moment sees a resurgence of naturalism in philosophy in general (including and especially Anglophone analytic philosophy), despite the criticisms of naturalism that have appeared throughout the 20 th century. Phenomenology seems to be at the center of both of these movements. On the one hand, it is the idea of a mathematized ontology that requires the return to Plato, a mathematized ontology constructed without a reflection on its transcendental grounds. On the other, the resurgence of naturalism is so strong that a book could be imagined and published with the bastard name of Naturalizing Phenomenology , as if the transcendental moment of phenomenology did not transform the very meaning of nature. These signs seem to indicate that we have entered into a phase of regression or even decline in philosophical thinking. If this interpretation of the signs is correct, if we have indeed entered into a phase of regression -- a twofold regression toward Platonism and toward naturalism -- we must ask the following question: is it possible for us to define something like a project or even a research agenda that would allow us to define a way of thinking that might lead us out of the present situation, a situation, it must be said, that seems dire for philosophy in general? If we can determine such a research agenda, perhaps we can also begin to understand what the tradition of "continental philosophy" has stood for.


In this perspective we explore the use of strategies from drug discovery, pattern recognition, and machine learning in the context of computational materials science. We focus our discussion on the development of donor materials for organic photovoltaics by means of a cheminformatics approach. These methods enable the development of models based on molecular descriptors that can be correlated to the important characteristics of the materials. Particularly, we formulate empirical models, parametrized using a training set of donor polymers with available experimental data, for the important current–voltage and efficiency characteristics of candidate molecules. The descriptors are readily computed which allows us to rapidly assess key quantities related to the performance of organic photovoltaics for many candidate molecules. As part of the Harvard Clean Energy Project, we use this approach to quickly obtain an initial ranking of its molecular library with 2.6 million candidate compounds. Our method reveals molecular motifs of particular interest, such as the benzothiadiazole and thienopyrrole moieties, which are present in the most promising set of molecules.


The first report on treatment of hip contractures in cerebral palsy was published in 1880.1 Lateral migration of the hip (subluxation or partial dislocation) occurs in 30-60% of children with cerebral palsy who are not walking independently at 5 years.2-5 Its clinical course has been well documented, including its effect on function (such as pain affecting the ability to sit and hygiene).w1 We review the literature on current management of hip dislocation in cerebral palsy in terms of its clinical course, measurement, and treatments.


In this paper we present a multicriteria methodology for supporting institutes' decisions on eLearning platform evaluation. Based on previous research, we define a set of evaluation criteria, define appropriate weights in collaboration with experts and utilize an outranking approach for the multicriteria model. In order to demonstrate the model we apply the method in evaluating a number of open source platforms and present the decision outcome. This methodology can support institutes' decision makers not only by providing a solution to the selection problem, but in understanding the factors that are involved in the selection decision through their involvement in the decision process as well.


Displaced retinal ganglion cells in birds are the sole source of the retinal projection onto the nucleus of the basal optic root, the main component of the accessory optic system. This nucleus has direct bilateral axonal projections onto the oculomotor nuclear complex, the trochlear nucleus- and folia IXc,d and paraflocculus of the vestibulocerebellum. The cerebellar projection terminates within a superficial band of the granule cell layer adjacent to the Purkinje cell layer as a mossy fiber system. This bisynaptic projection onto oculomotor neurons and the cerebellum may play a functionally distinct and specific role in oculomotor reflexes.


The investigation reported here provides a basis for considering the role of corrective and transformative critiques in producing knowledge through testing teaching for reframing teacher education in response to, and as an expression of, the globalisation of English. This knowledge-producing approach to critique begins with a literature review of prior testing models of content and language integrated learning through English medium instruction (EMI) programmes. Delphi procedures were employed with a panel of 30 experts from three focus groups, namely teachers, testing experts, and teacher evaluation administrators. A comparison of relative importance of the indicators generated through this study via the analytic hierarchy process yielded practical implications for reframing the internationalisation of education using EMI. The analysis of interviews with teachers was used to critically rework or otherwise correct the testing model. Through adopting the practice of critique as a knowledge-producing venture, this study offers a model of EMI testing that can contribute to improvements in the organisation of professional learning and change, as well as certification procedures.


To investigate the impact of rising staple food prices on household food security, we use a unique nationally representative household survey from Afghanistan, one of the world's poorest, most food-insecure countries. The econometric framework allows us to control for household, district, and province factors to isolate the effects of the 2008 sudden rise in wheat flour prices on several measures of household well-being related to food security. The results show large declines in food consumption and dietary diversity, but smaller declines in calories consumed. The evidence suggests that households choose to trade off quality for quantity, as they moved toward staple foods and away from micronutrient-rich foods, such as meat and vegetables. Additionally, for urban areas, the evidence suggests that wheat is a Giffen good; that is, as the price of wheat flour increases, demand for wheat products also increases. These findings may provide useful information for domestic and international policymakers and development agencies as they continue to confront the challenges of improving food security in this conflict-affected country.


Transnational environmental governance institutions are facing an escalating legitimacy crisis that comes about in part due to the absence of mechanisms ensuring that decision-makers are democratically accountable to persons affected by their decisions. Most prominently, accountability concerns arise in a transboundary context where decisions made in one state have environmental impacts on persons outside that state whose interests are not democratically represented within the source state. Similar concerns arise in the context of international institutions where the decisions taken and principles developed are directed towards groups, such as indigenous groups or other minorities, whose interests are inadequately represented by the state at the international level. One promising line of inquiry that seeks to bridge this accountability gap concerns the adaptation of deliberative models of democratic governance to transnational contexts. Deliberative models, which emphasize the role of mutual justification through reasoned dialogue as the basis for democratic legitimacy, are not tied to territorial boundaries or existing political structures to the extent that representative democratic models are. In this regard, deliberative democracy may better suit the blurred divisions between domestic/international and public/private settings that characterize transnational environmental issues. However, much of the scholarly work to date surrounding transnational deliberative democracy has been conceptual in nature, with little attention being given to existing mechanisms within governance structures that may promote deliberative processes at the transnational level. As a means to analyze the strengths and limitations of deliberative democratic processes in the context of transnational environmental decision-making, this paper considers the ability of international commitments to conduct environmental impact assessments (EIAs) to foster public, reasoned and discursive interactions between actors in the transnational sphere. EIAs, as a mechanism to implement international environmental objectives, have been embraced by international policy-makers in a wide range of contexts, including transboundary pollution, biodiversity, climate change and marine pollution. While the central idea that animates the EIA process is that decisions affecting the environment should be made in light of a comprehensive understanding of their impacts, EIAs go beyond simply requiring the ex ante consideration of scientific issues by promoting an information rich and participatory environment for agency decision-making. Moreover, notwithstanding their evaluative mandate, EIA commitments do not impose substantive obligations to avoid environmental harm. Rather the process is self-regulatory and reflexive; requiring decision-makers to account for and respond to the views of affected persons, and justify their decisions in light of their adherence to both right process and prevailing substantive environmental norms. EIAs, in effect, require decision-makers to engage affected persons in a principled and justificatory dialogue and can therefore be viewed as a mechanism to enhance accountability through deliberative practices. Drawing on domestic and transnational examples of EIA processes related to transboundary pollution, biological diversity and climate change, this paper seeks to contribute to the debate on the suitability of deliberative models of democracy in transnational environmental governance structures by demonstrating how an existing set of institutionalized decision-making processes actually structures interactions between transnational actors and contributes to accountability in transnational environmental decision-making.


The paper focuses on the concept of open educational resources (OER) and their influence on Romanian education system. The concept of OER appeared in 2002 at the UNESCO forum, representing any kind of didactic projects, course materials, textbooks, video materials, multimedia applications or files from the Internet, used in the teaching-learning process. They are used free of charge by teachers or students. Another important issue approached is the advantages and risks of using OER. Some of the advantages are: access to quality education for a larger number of persons; growing the community's interest in education; stimulation of innovation; low cost. And the risks are: low relative priority of the subject in the education reform; it is impossible to control the OER quality; there is not a viable business model based on OER. The last part of the paper deals with OER in Romania. The concept of open educational resources is new in Romania, even if in practice we find examples of such materials. The introduction of digital textbooks is one of the new projects proposed by the Ministry of Education. Like all over the world, the private sector - businesses or non-governmental organizations - is more dynamic and connected to the latest ideas. It is no surprise, therefore, that even with regard to OER, we find several exploratory attempts, some of which are relatively successful: DidaTec, Edu.moodle.ro, Didactic.ro, Education.inmures.ro. The conclusion is that the digital dimension of education will become more important in the years to come and that it is a phenomenon that we can not control. Romania has three major options: let things grow naturally; speed up the process by stimulating the creation and use of OER through public policy measures; force a rapid shift from traditional resources to OER through major investments and specific legislation. Of the three options we recommend the second, the one of equilibrium.


[Abstract] The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of evaluating the productive performance of Islamic banks operating in the GCC region over the period 2005-2008. Thus, we evaluate the productive performance of Islamic banks with the technique of productive efficiency proposed by Farrell (1957). We use the method of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to decompose the productive efficiency into technical efficiency, allocation efficiency, and cost efficiency. The application of this technique on a sample of 23 Islamic banks reveals that the technical inefficiency and allocation inefficiency increased bank costs, on average, by about 14% and 29%, respectively. In addition, the results show that internal and external factors seem to contribute significantly to the evolution of efficiency scores of Islamic banks operating in the GCC region. [Keywords] efficiency; Islamic banking; data envelopment analysis (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) Introduction The distinguishing feature of Islamic finance is its prohibition of interest (usury). The Islamic financial system opposes all forms of investment involving activities that are deemed to be not compliant with "Sharia law." Islamic banks are the fundamental components of the Islamic financial system, carrying out the full range of banking activities in accordance with Islamic law. The principle of the rejection of "Riba," a loan with interest, is a fundamental feature of the Islamic banking system. However, there are other aspects in which Islamic banking differs from conventional banking, in particular by virtue of the specific role of Islamic banks within the system. The notion underlying the activities of Islamic banks are the principle of risk-sharing, known as "al-Ghunm bi al-Ghurm." The principle is that a lender is committed to sharing both the benefits and the risks of the loan with the borrower. To this extent, Islamic banks act as partners, sharing both the gains and the losses generated by their customers. Banks will guarantee their continued role over time by multiplying the number of customers (in order to share the risk) and by providing advice and support services in management. While Islamic banks offer simple deposit accounts for individuals, of which the management costs are covered by depositors, their main function is to provide financial services for entrepreneurs and commonly take the following forms: * Mudharabah or "passive partnership": a bank provides the entire funds for an entrepreneur and shares the resulting profit (assuming there is any) with the entrepreneur based on a fixed percentage determined by contract. The sole source of revenue for the borrowers is their own profit share; they do not receive a salary. The bank is entirely liable for any potential losses. * Mousharaka or "active partnership": in this type of contract, the bank acts as a shareholder, and both the profits and the losses shared between the bank and the borrower in accordance with the level of ownership of the company's assets. * Mourabaha or "commercial funding with profit margin": the bank acquires merchandise for its customer in return for a profit margin defined by contract. The bank transfers the ownership of the merchandise to its customer once the latter has paid both the cost of the merchandise and the margin defined by contract. This type of contract differs from loans with interest insofar as the margin is fixed and does not increase in line with the term of payment. The first attempts to create Islamic financial institutions were made in the 1960s with the rural savings banks "MitGrammar" in Egypt and the "Pilgrim's Management Fund" in Malaysia. The aim of these institutions was to reduce the level of banking exclusion and to promote the development of underprivileged sectors of the population. While not ignoring these initial experiences, many economists agree that the early 1970s are the real birth date of modern Islamic finance. …


Freedom to choose when, where and on what to work might be viewed as mere telework. However, when we mix the adoption of ubiquitous technologies with personalities that take pleasure in problem solving and achievement for its own sake, a strong need for autonomy, the freedom to work wherever and whenever the mood strikes, and add a dash of entrepreneurial spirit, then perhaps we are seeing an emergent class of worker, and even the possibility of new organisational forms. This research draws on adaptive structuration theory to search for evidence of a different way of working, hidden among otherwise familiar patterns. It concludes by considering what implications the employment of such individuals might have for management processes with organisations.


This paper presents a Conceptual Framework (CF) for analysing and simulating transition dynamics (or radical systemic innovation) that is broadly consistent with both empirical evidence and current theorising about transitions. The framework distinguishes between a dominant socio-technical regime and a number of socio-technical niches. The central feature of the framework is to describe how niches and regime interact to produce a transition dynamic involving either a transformation or a total overthrow of the dominant regime. We base the analysis on reviews of patterns observed in historical transitions, and provide a framework for analysing the processes involved in producing future 'sustainability transitions'.


Early life stress (ELS) causes multiple epigenetic modifications (e.g. methylation of genes and histones) in a developing child's genome. Early life stress comes in various forms: Serious physical and mental abuse for example by parents, relatives, or caregivers; a poor social environment involving drug addicts and gang warfare; or loss of all parents and close relatives. This brief review is an attempt to update the information in the above-mentioned opus with a focus on in part on events in the brain and emphasizes that dissociable domains compose executive function


The early years of Syrian-US relations can be described as hopes dashed, hopes revived. Although American missionaries had visited the Middle East in the nineteenth century, it was not until after World War I that Syrian and US dignitaries met in an official capacity. The relationship had its ups-and-downs: warm under Woodrow Wilson; virtually non-existent under Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge; revived under Franklin Roosevelt when Syria sided with the Allies to declare war on Nazi Germany. In the aftermath of World War II the relationship took a new turn, as the US was accused of involvement in the series of coups and counter-coups that rocked the young republic from 1949 until the ill-fated Syrian-Egyptian union of 1958. Engagement and the right to self-determination were the rule of the game in the post-Wilson era, but this quickly transformed into espionage and covert activity during the Cold War when the US saw Syria as a Soviet proxy in the Middle East. In the forty years between 1919 and 1959, envoys from the White House, along with presidential candidates from both the Republican and Democratic parties, Secretaries of State, and US celebrities like Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller all came to Damascus and reported - in many different ways - their observations. Featuring original research and previously unpublished material, this book will be essential reading for scholars of the Middle East and US Diplomatic History and twentieth-century International Relations.


The Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones (DEI) is an independent research institute located in San Jose, Costa Rica, whose members include many notable Latin American social theorists, philosophers, and theologians. Through the institute's many publications, these scholars have articulated a unique version of critical theory with the aim of fostering a dialogue between philosophy, theology, and the social sciences. The institute's importance to communication researchers lies both in the sophistication of its social analyses and in its status as a viable model of socially engaged scholarly praxis. Of particular relevance to communication scholars is the DEI's conceptualization and analysis of the "total market," a term that refers to the social environment created by neoliberal globalization. The concept of the total market can refocus communication theory in light of contemporary socioeconomic conditions.


OBJECTIVE: Despite the existence of numerous case series, no evidenced-based medical management for atypical fractures associated with bisphosphonate (BP) treatment has been established. DESIGN: We report the outcome of teriparatide (TRP) administration followed by strontium ranelate (SR) in a woman with a complete and an incomplete contralateral atypical fracture of the femoral diaphysis (AFF) associated with BP treatment. The spontaneous complete AFF was managed with intramedullary nailing, discontinuation of BP and initiation TRP. RESULTS: Eleven months later, she suffered a contralateral incomplete AFF. At the completion of the TRP treatment, she had only slight discomfort in the femur with the incomplete AFF. BMD testing revealed increase of 7.61% at the lumbar spine (LS) and 0.8% at the hip. Following TRP, 1-year SR treatment resulted in further BMD increase of 9.2% at the LS and 1.4% in the hip, while she does not report any pain. Bone markers remain within the normal range. CONCLUSION: Our case indicates that sequential therapy with TRP and SR in cases of AFF might be a rational treatment option. However, there is a need for additional information concerning the effect of TRP and SR, given alone or sequentially, in these patients in order to incorporate these drugs into the management of AFF.


Polymer layered silicate (PLS) nanocomposites have been prepared with diglycidyl ether of bisphenol-A (DGEBA) epoxy resin as the matrix and organically modified montmorillonite (MMT) as the clay nanofiller. Resin-clay mixtures with different clay contents (zero, two, five and 10 wt%) were cured, both isothermally andnon-isothermally, using a poly(ethyleneimine) hyperbranched polymer (HBP), the cure kinetics being monitored by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The nanostructure of the cured nanocomposites was characterized by small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and their mechanical properties were determined by dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) and impact testing. The results are compared with an earlier study of the structure and properties of the same DGEBA-MMT system cured with a polyoxypropylene diamine, Jeffamine. There are very few examples of the use of HBP as a curing agent in epoxy PLS nanocomposites; here, it is found to enhance significantly the degree of exfoliation of these nanocomposites compared with those cured with Jeffamine, with a corresponding enhancement in the impact energy for nanocomposites with the low clay content of 2 wt%. These changes are attributed to the different cure kinetics with the HBP, in which the intra-gallery homopolymerization reaction is accelerated, such that it occurs before the bulk cross-linking reaction.


Organic matter (OM) in aquatic systems is either produced internally (autochthonous OM) or delivered from the terrestrial environment (ter-OM). For eutrophication (or the reverse – oligotrophication), the amount of autochthonous OM plays a key role for coastal ecosystem health. However, the influence of ter-OM on eutrophication or oligotrophication processes of coastal ecosystems is largely unclear. Therefore, ter-OM, or ter-OM proxies are currently not included in most policies or monitoring programs on eutrophication. Nevertheless, ter-OM is increasingly recognized as a strong driver of aquatic productivity: By influencing underwater light conditions and nutrient- and carbon availability, increased ter-OM input may shift systems from autotrophic towards heterotrophic production, but also alter the interactions between benthic and pelagic habitats. Thus, by changing baseline conditions in coastal zones, ongoing and predicted changes in inputs of ter-OM due to climate change (e.g. in precipitation) and anthropogenic activities (e.g. reduced sulfate deposition, damming, coastal erosion) may strongly modify eutrophication symptoms within affected ecosystems, but also hinder recovery from eutrophication following a reduction in nutrient loadings (i.e. oligotrophication). In this review, we aim to shed light upon the role of ter-OM for coastal eutrophication and oligotrophication processes and ecosystem health. Specifically, we (1) discuss the theoretical interactions between ter-OM and eutrophication and oligotrophication processes in coastal waters, (2) present global case studies where altered ter-OM supply to coastal ecosystems has shifted baseline conditions, with implications for eutrophication and oligotrophication processes, and (3) provide an outlook and recommendations for the future management of coastal zones given changes in ter-OM input. We conclude that it is essential to include and target all OM sources (i.e. also ter-OM) in monitoring programs to better understand the consequences of both eutrophication and oligotrophication processes on coastal ecosystems. Our review strongly urges to include ter-OM, or ter-OM proxies in eutrophication monitoring and policies to safeguard coastal ecosystem health also under changing climatic conditions and globally increasing anthropogenic perturbations of coastal ecosystems.


The details of our personal lives are our property and no one else's business. Those professionals who train medical office workers need to teach the medical law and ethics to those who will deal with these personal details of our lives. The instructors of medical office technology indicate that the right to medical privacy and all that it encompasses are very essential in the instruction of this curricula. Yet, they are not as familiar as they should be with the laws, and they are not covering medical law and ethics thoroughly in all curricula. Medical law and ethics should be taught as a separate core class in all medical office technology curricula, regardless of the length of training involved. Health care providers, their employees, and their agents have a legal duty to adopt security safeguards for the information they acquire and maintain-physical care of the recorded information, and care that employees are not verbally sharing the recorded information publicly. Verbal leakage of medical information may be the most dangerous due to how quickly information travels through the grapevine and the tremendous distortion of the information that occurs. CHAPTER


We study properties of the single-site reduced density matrix in the Bose-Bose resonance model as a function of system parameters. This model describes a single-component Bose gas with a resonant coupling to a diatomic molecular state, here defined on a lattice. A main goal is to demonstrate that the eigenstates of the single-site reduced density matrix have structures that are characteristic for the various quantum phases of this system. Since the Hamiltonian conserves only the global particle number but not the number of bosons and molecules individually, these eigenstates, referred to as optimal modes, can be nontrivial linear combinations of bare eigenstates of the molecular and boson particle number. We numerically analyze the optimal modes and their weights, the latter giving the importance of the corresponding state, in the ground state of the Bose-Bose resonance model. We find that the single-site von Neumann entropy is sensitive to the location of the phase boundaries. We explain the structure of the optimal modes and their weight spectra using perturbation theory and via a comparison to results for the single-component Bose-Hubbard model. We further study the dynamical evolution of the optimal modes and of the single-site entanglement entropy in two quantum quenches that cross phase boundaries of the model and show that these quantities are thermal in the steady state. For our numerical calculations, we use the density-matrix renormalization group method for ground-state calculations and time evolution in a Krylov subspace for the quench dynamics as well as exact diagonalization.


I read with interest the recent article by Sim and Baek [1], who reviewed the importance of regrowth following thermal ablation of benign thyroid nodules. They suggested the concept of the initial ablation ratio (IAR), defined as the ablated volume divided by the initial total volume before thermal ablation, as a way to predict future regrowth. They also suggested arterialfirst ablation followed by marginal venous ablation to prevent marginal regrowth of a viable nodule. They also proposed using a hydro-dissection technique for nodules undergoing ablation adjacent to a critical structure to obtain a safety margin for thermal injury. Thyroid nodules usually grow very slowly. Their review showed that a substantial number of nodules grew by more than 20% to 50% in volume within 1 year after treatment. I would like to suggest that we can predict the regrowth rate of ablated nodules not only by the IAR, but also by the previous growth rate of the thyroid nodule recorded before thermal ablation. If this is true, we can inform patients that they may need multiple rounds of thermal ablation or recommend surgery if they do not want multiple procedures. Some ablated nodules with rapid regrowth might be malignancies undetected by fine needle aspiration and/or core needle biopsy. This raises the question of whether there are any experiences or reports of patients who received thermal ablation, but eventually showed rapid regrowth, and delayed surgery proved the nodule to be malignant? My final question approaches the issue from a somewhat different point of view. Some patients with a large thyroid nodule have multiple medical conditions, which makes clinicians reluctant to recommend diagnostic surgery under general anesthesia, even if the biopsy result of their nodule shows an indeterminate malignant potential. Sim and Baek [1] suggested that recent advances in thermal ablation techniques may enable thorough ablation of thyroid nodules. In the opinion of the authors, what is the likelihood that thorough ablation of follicular variant papillary thyroid carcinoma and/or follicular carcinoma, which we cannot diagnose before surgery, could yield a similar effect to that of partial diagnostic thyroid surgery, with respect to prevention of future metastasis? Many meticulous techniques have been introduced for thyroid nodule management, such as standardization of thyroid cytopathology, introduction of genomics for diagnosis, and high-resolution ultrasonography, and for avoiding surgery or ensuring that surgery is performed accurately. If we could properly establish the significance of—and countermeasures against—regrowth after nodule ablation, thermal ablation of the thyroid will be


In a paper presented at SOS 2010, we developed a framework for big-step semantics for interactive input-output in combination with divergence, based on coinductive and mixed inductive-coinductive notions of resumptions, evaluation and termination-sensitive weak bisimilarity. In contrast to standard inductively defined big-step semantics, this framework handles divergence properly; in particular, runs that produce some observable effects and then diverge, are not "lost". Here we scale this approach for shared-variable concurrency on a simple example language. We develop the metatheory of our semantics in a constructive logic.


The Great Lakes region has 5,480 miles of U.S. lakeshore. Located along this shoreline are approximately 340 Federal Emergency Management Agency Flood Insurance Study sites with the associated Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRM's) and reports. Recent extreme Great Lakes water levels encountered in 1985-87 in conjunction with severe seasonal storms, prompted the consideration of adding wave runup into Flood Insurance Studies along the Great Lakes shorelines. Screening of these sites based on a certain bluff height criteria reduced the number of wave runup sites to 127. At these selected sites, the coastline is subject to intense wave action during storm conditions. Storm surges, individually, are not sufficient to cause the degree of damage experienced at these locations. However, high lake levels and accompanying storm rises combine to raise stillwater levels, thus allowing waves to runup the existing beaches and/or overtop structures causing shoreward flooding. This paper describes the anaylsis conducted using four wave runup methodologies. These are: combined probability; open-coast; coincident frequency analysis; and combined rise and runup coincident frequency anaylsis. Wave runup for each of three types of shorelines (vertical structure, rock revetment, and beach), typically encountered on the Great Lakes, were computed by these methodologies. Flooding during extreme storms at three test sites were evaluated using the four methodologies. This lead to the recommendaton of a single method. This method is namely the open-coast method.


It is argued that Aboriginal children's English is different inside and outside the classroom largely because characteristically, inside the classroom the Aboriginal children do not have the freedom to determine the discourse pattern which they have outside the classroom. This is illustrated on the basis of an analysis of five first person oral narratives of Aboriginal children of the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia recorded outside the classroom, which are compared both with a first person oral narrative of a non-Aboriginal child and with teacher led interactions in the classes of which these children were members. The Aboriginal children's discourse exhibits 'tracking,' a culture-specific way of organising narrative, which is widely exhibited in Aboriginal communities. It is implied that education of speakers of Aboriginal English needs to be sensitive to such discoursal features which are not shared by other English speakers.


The most interesting aspect of politics in western Canada is its tendency to generate new political parties. This has been going on for over a century and shows no signs of stopping, as illustrated by the success of the Saskatchewan Party in that province's election of September 1999. Formed only in 1998, the Saskatchewan Party won twenty-five seats as compared to twenty-nine for the New Democrats, thus reducing Roy Romanow's party to the expedient of forming a coalition with the Liberals. Indeed, the Saskatchewan Party got more popular votes than did the NDP. The NDP is the heir of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, founded in Calgary in 1932. The CCF/NDP has always aspired to be a national party, but it still bears the marks of its western origins. After the 1999 Manitoba election, the NDP until very recently governed three of the four western provinces. And yet, in the 1997 federal election, voters in the same region filled sixty of their eighty-eight seats in the House of Commons with members of the Reform Party, which stood at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from the NDP; and in the 2000 federal election, western voters elected sixty-four representatives of the Canadian Alliance, the successor to the Reform Party. What can one make of this except to say that, while western voters may swing either left or right, they like to support parties rooted in their own region? Without claiming to be complete, Table 1 lists some of the most important parties founded in western Canada. Several, such as the CCF, Social Credit, and Reform, have also operated outside the West; but all were founded in the West and had their main base of support in that region. The parties are designated F, P, or F+P, depending on whether they were purely federal, purely provincial, or operated at both levels. Some of the dates may be debatable because the founding of a political party is not always a clear-cut event. The list would be considerably longer if it included the instances in which a Liberal or Conservative party was reborn after a long period of dormancy in one province or another. Not surprisingly, Quebec, the other region of Canada in which many voters are fundamentally dissatisfied with the terms of Confederation, has demonstrated a similar proclivity for creating new political parties, as shown in Table 2. Again, the list does not claim to be complete but only to identify some of the most important cases. The parallelism between Quebec and the West is nicely illustrated by the fact that in 1993 a new party from Quebec--the Bloc Quebecois--was elected the Official Opposition in the House of Commons and was then replaced in that role in 1997 by a new party from the West--the Reform Party of Canada. Meanwhile, the Liberals continue to govern through their overwhelming domination of Ontario. The federal politics of the 1990s were an exaggerated version of a tableau that has often reappeared in modern Canadian history, in which political forces based in Ontario fight off challenges arising from Quebec and/or the West. Attempts to bring Quebec and the West into coalition with each other met with only infrequent and short-lived success under Robert Borden (1911-17), John Diefenbaker (1958-62), and Brian Mulroney (1934-93). The repeated emergence of new parties in the West is the most obvious manifestation of the special character of politics in that region of Canada. Historians and political scientists have identified three major features of western politics that seem to perpetuate themselves across the generations in the various new parties as they arise. (1) I would describe these three characteristics as suspicion of external control, rejection of Canada's federal parliamentary system, and a thirst for fundamental solutions. Let me expand on these three characteristics as they apply to western politics and parties, particularly the Reform Party of Canada, with which I had some personal familiarity. …


Droplet evaporation is an efficient process as it removes a large amount of heat by using the latent energy, making it suitable for heat transfer applications. In this research, evaporation of the silver-graphene hybrid nanofluid (SGHF) droplet, because of its synergistic thermal conductivity, is investigated for substrate temperature in a range of 25–100 °C. The experiments for droplet evaporation were performed in an environmental facility for two droplet sizes, 3 μL and 30 μL volume, on a copper plate. A 100 W silicone heater mat was used to heat the copper plate from the underside, while two T-type thermocouples were used to monitor its surface temperature. As droplet evaporation ended, a porous residue was formed on the copper surface. Subsequently, a 3 μL volume of the SGHF droplet was dispensed on the porous residue surface. The results showed a tremendous rise in the evaporation rate (up to 160%) for the subsequent SGHF droplet sitting on the porous residue as compared to the non-wetted copper surface. Moreover, the evaporation rate of the SGHF droplet on the copper surface increased up to 56% as compared to the water droplet for a substrate temperature range of 25–100 °C.


The external conditions facing the transition economies slightly improved on balance during the year 2004. The eight new EU member states of Central and Eastern Europe (NMS-8) recorded higher GDP growth (5% on average) than in the previous year, largely thanks to expanding domestic demand - in particular of investment (Czech Republic, Hungary and Latvia) and of private consumption (Poland, Slovakia, Estonia and Lithuania). Growth accelerated also in Southeast Europe (except Croatia and Macedonia), as well as in Belarus and Ukraine (Russia's GDP grew by 7% again). The transition economies have thus been one of the most dynamic regions in the world. The NMS have been growing more than 2 percentage points faster than the 'old' EU-15. These countries not only add a certain dynamism to the European economy but put some pressure on the EU reform agenda as well. On the downside, the situation on the labour market remains precarious, robust economic growth notwithstanding. The average rate of unemployment in the NMS is nearly twice as high as in the EU-15 (mainly on account of Poland and Slovakia); in most of Southeast Europe it is even higher, with little prospect for marked improvements any time soon. The latter refers to industry in particular, which - despite a remarkable acceleration of output growth (10% on NMS average in 2004) - continues to shed labour. This implies impressive gains in labour productivity and, given the general wage restraint, in unit labour costs as well. The improving international costs competitiveness of NMS has recently been eroded by appreciating domestic currencies (Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). After a temporary increase in 2004 (largely caused by tax adjustments prior to EU accession and rising energy prices), inflation resumed its downward trend, reaching low single digits in most NMS (except Slovakia) and in the remaining transition countries as well (except Romania, Serbia and Ukraine). Russian inflation has been stubbornly high, fuelled by large inflows of foreign currency, tariff hikes and galloping producer prices. The remaining inflation differential with respect to the eurozone, magnified by a natural appreciation tendency of NMS currencies (frequently stimulated by short-term capital inflows) may lead to competitiveness losses in the future. Given the ongoing productivity and quality improvements this danger is not imminent in most NMS yet. Still the exchange rate developments should be watched closely, not least in the period prior to EMU accession, which in several NMS will probably extend beyond 2010. The need to reduce excessive budget deficits represents another challenge facing several NMS in the coming years. The outstanding feature of last year's economic developments was a boost in foreign trade (or of intra-EU dispatches and arrivals in the case of NMS). NMS exports jumped by more than 20% in current euro terms, somewhat faster than imports (+18%), yet their aggregate trade balance slightly deteriorated (in fact foreign trade contributed positively to GDP growth in Poland only). Nonetheless, the export sector of NMS is strengthening - not least thanks to sustained reforms and large FDI inflows in the past few years - and their integration in the European and world economy is increasing. Today, 86% of NMS exports and 72% of imports represent intra-EU trade. Given the high (and rising) export surpluses of Russia and Ukraine - in both cases swelled by rising world market commodity prices - the trade contribution to growth has been positive in these countries as well. After the takeover of EU external trade policies upon accession, especially intra-NMS trade (preliminary estimates suggest an increase by 30% in 2004) and extra-EU trade are booming. Altogether, the NMS enjoy a surplus in trade transactions with the EU, an achievement attributable largely to the high and growing surpluses of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia (and to a lower deficit in Poland); the separate effect of trade with the EU on GDP growth was most likely positive. In Southeast Europe, trade integration is (with few exceptions such as Bulgaria) still rather low and many countries in the region suffer from huge trade and current account deficits which may not be sustainable (particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia). The EU accession of eight Central and East European countries on 1 May 2004 has brought few surprises and may generally be considered a success. The accession was well prepared and managed. The direct economic effects of accession on the NMS are difficult to identify economic growth, especially of industry, had speeded up already before May 2004, a temporary increase of inflation was soon successfully contained and domestic currencies strengthened. Net transfers from the EU budget were negligible (less than 1% of NMS GDP), yet inflows of FDI picked up in 2004 again - albeit remaining below the peak of 2000-2002. The GDP growth outlook is fairly robust barring major external shocks, the NMS are expected to grow by 4-5% annually in the coming years (the Baltic States will continue to enjoy even somewhat higher growth) thus maintaining their speed of nominal and real convergence to the 'old' EU. Inflation is converging to eurozone levels as well. The shadow side of this fairly upbeat forecast is the labour market where no substantial reduction of unemployment is expected. Estonia, Lithuania and Slovenia (all already participating in the ERM II) may adopt the euro in late 2006 or early 2007, with the remaining 'high-deficit' NMS following suit during 2008-2010. Also the economic outlook for Southeast Europe is more encouraging now than in the recent past GDP growth will accelerate in most countries (without recurring inflation), but unemployment will remain high. As far as the integration prospects of this region are concerned, Bulgaria and Romania will become EU members in 2007, followed by Croatia in 2008 and with Macedonia the next candidate. The coming two years will be crucial also for the remaining countries of the Western Balkans as a number of exceptionally difficult issues will have to be solved (in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo). If everything goes well (and there are a lot of caveats) the whole region could be in the EU around 2015. However, by that time the issue of Turkey's EU membership will have to be finally decided and a possible application of Ukraine (as well as Moldova) for EU membership will have to be dealt with. In addition, the enlarged EU will simultaneously have to clarify its relations with Russia. These challenging developments will doubtlessly require a new (and this time much more radical) reform of the whole system of EU institutions.


Miniaturisation is an important evolutionary trend for amphibians and has occurred several times in independent anuran lineages. Most miniaturised frogs live in the leaf litter of tropical forests and have terrestrial reproductive modes. They are expected to have reduced fecundity in number of eggs than larger-bodied related species, but little is known about reproductive cycles and proportion of reproductive females. Lower vagility is also assumed, however, as they are difficult to observe, there is little empirical evidence about their dispersal. We studied the reproductive biology (sex ratio, sexual size dimorphism and fecundity parameters) and population ecology (growth, dispersal, and phenology) of the miniature Guanabara Frog Euparkerella aff. brasiliensis (⩽ 20 mm). We collected and analysed 75 specimens of E. aff. brasiliensis, of which 27 were adult females with vitellogenic oocytes in their ovaries. Fecundity was low for number of eggs (average number = 9.7), but only one adult female had no vitellogenic oocytes. Sex ratio was relatively balanced among sexes, being female-biased (0.92) for all individuals and male-biased (1.17) for adults. Juveniles and ovigerous females were observed throughout the year during the two years of mark-recapture study, which indicates continuous breeding. We captured 121 individuals, of which 12% were recaptured in their original collection sites, suggesting low vagility. We discuss our findings considering the current knowledge about the ecology of miniaturised frogs and other Terraranae and suggest future directions for ecological studies and conservation planning.


Lymphadenopathy syndrome is a common manifestation of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). In general, enlarged lymph nodes are small and can be found in the cervical, inguinal and axillary regions. Lymph node involvement is present in up to 25% of the patients and normally appears in the first stages of the disease or during relapses.1 The differential diagnosis of lymphadenopathy syndrome in SLE includes histiocytic necrotizing lymphadenitis or Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease (KFD), Castleman's disease, syphilis, tuberculosis, sarcoidosis, infectious mononucleosis (Epstein–Barr virus [EBV], cytomegalovirus), herpes simplex, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), other infections and lymphoma.2 Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease, or histiocytic necrotizing lymphadenitis, is a rare clinical disorder characterized by lymph node involvement (generally cervical), fever, night sweats and


Abstract Objective: To develop a taxonomy of doctors' questions about patient care that could be used to help answer such questions. Design: Use of 295 questions asked by Oregon primary care doctors to modify previously developed taxonomy of 1101 clinical questions asked by Iowa family doctors. Setting: Primary care practices in Iowa and Oregon. Participants: Random samples of 103 Iowa family doctors and 49 Oregon primary care doctors. Main outcome measures: Consensus among seven investigators on a meaningful taxonomy of generic questions; interrater reliability among 11 individuals who used the taxonomy to classify a random sample of 100 questions: 50 from Iowa and 50 from Oregon. Results: The revised taxonomy, which comprised 64 generic question types, was used to classify 1396 clinical questions. The three commonest generic types were "What is the drug of choice for condition x?" (150 questions, 11%); "What is the cause of symptom x?" (115 questions, 8%); and "What test is indicated in situation x?" (112 questions, 8%). The mean interrater reliability among 11 coders was moderate (κ=0.53, agreement 55%). Conclusions: Clinical questions in primary care can be categorised into a limited number of generic types. A moderate degree of interrater reliability was achieved with the taxonomy developed in this study. The taxonomy may enhance our understanding of doctors' information needs and improve our ability to meet those needs.


Abstract. A new method of obtaining power spectral distribution of gravity waves as a function of ground-based horizontal phase speed and propagation direction from airglow observations has recently been proposed. To explain gravity wave power spectrum anisotropy, a new gravity wave transmission diagram was developed in this study. Gravity wave transmissivity depends on the existence of critical and turning levels for waves that are determined by background horizontal wind distributions. Gravity wave transmission diagrams for different horizontal wavelengths in simple background horizontal winds with constant vertical shear indicate that the effects of the turning level reflection are significant and strongly dependent on the horizontal wavelength.


Abstract Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a fundamental part of education. Incorporating high-quality SEL programming into day-to-day classroom and school practices has emerged as a main goal for many practitioners over the past decade. The present article overviews the current state of SEL research and practice, with a particular focus on the United States. The need for a model of SEL that goes beyond the classroom is illustrated, and a systemic approach to implementing SEL school-wide is introduced. It is argued that school-wide SEL maximises the benefits of SEL programming by becoming the organising framework for fostering students' potential as scholars, community members, and citizens. Further, a Theory of Action (ToA) developed by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) is presented that serves as a blueprint for implementing systemic SEL in schools. Potential challenges and barriers involved in moving toward school-wide SEL implementation are considered and discussed.