Are regions poor because they have bad institutions or are they poor because they are disconnected from the social channels through which technology diffuses? This paper tests institutional and technological theories of economic convergence by looking at income convergence across Colombian municipalities. We use formal employment and wage data to estimate growth of income per capita at the municipal level. In Colombia, municipalities are organized into 32 departamentos or states. We use cellphone metadata to cluster municipalities into 32 communication clusters, defined as a set of municipalities that are densely connected through phone calls. We show that these two forms of grouping municipalities are very different. We study the effect on municipal income growth of the characteristics of both the state and the communication cluster to which the municipality belongs. We find that belonging to a richer communication cluster accelerates convergence, while belonging to a richer state does not. This result is robust to controlling for state fixed effects when studying the impact of communication clusters and vice versa. The results point to the importance of social interactions rather than formal institutions in the growth process.


Background and aims : Stress and depression are the main reasons for the decline in labor productivity. Due to the changes are very difficult in job stress factors, the role of personality variables that can soften the effects of these factors is very important.This study examined the mediating role of psychological hardiness and extraversion in the relationship between job demands and stress and depression have been conducted. Methods : This study was descriptive-analytical study. The research sample consisted of 184 working men that selected via convenience sampling in Isafahan province and were completed the Morgeson and Humphrey's knowledge characteristics(2006), revised Norwegian hardiness scale(Hystad et al, 2010), Beck depression inventory(1996), Warttig et al perceived stress (2013) and extraversion subscale in NEO_FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1989). Results : The findings of this research showed that in the relationship between job demands and job stress, hardiness (B=-0.366, p=0.05) and extraversion (B=-0.155, p=0.05) play perfect mediator role and psychological hardiness mediates perfectly the relationship between job demands and depression (B=-1.399, p=0.05). In the basis of absolute, comparative and parsimony fit index; the final version of the research model has goodness of fit (GFI=0.925; TLI= 0.953, RMSEA= 0.056). Conclusion : According to the results, for people with high hardiness, job demands are perceived as a challenge that must be engaged and control them. job demands for these people necessarily lead to stress and depression. Extroverts also due to positive emotions, social support and orientation to success, are consistent with job demands and these demands will not lead to stress in them. According to the results, it is recommended that companies and organizations in the process of selection and training in jobs with high job demands consider hardiness and extraversion.


Improving oxygen reduction in microbial fuel cell (MFC) cathodes requires a better understanding of the effects of the catalyst binder chemistry and properties on performance. A series of polystyrene-b-poly(ethylene oxide) (PS-b-PEO) polymers with systematically varying hydrophilicity were designed to determine the effect of the hydrophilic character of the binder on cathode performance. Increasing the hydrophilicity of the PS-b-PEO binders enhanced the electrochemical response of the cathode and MFC power density by ∼15%, compared to the hydrophobic PS-OH binder. Increased cathode performance was likely a result of greater water uptake by the hydrophilic binder, which would increase the accessible surface area for oxygen reduction. Based on these results and due to the high cost of PS-b-PEO, the performance of an inexpensive hydrophilic neutral polymer, poly(bisphenol A-co-epichlorohydrin) (BAEH), was examined in MFCs and compared to a hydrophilic sulfonated binder (Nafion). MFCs with BAEH-based cathodes with two different Pt loadings initially (after 2 cycles) had lower MFC performance (1360 and 630 mW m−2 for 0.5 and 0.05 mg Pt cm−2) than Nafion cathodes (1980 and 1080 mW m−2 for 0.5 and 0.05 mg Pt cm−2). However, after long-term operation (22 cycles, 40 days), power production of each cell was similar (∼1200 and 700–800 mW m−2 for 0.5 and 0.05 mg Pt cm−2) likely due to cathode biofouling that could not be completely reversed through physical cleaning. While binder chemistry could improve initial electrochemical cathode performance, binder materials had less impact on overall long-term MFC performance. This observation suggests that long-term operation of MFCs will require better methods to avoid cathode biofouling.


With limited space and resources, Taiwan is currently facing conundrum with readjusting its energy portfolio towards sustainability. This paper examines the implementation of Taiwan's Renewable Energy Development Act (REDA) towards the nuclear-free commitment. At first, the pressures such as energy deficiency and nuclear concerns forced Taiwan to come up with new plan for its energy mix. To promote renewable energy usage, REDA was facilitated in 2009. Along with the constraint of nuclear power abolishment by 2025, the act has become the centre of public attention. PEST analysis is applied for identifying the influential factors in far external environment and putting them into themes in regard to the REDA policy implementation. The objective of the dissertation is to identify the companies' and governments' strategic foci due to the policy implementation. Recommendations are provided to resultant concerns and opportunities for future consideration.


Molecule generation is central to a variety of applications. Current attention has been paid to approaching the generation task as subgraph prediction and assembling. Nevertheless, these methods usually rely on hand-crafted or external subgraph construction, and the subgraph assembling depends solely on local arrangement. In this paper, we define a novel notion, principal subgraph, that is closely related to the informative pattern within molecules. Interestingly, our proposed merge-and-update subgraph extraction method can automatically discover frequent principal subgraphs from the dataset, while previous methods are incapable of. Moreover, we develop a two-step subgraph assembling strategy, which first predicts a set of subgraphs in a sequence-wise manner and then assembles all generated subgraphs globally as the final output molecule. Built upon graph variational auto-encoder, our model is demonstrated to be effective in terms of several evaluation metrics and efficiency, compared with state-of-the-art methods on distribution learning and (constrained) property optimization tasks.


Group-transfer polymn. of Me methacrylate (I) in THF with (1-methoxy-2-methyl-1-propenyloxy)trimethylsilane (II) as initiator and Bu4NCN as catalyst was investigated. Beside a fast isomerization, only very slow dimerization reactions of the initiator in the presence of the catalyst were obsd. Therefore, the system behaved like a living one. Values of .hivin.Mw.hivin.Mn approached 1.3 at low catalyst concns. Tacticity measurements yielded about 60% syndiotactic, 36% heterotactic, and 3% isotactic triads. Induction periods in time-conversion curves obtained with II as initiator and intercepts in the plots of the no.-av. mol. wt. vs. monomer vanished, when the reaction was initiated with the first addn. product of II and I. This is assumed to be a strong indication, that in the investigated system a slow initiation step between II and the first I unit precedes the propagation reaction.


Spontaneous orienting of attention towards an observer's gaze direction is typically measured using a gaze-cuing paradigm in which a centrally-fixated face shifts its gaze towards (congruent) or away (incongruent) from a peripheral target. The reaction time (RT) difference between incongruent and congruent targets (gaze-orienting effect; GOE) indicates attention orienting based on gaze-cues. Studies have reported an increased GOE when the face expresses fear compared to happy or neutral expressions that might be due to the signaling of threat in the environment. However, the time course of this effect remains unclear. We used a dynamic gaze-cuing paradigm in which a neutral face with direct gaze looked to the side (averted gaze shift) and then either expressed fear or performed a neutral movement (tongue protrusion). The target was then presented after one of five Stimulus-Onset Asynchronies (SOAs; 300, 400, 500, 600, or 700 ms), the time between the gaze shift and the target onset. Overall, RTs decreased with increased SOAs, were faster for fearful than for neutral gaze-cues and faster for congruent than incongruent trials (classic GOE). The GOE was significantly larger for fearful than neutral faces, due to faster RTs for fearful than neutral faces in congruent trials, and this effect of emotion was largest at 400 and 500ms SOA. Thus, fearful expressions and gaze-cues interact to enhance orienting to congruent targets and this interaction is maximal at 400-500ms SOA. These results will be compared to gaze-cue orienting to happy and neutral faces in a second participant group. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


Food‐induced allergies have been regarded as an emergent problem of public health. Classified as important allergenic ingredients, the presence of walnut and other nuts as hidden allergens in processed foods constitutes a risk for sensitized individuals, being a real problem of allergen management. Attending to the increasing importance dedicated to walnut allergy, this review intends to provide the relevant and up‐to‐date information on main issues such as the prevalence of walnut allergy, the clinical threshold levels, the molecular characterization of walnut allergens and their clinical relevance, as well as the methodologies for walnut allergen detection in foods. As the walnut used in human diet comes from Juglans regia and Juglans nigra, the molecular characterization of the allergens from both species included in the prolamins (Jug r 1, Jug n 1 and Jug r 3), cupins (Jug r 2, Jug n 2 and Jug r 4) and profilins (Jug r 5), together with respective clinical relevance, were compiled in this review. The most recent progresses on walnut allergen detection techniques (protein‐ and DNA‐based) are described and critically compared, including the emergent multitarget approaches.


OBJECTIVE
To measure changes in medication usage of as-needed, psychoactive medications and other select as-needed medication usage as a result of a therapy dog residing in the rehabilitation facility. Additional measures are participants' thoughts and feelings on quality-of-life factors.

DESIGN
One group, pretest, post-test.

SETTING
Residential rehabilitation facility.

PARTICIPANTS
Convenience sample, N = 58 residents living at the facility.

INTERVENTION
A certified, trained therapy dog.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S)
Changes in as-needed medication usage for the following categories: analgesics, psychoactive medications, and laxatives, as well as changes in vital sign measurements of blood pressure, pulse, respiration rate, and body weight. Additionally, changes in the residents' perception of quality-of-life factors.

RESULTS
One of the three monitored drug classes, analgesia, revealed a decrease in medication usage (mean = 2.6, standard deviation [SD] +/- 6.90, P = 0.017), and one of four monitored vital signs, pulse, showed a decrease (mean = 5.8, SD +/-7.39, P = 0.000) in study participants exposed to the therapy dog. Positive changes were reported in study participants' quality of life.

CONCLUSION
The benefits to human welfare as a result of the presence of a therapy dog have the potential to decrease medication usage for certain conditions in long-term care patients as well as decrease costs. Pharmacist involvement in animal-assisted therapy has the potential to make unique and measurable improvements to best patient care.


The information overflow problem is not simply one of information retrieval and information filtering: the user (reader) might also require aid in summarizing the retrieved information and judging its accuracy and quality. This shows that there is a clear role for the information broker, the human expert that gathers, structures, and evaluates information.

Typically information-brokering services of today utilize a predefined classification schema for information. Readers can individualize the service by selecting from the predefined categories. This approach has many disadvantages. First, the individual readers must select between classes of information that may be orthogonal to their real interests. Second, they are forced to use the broker's classification not only for retrieval, but also for structuring the retrieved information. Third, it becomes impossible for readers to indicate that they are looking for types of information that are not covered by the service. Finally, as the information changes over time, the classification schema may have to change.

In the EdInfo project [1] we have chosen a different approach. Editors, information brokers, readers, and information services may all use different classification schemas, and change them over time. Techniques from collaborative and intelligent filtering as well as information retrieval are used to create tools that allow services, brokers, and readers to communicate and synchronize their classification schemas.


We derive theoretical expressions for market betas from a rational expectation equilibrium model where the representative investor does not observe if the economy is in a recession or an expansion. Market betas in this economy are time-varying and related to investor uncertainty about the state of the economy. The dynamics of betas will also vary across assets according to the assets' cash-flow structure. In a calibration exercise, we show that value and growth firms have cash-flow structures that imply an opposing beta dynamics that goes in the direction of solving the value premium puzzle. During high uncertainty periods, value betas are higher while growth betas are lower. We estimate conditional betas empirically using proxies for investor uncertainty and show support of the model's prediction about the dynamics of growth and value betas.


The effect of magnesium on the yield of coffee grown in the acid Los Guineos clay was investigated and the following conclusions were drawn from the results: 1. Magnesium applications to coffee trees controlled leaf-magnesium deficiency. 2. Magnesium was responsible for significantly increasing coffee yields. Coffee trees supplied with magnesium produced, on the average, 7.5 hundredweights more marketable coffee per acre than the trees not receiving magnesimn. 3. Highest coffee yields were associated with high leaf-magnesium contents. 4. Highly significant correlations were found between relative yields and leaf-magnesium values in both summer and fall leaf samples. 5. The data indicate that magnesium content of coffee leaves can be used to predict relative yields.


A low affinity receptor for IgG immune complexes, Fc gamma RIII(CD16), is expressed on human NK cells as an integral membrane glycoprotein anchored through a transmembrane peptide; on polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMN) the receptor is anchored through a phosphatidylinositol (PI) linkage. The protein on NK cells has a molecular mass 6-10 kD larger than that on PMN, and, unlike the latter, is resistant to PI-specific phospholipase C (PI-PLC). Fc gamma RIII(CD16) transcripts isolated from PMN and NK cells of single donors revealed multiple single nucleotide differences, one of which converts an in frame UGA termination codon to a CGA codon. The resulting open reading frame encodes a longer cytoplasmic domain for Fc gamma RIII(CD16) in NK cells, contributing to its transmembrane anchor. Two nearly identical, linked genes that encode these transcripts have been cloned for Fc gamma RIII(CD16), one of which (III-1) is allelic for NA- 1 and NA-2. The allelic sites have been mapped to two single nucleotides in the extracellular domain. These genes are transcribed in a cell type-specific fashion to generate the alternatively anchored forms of this receptor.


The increasing demand for wireless communication systems has been the starting point for many
research activities and discussions about the best way to make a cleaver usage of the available spectrum
and the available power, in order to satisfy the requirements of the users. In these systems there are
several issues which have to be taken in to account for the evaluation of their Shannon-Capacity, i.e. the
maximum amount of information that can be reliably delivered: the mobility of the users, the presence
of time varying obstacles, power and bandwidth limitations. A lot of efforts have been conducted for
the Information-Theoretic characterization of wireless communication systems with the assumption of
perfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver side.
In this Thesis an Information-Theoretic analysis of a Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output multiple
access channel (MIMO MAC), with partial channel knowledge at the receiver, is provided. In particular
an inner and an outer bound for the rate region of a MIMO MAC with partial CSI when the inputs
are Gaussian, are derived. Moreover, the behavior of the gaps between the upper and lower bounds of
the mutual information terms, which define the achievable rate region, is analyzed as function of: i) the
number of the users, ii) the number of the receiving antennas, and iii) the signal to noise ratio. The
problem of finding the precodings that attempt to maximize the lower bound to the sum-rate is also
considered. Furthermore, the low-SNR and high-SNR regime for a MIMO MAC with partial CSI at the
receiver are described. For the former, the attention is focused on the minimum energy per bit and on
the multiaccess slope region, while for the latter on the high-SNR slope.
The aforementioned framework turns out to be useful to describe the performance limits of two relevant
scenarios of MAC systems in which only a partial CSI can be used at the receiver: Cooperative MIMO
Networks and Training Based Systems.
The performed analysis shows that the rates achievable over a MIMO MAC channel with partial CSI at
the receiver side can be interpreted in terms of a coherent MIMO MAC channel with an increased noise
level.


This thesis is an exposition and close reading of Torrance's doctrine of revelation and of the theological epistemology that emerges from it. In Torrance's account personal knowledge of God is available only in his self revelation in Christ. However, it is shown that his understanding of the place of the Bible and nature in theology points to them both as places of divine self-revelation.

There is a gracing of all knowledge of God whether in Christ, Scripture or nature which means that God is always
sovereign of his self-revelation. In his engagement
with the writings of Einstein on scientific method Torrance finds a similar gracing of scientific knowledge.

Chapter one demonstrates the foundational place of revelation in Christ in Torrance's theology. From this self revelation Torrance arrives at his definition of scientific
method, namely the precedence of ontology over epistemology. The epistemological significance of the doctrine of justification by grace is applied to the place of the Bible in revelation (chapter two). Barth's reasons for rejecting natural theology are explored (chapter three). Chapters four and five demonstrate that the gracious aspect of knowledge of reality applies not only to theology but also to the natural sciences. The natural sciences are brought under a larger theological account of reality in which their inexplicable ability to uncover the reality of the universe is founded on the creative Word of God. Torrance is shown to have turned the natural sciences into natural theology but in a way that compromises neither the independence of the sciences from theology in their operation nor the sovereign and gracious aspect of all knowledge of God.

From Torrance's doctrine of revelation there emerges a critically realist epistemology which takes account of the subjective element in all human knowing, is non-dualist,
correlates with the epistemology which characterises
contemporary scientific practice and unifies a wide range of disciplines including the natural sciences, the social sciences and humanities including theology.


One of the rainiest areas on earth, the Panama Bight and Pacific (western) littoral of Colombia, is the focal point for a regional modeling study utilizing the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University‐NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5) with nested grids. In this first of three parts, the observed climatology of the region is presented. The seasonal march of rainfall has a northwest‐southeast axis, with western Colombia near the center, receiving rain throughout the year. This study focuses on the August‐September season. The diurnal cycle of rainfall over land exhibits an afternoon maximum over most of South and Central America, typically composed of relatively small convective cloud systems. Over some large valleys in the Andes, and over Lake Maracaibo, a nocturnal maximum of rainfall is observed. A strong night/morning maximum of rainfall prevails over the coastal ocean, propagating offshore and westward with time. This offshore convection often takes the form of mesoscale convective systems with sizes comparable to the region's coastal concavities and other geographical features. The 10-day period of these model studies (28 August‐7 September 1998) is shown to be a period of unusually active weather, but with a time-mean rainfall pattern similar to longer-term climatology. It is concluded that the rain-producing processes during this time period are likely to be typical of those that shape the seasonal climatology.


The bioethics research conducted in Ibero-American countries has been very much restricted to its own realm. The aim of this study was to perform a bibliometric evaluation of bioethics papers by authors affiliated with Ibero-American institutions, and to determine how their work influences global bioethics literature. We performed a literature search in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) and Scopus. We identified a total of 5,975 documents, of which 84.3% were articles, 11.6% reviews and 4.1% book chapters. The median number of citations per paper was higher in English-language journals. Only 10 articles published between 2010 and 2019 in peer-reviewed bioethics journals and produced exclusively by authors from Ibero-American institutions garnered more than 15 citations. Our study suggests that if researchers from Ibero-American institutions want to influence global bioethical thinking, they must make the required leap in quality to be able to publish in high-quality bioethics and mainstream journals.


Direct numerical simulations (DNS) have been performed of turbulent flow in a plane channel with a solid top wall and a permeable bottom wall. The permeable wall is a packed bed, which is characterized by the mean particle diameter and the porosity. The main objective is to study the influence of wall permeability on the structure and dynamics of turbulence. The flow inside the permeable wall is described by means of volume-averaged Navier–Stokes equations. Results from four simulations are shown, for which only the wall porosity ($\epsilon_c$) is changed. The Reynolds number based on the thickness of the boundary layer over the permeable wall and the friction velocity varies from $\hbox{\it Re}_{\tau}^p\,{=}\,176$ for $\epsilon_c\,{=}\,0$ to $\hbox{\it Re}_{\tau}^p\,{=}\,498$ for $\epsilon_c\,{=}\,0.95$. The influence of wall permeability can be characterized by the permeability Reynolds number, $\hbox{\it Re}_K$, which represents the ratio of the effective pore diameter to the typical thickness of the viscous sublayers over the individual wall elements. For small $\hbox{\it Re}_K$, the wall behaves like a solid wall. For large $\hbox{\it Re}_K$, the wall is classified as a highly permeable wall near which viscous effects are of minor importance. It is observed that streaks and the associated quasi-streamwise vortices are absent near a highly permeable wall. This is attributed to turbulent transport across the wall interface and the reduction in mean shear due to a weakening of, respectively, the wall-blocking and the wall-induced viscous effect. The absence of streaks is consistent with a decrease in the peak value of the streamwise root mean square (r.m.s.) velocity normalized by the friction velocity at the permeable wall. Despite the increase in the peak values of the spanwise and wall-normal r.m.s. velocities, the peak value of the turbulent kinetic energy is therefore smaller. Turbulence near a highly permeable wall is dominated by relatively large vortical structures, which originate from a Kelvin–Helmholtz type of instability. These structures are responsible for an exchange of momentum between the channel and the permeable wall. This process contributes strongly to the Reynolds-shear stress and thus to a large increase in the skin friction.


This Article addresses the current proposal for the American Association of University Professors to enforce the collective bargaining rights of its individuals. This paper advocates that the AAUP's principle resources and focus has always been centered in academia, and the organization is better equipped to advise other entities employing collective bargaining, rather than affect such change on its own.


Strategic spatial planning (SSP) represents a consolidated long-term governance practice across developed and developing countries. It articulates sectoral policies, and it involves vision making and an array of stakeholders regarding land use and development issues around urban and rural territories. Land-use frontiers are territories with abundant land for agriculture and forestry, availability of natural resources relative to labor or capital, and rapid land-use change, often driven by large-scale investments and capitalized actors producing commodities for distal markets. Among various reasons, one of the objectives of SSP processes is to articulate a more coherent and future-oriented spatial logic for sustainable land-use patterns, resource protection and investments. SSP may thus constitute a useful approach to address some of the challenges posed to the governance of land-use frontiers, thus far, its potential contribution in land-use frontiers lacks an explicitly exploration. Here, we examine how SSP can play a role in governing land-use frontiers, through a case-study analysis of Mozambique as an emerging investment frontier. We gathered empirical evidence by interviewing experts involved in resource management, planning and strategizing territorial development in the country, complemented by a content analysis of literature and policy documents. We show that emerging land-use frontiers face several challenges, such as transnational land deals and intensification of commercial plantations. Interview data show that Mozambique lacks a strategic territorial vision, and the short-termism of political cycles hinders long-term territorial development, primarily in rural areas with plentiful land. Our analysis shows that SSP processes could contribute to address both global and country-specific challenges such as poverty traps and land degradation spirals, if various local and distant actors join forces and marry interests. We conclude by presenting a systematic framework explaining how SSP could play a role in governing emerging land-use frontiers for sustainable pathways.


A 60-year-man presented with painful gynaecomastia and polycythaemia due to a β-human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG)-secreting clear cell renal cell carcinoma. A computed tomographic scan of his chest, abdomen and pelvis showed an enhancing 9×9cm mass in the right kidney suggestive of a renal cell carcinoma. He underwent right radical nephrectomy and the histology showed a clear cell renal cell carcinoma. Following his nephrectomy, over the next 6 months, his gynaecomastia regressed and serum β-HCG levels became undetectable. Nine months after his nephrectomy, he developed a paratesticular lesion involving scrotal skin, for which he underwent a right radical orchidectomy. Histopathology of the paratesticular lesion showed metastatic renal cell carcinoma.


A finishing study was conducted to evaluate the effects of feeding 0 or 20% field peas in dry-rolled corn-based diets with 0 or 30% wet distillers grains plus solubles (WDGS). There was an interaction for DMI, in which WDGS had no effect in diets without peas, but increased DMI by 2.7 lb in diets containing peas. Peas decreased DMI by 1.3 lb in diets with no WDGS but had no effect on DMI in diets containing WDGS. A peas × WDGS interaction also was observed for F:G with WDGS decreasing F:G by 12% in diets without peas, but having no impact in diets containing peas. Field pea inclusion decreased F:G by 4% in diets with no WDGS, but increased F:G by 4% when WDGS was present. The impact of WDGS on F:G was diminished in the presence of peas from 40% to 24% improvement relative to corn. However, the increase in ADG due to WDGS was similar with or without peas.


The Henry J. Hyde US-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Act 2006 having been passed on 18 December 2006, the US Atomic Energy Act 1954 stands amended to conform to the Joint Statement signed on 18 July 2005 by the US President George Bush and the Prime Minister of India Dr Man Mohan Singh for a Bilateral US-India Cooperation in Civilian Nuclear Energy. This communication attempts to analyse how far the compromises have been made by the US and how far India may be willing to go towards achieving the goal.


This software implements software-defined radio procession over multi-core, multi-CPU systems in a way that maximizes the use of CPU resources in the system. The software treats each processing step in either a communications or navigation modulator or demodulator system as an independent, threaded block. Each threaded block is defined with a programmable number of input or output buffers; these buffers are implemented using POSIX pipes. In addition, each threaded block is assigned a unique thread upon block installation. A modulator or demodulator system is built by assembly of the threaded blocks into a flow graph, which assembles the processing blocks to accomplish the desired signal processing. This software architecture allows the software to scale effortlessly between single CPU/single-core computers or multi-CPU/multi-core computers without recompilation. NASA spaceflight and ground communications systems currently rely exclusively on ASICs or FPGAs. This software allows low- and medium-bandwidth (100 bps to .50 Mbps) software defined radios to be designed and implemented solely in C/C++ software, while lowering development costs and facilitating reuse and extensibility.


The present invention relates to a functional optical coherent imaging (fOCI) platform comprising at least one active camera unit (ACU) comprising a coherent and/or a partially coherent light source, and means for spectral filtering and imaging a selected body area of interest; an image processing unit (IPU) for pre-processing data received from an ACU; at least one stimulation unit (STU) transmitting a stimulation to a subject; at least one body function reference measurement unit (BFMU); a central clock and processing unit (CCU), with interconnections to the ACU, the IPU, the STU, for collecting pre-processed data from the IPU, stimuli from the STU body function reference data from the BFMU in a synchronized manner; a post-processing unit (statistical analysis unit, SAU); and an operator interface (HOI). Further the invention relates to a process for acquiring stimuli activated subject data comprising the steps of aligning a body function unit at a subject and monitoring pre-selected body function; selecting a stimulus or stimuli; imaging a body area of interest; exerting one or a series of stimuli on the subject; imaging the body area of interest synchronous with said stimuli and the preselected body functions; and transferring said synchronized image, stimuli and body function data to a statistical analysis unit (SAU) and performing calculations to generate results pertaining to body functions.


Introduction. Neural network models of autoassociative, distributed memory allow storage and retrieval of many items (vectors) where the number of stored items can exceed the vector dimension (the number of neurons in the network). This opens the possibility of a sublinear time search (in the number of stored items) for approximate nearest neighbors among vectors of high dimension. The purpose of this paper is to review models of autoassociative, distributed memory that can be naturally implemented by neural networks (mainly with local learning rules and iterative dynamics based on information locally available to neurons). Scope. The survey is focused mainly on the networks of Hopfield, Willshaw and Potts, that have connections between pairs of neurons and operate on sparse binary vectors. We discuss not only autoassociative memory, but also the generalization properties of these networks. We also consider neural networks with higher-order connections and networks with a bipartite graph structure for non-binary data with linear constraints. Conclusions. In conclusion we discuss the relations to similarity search, advantages and drawbacks of these techniques, and topics for further research. An interesting and still not completely resolved question is whether neural autoassociative memories can search for approximate nearest neighbors faster than other index structures for similarity search, in particular for the case of very high dimensional vectors.


Abstract This paper uses US state panel data to explore the relationship between the share of income received by affluent households and the level of income and earnings received by low and middle-income families. A rising top share of income can potentially lead to increases in the incomes of low and middle-income families if economic growth is sufficiently responsive to increases in inequality. A substantial literature on the impacts of inequality on economic growth exists, but has failed to achieve consensus, with various studies finding positive impacts, negative impacts, and no impacts on growth from increased levels of income inequality. This paper departs from that literature by exploring the effect of inequality on the standard of living of middle-income and low-income families. In the context of rising inequality, increased overall growth is not necessarily a suitable proxy for overall standard of living, since growth patterns are not uniform for the entire income distribution. The results of this study indicate that increases in the top share of income (particularly the top one percent) are associated with declines in the actual incomes (and earnings) of middle income families, but have no clear impact on families at the bottom of the income distribution.


Owing to environmental concerns, reducing energy consumption of optical access networks has become an important problem for network designers. This paper focuses on reducing energy consumption of optical network units (ONUs) in an Ethernet passive optical network (EPON). In an EPON, the optical line terminal (OLT) located at the central office broadcasts the downstream traffic to all ONUs, each of which checks all arriving downstream packets so as to obtain the downstream packets destined to itself. Thus, receivers at ONUs always have to stay in the awake status and consume a large amount of energy. To address the downstream challenge, we propose a novel sleep control scheme that can efficiently put ONU receivers into sleep without modifying the standardized EPON media access control protocol. The proposed scheme contains two main parts: downstream traffic scheduling rules at the OLT and sleep control schemes at ONUs. By letting ONUs be aware of the downstream traffic scheduling rules, ONUs can infer their own downstream queue status and switch into the sleep status properly; by letting the OLT know the sleep control scheme implemented at ONUs, the OLT can accurately infer the sleep status of ONUs and buffer traffic of asleep ONUs accordingly. We also theoretically analyze the impacts of different parameters in the sleep control scheme on the delay and energy-saving performances by using semi-Markov chains. It is shown that, with proper settings of sleep control parameters, the proposed scheme can save as much as 50% of the ONU receiver energy.


Abstract Knowledge of transport patterns of chemicals in groundwater is essential for environmental assessment of their potential impact. In the present study, the mobility of a chloride tracer injected into three different soils was investigated, using column experiments. The column tests were performed under steady-state conditions to determine parameters of chloride migration through soils. Based on breakthrough curves, pore-water velocity, dispersion coefficient and dispersivity constant were calculated for each soil sample using CXTFIT/STANMOD software. Pore-water velocity was in the range of 0.31 cm/min for fine sand, to 0.35 cm/min for silty sand and to 0.40 cm/min for vari-grained sand. The highest values of dispersion coefficient and dispersivity constant were observed for silty sand (0.55 cm2/min and 1.55 cm, respectively), while the lowest value was found for fine sand (0.059 cm2/min and 0.19 cm, respectively). Column experiments for chlorides (conservative tracer) are a preliminary stage for further research which will be undertaken to investigate migration parameters of selected neonicotinoids (reactive tracers) through different soils.


Consider a discrete-time, linear time-invariant process, two sensors and one controller. The process is observed by the sensors, which are connected to the controller via links that can be modeled as erasure channels. If a link transmits successfully then a finite-dimensional vector of real numbers is conveyed from the sensor to the controller. If an erasure event occurs, then any information conveyed over the link is lost. This paper addresses the problem of designing the maps that specify the processing at the controller and at the sensors for stabilizing the process in the bounded second moment sense. When the information is lost over the links either in an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) or Markovian fashion over time, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of maps such that the process is stabilized. Such conditions are expressed as inequalities involving the parameters of the plant and the probabilities of link fading, and provide the least conservative stabilization conditions. We also indicate how our approach can be used if more than two sensors are available, if the sensors can cooperate and if the acknowledgment signals are also transmitted over erasure channels. The analysis also carries over to the case when the single channels are replaced by networks of erasure channels.


The aetiology of Crohn's disease (CD), a chronic inflammatory disorder primarily
affecting the gastro-intestinal tract, remains obscure. The prevailing hypothesis centres
on an aberrant adaptive immune response to intestinal bacteria.
Intestinal lesions in CD are associated with granuloma formation, suggesting the
persistence of antigenic (infectious) material. Perianal involvement (PI) in CD, in
particular, is characterised by overt infection and abscess formation. However, to date
no single infectious aetiology has been demonstrated.
Inherited disorders of neutrophil function are associated with non-infectious,
granulomatous, intestinal inflammation that is indistinguishable from CD in up to 50%
of cases. Of these, 75-100% have PI. In these conditions, impaired clearance of bacteria
occurs as a consequence, and intestinal inflammation arises without aberrant adaptive
immune responses. Neutrophil dysfunction (inherited or otherwise) may contribute to
the pathogenesis of both intestinal and perianal involvement in CD.
Impaired neutrophil influx to sites of acute inflammation (induced by traumatic stimuli)
has been demonstrated in CD. An inferred defect in bacterial clearance would provide a
trigger for the induction of a granulomatous chronic inflammatory response, as it does
in the inherited disorders of neutrophil function. Although other aspects of neutrophil
function have been studied with respect to the pathogenesis of CD, the literature
provides conflicting conclusions and it is unclear whether a primary neutrophil
dysfunction could contribute.
The work in this thesis tests the hypothesis that bacterial clearance is abnormal in CD,
as well as investigating key aspects of neutrophil function in large cohorts of patients
with intestinal and perianal involvement.
For the first time, neutrophil influx to – and subsequent clearance of – E. coli in CD is
shown to be attenuated in vivo, while – very significantly – the clearance of S. aureus is
normal. Study of the neutrophil respiratory burst, however, reveals a small number of
patients with undiagnosed primary neutrophil disorders (investigated further). In
patients with perianal involvement, neutrophil adhesion is found to be defective and
may be related to the lipid composition of plasma membranes. This would contribute to
impaired neutrophil influx and bacterial persistence – leading to overt infection.
In conclusion, although neutrophil function is likely to be normal in the majority of
patients with CD, it may explain the development of PI. Furthermore, a small but
significant group of patients with presumed 'idiopathic' CD may have an underlying
inherited neutrophil defect. It is important to identify these patients in order to alter their
treatment from the usual anti-inflammatory or immunosuppressive therapies commonly
employed for CD. Bacterial persistence is likely to be a primary pathogenic
phenomenon in CD and offers targets for therapeutic intervention.


Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder characterized by recurrent, sudden discharges of cerebral neurons, called seizures. Seizures are not always clearly defined and have extremely varied morphologies. Neurophysiologists are not always able to discriminate seizures, especially in long-term EEG datasets. Affecting 1% of the worlds population with 1/3 of the epileptic patients not corresponding to anti-epileptic medication, epilepsy is constantly under the microscope and systems for automated detection of seizures are thoroughly examined. In this paper, a method for automated detection of epileptic activity is presented. The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is used to decompose the EEG recordings in several subbands and five features are extracted from the wavelet coefficients creating a set of features. The extracted feature vector is used to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Five classification problems are addressed, reaching high levels of overall accuracy ranging from 87% to 100%.


1Cr12Ni3Mo2VN is a new type of martensitic stainless steel for the last-stage blades of large-capacity nuclear and thermal power turbines. The deformation behavior of this steel was studied by thermal compression experiments that performed on a Gleeble-3500 thermal simulator at a temperature range of 850°C to 1200°C and a strain rate of 0.01s-1 to 20s-1. When the deformation was performed at high temperature and low strain rate, a necklace type of microstructures was observed, the plastic deformation mechanism is grain boundary slip and migration, when at low temperature and lower strain rate, the slip bands were observed, the mechanism is intracrystalline slips, and when at strain rate of 20s-1, twins were observed, the mechanism are slips and twins. The Arrhenius equation was applied to describe the constitutive equation of the flow stress. The accuracy of the equation was verified by using the experimental data and the correlation coefficient R2 = 0.9786, and the equation can provide reasonable data for the design and numerical simulation of the forging process.


The Game Description Language is a high-level, rule-based formalisms for communicating the rules of arbitrary games to general game-playing systems, whose challenging task is to learn to play previously unknown games without human intervention. Originally designed for deterministic games with complete information about the game state, the language was recently extended to include randomness and imperfect information. However, determining the extent to which this enhancement allows to describe truly arbitrary games was left as an open problem. We provide a positive answer to this question by relating the extended Game Description Language to the universal, mathematical concept of extensive-form games, proving that indeed just any such game can be described faithfully.


Type-2 fuzzy logic systems (FLSs) are proposed in the literature as an alternative to type-1 FLSs because of their ability to more effectively model uncertainties that may exist in the rule base. However, the parameters of the system still need to be optimized. For this purpose, the use of a sliding mode control theory-based learning algorithm is proposed in this paper. In the approach, instead of trying to minimize an error function, the parameters of the network are tuned by the proposed algorithm in such a way that the learning error is enforced to satisfy a stable equation. The update rules to achieve this are derived, and the convergence of the parameters is proved by Lyapunov stability method. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested by simulations on a Duffing oscillator and also by real-time experiments on a laboratory servo system. The results indicate that the given type-2 fuzzy neural network with the proposed learning algorithm can handle the uncertainties in a better way as compared to its type-1 counterpart. Moreover, it is computationally easier to implement in real-time systems.


Generating laterally ordered, ultradense, macroscopic arrays of nanoscopic elements will revolutionize the microelectronic and storage industries. We used faceted surfaces of commercially available sapphire wafers to guide the self-assembly of block copolymer microdomains into oriented arrays with quasi–long-range crystalline order over arbitrarily large wafer surfaces. Ordered arrays of cylindrical microdomains 3 nanometers in diameter, with areal densities in excess of 10 terabits per square inch, were produced. The sawtoothed substrate topography provides directional guidance to the self-assembly of the block copolymer, which is tolerant of surface defects, such as dislocations. The lateral ordering and lattice orientation of the single-grain arrays of microdomains are maintained over the entire surface. The approach described is parallel, applicable to different substrates and block copolymers, and opens a versatile route toward ultrahigh-density systems.


Abstract Terror management theory has spawned a body of experimental research documenting a multitude of defensive responses to mortality salience manipulations (e.g., rigid adherence to dominant cultural values, self-esteem bolstering). Another substantive body of work suggests that humor functions as a natural and often effective means of down-regulating stressful or traumatic experiences. Integrating a terror management paradigm with a cartoon captioning task, the present study finds that participants subliminally primed with death wrote funnier captions than those primed with pain, as judged by outside raters. Interestingly, a reverse pattern was obtained for participants' own ratings of their captions; explicitly death-primed participants rated themselves more successful at generating humorous captions than their pain-primed counterparts, while no significant difference emerged between the two subliminal priming conditions. Findings contribute new insights to recent research suggesting that death reminders may sometimes facilitate creativity and open-mindedness.


The gas-phase reaction products of silacyclobutane (SCB) and 1, 1-dideuterio-silacyclobutane (SCB-d(2)) from a hot-wire chemical vapor deposition (HWCVD) chamber were diagnosed in situ using vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) laser single-photon ionization (SPI) coupled with time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry. The SCB molecule was found to decompose at a filament temperature as low as 900 degrees C. Both Si- (silylene, methylsilylene, and silene) and C-containing (ethene and propene) species were produced from the SCB decomposition on the filament. Ethene and propene were detected by the mass spectrometer. It is demonstrated that the formation of ethene is favored over that of propene. The experimental study of hot-wire decomposition of SCB-d(2) shows that propene is most likely produced by a process that is initiated by a 1,2-H(D) migration to form n-propylsilylene, followed by an equilibration with silacyclopropane, which then decomposes to propene. The detection of ethene in our experiment indicates that a competitive route of fragmentation exists for SCB decomposition on the filament. It has been shown that this competitive route occurs without H/D scrambling. The highly reactive silylene, silene, and methylsilylene species produced from SCB decomposition underwent either insertion reactions into the Si-H bonds of the parent molecule or pi-type addition reaction across the double and triple CC bonds. The dimerization product of silene, 1,3-disilacyclobutane, at m/z = 88 was also observed.


Ultra‐high‐performance fiber‐reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) is a relatively new construction material. In comparison with conventional high‐strength concrete, UHPFRC does not usually contain coarse aggregates larger than 6–7 mm in size. This paper presents the outcomes of an experimental study of UHPFRC beams subjected to four‐point loading. The effect of two parameters was studied, namely, the fiber content and the temperature of the curing water. Eight UHPFRC beams were tested, comprising six beams reinforced with rebars and two beams without rebars. Three fiber contents were investigated in this study (1, 2, and 4% in volume). The study investigated two curing temperatures of water, 20 and 90°C. The results presented in this paper include deflections, toughness energy, and moment capacity and also includes a comparison with calculations according to EC2 provisions. A minor difference was observed in the deformation and flexural behavior of beams with fiber contents of 1 and 2% (in volume). However, beams with 4% (in volume) fibers exhibited a higher flexural capacity. Only flexural failure was observed and no shear‐related failure was recorded. Beams with 1% (in volume) fibers for both curing regimes had the highest peak load toughness energy. Beams reinforced with rebars and cured at 20°C had a significantly higher bending resistance.


This project focuses on the installation, teaching, and developing Information Technology in a self-maintained collective organisation: the Montessori Training Centre, Lushoto, Tanzania. Our practical endeavour consists in implementing modern technology in this environment. We have organised teachings for the staff of this organisation based on basic knowledge in computer use. We also studied how Information Technology may be implemented and its impact on their schooling system, their administrative tasks as well as their business activities (such as hostel and small scale manufacturing). The expected result of our work is to provide the Montessori personnel with independent means of computer management with built-in facilities for extensions, as well as technical means to maintain their technical equipment.


A multiple interpretation scheme is an ordered sequence of morphisms. The ordered multiple interpretation of a word is obtained by concatenating the images of that word in the given order of morphisms. The arbitrary multiple interpretation of a word is the semigroup generated by the images of that word. These interpretations are naturally extended to languages. Four types of ambiguity of multiple interpretation schemata on a language are defined: o-ambiguity, internal ambiguity, weakly external ambiguity and strongly external ambiguity. We investigate the problem of deciding whether a multiple interpretation scheme is ambiguous on regular languages.


Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) aims to learn multi-modal representations from image-text pairs and serves for downstream vision-language tasks in a fine-tuning fashion. The dominant VLP models adopt a CNN-Transformer architecture, which embeds images with a CNN, and then aligns images and text with a Transformer. Visual relationship between visual contents plays an important role in image understanding and is the basic for inter-modal alignment learning. However, CNNs have limitations in visual relation learning due to local receptive field's weakness in modeling long-range dependencies. Thus the two objectives of learning visual relation and inter-modal alignment are encapsulated in the same Transformer network. Such design might restrict the inter-modal alignment learning in the Transformer by ignoring the specialized characteristic of each objective. To tackle this, we propose a fully Transformer visual embedding for VLP to better learn visual relation and further promote inter-modal alignment. Specifically, we propose a metric named Inter-Modality Flow (IMF) to measure the interaction between vision and language modalities (i.e., inter-modality). We also design a novel masking optimization mechanism named Masked Feature Regression (MFR) in Transformer to further promote the inter-modality learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the benefit of Transformer for visual feature learning in VLP. We verify our method on a wide range of vision-language tasks, including Image-Text Retrieval, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Visual Entailment and Visual Reasoning. Our approach not only outperforms the state-of-the-art VLP performance, but also shows benefits on the IMF metric.


Survey, documentation, and excavation projects carried out at Aphrodisias between 1999 and 2001 focused on the study of the city plan, and on the City Wall, the Stadium, the North Agora, the Bouleuterion, the Bishop's Palace, and the Basilica. Research outside the city consisted of limited excavation in three areas just northeast of the City Wall, and a brief survey of known extramural tombs and other structures. Site conservation projects included the beginning of a long-term program for the conservation of the Bouleuterion and a series of emergency repairs to the walls of the Stadium. Sculpture conservation projects continued with trial restorations of two of the Sebasteion reliefs, and the restoration and installation in the Aphrodisias Museum of two portrait statues of boxers found in the Theater in the 1970s. New finds of sculpture include seven sarcophagi from the southeast necropolis and an important Late Antique portrait head. This head belongs to the chlamydatus statue of the governor Oecumenius (ca. A.D. 400) excavated in 1965 in the north stoa of the North Agora together with its inscribed base.


Background and purpose: Catechol is a ring form organic compound with high toxicity that is used in petrochemical, pharmaceutical and manufacturing of pesticide. It has adverse effects on human and environmental health if discharged into the environment. The purpose of this study was removal of catechol using catalytic ozonation using core-shell magnetic nanoparticles of iron oxide doped with silica and titanium dioxide from aqueous solution. Materials and methods: We conducted a basic-applied study in which magnetic nanoparticle Fe3O4@SiO2@TiO2 was synthesized using sol-gel method. To determine the characteristics of nanoparticle, XRD, SEM and EDX tests were used. Then effect of different parameters on removal efficiency were investigated. These included solution pH (2-10), reaction time (0-60 min), dose of catalyst (0.2-3 gr/L), initial concentration of catechol (50-1000 mg/L), recycled test (7 times), and determining the mineralization and scavenger effect. The residual concentration of catechol was measured using high-performance liquid chromatography at 275 nm. Results: The optimal pH for the catalytic ozonation process was 8. The maximum efficiency of the process in optimal conditions (catechol concentration 1000 mg/l, pH=8, catalyst dosage 3 gr/L and dose of ozone 0.38 gr/hr) was 100% after 60 minutes of contact time. Kinetics of degradation of catechol followed first degree model. After reaction time the amount of mineralization was 91.5%. Reusability of catalyst was done 7 times and its efficiency decreased by about 4%. Scavenger (1 gr/l tert-butanol) decreased removal of catechol by 4.16%. Conclusion: The catalytic ozonation process using Fe3O4@SiO2@TiO2 nanoparticles in an alkaline pH was found to be capable of eliminating high concentrations of catechol effectively.


This study examines the ability of revealed preference (RP), site-specific stated preference (SP), transferred SP, and various joint RP-SP models to predict aggregate and individual recreation site choice behavior in a holdout sample. For two statistical comparisons, the site-specific RP model provided the most accurate predictions of individual choices. However, the transferred SP model, applied directly or estimated jointly with the RP data, performed best in three aggregate and one individual prediction tests and second best in the other individual prediction comparisons. In every test examined the transferred SP models outperformed the site-specific SP models. This result is traced to the method used to collect the hypothetical choice data (mail out vs. in-person settings) and illustrates the importance of data quality in accuracy of behavioral prediction. These findings suggest that data from well designed and conducted SP surveys from one site can be combined with site-specific RP data from another site to generate improved models of recreation site choice.


Since the mid 1990s, network and systems management has steadily evolved from a centralized paradigm, where all the management processing takes place in a single management station, to distributed paradigms, where management is distributed over a potentially large number of nodes. Some of these paradigms, epitomized by the SNMPv2 and CMIP protocols, have been around for several years, whereas a flurry of new ones, based on mobile code, distributed objects or intelligent agents, only recently emerged. The goal of this survey is to classify all major network and systems management paradigms known to date, in order to help network and systems administrators design a management application. In the first part of the survey, we present a simple typology, based on a single criterion: the organizational model. In this typology, all paradigms are grouped into four types: centralized paradigms, weakly distributed hierarchical paradigms, strongly distributed hierarchical paradigms and cooperative paradigms. In the second part of the survey, we gradually build an enhanced typology, based on four criteria: delegation granularity, semantic richness of the information model, degree of specification of a task, and degree of automation of management. Finally, we show how to use our typologies to select a management paradigm in a given context.


OBJECTIVE
To analyze the corrected trend of overall cancer mortality and leading sites in the state capitals and other municipalities of Brazil between 1980 and 2006.

METHODS
Data on deaths (n = 2,585,012) caused by cancer between 1980 and 2006 were obtained from Sistema de Informações sobre Mortalidade (Mortality Information System), and demographic data were provided by Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). The rates of overall cancer mortality and major types were corrected by proportionally redistributing 50% of ill-defined causes of death and standardizing them by age according to the standard world population. Trend curves for Brazil and its major regions were calculated for state capitals and other municipalities according to sex, and were evaluated by means of simple linear regression.

RESULTS
Among men, ascending mortality rates were observed for lung, prostate and colorectal cancer; declining rates for stomach cancer; and stable rates for esophagus cancer. Among women, mortality from breast, lung and colorectal cancer increased, and the rates for cervical and stomach cancer declined. Mortality evolution varied across the regions of Brazil, with distinct patterns between state capitals and other municipalities.

CONCLUSIONS
The correction of mortality rates based on redistribution of ill-defined causes of death increased the magnitude of the overall cancer mortality in Brazil by approximately 10% in 1980 and 5% in 2006. In the inland municipalities no decrease or stability was identified, differently from what was observed in the state capitals. Limited scope of prevention actions and lower access to services of cancer diagnosis and treatment for the population living away from large urban centers may partly explain these differences.


We provide an estimate of genetic differentiation within and among 11 populations of Cordia alliodora, an economically important timber tree. Cordia alliodora is a widespread species that is distributed throughout Central and South America. Our survey of isozyme variation was conducted on material gathered for international provenance trials over approximately 1,000 km in Central America. Results from provenance trials indicate that there are significant differences between Atlantic and Pacific coast provenances for quantitative characters. Genetic data support some of these findings. Populations of C. alliodora show significant differences in allele frequency at various loci. Significant differences in multilocus allele frequencies occur at 13 of the 55 possible combinations. Eight of these 13 populations are situated on opposite coasts. This physical separation corresponds well with the results of provenance trials that indicate differentiation among the Atlantic and Pacific populations in quantitative morphological traits. We also found a significant negative correlation between levels of heterozygosity and the amount of rainfall, indicating that populations from the drier zone are genetically more heterogenous than populations from the wet zone. Our study indicates that in situ and ex situ conservation should accord high priority to the dry zone populations; furthermore, conservation of this widespread species would require preservation of multiple populations.


The paper refutes Douglas McCabe's essay "'Higher Realities': New Age Spirituality in Ben Okri's The Famished Road" for its injudicious attack on Okri as a New Ageist and "detraditionalizing perennialist" whose novel The Famished Road purportedly reinforces cultural imperialism and global capitalism. The paper reveals that McCabe's primary intention is to indict Okri for the latter's supposed misappropriation of the traditional abiku narrative and that McCabe's imputation of The Famished Road relies on evidence from without, rather than within, the novel itself. The paper goes on to consider Okri's suffusion of spirituality in the novel as a means of imparting an "enchanted" history. It suggests that notions of cosmopolitanism, in Anthony Kwame Appiah's sense, pervade the text and that characters like Dad and the Photographer can offer insight into individual attempts to manage the various, contesting ontological systems at play in an African culture.


Summary

1
Habitat loss and fragmentation are serious threats to biodiversity, especially in the Amazon Basin, where biodiversity is greatest and deforestation is continuing at an alarming rate. Nonetheless, little is known about the responses of biotas to spatially explicit aspects of landscape structure.

2
Bats are a promising indicator group for studying consequences of forest fragmentation in the Neotropics. Therefore, population- and assemblage-level responses of bats to landscape composition and configuration were quantified at each of three focal scales (circles of 1-, 3-, and 5-km radii) at 14 sites in lowland Amazonia.

3
Responses to landscape characteristics were scale-dependent. Abundance and richness were higher in moderately fragmented forest than in continuous forest. Moreover, the abundance of each of nine frugivorous species decreased with increasing forest cover.

4
The abundance of frugivores probably responded to landscape composition (e.g. percentage forest, mean patch density) because of an increase in early successional fruits and flowers in areas with reduced canopy cover. In contrast, abundances of gleaning animalivores responded to landscape configuration (e.g. edge density), probably by exploiting low-contrast edges (i.e. closed canopy forest patches embedded in secondary forest) while foraging and travelling between higher quality resource patches.

5
Synthesis and applications. Species- and ensemble-specific responses to aspects of landscape structure suggest that both compositional and configurational aspects need to be managed effectively in conservation planning. However, conservation decisions based on associations of biodiversity metrics (e.g. richness, diversity and rarity) with landscape structure may be problematic as they are composite characteristics that mask individual responses and potentially reflect only patterns of the dominant species or groups.


For pt.CXIX see Z. Naturforsch. a, vol.32, p.134 (1977). The crystal structure of lithium nitrate trihydrate, LiNO 3.3H 2O, has been determined by X-ray diffraction at 295K. The crystal is orthorhombic, space group Cmcm, a=6.8018 (4), b=12.7132 (9), c=5.9990 (4) Aring, V=518.75 Aring 3, Z=4. The nitrate ions, Li + ions and one of the two crystallographically non-equivalent water molecules lie in a mirror plane and are bonded to atoms in adjacent planes through the second water molecule. The Li + ion is octahedrally surrounded by six O atoms, four belonging to water molecules and two to nitrate ions. The two non-equivalent water molecules are present in the structure in distinctly different bonding situations. One is bonded to two Li + ions and is the donor of two hydrogen bonds. The other is involved in six hydrogen bonds: the O atom accepts two hydrogen bonds, and both protons are involved in bifurcated hydrogen bonds.


Fieldwork is a fundamental part of the curriculum in undergraduate Earth, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, but not all students are able to participate in authentic field exercises. Distance learning students are more likely to find fieldwork problematic for a variety of reasons including their location (e.g. rural, overseas, or in inaccessible environments), the field trip location (e.g. often a considerable distance away), or because of a disability or caring responsibilities. Within second-level Environmental Science modules (i.e. S206 and SXF206) we have sought to make authentic fieldwork accessible to these students, by designing and running an interactive live field trip. Using the OU's 'Stadium Live' platform, we produced three evening broadcasts over a one week period at the Open University last May examining the ecology of a nearby species rich meadow. The participating students used interactive widgets presented alongside the video to make observations, generate hypotheses and design their own field investigation, which was carried out by the scientists 'on the ground' and analysed live. Each of the three fieldcasts related to a specific aspect of field work: 1) observations and hypothesis development; 2) sampling strategy and data collection; 3) data analysis and interpretation. The process was iterative between the online students and onsite lecturers: for example information was provided to the students such as general observations of the site, which enabled the students to develop a hypothesis to investigate. This interaction operated during the fieldcasts, and continued in the forums after and between the livecast events. The trial use of 'fieldcasting' showed how mobile communication and video technologies can be used to increase access to fieldwork for all students and particularly those who might otherwise be excluded from field trips. The current phase of the project is to survey Environmental Science students this year, in order to evaluate the extent to which the fieldcasts help students achieve the desired learning outcomes, and to compare their fieldcast experience with that of attending a comparable face-to-face field trip led by an OU tutor. This presentation will introduce the challenges of supporting practical fieldwork within distance education and the use made of the fieldcast approach; it will also explain the design and methodology for this year's evaluation project, and how this approach compares to other forms of fieldwork education used within distance learning to address accessibility requirements. Delegates attending this presentation will gain an understanding of fieldwork pedagogy, an awareness of how technology is being used to enhance fieldwork learning within distance education, and an insight into the practicalities of evaluating comparative forms of learning.


DArTseq technology is potentially the most appropriate system to discover hundreds of polymorphic genomic loci, scoring thousands of unique genomic-wide DNA fragments in one single experiment, without requiring existing DNA sequence information. The DArT complexity reduction approach in combination with Illumina short read sequencing (Hiseq2000) was applied. To test the application of DArTseq technology in pineapple, a reference population of 13 Ananas genotypes from primitive wild accessions to modern cultivars was used. In a comparison of 3 systems, the combination of restriction enzymes PstI and MseI performed the best producing 18,900 DArT markers and close to 20,000 SNPs. Based on these markers genetic relationships between the samples were identified and a dendrogram was generated. The topography of the tree corresponds with our understanding of the genetic relationships between the genotypes. Importantly, the replicated samples of all genotypes have a dissimilarity of close to 0.0 and occupy the same positions on the tree, confirming high reproducibility of the markers detected. Eventually it is planned that molecular markers will be identified that are associated with resistance to Phytophthora cinnamomi (Pc), the most economically important pathogen of pineapple in Australia, as genetic resistance is known to exist within the Ananas. Marker assisted selection can then be utilized in a pineapple breeding program to develop cultivars resistant to Pc.


The Genesis benchmark suite has been assembled to evaluate the performance of distributed-memory MIMD systems. The problems selected all have a scientific origin (mostly from physics or theoretical chemistry), and range from synthetic code fragments designed to measure the basic hardware properties of the computer (especially communication and synchronisation overheads), through commonly used library subroutines, to full application codes. This is the second of a series of papers on the Genesis distributed-memory benchmarks, which were developed under the European ESPRIT research program. Results are presented for the SUPRENUM and iPSC/860 computers when running the following benchmarks: COMMS1 (communications), TRANS1 (matrix transpose), FFT1 (fast Fourier transform) and QCD2 (conjugate gradient kernel). The theoretical predictions are compared with, or fitted to, the measured results, and then used to predict (with due caution) how the performance might scale for larger problems and more processors than were actually available during the benchmarking.


The work at hand outlines a recording setup for capturing hand and finger movements of musicians. The focus is on a series of baseline experiments on the detectability of coloured markers under different lighting conditions. With the goal of capturing and recording hand and finger movements of musicians in mind, requirements for such a system and existing approaches are analysed and compared. The results of the experiments and the analysis of related work show that the envisioned setup is suited for the expected scenario.


Predicting impacts of global environmental change is challenging due to the complex life cycles that characterize many terrestrial and aquatic taxa. Different life stages often interact with the physical environment in distinct ways, and a growing body of work suggests that stresses experienced during one life stage can "carry over" to influence subsequent stages. Assessments of population responses to environmental perturbation must therefore consider how effects might propagate across life-history transitions. We investigated consequences of ocean acidification (decreased pH and carbonate saturation) for early life stages of the Olympia oyster (Ostrea lurida), a foundation species in estuaries along the Pacific coast of North America. We reared oysters at three levels of seawater pH, including a control (8.0) and two additional levels (7.9 and 7.8). Oysters were cultured through their planktonic larval period to metamorphosis and into early juvenile life. Larvae reared under pH 7.8 exhibited a 15% decrease in larval shell growth rate, and a 7% decrease in shell area at settlement, compared to larvae reared under control conditions. Impacts were even more pronounced a week after settlement, with juveniles that had been reared as larvae under reduced pH exhibiting a 41% decrease in shell growth rate. Importantly, the latter effect arose regardless of the pH level the oysters experienced as juveniles, indicating a strong carry-over effect from the larval phase. Adverse impacts of early exposure to low pH persisted for at least 1.5 months after juveniles were transferred to a common environment. Overall, our results suggest that a stringent focus on a single phase of the life cycle (e.g., one perceived as the "weakest link") may neglect critical impacts that can be transferred across life stages in taxa with complex life histories.


INTRODUCTION: The cultural diversity of ethnic groups in Iranian academic contexts highlights the importance of enhancing cultural awareness and minimizing cultural conflicts. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the intercultural intelligence of the university personnel in interacting with students. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This cross-sectional study was a correlational research conducted on 136 employees in Sabzevar University of Medical Sciences, Iran. The participants were selected by randomized clustered sampling. The data on intercultural intelligence were collected using Earley and Ang's Questionnaire and were analyzed in SPSS using descriptive and inferential statistics. RESULTS: Mean score of intercultural intelligence in the education-research staff, secretarial staff, and student-cultural staff was 41 ± 9, 35.6 ± 8.3, and 44.2 ± 7.7, respectively. ANOVA showed a significant difference in the overall scores of intercultural intelligence across the three groups (P = 0.001); the scores of subsections were also statistically different, the student-cultural staff showing higher intelligence scores than the other groups. Furthermore, the overall intercultural intelligence scores varied significantly across the participants' educational levels so that the score of the staff with bachelor's degree was 37.8 ± 8.7 and those with master's degree was 45 ± 7.8 (P = 001), especially in their metacognitive and cognitive subsection scores. CONCLUSION: The scores of intercultural intelligence were moderate to low in the staff of different working sections of the university. Moreover, the level of education shows impacts on intercultural encounters in this academic setting. The results highlight the need to develop programs in order to raise intercultural understanding in staff.


In this paper, the effect of bedrock inclination on seismic performance of slopes is investigated. The study was conducted based on dynamic analysis of different slopes, evaluation of the earthquake acceleration in sliding mass, and calculating the permanent displacement of the slope, using Newmark sliding block. The investigation indicates that variation of the bedrock inclination may cause the acceleration magnitude and the displacement in the sliding mass to reach to their maximum level. This may happen in conditions that the mean period of the acceleration time history on failure surface (Tmt) and the predominant period of the slope (Ts ) are close to each other. Typical results are presented and discussed. A two dimensional model of a typical slope was considered and conducting dynamic analyses, the slope performance was studied for different geometries, strength parameters and shear wave velocities. Such a performance has been studied by assessing the record of acceleration in sliding mass (the mass above the critical sliding surface) and calculating the slope displacement using Newmark method. It is shown that neglecting the effect of bedrock inclination, would lead to non-real results in assessing the seismic slope performance.


We use laboratory experiments to test models of rational inattention, in which people acquire information to maximize utility net of information costs. We show that subjects adjust their attention in response to changes in incentives in line with the rational inattention model. However, our results are qualitatively inconsistent with information costs that are linear in Shannon entropy, as is often assumed in applied work. Our data is best fit by a generalization of the Shannon model which allows for a more flexible response to incentives and for some states of the world to be harder to distinguish than others.


The increase in wage inequality in Russia during its transition process has far exceeded the increase in wage dispersion observed in other European countries undergoing transition. Russia also has an extremely large incidence of wage arrears. We analyze to what extent wage arrears affect the wage distribution and measures of wage inequality in Russia. We present counterfactual distributions, derived from a variety of different methods, which suggest that conventional measures of earnings dispersion would be some 20 to 30 per cent lower in the absence of arrears. We then go on to show how wage gaps at various points in the pay distribution across gender, education, region and industry are influenced by a failure to allow for wage arrears. Using our counterfactual estimates we show, for example, that the median gender wage gap would be around twenty-five points higher than the actual gap that we observe. Similarly, the counterfactual ratio of mean graduate pay to mean pay of those with primary education is around twenty points lower than observed. We show that the parameters of the counterfactual wage distributions are very similar to the parameters of the observed wage distributions of those not in arrears. This means that for those wishing to study aspects of wage differentials and inequality in Russia, it may be feasible to use the subset of those not in arrears and still get close to the true population parameters.


Psychological Subjects 'is a book about how twentieth-century Britons viewed both themselves and their world in psychological terms. It examines the extent to which psychological thought and practice could mediate not just understanding of the self, but also a wide range of social and economic, political, and ethical issues that rested on assumptions about human nature' (p. 1). There are three thematic sections to the book, which also move the story forward in time, although there is considerable overlap between the chronological boundaries of most chapters. The first part, 'Psychologies of the New Age', explores the excitement surrounding the new possibilities of understanding human nature and character raised by psychology from around the turn of the century to the mid-1930s. Its chapters respectively tackle popular psychological ideas and practice, academic and professional psychology, and the 'intellectual culture' of psychology. The second section, 'Problems and Prospects', is concerned with how psychology attempted to respond to some of the major dilemmas raised by industrial civilization, and contains chapters on education, industry, and medicine and health. The substantive, although by no means exclusive, focus here is on the interwar years. Finally, the two chapters which comprise the final section, 'Ends', focus on particular historical moments which could serve as ends to the story of popular enthusiasm and opportunity which has emerged: the Second World War, and the era of the permissive society of the 1960s and 70s.


A large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early‐life environments, so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes. These developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood. Yet, remarkably little is known about whether poverty‐alleviation programs improve children's developmental outcomes. We examine how a government‐run cash transfer program for poor mothers in rural Ecuador influenced the development of young children. Random assignment at the parish level is used to identify program effects. Our data include a set of measures of cognitive ability that are not typically included in experimental or quasi‐experimental studies of the impact of cash transfers on child well‐being, as well as a set of physical health measures that may be related to developmental outcomes. The cash transfer program had positive, although modest, effects on the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development of the poorest children in our sample.


Wearable Monitors Advances in microelectronics have yielded high-quality devices that allow for intensive signal collection or transmission. S. Xu et al. (p. 70) show how to make a soft wearable system that is constructed like a stretchable circuit board, where the electronic components are bridged electrically by thin, meandering conducting traces that float in a highly visco-elastic polymer. A complete soft circuit capable of multisignal physiological sensing on skin was created, with potential for use in health monitoring or neonatal care. Flexible skin-integrated electronic sensors enable continuous, wireless health monitoring. When mounted on the skin, modern sensors, circuits, radios, and power supply systems have the potential to provide clinical-quality health monitoring capabilities for continuous use, beyond the confines of traditional hospital or laboratory facilities. The most well-developed component technologies are, however, broadly available only in hard, planar formats. As a result, existing options in system design are unable to effectively accommodate integration with the soft, textured, curvilinear, and time-dynamic surfaces of the skin. Here, we describe experimental and theoretical approaches for using ideas in soft microfluidics, structured adhesive surfaces, and controlled mechanical buckling to achieve ultralow modulus, highly stretchable systems that incorporate assemblies of high-modulus, rigid, state-of-the-art functional elements. The outcome is a thin, conformable device technology that can softly laminate onto the surface of the skin to enable advanced, multifunctional operation for physiological monitoring in a wireless mode.


In this paper, we describe methods to exploit search queries mined from search engine query logs to improve domain detection in spoken language understanding. We propose extending the label propagation algorithm, a graph-based semi-supervised learning approach, to incorporate noisy domain information estimated from search engine links the users click following their queries. The main contributions of our work are the use of search query logs for domain classification, integration of noisy supervision into the semi-supervised label propagation algorithm, and sampling of high-quality query click data by mining query logs and using classification confidence scores. We show that most semi-supervised learning methods we experimented with improve the performance of the supervised training, and the biggest improvement is achieved by label propagation that uses noisy supervision. We reduce the to error rate of domain detection by 20% relative, from 6.2% to 5.0%.


In this research, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed to study the comparative performance of German and Colombian non-energy intensive sectors between 1998 and 2005. The results of the DEA indicate that the great majority of these sectors improved on this index during the sample period, demonstrating that energy input is an important variable within the production structure and a key element in technology development. At a second stage, regression analysis using panel data analysis reveals that several factors, including labour productive, enterprise size, investments and capital input can be considered determinants of differences in energy efficiency among German and Colombian non-eenrgy intensive sectors. Our results also show that different energy policies should apply across non-energy intensive sectors and that they should encourage the importance of energy efficiency in order to improve it, especially in small and medium enterprises and manufacturing industries of developing countries.


Over the last decades, several techniques have been proposed for the optimal placement of FACTS devices across power systems. Although these techniques were shown to improve power system operation, they are usually computationally intractable while having serious inherent limitations. In this paper, we present a novel approach to guide the SVC location identification in order to enhance power system stability. Specifically, the proposed method exploits findings in passivity-based control analysis and design in order to address the most vulnerable-in terms of passivity-buses of the system and consequently the optimal locations for SVC installation. We then show how the incorporation of SVCs at the aforementioned buses can passivate the system and provide guarantees for increased stability. Furthermore, we provide a brief discussion regarding the sizing and the number of required SVC devices in order to guarantee such stability improvement. Finally, we illustrate our results with simulations on the IEEE 68 bus system and show that both the dynamic response and the damping of the system are significantly improved.


Several documents in a collection describe aspects of the development of advanced materials and fabrication processes intended to enable the manufacture of advanced rocket combustion chambers and nozzles at relatively low cost. One concept discussed in most of the documents is the fabrication of combustion-chamber liners by vacuum plasma spraying (VPS) of an alloy of 88Cu/8Cr/4Nb (numbers indicate atomic percentages) -- a concept that was reported in "Improved Alloy for Fabrication of Combustion Chambers by VPS" (MFS-26546). Another concept is the deposition of graded-composition wall and liner structures by VPS in order to make liners integral parts of wall structures and to make oxidation- and thermal-protection layers integral parts of liners: The VPS process is started at 100 percent of a first alloy, then the proportion of a second alloy is increased gradually from zero as deposition continues, ending at 100 percent of the second alloy. Yet another concept discussed in one of the documents is the VPS of oxidation-protection coats in the forms of nickel-and-chromium-containing refractory alloys on VPS-deposited 88Cu/8Cr/4Nb liners.


In this essay, I propose that the field of composition/rhetoric can make important con tributions to the understanding of ethics based on our critical perspective on language as interactional and rhetorical. The actual language of decision making with ethical dimensions has rarely been studied directly in the literature, a crucial gap our field can usefully fill. To illustrate this approach, I analyze the language of research recruitment in two biomedical and behavioral studies, arguing that different ethical frameworks a principle-based ethics of rights and a context-based ethic of care-license different kinds of interaction and rhetorical persuasion. The findings identify and complicate certain concepts and assumptions within these ethical frameworks, with implications for the context of regulated research in the university.


After the corporate collapses of Enron, Swissair, Daewoo Group, WorldCom, HIH, Oneself etc the talk about ethics in business matters has become nearly as clamourous as making profit.2 Companies, universities, law schools, newspapers and politics focus on ethics in a distinctive way. Therefore, it is not surprising that the World Wide Web is full of guidelines, reports, ethical fitness seminars and advice as to why and how company directors should act ethically (Google shows 5,110,000 results 'for director ethics' and 28 Mio. results for 'business ethics'). A whole business ethics industry provides help to develop ethical behaviour. The mission of this industry is, 'to promote ethical behaviour in individuals, institutions, and through research, public discourse, and practical action'.3 It remains unclear what ethics in business matters means, however. The aim of this article is to analyse (a) the demand of more director ethics in the lights of classical philosophy, (b) the search for new ethical guidelines for directors and its reasons and, (c) the main elements of director ethics in the post-Enron-era.


Our previous theory for calculating the scattering pattern from single spheres in the vicinity of a dielectric substrate [J. Opt. Soc. Am. A14, 1505 (1997)] is extended to the case of aggregated spheres. This extension preserves our main result that a nonvanishing field, though somewhat attenuated when the substrate is absorptive, can propagate along the interface; this feature is apparent in the patterns from all the aggregates that we considered. The effects that can be expected when scattering particles on the dielectric surface either aggregate or undergo some kind of subdivision are investigated by comparing the pattern from a sphere containing a chosen volume V of a given refractive material with the pattern from the aggregate of two such spheres and with the pattern from two aggregated spheres of the same material, each of volume V/2.


- Mobile phone adoption and usage enjoyed drastic and exponential success as far as the history of technology adoption goes. However, there are indications that users are becoming overwhelmed by the unconstraint addition of features and services to the mobile phone guided by the assumption that "more is better". Currently, mobile phone features present a range of innovations that are rarely useful to majority of users. The result is that many mobile phone features are never used and yet these features significantly contribute to power consumption and cost of the mobile phone. This study investigated innovative phone features that influence mobile phone usage patterns amongst university students in Kenya. In this descriptive analytical study 310 students were selected. Data was collected using a questionnaire and interviews. An average of 24% of respondents indicated that they used most of the features provided by their mobile phones. Provision of appropriate educational programs about beneficial use of mobile phone is quite crucial.


Biblical scholars tend to see the Ethiopian eunuch and court official through the eyes of Philip the evangelist, which is also what the author of the text wants us to do. However, the narrative about the Ethiopian court official is also a story about the experiences of an ancient traveller, and as such, the story invokes the tales of contemporary migrants. In this study, I explore how the story about a sojourning court official intersects with contemporary immigration and identity issues. My study demonstrates how the travelling court official can be used as a figure to think with and how his story mirrors challenges faced by migrant workers today.


Introduction Bypassing refers to a person's decision to seek care at a healthcare facility that is not the nearest one of its type to the person's home. Methods This study examined inpatient care facility bypassing in urban Bo, Sierra Leone using data from 1,980 women with children 15 years of age and younger who were interviewed in 2010-2011. The locations of residential structures and hospitals were identified using a geographic information system (GIS), and the road distances from participating households to the nearest and preferred inpatient care facilities were measured. Results Nine inpatient care facilities serve Bo residents, but more than 70% of the participating women reported that the city's main public hospital (Bo Government Hospital), located in the city center, was their preferred inpatient care provider. Participants resided within a median distance of 0.9 km (Interquartile range (IQR): 0.6, 1.8) from their closest inpatient facility, but they would travel a median distance of 2.4 km (IQR: 1.0, 3.3) to reach their preferred providers. About 87% of the women would bypass their nearest inpatient care facility to access care at a preferred provider. Bypassing rates were similar for various demographic and socioeconomic groups, but higher for women living farther from the city center. Conclusion Although Bo has a diverse healthcare marketplace, access to affordable advanced care options is limited. Most women in Bo would choose to bypass facilities nearer to their homes to seek the low-cost and comprehensive care offered by Bo Government Hospital.


Glial cell properties dictated by neurons Neurons in the brain coexist with astrocytes, a type of glial cell, which help support many functions of their neighboring nerve cells. Farmer et al. now show that the support goes both ways (see the Perspective by Stevens and Muthukumar). They explored the influence of neurons on two specialized types of astrocytes in the mouse cerebellar cortex. The neurons produced the morphogen known as Sonic Hedgehog. Hedgehog signaling adjusted distinctive gene expression within the two astrocyte cell types. Thus, mature neurons appear to promote and maintain specific properties of associated astrocytes. Science, this issue p. 849; see also p. 813 Signals from neurons alter gene expression in neighboring astrocytes. [Also see Perspective by Stevens and Muthukumar] Astrocytes are specialized and heterogeneous cells that contribute to central nervous system function and homeostasis. However, the mechanisms that create and maintain differences among astrocytes and allow them to fulfill particular physiological roles remain poorly defined. We reveal that neurons actively determine the features of astrocytes in the healthy adult brain and define a role for neuron-derived sonic hedgehog (Shh) in regulating the molecular and functional profile of astrocytes. Thus, the molecular and physiological program of astrocytes is not hardwired during development but, rather, depends on cues from neurons that drive and sustain their specialized properties.


According to the statistics by Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than nine people are killed and more than 1,060 people are injured in crashes involving distracted driving daily. Driving distractions are any activities that could take away the driver's attention from the road, which could be anything from using cell phone to looking at billboards. Due to an alarming increase in cell phone-related accidents, many studies have largely focused on investigating detrimental effects that texting and calling have on the driver's performance. Multiple findings show a delay in reaction times, variable lane deviations and slow speed when drivers are distracted. This subsequently resulted in the banning of texting in all 50 States and Puerto Rico while calling is prohibited in some area. On the contrary, there have not been many studies about the effects of non-cell phone distractions. Most people also perceive activities, such as eating and looking up directions, as harmless and acceptable to do while driving.
In the current study, reaction time was used as a measuring parameter to determine effects of distractions on the drivers. The results show that looking up directions has similar reaction time to texting while eating has similar reaction time to calling. This finding suggests that looking up directions should also be avoided while driving since it generated the same delay as texting. In order to effectively improve road safety and lower distraction-related accident rates, bringing awareness to the public to clarify some misunderstandings about distracted driving is an important step, as risk perception is one of the factors influencing people to engage in reckless behaviors.