Continuous shrinking in feature size, increasing power density etc, increase the vulnerability of microprocessors against soft errors even in terrestrial applications. The register file is one of the essential architectural components where soft errors can be very mischievous because errors may rapidly spread from there throughout the whole system. Thus, register files are recog nized as one of the major concerns when it comes to reliability. The paper introduces Self-Immunity, a technique that improves the integrity of the register file with respect to soft errors. Based on the observation that a certain number of register bits are not always used to represent a value stored in a register. The paper deals with the difficulty to exploit this obvious ob servation to enhance the register file integrity against soft errors. We show that our technique can reduce the vulnerability of the register file considerably while ex hibiting smaller overhead in terms of area and power consumption compared to state-of-the-art in register file protection. For embedded systems under stringent cost constraints, where area, performance, power and reliability cannot be simply compromised, we propose a soft error mitigation technique for register files.


A lethal disease of stone fruit trees, characterized by proliferation of axillary shoots and witches' broom symptoms, has caused severe problems for more than 200,000 almond, peach and nectarine plants in Lebanon since the 1990s. The agent associated with almond witches' broom (AlmWB) was identified as ' Candidatus Phytoplasma phoenicium', belonging to subgroup 16SrIX-B. Management of the disease has relied on uprooting of affected trees. Since no disease-resistant cultivars have been identified, grafting experiments in the field and in the greenhouse we performed to develop a new option for the integrated management of the disease. AlmWB-affected almond trees were grafted with apricot or plum scions, and their growth was symptomless for over 2 years in the field. Similarly, in greenhouse trials, grafting AlmWB-affected almond scions onto seedlings of plum and apricot resulted in growth of symptomless shoots. One year post-grafting in the greenhouse the phytoplasma was not detected by PCR in almond grafted on Angeleno and Red plum and Early Blush apricot used as rootstocks. The phytoplasma was, however, detected in almond scions grafted on Farclo apricot and Jawhara plum, although their growth was symptomless. Shoots developing from Farclo apricot grafted on AlmWB-affected trees in the field showed severe symptoms 2 months after grafting but recovered 3 months later, and remained symptomless for about 2.5 years. Similarly, in the greenhouse trial, the growth of phytoplasma-infected scions grafted on Early blush apricot developed symptoms 2 months after grafting, did not show symptoms 2 months later, and remained symptomless 1 year later. Quantitative PCR analysis of almond scions grafted on Early blush apricot seedlings confirmed reduction of phytoplasma titre from 44 GU/ng DNA to below detection level.


This editorial note introduces the second of three issues of Common Knowledge dedicated to experiments in scholarly form. The first appeared in Winter 1996 and was introduced by a dialogue between two editorial board members, Greil Marcus and Hugh Kenner, who differed over whether tampering with set scholarly forms should be regarded as a serious business (Marcus) or as a matter of fun (Kenner). Philosophically, this note explains, the journal takes exception to distinctions of the form-versus-content variety—a resistance that stems from desire for peaceful transactions in intellectual life. But though the desire for peace, like any other, can be uncompromising, this one recoils from its own strength and requires indirect expression. One way, it is argued, to achieve indirection is to tamper with forms in which a strong position finds natural expression. Tampering, for instance, with the distinction between narrative history and fiction, or between discursive philosophy and poetry, is a time-honored maneuver. Hence the appearance in this special issue of three pieces (by historians Natalie Zemon Davis, Sir Keith Thomas, and Colin Richmond) on microhistory, along with the first installment of a two-part symposium on "lyric philosophy" and a "pseudepigraphon" premised on its author's conviction that not-for-credit truths are credible only if they appear to be fabrications.


This article addresses the increasing vulnerability of electronic information, particularly in light of proposed electronic discovery rules, which are likely to go into effect December 1, 2006. Under the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, electronically stored information deemed "inaccessible" is subject to a reduced discovery obligation, and a new safe harbor excuses the destruction of electronic information pursuant to a document retention policy. As organizational information migrates to an electronic form, legal disputes involving such topics as employment discrimination, product liability, and securities fraud, will rest upon evidence in an increasingly fragile state. The extent to which crucial information such as email and metadata is accessible is entirely in the hands of its keepers. As developing case law and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure combine to send the message that organizations should not be burdened with the need to preserve or retrieve inaccessible electronic data, electronically stored information may gravitate towards retention policies that insure an organizational "Alzheimer's." In response to the growing vulnerability of electronic information, the article suggests ways that litigants and the courts can and should take a proactive role in preserving the duty to preserve electronic evidence in anticipation of litigation.


This article expands Michel Foucault's genealogy of liberalism and neoliberalism by analysing the concept of competition. It addresses four key liberal conceptions of competition in turn: the idea of competition as a destructive but progressive and thus necessary force (roughly 1830–90); economic theories of market equilibrium that theorize competition mathematically (1870 onwards); socio-biological ideas of competition as something natural (1850–1900); and sociological arguments that see competition as adding value to the social (1900–20). From this starting point, the article considers the ways in which three main trajectories of neoliberal thought that emerged from the early 1920s onwards – Austrian, German and American – developed and responded to these conceptualizations of competition. In conclusion, it is argued that this history of the concept of competition leads to a new understanding of the tensions that lie at the heart of neoliberal thought, and which are largely missing from Foucault's account.


Background: Interprofessional relationship plays a major role in effective patient care. Specialized units such as critical care require multidisciplinary care where perception about every members role may affect the delivery of patient care. The objective of this study was to find out nurses' perceptions of the role of physiotherapists in the critical care team. Methods: Qualitative study by using semi-structured interview was conducted among the qualified nurses working in the Intensive Care Unit of a tertiary care hospital. The interview consisted of 19 questions divided into 3 sections. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. In-depth content analysis was carried out to identify major themes in relation to the research question. Results: Analysis identified five major issues which included role and image of a physiotherapist, effectiveness of treatment, communications, teamwork, and interprofessional relations. Physiotherapists were perceived to be an important member of the critical team with the role of mobilizing the patients. The respondents admitted that there existed limitations in interprofessional relationship. Conclusion: Nurses perceived the role of physiotherapist in the critical care unit as an integral part and agreed on the need for inclusion of therapist multidisciplinary critical care team.


The book is a collection of papers presented at various forums. These papers focus on the intricacies that arise when one interprets the law in the context of complex tax structures. It is an attempt to ignite the thought process of the readers to next level.

Key features

• Includes discussion on complex business structures in the cross border outsourcing and EPC space
• Contains reactive legislative amendments in the form of Indirect Transfer Provisions, Equalisation levy, POEM and GAAR
• Provides a concluding angle by giving an instance of judiciary stepping in when legislature stands helpless to ensure justice.


Background: Mobile phones have become increasingly popular in recent years, especially in young generation. Although these are convenient and useful, teenagers are becoming more and more dependent on them.

Aims and Objective: This study was designed to assess the mobile phone usage pattern and its negative effects on psychological health, sleep, and academic performance in students of a medical university.

Materials and Methods: A descriptive study was conducted on a total of 1,000 medical students aged between 17 and 24 years who were using mobile phone for at least 1 year. They were requested to fill a specially designed, self-administrated, pretested, questionnaire that comprised details of their frequency and pattern of using mobile phone and its effects on their psychological health, sleep-related behavioral issues, and academic performance. The data collected were statistically analyzed.

Result: Among the total 1,000 students, all of them possessed their own mobile phone, with about 76.4% students having smart phones. Major purpose of using the phone was for communication, coordination of activities, and in emergency situations, while others were also using it for downloading games, music, videos, and for style. Nighttime usage of mobile phone was highly significantly (p < 0.0001) associated with difficulty in waking up, waking time tiredness, decline in study habits, difficulty in concentration, increase in missed classes, and going late for classes. Total time spent on mobile phones was significantly (p < 0.05) associated with waking time tiredness and difficulty in waking up and highly significantly (p < 0.001) with decline in study habits, increase in missed classes, and going late for classes.

Conclusion: Besides the positive role of mobile phones in our daily lives, its overuse presents negative impact on psychological health, sleep, and academic performance of students. Hence, it is important to guide the students regarding efficient, safe, purposeful usage, and negative effects of mobile phones on health and environment.


Thoughts of suicide can be abundant and frequent for some. These thoughts easily disrupt the lives of not only the suicidal person but the world around said person. It may, however, be possible to tell someone is suicidal before it's too late. Participants of committee on the Pathophysiology and Prevention of Adult and Adolescent Suicide of the Institute of Medicine's held two workshops, Risk Factors for Suicide, March 14, 2001 and Suicide Prevention and Intervention, May 14, 2001, to discuss the topic of suicide. The two workshops were designed to allow invited presenters to share with the committee and other workshop participants their particular expertise in suicide, and to discuss and examine the existing knowledge base. Risk Factors for Suicide: Summary of a Workshop summarizes the first workshop whose participants were selected to represent the areas of epidemiology and measurement, socio-cultural factors, biologic factors, developmental factors and trauma, and psychologic factors. They were asked to present current and relevant knowledge in each of their expertise areas.


Teaching practical science at a distance is challenging – how do you give students studying online a meaningful practical experience? In July 2013, the Open University (OU) launched the Wolfson OpenScience Laboratory (OSL) to deliver a wide a range of authentic practical science activities for their distance learning undergraduates. Prompted by the recognition that modern science is increasingly conducted via a computer screen (e.g. remote sensing, Martian fieldwork), the OSL presents a variety of opportunities for students to observe, investigate, gather and analyse data. The rationale is to foster problem-based, active learning, which has been proven effective by numerous studies. Simulation is kept to a minimum; most activities either generate or use real data, with authentic anomalies and 'noise' included – an aspect valued by the students. Geoscience is rooted in raw data collected during practical investigations, notably fieldwork. A key skill is observation, so the OSL includes digital collections of minerals, rocks and fossils, as zoomable, high resolution images and 360° videos for the 3D perspective. The Virtual Microscope enables petrographic examination of thin sections using high-quality zoomable images, in both plane- and cross polarised light, with rotation of the sample for certain points of interest. There is a virtual field trip based in a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), as well as an exercise on maps and landforms. Developed primarily for OU undergraduates, many of the assets in the OSL are being made more openly accessible, with free registration. We are developing partnerships with other universities and schools, both as users and contributors to further assets (e.g. thin section collections). We have also gathered feedback from several surveys of OU undergraduates, as well as external users. Feedback on the pedagogical aspects of the OSL is broadly positive, with some assets (e.g. the virtual microscope) garnering particular praise; respondents value the potential for interaction with experts but also desire an explicit connection to the materials' original field context. However, technological issues at times present a barrier to learning – perhaps reflecting the high diversity of OU cohorts, especially in terms of their individual hardware, software and IT skills. Some students resent the time investment required to master specialised scientific software, though it could be argued that acquiring such IT skills is an essential part of practising modern science!


We describe a novel mechanism that can significantly lower the amplitude of the climatic response to certain large volcanic eruptions and examine its impact with a coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model. If sufficiently large amounts of water vapour enter the stratosphere, a climatically significant amount of water vapour can be left over in the lower stratosphere after the eruption, even after sulphate aerosol formation. This excess stratospheric humidity warms the tropospheric climate, and acts to balance the climatic cooling induced by the volcanic aerosol, especially because the humidity anomaly lasts for a period that is longer than the residence time of aerosol in the stratosphere. In particular, northern hemisphere high latitude cooling is reduced in magnitude. We discuss this mechanism in the context of the discrepancy between the observed and modelled cooling following the Krakatau eruption in 1883. We hypothesize that moist coignimbrite plumes caused by pyroclastic flows travelling over ocean rather than land, resulting from an eruption close enough to the ocean, might provide the additional source of stratospheric water vapour.


ADEME (the French national environmental and energy agency) develops tools in order to measure farm energy performance. The actual measurement is based on the total amount of energy consumed by farmers. The main objective of this paper is to propose an alternative method that can be used in order to improve this measurement. The alternative method that we propose is based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models. Following the procedure adopted in a cost framework by Farrell (1957) and developed by Färe et al. (1985), we propose to decompose an overall energy performance measurement into two components, namely technical and allocative performances. In order to do this, we replace prices by energy content of inputs. We show that this decomposition can considerably help policy makers to design accurate energy policies. The presence of uncertainty on data, and more particularly on energy content of inputs, leads us to recommend exploiting the methodology proposed by Camanho and Dyson (2005) in order to produce more robust results. Thus, this methodology allows deriving both upper and lower bounds for the performance measurements. A year 2007 database of French farms specialized in crops is used for empirical illustration.


This article is concerned with the diverse forms of Christianity as the religion spreads around Southeast Asia. Although growth and expansion characterize much of Christianity's fortunes, no unifying trend is readily discernible. Four trends are identified in this article: popular religion, megachurches, the global church, and the struggling church. The article draws from different cases around the region to illustrate the importance of these developments. It in this manner that the article complicates the narrative that Christianity is moving to the Global South. The narrative often presents Christianity as a religion at war with itself insofar as geographic tensions are concerned. In contrast to its counterpart in the West, Christianity in the region is depicted as strict, fundamentalist, and often Charismatic in orientation. To view Christianity in Southeast Asia as a homogenous entity disregards issues at stake for its many denominations. Some of these concerns include different political regimes and uneven levels of economic development. This paper was delivered as an opening lecture at the workshop on Christian art in Southeast Asia, organized by SEAMEO SPAFA in the Philippines in March 2016.


A narrative perspective was employed to explore the problematic concept `relationship'. Relationships are said to exist either in relational partners' patterned behaviors or in their shared perceptions, although neither alternative is well supported in the literature. In response, the claims were made (1) that relationship narratives transcend the behavior/perception dilemma by both depicting partners' behaviors and reporting their perceptions, and (2) that relationship stories are our primary source of knowledge about relationships. Certain advantages of this approach were developed, and to illustrate them, L6vi-Strauss's concepts of bricoleur and bricolage were used as analytical tools for examining selected relationship stories. The narratives examined were excerpts from James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Russell Baker's Growing Up, and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings. Their accounts were found to depict persons-in-relationship as well as certain commonly encountered episode types. In addition, the concept of the bricoleur called attention to the centrality of process in relationships, and the concept of bricolage pointed to the nature and source of materials for conducting relationships, their portability from one relationship to another, and their social-dialogical dimension.


In quantum optimal control theory, kinematic bounds are the minimum and maximum values of the control objective achievable for any physically realizable system dynamics. For a given initial state of the system, these bounds depend on the nature and state of the controller. We consider a general situation where the controlled quantum system is coupled to both an external classical field (referred to as a classical controller) and an auxiliary quantum system (referred to as a quantum controller). In this general situation, the kinematic bound is between the classical kinematic bound (CKB), corresponding to the case when only the classical controller is available, and the quantum kinematic bound (QKB), corresponding to the ultimate physical limit of the objective's value. Specifically, when the control objective is the expectation value of a quantum observable (a Hermitian operator on the system's Hilbert space), the QKBs are the minimum and maximum eigenvalues of this operator. We present, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the necessary and sufficient conditions for surpassing the CKB and reaching the QKB, through the use of a quantum controller. The general conditions are illustrated by examples in which the system and controller are initially in thermal states. The obtained results provide a basis for the design of quantum controllers capable of maximizing the control yield and reaching the ultimate physical limit.


Food consumption parameters have been estimated for six selected food items-rice, wheat, potatoes, pulses, fish and edible oil-using the Bangladesh 1981-82 Household Expenditure Survey data. For the two major staples rice and wheat, the estimates revealed that while the absolute value of the own-price elasticity for rice of the rural households was twice that of the urban households, the absolute value of that for wheat of the urban households was more than four times that of the rural households. For most of the food items, rural and urban parameters were structurally different. However, estimates by disaggregated income classes revealed that the source of the difference between rural and urban parameters was the high-income households and for the low-income households, the implications of relative price and/or income changes on food consumption remained invariant with respect to their rural-urban locations. In interpreting tne relatively higher values of the parameter estimates of the rural households, the possible bias arising from consumption of own-production needs to be taken Into account.


The paper presents some consequences of using semi-open lists, including the preferential vote mechanism, in parliamentary elections in Poland. The Authors discuss whose role in assigning parliamentary seats is greater: that of party organizations' leaders, who decide on the order of candidates on electoral lists, or that of citizens who cast preferential votes. The paper focuses in the elections in the years 2001–2011, in which, according to poll data, party voting dominated over personal voting. The results of parliamentary elections in Poland show that ballot position effects are persistently present and that people tend to vote for list leaders in their constituencies. However, a simulation of a closed-list mechanism shows that in 2001–2011, ca 20 per cent of parliamentary seats were assigned as a result of the interventionist impact of the preferential vote on the candidate lists established by parties. The ability to vote for a specific candidate is rather important for Poles. The Authors also point out that the candidates from the top of party lists may obtain such good results because voters resort to simple reasoning and vote for those from the top of a list, irrespective of the nature of the list itself. (However, the effect does not seem to be very significant).


This paper examines the effect of income distribution on growth in developing countries. Based on data from the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, we use a sample of twenty-eight developing economies and find that income distribution does not affect growth in these countries, unlike the results of previous studies by Alesina and Rodrik (1994). Neither do we find that the level of democracy in a country has a statistically significant impact on growth. We observe that the coefficient estimate of one independent variable does not have the anticipated sign due to the severe degree of multicollinearity among statistically significant explanatory variables. Regression results show that the total fertility rate, the initial level of per capita GDP, and the ratio of female to male literacy rate, taken together, do linearly influence growth in developing economies. Statistical results of such empirical examination will assist governments in those countries identify areas that need to be improved upon in order to stimulate economic development. Data for all variables are from the 1978 World Development Report, the World in 2007, and the 1999, 2000, and 2007/08 Human Development Reports. We apply the least-squares estimation technique in a multivariate linear regression. We also note that the severe degree of multicollinearity among explanatory variables may have caused their coefficient estimates to have the wrong sign.


Modern sedimentation in the Navua-Suva Lagoon, southeastern Viti Levu, Fiji, derives from both allochthonous siliciclastics and autochthonous marine carbonates. Sediments are characterized by a high insoluble load, small grain size, a wide range of textures, and a high degree of mixing. The distribution of the two facies (skeletal-dominated muddy sandy gravel and skeletalbearing very fine sand to mud) is controlled by both the shallow-marine carbonate sediment productivity and sediment supply and dispersal processes from siliciclastic point sources across a narrow lagoon. Mollusks and Halimeda dominate the gravel fraction of the skeletal grains. Sediment budget estimates indicate that 97% of the siliciclastic supply bypasses the lagoon. Some 0.2 Mt/yr is accumulating in the lagoon, not yet enough to inhibit potential carbonate production (~0.1 Mt/yr) by a interreefal benthos that is at least somewhat sediment-tolerant. Contemporary allochthonous siliciclastic and autochthonous skeletal carbonate sedimentation in the lagoon results in true syndepositional (in situ) mixing. The central high volcanic island mass in a tropical setting produces the geomorphological (high topographic relief, narrow shelf ), environmental (high rainfall), and ecological (shallow benthic area) conditions that lead to carbonate-siliciclastic mixing in lagoons along adjacent, mostly carbonate, coasts of oceanic islands, a high volcanic island mass effect. We propose that tropical in situ mixing of carbonate and siliciclastic sediments is more common in high volcanic island settings than previously appreciated. Such islands are thus excellent testing grounds for the study of carbonate-siliciclastic interactions. Their special characteristics highlight the need for better understanding of coastal physical processes of tropical Pacific high volcanic islands.


Changing patterns in land use in relation to the breeding distribution and foraging behaviour of the African White-backed Vulture Gyps africanus were investigated around Kimberley, South Africa. Recent land-use trends indicate a significant increase in game farming and a decrease in traditional cattle and sheep enterprises. Combined cattle and game farms were significantly larger than other farm types and associated with land-use activities that positively affect vulture behaviour. Vulture breeding colonies were found in Acacia woodland areas that are associated mostly with cattle farms and combined cattle and game farms. Food availability, as either livestock mortalities or animals wounded by hunters, was positively associated with vulture activity except on farms with sheep, which had less vulture activity than other farm types. The observed increase in area used for game farming is concluded to offer potential benefits to the resident African White-backed Vulture population.


It is unknown whether relations between early-life factors and overall health in later life apply to burden of cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD), a major cause of stroke and dementia. We explored relations between early-life factors and cSVD in the Lothian Birth Cohort, a healthy aging cohort. Participants were recruited at age 70 (N = 1091); most had completed a test of cognitive ability at age 11 as part of the Scottish Mental Survey of 1947. Of those, 700 participants had brain MRI that could be rated for cSVD conducted at age 73. Presence of lacunes, white matter hyperintensities, microbleeds, and perivascular spaces were summed in a score of 0-4 representing all MRI cSVD features. We tested associations with early-life factors using multivariate logistic regression. Greater SVD score was significantly associated with lower age-11 IQ (OR higher SVD score per SD age-11 IQ = .78, 95%CI 0.65-.95, p=.01). The associations between SVD score and own job class (OR higher job class, .64 95%CI .43-.95, p=.03), age-11 deprivation index (OR per point deprivation score, 1.08, 95%CI 1.00-1.17, p=.04), and education (OR some qualifying education, .60 95%CI .37-.98, p=.04) trended towards significance (p<.05 for all) but did not meet thresholds for multiple testing. No early-life factor was significantly associated with any one individual score component. Early-life factors may contribute to age-73 burden of cSVD. These relations, and the potential for early social interventions to improve brain health, deserve further study.


CleverHans is a software library that provides standardized reference implementations of adversarial example construction techniques and adversarial training. The library may be used to develop more robust machine learning models and to provide standardized benchmarks of models' performance in the adversarial setting. Benchmarks constructed without a standardized implementation of adversarial example construction are not comparable to each other, because a good result may indicate a robust model or it may merely indicate a weak implementation of the adversarial example construction procedure.
This technical report is structured as follows. Section 1 provides an overview of adversarial examples in machine learning and of the CleverHans software. Section 2 presents the core functionalities of the library: namely the attacks based on adversarial examples and defenses to improve the robustness of machine learning models to these attacks. Section 3 describes how to report benchmark results using the library. Section 4 describes the versioning system.


The behavior of Radial Basis Function (RBF) Networks greatly depends on how the center points of the basis functions are selected. In this work we investigate the use of instance reduction techniques, originally developed to reduce the storage requirements of instance based learners, for this purpose. Five Instance-Based Reduction Techniques were used to determine the set of center points, and RBF networks were trained using these sets of centers. The performance of the RBF networks is studied in terms of classification accuracy and training time. The results obtained were compared with two Radial Basis Function Networks: RBF networks that use all instances of the training set as center points (RBF-ALL) and Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN). The former achieves high classification accuracies and the latter requires smaller training time. Results showed that RBF networks trained using sets of centers located by noise-filtering techniques (ALLKNN and ENN) rather than pure reduction techniques produce the best results in terms of classification accuracy. The results show that these networks require smaller training time than that of RBF-ALL and higher classification accuracy than that of PNN. Thus, using ALLKNN and ENN to select center points gives better combination of classification accuracy and training time. Our experiments also show that using the reduced sets to train the networks is beneficial especially in the presence of noise in the original training sets. Keywords—Radial basis function networks, Instance-based reduction, PNN.


Abstract. Gravity waves are an important driver for the atmospheric circulation and have substantial impact on weather and climate. Satellite instruments offer excellent opportunities to study gravity waves on a global scale. This study focuses on observations from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) onboard the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Aqua satellite and the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) onboard the European MetOp satellites. The main aim of this study is an intercomparison of stratospheric gravity wave observations of both instruments. In particular, we analyzed AIRS and IASI 4.3 μm brightness temperature measurements, which directly relate to stratospheric temperature. Three case studies showed that AIRS and IASI provide a clear and consistent picture of the temporal development of individual gravity wave events. Statistical comparisons based on a 5-year period of measurements (2008–2012) showed similar spatial and temporal patterns of gravity wave activity. However, the statistical comparisons also revealed systematic differences of variances between AIRS and IASI that we attribute to the different spatial measurement characteristics of both instruments. We also found differences between day- and nighttime data that are partly due to the local time variations of the gravity wave sources. While AIRS has been used successfully in many previous gravity wave studies, IASI data are applied here for the first time for that purpose. Our study shows that gravity wave observations from different hyperspectral infrared sounders such as AIRS and IASI can be directly related to each other, if instrument-specific characteristics such as different noise levels and spatial resolution and sampling are carefully considered. The ability to combine observations from different satellites provides an opportunity to create a long-term record, which is an exciting prospect for future climatological studies of stratospheric gravity wave activity.


It has become more and more common for companies to move part of their production to low cost countries and/or closer to important markets. However, quite often the product development is not moved. The result is an increased distance between product development and production. The interface between the two departments is important to lead time, cost and quality and therefore the cooperation must work smoothly. To achieve this, most literature recommends early and tight cooperation. However this can be complicated by expensive and time consuming travels and/or usage of less rich communication such as emails and phone calls. It is difficult to make the transition in general from product development to production and the possible problems increase with the distance. The PD-P interface consists of several components and how a problem in one component is affected by problems in other components is not explicitly discussed in literature. The purpose in this paper is to explore if there are such connections i.e. connections between an observable problem and other components in the PD-P interface in a geographically dispersed setting. The paper does so by merging the distributed work literature and the PD-P interface literature. The analysis is based on four PD-P interface components; technological, organizational, scope and task. The analysis indicates that observable problems as e.g. low frequency of communication can be the symptom of one or a combination of problems. Connections between the components in the PD-P interface are exemplified in a geographically dispersed setting. Furthermore the underlying causes to the problems connected to the geographically dispersed setting in the PD-P interface are elucidated. In the case of low frequency of communication, it could be the technical system hindering communication and the different time zones disrupt it even more. Hence one symptom could be caused by different underlying problems. Each problem needs to be broken down to find the cause and the solution could be found in any of the four interface components. The results indicate that the actual distance is not the biggest problem but uncertainties (e.g. new collaborations) and differences (culture and work methods) which increase lead time. We have also seen that single underling problems can cause problem in several of the PD-P interface components. This indicates that if these underlying problems can be solved the project results can be vastly improved. For example, trust issues occur in the scope component (affects the willingness to share information) and in the organizational interface component (both competence trust and goodwill trust affects involvement and commitment to the project). Consequently, if problems like this can be solved many other problems will become minor problems and project objectives will be more likely to be obtained. However trust is difficult to achieve with a geographical distance between product development and production. The analysis also indicates that due to the distance more attention is paid to the PD-P interface, e.g. more experienced team members are appointed. This can be contributing to a smoother PD-P interface than expected.


The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) has used Asphalt Rubber (AR) modified binders since the early 1970's. The primary purpose for using AR is to reduce reflective cracking in Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) rehabilitation overlays. The AR mixtures have also performed well in cold climate conditions. This research study had the primary objective of conducting a laboratory experimental program to obtain typical cracking properties for asphalt rubber mixtures used in Arizona and comparing the performance of these AR mixtures to other conventional asphalt mixtures. Gap and open graded mixtures were subjected to fatigue and indirect tensile cracking tests. All test specimens in this study were prepared using hot mix AR mixtures that were collected during construction. Fatigue testing of AR specimens was conducted at different test temperatures using the beam fatigue apparatus proposed by the Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP). The indirect tensile strength and creep tests were carried out at three temperatures according to the procedures described in the draft indirect tensile test protocol developed for the new 2002 Design Guide. The results from the fatigue tests indicated that the AR mixtures would have longer fatigue life compared with the ADOT conventional dense graded mixtures. For the indirect tensile strength tests, the analysis for strains measured at failure showed that the AR mixtures have higher values than the conventional mixes. AR mixtures exhibiting higher strains at failure would have higher resistance to thermal cracking. The fracture energy results indicated that the AR mixtures are not as greatly affected by the decrease in temperature as compared to the conventional mixes. This relative insensitivity for changes in temperature makes the AR mixtures better resisting to thermal cracking in the field.


This work addresses the question of the Egyptian Hegemony during the 13th century BCE: its nature and its cultural processes, and the analysis of the Egyptian-style pottery in three Canaanite City-States is used to provide the proofs of the Egyptian presence there. The author has chosen the archaeological sites of Hazor, Megiddo and Lachish for a case study. Situated in three different regions of Southern Canaan, these three cities are known to be powerful and rich during the 13th century BCE. The Egyptian pottery of these sites has been identified and classified in a typology with numerous parallels to the Egyptian contemporaneous sites. A fabric analysis has been made from description of a fresh break section taken from each sample studied and, in a few cases completed by a petrographic analysis. All the data are gathered in an electronic database and can be consulted for further studies about this corpus. From the interpretation of the corpus, the author presents a spatial analysis of the Egyptian-Style pottery for each identified building in each site in order to shed light on an Egyptian presence at these cities and to qualify this presence.


PT-symmetric systems can have a real spectrum even when their Hamiltonian is non-Hermitian, but develop a complex spectrum when the degree of non-Hermiticity increases. Here we utilize random-matrix theory to show that this spontaneous PT-symmetry breaking can occur via two distinct mechanisms, whose predominance is associated to different universality classes. Present optical experiments fall into the orthogonal class, where symmetry-induced level crossings render the characteristic absorption rate independent of the coupling strength between the symmetry-related parts of the system.


Stateless Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol service for IPv6 (DHCPv6) is used by nodes to obtain configuration information, such as the addresses of DNS recursive name servers, that does not require the maintenance of any dynamic state for individual clients. A node that uses stateless DHCP must have obtained its IPv6 addresses through some other mechanism, typically stateless address autoconfiguration. This document explains which parts of RFC 3315 must be implemented in each of the different kinds of DHCP agents so that agent can support stateless DHCP.


This article discusses the policy issues relevant to the taxation of contingent interest convertible bonds and of conventional convertible bonds. The policy discussion is framed by reference to Revenue Ruling 2002-31, which addresses many of the central policy issues surrounding contingent interest convertibles. The article also responds to Notice 2002-36, in which the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service express concern about the disparity in the treatment of contingent convertibles and conventional convertibles and invite comment on that issue. The article discusses each of the main holdings of Revenue Ruling 2002-31 from a policy perspective and argues that the ruling is correct to hold that contingent interest convertibles are properly taxed under the rules applicable to contingent payment debt instruments rather than those applicable to conventional convertible debt. The article also considers issues raised by sections 163(l), 249 and 1032, and agrees with the policy choices made by the ruling, which generally allow an issuer of a contingent convertible bond to deduct interest expense to the extent of the comparable yield, as determined under the contingent payment debt instrument rules. The article further offers some response to the issues raised by Notice 2002-36 by arguing that the rules for taxing conventional convertible bonds lead to a systematic underaccrual of income and that any tension between the taxation of contingent convertibles and conventional convertibles is best resolved by taxing conventional convertibles as contingent payment debt instruments.


Leukocyte migration from the blood vessel, across the vascular wall and into the tissue underneath occurs in both an inflammatory response as well as immunosurveillance. During this process multiple adhesive interactions occur between leukocytes and vascular endothelial cells (ECs). The EC itself is rendered compliant to transmigration following inside-out signalling in response to leukocyte adhesion altering the activity of a number of different cellular components including the actin cytoskeleton, Rho GTPases and various protein kinases. For this, adhesion to endothelial intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1/CD54) is particularly important and the focus of this study. Indeed, previous work in our lab has shown that endothelial ICAM-1 signalling controls lymphocyte diapedesis by modulating interendothelial VE-cadherin (VEC) junction phosphorylation via a pathway involving calcium, AMP kinase and nitric oxide synthase (eNOS).
In this study, I have investigated if ICAM-1-mediated endothelial mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinases activation played a role during lymphocyte transmigration across brain microvascular ECs. All three MAP kinases, namely ERK, JNK and p38, were found to be activated in response to ICAM-1 engagement, however only JNK was important for lymphocyte transmigration. Significantly, specific neutralisation experiments using small-molecule inhibitors or dominant-negative plasmids inhibiting JNK resulted in inhibition of transmigration. Activation of JNK required Src, Rho GTPase, MKK7 and protein kinase C (PKC), with all these components also found to be important for lymphocyte transmigration. I further demonstrate that this novel pathway led to the phosphorylation of the actin-associated protein paxillin and its association with VEC. Ultimately this triggered VEC internalisation, suggesting that adherens junction modulation is an important element during transendothelial leukocyte migration. Furthermore, this also suggests that at least two endothelial signalling pathways (JNK-paxillin and eNOS-VEC) converge and cooperate to regulate ICAM-1-mediated lymphocyte transmigration.


Paraquat (1, 1'-dimethyl-4, 4'-dipyridylium) is a bipyridilium herbicide used widely in our country and is a highly toxic compound. This compound is very notorious to cause rapid development of renal, liver, and respiratory failure with very high mortality due to lack of specific antidote and dearth of high-quality evidence-based treatment. Respiratory system involvement is the most common cause of death in these people. We hereby report a fatal case of a 30-year-old male with a history of paraquat consumption. The patient developed oliguric renal failure, deterioration of liver function, and acute respiratory distress syndrome over next few days. Different treatment modalities were tried to manage patient's condition. In this case, none of the strategies worked well, and death ensued due to multi-organ dysfunction syndrome.


Introduction: Securigera securidaca seed is used as a hypoglycemic agent in Iranian folk medicine. In this study, potential effect of oral administration of whole seed extract its fractions were investigated on Streptozosin diabetic mice and rats (200 mg/kg, ip). Materials and Methods: In acute study, diabetic mice were received different doses of whole seed extract, its fractions including chloroform, methanol, or mixture of chloroform and methanol, along with glibenclamide (10 mg/kg) and normal saline, by gavage. Blood glucose levels were assessed at baseline and again during 1, 2 and 4 h after gavage. Diabetic rats were received a mixture of chloroform and methanol fraction (30:70) in a dose 500 mg/kg, along with regular and NPH Insulin (30:70), glibenclamide and normal saline, by gavage, two times a day for two weeks. Blood glucose levels were measured at baseline and again after one and two weeks. Blood biochemical measures and liver histology examination were done after two weeks. Results: Acute study showed that chloroform fraction reduced blood glucose level after 1 h wherease methanol fraction and mixture of fractions decreased blood glucose levels toward a normal range, after 4 h. In sub-acute study, no significant change was not observed in blood glucose and biochemical parameters, after administration of fractions. Compared to rats received mixture of fractions, liver cells destruction was lower in groups receiving insulin and glibenclamide. Conclusion: Acute dose of S. securidaca seed could reduce blood glucose by similar mechanism as insulin.


The study examined how the foraging activity, foraging efficiency and the pup provisioning
of a top marine predator, the Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella), were affected by
inter-annual variability in oceanographic conditions and prey availability in the Antarctic
Polar Frontal Zone (APFZ), in February 1998, 1999 and 2000. It formed part of a larger
multidisciplinary study examining predator-prey relationships in relation to oceanographic
features between Antarctic fur seals, king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) and their
mesopelagic, fish prey, myctophids. The Kerguelen Archipelago (49°07'S, 70°45'E), which
is located in a region of the southern Indian Ocean characterised by considerable
hydrographic complexity, was chosen as the study site.
Seals were fitted with time-depth recorders and/or satellite transmitters to study their diving
behaviour and at-sea distribution. Intra-population variability in diving behaviour was
studied for female fur seals from two study sites at Cap Noir and lies Nuageuses during the
three years. Dietary composition was determined and compared over the three years by (1)
faecal analysis and (2) fatty acid signature analysis of milk samples, to identify both short
and longer-term dietary preferences. Nocturnal transect surveys were conducted by a
dedicated research vessel to estimate fish availability in the foraging zones of seals, as
determined from satellite tracking of seals. The fatty acid profiles and calorific content of
fish prey captured during transect surveys conducted in the fur seal foraging zones were also
determined. The spatial distribution of the diving effort of the fur seals was analysed in
relation to oceanographic variables (sea surface temperature, chlorophyll-a concentration,
and bathymetry) using spatial analysis techniques for a range of spatial scales. The foraging
parameters of female seals were subsequently related to the growth performance of their
pups on a per trip basis and throughout lactation.
Inter-annual differences in foraging behaviour were identified for all parameters examined.
The diving activity of seals varied inter-annually and considerably between individuals
within a season. The diving behaviour of seals during one foraging trip (n=117) was
categorised by cluster analysis to one of four behavioural dive groups: (1) deep divers; (2)
shallow active divers; (3) shallow-divers and (4) daytime divers. The proportion of seals
displaying the deep diving behaviour declined from 82% in 1998 to around 50% in 1999 and
2000, indcating changes in prey availability and accessibility. Seals at lies Kerguelen dived
consistently to greater mean depths than seals than previously recorded for this species.
Energy-rich mesopelagic myctophid fish formed the majority of estimated dietary biomass
consumed by seals in all years, with Gymnoscopelus piabilis, G. nicholsi and Electrona
subaspera always comprising the three main species. However, in 1998 fur seals also preyed heavily on icefish (Champsocephalus gunnari) and other fish families. Simultaneous shipbased
transect surveys in the foraging areas of seals confirmed that 1998 was a year of low
prey availability in the foraging areas of seals in comparison to 1999. Species caught during
the surveys correlated only wealdy to those species identified in seal scats, indicating a high
degree of prey selectivity by seals was occurring. Fatty acid analyses of fur seal milk
samples confirmed the finding of the inter-annual differences observed in dietary intake for
1999 and 2000. Levels of fat within milk samples were also significantly higher in 2000
(~53%), the year of highest apparent prey availability and female body condition, than 1999
(~43%).
Seals foraged relatively close to the colony, on the edge of the continental shelf, in 1998,
with foraging zones becoming more dispersed in 1999 and 2000 as females increased their
median foraging range over the three years from 111Icm to 215km. This behaviour coincided
with a lower average chlorophyll-a concentration (mg n-3 ) over the foraging zone of fur
seals in 1998, than in the two following seasons. Anomalous warm sea surface temperatures
(SST) were present within the same region in 1998, and were cooler in 1999 and 2000,
indicating a migration further north of Polar Frontal waters during the study. There is also
evidence to suggest that the warm SST anomaly recorded in the Kerguelen region in 1997/98
coincided with one of the largest ENSO events recorded in the central Pacific Ocean in this
year. A preferred foraging area to the northeast of the archipelago was identified, although in years
of higher marine productivity foraging strategies were more diverse. In 2000, the at-sea
distribution and diving behaviour of the fur seals on a fine scale reflected specific
combinations of environmental variables. Seals foraging to the southeast in cool SST over
the continental slope dived to shallow depths whilst those foraging to the NE of the island in
warmer SST over deeper water spent greater amounts of time diving to deeper depths. The
foraging efficiency of mothers (daily allocation of energy to the pup) was similar between
seals foraging in the different ecoregions, in this year of high prey availability.
Despite changes in the diving behaviour and dietary intake of the fur seal females, it appears
that the seals were unable to fully compensate for the changes in prey availability and prey
composition in this way, as rates of pup growth was much reduced in 1998 compared to
1999 and 2000. Both maternal and pup body composition were significantly poorer in 1998
than in other years, as were rates of foraging efficiency measured as the daily mass gain of
pups over a foraging cycle (combined duration of a foraging trip and subsequent shore bout).
Sex-based differences in mean mass and body length prior to weaning (March) were evident for pups, however mean growth rates during the second half of lactation in all years were
similar between sexes.
The study highlights the flexible foraging strategies displayed by at top marine predator in
response to changing oceanographic conditions and the importance of energy-rich
myctophids in the diet of seals foraging in the Antarctic Polar Frontal Zone. Female seals
adjusted their foraging behaviour, including the location of foraging zones, their diving
activity and diet, and foraging efficiency, concurrently with arinual changes in SST and prey
availability. Parameters such as foraging efficiency over a foraging cycle and variability in
mean provisioning rates (trip duration), were identified as proxies of prey availability within
the foraging range of seals in 1998, 1999 and 2000, emphasising the effectiveness of using
Antarctic fur seal foraging behaviour as an indicator of both food and oceanographic
variability.


The first substantial overview of the British film industry with emphasis on its genres, stars, and socioeconomic context, British National Cinema by Sarah Street is an important title in Routledge's new National Cinemas series. British National Cinema synthesizes years of scholarship on British film while incorporating the author' fresh perspective and research. Street divides the study of British cinema into four sections: the relation between the film industry and government; specific film genres; movie stars; and experimental cinema. In addition, this beautifully illustrated volume includes over thirty stills from every sphere of British cinema. British National Cinema will be of great interest to film students and theorists as well as the general reader interested in the fascinating scope of British film.


Soil parameters for hydrology modeling in cropland dominated areas, from the regional to local scale, are part of critical biophysical information whose deficiency may increase the uncertainty of simulated conservation effects and predicting potential. Despite this importance, soil physical and hydraulic parameters lack common, wide-coverage repositories combined to digital maps as required by various hydrology-based agricultural water quality models. This paper describes the construction of a geoprocessing workflow and the resultant hydrology-structured soil hydraulic, physical, and chemical parameters geographic database for the entire United States, named US-SOILM-CEAP. This database is designed to store a-priori values for a suit of models, such as SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool), APEX (Agricultural Policy Environmental EXtender) and ALMANAC (Agricultural Land Management Alternatives with Numerical Assessment Criteria), which are commonly used for the across scale assessment of agricultural hydrology and conservation practice scenarios. The Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) database developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided the main source data for this development. Additional spatial information, a geographic information system platform and Python computer programming language code were used to create hydrology-based tile coverage of the areal soil units linked to the specific and detailed attributes required by each model. The created repository adds value to the source soil survey data, while maintaining and extending the detailed information necessary for the across scale and combined application of the models. Ultimately, our multi-model database provides a comprehensive product achieving joined informational-mapping-geoprocessing functionality with the explicit maintenance of the original conceptual links between soil series and composing soil layers, allowing for efficient data retrieval, analysis and service as input for modeling conservation effects.


The Department of Geology at the University of Pretoria will celebrate its centennial in early 2008. During the almost 100 years of its existence, after a difficult beginning under short commons (Professor D.F. du Toit Malherbe was responsible, simultaneously, for three departments), it has been guided by six of South Africa's leading geoscientists, all of whom made seminal contributions to geological education and research in the country: Louis C. de Villiers (1920 to 1947), Ben Lombaard (1947 to 1952), Johannes Willemse (1952 to 1967), Dirk Visser (1968 to 1977), Gerhard von Gruenewaldt (1978 to 1991) and Sybrand de Waal (1992 to 2005). Traditionally, the Department has focused on fundamental research related to layered mafic intrusives, particularly the Bushveld Complex, and applied research within the fields of exploration geophysics and engineering and hydrogeology. Undergraduate teaching has always emphasized the basic geological disciplines, with a strong emphasis on mineralogy and petrology, underpinned in the last half century by excellent analytical facilities.


Background Although a tube potential of 140 kV is available on most computed tomography (CT) scanners, its incremental diagnostic value versus 120 kV has been controversial. Purpose To retrospectively evaluate the image quality and radiation exposure of cardiac computed tomography angiography (CCTA) performed at 140 kV in comparison to CCTA at 120 kV in overweight and moderately obese patients. Material and Methods Eighty-eight patients who were referred for CCTA between January 2010 and May 2012 were included. Forty-four patients who were overweight or moderately obese (body mass index [BMI], 25–35 kg/m2) underwent CCTA with dual-source CT (DSCT) scanner at 140 kV. Forty-four match controls who underwent CCTA with DSCT at 120 kV were identified per BMI, average heart rate, scan indication, and scan acquisition mode. All scans were performed per routine protocols with direct physician supervision. Quantitative image metrics (CT attenuation, image noise, contrast-to-noise ratio [CNR], and signal-to-noise ratio [SNR] of left main [LM] and proximal right coronary artery [RCA]) were assessed. Effective radiation dose was compared between the two groups. Results Overall, all scans were diagnostic without any non-evaluable coronary segment per clinical report. 140 kV had a lower attenuation and image noise versus 120 kV (P < 0.01). Both SNR and CNR of proximal coronary arteries were similar between 140 kV and 120 kV (SNR, LM P = 0.93, RCA P = 0.62; CNR, LM P = 0.57, RCA P = 0.77). 140 kV was associated with a 35.3% increase in effective radiation dose as compared with 120 kV (5.1 [3.6–8.2] vs. 3.3 [2.0–5.1] mSv, respectively; P < 0.01). Conclusion 140 kV CCTA resulted in similar image quality but a higher effective radiation dose in comparison to 120 kV CCTA. Therefore, in overweight and moderately obese patients, a tube potential of 120 kV may be sufficient for CCTA with diagnostic image quality.


This paper addresses stative sentences like Er hat den Arm verbunden ('He has his arm bandaged'), which are going to be referred to as haben -statives. A 'passive analysis' of haben -statives is rejected. Instead, I put forward a syntactic analysis of haben -statives where haben 'have' embeds a small clause in which the participle functions as an adjectival predicate. In my approach, Kratzer's (1993) stipulative distinction between 'lexical' and 'phrasal' adjectivization (cf. Rothstein 2007) can be abandoned. The proposed analysis allows for a uniform analysis of an array of different haben -structures in German, since they can all be ascribed the same underlying structure.


We present a theoretical model based on the coupled-mode theory and use this model to analyze the diffraction properties of volume holographic diffusers, such as diffraction efficiency and wavelength sensitivity. For small diffraction angles our results predict that the diffraction efficiency exhibits a blue shift for its maximum value and a dip at the recording wavelength. For color displays we propose and analyze the wavelength-multiplexed volume holograms recorded with three primary colors, red, green, and blue. Furthermore, our results demonstrate the enhancement of wavelength tolerance for a thin holographic medium, which can serve as a wideband diffuser over the entire visible range.


We report our outcomes following combined intestinal and abdominal wall transplantation, focusing on the presentation and treatment of acute rejection of the abdominal wall vascularized composite allograft (VCA). Retrospective analysis of all patients with combined intestinal/VCA transplantation was undertaken. Graft abnormalities were documented photographically and biopsies taken, with histological classification of rejection according to Banff 2007 guidelines. We have performed five combined intestinal and abdominal wall transplants to date. Two patients developed erythematous, maculopapular to papular eruptions confined to the VCA, histologically confirmed as grade II/III rejection, yet with normal bowel on endoscopy. Both patients' rashes resolved within 72 h of increasing immunosuppressive treatment. One patient later developed a recurrence of the rash, confirmed as skin rejection, but did not immediately seek medical attention. Treatment was therefore delayed, and mild intestinal rejection developed. We describe the rash associated with VCA rejection, and propose that while the skin of an abdominal wall VCA may reject independently of the intestinal allograft, delay in treatment of rejection episodes may result in rejection of the intestinal graft.


In elections that take place in a less-than-perfect democracy, incumbency advantages are different from those in mature democracies. The incumbent can prevent credible challengers from running, organize vote fraud, or even physically eliminate the main opponents. At the same time, formally winning the election does not guarantee staying in power. We present a unified model of elections and mass protests, where the purpose of competitive elections is to reveal information about the relative popularity of the incumbent and the opposition. Citizens are heterogenous in their attitudes toward the dictator and these individual preferences serve as private signals about the aggregate distribution of preferences; this ensures a unique equilibrium for any information the incumbent may reveal. We show that the most competent/popular dictators run in competitive elections, mediocre ones prevent credible opponents from running or cancel elections, and the least competent ones use outright repressions. A strong opposition makes competitive elections more likely, but also increases the probability of repression. A totalitarian regime, where repression is cheaper, will have more repression, but even in the absence of repression, competitive elections will be rarer. A crueler, say military, regime, where protesting is costly, makes repression less likely and, surprisingly, competitive elections more likely.


Acute renal failure (ARF) is a common diagnosis in hospitalized patients, particularly in intensive care units (ICU). Determining the cause and contributing factors associated with ARF is crucial during treatment. The etiology is complex, and several factors often contribute to its development. Medications can cause acute tubular necrosis, acute interstitial nephritis, and crystal-induced or post-obstructive nephropathy. There have been several case reports of ARF secondary to fluoroquinolones. Here we report the development of acute renal failure within a few days of initiating oral ciprofloxacin therapy and briefly describe the different types of renal failure secondary to fluoroquinolone administration. Clinical studies demonstrate that using fluoroquinolones with other potentially nephrotoxic medications requires monitoring of renal function to limit the renal toxicity with these medications. Also, the risk-benefit profile of patients requiring fluoroquinolones should be considered.


Abstract. Pre-activation denotes the capability of particles or materials to nucleate ice at lower relative humidities or higher temperatures compared to their intrinsic ice nucleation efficiency after having experienced an ice nucleation event or low temperature before. This review presumes that ice preserved in pores is responsible for pre-activation and analyses pre-activation under this presumption. Idealized trajectories of air parcels are used to discuss the pore characteristics needed for ice to persist in pores and to induce macroscopic ice growth out of the pores. The pore width needed to keep pores filled with water decreases with decreasing relative humidity as described by the inverse Kelvin equation. Thus, narrow pores remain filled with ice well below ice saturation. However, the smaller the pore width, the larger the melting and freezing point depressions within the pores. Therefore, pre-activation due to pore ice is constrained by the melting of ice in narrow pores and the sublimation of ice from wide pores imposing restrictions on the temperature and relative humidity range of pre-activation for cylindrical pores. Ice is better protected in ink-bottle-shaped pores with a narrow opening leading to a large cavity. However, whether pre-activation is efficient also depends on the capability of ice to grow macroscopically, i.e. out of the pore. A strong effect of pre-activation is expected for swelling pores, because at low relative humidity (RH) their openings narrow and protect the ice within them against sublimation. At high relative humidities, they open up and the ice can grow to macroscopic size and form an ice crystal. Similarly, ice protected in pockets is perfectly sheltered against sublimation but needs the dissolution of the surrounding matrix to be effective. Pores partially filled with condensable material may also show pre-activation. In this case, complete filling occurs at lower RH than for empty pores and freezing shifts to lower temperatures. Pre-activation experiments confirm that materials susceptible to pre-activation are indeed porous. Pre-activation was observed for clay minerals like illite, kaolinite, and montmorillonite with inherent porosity. The largest effect was observed for the swelling clay mineral montmorillonite. Some materials may acquire porosity, depending on the formation and processing conditions. Particles of CaCO3, meteoritic material, and volcanic ash showed pre-activation for some samples or in some studies but not in other ones. Quartz and silver iodide were not susceptible to pre-activation. Atmospheric relevance of pre-activation by ice preserved in pores may not be generally given but depend on the atmospheric scenario. Lower-level cloud seeding by pre-activated particles released from high-level clouds crucially depends on the ability of pores to retain ice at the relative humidities and temperatures of the air masses they pass through. Porous particles that are recycled in wave clouds may show pre-activation with subsequent ice growth as soon as ice saturation is exceeded after having passed a first cloud event. Volcanic ash particles and meteoritic material likely influence ice cloud formation by pre-activation. Therefore, the possibility of pre-activation should be considered when ice crystal number densities in clouds exceed the number of ice-nucleating particles measured at the cloud forming temperature.


Carl Rhodes examines the implicit power of writing and authorship that is at play when people and organisations are (re)presented in research. To explore this, the book reports a research project in the area of organisational storytelling that investigates how people in one organisation used stories to (re)present their own learning experiences from the implementation of a quality management program. This research is written in three principal genres: autobiography, ethnography and a fictional short story. These (re)presentational strategies are reviewed to examine how different genres effect authority in different ways. Drawing extensively on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and on writers associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism, the book offers a challenging discussion of what organisational research might be when the notion of the equivalence of reality and representation is radically questioned.


As I look at my fifth year as Dean of Hamline University School of Law, I am often struck by the dissonance between my professional life, as a lawyer and law professor, and my administrative life, as a dean within a small university. In both roles, I remain driven to make a difference for the individuals I serve and the broader community in which we live. But these roles have never sat comfortably, one with the other. I am a product of my unique practice and academic experience. An entertainment lawyer by disposition, my field includes a broad array of intellectual property law and the arts or business organizations which exploit these rights. Perhaps blinded by my professional background, I believe that to make a difference, we must learn from these fields to make a difference for our schools, students, institutions, and communities. As I prepare for my last year as Dean of Hamline, this essay allows me the opportunity to reflect on how to make that difference for both our students and our institutions.


Social movement actors seeking alternatives to the highly industrialized, global food system have been advocating for more sustainable, local food systems. Many of the local food movement strategies and initiatives to counter the conventional practices of the industrial food system have proven successful. Social movement researchers have documented the importance of the roles and services social movement organizations provide for movement constituents to realize their success, emphasizing human and financial capital as key components for mobilizing collective action. Researchers have also documented the value of interorganizational networks, and the benefits of collaboration to expand the share of resources, and perhaps more importantly design social movement frames to direct collective action for social change. However, what local food movement research has yet to address are some of the potential barriers that minimize collaboration among organizational leaders as it relates to social capital and collective identity. This dissertation takes a cross-sectional, network analysis of social movement organizations working to increase the sustainability of the local food system in Marin County, California, a historically agricultural region serving a number of urban communities. Findings from the mixed-methods research reveal evidence of collective identity and social capital as enhancing collaboration among particular types of organizations while reducing potential collaboration among and between other social movement organizations. By analyzing the collective identity and dichotomous nature of social capital among social movement organizations, this research contributes a clearer understanding of the existing gaps for realizing a more sustainable local food system.


ABSTRACT Food is a central aspect of care in late life. This article focuses on the growing number of elderly Muslim immigrants in Denmark who on the basis of Service Act §94 can have a family member employed by the municipality as their "self-appointed helper." The task is often given to a spouse, daughter or daughter-in-law, whose task is then to provide the care services for which the elderly person has been referred. Usually this would be undertaken by professional care workers, but instead a close family member is employed to fulfil the tasks. Food and meals is an area of conflicts between the elderly citizens, their self-appointed helpers and the municipality, since they often have different approaches to and understandings of the aim, function and meanings of food and meals. It is the ambition of the so-called universal Scandinavian welfare state to treat all citizens equal. However, the ambition and efforts of municipal care managers (visitatorer) to create the same conditions and equal opportunities for all elderly citizens, paradoxically result in elderly Muslims immigrants (and their families), being further marginalized in Danish society.


The City of San Francisco, California, has a combined sewer system that presently overflows into the bay or ocean when it rains. Under the current wastewater management program being implemented, this combined flow of storm and sanitary wastes will be treated and discharged into the Pacific Ocean through a three-pipe outfall system. The system will dispose of the treated sanitary wastewater (dry weather flow) through a 2740-millimetre-(mm)-diameter, 6-kilometre (km) ocean outfall, and the mixture of sanitary wastewater and stormwater (wet weather flow) will be disposed of through two 2740-mm-diameter outfalls, 4 km long. The depth of the dry weather diffuser is approximately 24 m and the depth of the wet weather diffuser is approximately 17 m. The wet weather outfall will operate only when the rain exceeds 0.5 mm per hour. Rain exceeds this intensity about 4 percent of the time, or 350 hours per year. The peak wet weather flow is approximately 1800 megalitres per day (Ml/day)3. The average dry weather flow is 400 Ml/day and the peak dry weather flow is approximately 700 Ml/day. This paper reviews the unique problems of an intermittently operated outfall located in an area of shallow water with loose bottom sediments on a coast subjected to high wave energy. The circulation of seawater through the dormant diffuser and the resulting reduction in hydraulic capacity by sediment intrusion and biofouling are identified as the most severe problems for the intermittently operated outfall. The features incorporated to reduce these problems are bottom-exiting risers, diffuser ports elevated above the seabed, four ports per riser with a dual valve system, and use of antifouling materials and a flushing system.


Depressional forested wetlands or geographically isolated wetlands such as cypress swamps and Carolina bays are common land features in the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the southeastern US. Those wetlands play important roles in providing wildlife habitats, water quality improvement, and carbon sequestration. Great stresses have been imposed on those important ecosystems due to rapid human population growth and climate change in the region. The objectives of this research were to (1) test a distributed forest hydrology model, FLATWOODS, for a Carolina bay wetland system using seven years of water table data and (2) apply the validated model to understand how wetland position (geomorphology) and geology affect lateral groundwater flow directions. The research site is a 6-ha depressional wetland known as a Carolina bay and is located in Bamberg County, South Carolina on the Lower Coastal Plain of the southeastern US (32.88 N, 81.12 W). Model calibration (1998) and validation (1997, 1999-2003) data span a wet and a long drought period allowing testing of the model for a wide range of weather conditions. While the major input to the wetland is atmospheric rainfall and output from the wetland is through evapotranspiration, modeling results suggest that the Carolina bay is a flow-through wetland, receiving discharged groundwater from one part of the upland area, but losing water as groundwater recharge to the other side, especially during wet periods in winter months. The simulation study also suggests that groundwater flow direction is controlled by the gradient of the underlying hydrologic restricting layer beneath the wetland-upland continuum, not by the topographic gradient of land surface. Groundwater flow appeared to change flow direction during the transition period during the wet-dry cycle. The changes depend on the geomorphology and underlying geology of the wetland-upland continuum.


Abstract The asteroids are a major source of potential impactors on the Earth today. It has long been assumed that the giant planet Jupiter acts as a shield, significantly lowering the impact rate on the Earth from both cometary and asteroidal bodies. Such shielding, it is claimed, enabled the development and evolution of life in a collisional environment, which is not overly hostile. The reduced frequency of impacts, and of related mass extinctions, would have allowed life the time to thrive, where it would otherwise have been suppressed. However, in the past, little work has been carried out to examine the validity of this idea. In the first of several papers, we examine the degree to which the impact risk resulting from a population representative of the asteroids is enhanced or reduced by the presence of a giant planet, in an attempt to understand fully the impact regime under which life on Earth developed. Our results show that the situation is far less clear cut that has previously been assumed, that is, the presence of a giant planet can act to enhance the impact rate of asteroids on the Earth significantly.


Background Long-term central venous catheters are essential for the management of chronic medical conditions, including childhood cancer. Catheter occlusion is associated with an increased risk of subsequent complications, including bloodstream infection, venous thrombosis, and catheter fracture. Therefore, predicting and pre-emptively treating occlusions should prevent complications, but no method for predicting such occlusions has been developed. Methods We conducted a prospective trial to determine the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of catheter-resistance monitoring, a novel approach to predicting central venous catheter occlusion in pediatric patients. Participants who had tunneled catheters and were receiving treatment for cancer or undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplantation underwent weekly catheter-resistance monitoring for up to 12 weeks. Resistance was assessed by measuring the inline pressure at multiple flow-rates via a syringe pump system fitted with a pressure-sensing transducer. When turbulent flow through the device was evident, resistance was not estimated, and the result was noted as "non-laminar." Results Ten patients attended 113 catheter-resistance monitoring visits. Elevated catheter resistance (>8.8% increase) was strongly associated with the subsequent development of acute catheter occlusion within 10 days (odds ratio = 6.2; 95% confidence interval, 1.8–21.5; p <0.01; sensitivity, 75%; specificity, 67%). A combined prediction model comprising either change in resistance greater than 8.8% or a non-laminar result predicted subsequent occlusion (odds ratio = 6.8; 95% confidence interval, 2.0–22.8; p = 0.002; sensitivity, 80%; specificity, 63%). Participants rated catheter-resistance monitoring as highly acceptable. Conclusions In this pediatric hematology and oncology population, catheter-resistance monitoring is feasible, acceptable, and predicts imminent catheter occlusion. Larger studies are required to validate these findings, assess the predictive value for other clinical outcomes, and determine the impact of pre-emptive therapy. Trial Registration Clinicaltrials.gov NCT01737554


This paper surveys recent research on employment and unemployment in the 1930s. Unlike earlier studies that tended to rely heavily on aggregate time series, the research discussed in this paper focuses on disaggregated data. This shift in focus stems from two factors. First, dissaggregated evidence provides many more degrees of freedom than the decade of annual observations associated with the depression and thus can prove helpful in discriminating between macroeconomic models. Second, and more importantly, disaggregation has revealed aspects of labor market behavior hidden in the time series that are essential to their proper interpretation and which are, in any case, important in their own right. In particular, the findings dispute the view that representative-agent models are useful for interpreting shifts in employment and unemployment over the course of the Depression.


INTRODUCTION The financial and economic crisis that came to a head in the late summer of 2008 has brought forth a huge government response, many elements of which are without precedent. The crisis, however, did not come from nowhere. In important regards, its roots lie, first, in government policies to promote more widespread homeownership than would occur in a free market and, second, in the Federal Reserve System's mismanagement of interest rates and the money stock. The crisis is far from over, yet it already appears that the surge of extraordinary government actions and the new policies that the crisis has provoked will give rise to important, permanent increases in the government's size, scope, and power. In this way, it mimics the national emergencies of the past century. I. DIMENSIONS OF THE CRISIS AND THE GOVERNMENT'S RESPONSES Although the National Bureau of Economic Research places the recent peak of economic activity in the fourth quarter of 2007, (1) real gross domestic product (GDP) did not reach its peak until the second quarter of 2008. (2) By the second quarter of 2009, real GDP had fallen by four percent. (3) Likewise, financial stringencies in certain credit markets began to appear in 2007, though they did not become widely noticed until late September 2008, when a full-fledged financial panic developed, and commentary in the news media and the statements of public officials took on a frightened tone. The civilian unemployment rate began to rise after March 2007, when it stood at 4.4%, and by October 2009, it had reached 10.2%. (4) In response to the growing economic troubles, especially the perceived "credit crunch" of September 2008, policymakers in the Bush Administration (most notably, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson), in Congress, and at the Federal Reserve System (the Fed) responded by initiating a series of unprecedented actions to rescue tottering banks and other financial institutions and to inject credit into the financial system. (5) In September, the Fed took control of the insurance giant American International Group (AIG), (6) and the Federal Housing Finance Authority took over the huge government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, secondary lending institutions that held or insured more than half of the total value of U.S. residential mortgages. (7) On October 3, Congress passed and the President signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. (8) Title 1 of this statute authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to create the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and authorizes as much as $700 billion for the purchase of so-called troubled assets, primarily mortgage-related securities, held by banks and other financial institutions. (9) Unable to implement the planned acquisition of troubled assets, the Treasury instead used TARP mainly to inject funds into the banks by purchasing preferred shares and warrants to purchase common stock from them. By the end of 2008, the Fed had made large, unprecedented types of loans and had given other forms of assistance, including loan guarantees, asset swaps, and lines of credit, to securities dealers, commercial-paper sellers, money-market mutual funds, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks, buyers of certain asset-backed securities based on consumer and small-business loans, Citigroup (related to losses resulting from a federal government guarantee of a specified pool of assets), and fourteen foreign central banks. (10) The Treasury and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation also took a variety of other large-scale actions to prop up credit and housing markets during the final quarter of 2008. (11) After Barack Obama became President, his administration and Democratic leaders in Congress concentrated on gaining passage of a new "economic stimulus" bill. These efforts ultimately resulted in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which the President signed into law on February 17. …


Windrow is a long-established term for the aggregations of seafoam, seaweeds, plankton and natural debris that appear on the ocean surface. Here, we define a "litter windrow" as any aggregation of floating litter at the submesoscale domain (<10 km horizontally), regardless of the force inducing the surface convergence, be it wind or other forces such as tides or density-driven currents. The marine litter windrows observed to date usually form stripes from tens up to thousands of meters long, with litter densities often exceeding 10 small items (<2 cm) per m2 or 1 large item (>2 cm) per 10 m2. Litter windrows are generally overlooked in research due to their dispersion, small size and ephemeral nature. However, applied research on windrows offers unique possibilities to advance on the knowledge and management of marine litter pollution. Litter windrows are hot spots of interaction with marine life. In addition, since the formation of dense litter windrows requires especially high loads of floating litter in the environment, their detection from space-borne sensors, aerial surveys or other platforms might be used to flag areas and periods of severe pollution. Monitoring and assessing of management plans, identification of pollution sources, or impact prevention are identified as some of the most promising fields of application for the marine litter windrows. In the present Perspective, we develop a conceptual framework and point out the main obstacles, opportunities and methodological approaches to address the study of litter windrows.


A number of writers have picked out the way knowledge in the human sciences reflexively alters the human subject as what separates these sciences from the natural sciences. Furthermore, they take this reflexivity to be a condition of moral existence. The article sympathetically examines this emphasis on reflexive processes, but it rejects the particular conclusion that the reflexive phenomenon enables us to demarcate the human sciences. The first sections analyse the different meanings that references to reflexivity have in the psychological and social sciences, in philosophy and in material life, and they link these meanings to the post-positivist philosophy of the social sciences. The discussion considers the problems raised (most influentially in the human sciences by Foucault) by being reflexive about reflexivity itself. They put a large question mark against hopes for a revived philosophical anthropology. Whatever the philosophical arguments, however, there is clearly a reflexive practice in the humanities and human sciences which there is not in the natural sciences. This leads to the argument that there are different forms of knowledge for different purposes and that it may therefore be divergence of purpose, not reflexivity itself, that creates differences among the sciences. It is the fact and purpose of human self-reflection that marks out the human sciences. If this is so, then it explains why an apparently circumscribed question about the classification of knowledge turns out to be inseparable from ontological and moral questions about human identity.


We consider the bootstrapping problem, which consists in learning a model of the agent's sensors and actuators starting from zero prior information, and we take the problem of servoing as a cross-modal task to validate the learned models. We study the class of sensors with bilinear dynamics, for which the derivative of the observations is a bilinear form of the control commands and the observations themselves. This class of models is simple, yet general enough to represent the main phenomena of three representative sensors (field sampler, camera, and range-finder), apparently very different from one another. It also allows a bootstrapping algorithm based on Hebbian learning, and a simple bioplausible control strategy. The convergence properties of learning and control are demonstrated with extensive simulations and by analytical arguments.


American legal scholars spend a large proportion of their time debating and theorizing procedure. This Article focuses on American proceduralism in the particular field of civil justice and undertakes a detailed comparison with England, where procedural questions receive little academic attention. It finds that procedure is more prominent in America partly because Americans have been more willing than others to use private litigation as a tool for regulation. More significantly, procedural questions necessarily occupy more space in American debates because authority over civil justice is unusually dispersed among different actors; procedural rules allocate power among these actors. But American proceduralism runs deeper than these surface explanations allow, and a full account requires an examination of the history of American legal thought. I trace contemporary American proceduralism to a counterintuitive source—the emergence of Legal Realism in the 1920s and 1930s.


We present a universal neural vocoder based on Parallel WaveNet, with an additional conditioning network called Audio Encoder. Our universal vocoder offers real-time high-quality speech synthesis on a wide range of use cases. We tested it on 43 internal speakers of diverse age and gender, speaking 20 languages in 17 unique styles, of which 7 voices and 5 styles were not exposed during training. We show that the proposed universal vocoder significantly outperforms speaker-dependent vocoders overall. We also show that the proposed vocoder outperforms several existing neural vocoder architectures in terms of naturalness and universality. These findings are consistent when we further test on more than 300 open-source voices.


World War I led to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, generating widespread political upheaval across Europe that provided numerous ethnic groups within those former empires the opportunity to break free and begin the process of independent nation-building. New nations need to create a history for themselves and their people to legitimate their existence. Estonia was one such nation. It was forced to fight a War of Independence at the very beginning of its existence as a separate entity to establish its right to statehood. This war served as Estonia's founding myth and even while it was still being fought, the war was integrated into the narrative of the Estonian people's great, centuries-long struggle for liberation from the yoke of Baltic German oppression. The achievement of independence was seen as the culmination of Estonian history. This article explores the customs that evolved for commemorating Independence Day from the perspective of performative, collective memory. These customs form the basis for analysing the shifts that took place in the politics of memory and history when a coup d'etat carried out in March of 1934 established an authoritarian regime in Estonia in place of parliamentary democracy. Thenceforth the narrative was adjusted so that the culmination of Estonian history was no longer merely the achievement of independence. Instead, the narrative claimed that independence was won when Estonians defeated their Baltic German historical enemy once and for all. The way that such ideological precepts were reflected in commemorative practices is examined together with the corresponding implications for the creation of a national Estonian identity.

KEYWORDS: Estonian history, collective memory, commemorative practice, Independence Day, national days, national flag, national identity, propaganda


Mips is a planning system that applies binary decision diagrams (BDDs) to compactly represent world states in a planning problem and efficiently explore the underlying state space. It was the first general planning system based on model-checking methods. It can handle the strips subset of the pddl language and some additional features from adl, namely, negative preconditions and (universal) conditional effects. At the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS'00), mips was one of five planning systems to be awarded for distinguished performance in the fully automated track. This article gives a brief introduction to, and explains the basic planning algorithm used by, mips, using a simple logistics problem as an example.


Analysis of publications related to category of smart cities as smart social system shows differences between all characteristics describing the smart city and especially the contribution of digital dimension to the general concept of smart city. Differences and similarities of opinions of different authors about the digital dimension have been noted. The practical analysis has been prepared using EUROSTAT, the open databases published by international projects and Lithuanian committee for development of information society. A methodic that uses statistical comparison of places of states and cities in lists ranked by various indicators of smartness has been tried out. The paper compares three cities (of a similar size) of Baltic countries (Kaunas, Liepaja and Tartu) from the point of view of digital dimension. The investigation has shown that their positions in the abovementioned lists correspond to the positions of the states. Further research is required to find out to what extent that is true for other cities. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ppaa.13.3.8295


Ultra High Performance Concrete (UHPC) is a class of cementitious materials that share similar characteristics including very large compressive strengths, tensile strength greater than conventional concrete and high durability. The material consists of finely graded cementitious particles and aggregates to develop a durable dense matrix. The addition of steel fibers increases ductility such that the material develops usable tensile strength. The durability and strength of UHPC makes it a desirable material for the production of highway bridge girders. However, UHPC's unique constitutive materials make it more expensive than conventional concrete. The cost and lack of appropriate design guidelines has limited its introduction into bridge products. The investigation presented in this thesis developed several optimization formulations to determine a suitable bridge girder shape for use with UHPC. The goal of this optimization was to develop a methodology of using UHPC in highway bridge designs that was cost competitive with conventional concrete solutions. Several surveys and field visits were performed to identify the important aspects of girder fabrication. Optimizations were formulated to develop optimized girder cross sections and full bridge design configurations that utilize UHPC. The results showed that for spans greater than 90 ft UHPC used in the proposed girder shape was more economical than conventional girders. The optimizations and surveys resulted in the development of a proposed method to utilize UHPC in highway bridges utilizing existing girder shapes and formwork. The proposed method consists of three simple calculations to transform an initial conventional design to an initial design using modified UHPC girders.


This paper examines the contemporary formal theory of delegation in the environment of quasi-governmental, special purpose bodies (SPBs). Better known as "quangos", these agencies present a challenge for the theory of delegation, since their tasks are often comprised of routine administration, such as the distribution of benefits and the collection of user fees, rather than more politically salient policymaking. Do (spatial) policy conflict and legislative capacity effect the conditions under which authority is delegated to quangos? What effect do "good government" ideology and legislative capacity have on the presence of ex ante and ex post control over quangos? These questions are theoretically framed by the hidden action problem particularly acute in the case of quangos. Theoretical predictions are examined with data from a study of Dutch public bodies by the Netherlands Court of Audit and as well as issue scales from the Manifesto Research Group. Multinomial logit statistical models produce evidence that though policy conflict and legislative capacity measures affect the probabilities of enacting both ex ante and ex post controls, their contributions to ex post measures, as expected in the presence of important hidden action incentives, are much stronger.


We develop a protocol for optimizing dynamic behavior of a network of simple electronic components, such as a sensor network, an ad hoc network of mobile devices, or a network of communication switches. This protocol requires only local communication and simple computations which are distributed among devices. The protocol is scalable to large networks. As a motivating example, we discuss a problem involving optimization of power consumption, delay, and buffer overflow in a sensor network.

Our approach builds on policy gradient methods for optimization of Markov decision processes. The protocol can be viewed as an extension of policy gradient methods to a context involving a team of agents optimizing aggregate performance through asynchronous distributed communication and computation. We establish that the dynamics of the protocol approximate the solution to an ordinary differential equation that follows the gradient of the performance objective.