TPC-E is a new OLTP benchmark recently approved by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). In this paper, we compare TPC-E with the familiar TPCC benchmark in order to understand the behavior of the new TPC-E benchmark. In particular, we compare the I/O access patterns of the two benchmarks by analyzing two OLTP disk traces. We find that (i) TPC-E is more read intensive with a 9.7:1 I/O read to write ratio, while TPC-C sees a 1.9:1 read-to-write ratio; and (ii) although TPC-E uses pseudo-realistic data, TPC-E's I/O access pattern is as random as TPC-C. The latter suggests that like TPC-C, TPC-E can benefit from SSDs, which have superior random I/O support. To verify this, we replay both disk traces on an Intel X25-E SSD and see dramatic improvements for both TPC-C and TPC-E.


Mirroring the success of masked language models, vision-and-language counterparts like ViLBERT, LXMERT and UNITER have achieved state of the art performance on a variety of multimodal discriminative tasks like visual question answering and visual grounding. Recent work has also successfully adapted such models towards the generative task of image captioning. This begs the question: Can these models go the other way and generate images from pieces of text? Our analysis of a popular representative from this model family - LXMERT - finds that it is unable to generate rich and semantically meaningful imagery with its current training setup. We introduce X-LXMERT, an extension to LXMERT with training refinements including: discretizing visual representations, using uniform masking with a large range of masking ratios and aligning the right pre-training datasets to the right objectives which enables it to paint. X-LXMERT's image generation capabilities rival state of the art generative models while its question answering and captioning abilities remains comparable to LXMERT. Finally, we demonstrate the generality of these training refinements by adding image generation capabilities into UNITER to produce X-UNITER.


Rating systems play an important role in competitive sports and games. They provide a measure of player skill, which incentivizes competitive performances and enables balanced match-ups. In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian rating system for contests with many participants. It is widely applicable to competition formats with discrete ranked matches, such as online programming competitions, obstacle courses races, and some video games. The simplicity of our system allows us to prove theoretical bounds on robustness and runtime. In addition, we show that the system aligns incentives: that is, a player who seeks to maximize their rating will never want to underperform. Experimentally, the rating system rivals or surpasses existing systems in prediction accuracy, and computes faster than existing systems by up to an order of magnitude.


Adaptor protein 180 (AP180) and its homolog, clathrin assembly lymphoid myeloid leukemia protein (CALM), are closely related proteins that play important roles in clathrin-mediated endocytosis. Here, we present the structure of the NH2-terminal domain of CALM bound to phosphatidylinositol-4,5- bisphosphate [PtdIns(4,5)P2] via a lysine-rich motif. This motif is found in other proteins predicted to have domains of similar structure (for example, Huntingtin interacting protein 1). The structure is in part similar to the epsin NH2-terminal (ENTH) domain, but epsin lacks the PtdIns(4,5)P2-binding site. Because AP180 could bind to PtdIns(4,5)P2 and clathrin simultaneously, it may serve to tether clathrin to the membrane. This was shown by using purified components and a budding assay on preformed lipid monolayers. In the presence of AP180, clathrin lattices formed on the monolayer. When AP2 was also present, coated pits were formed.


Regulatory approach to the right to abortion in Europe is diverse and basically related to the issue of when the right to life begins and how this question is reflected in national legislation. Such an approach and diversity is tolerated by the European Court of Human Rights, but only if some specific standards and criteria formulated in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights are reflected in national legislation. Research of the Lithuanian legal acts conducted in the light of the jurisprudence of the Court shows that they are not in accordance with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the solutions are therefore suggested. The aim of the article is to systematically analyse the Lithuanian legal acts regulating issues of abortion and to identify the existing problems and provide suggestions as to how to solve those problems with the help of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in abortion cases. Analysis of the Lithuanian legal acts reveals that the existing legal regulation and practice is confusing and ambiguous. Abortion questions are regulated in Lithuania by means of secondary legislation, namely by order of the Health Minister which is more than 15 years old, and the classification of diseases dangerous to woman's health and life is based on international classification that is invalid. The order is not in reconciled with the Lithuanian criminal law. Some other ambiguities and problems are identified in the article. Abortion on a woman's request in Lithuania is possible by the end of the 12 week of pregnancy and during the entire pregnancy, if it causes danger to woman's health and life. The Lithuanian legislator requires that both conditions – danger to woman's health and life – are met in order to terminate pregnancy what is unnecessary and sometimes even confusing. The author suggests providing two separate bases for abortion – danger to woman's life or health. Foetus problems – if a foetus is irreversibly damaged or suffering from an incurable life-threatening disease, it is not a separate basis for abortion in Lithuania, however those abnormalities of the foetus are related to the health and life of a pregnant woman. In the opinion of the author, looking into the practice of the other EU countries, it is better to provide a separate ground for abortion because of abnormalities of the foetus. The basic problem in Lithuania that is similar in Poland and in Ireland is that there is no clear procedure in case a pregnant woman is not satisfied with the decision of the medical commission regarding the question of her abortion or if the opinion of members of the commission is diverse – no time guidance or appeal institution is provided.


We consider the class of voting by committees to be used by a society to collectively choose a subset from a given set of objects. We offer a simple criterion to compare two voting by committees without dummy agents according to their manipulability. This criterion is based on the set-inclusion relationships between the two corresponding pairs of sets of objects, those at which each agent is decisive and those at which each agent is vetoer. We show that the binary relation "to be as manipulable as" endows the set of equivalence classes of anonymous voting by committees (i.e., voting by quotas) with a complete upper semilattice structure, whose supremum is the equivalence class containing all voting by quotas with the property that the quota of each object is strictly larger than one and strictly lower than the number of agents. Finally, we extend the comparability criterion to the full class of all voting by committees.


European eels (Anguilla anguilla) undertake spawning migrations of more than 5000 km from continental Europe and North Africa to frontal zones in the Sargasso Sea. Subsequently, the larval offspring are advected by large-scale eastward ocean currents towards continental waters. However, the Sargasso Sea is oligotrophic, with generally low plankton biomass, and the feeding biology of eel larvae has so far remained a mystery, hampering understanding of this peculiar life history. DNA barcoding of gut contents of 61 genetically identified A. anguilla larvae caught in the Sargasso Sea showed that even the smallest larvae feed on a striking variety of plankton organisms, and that gelatinous zooplankton is of fundamental dietary importance. Hence, the specific plankton composition seems essential for eel larval feeding and growth, suggesting a linkage between eel survival and regional plankton productivity. These novel insights into the prey of Atlantic eels may furthermore facilitate eel larval rearing in aquaculture, which ultimately may replace the unsustainable use of wild-caught glass eels.


This thesis is situated within three main developments within social and cultural
geography concerned with the practices and spaces of consumption, the corporeal turn
as a means to embody geographical knowledges and the role of clothing in the
materialisation of bodies. The main intention of this thesis, therefore, is that it acts as a
means of animating theoretical articulations of the body with in-depth empirical work
(individual and group interviews and accompanied shopping) concerned with women's
embodied experiences of clothing consumption. Therefore, the practices of consumption
form a vehicle through which a detailed account of the intricacies of female embodiment
can be discerned.
Female embodied subjectivity is made sense of through post-structural work on the
(female) body which works against dualistic and static understandings of embodiment to
highlight the fluid and messy constitution of subjectivity (Grosz 1994). Empirical
articulations of female consuming bodies focuses on what this subjectivity looks/ feels/
sounds like, through elaborating upon the tension between material and discursive
bodies, the ability of bodies to co-produce each other (including my own), and
identifying a need to move beyond understanding the body as a presence which must be
materially there to 'matter'. Instead, this account of female corporeality presents a more
nuanced account of how women experience their bodies and thus, the role that
theoretical bodies have for making sense of these embodied experiences.
Female embodied subjectivity is discussed as, what I have termed, 'bodily doings'. These
are Slimming, Sizing, Zoning and Looking and are presented as independent yet related
theoretically annotated empirical accounts of female embodiment. Through these
'bodily doings', I will highlight how the female body figures in accounts contemporary
consumption beyond a victim/resistance dichotomy, rethink the typology of flesh in
order to unsettle categories of bodies such as big and small, focus on the potential for the
matter of female bodies, such as flab, for understanding women's experiences with their
own materiality and re-orientate debates about 'body image' and what it means for
women to look (at themselves and each other) and be looked at.
In a sense this thesis has no closure, and instead, concludes highlighting the
potentialities that this thesis has for empiricalising female embodied subjectivity in its
inherent fluidity and indeterminacy and emphasises the importance of situating 'the
bod)" as a place to theorise from and work with rather than upon, in order to get at
what is too often uncritically posited as "the geograph)' closest in'.


A general methodology is described in which policyholder behaviour is decoupled from the pricing of a variable annuity based on the cost of hedging it, yielding two sequences of weakly coupled systems of partial differential equations (PDEs): the pricing and utility systems. The utility systems are used to generate policyholder withdrawal behaviour, which is in turn fed into the pricing systems as a means to determine the cost of hedging the contract. This approach allows us to incorporate the effects of utility-based pricing and factors such as taxation. As a case study, we consider the Guaranteed Lifelong Withdrawal and Death Benefits (GLWDB) contract. The pricing and utility systems for the GLWDB are derived under the assumption that the underlying asset follows a Markov regime-switching process. An implicit PDE method is used to solve both systems in tandem. We show that for a large class of utility functions, the two systems preserve homogeneity, allowing us to decrease the dimensionality of solutions. We also show that the associated control for the GLWDB is bang-bang, under which the work required to compute the optimal strategy is significantly reduced. We extend this result to provide the reader with sufficient conditions for a bang-bang control for a general variable annuity with a countable number of events (e.g. discontinuous withdrawals). Homogeneity and bang-bangness yield significant reductions in complexity and allow us to rapidly generate numerical solutions. Results are presented which demonstrate the sensitivity of the hedging expense to various parameters. The costly nature of the death benefit is documented. It is also shown that for a typical contract, the fee required to fund the cost of hedging calculated under the assumption that the policyholder withdraws at the contract rate is an appropriate approximation to the fee calculated assuming optimal consumption.


Extensive tidal flats and shallow waters used to exist in Mikawa Bay. About 17% of them have been lost by land reclamation, etc. It is known that deterioration of water purification ability due to the loss of many tidal flats and shallow waters has caused various environmental problems such as red tide, oxygen-depleted water and so on. In order to make navigation safer, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MLIT) dredged Nakayama Waterway at the mouth of Mikawa Bay between 1998 and 2004. The MLIT and Aichi Prefecture are jointly created tidal flats and shallow waters by the dredged materials in environmental rehabilitation inside Mikawa Bay. In the districts of created tidal flats and shallow waters, monitoring surveys have been conducted on environmental conditions such as water quality, sediment quality, and benthos. Here, we report on the monitoring results of tidal flat creation utilizing dredged sand in the Mito and Nishiura districts at the innermost part of Mikawa Bay. From the second year after the creation of the tidal flat, bivalves such as Ruditapes philippinarum and Mactra chinensis increased. The recovery of benthos, in particular, is likely to be due to the reduction of oxygen-depleted water as a result of the creation of the shallow site. Improvement of water purification ability is expected due to the increase of bivalve shellfish, which has high water purification ability.


Book synopsis: A new generation of archaeologists has thrown down a challenge to post-processual theory, arguing that characterizing material symbols as arbitrary overlooks the material character and significance of artifacts. This volume showcases the significant departure from previous symbolic approaches that is underway in the discipline. It brings together key scholars advancing a variety of cutting edge approaches, each emphasizing an understanding of artifacts and materials not in terms of symbols but relationally, as a set of associations that compose people's understanding of the world. Authors draw on a diversity of intellectual sources and case studies, paving a dynamic road ahead for archaeology as a discipline and theoretical approaches to material culture.


The center of the IS field is presented as a market of ideas, an intellectual exchange related to the design and management of information technologies in organized human enterprise. In this view, the IS field is a loosely coupled system operating through weak social ties across intellectual communities. A loosely coupled system can operate towards contradictory goals of both plasticity and stability in the search for new research opportunities and generation of valid knowledge. The market of ideas allows reconciliation of rigor and relevance, technical and social, design and explanation. It lowers the barriers of established disciplinary regimes and institutions, and facilitates scholarship in fields where conditions change quickly. It helps to balance exploration and exploitation in an effort to avoid competency traps. Limitations of the metaphor are considered.


This paper argues that a cable operator with sufficient market power in the downstream multi-channel video programming distribution (MVPD) market can deny access to unaffiliated programmers, resulting in an upstream programming rival's exit or impaired dynamic efficiency. Further, market dominance by cable operators may harm consumers of video programming through higher prices and less choice in the downstream MVPD market. The reason is that as unaffiliated video programming becomes affiliated programming, the latter is then withheld from rival MVPDs. This analysis is then applied to the recent acquisition of Adelphia by Comcast and Time Warner.


This volume addresses the role of communicative interaction in driving various dimensions of second language development from the perspective of Vygotskian sociocultural psychology. Emphasizing the dialectical relationship between the external-social world and individual mental functioning, the chapters delve into a wide range of topics illustrating how the social and the individual are united in interaction. Themes include psychological and human mediation, joint action, negotiation for meaning, the role of first language use, embodied and nonverbal behaviors, and interactional competencies. Theoretical discussions and key concepts are reinforced and illustrated with detailed qualitative analyses of interaction in a variety of second language contexts. Each chapter also includes pedagogical recommendations. Supplemental materials or 'data sessions' that engage the readers with the themes presented in the book through sample analytic exercises are included, while videos have been made available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lllt.44.video .


This paper considers how health economists can assist nurse managers, using the concepts and tools of economic evaluation. We aim to clarify these and also explode some of the myths about economic evaluation and its role in health care decision-making. Economic evaluation techniques compare alternative courses of action in terms of their costs and consequences. There are four principal methods; cost-minimization, cost-effectiveness, cost-utility and cost-benefit analysis, all of which synthesize costs and outcomes, at different levels of outcome. Economic evaluation is an intrinsic part of national decision-making about the efficient provision of effective treatments and services, and increasingly, organizational matters. In the UK, such technology evaluation is disseminated in guidelines from the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE), having a top-down impact on the nurse manager. But economic evaluation is increasingly relevant to the nurse manager at local level, through newer techniques such as Programme Budgeting Marginal Analysis (PBMA), which facilitates explicit, transparent decisions, from the bottom-up. Nurse managers need to weigh up competing demands on resources and decide in ways which maximize health gain. Economic evaluation can help here because it presents evidence to challenge or support existing allocations, and provides a systematic framework to analyse health care decisions. In the current context of competition for scarce resources, we suggest that nurse managers need to embrace these techniques, or be marginalized from the resource allocation process.


This research focused on the development of instructional materials for music education from Zilizopendwa (early Kenyan popular music of 1945 - 1975) with the hope of providing a socio-cultural education. The study sought to: establish musical and extra-musical content of Zilizopendwa; identify features of Zilizopendwa that are practical for use in education; develop an index of song material; each with derivable music concepts; and generate learning materials from Zilizopendwa useable for teaching music concepts and skills. The study was conducted in Nairobi and Nyanza provinces. The study population included music teachers, popular musicians and recordings from era under study. Purposive and stratified sampling techniques yielded respondents for the study. Data collection instruments included opinionnaire, observation and analysis schedules. Qualitative data was analysed through the descriptive method that involved the transcription of songs into staff notation for analysis in reference to musical concepts and translation of text into English to facilitate understanding of verbal message. The study authenticates the suitability of Zilizopendwa in providing materials functional in music education. Through the analysis, an instructional model was created that validates the genre's applicability for music instruction. The study further generated a collection of song material for classroom use. A song index was developed to guide the selection of this song material for the implementation of various segments of the music curriculum. Finally, in light of the study findings, the recommendations made for possible implementations by relevant authorities included the need for: teaching strategies that involve active experiences with the music; socio-cultural sensitive education policies, methodologies, strategies' and resources; equipping teachers with contemporary teaching strategies and techniques and the incorporation of more socio-cultural teaching materials and resources in music education.


The sorptivity (S) of a porous medium quantifies the effect of capillarity and surface forces on liquid infiltration. For infiltration into initially dry soil, S is dependent on three system attributes: the infiltrating liquid properties, the soil properties, and the maximum liquid content behind the infiltration front, θm Through the use of scaling analyses, a singular, dimensionless value of intrinsic sorptivity (S*) and an accompanying dimensionless Boltzmann transformation (Φ*) were previously derived that are independent of these system attributes for Miller‐similar materials. The existence of S* for different infiltrating liquid properties alone were tested by performing a series of experiments that examined the infiltration of either water or the aliphatic oil Soltrol 220 into an initially dry silica sand. This study extended that work to include testing of intrinsic sorptivity for different values of θm and different Miller‐similar soils. A series of 57 experiments examined the infiltration of water or Soltrol 220 into two Miller‐similar dry silica sands across a range of θm values. The results of these experiments, together with the previous ones, support the existence of S* for the experimental conditions investigated. A singular value of S* can be used to estimate sorptivity values for Miller‐similar media for a range of conditions. Likewise, Φ* can be used to generate a similarity profile for normalized liquid content in Miller‐similar media for different liquid types and θm values.


Books applicable to the broad field of program evaluation are reviewed. Books may be reviewed singly or in groups to illuminate similarities and differences in intent, philosophy, and usefulness. Persons with suggestions of books to be reviewed or those who wish to submit a review should contact Dr. Byron R. Burnham, Evaluation Specialist (Cooperative Extension Service, Utah State University, Logan, UT 84322- 4900 ; phone: 801-750-1637) for specific instructions. In general, a review of an individual book should not exceedfour double-spaced typewritten pages; groups of books may require additional length.


The organization of myosin in the fibroblast lamellum was studied by correlative fluorescence and electron microscopy after a novel procedure to reveal its underlying morphology. An X-rhodamine analog of conventional smooth muscle myosin (myosin II) that colocalized after microinjection with endogenous myosin was used to trace myosin distribution in living fibroblasts. Then, the same cells were examined by EM of platinum replicas. To visualize the structural arrangement of myosin, other cytoskeletal fibrillar structures had to be removed: microtubules were depolymerized by nocodazole treatment of the living cells before injection of myosin; continued nocodazole treatment also induced the intermediate filaments to concentrate near the nucleus, thus removing them from the lamellar region; actin filaments were removed after lysis of the cells by incubation of the cytoskeletons with recombinant gelsolin. Possible changes in myosin organization caused by this treatment were examined by fluorescence microscopy. No significant differences in myosin distribution patterns between nocodazole-treated and control cells were observed. Cell lysis and depletion of actin also did not induce reorganization of myosin as was shown by direct comparison of myosin distribution in the same cells in the living state and after gelsolin treatment. EM of the well-spread, peripheral regions of actin-depleted cytoskeletons revealed a network of bipolar myosin mini-filaments, contracting each other at their terminal, globular regions. The morphology of this network corresponded well to the myosin distribution observed by fluorescence microscopy. A novel mechanism of cell contraction by folding of the myosin filament network is proposed.


The scientific intention of this work was to synthesize and characterize new bidentate, tridentate and multidentate ligands and to apply them in heterogenous catalysis. For each type of the ligands, new methods of synthesis were developed. Starting from 1,1'-(pyridine-2,6-diyl)diethanone and dimethylpyridine-2,6-dicarboxylate different bispyrazolpyridines were
synthesized and novel ruthenium complexes of the type (L)(NNN)RuCl2 could be obtained. The complexes with L = triphenylphosphine turned out to be highly efficient
catalyst precursors for the transfer hydrogenation of aromatic ketones. Introduction of a butyl group in the 5-positions of the pyrazoles leads to a pronounced increase of catalytic activity.
To find a method for the synthesis of bispyrimidinepyridines, different reactants and condition were applied and it was found that these tridentate ligands can be obtained by mixing and grinding the tetraketone with guanidinium carbonate and silica, which plays the role of a catalyst in this ring closing reaction.
The bidentate 2-amino-4-(2-pyridinyl)pyrimidines were synthesized from different substrates according to the desired substituent on the pyrimidine ring.
Reacting these bidentate ligands with the ruthenium(II) precursor [(η6-cymene)Ru(Cl)(μ
2-Cl)]2 gave cationic ruthenium(II) complexes of the type [(η6-cymene)Ru(Cl)(adpm)]Cl (adpm = chelating 2-amino-4-(2-yridinyl)pyrimidine ligand). Stirring the freshly prepared complexes with either NaBPh4, NaBF4 or KPF6, the chloride anion was exchanged against other coordinating anions (BF4-, PF6-, BPh4-).Some of these ruthenium complexes have shown very special activities in the transfer hydrogenation of ketones by reacting them in the absence of the base. This led to detailed investigations on the mechanism of this reaction. According to the activities and with the help
of ESI-MS experiments and DFT calculations, a mechanism was proposed for the transfer hydrogenation of acetophenone in the absence of the base. It shows that in the absence of the base, a C-H bond activation at the pyrimidine ring should occur to activate the catalyst.
The palladium complexes of bidentate N,N ligands were examined in coupling reactions. As expected, they did not show very special activities.
Multidentate ligands, having pyrimidine groups as relatively soft donors for late transition metals and simultaneously possessing a binding position for a hard Lewis-acid, could be obtained using the new synthesized bidentate and tridentate ligands.


ABSTRACT This article reviews discoveries that emerged from the author's MINDtouch media research project, in which a mobile device was repurposed for visual and non-verbal communication through gestural and visual mobile expressivity. The work revealed new insights from emerging mobile media and participatory performance practices. The author contextualizes her media research on mobile video and networked performance alongside relevant discourse on presence and the embodiment of technology. From the research, an intimate, phenomenological and visual form of mobile expression has emerged. This form has reconfigured the communication device from voice and text/SMS only to a visual and synesthetic mode for deeper expression.


The recently proposed massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) system has been shown to be capable of translating over 100 languages to and from English within a single model (Aharoni, Johnson, and Firat 2019). Its improved translation performance on low resource languages hints at potential cross-lingual transfer capability for downstream tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the cross-lingual effectiveness of representations from the encoder of a massively multilingual NMT model on 5 downstream classification and sequence labeling tasks covering a diverse set of over 50 languages. We compare against a strong baseline, multilingual BERT (mBERT) (Devlin et al. 2018), in different cross-lingual transfer learning scenarios and show gains in zero-shot transfer in 4 out of these 5 tasks.


The major wheat-producing countries have heterogeneous and fragile agro climatic surroundings but frequently restraining wheat yield and quality losses are predominant under heat and drought prone agriculture exclusively when both stresses occur in blend, which looms the food security globally. However, many suggested examples are available in these countries for the mitigation of these two stresses by using different conventional and modern improvement and agronomic approaches. In addition to these approaches, morphological, physiological, anatomical, biochemical, phenological, and physiochemical vicissitudes, which trigged during these stresses, have also been elucidated. There complete deliberation in combination for wheat improvement is still a contest, but a win-win option is a holistic attitude in future.


Trigeminal neuralgia (TN) is defined as sudden, usually unilateral, severe, brief, stabbing, and recurrent pain in the distribution of one or more branches of the fifth cranial nerve. The pain is generally abrupt, severe, and can pose a significant impact on the quality of life. The etiology of TN is not always clear, and therefore, treatment can be challenging and multimodal. Pharmacotherapy is generally the first-line treatment though unsuccessful in over a third of patients requiring minimally invasive modality. We report the case of a young patient with refractory and debilitating TN with failed four sessions of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) in addition to the regular use of oral medications. Our treatment included simultaneous RFA and phenol injection with complete symptomatic resolution within fortnight after intervention. In conclusion, the treatment of TN poses a clinical challenge. Although RFA or phenol injections are recognized invasive treatment modalities, we have proven that simultaneous use of both therapies at the same time is safe and effective treatment option for refractory TN with failed previous multi-modal therapy.


§ 1. INTRODUCTION Environmental law, as it has evolved over the past thirty-five years, is primarily aimed at those who routinely dispose of wastes to the air, land, and water.1 Environmental law usually requires dischargers to obtain a permit that limits their emissions or effluent discharges.2 Enforcement programs are used to ensure that pollution releases stay within these legal limits.3 However, public health is also threatened by discharges that are not controlled by the laws aimed at routine releases or planned waste disposal practices. Nonroutine releases, whether accidental, negligent, or due to intentional conduct, are not as amenable to legal control as are routine releases. Therefore, nonroutine releases are subjected to different legal requirements involving notification, clean-up, and compensation programs.4 Such releases have received additional attention in the post-September 11, 2001, era because biological, chemical, and radiological weapons are primarily an air pollution threat. This Article focuses on the legal regimes established by federal environmental laws to deal with unpermitted releases. Notification requirements are especially important because owners or operators of a facility may be punished both for an unpermitted discharge and for the failure to report it.5 For the government, proving that an illegal discharge occurred can be more difficult than proving a failure to notify.6 In such circumstances, the notification requirements become an important part of the government's program to protect the public from unpermitted pollutant releases, especially in the case of air pollutant releases that disperse quickly.7 To avoid increased penalties, it is important for those responsible for unpermitted releases to notify the proper authorities in a timely fashion. §2. THE NATIONAL RESPONSE CENTER The National Response Center (NRC) is the national recipient, or "point of contact,"8 for federally mandated reports of "oil, chemical, radiological, biological, and etiological discharges into the environment anywhere in the United States and its territories."9 NRC is the operations and communications center for the National Response Team (NRT), which is the planning, policy-making, and coordinating organization for discharge incidents. NRT member agencies include the Environmental Protection Agency (chair), the U.S. Coast Guard (vice chair), and fourteen other federal departments and agencies.10 In addition, NRC distributes reported release information to any federal entity that has concluded a written agreement or understanding with NRC.11 NRC is also the contact point for activation of the NRT12 and provides facilities for the NRT to use in coordinating a national response action when required.13 The National oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (NCP) contains detailed provisions regarding NRC's duties and organizational structure.14 Coast Guard personnel and civilian employees staff NRC's operations center and provide callers with around-the-clock assistance and information services.15 When a telephone call or web-based notification is received, an NRC Duty Officer asks the caller a detailed set of standardized questions in order to obtain the maximum amount of available information concerning the incident.16 NRC personnel then enter information regarding releases to the environment directly into an online database (IRIS), where it is distributed electronically through the NRS.17 Within fifteen minutes of receiving a notification of a spill or release, NRC notifies the proper federal agency based on (1) the material involved; (2) the mode of transportation used; and (3) any injuries, damage, and fatalities incurred.18 Data collected by NRC is available to the general public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).19 NRC also makes its spill data available via the Internet.20 However, if the data is intended for use in a legal proceeding, a formal request must be mailed to the Coast Guard. …


The financial crisis of 2008 is blurring the lines between the State and the private sector. While painful, this process may facilitate a re-examination of the state action doctrine. This Article argues that corporations have for some time been increasingly taking on roles as pseudo-governmental actors without incurring the accountability to the people generally associated with state action. This is happening via new governance, and while the recent financial crisis may suggest that the problems associated with new governance are waning, the reality is that the corporate consolidations likely to follow in the wake of the downturn - together with the government's oft-stated desire to divest its bailout stakes in private companies as soon as possible - will result in even more powerful corporate actors with an even greater ability to govern. In this Article, I argue that there are at least four reasons why state action is present when private actors leverage state-granted limited liability to carry out this type of governance: First, the corporation does not exist without the State and the State derives significant benefits in exchange for granting corporate status. Second, the abuse of the corporate form for illegitimate governing is foreseeable and has been predicted since the 1800s, but state law nevertheless encourages this type of abuse by making shareholder wealth maximization the priority of corporate management and protecting those managers from personal liability via doctrines such as the business judgment rule. Third, the democratic process has arguably failed to keep the accumulation of corporate power in check and therefore it falls to the judiciary to rein in the abuse of that power. Fourth, to the extent that the arguments made in this Article constitute an expansion of current state action doctrine, such expansion is consistent with the history of that doctrine. Understanding state action under the Fourteenth Amendment to include new governance has wide-ranging implications, not least of which is the potential for increasing the degree to which international corporations may be held accountable for human rights violations.


Hypertension caused by chronic infusion of angiotensin II (Ang II) in experimental animals is likely to be mediated, at least in part, by an elevation of ongoing sympathetic nerve activity (SNA). However, the contribution of SNA relative to non‐neural mechanisms in mediating Ang II‐induced hypertension is an area of intense debate and remains unresolved. We hypothesize that sympathoexcitatory actions of Ang II are directly related to the level of dietary salt intake. To test this hypothesis, chronically instrumented rats were placed on a 0.1 (low), 0.4 (normal) or 2.0% NaCl diet (high) and, following a control period, administered Ang II (150 ng kg−1 min−1, s.c.) for 10–14 days. The hypertensive response to Ang II was greatest in rats on the high‐salt diet (Ang II–salt hypertension), which was associated with increased 'whole body' sympathetic activity as measured by noradrenaline spillover and ganglionic blockade. Indirect and direct measures of organ‐specific SNA revealed a distinct 'sympathetic signature' in Ang II–salt rats characterized by increased SNA to the splanchnic vascular bed, transiently reduced renal SNA and no change in SNA to the hindlimbs. Electrophysiological experiments indicate that increased sympathetic outflow in Ang II–salt rats is unlikely to involve activation of rostral ventrolateral medulla (RVLM) vasomotor neurons with barosensitive cardiac rhythmic discharge. Instead, another set of RVLM neurons that discharge in discrete bursts have exaggerated spontaneous activity in rats with Ang II–salt hypertension. Although their discharge is not cardiac rhythmic at resting levels of arterial pressure, it nevertheless appears to be barosensitive. Therefore, these burst‐firing RVLM neurons presumably serve a vasomotor function, consistent with their having axonal projections to the spinal cord. Bursting discharge of these neurons is respiratory rhythmic and driven by the respiratory network. Given that splanchnic SNA is strongly coupled to respiration, we hypothesize that enhanced central respiratory–vasomotor neuron coupling in the RVLM could be an important mechanism that contributes to exaggerated splanchnic sympathetic outflow in Ang II–salt hypertension. This hypothesis remains to be tested directly in future investigations.


Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are collections of wireless mobile devices with restricted broadcast range and resources, and no fixed infrastructure. Communication is achieved by relaying data along appropriate routes that are dynamically discovered and maintained through collaboration between the nodes. Discovery of such routes is a major task, both from efficiency and security points of view. Recently, a security model tailored to the specific requirements of MANETs was introduced by Acs, Buttyan, and Vajda. Among the novel characteristics of this security model is that it promises security guarantee under concurrent executions, a feature of crucial practical implication for this type of distributed computation. A novel route discovery algorithm called endairA was also proposed, together with a claimed security proof within the same model. In this paper, we show that the security proof for the route discovery algorithm endairA is flawed, and moreover, this algorithm is vulnerable to a hidden channel attack. We also analyze the security framework that was used for route discovery and argue that composability is an essential feature for ubiquitous applications. We conclude by discussing some of the major security challenges for route discovery in MANETs.


Modern coarse-grained deltas are common in tectonically active coastal zones. However, the stratigraphic architecture and evolution of these deltas in relation to allogenic forcing are poorly understood compared with fine-grained deltas, mainly because of short vertical exposure in outcrop and lack of detailed ages. This paper investigates the coarse-grained delta in the lower reaches of the Tenryu River developed at an island-arc collision coast through analyses of radiocarbon-dated core sediments and borehole data. The vertical successions of the proximal and distal part of the delta constitute basal, coarse-grained braided-river deposits overlain by fine-grained sand and mud accumulated under temporary marine influence. The fine-grained deposits in turn are covered mainly with coarse-grained braided-river deposits in the proximal part and upper shoreface to beach sand and gravel in the distal part. At the apex of the delta, in contrast, the fine-grained deposits are almost absent and thick gravels dominate.

Allogenic forcing, especially the rate of glacioeustatic sea-level change, has influenced the accumulation rates and stacking pattern of the delta. Most of the sediment may have been transported to the deep sea via a canyon, and deposition has been minimal under the present subaerial delta before 14 ka. Although aggradation almost equivalent to rapid sea-level rise (∼ 15 mm/yr) is found at the proximal part between ca. 11.5 and 8 ka, even with significant basin sediment yield and supply, transgression occurred and gravel supply to the coast waned. Notably, only 30% of the sediment yield from the upstream catchment might have been trapped under the present delta plain during that period. This means that large amounts of sediment were transported farther offshore or alongshore. In contrast, slow aggradation in the proximal part and apex of the delta accompanied by progradation in the distal part might become dominant during the past 8 ka, when the rate of sea-level rise decreased to ∼ 10 mm/yr. A similar response was also observed at other Holocene fluvio-deltaic systems, although they are very different in their geological setting such as sediment supply, water discharge, tectonic movement, and gradient of river and shelf. The results imply that the rate of sea-level rise and its change have a greater significance on coastal depositional systems than other factors such as fluvial sediment supply. This study contributes to an improved understanding of evolution of modern and ancient coarse-grained deltas and reconstruction of sea-level change from geological data.


We propose a method called ideal regression for approximating an arbitrary system of polynomial equations by a system of a particular type. Using techniques from approximate computational algebraic geometry, we show how we can solve ideal regression directly without resorting to numerical optimization. Ideal regression is useful whenever the solution to a learning problem can be described by a system of polynomial equations. As an example, we demonstrate how to formulate Stationary Subspace Analysis (SSA), a source separation problem, in terms of ideal regression, which also yields a consistent estimator for SSA. We then compare this estimator in simulations with previous optimization-based approaches for SSA.


Despite the well-known gains from trade, trade liberalization is politically one of the most contentious actions that a government can take. We propose and formalize a new argument, having to do with uncertainty, which is complementary to the usual explanations for why that is the case; many individuals will simply not know how they will fare under trade reform, and this can reduce support for a reform which would have been otherwise popular, even in the absence of risk aversion. We show that reforms that would have received adequate popular support ex post (i.e., which once enacted will last) may fail to carry the day ex ante, because of uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses. Moreover, the role of uncertainty in determining the outcomes is not symmetric, since reforms that are initially rejected will continue to be so in the future while reforms that are initially accepted may find themselves reversed over time. We discuss empirical illustrations drawn from the experiences of South Korea, Chile and Turkey to provide support for the argument.


In this study, the question "According to PISA 2009 data, what is the situation of the school policies and practices at upper secondary schools in Turkey?" was answered. Study group included 150 principals at upper secondary schools, which were taken into PISA 2009 Turkey sample. The data related to school policies and practices used in this study were derived from OECD database of which were the responses of school principals to the questions placed in the part F of the PISA 2009 school questionnaire. The dimensions of study are as follows: The considered factors in admitting students to school; grouping students; the reasons for transferring students; using assessment of student data in declaration/transparency and monitoring-developing; the methods for monitoring the practice of teachers; using assessment of student data in evaluation of teachers' and principal's performance. Using data from the PISA 2009, the findings suggest that equity is not taken sufficiently into account for school policies and practices, and administrative accountability is used predominantly rather than professional accountability.


Lori Beth Schneider, M.D. Virgilio D. Salanga, M.S., M.D. Two patients are described as examples of a benign acute cerebellar syndrome. Each had abnormal ocular oscillations and truncal ataxia after an upper respiratory infection. One had myoclonus of the head and neck; the other had ataxic dysarthria. Each exhibited a lymphocytic pleocytosis of the cerebrospinal fluid. Historically similar cases have been identified as benign postviral encephalitis. No viral etiology was identified in these two patients or the reference cases. No other underlying pathology proposed for this syndrome has been proven in these two cases. In addition, the physical findings of each patient are most closely associated with isolated cerebellar dysfunction. Therefore, the authors prefer to label these cases, benign acute cerebellitis.


What if, even in the heart of a densely developed city, people could have meaningful encounters with nature? While parks, street trees, and green roofs are increasingly appreciated for their technical services like storm water reduction, from a biophilic viewpoint, they also facilitate experiences that contribute to better physical and mental health: natural elements in play areas can lessen children's symptoms of ADHD and adults who exercise in natural spaces can experience greater reductions in anxiety and blood pressure. The Handbook of Biophilic City Planning & Design offers practical advice and inspiration for ensuring nature in the city is more than infrastructure, that it also creates an emotional connection to the earth and promotes well-being among urban residents. Divided into six parts, the Handbook begins by introducing key ideas, literature, and theory about biophilic urbanism; followed by chapters that highlight urban biophilic innovations in more than a dozen global cities; the final part concludes with lessons on how to advance an agenda for urban biophilia and an extensive list of resources.As the most comprehensive reference on the emerging field of biophilic urbanism, the Handbook is essential reading for students and practitioners looking to place nature at the core of their planning and design ideas and encourage what pre-eminent biologist E. O. Wilson described as "the innate emotional connection of humans to all living things."


We present the result of our investigations on electrical fixing in Sr0.60Ba0.40Nb2O6 (SEN:60). Two electrical fixing techniques which result in very high diffraction efficiencies are discussed and compared to previous publications on electrical fixing. Constant and varying depoling voltages around the coercive field are applied along the c-axis during and after holographic recording in the crystal. The holographic grating is written with two mutually coherent, ordinarily polarized Argon beams at 514 nm. The diffraction efficiency is monitored with an extraordinarily polarized, low power He-Ne beam. The writing beams are expanded to fill the crystal to improve the stability of the reversed domains. The diffraction efficiency in the recording stage is more than an order of magnitude higher than that of a grating written without an external field. We achieve diffraction efficiencies as high as 95% with a gradually increasing negative voltage, while a positive voltage produces a revealed grating with a diffraction efficiency of up to 15%.


Summary: At the request of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, two wilderness study areas in southern Utah (fig. 1) were studied in order to appraise their identified mineral resources and assess their potential mineral resources. The areas studied are the Cockscomb (UT-040-275) Wilderness Study Area, 5,100 acres (8 square miles), and the Wahweap (UT-040-248) Wilderness Study Area, 70,380 acres (110 square miles), both in Kane County, Utah. In this report the areas studied are called "wilderness study areas," simply "study areas," or "Cockscomb area" or "Wahweap area," as appropriate. The Cockscomb area (fig. 1) lies along the steeply east-dipping East Kaibab monocline, and the Wahweap area, farther to the east, consists of flat-lying but gently folded rocks. These areas adjoin the Paria-Hackberry Wilderness Study Area (UT-040-247) to the west.


Disentangled representation learning finds compact, independent and easy-to-interpret factors of the data. Learning such has been shown to require an inductive bias, which we explicitly encode in a generative model of images. Specifically, we propose a model with two latent spaces: one that represents spatial transformations of the input data, and another that represents the transformed data. We find that the latter naturally captures the intrinsic appearance of the data. To realize the generative model, we propose a Variationally Inferred Transformational Autoencoder (VITAE) that incorporates a spatial transformer into a variational autoencoder. We show how to perform inference in the model efficiently by carefully designing the encoders and restricting the transformation class to be diffeomorphic. Empirically, our model separates the visual style from digit type on MNIST, separates shape and pose in images of human bodies and facial features from facial shape on CelebA.


The new Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act (2004) offers local education agencies the choice of using a student's response to intervention (RTI) as a major component to determine eligibility for special education under the category of specific learning disabilities (SLD). Using a RTI model, it is not expected that different students will be identified as SLD than those identified historically. For more than 25 years, accumulated evidence has strongly suggested that most students labeled SLD have been those students with severe educational needs (i.e., have performance discrepancies compared to students in their own communities), regardless of the stated eligibility criterion (e.g., ability–achievement discrepancies). What is unique about RTI is that educational need is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for SLD identification. Students also must not be responding to high-quality general education instruction (i.e., receiving educational benefit). This article first explores the scientific evidence for operationalizing the educational need component using curriculum-based measurement. Second, the use of curriculum-based measurement to assess RTI is presented not only within a special education eligibility process, but also for universal screening and progress monitoring for all students within a three-tier problem-solving model. The article concludes with important research questions within RTI.


In this new CEPS Commentary, a team of climate and energy specialists argue that a reliable system of climate and energy governance in the EU would certainly need to go beyond the issues that are identified in the 2030 framework for climate and energy and the Energy Union. In their view, such a system would consist of no less than seven complex areas, which they proceed to outline and discuss their interrelationships. To ensure that these areas are dealt with in an integrated manner, they recommend that the European Commission creates a roadmap – possibly in the form of a Communication – that would indicate the direction, interactions and a timeline for their adoption.


Indium-tin oxide (ITO) films have been deposited by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) to achieve low resistivity and high transmittance in visible region. Important parameters governing the growth of ITO films, which include laser wavelength, substrate tempera - ture, and the background gas pressure, are discussed. By utilizing the energetic plasma in laser ablation of an ITO target, relatively low substrate temperature growth has been demonstrated. Room temperature deposition enables ITO films to be deposited on the polymer substrate. In addition, deposition in different background gases promotes the catalyst-free growth of nanostructured ITO films. In particular, deposition in Ar or He at optimized pressures enables the growth of highly crystalline ITO nanostructures, which include nanorods and nanowires due to the self-catalyzed growth from the plasma plume. The conditions which allow the pulsed laser deposition of ITO thin films and the growth of nanostructured ITO are reviewed and discussed.


A central biological process in all living organisms is gene translation. Developing a deeper understanding of this complex process may have ramifications to almost every biomedical discipline. Reuveni et al. recently proposed a new computational model of gene translation called the Ribosome Flow Model (RFM). In this paper, we consider a particular case of this model, called the Homogeneous Ribosome Flow Model (HRFM). From a biological viewpoint, this corresponds to the case where the transition rates of all the coding sequence codons are identical. This regime has been suggested recently based on experiments in mouse embryonic cells. We consider the steady-state distribution of the HRFM. We provide formulas that relate the different parameters of the model in steady state. We prove the following properties: 1) the ribosomal density profile is monotonically decreasing along the coding sequence; 2) the ribosomal density at each codon monotonically increases with the initiation rate; and 3) for a constant initiation rate, the translation rate monotonically decreases with the length of the coding sequence. In addition, we analyze the translation rate of the HRFM at the limit of very high and very low initiation rate, and provide explicit formulas for the translation rate in these two cases. We discuss the relationship between these theoretical results and biological findings on the translation process.


Making a television programming genuinely educational for young children is a difficult endeavour; hampered primarily by the mass audience paradigm of the television broadcast. The rollout of interactive television services, such as 'red button', are a seemingly natural fit for enhancing the educational impact of children's television, through providing the possibility of a reciprocal interaction in line with contemporary thinking on children's education. However, to date, there is little evidence of interactive television applications for children that represent a compelling model of best practice.

This thesis tested the assumption that interactive television can significantly increase comprehension in young children, ages 4 and 5, when compared to comprehension results gained from non-interactive programming. This was accomplished in three phases of primary research; Exploratory, Formative, and Evaluative. In Phase 1, a series of interviews with children's interactive television producers were undertaken in the UK and USA in an attempt to identify the elements of interactive television for children that amount to best practice. Though there is little academic literature about the affect of interactive television on children's learning, this phase attempted to draw insight from the creators of children's content in an effort to fill this important gap, and arrive at an understanding of both iTV best practice and the commercial barriers that hamper this approach from being realised. The feedback was collated and analysed, and a set of best practice conventions were produced. The results also found that best practice in children's iTV is hampered significantly by the cost of development and transmission of interactivity, whether by satellite, cable, or broadband.

In Phase 2, this notion of best practice was adopted as the basis for the construction of an 'interactive construct'; a premise for how a children's interactive television programme might look if it was built from its inception with interactivity at its core. This construct was evaluated in at a set of preschool classes in Perth, Western Australia. 65 children were exposed to the programme, and data on the performance of the construct was gathered using an attention test, simple observation, and a drawing activity. It was found that the construct was highly engaging for young children, however one particular element was found to hinder their ability to negotiate the construct. The children were observed to be distracted at times when they switched between two simultaneous onscreen activities that bore no relation to each other. The outcome of the study was to recommend that concurrent activities must be contextually related to ensure that interacting participants are not isolated at times that viewers choose to switch streams.

Phase 3 incorporated the insight from Phase 1 and 2 into a final episode of programming for testing. An additional 'control' episode was created, in which the interactive elements were removed; leaving a linear programme. Finally, in response to cost concerns raised in Phase 1, an 'Interactive Stills' version was created, in which interactivity was in the form of a 'simple' execution; forsaking the rich video sequences for still screen images. The hypotheses under investigation were:

1. That the inclusion of interactivity in children's television programming significantly increases comprehension in children, ages 4 and 5, 7

2. That the use of 'simple' iTV production techniques does not significantly reduce this impact.
199 children ages 4 to 5 from randomly selected schools in Perth, Western Australia, were exposed to the stimulus. Children were randomly assigned to one of the three cells; (1) Control, (2) Interactive Video, and (3) Interactive Stills. Data was gathered using a paper comprehension test, and coding of both attention and engagement with the programming. Statistical analysis found that children exposed to the (2) Interactive Videos stimulus on average scored a statistically significant 23% higher on the comprehension test than those in the Control. It was also found that those in the (3) Interactive Stills sample also performed better than the Control group, and did not demonstrate significantly lower comprehension scores than the Interactive Video group. Children exposed to the Interactive Video did not pay more attention to the programming than the Control group; as such, data indicates that they extracted a higher yield of processing of the programme's educational outcomes. Behavioural measures indicated that this effect was a result of heightened expectations, and a more intellectual investment in the programming. The study arrived at a set of principles for successful production of interactive children's programming, and concluded that the incorporation of these principles can successfully increase comprehension of content in children's television.

It was concluded that this comprehension effect is not contingent upon production values; a critical sticking-point in the widespread rollout of iTV for children. As such,
the use of simple iTV programming, a fundamental cost-saving measure in the commercial children's programming industry, does not diminish the positive effects seen in this research.


One of the problems with designing new and untried applications, is the sheer effort needed to produce a testable prototype. Many projects get bogged down with production problems and hardware/software issues before they can even be tested for their basic functionality. This creates delays and frustrations within the project structure as well as creating unnecessary pressures on the project structure itself.

This is equally true for the two main types of prototype/application created in design research:
1. a potential new product
2. a viable test bed to test an hypothosis.

This paper investigates approaches, both practical and philosophical, to design processes and construction techniques that endeavour to bypass the most common pitfalls and stumbling blocks to a working prototype. In the main, the paper focuses on designing with 'Audio' as an effective tool for quick, effective and emotive prototyping. Practical examples, both successful and catastrophic, are used to illustrate these aspects. In specific we will be comparing two audio based games, Journey and Beowulf, looking at their respective weaknesses and strengths. These prototyping techniques are realised, in the main, through easily available tools and recording techniques, based on standard audio-visual techniques. This provides a neat fast-track to developing ideas into viable applications.

However while we can utilize a vast array of existing technologies to enable fast proto-typing, the most crucial element in successfully creating testbeds and bringing them before a test group is the intellectual approach to experiment design. Understanding the fundamental processes and isolating the essential questions the application is intended to answer has a direct bearing on our ability to channel available creative and productive energies with the maximum focus. Audio provides us with emotive tools highly suited to performing these kinds of functions.

The advantage of taking this approach is a quick, flexible and, not least, economic route to getting vital early answers to practical research problems in IT user-based projects.


The determinant of the credit risk of banks in a developing country have limited data to analyze and limited participation in literature. Determinants of credit risk are very important in order to define the non-performing loans (NPL) in Kosovo banking sys- tems. Even though banking system in Kosovo is the newest in region, it is comparable with banking systems to all places in regions (Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.). The main purpose of this paper is to classify some factors that influence credit risk in commercial banks in Kosovo. The research includes seven commercial banks for the period 2006–2015. Data analysis and interpretation are processed with Statistical Program for Social Sciences SPSS v.19.0. The effect of variations in the determinants of credit risk exposure is based on using a multivariate panel regression model. Our empirical results suggest that a significant relationship exists between credit risk and the following variables: Profitability (ROE and ROA), Inefficiency (IE), Loans to deposit ratio (LDR), Credit growth (CG) and Deposit rate (DR), while variables of Solvency (SR) and Credit rate (CR) are not statis- tically significant in terms of credit risk.


One reason why countries service their external debts is the fear that default might lead to shrinkage of international trade. If so, then creditors should systematically lend more to countries with which they share closer trade links. We develop a simple theoretical model to capture this intuition, then test and corroborate this idea.


Abstract Neuroleptic drugs are used in several mental disorders, but are suspected of causing oropharyngeal dysphagia, mainly in the elderly. Aim To study the effect of neuroleptic agents on swallowing of institutionalized older people. Material and method A cross sectional study of swallowing in 47 subjects that either used or did not use neuroleptic drugs. Bedside swallowing tests with foods of four different consistencies were carried out. Results There was no significant difference between the two groups. Users of neuroleptic medications showed a higher percentage of multiple swallowing while non-users had a higher percentage of oral food escape. Conclusion Neuroleptic agents alone do not affect the mechanism of swallowing in the elderly; nonetheless. Further studies with a larger number of individuals and specific swallowing tests are needed.


Traumatic extradural haematomas (EDHs) comprise 1 to 3% of all head trauma admissions. The availability of computed tomography has increased the diagnosis of extradural haematomas. From January 1,1986 to December 31,1994,4,553 patients with head injury were admitted to the Department of Neurosurgery, Izmir State HospitaL. Of 4,553 patients, 190 patients with surgically treated EDH were included in this study. There were 161 males (85%) and 29 females (15%). The ages of the patients ranged from 4 to 70 years (mean 28 years). Seventy percent of the patients were between 15 and 40 years of age. The overall mortality was 15.7% (30 patients). All deaths occurred in comatose patients, except for one case (p< 0.0001). Comatose state, presence of focal motor signs, respiratory irregularities and bradycardia, pupillary changes were determined as the bad prognostic factors. A midline shift greater than 10 mm, haematoma volume greater than 90 ml and haematoma thickness greater than 30 mm significanHy increased the mortality. The primary factor on outcome is Glasgow Coma Scale scores of the patients at the time of surgery. Therefore early surgery is crucial in the managment of EDH which is a dynamic process.


Although the use of metric fluents is fundamental to many practical planning problems, the study of heuristics to support fully automated planners working with these fluents remains relatively unexplored. The most widely used heuristic is the relaxation of metric fluents into interval-valued variables --- an idea first proposed a decade ago. Other heuristics depend on domain encodings that supply additional information about fluents, such as capacity constraints or other resource-related annotations. A particular challenge to these approaches is in handling interactions between metric fluents that represent exchange, such as the transformation of quantities of raw materials into quantities of processed goods, or trading of money for materials. The usual relaxation of metric fluents is often very poor in these situations, since it does not recognise that resources, once spent, are no longer available to be spent again. We present a heuristic for numeric planning problems building on the propositional relaxed planning graph, but using a mathematical program for numeric reasoning. We define a class of producer--consumer planning problems and demonstrate how the numeric constraints in these can be modelled in a mixed integer program (MIP). This MIP is then combined with a metric Relaxed Planning Graph (RPG) heuristic to produce an integrated hybrid heuristic. The MIP tracks resource use more accurately than the usual relaxation, but relaxes the ordering of actions, while the RPG captures the causal propositional aspects of the problem. We discuss how these two components interact to produce a single unified heuristic and go on to explore how further numeric features of planning problems can be integrated into the MIP. We show that encoding a limited subset of the propositional problem to augment the MIP can yield more accurate guidance, partly by exploiting structure such as propositional landmarks and propositional resources. Our results show that the use of this heuristic enhances scalability on problems where numeric resource interaction is key in finding a solution.


Barker's "fetal origin hypothesis" advocates that the diseases in later life originate through adaptations that fetus makes when it is undernourished. These adaptations, whether cardiovascular, metabolic, or endocrine, permanently change the structure, and functions of the body, and pave the road to chronic killer diseases in later life, such as; coronary heart diseases, related disorders, stroke, diabetes, and hypertension. The main objective of the study, both prospective, and retrospective, covering the subjects from 0 to 1 year, and 3 to 15 years, respectively, is to test the Barker "fetal origin hypothesis" that nutrition in early life does influence the disease pattern in later life. The research is specifically designed to study the relationship between infant body size, placental weight, blood pressure, and lipid profile in late infancy; and whether or not the relationship between high blood pressure, and low birthweight is initiated in uterus, or during the infancy. The prospective studies were carried out in Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz Hospital in Riyadh, KSA. The sampling was performed systematically. Every fifth child born in the delivery room was selected in the obstetric ward. A total of 1026 neonates were included in the prospective studies. The retrospective studies were conducted in Deraya Primary Health Care Centre, and data were collected from the medical record department, which included 1505 subjects, aged 3 to 15 years. The babies with major congenital malformations were excluded both studies included questionnaires, anthropometric measurements, and critical evaluation of haematological and biochemical parameters. The data collected, both prospective and retrospective and retrospective studies, were categorised, analysed, and statistically interpreted by using the Statistical Package for Social Science SPSS/PC+V9.0. Normal distributions of data were confirmed by using the Kolmogorow-Smirnow Test. In all cases, significance was assumed at P<0.05. The major findings do support Barker's epidemiological data, and evidences. Although, it is still somewhat too early, and premature to confirm these findings, due to the length of period covered, the data presented, both prospective and retrospective, do point out, and lead to the following major conclusions: Chronic diseases are being imprinted "Programmed" in feto-placental unit during pregnancy, and infancy, there is indeed a strong association between birthweight, especially, low birthweight, and placental weight, blood pressure, lipid metabolism in early infancy, and in childhood. Low birthweight, <2500gms is strongly associated with elevated systolic blood pressure, and low birthweight infants, if survived, are predisposed to inevitable disabilities of all kinds, and chronic diseases in later life.


Propagation of light in the gravitational field of self-gravitating spinning bodies moving with arbitrary velocities is discussed. The gravitational field is assumed to be weak everywhere. Equations of motion of a light ray are solved in the first post-Minkowskian approximation that is linear with respect to the universal gravitational constant $G$. We do not restrict ourselves with the approximation of gravitational lens so that the solution of light geodesics is applicable for arbitrary locations of source of light and observer. This formalism is applied for studying corrections to the Shapiro time delay in binary pulsars caused by the rotation of pulsar and its companion. We also derive the correction to the light deflection angle caused by rotation of gravitating bodies in the solar system (Sun, planets) or a gravitational lens. The gravitational shift of frequency due to the combined translational and rotational motions of light-ray-deflecting bodies is analyzed as well. We give a general derivation of the formula describing the relativistic rotation of the plane of polarization of electromagnetic waves (Skrotskii effect). This formula is valid for arbitrary translational and rotational motion of gravitating bodies and greatly extends the results of previous researchers. Finally, we discuss the Skrotskii effect for gravitational waves emitted by localized sources such as a binary system. The theoretical results of this paper can be applied for studying various relativistic effects in microarcsecond space astrometry and developing corresponding algorithms for data processing in space astrometric missions such as FAME, SIM, and GAIA.


Phosphorylation is the addition of a phosphate (PO 4) group to a protein or other organic molecule. Phosphorylation activates or deactivates many protein enzymes, causing or preventing the mechanisms of diseases such as cancer and diabetes. This book shows how to use mass spectrometry to determine whether or not a protein has been correctly modified by the addition of a phosphate group. It also provides a combination of detailed, step-by-step methodology for phosphoproteomic sample preparation, mass spectral instrumental analysis, and data interpretation approaches. Furthermore, it includes the use of bioinformatic Internet tools such as the Blast2GO gene ontology (GO) tool, used to help understand and interpret complex data collected in these studies.


We develop a unifying analytical and optimization- based framework for the design, operation and performance evaluation of networks of dynamic autonomous agents. The fundamental view is that agents in such a network are dynamic entities that collaborate because via collaboration they can accomplish objectives and goals much better than working alone, or even accomplish objectives that they cannot achieve alone at all. Yet the benefits derived from such collaboration require some costs (e.g. communications), or equivalently, the collaboration is subject to constraints. Understanding and quantifying this tradeoff between the benefits vs the costs of collaboration, leads to new methods that can be used to analyze, design and control/operate networks of agents. Although the inspiration for the framework comes from social and economic networks, the fundamental ideas and in particular the methodology of dynamic constrained coalitional games (DCCG) can unify many concepts and algorithms for networks in various areas: social networks, communication networks, sensor networks, economic networks, biological networks, physics networks. We then analyze a specific instance of such tradeoffs arising in the design of security aware network protocols. We extend network utility maximization (NUM) so as to encompass security metrics such as "trust". The trust values assigned to nodes are based on interaction history and community-based monitoring. The effect of these trust values on the resulting protocols is that in routing and media access scheduling node trustworthiness is automatically considered and used. We develop a distributed algorithm for the joint physical-MAC-routing protocol design. Our extension to NUM with security concerns leads to resilient networks.


A classic property rights question looms large in the field of patent law: where do the rights of inventors end and the rights of the public begin? The right of inventors to modify the scope of their claimed inventions, even after the patent issues, is in direct tension with the concepts of public notice and the public domain. The Patent Act currently permits broadening of claims so long as a reissue application demonstrating intent to broaden is filed within two years of the original patent issue. Over the years, however, this relatively straightforward statutory provision has sparked numerous disputes over its meaning and application. On September 8, 2011, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard oral arguments for In re Staats. In this case, Apple Computer, Inc. appeals the rejection of a continuation reissue patent application. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences rejected the application on the grounds that Apple attempted to broaden the scope of its patent claims in a manner not "foreseeable�? more than eight years after the patent first issued. Apple contends that the language of the statute and prior case law permit its interpretation, and the application should be allowed in the interest of innovation. This issue is hardly a new one - this submission highlights nearly 140 years of case law, legislative history, and statutory shaping pertaining to broadening reissues. We analyze the issues raised in the briefs from Staats, as well as the oral arguments. Finally, we discuss from a practitioner's perspective what the Federal Circuit could do - and should do - in the field of broadening reissues.


In a series of papers
starting in the early 1980s, Toft proposed a general scenario to explain
dietary evolution in leaf litter anurans in which species would "form a continuum from those that
specialize on ants and mites, through generalists, to species that avoid ants
and mites", and these differences would in turn correlate with foraging
strategies, morphology, and defense mechanisms. In this study, we reassess this
hypothesis using a global dataset on the dietary composition of 120 anuran
species. Surprisingly, we found that the relative contribution of ants and
mites in anuran diets were largely orthogonal to one another. Moreover, we did
not find evidence for the continuum of dietary composition envisioned by Toft.
These results suggest that, although ants and mites have played a major role in
the evolution of aposematic species, the trends found in those species might
not be directly extrapolated to all leaf litter anurans.


Abstract:Malcolm James analyses the ways that the reception of the 'Jihadi John' videos reinforces the idea of a civilised 'us' confronting a barbaric 'them': this was mobilised to suggest that the civilised world are fighting an enemy that is savage and inhuman - a setting up of civilisational oppositions that is happily embraced on the other side by Isis. He shows how the videos tap into anxieties about the enemy within, and are used to reinforce a view of all British Muslims as potentially dangerous - an almost inevitable consequence of the crude civilisational oppositions that circulate in mainstream discourse. The symbiotic relationships between the internet and broadcast news exponentially multiplied the numbers of viewers of the videos; and at the same time internet viewing made the experience more intimate, more immediate and more frightening, while the absence of context allowed for the creation of a wide range of meanings and interpretations both in the mainstream media and on the internet. In contrast to the use of the videos as propaganda - by both 'sides' - the article makes a case for the valuing all human life and against the kinds of colonial representation that work to dehumanise some people so that their death (or oppression) becomes possible.


Summary form only given. Typical algorithms for decentralized data distribution work best in a system that is fully built before it first used; adding or removing components results in either extensive reorganization of data or load imbalance in the system. We have developed a family of decentralized algorithms, RUSH (replication under scalable hashing), that maps replicated objects to a scalable collection of storage servers or disks. RUSH algorithms distribute objects to servers according to user-specified server weighting. While all RUSH variants support addition of servers to the system, different variants have different characteristics with respect to lookup time in petabyte-scale systems, performance with mirroring (as opposed to redundancy codes), and storage server removal. All RUSH variants redistribute as few objects as possible when new servers are added or existing servers are removed, and all variants guarantee that no two replicas of a particular object are ever placed on the same server. Because there is no central directory, clients can compute data locations in parallel, allowing thousands of clients to access objects on thousands of servers simultaneously.


This paper proposes seamless customer identification (SCI), a means to identify physically present customers without any effort on customers' part beyond a one-time opt-in. With SCI, customers need not present cards or operate smartphones to convey their identities. So, stores can provide personalized shopping experiences at any time, not just at check-out. SCI uses two complementary technologies: device detection and face recognition. Device detection identifies customers by detecting their phones through low-power wireless discovery, in our case using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Face recognition recognizes customers by matching pictures captured during registration with images captured by a store camera. Device detection makes face recognition feasible by limiting the number of potential customers, while face recognition provides directional information that device detection lacks. Together, these technologies provide an ordering of likely candidates to a store employee, who makes the final determination of identity. We have designed and built SCI, and demonstrated its usefulness in an application called Zero-Effort Payments (ZEP). ZEP uses SCI to let customers effortlessly make small purchases at a coffee stand. We conducted two real-world deployments of ZEP on actual customers: a two-day deployment during a technology fair and a four-month deployment in our building. Across both deployments, 274 customers made 705 purchases using ZEP. Through these deployments and other experiments, we demonstrate how our techniques make seamless customer identification feasible and practical.


Small business is an important lever for solving a whole complex of political, economic and social problems, taking into consideration its effectiveness in society. It attracts population to promote economic reforms, it fulfils the market with goods and services, it creats new job places, it grows entrepreneurial spirit and entrepreneurial culture, developes a careful attitude towards property, forms a progressive structure of the national economy. We can deduce after the research in this article that as an independent and irreplaceable structure, the small and medium enterprise sector in Moldova constitutes one of the most efficient levers that contribute at solutioning the economic and social problems. It also is a factor which structurally transforms the economy, consolidates its economic base and its zones, fulfils in an accelerate mode the market with goods and services, attenuates the monopolism and favours competition development, implementation of scientific and technical achievements, the country's increasing export opportunities, , providing new jobs to a large number of people .


A sensitive ultraviolet resonance Raman (UVRR) system, which integrates bulk and microscopic capabilities, is described for use with human tissue. The system incorporates a quasi-continuous tunable laser excitation source in the range 200–300 nm, a liquid nitrogen-cooled charge-coupled device (CCD), a single grating spectrometer, dielectric longpass laser line rejection filters, and cooled specimen holders to minimize bio- and photo-degradation. The system was used on normal human colon tissue, and was compared to our previously used Nd:YAG-based system. Spectra with higher signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) than has previously been achieved, and with less than 5% photobleaching, are presented. The present system outperforms our previous system by improving the S/N in bulk normal colon spectra by a factor of greater than 10. We show for the first time UVRR spectra collected from the various microscopic regions of human colon in a thin section preparation, and the line shapes from the different microscopic morphological components are related to the bulk colon spectra. At 251 nm the epithelial cells and the lamina propria are the major contributors to the UVRR spectrum of bulk colon tissue. Our data suggest that combined bulk and microscopic UVRR spectroscopy of human tissue could provide a valuable tool for bioassay and histochemistry.


One in four people in the world will be affected by a mental disorder at some point in their life, and mental health problems are currently the leading cause of global morbidity. Effectively addressing and understanding this vast unmet need requires research that spans basic research, all the way through to clinical/applied research. Research deepens our knowledge of mental ill-health and its underlying mechanisms and allows us to understand which interventions are effective and for whom. By setting funding levels and designing funding programs, policymakers and funders directly influence what kind of research is being conducted, where and by whom, and at what scale. But our understanding of the distribution of mental health research funding is limited, potentially undermining the effectiveness of such investments. This report attempts to fill that gap for the first time by mapping the global mental health research funding landscape.The International Alliance of Mental Health Research Funders (IAMHRF) has analyzed over 75,000 research grants awarded by nearly 350 funders from over 35 countries, revealing for the first time the extent and nature of mental health research funding.


A current challenge for project network scholars is to explain "how history matters"; in other words, how past experiences of collaboration between actors in a project network are transformed into an (informal) organizational format that is replicable in future collaborations. How are project networks formed in the first place? By examining a collaboration under formation between two organizations, this article proposes that project networks can be conceptualized as psychological contracts. In this formation process, critical incidents play a key role as they define "items" in the psychological contract; in project network terms, these items define routines for collaboration.


The eastward equatorial electric field (EEF) in the E region ionosphere drives many important phenomena at low latitudes. We developed a method of estimating the EEF from magnetometer measurements of near‐polar orbiting satellites as they cross the magnetic equator, by recovering a clean signal of the equatorial electrojet current and modeling the observed current to determine the electric field present during the satellite pass. This algorithm is now implemented as an official Level‐2 Swarm product. Here we present first results of EEF estimates from nearly a year of Swarm data. We find excellent agreement with independent measurements from the ground‐based coherent scatter radar at Jicamarca, Peru, as well as horizontal field measurements from the West African Magnetometer Network magnetic observatory chain. We also calculate longitudinal gradients of EEF measurements made by the A and C lower satellite pair and find gradients up to about 0.05 mV/m/deg with significant longitudinal variability.


This paper concerns how subjectivity is encoded with a third person singular anaphor through grammaticalization in Taiwanese Southern Min. The case study of constructions hoo7-i1 and khit4hoo7-i1, which consist of the third person singular anaphor i1preceded by a functional marker, hoo7 or khit4hoo7, shows that subjectivity can be construed in terms of the speaker's mental space for the speaker-hearer distance. The core meaning of hoo7 is 'to give', and hoo7 and khit4hoo7 are agentive markers in passive constructions. Hoo7-i1 and khit4hoo7-i1 are undergoing grammaticalization to become speaker-oriented discourse markers. The referent of the third person pronoun in the grammaticalized constructions can no longer be traced in the context. The model of Basic Communicative Space Network (BCSN) (Sanders, Sanders & Sweetser 2009) is adopted to account for how subjectification occurs in grammaticalization. As hoo7-i1 and khit4hoo7-i1 become grammaticalized, they encode the speaker's perspective toward an event and reflect the Speaker-Hearer relationship.


IN THIS ARTICLE, I will discuss the Old Norse concept of ogofa, typically translated as misfortune or lucklessness. (1) Scholars have pointed out that it was connected to a person's fate and sometimes caused by another's curse or witchcraft. It could also be part of the person's inherent character or an irreversible burden laid on him by Odinn. Ogofa additionally implied a lack of happiness or a destiny that the individual him/herself freely chose, either by striving for the wrong or failing to achieve the right goals. Killing a kinsman or committing other such nidingsverk (villainy) were among the possible causes of ogofa. In recent scholarship, ogofa has been given Christian connotations, and gofumadr, a man of fortune, has been seen as denoting a good Christian in the pre-Christian period (Hallberg; Hermann Palsson, "Icelandic Sagas"; Hermann Palsson, "Um gaefumenn"; Lonnroth, "Kroppen"; Sejbjerg Sommer). I do not intend to dispute the definitions, but instead to broaden our understanding of the concept of ogofa. I will argue that this concept was not just a part of a person's fate that denoted bad luck, but that it also had emotional or emotion-like connotations. It could be used to express the inner struggles of the saga protagonist and his feelings of guilt in a culture that did not yet have a word for this kind of affective state. As suggested in the works of William Ian Miller, this culture was a one of shame rather than of guilt, i.e. of emotions of status, not of conscience. According to Miller, scholars who identify guilt in the sagas are interpreting events in the light of "Christian emotional style" (Miller, Humiliation 93-130). This view implies that guilt could not have been experienced until the adoption of Christianity when the concept of sin had been thoroughly accepted and internalized. It is quite possible, of course, that this internalization had already taken place by the time the majority of the sagas were written two centuries after Christianization. Hermann Palsson has noted the great influence of humanistic thought in Iceland in that period ("Icelandic Sagas" and "Um gaefumenn"). Shame was a very important theme in the sagas since it was often the major cause of the events leading to revenge, whereas feelings of guilt did not elicit any such source of action. The distinction between cultures emerging from guilt or shame should not, however, be taken for granted. Distinguishing different cultures in this way often presupposes that those grounded in heathen shame are more primitive in an ethical and psychological sense than those based on Christian guilt. This rather Darwinian view assumes that lack of guilt diminishes the variety of experience in social interaction since shame is involved in threats to the self, but guilt concerns the welfare of others; it is, therefore, the more moral emotion of the two and has a special link with empathy. A possible shift from heathen shame to Christian guilt may, of course, lie at the core of the concept of ogofa, but to account for ogofa with Christian guilt is to ignore the fact that emotions associated with guilt could be felt in non-Christian societies and that shame, too, could elicit a moral sense of social responsibility. Guilt is bound to the presence of moral judgment and a sense of moral responsibility, but the authority that makes the judgment may be worldly or divine. Moreover, both shame and guilt seem to be more or less prominent in all cultures, whatever their orientation, prevailing religious attitudes, or stage of technical development. In addition, it is not always easy to distinguish guilt from shame, which makes the study of these emotions difficult. The phenomenological experience of these two emotions differs in respect to the self: shame is about the self with the attitude in Tangney's words, "I did that horrible thing," whereas guilt is about the act and its negative evaluation ("I did that horrible thing"). (2) Bearing this in mind, any examination of the moral and social aspects that prevail in medieval Icelandic literature necessitates the minimizing of the distinction between cultures based on shame or guilt. …


This book offers readers a quick, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the most important methodologies, technologies, APIs and standards related to the portability and interoperability of cloud applications and services, illustrated by a number of use cases representing a variety of interoperability and portability scenarios. The lack of portability and interoperability between cloud platforms at different service levels is the main issue affecting cloud-based services today. The brokering, negotiation, management, monitoring and reconfiguration of cloud resources are challenging tasks for developers and users of cloud applications due to the different business models associated with resource consumption, and to the variety of services and features offered by different cloud providers. In chapter 1 the concepts of cloud portability and interoperability are introduced, together with the issues and limitations arising when such features are lacking or ignored. Subsequently, chapter 2 provides an overview of the state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies that are currently used or being explored to enable cloud portability and interoperability. Chapter 3 illustrates the main cross-platform cloud APIs and how they can solve interoperability and portability issues. In turn, chapter 4 presents a set of ready-to-use solutions which, either because of their broad-scale use in cloud computing scenarios or because they utilize established or emerging standards, play a fundamental part in providing interoperable and portable solutions. Lastly, chapter 5 presents an overview of emerging standards for cloud Interoperability and portability. Researchers and developers of cloud-based services will find here a brief survey of the relevant methodologies, APIs and standards, illustrated by case studies and complemented by an extensive reference list for more detailed descriptions of every topic covered.


Abstract This paper focuses on the migration crisis from the perspective of Slovakia while examining the impact of the crisis on the last parliamentary elections in 2016. The migration/refugee crisis that started in 2015 played a significant role during the pre-electoral discourse and political campaigns. This paper has two main goals. The primarily goal is to apply the theory of securitization as proposed by the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute on the case study of Slovakia, and the secondary goal is to analyze the 2016 Slovak general elections. In here, I describe the securitization processes, actors, and other components of the case. Subsequently, I focus on a key element of this theory that is linked to the speech act. I evaluate Islamophobia manifestations in speech act and political manifesto of Slovak political parties. My source base includes the rhetoric of nationalist political parties such as Direction-SD (Smer-SD), Slovak National Party (Slovenská národná strana), We Are Family-Boris Kollár (Sme Rodina-Boris Kollár), and Kotleba-People' Party Our Slovakia (Kotleba-Ľudová strana Naše Slovensko), all of which often apply anti-Muslim and anti-Islam rhetoric.


Mal de Debarquement Syndrome is a neurological disorder of motion perception, triggered by external motion. This study aimed to determine the importance of psychosocial factors in relation to depression and quality of life in Mal de Debarquement Syndrome. A total of 66 participants with self-reported Mal de Debarquement Syndrome completed quality-of-life, symptom severity, stigma, depression, and illness intrusiveness measurements in this naturalistic correlational study. Mal de Debarquement Syndrome was associated with high levels of depression and illness intrusiveness. Illness intrusiveness mediated between stigma and quality of life; also the level of stigma moderated the effect of illness intrusiveness on quality of life. Targeted interventions aimed at alleviating psychological distress may improve quality of life in Mal de Debarquement Syndrome.


In video coding, motion compensated prediction between the frames is a very efficient way for exploiting temporal correlation. Different motion estimation algorithms have been developed in order to provide efficient motion compensated prediction of scene motion between frames. In this thesis, full search, fast search, hierarchical search, sub pixel interpolation and mesh based motion estimation algorithms have been implemented. Comparisons are made both in the spatial and temporal domain, mainly in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and computational complexity. A video codec using lifting based wavelet transform is used for the comparisons in the temporal domain.


Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has made great strides with the development of digital signal processing hardware and software, especially using English as the language of choice. Despite of all these advances, machines cannot match the performance of their human counterparts in terms of accuracy and speed, especially in case of speaker independent speech recognition. In this paper, a new feature based on formant is presented and evaluated on Malaysian spoken vowels. These features were classified and used to identify vowels recorded from 80 Malaysian speakers. A back propagation neural network (BPNN) model was developed to classify the vowels. Six formant features were evaluated, which were the first three formant frequencies and the distances between each of them. Results, showed that overall vowel classification rate of these three formant combinations are comparatively the same but differs in terms of individual vowel classification.