Empirical studies of plant costs and efficiency always have stressed the importance of both size of plant and length of operating season on the level and shape of the economies of scale curve as well as the technical organization of production implied in it. Because most processing firms are integrated systems of product assembly, processing, and distribution, the minimum- cost combination of plant size and hours operated must be considered in terms of total operation, not of any single "stage" or component. This paper presents a method for determining optimum combinations of hours of operation and size of plant (as measured by rates of output) for two components, field and plant operations, of an integrated system of preparing lima beans for freezing. Though the analysis is oriented to only two "stages" and a particular product, the authors are hopeful that it may point the way toward extension to addi-tional "stages" and other products.


Objective :This study was conducted to update the prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolates among human clinical S. aureus isolates recovered from Northern Palestine, to evaluate the possible presence of vancomycin-Resistant S. aureus (VRSA) and vancomycin- intermediate resistant S. aureus strains (VISA) and to determine the antimicrobial susceptibilities of these clinical isolates. Methods: The in vitro activities of 11 antibiotics against 204 non-duplicate S. aureus isolates from clinical samples in North of Palestine were determined by the disk- diffusion method. These samples were isolated between June 2006 and December 2007. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of vancomycin for 115 methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains was carried out using the agar dilution method. Results: One hundred and fifteen (56.4 %) of these isolates were MRSA and according to their antibiotic profile these are multidrug resistant (resistant to three or more non-β-lactam antibiotics). Ninety nine (43.6 %) isolates were methicillin sensitive S. aureus (MSSA), forty four of MSSA isolates (44.4%) were multidrug resistant, while forty five (45.6%) were non multidrug resistant. Our results showed that the most common resistance (95.6%) was to penicillin. Two strains of MRSA have shown to be vancomycin- intermediate resistant, had MIC of 4 μg/mL and 8 g/mL and these vancomycin- intermediate resistant S. aureus strains (VISA) are resistant to all antibiotics tested. Conclusion: According to our information this is the first study report about VISA in Palestine.


Background : Phenylketonuria (PKU) is a metabolic disease with autosomal recessive pattern of inheritance caused by a deficiency or absence of the enzyme phenylalanine hydroxylase in the liver. Phenylketonuria incidence is 1 in 10,000 births. This study aimed to determine the epidemiological characteristics of phenylketonuria in Lorestan province.
Materials and Methods: All 81 phenylketonuria patients known in Lorestan province up to winter 2014 were considered in this descriptive epidemiologic study. Based on the goals and variables of the study, a complete questionnaire was developed to collect data through interviews with parents and the records and they were analyzed by use of SPSS v.16 software with preparing tables and graphs and using chi-square and t-test.
Results: Results showed that phenylketonuria prevalence is 4.3 out of 100,000 people in Lorestan province. Twenty of the patients (24.7%) were identified through screening and 61 patients (75.3%) through other methods. Forty-six of the samples (56.8%) were female and 35 cases (43.2%) were male. Nearly 75% of PKU patients had a positive history of consanguinity marriage in their parents. The prevalence of the disease was significantly different from other cities.
Conclusion: Neonatal screening for phenylketonuria is necessary and should be done within 3-5 days of birth. In families with children suffering from PKU, prenatal diagnosis is necessary for other pregnancies.
Keywords: Phenylketonuria, Consanguineous Marriage, Screening, Prevalence, Lorestan


Leachate characteristics associated with landfilling of municipal wastes on pervious sandy soil in wetland areas are examined in this thesis. Treatment of high strength leachate by rapid infiltration through soils with a high Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC >5 meq/IOOg) in 4.5 cm diameter columns was found not only ineffective, but also led to the production of leachate containing a high COD but devoid of phosphate. This treatment is therefore inappropriate if the leachate is to be treated by biological processes.

Results of a series of soil column experiments using sandy soil with the leachate containing 4,000 mg/L to 21,000 mg/L COD and maintained under anaerobic conditions indicated that the major part of the COD was removed in the sand by methane fermentation. The process, however, is very slow for leachate with a high initial COD. At 21,000 mg/L influent COD, the methanogenic stage could not be established in the soil column even after 18 weeks.

Biological treatment of the high strength leachate in a sand layer beneath a solid waste layer in a lysimeter also found capable of stabilising the leachate, saturated conditions, the methanogenic stage was difficult was Under to establish in the solid waste layer because of low pH (5.3) associated with a very high COD. However, the methanogenic stage was established in the underlying sand layer. This process was examined in the laboratory lysimeter by introducing water through the bottom of the lysimeter upward to saturate the sand and solid waste and releasing the water gradually through a bottom drainage over a period of 2 years. By this method, appropriate dilution and detention of the leachate promoted establishment of the methane fermentation process.

The sand layer maintained stable methanogenic conditions when operated at organic loading rates as high as 873 g COD/m3 pore volume/day. The removal efficiencies were 92% for COD and 99% for BOD5 . An average gas production of 77 mL/day/Kg wet weight solid waste accompanied the COD removal. A mass balance analysis indicated that for every gram of COD removed, 500 mL of gas was generated in the lysimeter. The COD level and ammonia-N concentration in the effluent leachate after the methane fermentation remained relatively high at a around 2000 mg/L and 1350 mg/L respectively. Both pollutants are very mobile in soil water and therefore require further treatment.

Field leachate quality monitoring at a completed landfill in Bayswater, Perth indicated that nutrients in the leachate found their way into the adjoining Swan River through underground flow as well as surface discharge, nutrient load was especially high during the few months after winter.

Recycling leachate through land irrigation by using stabilised leachate for growing grass was tested under field conditions in Perth. The grass in plots receiving leachate after 10 weeks irrigation produced biomass more than double the production in the control plots. The faecal coliform counts of the leachate was well below the maximum permissible limit for landscape irrigation with public access after a drying out period.

The results suggest that leachate control through natural in-situ methane fermentation followed by controlled irrigation is a viable option for solid waste landfilled in sandy soils of wetland areas.


ABSTRACT Belgium has seen more foreign fighters leave for the ISIS 'caliphate' than any other western European country in per capita figures. But among Belgian foreign fighters, as well as among Belgian terrorists who did not travel abroad, a stunning majority have been Belgian-Moroccan. What factors can explain this phenomenon? Both groups live in relatively similar socio-economic settings, experience stigmatization and discrimination, and both are, relative to broader Belgian society, poorly integrated. However, in investigating this question, an interesting caveat emerges vis-à-vis the 'integration deficit' theory: Belgian-Turks, who are found to be comparatively less integrated than the Belgian-Moroccans, are underrepresented in extremist milieus. This paper argues that the insularity of the Belgian-Turkish population, a phenomenon not found to the same extent among Belgian-Moroccans despite also being poorly integrated (with some outliers), has protected the population from negative environmental elements, both criminal and extremist. That there are seen to be local factors that contribute to a 'vulnerability' to the pull of crime and extremism, means that such conditions are likely to remain even if a group like ISIS fades into irrelevance.


It has been proposed that worry is a form of cognitive fear avoidance (Borkovec,
Shadick, & Hopkins, 1991). That is, individuals faced with actual or potential threat
avoid unpleasant physiological arousal by increasing their thought-based mental
activity: worry. Worry is maintained by this avoidance of arousal and in some
individuals becomes a common response to threat. The proposed mechanism by which
cognitive fear avoidance operates has been termed autonomic rigidity. Autonomic
rigidity refers to the suppression of the sympathetic nervous system that results in the
restriction of heart rate and skin conductance responses to stress observed in patients
with generalised anxiety disorder (Hoehn-Saric, McLeod, & Zimmerli, 1989).

The empirical part of this thesis consists of two sections. The first is the collection of
questionnaire data relating to worry in the Tasmanian university population. The
second section describes a series of three experiments that investigate the autonomic
rigidity hypothesis in female participants.
The first experiment aimed to investigate the autonomic rigidity hypothesis using a
worry period of one hour prior to a speaking task. Worriers (N=15) did not differ
from non-worriers (N=15) in their physiological response to this task. A possible
explanation for this result was that both groups may have engaged in productive
cognitive activity (thought) before the speaking task and therefore the physiological response of the groups was similar. Despite these results subjective reports indicated
a difference in worry activity between the groups.
Studies published after the first experiment was completed indicated that there may be
differences in both parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system activity in
chronic worriers (Lyonfields, Borkovec, & Thayer, 1995; Thayer, Fiedman, &
Borkovec, 1996). Parasympathetic activity is indexed by measuring heart period
variability. The second experimental study compared average heart rate, heart rate
variability and skin conductance of worriers (N=32) and non-worriers (N --32) during
verbal and non-verbal thinking task and worry. Contrary to predictions, the results
were that worriers had more heart rate variability and tended to have lower average
heart rates than non-worriers. There was no evidence of a restriction in heart rate
variability for worriers. However, subjective differences in worry activity were found
as predicted.
The third experiment aimed to establish conditions similar to those where autonomic
rigidity was found in worriers. The average heart rate and heart period variability of
worriers (N=31) and non-worriers (N=31) were compared while they engaged in
relaxation, worry, and-aversive imagery. No difference was found in the pattern of
response to the tasks for worriers and non-worriers. However, relaxation resulted in
more heart period variability than worry or imagery. Subjective differences in worry
and relaxation were found as predicted.
The conclusions of this thesis were that, firstly, survey data reveals that there are
marked gender differences in the amount of worry in the University of Tasmania
population with women reporting more worry than men across a number of topics.
Secondly, the results of the three experiments demonstrate that autonomic rigidity is
not always found in worriers. Although differences in experimental conditions and
population may explain the findings, the phenomenon is harder to establish than
earlier findings imply.


Introduction: This chapter describes the demographics of UK RRT patients in 2007. Methods: Complete data were electronically collected from 71 UK centres with the remaining 1 centre submitting summary data. A series of crosssectional and longitudinal analyses were performed to describe the demographics of prevalent UK RRT patients in 2007 at a centre and a national level. Results: There were 45,484 adult patients receiving RRT on 31/12/2007. The population prevalence for adults was 746 per million population per year (pmp) with an annual increase in prevalence of approximately 5% per annum. There was substantial variation in standardised prevalence ratios between Primary Care Trust (PCT)/Health Authority (HA) areas which were associated with geographical factors and differences in ethnicity with mean standardised prevalence ratios (SPR) significantly higher in PCTs/HAs with a high proportion of ethnic minorities. The median age of prevalent RRT patients was 57 years (HD 65 years, PD 60 years, transplant 50 years). Median RRT vintage was 5.3 years (HD 2.8 years, PD 2.1 years, transplant 10.4 years). For all ages, crude prevalence rates in males exceeded those in females, peaking in the 75–79 year age band for males at 2,506 pmp and in females in the 70–74 year age band at 1,314 pmp. The most common identifiable diagnosis was glomerulonephritis (15.3%) but in those over 65 it was diabetes (15.1%). The most common treatment modality was transplantation (46.6%), closely followed by centrebased HD (42.1%) in either the primary centre (25.2%) or the satellite unit (16.9%). The HD population has continued to expand, and the PD population to contract. HD was increasingly prominent with increasing age at the expense of transplantation. Conclusions: There were national, area and dialysis centre level variation in the prevalent UK RRT population. This has implications for service planning and ensuring equity of care for RRT patients.


As the Rules Advisory Committee considers proposals to make significant changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in light of the Supreme Court's controversial pleading decisions in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, it is an appropriate time to reconsider the normative deep structure of modern procedure (what can be called the "litigation matrix"),and to test the current pleading and discovery rules by that standard. This Article seeks to perform both tasks. It proposes a list of sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting values that our procedural system should be deemed to foster, and then tests the approaches adopted in the Federal Rules by the standard of those underlying values. The Article concludes that far from being the villain that it is often portrayed to be, the Supreme Court's "plausibility" requirement for pleadings represents a fair and efficient compromise of the competing interests involved, and properly fosters the synthesis of procedural values that make up the system's litigation matrix. Far from imposing the rigid "fact pleading" standard imposed in pre-Federal Rules practice, the test permits a complaint to go forward even when it lacks a detailed description of defendant's behavior, as long as the non-conclusory facts alleged give rise to the reasonable belief that - assuming the truth of those allegations - unlawful acts likely have been committed. The Article asserts that far from disrupting preexisting Supreme Court pleading doctrine, the plausibility standard is consistent with all of the Court's prior decisions, including the holding in its cornerstone pleading decision, Conley v. Gibson. It demonstrates that the only alternatives to the rejected fact pleading standard and the adopted plausibility standard is one that allows plaintiffs to proceed to the often costly and burdensome process of discovery on the basis of nothing more than vague, conclusory and unsupported allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the defendant (what can be be called a "notice pleading minus" standard). It further establishes that such a standard is both inefficient and unfair, and therefore must be rejected under the controlling litigation matrix. While the Article argues that the plausibility standard is fully consistent with the text and intent of Rule 8(a)'s pleading standard, it urges an amendment expressly adopting the language of the plausibility standard, in order to put an end to the doctrinal confusion that has often plagued lower court decisions interpreting the rule.The Article also considers the Federal Rules' strategies to control discovery abuse, concluding that all such methods are inadequate because of their inability to put an end to the problems of abusive and excessive discovery. It argues that the most effective means of implementing the litigation matrix would be to recognize that the costs of discovery are, in the first instance, appropriately to be attributed to the requesting party, rather than to the responding party. The Article thus rejects current practice concerning discovery cost allocation, which in any event finds no grounding in the text of the Federal Rules.


The feeling that a body part is one's own body (sense of ownership; SoO) and the feeling based on the causal relationship between one's will and action (sense of agency; SoA) have been recognized as the basis of our bodily self-consciousness. Previously, the illusory SoO over a fake body part (e.g., rubber hand) was introduced as the rubber hand illusion (RHI). Furthermore, it was determined that one could also evoke a SoA over an object with movements linked to the one's prior intention. On the other hand, the postdictivity of our spontaneity implies that it is essentially inseparable whether actions originate from self or others. In other words, our SoA or daily experiences are obtained in such as inseparable scenario. Previous research, however, has maintained the premise that self- and other-origin movements are perceptually distinguishable. Here, we implement a protocol to make these aspects ambiguous for the participants and to estimate whether they can feel SoO and/or SoA and how. To this end, we employ an experiment using virtual reality, under which participants observe virtual fingers moving very slowly (or quickly or not moving) while their own fingers do not move. For evaluation of the illusory SoO, measurements of skin conductance responses against a knife threat are adopted. Additionally, we introduce face-to-face interviews to determine whether the feelings regarding the slow movement match the conventional SoA definition. Our representative results suggest that the SoO is evoked over the hand, and various attitudes to accept its movement as the participant's own with awareness that they did not originate it are reported by the majority. As the results show, the novelty of this protocol is discovering that in such a situation, the SoO cooperates with an externally produced SoA to establish one's own bodily experience rather than the independence of the SoO and SoA.


Conformal prediction is a technique for constructing prediction intervals that attain valid coverage in finite samples, without making distributional assumptions. Despite this appeal, existing conformal methods can be unnecessarily conservative because they form intervals of constant or weakly varying length across the input space. In this paper we propose a new method that is fully adaptive to heteroscedasticity. It combines conformal prediction with classical quantile regression, inheriting the advantages of both. We establish a theoretical guarantee of valid coverage, supplemented by extensive experiments on popular regression datasets. We compare the efficiency of conformalized quantile regression to other conformal methods, showing that our method tends to produce shorter intervals.


Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time. Edited by Ian Inglis. (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. [xvi, 205 p. ISBN 0-7546-4056-6. $99.95.] Bibliography, index. Imagine reducing rock history to a handful of moments, linchpins on which a whole genre might have turned, or as editor Ian Inglis states in the introduction, "signposts to the turbulent, unpredictable and constantly surprising history of rock'n'roll" (p. xvi). This is, in essence, Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time (part of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series): an exploration of the context surrounding fifteen formative moments in popular music. Inglis hopes to correct academics' "neglect" of live popular music performance, a regrettable but perhaps understandable tendency in scholarship considering the availability of sound and video recordings of popular musicians and the ever-increasing cost of live concerts. The authors of this collection are a varied group, and it shows in their approaches to the recurrent themes of authenticity/ identity and audience reaction/response: a little over half of the contributors have a background in the social sciences and this is reflected in the cultural studies bent in most of the essays. Approaches range from feminist studies to analysis based on camera angles and television production. The performances themselves are representative of several popular music genres including folk, pop, punk, glam, and grunge, although newer genres such as rap and hip hop are noticeably absent. The essays are arranged in chronological rather than generic or thematic order, beginning with Laurel Sercombe's analysis of The Beatles' performance on The Ed Sullivan Show of 9 February 1964. Lee Marshall addresses the circumstances surrounding Bob Dylan's performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, explaining the issue of Dylan's folk authenticity with grace. Marshall's opinion that Dylan's split from the folk scene represented "an increasing emphasis on individualism" in life and music (p. 24) is well argued. Sarah Hill's essay on Otis Redding's performance at the Monterey Pop Festival gives a good background of the social and economic issues surrounding Monterey. She argues that while several African American artists were invited to the festival, only three (the others being Jimi Hendrix and Lou Rawls) actually performed, becoming an obvious minority that affected history's view of their performances. Inglis' discussion of Elvis Presley's conflicting images in the 1968 Comeback Special posits a "counterfactual analysis" of the choices he made after 1968 that affected his life and career (p. 49). What would have happened had he performed at Woodstock? Inglis's essay, by considering similar what ifs, convincingly argues that the Comeback Special was a significant turning point, one that had a profound impact on Presley's career. Jimi Hendrix's name resurfaces, this time as the focus of an essay by Mike Daley, who examines the background and impact of Hendrix's performance at Woodstock in 1969. Norma Coates' contribution on the Altamont debacle debunks the rock myth that turned The Rolling Stones into devils incarnate. Her description of the historical events leading to the Stones' free concert and the bad press they received on the United States tour clearly demonstrates the path that led to the death of one concertgoer and the beating of several others. Significant performances of the 1970s are discussed in Philip Auslander's article on David Bowie and the "death" of Ziggy Stardust at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, and Sheila Whiteley on Patti Smith performing for The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1976. Both speak loudly to issues of identity in popular music: David Bowie made a career out of playing characters who transgressed boundaries of gender and sexuality, and Whiteley defines Patti Smith as a performer "whose image embodied androgyneity, and who redefined women's role in rock" (p. …


Background and Objectives
To examine whether nursing homes (NHs) provide better quality when unemployment rates rise (countercyclical) and explore mechanisms contributing to the relationship between quality and unemployment rates.

Research Design and Methods
The study uses the data on privately owned, freestanding NHs in the continental United States that span a period from 2001 through 2015. The empirical analysis relies on panel fixed-effect regressions with the key independent variable being the county-level unemployment rate. NH quality is measured using deficiencies, outcomes, and care process measures. We also examine nursing staff levels, as well as employee turnover and retention.

Results
NHs have better quality when unemployment rates increase. Higher unemployment rates are associated with fewer deficiencies and lower deficiency scores. This countercyclical relationship is also found among other quality measures. In terms of mechanisms, we find higher nursing staff levels, lower employee turnover, and better workforce retention when unemployment rates rise. Improvement in staffing is likely contributing to better quality during recessions. Interestingly, these effects predominately occur in for-profit NHs for deficiencies and staffing levels.

Discussions and Implications
NH quality is countercyclical. With near record-low unemployment rates in 2018, regulatory agencies should pay close attention to NH quality when and where the local economy registers strong growth. On the other hand, the finding of the unemployment rate-staffing/turnover relationship also suggests that policies increasing staffing and reducing employee turnover may not only improve NH quality but also have the potential to smooth quality fluctuations between business cycles.


Two opposing approaches to include resonant magnetic perturbations (RMPs) in fast ion simulations are compared, one where the vacuum field caused by the RMP current coils is added to the axisymmetric MHD equilibrium, the other where the MHD equilibrium includes the plasma response within the 3D deformation of its flux-surfaces. The first model admits large regions of stochastic field-lines that penetrate the plasma without alteration. The second assumes nested flux-surfaces with a single magnetic axis, which excludes stochastic field-lines, and embeds the RMPs within a 3D saturated ideal MHD state. The two descriptions of RMPs have been implemented in the VENUS-LEVIS guiding-centre orbit code. Simulations of fast ion populations resulting from MAST neutral beam injection have been applied to MAST n = 3 RMP coil configuration. At low beam energies, particle losses are dominated by parallel transport due to the stochasticity of the field-lines (vacuum-RMP model), whereas at higher energies, losses are accredited to the 3D structure of the perturbed plasma and the resulting drifts (equilibrium-RMP model).


Outdoor air economizers (OAE) control the amount of air drawn into a building in order to reduce energy usage and improve indoor air quality. Air-side economizers are required by energy standards such as ASHRAE Standard 90.1 in many commercial applications because of their energy savings' potential. However, many economizers do not operate as designed because of damper, sensor, and other faults which can actually lead to greater energy use. Fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) tools have been developed to identify faults when they occur, however, no general methodology for assessing these tools has yet to be proposed. This paper presents and applies a general OAE FDD assessment method. FDD tools described by Seem and House (2009), Schein et al. (2003), and Brambley et al. (1998) are analyzed with respect to various OAE faults. Additionally, these FDD methods are assessed with the method using simulated and experimental data with both single and multiple simultaneous faults.


Abstract Since the establishment of One Stop Center Farmer Associations (OSCAs) in Uganda 13 years ago, no documentation of the work done had been carried out. This study was conducted on the partnership and value co-creation initiatives implemented by two OSCAs in the rice value chain in Luwero and Bugiri districts, Uganda. The methodology used involved use of semi structured interviews and check lists for focus group discussions as well as key informant interviews. Eight focus group interviews were conducted, with an average attendance of six members per group (48 members) in Bugiri and 48 members in Luwero district. Interviews were also conducted for 44 key informants. A total of 140 respondents were interviewed both in the focus group discussions and as key informants. The information was analyzed with NVIVO software. Findings indicate that partnership construction and value co-creation occurred in the OSCA value chains, but have not yet reached the ideal status, although they have advanced through the stages of development. There is an increased number of actors with vast interests interacting with the OSCAs for value co-creation. However, the cooperative co-creation of value along the chain requires a focus on achieving all actor value propositions as well as optimal outcomes for all. The study, therefore, recommends that in the process of constructing partnerships and co-creation, it is necessary to be aware of differences in each actor's views, motivations, and ways of working. This will lead to complementing each other through realizing and accepting differences to make the partnerships work.


The narrow bandwidth of computer-mediated communication (CMC) courses reduces status differences, suggesting that men and women will participate equally in course activities. In contrast, gender differences in computing skill, attitude, experience, and family support for students' CMC activities suggest that females will have lower levels of participation. A study of interactions among 15 students enrolled in a graduate course in education found no instances of sexist language or overt exclusionary behaviour. However, women exercised less procedural leadership, had reduced influence on group products, contributed less to the advancement of their group's argument, and overall had fewer productive contributions.


Sickle cell nephopathy (SCN) begins early in childhood from failure of urinary concen- tration (hyposthenuria), albuminuria to hyperfiltration, hematuria and progression to falling glomerular filtration to end-stage renal disease and increased mortality. Renal involvement is more severe in homozygous individuals (HbSS) than in compound het-erozygous patients (HbSC). The pathogenesis of SCN is multifactorial from hypoxia, acidosis, hemolysis, ischemia-reperfusion injury and albuminuria. The clinical manifes tations depend on whether the main pathology is tubular, glomerular or a mixture of both abnormalities. This chapter offers a critical review of the recent literature and will highlight the pathophysiology, epidemiology, clinical manifestations and management of sickle cell nephropathy with particular focus on the major advance in the early diagnosis. Learning points : For SCN, the onset of hyperfiltration and albuminuria in infants and childhood is an opportunity to intervene early. There is no diagnostic markertest capable of detecting the onset of these changes. Moreover there is no reliable therapeutic agent to prevent or halt early changes due to SCN. The development of a marker of renal impair - ment in SCD such as such as Cystatin C assay if validated may be appropriate for wider clinical application.


The objective of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using English animated movie in writing descriptive text and to figure out the students responds in using of English animated movie in their writing descriptive text to the fourth semester of English department at STKIP Bina Bangsa Getsempena. In this research, there were 12 students that took as a sample. The data was obtained through quantitative and qualitative design method. The quantitative data was taken from the students' writing score, while qualitative data was obtained from the questionnaire which were distributed to figure out the students respond in using English animated movie in their writing descriptive text. The data collected by using two steps of test, there are pre-test and post-test. The post-test result was 83.5 and the mean of pre-test was 75.25. It meant that the post-test mean is higher than the pre-test, while the score of t-test was 22.88. Keyword: English Animated Movie, Descriptive Text, Writing Skill


Neural machine translation (NMT) has arguably achieved human level parity when trained and evaluated at the sentence-level. Document-level neural machine translation has received less attention and lags behind its sentence-level counterpart. The majority of the proposed document-level approaches investigate ways of conditioning the model on several source or target sentences to capture document context. These approaches require training a specialized NMT model from scratch on parallel document-level corpora. We propose an approach that doesn't require training a specialized model on parallel document-level corpora and is applied to a trained sentence-level NMT model at decoding time. We process the document from left to right multiple times and self-train the sentence-level model on pairs of source sentences and generated translations. Our approach reinforces the choices made by the model, thus making it more likely that the same choices will be made in other sentences in the document. We evaluate our approach on three document-level datasets: NIST Chinese-English, WMT19 Chinese-English and OpenSubtitles English-Russian. We demonstrate that our approach has higher BLEU score and higher human preference than the baseline. Qualitative analysis of our approach shows that choices made by model are consistent across the document.


Studies were conducted between June and October, 2013 on the species composition, relative abundance and physicochemical conditions of breeding microhabitats of Anopheles mosquitoes in rock pools within Kaduna State, Nigeria. Plastic soup ladle dipper was used to obtain representative samples of mosquitoes in 269 rock pools on 21 inselbergs. Mosquito larvae were reared to adults on yeast diet, preserved dry on silica gel and identified morphologically with the use of a stereo microscope. Extracted genomic DNA of preserved mosquito specimens were subjected to polymerase chain reaction (PCR), followed by electrophoresis to discriminate sibling species. Three physical and ten chemical properties of larval microhabitats were determined in situ and in the laboratory using standard protocols. A total of 12(57.14%) of the 21 inselbergs supported anopheline mosquitoes' breeding from which 84 adults were reared successfully. Identified mosquitoes belonged to five species and one species complex which included 2(2.38%) An. arabiensis Patton, 45(53.77%) An. gambiae Giles s.l., 30(35.71%) An. gambiae Giles s.s. , 1(1.19%) An. Longipalpis Theobald, 1(1.19%) An. pretoriensis Theobald and 5(5.95%) An. rufipes Gough. Ranges of hydro-physical (depths and surface areas) differ significantly (P 0.05) in their ability to support breeding of mosquito species. The study observed the breeding, in sympatry, of two of the most important malaria vectors ( An. gambiae s.s. and An. arabiensis ) in rock pools.


Deep
Neural Networks (DNNs) have greatly advanced the state-of-the-art in a wide range
of machine learning tasks involving image, video, speech and text analytics,
and are deployed in numerous widely-used products and services. Improvements in
the capabilities of hardware platforms such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)
and specialized accelerators have been instrumental in enabling these advances
as they have allowed more complex and accurate networks to be trained and
deployed. However, the enormous computational and memory demands of DNNs
continue to increase with growing data size and network complexity, posing a
continuing challenge to computing system designers. For instance,
state-of-the-art image recognition DNNs require hundreds of millions of
parameters and hundreds of billions of multiply-accumulate operations while
state-of-the-art language models require hundreds of billions of parameters and
several trillion operations to process a single input instance. Another major
obstacle in the adoption of DNNs, despite their impressive accuracies on a range
of datasets, has been their lack of robustness. Specifically, recent efforts
have demonstrated that small, carefully-introduced input perturbations can
force a DNN to behave in unexpected and erroneous ways, which can have to
severe consequences in several safety-critical DNN applications like healthcare
and autonomous vehicles. In this dissertation, we explore approximate computing
as an avenue to improve the speed and energy efficiency of DNNs, as well as
their robustness to input perturbations.

Approximate
computing involves executing selected computations of an application in an
approximate manner, while generating favorable trade-offs between computational
efficiency and output quality. The intrinsic error resilience of machine learning
applications makes them excellent candidates for approximate computing, allowing
us to achieve execution time and energy reductions with minimal effect on the
quality of outputs. This dissertation performs a comprehensive analysis of
different approximate computing techniques for improving the execution efficiency
of DNNs. Complementary to generic approximation techniques like quantization,
it identifies approximation opportunities based on the specific characteristics
of three popular classes of networks - Feed-forward Neural Networks (FFNNs),
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which vary
considerably in their network structure and computational patterns.

First, in
the context of feed-forward neural networks, we identify sparsity, or the presence
of zero values in the data structures (activations, weights, gradients and errors),
to be a major source of redundancy and therefore, an easy target for
approximations. We develop lightweight micro-architectural and instruction set
extensions to a general-purpose processor core that enable it to dynamically
detect zero values when they are loaded and skip future instructions that are
rendered redundant by them. Next, we explore LSTMs (the most widely used class
of RNNs), which map sequences from an input space to an output space. We
propose hardware-agnostic approximations that dynamically skip redundant
symbols in the input sequence and discard redundant elements in the state
vector to achieve execution time benefits. Following that, we consider SNNs,
which are an emerging class of neural networks that represent and process
information in the form of sequences of binary spikes. Observing that spike-triggered
updates along synaptic connections are the dominant operation in SNNs, we
propose hardware and software techniques to identify connections that can be
minimally impact the output quality and deactivate them dynamically, skipping any
associated updates.

The
dissertation also delves into the efficacy of combining multiple approximate computing
techniques to improve the execution efficiency of DNNs. In particular, we focus
on the combination of quantization, which reduces the precision of DNN data-structures,
and pruning, which introduces sparsity in them. We observe that the ability of
pruning to reduce the memory demands of quantized DNNs decreases with precision
as the overhead of storing non-zero locations alongside the values starts to
dominate in different sparse encoding schemes. We analyze this overhead and the
overall compression of three different sparse formats across a range of
sparsity and precision values and propose a hybrid compression scheme that
identifies that optimal sparse format for a pruned low-precision DNN.

Along with
improved execution efficiency of DNNs, the dissertation explores an additional
advantage of approximate computing in the form of improved robustness. We
propose ensembles of quantized DNN models with different numerical precisions as
a new approach to increase robustness against adversarial attacks. It is based on
the observation that quantized neural networks often demonstrate much higher robustness
to adversarial attacks than full precision networks, but at the cost of a substantial
loss in accuracy on the original (unperturbed) inputs. We overcome this limitation
to achieve the best of both worlds, i.e., the higher unperturbed accuracies of
the full precision models combined with the higher robustness of the low
precision models, by composing them in an ensemble.

In
summary, this dissertation establishes approximate computing as a promising direction
to improve the performance, energy efficiency and robustness of neural networks.


Despite progressive law reforms, sexual assault complainants continue to experience the criminal justice response to the violations that they have suffered as unsatisfactory, if not traumatic. One emerging response to this dilemma involves greater consideration of the ethical boundaries imposed on lawyers that practice sexual assault law. What is the relationship between a criminal lawyer's ethical duties and the reforms to the law of sexual assault in Canada? How do lawyers themselves understand the ethical limits imposed on their conduct of a sexual assault case? How do lawyers that practice in this area of law comprehend their role in the criminal law's response to sexual harm? What is their sense of professionalism when acting in this capacity? If reforms to the law of sexual assault will not alone result in significant improvements to the experience of sexual assault complainants, perhaps greater focus on the ethics of sexual assault lawyering could improve the legal response to sexual harm. While the body of legal scholarship examining the issue of sexual violence has grown substantially in the past several decades, there has been very little research on the perspectives of criminal lawyers themselves. This is the first research aimed specifically at ascertaining how sexual assault lawyers understand their ethical obligations. Through analysis of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with experienced criminal defence lawyers and crown attorneys across Canada, this article presents a portrait of the ethical identity of sexual assault lawyers.


The fact that large manufacturing plants export relatively more than small plants has been at the foundation of much work in the international trade literature. We examine this fact using Census micro data on plant shipments from the Commodity Flow Survey. We show the fact is not entirely an international trade phenomenon; part of it can be accounted for by the effect of distance, distinct from any border effect. Export destinations tend to be further than domestic destinations, and large plants tend to ship further distances even to domestic locations, as compared with small plants. We develop an extension of the Melitz (2003) model and use it to set up an analysis with model interpretations of ratios between large plant and small plant shipments that can be calculated with the data. We obtain a decomposition of the overall ratio into a term that varies with distance, holding fixed the border, and a term that varies with the border, holding fixed the distance. The distance term accounts for more than half of the overall difference.


It is often claimed that voting is irrational. This article argues that this claim is false. That voting is irrational seems to follow from rational choice models which highlight (a) that voting has costs for each voter (time, transportation, etc.), and (b) that the likelihood that any voter's vote will be pivotal in favor of her preferred candidate is incredibly small. For any individual voter, voting seems an unwise investment: taking on the costs associated with voting for the incredibly small chance that she will affect the outcome of the election. This gives rise to a "paradox" of voting. These two compound propositions both seem true but also seem incompatible with each other: P1: (a) individuals have a reason to vote that is based on the difference their vote might make to the electoral outcome, and (b) it is often reasonable for individuals to vote for this reason P2: (a) for any individual voter, there is only a very small chance that her vote will make a difference to the electoral outcome; and (b) the chance is so small that it would not be reasonable to vote for this reason I present a solution which rejects (P2). Rather than focus just on who gets elected, we do and should also care about how they get elected. The account developed in this paper highlights that each of us, each individual voter and non-voter, makes a difference through our voting behavior this feature of the electoral outcome: the strength of the elected representative's manifest normative mandate. I argue that, if one supports a candidate, it is often rational to vote for that candidate because doing so contributes to the strength of the candidate's manifest normative mandate. Increasing the strength of a candidate's manifest normative mandate is worth caring about, if one supports that candidate, because representatives are more morally justified in acting as trustees, rather than as delegates, as their manifest normative mandate increases. If one supports a candidate, one ought to want that candidate to be morally justified in acting as a trustee. Therefore, if one supports a candidate, it will generally be rational for one to vote for that candidate. The article presents the normative mandate account of voting, explains how the account works, and explains why individual voters would be rational in caring about strengthening – even by just one vote – the manifest normative mandate of those candidates whom they support. Along the way, I will also show how this account provides a resolution of what has been called "the central classic controversy in the literature of political representation." The central controversy: "should (must) a representative do what his constituents want . . . or should (must) he be free to act as seems best to him in pursuit of their welfare?" As I will argue, the answer to this question will vary depending on the strength of a representative's manifest normative mandate.


The aim of this master thesis is to investigate the role of transfer in Norwegians' use and evaluation of English nominal phrases. Twelve 16-year old Norwegian high school students and twelve Norwegian master-students perform an acceptability judgment test, evaluating 72 English sentences where 36 of them aim at investigating possible transfer elements of the different nominal systems. Most ratings seem to be within expectations and only certain elements seem to suggest any influence by negative transfer. The results show that proficiency does matter in the evaluation of the sentences and the master students show less trace of negative transfer than the high school students. The result also indicates that other factors influenced the ratings. These factors include the lexical and syntactical level of the sentences, and the naturalness or abnormality of the content of the sentences.


Dynamic rheological techniques can aid the understanding of the factors contributing to ice cream structure, though the data obtained differs from that deduced from destructive techniques. Studies have shown that ice cream systems are both strain- and frequency-dependent. Chocolate ice cream is normally more viscous than the equivalent vanilla ice cream during mix preparation and has more body on freezing. Ice creams were prepared with and without cocoa solids and frequency sweeps were made from 0.1 to 100 Hz at 0.1% strain. With rapidly frozen ice creams, both G' and G increased in the presence of cocoa solids. Comparison of mixes made with and without low-fat cocoa powder or non-gelatinizing starch demonstrated a similar relationship, with higher apparent viscosities in those mixes containing either cocoa powder or the starch. The results were consistent with the cocoa particles adding to the effect of the fat globules in increasing viscosity.


Asia is home to some of the world's fastest growing economies. Yet millions of people remain poor, while a handful gets richer and richer. Asia needs a development model that leaves no one behind: not the workers and farmers, who act as the driving force behind Asia's growth – and certainly not the women, who take on the lowest paying jobs in the region. This model must also consider constraints, particularly the earth's finite natural resources which future generations need to survive. It must move away from carbon dependence and must anticipate and plan for the impacts of climate change. These principles together inform inclusive and sustainable development, which Asian governments can use as a roadmap to transform their societies in an era of vanishing resources and staggering inequalities.


The cryptofauna of coral reefs may act as a food source for fish, while being grazers or predators themselves, and hence constitute an important group in the coral reef food web. In addition, the actively eroding taxa of the cryptofauna contribute to the decomposition and recirculation of calcium carbonate and are consequently essential for the rebuilding new coral. However, when coral reefs are disturbed, changes in these functions may severely affect the reef ecosystem. In this thesis correlations and causal effects of environmental factors on benthic cryptofauna and bioerosion of corals were investigated at several coral reefs off the west coast of Zanzibar (Unguja), Tanzania. An aim in the first paper was to investigate effects of elevated nutrient levels on bioerosion and bioeroding fauna. Yet, the study found no difference in abundance of the total eroding fauna with distance to a major sewage outlet. However, the faunal composition differed along the gradient, with some deposit feeders being more numerous near the outlet and some suspension feeders being more numerous further away. In a comparison of three coral taxa, as well as coral rubble, the total boring fauna did not differ significantly in abundance or erosion.Internal bioerosion generally increases with time, and the second paper focused on the succession of bioeroders at two experimental sites. There was more total internal erosion at one of the sites, and some eroding taxa were common at one site while rarely found at the other. While some taxa followed an expected successional pattern, others did not. Within taxa, number of individuals was uncorrelated to the extent of erosion, suggesting that it is a result of increased growth rate and low recruitment of new individuals.The last two papers deal with the influence of fish grazing of algae on the bioeroding and non-eroding cryptofauna, respectively. The bioeroding community showed a complex response to varying grazing pressure, varied within and outside damselfish territories, with some taxa, usually suspension feeders, being more abundant in highly grazed areas outside damselfish territories while deposit feeders were more abundant within territories. Further, with a high grazing pressure, the non-boring cryptofauna decreased in abundance compared to areas protected from grazing. However, this was not true for all taxa. Comparing the abundance of taxa at the surface of the coral with taxa in the coral holes and cavities, none of these correlated in numbers.


We have observed a new, strong feature at 47 cm ' in the first-order Raman spectrum of ionimplanted GaAs, prior to any anneal. It is not present in the Raman spectrum of either amorphous or single-crystal GaAs. The peak is strong between excitation photon energies -1.5 and 2.2 eV. Above 2.2 eV it is masked by the Raman spectrum of the amorphous GaAs component of the mixed microcrystalline-amorphous system. Its frequency and line shape are not dependent upon implant species or energy. The photon-energy dependence of the intensity of the amorphous GaAs component of the Raman spectrum is found to be completely accounted for by the photon-energy dependence of the optical penetration depth over the full range studied (1.55-2.71 eV). This then serves as an internal intensity standard for our measurements, permitting us to separate scattering efficiencies from mere scattering volume effects. The longitudinal-optical phonon of the microcrystalline remnant resonates near the E& interband transition peak in the electronic density of states, consistent with a feature corresponding to a Raman-active crystal phonon. However, the new feature at 47 cm ' is observed to resonate strongly at an energy near the Eo and ED+50 electronic transition energies and not near El. We propose that this feature is an acoustic vibration of microcrystalline GaAs, observed via defect-assisted scattering between an electron or hole and the crystalline-amorphous interface regions characteristic of ion-implanted GaAs. The additional scattering breaks the k=0 infinite-crystal selection rule, and double-resonance effects result in intense scattering for phonons in special regions of the Brillouin zone. Electronic wave functions with sufficiently large wavelengths (on the scale of the crystallite size) are strongly affected by the disorder. A phenomenological model accounts for the resonance behavior reasonably well.


Atherosclerosis results from a combination of lipid dysregulation and inflammation-mediated pathology of the vasculature. Lo et al. show that increased expression of related members of the tumor necrosis factor family of inflammatory cytokines, LIGHT and lymphotoxin (LT), on T cells can elevate circulating blood cholesterol and triglycerides in mice. This effect appeared to be mediated via lymphotoxin β receptor (LTβR) signaling in hepatocytes, leading to a drop in the activity of hepatic lipase, an enzyme central to lipid metabolism. The normally high lipid levels found in mice that lack the low-density lipoprotein receptor gene were reduced when LTβR signaling was inhibited. These results raise questions about how the immune system detects and subsequently exacerbates dyslipidemia and whether this process makes any direct contribution to atherosclerosis in humans. J. C. Lo, Y. Wang, A. V. Tumanov, M. Bamji, Z. Yao, C. A. Reardon, G. S. Getz, Y.-X. Fu, Lymphotoxin β receptor-dependent control of lipid homeostasis. Science 316, 285-288 (2007). [Abstract] [Full Text] G. K. Hansson, LIGHT hits the liver. Science 316, 206-207 (2007). [Summary] [Full Text]


The web-technology is going through major changes these years, both with respect to types of systems based on web-technolog y, organization of the development work, required approaches and competencies, etc. We must rethink the organization of the development work. This requires a deeper and coherent understanding of the nature of web-developme nt. This paper presents findings from a field study undertaken in a web-development company. From these findings we characterize web-application development and discuss some major challenges to cope with and to find proper support for in the future. We found that web-development is characterized by involvement of many expertise groups with little training and experience in information systems design, that some of the existing modeling and communication tools introduce severe problems, and that the pace of the introduction of new tools and features causes development and management problems. A further complication factor is that web-applications of today often are business critical systems.


Monolithic piezoelectric sensors commonly used for acoustic emission and ultrasonic inspection are non-conforming, bulky, costly and heavy. This means they do not fit well to complex geometries, they can be susceptible to damage, and on larger structures their cost and weight can be prohibitive. An alternative to this is the use of piezo-electric thick films, which comprise of piezo-electric particles suspended in a matrix material. Such materials could provide "paint on" or "printable" sensors and sensor networks that are low profile, easy to mount and very cheap. In this work we explore the potential of piezo-electric thick films to sense and actuate for Acoustic Emission and ultrasonic applications. Sensors were produced by dispersing PZT 5a particles within water based acrylic and epoxy matrix materials with up to 70% fill by weight. The PZT films were applied to steel and their responses to artificial AE sources (Hsu-Nielson) were assessed and three-dimensional laser vibrometry was used to study the frequency response and mode shapes of the sensors under excitation. The results showed that although less sensitive than monolithic piezoelectric transducers, the thick film sensors can excite and detect ultrasonic waves for SHM applications and there is great potential for the development of a low cost, printed sensor network for SHM.


Field data were used to estimate the wavelength, phase speed, direction of propagation, frequency, and the vertical structure of high‐frequency internal waves observed on the crests of basin‐scale waves of Lake Kinneret during periods of strong wind. Shear stability analysis indicates that these waves were generated by shear in the surface mixing layer. The characteristics of the high‐frequency internal waves changed within a wind event as the result of the evolution of the background flow conditions following the deepening of the surface layer and the propagation of the basin‐scale internal waves. When the background conditions were appropriate, the vertical structure of the unstable mode was such that the perturbations generated visible sinuous internal waves that in turn modified the density profile in the metalimnion in such a way that secondary shear instabilities were triggered. The high‐frequency internal waves were observed over larger distances, but poor coherence in temperature records from stations 200 m apart indicated that individual high‐frequency internal waves were dissipated locally; these waves are thus a local mechanism allowing energy to be drawn from the energized surface layer and transported to the metalimnion, where it sustains turbulence. Part of the energy extracted from the surface layer was also returned to the mean flow in the metalimnion; high‐frequency internal waves are therefore also a source of momentum for the metalimnetic currents. The vertical excursions of the waves also indicate that they could potentially play a role in phytoplankton growth by significantly altering the light regime at relatively high frequencies.


Supply chain formation (SCF) is the process of determining the set of participants and exchange relationships within a network with the goal of setting up a supply chain that meets some predefined social objective. Many proposed solutions for the SCF problem rely on centralized computation, which presents a single point of failure and can also lead to problems with scalability. Decentralized techniques that aid supply chain emergence offer a more robust and scalable approach by allowing participants to deliberate between themselves about the structure of the optimal supply chain. Current decentralized supply chain emergence mechanisms are only able to deal with simplistic scenarios in which goods are produced and traded in single units only and without taking into account production capacities or input-output ratios other than 1:1. In this paper, we demonstrate the performance of a graphical inference technique, max-sum loopy belief propagation (LBP), in a complex multiunit unit supply chain emergence scenario which models additional constraints such as production capacities and input-to-output ratios. We also provide results demonstrating the performance of LBP in dynamic environments, where the properties and composition of participants are altered as the algorithm is running. Our results suggest that max-sum LBP produces consistently strong solutions on a variety of network structures in a multiunit problem scenario, and that performance tends not to be affected by on-the-fly changes to the properties or composition of participants.


Background: Colicins interact with Tol proteins in the periplasm to facilitate their killing of E. coli cells. Results: The N terminus of colicin A interacts with the C terminus of TolA through β-strand addition. Conclusion: Colicin A interacts with TolA at a novel binding site to promote cell killing. Significance: TolA is integral to cell entry of colicin A, providing information to refine current models of colicin translocation. The Tol assembly of proteins is an interacting network of proteins located in the Escherichia coli cell envelope that transduces energy and contributes to cell integrity. TolA is central to this network linking the inner and outer membranes by interactions with TolQ, TolR, TolB, and Pal. Group A colicins, such as ColA, parasitize the Tol network through interactions with TolA and/or TolB to facilitate translocation through the cell envelope to reach their cytotoxic site of action. We have determined the first structure of the C-terminal domain of TolA (TolAIII) bound to an N-terminal ColA polypeptide (TA53–107). The interface region of the TA53–107-TolAIII complex consists of polar contacts linking residues Arg-92 to Arg-96 of ColA with residues Leu-375–Pro-380 of TolA, which constitutes a β-strand addition commonly seen in more promiscuous protein-protein contacts. The interface region also includes three cation-π interactions (Tyr-58–Lys-368, Tyr-90–Lys-379, Phe-94–Lys-396), which have not been observed in any other colicin-Tol protein complex. Mutagenesis of the interface residues of ColA or TolA revealed that the effect on the interaction was cumulative; single mutations of either partner had no effect on ColA activity, whereas mutations of three or more residues significantly reduced ColA activity. Mutagenesis of the aromatic ring component of the cation-π interacting residues showed Tyr-58 of ColA to be essential for the stability of complex formation. TA53–107 binds on the opposite side of TolAIII to that used by g3p, ColN, or TolB, illustrating the flexible nature of TolA as a periplasmic hub protein.


This study presents data on the first language development of final consonant cluster acquisition in Cairene Arabic. We compare the production of final consonant clusters of two siblings (an older brother and a younger sister) acquiring Cairene Arabic in a monolingual setting when both were 2 years, 8 months (2;8). Since one child had more target-appropriate clusters than the other at that age, we get a glimpse of the developmental path of final consonant cluster acquisition in Cairene Arabic. Our findings include that pharyngeal-initial final clusters are acquired early and that gemination is the common "repair" strategy for clusters not yet acquired. We conclude by relating our findings to theories regarding the nature of first language phonological acquisition.


This paper addresses the task of user classification in social media, with an application to Twitter. We automatically infer the values of user attributes such as political orientation or ethnicity by leveraging observable information such as the user behavior, network structure and the linguistic content of the user's Twitter feed. We employ a machine learning approach which relies on a comprehensive set of features derived from such user information. We report encouraging experimental results on 3 tasks with different characteristics: political affiliation detection, ethnicity identification and detecting affinity for a particular business. Finally, our analysis shows that rich linguistic features prove consistently valuable across the 3 tasks and show great promise for additional user classification needs.


Modeling Vapor-Liquid-Solid Phase Behavior in Natural Gas Systems By Mesude Ozturk This thesis proposes modeling phase behavior, including the solid phase, during gas processing. Failure to accurately predict solid phase formation or freezing of CO2, hydrates, and water ice causes plugging and equipment failure. Vapor-liquid-solid phase behaviors of hydrocarbons are modeled using the Perturbed Chain-SAFT (PC-SAFT) equation of state in the presence of carbon dioxide at cryogenic temperatures. PC-SAFT does an excellent job predicting vapor-liquid equilibria (VLE), vapor-solid equilibria (VSE), and liquid-solid equilibria (LSE) using binary interaction parameters fit to the vapor-liquid equilibria data. Using these parameters produces excellent results for LSE and VSE for hydrocarbon + carbon dioxide systems over the entire range of measured temperatures and pressures. Predicting accurate solid phase behavior will help in design and optimization of processes for cryogenic systems especially when data are lacking at process conditions. Further, modeling at extreme high temperatures and pressures demonstrates the usefulness of PC-SAFT for deepwater reservoirs.


The accuracy and acceptability of saliva human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) antibody testing were compared with serum testing in a study of paired specimens from HIV-1-seropositive and HIV-1-seronegative Ugandan adults attending a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. Saliva collection was performed with the Omni-sal device (Saliva Diagnostic Systems, Vancouver, Wash.), and antibody testing was performed by a rapid filter paper assay (Test-Pack; Abbott Laboratories, Abbott Park, Ill.). Relative to serum testing, the sensitivity of saliva testing was 95% (195 of 205) and the specificity was 99% (295 of 297). The sensitivity of saliva testing was higher for patients with elevated levels of beta-2 microglobulin in sera and greater numbers of HIV-1-related symptoms. Pre- and poststudy interviews indicated that saliva testing did not foster inordinate fears of saliva exposure. The development of saliva tests that are inexpensive and do not require electricity is needed.


Objective To compare healthcare professionals (HCPs) and school personnel (SP) perceptions of and familiarity with academic adjustments for adolescents following a concussion. Design Cross-sectional. Setting Self-reported online survey. Subjects 4,376 participants (1,095 males, 2,003 females, 1,278 missing sex; 2,209 HCPs, 2,156 SP; age=47.5 ± 14.8) from a convenience sample of 51,507 individuals (8.5% response rate) completed the Beliefs, Attitudes, and Knowledge of Paediatric Athletes with Concussions (BAKPAC) survey. Outcome measures The independent variable was role (2 levels: HCP, SP). The dependent variables were participants' responses to the survey items. Mann Whitney U tests (P<0.05) were used to determine group differences. Results Both HCPs and SP agreed that concussions can affect school performance (3.7/4.0±0.9; P=0.08) and that concussed adolescents are eligible for consideration under the Americans with Disabilities Act (3.0/4.0±1.0; P=0.81). 57.3% of HCPs and 57.0% of SP reported that they have managed a concussed adolescent who experienced decreased school performance, while 61.0% of HCPs and 57.5% of SP noted concussed adolescents received academic adjustments. Familiarity with individualised education plans (IEPs; P≤.001) and 504-plans (P≤.001) differed among groups. SP were moderately to extremely familiar with IEPs (3.5/4.0±0.71) and 504-plans (3.3/4.0±0.91), while HCPs were only minimally to moderately familiar (IEP: 2.8/4.0±1.2; 504-plans: 2.6/4.0±1.4). Conclusions HCPs and SP must collaborate to ensure proper concussion management for concussed adolescents. These results suggest the need for targeted education for HCPs and SP concerning academic adjustments to promote a safe return-to-learn. Competing interests None.


Special-interest money is destroying our democratic process. But now that the Citizens United decision has thrown out campaign spending limits as abridgments of free speech, Americans want to know what they can do about it. Derek Cressman gives us the tools, both intellectual and tactical, to fight back.

 There's nothing inherently unconstitutional in limiting the amount of speech, Cressman insists. We do it all the time—for example, cities control when and where demonstrations can take place or how long people can speak at council meetings. Moreover, he argues that while you choose to patronize Fox News, MSNBC, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, political advertising is forced upon you. It's not really free speech at all—it's paid speech. It's not at all what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment.

 Cressman examines how courts have foiled attempts to limit campaign spending, details what a constitutional amendment limiting paid speech should say, and reveals an overlooked political tool concerned citizens can use to help gain the amendment's passage. Seven times before in our history we have approved constitutional amendments to overturn wrongheaded rulings by the Supreme Court—there's no reason we can't do it again.


The impact of subtelomeric DNA on epigenetic switching in Saccharomyces cerevisiae Sanna Abbasi Advisor: Dr. K. Yankulov University of Guelph, 2016 Gene expression is regulated through multiple mechanisms including epigenetic means, such as chromatin structure. Chromatin structure is heritable and ensures the proper transmission of gene expression programs to future daughter cells. However, switches in the expression state of a gene are observed in many organisms. While epigenetic switching is evident in various organisms, crucial for human cell differentiation, and implicated in multiple diseases, the underlying mechanism for such conversions is not fully understood. To study epigenetic switching in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, I specifically looked at the subtelomere of chromosome VII. Because these regions undergo random epigenetic switches about once per 20 generations, genes typically display both the active or silenced state. I used the Telomere Position Effect (TPE) variegation assay, previously established in our lab, to determine the frequency of switches of a reporter gene inserted at this subtelomere. Previously we have shown that two genes, CAC1 and RRM3, affect the frequency of such conversions. In these earlier studies, we used a reporter construct that removed the natural subtelomeric elements found at chromosome VII. In the current study, I attempted to identify the role these removed elements play in epigenetic conversions by using the TPE variegation assay with both the standard reporter construct and a modified reporter construct that includes the elements. Using the standard reporter, I confirmed the involvement of two additional genes in epigenetic switching, SAS2 and, very mildly, RTT106. Meanwhile, the addition of subtelomeric elements appeared to increase the frequency of conversions from the active to silent state in all tested strains and matched previous silencing data, however it appeared to have no impact on


[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Frank Keating," says an ABA colleague, "is made for the medium." The "medium" being television. Actually, the former Governor of Oklahoma is at home speaking in front of any audience, whether it be a banker convention, a congressional committee, or one-on-one with a TV anchor. It's a valuable skill, and Keating has made full use of it in his first year as President and CEO of the ABA. All told, he did dozens of media interviews in 2011, many of them on national television. The latter have included ABC World News, CNBC, Fox Business News, Bloomberg, and MSNBC. Most of the appearances were related to financial issues, but some were on topics ranging from the federal budget deficit to national security. Keating's varied background (besides being a governor, he was an FBI agent, assistant secretary of the Treasury, and a member of the Rivlin-Domenici Debt Reduction Task Force) makes him a sought-after guest on TV news shows. As he points out, "If someone wants to talk to me about national security issues, I can say, 'Remember, part of national security includes protection against cyber attacks on financial institutions,' and then mention the indispensability of a healthy and well-functioning banking system." But in most cases, the questions are about banking issues, and here Keating believes that ABA's high visibility in the media is a member service. "Our 5,000 bank members," he said in a recent interview, "spend their days visiting customers, providing services to depositors, borrowers, and clients. It's the responsibility of their trade association to advance the positives of banking and the banking industry in America. We are their advocates." Also, he says, "ABA is there to take the arrows of justified or unjustified criticism of the industry, as opposed to individual banks having to do that." An example was the interchange debate in which ABA explained why charges are required in order to provide the service. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "If I were a bank CEO," Keating continues, "I'd like to be able to turn on CNBC or FOX or read a newspaper and see that my trade association is defending me against unfair criticism, or advancing a positive agenda." As much as he unhesitatingly defends the worth, indispensability, and integrity of the banking industry--and urges bankers to do the same--Keating is careful to always speak not about what's best for bankers, but about what's best for ordinary people--the depositors, borrowers, and stockholders of banks. He also does not hesitate to acknowledge reality. "I've always found the best policy is just to tell the truth," he says. "If the truth is not pleasant, the best thing to do is say, 'Well, that was an error,' or 'That was an oversight, and here is what we're going to do going forward.' You cannot, in a free society, defend the indefensible. You cannot advance an agenda of falsehoods. "We want to always be factual and be helpful to advance the interest of ordinary Americans," Keating continues. "They have to trust us. That's why to me integrity and bipartisanship are essential hallmarks for the success of the ABA." Don't tread on me Frank Keating knows politics. And he knows what it's like to campaign for office, which he's done successfully four times in Oklahoma (twice as governor; twice in the state legislature). It gets rough out there, and ugly. And while the former FBI agent doesn't go so far as to embrace Sean Connery's memorable line from the movie The Untouchables--"They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue"--Keating did say this at ABA's Annual Convention this fall: "I took the position when I came aboard the ABA, every time somebody kicks us in the shins we will kick back." In the interview, he expanded on the point. "It's important to view what ABA does as a political campaign," says Keating. …


How is the Dutch population faring? That is the
central question addressed in The Social State of the Netherlands
2009. In this book we describe the present status of the Netherlands and
the Dutch in a number of key areas of life, and also highlight the changes that
have taken place in people's life situation over the last ten years. Have
people's incomes improved? Are there more or fewer people in work? And which
groups in the population have made the greatest progress or fallen back
furthest? Are the educational achievements of young people improving or
deteriorating? What about our (unhealthy) habits and lifestyles? How do the
Dutch use their time? People's own subjective experiences are also explored.
How do Dutch citizens view the future: Do we have confidence in it or are we
deeply worried? Is social cohesion in the Netherlands fragmenting? Are some
groups in danger of becoming marginalised? Do those in need of help receive
proper support? And what about voluntary work and club and society
life?

By describing all these diverse themes in their
mutual relationship, we arrive at an overall picture of the life situation of
the Dutch. Naturally, we also devote attention to separate groups - after all,
people's capacities, opportunities and preferences for the way they structure
their lives differ and are related, causally or otherwise, to their age, sex,
whether or not they are disabled, their ethnic origin and their financial
position. The impact of the financial crisis which began in 2008 is also
described for those themes for which data were available. And because Europe is
coming ever closer and a great deal of government policy is today actually
European policy, we indicate in several places how the Dutch compare with their
European neighbours.

The Social State of the Netherlands (SSN)
is part of a long and international research tradition in which an attempt is
made using social indicators to monitor the living conditions and quality of
life of citizens over time, and to identify trends in these areas. The
availability and comprehensiveness of data are improving, and this is creating
better opportunities for charting social trends within the population as a
whole.

The Social State of the Netherlands has
been published every two years since 2001; this is the fifth
edition.


Since 1861, every version of the federal income tax has included a deduction for state and local taxes (often referred to by its popular acronym "SALT"). Since this provision, the "SALT deduction," minimizes the effect of state and local taxes on taxpayers, it offers greater benefits to those living in states that impose the highest tax burden — the high-tax "blue" states. In 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act marked a major shift in this long-established federal policy toward state taxes. Among its many provisions, the Act capped the SALT deduction at $10,000 per married couple, providing no Federal tax offset for amounts paid in excess of that amount.

In this article, I attempt to address two questions raised by this turn of events. First, how will states respond to this change in federal law? Second, does the capping of the SALT deduction represent a major shift in federal-state relations, an unprecedented attack on blue states, or is it simply politics as usual?

My novel approach to the subject is to consider these questions by exploring the similarities and contrasts between the income tax SALT deduction and the estate tax state death tax credit, which was established in 1924 and repealed in 2001. Viewing the 2017 legislation within this broader historical context reveals trends and patterns, providing greater insight than would a study of the SALT deduction in isolation.

This approach yields two results. First, analyzing state legislative responses to the 2001 estate tax changes helps to predict how state governments may respond to the 2017 income tax change and thus offers insight into the future evolution of state income tax regimes. Second, placing the 2017 Tax Act in a broader historical context reveals a pattern of federal interference with state tax regimes, yielding lessons about the interdependence of federal and state tax law as well as how a changing political climate can shape tax policy.


Real estate in common with many other business sectors has experienced significant levels of internationalisation in its market activities over the last decade. These range from the internationalisation of key market actors such as real estate service providers and investors to the increasingly cross-border nature of a wide spectrum of real estate involvements. However, with respect to one group of market actors specifically listed real estate firms the evidence so far available of their activity internationalisation suggests that it has more been limited and highly sector specific as compared to other groups of market actors. This paper sets out to systematically examine the internationalisation of the real estate involvements of this group as a means of identifying the key drivers of this process in the listed real estate universe. The analysis examines the experience of listed firms in Australia, France, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom and The United States. By using a range of case study locations the paper attempts to identify the extent to which country specific factors play a role in explaining different levels of internationalisation. Sector specific considerations, levels of market capitalisation, growth strategies and the incentive of superior performance are all examined as potential drivers of the process. The role of opportunistic timing as a driver is also considered. The paper concludes with an assessment of the findings for our understanding of activity internationalisation in the real estate market and identifies a number of priorities for future research.


Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a new Microsoft technology for allowing software to communicate. Superseding earlier technologies, such as COM/DCOM, .NET Remoting, ASP.NET Web Services, and the Web Services Enhancements for .NET, WCF provides a single solution that is designed to always be the best way to exchange data among software entities. It also provides the infrastructure for developing the next generation of Web services, with support for the WS-* family of specifications, and a new serialization system for enhanced performance. For information technology professionals, WCF supplies an impressive array of administration tools that enterprises and software vendors can use to reduce the cost of ownership of their solutions without writing a single line of code. Most important, WCF finally delivers on the long-postponed promise of model-driven software development with the new software factory approach, by which one can iteratively design solutions in a modeling language and generate executables from lower-level class libraries.Windows Communication Foundation Unleashed is designed to be the best resource for software developers and architects working with WCF. The book guides readers toward a conceptual understanding of all the facilities of WCF and provides step-by-step guides to applying the technology to practical problems. Introduces you to WCF and then takes you deep inside the technology Gives you nearly 100 best practices for programming with WCF Provides detailed coverage on how to version services that you will not find anywhere else Delves into using WCF together with Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows CardSpace Provides detailed coverage of the new high-performance data contract serializer for .NET Walks you through how to do secure, reliable, transacted messaging, and how to understand the options available Introduces you to federated, claims-based security, and shows you how to incorporate SAML and WS-Trust security token services into your architecture Provides step-by-step instructions for how to customize every aspect of WCF Shows you how to add your own behaviors, communication channels, message encoders, and transports Gives you options for implementing publish/subscribe solutions Walks you through how to do peer-to-peer communications with WCFAs evangelists at Microsoft for WCF, Craig McMurtry, Marc Mercuri, Nigel Watling, and Matt Winkler are uniquely positioned to write this book. They had access to the product as it was being built and to the development team itself. Their work with enterprises and outside software vendors has given them insight into how others see the software, how they want to apply it, and the challenges they face in doing so. Foreword Introduction Part I Introducing the Windows Communication Foundation 2 The Fundamentals 3 Data Representation 4 Sessions, Reliable Sessions, Queues, and Transactions Part II Introducing the Windows Workflow Foundation 5 Fundamentals of the Windows Workflow Foundation 6 Using the Windows Communication Foundation and the Windows Part III Security 7 Security Basics 8 Windows CardSpace, Information Cards, and the Identity Metasystem 9 Securing Applications with Information Cards 10 Advanced Security Part IV Integration and Interoperability 11 Legacy Integration 12 Interoperability Part V Extending the Windows Communication Foundation 13 Custom Behaviors 14 Custom Channels 15 Custom Transports Part VI Special Cases 16 Publish/Subscribe Systems 17 Peer Communication 18 Representational State Transfer and Plain XML Services Part VII The Lifecycle of Windows Communication Foundation Applications Index


This review provides a formalism for understanding magic angle effects in clinical studies. It involves consideration of the fiber‐to‐field angle for linear structures such as tendons, ligaments, and peripheral nerves, disc‐like and circular structures such as menisci and labra, as well as complex three‐dimensional structures. There may be one or more fiber types with different orientations within each of these tissues. The orientation of these fibers to B0 is crucial in determining their magic angle effect. Tissues may show a variety of appearances depending on their baseline T2, as well as the increase in T2 produced by the magic angle effect. The appearances are affected by TE, which affects both the general tissue signal level and the change in signal produced by the magic angle effect, fiber‐to‐slice orientation, and partial volume effects. Deliberate positioning of structures and tissues at particular orientations to B0 can be used to increase the signal from tissues such as tendons and ligaments and so allow them to be imaged with conventional sequences. The technique can also be used to produce contrast between tissues with fibers that have different orientations to B0. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


This study sought to uncover the career readiness and professional development needs of Ph.D. students at a large, Midwestern research university. Findings indicate that career goals of graduate students change over time, skill preparation for academic and non-academic careers continues to be inadequate for many students and professional development and career guidance is lacking for many graduate students. Unlike other studies of graduate student professional socialization, this study introduces the theory of Academic Capitalism and its impact on the career and professional development of doctoral students. In a time when tenure track faculty positions are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, increased attention is being given by faculty advisors and graduate student administrators to the education and professional preparation of Ph.D. students. Since the 1980' s, decreases in funding for higher education have forced many institutions to reduce permanent positions, cut research budgets, and increase faculty workload (Finkelstein, Seal, & Shuster, 1998; Rhoades & Slaughter, 1997). Throughout history, in response to ongoing financial shortfalls, universities have continually sought to adjust by seeking new sources of funding (Slaughter «Sc Leslie, 1997) and by reallocating internal resources to academic units thought to be revenue producers for better market competition (Hackman, 1985; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Slaughter, 1993; Volk, Slaughter, «Sc Thomas, 2001) . This market effect created dynamics which led faculty to compete for external funding that was increasingly tied to the market. This entrepreneurial turn towards increased "academic capitalism," can be understood as, "emphasizing the utility of higher education to national economic activity on the part of the faculty and institutions" (Slaughter «ScLeslie, 1997, p. 33). The movement towards increased academic capitalism and entrepreneurialism is problematic for academic professionals and graduate students because it requires the collective action of the university as a whole, altering beliefs and values along the way and ultimately creating tension and dissonance for those working in higher education. Faculty members are sometimes uncomfortable with the practices of their institutions and many national professional associations in these instances have often produced guidelines that caution against approaches that do not prioritize the needs of students (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Rhoades and Slaughter (2004) further suggest that the financial and economic interests of institutions are being prioritized over the interests (codes of ethics) of the professionals and their clients (in this case students). These changes have transformed the composition of the academy's faculty and the nature of academic work (Shuster & Finkelstein, 2008) and have impacted the education, learning, and training of graduate students. Over the past decade, researchers have examined the formal and informal professional socialization process that doctoral students undergo as they pursue the doctorate and the various issues students encounter while pursing the Ph.D. (Austin & Barns, 2005; Golde & Dore, 2001; Tierney & Bensimon, 1996; Weidman, Twale, & Stein, 2001; Wulff & Austin, 2004; Wulff, Austin, Nyquist, & Sprague, 2004). These professional socialization issues and challenges are based largely on a shrinking academic job market; the knowledge, ability, and skills that employers of advanced degree holders seek; and the socialization and training for the future "stewards of our disciplines" (Golde & Walker, 2006). Research on the professional socialization for academic positions suggests that some graduate programs may not be adequately preparing students for the realities of faculty life (Adams, 2002; Austin, 2002; Olsen & Crawford, 1998) or is not preparing students for the needs of a changing work force (Nyquist & Wulff 2000). …


The law of employee non-competition agreements is a mess. Differing standards, unpredictability, and uncertainty within and between jurisdictions is the norm. The variability in state law provides a significant incentive on both sides to forum shop when a dispute over a non-compete arises. This forum shopping leads to conflicts of law, and choice of law doctrine does not resolve these disputes in a satisfactory way. Because non-compete law is often a matter of fundamental public policy, the use of escape valves from the operation of conflicts principles means that there is no predictability or certainty in non-compete litigation. The search for favorable law results in races to the courthouse and parallel litigation in different jurisdictions that can lead to standoffs between the courts, and neither comity principles nor abstention doctrine provide a satisfactory resolution. Uniformity in non-compete law, whether achieved through the uniform act process, a model act, or otherwise, is thus desirable. Moreover, a uniform rule of unenforceability would do the most to reduce the disadvantages of the diversity of state law and to facilitate the flow of commercial transactions because such a rule is discrete, easily applied, the least likely to be subject to interpretive changes over time, and promotes a free market in labor.


Experience-driven design considers all aspects of a product – its appearance, cultural meaning, functionality, interaction, usability, technology, and indirect consequences of use – with the aim to optimize and orchestrate all these aspects and create the best possible user experience. Since the late 1990s, designers and design researchers have begun to explicitly investigate how products elicit emotions in users, and how knowledge of specific emotions like joy, pride, frustration or sadness could help designers to improve the user experience of products. Generally speaking, it seems that the most evident aim for a designer is to maximize the amount of positive user emotions and to minimize the amount of negative user emotions – based on the assumption that positive emotions are always desirable and negative emotions are always undesirable. However, if we look at some examples of enjoyable and meaningful human experiences, we quickly realize that this assumption is not always valid. Several examples of art and entertainment demonstrate this: People who ride rollercoasters, play challenging video games, or listen to downbeat music are experiencing fear, frustration, and sadness, respectively, but are also enjoying themselves. Furthermore, they do not seem to enjoy these activities despite these emotions, but because of them: unintimidating rollercoasters, effortless games and unmoving music are not nearly as satisfying. In my PhD-project I have focused on such experiences – named 'rich experiences' – and investigated how these can be systematically designed into consumer products and services. The first four chapters lay the theoretical foundation of this investigation. In the first chapter I explore some assumptions about emotions and when they are considered positive or negative. In chapter two I describe a phenomenological study that examined what kind of life situations evoke mixed emotions, and in which cases those emotions constitute rich experiences. Chapter three discusses the possible reasons why people seek out negative emotions and the condition under which these emotions can be enjoyed. The insights lead to a framework of the formation of rich experiences, which is used to analyze six product examples. Lastly, chapter four discusses a series of studies that lead to the creation of a textual and audiovisual database that offers designers knowledge about a highly differentiated set of negative emotions to help them create unique rich experiences. The last five chapters subsequently discuss how designers could evoke this kind of experiences through products and services. Chapter five introduces a methodical design approach to emotionally enrich user experiences. In addition to the overall approach, it also discusses ten 'rich experience qualities' that designers could use right away in their projects. Six design concepts generated with the approach are discussed. Chapter six further examines the design approach, by reflecting on the results and processes of nearly sixty design students and a professional designer. The chapter discusses the rich experience qualities and the design concepts that the designers generated using the approach. Chapter seven describes a larger case study: the design and testing of an interactive wristband that aimed to add engagement to the activity of running by evoking fear in users. Chapter eight slightly extends the scope of the thesis. Whereas the preceding chapters focused primarily on adding enjoyment, engagement and meaning to generally boring or empty situations, chapter eight investigates whether a similar approach can be used to design for user situations that already involve a strong negative emotion. The final chapter reviews the findings of the thesis, discusses ethical implications, and contemplates some possibilities for future research.