In modern times, catapults have been used extensively at all levels as an educational tool. Recently, many communities, universities, and organizations have begun to hold contests where participants are tasked to build a catapult to throw pumpkins at targets or for distance. In 2013, Team ETHOS (Experimental Torsion Hybrid Onager System), a non-profit group promoting STEM education, began design and manufacture of a carbon-fiber throwing arm for their catapult. This article describes the process Team ETHOS and partners went through to design and manufacture a new arm for their machine while using the journey as an educational tool for themselves and student team members. The team developed requirements and models to demonstrate the impact of various design strategies to create a reliable structural arm. A hybrid filament winding process was chosen as a manufacturing method for the new arm. This approach consisted of building a semi-structural mandrel suitable for filament winding and incorporating pultruded unidirectional materials into the filament wind process. A unique ply-drop technique was developed in the filament winding process to address the need for skin thickness reductions from the arm root to tip. Experimental measurements of mass, center of gravity, mass moment of inertia (MOI), and internal strains of the new arm were quite close to those specified in the design process. The as-manufactured arm displayed a mass 1.80% higher and a center of gravity 15mm away from specified in the design of the 4.6m arm. Most importantly, the MOI about the arm pivot was less than 0.5% higher than predicted. Field-measurements of strain compare favorably with models.


During the course of infection, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) maintains a stably integrated reservoir of replication-competent proviruses within the host genome that are unaffected by antiretroviral therapy. Curative advancements rely heavily on targeting the reservoir, though determinants of its evolutionary origins remain ill-supported through current strategies and are often limited by sample variety. Here, we describe a single-cell deoxyribonucleic acid sequencing (scDNA-seq) method, optimized for sequencing of proviral and host DNA from a treatment-interrupted HIV animal model. We report its benefits for improving viral reservoir resolution to support critical evolutionary events otherwise considered unreliable using traditional viral envelope gene signal alone, as well as comparative advantages to existing near-full-length genome sequencing methods. Given the variety of proviral characteristics that may influence viral rebound, scDNA-seq holds immense value in its ability to streamline many of the present-day applications available in viral reservoir studies, such as integration status and putative replication competency.


The installment land contract is rarely used in some states, but in many it is the predominant means of vendor financing of land sales. Much has been written about it, but nearly all of the literature focuses on the law of one particular state or another. Our purpose here is to provide a nationwide perspective, with particular attention to the states in which the contract has been widely used and extensively litigated. We propose to examine the reasons for the installment contract's popularity, its advantages and disadvantages, and the risks it presents to both vendor and purchaser.


Identification of marker traits in annual Medicago species (medics) would assist plant breeders in cultivar development. The objective of this research was to determine the inheritance of pod type, stem color, and dwarf growth habit in Medicago polymorpha L., a diploid species. Progeny from each of three crosses were evaluated in the F 1 , F 2 , and F 3 generations. Results indicate that pod type was controlled by a single gene with a dominant allele for spiny pods. We propose the gene symbol Sp 1 for the pod type trait. Stem color also was controlled by a single gene, with a dominant allele for red stems. We propose Rs 1 as the gene symbol for this trait. The dwarf trait was not present in the parents or the F 1 generation, but was observed in the F 2 generation of one of the crosses. Dwarf plants had much shorter stems, internodes, and leaf petioles than normal plants, and they also had smaller, puckered leaves. The trait appeared to be controlled by two genes with partial recessive epistasis. We propose the gene symbols Dw 1 and Dw 2 for this trait. Results indicated that the genes for pod type and stem color segregated independently and were not linked.


This book presents a substantial new statement on the character of social life in confinement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in two contrasting English maximum security prisons, the authors systematically compare their institutional order, including the differing control strategies deployed in each, as seen by both custodians and captives, controllers and controlled. The authors discuss the implications of their research for the tradition of sociological concern within the'prison community'. They re-examine the resources of that rich but latterly somewhat dormant field in the light of some of the main currents in contemporary social theory, and thereby provide a new perspective on the 'problem of order' in maximum custody. This book will have significant policy implications, and it will be required reading for scholars and students in criminology and criminal justice, as well as for administrators and reformers in penal system.


The purpose of the present thesis was to evaluate the impact of the 'Schools on the Move' project, a pedometer-based intervention aimed at promoting physical activity in young people aged 9 to 13, by using qualitative and quantitative methods along dimensions of the RE-AIM evaluation framework. A second purpose was to identify which factors accounted for the success or failure of the intervention. A case study analysis involving six schools (3 primary and 3 secondary) was conducted in two stages: (1) within-case analysis and (2) cross-case analysis. In within-case analysis, each case was examined in-depth in order to identify what happened, built an explanation, and identify causal links about the case. In cross-case analysis, the factors that could possibly be associated with greater or lesser impact of the intervention were investigated. Specifically, implementation factors, adoption factors, and context (school and socio-regional) were examined to explain variation in project's impact among schools. The findings indicated that the project had some positive effect in terms of increasing physical activity levels and awareness of health benefits of physical activity. Given the high dropout rates noted in all schools, these findings pertain only to the pupils who remained in the project. Differentiating schools with more or less impact, the results of cross-case analysis indicated that primary schools were more successful than secondary schools. Support provided to children during the implementation of the project appeared to explain variation between less or more successful schools. In primary schools, children were more intrinsically motivated, valued, and enjoyed the project more. In addition, primary school age children, while participating in the project, felt more competent, autonomous, and related to each other. In conclusion, the high dropout rates suggest that the pedometer-based intervention was not acceptable by the participants and that the sustainable use of pedometers was not feasible in the schools. It is hoped that this evaluation in 'real-world' settings will inform to better design and implement school-based physical activity interventions.


Review: Property and Politics in Sabah: Native Struggles over Land Rights By Amity Doolittle Reviewed by Elery Hamilton-Smith Charles Sturt University, Australia Amity A. Doolittle. Property and Politics in Sabah, Malaysia: Native Struggles over Land Rights. University of Washington Press, Seattle and Washington, 2005. 232pp. ISBN 0 295 98539 9; $US50.00. This is indeed a powerful book. The author is daughter of George Appell, one of the most important authors on the anthropology of Malaysia Borneo and so grew up immersed in an understanding of that society. In this work, she has examined the politics of control over land tenure, drawing upon both a detailed historical record and a thorough analysis utilizing a state-of-the-art political ecology framework. Her documentation is comprehensive, detailed and absolutely meticulous. In summary, she shows the extent to which both British colonialism and Malaysian neo-colonialism have consistently demonstrated both a lack of respect for, and understanding of, the indigenous people. Certainly, the story is a very complex one and continuing high-sounding rhetoric has often disguised the oppression and associated denial of human rights that has resulted. Even though the policy and programs of government have been subject to continuing change and even absolute reversal, the underlying problems have remained remarkably unchanged. The view from the outside world is informed largely by the rhetoric which, of course, is the perception offered by the formal media. Accordingly, Sabah is often seen as a successful society and no doubt it is for the affluent and powerful Malayan politicians and administrators. At the same time, an inquiring visitor to Malaysia needs relatively little social sensitivity to realize the immense injustice done to the traditional inhabitants. Perhaps, the only positive thing that can be said is that this occurs less in Sabah than elsewhere in Malaysia. The book totally confirms the negative perceptions that I have developed over some forty years of intermittent visiting. At the same time, well-intentioned international organizations concerned with the provision of aid and with the development of nature conservation across the world are struggling to achieve positive results. They often do so within the dominant framework imposed by the government and this is doubtless to be commended. However, the necessary compromises often fail to make a significant impression upon the well being of indigenous people


An incompressible pipe flow with leak was investigated numerically in the present study to provide the understanding of how different parameters including leak-pipe diameter, inlet mass flow, and main pipe length can affect leak. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been carried out to simulate the leakage in water pipe under different conditions. The present CFD data show that the effect of the inlet mass flow rate is more significant on total pressure drop and pressure change at the leak location than that of the main pipe length. The effect of these two factors on leak mass flow rate becomes comparably important. The relationship between the pressure change at leak location and leak mass flow rate is approximately linear, with dominant effect of the inlet mass flow rate and negligible effect of the pipe length. When the leak quantity ratio smaller than approximately 2%, the pressure change at leak-location is negligible with no difference observed. The present study proves that CFD analysis could be an effective and less-costly means to investigate pipe flow with leakage, so as to provide scientific understanding of the underline mechanism on flow leakage.


In this book, one of the world's leading intellectual historians offers a critical survey of Western historical thought and writing from the pre-classical era to the late eighteenth century. Donald R. Kelley focuses on persistent themes and methodology, including questions of myth, national origins, chronology, language, literary forms, rhetoric, translation, historical method and criticism, theory and practice of interpretation, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and "historicism." Kelley begins by analyzing the dual tradition established by the foundational works of Greek historiography-Herodotus's broad cultural and antiquarian inquiry and the contrasting model of Thucydides' contemporary political and analytical narrative. He then examines the many variations on and departures from these themes produced in writings from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian antiquity, in medieval chronicles, in national histories and revisions of history during the Renaissance and Reformation, and in the rise of erudite and enlightened history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, Kelley discusses how later historians viewed their predecessors, including both supporters and detractors of the authors in question. The book, which is a companion volume to Kelley's highly praised anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in interpretations of the past.


Following an introduction giving the reasons for writing on Thomas Laycock,
there are two chapters of personal biography making use of his unpublished personal
Journal.
An account is then given of his papers on hysteria and the thinking which led
from hysteria to reflex brain function.
Next a chapter is devoted to Laycock's writings on public health and his
involvement with Edwin Chadwick in the preparation for the City of York of The Report
on the state of Large Towns and Populous Districts.
Laycock always had a special interest in medical psychology and extended reflex
action to explain some of the phenomena of mental illness and memory. An account is
also given of his various other writings related to psychiatry.
He was aware that extending reflex function to the brain would result in various
philosophical and theological problems and Laycock's opinions are given on these issues
together with a brief account of his classical work Mind and Brain.
Having a great interest in medical psychology, also being a lecturer at the York
Medical School and later Professor of the Practice of Physic at Edinburgh, it was natural
he should be a pioneer in the teaching of the subject.
Many fascinating ideas are to be found in Laycock's writings on general
medicine, especially his use of neurology to explain oedema and certain types of
pulmonary disease. A trophic nervous system was thought to cause tissue pathology
which was a reversion to a lower evolutionary type.
In his last decade Laycock wrote consolidating many of his previous ideas but
attempted to bring these into line with then current scientific advances. A selection of
his unpublished writings is examined in the same chapter.
In his lifetime Laycock was not an influential person but he impressed a few of
his more able students, several of whom were to become professionally distinguished.
The careers of these are described.
After some conclusions a bibliography, with notes. is provided of
published and unpublished works used in this thesis.


The IETF Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) protocol
supports arbitrary link technologies between TRILL switches, including
point-to-point links and multi-access Local Area Network (LAN) links
that can have multiple TRILL switches and end stations attached. TRILL
uses Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) routing. This
document specifies the establishment, reporting, and termination of
IS-IS adjacencies between TRILL switches, also known as RBridges
(Routing Bridges). It also concerns four other link-local aspects of
TRILL: Designated RBridge (DRB) selection, MTU (Maximum Transmission
Unit) testing, pseudonode creation, and BFD (Bidirectional Forwarding
Detection) session bootstrapping in connection with adjacency. State
diagrams are included where appropriate. This document obsoletes RFC
6327 and updates RFC 6325.


Objective. This study examined, in a health maintenance organization population of children, the associations between parents' smoking and otitis media (OM) in their children while controlling for other known risk factors.
 Methods. Healthy newborns (1246) in a large health maintenance organization were enrolled at birth, and 1013 (81%) were followed prospectively for the first year of life. Their medical records were reviewed for the diagnosis of otitis media. Information on risk factors for recurrent OM (ROM) was collected, including a number of variables related to parental smoking.
 Results. After controlling for other known risk factors for ROM including gender, day care, other siblings in the home, parental history of hay fever, and method of feeding, it was found that heavy maternal smoking of 20 or more cigarettes per day was a significant risk factor for ROM but not for nonrecurrent otitis. Heavy maternal smoking was associated with a threefold risk for ROM if the infant weighed less than the mean at birth (3.5 kg) after controlling for other risk factors. No association was found with paternal smoking.
 Conclusions. Heavy maternal smoking is a significant risk factor for ROM in the first year of life. This smoking effect seems to be stronger among infants of lower birth weight.


Although most prospective cohort studies do not support an association between coffee consumption and pancreatic cancer, the findings for alcohol are inconsistent. Recently, a large prospective cohort study of women reported statistically significant elevations in risk of pancreatic cancer for both coffee and alcoholic beverage consumption. We obtained data on coffee, alcohol, and other dietary factors using semiquantitative food frequency questionnaires administered at baseline (1986 in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and 1980 in the Nurses' Health Study) and in subsequent follow-up questionnaires. Data on other risk factors for pancreatic cancer, including cigarette smoking, were also available. Individuals with a history of cancer at study initiation were excluded from all of the analyses. During the 1,907,222 person-years of follow-up, 288 incident cases of pancreatic cancer were diagnosed. The data were analyzed separately for each cohort, and results were pooled to compute overall relative risks (RR). Neither coffee nor alcohol intakes were associated with an increased risk of pancreatic cancer in either cohort or after pooling the results (pooled RR, 0.62; 95% confidence interval, 0.27-1.43, for >3 cups of coffee/day versus none; and pooled RR, 1.00; 95% confidence interval, 0.57-1.76, for > or = 30 grams of alcohol/day versus none). The associations did not change with analyses examining different latency periods for coffee and alcohol. Similarly, no statistically significant associations were observed for intakes of tea, decaffeinated coffee, total caffeine, or alcoholic beverages. Data from these two large cohorts do not support any overall association between coffee intake or alcohol intake and risk of pancreatic cancer.


This study was undertaken with the to determine the attitude and perception of primary health care physicians in Jeddah, Ministry of Health, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, towards evidence based medicine and their related educational needs. One hundred seventy selfadministered questionnaires were distributed to all Primary health care centre physicians from 1 July to 30 July 2010. One hundred twenty-eight completed the questionnaires, a response rate of 75.3%. Respondents welcomed evidence based medicine and agreed that its practice will improve patient care. They had a low level of awareness of extracting information from journals, review publications and databases. The majority of unqualified physicians, 100 (78%), were unaware of the Cochrane Database of SystematicReviews. The major barrier to practicing evidence-based medicine was lack of time, 83(64.8%). Fifty four (42.9%) physicians approved using evidence based practice guidelines or protocols developed by colleagues. Despite the physicians having positive attitude towards evidence based medicine, their level of knowledge and skills are still below average. Accordingly, there is a need to start training courses and providing them with the required. Physicians who are board qualified should be encouraged to teach evidence based medicine skills to their non board qualified colleagues and develop local evidence based guidelines.


Since Ross' interesting observation
1
that the abdomen of an adult anopheline when at rest forms an angle with the surface, while that of a culicine roughly parallels it, the statement, in the light of subsequent experience of many workers, has taken on axiomatic significance. To be sure this condition holds apparently in most cases. At least two exceptions to this generalization however, are known for anophelines. James and Liston
2
mentioned Anopheles culicifacies in India as resting in a Culex-like attitude. A similar resting position is taken by A. quadrimaculatus according to Darling.
3
The two species of Anopheles known from Haiti both rest in the anopheline manner. Nevertheless merely a glance suffices to distinguish one from the other. A. albimanus falls into the more or less orthodox type, that is, the body projects at about a 45° angle from a vertical surface on which the insect is resting.


Sponges (phylum Porifera) have the most simple and probably the most ancient body plan of the multicellular animals. They are, however, very successful in most benthic ecosystems. They are dominant in submarine caves, where their study has provided unexpected results. Submarine caves share several ecological features with deep-sea habitats. The communities living in these habitats depend on allochthonous organic input, and some bathyal species are able to colonize the darkest parts of littoral caves. Some examples will be given, including calcified sponges,«living fossils» of ancient reef builders. Faunal and environmental similarities, however, are limited by the obvious differences in pressure, temperature, habitat size, and by the dispersal abilities of deep water organisms. A recently discovered Mediterranean cave more closely approximates deep-sea conditions, due to the entrapment of a cold water mass resulting in stable temperature conditions throughout the year. Easily accessible to scuba divers, this «bathyal island» in the littoral zone is a natural mesocosm of the deep Mediterranean which offers exceptional opportunities for deep-sea biology. Preliminary results have already provided unexpected insights, which are illustrated. A large population of Oopsacas minuta, a representative of the bathyo-abyssal hexactinellid sponges, reproduces here year round - making possible the first observations of larval behaviour and ultrastructure to be carried out on this phylogenetically important group of invertebrates, and opening up the poorly known area of larval ecology of these deep-sea sponges. The presence of a species of the deepest known genus of sponges, Asbestopluma (8 840 m in the Central Pacific) is a fascinating opportunity to investigate the biology of the strange deep-sea cladorhizid sponges, which may live in the most oligotrophic abyssal basins. A highly unexpected result is that they are non-filter-feeding sponges with a carnivorous feeding habit. They capture and digest small crustaceans by means of filaments provided with minute hook-shaped spicules. The biology and peculiarities of this carnivorous sponge are illustrated by a video.


Idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH), previously known as pseudotumor cerebri, is a condition of increased intracranial pressure of unknown etiology. The most common ocular sign of the disorder is bilateral optic disc edema. Early and appropriate diagnosis and effective management are crucial. This teaching case report will highlight the overall role of the primary care optometrist in the diagnosis and management of a patient with IIH. The case specifically deals with the challenges involved in delivering bad or upsetting news to patients, the facilitation of communication, both interprofessional and doctor/patient, and the critical thinking skills needed for accurate patient management.


We present ultrafast x-ray diffraction (UXRD) experiments on different photoexcited oxide superlattices. All data are successfully simulated by dynamical x-ray diffraction calculations based on a microscopic model, that accounts for the linear response of phonons to the excitation laser pulse. Some Bragg reflections display a highly nonlinear strain dependence. The origin of linear and two distinct nonlinear response phenomena is discussed in a conceptually simpler model using the interference of envelope functions that describe the diffraction efficiency of the average constituent nanolayers. The combination of both models facilitates rapid and accurate simulations of UXRD experiments.


The effectiveness of a design process can be critical to the success of information system development projects. There have been very few empirical studies on the effectiveness of design processes that use unified modeling language (UML). This paper establishes a model for measuring the effectiveness of diagram derivation as a way of measuring the effectiveness of the object-oriented design (OOD) process. It utilizes the defect density approach to evaluate an OOD process in terms of how correct the results are that it produces, how consistent those results are and how scalable the process is. To demonstrate how applicable the proposed methodology is, we conducted an empirical evaluation to determine the effectiveness of the user interface driven design process. This study calculated the defect densities for four UML diagrams and measured the effectiveness of the design process on three levels: individual type of defect, type of diagram and the entire project. The results show that the proposed methodology can be reliably used to evaluate an OOD process.


Price gouging is the use of high prices to ration access to a good in unexpectedly short supply. Because sellers can always recoup their costs by choosing not to ration with price and instead allowing the good to sell out, price gouging harms consumers: it transfers wealth from consumers to firms unnecessarily. This harm to consumers could violate the antitrust laws in two ways. First, it could serve as the basis for a per se rule against algorithmic price gouging — surge pricing — because the superhuman speeds with which surge pricing algorithms respond to shortages effectively shorten the period during which the effects of competition in the pre-shortage period continue to discipline prices during the shortage, and that should satisfy antitrust' s anticompetitive conduct requirement. Second, price gouging's harmfulness to consumers could serve as the basis for an antitrust prohibition on all price gouging were antitrust at last to take its consumer welfare standard seriously and prohibit consumer-harmful pricing even when not accompanied by anticompetitive conduct.


Interleukin-37 protects against inflammatory bowel disease in mice by inhibiting the production of proinflammatory cytokines. Many members of the interluekin-1 (IL-1) family of cytokines, including IL-1β and IL-18, play key roles in stimulating inflammation (see commentary by Kim and Kronenberg). Although proinflammatory responses are beneficial in the short term, long-term inflammation is responsible for such conditions as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Therapies that inhibit the effects of proinflammatory cytokines, such as the use of blocking antibodies, provide relief for many, but not all, patients with IBD; thus, further therapies are required. Despite its structural similarity to IL-18, the IL-1 family member IL-37 does not stimulate inflammation; indeed, IL-37 has anti-inflammatory effects in vitro. McNamee et al. studied a role for IL-37 in inflammation in vivo by overexpressing human IL-17 in transgenic mice (hIL-37tg mice) and treating them with dextran sulfate sodium (DSS) to induce colitis, a mouse model of IBD. Breakdown of the epithelial barrier of the colon by DSS was required to induce the expression of the transgene and the production of IL-37 protein. hIL-37tg mice treated with DSS exhibited less severe clinical signs of colitis than did wild-type mice treated with DSS, and this correlated with reduced production of proinflammatory cytokines from colonic explants of hIL-37tg mice. Experiments in which irradiated wild-type mice received bone marrow from either wild-type or hIL-37tg mice showed that IL-37 derived from hematopoietic cells was required to protect mice from DSS-induced colitis. Inducible production of IL-37 also resulted in increased amounts of the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10; however, a blocking antibody against the IL-10 receptor did not prevent the protection of hIL-37tg mice from DSS-induced disease. Together, these data suggest that production of IL-37 is part of a feedback mechanism to prevent chronic inflammation in the intestine and provide a potential therapeutic target in the treatment of IBD. E. N. McNamee, J. C. Masterson, P. Jedlicka, M. McManus, A. Grenz, C. B. Collins, M. F. Nold, C. Nold-Petry, P. Bufler, C. A. Dinarello, J. Rivera-Nieves, Interleukin 37 expression protects mice from colitis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108, 16711–16716 (2011). [Abstract] [Full Text] G. Kim, M. Kronenberg, Cooling the fires of inflammation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108, 16493–16494 (2011). [Full Text]


We present a physically based method for modeling and animating fire. Our method is suitable for both smooth (laminar) and turbulent flames, and it can be used to animate the burning of either solid or gas fuels. We use the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations to independently model both vaporized fuel and hot gaseous products. We develop a physically based model for the expansion that takes place when a vaporized fuel reacts to form hot gaseous products, and a related model for the similar expansion that takes place when a solid fuel is vaporized into a gaseous state. The hot gaseous products , smoke and soot rise under the influence of buoyancy and are rendered using a blackbody radiation model. We also model and render the blue core that results from radicals in the chemical reaction zone where fuel is converted into products. Our method allows the fire and smoke to interact with objects, and flammable objects can catch on fire.


While scalar fields on surfaces have been staples of geometry processing, the use of tangent vector fields has steadily grown in geometry processing over the last two decades: they are crucial to encode both directions and sizing on surfaces as commonly required in tasks such as texture synthesis, non-photorealistic rendering, digital grooming, and meshing. There are, however, a variety of discrete representations of tangent vector fields on triangle meshes, and each approach offers different trade-offs among simplicity, efficiency, and accuracy depending on the targeted application. This course reviews the three main families of discretizations used to design computational tools for vector field processing on triangle meshes: face-based, edge-based, and vertex-based representations. In the process of reviewing the computational tools offered by these representations, we go over a large body of recent developments in vector field processing in the area of discrete differential geometry. We also discuss the theoretical and practical limitations of each type of discretization, and cover increasingly-common extensions such as n-direction and n-vector fields. While the course will focus on explaining the key approaches to practical encoding (including data structures) and manipulation (including discrete operators) of finite-dimensional vector fields, important differential geometric notions will also be covered: as often in Discrete Differential Geometry, the discrete picture will be used to illustrate deep continuous concepts such as covariant derivatives, metric connections, or Bochner Laplacians.


A Sustainable Energy Future: Steps to Reduce US Carbon Dioxide Emissions R.M. Friedman, R.M. Bierbaum. Energy Efficiency, Human Activities, and Climate Change L. Schipper. Integrating Energy, Economy, and Environmental Concerns: No Regrets Tax Reform A. Cristofaro. Multiple Benefits Environmental Policy D. Dudek. Implications for Decision Making: Government Perspectives H. Gruenspecht. Auto Industry Perspectives S.A. Leonard. Strategies for International Negotiations: Status of Framework Convention Talks D.A. Reifsnyder. Equity in International Agreements R. Stewart. The Ethics of Living in a Global Greenhouse: Corporate and Personal Responsibility D. Jamieson. Intergenerational Equity D. MacLean. Examining the Linkages: Designing a Carbon Tax Strategy R. Dower. A Congressional View of Workable Linkages J.D. Dingell. 23 additional articles. Index.


LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: 3 SUMMARY Background. The risks of BASE jumping are due both to its high inherent risk and the austere locations in which jumpers are often injured. Despite this, emergency management education and resources are lacking for BASE jumpers. We seek to highlight a category of treatable incidents whose outcomes could be improved through emergency medical education and training. Methods. The available literature on BASE jumping injury profiles and wilderness medical education were reviewed. Based on these data, experts on BASE jumping injuries and austere rescue provide medical training and equipment suggestions for BASE jumpers operating in remote environments. Results. Orthopedic injuries, particularly of the lower limbs and spine, predominate in BASE jumping. Almost no medical or training resources exist that have been developed for, or in partnership with, the BASE jumping population. Group preparedness may be significantly aided through a combination of equipment carried on each person and equipment that can be quickly accessed. Conclusions. Emergency preparedness is multifactorial and context-dependent, but jumpers' ability to respond to both injury and rescue situations is crucial in the BASE environment. A proactive approach from the wilderness medicine community can address the problem of BASE jumping injuries from medical and pre-hospital perspectives.


This readable, comprehensive text covers endothelial biology from the fundamentals of structure and lung fluid balance physiology to state-of-the-art descriptions of the molecular mechanisms involved in the development of lung failure. The material and illustrations, provided by outstanding experts in their individual areas of research and clinical concentration, is artfully woven together to provide the reader with an integrated, in-depth, and up-to-date knowledge of endothelial function, vascular integrity, pulmonary function, and pathophysiology in respiratory failurec


Think back to first year property class. You are a bright-eyed 1L, and one of the first cases you read deals with hunting foxes on the beaches of Long Island, New York. The fact pattern seems obscure enough, but Pierson v. Post is the seminal case used to teach generations of law students about the acquisition of property. The interest in Pierson has recently been reinvigorated thanks to the uncovering of the original record of this case. Last year the Law and History Review dedicated an entire issue to this famous foxhunt. The holding in Pierson v. Post has been accepted as gospel for first year law students and property scholars alike - but how did the Court arrive at that conclusion? In 1805, New York did not have any statutory or common law to govern this dispute, so the majority and dissenting opinions turned to the natural law. The Judges relied on the writings of Pufendorf, Grotius, and Barbeyrac. An analysis of the court's reliance on the natural law writers has been neglected in property scholarship. This article aims to fill that gap. The natural law jurists wrote at great length about how to obtain a property right to a wild animal. This article provides the first thorough digest of these writings, highlights where the jurists agree and disagree with one another, and examines how faithfully the Pierson court construed their writings. Additionally this article shows how the holding exemplifies the common law court's desire to promote certainty, and shows the congruence between the natural law and economic efficiency. By gaining a more complete understanding of the competing arguments of these jurists, Pierson v. Post is revealed to be a much more sophisticated opinion than we all thought as 1Ls.


Biological activities of five Veronica species (Scrophulariaceae), V. cymbalaria, V. hederifolia, V. pectinata var. glandulosa, V. persica and V. polita were studied for their anti-inflammatory and cytotoxic activities. Their methanol extracts showed both the inhibitory activity of nitric oxide (NO) production in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated macrophages and cytotoxic activity against KB epidermoid carcinoma and B16 melanoma. When the methanol extracts were fractionated between water and chloroform, water fractions significantly inhibited NO production without any cytotoxicity, while chloroform fractions showed cytotoxicity dose-dependently. When the radical scavenging activity was determined using 2,2-diphenyl-1-picryl-hydrazyl (DPPH), water fractions of the five Veronica species scavenged free radicals effectively, suggesting that the inhibitory effect of this species on NO production was due to their radical scavenging activity. On the other hand, chloroform fractions of Veronica species except for V. cymbalaria showed similar cytotoxic activity against KB and B16 melanoma cells.


ABSTRACT The actin depolymerizing factor (ADF)/cofilin family comprises small actin-binding proteins with crucial roles in development, tissue homeostasis and disease. They are best known for their roles in regulating actin dynamics by promoting actin treadmilling and thereby driving membrane protrusion and cell motility. However, recent discoveries have increased our understanding of the functions of these proteins beyond their well-characterized roles. This Cell Science at a Glance article and the accompanying poster serve as an introduction to the diverse roles of the ADF/cofilin family in cells. The first part of the article summarizes their actions in actin treadmilling and the main mechanisms for their intracellular regulation; the second part aims to provide an outline of the emerging cellular roles attributed to the ADF/cofilin family, besides their actions in actin turnover. The latter part discusses an array of diverse processes, which include regulation of intracellular contractility, maintenance of nuclear integrity, transcriptional regulation, nuclear actin monomer transfer, apoptosis and lipid metabolism. Some of these could, of course, be indirect consequences of actin treadmilling functions, and this is discussed. Summary: This Cell Science at a Glance article and the accompanying poster serve as an introduction to the diverse roles of ADF and cofilin proteins in cells.


In this study, the influence of CaZrO3 doped with three dopants, SiO2, MnO, and Nb2O5, and then sintered in a reducing atmosphere on microstructure, phase formation, and electrical properties is investigated. SiO2 plays the role of sintering aid to enhance the density of CaZrO3 leading to better performance of electrical properties as a function of SiO2 content. MnO, and Nb2O5 were incorporated into the Zr-site of CaZrO3 to make stoichometric CaZrO3 into non-stoichiometric CaZrO3 with Zr excess resulting in the formation of a second phase, CaZr4O9, which has a lower dielectric constant (13) in comparison with that of the main phase of CaZrO3 (32). Thus, the dielectric constant of CaZrO3 doped with Nb2O5, or MnO is decreased markedly. In addition, Mn+2 incorporated into Zr-sites of CaZrO3 plays the role of acceptor, which compensates for the number of conduction electrons and contributes to better performance of electrical properties such as insulation resistance and tan δ. Conversely, Nb+5 incorporated into Zr-sites of CaZrO3 plays the role of donor and provides more conduction electrons, leading to poor performance of electrical properties.


Objective Communication between the surgeon and the patient is a core clinical skill. The ability to communicate with patients and their family members is very important in the optimum care of the surgical patient. Few studies have assessed communication between surgical trainees and their patients in sub-Saharan Africa. In response to this, the communication skills of residents in the department of surgery were evaluated to determine their perception of competency and perceived need for training in communication skills as a basis for developing an effective education programme. Method A survey of patient care - related communication skills among surgery residents and assessment of competence, rating the importance and perceived need for training in communication skills. Results Most residents rated their skills as either fairly or extremely competent in all areas except in providing bereavement counseling. They found all skills important and indicated a need for training in them. Senior registrars rated their competence and the importance higher in skills relating to breaking bad news, educating and preparing patients and families for surgery and encouraging them to express their anxieties. (p 0.05). Conclusion Residents face difficult communication challenges with patients and their families. There is a dire need for improved education in communication skills. Understanding the surgical trainees perceptions of patient care related communication skills is the first step in designing an effective education programme. Key Words: Communication skills, surgical trainees, perception


We study the growth effects of outward‐oriented economies by using stochastic frontier analysis to measure the efficiency externalities of three forms of economic cross‐border activities – international trade, foreign direct investment (FDI) and migration – for OECD countries. The study also examines whether the efficiency of these cross‐border activities is affected by the level of human capital in the host country. We find that international trade and FDI are important channels for improving efficiency, as is human capital accumulation, and that the positive effects of international trade, FDI, and migration depend crucially on the level of accumulated human capital. Our results show that the impact of human capital is important for increasing efficiency via international trade flows and FDI flows, while immigration into countries that are richer in human capital enhances their efficiency relatively more than immigration into countries with lower human capital. These results remain robust to alternate measures of human capital, controls on education levels among immigrants, and to a non‐parametric estimation of the model.


We consider the set of equtional classes of finite functions endowed with the operation of class composition. Thus defined, this set gains a semigroup structure. This paper is a contribution to the understanding of this semigroup. We present several interesting properties of this semigroup. In particular, we show that it constitutes a topological semigroup that is profinite.


After President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, Governor Brown issued a joint statement with his counterparts from New York and Washington, announcing that the three governors "are teaming up to fight climate change in response to President Trump's" withdrawal decision. A few days later, Governor Brown met in Beijing with China's President Xi Jinping. The Chinese President reportedly "welcomed California's efforts to work with the Chinese government to help combat global warming." According to the California government web site, the state is party to a total of 54 "international agreements" on climate change, including agreements with both national and sub-national governments.
Governor Brown's international diplomacy raises two distinct constitutional concerns. First, the Compact Clause provides: "No State shall, without the Consent of Congress . . . enter into any Agreement or Compact . . . with a foreign Power." California's cap-and-trade agreement with the Government of Quebec (the "Linking Agreement") is vulnerable to a constitutional challenge in this respect. Second, the Foreign Commerce Clause grants Congress power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations." The Supreme Court has held that state laws may violate the Dormant Foreign Commerce Clause if they "prevent this Nation from 'speaking with one voice' in regulating foreign commerce." The Linking Agreement may also run afoul of the Dormant Foreign Commerce Clause. Although the matter is not free from doubt, I conclude that the Linking Agreement does not violate the Dormant Foreign Commerce Clause. However, the Agreement may be unconstitutional under the Compact Clause, absent congressional consent. The Conclusion considers options available to Governor Brown to mitigate potential constitutional difficulties.


Objective
Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) has an unfavourable prognosis despite the advances made in the treatment of breast cancer. Our study aimed to define immunohistochemistry-based surrogate subtype distribution to determine whether the breast cancer subtype accompanied survival outcome differences in IBC.

Materials and Methods
Medical records of female breast cancer patients with non-metastatic inflammatory breast cancer admitted to our clinic between March 2000 and December 2015 were retrospectively reviewed. Patient demographics, clinical and pathological feature of the primary tumour, adjuvant treatment options and survival data were analysed. Intrinsic breast cancer subtypes were defined according to ER, PR, HER-2 and ki-67 status.

Results
We identified 129 non-metastatic inflammatory breast cancer patients. Median follow-up was 73 months. 10 (7.7%) were luminal A-like, 67 (51.9%) were luminal B-like, 37 (28.6%) were HER-2 positive, and 15 (11.6%) were triple negative (TNBC) by immunohistochemistry. There were no statistically significant differences between subtypes in terms of histological type, grade, tumour size and lymph node status. Median disease-free survival was 47 months (95% confidence interval [CI] 29.2-82.6) and median overall survival was 75 months (95% CI 64.7-90.8). Triple negative breast cancer showed poorer outcome than other subgroups. Presence of TNBC disease was associated with poorer outcome compared to luminal A (HR: 0.19, 95% CI 0.04-0.92, p: 0.039), luminal B (HR: 0.34, 95% CI 0.15-0.74, p: 0.007) and HER-2 positive subgroups (HR: 0.40, 95% CI 0.17-0.94, p:0.037). Luminal A patients had a trend to have a better overall survival which did not reach to a statistical significant difference.

Conclusion
Our study put forth that IBC have a poor prognosis irrespective of breast cancer surrogate subtype distribution. Luminal A, the most frequent subtype of breast cancer was the least common in our IBC patient group. TNBC had the worst outcome when compared to other breast cancer subtypes.


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
A pluripotent progenitor cell was demonstrated to be involved in myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) with normal karyotype or with numerical chromosome aberrations, but the pattern of lineage involvement by the 5q31 deletion in the 5q- syndrome is unknown. We performed this study in order to define the distribution pattern of the 5q- anomaly better in the non-lymphoid cell compartment

DESIGN AND METHODS
Bone marrow (BM) smears from 8 patients with the 5q- syndrome were studied by a modification of the fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) technique that allowed direct visualization of cell morphology. A commercial LSI EGR1 probe (Vysis Inc.) for the 5q31 band was used simultaneously in dual-color experiments with a chromosome-5-centromeric probe (Vysis Inc.) on BM smears from 8 patients with the 5q-syndrome. As additional internal controls a chromosome-7-centromeric probe and a 7q31 probe were used. To establish the sensitivity limit of this approach 5 normal BM smears were studied. All 8 patients had the 5q- chromosome as the sole anomaly in 45% to 75% of the interphase cells.

RESULTS
For each patient 20-40 erythroblasts were analyzed: they were mostly proerythroblasts and basophilic erythroblasts. In all patients a clone carrying the 5q31 deletion was detected (35-50% of the cells, median 45%). Between 20-50 granulocyte precursors were scored; the 5q31 deletion was found in 40%-50% (median 45%) in all cases. The proportion of neutrophils carrying the 5q deletion was consistently lower than the corresponding value in promyelocytes (28.7% vs 45.6%). In the 20-25 megakaryocytes analyzable in all patients, the overall incidence of 5q31 deletion was 52-68%. Equal proportions of large multilobular megakaryocytes and hypolobular megakaryocytes characteristic of the 5q- syndrome were scored: the latter cells showed the 5q31 deletion more frequently than the former cells (93.6% vs 19.3% of the cells). In 66% to 100% of the cases (median 83%) a few cells with uncondensed nuclear chromatin pattern, and two or three prominent nucleoli with cytoplasmatic hypogranulation were seen in each sample carrying the 5q31 deletion.

INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSIONS
We arrived at the following conclusions: i) the transformation in the 5q- syndrome involves an early progenitor cell retaining the ability to proceed along multiple differentiation pathways; ii) there is a preferential distribution of the 5q31 deletion within immature cells and morphologically abnormal megakaryocytes.


Abstract: The Russian protest movement of 2011–12, which challenged the outcome of the December 2011 State Duma elections and called for transparency, accountability, and democratic reform, posed the first real challenge to President Vladimir Putin and the political system that he has established in Russia. As hundreds of thousands of Muscovites repeatedly flooded the streets in protest between December 2011 and May 2012 and smaller rallies took place in dozens of other cities, it became clear that Putin and his United Russia party were losing popularity— particularly among the more urban, affluent, and influential segments of the population. Even now, a year into Putin's third term, the regime has failed to return to business as usual. Demands among the Russian people for transparency and accountability are growing, as is a greater reluctance to accept the status quo.


This European study of long-term care expenditure investigates the key factors that are likely to affect the future expenditure on long-term care services in Germany, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. The approach involves investigating how sensitive long-term care projections are to assumptions made about future trends in different factors, using comparable projection models. The main factors investigated in this study include demography changes, trends in functional dependency (defined as the ability to perform activities of daily living), future availability of informal care, the structure of formal care services and patterns of provision, and the future unit costs of services.


A near-field measurement technique for the prediction of asymptotic far-field antenna patterns from data obtained from a modified cylindrical or plane-polar near-field measurement system is presented. This technique utilizes a simple change in facility alignment to enable near-field data to be taken over the surface of a conceptual right cone [1, 2], or right conic frustum [3, 4], thereby allowing existing facilities to characterize wide-angle antenna performance in situations where hitherto they would perhaps have been limited by truncation. This paper aims to introduce the measurement technique, and to describe the novel probe-corrected near-field-to-far field transform algorithm. The algorithm is based upon a cylindrical-mode expansion of the measured fields. Preliminary results of both computational electromagnetic simulations and actual range measurements are presented. As this paper recounts the progress of ongoing research, it concludes with a discussion of the remaining outstanding issues, and presents an overview of the planned future work.


We review the inclusion of dark energy into the formalism of spherical collapse, and the virialization of a two-component system, made of matter and dark energy. We compare two approaches in previous studies. The first assumes that only the matter component virializes, e.g. as in the case of a classic cosmological constant. The second approach allows the full system to virialize as a whole. We show that the two approaches give fundamentally different results for the final state of the system. This might be a signature discriminating between the classic cosmological constant which cannot virialize and a dynamical dark energy mimicking a cosmological constant. This signature is independent of the measured value of the equation of state. An additional issue which we address is energy non-conservation of the system, which originates from the homogeneity assumption for the dark energy. We propose a way to take this energy loss into account. On virialization with dark energy 2


Monica C. Lewis, "Anthony Trollope and the Voicing of Victorian Fiction" (pp. 141––165) Although critics have read the intrusive nature of Anthony Trollope9s narrators as everything from suicidal to cordial, little to no attention has been paid to the larger context in which these intrusions would have been voiced or to Trollope9s carefully constructed relationship to the interpretive community upon which his literary livelihood depended. Well aware that his novels would be read aloud to his Victorian audience, Trollope adopted a particularly "modern" approach to the questions of audience and reception. At the moment of articulation, this essay argues, the voice of Trollope9s author-narrator welcomes his listeners into a critical dialogue that calls into question not only the aesthetics of fiction but also moral and ethical codes, the construction of "character," and an increasingly modern world. Trollope9s novel of life in the employ of the civil service, The Three Clerks (1858), is a heretofore-neglected case in point. The novel9s protagonist, Charley Tudor, is both a clerk and an aspiring novelist; the reading aloud of his manuscript to an assembled company of admirers serves as a showcase for the ways in which Trollope expected his audience to engage with his own narratives. Drawing upon theories of reading and reception, recent scholarship on nineteenth-century reading practices and Trollope9s negotiation of modernity, and evidence from Trollope9s own experiences as a reader and writer, this essay exposes Anthony Trollope as a novelist whose ambivalent engagement with modernity found its expression in the dialogical space he created among author-narrator, reader, and listener.


The phenomenon of population interference, where a treatment assigned to one experimental unit affects another experimental unit's outcome, has received consider- able attention in standard randomized experiments. The complications produced by population interference in this setting are now readily recognized, and partial remedies are well known. Much less understood is the impact of population interference in panel experiments where treatment is sequentially randomized in the population, and the outcomes are observed at each time step. This paper proposes a general frame- work for studying population interference in panel experiments and presents new finite population estimation and inference results. Our findings suggest that, under mild assumptions, the addition of a temporal dimension to an experiment alleviates some of the challenges of population interference for certain estimands. In contrast, we show that the presence of carryover effects | that is, when past treatments may affect future outcomes | exacerbates the problem. Revisiting the special case of standard experiments with population interference, we prove a central limit theorem under weaker conditions than previous results in the literature and highlight the trade-off between flexibility in the design and the interference structure.


The sharp increase in refugee numbers arriving in the European Union has recently caused major and manifold challenges for the member states and their administrative services. Location based situation reports and maps may support the refugee management from local to European level. The first support is mapping of the geographical distribution of migrating people which needs more or less real time data. The actual data sources are location related observations along the routes of refugees, actual satellite observations and data mining results. These tools and data are used to monitor spatial distributions as well as extrapolate the arrival of refugees for the subsequent weeks. The second support is the short term update of the location of initial registration facilities and first reception facilities, their capacities, and their occupancy. The third management level is the systematic inquiry for unoccupied housing facilities and for empty places within build-up areas. Geo-coded data sets of house numbers have to be cross-referenced with city maps and communal inhabitants address data. The legal aspects of data mining and secured access to personal data are strictly controlled by the administration allowing only limited access and distribution of data and results. However, the paper will not disclose scientific progress in Earth Observation and GIS, but will actually demonstrate an urgently needed new combination of existing methods to support actual needs. The societal benefits of EO/GIS are no longer just potential possibilities, but actual results in real political, administrative and humanitarian day to day reality.


Interactive systems have goals and characteristics that differ from those of batch systems. These differences lead to a need for new techniques, methods, and tools for manipulating and constructing interactive systems. The difference in structure between batch and interactive systems. The difference is considered, focusing on the distinction between command decomposition and component decomposition. The possible ways of solving a problem using an interactive system using action paths, which account for the relatively unconstrained actions of interactive users, are described. It is shown that interactivity is not an inherent characteristic of a system but rather a characteristic that depends on the error profile of its users. The requirements that interaction places on the underlying implementation, specifically the need for incrementality and integration, are considered. The results are applied to several existing classes of systems. >


Edge detection is the base of most image processing applications. There are various classical methods for performing edge detection such as canny operator. The main flaw of these methods is that they are not flexible. Pulse coupled neural network (PCNN) is proposed based on a neuron's model in order to provide this flexibility in image processing application. This flexibility is due to the presence of many parameters which can be adjusted for different images in order to reach an acceptable performance. On the other hand, reaching an effective performance relies on specifying all of these parameters correctly which is very challenging. Due to this fact, simplified models of PCNN are presented. In this paper, we propose a parallel structure based on one simplified model in order to perform effective edge detection. Also we set this model's parameters in a selfadaptive manner. In simulation results, we compare edge detection performance of our proposed algorithm to other methods. These results show that our algorithm has better performance in terms of noise canceling and effective edge detection.


During Spring 2013, the MOTA-DACH Office of Bethlehem was informed of the retrieval of a tomb during the construction of an industrial area roughly 2.2 Km south-east of the Basilica of the Nativity on the Hindaza hill slope called Khalet al-Jam'a. Palestinian archaeologists recovered a number of items identifying there a multi-period necropolis. The site was the object of a rescue excavation in the following Spring 2014. Eleven tombs and their fittings were rescued and recovered in the MOTA storerooms. In May 2015, a joint Italian-Palestinian team preliminary surveyed the necropolis and recorded its finds, planning a future systematic exploration. At a provisional exam, KJ necropolis was in use during Intermediate Bronze Age (EB IV), Middle Bronze Age and, successively, through the whole Iron Age.


Cognitive radio (CR) is the key enabling technology for an efficient dynamic spectrum access. It aims at exploiting an underutilized licensed spectrum by enabling opportunistic communications for unlicensed users. In this work, we first develop a distributed cognitive radio MAC (COMAC) protocol that enables unlicensed users to dynamically utilize the spectrum while limiting the interference on primary (PR) users. The main novelty in COMAC lies in not assuming a predefined CR-to-PR power mask and not requiring active coordination with PR users. COMAC provides a statistical performance guarantee for PR users by limiting the fraction of the time during which the PR users' reception is negatively affected by CR transmissions. To provide such a guarantee, we develop probabilistic models for the PR-to-PR and the PR-to-CR interference under a Rayleigh fading channel model. From these models, we derive closed-form expressions for the mean and variance of interference. Empirical results show that the distribution of the interference is approximately lognormal. Based on the developed interference models, we derive a closed-form expression for the maximum allowable power for a CR transmission. We extend the min-hop routing to exploit the available channel information for improving the perceived throughput. Our simulation results indicate that COMAC satisfies its target soft guarantees under different traffic loads and arbitrary user deployment scenarios. Results also show that exploiting the available channel information for the routing decisions can improve the end-to-end throughput of the CR network (CRN).


Abstract We analyze whether, and since when, East and West German business cycles are synchronised. We investigate real GDP, unemployment rates and survey data as business cycle indicators and we employ several empirical methods. Overall, we find that the regional business cycles have synchronised over time. GDP-based indicators and survey data show a higher degree of synchronisation than the indicators based on unemployment rates. However, synchronisation among East and West German business cycles seems to have become weaker again recently.


This Article takes as its starting point the "agency reference model" for judicial preemption decisions, adopting the foundational premise that courts should take advantage of what federal agencies, which are uniquely positioned to evaluate the impact of state regulation and common law liability upon federal regulatory schemes, have to offer. The Article's main focus is on the federalism dimension of the debate: Congress's and federal agencies' respective ability to serve as loci of meaningful debate with state governmental entities about the impact of federal regulatory schemes on state regulatory interests. Notwithstanding the dismal track record of federal agencies, which seems to be characterized by total neglect of states' regulatory interests, the Article sides with agencies over Congress and trains its focus on reform of the agency rulemaking process. Given that the 1999 Federalism Executive Order provides a blueprint for timely and meaningful consultation with the states, issuance of federalism impact statements, and robust interchanges during the notice-and-comment period, what is needed now is an effective enforcement mechanism. The Article advocates a variety of "agency-forcing" measures designed to enhance the ability of Congress, the executive, and especially the courts, to ensure that agencies abide by executive mandates and other reforms, and to provide a check on overt politicization or inaction on agencies' part. The Article introduces the concept of "indirect challenges" to agency rulemaking, arising outside of the Administrative Procedure Act's domain of direct challenges to agency action at a later juncture when a defendant asserts a preemption defense to state common law tort actions.


Ahmad T, Ohlsson C, Östenson C-G, et al. Peripheral quantitative computed tomography for the detection of diabetic osteopathy: A study in the Goto-Kakizaki rat. Invest Radiol 2003;38:171–176. Rationale and Objective. To assess the utility of dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) and peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT) in detecting trabecular and cortical bone changes in diabetes as a model of osteopenia. Materials and Methods. The tibia from 10 type-2 diabetic Goto-Kakizaki (GK) rats and 10 control Wistar rats were analyzed by DEXA, pQCT, and ash weight determination. Results. DEXA of GK rats showed a significant reduction in mineral content (32%) and density (24%) of the metaphysis, but not of the diaphysis. PQCT disclosed that the reduction of density predominantly pertained to the trabecular bone (reduced by 62%). Periosteal and endosteal circumferences of the diaphyses were increased and cortical thickness was unchanged leading to increased moment of inertia. Conclusions. This study suggests that in osteopathic conditions, cortical and trabecular bone should be separately examined within specific subregions to obtain relevant information. Loss of metaphyseal trabecular bone seems to be a predominant feature in diabetic rats. Moreover, there is increased moment of inertia in the diaphysis implying increased strength. These diagnostic features of diabetic osteopathy can only be assessed by pQCT. It may prove that similar changes occur in human type-2 diabetes, which could explain the susceptibility to periarticular fracture and Charcot arthropathy.


Reductions in atmospheric deposition of sulfur (S) coupled with increases in yields of Glycine Max (L.) Merr. (soybean) has led to S deficiencies in Indiana. Poor nodulation due to limited S, and thus a decrease in nitrogen (N) supply, restricts the yield and quality of soybean grain (i.e., protein). Sulfur is a key component of methionine and cysteine, which are important amino acids in the nutrition of foodstuffs. The objective of the first study is to improve yield and composition of soybean through various applications of N and S. Ten N+S fertility treatments were factored by 2 planting dates (early vs. late) at West Lafayette, IN in 2018 and 2019. The same 10 N+S fertility treatments were factored by 2 varieties (Asgrow 24x7 and 34x6) at Wanatah, IN in 2018 and 2019. Soybean yield increases among the N+S fertility treatments of the May 11th planting (early) were 380 to 1006 kg ha-1 over the untreated control, with no difference within the June 5th planting (late) in 2018. Cool and wet conditions that limited mineralization of N and S from the early planting are likely the source of yield improvements. Protein concentrations were maintained and even increased with N and S treatments that were coupled with yield improvements. The Wanatah location showed that protein levels were increased with the ATS and R4+ NS treatments, while the UAN Direct treatment had the lowest protein in both varieties, suggesting that having no source of S could limit protein development. Although variety did not affect yield, fertility improved yields with the V4R3 NS, Plant NS, R3 NS, R4+ NS, and V4 NS treatments. The yield improvements that developed with these treatments is interesting because each treatment contained a source of N equaling at least 44.8 kg N ha-1.Secondly, the optimal rate and timing of foliar S applications were determined at a S-deficient location (La Crosse, IN) in 2018 and 2019. Three target application timings; V4, R3, and V4 + R3, were crossed with 4 rates of foliar S at 1.12, 2.24, 4.49, 6.73 kg S ha-1 with each application. Therefore, the sequential application (V4 + R3) received a total of 2.24, 4.49, 8.96, and 13.44 kg S ha-1. The optimal rate with 2018 yields was 4.5 kg S ha-1 at V4 or R3; whereas, the optimal rate was 7.9 kg S ha-1 with the sequential V4 + R3 treatment in 2019. Leaf tissue concentrations of S were nearly deficient (0.25%) post-V4 and post-R3. Higher rates of S had greater S concentrations in the leaf; furthermore, most cases resulted in a linear increase of S concentration with the rate of S applied. Foliar applications of S also reduced N:S ratio. Protein levels in 2018 increased at an equal rate for both the V4 and the R3 timings. In 2019, at a 6 lb ac-1 rate of S the protein levels were 39.5 and 39.8% for V4 and R3 timings, respectively. Foliar S applications at V4 vs. R3 timings had little variation in yield or protein levels, thereby resulting in flexibility for application timing for growers.


We propose a recursive data-driven risk-estimation method for non-linear iterative deconvolution. Our two main contributions are 1) a solution-domain risk-estimation approach that is applicable to non-linear restoration algorithms for ill- conditioned inverse problems; and 2) a risk estimate for a state-of-the-art iterative procedure, the thresholded Landweber iteration, which enforces a wavelet-domain sparsity constraint. Our method can be used to estimate the SNR improvement at every step of the algorithm; e.g., for stopping the iteration after the highest value is reached. It can also be applied to estimate the optimal threshold level for a given number of iterations.


In 2016 two nonfiction titles exploring girls and sexuality and presentations of the sexual self received extensive media attention, thus shaping a construction of girl in popular media. In this article I examine how Nancy Jo Sales's American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers and Peggy Orenstein's Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape construct girls as sexual subjects and desired objects. In a close reading of the texts I consider how the authors constitute girl and the ways in which girls navigate society's expectations and constructions of them as sexual subjects. I use the words of girls themselves to examine the dissonance between authorial constructions and the post-feminist culture that emerges in the texts on the one hand, and the girls' language on the other.


Each year the United States resettles thousands of refugees in pre-determined locations across the country. However, refugees are free to relocate upon arrival. Although this secondary migration can fundamentally alter outcomes for both refugees and the communities that host them, policymakers lack systematic data on this phenomenon. Using novel administrative data covering all adult refugees resettled between 2000 and 2014 (N≈447,000), we provide a comprehensive analysis of secondary migration patterns. A high proportion of refugees leave their initial resettlement site and migrate to a different state, although rates vary widely by origin, family ties, and arrival state. Importantly, secondary migration is driven primarily by the presence of co-ethnic networks and labor market considerations. We find no evidence that patterns of secondary migration are driven by state partisanship and the generosity of welfare benefits.


This article deals with the problem of combating international crime related to violence at sea. The question addressed is whether, according to public international law, all violent acts in the maritime domain, such as maritime piracy, drug trafficking, human trafficking and maritime terrorism, can be combined into one legal concept. In order to answer this question, this article takes the traditional notion of "piracy" in the sense used in the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention and explores the possibility of the notion being extended to encompass the other forms of crime to a concept of "universal maritime crime". Jurisdictional issues, the difficulties of incorporating the resulting concept into domestic criminal legislation and challenges related to the prosecution of alleged criminals, such as due process and human rights issues, are also considered.


The behavior of the mixed amphiphilic drug promethazine hydrochloride (PMT) and cationic as well as nonionic surfactants was studied by tensiometry. The cmc values of the PMT-surfactant systems decrease at a surfactant mole fraction of 0.1 and it then becomes constant. The critical micelle concentration (cmc) values are lower than the ideal cmc (cmc * ) values for PMT/TX-100, PMT/TX-114, PMT/Tween 20, and PMT/Tween 60 systems. For the PMT/Tween 40, PMT/Tween 80, PMT/CPC, and PMT/CPB systems the cmc values are close to the cmc * values. This indicates that PMT forms mixed micelles with these surfactants by attractive interactions. The surface excess (Γmax) decreases in the presence of surfactants. The rigid structure of the drug makes adsorption easier and the contribution of the surfactant at the interface decreases. The interaction parameters β m (for the mixed micelles) and β σ (for the mixed monolayer) are negative indicating attraction among the mixed components.


Miller Williams, winner of the prestigious Poets' Prize for 1990, is considered one of the best poets of his generation. "Miller Williams and the Poetry of the Particular" examines his distinguished career, offering a wide variety of critical and personal essays from 13 scholars and writers, including Howard nemerov, Maxine Kumin, William Stafford, X.J. Kennedy, James Whitehead, John Federick Nims, and Fred Chappell. While the themes and formal concerns of Miller Williams' poetics are the focal point of the essays, important attitudes that have shaped American poetry over the past 30 years are also addressed. Those who have long known or are coming to know Williams' poetry will appreciate the discussions of such subjects as his "skeptical science", his mastery of the dramatic monologue, and his uses of commonplace images to root his poetry to the particulars of day-to-day life. Essays are also devoted to Williams' skill as a translator and to his early years as a poet learning and mastering his trade. An insightful interview with Williams and a descriptive chronology complete the collection and enhance our understanding of the thoughts and accomplishments of this literary artist.


The study is a comparative analysis of adequacy of income in Defined benefits Pension plans and defmed contribution pension plans. The main objective of the study is to establish whether retirees will have adequate income at retirement under defined contribution pension plan and its differential effects on income distribution among different categories of retirees. Problem with Defined Contribution Pension plan is that the benefits to retirees are not certain because the benefits depend on the contribution rates and investment returns. Because of undeveloped capital markets in most developing countries, it is unclear whether retirees can achieve adequate replacement ratio in defined contribution pension design. The two-thirds retirement model of Macdonald and Cairn (2006) was used to test adequacy of retirement income. If the DC yields a replacement ratio of forty percent, the retirement income will be considered adequate for this study. According to the World Bank and International Labor Organization, 40% replacement ration is considered adequate for developing economies. To determine the inequality of income among retirees in the two pensions plans a gini coefficient was used. Using a sample of 118 employees of the Teachers Service Commission and 40 staff of the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, the study established that employees with DB plans are likely to be more secure in terms of retirement income than retirees under the defined contribution pension plan. The results also show that there is greater disparity of retirement income under the Defined Contribution Pension design than under the Defined Benefit plan. The key findings are that DC plans tend to have lower retirement income and higher income disparity among workers compared to DB designs. Whereas basic earnings contribute about 80% of retirement benefits under the defined benefits plans, contribution rates and investment returns contribute about 60% of retirement benefits in Defined Contribution pension plan.


The Shuttle Engineering Simulator (SES) is a facility which houses the software and hardware for a variety of simulation systems. The simulators include the Autonomous Remote Manipulator, the Manned Maneuvering Unit, Orbiter/Space Station docking, and shuttle entry and landing. The SES simulators are used by various groups throughout NASA. For example, astronauts use the SES to practice maneuvers with the shuttle equipment; programmers use the SES to test flight software; and engineers use the SES for design and analysis studies. Due to its high demand, the SES is busy twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. Scheduling the facility is a problem that is constantly growing and changing with the addition of new equipment. Currently a number of small independent programs have been developed to help solve the problem, but the long-term answer lies in finding a flexible, integrated system that provides the user with the ability to create, optimize, and edit the schedule. COMPASS is an interactive and highly flexible scheduling system. However, until recently COMPASS did not provide any optimization features. This paper describes the simulated annealing extension to COMPASS. It now allows the user to interweave schedule creation, revision, and optimization. This practical approach was necessary in order to satisfy the operational requirements of the SES.


ABSTRACT A new species of Rhinocerotidae, Brachypotherium minor n. sp., from the Early Miocene of Buluk, northern Kenya, is described. The new species shares with other members of the genus large sexually dimorphic incisors, flattened buccal walls on its molars, and a low astragalus, but differs from other species of Brachypotherium Roger, 1904 in its small size, placement of the orbit, having widely separated temporal lines, and more simple molar crown morphology. A comparison of the new species with other brachypotheres suggests that the new species may be present at a small number of other sites, and that the brachypothere group may contain more than one African lineage, adding to our understanding of the diversity of African rhinoceroses.


There is a rapid growth in the use of voice-controlled intelligent personal assistants on mobile devices, such as Microsoft's Cortana, Google Now, and Apple's Siri. They significantly change the way users interact with search systems, not only because of the voice control use and touch gestures, but also due to the dialogue-style nature of the interactions and their ability to preserve context across different queries. Predicting success and failure of such search dialogues is a new problem, and an important one for evaluating and further improving intelligent assistants. While clicks in web search have been extensively used to infer user satisfaction, their significance in search dialogues is lower due to the partial replacement of clicks with voice control, direct and voice answers, and touch gestures. In this paper, we propose an automatic method to predict user satisfaction with intelligent assistants that exploits all the interaction signals, including voice commands and physical touch gestures on the device. First, we conduct an extensive user study to measure user satisfaction with intelligent assistants, and simultaneously record all user interactions. Second, we show that the dialogue style of interaction makes it necessary to evaluate the user experience at the overall task level as opposed to the query level. Third, we train a model to predict user satisfaction, and find that interaction signals that capture the user reading patterns have a high impact: when including all available interaction signals, we are able to improve the prediction accuracy of user satisfaction from 71% to 81% over a baseline that utilizes only click and query features.


Mangrove forests possess multiple functions for the environment and society through their valuable ecosystem services. Along with this, the mangrove forests have large and diverse social values, in combination contributing to the health and wellbeing of the surrounding communities. This study aims (i) to assess the benefits of mangrove forests and their impact on subjective and psychological wellbeing of coastal communities and (ii) to understand the challenges coastal communities face that limit sustainable wellbeing. We have used a mixed methodological approach, combining workshop, interview, and survey, to obtain qualitative and quantitative information from two coastal communities in Malaysia and Indonesia. For quantitative data, 67 participants from both coastal communities participated using a pre-tested structured questionnaire. To obtain opinions from key informants in Malaysia and Indonesia, we organized two stakeholders' workshops and community interviews. When merging these interviews and workshops, we identified the following three themes related to the perception of mangrove forest benefits: (1) the advantage of living in a natural countryside; (2) the natural resources supporting employment, income, and family security; and (3) the increase in subjective and psychological wellbeing. The mean score of wellbeing for Indonesian participants (28.6) was slightly higher than that for Malaysian participants (26.2) and was significant. Overall, the respondents felt happy because the combination of job security and leisure activities supports feeling content and satisfied. The analyses also suggest that the combination of exposure to coastal environments and stress reduction promotes good mental health; however, diagnostic health data are lacking. The lower score of mental wellbeing in Malaysia is attributed to respondents involved in risky fishing activities and local regions with excessive tourism. The findings from this study imply that coastal mangrove forest management plays an important role in the living conditions of coastal communities and their subjective and psychological wellbeing. Hence, restoration and sustainability of mangrove ecosystem are important.


Recent theoretical progress indicates that spacetime and gravity emerge together from the entanglement structure of an underlying microscopic theory. These ideas are best understood in Anti-de Sitter space, where they rely on the area law for entanglement entropy. The extension to de Sitter space requires taking into account the entropy and temperature associated with the cosmological horizon. Using insights from string theory, black hole physics and quantum information theory we argue that the positive dark energy leads to a thermal volume law contribution to the entropy that overtakes the area law precisely at the cosmological horizon. Due to the competition between area and volume law entanglement the microscopic de Sitter states do not thermalise at sub-Hubble scales: they exhibit memory effects in the form of an entropy displacement caused by matter. The emergent laws of gravity contain an additional `dark' gravitational force describing the `elastic' response due to the entropy displacement. We derive an estimate of the strength of this extra force in terms of the baryonic mass, Newton's constant and the Hubble acceleration scale a_0 =cH_0, and provide evidence for the fact that this additional `dark gravity~force' explains the observed phenomena in galaxies and clusters currently attributed to dark matter.


Anthropological approaches to contexts of violence and conflict often focus on the exceptional and extraordinary moment of violence or its memory, leaving little room for the ordinary ways in and through which much conflict is lived. How might conflict and violence permeate ordinary practice, daily events and experience? What about the mundane and anticipatory moments through which violence may be predicted, anticipated and waited upon? This thesis explores ordinary security perspectives and practices among Jewish-Israelis in Tel Aviv. It is based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork among security guards, civil guards and city residents between 2005 and 2007 as they do and discuss bitachon (security). Participant observation with street-level security staff, with civil guard patrols and within the critical activities and conversations at a local neighbourhood kiosk cafe all explore practices, perspectives and experiences of security. This thesis argues that security practices that are often invoked as a precaution against danger and a provider of protection may paradoxically produce a sense of even more danger, uncertainty and insecurity. Security is not only about spectacular conflicts or strategic concepts but is also engaged with and experienced through mundane and ordinary social life. As well as claiming to protect the nation-state or managing strategic threats, security is also a kind of practice and emotion; an atmosphere, activity, and a feeling. Security is not only about extraordinary events and explosive situations, but also about a particular kind of waiting; an uncertain and boring anticipation of potential violence to come. It may be less about performance, legibility, or defence against dangerous others, than the identification of intimate and illegible populations, the playing out of racialized notions of danger and the ethno-nationalist uncertainties of the nation-state. In this context, collective anxieties and insecurities may be brought about not by the scale or magnitude of security threats, but by the perceived incapacity and protective impotence of the state. This thesis contributes to the anthropology of conflict and violence, the anthropology of Israel/Palestine and urban anthropology more generally. It points towards ways in which anthropology may meaningfully contribute to and enter dialogue with security studies, and argues in favour of an ordinary approach to the analysis of conflict and security.


The lognormal diffusion process is mathematically tractable and incorporates the kind of continuous random evolution of the price by small increments that seems to characterize most security prices. But market microstructure studies have shown that a lognormal diffusion does not describe very well price formation at the shortest intervals. This is especially true of short-term bond returns. Bond price changes are mostly small, but the tails of the distribution are fatter than the lognormal allows and occasional non-diffusive jumps do seem to occur. Also, the intervals between price changes vary considerably in length. Alternative distributions have been proposed, but they do not have the convenient mathematical properties of the lognormal, so implementation can be challenging. Hainaut and MacGilchrist propose using the normal inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution that arises from a particular Levy process and develop a lattice implementation for pricing. A pentanomial tree incorporates the NIG by matching its first four moments. In a simulation exercise, the NIG consistently outperforms the lognormal, largely due to its ability to capture skewness in returns.


Winter hardiness is one of the main traits affecting survival, productivity and cultivar choice for important horticultural plants in a temperate climatic zone. Given the complexity of the trait and the often fluctuating winter weather, extensive field testing over many years would be required to gain reliable results. Testing for cold tolerance under controlled conditions to grade genotypes has been used in several plant breeding programs to identify superior genotypes of different species. The aim of the present study was to investigate cold tolerance of microshoots of different genotypes of the genera Prunus and Fragaria after 7, 14, 28 and 56 days of cold acclimation, by measuring ion leakage and evaluating the critical temperature (CT50) after freezing in vitro. Genotypes of Rosacea family demonstrated distinct patterns of CT50 change during cold acclimation. Cold acclimation for 56 days decreased the CT50 value by 1.3–2.0°C for Prunus microshots and by 0.8–2.1°C for Fragaria microshoots in comparison to nonacclimated plants. The results of cold acclimation and freezing treatments of Rosacea family plants in vitro show that for maximal cold hardiness, acclimation for 56 days or longer is required. Sour cherry (Prunus cerasus) cv. 'Orkolija', garden strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) cv. 'Melody', Virginia strawberry (F. virginiana) and musk strawberry (F. moschata) were the most winterhardy after 56 days' cold acclimation. The data obtained in the study can be used to improve breeding and cryopreservation technologies of Rosacea plants, and lay the foundation for identification of genes responsible for efficient cold acclimation and low temperature tolerance.


Current state-of-the-art neural dialogue systems are mainly data-driven and are trained on human-generated responses. However, due to the subjectivity and open-ended nature of human conversations, the complexity of training dialogues varies greatly. The noise and uneven complexity of query-response pairs impede the learning efficiency and effects of the neural dialogue generation models. What is more, so far, there are no unified dialogue complexity measurements, and the dialogue complexity embodies multiple aspects of attributes—specificity, repetitiveness, relevance, etc. Inspired by human behaviors of learning to converse, where children learn from easy dialogues to complex ones and dynamically adjust their learning progress, in this paper, we first analyze five dialogue attributes to measure the dialogue complexity in multiple perspectives on three publicly available corpora. Then, we propose an adaptive multi-curricula learning framework to schedule a committee of the organized curricula. The framework is established upon the reinforcement learning paradigm, which automatically chooses different curricula at the evolving learning process according to the learning status of the neural dialogue generation model. Extensive experiments conducted on five state-of-the-art models demonstrate its learning efficiency and effectiveness with respect to 13 automatic evaluation metrics and human judgments.


The conventional view of receptor tyrosine kinase-mediated signal transduction holds that upon ligand binding, a signaling cascade initiated at the cell surface ultimately regulates gene expression. Although it has been proposed that such receptors may localize to the nucleus to affect transcription directly, the mechanism for nuclear translocation has not been clear. Ni et al. (see the Perspective by Heldin and Ericsson) show that cleavage of ErbB-4, an epidermal growth factor receptor family member, by presenilin-dependent secretase releases a transcriptionally active intracellular domain of ErbB-4 to the nucleus. In the absence of this cleavage, the ErbB-4 ligand could not modulate cell growth. C.-Y. Ni, M. P. Murphy, T. E. Golde, G. Carpenter, γ-Secretase cleavage and nuclear localization of ErbB-4 receptor tyrosine kinase. Science 294, 2179-2181 (2001). [Online Journal] C.-H. Helden, J. Ericsson, RIPping tyrosine kinase receptors apart. Science 294, 2111-2113 (2001). [Online Journal]


The revolving door between the government and the private sector has long been presumed to lead to the capture of regulators by industry interests. A growing body of empirical literature, however, either finds no conclusive evidence of a capture effect or finds evidence of an opposite effect that the revolving door indeed results in more aggressive, not less aggressive, regulatory actions. To account for these incongruous results, scholars have formulated and tested a new "human-capital" theory positing that revolving-door regulators have incentives to be more aggressive toward the regulated industry as a way of signaling their qualifications to prospective industry employers. But even with the insights offered by the human-capital theory, the prevailing analyses of the revolving door are still incomplete. This Article theorizes on yet another incentive created by the revolving door that deserves being recognized as a structural force inherent in the regulatory process: the incentive for regulators to expand the market demand for services they would be providing when they exit the government. This "market-expansion" incentive may manifest itself differently in different regulatory settings. In the enforcement setting, it may result in more enforcement actions, broadened jurisdictional reach of the enforcement actions, and higher penalties in the enforcement actions. In the rulemaking setting, it may result in agencies' expanded rulemaking authority, the use of flexible standards rather than bright-line rules, and agencies' preference for complex as opposed to simple rules or standards. This market-expansion theory represents a paradigmatic shift in conceptualizing the role of individual regulators in the regulatory process. Contrary to the prevailing analyses, which posit that revolving-door regulators take the industry's needs as given and merely respond to those needs, the market-expansion theory suggests that revolving-door regulators may exert efforts to expand the industry's needs. Recognizing this market-expansion incentive has important implications for a wide range of policy issues, including agency aggrandizement, overenforcement versus underenforcement, regulatory settlements, compliance monitors, private rights of action, and professional responsibility. © 2015 Wentong Zheng. Individuals and nonprofit institutions may reproduce and distribute copies of this Article in any format at or below cost, for educational purposes, so long as each copy identifies the author, provides a citation to the Notre Dame Law Review, and includes this provision in the copyright notice. * Associate Professor of Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law. I thank Stuart Cohn, Mark Fenster, Joan Hemingway, Tom Lin, Bill Page, Sidney Shapiro, D. Daniel Sokol, Glen Staszewski, Gregory Stein, Maurice Stucke, Michael Wolf, and participants in the University of Florida Levin College of Law Ideas Incubator, the University of Tennessee College of Law Faculty Forum, and the Southeastern Association of Law Schools New Scholar's Colloquium for comments on early drafts of this Article.


In this contribution, we investigate the effect of post-deposition treatments on finished non-encapsulated thin-film microcrystalline silicon solar cells and show that annealing in vacuum leads to improved electrical properties of the solar cells, particularly for cells deposited on rough superstrates. Our results suggest that both curing of intrinsic defects in the silicon, which can appear during the deposition of the ZnO back electrode, as well as an improvement of the ZnO back-electrode conductivity itself, occur during an annealing in vacuum, leading to large improvements of the open-circuit voltage and fill factor values. An improvement of the porous zones in the absorber layer, as induced by rough superstrates, is also observed by Fourier-transform photocurrent spectroscopy, implying that these porous zones cannot be considered as being purely bi-dimensional, but have a spatial extension within the absorber layer.


This thesis proposes novel algorithms for using Gaussian processes for Discriminative pose estimation. We overcome the traditional limitations of Gaussian processes, their cubic training complexity and their uni-modal predictive distribution by assembling them in a mixture of experts formulation. Our First contribution shows that by creating a large number of Fixed size Gaussian process experts, we can build a model that is able to scale to large data sets and accurately learn the multi-modal and non- linear mapping between image features and the subject?s pose. We demonstrate that this model gives state of the art performance compared to other discriminative pose estimation techniques.We then extend the model to automatically learn the size and location of each expert. Gaussian processes are able to accurately model non-linear functional regression problems where the output is given as a function of the input. However, when an individual Gaussian process is trained on data which contains multi-modalities, or varying levels of ambiguity, the Gaussian process is unable to accurately model the data. We propose a novel algorithm for learning the size and location of each expert in our mixture of Gaussian processes model to ensure that the training data of each expert matches the assumptions of a Gaussian process. We show that this model is able to out perform our previous mixture of Gaussian processes model.Our final contribution is a dynamics framework for inferring a smooth sequence of pose estimates from a sequence of independent predictive distributions. Discriminative pose estimation infers the pose of each frame independently, leading to jittery tracking results. Our novel algorithm uses a model of human dynamics to infer a smooth path through a sequence of Gaussian mixture models as given by our mixture of Gaussian processes model. We show that our algorithm is able to smooth and correct some mis- takes made by the appearance model alone, and outperform a baseline linear dynamical system.