The current research aimed at exploring the moderating role of gender on the relationship between positive beliefs about rumination and negative well-being mediated serially by metaworry and emotion-oriented coping. A total of 514 employed professionals from different organizations completed Positive Beliefs about Rumination Scale, Anxious Thought Inventory, Coping Inventory for Stressful Situation, and Well-being Questionnaire-12. The findings showed positive relationships among study variables. Gender moderation was tested in both direct and indirect regression paths. The direct path between metaworry and emotion-oriented coping was moderated by gender. Positive beliefs about rumination were mediated by metaworry on emotion-oriented coping that further mediated effect of metaworry on negative well-being. The moderated mediations appeared to be significant for men only suggesting a moderating role of gender on direct and total effects. The indirect path from positive beliefs about rumination to negative well-being was serially mediated by metaworry and emotion coping for both men and women proposing absence of moderation by gender. The moderation in men within organizational settings proposed that despite holding positive metacognitive beliefs, the direct and total effects were significantly buffered in men for metaworry. However, emotion-oriented coping predicted negative well-being within organizational settings irrespective of gender category. The findings were suggestive of deleterious effects on well-being following an emotion focused approach within proactive environmental needs.


Seeds of sentang were exhibit recalcitrant and cannot be stored for a long period of time. So efforts have been made to propagate this species vegetatively via rooted cuttings technique. It is envisaged that for the technique to be deemed successful, the quality of wood that it produces should be comparable with or better than the wood extracted from the natural forest or established plantation via seedlings. The main objective of this study was to determine and compare the wood qualities of the trees grown from seedlings and rooted cuttings and to study the property variations within the tree. The specific objectives of these studies were to evaluate the macroscopic features, anatomical, physical, mechanical properties and resistance to fungal decay of sentang which grown from these two propagation techniques. Correlations between anatomical, physical and mechanical properties of the wood were also analysed. The studies of both types of wood were done at three different height levels, i.e bottom, middle and top and also in the sapwood and heartwood portion. Data were subjected to Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and further analysed using Least Significant Difference (LSD) at p ≤ 0.05.
The barks of both types of wood were smooth and pinkish grey. There was significant difference in colour of sapwood and heartwood between these two propagation techniques where the sapwood from seedling trees was lighter than those from rooted-cutting trees. However, the heartwood of the latter was darker. The mean percentage of sapwood-heartwood ratio was not significantly different between these two types of wood and the amount of sapwood-heartwood ratio increased towards the top. The anatomical structure in both types of wood is similar with typical sentang. Vessels are diffuse, solitary or multiple, round to oval shaped and filled with dark-coloured dried extractives deposits in the heartwood. Apotracheal and paratracheal parenchyma are present in both types of wood. Tangential section shows multiseriate rays which mostly 2-3 cells wide and heterocellular rays were observed in the radial section in both types of wood. The rooted-cutting wood showed higher value in fibre dimensions, vessel diameter and proportion of vessels, whereas vessel density and proportion of fibre were higher in the seedling wood and proportion of rays was not significantly different between both types of wood. Both the seedling and rooted-cutting wood showed a decreasing trend towards the top in fibre dimensions, vessel diameter and proportion of rays. Increasing trend was observed in vessel density and proportions of vessels and fibres. The sapwood exhibited higher value in fibre dimensions, proportion of rays and larger vessel diameter but lower value in vessel density and proportions of vessels and fibres than the heartwood in the seedling wood However, in the rooted-cutting wood there was no significant difference between sapwood and heartwood in proportion of rays, vessels and fibres.
Both types of wood were not significantly different in basic density. Moisture content at green condition and shrinkages in green to air-dry and green to oven-dry conditions were higher in the rooted-cutting wood, but tangential and radial shrinkages from green to oven-dry conditions showed no significant difference between both types of wood. The physical properties of both types of wood showed a decreasing trend from the bottom to the middle of the tree and then a slight increasing trend towards the top. Basic density was higher in the sapwood but moisture content and shrinkages in both conditions were higher in the heartwood.
Compression and shear parallel to the grain were higher in the seedling wood, however MOE was higher in the rooted-cutting wood and MOR showed no significant difference between the seedling and rooted-cutting wood. Mechanical properties showed increasing trend towards the top and higher values in the heartwood in both types of wood. All the mechanical properties in the seedling and rooted-cutting wood were significantly related with vessel diameter, proportion of fibres and volumetric shrinkage with small correlation. Basic density was weakly correlated with mechanical properties in this present study. Both types of wood were classified as resistant with rooted-cutting wood being more resistance to white rot fungus (Lentinus sajor-caju) than the seedling wood. The resistance of the wood to fungal decay decreased towards the top and higher resistance was shown in the heartwood than the sapwood portion.


The increasing technological inventions like cellular phones and GPS devices, we observe increasing number of distractions to divert the driver's attention. This distraction has led to increasing number of accidents on road, which brings a need of a Drowsiness Detection System that calculates various eye parameters to help the driver stay alert. This type of system brings about alertness and accuracy in the driver towards risk and safety. This technology uses face and eye detection methods to create a prototype which can be further developed into a software to reduce the risk of road accidents. Keyword: Chromium powder, MRR, TWR and Response Surface Methodology.


The subject area of multiobjective optimisation deals with the investigation of optimisation problems that possess more than one objective function. Usually, there does not exist a single solution that optimises all functions simultaneously, quite the contrary, in general the set of so-called efficient points, these are solutions to multiobjective optimisation problems, is large. Since it is important for the decision maker to obtain as much information as possible about this set, our research objective is to determine a well-defined and meaningful approximation of the solution set for nonlinear multiobjective optimisation problems. In order to achieve this target we develop an algorithm that employs the optimality conditions introduced by Karush, Kuhn and Tucker for a scalarised objective function and computes solutions to the corresponding system of equations via a modified Newton method. In particular, we utilise an infeasible interior-point technique which determines solutions in the neighbourhood of a central path and therefore, constitutes a path-following approach. We proof the convergence of our algorithm under certain assumptions and develop a warm-start strategy to compute different solutions for varying weighting parameters. Furthermore we examine our numerical implementation in MATLAB and present the results we obtained for several suites of test problems from the literature.


We study the design of loss functions for click-through rates (CTR) to optimize (social) welfare in advertising auctions. Existing works either only focus on CTR predictions without consideration of business objectives (e.g., welfare) in auctions or assume that the distribution over the participants' expected cost-per-impression (eCPM) is known a priori, then use various additional assumptions on the parametric form of the distribution to derive loss functions for predicting CTRs. In this work, we bring back the welfare objectives of ad auctions into CTR predictions and propose a novel weighted rankloss to train the CTR model. Compared to existing literature, our approach provides a provable guarantee on welfare but without assumptions on the eCPMs' distribution while also avoiding the intractability of naively applying existing learning-to-rank methods. Further, we propose a theoretically justifiable technique for calibrating the losses using labels generated from a teacher network, only assuming that the teacher network has bounded $\ell_2$ generalization error. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed loss on synthetic and real-world data.


Over the last few years, reorganization practice has undergone a massive change. A new device — the restructuring support agreement — has transformed Chapter 11 negotiations. This puts reorganization law at a crossroads. Chapter 11's commitment to a nonmarket restructuring with a rigid priority system requires bankruptcy judges to police bargaining in bankruptcy, but the Bankruptcy Code gives them relatively little explicit guidance about how they should adjust when a new practice alters the bargaining environment. This essay shows that long-established principles of bankruptcy should lead judges to focus not on how these agreements affect what each party receives, but rather on how they can interfere with the flow of information needed to apply Chapter 11's substantive rules.


User experience is becoming increasingly important in gaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace. One way to improve user experience is by including images of faces, which, according to the social presence theory, can create a feeling of warmth. People are drawn to faces not only because they can act as social cues signaling the presence of others, but also because paying attention to faces has played a significant role in human evolution. Areas on a web page that typically receive less attention from users, such as the right side or below the fold, may benefit from including images of faces, which can draw users' attention. Although they may be useful in attracting attention to particular places on a web page, images of faces may also distract attention from key information. To test this possibility, we conducted two eye tracking studies in which images of faces were placed on areas of a web page that are shown to receive less attention. The results indicated that faces did not increase the number of people who viewed the areas where faces were located but faces affected fixation patterns on these areas. Our results also showed that faces located above the fold of the web page negatively affected the performance of those who were completing tasks.


In recent paper [W. Cheng, Phys. Lett. A 364: 517-521 (2007)] we take the original 4 times 4 bound entangled states in [S.-M. Fei, et al, Phys. Lett. A 352: 321-325 (2006)] as 2 times 8 states and show that it is still bound entangled. Whether other bound entangled states, especially 4 times 4 bound entangled states, have the same property or not? In this paper, we consider another 4 times 4 bound entangled state in [F. Benatti, et al, Phys. Lett. A 326: 187-198 (2004)]. The result again affirms our observation that different systems, having the same matrix representation, have similar properties.


Using a model for the self-regulated growth of supermassive BHs in mergers involving gas-rich galaxies, we study the relationship between quasars and the population of merging galaxies and predict the merger-driven SFR density of the universe. Mergers drive gas inflows, fueling starbursts and ``buried'' quasars until feedback disperses the gas, allowing the quasar to be briefly visible as a bright optical source. By simulating the evolution of such events, we demonstrate that the observed statistics of merger rates/fractions, luminosity and mass functions, SFR distributions, quasar (and quasar host) luminosity functions, and elliptical/red galaxy luminosity and mass functions are self-consistent. We use our simulations to deconvolve quasar and merger luminosity functions and determine the birthrate of BHs and merger rates as a function of mass. From this, we predict the merging galaxy luminosity function in various observed wavebands, color-magnitude relations, mass functions, SFR distributions and density, and quasar host galaxy luminosity function, as a function of redshift from z = 0 to 6. We invert this to predict quasar luminosity functions from observed merger luminosity functions or SFR distributions. Our results show good agreement with observations, but idealized models of quasar light curves give inaccurate estimates and are ruled out at >99.9% confidence, provided that quasars are triggered in mergers. Using only quasar observations, we estimate the contribution of mergers to the SFR density of the universe to high redshifts, z ~ 4, and constrain the evolution in the characteristic initial gas fractions of quasar and spheroid-producing mergers.


State-of-the-art 3D-aware generative models rely on coordinate-based MLPs to parameterize 3D radiance fields. While demonstrating impressive results, querying an MLP for every sample along each ray leads to slow rendering. Therefore, existing approaches often render low-resolution feature maps and process them with an upsampling network to obtain the final image. Albeit efficient, neural rendering often entangles viewpoint and content such that changing the camera pose results in unwanted changes of geometry or appearance. Motivated by recent results in voxel-based novel view synthesis, we investigate the utility of sparse voxel grid representations for fast and 3D-consistent generative modeling in this paper. Our results demonstrate that monolithic MLPs can indeed be replaced by 3D convolutions when combining sparse voxel grids with progressive growing, free space pruning and appropriate regularization. To obtain a compact representation of the scene and allow for scaling to higher voxel resolutions, our model disentangles the foreground object (modeled in 3D) from the background (modeled in 2D). In contrast to existing approaches, our method requires only a single forward pass to generate a full 3D scene. It hence allows for efficient rendering from arbitrary viewpoints while yielding 3D consistent results with high visual fidelity.


Class counsel and prosecutors have a lot more in common than scholars realize. These lawyers have clients, but their clients are diffuse and lack a formal decisionmaking structure. Because of the nature of their clients, class counsel and prosecutors have to make decisions for their clients that one would ordinarily expect clients to make — and indeed that legal ethics rules would expressly require clients to make in other contexts — such as decisions concerning objectives of representation or whether to settle or plead guilty. Both complex litigation and criminal law scholars recognize that these lawyers' self-interests diverge from their clients' interests. But the complex litigation and criminal law literatures discuss the ensuing accountability problem solely in their own spheres. This article considers the insights about accountability that complex litigation can learn from criminal law. More specifically, the article argues that although there are real differences between the two systems, these differences do not justify the completely different approaches to accountability that the two contexts employ. Rather, the comparison suggests that internal checks within class counsel's firm, between plaintiffs' firms, or between third-party funders and class counsel can improve accountability, much as internal checks improve accountability within some prosecutors' offices.


Introduction: Total en bloc spondylectomy (TES) is gaining increasing favour as a treatment of choice for cancers of the spine that are resistant to radiological and chemotherapeautic intervention such as renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Until recently, RCC of the lumbar spine has presented a surgical challenge due to anatomical and vascular constraints. The development of the combined posterior-anterior en bloc spondylectomy offers improved access to the lumbar region. This case report and review of the literature presents a combined posterior-anterior lumbar en bloc spondylectomy for RCC involving L3 vertebra, which we believe is the first reported in Australia. Methods: A 46-year-old male with a seven-year history of renal cell carcinoma resulting in a left nephrectomy presented with a lytic lesion involving the L3 vertebral body, extending to the epidural space and compressing the cauda equina and left L3 and L4 nerve roots on MRI. A literature review revealed ten previous cases of the posterior-anterior TES in the lumbar spine for cancerous lesions but none from Australia. Results: A posterior-anterior TES and L2-L4 fusion was performed to remove a cancerous renal cell carcinoma of L3 with wide margins. Blood loss was the major complication. The patient remains recurrence free at nineteen months post procedure. Conclusion: Despite being an aggressive and invasive procedure, TES is rapidly becoming the treatment of choice for curative and palliative care in select patients with isolated metastatic tumours of the lumbar spine.


Pulley Ridge is a series of drowned barrier islands that extend over 100 km in 60-100 m water depths. This drowned ridge is located on the Florida Platform in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico about 250 km west of Cape Sable, Florida. This barrier island chain formed during the initial stage of the Holocene marine transgression. These islands were then submerged and left abandoned near the outer edge of the Florida Platform. The southern portion of Pulley Ridge hosts zooxanthellate scleractinian corals, green, red and brown macro algae, and a mix of deep and typically shallow-water tropical fishes. This reef community is in unusually deep water, and its extent and the controls on its distribution were unknown. To address these questions scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey Coastal and Marine Geology Program in cooperation with scientists from the University of South Florida Department of Marine Sciences have completed a detailed mapping of the southernmost 35 km of Pulley Ridge. The area was mapped using multibeam bathymetry, sidescan-sonar imagery, and high-resolution seismic-reflection profiling to define the geologic framework on which the reef is established. Submersible dives, remotely operated vehicle (ROV) transects, and transects of bottom photographs and video were collected to identify the corals and to map their distribution. This extensive suite of data has been compiled and preliminary analysis of the data suggests that the reefs are not tied to the ridge system, but instead are more broadly distributed. Whether reef distribution is controlled by oceanographic conditions or by subtle differences in the substrate that overlies the barrier island system is unclear, and are topics of continued research.


AS A FORM of representation of external reality the photograph in its colonial context played a powerful role in helping to establish concepts of order and interpretations of an alien environment. Importantly, as well as measuring potential resources (topographical, geological and human), it could provide the means to place an alien world in a comprehensible European context. As images were constructed subjectively they were (often it seems unwittingly) used to confirm what was already understood rather than as a cipher of new knowledge. The apparent veracity of the photographic image in these contexts lent it an unprecedented (and often unquestioned) credibility. The camera's ability to accurately reproduce the world on a two-dimensional surface stood as proof that the manner in which a subject was recorded was definitive and unquestionable. Despite its shrunken, monotone and two-dimensional appearance, the photograph was held in a position of unparalleled importance as a piece of factual evidence. As a device of moralising and comparison, the photograph was unsurpassed--for it was so closely linked to reality that belief inevitably followed. Colonial photographers constructed images of `civilisation' and juxtaposed them in albums besides photographs of the so-called `native' hut. One such collection of images from a late 19th Century Kimberley family album compares a newly built Wesleyan church with an image titled "Kaffir family group". (1) As in this example, these images were physically, page to page, as well as visually, image to image, set against their opposites in order, it would seem, to deliver a specific if somewhat unsubtle message. In this essay, attention is focused on the carte-de-visite and cabinet portrait photographs from Cape Town, South Africa, taken by four photographers--Wilhelm Hermann (1841-1916), David McKenzie Selkirk (1829-1904) and his partner William Lawrence (1835-1905) and Samuel Baylis Barnard (1841-1916). (2) As will be seen, these photographers produced commercial portraits and also shared work for Dr Wilhelm Bleek, a Berlin-born, philologist and student of the indigenous southern African peoples, who commissioned anthropometric type images to be made of prisoners from the Breakwater gaol in Cape Town. Bleek and the photographs The carte de visite was introduced to the Cape colony via the Cape Monthly magazine of September 1860, which contained a carte portrait of Prince Alfred Duke of Edinburgh. (3) The first Cape cartes sold for the price of 1s.6d but such was their importance in relation to possession as social standing, that supply could barely match demand. The first locally produced cartes of the people of Cape Town were made in 1861 by the photographer Arthur Green (4). As with the European carte, the Cape images used painted backdrops of landscape or architectural scenes and even props such as logs and fountains. Gradually the association with the cartes original concept of the calling card disappeared and they became elaborate portrait photographs depicting an affluent and settled colonial class of people. This class aspired to, and achieved, the respectable image found in cartes of the European middle classes. Originally the carte served to deliver a desirable likeness coded with a social message of position, wealth, sobriety, etc. These were the very reasons that it achieved such popularity in the Cape. Capetonians adopted the carte craze with as much enthusiasm as their European counterparts. In an environment so close to the perimeter of Western civilisation this might be perceived to have been especially important. In light of its original intended use it seems ironic that the carte should also have been utilised as an anthropometric tool. In the case of its use within the bounds of ethnology it worked outside of the control of the individual pictured and served as an identifier in a completely different manner to its use in the conventional sense. …


Property rights protected by the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause have long been "relegated to the status of a poor relation" in Supreme Court jurisprudence. Over the last 25 to 30 years, however, Takings Clause issues have been more seriously contested in the Court than previously, and property rights have had a modest revival. During the 2012–2013 Supreme Court term, property rights advocates won notable victories in Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States and Koontz v. St. Johns River Water Management District.This article considers the significance of Arkansas Game & Fish and Koontz, arguing that both cases are potentially important victories for property rights, and that the Court decided both correctly. But because both rulings also left some key issues unresolved, their full impact may not be evident for some time to come. In Part I, I discuss Arkansas Game & Fish, the less controversial of the two cases. The Court's unanimous decision makes clear that when the government repeatedly and deliberately floods property owners' land, it is possible that the resulting damage qualifies as a taking for which "just compensation" must be paid under the Fifth Amendment. The Court's unanimity is a rebuke to the extreme position taken by the federal government in the case. But it also leaves a number of crucial issues for later resolution.Part II considers Koontz, which ruled that there can potentially be a taking in a situation where a landowner was refused a permit to develop his land by a government agency, unless he agreed to, among other things, pay for off-site repair and maintenance work on other land in the area that he did not own. Koontz thereby limits the government's ability to use permit processes and other land-use restrictions as leverage to force property owners to perform various services. The case could be the most important property rights victory in the Supreme Court in some time. In part for this reason, the Court was much more divided than in Arkansas Game & Fish, with the justices splitting 5-4 along ideological lines. Like the term's other major Takings Clause case, Koontz leaves some crucial issues for later determination.Finally, the conclusion briefly discusses the implications of these decisions for the future of constitutional property rights. Although both cases represent incremental progress, there is still a long way to go before property rights cease to get second-class treatment from the Court.


Oil exploration activities have been ongoing in Turkana County, Kenya resulting in discovery of a huge amount of oil deposits. However, very little research has been conducted to determine the effects of oil exploration activities on socio-economic and environmental factors in Turkana County. The purpose of this study was to analyze effects of oil exploration on the social fabrics, the economic variables and the environmental factors in the oil exploration areas in Turkana County. The study applied a cross-sectional survey design. Data was analyzed using both parametric and non-parametric statistical methods. The results of the study showed that despite the ongoing oil exploration in the county, the locals have not adequately benefitted from job opportunities created by the exploration companies. In addition, cost of land has also increased. However, the study shows that despite the influx of migrants the trade volumes within oil exploration regions has not substantially increased. Further, oil exploration activities have adverse negative effects on environment, health and education of the locals. The study would greatly help policy makers at national and county levels to develop policies addressing problems associated with oil exploration faced by people living in oil exploration zones of Turkana County.


We propose a new biometric approach where the tissue thickness of a person's forehead is used as a biometric feature. Given that the spatial registration of two 3D laser scans of the same human face usually produces a low error value, the principle of point cloud registration and its error metric can be applied to human classification techniques. However, by only considering the spatial error, it is not possible to reliably verify a person's identity. We propose to use a novel near-infrared laser-based head tracking system to determine an additional feature, the tissue thickness, and include this in the error metric. Using MRI as a ground truth, data from the foreheads of 30 subjects was collected from which a 4D reference point cloud was created for each subject. The measurements from the near-infrared system were registered with all reference point clouds using the ICP algorithm. Afterwards, the spatial and tissue thickness errors were extracted, forming a 2D feature space. For all subjects, the lowest feature distance resulted from the registration of a measurement and the reference point cloud of the same person. The combined registration error features yielded two clusters in the feature space, one from the same subject and another from the other subjects. When only the tissue thickness error was considered, these clusters were less distinct but still present. These findings could help to raise safety standards for head and neck cancer patients and lays the foundation for a future human identification technique.


There are four trends in modern high-performance computing (HPC) that have led to an increased need for efficient memory management techniques for heterogeneous systems (such as one fitted with GPUs). First, the average size of datasets for HPC applications is rapidly increasing. Read-only input matrices that used to be on the order of megabytes or low-order gigabytes are growing into the double-digit gigabyte range and beyond. Second, HPC applications are continually required to be more and more accurate. This trend leads to larger working set sizes in memory as the resolution of stored and computed data becomes more fine. Third, no matter how close accelerators are to the CPU, memory address spaces are still incoherent and automated memory management systems are not yet reaching the performance of hand-crafted solutions for HPC applications. Fourth, while the physical memory size of accelerators is growing it fails to grow at the same rate as the working set sizes of applications. Taking these four trends together leads to the conclusion that future supercomputers will rely heavily on efficient memory management for accelerators to be able to handle future working set sizes, but that new techniques in this field are required. In this paper we describe, evaluate, and discuss memory management techniques for two common classes of scientific computing applications. The first class is the simpler of the two and assumes that the locations of all memory accesses are known prior to a GPU kernel launch. The second class is characterized by an access pattern that is not predictable before performing the actual computation. We focus on supporting data sets which do not fit in the physical memory of current GPUs and which are used in applications exhibiting both of these access patterns. Our approach considers GPU global memory as a cache for a large data set stored in system memory. We evaluate the techniques described in this paper on a production (industrialstrength) geophysics application as part of a larger GPU Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright 20XX ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$15.00. implementation. Our results demonstrate that these techniques flexibly support out-of-core datasets while minimizing overhead, future-proofing the target application against future generations of GPUs and dataset size increases. Our results demonstrate that using these out-of-core memory management techniques results in 80-100% GPU memory utilization while adding 7-13% of overhead. These overheads are offset by the performance improvement from using GPUs and using the memory management techniques described in this paper improves the flexibility of the overall application.


Noncooperative game theory enjoys a vast canon of solution concepts. The predominant solution concept is Nash equilibrium (Nash, 1950a; Nash, 1951). Other solution concepts include generalizations and refinements of Nash equilibrium as well as alternatives to it.
Despite their successes, the established solution concepts are in some ways unsatisfactory. In particular, for many games, such as the Centipede Game (Rosenthal, 1981), the p-Beauty Contest (Moulin, 1986; Simonsen, 1988), and the notorious Traveler's Dilemma (Basu, 1994; Basu, 2007), many of the solution concepts yield solutions that are both unreasonable in theory and refuted by the experimental evidence. And when a solution concept manages to yield the expected or reasonable solutions for such games, it often suffers from other difficulties such as unwieldy complexity or reliance on ad hoc or game-specific constructions that may fail to be generalizable.
We propose a new solution concept, which we call least-squares regret, that yields the expected or reasonable solutions for games that have thus far proved to be problematic, such as the Traveler's Dilemma; that is simple; that involves no ad hoc or game-specific constructions and can thus be applied immediately and consistently to any arbitrary game; that exhibits nice properties; and that is grounded in human psychology. Intuitively, we suppose that a player chooses a strategy so as to minimize the divergence from perfect play overall. In particular, we suppose that a player is partially strategic and chooses a strategy so as to minimize the sum, across all partial profiles of strategies of the other players, of the squares of the regrets, where the regret of a strategy with respect to a partial profile is the difference of the best-response payoff with respect to the partial profile and the payoff from choosing the strategy with respect to the partial profile.
The aim of this work is to develop the solution concept of least-squares regret; explore its properties; assess its performance with respect to various games of interest; determine its merits and demerits, especially in relation to other solution concepts; review its weaknesses; introduce a refinement, which we call mutual weighted least-squares regret, that addresses some of the
weaknesses; and propose some questions for further research.


ABSTRACT With decreases in funding support, U.S. public universities have increasingly substituted less costly nontenure eligible faculty for tenured and tenure-track faculty while newly imposed funding mandates require evidence of productivity improvements tied to student graduation success. Universities have been forced into a Catch 22 dilemma as to what faculty mix produces optimal student/funding outcomes. To date, guidance provided by empirical evidence is mixed. This article offers new evidence employing Färe–Primont productivity indexes and parametric estimates to determine how faculty status affects graduation productivity. Results indicate that a reversal in the employment trend is in order so as to increase tenured relative to nontenure eligible faculty and improve student graduation success and, ultimately, university funding.


This study proposes a simple methodology for assessing future-projected evolution of water cycle components (precipitation, potential evapotranspiration, and potential runoff) based on the two-level Palmer model of the soil and their impact on drought condi - tions at basin level. The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) is used as drought metric. The catchments of rivers Arges, Mures, Prut, Siret and Somes (mid- and lower Danube basin) have been chosen as case studies. The present climate data consist of Romanian gridded dataset, monthly precipitation and values of streamflow from Romania and Republic of Moldova and potential evapotranspiration-related data from the Climate Research Unit (University of East Anglia). We used as future projections five numeri - cal experiments with regional models obtained through the EURO-CORDEX initiative, under two Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios. The correlations between observed streamflow at the river basin outlets and PDSI-related components of the water cycle show that PDSI represents reasonably well processes taking place in the selected catchments. Depending on the specific scenario and catchment, droughts that in the Palmer classification were deemed as incipient, mild or severe under present climate will become a normal summer feature toward the end of this century, especially over catch ments situated in the lower Danube basin.


Suspended and sinking particles were studied around a barrier reef of the Palau Islands in the western Pacific. Concentrations of particulate organic carbon (POC), particulate organic nitrogen (PON), and chlorophyll a were high in reef waters and decreased toward the open ocean. At the reef edge, concentrations of organic particles in outgoing waters were higher than those in incoming waters, indicating net export of organic matter. Sediment trap observations conducted off the barrier reef showed a larger vertical flux of POC at an inshore station (2.5 km off the reef edge) than that at an offshore station (20 km), attributable to the net export of organic particles. Organic/inorganic carbon ratios of particles trapped at a depth of 45 m in the lagoon were smaller than those of suspended particles in surface water, suggesting a rapid decomposition of organic matter during sedimentation and a resuspension of carbonate‐dominant bottom sediments.


This paper proposes a simplified version of poker as an instructional classroom game. In spite of the game's simplicity, it provides an excellent illustration of a number of topics: signaling, bluffing, mixed strategies, the value of information, and Bayes' Rule. We first briefly cover the history of poker in game-theoretic contexts. Next we characterize Stripped-down Poker: how to play it, what makes it an interesting classroom game, and how to teach its solution to students. We discuss possible applications of this model to real-world interactions, such as litigation, tax evasion, and domestic or international diplomacy. Finally, we suggest modifications of the game either for use in class or as homework problems.


Luhuitou fringing reef, which has been seriously affected by human activities and terrestrial runoff, has degraded quickly in recent decades. However, direct impact by hyperthermal stress has probably been minimal because of the influence of the Qiongdong upwelling in summer. Seawater temperature anomalies in 2010 resulted in mean monthly seawater temperatures in summer to be 1–2°C higher than in the same period of the 3 preceding years. Moderate coral bleaching at Luhuitou fringing reef was observed in the summer of 2010 due to high thermal stress. Montipora was the most susceptible taxon, whereas Galaxea fascicularis and Pocillopora damicornis were among the least susceptible taxa. Mortality of Montipora was 21.7%, whereas for the remaining taxa it was less than 5%. No mortality was observed for tabular Acropora, G. fascicularis, P. damicornis, Favites and Leptoria. Most taxa showed relatively high bleaching in larger colonies compared with that in smaller ones. Juvenile coral colonies showed less bleaching (3%) than adult coral colonies (28%). Our study suggested that although most taxa in the survey area might recover from this moderate coral bleaching episode, coral reproduction in the year following bleaching may be adversely affected.


To evaluate the influence of condensed water on the rolling friction in the microtribosystems, the authors used a micro tribometer consisting in a driving rotational disc in contact with 3 microballs which sustain an inertially driven rotational disc. The driving disc has a constant rotational speed and the rotational motion is transmitted from the driving disc to the inertially driven disc by friction between the rolling contacts realized by the microballs and the two discs. A camera monitors the angular position of the inertially driven disc, from the start to the synchronism rotation and friction coefficient between the microballs and the inertial disc was determined as a function of the angular acceleration of the inertial disc. Experimental investigations were realized with the microballs having the diameter of 1.588 mm, 2.0 mm and 4.762 mm loaded with normal load of 9.42 mN both in dry conditions and in presence of condensed water on surfaces. The presence of the condensed water on the surfaces leads to the increase on the rolling friction coefficient, depending of the microballs diameter.


BACKGROUND
Responding to the growing interest in the environmental influences on physical activity, and the concerns about the limitations of self-report data, this study evaluates Global Positioning System (GPS) units for measuring outdoor physical activity.

METHODS
Four GPS models were selected to test their accuracy related to adherence to an actual route walked, variations based on position of unit on user's body, and variations against a known geodetic point. A qualitative assessment was performed using the following criteria: a) battery life, b) memory capacity, c) initial satellite signal acquisition time, d) ease of data transfer to other programs, e) wearability, f) ease of operation, g) suitability for specific study populations, and h) price.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
The Garmin Forerunner provided the most accurate data for data points collected along a known route. Comparisons based on different body placement of units showed some variations. GlobalSat reported battery life of 24 hours, compared with 9-15 hours for the other units. The static test using ANOVA showed that the Garmin Foretrex's data points compared with a geodetic point was significantly more accurate than the other 3 models. GPS units appear promising as a tool to capture objective data on outdoor physical activities.


The purpose of this study was to compare fat oxidation rates between children of lean biological mothers (CLP) (BMI[less than or equal to]28kg/m[superscript]2) and children of extremely obese biological mothers (COP) (BMI[less than or equal to]40 kg/m[superscript]2); and to determine if aerobic exercise training can improve fat oxidation in both groups in a similar manner. Each participant (n=3 per group) completed two 10 minute submaximal exercise tests at an absolute workload of 15 W and a relative workload of 65% of peak VO[superscript]2. Respiratory exchange ratio was measured during these submaximal workloads to assess differences and changes in fat oxidation. Participants were matched for age gender and race and placed into either CLP or COP based on biological mothers BMI. Each child was recruited for 4 weeks 3 sessions a week for 30-60 minutes. The exercise protocol consisted of aerobic activities such as tennis tag and soccer. Each participant was required to maintain a heart rate of > 140 bpm during each training session. This exercise protocol was approved by the East Carolina Institutional Review Board. No significant difference was seen in the initial respiratory exchange ratios (RER) between groups at an absolute submaximal workload (15 W) prior to training or after training (p=0.25). However both groups showed a decrease in RER indicating increased in fat utilization from pre to post-training (p=0.06). A significant decrease in carbohydrate use was observed during absolute submaximal exercise in both groups (p=0.03). No significant increase was seen fat oxidation during absolute workload (p=0.21) however they did improve slightly. From our results there appeared to be no differences observed between groups and no changes with exercise at a relative workload. These findings suggest that aerobic exercise training can improve a child's ability to use fat during submaximal exercise and thus decrease the risk of becoming obese in adulthood.


Quantum gravity, the initial low entropy state of the Universe, and the problem of time are interlocking puzzles. In this article, we address the origin of the arrow of time from a cosmological perspective motivated by a novel approach to quantum gravitation. Our proposal is based on a quantum counterpart of the equivalence principle, a general covariance of the dynamical phase space. We discuss how the nonlinear dynamics of such a system provides a natural description for cosmological evolution in the early Universe. We also underscore connections between the proposed non-perturbative quantum gravity model and fundamental questions in non-equilibrium statistical physics.


Abstract Social factors, such as farming methods, have an impact on farm vulnerability to drought, but have received little research or policy attention. Some researchers and advocates have argued that sustainable agriculture systems are less vulnerable to climate risk than conventional systems because sustainable agriculture requires producers to have skills promoting adaptability. In this paper, we investigate producers' perceptions on the use of sustainable agriculture in reducing drought risk, and what they believe would help them better adapt to drought. We surveyed and interviewed farmer members of two sustainable agriculture organizations in Nebraska, USA, during a multi-year drought period from 1999 to 2007. Producers reported implementing a range of practices, such as organic soil building techniques, reduced tillage, targeted crop selection and diversification of crop and livestock production systems, to reduce their drought vulnerability. Although some practices were implemented specifically to reduce drought risk, producers felt that the practices they implemented as part of their normal operation were largely responsible for reducing their risk. Respondents held mixed views on the effects of insurance and farm programs on their drought management decisions. Finally, producers indicated that their ability to adapt to drought is limited by a number of barriers, especially a lack of capital and the need to respond to markets and maximize production to maintain cash flows.


Over the past four decades the Arab nations have exercised an enormous political and economic influence on world events. Much of that impact has been exerted not through the direct actions of individual governments but collectively or indirectly through pan-Arab organizations, economic associations such as OPEC, or through international agencies including the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. "Arab Regional Organizations "is a fully annotated bibliographic guide to the functions, infrastructures, and effectiveness of Arab organizational activity. The organizations covered in this volume have grown in importance in lockstep with developments in the Middle East. This is particularly so in the areas of economics and energy where there has been the establishment of national control over the oil industry and a consequent economic boom. Institutions such as the Gulf Cooperation Council have also become vital to the continued politcal stability of the member states and to the strategic importance of the region as illustrated by the Iran-Iraq war and the Persian Gulf War. The book also takes note of the special economic importance of organizations such as the Kuwait, Saudi, and Abu Dhabi Funds. These perform a major role among developing nations because of their project aid and technical assistance programs. "Arab Regional Organizations "covers a variety of subjects but concentrates on economics, energy, politics, and development subjects. A lengthy introductory section is designed to provide readers with the background of each organization and to direct them to other sources of information. A supplementary section deals with the effects of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War. Researchers, librarians, economists, political scientists, and Middle East specialists will find this volume an invaluable guide to the literature of the region.


We present results of three‐dimensional joint inversion of seismic, magnetotelluric, and gravity data over a marine salt dome. Such structures are difficult to image with a single method, and our results demonstrate how combining different techniques can yield improved results. More importantly, we examine the reliability of velocity‐conductivity relationships derived from structure‐coupled joint inversion approaches. Comparison with a seismic reflection section shows that our models match the upper limit of the salt. Furthermore, velocity and resistivity logs from a borehole drilled into the salt dome's flank match, within error, those recovered by the inversion. The good match suggests that the difference in length scale does not have a significant effect in this case. This provides a strong incentive to incorporate borehole data into the joint inversion in the future and substantiates approaches that use the relationships derived from joint inversion models for lithological classification.


This study was conducted at colleges in three countries (United States, Venezuela, and Spain) and across three academic disciplines (engineering, education, and business), to examine how experienced faculty define competencies for their discipline, and design instructional interaction for online courses. A qualitative research design employing in-depth interviews was selected. Results show that disciplinary knowledge takes precedence when faculty members select competencies to be developed in online courses for their respective professions. In all three disciplines, the design of interaction to correspond with disciplinary competencies was often influenced by contextual factors that modify faculty intention. Therefore, instructional design will vary across countries in the same discipline to address the local context, such as the needs and expectations of the learners, faculty perspectives, beliefs and values, and the needs of the institution, the community, and country. The three disciplines from the three countries agreed on the importance of the following competencies: knowledge of the field, higher order cognitive processes such as critical thinking, analysis, problem solving, transfer of knowledge, oral and written communication skills, team work, decision making, leadership and management skills, indicating far more similarities in competencies than differences between the three different applied disciplines. We found a lack of correspondence between faculty's intent to develop collaborative learning skills and the actual development of them. Contextual factors such as faculty prior experience in design, student reluctance to engage in collaborative learning, and institutional assessment systems that focus on individual performance were some of these reasons.


This study examines the relationship between the Irish nationalist risings in Wexford and Antrim in 1798. The Antrim Rising was a largely ideological movement that was influenced by the beliefs of the United Irishmen; in contrast, the Wexford Rising was a reactionary movement that was influenced by the leadership of Fr. John Murphy of Boolavogue. An analysis of the differences and similarities of these two leaders serves as the primary mode of analysis. McCracken restructured the United Irishmen in Belfast into a secret revolutionary ■society, as Murphy mobilized rebel forces in Wexford and inspired a military uprising. This thesis seeks to uncover the similarities and contrasts and ultimately, the reasons for the eventual British victory. The objective is to identify the degree of reliance that these movements had on one another, especially the influence the United Irishmen had over the rebellion in Wexford. Could the methods employed in Ulster have worked in Wexford? Was the Wexford rebellion a reactionary uprising in opposition to the atrocities of the British, or was it motivated by the beliefs and actions of the United Irishmen in the North? Sources include eyewitness accounts from significant participants in the events of 1798: Miles Byrne, Sir Richard Musgrave, Rev. James Gordon and Richard Robert Madden provided great insight into the political, religious, and personal motivations of principal players, Murphy and McCracken. Madden's work chronicles the history of the United Irishmen from their origins in 1791, through their military reorganization, to their military efforts in 1798.


In October 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion to seize a palatial cliff-top home in Malibu, California. The 16-acre property towers over its neighbors, with a palm-lined driveway leading to a plaster-and-tile mansion. Situated in the heart of one of the United States' most expensive neighborhoods, the $30 million estate includes a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a four-hole golf course. In its complaint, the Justice Department also set its sights on high-performance speedboats worth $2 million, over two dozen cars (including a $2 million Maserati and eight Ferraris), and $3.2 million in Michael Jackson memorabilia—in total, assets equaling approximately $71 million. What made these extravagant possessions all the more remarkable was that they belonged to a government worker from a small African country who was making an official salary of about $80,000 a year: Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the oldest son of and heir apparent to Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the longtime president of Equatorial Guinea. Home to over one billion barrels of oil reserves, Equatorial Guinea has exported as many as 400,000 barrels of oil a day since 1995, a bonanza that has made the country wealthier, in terms of gdp per capita, than France, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Little of this wealth, however, has helped the vast majority of Equatorial Guinea's 700,000 people: today, three out of every four Equatorial Guineans live on less than $2 a day, and infant mortality rates in the country have barely budged since


In this paper, a numerical method to obtain an unconditionally stable solution of the time domain electric field integral equation for arbitrary conducting thin wires is presented. The time-domain electric field integral equation (TD-EFIE) technique has been employed to analyze electromagnetic scattering and radiation problems from thin wire structures. However, the most popular method to solve the TD-EFIE is typically the marching-on in time (MOT) method, which sometimes may suffer from its late-time instability. Instead, we solve the time-domain integral equation by expressing the transient behaviors in terms of weighted Laguerre polynomials. By using these orthonormal basis functions for the temporal variation, the time derivatives can be handled analytically and stable results can be obtained even for late-time. Furthermore, the excitation source in most scattering and radiation analysis of electromagnetic systems is typically done using a Gaussian shaped pulse. In this paper, both a Gaussian pulse and other waveshapes like a rectangular pulse or a ramp like function have been used as excitations for the scattering and radiation of thin-wire antennas with and without junctions. The time-domain results are compared with the inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT) of a frequency domain analysis.


Objective To design a simple magnetic resonance (MR)–based assessment system for quantification of osteochondral defect severity prior to cartilage repair surgery at the knee. Design The new scoring tool was supposed to include 3 different parameters: (1) cartilage defect size, (2) depth/morphology of the cartilage defect, and (3) subchondral bone quality, resulting in a specific 3-digit code. A clearly defined numeric score was developed, resulting in a final score of 0 to 100. Defect severity grades I through IV were defined. For intra- and interobserver agreement, defects were assessed by 2 independent readers on preoperative knee MR images of n = 44 subjects who subsequently received cartilage repair surgery. For statistical analyses, mean values ± standard deviation (SD), interclass correlation coefficients (ICC), and linear weighted kappa values were calculated. Results The mean total Area Measurement And DEpth & Underlying Structures (AMADEUS) score was 48 ± 24, (range, 0-85). The mean defect size was 2.8 ± 2.6 cm2. There were 36 of 44 full-thickness defects. The subchondral bone showed defects in 21 of 44 cases. Kappa values for intraobserver reliability ranged between 0.82 and 0.94. Kappa values for interobserver reliability ranged between 0.38 and 0.85. Kappa values for AMADEUS grade were 0.75 and 0.67 for intra- and interobserver agreement, respectively. ICC scores for the AMADEUS total score were 0.97 and 0.96 for intra- and interobserver agreement, respectively. Conclusions The AMADEUS score and classification system allows reliable severity encoding, scoring and grading of osteochondral defects on knee MR images, which is easily clinically applicable in daily practice.


Confronting the law as a form of ideology is not an easy task, especially for lawyers very strongly attached to the internal point of view as part of their professional habitus. Despite this difficulty, the present paper aims at contributing to the ideological demistification of law by proposing to apply Slavoj Žižek's critique of ideology to the legal field. In particular, the paper elaborates a specific methodology of subjecting legal texts to a critique of ideology by way of identifying the symptoms, i.e. points of breakdown of the ideological field which are simultaneously necessary for that field to achieve its closure. The paradox of symptoms is that they are inevitable for the ideological field, yet at the same time they undermine it, opening up a space for its critique. In this context, the aim of this paper is to confront the fundamental fantasies conveyed by legal ideology. The paper approaches ideological fantasies in strict connection with ideological interpellation, i.e. the process in which a human individual is transformed into a subject of ideology. Ideological interpellation of individuals into subjects is one of the chief operations of the law, which, in its current form, is based on the fundamental assumption that human beings are subjects of rights and duties. Directing the critique of ideology at legal texts aims at undermining the efficacy of the ideological grip held by the Symbolic order upon individuals by insisting on the classical Lacanian thesis that 'the big Other does not exist'. On a practical level, critique of legal ideology performed by lawyers themselves can help to bring about a more reflexive approach to their participation in the principal practices of legal culture and can help to raise lawyers' awareness regarding their role in society.


Albeit an important goal of Information Centric Networking (ICNs) is traffic reduction, a perhaps even more important aspect follows from the above achievement: the reduction of ISP operational costs that comes as consequence of the reduced load on transit and provider links. Surprisingly, to date this crucial aspect has not been properly taken into account, neither in the architectural design, nor in the operation and management of ICN proposals. In this work, we instead design a distributed cost-aware scheme that explicitly considers the cost heterogeneity among different links. We contrast our scheme with both traditional cost-blind schemes and optimal results. We further propose an architectural design to let multiple schemes be interoperable, and finally assess whether overlooking implementation details could hamper the practical relevance of our design. Numerical results show that our cost-aware scheme can yield significant cost savings, that are furthermore consistent over a wide range of scenarios.


Abstract Dopamine (DA) has been implicated in modulating multiple cognitive control processes, including the robust maintenance of task sets and memoranda in the face of distractors (cognitive stability) and, conversely, the ability to switch task sets or update the contents of working memory when it is advantageous to do so (cognitive flexibility). In humans, the limited specificity of available pharmacological probes has posed a challenge for understanding the mechanisms by which DA, acting on multiple receptor families across the PFC and striatum, differentially influences these cognitive processes. Using a within-subject, placebo-controlled design, we contrasted the impact of two mechanistically distinct DA drugs, tolcapone (an inhibitor of catechol-O-methyltransferase [COMT], a catecholamine inactivator) and bromocriptine (a DA agonist with preferential affinity for the D2 receptor), on the maintenance and switching of task rules. Given previous work demonstrating that drug effects on behavior are dependent on baseline DA tone, participants were stratified according to genetic polymorphisms associated with cortical (COMT Val158Met) and striatal (Taq1A) DA system function. Our results were partially consistent with an inverted-U-shaped relationship between tolcapone and robust rule maintenance (interaction with COMT genotype) and between bromocriptine and cued rule switching (interaction with Taq1A genotype). However, when task instructions were ambiguous, a third relationship emerged to explain drug effects on spontaneous task switching (interaction of COMT genotype and bromocriptine). Together, this pattern of results suggests that the effects of DA drugs vary not only as a function of the DA system component upon which they act but also on subtle differences in task demands and context.


To what extent do personal circumstances, as compared to ideological dispositions, drive voters' preferences on welfare policy? Addressing this question is difficult because a person's ideological position can be an outcome of material interest rather than an independent source of preferences. The article deals with this empirical challenge using an original panel study carried out over four years, tracking the labor market experiences and the political attitudes of a national sample of Americans before and after the eruption of the financial crisis. The analysis shows that the personal experience of economic hardship, particularly the loss of a job, had a major effect on increasing support for welfare spending. This effect was appreciably larger among Republicans than among Democrats, a result that was not simply due to a "ceiling effect." However the large attitudinal shift was short lived, dissipating as individuals' employment situations improved. The results indicate that the personal experience of an economic shock has a sizable, yet overall transient effect on voters' social policy preferences.


This article will address the area of arbitration of matrimonial property disputes. This topic is of particular interest in Australia in 2000 as long-awaited legislation is proposed to pass through Federal Parliament by 1 July, 2000 to enable the enforcement of matrimonial property and spousal maintenance arbitral awards.


This Norton Critical Edition of her best-selling novel is annotated and edited by preeminent Gaskell scholar Alan Shelston. "Contexts" includes contemporary reviews and correspondence related to North and South, along with the full text of Gaskell's 1850 short story "Lizzie Leigh," which, like North and South, is set in industrial Manchester and deals with strong working women. This topic is further addressed in Bessie Rayner Parkes's essay on Victorian working women. "Criticism" collects eleven assessments of the novel, among them Louis Cazamian's 1904 study of industrial fiction and Hilary Schor's recent study of North and South in the context of discourse analysis. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.


textabstractThis chapter begins with an empirical case where various public sector
organisations in the Netherlands have cooperated with a particular type of
technology, geoICT, since 1996. Throughout this document, GeoICT refers to
the collection of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) based
systems allowing the study of natural and man-made phenomena with an
explicit bearing in space (de By, 2004:15). Specific to 'geo-'ICT is that it
creates and manipulates 'geospatial data.' Similarly to other types of ICT, it has
only partly affected the four spheres of government: policy, politics, public
organisation, citizens (Zouridis and Thaens, 2005). However 'Geo-'ICT has the
potential to influence the public organisation beyond the operational core of
public administration (ibid.). Section 1.2 begins from this assumption and
presents the case. Section 1.3 follows with a conceptual analysis of this case, to
derive a set of basic research questions. Section 1.4 formulates these research
questions. Section 1.5 explains the approach with which these research
questions are addressed. Section 1.6 describes the position of this research in
relation to three research domains: geo-information science, public
administration and organisational science. Section 1.7 provides a summary of
the section and its relation to the subsequent chapters.


As the ability to control the differentiation of endothelial stem/progenitor cells (EPCs) into vascular endothelial cell lineages could be useful for promoting neovascularization, it is important to obtain a deeper understanding of the epigenetic mechanisms that regulate EPC differentiation and neovascularization. Heterochromatin protein 1α (HP1α) is known to be involved in the epigenetic regulation of gene silencing. However, recent reports demonstrate that HP1α can also activate gene expression during cell differentiation. In this study, microarray analysis revealed that HP1α expression was induced during EPC differentiation and is associated with the expression of outgrowing endothelial cell (OEC)‐specific protein markers. To explore the role of HP1α in the differentiation of EPCs to OECs, its expression was knocked‐down or over‐expressed in differentiating EPCs. Overexpression of HP1α promoted the differentiation and angiogenic activity of EPCs in vitro and in vivo, whereas knockdown of HP1α led to a defect in OEC migration, tube formation, and angiogenic sprouting activity. Gene expression profiling showed increased expression of angiogenic genes, including NOTCH1, cadherin‐5, and angiopoietin‐like‐2, and decreased expression of progenitor cell marker genes, including CD133, CXCR4, and C‐KIT, in HP1α‐overexpressing EPCs. Also, increased HP1α at an early stage of EPC differentiation may regulate angiogenic gene transcription by interacting with chromatin that modifies epigenetic factors such as the methyl‐CpG binding domain, Polycomb group ring finger 2, and DNA methyltransferases. Our findings demonstrate, for the first time, that HP1α plays an important role in the differentiation and angiogenic function of EPCs by regulating endothelial gene expression. Stem Cells 2015;33:1512–1522


Epidemiologic and experimental studies were reviewed to assess the role of postural factors, high handgrip and pinch forces, repetitive hand and wrist movements, external pressure, and vibration in the occurrence of carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). Forceful repetitive work, vibration, and extreme wrist postures have been associated with CTS in several epidemiologic studies. Experimental studies have shown that certain forearm, wrist, and finger postures, even moderate hand loads and external pressure on the palm, can increase carpal tunnel pressure (CTP) at least temporarily to levels at which nerve viability is threatened. It is concluded that while more research is needed, there is sufficient information to suggest that reducing the duration, frequency or intensity of exposure to forceful repetitive work, extreme wrist postures and vibration is likely to result in a reduction of the incidence or severity of CTS in working populations.


Social support can have significant stress-preventive and stress-buffering benefits for troubled individuals in everyday circumstances. Consequently, it is not surprising that many therapeutic and preventive programs enlist social support to address problems of child and family psychopathology, especially in the context of "two-generation interventions" that seek to improve child well-being by strengthening parental functioning and parent–child relationships. Home visitation programs are the best known of these two-generation strategies and have become the focus of state-level and national efforts to support families and prevent harm to children. The conclusions of basic research studies on social support converge significantly with the findings of evaluation studies of the impact of home visitation programs to yield important new insights into the conditions in which formal social support is likely to be beneficial, or ineffective, in improving child and family well-being. Both basic and applied research literatures emphasize the importance of linking formal social support to informal social networks in extended families, neighborhoods, and communities, and attending to the complex reactions of the recipients of support and the needs of support providers. These studies are reviewed and evaluated to highlight the connections between social support, developmental psychopathology, and social policy.


While T-Nb2O5 has been frequently reported to display an exceptionally fast rate of Li-ion storage (similar to a capacitor), the detailed mechanism of the energy storage process is yet to be unraveled. Here we report our findings in probing the nature of the ultrafast Li-ion storage in T-Nb2O5 using both experimental and computational approaches. Experimentally, we used in operando Raman spectroscopy performed on a well-designed model cell to systematically characterize the dynamic evolution of vibrational band groups of T-Nb2O5 upon insertion and extraction of Li ions during repeated cycling. Theoretically, our model shows that Li ions are located at the loosely packed 4g atomic layers and prefer to form bridging coordination with the oxygens in the densely packed 4h atomic layers. The atomic arrangement of T-Nb2O5 determines the unique Li-ion diffusion path topologies, which allow direct Li-ion transport between bridging sites with very low steric hindrance. The proposed model was validated by computational and experimental vibrational analyses. A comprehensive comparison between T-Nb2O5 and other important intercalation-type Li-ion battery materials reveals the key structural features that lead to the exceptionally fast kinetics of T-Nb2O5 and the cruciality of atomic arrangements for designing a new generation of Li-ion conduction and storage materials.


This Article wears two hats: on the one hand it responds to recent revisionist re-readings of Justice Miller's opinion in the Slaughter-House Cases, and on the other hand it seeks a historical connection between two areas of Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence invigorated by recent Supreme Court decisions. On the latter point I argue that the historical background of the framing and early application of the Fourteenth Amendment reveals an intimate and essential connection between the proper interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause (an issue hinted at by the Court in Saenz v. Roe) and congressional enforcement powers under Section Five (an issue actively addressed by the Court in City of Boerne and its progeny). The Article's architecture is as follows: Part One critiques the Slaughter-House revisionists, arguing that they provide an overly charitable reading of Justice Miller's opinion on the question of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Part Two explores the historical evidence from congressional debates about the Amendment and simultaneous congressional legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Freedman's Bureau Act and then critiques the revisionists' implicit adoption of Miller's anti-natural rights interpretation of federal citizenship privileges. Part Three develops the idea of the congressional power of interpretive enforcement of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, primarily through a close reading of some of the congressional actions throughout Reconstruction, including the Anti-Peonage Act, the Enforcement (Anti-Klan) Act of 1871 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. This Part argues that Congress took a fairly broad view of the Privileges or Immunities Clause and its own powers prior to the Supreme Court's decision in Slaughter-House, and that Slaughter-House re-directed congressional discourse away from a more expansive, fundamental rights interpretation of the Clause and toward a more constrained equality-of-rights interpretation. Finally, Part Four discusses the final blow to congressional development of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the Civil Rights Cases. This Article suggests that if it is true that Congress should play an important role in developing the contours of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, then actions by Congress which are based on its understanding of the Clause should be accorded more deference than currently granted by Court. By re-uniting the historical understandings of the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the Enforcement Clause modern interpreters might find a plausible but overlooked constitutional basis for congressional actions to protect the rights of groups such as women, the disabled, and religious minorities.


The volume of Initial Coin Offerings has risen steeply with an all-time high market capitalisation of close to USD 1 trillion in December 2017. Since then the digital asset market has slumped, retreating to merely approximately USD 200 billion in mid-2018. Stakeholders of the crypto industry have pondered the reasons for this retrenchment and are increasingly focusing on the notion that many ICOs could be scams. A recent industry study even went as far to claim that 80% of all ICOs are indeed scams. In this paper, we investigate the question whether scams are as common in the crypto field. We do so by, first, defining what a scam is and, secondly, by drawing on empirical data to assess the number of cases fitting such a definition. Building on Principal Agent Theory and based on the statistical analysis of our empirical data set we attempt to establish the current state of affairs with regards to scams in the crypto-currency world. The results of our study divert from salient beliefs.


An important aspect of electronic commerce is the potential for market participants to automate transaction processing fully, from the point of trade to final settlement. Such 'straight-through processing' could make wholesale financial markets more efficient, and lower the costs and risks that participants face. But it requires participants to use common message standards to exchange transaction data electronically. Several market-led initiatives to develop common standards have made substantial progress. But many trade messages are still sent by fax or using incompatible electronic networks, which means that different participants may have to re-input the same data manually at various points during the trade process. This article describes some of the initiatives to establish common standards. It then looks to economic theory to explain why market participants may find it difficult to co-ordinate to introduce a single standard, in spite of the wider benefits. It discusses how such technological changes may affect market structure. Finally, it considers whether some recent technologies, in particular eXtensible Markup Language (XML), may make it easier for market participants to adopt common standards.


We present two solutions to the firing synchronization problem on the ring, an 8-state minimal-time solution and a 6-state non-minimal-time solution. Both solutions use fewer states than the previous best-known minimal-time automaton, a 16-state solution due to Culik. We also give the first lower bounds on the number of states needed for solutions to the ring firing synchronization problem. We show that there is no 3-state solution and no 4-state, symmetric, minimal-time solution for the ring.


The Myth of Hitler's Pope. By Rabbi David G. Dalin. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing Co. 2005. Pp. ix, 209. $27.95.) This book had its genesis in an article by Rabbi Dalin in the Weekly Standard of February 26, 2001, entitled "Pius XII and the Jews." There Dalin showed that as Nuncio in Germany in the 1920's, as Papal Secretary of State from 1930, and as Pope from 1939, Eugenio Pacelli was a consistent and outspoken opponent of the Nazis."People at the time," Dalin wrote,"Nazis and Jews alike, understood the pope to be the world's most prominent opponent of the Nazi ideology." Hitler's propaganda machine branded him "the Jew-loving cardinal." During World War II Pius XII inspired and directed rescue efforts which saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from destruction. For this he received many expressions of thanks from the survivors, both during the war and thereafter. With few exceptions, Dalin charged, those who today criticize Pius XII for silence and inaction in the face of the Holocaust are angry or lapsed Catholics seeking to discredit papal authority. Their polemic would have shocked Jews of an earlier generation. By overlooking contemporary Jewish tributes to the pontiff, his present-day critics are hijacking the Holocaust in the interest of an innerCatholic debate. Jews, whatever their view of the Catholic Church, have a duty to condemn those who disparage the testimony of Holocaust survivors, especially when it transfers to others the condemnation that belongs properly to Hitler and the Nazis. Pius XII deserves not condemnation, Dalin concluded, but inclusion in Yad Vashem's still lengthening list of "righteous gentiles." The Myth of Hitler's Pope expands this argument with additional supporting evidence. Like the works of the pope's critics, it is not really history but advocacy. This is a lawyer's brief for the defense, and it is brilliantly argued. For the pope's critics it is devastating. Dalin bolsters his case by a chapter on "Hitler's Mufti," an Arab cleric who publicly supported Hitler's program of Jewish extermination, both during the war in Berlin and thereafter in the Middle East. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a virulent and active anti-Semite born in Jerusalem in 1893, was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1922. The instigator of numerous terrorist attacks on Jews before and after the creation of the state of Israel, Husseini died in exile in 1974. Among his disciples were the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser and Yasser Arafat, who in an interview as late as August, 2002, called Husseini "our hero." Dalin asks why Pius XII's critics are so silent about the virulent hatred of Jews in the Arab world today. "It is particularly irresponsible and outrageous," Dalin writes, for these critics "to blame the Catholic Church for anti-Semitism, to falsify the Church's efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust, and to ignore the fact that popes since the twelfth century have rejected the blood libel [that Jews use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes]. …


The c-Jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK) is activated when cells are exposed to ultraviolet (UV) radiation. However, the functional consequence of JNK activation in UV-irradiated cells has not been established. It is shown here that JNK is required for UV-induced apoptosis in primary murine embryonic fibroblasts. Fibroblasts with simultaneous targeted disruptions of all the functional Jnk genes were protected against UV-stimulated apoptosis. The absence of JNK caused a defect in the mitochondrial death signaling pathway, including the failure to release cytochrome c. These data indicate that mitochondria are influenced by proapoptotic signal transduction through the JNK pathway.


Existing hair capture systems fail to produce strands that reflect the structures of real-world hairstyles. We introduce a system that reconstructs coherent and plausible wisps aware of the underlying hair structures from a set of still images without any special lighting. Our system first discovers locally coherent wisp structures in the reconstructed point cloud and the 3D orientation field, and then uses a novel graph data structure to reason about both the connectivity and directions of the local wisp structures in a global optimization. The wisps are then completed and used to synthesize hair strands which are robust against occlusion and missing data and plausible for animation and simulation. We show reconstruction results for a variety of complex hairstyles including curly, wispy, and messy hair.


Bone chips are used by orthopaedic surgeons for treating spinal trauma and to augment large bone defects. A potential alternative to autologous bone is regeneration of bone tissue in the lab by developing hybrid implants consisting of osteogenic (stem) cells seeded on supportive matrices. Application of large bone grafts in the operation room is not a clinical reality yet due to, among other factors, cell death in de core of cm-scale implants. One of the reasons for this is the time needed for vascularisation of the grafts after in vivo implantation. Also, current hybrid grafts are rather simplistic often comprising of one cell type seeded on one type of a biomatrix, while native bone tissue consists of multiple cells, matrix molecules and growth factors each with own spatiotemporal pattern of presentation. For development of functional, large-size grafts it would be attractive to employ techniques that approach the complex organization of bone tissue. Organ- or tissue printing is a novel approach of regenerative medicine, which enables mimicking anatomical organization of tissues by developing 3D-structured cell-laden multimaterial scaffolds. In this thesis we studied the application of 3D fiber deposition (an organ printing technique) for development of (vascularized) bone grafts. We first present a literature overview addressing studies that describe a positive effect biomimicking approaches the functionality of tissue-engineered grafts, and define parameters necessary for printing of cell-laden constructs in their application as bone grafts. Hydrogel matrices are highly hydrated polymer networks used as scaffolding materials in organ printing. Of all synthetic hydrogels, photopolymerizable hydrogels formed by UV-exposure of photosensitive polymers in the presence of photoinitiators, are currently one of the most promising materials for skeletal TE due to their mechanical stability. The influence of photoexposure on cell-cycle progression, which is often cautioned for, is well tolerated by encapsulated cells in hydrogels. One of the other principal printing components is the 3D fiber deposition machine, and we tested its applicability to print cell-laden hydrogels, demonstrating that osteogenic progenitors and hydrogels can be deposited simultaneously. We showed that osteogenic progenitors survive the deposition process and retain the ability to differentiate after printing. Based on our findings we conclude that 3DF is a well-suited tool for printing of viable osteogenic grafts. Tailoring of dispensing parameters such as fiber distance, orientation, pressure, and speed was employed to modulate the characteristics of the printed scaffolds including their porosity and mechanical properties. Porous scaffold design is vital for functionality of embedded cells in vitro and supports tissue development in vivo, while addition of calcium phosphate microparticles is useful to further enhance bone formation. The second part of this thesis addressed the development of multicellular grafts whereby heterogeneous grafts demonstrate retention of cell organization introduced by the printing and result in heterogeneous matrix formation, both for vascularised bone grafts and osteochondral implants. Cumulatively, these results demonstrate the possibility of manufacturing viable and functional heterogeneous tissue constructs by a 3D fiber deposition technique, which could potentially be used for the repair of bone defects and osteochondral lesions.


Aim: To study the effect of site and size of tympanic membrane perforation on graft uptake rates and hearing improvement in Type I tympanoplasty using sliced conchal cartilage reinforced with temporalis muscle fascia and temporalis muscle fascia alone. Materials and Methods: In this retrospective study, a total of forty patients presenting with dry central perforation with intact and mobile ossicular chain and conductive type of hearing loss, visiting the ENT outpatient department of Government Medical College, Amritsar, were included. They were randomly divided into two groups of twenty patients each, with Group I patients undergoing Type I tympanoplasty with temporalis muscle fascia and Group II patients with sliced conchal cartilage as graft reinforced with temporalis fascia. A pure-tone audiometry (PTA) was done within 1 week prior to the surgery and at 3 months postoperatively to evaluate the hearing status. Results: Overall graft uptake rate in Group I was 85%, whereas that in Group II was 95% (P < 0.01). In Group I, graft uptake rate for small perforations was 100%, for medium 85.71%, subtotal 80%, and big central 66.66%. However, Group II graft uptake rates were 100% in all sizes except in medium-sized perforations (83.33%). The air–bone gap gain in Groups I and II was 14.91 (standard deviation [SD] ±9.741) and 14.48 (SD ± 9.366), respectively (P > 0.05). The hearing improvement was statistically insignificant between anterior and posterior perforations. Conclusion: From this study, we observed that size of the perforation is a major factor that influences graft uptake and hearing improvement results in Type I tympanoplasty using reinforced sliced conchal cartilage. Site of perforation failed to be a statistically significant influencing factor in this study.


Nicholson Baker, his name has already been mentioned several times during this conference. In 1994 he published an erotic fantasy novel: The Fermata. I will not discuss the contents of this novel before this audience, but I want to read to you a quotation: "The particular library table I had chosen with some care, of course. It had one other resident, a petite woman in her late thirties with curly salt and pepper hair (…). She was looking through several piles of microfilm copies, sorting them and and circling paragraphs ever so often. She spun her pen silently on the table as she read, as if it was a spinner in a child's game. Her eyes moved with impressive speed over the chemical smelling, legal sized pages, but she looked tired from spending hours gazing at the grey light in one of the libraries horrible microfilm readers, contending with the trembling magnified crotch hairs and scratches on its screen." It appears that Baker already was concerned about microfilming and reading equipment by that time. Seven years later he launched his famous campaign against libraries' abuse of microfilming as an excuse for destroying originals, mainly newspapers and periodicals in his book Double Fold (Baker, 2001).


In order to face resource depletion and climate change, society needs to move as quickly as possible to a renewable energy supply. Here, we argue that the transition can be seen as a process similar to the challenge faced by ancient farmers who had to save some of their harvest as seed for the next harvest. In the present case, during the initial phase of the transition, we need to save and invest part of the energy produced by fossil fuels in order to build their own replacement in the form of renewable energy plants. This strategy is called here "the Sower's Way". The needs for the transition can be quantified in terms of the "energy return for energy invested" (EROI or EROEI) in order to estimate the amount of "seed" that's necessary to invest before either fossil fuels become too expensive to be profitably extracted or the temperature rise caused by greenhouse gases exceed the safe limits, as they are understood today. Taking into account that it is necessary to maintain a minimum level of energy supply for a growing human population and for improving the living standards of people living in poor countries, the calculations indicate that a considerable increase in the investments in renewable energy is necessary, and that it is necessary to start as soon as possible.


Coexistence of sperm-dependent asexual hybrids with their sexual progenitors depends on genetic and ecological interactions between sexual and asexual forms. In this study, we investigate genotypic composition, modes of hybridogenetic gametogenesis and habitat preferences of European water frogs (Pelophylax esculentus complex) in a region of sympatric occurrence. Pelophylax esculentus complex comprises parental species P. ridibundus and P. lessonae, whose primary hybridization leads to hybridogenetic lineages of P. esculentus. Hybrids clonally transmit one parental genome and mate with the other parental species, forming a new generation of hybrids. In the region of western Slovakia, we found syntopic occurrence of diploid and triploid hybrids with P. lessonae, syntopic occurrence of all three taxa as well as the existence of pure P. ridibundus populations. All triploid hybrids were exclusively male possessing one ridibundus and two different lessonae genomes (RLL). Sex ratio in diploid hybrids was substantially female-biased. Irrespective of the population composition, diploid hybrids excluded the lessonae genome from their germ line and produced ridibundus gametes. Contrarily, RLL males unequivocally eliminated the ridibundus genome and produced diploid lessonae sperms. Perpetuation of RLL males in studied populations is most likely achieved by their mating with diploid hybrid females. The composition of water frog populations is also shaped by taxon-specific habitat preferences. While P. ridibundus preferred larger water bodies (gravelpits, fishery ponds, dead river arms), P. lessonae was most frequently found in marshes and smaller sandpits. Pelophylax esculentus occupied predominately similar habitats as its sexual host P. lessonae.


OBJECTIVE
To compare the outcomes of total laparoscopic hysterectomy (TLH), a relatively new procedure, with vaginal hysterectomy (VH), a well-established procedure, in a university teaching hospital.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS
A retrospective chart review of all patients who underwent TLH at the University Hospital of the West Indies between January 2007 and December 2011 was conducted. Chart review was also conducted of a group of patients who underwent VH during this time period. The groups were compared with respect to demographic data and intraoperative and postoperative outcomes. Statistical analysis was undertaken using the SPSS software, version 12.0 (SPSS, Chicago, IL). The Student unpaired t-test was used to analyse continuous variables, and the Chi-square test and Fisher exact test for categorical variables, when appropriate. A p-value of < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

RESULTS
Ten patients underwent TLH, and were compared with 22 women who underwent VH. There was no statistically significant difference between groups in uterine weight, estimated blood loss, postoperative analgesic requirement, or length of hospitalization. Total laparoscopic hysterectomy took significantly longer to perform (209.9 vs 145.6 minutes, p = 0.004). One patient in the TLH group had to be brought back to the operating theatre after three months because of bowel prolapse secondary to vault dehiscence. With the exception of one case of bladder injury in the VH group, there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of intraoperative and postoperative complications.

CONCLUSION
Total laparoscopic hysterectomy, notwithstanding its learning curve, is as safe as VH However, TLH was associated with a significantly longer operative time.


No person with a disability shall be left behind. This report presents suggested indicators for monitoring the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability and Agenda 2030 in the Nordic region. The vision of the Nordic cooperation is to become the most integrated and sustainable in the world by 2030. The vision mirrors the sustainable development goals of Agenda 2030, according to which no-one shall be left behind. Persons with disabilities have the right to inclusion, and the Nordic countries monitor the developments of living conditions for persons with disabilities. All countries have also ratified the Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities and have high ambitions with regard to Agenda 2030. Throughout the region we face similar challenges concerning inclusion. Participation is not equal, not in employment, nor in education, economy, or health. But to improve this we need to see it. Even if a set of indicators is not the only way forward, they can help us measure if we are on the right track. In this report, we suggest a set of indicators that could be developed further and used to follow the developments towards inclusion and measure living conditions. By developing such a set of comparable indicators in the Nordic countries, we can see whether the countries separately and collectively follow the intentions of the UNCRPD to improve the living conditions of people with disabilities. The indicators are also an aid in the work to identify whether we are working correctly to achieve the Agenda 2030 targets.


Since the first photogeologic exploration of Mars, vast mounds of layered sediments found within the Valles Marineris troughs (interior layered deposits, ILDs) have remained unexplained. Recent spectroscopic results showing that these materials contain coarse-grained hematite and sulfate suggest that they are fundamentally similar to layered sulfate deposits seen elsewhere on Mars, and are therefore a key piece of the global aqueous history of Mars. In this work we constrain the origin of the ILDs by considering mass balance equations. One model involving formation of the ILDs by groundwater upwelling requires that a significant fraction of the global Martian sulfur budget was concentrated in the Valles Marineris at the time when the ILDs formed. It also necessitates high deposition and erosion rates in the Hesperian. We favor an alternative model in which the ILDs formed in a configuration similar to what is observed today through atmospherically driven deposition of ice, dust, and volcanogenic sulfuric acid. Such a model is easily compatible with the global sulfur budget, and does not require significant erosion rates or large volumes of liquid water. We propose that formation of sulfate-rich layered sediments on Mars was governed through time by volcanogenic SO 2 and H 2 O emission rates and dust production against a backdrop of obliquity variation in a largely cold and dry climate.


An optical solution method with genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed as a means to minimize the Petzval field curvature aberration (Petzval FCA), which is intrinsic, but plays a significant role at improvement of projection optics. Petzval FCA is generally more sensitive to the surface curvature and refractive index, closely related to the fundamental optical layout and its physical concept. Through the proposed optimization method in this research, with crossover and mutation operations provided by the GA, the simulation results imply that 79.75% at least of the Petzval FCA of projection optics can be eliminated, which leads to better performance of projector optics, especially in 1080P and 3-D high-definition projection optics.


Central banks typically control an overnight interest rate as their policy tool, and the transmission of monetary policy happens through the relationship of this overnight rate to the rest of the yield curve. The expectations hypothesis, that longer-term rates should equal expected future short-term rates plus a term premium, provides the typical framework for understanding this relationship. We explore the effect of volatility in the federal funds market on the expectations hypothesis in money markets. We present two major results. First, the expectations hypothesis is likely to be rejected in money markets if the realized federal funds rate is studied instead of an appropriate measure of the expected federal funds rate. Second, we find that lower volatility in the bank funding markets market, all else equal, leads to a lower term premium and thus longer-term rates for a given setting of the overnight rate. The results appear to hold for the US as well as the Euro Area and the UK. The results have implications for the design of operational frameworks for the implementation of monetary policy and for the interpretation of the changes in the Libor-OIS spread during the financial crisis. We also demonstrate that the expectations hypothesis is more likely to hold the more closely linked the short- and long-term interest rates are.