This research examines storage and delivery process at Total Logistic Services (M) Sdn. Bhd and the scope of study is at TLS's SA2 warehouse. The research concentrates the application process on storage and delivery process, and the problems arise during the part movement from 2010 to 2012. This research discusses some of the possible factors implemented by the company in order to identify the problems. In order to achieve the research objective, four questions were addressed. There are (i) How does the implement for storage and delivery process at the TLS's SA2 warehouse?; (ii) What are the problems faced at SA2 warehouse?; and (iii) What are the factors that causing these problems at SA2 warehouse?; (iv) What are the recommendations suggested to the TLS's SA2 warehouse to solve problem faced?. This research takes a qualitative approach in collecting the primary data from interviews as well as observations because this is the most appropriate way to conduct a firm level study. Secondary data such as the company's performance reports and departments' operational records were used for ensuring that the result of this research is valid and precise. The respondents involved in the interviews are the staff which responsible in managing the storage and delivery area. Findings on storage and delivery process, type of problems as well as the factors that cause problems are illustrated in figures and tables. Samples of documentation, procedure, process, inspection, and problem reports are attached for reference. This research concludes that part damages are common problems in handling part movement for storage (segregation, unpacking, staging); and delivery (packing, devanning, delivery) process. These are due to lack of commitment in 5'S practices and provision of training to staff. This paper ends with the possible solutions that can be executed in order to help the company to achieve the targeted operation performance.


Swarm robotics is a new and quickly growing field of research that has many applications to the real-world. The idea is to use a coordinated group of devices to perform tasks that are either unsafe or infeasible for a single device to accomplish. While a lot of research is being done on swarms, surprisingly, there are not many physical platforms available to apply these ideas to. Being able to take this research out of simulation will greatly improve the quality and feasibility of these ideas outside of nearperfect conditions. In this thesis we develop a new swarm control platform (that can function as either a Centralized or Distributed system), as well as potential research applications and educational exercises that can be created using this platform. The platform utilizes an open source NanoQuadcopter called the Crazyflie and uses the OptiTrack motion capture camera system for localization. It is designed for scalability using the Virtual Reality Peripheral Network (VRPN), a type of Multi-Cast UDP protocol, to transmit localization data. We use this location data and set of nine nested PID controllers to command the Crazyflie to any location in space. It also supports flying multiple Crazyflies on one USB Radio, and multiple radios per computer, further reducing the scale up cost. As a proof of concept, we crafted a few applications for the Platform to demonstrate its abilities. These examples range from simple single Crazyflie autonomous flight, to more complex gesture controlled multi-Crazyflie master-slave 'follow-the-leader' type systems. We intend to extend these systems to test even more complex problems in optimization and stochastic lossy networks, as well as creating lab experiments and educational resources for students to learn more about controls.


Abstract The number of party employees is increasing, but to what extent and in what sense are party employees integrated into their parties? Based on the literature on party change, the article identifies three important dimensions ‒ ties, tasks, and career plans ‒ and constructs a typology of four ideal types of party employees – technical assistants, party bureaucrats, independent professionals, and unelected politicians. Data on Norwegian party employees suggest that they have strong party ties and are entrusted with a wide range of political tasks. However, career plans rarely include elected office. The results indicate that party employees have stronger party ties than envisaged in influential party models. Professionalisation does not render party grassroots irrelevant, but rather turns some grassroots activists into professionals – what can be called 'unelected politicians'. In conclusion, the article discusses implications for contemporary understandings of political parties.


During the past four decades, molecular biology has dominated the life sciences. Curiously, no participant in this scientific revolution has previously attempted a book-length history of the development of this powerful science. Harrison ('Hatch') Echols provides such an account in "Operators and Promoters". A gifted molecular biologist and talented raconteur, Echols relates the intellectual history of the most influential discoveries in molecular biology from his own experiences. Echols joins his vast knowledge of biology with personal interviews of the principal operators and promoters in the field to convey a captivating side of science - specifically, how the personalities of scientists and their competitive and collaborative relations affect new ideas and discoveries. The author reveals how logic and order often arise only in hindsight from the chaos of discovery; eventual solutions often come from experiments performed for entirely different reasons. Echols also shares his deep-seated feelings for the science itself, communicating his admiration, even awe, for the purity and simplicity with which life systems are organized. This gripping insider's account of the first fifty years of molecular biology ties together the biological questions with the scientific solutions of the people who established the field. It will appeal not only to students and those interested in the development of the discipline, but to anyone intrigued by the human side of science and the process of scientific inquiry and discovery.


People who survive a heart attack often develop chronic heart disease because of the limited ability of the heart to repair damage by replacing lost cells. Noting that thymosin β4 (which stimulates cell migration, skin wound healing, and angiogenesis) is expressed in the developing cardiovascular system, Bock-Marquette et al. investigated the possibility that this G-actin-sequestering protein could be used to promote regeneration of damaged cardiac tissues (see Schneider). Thymosin β4 mRNA and protein were expressed in regions of the developing mouse heart that were rich in migratory cells. Thymosin β4 was secreted by transfected Cos1 cells, and thymosin β4 expressed on the surface of phage particles was internalized by cells in embryonic cardiac explants. Thymosin β4 promoted the in vitro migration of embryonic endothelial and myocardial cells, as well as the in vitro migration and survival of neonatal cardiomyocytes. Thymosin β4 bound to the LIM domain protein PINCH [which binds to integrin-linked kinase (ILK) as part of the focal adhesion kinase] and immunoprecipitated together with PINCH and ILK. Moreover, exposure to thymosin β4 or transfection with a thymosin β4-expressing plasmid increased ILK content and promoted phosphorylation of the ILK substrate Akt in C2C12 myoblasts. Administration of thymosin β4 also increased ILK content and Akt phosphorylation in heart extracts from mice subjected to coronary artery ligation to elicit a myocardial infarction, as well as reducing the size of the scar and improving cardiac function. Thus, the authors propose that thymosin β4 and the pathway it regulates may provide a new means of therapeutic intervention to ameliorate cardiac damage. I. Bock-Marquette, A. Saxena, M. D. White, J. M. DiMalo, D. Srivastava, Thymosin β4 activates integrin-linked kinase and promotes cardiac cell migration, survival and cardiac repair. Nature 432, 466-472 (2004). [Online Journal] M. D. Schneider, Prometheus unbound. Nature 432, 451-453 (2004). [Online Journal]


From the Pharaohs to the United Arab Republic of the present day, Egypt's agriculture has been subject to very different forms of political power and organization. The papers in this volume draw on the abundant documentary and archaeological evidence to analyse and compare the patterns of agricultural exploitation across historical periods (including Ptolemaic, Roman, and Ottoman times). Among important themes discussed are: the changing composition of agrarian elites, relationships between state, landholders and peasants, the impact of commercialization on the rural economy, technology, irrigation and water control, and changes in crop patterns and production. This volume's comparativist approach to the subject is crucial in crossing the linguistic and historical barriers between the different eras in Egypt's agrarian history.


In order to compare spatial attention and visual processing capabilities of humans and rhesus macaques, we developed a visual maze task both could perform. Maze stimuli were constructed of orthogonal line segments displayed on a monitor. Each was octagonal in outline and contained a central square (the 'start box'). A single ('main') path, containing a random number of turns, extended outward from the start box, and either reached an exit in the maze's perimeter, or a blind ending within the maze. Subjects maintained ocular fixation within the start box, and indicated their judgment whether the path reached an exit or not by depressing one of two keys (humans) or foot pedals (monkeys). Successful maze solution by human subjects required a minimum viewing time. Replacing the maze with a masking stimulus after a variable interval revealed that the percent correct performance increased systematically with greater viewing time, reaching a plateau of approximately 85% correct if mazes were visible for 500 ms or more. A multiple linear regression analysis determined that the response time of both species depended upon several parameters of the main path, including the number of turns, total length, and exist status. Human and nonhuman primates required comparable time to process each turn in the path, whereas monkeys were faster than humans in processing each unit of path length. The data suggest that a covert analysis of the maze proceeds from the center outward along the main path in the absence of saccadic eye movements, and that both monkeys and humans undertake such an analysis during the solution of visual mazes.


Although acts of genocide are undeniable historical facts, they soon come under assault by doubters, deniers, and "interpreters, " who try to shape the events to fit their own purposes, often creating confusion and doubt. This book is important to keep the record straight. Filled with eyewitness accounts, scholarly analyses, and historical data, this first-of-its-kind overview is the work of leading scholars and thinkers. It meticulously documents atrocities and crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated for reasons that range from "the will of God" to "ethnic cleansing." Focusing on the major atrocities of our time, the book provides accurate and verifiable historical information on how and why particular genocides were committed. Each original essay is accompanied by excerpts from personal accounts of survivors that vividly remind us that the statistics and plain facts represent men, women, and children who were persecuted and killed. Since each contributor addresses the same questions and issues, the essays provide a unified framework for analyzing and comparing the various historical events. An index facilitates research, and bibliographies point to sources where the subject can be pursued in greater depth.


The knowledge-based treatment planning automation has evolved from academic research from the clinical application with the involvement of the major industry TPS vendors. Previous work proved the concept that IMRT or VMAT plans can be designed without or with minimal human intervention. Recently, the major industry vendors start releasing the automatic planning product such as Philips automatic treatment planning, Varian's Rapidplan, and RaySearch's autoplan. Many centers start to evaluate and use the automatic planning products from TPS vendors. It is more and more becoming evident that automatic planning will be routinely used in the clinic. The first presentation will focus on the knowledge modeling for clinical treatment planning. The presenter will introduce the algorithm and theory for developing the dose volume histogram (DVH) model, summarize the results on the validation of the DVH model, and discuss the application of DVH for the automatic treatment planning. The second presenter will focus on the clinical use of the automatic treatment planning. The presenter will give an overview of the several automatic treatment planning tools including the tools developed commercially and in-house, present the early experience of using those tools, and discuss the application of the tools in the routine clinical use and in the quality control of the treatment planning. Learning Objectives: 1. Describe the algorithm and theory behind the knowledge based treatment planning automation. 2. Clinical experience of using automatic planning in clinical trial and patient treatment 3. Early clinical experience of using commercial automatic planning approach 4. The application of automatic planning approach to perform quality assurance of treatment plan. XD obtain the research funding from Varian Medical System, Philips Medical System and Funding support form Sister Institution Network Fund of MD Anderson, XD is also a founder of Global Oncology One


Optical two-dimensional Fourier transform spectroscopy is implemented near 800 nm with active stabilization. Excitation pulse delay is stabilized during data acquisition and stepped with interferometric accuracy. The reference used for heterodyne detecting the complete transient four-wave mixing signal is also phase-stabilized. The phase evolution of the four-wave mixing signal during the initial evolution period and the final detection period is then measured and correlated. Two-dimensional spectra with absorption and emission frequency axes are obtained by Fourier transforms with respect to the corresponding time variables. Measurement performed on a GaAs multiple quantum well sample shows light-hole and heavy-hole exciton transitions as the diagonal peaks and coupling between these two resonances as off-diagonal peaks.


In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists - including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace - to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the devlopment of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment.


In Turkey, urban planning is being replaced by piecemeal and property-led urban regeneration projects. Those urban regeneration projects affect cities in Turkey in two fundamental ways. The first impact is on the morphology and the second impact is on the social structure of the city. In this paper, their impact on the morphology of the city is analyzed through a case study of Istanbul's Gaziosmanpasa District. There are squatter houses from 1950s and apartment blocks redeveloped from squatter houses in the urban regeneration area designated by central and local governments. Today, these buildings have become the subject of regeneration. The paper is based on the preliminary findings of a TUBITAK-funded (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) project being developed by the authors. As well as literature review, the research is shaped by face-to-face interviews with related agency representatives, on-site observations, analysis of plans, projects and documents prepared by related agencies and articles in the media on the subject. The main findings of the research established that the existing urban morphology of the area, formed by low-rise, single houses in an organic and unplanned setting, was changing. This existing urban fabric is being replaced by high-rise apartment blocks which can be described as gated communities. As far as Istanbul is concerned, its existing organic, unplanned structure leaves its place to a, mostly grid-shaped, planned structure and thus a spatial structure which takes no notice of local features such as climate, topography and orientation, and its immediate surroundings emerges.


Starting with the Fitzgerald-Larmor-Lorentz contractions of length and frequency the measurements which can be made on a uniformly moving particle from a uniformly moving platform, using clocks and rods moved at observed finite speeds, are determined. A single quantity in the Fitzgerald-Larmor-Lorentz invariant framework is found to be determinable from such measurements. This, the so-called "chronotopic interval" is a length, which is identified with a stationary undistorted dimension of an interferometer, which, experiencing the length and frequency contractions on motion, always gives a "null" result. The complete expression for this quantity in terms of the variant rods and clocks is given by a formula which is not identical with the invariant framework expression, but is a function of all the observed quantities, including the observed velocities of the rods and clocks. Applying the same analysis to observations made in a gravitational field, on certain assumptions, an expression is found for the "chronotopic interval" or interferometer dimension, which is a function of the gravitational constant when expressed in the invariant framework, but is identical with the nongravitational formula when expressed in terms of variant rod and clock measurements.


The Internet has become a communication medium of intense group interaction, and individuals with marginalised identities have used anonymity as a tool with which to participate in online interaction. In order to capture the full spectrum of the role that anonymity plays in cyberspace, I explore in this article the US constitutional right to anonymous association. I draw on the concepts of anonymity defined in the social science literature - identity protection, visual anonymity, and action anonymity - and analyse US case law regarding the right to anonymous association in both offline and online worlds. The examination suggests that (1) the right to anonymous association has been especially meaningful for those who are marginalised in society; (2) future courts - in light of established legal rules governing the right to anonymous association - must give careful consideration to the question as to who is seeking anonymity; (3) different concepts of anonymity have greater independence in cyberspace and, therefore, need to be distinguished by scholars and courts. Overall, the right to anonymous association in cyberspace can be understood as the positive right of individuals to control information about themselves in order to find and associate with others. The examined case law shows that strong support for such a right is embedded in the US legal tradition.


This thesis combines a literature review and a case study in order to examine startup accelerators as social networks. The literature review looks at two distinct bodies of research; the first on Social Network Theory, in order to create a framework within which to describe an accelerator as a social network, the second on startup accelerators in order to understand their structure and evolution as business support programs. The case study uses EyeFocus Accelerator, founded by this researcher, to test some of the ideas formulated from the literature.

The literature demonstrates that accelerators are social networks, and the dynamics between the different actors in those networks can be explained and defined using the vocabulary and concepts of Social Network Theory. This describes the structure of the accelerator network, and how such a network is able to reward people with Social Capital, which is observed in this thesis to be the currency of accelerators.

Consequently, the unique nature of the research in this thesis is to describe accelerators using the language and concepts of Social Network Theory, providing new insights into how and why accelerators work.

This understanding identifies that value in accelerators lies in their ability to facilitate the flow of non-redundant information, and to provide early access to this information. Creating this value also enables accelerators to withdraw access to that value as a threat of sanction against bad actors.

Other aspects of the social network structure and behaviour of accelerators are examined, including the tendency of weak ties and non-redundancy of information to decay over time, suggesting that this may explain the typical fixed term of most accelerators.

Combined, this theory leads to an accelerator being described as a dynamic social network with a high level of closure at the core, set within a weak network architecture, with many weak ties, and consequently many bridging ties. It is policed using link reciprocity, and its currency is Social Capital. The skill used to operate in this network involves having complex role and status sets.


Xylella fastidosa, a gram-negative, xylem-limited bacterium, is the causal agent of several economically important plant diseases, including Pierce's disease (PD) and citrus variegated chlorosis (CVC). Until recently, the inability to transform or produce transposon mutants of X. fastidosa had been a major impediment to identifying X. fastidosa genes that mediate pathogen and plant interactions. A random transposon (Tn5) library of X. fastidosa was constructed and screened for mutants showing more severe symptoms and earlier grapevine death (hypervirulence) than did vines infected with the wild type. Seven hypervirulent mutants identified in this screen moved faster and reached higher populations than the wild type in grapevines. These results suggest that X. fastidosa attenuates its virulence in planta and that movement is important in X. fastidosa virulence. The mutated genes were sequenced and none had been described previously as antivirulence genes, although six of them showed similarity with genes of known functions in other organisms. One transposon insertion inactivated a hemagglutinin adhesin gene (PD2118), which we named HxfA. Another mutant in a second putative X. fastidosa hemagglutinin gene, PD1792 (HxfB), was constructed, and further characterization of these hxf mutants suggests that X. fastidosa hemagglutinins mediate contact between X. fastidosa cells, which results in colony formation and biofilm maturation within the xylem vessels.


In the last few years the relevance of transit migration was corroborated for many African countries. Oftentimes, it is related to urban migrants' subsisting linkages to their areas of origin, other times by the necessity or aspiration for onward journey. Based on recent research, this article examines the consequences of transit migration for the urban housing market and related challenges for sustainable housing policies in Ghana and South Africa. While in Ghana governmental housing hardly considers the urban poor, in South Africa a substantial post-apartheid subsidy system explicitly targets the lowest-income population. This article argues that neither approach adequately addresses transitory housing requirements related to mobility. Whereas the informal housing market can and often has responded with pragmatic solutions, it does not provide the maximum benefit to migrants. Therefore urban governments should enhance options in this increasingly important and highly dynamic housing sector recognising and enhancing informal approaches.


This piece looks at the recurring problem of inflated threat claims offered by executive branch actors to persuade the Nation to consent to the use of force. It sets out the experience of the Bush Administration's use of incorrect threat claims to persuade the country to consent to the use of force in Iraq as a backdrop to evaluating the President Obama's use of threat claims to support the continuing use of force in Afghanistan. Although comparison of threat advocacy by the Bush and Obama administrations must be imperfect, it allows for some observations about the extent to which the structures and incentives that have in the past allowed executive branch officials to assert unverified threats as certain and sufficient to justify the use of force have changed or remain the same. Because the structures and incentives that allow for the possibility of unverified threat claims have not changed significantly, and because significant legal changes to address the systematic problems are unlikely, this piece proposes that citizens can impose some minimal level of contemporaneous accountability on executive department threat claims offered to persuade them to consent to the use of force by keeping a several basic recognitions about executive department advocacy, intelligence information, and the incentives that impact oversight of executive branch activities in mind.


Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea‐level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted. Atoll islands affected by rapid sea‐level rise did not show a distinct behavior compared to islands on other atolls. Island behavior correlated with island size, and no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size. This threshold could be used to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy and to assess atoll countries and territories' vulnerability to climate change. Beyond emphasizing the major role of climate drivers in causing substantial changes in the configuration of islands, this reanalysis of available data indicates that these drivers explain subregional variations in atoll behavior and within‐atoll variations in island and shoreline (lagoon vs. ocean) behavior, following atoll‐specific patterns. Increasing human disturbances, especially land reclamation and human structure construction, operated on atoll‐to‐shoreline spatial scales, explaining marked within‐atoll variations in island and shoreline behavior. Collectively, these findings highlight the heterogeneity of atoll situations. Further research needs include addressing geographical gaps (Indian Ocean, Caribbean, north‐western Pacific atolls), using standardized protocols to allow comparative analyses of island and shoreline behavior across ocean regions, investigating the role of ecological drivers, and promoting interdisciplinary approaches. Such efforts would assist in anticipating potential future changes in the contributions and interactions of key drivers.


In Kalasha, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northwest Pakistan, the linguistic encoding of 'put' and 'take' events reveals a symmetry between lexical 'put' and 'take' verbs that implies 'placement on' and 'removal from' a supporting surface. As regards 'placement in' and 'removal from' an enclosure, the data reveal a lexical asymmetry as 'take' verbs display a larger degree of linguistic elaboration of the Figure-Ground relation and the type of caused motion than 'put' verbs. When considering syntactic patterns, more instances of asymmetry between these two event types show up. The analysis presented here supports the proposal that an asymmetry exists in the encoding of goals versus sources as suggested in Nam (2004) and Ikegami (1987), but it calls into question the statement put forward by Regier and Zheng (2007) that endpoints (goals) are more finely differentiated semantically than starting points (sources).


Increasing concerns regarding the sustainability of lithium sources, due to their limited availability and consequent expected price increase, have raised awareness of the importance of developing alternative energy-storage candidates that can sustain the ever-growing energy demand. Furthermore, limitations on the availability of the transition metals used in the manufacturing of cathode materials, together with questionable mining practices, are driving development towards more sustainable elements. Given the uniformly high abundance and cost-effectiveness of sodium, as well as its very suitable redox potential (close to that of lithium), sodium-ion battery technology offers tremendous potential to be a counterpart to lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in different application scenarios, such as stationary energy storage and low-cost vehicles. This potential is reflected by the major investments that are being made by industry in a wide variety of markets and in diverse material combinations. Despite the associated advantages of being a drop-in replacement for LIBs, there are remarkable differences in the physicochemical properties between sodium and lithium that give rise to different behaviours, for example, different coordination preferences in compounds, desolvation energies, or solubility of the solid–electrolyte interphase inorganic salt components. This demands a more detailed study of the underlying physical and chemical processes occurring in sodium-ion batteries and allows great scope for groundbreaking advances in the field, from lab-scale to scale-up. This roadmap provides an extensive review by experts in academia and industry of the current state of the art in 2021 and the different research directions and strategies currently underway to improve the performance of sodium-ion batteries. The aim is to provide an opinion with respect to the current challenges and opportunities, from the fundamental properties to the practical applications of this technology.


Theoretical understandings of war have been dominated by the thought of Clausewitz for a number of decades. His thought is valid in many respects, but for various reasons it is open to misinterpretation and misunderstanding; furthermore, a number of his observations (particularly on the prevalence of chance and uncertainty in war) are not fully explored and substantiated theoretically. This thesis is an attempt to present and elucidate a new theoretical understanding of war's nature which complements Clausewitz's theories and addresses these concerns: this is the understanding of war as a form of violent conflict which is not bound by rules.

The thesis consists of five main chapters. The first is an in-depth study of Clausewitz, which will provide an exegesis of his theories and highlight the deficiencies in his thought, before positing how understanding war as 'violent conflict without rules' could be used to address and explain them. The second chapter is a study of the theory of rules, examining in particular the role they play in moderating conflict: we can find that amongst other things, rules lend predictability and psychological security to a contest, restrict the scope of physical harm and tend to preserve the political and social status quo. As war lacks rules (in the sense that there are no 'rules of war' as there are 'rules of chess'), it therefore lacks these benefits. A following chapter on the laws and customs of war will address cases where war appears to be bound by rules, and clarify my position.

The final two chapters explore the implications of war's lack of rules with reference to two areas which are most commonly associated with war. The fourth chapter on strategy will explore how this military concept is necessitated by war's ruleless nature; the final chapter will examine the uniquely violent, physical nature of war through the same theoretical prism, and will show how the technological innovation associated with war is a consequence of its lack of regulation, and a potent contributor to the chance and uncertainty which plagues warfare.


People differ in the way they deal with ridicule. The study examines the personality correlates of those who fear being laughed at (gelotophobes), those who enjoy being laughed at (gelotophiles) and those who enjoy laughing at others (katagelasticists). Gelotophobes do not interpret laughter by others as something positive but more as a mean to put them down. Gelotophiles enjoy being laughed at and interpret the laughter by others positively, as a sign of appreciation. Katagelasticists enjoy laughing at others and do not feel that there is anything wrong in doing so. In an empirical study (N = 394), gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism were related to the PEN-model. Gelotophobes were found to be introverted neurotics. Gelotophilia was primarily related to extraversion and in a multiple regression analysis gender (higher among males) turned out to be predictive as well. Katagelasticists were found to be younger males with higher scores in extraversion and psychoticism. Overall, in a regression analysis the content scales of the short form of the EPQ-R predicted gelotophobia best, but gelotophilia and katagelasticism also yielded robust relations.


Roadsides are the most important linear structures of the isle of Korfu. They show high a- and s-diversity, due to very different habitats. At dry and sunny locations Brometalia rubenti-tectori/-Carthametalia lanati communities are developped. They are characterized by numerous thistles and thistle-like plants. The most common plant community at low elevation is the Verbascum pulverulentum - Echium plantagineum community, scattered sometimes by small isles of the Hordeo-Onopordetum illyrici. The roadsides of the Pantokrator massif above 400 m are bordered by Verbascum macrurum-Tyrimnus leucographus community. Inulo-Oryzopsidetum miliaceae and Sambucetum ebuli are furthermore plant communities on roadsides. On shaded roadsides Urtico-Scrophularietalia stands are to be found, especially the Melissa officinalis-Parietaria judaica community. The Vegetation of ditches as well as the accompanying scrub vegetation are documented by releves. In the course of road constructions rocks were blown up and many retaining walls were built, the vegetation of their fissures is described too.


Universities must motivate future professionals so that they are able to apply their experience over and beyond the scientific and technological context. These professionals should also be trained so that they are aware of the current position as regards the economy and limited energy resources, and they must be creative, knowledgeable and committed if they are to rethink the current model.

The Departments of Architectural Technology II and Applied Physics, in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Centre of Technology, Innovation and Education for Sustainability (CITIES), believed that students could be given the opportunity to specialise in the area of sustainable development by means of their final theses [2]. With this objective in mind, a line of theses called Energy Assessments was created as part of the Plan for Resource Consumption Efficiency (PECR). The line was based on a learning strategy that focused on the student.

The teaching staff was able to observe that, in terms of cognitive aspects, the students improved their knowledge of environmental issues and the associated skills, and that they were more able to solve problems in the area of sustainability and had greater concerns about this subject matter after having completed their theses.


This paper explores the motivations behind the adoption of key renewable energy technologies in an early adopter market. Notwithstanding their social benefits, uptake of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and solar photovoltaic panels remains low, necessitating targeted measures to address this. We conducted a comprehensive survey of a nationally representative sample of Irish households and analysed this rich dataset using pairwise group comparisons and a factor analysis combined with a logit regression model. We found fundamental differences between adopters and non-adopters. Current adopters tend to be younger, more educated, of higher socio-economic status, and more likely to live in newer buildings of generous size than non-adopters. Environmental attitudes are an insufficient predictor of uptake - whilst non-adopters self-report as being more sustainable, adopters believe that their own decisions impact climate change. Importantly, social processes will be instrumental in future uptake. Word-of-mouth recommendation will matter greatly in communicating the use and benefits of technologies as evident from the significantly larger social networks that current adopters enjoy. Using these insights, policy incentives can be designed according to public preferences.


This study is an exploration of the extent to which the introduction of a 'quasimarket' within Personal Social Services in England had enabled them to respond more sensitively to the different needs of those they served compared to the previous model of large scale local authority provision. This issue was examined in depth by concentrating on the possibly, distinctive needs/preferences of older 'African-Caribbean' people, as an illustration of the opportunities and difficulties that this new style of 'public management' presented in two London Authorities. To explore this question, three discrete, but connected methods of inquiry were pursued. The first focused on the implementation of the 'NHS and Community Care Act 1990', and more specifically the recommended introduction of a range of 'private' and 'not for profit' provider's under contract. The findings suggest this was only partially implemented. There were changes to the way in which services were purchased, and the way they were provided, but these changes did not constitute a genuine 'quasi-market'. The development of the purchasing function offered the potential for local authorities to respond to 'ethnic diversity', but this did not happen. Indeed an Exploration of service developments suggested that the previous model was more responsive to the differentiated needs of older 'African-Caribbean' people than this new model. The second dimension of this research explored the 'mixed economy' of care through a case study of 'meals' provision. The findings suggested a tendency to monopoly provision, with 'risk' and 'cost' operating as more significant factors than 'differentiated need' in shaping purchasing decisions. The third part of this study explored whether there were distinctive service preferences expressed by older 'African-Caribbean' people for 'culturally specific' provision, and found that whilst there were some, there were also a range of preferences within that community.


He has been a trickster, a shaman, a divine child; he has been a sacrificial victim, a consort of the earth goddess, a warrior, a sky king; and the creator, a distant and impersonal immensity. He is the male divine, seen in the many gods of myth, and his life story is told here in this graceful and illuminating account by David Leeming and Jake Page. Illustrating their points with materials ranging from the prehistoric cave paintings to the mystic Jewish Kabbalah, from the ancient Indian Vedas to tales of the North American Indians and other myths from around the world, Leeming and Page reveal the changing mask of the male divine. We see how that divinity emerged in some areas from cults involving "animal masters" (as in the Bear Man of the Cherokee Indians), sorcerers, and shamans who embarked on spirit journeys. God sometimes appeared as the trickster-as Loki of the Norse people, Legba of Africa's Yoruba, Raven and Coyote of North America, and Krishna of India-both creative and bedeviling. With the Neolithic age came the rise of agriculture and animal husbandry, of settlements and specialization in the roles of males and females-and a more sophisticated body of myths and rituals. Here the Mother Goddess was dominant, and the male God became her consort, ultimately dying in order that nature might be renewed. The authors illustrate this new stage in the male divine with tales of the Egyptian Osiris, the Caananite Baal, and Wiyot of California's Luiseno Indians, among others. They describe the rise of a male sky God as "the equal to, the true mate, of Goddess, who was still associated with Earth." In the Iron Age, the sky God became more aggressive, separating from the Goddess and taking his place as the King God, as Zeus, Odin, and Horus. Ultimately he emerged as the creator, a more distant and impersonal force. Here Leeming and Page also illuminate an important trend-a sense that the divine is beyond gender, that it permeates all things (as seen in Chinese Tao, the Indian Brahmin, and En Sof of the Kabbalah). They see a movement in the biography of God toward a reunion with the Goddess. "As the Supreme Being becomes less Goddess and less God," they write, "it speaks more clearly to the essential human need for unity and understanding." In their previous work together, Goddess, Leeming and Page provided a marvelous biography of the female divine-an account that won a wide and enduring audience. Now, in God, they provide the perfect companion volume-completing, as the authors write, "a record of what we humans believe ourselves at the deepest level to be."


Rather than collect data from a variety of surveys, it is often more efficient to merge information from administrative lists. Matching of person files might be done using name and date-of-birth as the primary identifying information. There are obvious difficulties with entities having a commonly occurring name such as John Smith that may occur 30,000+ times (1.5 for each date-of-birth). If there are 5% typographical error in each field, then using fast character-by-character searches can miss 20% of true matches among noncommonly occurring records where name plus date-ofbirth might be unique. This paper describes some existing solutions and current research directions.


Extracted from text ... E SCR-Net is set to have its inau- gural conference in March/April 2003 in Mexico City. Two hundred participants from around the world are expected to attend. Arrange- ments are being made to facilitate the participation of some organisa- tions from Africa. ESCR-Net is an international network for economic, social and cultural rights. It arose as a result of the difficulties that anti-poverty groups face in articulating economic, social and cultural issues from a rights perspective. These difficulties stem partially from non-application of new tools and concepts that a rights-based approach requires. They also partly arise from the fact ..


Systems-on-Chip (SoC) design involves several challenges, stemming from the extreme miniaturization of the physical features and from the large number of devices and wires on a chip. Since most SoCs are used within embedded systems, specific concerns are increasingly related to correct, reliable, and robust operation. We believe that in the future most SoCs will be assembled by using large-scale macro-cells and interconnected by means of on-chip networks. We examine some physical properties of on-chip interconnect busses, with the goal of achieving fast, reliable, and low-energy communication. These objectives are reached by dynamically scaling down the voltage swing, while ensuring data integrity-in spite of the decreased signal to noise ratio-by means of encoding and retransmission schemes. In particular, we describe a closed-loop voltage swing controller that samples the error retransmission rate to determine the operational voltage swing. We present a control policy which achieves our goals with minimal complexity; such simplicity is demonstrated by implementing the policy in a synthesizable controller. Such a controller is an embodiment of a self-calibrating circuit that compensates for significant manufacturing parameter deviations and environmental variations. Experimental results show that energy savings amount up to 42%, while at the same time meeting performance requirements.


Landfilling of organic waste is prohibited in Sweden. Modern Swedish landfills differ from landfills containing municipal solid waste rich in organic matter. As a first step to understanding long-term leaching from modern landfills, a leaching test was performed. The leaching of heavy metals was small compared to the total contents. At a liquid to solid ratio of 10 more than 99 % of most heavy metals remained in the waste. The degradation potential measured as respiration during four days was below 1 mg O2•g-1 dry waste and it decreased during the leaching. Due to the low degradability of this waste it does not seem motivated to keep the landfill moist to enhance degradation during the active phase. The contaminants of concern in a modern landfill are largely non-degradable, e.g. heavy metals, and they must be disposed of somewhere once removed from the leachate. A reasonable management option, therefore, could be to keep the landfill as dry as possible in an attempt to keep the metals in the landfill for as long time as possible. (Less)


The 'Early Professional Learning Project' (ESRC Reference No. RES-139-25-0122; see website http://www.ioe.stir.ac.uk/EPL/index.htm) identified a number of dimensions in the learning and development of new teachers in their first year of teaching. The multi-dimensional nature of their experience was based on over 150 in-depth interviews with the new teachers themselves. Analysis indicated that the emotional-relational was much more dominant than learning that could be construed as more cognitive in nature particularly in the first few months. There was also evidence of the material/physical, the structural/systemic, the ethical and the temporal. Although these dimensions were present to different degrees across the interview data, there was a fairly consistent narrative theme of identity formation, of individuals finding (discovering or inventing) their teaching selves (Giddens 1991). Part of the rationale for the study was the need to address the increasing polarisation of policy and research on early teacher development, the widening gap between what the professional standard appeared to presume and dictate, through competences and benchmarks (GTCS 2001) and what the lived experience appeared to be. Previous research, for example, had identified the importance of a more informal kind of professional learning (McNally 2006), while acknowledging a definitional vagueness and empirical weakness (e.g. Eraut 2004). Aim and Methodology. A major aim, therefore, was to explore the extent to which it would be possible to draw on well grounded empirical evidence to inform and enhance the professional standard. Bound up in this was the perception that much of the research on teacher development was founded on what the policy community seemed to regard as soft story-based data - and so a quantitative element was incorporated in the research design. This consisted of five indicators for qualitatively important areas of new teacher development and performance (interactions, children's view, pupil development, job satisfaction and expert judgement), developed as part of the project and statistically analysed. All of this, however, was set within a naturalistic paradigm, grounded in practice (Glaser 1978; Lincoln & Guba 1985). One feature of the research design was the use of six practising teachers as researchers. They played a full part in the collection of data and development of the indicators and became increasingly central to the research. In particular, they conducted all the interviews, beginning as 'insiders' with the new teachers in their own schools before moving on to other schools (a total of 132 teachers across 34 primary and secondary schools in Scotland), and also administered the indicators as instruments in the sampled institutions. Following a brief overview of the project, covering the aspects above, a more detailed account of one of the dimensions (relationality) and its associated indicators will be given. The main statistical findings will be presented and discussed in relation to relevant narrative extracts. Implications for policy and practice. There are some pieces of practical advice suggested by our findings, mainly within the material dimension (e.g. on accommodation and resources), but also on mentoring, that could be relayed to schools and supporting teachers; there are also some systemic issues (e.g. placement, post-induction employment) that the policy community need to address; and there is a case for offering beginning teachers (and their supporters) some meta-cognition of the process they are living through, probably with some actual narrative illustration. However, examples of the emotional and relational in existential issues of identity formation, despite wider corroboration of their fundamental importance in the literature (e.g. Bosma & Kunnen 2001) are unlikely to be perceived as useful in practice. The deeper implications of our evidence for policy and practice are not straightforward. We need to begin an exploratory dialogue with the policy-making community that is not a meeting of polar opposites but which recognises the relative absence of reference to the professional standard (the SFR in Scotland) in interviews; that acknowledges the emotional-relational in identity formation (Hargreaves 1998; Bosma & Kunnen 2001) as well as the cognitive, the ontological and ethical (Giddens 1991; Hinchcliffe 2004) as well as the epistemological; and asks to what extent formal standards and support systems can be expected to capture the complex, personal nature of the beginner's experience. We have little empirical or theoretical sense of how specific competence statements are or could be meaningfully used by practitioners but it may be possible to discover whether some competences are more important or more stage-critical than others. There are interesting comparative developments: parallel research in England (Day et al. 2005; Corbin 2006); the 'experiment' in the Netherlands where a new standard has been devised by practising teachers (Storey 2006); the contradiction in Sweden between formal knowledge and the tacit knowledge used by teachers (Carlgren 1996); the conceptual gap between occupational (professional) standards and workplace (school-based) learning in general.


CaO-partially stabilized ZrO2 ceramics were prepared from nanosized powders synthesized by the coprecipitation technique. In order to study the effect of different crystallographic phases on the electrical resistivity, powder compacts were sintered at 1500 oC for soaking times of 2 h and 3 min. The thermal decomposition of the precursor gel occurs at low temperatures giving rise to a high specific surface area powder material. The densification of powder compacts starts at temperatures lower than 1000 oC, although the sintering kinetics depends on the crystallographic phase formed during heating of the compact. The phase assemblage of sintered compacts depends on the soaking time. Impedance spectroscopy measurements allowed for identification of the relative contribution of different phases to the total electrical resistivity of calcia-partially stabilized zirconia ceramics.


Circadian rhythms are biological variables that oscillate with periods close to 24 h that are generated internally by biological clocks. Depending on the tissue/cell type, about 5–20% of genes are expressed rhythmically. Unexpectedly, the correlation between the oscillations of messengers and the proteins they encode is low. We hypothesize that these discrepancies could be because in certain phases of the circadian cycle some messengers could be translationally silenced and stored. Processing bodies (PBs) are membraneless organelles formed by ribonucleoprotein aggregates located in the cytoplasm. They contain silenced messengers and factors involved in mRNA processing. A previous work showed that the number of cells containing these mRNA granules varies when comparing two time-points in U2OS cell cultures and that these differences disappear when an essential clock gene is silenced. Here we evaluate whether PBs oscillate in Neuro2A cells. We analyzed in cell cultures synchronized with dexamethasone the variations in the number, the signal intensity of the markers used (GE-1/HEDLS and DDX6), and the area of PBs between 8 and 68 h post-synchronization. All three parameters oscillated with periods compatible with a circadian regulated process. The most robust rhythm was the number of PBs. These rhythms could be generated by oscillations in proteins that have been involved in the nucleation of these foci such as LSM1, TTP, and BRF1. The described phenomenon would allow to explain the differences observed in the temporal profiles of some messengers and their proteins and to understand how circadian clocks can control post-transcriptionally cellular functions.


The process of identifying the state of an object in a video sequence is referred as visual tracking. It is mainly achieved by using the appearance information from a reference image to recognize the similar characteristics from the other images. Since a digital image is built-up with rows and columns of pixels that are represented with finite set of digital values, the appearance information is measured with a mathematical formulation that is known as image intensity. The problem of distinguishing the intensity of the object of interest from the other objects and the surrounding background is always the main challenge in visual tracking. In this study, a novel invariant feature descriptor model is introduced to address the aforesaid problem. The proposed framework is inspired by the theoretical model of local features that has been widely-used for image recognition. From the large number of diversified scenarios in the surveillance applications, the performance of the proposed model is demonstrated with the benchmarked dataset of single-target tracking. The experiment results shown the advantage of our proposed model for tracking non-rigid object in the changing background as compared to other state-of-the-art visual trackers. In addition, the important aspects of the proposed model are analyzed and highlighted as well in the experimental discussions.


ABSTRACT Microbes modify immunometabolism responses linking obesity and type 2 diabetes. Immunity helps maintain a host-microbe symbiosis, but inflammation can promote insulin resistance in tissues that control blood glucose. We were interested in compartmentalization of immune responses during obesity and show here that feeding mice an obesity-causing high-fat diet (HFD) decreased a marker of neutrophil activation and cytokines related to Th17 responses in the gut. A HFD decreased IL-17 and IL-21/22 in the ileum and colon, respectively. A HFD increased IL-17, IL-21/22 and other related Th17 responses in the liver. At the whole tissue level, there is divergence in gut and metabolic tissue Th17 cytokines during diet-induced obesity. Deletion of the bacterial peptidoglycan sensor NOD2 had relatively minor effects on these immune responses. We propose a model where diet-induced obesity promotes a permissive gut immune environment and sets the stage for host genetics to contribute to dysbiosis-driven metabolic tissue inflammation.


The dynamic trafficking of AMPA receptors (AMPARs) into and out of synapses is crucial for synaptic transmission, plasticity, learning, and memory. The protein interacting with C-kinase 1 (PICK1) directly interacts with GluA2/3 subunits of the AMPARs. Although the role of PICK1 in regulating AMPAR trafficking and multiple forms of synaptic plasticity is known, the exact molecular mechanisms underlying this process remain unclear. Here, we report a unique interaction between PICK1 and all three members of the protein kinase C and casein kinase II substrate in neurons (PACSIN) family and show that they form a complex with AMPARs. Our results reveal that knockdown of the neuronal-specific protein, PACSIN1, leads to a significant reduction in AMPAR internalization following the activation of NMDA receptors in hippocampal neurons. The interaction between PICK1 and PACSIN1 is regulated by PACSIN1 phosphorylation within the variable region and is required for AMPAR endocytosis. Similarly, the binding of PICK1 to the ubiquitously expressed PACSIN2 is also regulated by the homologous phosphorylation sites within the PACSIN2-variable region. Genetic deletion of PACSIN2, which is highly expressed in Purkinje cells, eliminates cerebellar long-term depression. This deficit can be fully rescued by overexpressing wild-type PACSIN2, but not by a PACSIN2 phosphomimetic mutant, which does not bind PICK1 efficiently. Taken together, our data demonstrate that the interaction of PICK1 and PACSIN is required for the activity-dependent internalization of AMPARs and for the expression of long-term depression in the cerebellum.


Advanced window wall systems have the potential to provide demand response by reducing peak electric loads by 20-30% in many commercial buildings through the active control of motorized shading systems, switchable window coatings, operable windows, and ventilated doubleskin facade systems. These window strategies involve balancing daylighting and solar heat gains, heat rejection through ventilation, and night-time natural ventilation to achieve space-conditioning and lighting energy use reductions without the negative impacts on occupants associated with other demand responsive (DR) strategies. This paper explores conceptually how advanced window systems fit into the context of active load management programs, which cause customers to directly experience the time-varying costs of their consumption decisions. Technological options are suggested. We present pragmatic criteria that building owners use to determine whether to deploy such strategies. A utility's perspective is given. Industry also provides their perspectives on where the technology is today and what needs to happen to implement such strategies more broadly in the US. While there is significant potential for these advanced window concepts, widespread deployment is unlikely to occur with business-as-usual practice. Technologically, integrated windowlighting-HVAC products are underdeveloped. Implementation is hindered by fragmented labor practices, non-standard communication protocols, and lack of technical expertise. Design tools and information products that quantify energy performance, occupant impacts, reliability, and other pragmatic concerns are not available. Interest within the building industry in sustainability, energyefficiency, and increased occupant amenity, comfort, and productivity will be the driving factors for these advanced facades in the near term – at least until the dust settles on the deregulated electricity market.


This thesis studies behavioural equivalences on labelled infinite transition graphs and the role that they can play in the context of modal logics and notions from language theory. A natural class of such infinite graphs is that corresponding to the SnS -definable tree languages first studied by Rabin. We show that a modal mu-calculus with label set f0; : : : ; n 1g can define these tree languages up to an observational equivalence. Another natural class of infinite transition graphs is that of normed BPA processes, which correspond to the graphs of leftmost derivations in context-free grammars without useless productions. A remarkable result is that strong bisimulation is decidable for these graphs. After an outline of the existing proofs due to Baeten et al. and Caucal we present a much simpler proof using a tableau system closely related to the branching algorithms employed in language theory following Korenjak and Hopcroft. We then present a result due to Colin Stirling, giving a weakly sound and complete sequent-based equational theory for bisimulation equivalence for normed BPA processes from the tableau system. Moreover, we show how to extract a fundamental relation (as in the work of Caucal) from a successful tableau. We then introduce silent actions and consider a class of normed BPA processes with the restriction that processes cannot terminate silently, showing that the decidability result for strong bisimilarity can be extended to van Glabbeek's branching bisimulation equivalence for this class of processes. We complete the picture by establishing that all other known behavioural equivalences and a number of preorders are undecidable for normed BPA processes.


The DALLAS ("application of Data AnaLysis with LeArning Systems") project
has been designed to bring together groups using learning systems
(e.g. artificial neural networks, non-linear multi-variate statistics,
inductive logic etc) at five universities and research institutes,
with seven companies with data analysis tasks from various industrial
sectors in Sweden. An objective of the project has been to spread
knowledge and the use of learning systems methods for data analysis in
industry. Further objectives have been to test the methods on real world
problems in order to find strengths and weaknesses in the methods and
to inspire research in the area.


Abstract: The relationships between meteorite impact craters, flood basalt volcanism and sudden environmental perturbation on Earth have been debated extensively. We present only the second example of contemporaneous meteorite impact and flood basalt volcanism: the 17 km diameter Logoisk impact structure (Belarus) and Afro-Arabian flood volcanism. The new precise 40Ar/39Ar age of 29.71 ± 0.48 Ma for Logoisk is coincident with the acme of flood volcanism. We argue that at least one crater the size of Logoisk is likely to form during the emplacement of a flood volcanic province, and that contemporaneity of impacts and flood volcanism was the norm. The absence of a biotic effect from the combined Logoisk–Afro-Arabian volcanism we attribute to the magnitude of these combined events, which are both significantly smaller than the other known example of the Chicxulub impact event and the Deccan Traps flood volcanism. Supplementary material: 40Ar/39Ar data are available at http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/SUP18329.


Abstract Natural products might provide an organic means of weed control. Our objective was to evaluate the potential use of vinegar and a clove-oil product with regard to how volume, concentration, and application timing affect weed control and crop response. Treatments included broadcast applications of 200- and 300-grain vinegar at 318 liters per hectare (L/ha), 150- and 200-grain vinegar at 636 L/ha, a 3.4% v/v clove oil mixture in water (318 L/ha), and a 1.7% clove oil mixture in 200-grain vinegar (318 L/ha). Field trials were conducted in sweet corn, onion, and potato. Weed control, weed biomass, crop injury, and yield data were collected. Corn treated at 15 and at 30 to 45 cm was initially burned and stunted by these products. By 4 wk after application much of the initial injury was outgrown. Late applications significantly reduced yields of early-maturing sweet corn 'Trinity'. With the exception of the 200-grain vinegar (318 L/ha) treatment, early applications to sweet corn 'Avalon' did not reduce marketable yield. Two hundred-grain vinegar (636 L/ha) applied to pre-emergence–flag stage onion reduced the duration of the first handweeding by 59 to 67%. All treatments reduced onion yields when treated at the 2-leaf stage. Potato treated early (2 to 10 cm) and late (30 cm) were injured by all vinegar treatments 59 to 83%, 1 d after treatment (DAT). Potato yield losses were insignificant with applications of 3.4% clove oil and with some low-volume (318 L/ha) vinegar treatments. Product efficacy was dependent on the weed species and their size at the time of application. Weed control was greatest (83%, 1 DAT) with 200-grain vinegar (636 L/ha). Broadcast applications of vinegar and clove oil have potential for use on young, actively growing sweet corn, onion, and potato. Nomenclature: Acetic acid; clove oil; Matran II; vinegar; corn, Zea mays L.; onion, Allium cepa L.; potato, Solanum tuberosum L


Recent assessments of water quality status have identified eutrophication as one of the major causes of water quality "impairment" around the world. In most cases, eutrophication has accelerated by increased inputs of phosphorus and/or nitrogen due to intensification of crop and animal production systems since the early 1990's. As animal-based agriculture has evolved to larger production in subtropical region of United States, the problems associated with manure handling, storage and disposal have grown significantly. Little information exists regarding possible magnitudes of nutrient losses from pastures that are managed for both grazing and hay production and how these might impact adjacent bodies of water. Trends in water quality parameters and trophic state index (TSI) of lakes associated with beef cattle operations are being investigated. Overall, there was no spatial or temporal build up of soil nutrients despite the annual application of fertilizers and daily in-field loading of animal waste. Our results indicate that when nutrients are not applied in excess, cow-calf systems are slight exporters of nutrients through removal of cut hay. Water quality in lakes associated with cattle production was "good" (30-46 TSI) based upon the Florida Water Quality Standard. Our results indicate that current cattle rotation and current fertilizer application offer little potential for negatively impacting the environment. Properly managed livestock operations contribute negligible loads of nitrogen and phosphorus to shallow groundwater and surface water.


Aim The aim of the present study was to explore if children who spend more time on screen-based sedentary behaviors (i.e.TV viewing and computer use) drink more sugar-sweetened soft drinks. The study also assessed whether these associations were independent of individual and home environmental correlates of soft drink consumption and whether they were moderated by parental education. Methods Data were collected from 7886 children participating in the EuropeaN Energy balance Research to prevent excessive weight Gain among Youth (ENERGY) survey conducted in eight European countries. Self-report questionnaires were used. Multilevel linear regression analyses with soft drink consumption as dependent variable, TV viewing and computer use as independent variables and age, gender, parental education, attitude towards soft drinks, self-efficacy, parental modelling, parental rules and home availability of soft drinks as covariates were conducted. Further interactions were tested to explore if these associations were moderated by parental education. Country-specific analyses were conducted. Results In six of the eight included countries, a significant positive association was observed between TV viewing (min/day) and soft drink consumption (ml/day), independent of individual and home environmental correlates of soft drink consumption (B = 0.46 (0.26–0.66) in Greece, B = 0.77 (0.36–1.17) in Norway, B = 0.82 (0.12–1.51) in Hungary, B = 1.06 (0.67–1.46) in Spain, B = 1.21 (0.67–1.74) in Belgium and B = 1.49 (0.72–2.27) in Switzerland). There was no significant association between computer use and soft drink consumption in six of the eight included countries in the final models. Moderation effects of parental education in the association between TV viewing and soft drink consumption were found in Norway and Hungary, the association being stronger among those with low parental education. Conclusions TV viewing appears to be independently associated with soft drink consumption and this association was moderated by parental education in two countries only. Reducing TV time might therefore favorably impact soft drink consumption.


During the period 1995-1998, in the Italian NHS, hospital services were provided in a setting characterised by a partial split between purchasers and providers, a DRG-based prospective payment system, and freedom of choice for patients. Managed competition was introduced to reduce prices and improve quality through a better contractual specification of the terms of supply. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the contracts for hospital services between purchasers (AUSLs) and independent public hospitals (AOSPs). The analysis shows that the contractual terms reflected the strong hierarchical control exterted by the Regional Government over the bargaining parties due to the former's responsibility to fund any excess spending. In these highly incomplete contracts, the overall budget was built on a DRG-based mechanism, and financial limits were set on the basis of the historical volumes of production. Due to a lack of productive flexibility, AOSPs systematically violated the budget, and different types of risk-sharing rules were ineffective to that purpose as providers could not be driven out of business. Hence, AUSLs were compelled to purchase hospital services from the local AOSPs at higher prices than those granted by vertically integrated providers. In this context, contracts were used more than to elicit price or quality competition as attempts to control current expenditure and to reduce excess supply. Accordingly, in 1999 most competitive elements of the previous mechanism were replaced by cooperative partnerships between purchasers and producers.


A new modeling approach is based on the concept of large eddy simulation (LES) within which the large scales are computed and the small scales are modeled. The new approach is expected to retain the fidelity of the physics while also being computationally efficient. Typically, only models for the small-scale fluxes of momentum, species, and enthalpy are used to reintroduce in the simulation the physics lost because the computation only resolves the large scales. These models are called subgrid (SGS) models because they operate at a scale smaller than the LES grid. In a previous study of thermodynamically supercritical fluid disintegration and mixing, additional small-scale terms, one in the momentum and one in the energy conservation equations, were identified as requiring modeling. These additional terms were due to the tight coupling between dynamics and real-gas thermodynamics. It was inferred that if these terms would not be modeled, the high density-gradient magnitude regions, experimentally identified as a characteristic feature of these flows, would not be accurately predicted without the additional term in the momentum equation; these high density-gradient magnitude regions were experimentally shown to redistribute turbulence in the flow. And it was also inferred that without the additional term in the energy equation, the heat flux magnitude could not be accurately predicted; the heat flux to the wall of combustion devices is a crucial quantity that determined necessary wall material properties. The present work involves situations where only the term in the momentum equation is important. Without this additional term in the momentum equation, neither the SGS-flux constant-coefficient Smagorinsky model nor the SGS-flux constant-coefficient Gradient model could reproduce in LES the pressure field or the high density-gradient magnitude regions; the SGS-flux constant- coefficient Scale-Similarity model was the most successful in this endeavor although not totally satisfactory. With a model for the additional term in the momentum equation, the predictions of the constant-coefficient Smagorinsky and constant-coefficient Scale-Similarity models were improved to a certain extent; however, most of the improvement was obtained for the Gradient model. The previously derived model and a newly developed model for the additional term in the momentum equation were both tested, with the new model proving even more successful than the previous model at reproducing the high density-gradient magnitude regions. Several dynamic SGS-flux models, in which the SGS-flux model coefficient is computed as part of the simulation, were tested in conjunction with the new model for this additional term in the momentum equation. The most successful dynamic model was a "mixed" model combining the Smagorinsky and Gradient models. This work is directly applicable to simulations of gas turbine engines (aeronautics) and rocket engines (astronautics).


Web-based course materials are being used extensively to provide supplementary as well as standalone instruction in educational settings. One of the most powerful elements of using the Web for teaching is the ability to engage learners in an interactive format. Although there are many technologies available that allow instructors to develop interactive Web course materials and elicit feedback from students, many educators choose to use the Web only for distributing static documents. This severely limits the potential of the Web to improve the teaching/learning process. Feedback and Assessment can be used to monitor student progress, control the pace of learning, and evaluate teaching strategies. Using HTML Forms is a simple but powerful technique to collect student feedback and leverage it to improve teaching. Forms are used to collect data from the students who use Web-based course materials. Student feedback can provide the instructor formative evaluation of teaching during the semester. By using this evaluation method, instructors can get immediate feedback on course material, teaching style and student progress in order to make necessary adjustments. This article explores cognitive aspects of learning and using sample Educational Psychology courses to demonstrate how student feedback can be applied in education to improve teaching. Many educators have recognized the potential of using the Internet for instruction. Although many Internet technologies such as e-mail, listservs, ftp and conferencing can be used to assist with teaching, the World Wide Web remains the most popular medium. It provides a user friendly front end and easy access to text, graphics, audio and video materials that may be used in a common and consistent format. Most education Web sites provide basic course information such as syllabus, schedule, announcements and reading lists. Others go beyond static materials to include synchronous or asynchronous communication, online testing, discussion groups, conferences, whiteboards, streaming audio and video. These type of materials are being made available in courses that meet in classrooms regularly and use Web materials as supplementary tools, as well as courses that are delivered entirely over the Web without traditional classroom meetings. The popularity of the Web for use in education can be seen from sites such as The World Lecture Hall (http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture) that contains links to hundreds of courses created by educators worldwide. Course topic areas on this site range from Accounting and Advertising to Women's Studies and Zoology. Web Interactivity Chickering and Ehrmann (1998) suggest that while using technology to teach, educators should eschew materials that are didactic and instead search for technology-assisted solutions that are interactive, problem oriented, and that evoke student motivation. Web interactivity helps engage students in active application of knowledge, principles and values, and provides them with feedback that allows their understanding to grow and evolve. As compared to just accessing a static Web page and either reading or printing it, interactive components involve participation by having the user in some way interact with the Web environment. The interaction can be with content, other students, instructor, participation in a discussion group, quiz questions, simulation program, conferencing, live chat, or by filling out a feedback form. Web environments can make use of one or more of these interactive components at any time. This type of interactivity may seem directly related to the constructivist theory. In designing learning environments, researchers (Honebein 1996; Lebow 1993; Knuth and Cunningham 1993) have recommended using constructivist theory for effective learning. The constructivist approach incorporates pedagogical goals in the knowledge construction process by providing appreciation for multiple perspectives, embedding learning in relevant contexts, encouraging ownership in the learning process, embedding learning in social experience, encouraging use of multiple modes of representation, and encouraging self awareness of the knowledge construction process (Vygotsky 1986; Bruner 1990). …


Curiosity is often included as one of several attributes comprising the entrepreneurial mindset. While research on curiosity has been conducted in the field of psychology for many decades, applied research on the construct in the entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education settings has been lacking. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance for assessing curiosity in the engineering entrepreneurship education context, focusing on two steps of the assessment process: defining curiosity, a step critical for developing program objectives, and identifying possible sources of evidence. Many unanswered questions remain about how the various dimensions of curiosity apply to the entrepreneurship education context.


Among the most serious challenges facing health systems in lower and middle income countries is establishing efficient, fair, and sustainable financing mechanisms that offer universal protection. Lack of financial protection forces families to suffer the burden not only of illness but also of economic ruin and impoverishment. In Latin America, financial protection for health continues to be segmented and fragmented; health is mainly financed through out-of-pocket payments.Financing Health in Latin America presents new and important insight into the crucial issue of financial protection in health systems. The book analyzes the level and determinants of catastrophic health expenditures among households in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Peru, applying both descriptive and econometric analyses. The results demonstrate that out-of-pocket health spending is pushing large segments of the population into impoverishment and that the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the population are most at risk of financial catastrophe. This work is a product of the collaboration between more than 25 researchers and 18 institutions associated with the Research for Health Financing in Latin America and the Caribbean Network, with support from the International Development Research Centre of Canada.


Purpose: To investigate the diagnostic value of postprocessing techniques for 3-dimensional (3D) computed tomography (CT), with emphasis on CT virtual intravascular endoscopy (VIE), in patients with abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) treated with suprarenal stent-grafts. Methods: The preprocedural and postprocedural CT datasets from 47 AAA patients (40 men; mean age 75 years, range 61–87) undergoing aortic stent-grafting with suprarenal fixation were examined. The CT datasets were processed to create various 3D reconstructions: shaded surface display (SSD), maximum intensity projection (MIP), and VIE. Three independent radiologists assessed various diagnostic parameters for each 3D reconstruction method and compared them to axial CT images. Results: Scores for VIE reconstructions were inferior to axial CT images in the visualization of normal arterial branches, measurement of the aneurysm diameter and neck length, as well as assessment of vessel patency and presence of endoleaks. VIE was rated superior to axial CT and other 3D imaging methods in visualizing the configuration of stent struts relative to the aortic branch ostia and the number of stent wires crossing the ostia in >80% of cases. Conclusions: VIE was not found to play a role in most preoperative situations compared to axial CT images. However, VIE provided additional postgrafting information on the 3D relationship of the suprarenal stent struts to the aortic branch ostia (in particular the renal and superior mesenteric arteries). VIE findings might aid clinicians in accurately assessing the effect of suprarenal stent-grafting on the renal arteries.


We investigate the appropriateness of four different methods to produce precipitation accumulation fields using radar data alone or combined with precipitation gauge data. These methods were validated for high-latitude weather conditions of Finland. The reference method uses radar reflectivity only, while three assimilation methods are used to blend radar and surface observations together, namely the linear analysis regression, the Barnes objective analysis and a new method based on a combination of the regression and Barnes techniques (RandB). The Local Analysis and Prediction System (LAPS) is used as a platform to calculate the four different hourly accumulation products over a 6-month period covering summer 2011. The performance of each method is verified against both dependent and independent observations (i.e. observations that are or are not included, respectively, into the precipitation accumulation analysis). The newly developed RandB method performs best according to our results. Applying the regression or Barnes assimilation analysis separately still yields better results for the accumulation products compared to precipitation accumulation derived from radar data alone.


Proton therapy, in particular, and ion therapy, just beginning, are becoming an increasing focus of attention in clinical radiation
oncology and medical physics. Both modalities have been criticized of lacking convincing evidence from randomized trials proving their efficacy, justifying the higher costs involved in these therapies.
This session will provide an overview of the current status of clinical trials in proton therapy, including recent developments in ion therapy. As alluded to in the introductory talk by Dr. Schulte, opinions are diverging widely as to the usefulness and need for clinical trials in particle therapy and the challenge of equipoise. The lectures will highlight some of the challenges that surround clinical trials in particle therapy. One, presented by Dr. Choy from UT Southwestern, is that new technology and even different types of particles such as helium and carbon
ions are introduced into this environment, increasing the phase space of clinical variables. The other is the issue of medical physics quality assurance with physical phantoms, presented by Mrs. Taylor from IROC Houston, which is more challenging because 3D and 4D image guidance and active delivery techniques are in relatively early stages of development. The role of digital phantoms in developing clinical treatment planning protocols and as a QA tool will also be highlighted by Dr. Lee from NCI.
The symposium will be rounded off by a panel discussion among the Symposium speakers, arguing pro or con the need and readiness for clinical trials in proton and ion therapy.
Learning Objectives:
1.
To get an update on the current status of clinical trials allowing or mandating proton therapy.
2.
Learn about the status of planned clinical trials in the U.S. and worldwide involving ion therapy.
3.
Discuss the challenges in the design and QA of clinical trials in particle therapy.
4.
Learn about existing and future physical and computational anthropomorphic phantoms for charged particle clinical trial development and support.
Research reported in this presentation is supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National; Institutes of Health under Award Number P20CA183640.


The method of logical relations is a classic technique for proving the equivalence of higher-order programs that implement the same observable behavior but employ different internal data representations. Although it was originally studied for pure, strongly normalizing languages like System F, it has been extended over the past two decades to reason about increasingly realistic languages. In particular, Appel and McAllester's idea of step-indexing has been used recently to develop syntactic Kripke logical relations for ML-like languages that mix functional and imperative forms of data abstraction. However, while step-indexed models are powerful tools, reasoning with them directly is quite painful, as one is forced to engage in tedious step-index arithmetic to derive even simple results.
 In this paper, we propose a logic LADR for equational reasoning about higher-order programs in the presence of existential type abstraction, general recursive types, and higher-order mutable state. LADR exhibits a novel synthesis of features from Plotkin-Abadi logic, Gödel-Löb logic, S4 modal logic, and relational separation logic. Our model of LADR is based on Ahmed, Dreyer, and Rossberg's state-of-the-art step-indexed Kripke logical relation, which was designed to facilitate proofs of representation independence for "state-dependent" ADTs. LADR enables one to express such proofs at a much higher level, without counting steps or reasoning about the subtle, step-stratified construction of possible worlds.


Modern software must continually adapt to changing operating contexts such as hardware/software platforms. This adaptation involves detection of context, mapping of context to a software configuration which is a set of appropriate software components and parameters, followed by seamless execution of this software configuration. All this happens while minimizing the impact of dynamic adaptation on user experience. Can we provide a generic software platform to build dynamically adaptive software for scientific computing? This is the question we answer with Girgit, an ultra-lightweight (~70KB) open-source Python based framework, to develop component-based dynamically/self adaptive systems. Girgit allows creation of software components with a well defined interface which may encode its logic in any programming language accessible using Python wrappers. These components and their parameters can be configured in a number of ways and connected in various orchestrations. This gives rise to a large set of software configurations. Girgit provides a model-based specification to specify configurations of the system that are triggered by events. The core of Girgit provides a module manager that loads and caches instances of components, a dynamic configurator that executes the reconfiguration of the system, an event manager that manages incoming events and suggests actions such as changing of components or complete orchestrations, and a service layer to connect a dynamically adaptive system to external services or systems.The model of how Girgit maps events to configurations itself can change at runtime without halting the system. Our current application of Girgit is in the domain of building adaptive vision system. A typical use case involves using Girgit to orchestrate vision components for human intrusion detection. An intrusion event triggers a change in configuration to detect faces(s) that ascertain humans in the scene. In such as scenario, Girgit triggers an adaptation rule that replaces the image segmentation component and adds a new component for detecting facial features at runtime. We perform rigorous experiments to demonstrate that Girgit has a very low adaptation time between configurations which we believe is effective for real-time vision sytems. We expect to extrapolate similar results in other scientific computing applications. From an usability point of view, Girgit provides a minimalistic API exposed as a service.


The current research being reported on employed a Clinical Supervision (CS) model as a conceptual framework to design and implement CS interventions to develop teachers' pedagogical and instructional skills with three teachers in two secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago over a six-month period. Data collection methods included: classroom observations, questionnaires, interviews and journals. The findings showed that the CS intervention that focused on building a collaborative and collegial relationship with the teachers, to develop their skills, attitudes and competencies, enabled them to learn and improve their pedagogical and instructional practices within the complex classroom environments. Teachers indicated that the collaborative process allowed them to reflect and improve their practice with assistance and guidance from their supervisors, whom they regarded as mentors. The study is significant as it validates CS as a viable and sustainable teacher CPD strategy.


In this paper we examine the impact of subsidies granted at national and regional levels on a set of R&D employment variables and, specifically, we seek to identify the existence of the behavioural additionality effects of these public subsidies on firms' R&D human resources. We begin by assessing the effects of public funds on R&D private expenditures and on the number of R&D employees, and then focus on their impact on the composition of human resources engaged in R&D as classified by occupation and level of education. The data used correspond to the Spanish Technological Innovation Panel for the period 2006-2011. To control for selection bias and endogeneity, a combination of non-parametric matching techniques are implemented. After ruling out the existence of crowding out effects, our results show that R&D subsidies increase the number of R&D employees. However, no increase is found in the average level of qualification of R&D staff members in subsidized firms. All in all, the effects of public support are heterogeneous being dependent on the source of the subsidy and the firms' characteristics.


The house in a plum grove shows the plastic language of modernism with its white and abstract image, its free facade, and its flat roof. The terrace of this house by Sejima is conceived as another habitable space of the building, since it is configured as one of the autonomous living spaces that make up the house. Double-height spaces are created with empty volumes that make up autonomous units. These units are assembled to each other, generating a highly intense spatial complexity through the division of the original pure prism. All the plane surfaces of the house work as diaphragms, mainly responding to internal stress forces having to do with buckling and warping than to vertical forces. The wall surfaces are placed creating right-angled corners and forming the different volumes that make up the house. In the corners, all three planes work to provide each other with bracing. An apparent isotropy is sought, along with a tack of distinction between horizontal and vertical planes. Through the study and observation of several models with progressive modifications, Sejima's architecture, the Sanaa office, is able to find the true concept that generates the project, which goes beyond the original sources of modernism. In conclusion, the House in a Plum Grove stands out not only for its compactness and physical coherence, but also because it marks a milestone in the development of contemporary architecture at a conceptual level.


The computer game industry has grown in a rapid rate over the past two decades becoming a billion dollar industry, even rivaling the movie industry. The greed for money caused the industry to grow large but the maturity did not grow in proportion. Compared to software engineering, game development is still a seed waiting to blossom. In this paper a development process (RGP) for games development using various software engineering paradigms is proposed. Furthermore a comparison between RGP and other game development processes will to some extent show the strengths and weaknesses of this process. The conclusions drawn are based on already validated software processes since the game process inherits a subset of these.


Nigerian men who have sex with men (MSM) have a high burden of HIV infection and are known to engage in bisexual behavior. This study presents the first data on characteristics and correlates of Nigerian men having sex with men and women (MSMW) in three Nigerian cities. Five hundred and fifty-seven MSM who engaged in anal sex with men completed a behavioral survey; 48.1% of these MSM also engaged in sex with women in the previous 2 months. MSMW displayed high levels of risky sexual behavior with female sex partners; casual (56.0%) and multiple female partners were common (69.0%) and 66.0% had unprotected vaginal sex. As much as 45.1% MSMW had anal sex with female partners of which 74.0% did not use protection in the 2 months prior. In bivariate analyses, bisexual behavior was associated (p<0.05) with being married or living with a women (OR 5.0, 95% CI = 2.6–9.4), less education (OR 2.0, 95% CI = 1.4–3.0), bisexual/straight identity (OR 2.3, 95% CI = 1.6–3.2), being an insertive partner (OR 3.0, 95% CI = 1.9–4.5), being HIV-negative (OR 1.6, 95% CI = 1.1–2.5), living in Lagos (OR 2.3, 95% CI = 1.7–2.2), being Muslim (OR 1.7, 95% CI = 1.1–2.5), and being away from home (OR 1.5, 95% CI = 1.0–2.1). In the multivariate model, being married to or living with a woman (AOR = 5.1; 95% CI = 2.5–10.3), bisexual/straight identity (AOR = 2.2; 95% CIs = 1.5–3.3), being an insertive partner (AOR = 3.0; 95% CI = 1.9–4.9), being away from home (AOR = 1.6; 95% CI = 1.1–2.3) and living in Lagos (AOR = 1.7; 95% CI = 1.0–2.8) remained significant (p< 0.05). High levels of bisexual behavior exist among Nigerian MSM, and these men engage in risky sexual behaviors with both male and female sex partners. While decriminalization of same-sex behavior in Nigeria will promote access to HIV prevention programs, current MSM interventions must incorporate information on safe sex with both male and female sex partners.


Applying Cloud computing techniques for analyzing large data sets has shown promise in many data-driven scientific applications. Our approach presented here is to use Cloud computing for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)data analysis which normally consists of large amounts of data. Biologists often use third party or commercial software for ease of use. Enabling the capability to use this kind of software in a Cloud will be highly advantageous in many ways. Scripting languages especially designed for clouds may not have the flexibility biologists need for their purposes. Although this is true, they are familiar with special software packages that allow them to write complex calculations with minimum effort, but are often not compatible with a Cloud environment. Therefore, biologists who are trying to perform analysis on NMR data, acquire many advantages due to our proposed solution. Our solution gives them the flexibility to Cloud-enable their familiar software and it also enables them to perform calculations on a significant amount of data that was not previously possible. Our study is also applicable to any other environment in need of similar flexibility. We are currently in the initial stage of developing a framework for NMR data analysis.


We study theoretically and numerically the downstream flow near the corner of a bluff body partially submerged at a deadrise depth ${\rm\Delta}h$ into a uniform stream of velocity $U$ , in the presence of gravity, $g$ . When the Froude number, $\mathit{Fr}=U/\sqrt{g{\rm\Delta}h}$ , is large, a three-dimensional steady plunging wave, which is referred to as a corner wave, forms near the corner, developing downstream in a similar way to a two-dimensional plunging wave evolving in time. We have performed an asymptotic analysis of the flow near this corner to describe the wave's initial evolution and to clarify the physical mechanism that leads to its formation. Using the two-dimensions-plus-time approximation, the problem reduces to one similar to dam-break flow with a wet bed in front of the dam. The analysis shows that, at leading order, the problem admits a self-similar formulation when the size of the wave is small compared with the height difference ${\rm\Delta}h$ . The essential feature of the self-similar solution is the formation of a mushroom-shaped jet from which two smaller lateral jets stem. However, numerical simulations show that this self-similar solution is questionable from the physical point of view, as the two lateral jets plunge onto the free surface, leading to a self-intersecting flow. The physical mechanism leading to the formation of the mushroom-shaped structure is discussed.


SUMMARY This contribution presents a simple method for the automatic recognition and hinting of character structure elements such as horizontal and vertical stems. Stem recognition is based on successive steps such as extraction of straight or nearly straight contour segments, detection of hidden segments, merging of original and hidden segments into larger segments, sorting of segments into classes according to their slopes and, finally, composition of black and white stems. Reference values required for character hinting purposes are obtained by evaluating the regularity of the font through statistical analysis of features such as stem widths and stem angles. Knowledge about the location of stems and analysis of outline parts between stems is used in order to produce automatically appropriate grid constraint rules (hints). The presented outline analysis and stem extraction techniques are very general and may be applied to non-Latin characters as well.