This thesis is concerned with an analysis ofLudwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus that centers around the dilemma in which Wittgenstein finds himself in expressing the belief that the propositions of his work, while they are nonsensical according to their own standards, remain informative. The contention is that whether the text is successful in upholding Wittgenstein's claim relies deeply on the account that it gives of relations, in particular the pictorial relation and the relations that pertain amongst objects in states of affairs. It will be argued that the Tractatus sets itself the requirement that ifits propositions are to be nonsensical yet informative, then they must display the general form of a proposition that can have 'sense.' In turn, if any proposition is to be able to have 'sense,' then the pictorial relation must serve a dual purpose in holding the situation represented in the sense of a proposition distinct from the reality it depicts, while acting as a means of comparison such that the truth or falsity of a proposition can be determined. It will then be argued that if the pictorial relation is to be able to function in this way, then propositions must be able to signify exactly which relations pertain in the situation depicted by its sense. In conclusion a case will be made that the Tractatus is unable to meet the demands that it places on itself, for the work does not give an account by which elementary propositions, to which all propositions are analyzable, can signify the specific relations which pertain in the states of affairs they represent.


Targeted delivery of drug-loaded implants for regional drug therapy has become an important approach to therapy. Simple and reproducible imaging methodologies to evaluate the implant noninvasively are needed. The goal of this work was to noninvasively evaluate the visibility, shape and degradation of a biodegradable implant containing Lipiodol (an X-ray contrast medium) by computed tomography (CT). For in vitro evaluation, Lipiodol was incorporated in poly(sebacic-co-ricinoleic acid) [P(SA:RA)], a biodegradable injectable pasty polymer, and CT visibility was assessed. For ex vivo evaluation, bovine liver was injected with the polymer-loaded Lipiodol; for in vivo evaluation rats were injected subcutaneously with Lipiodol in polymer and CT was performed. We show that polymer diameter at CT correlates with implant weight and pathological measurements. Polymer formulation containing 5% Lipiodol was visible on CT in vitro. Ex vivo tests showed a round polymer deposit at the injection site compared with free dispersion of Lipiodol alone. Correlation between implant size at CT scan and surgery at 48 h was R(2)  = 0.78. Average CT diameter at 9 days was 14.2 ± 2.8 mm in rats injected with Lipiodol in the polymer formulation, as compared with 7.3 ± 1.1 mm in controls. After 9 days, the implant degraded into several zones containing inflammatory cells seen on CT as areas with increased heterogeneity. In conclusion, Lipiodol incorporated in P(SA:RA) is visible on CT, and polymer degradation can potentially be monitored noninvasively. This method can be widely applied to follow changes in biodegradable implants.


Successful security professionals have had to modify the process of responding to new threats in the high-profile, ultra-connected business environment. But just because a threat exists does not mean that your organization is at risk. This is what risk assessment is all about. Information Security Risk Analysis, Third Edition demonstrates how to identify threats your company faces and then determine if those threats pose a real risk to your organization.Providing access to more than 350 pages of helpful ancillary materials, this volume: Presents and explains the key components of risk management Demonstrates how the components of risk management are absolutely necessary and work in your organization and business situation Shows how a cost-benefit analysis is part of risk management and how this analysis is performed as part of risk mitigation Explains how to draw up an action plan to protect the assets of your organization when the risk assessment process concludes Examines the difference between a Gap Analysis and a Security or Controls Assessment Presents case studies and examples of all risk management components Authored by renowned security expert and certification instructor, Thomas Peltier, this authoritative reference provides you with the knowledge and the skill-set needed to achieve a highly effective risk analysis assessment in a matter of days. Supplemented with online access to user-friendly checklists, forms, questionnaires, sample assessments, and other documents, this work is truly a one-stop, how-to resource for industry and academia professionals.


Collecting species presence data and then building models to predict species distribution has been long practiced in the field of ecology for the purpose of improving our understanding of species relationships with each other and with the environment. Due to limitations of computing power as well as limited means of using modeling software on HPC facilities, past species distribution studies have been unable to fully explore diverse data sets. We build a system that can, for the first time to our knowledge, leverage HPC to support effective exploration of species similarities in distribution as well as their dependencies on common environmental conditions. Our system can also compute and reveal uncertainties in the modeling results enabling domain experts to make informed judgments about the data. Our work was motivated by and centered around data collection efforts within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that date back to the 1940s. Our findings present new research opportunities in ecology and produce actionable field-work items for biodiversity management personnel to include in their planning of daily management activities.


There is an ongoing debate about the place of traditional and community courts in South Africa. Some people feel that both traditional and community courts have previously operated in a brutal manner to address problems. Therefore they are regarded as a threat to communities and must be abolished. On the other hand, some believe that both courts should be given a chance. Those who are in favour of traditional courts are traditional leaders themselves, as well as rural communities which value these institutions. There are also people from urban settings who still see the need for the existence of traditional courts. Those who are against the traditional courts are mostly the youth and urban adults who do not value African culture any more. Another perspective on the existence of community courts is that which is prevalent in most of the South African townships. Community courts were popular during the period of political struggle to get rid of apartheid. Most of the community courts were dominated by the youth and there was a lot of bias in terms of handling cases. As a result many people were not impressed by community courts' management style. The focus of this paper is on both the traditional and community courts and their modus operandi in terms of conflict management. The major focus is on factors that make people feel uncomfortable about these courts. The research methodology employed in this research is personal experience of community courts, for example, previously seeing how street committees and 'kangaroo courts' operated, informal interviews , as well as secondary data from newspapers, texts, magazines and electronic media (videos). In the final instance, the paper attempts to suggest some solutions to the problems.


Promising results have been reported in preclinical stroke target validation for pharmacological principles that disrupt the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor–post-synaptic density protein-95–neuronal nitric oxide synthase complex. However, post-synaptic density protein-95 is also coupled to potentially neuroprotective mechanisms. As post-synaptic density protein-95 inhibitors may interfere with potentially neuroprotective mechanisms and sufficient validation has often been an issue in translating basic stroke research, we wanted to close that gap by comparing post-synaptic density protein-95 inhibitors with NOS1−/− mice and a NOS inhibitor. We confirm the deleterious role of NOS1 in stroke both in vivo and in vitro, but find three pharmacological post-synaptic density protein-95 inhibitors to be therapeutically ineffective.


Wrong-drug errors, thought to be caused primarily by drug names that look and/or sound alike, occur at a rate of about one error per thousand dispensed prescriptions in the outpatient setting and one per thousand orders in the inpatient setting.1 ,2 Most are relatively benign, but some cause severe or even fatal harm.3–5 One of the best known attempts to reduce drug name confusion has been the use of mixed case or 'Tall Man' lettering.6 The idea is to use capital letters to maximise the visual perceptual difference between two similar drug names. Thus, vinblastine and vincristine become vinBLAStine and vinCRIStine. If some look-alike/sound-alike (LASA) mix-ups are caused by errors in visual perception, the reasoning goes, then making the names more visually distinct should reduce the probability of confusion and error.

After being endorsed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA),6 the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP),7 The Joint Commission8 and others, the practice has become widespread.9 However, apart from limited evidence of effectiveness in laboratory settings, no evidence shows that this technique prevents drug name confusion errors in clinical practice. Zhong et al 10 attempted to assess the effect of Tall Man lettering on drug name confusion errors in a large scale, longitudinal, observational study. They conclude that this widely disseminated error-prevention strategy had no measurable effect on the rate of drug name confusions in 9 years of data from 42 children's hospitals in the USA. Below we comment on methodological issues in the Zhong et al study, review laboratory research on Tall Man lettering and consider policy implications.

The authors are to be commended for conducting a large-scale, empirical test of the effect of Tall Man lettering on the drug name confusion error rate in real-world clinical settings. The …


Raman lasing of a two-phonon Raman band in the anti-Stokes side is demonstrated. Two femtosecond light pulses with identical wavelengths are irradiated onto a SrTiO3 crystal in a cross-beam configuration. Under low excitation power, several wave-mixing signals with identical wavelengths are emitted. When the power exceeds a critical value, cascaded coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) signals are emitted, the frequency step of which is coincident with that of the strongest two-phonon Raman band of 2TO2.


Can Europe tame the Balkans? That's the question veteran journalist Elizabeth Pond addresses in this timely and absorbing book. Starting with the wars of the Yugoslav succession, Endgame in the Balkans guides readers through the region's tumultuous recent history and explores both how the lure of European Union (EU) membership has affected the Balkans and how Balkan developments have shaped the EU. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, as well as decades of experience as a foreign correspondent, Pond moves deftly across the region, from Bulgaria to Romania, Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, and Serbia and Montenegro. She examines the many hurdles standing between these countries and EU membership --including poverty, corruption, and rabid chauvinism --as well as the hopes and problems that have led Balkan leaders to look to the West. In the process, she paints a vivid picture of the challenges facing the region as it seeks to vault from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Already in its brief history, the European Union has forged a historic reconciliation between France and Germany and helped consolidate democracy in Portugal, Spain, and Greece. But in southeastern Europe, it faces one of its most difficult tasks yet. En dgame in the Balkans r eveals the full extent of this challenge, as well as the grounds for hope. Rich in detail and penetrating analysis, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the future both of the region and of Europe as a whole.


Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical devices which are accessible through the Internet. All the devices are assigned with an IP address and are competent enough to collect data and provide some services. The installed technology and software used in all these smart items help them to interact with the end-user(s). Thus the IoT network becomes more vulnerable to attacks by external entities. Consequently, it is required to check the leakage of any information during message transmission in the network. Message injection, relay attacks, and side channel attacks by a malicious node can result in privacy loss and security hacks. Service-Oriented Architecture help vendors provide services to the consumer over a network following some protocols. In this paper we have implemented a security scheme that can be suitable for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based IoT network. The proposed scheme allows to transfer data in a network only if the public key (encrypted hop-count) received by the packet matches with the public key(decrypted hop-count) between the source and destination node stored in the routing table. Otherwise, the data is considered to be malicious and discarded from the network. A non-cooperative Stackelberg game based mathematical model is presented, which considers defenders as leaders and attackers as followers. We have simulated our proposed scheme and have compared it with the existing security and authentication scheme, UAKMP, in identical conditions. From the analysis of the results we evaluate that, SecureIoT has improved performance with reduced communication overheads.


Despite its status as one of the world's major crops, linkage disequilibrium (LD) patterns have not been systematically characterized across the genome of Asian rice (Oryza sativa). Such information is critical to fully exploit the genome sequence for mapping complex traits using association techniques. Here we characterize LD in five 500-kb regions of the rice genome in three major cultivated rice varieties (indica, tropical japonica, and temperate japonica) and in the wild ancestor of Asian rice, Oryza rufipogon. Using unlinked SNPs to determine the amount of background linkage disequilibrium in each population, we find that the extent of LD is greatest in temperate japonica (probably >500 kb), followed by tropical japonica (∼150 kb) and indica (∼75 kb). LD extends over a shorter distance in O. rufipogon (≪40 kb) than in any of the O. sativa groups assayed here. The differences in the extent of LD among these groups are consistent with differences in outcrossing and recombination rate estimates. As well as heterogeneity between groups, our results suggest variation in LD patterns among genomic regions. We demonstrate the feasibility of genomewide association mapping in cultivated Asian rice using a modest number of SNPs.


Recent research indicates that prediction-based coherence optimizations offer substantial performance improvements for scientific applications in distributed shared memory multiprocessors. Important commercial applications also show sensitivity to coherence latency, which will become more acute in the future as technology scales. Therefore it is important to investigate prediction of memory coherence activity in the context of commercial workloads.This paper studies a trace-based Downgrade Predictor (DGP) for predicting last stores to shared cache blocks, and a pattern-based Consumer Set Predictor (CSP) for predicting subsequent readers. We evaluate this class of predictors for the first time on commercial applications and demonstrate that our DGP correctly predicts 47%-76% of last stores. Memory sharing patterns in commercial workloads are inherently non-repetitive; hence CSP cannot attain high coverage. We perform an opportunity study of a DGP enhanced through competitive underlying predictors, and in commercial and scientific applications, demonstrate potential to increase coverage up to 14%.


Phytoplankton are composed of diverse taxonomical groups, which are manifested as distinct morphology, size and pigment composition. These characteristics, modulated by their physiological state, impact their light absorption and scattering, allowing them to be detected with ocean color satellite radiometry. There is a growing volume of literature describing satellite algorithms to retrieve information on phytoplankton composition in the ocean. This synthesis provides a review of current methods and a simplified comparison of approaches. The aim is to provide an easily comprehensible resource for non-algorithm developers, who desire to use these products, thereby raising the level of awareness and use of these products and reducing the boundary of expert knowledge needed to make a pragmatic selection of output products with confidence. The satellite input and output products, their associated validation metrics, as well as assumptions, strengths and limitations of the various algorithm types are described, providing a framework for algorithm organization to assist users and inspire new aspects of algorithm development capable of exploiting the higher spectral, spatial and temporal resolutions from the next generation of ocean color satellites.


Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) has become a crucial part of next generation air

traffic surveillance technology and will be mandatorily deployed for most of the airspaces worldwide by 2020. Each

aircraft equipped with an ADS-B device keeps broadcasting plaintext messages to other aircraft and the ground

station controllers once or twic per second. The lack of security measures in ADS-B systems makes it susceptible to

different attacks. Among the various security issues, we investigate the integrity and authenticity of ADS-B

messages. We propose a new framework for providing ADS-B with authentication based on three-level hierarchical

identity-based signature (HIBS) with batch verification. Previous signature-based ADS-B authentication protocols

focus on how to generate signatures efficiently, while our schemes can also significantly reduce the verification cost,

which is critical to ADS-B systems, since at any time an ADS-B receiver may receive lots of signatures. We design

two concrete schemes. The basic scheme supports partial batch verification and the extended scheme provides full

batch verification. We give a formal security proof for the extended scheme. Experiment results show that our

schemes with batch verification are tremendously more efficient in batch verifying n signatures than verifying n

signatures independently. For example, the running time of verifying 100 signatures is 502ms and 484ms for the

basic scheme and the extended scheme respectively, while the time is 2500ms if verifying the signatures

independently.


Thymidylate synthase (TS; EC 126.96.36.199) is an important cellular enzyme that converts dUMP to dTMP, which is essential for DNA biosynthesis. In addition, TS is an important cellular target for the fluoropyrimidine cytotoxic drugs that are widely used in the treatment of solid tumors. We have generated five monoclonal antibodies against human TS using a recombinant human TS enzyme. These antibodies react specifically with human TS and display negligible cross-reactivity with other cellular proteins found in human cells. Binding affinity studies demonstrate that all antibodies form a tight interaction with recombinant human TS enzyme (A',, range = 0.3-11.0 iiM). All antibodies display reactivity on enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and immunoprecipitation. On Western blot analysis each detects a protein of approximately 36 kDa molecular mass under denaturing conditions. In addition to their reactivity on immunoprecipitation and Western analysis, two of the antibodies, TS 106 and TS 109, are reactive on immunohistochemical staining of human colon carcinoma cell lines and tissue, producing a granular cytoplasmic staining pattern. Specificity for TS is demonstrated by the lack of staining with preimmune IgG and the disappearance of the signal when the antibodies are preabsorbed with recombinant human TS enzyme. Quantitation of TS by Western blot analysis and biochemical I ill Ml' binding assay in 5-fluorouracil-resistant colon carcinoma cell lines (NCI II63l)u,,i. NCI H630R,) and a sensitive colon carcinoma cell line (NCI H630) revealed a 36and 6-fold increase in TS in the resistant cell line as measured by the biochemical assay compared to a 39and 10.6-fold increase as measured by densitometric analysis of the Western blot. These comparative studies of immunohistochemical. Western, and biochemical analyses reveal that the immunological detection of TS in human colon cell lines is a sensitive and quantitative assay. Thus the ability of these antibodies to detect TS in human cancer cells and tissue may allow measurement of TS in human tissues by quantitative immunohistochemistry in studies of drug resistance and for determination of proliferatiti rates.


In planar location problems with barriers one considers regions which are forbidden for the siting of new facilities as well as for trespassing. These problems areimportant since they reflect various real-world situations.The resulting mathematical models have a non-convex objectivefunction and are therefore difficult to tackle using standardmethods of location theory even in the case of simple barriershapes and distance funtions.For the case of center objectives with barrier distancesobtained from the rectilinear or Manhattan metric it is shown that the problem can be solved by identifying a finitedominating set (FDS) the cardinality of which is bounded bya polynomial in the size of the problem input. The resultinggenuinely polynomial algorithm can be combined with bound computations which are derived from solving closely connectedrestricted location and network location problems.It is shown that the results can be extended to barrier center problems with respect to arbitrary block norms having fourfundamental directions.


In this paper, adaptive hybrid genetic algorithms (AHA0 ~ AHA3) are proposed for the sequence-dependent setup times permutation flow shop scheduling problem with the objectives to minimize makespan and total weighted tardiness, both of which will be considered separately. Each job is assigned an introduced inheriting factor, which indicates the probability that the job is copied to the same position of the offspring individual during crossover and is dynamically updated. Good genes and bad genes can be mined by inheriting factors. Probability-based Multi-Point Crossover (PMPC) is constructed to inherit good genes with high probabilities to the offspring and destroy bad genes with high probabilities. Inheriting factors determine such probabilities and the genetic algorithm evolves adaptively and is denoted as AHA0. Three local search methods (LS1, LS2, and LS3) are separately integrated with AHA0 and three hybrid algorithms AHA1 ~ AHA3 are developed. Compared with GA_RMA and CPSO (effective algorithms without integrating any local search), AHA0 is the most effective. Another six hybrid algorithms are extended from IG_RS (the current best algorithm for the two considered problems) and CPSO by integrating with the three local search methods and they are compared with AHA1 ~ AHA3 comprehensively. Experimental results show that for the two considered problems, AHA1 outperforms the other algorithms on small setup-time instances and AHA3 is the most effective algorithm among the compared ones on big setup-time instances, while the computation time of AHA1 is moderate among the LS1 integrated algorithms, so is AHA3. The effects of the key factors or parameters on algorithms are analyzed as well.


This thesis presents a comprehensive study on emissions predictive control modelling for hybrid electric scooters. Two approaches were investigated on a constructed hybrid electric scooter. The first approach involves developing a hybrid electric scooter dynamic model using MATLAB-Simulink and the second involves the development of an Emissions Predictive Model using artificial neural network. The hybrid electric scooter model was developed to further understand and analyze as well as to predict its performance and emissions before proper construction of the prototype begins. The MATLAB-Simulink model consists of four integrated models that formed the complete hybrid scooter model: Battery Model, Engine Model, DC Motor Model and the Vehicle Dynamics Model. The multi-mode controller predicts the required parameters to operate the scooter in an optimize condition. Experimental data were gathered and thus compared to the simulated data to check the model's feasibility and accuracy on four distinct driving cycles: Modified Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule, New York City Cycle, European Driving Cycle and the Modified Highway Fuel Economy Driving Schedule. Results showed that the developed multi-state hybrid electric scooter model was accurate and feasible with predictive errors of ±10 % for emission levels and fuel economy on the European Driving Cycle. Simulated results were also compared to the existing literature and it was found that the qualitative trends were similar. By having a high-confidence simulation model, performance of the hybrid electric scooter were also simulated over the mentioned driving cycles demonstrating the optimization strategy of the multi-state control system.
For the second approach, the Emissions Predictive Model was then built using artificial neural network techniques to predict the following tailpipe emissions gases; CO, CO2, HC and O2. Three feed-forward neural network models were investigated and compared in this study; back-propagation, optimization layer-by-layer and radial basis function networks. Based on the experimental setup, the neural network models were trained and tested to accurately predict the effect of the engine operating conditions on the emissions by varying the number of hidden nodes. The selected optimization layer-by-layer network proved to be the most accurate and reliable predictive tool with prediction errors of ±5 %. The effect of the engine operating conditions on the tailpipe emissions for a scooter is shown to display similar qualitative and quantitative trends between the simulated and the experimental data.
Having accurate predictive models for emissions and fuel economy enable the hybrid electric scooter to be optimized via modelling and simulation before proper construction begins. The developed emissions predictive models could act as a virtual emissions sensor replacing costly hardware for the developed physical hybrid electric scooter. This study provides a better understanding in effects of engine process parameters on tailpipe emissions for the hybrid electric scooter as well as for general hybrid vehicular applications


Approaches to address unsustainable ways of societal development constantly proliferate, but total consumption of resources and aggregate environmental impacts continue rising. This could partially be explained by weak attempts to develop comprehensive sustainability strategies that address the entire life cycle of products and especially resource extraction and use phases. This paper seeks to explore to what extent these life cycle stages and associated impacts are taken into account when various actors employ life cycle thinking and how these concerns can be better attended to in policy-making, business strategies and lifestyle choices. To accomplish this, we evaluate the efforts of the main stakeholders in reaching sustainable consumption and sustainable resource management, and impediments to further progress, and study whether and how deficits in these phases coincide and can potentially contribute to more holistic practical realization of life cycle thinking. We demonstrate that new approaches are needed to be able to tackle the international dimension of production and consumption.


Abstract One of the greatest challenges in using faunal assemblages to make ecological or paleoecological interpretations is determining the spatial scale over which such analyses are applicable. As a result, it has been difficult to use these assemblages to test hypotheses about spatial and temporal variability in populations. Here we show that it is possible to use strontium (Sr) isotopes from bones and vegetation to statistically constrain the area sampled in two Holocene predator accumulations in northeastern Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Previous studies have used these sites to elucidate local population responses to climatic change, by assuming that the specimens originated within ∼5 km of the site. We used Sr analyses to construct a likelihood curve that describes the probability that our samples were collected within a given radius of each site. Our results indicate that the specimens in both sites were derived from non-overlapping populations and that the collection radius has not changed detectably over the past 3000 years. This work underscores the promise of this technique for ascribing source areas to paleontological, biological, and ecological specimens.


Although international trade, foreign direct investment, and competition policy converge at several points, their overarching theme is to increase world wealth by opening markets to foreign goods, services, and capital.1 These three policies can be mutually reinforcing when pursued with the common goal of encouraging cross-border competition. For example, a liberal trade policy has as its goal the elimination or lowering of barriers to trade in goods, opening foreign markets to goods from abroad, and bringing competition to bear on domestic producers. A liberal trade policy thus can have a significant impact on competition and on markets. To the extent trade liberalization reduces entry barriers to foreign markets, it gives domestic firms less ability to engage in anti-competitive behavior. Similarly, to the extent that domestic firms tie up channels of distribution in local markets and thereby block market access to imports, a liberal investment policy can eliminate such anti-competitive practices by permitting foreign firms to own distribution networks in the local market. In theory, then, trade, investment, and competition policies ought to work in harmony. Their shared goals and objectives suggest teaming rules against private anti-competitive behavior with rules on the elimination of government barriers to international trade and investment. This paper examines whether the mutually-reinforcing roles that international trade, foreign investment, and competition policy play in opening markets to foreign goods, services,.and capital should be integrated into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade-World Trade Organization (GATT-WTO) system through WTO multilateral agreements on investment and competition policy. The primary focus is on WTO agreement on competition policy. The reasons for this focus are fourfold: (1) overall, the issues facing negotiators are far more formidable with regard to a competition policy agreement than with regard to an investment agreement; (2) developing countries have a long-standing objection that they will not consider a multilateral investment agreement without a parallel agreement on competition policy; (3) the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) has broken the trail for negotiations on a multilateral investment agreement with the culmination in 1998 of its work on the aborted Multilateral Agreement on Investment; and (4) the WTO's follow-on negotiations on trade in services, which will include market access through a physical presence of foreign services providers, will be a telltale for the prospects of a WTO investment agreement. Part I examines the trade and competition policy relationship. Part II reviews the investment and competition policy relationship. Part III addresses the wisdom of negotiating multilateral agreements on competition policy and investment under WTO auspices. Part IV argues that multilateralism is no panacea for resolving every cross-border issue that may arise between trading countries. Parts V and VI conclude that existing WTO agreements are adequate to resolve at least some competition policy disputes. I. THE TRADE AND COMPETITION PoLICY RELATIONSHIP Although nowhere explicitly stated in any WTO agreement, the guiding economic premise that underlies the entire GATT-WTO system is open or liberal trade.2 Why did open trade become the WTO's desideratum? The answer is short but compelling: by exploiting the law of comparative advantage, liberal trade policies permit the unrestricted cross-border flow of the best goods and services at the lowest prices, thereby increasing total world wealth. Under the law of comparative advantage, resources are allocated efficiently across and within industries in response to competitive pressures from imports. Both of these phenomena lead to product specialization and increased firm size that in turn lowers the unit cost of goods and services. The role that multilateral trade rules play in fostering liberal trade manifests itself in two important ways. …


Abstract The crystal chemistry of a natural, gem-quality, blue-grey Zn-rich spinel crystal from Jemaa, Kaduna State, Nigeria, was studied using electron microprobe, single-crystal X-ray diffraction, optical absorption and Raman spectroscopies. The composition of the crystal approaches the gahnite endmember (ZnAl2O4), ~94 mol.%, with the remainder being dominated by a hercynite component (FeAl2O4). The unit-cell dimension is 8.0850(3) Å and the tetrahedral and octahedral bond distances are determined as T-O 1.9485(6) Å and M-O 1.9137(3) Å. Crystal chemical analysis resulted in the empirical structural formula T(Zn0.94Fe0.032+Al0.03)M(Al1.96Fe0.032+Fe0.013+)O4, which shows Zn and Al almost fully ordered in the tetrahedrally and octahedrally coordinated T and M sites, respectively. Raman spectra obtained using the excitation of the blue 473.1 nm line of a Nd:YAG laser display three of the five Raman-active modes predicted for the general oxide spinel group of minerals. These are the Eg mode at 420.6 cm-1 and the T2g modes at 510 cm-1 and 661 cm-1, due to vibrations in the AlO6 octahedra. Optical absorption spectra recorded in the UV/VIS-NIR-MIR range 2000-29000 cm-1 show a dominant absorption band at ~5000 cm-1 which is caused by spin-allowed electronic d-d transitions in Fe2+ located at the T sites. The blue-grey hue exhibited by the sample is mainly due to spin-forbidden electronic transitions in TFe2+ and to MFe2+ ↔ MFe3+ intervalence charge transfer, and the poor saturation of the colour is due to the small concentration of Fe2+ and Fe3+.


How might "transmedia" approaches—or working across media—fit into histories of textual and visual innovation within anthropology, and what might they contribute to the discipline in the current moment? I explore this question through the Exit Zero Project, which includes a book, documentary film, and planned interactive website that examine the impact of deindustrialization on Southeast Chicago and the relationship between industrial job loss and expanding class inequalities in the United States. While the book and film take an "autoethnographic" approach, the website is based on collaboration with a local museum. I argue that transmedia ethnography both provokes new research questions and supports a growing interest in public anthropology by offering diverse spaces for engagement with subjects and audiences.


Though a small country, Lebanon hosts various ecosystems that allow for a large number of plants ranging from cold requiring crops to subtropical ones to live and flourish. More than 80 plant species for food and agriculture are currently cultivated and/or utilized in the country, excluding ornamental, medicinal, forest and forage plants. The main crops grown in Lebanon are olives, fruit trees and cereals followed by tubers and fruity vegetables. Furthermore, a number of species of the wild flora are harvested and used as food including aromatic plants, spices and condiments. This paper reviews the currents status of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in the country with the multiple concerns and challenges regarding their sustainable use, in-situ management and ex situ conservation over the recent years.


Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) provide unique and important feedback in quiescent galaxies, but their impact has been underappreciated. In this paper, we analyze a series of high-resolution simulations to examine the energetics and turbulence of the medium under SNe Ia. We find that when SN remnants are resolved, their effects differ distinctly from a volumetric heating term, as is commonly assumed in unresolved simulations. First, the net heating is significantly higher than expected, by 30 ± 10% per cooling time. This is because a large fraction of the medium is pushed into lower densities, which cool inefficiently. Second, the medium is turbulent; the root-mean-squared (rms) velocity of the gas to 20–50 km s−1 on a driving scale of tens of parsecs. The velocity field of the medium is dominated by compressional modes, which are larger than the solenoidal components by a factor of 3–7. Third, the hot gas has a very broad density distribution. The ratio between the density fluctuations and the rms Mach number, parameterized as b, is 2–20. This is in contrast to previous simulations of turbulent media, which have found b ≲ 1. The difference is mainly caused by the localized heating of SNe Ia, which creates a large density contrast. Last, the typical length scale of a density fluctuation grows with time, forming increasingly larger bubbles and filamentary ridges. These underlying density fluctuations need to be included when X-ray observations are interpreted.


Chiral photoinduction in a photoresponsive gel based on an achiral 2D architecture with high geometric anisotropy and low roughness has been investigated. Circularly polarized light (CPL) was used as a chiral source and an azobenzene chromophore was employed as a chiral trigger. The chiral photoinduction was studied by evaluating the preferential excitation of enantiomeric conformers of the azobenzene units. Crystallographic data and density functional theory (DFT) calculations show how chirality is transferred to the achiral azomaterials as a result of the combination of chiral photochemistry and supramolecular interactions. This procedure could be applied to predict and estimate chirality transfer from a chiral physical source to a supramolecular organization using different light-responsive units.


The Philippine student movement has persisted for over twenty years now despite the death of its contemporaries in the international scene. For unlike the Western student movement which is more symbolic and sectoral in character, the Philippine student movement's being armed with a vision of an alternative society and its perspective in linking arms with other sectors such as the workers and the peasants enabled it to transcend its narrow sectional interest and transform itself into a political force within a broader social movement. There is little doubt that student activism in the Philippines will endure for another decade, but whether it can still approximate the dynamism of its pre-Martial Law existence is another question. How the student groups will be able to adapt to the rapid unfolding of events in the national scene will partly spell their success or failure to maintain a profound presence in the Filipino people's struggle for social liberation.


Abstract Distinguishing the differential roles of hardpart-input rates and burial rates in the formation of shell beds is important in paleobiologic and sedimentologic studies, because high shelliness can reflect either high population density of shell producers or lack of sediment. The modeling in this paper shows that differences in the relative importance of burial rates and hardpart-input rates lead to distinct patterns with respect to the degree of shelliness and taphonomic alteration in shell beds. Our approach substantially complements other models because it allows computation of both shelliness and assemblage-level alteration. To estimate shelliness, we dissected hardpart-input rates into dead-shell production and shell destruction rates. To estimate assemblage-level alteration, we computed an alteration rate that describes how rapidly shells accrue postmortem damage. Under decreasing burial rates but constant hardpart-input rates, a positive correlation between alteration and shelliness is expected (Kidwell's R-sediment model). In contrast, under decreased destruction rates and/or increased dead-shell production rates and constant burial rates (Kidwell's R-hardpart model), a negative correlation between shelliness and alteration is expected. The contrasting predictions thus provide a theoretical basis for distinguishing whether high shell density in shell beds reflects passive shell accumulation due to a lack of sediment dilution or whether it instead reflects high shell input from a life assemblage. This approach should be applicable for any fossil assemblages that vary in shell density and assemblage-level alteration. An example from the Lower Jurassic of Morocco, which has shell-rich samples less altered than shell-poor samples, suggests that the higher shelliness correlates with higher community-level abundance and lower proportion of juveniles of the main shell producer, supporting the driving role of hardpart-input rates in the origin of the shell-rich samples in this case. This is of significance in paleoecologic analyses because variations in shelliness can directly reflect fluctuations in population density of shell producers.


Abstract. Methanol exchanges over a mixed temperate forest in the Belgian Ardennes were measured for more than one vegetation season using disjunct eddy-covariance by a mass scanning technique and Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS). Half-hourly methanol fluxes were measured in the range of −0.6 μg m −2 s −1 to 0.6 μg m −2 s −1 , and net daily methanol fluxes were generally negative in summer and autumn and positive in spring. On average, the negative fluxes dominated (i.e. the site behaved as a net sink), in contrast to what had been found in previous studies. An original model describing the adsorption/desorption of methanol in water films present in the forest ecosystem and the methanol degradation process was developed. Its calibration, based on field measurements, predicted a mean methanol degradation rate of −0.0074 μg m −2 s −1 and a half lifetime for methanol in water films of 57.4 h. Biogenic emissions dominated the exchange only in spring, with a standard emission factor of 0.76 μg m −2 s −1 . The great ability of the model to reproduce the long-term evolution, as well as the diurnal variation of the fluxes, suggests that the adsorption/desorption and degradation processes play an important role in the global methanol budget. This result underlines the need to conduct long-term measurements in order to accurately capture these processes and to better estimate methanol fluxes at the ecosystem scale.


User authentication is one of the primary mechanisms that protects online accounts from break-in by attackers. Password-based authentication is currently the most widespread form of user authentication, but has many well-documented usability and security drawbacks. As an increasing number of consumer, financial, governmental, and other organizations move towards offering services online, users are burdened with creating and managing increasingly large portfolios of online accounts; this increased user burden exacerbates the drawbacks of password-based authentication. This thesis contributes to the reinforcement of password-based authentication by pursuing parallel mechanisms that improve security without further burdening users---this is a prominent avenue of improvement, given the continued dominance of password authentication. To that end, our contributions achieve three broad goals. First, we identify, develop, and evaluate device fingerprinting mechanisms for use alongside passwords, and offer guidance on their use, to enhance the security of password-based web authentication. Second, we expand on the concept of mimicry resistance, a dimension that has thus far been overlooked in the design and study of web authentication schemes. We develop a comprehensive methodology for evaluating the mimicry resistance of web authentication schemes and provide guidance on how to combine multiple schemes alongside password authentication to maximize the benefits gained. Third, we perform a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of a broad range of single sign-on (SSO) schemes, which reduce password fatigue by allowing users to access a multitude of online services through a single master password. We identify design properties of SSO schemes and develop an evaluation framework that highlights their benefits and drawbacks, revealing trade-offs between different designs. These three contributions encompass complementary approaches that can be used together to improve online security with minimal impact on usability.


A recent rise in the volume of corporate share repurchases has prompted calls for changes to the rules governing stock buybacks. These calls for reform are animated by concerns that buybacks enrich corporate executives at the expense of productive investment. This emerging antibuyback movement includes prominent politicians as well as academics and Republicans as well as Democrats. The primary focus of buyback critics has been on securities-law changes to deter repurchases, with only passing mention of potential tax-law solutions. This Article critically examines the policy arguments against buybacks and arrives at a mixed verdict. On the one hand, claims that buybacks reduce corporate investment and inappropriately reward executives turn out to be poorly supported. On the other hand, the Article identifies legitimate tax-related concerns about the rising buyback tide. Buybacks exacerbate two of the U.S. tax system's most severe flaws. The first is the "Mark Zuckerberg problem": the effective nontaxation of firm founders on what is essentially labor income. The second is what we call the "Panama Papers problem": the use of U.S. capital markets by investors in offshore tax havens to generate tax-free returns. Our search for solutions to the Mark Zuckerberg and Panama Papers problems brings us back to a prescient 1969 article by then-Yale Law School professor Marvin Chirelstein. The main innovation of Chirelstein's article was to explain how buybacks could be taxed the same way as dividends at the shareholder level. Chirelstein's proffered justification for his proposal has obsolesced in the succeeding five decades, but the proposal nonetheless provides a technically elegant framework for addressing two of the modern-day U.S. tax system's major ills. This Article evaluates Chirelstein's proposal and updates it for the twenty-first century. We outline the mechanics of the proposal, suggest a range of tweaks, and show how adoption of the proposal would substantially improve the U.S. capital-taxation regime. Along the way, we


The 15 former Soviet republics known as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) all have their own national accounting and auditing certifications. These republics have been evolving in different directions since the break up of the Soviet Union. But they have at least one thing in common - their certifications are not held in high regard beyond their borders, and perhaps even within their own countries. Several internationally recognized certification bodies have tried to fill the market need by offering their exams within the borders of the CIS, but these attempts have been only partially successful because these international certification exams are offered only in the English language. As a result, the majority of accountants in the CIS are not able to write a professional exam. Until recently, non-English speaking accountants within the CIS had no alternatives other than their national exams. Starting in late 2001, a plan was made to introduce into several former Soviet republics a series of examinations based on the accounting principles used in the developed market economies. These exams were offered in the Russian language, thus offering non-English speaking accountants an opportunity to earn a certification based on internationally recognized accounting principles. This paper reports on this movement.


Stress impacts the reproductive axis at the level of the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, which exert an effect on the ovary. Menstruation is regulated by the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovary (HPO) axis. However, the role of stress in menstruation remains unclear. The objective of this study was to explore the role of stress in endometrial breakdown and shedding, using the pseudopregnant mouse menstrual-like model. Female mice were mated with vasectomized males and labeled day 0.5, upon observation of a vaginal seminal plug. On day 3.5, decidualization was induced in pseudopregnant mice using arachis oil. On day 5.5, pseudopregnant mice with artificial decidualization were placed in restraint tubes for 3 h. The findings indicated that acute restraint stress resulted in the disintegration of the endometrium. While corticosterone concentration in the serum increased significantly due to restraint stress, follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH) and progesterone (P4) levels in the serum decreased significantly. An endometrial histology examination indicated that progesterone implants may rescue P4 decline caused by acute stress and block endometrium breakdown and shedding. In addition, mice were treated with metyrapone, an inhibitor of corticosterone synthesis, 1 h prior to being subjected to restraint stress. Interestingly, metyrapone not only inhibited stress-induced endometrium breakdown and shedding, but also prevented stress-induced reduction of P4, LH and FSH. Furthermore, real-time PCR and western blot showed that mRNA and protein expression of CYP11A1 (cytochrome P450, family 11, subfamily A, polypeptide 1) and steroidogenic acute regulatory protein (StAR), the two rate-limiting enzymes for progesterone synthesis in the ovary, decreased following acute stress. But metyrapone prevented the reduction of StAR expression induced by restraint stress. Overall, this study revealed that acute stress results in an increase in corticosterone, which may inhibit LH and FSH release in the serum and CYP11A1 and StAR expression in the ovary, which finally leads to the breakdown and shedding of the endometrium. These experimental findings, based on the mouse model, may enable further understanding of the effects of stress on menstruation regulation and determine the potential factors affecting stress-associated menstrual disorders.


Pancreatic islets from A.TH mice were transplanted into the spleen or streptozotocin (SZ)‐diabetic A.TL mice. The two strains of mice are congenic inbred strains, differing only in the I and S subregions of the H‐2 complex. The allogeneic islet grafts decreased blood glucose temporarily, but the islets were rejected after 21 ± 7 days (mean ± SD). The effect of skin presensitization was tested by giving both allogeneic and syngeneic skin grafts to each of a second set of A.TL mice before streptozotocin treatment and islet transplantation. The time course of rejection of the allogeneic islets in animals that received initial skin grafts was decreased to 8 ± 3 days. In both skin‐presensitized and non‐presensitized mice syngeneic islet grafts were able to restore normoglycaemia, even in animals that had previously rejected an islet allograft. These observations demonstrate that transplantation of pancreatic islet allografts across the I and S subregions of the H‐2 complex is sufficient to induce rejection of the islets. The islet rejection was markedly accelerated by prior sensitization with allogeneic skin grafting. It is suggested that elements in allogeneic skin grafts serve as inducers of cytotoxic T‐cell responses directed against gene products of the I and/or S subregions present on cells in the allogeneic islets.


. Pricing weather derivatives is becoming increasingly useful, especially in developing economies. We describe a statistical model based approach for pricing weather derivatives by modeling and forecasting daily average temperature data which exhibits long-range dependence. We pre-process the temperature data by filtering for seasonality and volatility and fit autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA) models, employing the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) algorithm for fast computation of the likelihood function. We illustrate our approach using daily temperature data from 1970 to 2008 for cities traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), which we employ for pricing degree days futures contracts. We compare the statistical approach with traditional burn analysis using a simple additive risk loading principle for pricing, where the risk premium is estimated by the method of least squares using data on observed prices and the corresponding estimate of prices from the best model we fit to the temperature data.


The instructional level, a measure of optimal instructional challenge, addresses the amount of review material interspersed with new. The current study further attempted to identify the instructional level for drill tasks by teaching sight-words to five fourth grade students with reading disabilities and documented attention difficulties. Four different drill ratios. 0% known. 50% known, 83% known, and 90% known, were used with a 1-week retention interval and both recall and on-task behavior being the dependent variables. Results suggested that the 90% known condition led to the highest percentage of on-task behavior and the highest retention, but required much more time to complete. Limitations and implications for future research are included. ********** "The most effective device that can be applied to learning is to increase the amount of drill or practice" (p. 289) and efforts to improve academic motivation serve to increase the amount of practice (Symonds & Chase, 1992). Thus, scholars suggested the need for high repetition of new items during initial learning (Daly, Hintze, & Hamler, 2000: Gickling & Thompson, 1985: Tucker, 1989) and Shapiro (1996) recommended that practitioners turn to various drill formats for academic remediation. Gickling and colleagues (Gickling & Armstrong, 1978; Gickling & Rosenfield, 1995, Thompson, Gickling & Havertape, 1983) demonstrated that students presented with an appropriate level of challenge exhibited higher task completion, task comprehension, and on-task behavior. They labeled this appropriate level of challenge the instructional level, a term first corned by Betts (1946), and theorized that it involved presenting a child with enough review material interspersed with new material to be adequately challenging without being frustrating. Most academic tasks fall into one of two categories, 1) gaining meaning from print (reading), and 2) rehearsing tasks such as mathematics computation, spelling, and sight-word recognition (drill; Gravois & Gickling, 2002). In order for a reading task to be at a child's instructional level, it should include 93% to 97% words that the child can read without effort (Gickling & Thompson, 1985). Drill tasks were theorized to be presented at an instructional level when 70% to 85% of the items have already been learned to the point that they can be recalled without effort (Gickling & Thompson, 1985). Research has consistently supported that providing reading instruction at Gickling's proposed instructional ratio improved reading skills (Burns, 2002; Gickling & Rosenfield, 1995; Shapiro, 1992; Shapiro & Ager, 1992), but the instructional level for drill tasks was not derived from empiricism and data regarding instructional ratios for drill tasks have not been conclusive. Although research has demonstrated the need to provide instruction that is at each student's instructional level, what that level is for drill tasks has not been conclusively defined. Different ratios of known to unknown items for drill tasks have been suggested including 70% to 85% known and 15% to 30% unknown (Gickling & Thompson, 1985), 10% unknown to 90% known (Tucker, 1989), 30% unknown to 70% known (Coulter & Coulter, 1990), and 50% unknown to 50% known (Neef; Iwata. & Page, 1980). Roberts, Turco, and Shapiro (1991) suggested that the more challenging ratios such as 50% unknown and 40% unknown to 60% known resulted in more unknown sight words being acquired during drill sessions, but the 20% unknown to 80% known level was linked to better retention. Roberts and Shapiro (1996) also found that the 20% unknown to 80% known condition resulted in a higher percentage of material learned, but resulted in less total material learned compared to more challenging ratios. However, research comparing drill tasks containing 90% known, 50% known and 0% known items found that the 90% known condition led to significantly better retention (MacQuarrie, Tucker, Burns, & Hartman, 2002). …


i»?Since the 1980s, emerging countries have been urged to welcome foreign capital inflows. The result has often been a pattern of surges, where excessive inflows were followed by damaging "sudden stops†and reversals. This was dramatically evident in the Asian crisis of 1997–1998. Since that crisis, the emerging countries of East Asia have typically run current account surpluses and have accumulated substantial foreign exchange reserves. This has kept them largely protected from the impact of volatile capital flows, but this strategy is neither sustainable nor optimal. What is needed is a strategy that makes use of the potential benefits of capital "flowing downhill†(that would require these countries to run current account deficits) while at the same time protecting them from both the excessive inflows and the reversals. This strategy needs to take account not only of the fickle nature of the capital flows, but the structurally-higher profitability which is characteristic of emerging countries, which motivates the excessive inflows. This strategy would require more active management of both exchange rates and capital flows than has been the accepted "best practice†. This requires a substantial shift in the current policy mindset. The International Monetary Fund has shifted some distance on this issue, but has further to go.


At the end of the 19th century, Americans heralded the end of the westward march across the continent. The West had been won. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner put it best when in 1893 he proclaimed:"And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history."Long understood as a geographically remote wilderness where the epic struggle between "civilized" and "savage" would determine the fate of America's future, suddenly the frontier defined the nation's past. Previous scholars, in examining the work of artists, writers, entertainers, and others, have explored how certain individuals fashioned a nostalgic legacy of western expansion at this moment in the nation's history.My dissertation charts new territory in this field by exploring how Americans nationwide fashioned a legacy of western expansion in an assemblage of works of art neglected until now, sculptural monuments erected in public space. In so doing, it provides a fresh understanding of the nation's defining legend, the myth of the frontier, and how this myth corresponds to the history upon which it is based.By employing the Smithsonian Institution American Art Museum Inventory of American Sculpture to examine the entire range of public monuments commemorating western expansion from 1890-1930, my study provides an unprecedented synthesis on this topic. Inventory research revealed one striking pattern--monuments focused overwhelmingly on two figures, the Indian and the pioneer. It also led to one surprising finding--while represented as combatants in the battle for the continent in the 19th century, both figures would be remembered heroically in the wake of western expansion, each the foundation upon which citizens would construct American identities in the early-20th century.Thus, in a series of case studies complementing my Smithsonian Inventory research, my dissertation examines the life of two mythic American figures, the Indian and the pioneer, and how these figures were used to fashion a legacy of western expansion in a rich array of artifacts including public sculptures, minted coins, and memorial highways.


Staphylococcus  aureus  is  a ubiquitous  organis m commonly  is olated  from bulk raw milk  s uffering   from  mas titis   that   res ulted   as   a  major  concern  for  the  s afety  of traditionally  produced  chees es . Pres ervative materials us age can prevent the growth of S. aureus  during chees e making. Ros a damas cena petals  extract have antibacterial and antioxidant properties activities agains t. The aim of this s tudy is to inves tigate the effect of bacterios tatic  extract  of R. damas cena petals  on growth of S. aureus  is olated from Iranian  traditional  ch ees e. In this  inves tigation, the extraction  of R. damas cena petals was produced after s oaking in ethanol and dis tillation under vacuum evaporator rotary. The  concentrations  of extraction  were prepared  in 4000, 2000, 1000, and 500 ppm and the  bacterios tatic  effects  of  extract  were  meas ured  with  calculating  the  diameter  of inhibition   zone   in   microbial  culture   medium.   Res ults   s howed   that   the   maximum inhibition affect was the concentration 4000 ppm. It was concluded that the extraction of R. damas cena petals can be us eful as a natural bacterios tatic additive for the control of S. aureus in traditional chees e.


currettings were collected for Chlamydia trachomatis anti- gen detection. Blood specimen was taken for VDRL, TPHA, HIV (after pretest counselling), and HBs Ag. All the tests proved negative, but on microscopy of the endocervical smear, Gram negative intracellular diplococci were observed. N gonorrhoeae was isolated on chocolate agar and saponin lysed blood agar with VCNT inhibitors. Standard methods 3 were utilised for confirmation of the isolate.


Preventive maintenance on aged steel railway structures is all important due to their long service time after completion. This paper introduced a strengthening method for old steel railway bridges by using rubber-latex mortar, glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) plates, lightweight rapid hardening concrete, and reinforcing bars. Both laboratory tests and field tests were performed to confirm the effects of the present strengthening method. In total, two old railway bridges were employed in this study. One of them has been in service for around 100 years. The static loading test was performed in the laboratory. Experimental results, including load-deflection response, strain distribution on the structural steel, GFRP plates as well as concrete, were given and compared between the original steel railway bridge and the strengthened bridge. Theoretical results were also provided to make a comparison with the experimental results. Both the experimental and theoretical results indicated that the present renovation method could greatly enhance the rigidity and reduce the stress levels of old steel members, resulting in the extension of the residual service life of the old steel railway bridge. In addition, field tests were performed on the other old railway bridge, which has been used for 86 years, and stress variation on the railway bridge under the running train was measured and the effects of the present strengthening method in the real service condition were also confirmed.


We focused upon habitat use and home range size variation in an alpine population of the Black Woodpecker Dryocopus martius. Habitat selection analyses showed that the dominant local forest type, i.e. Mountain Pine Pinus mugo uncinata, was significantly avoided. Scots Pine Pinus sylvestris stands were positively selected, likely because of the abundance of ants; Beech Fagus sylvatica was chosen for nesting and roosting. A high level of flexibility in ranging behaviour and habitat selection, with remarkable among- and within-individual variability, was recorded. We assessed the reliability of census techniques by comparing results obtained by radio-telemetry and territory mapping, which showed that territory mapping failed to identify all pairs detected through radio-tracking. Several behavioural and ecological traits may bias count results irrespective of the methods used. Mapping methods are particularly ineffective because the Black Woodpecker is weakly territorial: in our study area home range overlap was rather high and no territorial defence was detected. Based on these results, the potential of the Black Woodpecker as ecological indicator is questioned.


Woman Lawyer tells the story of Clara Foltz, the first woman admitted to the California Bar. Famous in her time as a public intellectual, leader of the women's movement, and legal reformer, Foltz faced terrific prejudice and well-organized opposition to women lawyers as she tried cases in front of all-male juries, raised five children as a single mother, and stumped for political candidates. She was the first to propose the creation of a public defender to balance the public prosecutor. Woman Lawyer uncovers the legal reforms and societal contributions of a woman celebrated in her day, but lost to history until now. It casts new light on the turbulent history and politics of California in a period of phenomenal growth and highlights the interconnection of the suffragists and other movements for civil rights and legal reforms.


Background: Evidence has shown that people living with nonpsychotic mental disorders experience difficulties in maintaining their daily living, consequently impacting on psychological well-being. However, the role of daily life experience remains unclear. This systematic review and meta-analysis aims to determine the association between daily life experience and psychological well-being in people living with nonpsychotic mental disorders, and evaluate daily life experience as a moderator of psychological well-being in this population. Methods: Literature search will be performed using a combination of title/abstract words and subject headings on 7 electronic databases according to predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data will be extracted by 4 independent reviewers (JH, SPCN, WKKW, and WKH). Disagreement will be resolved by discussion with senior reviewers. Observational studies involving subjects with unipolar depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, acute stress disorder, as post-traumatic stress disorder as distinct groups with quantitative measurement of daily life experience and psychological well-being will be included. Results: Effect sizes will be pooled by random effects model. The quality of the studies will be assessed using Newcastle–Ottawa scale. Heterogeneity between studies will be quantified using I2 index. This review is registered in PROSPERO. Conclusions: While symptoms and existing treatments of nonpsychotic mental disorders could be long term and dependent upon medical regimens, sustaining daily life experience will be a potentially important and concrete pathway that empowers patients to recover from the disorders, maintain or enhance psychological well-being, and be reintegrated into society. Findings of this review will inform prospective interventional trials of enhancing daily life experience in prevention of recurrence and enhancing psychological well-being in people living with nonpsychotic mental disorders.


Precise, non-invasive determination of the aetiology and site of pathology of inner ear disorders is difficult. The aim of this study was to describe an alternative method for inner ear visualization, based on local application of the paramagnetic contrast agent gadolinium. Using a 4.7 T MRI scanner, high contrast images of all four cochlear turns were obtained 3.5 h after placing gadolinium on the round window membrane. Gadolinium cleared from the cochlea within 96 h. Auditory brainstem response measurements performed on a separate group of animals showed no significant threshold shifts after the application, indicating that gadolinium is non-toxic to the guinea pig cochlea.


Access to natural resources is a problem current and future generations must overcome. To better understand potential changes in access for society due to environmental impacts, global spatio-temporal modeling is required. Spatial data for global assessments have uncertainty, and decision making can be problematic in regards to combining data. The basic problem associated with combining data for global assessments is the data's heterogeneous nature in terms of source, type, quality, uncertainty, and accuracy. The data uncertainty must be communicated. The overarching question is: how can uncertain information be defined and modelled for global scale studies? This thesis applies geographic information systems for solving spatial questions requiring the combination of several data sets that cover large geographical areas, come from many different data providers, and have varying quality with known and unknown uncertainty. The thesis uses combined spatial data for decision-making related to petroleum exploration and climate change. The first section elucidates the spatial understanding of climate class change on ecosystem services. An ecosystem service assessment valuation composed of 19 criteria is proposed. A global, spatial valuation is calculated by combining empirical data from 23 spatial and nonspatial databases. The global value presented is less than previous studies; however, this study excludes criteria from previous publications and was unable to reliably quantify all criteria. Uncertainty in the input data are described but not quantified. Using five general circulation models and four representative concentration pathways, the Koppen-Geiger climate classification transitions were modeled from 2005 to 2099. The ecosystem service value was evaluated to quantify how much would be in a new climate class. Depending on the representative concentration pathway, between 25-66% of the ecosystem service value will be affected by a climate class change. Uncertainty in the results are presented as a range of values. The second section focuses on using spatial multi-criteria evaluation and error propagation for petroleum exploration. The first part proposes a fuzzy logic multi-criteria evaluation by combining 16 criteria comprised of 26 data sets. The data sets are empirically defined and expert-based. The use of fuzzy logic is meant to mimic the traditional approach by a geologist evaluating the data but provides a framework for consistency, repeatability, and uncertainty evaluation. A case study of northern South America predicts new areas for exploration. Uncertainty is quantified in the second half of the study. After the multi-criteria evaluation is applied, the attribute classification, fuzzy logic memberships, and multi-criteria evaluation calculations are subjected to an error propagation analysis in order to quantify the uncertainty. The error propagation analysis showed that attribute classification using expert-defined uncertainty was the preferred approach over a constant defined uncertainty. Further, attribute classification uncertainty affected the results more than the fuzzy membership uncertainty, which could therefore be omitted; uncertainty related to the multi-criteria evaluation calculations heavily influenced the results and thus require care when selecting. In the concluding remarks, a data and model transparency checklist is provided based on what may be considered appropriate points in a study to quantify or describe the uncertainty in a model.


Damage zones are ubiquitous components of faults that may affect the nucleation, propagation and arrest of earthquake ruptures. Dynamic rupture simulations show that waves trapped in a fault damage zone can induce pulse-like rupture, a mode of earthquake rupture propagation that is a primary candidate for the origin of fault slip complexity and for the apparent weakness of major faults. However, the efficiency of the mechanism revealed in previous studies depends strongly on arbitrarily prescribed initial stresses. Here, we investigate the promotion of pulse-like rupture by damaged fault zones through numerical simulations of multiple earthquake cycles in which the distribution of initial stress before each rupture is a self-consistent result of the earthquake cycle. We consider a fault bisecting a homogeneous low-rigidity layer embedded in an intact medium. Using scaling arguments we show that pulse-like ruptures are expected to appear in a highly compliant fault zone after the rupture has grown larger than the fault zone thickness. We confirm this result by conducting quasi-dynamic earthquake cycle simulations on fault zones with varying degrees of damage and thickness. Over a wide range of fault zone properties, fault-zone effects produce pulse-like ruptures with shorter rise-times and flatter slip profiles than ruptures in an intact homogeneous medium. We also find complex rupture patterns involving back-propagating secondary fronts that emerge from the primary rupture front and propagate in the opposite direction. These complex slip patterns robustly persist over multiple earthquake cycles. While such patterns are challenging to resolve in current seismological observations of large earthquakes, slow-slip numerical models show similar slip complexity, suggesting a connection between a basic structural feature of faults and rapid-tremor-reversals observed during episodic tremor and slip in Cascadia and Japan.


In 2012, Washington State legalized recreational cannabis. The challenge of policing cannabis-related motor vehicle operator impairment emerged as an issue in the wake of legalization. There has been less focus on exploring the topic of boating under the influence (BUI), which is regrettable given the popularity of boating. The National Association of State Boating Law Administrators and the National Safe Boating Council (NASBLA), in concert with the U.S. Coast Guard, have identified cannabis-impaired boating as a major problem and are using resources from the Sports Fish Restoration and Boating Trust Fund to address it. To explore this topic, we conducted 17 semi-structured qualitative interviews with local and state law enforcement marine officers and their supervisors and trainers in Washington, as well as NASBLA-certified BUI trainers. These interviews explored the marine officers' experiences since legalization, as well as their perceptions of marijuana legalization on public safety. Results drawn from the interviews indicate that marine officers are very concerned about the threats to public safety and responsible boating practices arising from cannabis-impaired boating and feel that enhanced training and funding is needed to better detect impairment and enforce BUI laws. Public policy, police training, and best practices implications arising from these interviews are discussed.


The major issue addressed in this thesis is the quality of secondary education in Fiji, investigating the variables which affect school effectiveness. The theoretical and conceptual perceptives on the quality of education are initially examined with a review of the literature, contrasting western perspectives with those specifically related to developing countries. The main empirical part of this thesis is based on a study of eleven secondary schools in Fiji and the Form Four students in these schools. The aim was to investigate what the critical factors are for improving school effectiveness, measured largely in terms of pupil achievement. The thesis concludes that in-school factors are more important than the antecedent variables of the individual children, such as race or socio-economic status. The stability and strength of school management, principalship, combined with the judicious use of resources emerged as the critical factors in school effectiveness. Various policy implications relating to secondary education in Fiji are drawn on the basis of these findings. A historical study of education in Fiji from pre-colonial times to the present focusses on education within its socio-political parameters and tests the hypothesis that socio-economic and political contexts provide the demand for education. The Grant-in-aid system of education was established in 1916 which provided for government and the people to enter into a partnership in the provision of education. This system is studied as it has proved to be both a strength and a major weakness of the Fiji's education system.


This paper evaluates the transmission of the U.S. Subprime Crisis and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis to sixteen emerging markets. A GARCH model is formulated to test for the transmission of shocks and for transmission effects through financial channels. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the Greek debt restructuring are used as breakpoints for these sub-periods. The U.S. stock market has a significant transmission effect on emerging markets at the early stage of the crises and normal time, whether in terms of a contemporaneous day or a one-day lag time. The stock markets in emerging market tried to loosen their ties or reduce the connection with the Dow Jones after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Most emerging markets also attempted to moderate the effects of the crises and loosened their relationship between their local currencies and stock markets. Before the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers, all Asian emerging markets in our samples had already started to show significance to Spanish CDS. It is evident that the U.S. Subprime Crisis and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis had linkage. Finally, the decoupling phenomenon is quite obvious after the Greek debt restructuring.


The starting point of this article is the paradigm shift in cultural policy from the arts to the broader view of the creative industries that has taken place in many countries, in the European Union and in UN agencies. The emphasis on creative industries as a source of economic growth has highlighted the role of creativity and of copyright as an incentive for it. Little is known, however, about the economics of creativity or what economic incentives it responds to and this is a gap in our understanding of cultural supply that requires detailed research. The application of 'crowding' theory to the motivation for creativity forms a basis for that research, as does work in cultural economics on artists' labour markets. Likewise, economists have almost no empirical evidence about copyright as an incentive to creativity generated by individual creators. Research is, however, held back by data problems concerning the measurement of creative industry output and employment and especially of the supply of core creative content, making claims of the impact of copyright difficult to assess. The impetus for the article is to express these concerns and to emphasis the need for empirical research in this area.


In the paper presented, the author considers few aspects of the so-called "digital divide". It is easily noticeable worldwide, that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) "possess" a great ability to spread, at high pace, among countries from all around the world. At the same time, we can see that ICTs are being implemented at different pace in difference economies. Different pace of ICTs implementation generates significant inequalities in level of usage and application of these technologies in different countries. The main purpose of the paper is to assess magnitude of existing digital divides among countries, which can partly explain existing inequalities in use and application of ICTs. The author will apply relevant methodology – taken from basic taxonomy methodology – to measure the digital divides among economies. All countries where necessary data is available and reliable will be included in the study.


Purpose: In airline revenue management, the modeling of the spill and recapture effects is essential for an accurate estimation of the passenger flow and the revenue in a flight network. However, as most current approaches toward spill and recapture involve either non-linearity or a tremendous amount of additional variables, it is computationally intractable to apply those techniques to the classical network design and capacity planning models. Design/methodology: We present a new framework that incorporates the spill and recapture effects, where the spill from an itinerary is recaptured by other itineraries based on their attractiveness. The presented framework distributes the accepted demand of an itinerary according to the currently available itineraries, without adding extra variables for the recaptured spill. Due to its compactness, we integrate the framework with the classical capacity planning and network design models. Findings: Our preliminary computational study shows an increase of 1.07% in profitability anda better utilization of the network capacity, on a medium-size North American airline provided by Sabre Airline Solutions. Originality/value: Our investigation leads to a holistic model that tackles the network design and capacity planning simultaneously with an accurate modeling of the spill and re- capture effects.Furthermore, the presented framework for spill and recapture is versatile and can be easily applied to other disciplines such as the hospitality industry and product line design (PLD) problems.


For several years, merger freezeouts were invariably subject to entire fairness review, a demanding standard of judicial review that enables courts to revise the price of a transaction when the price is challenged by the shareholders of the selling company. But this changed in 2013. In an attempt to incentivize the simultaneous use of independent director approval and majority-of-the-minority conditions, the Delaware Chancery Court held in In re MFW Shareholders Litigation (2013) that when a merger freezeout is subject to those procedural protections, the transaction would subsequently be reviewed under the deferential business judgment rule rather than under entire fairness. This paper examines the impact of MFW on transactional practice and deal outcomes. The results show that majority-of-the-minority conditions increased significantly after the opinion, from an incidence rate below 40% to a rate of more than 80%. Special committees were already the norm before 2013 and their incidence did not change after MFW. The increase in majority-of-the-minority conditions, however, was not followed by significant changes in deal premiums, target returns, changes from the controller's first offer to the final offer, or deal completion rates. The results therefore suggest that deferential judicial review is an effective way to incentivize procedural protections in freezeout transactions and that the increase in shareholder approval conditions did not come at the cost of higher frustration rates. In addition, the results suggest that procedural protections and entire fairness review seem to have a similar effect on the gains of the target shareholders. Taken together, these results present an assessment of MFW in particular and also shed light on the role of shareholder voting in freezeout transactions more generally.


We study the problem of schema revalidation where XML data known to conform to one schema must be validated with respect to another schema. Such revalidation algorithms have applications in schema evolution, query processing, XML-based programming languages, and other domains. We describe how knowledge of conformance to an XML Schema may be used to determine conformance to another XML Schema efficiently. We examine both the situation where an XML document is modified before it is revalidated and the situation where it is unmodified


The formulation of compact schemes in a parallel environment is described in detail for the case of differencing. Compact numerical schemes are spatially implicit methods for obtaining spatial derivatives and partial integrations, interpolating from one grid to its staggered counterpart, and so on, where the target results occupy a regular grid as dense as the regular grid of source data. Among the numerical schemes to perform such operations at a given formal order of accuracy, the compact forms usually yield the smallest principal truncation error coefficients and, when properly coded for a shared-memory machine, require essentially minimal extra computational cost. However, the inherently recursive nature of the application of compact schemes poses a problem for their efficient implementation on distributed-memory machines, which we set out to address in this note. Generally, a compact scheme is expressed for an entire line of data simultaneously by a linear system characterized by banded matrices on both sides of the equation. The solution involves a preliminary "L-D-U" decomposition of the system matrix on the left-hand side of the equation, where L and U are lower and upper triangular banded matrices with unit main diagonals, D is a diagonal matrix. For the common case in which the original system matrix is symmetric, factors L and U are the transposes of each other and the decomposition is a modified Cholesky factorization. The components of the resulting factors provide the coefficients for a pair of one-sided recursions required by the subsequent application of the scheme to lines of data. For unbounded (effectively infinite or cyclic) lines of data on a uniform grid, the recursions simplify to the extent of having constant coefficients and it is convenient to retain this simplicity, by appropriate manipulations of the scheme's end conditions, even when finite boundaries intrude. We show, using three different implementation strategies, that each such constant-coefficient recursion can then be carried out in a reasonably efficient manner across several processors of a distributed-memory computer although the cost now becomes significantly greater than the cost of applying the conventional difference scheme of the corresponding order of accuracy. Nevertheless, the compact schemes remain viable within a massively parallel atmospheric model where high-order numerics are desired. Spatial filters with recursive components, such as the various Butterworth filters, involve similar numerical considerations and, as we show, may be handled in a parallel computing environment in the same way.


Current Virtual Reality systems typically use cameras to capture user input from controllers or free-hand mid-air interaction. In this paper, we argue that this is a key impediment to productivity scenarios in VR, which require continued interaction over prolonged periods of time-a requirement that controller or free-hand input in mid-air does not satisfy. To address this challenge, we bring rapid touch interaction on surfaces to Virtual Reality-the input modality that users have grown used to on phones and tablets for continued use. We present TapID, a wrist-based inertial sensing system that complements headset-tracked hand poses to trigger input in VR. TapID embeds a pair of inertial sensors in a flexible strap, one at either side of the wrist; from the combination of registered signals, TapID reliably detects surface touch events and, more importantly, identifies the finger used for touch. We evaluated TapID in a series of user studies on event-detection accuracy (F1 = 0.997) and hand-agnostic finger-identification accuracy (within-user: F1 = 0.93; across users: F1 = 0.91 after 10 refinement taps and F1 = 0.87 without refinement) in a seated table scenario. We conclude with a series of applications that complement hand tracking with touch input and that are uniquely enabled by TapID, including UI control, rapid keyboard typing and piano playing, as well as surface gestures.


I. INTRODUCTION A lawsuit may not be certified as a class action unless the named plaintiff shows that the central facts of the case will be proved on a class-wide basis.1 The named plaintiff often attempts to meet this burden through an expert witness, who opines that the case's material facts, which would seem to require individualized inquiries from each class member, can instead be proved through a common formula on behalf of the entire class. The defendant invariably responds with his own expert, who opines that the plaintiffs expert has oversimplified the matter and that the facts at issue cannot be proved without individualized inquiries from the class members. Two important questions arise regarding the district court's use of expert opinion testimony at the class certification stage. First, how closely should the district court scrutinize an expert's opinion? In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the Supreme Court emphasized that courts must look beneath the surface of expert opinions, closely examine the expert's methodologies, and exclude testimony that is irrelevant or unreliable.2 But the Supreme Court has never addressed whether the district court must subject expert testimony to Daubert's strictures at the certification stage. Second, assuming both parties' experts pass muster under Daubert, should the district court resolve fact disputes between the opposing experts where class certification would be appropriate under one set of facts but not another? At first blush, the Supreme Court's statements regarding how deeply the district court should delve into the factual underpinnings of the parties' claims and defenses seem to conflict. In an early case, Eisen v. Carlisle & Jacquelin, the Court stated that the district court may not conduct a "preliminary inquiry into the merits" in deciding whether to certify the class.3 A few years later, the Court reversed course, requiring district courts to undertake a "rigorous analysis" of the facts offered at the class certification stage, "probfing] behind the pleadings" to discern whether the case could be effectively adjudicated as a class.4 These rather vague standards do not specifically address how the district court should assess competing expert testimony at the class certification stage, and the Court has never focused on me issue. In the absence of clear guidance, the federal circuit courts have adopted three different approaches to class certification where the parties present expert evidence. The first approach leans heavily on Eisen's objection to "merits" inquiries.5 Courts that follow this approach refuse to subject a plaintiffs expert to a full Daubert inquiry at the class certification stage, instead conducting only a "limited" review to ensure that the expert's opinions are not "inadmissible as a matter of law."6 These courts certify the proposed class so long as the plaintiffs evidence survives this low level of scrutiny, and will not assess counterproof offered by the defendant in opposition to class certification. The second approach requires a Daubert analysis when the plaintiff offers expert testimony in support of class certification, but refuses to assess competing evidence offered by the defendant.7 This approach leaves class certification virtually automatic so long as the plaintiffs expert passes Daubert' s requirements. Finally, the third approach recognizes that Daubert and Rule 23 have wholly different requirements and serve wholly different purposes.8 The Daubert analysis merely determines whether expert testimony is sufficiently relevant and reliable to be admitted into evidence. Rule 23's requirements, on the other hand, ensure that class treatment is fair to the defendant and the absent class members alike. This approach permits an examination of the full range of evidence presented in support of and opposition to class certification. The district court makes whatever factual and legal inquiries are necessary to determine whether common issues will predominate and whether class treatment is superior to other available methods for resolving the dispute. …


In this paper we present a set of techniques for fast and efficient rendering of segmented data. Our approach utilizes the expected difference between two co-located texture lookups of a label volume, taken with different interpolation filters, as a feature boundary indicator. This allows us to achieve smooth class boundaries without needing to explicitly sample all eight neighbors in the label volume as is the case with previous methods. We also present a data encoding scheme that greatly simplifies transfer function construction.


Objective: Angiogenin (ANG) is upregulated in a variety of cancers including those of prostate, cervix, pancreas, liver, oral cavity, skin, and etc., however, the role of ANG in gastric cancer has not been fully elucidated yet. We use tissue microarray (TMA) to examine ANG expression to investigate the role of ANG in the progression of gastric cancer. Method: Immunohistochemistry was used to evaluate ANG expression in TMA with 208 spots from 104 patients diagnosed with gastric cancer and the corresponding adjacent tissue. Results: In normal adjacent tissue, ANG was expressed mainly in cytoplasm at basal gland of the gastric mucus where gastric stem cells are reserved, and also sparsely expressed in the nucleus of gastric mucosal gland cells at isthmus where gastric stem cells are gathered. In cancer tissues, ANG was very sparsely expressed in the nucleus of gastric glandular cells. ANG expression in the cytoplasm was found to be significantly associated with pathological types (p<0.001) and malignancy (p<0.001). ANG expression in the nucleus was inversely correlated with malignancy (p=0.019), differentiation status (p< 0.001), and tumor stage (p= 0.048).Conclusion: ANG might play an important role in gastric cancer development.


In part 1 of this work we discussed the possibilities for the selection of a GSSP for the Berriasian Stage of the Cretaceous System, based on prevailing practical methods for correlation in that J/K interval, traditional usage and the consensus over the best boundary markers that had developed in the last forty years. This consensus has developed further, based on the results of multidisciplinary studies on numerous sites over the last decade. Here in Part 2 we give an account of the application of those results by the Berriasian Working Group (ISCS), and present the stratigraphic evidence that justifies the selection of the locality of Tre Maroua (Hautes-Alpes, SE France) as the proposed GSSP. We describe a 45 m-thick section in the Calcaires Blancs vocontiens – that part of the formation covering the calpionellid Chitinoidella, Remanei. Intermedia, Colomi, Alpina, Ferasini, Elliptica and Simplex biozones. The stratigraphic data collected here has been compiled as part of a wider comparative study of complementary Vocontian Basin sites (with localities at Charens, St Bertrand, Belvedere and Le Chouet). Evidence from Tre Maroua thus sits in this substantial regional biostratigraphic and magnetostratigraphic context. For the purposes of the GSSP definition, here we particularly concentrate on the unbroken sequence and biotic markers in the interval immediately below the boundary, the Colomi Subzone (covering circa 675,000 years), and immediately above, the Alpina Subzone (covering circa 725,000 years). Particularly significant fossil datums identified in the Tre Maroua profile are the primary basal Berriasian marker, the base of the Alpina Subzone (a widespread event marked by dominance of small Calpionella alpina, with rare Crassicollaria parvula and Tintinopsella carpathica): the base of the Berriasian Stage is placed at the base of bed 14, which coincides with the base of the Alpina Subzone. Secondary markers bracketing the base of the Calpionella Zone are the FOs of the calcareous nannofossil species Nannoconus wintereri, close below the boundary, and the FO of Nannoconus steinmannii minor, close above. The Tithonian/Berriasian boundary level occurs within M19n.2n, in common with many documented sites, and is just below the distinctive reversed magnetic subzone M19n.1r (the so-called Brodno reversal). We present data which is congruent with magnetostratigraphic and biostratigraphic data from other key localities in France and in wider regions (Le Chouet, Saint Bertrand, Puerto Escano, Rio Argos, Bosso, Brodno, Kurovice, Theodosia…), and thus the characteristics and datums identified at Tre Maroua are key for correlation and, in general, they typify the J/K boundary interval in Tethys and connected seas.


This document defines a Mobile IPv4 Registration Revocation mechanism whereby a mobility agent involved in providing Mobile IP services to a mobile node can notify the other mobility agent providing Mobile IP services to the same mobile node of the termination of this registration. The mechanism is also usable by a home agent to notify a co-located mobile node of the termination of its binding as well. Moreover, the mechanism provides for this notification to be acknowledged. A signaling mechanism already defined by the Mobile IPv4 protocol is leveraged as a way to inform a mobile node of the revocation of its binding.