To better utilize the capacity of the twisted-pair access networks, operators deploying very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) systems need accurate parameters for power back-off (PBO). However, VDSL standards give almost no guidance on how these parameters should be established for a particular network. In this paper we present a new technique for optimizing PBO parameters for a cable bundle, which is based on the Nelder-Mead simplex search algorithm. In this way each operator can easily calculate PBO parameters that match its actual access network down to the individual cable bundle. Using the properties of the PBO, as defined in the VDSL standard, we show how a normalized FEXT coupling can replace the knowledge of the individual couplings during the optimization of the PBO parameters. By simulations based on measured cable data we show that our approach using cable bundle unique PBO (CUPBO) achieves a significant improvements compared to the performance achieved with the ordinary PBO.


Is it possible to effectively address complex problems when there are multiple and often conflicting interests, as well as multiple interacting causalities, within a constantly changing and complex environment? The analysis of such problems often results in an endless list of often contradictory factors and provides a picture with no linear causality and no overall coherent meaning, too random to help explain the complex interactions that led to the problem. Understanding not only the characteristics of organisations with their multiple interacting issues and causalities, but their co-evolutionary dynamics is the key here. This chapter provides detailed advice on how to use the complexity perspective in real life examples showing how the two parts of the EMK methodology were used in a challenging context. The first part was the identification of the multi-dimensional problem space and the co-evolutionary dynamics between the multiple dimensions, which provided a starting point for decision-making. The second part acknowledged that complex problems do not have single solutions, but need a broader enabling environment, capable of addressing the challenge over time as it changes and evolves.


The Web of the future will provide a huge amount of information. We need better ways for dealing with and managing the information. A qualified semantic annotation of the information plays a key role for the Web of the future. This article gives an overview about the efforts of the mathematical community to build up a distributed and open information and communication system for mathematics: the Math-Net. The Math-Net Initiative has developed metadata schemas for some classes of Web resources which are relevant in mathematics. Math-Net Services process this information and enable the user to efficiently search and access the information.


Contract is, of course, often good. It permits parties to negotiate terms that are specific to their needs, something statutes can't do. But contract is often evil and used for evil ends, particularly because much of contract theory and doctrine is unconcerned with the distribution of power; information and shrewdness between the parties and is based, in part, on a romantic view of contract, emphasizing its basis in free will and liberty. This almost deification of Contract blinds those who follow it to the very absence of free will and liberty when the ability to deal in contract is unbalanced. The current dialogue about contracts of adhesion and the question whether they should even be considered contracts requires us to take a new look at contract. The use of contract to limit constitutional and other rights based on a notion of voluntary waiver raises serious issues about whether we should be skeptical about the assumed good of contract. We need contracts, but we need also to rethink what we mean by contract and whether the formalistic conservative libertarian approach to it needs to be reined in.This Article looks at Margaret Jane Radin's argument that adhesion contracts are not really contracts and should be treated more through tort law, and looks briefly at the progression of product liability from contract to tort to strict liability. The Article also consider whether the model of agency regulation should be applied when traditional contract reasoning is overwhelmed by the actual facts of a supposed bargain. The Article then examines judicial approval through contract reasoning of unfair or even dishonest conduct in a number of quite different contexts. Sometimes the good guys win, but too often they don't because contract is said to beat them.Contract often aids evil. Government regulation — thoughtful but serious regulation by Congress, legislatures, administrative agencies and courts — is not antithetical to freedom of contract. It is needed to protect those who lack power and skill and consequently, the very free will and liberty that are supposedly the basis of contract.


Chameleon gravity is a scalar-tensor theory that includes a nonminimal coupling between the scalar field and the matter fields and yet mimics general relativity in the Solar System. The scalar degree of freedom is hidden in high-density environments because the effective mass of the chameleon scalar depends on the trace of the stress-energy tensor. In the early Universe, when the trace of the matter stress-energy tensor is nearly zero, the chameleon is very light, and Hubble friction prevents it from reaching the minimum of its effective potential. Whenever a particle species becomes nonrelativistic, however, the trace of the stress-energy tensor is temporarily nonzero, and the chameleon begins to roll. We show that these "kicks" to the chameleon field have catastrophic consequences for chameleon gravity. The velocity imparted to the chameleon by the kick is sufficiently large that the chameleon's mass changes rapidly as it slides past its potential minimum. This nonadiabatic evolution shatters the chameleon field by generating extremely high-energy perturbations through quantum particle production. If the chameleon's coupling to matter is slightly stronger than gravitational, the excited modes have trans-Planckian momenta. The production of modes with momenta exceeding 107 GeV can only be avoided for small couplings and finely tuned initial conditions. These quantum effects also significantly alter the background evolution of the chameleon field, and we develop new analytic and numerical techniques to treat quantum particle production in the regime of strong dissipation. This analysis demonstrates that chameleon gravity cannot be treated as a classical field theory at the time of big bang nucleosynthesis and casts doubt on chameleon gravity's viability as an alternative to general relativity.


ATPase associated with various cellular activities (AAA) proteins are important regulators involved in diverse cellular functions. To date, the molecular mechanisms of AAA proteins involved in response to salt and drought stresses in plants are largely unknown. In this study, a putative SKD1 (suppressor of K + transport growth defect 1) ortholog from Zea mays (ZmSKD1), which encodes a putative AAA protein, was isolated. The transcript levels of ZmSKD1 were higher in aerial tissues and were markedly up-regulated by salt or drought stress. Over-expression of ZmSKD1 in tobacco plants enhanced their tolerances not only to salt but to drought. Moreover, reactive oxygen species accumulations in ZmSKD1 transgenic lines were relative less than those in wild-type plants during salt or PEG-induced water stress. The interaction between ZmSKD1 and NtLIP5 (Lyst-Interacting Protein 5 homolog from Nicotiana tabacum) was confirmed by both yeast two-hybrid and immuno-precipitation assays; moreover, the α-helix-rich domain in the C-terminus of ZmSKD1 was identified to be required for its interaction with NtLIP5 using truncation mutations. Collectively, these data demonstrate that ZmSKD1could be involved in salt and drought stress responses and its over-expression enhances salt or drought stress tolerance possibly through interacting with LIP5 in tobacco. This study may facilitate our understandings of the biological roles of SKD1-mediated ESCRT pathway under stress conditions in higher plants and accelerate genetic improvement of crop plants tolerant to environmental stresses.


We describe a method for computing a pair of spike detection thresholds, called 'truncation thresholds', using truncated probability distributions, for extracellular recordings. In existing methods the threshold is usually set to a multiple of an estimate of the standard deviation of the noise in the recording, with the multiplication factor being chosen between 3 and 5 according to the researcher's preferences. Our method has the following advantages over these methods. First, because the standard deviation is usually estimated from the entire recording, which includes the spikes, it increases with firing rate. By contrast, truncation thresholds decrease in absolute value with increasing firing rate, thereby capturing more of the signal. Second, the parameters of the selected noise distribution are estimated more accurately by maximum likelihood fitting of the truncated distribution to the data delimited by the truncation thresholds. Third, the computation of the truncation thresholds is completely data-driven. It does not involve a userdefined multiplication factor. Fourth, methods that use a threshold that is proportional to the estimated standard deviation of the noise assume that the noise distribution is symmetrical around the mean. By contrast, truncation thresholds are not linked to each other by an assumption of symmetry about some axis. Fifth, existing methods do not verify that subthreshold data obey a noise distribution. Truncation thresholds, however, are defined by the fact that the distribution of the data they delimit is statistically indistinguishable, according to the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, from a selected distribution, truncated at those thresholds. Application of the method is illustrated using recordings from cortical area M1 in awake behaving rats, as well as in simulated recordings. Source code and executables of a software suite that computes the truncation thresholds are provided for the case when the noise distribution is modeled as truncated normal.


This article presents a new dimensionally-reduced linear image space that allows a number of recent image manipulation techniques to be performed efficiently and robustly. The basis vectors spanning this space are constructed from a scale-adaptive image decomposition, based on kernels of the bilateral filter. Each of these vectors locally binds together pixels in smooth regions and leaves pixels across edges independent. Despite the drastic reduction in the number of degrees of freedom, this representation can be used to perform a number of recent gradient-based tonemapping techniques. In addition to reducing computation time, this space can prevent the bleeding artifacts which are common to Poisson-based integration methods. In addition, we show that this reduced representation is useful for energy-minimization methods in achieving efficient processing and providing better matrix conditioning at a minimal quality sacrifice.


Author(s): Porterfield, V. | Abstract: gher levels of civic and community engagement in higher education are positively associated with students' academic performance and they also build upon citizenship skills such as informed voting. Yet, while these are worthy and important outcomes of higher education, students from disadvantaged backgrounds can have more difficulty navigating civic engagement. Focusing on students at thirteen major public universities in the United States, and utilizing survey data generated by the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, this study suggest social perspective-taking has a significant positive effect on all students' probability of voting and participating in community service. Students who were asked to identify challenge/solutions to social problems and reflect/act on community issues in the classroom were also more likely to participate in community service. Additionally, Hispanic students and students from lower-income households are significantly less likely to vote and perform community service—findings corroborated by previous research. Females are more likely to vote and participate in community service—findings also corroborated by prior research. Hispanic students and students from low-income backgrounds were more likely to participate in voting and community service if they had increased rates of social perspective-taking. These results suggest that increased opportunities to connect with classmates in the classroom and develop perspective-taking skills (e.g. appreciating the world from someone else's perspective, acknowledging personal differences, interacting with someone with views that are different from your own, and discussing and navigating controversial issues) are potentially quite powerful ways to foster civic engagement among students who traditionally have the lowest civic engagement rates compared to their peers.


The effect of sheep red blood cells (SRBC), live Escherichia coli cells administration and interleukin-6 (IL-6) treatment on steroidogenesis in murine lymphoid organs with concomitant changes in serum IL-6 levels were studied in the male Swiss albino mice. From the lymphoid tissue homogenate, the activities of 3betaHSD, 17betaHSD, corticosterone, testosterone and IL-6 levels of serum were estimated. The 3betaHSD activity in murine lymphoid organs, as well as the IL-6 levels in serum increased after administration of SRBC and live E. coli cells, as compared to control. Whereas the 17betaHSD activity was decreased in the murine lymphoid organs with a concomitant reduced serum testosterone level was found after particulate antigen administration or IL-6 treatment. The serum corticosterone and serum IL-6 level were also elevated.


The early growth response gene-1 (Egr-1) is a transcription factor that plays an important role in cell growth and differentiation. It has been known that Egr-1 expression is down-regulated in many types of tumor tissues, including human fibrosarcoma HT1080 cells, and introduction of the Egr-1gene into HT1080 cells inhibits cell growth and tumorigenic potential. Trifluoperazine (TFP), a phenothiazine class calmodulin antagonist, is known to inhibit DNA synthesis and cell proliferation and potentially important in antitumor activities. To understand the regulatory mechanism of Egr-1, we investigated the effect of TFP on expression of Egr-1 in HT1080 cells. Herein, we report thatEgr-1 expression was increased by TFP in synergy with serum at the transcriptional level. Both the Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II inhibitor KN62 and the calcineurin inhibitor cyclosporin A enhanced TFP-dependent increase of Egr-1, suggesting that the Ca2+/calmodulindependent pathway plays a role in regulation of Egr-1 expression in HT1080 cells. The TFP-stimulated increase of the Egr-1 protein was preferentially inhibited by the MEK-specific inhibitor PD98059. In addition, activation of human Egr-1 promoter and the transcriptional activation of the ternary complex factor Elk-1 induced by TFP were inhibited both by pretreatment of PD98059 and by expression of the dominant-negative RasN17. These results indicate that the Ras/MEK/Erk/Elk-1 pathway is necessary for TFP-inducedEgr-1 expression. We propose that the calmodulin antagonist TFP stimulates Egr-1 gene expression by modulating Ras/MEK/Erk and activation of the Elk-1 pathway in human fibrosarcoma HT1080 cells.


Is your Web site in violation of copyright laws? Do you know how you can keep others from copying your creative products? What effect has the rapid proliferation of communications--from the Internet to ipods--had on copyright law? In this step-by-step book and companion CD-ROM Francine Ward answers all the important questions--from the time limits of copyrights to the rights and limitations of a copyright holder. The CD-ROM includes pointers for filling out U.S. Government forms. Business owners, authors, HR professionals, and everyone who produces creative material for any medium will find this box set helpful.


This Article outlines the current questions surrounding the admissibility of hearsay forensic results (including lab reports, autopsies, and certifications), and thoroughly documents the extensive development of quarreling factions among state and federal courts of last resort in answering these questions. Further, the Article considers the constitutionality and desirability of state notice-and-demand statutes, which work to obtain a waiver of the defendant's Confrontation Clause rights where the methodology and substantive accuracy of the forensic report's contents are not in dispute. The Article proposes a two-part comprehensive resolution that respects both defendants' constitutional rights and the practical constraints on the State's ability to regularly present its experts for cross-examination. Simply put, this solution would recognize the majority of forensic hearsay documents as testimonial (and thus trigger defendants' Confrontation rights), but would temper the practical consequences through waiver statutes, carefully constructed to avoid unduly burdening defendants' exercise of their constitutional rights. 1. INTRODUCTION The traditional paradigm of evidence law has long struggled to accommodate the State's use of hearsay evidence while recognizing the extent to which any such concession may undercut rights stemming from the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment. Under the ambit of both federal and state law, prosecutors have routinely succeeded in admitting a wide range of hearsay forensic evidence, including the results of blood tests, compound analyses, and autopsies, all without ever calling to the stand the doctors or lab technicians who conducted those tests. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Crawford v. Washington, (1) holding that the admission of "testimonial" hearsay evidence violates the Confrontation Clause, dramatically upset that evidentiary landscape. Varying interpretations of "testimonial" by courts have led to an unacceptable incongruity in the administration of federal constitutional law: In some states, prosecutors may admit the aforementioned test results in the declarant's absence; in others, defendants have gained a forceful weapon with which to challenge the State's evidence. Part II of this article recites the pre-Crawford framework for admission of hearsay forensic results, details the Crawford decision and the impetus behind it, and examines the Court's sole post-Crawford disquisition on the meaning of "testimonial." Part III outlines the current questions surrounding the admissibility of varied hearsay forensic results. Such points of dispute include the relevance of the declarant's knowledge that test results might or will be used in a future criminal prosecution; the applicability of the business records and public records hearsay exceptions; the role of public policy and "trustworthiness" of forensic test results in these debates; and ultimately, the differences in "testimonial" quality, if any, of such varied forensic tests as lab reports, autopsy reports, and Breathalyzer certifications. Also, this part documents the development of quarreling factions among state and federal courts of last resort, as well as among legal scholars, in answering these questions. Part IV considers the constitutionality and desirability of state notice-and-demand statutes, which generally work to obtain a waiver (phrased more aggressively, forfeiture) of defendants' Confrontation Clause rights in cases where the methodology and substantive accuracy of the forensic report's contents, as well as the credibility of the absent expert, are not in apparent dispute. Finally, Part V proposes a two-part comprehensive solution that respects both defendants' constitutional rights and the practical constraints on the State's ability to regularly present its experts for cross-examination. II. BACKGROUND A. THE PRE-CRAWFORD HEARSAY FRAMEWORK Legal scholars have long debated the interplay between the "evidentiary hearsay rule" (2) and the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause, (3) with most recognizing not only that the two share an underlying concern about the reliability of out-of-court statements, but also that the former is informed and mandated at least to some extent by the latter. …


Limonium gueneri Dogan, Duman & Akaydın sp. nova (Plumbaginaceae) is described and illustrated from Patara (C2 Antalya, Turkey), where it grows on calcareous slopes on the coast. It is probably closely related to L. ocymifolium (Poir.) Kuntze, an East Mediterranean species. The diagnostic morphological characters are discussed. A taxonomic key for the coastline species of Turkish Limonium without sterile branches is also presented along with some notes on the ecology and biogeography of the new species.


The design, implementation and characterization of a Doherty Power Amplifier (DPA) for 3.5 GHz WiMAX applications are discussed. The DPA has been implemented using a commercial GaN HEMT from Cree inc., following a class AB and C scheme for the main and peak module, respectively. The measured maximum power of the DPA is 22W with a first peak efficiency of 57%, and maximum drain efficiency of 65% at the DPA saturation. Efficiency over the so-called Doherty region (where both the main and the peak amplifiers operate) does not drop below 55% from saturation to 6 dB input back-off. The gain at the onset of the Doherty region is 8 dB, with around 1 dB roll-off.


Public art invariably involves the drawing of individuals into the roles of audience and participant by virtue of it being in the public domain – in public places where those individuals are getting on with their everyday lives. As such, a large proportion of the 'audience' is an unwitting one, subjected to the art rather than subscribing to it. This is equally true of public sound art, where response to an intervention may vary from engagement to non-engagement to indifference to unawareness, along with a variety of transitional states between. This essay seeks to investigate this ambiguous territory in public sound art, proposing it both as an area rich in possibility for creative exploration and as a means by which artists may reveal and encourage sensitivity to the existing characteristics of a site (thus accommodating the pursuit of agendas relating to acoustic ecology). In particular it investigates and presents a case for the use of lowercase strategies in sound art as ways in which the public might be invited into a dialogue with works (invitation rather than imposition) and thus empowered as partakers of public sound art.


Through a survey-based study of 761 franchisees from four countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Spain – this research examines how a franchisee's entrepreneurial personality traits affects the financial and relational performance of franchise units. While there is consensus that franchisee characteristics are important for successful franchise networks, there is a long-standing debate within the franchise literature as to the status, and indeed desirability, of franchisees as entrepreneurs. First, we consider how the personality traits of proactivity, innovativeness and locus of control influence the manifestation of entrepreneurial behaviours within the franchise unit, and both the direct and indirect relationships with unit performance. Second, we explore these relationships in two contexts, one associated with high entrepreneurial values (the United States and the United Kingdom) and another with low entrepreneurial values (France and Spain) to determine if the results are consistent across cultures which value entrepreneurship differently. The results suggest that franchisee performance, in terms of both financial performance and relationship quality, are indirectly enhanced by a proactive disposition, mediated by entrepreneurial behaviours. A direct positive relationship was found between locus of control and performance outcomes, but interestingly, franchisees with more innovative personalities performed less well financially. The relationships between franchisee personality, entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and performance were found to be largely consistent across the two cultural groups.


The rise of international criminal law has been one of the remarkable features of international law since 1990. One of the less-explored questions of international criminal law is its social effects, within the international community and the community of public international law, in other parts and activities of international law. In particular, what are the effects of the rise of international criminal law and its emerging system of tribunals on the rest of the laws of armed conflict? What are the effects upon apparently unrelated aspects of humanitarian and human rights law? What are the effects upon other large systems and institutions of public international law, such as the UN and other international organizations? As international criminal law has emerged as a visible face of public international law, has it supplanted or even 'crowded' other aspects and institutions of public international law? This brief article offers a high-altitude, high-speed look at the effects of international criminal law on other parts of public international law and organizations.


Background Inherited mutations in DNA mismatch repair genes predispose to different cancer syndromes depending on whether they are mono-allelic or bi-allelic. This supports a causal relationship between expression level in the germline and phenotype variation. As a model to study this relationship, our study aimed to define the pathogenic characteristics of a recurrent homozygous coding variant in PMS2 displaying an attenuated phenotype identified by clinical genetic testing in seven Inuit families from Northern Quebec. Methods Pathogenic characteristics of the PMS2 mutation NM_000535.5:c.2002A>G were studied using genotype–phenotype correlation, single-molecule expression detection and single genome microsatellite instability analysis. Results This PMS2 mutation generates a de novo splice site that competes with the authentic site. In homozygotes, expression of the full-length protein is reduced to a level barely detectable by conventional diagnostics. Median age at primary cancer diagnosis is 22 years among 13 NM_000535.5:c.2002A>G homozygotes, versus 8 years in individuals carrying bi-allelic truncating mutations. Residual expression of full-length PMS2 transcript was detected in normal tissues from homozygotes with cancers in their 20s. Conclusions Our genotype–phenotype study of c.2002A>G illustrates that an extremely low level of PMS2 expression likely delays cancer onset, a feature that could be exploited in cancer preventive intervention.


Resource plays such as Coalbed Methane (also called Coal Seam Gas) fields typically exhibit a number of unique characteristics that set them apart to other hydrocarbon accumulations. We will argue in this paper that as consequence, conducting effective field development planning studies for CBM resources requires adopting a markedly different approach to the ones typically followed with conventional oil and gas fields. In contrast to traditional offshore plays, replete with a rich literature of best practices and adequate tools, coalbed methane field development planning typically involves very large areas and number of wells, hence a correlative abundance of (static and dynamic) data, but also displays an often surprising variability between neighbouring wells. This variability is the consequence of a high degree of heterogeneity present at a small (1's-10's metres) to medium (10's-100's meters) scale, notably for permeability, but also isothermal properties, gas content, and even net coal distribution and seam geometry for some plays. This paper offers insights on integrated development planning methods, uncertainty management techniques and modelling workflows, accumulated through the experience of a number of CBM plays. Expected relationships and possible crossparameter models for the key reservoir properties are discussed. The development of practical tools to characterise the reservoir properties, as well as the performance of different well and completion configurations, simulation, field development planning, all the way to ultimately assessing the economic potential of the play are also illustrated.


Infections Against Infection In the same way that infection with the bacteria Wolbachia spp. can make Aedes mosquitoes resistant to dengue virus, there have been hints that these bacteria can interfere with the reproduction of malaria parasites. Bian et al. (p. 748) established a heritable Wolbachia infection in anopheline mosquitoes, which simultaneously suppressed the reproduction of malaria parasites within the adult female mosquitoes. The results hold promise for developing the model into a biocontrol agent to assist malaria control. Stable inheritance of a symbiotic bacterium suppresses malaria parasites in mosquitoes. Wolbachia is a maternally transmitted symbiotic bacterium of insects that has been proposed as a potential agent for the control of insect-transmitted diseases. One of the major limitations preventing the development of Wolbachia for malaria control has been the inability to establish inherited infections of Wolbachia in anopheline mosquitoes. Here, we report the establishment of a stable Wolbachia infection in an important malaria vector, Anopheles stephensi. In A. stephensi, Wolbachia strain wAlbB displays both perfect maternal transmission and the ability to induce high levels of cytoplasmic incompatibility. Seeding of naturally uninfected A. stephensi populations with infected females repeatedly resulted in Wolbachia invasion of laboratory mosquito populations. Furthermore, wAlbB conferred resistance in the mosquito to the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.


In this paper, we present an ontology-based approach for the improvement of searching in an information portal. The approach is based on incremental refinement of user's queries, according to the ambiguity of a query's interpretation. The so-called Librarian Agent plays the role of the human librarian in the traditional library - it uses information, about the domain vocabulary, the capacity of the knowledge repository and the behaviour of previous users in order to help users find the resources they are interested in. Moreover, the agent analyses the users' requests off-line and compares the users' interests with the capacity of the information repository, in order to find which new topics should be introduced or which topics users are no more interested in. We partially im plemented the approach in the Web Portal of our Institute and some initial evaluation results are shown.


Learning the common structure shared by a set of supervised tasks is an important practical and theoretical problem. Knowledge of this structure may lead to better generalization performance on the tasks and may also facilitate learning new tasks. We propose a framework for solving this problem, which is based on regularization with spectral functions of matrices. This class of regularization problems exhibits appealing computational properties and can be optimized efficiently by an alternating minimization algorithm. In addition, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for convexity of the regularizer. We analyze concrete examples of the framework, which are equivalent to regularization with Lp matrix norms. Experiments on two real data sets indicate that the algorithm scales well with the number of tasks and improves on state of the art statistical performance.


Model extraction attacks attempt to replicate a target machine learning model by querying its inference API. State-of-the-art attacks are learningbased and construct replicas by supervised training on the target model's predictions, but an emerging class of attacks exploit algebraic properties to obtain high-fidelity replicas using orders of magnitude fewer queries. So far, these algebraic attacks have been limited to neural networks with few hidden layers and ReLU activations. In this paper we present algebraic and hybrid algebraic/learning-based attacks on large-scale natural language models. We consider a greybox setting, targeting models with a pre-trained (public) encoder followed by a single (private) classification layer. Our key findings are that (i) with a frozen encoder, high-fidelity extraction is possible with a small number of in-distribution queries, making extraction attacks indistinguishable from legitimate use; (ii) when the encoder is fine-tuned, a hybrid learning-based/algebraic attack improves over the learning-based state-ofthe-art without requiring additional queries.


In this work we present a novel approach to solving concurrent multiagent planning problems in which several agents act in parallel. Our approach relies on a compilation from concurrent multiagent planning to classical planning, allowing us to use an off-the-shelf classical planner to solve the original multiagent problem. The solution can be directly interpreted as a concurrent plan that satisfies a given set of concurrency constraints, while avoiding the exponential blowup associated with concurrent actions. Our planner is the first to handle action effects that are conditional on what other agents are doing. Theoretically, we show that the compilation is sound and complete. Empirically, we show that our compilation can solve challenging multiagent planning problems that require concurrent actions.


Purpose

This study aims to conceptualise and empirically examine how blog users engage with the sponsored posts on consumer-generated content, specifically blogs.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper empirically tested the proposed hypotheses using the structural equation modelling using a sample of 399 blog users.

Findings

The need for cognition, perceived interactivity and perceived credibility of blogs has been found to directly influence consumers' attitude towards blogs. Innovativeness has been found to have a weak negative link with the attitude towards blogs. Blog users were more favourable towards the sponsored posts if the blogs were more interactive. Attitude towards blogs has been found to mediate the relationship between users' perceived interactivity and their avoidance of the sponsored posts and also between perceived credibility and avoidance of the sponsored posts on blogs. The most significant finding of this study is that the positive attitude towards a blog results in a higher avoidance of the sponsored posts.

Research limitations/implications

This study focuses on the sponsored posts on blogs. It does not look at other forms of advertising on blogs such as banner ads, or other forms of consumer-generated content.

Practical implications

Marketers and bloggers should carefully consider the suitability of the sponsored posts on blogs as they risk alienating the regular users of the blogs. Sponsored posts which are perceived as honest reviews (as opposed to paid advertorials) might be more acceptable to blog users.

Social implications

This study highlights the importance of credibility of bloggers to blog users. There are some serious ethical issues related to the sponsored posts which have not been discussed here but need to be examined further.

Originality/value

This study represents one of the first attempts to conceptualise and empirically examine how blog users engage with customer-generated advertising – sponsored posts. It contributes to marketing literature by enhancing the understanding of how consumers perceive consumer-generated content and more specifically, with regard to consumer attitudes towards online consumer-generated advertising. This study enhances the theoretical and empirical knowledge on how consumers react to advertisements on social media, with important suggestions for future research and implications for practitioners.


Many component-based systems are deployed in diverse environments, each with different components and with different component versions. To ensure the system builds correctly for all deployable combinations (or, configurations), developers often perform compatibility testing by building their systems on various configurations. However, due to the large number of possible configurations, testing all configurations is often infeasible, and in practice, only a handful of popular configurations are tested; as a result, errors can escape to the field. This problem is compounded when components evolve over time and when test resources are limited.
To address these problems, in this dissertation I introduce a process, algorithms and a tool called Rachet. First, I describe a formal modeling scheme for capturing the system configuration space, and a sampling criterion that determines the portion of the space to test. I describe an algorithm to sample configurations satisfying the sampling criterion and methods to test the sampled configurations.
Second, I present an approach that incrementally tests compatibility between components, so as to accommodate component evolution. I describe methods to compute test obligations, and algorithms to produce configurations that test the obligations, attempting to reuse test artifacts.
Third, I present an approach that prioritizes and tests configurations based on developers' preferences. Configurations are tested, by default starting from the most preferred one as requested by a developer, but cost-related factors are also considered to reduce overall testing time.
The testing approaches presented are applied to two large-scale systems in the high-performance computing domain, and experimental results show that the approaches can (1) identify compatibility between components effectively and efficiently, (2) make the process of compatibility testing more practical under constant component evolution, and also (3) help developers achieve preferred compatibility results early in the overall testing process when time and resources are limited.


In their letter to Nature , Hayashi et al . describe a new method for the generation of ocular surface epithelium-like cells by incubating human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) into four defined concentric zones mimicking the developing eye, which the authors named as self-formed ectodermal autonomous multi-zone (SEAM) (1). Different SEAM zones contained cells with characteristics of the ocular surface ectoderm, the lens, the neural retina and the retinal pigment epithelium. Isolated corneal surface-like cells successfully reinstated a corneal epithelium in a rabbit limbal stem cell deficiency (LSCD) model. The paper offers a new option for patients with LSCD.


This thesis describes an historical archaeology programme designed to investigate and interpret apparent anomalies between the documentary accounts of the 1824–1829 British settlement on Melville Island and the information conveyed by its physical position and material construction, as demonstrated in the remaining ruins of the settlement. Information gained through a part-time project of four years of historical study, and three seasons of archaeological investigation of the settlement is compiled and presented. The archaeological work concentrated particularly on the stronghold, Fort Dundas, to evaluate the military component of the settlement. Both archival and archaeological evidence is considered, and the influences of the world and regional geopolitical context bearing on the British venture are evaluated. The thesis argues that, while the documentary evidence outlining the planning for the Melville Island outpost speaks in great part of the establishment of a commercial trading port, the implementation of the project by the Admiralty took the form of constructing an imperialist military station. Examination of the ruins of Fort Dundas and consideration of its geographical location reveal little orientation toward commercial activity, but considerable preparation for defence. This interpretation of the Melville Island venture throws doubt on its common description as a 'failed settlement of the north'. Fort Dundas may more accurately be seen as the instrument of a military gambit, which served its purpose in British imperialist strategy and was retired once its function had been served.


Habitat invasibility is a central focus of invasion biology, with implications for basic ecological patterns and processes and for effective invasion management. "Invasibility" is, however, one of the most elusive metrics and misused terms in ecology. Empirical studies and meta-analyses of invasibility have produced inconsistent and even conflicting results. This lack of consistency, and subsequent difficulty in making broad cross-habitat comparisons, stem in part from (1) the indiscriminant use of a closely related, but fundamentally different concept, that of degree of invasion (DI) or level of invasion; and (2) the lack of common invasibility metrics, as illustrated by our review of all invasibility-related papers published in 2013. To facilitate both cross-habitat comparison and more robust ecological generalizations, we clarify the definitions of invasibility and DI, and for the first time propose a common metric for quantifying invasibility based on a habitat's resource availability as inferred from relative resident species richness and biomass. We demonstrate the feasibility of our metric using empirical data collected from 2475 plots from three forest ecosystems in the eastern United States. We also propose a similar metric for DI. Our unified, resource-based metrics are scaled from 0 to 1, facilitating cross-habitat comparisons. Our proposed metrics clearly distinguish invasibility and DI from each other, which will help to (1) advance invasion ecology by allowing more robust testing of generalizations and (2) facilitate more effective invasive species control and management.


The theory for a new form of transistor is presented. This transistor is of the "field-effect" type in which the conductivity of a layer of semiconductor is modulated by a transverse electric field. Since the amplifying action involves currents carried pre-dominantly by one kind of carrier, the name "unipolar" is proposed to distinguish these transistors from point-contact and junction types, which are "bipolar" in this sense. Regarded as an analog for a vacuum-tube triode, the unipolar field-effect transistor may have a mμ of 10 or more, high output resistance, and a frequency response higher than bipolar transistors of comparable dimensions.


Air Free/Air Free 2 – Audio Installation Exhibited in: THE NEW NEW, 83rd Thessaloniki International Fair's Pavilion 2 - Thessaloniki, Greece. 8-16 September 2018 FREIRAUM in Berlin, On the State of Freedom in Europe: Exhibition, discussion, concert, performance in Berlin. ZK/U Center for Art and UrbanisticsSiemensstrase 27, 10551 Berlin. 12-17 March 2019. Freiraum Exhibition: From Berlin to Thessaloniki. LABattoir -Thessaloniki, Greece. 17-24 May 2019. Created for a collaboration with the Goethe Institut, ArtBOX&Artecitya in the Freiraum project. Co-Funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. As an academic researcher and audio practitioner, one of my main interests is understanding the intimate qualities of mediated sound. The radio voice, this fragment of an otherwise unknown person, contains some of their most intimate qualities. In this project a space is created that simulates the unseen intimacies of the airwaves. Voices meet and converse privately yet freely, through the intimacy of the voice as pure sound. The voices in this artwork were collected in Thessaloniki-Greece and Carlisle- UK. The anonymous Greek-speaking voices were collected for me in Thessaloniki by Maria Kyrou, Stella Massia & Eleni Papoulidou from the community group Media Lab by LABattoir, after workshops where I taught audio documentary, theory and practice. The aim was for local people to bring me the voices of their community, rather than me selecting these as an outsider who might carry preconceptions. The English-speaking voices belong to poets from the Speak Easy poetry group in Carlisle: Jane Moss-Luffrum, Phil Hewitson, Susan Cartwright Smith, James Scott Riddick, John Chambers, Ruby Evans, Kim Braschko(& her 2 children Maya and Henry). The poets were sent audio clips of the voices from Greece along with three short poems I wrote in English, deriving from the content of the stories collected in Thessaloniki. The poets were asked to write poems as responses to these voices and my poem. Despite only listening to voices they could not understand and my poems being a very abstract representation of those voices, the poets in Carlisle absolutely captured the essence of those stories and provided very emotive responses. I edited these voices together in a conversation that reveals how the intricacies, fears, aspirations of distant communities might be much closer than they seem. The voices in this artwork are an intimate aural tapestry of all those things that we have in common. The work was listened to via headphones, within an intimate, private audio booth. Poems written by Evi K based on the interviews and stories collected in Greece: 1. I am a grandmother Eighty-one years old when I was eleven, There was guerrilla fighting then. My mother sent me back to the village To get a police permit Night fell, I was taken In by a friend. The fighters took my friend. They did not take me cause I was thin, a fake. I made it back to Neapoli. I went to school, they gave us cocoa and raisin bread. Then they took us to the islands, in Mytilene For eight months My dad, they were sad They filled in the paperwork and they took us back I finished primary school. My story is this one story. I have many but I cannot tell any more. 2. I am twenty years old. I come from Albania. People there do not warm up to me. I cannot quite speak like them. I came to Thessaloniki when I was ten months old. Life here is better than it is there. For me. Here I can open up to people. Cause this is the language I speak. 3. I am fifty-three years old. I am a musician. Today With millions of people around Here, now, I am sitting in my bedroom. Twenty meters away lives my best friend Five meters away, my cousin. I do not want to get in touch. It is so sweet to be alone. I am replete. I want good friends. I want a wife. I have a child. I am not really lonely. This is why I want to be alone


Oncology nurses are well versed in the administration of chemotherapy and management of associated side effects. The side effects range from mild and easily managed to severe and potentially dose limiting, such as hypersensitivity reactions (HSRs). Although severe HSRs are not common and can be seen with any agent, some treatments or medications are associated with much higher risks, such as monoclonal antibodies. Anaphylaxis usually is uniphasic in nature; however, 20% of reactions are biphasic, with symptoms resurging after initial resolution of the original reaction. Some reactions can be delayed, occurring after repeated infusions or presenting days to weeks after the original drug administration. For specific patients, a protracted period of anaphylaxis may occur beyond 24 hours. This article describes the proposed pathophysiology for biphasic and delayed HSRs, as well as management strategies for anaphylaxis. Case reports will illustrate patient presentations for biphasic and delayed HSRs. Oncology nurses must be aware of the risk for HSRs and understand the difference in presentation for biphasic and delayed anaphylactic reactions. Biphasic and Delayed Hypersensitivity Reactions: Implications for Oncology Nursing


Temperature stability of the optical power output of colored (blue-red) light emitting diode (LED) elements is considered. It is shown that LEDs based on blue 455 nm semiconductor chips have the best thermal stability, which is expressed in just 4 % of optical power losses with LED board temperature increasing from 25 °C up to 50 °C. The value of optical power losses for red chips emitting at 660 nm and 730 nm were 7 % and 11 %, respectively, while devices based on 455 nm blue chips and red nitride phosphors with 2 % and 8 % phosphor concentration showed losses of 4 % and 8 %, respectively. Wall plug efficiency of the studied samples demonstrated a similar trend with the temperature increasing as the optical power did.


This handbook brings together authoritative contributions from leading mental health researchers, educators and practitioners to provide a comprehensive text for community mental health nurses in training and practice. In thirty-three chapters it covers a wide range of topics, from the history of the profession to current approaches to specific client groups, organised around three linked themes:

 * professional context
 * practice issues
 * education and research.

Each chapter includes a summary of key points and suggestions for further reading, and also includes useful appendices listing key professional and voluntary organisations, journals, Internet and mailing lists.

The handbook reflects the diversity and scope of the role of the CMHN and recognizes the multidisciplinary and service user context in which nurses work. It is an essential text for CMHNs and mental health nurse educators, and offers a useful source of reference for allied professionals.


Objective: To report the effectiveness and safety of the ENAR device as well as the conditions for which the therapy was employed and its perceived effectiveness. The impact of therapy on medication use is also explored.

Design and setting: An Australian post-market, web-based survey of ENAR therapy users.

Results: Most respondents (76%) used ENAR exclusively for pain relief for musculoskeletal disorders, especially back, shoulder and neck pain; 8% used ENAR exclusively for non-musculoskeletal disorders; while 16% used ENAR for both. Respondents reported a mean reduction in pain of 70% [t(423) = 38.73, p< .001] and functional improvement of 62% [t(423) = 10.45, p< .001] using 11-point numerical rating scales. Following ENAR treatment medication reduction was reported by 91% of respondents. Very few respondents reported safety incidents or concerns with the therapy.

Conclusions: Most respondents reported high satisfaction and a reduction in medication use following ENAR therapy, with between 15-20% reporting complete pain relief. The self-delivery of ENAR may, in part, account for the high level of satisfaction.


Recently, research topics are focusing on clustering approaches for Ad hoc networks due to their effectiveness in building a virtual backbone formed by a set of suitable clusterheads (CH) to guarantee the communications across clusters. In this paper, we propose a clustering approach to elect suitable nodes' representatives and to store minimum topology information by reducing the propagation of routing information which facilitates the spatial reuse of resource and increase the system capacity. The clusters must adapt dynamically to the environment changes, we also propose a distributed maintenance procedure that allows managing nodes' adhesion, nodes' handoff and CHs' re-election. Based on our analytical model used to estimate the quality of service (QoS) parameters, we implement an admission control algorithm to determine the number of members inside a cluster that can be accommodated while satisfying the constraints imposed by the current applications. This might effectively drive congestion avoidance on the CH and interclusters load-balancing to achieve better network resource utilization. The obtained results will help us to readjust the clustering algorithm metrics in order to provide better maintenance and QoS guarantees depending on the used applications. Through numerical analysis and simulations, we have studied the performance of our model and compared it with that of other existing algorithms. The results demonstrate better performance in terms of number of clusters, number of handoffs, number of transitions (state change) on CHs, QoS parameters, load balancing and scalability. We also observed how the connectivity and the stability are maximized when the number of nodes increases in presence of the mobility.


This article presents a learning activity and its user study involving the Cellula platform, a novel versatile robotic tool designed for education. In order to show the potential of Cel-lulo in the classroom as part of standard curricular activities, we designed a learning activity called Windfield that aims to teach the atmospheric formation mechanism of wind to early middle school children. The activity involves a didactic sequence, introducing the Cellulo robots as hot air balloons and enabling children to feel the wind force through haptic feedback. We present a user study, designed in the form of a real hour-long lesson, conducted with 24 children in 8 groups who had no prior knowledge in the subject. Collaborative metrics within groups and individual performances about the learning of key concepts were measured with only the hardware and software integrated in the platform in a completely automated manner. The results show that almost all participants showed learning of symmetric aspects of wind formation while about half showed learning of asymmetric vectorial aspects that are more complex.


These guidelines review the historical evolution of treatment for early-stage Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) with current standards that rely on prognostic factors to risk stratify and direct current treatment schemes that includes differentiation of favorable and unfavorable presentations. The major clinical trials for unfavorable early-stage HL are reviewed. Patients in this heterogenous subgroup of classic HL are best managed with sequential chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The role of imaging response assessment as a means to modify therapy is a strategy under investigation. Tailoring the radiation treatment volume and radiation dose prescription along with selective use of modern conformal techniques is expected to help reduce long-term toxicities. Many patients are well served receiving involved-site radiotherapy to 30 Gy after appropriate systemic therapy intensity; but, there are nuances for which some variations in the chemotherapy and radiotherapy specifics are appropriately individualized. Following a discussion of the current evidence-based treatment algorithms, several different example cases are reviewed to help physicians make appropriate treatment decisions. The American College of Radiology Appropriateness Criteria are evidence-based guidelines for specific clinical conditions that are reviewed every 3 years by a multidisciplinary expert panel. The guideline development and review include an extensive analysis of current medical literature from peer-reviewed journals and the application of a well-established consensus methodology (modified Delphi) to rate the appropriateness of imaging and treatment procedures by the panel. In those instances where evidence is lacking or not definitive, expert opinion may be used to recommend imaging or treatment.


History of science's spatial turn has focused on the horizontal dimension, leaving the role of the vertical mostly unexplored as both a condition and object of scientific knowledge production. This special issue seeks to contribute to a burgeoning discussion on the role of verticality in modern sciences, building upon a wider interdisciplinary debate about the importance of the vertical and the volumetric in the making of modern lifeworlds. In this essay and in the contribu-tions that follow, verticality appears as a condition of knowledge production — a set of movements and mobilities, technical challenges, political negotiations, and bodily hardships — and an object of scientific inquiry, requiring new techniques of mapping and visualisation and generative of new insights into physical processes and temporal change. By foregrounding the vertical, historians of science can gain new insights and tell new stories about how science is done in the field, the observatory, and the laboratory, and about how those sciences have helped build a modern, three-dimensional world.


Outcome trials in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus have demonstrated reduced hospitalizations for heart failure (HF) with sodium-glucose co-transporter-2 inhibitors. However, few of these patients had HF, and those that did were not well-characterized. Thus, the effects of sodium-glucose co-transporter-2 inhibitors in patients with established HF with reduced ejection fraction, including those with and without type 2 diabetes mellitus, remain unknown.

 DEFINE-HF (Dapagliflozin Effects on Biomarkers, Symptoms and Functional Status in Patients with HF with Reduced Ejection Fraction) was an investigator-initiated, multi-center, randomized controlled trial of HF patients with left ventricular ejection fraction ≤40%, New York Heart Association (NYHA) class II-III, estimated glomerular filtration rate ≥30 mL/min/1.73m
 2
 , and elevated natriuretic peptides. In total, 263 patients were randomized to dapagliflozin 10 mg daily or placebo for 12 weeks. Dual primary outcomes were (1) mean NT-proBNP (N-terminal pro b-type natriuretic peptide) and (2) proportion of patients with ≥5-point increase in HF disease-specific health status on the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire overall summary score, or a ≥20% decrease in NT-proBNP.

 Patient characteristics reflected stable, chronic HF with reduced ejection fraction with high use of optimal medical therapy. There was no significant difference in average 6- and 12-week adjusted NT-proBNP with dapagliflozin versus placebo (1133 pg/dL (95% CI 1036–1238) vs 1191 pg/dL (95% CI 1089–1304),
 P
 =0.43). For the second dual-primary outcome of a meaningful improvement in Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire overall summary score or NT-proBNP, 61.5% of dapagliflozin-treated patients met this end point versus 50.4% with placebo (adjusted OR 1.8, 95% CI 1.03-3.06, nominal
 P
 =0.039). This was attributable to both higher proportions of patients with ≥5-point improvement in Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire overall summary score (42.9 vs 32.5%, adjusted OR 1.73, 95% CI 0.98–3.05), and ≥20% reduction in NT-proBNP (44.0 vs 29.4%, adjusted OR 1.9, 95% CI 1.1–3.3) by 12 weeks. Results were consistent among patients with or without type 2 diabetes mellitus, and other prespecified subgroups (all
 P
 values for interaction=NS).

 In patients with heart failure and reduced ejection fraction, use of dapagliflozin over 12 weeks did not affect mean NT-proBNP but increased the proportion of patients experiencing clinically meaningful improvements in HF-related health status or natriuretic peptides. Benefits of dapagliflozin on clinically meaningful HF measures appear to extend to patients without type 2 diabetes mellitus.

 URL:
 https://www.clinicaltrials.gov
 . Unique identifier: NCT 02653482.


In this paper, we propose, analyze, and experimentally verify polarization-multiplexed optical wireless transmission with coherent detection as a means of improving performance and increasing the per-wavelength data rate in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. It is first shown that in terrestrial last-mile applications, the polarization state changes of the optical wireless signal are governed by optical source properties both in the absence and in the presence of mild to moderately severe turbulence. Under these conditions, it is shown that the polarization evolution is reduced to a polarization state rotation wherein the cross-polarization interference can be equalized with well-known blind algorithms. We also experimentally verify the analytical findings, demonstrating 112 Gb/s POLMUX-QPSK transmission with coherent detection in a non-fading free-space channel, and numerically extend the experimental results to turbulent settings by invoking the lognormal model for turbulence-induced fading. Performance gains of 5-14 dB along with a doubling of the data rate through polarization multiplexing are exhibited compared to legacy single-polarization intensity modulation/direct detection (IM/DD) optical wireless systems. The presented analytical and experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is promising for notably increasing the data rate in last-mile free-space optical transmission.


A transdisciplinary research approach requires that different scientists with their discipline-specific theories, concepts and methods find ways to work together with other societal players to address a real-life problem. In this study, the push–pull technology (PPT) was used as a boundary object to enable interactions among stakeholders across science-practice boundaries engaged in the control of stemborer pest in maize crops in Bako Tibe, Jimma Arjo and Yayu Woredas in Ethiopia between August 2014 and April 2015. The PPT is a biological mechanism developed by researchers for the control of stemborer pests and Striga weed in maize crop. It involves inter-cropping maize with a stemborer moth-repellent silverleaf or greenleaf Desmodium (push), and planting an attractive trap crop, Napier or Brachiaria grass (pull), around it. The on-farm implementation of PPT was used to provide an opportunity for collaboration, interaction and learning among stakeholders including researchers from the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research and practitioners from the Ministry of Agriculture and smallholder farmers/traders. The research was implemented following the transdisciplinary action research and the data collected using mixed methods approach, including key informant interviews, focus group discussions, workshops, on-farm practical demonstrations and participant observations. The findings show that collaborative leadership provides a chance for the stakeholders to participate in the technology learning and decision making, by enabling them to jointly contribute skills towards development, refinement and adaptation of the PPT. In situations where there are conflicts, they are embraced and converted to opportunities for in-depth learning, finding solutions and adaptation of the innovation processes rather than being sources of contradictions or misunderstandings. The leadership roles of the farmers enabled them to reflect on their own practices and draw on scientific explanations from researchers. It also enabled them to take the lead in new technology implementation and information sharing with fellow farmers and other stakeholders in a free and easy manner. Although the perennial nature of the companion crops in the PPT provides opportunities for continuous stakeholder interaction and learning, it requires a personally committed leadership and formal institutional engagements for the sustainability of the activities, which span several cropping seasons. Market forces and the involvement of the private sector also play a role as shown from the involvement of individual farmers and traders in Desmodium and Brachiaria seed production, collection and distribution during the PPT implementation.


We present methods for accurate evaluation of van der Waals coefficients of dimers with excited atoms that have a strong decay channel. We calculate C_6 coefficients for the Yb-Yb 1S_0+ 3P_{0,1}, 3P_0+3P_0 and Yb-Rb 3P_1+5s, 1S_0+ 5p_{1/2} dimers and C_8 coefficients for the Yb-Yb 1S_0+1S_0, 1S_0+3P_1 and Yb-Rb 1S_0+5s dimers. We evaluate uncertainties of all properties.


Dynamic task graph schedulers automatically balance work across processor cores by scheduling tasks among available threads while preserving dependences. In this paper, we design NABBITC, a provably efficient dynamic task graph scheduler that accounts for data locality on NUMA systems. NABBITC allows users to assign a color to each task representing the location (e.g., a processor core) that has the most efficient access to data needed during that node's execution. NABBITC then automatically adjusts the scheduling so as to preferentially execute each node at the location that matches its color—leading to better locality because the node is likely to make local rather than remote accesses. At the same time, NABBITC tries to optimize load balance and not add too much overhead compared to the vanilla NABBIT scheduler that does not consider locality. We provide a theoretical analysis that shows that NABBITC does not asymptotically impact the scalability of NABBIT. We evaluated the performance of NABBITC on a suite of memory intensive benchmarks. Our experiments indicates that adding locality awareness has a considerable performance advantage compared to the vanilla NABBIT scheduler. In addition, we also compared NABBITC to OpenMP programs for both regular and irregular applications. For regular applications, OpenMP achieves perfect locality and perfect load balance statically. For these benchmarks, NABBITC has a small performance penalty compared to OpenMP due to its dynamic scheduling strategy. For irregular applications, where OpenMP can not achieve locality and load balance simultaneously, we find that NABBITC performs better. Therefore, NABBITC combines the benefits of localityaware scheduling for regular applications (the forte of static schedulers such as those in OpenMP) and dynamically adapting to load imbalance (the forte of dynamic schedulers such as Cilk Plus, TBB, and Nabbit).


The study will analyse how Anglo-American evangelicals' antipathy towards
slavery spread and transformed in the context of the transatlantic evangelical
network. Many researchers have treated antislavery sentiment as a spontaneous
reaction, or as one of a number of background moods influencing those who started
the abolitionist movement. However, this sentiment spread in the Atlantic world as
result of evangelical activities throughout the eighteenth century.
The formation of the transatlantic evangelical network is central to
understanding the spread of antislavery sentiment. Stimulated by the Great
Awakening in the 1730s and the 1740s, Anglo-American evangelicals began to
travel between both sides of the Atlantic. Much evidence suggests that a religious
and ideological sense of unity was being forged during this process. Importantly, the
evangelical network offered a channel of transatlantic communication allowing
Anglo-Americans to debate common issues. Although in itself not antislavery, it had
the potential to develop antislavery sentiment among its members.
Many historians have not traced the development of antislavery ideals in the
mid-eighteenth century as there seemed no public self-identifying antislavery
movement. However, close examination of 'proslavery' literature reinvents this
period into years of transformation of evangelical attitudes to slavery, far from a
'dark age' of unquestioned proslavery expression. Below the surface, fledgling
antislavery sentiment was spreading in the Atlantic world before the American
Revolution.
In the tense atmosphere of the American Revolution in the 1770s, antislavery
sentiment became transformed into moral conviction. Many members of religious
communities on both sides of the Atlantic lost their confidence in the imperial
system, and were fearful for their moral health. As part of this process, ill-feeling
towards both the inhumanity and religio-moral inconsistencies of slavery became
transformed into a moral ideology. Furthermore, the Revolution stimulated
evangelical abolitionism and participation in wider secular political activities.
After the Revolution, the evangelical network seemed to be reinvigorated,
responding to new territorial and economic circumstance. However, conflicts within
the transatlantic evangelical community caused by disestablishment debates
stimulated the process of division, and influenced the developmental process of the
antislavery movement in the transatlantic evangelical network. Consequently,
evangelicals in each area developed individual abolitionist movements, producing
different outcomes. This reflects that the transatlantic evangelical network's mission
for a transatlantic channel for the antislavery cause was finishing.


The purpose of this study was to explore 28 Taiwanese fifth graders' development of knowledge on biological reproduction. The students received three weeks of instruction about biological reproduction and were interviewed to determine their cognitive structures. The interviews were conducted three times, at weekly intervals throughout the instruction, and an additional interview was conducted two months after the instruction. The interview data were analysed through a flow map method to show cognitive structure, and the students' information processing strategies, derived from an analysis of the flow map data, were also explored. The results suggest that there are three stages of cognitive structure development. In the first stage, categorised as 'knowledge development', both the extent of knowledge and the richness of networking of ideas increase. In the second stage, categorised as 'knowledge extension', only the amount of knowledge continues to increase. In the final stage, called 'knowledge refinement', the amount of knowledge recalled decreases, while the richness in networking of ideas remains stable. At the same time, the use of higher-order information processing modes (e.g., narrative containing statements inferring and explaining) increases dramatically. This implies that the rich connections between concepts and the use of higher-order information processing strategies may facilitate maturation of connected knowledge in memory.


This book will remain timeless in its study of Aristotle's objective grasp of reality. The book's uniqueness lies in its aim of letting Aquinas himself speak on the subject of metaphysics. The work embraces both a history of philosophy and Aristotle's subsequent reasoning toward God as pure act. Readers will find a summary of the wealth of insight of Aristotle, further elaborated by Aquinas. Metaphysics of Aquinas will appeal to both graduate and undergraduate students and scholars of metaphysics. Contents: Preface; PART ONE: INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY; Prologue of Aquinas; The Human Being Naturally Desires to Know; The Wise Human Being and Metaphysics; Pursuit of First Causes in the Past; Critique of Early Thinking on First Causes; The Human Being and Knowledge of Truth; The Subject of Metaphysics; The First Principles of Demonstration; The Vocabulary of Philosophy; How Metaphysics Treats of Being; PART TWO: FIRST PHILOSOPHY OR METAPHYSICS; Substance, the Principal Subject of Metaphysics; Potency and Act; One, and What Follows upon One; The First Principles of Being; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.


Understanding the environmental drivers of movement patterns are critical to the protection, management and recovery of endangered species. The Arabian Gulf is considered to be the hottest marine system in the world and is known for its extreme environmental conditions that pose substantial physiological stress on marine organisms living there. Satellite tags were deployed on hawksbill turtles in the Arabian Gulf and quantitative ecological modeling (i.e., Bayesian state-space models and GAMMs) was used to provide new insights into the ecological basis of observed hawksbill movement and behavior. Hawksbills used a relatively large core area in the southeast Arabian Gulf when transit and area-restricted search behaviors were included. The numerous hotspots identified suggest that important habitat occurs along a large area of the Qatari eastern coastline and into Saudi Arabia. Offshore islands with fringing reef habitat and deep-water habitats near the 30–50 m isobaths were intensely used. Hawksbills made seasonal migrations to deep-water habitat during summer months, typically once SST reached ∼33°C and bottom temperature reached ∼32°C. These data provide valuable information to managers seeking to conserve hawksbills in the region. Our data also provide a context to understand the underlying physiological, energetic and behavioral drivers of hawksbill movement in the Arabian Gulf. Future studies should include the use of biologging devices, benthic surveys, and dietary biomarkers to better understand the seasonal migrations of Arabian Gulf hawksbills to this deep-water region.


This paper describes the development and characterisation of small-scale rotary engines with displacements in the range of 781500 mm for portable applications in the range of 10200 W of power output. Small-scale combustion engines present a number of research challenges including manufacturing tolerances, sealing, thermal management, ignition, combustion efficiency and porting. Four engines have been characterised using a custom test bench and show an increase in performance due to design changes that mitigate the challenges associated with small-scale engines. The volumetric power density has been increased from 11 W/cm in a 348 mm engine operating with a supercharged hydrogen/air mixture to 22 W/cm in a 1500 mm engine operating with naturally aspirated liquid hydrocarbon fuel. The thermal efficiency has also been increased from 0.2 to 4%. Continued improvements in sealing, thermal management, combustion efficiency and friction reduction will allow further increases in engine performance.


Purpose
To confirm whether choroideremia (CHM) is a systemic disease characterized by blood lipid abnormalities and crystals found in, or associated with, circulating peripheral blood cells of patients.

Methods
Peripheral blood samples obtained from three subjects with confirmed mutations in the CHM gene and three age-matched normal controls were processed for transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Fatty acids from plasma of nine male CHM subjects were analyzed and compared to reference values for a sample from a Canadian population.

Results
Intracellular crystals were not observed in the cells from choroideremia-affected males. No crystals were found adherent to the external plasma membrane of red blood cells. Fatty acid profiles of patients were similar to reference values, with the exception of lower levels of nervonic acid.

Conclusions
This investigation failed to observe crystals previously reported in peripheral circulating blood cells derived from CHM subjects, and showed no significant fatty acid abnormalities, not supporting the view of CHM as a systemic disease.


The riverine transport of elements from land to ocean is an integral flux for many element cycles and an important climate regulating process over geological timescales. This flux consists of both dissolved and particulate material. The world's rivers are estimated to transport between 16.6 and 30 Gt yr 1 of particulate material, considerably higher than the dissolved flux of 1 Gt yr . Therefore, the dissolution of particulate material upon arrival in estuaries and coastal waters may be a significant flux for many elements. Here we assess the role of riverine particulate material dissolution in seawater with closed-system experiments using riverine bedload material and estuarine sediment from western Iceland mixed with open ocean seawater. Both particulate materials significantly changed the elemental concentrations of the surrounding water with substantial increases in Si concentrations indicative of silicate dissolution. Seawater in contact with bedload material shows considerable enrichment of Ca, Mg, Mn, and Ni, while Li and K concentrations decrease. Moreover, the Sr/Sr of seawater decreases with time with little change in Sr concentrations, indicative of a significant two-way flux between the solid and fluid phases. Mass balance calculations indicate that 3% of the Sr contained in the original riverine bedload was released during 9 months of reaction. In contrast, the estuarine material has a negligible effect on seawater Sr/Sr and transition metal concentrations, suggesting that these reactions occur when particulate material first arrives into coastal waters. Solubility calculations performed using the PHREEQC computer code confirm that primary minerals are undersaturated, while secondary minerals such as kaolinite are oversaturated in the reacted fluids. These results demonstrate that riverine transported basaltic particulate material can significantly alter the composition of seawater, although the total concentrations of many major elements in seawater are regulated by the formation of secondary phases. This behavior has important implications for nutrient supply to coastal waters and the isotopic mass balance of several elements in the oceans. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


Accountants in Poland have recently had the opportunity to celebrate the 20 th anniversary of the introduction of the Accounting Act. The act was passed by the Polish Parliament in 1994. 500 years earlier, a treaty on double-entry accounting system was published by Pacioli. The publishing of Tractatus XI. Particularis de computis et scripturis was a momentous event marking the beginning of a new field of economics. Double-entry accounting was in use since Cotrugli introduce it some thirty years before Pacioli published his work. Recently, in accounting as well as in economics, emphasis has been put on ethics, moral values, and professional attitudes. It is worth considering whether, or to what extent, these were present in the early works of accountancy from 550 years ago and how accountants approached these matters at the beginning of the written history of accounting. This article presents the main ideas included in the guidelines set by Pacioli and Cotrugli regarding double-entry systems and investigates if ethical guidelines were present there. It turns out that the author of an essential work in the history of accounting, as well as his predecessor, devoted much attention to the moral attitude of the merchant, their appropriate behaviour, their attitude towards customers, and their colleagues and competitors.


This paper presents a Chinese short text classification method which considering extended semantic constraints and statistical constraints. This method uses "HowNet" tools to build the attribute set of concept. when coming to the part of feature expansion, we judge the collocation between the attribute words of original text and the characteristics before and after expansion as the semantic constraints, and calculate the ratio between the mutual information of the original contents and the features before expansion versus the mutual information of the original contents and the features after expansion as statistical constraints, so as to judge whether feature expansion is effective with this two constraints , then rationally use various semantic relation word-pairs in short text classification. Experiments show that this method can use semantic relations in Chinese short text classification effectively, and improve the classification performance.


Since the military overthrow of President Mursi in mid-2013, Egypt has witnessed an authoritarian rollback. Through a combination of repression and nationalist securitizing discourses, popular pressure for reform was successfully channelled into a state-centric model of governance. But despite state violence and the restriction of public spaces, protests have anything but ceased. Contested Legitimacies explores this resilience of protest despite unprecedented repression through an approach attuned to the physical and discursive interactions among key players in Egypt's post-revolutionary arena. Starting with the successful Tamarod uprising against President Mursi, to the unsuccessful Islamist resistance against the military coup, to the Rabaa massacre and the shrinking spaces for protest under Al-Sisi's authoritarian rule, to the resurgence of popular resistance in the shape the Tiran and Sanafir island campaign, it investigates the rise and fall of different coalitions of contenders and explores their impact on Egypt's political transition.


Economists studying public policy have generally assumed that the relevant social planner knows how policy affects population behavior. Planners typically do not possess all of this knowledge, so there is reason to consider policy formation with partial knowledge of policy impacts. Here I consider the choice of a profiling policy where decisions to search for evidence of crime may vary with observable covariates of the persons at risk of being searched. To begin I pose a planning problem whose objective is to minimize the utilitarian social cost of crime and search. The consequences of candidate search rules depends on the extent to which search deters crime. Deterrence is expressed through the offense function, which describes how the offense rate of persons with given covariates varies with the search rate applied to these persons. I study the planning problem when the planner has partial knowledge of the offense function. To demonstrate general ideas, I suppose that the planner observes the offense rates of a study population whose search rule has previously been chosen. He knows that the offense rate weakly decreases as the search rate increases, but he does not know the magnitude of the deterrent effect of search. In this setting, I first show how the planner can eliminate dominated search rules and then how he can use the minimax or minimax-regret criterion to choose an undominated search rule.


The cob operon of Salmonella typhimurium encodes enzymes required for synthesis of adenosyl-cobalamin (vitamin B12). The pdu operon encodes enzymes needed for use of propanediol as a carbon source, including an adenosyl-cobalamin-dependent enzyme, propanediol dehydratase. These two operons both map near min 41 of the S. typhimurium linkage map and are transcribed divergently. Here we report that the cob and pdu operons form a single regulon. Transcription of this regulon is induced by either glycerol or propanediol. The metabolism of these compounds is not required for induction. Propanediol induces the regulon either aerobically or anaerobically during growth on poor carbon sources. Aerobically glycerol induces only if its metabolism is prevented by a mutational block such as a glpK mutation. Under anaerobic conditions, glycerol induces in both glpK+ and glpK mutant strains during growth on poor carbon sources. A new class of mutations, pocR, prevents induction of the cob/pdu regulon by either propanediol or glycerol and causes a Cob- Pdu- phenotype. The pocR gene is located between the cob and pdu operons and appears to encode a trans-acting protein that acts as a positive regulator of both operons. Transcription of the pocR regulatory gene is induced, even without the PocR protein, during aerobic growth on poor carbon sources and during anaerobic respiration. With the functional PocR protein, transcription of the pocR gene is autoinduced by propanediol but not by glycerol. The growth conditions that increase pocR gene expression correlate with growth conditions that allow high induction of the cob/pdu regulon. A model for control of this regulon suggests that the PocR protein is a transcriptional activator of both the cob and pdu operons and that both glycerol and propanediol can individually serve as effectors of the PocR protein. We suggest that global control mechanisms cause variation in the level of the PocR protein; an increased level of the PocR protein permits higher induction by propanediol or glycerol.


The Advanced Statistical Trajectory Regional Air Pollution (ASTRAP) model simulates long-term transport and deposition of oxides of sulfur and nitrogen. It is a potential screening tool for assessing long-term effects on regional visibility from sulfur emission sources. However, a rigorous evaluation is required before the model can be recommended for the particular application. As a first step, the authors modified the original 1985 IBM-3033 version of the model to create the ASTRAP-EPA version for applications on the EPA VAX-8600 computer using existing EPA preprocessed meteorological and emissions data files. Additional modifications improved the model design by eliminating several model assumptions and replacing some modeling approaches. The cumulative effect of the model modifications was assessed by comparing the quarterly 1980 calculations of sulfur wet deposition of both versions with screened measurements. The seasonal correlation coefficients and standard errors of each model version are insignificantly different at the 0.05 level, demonstrating that the two model versions produce similar results. The improvements in model design only slightly enhance model performance. Sensitivity of ASTRAP-EPA calculations of sulfur wet deposition was also assessed for several model assumptions and values of model parameters. ASTRAP-EPA model predictions are most sensitive to three parameters - the model timemore » step, the truncation of trajectories near the border of wind-data-void regions, and the temporal aggregation of ensemble trajectory statistics. The maximum quarterly predictions of sulfur wet deposition, across southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia, decrease by as much as 30% when either the model time step changes from 3 hours to 6 hours, or when trajectories are not truncated, or when trajectory statistics are not temporally aggregated.« less


Background: Hypothesizing that statins may be useful as adjuvant treatment for renal anemia, we examined the association between statin prescription (Rx) and erythropoiesis-stimulating agent (ESA) hyporesponsiveness in Japanese hemodialysis (HD) patients prescribed ESAs. Methods: We examined 3,602 patients in 60 HD facilities dialyzed 3 times/week for ≥4 months from the Japan Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study phases 3-5 (2005-2015). Statin Rx was reported at the end of a 4-month interval (baseline) for each patient. ESA hyporesponsiveness in the subsequent 4 months was then defined as a binary indicator (mean hemoglobin [Hgb] level <10 g/dL and mean ESA dose >6,000 units/week) and separately as the ESA resistance index (ERI; mean ESA dose/[dry weight × mean Hgb]). We used adjusted logistic and linear regressions to evaluate the associations between statin Rx and ESA hyporesponsiveness. Results: At baseline, 16.2% of patients reported statin Rx; 12.8% were classified as having ESA hyporesponsiveness during 4 months of follow-up. Compared to patients without statin Rx, patients with statin Rx had lower odds of ESA hyporesponsiveness (OR 0.87; 95% CI 0.66-1.15). Similarly, the ERI was lower for those with statin Rx than without (ratio of means, 0.94; 95% CI 0.89-0.99) after adjustment for possible confounders. Conclusions: Our results suggest that statins may slightly reduce ESA hyporesponsiveness in HD patients. However, any causal inference is limited by the observational study design and unmeasured compliance with statin Rx.


We consider radio applications in sensor networks, where the nodes operate on batteries so that energy consumption must be minimized, while satisfying given throughput and delay requirements. In this context, we analyze the best modulation and transmission strategy to minimize the total energy consumption required to send a given number of bits. The total energy consumption includes both the transmission energy and the circuit energy consumption. We first consider multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) systems based on Alamouti diversity schemes, which have good spectral efficiency but also more circuitry that consumes energy. We then extend our energy-efficiency analysis of MIMO systems to individual single-antenna nodes that cooperate to form multiple-antenna transmitters or receivers. By transmitting and/or receiving information jointly, we show that tremendous energy saving is possible for transmission distances larger than a given threshold, even when we take into account the local energy cost necessary for joint information transmission and reception. We also show that over some distance ranges, cooperative MIMO transmission and reception can simultaneously achieve both energy savings and delay reduction.


Writing and Society is a stunning exploration of the relationship between the growth in popular literacy and the development of new readerships and the authors addressing them. It is the first single volume to provide a year-by-year chronology of political events in relation to cultural production. This overview of debates in literary critical theory and historiography includes facsimile pages with commentary from the most influential books of the period. The author describes and analyses: * the development of literacy by status, gender and region in Britain * structures of patronage and censorship * the fundamental role of the publishing industry * the relation between elite literary and popular cultures * and the remarkable growth of female literacy and publication.


A series of derivatives of naphtho[1,2-b]pyran and the [2,1-b] and [2,3-b] isomers has been prepared. Those compounds with aryl substituents adjacent to the hetematom have been obtained by an acid catalysed reaction of a naphthol with a 1,1-
diarylprop-2yn-l-ol and thermal cyclisation of the intermediate ether. Alkyl and spiro-cycloalkyl derivatives have been synthesized by the reduction of the related naphthopyranones and dehydration of the resulting pyranols. The latter reaction was accompanied by dimerised and polymerised material in the [1,2-b] and [2,3-b] series.
Some reactions of the pyran double bond have been studied in order to assess the influence of the position of fusion of the naphthalene unit on to the pyran ring. Based on the reaction with hypobromous acid and on direct epoxidation of the
double bond, the naphthopyrans are more reactive than the corresponding benzopyrans. Particular reactivity was exhibited by the [1,2-b] and [2,3-b] systems, which were also prone to electrophilic attack in the naphthalene moiety.
Ring opening reactions of the epoxynaphthopyrans have been investigated and found to be attractive precursors for benzo-fused derivatives of chroman-3-ones and chroman-3,4-diones.
The 9-hydroxy derivatives of the naphtho[2,1-b]pyrans have been etherified with o-halogenoalcohols and these compounds together with their 9-hydroxy precursors have been esterified with methacryloyl chloride. A range of novel polymers has been prepared by the free radical solution polymerisation of these methacrylate esters. The resulting naphtho[2,1-b]pyran based polymers varied in the substitution at C-3 and in the length of the group separating the naphthopyran unit
from the polymer backbone. Macromolecular weight and its distribution have been measured for all of the polymers by gel permeation chromatography. Increase in the length of the spacer group led to a higher molecular weight and to a narrower distribution for the polymer. Conversely, increasing the size of the substituents at C-3 resulted in a decrease in molecular weight.
The photochromic properties of the monomers and polymers have been investigated. Alkyl and spiro-cycloalkane substituted naphtho[2,1-b]pyrans showed no photochromism at 0 °C, but their derived polymers become pale yellow on irradiation. Diaryl derivatives exhibited red to brown photochromism both as monomers and polymers. Polymerisation resulted in a decreased rate of fading which is influenced by the length of the spacer.


Growth and economic fluctuations are negatively correlated at the country level. Least developed countries measures of output volatility are almost double the size of the developed countries counterpart. This paper provides an explanation for this stylized fact. I construct a measure of output volatility for all the states belonging to the United States for the period 1960 – 2004. For the state sample, the correlation estimate of output growth and output volatility is zero. This suggests that the factor linking output growth and volatility is not present at the state level. This research suggests that governments that design policies that increase uncertainty create an asymmetric information problem for firms operating in that country. Firm's inability to observe the size of the transfer to be paid to the government choose production and investment plans that exhibit higher variance than when information is perfect. This approach suggest that governments of least developed countries can reduce excessive output volatility by designing more steady and sound policies.


Abstract. Two modifications to an existing scheme of tidal mixing are implemented in the coarse resolution ocean component of a global climate model. First, the vertical distribution of energy flux out of the barotropic tide is determined using high resolution bathymetry. This shifts the levels of mixing higher up in the water column and leads to a stronger mid-depth meridional overturning circulation in the model. Second, the local dissipation efficiency for diurnal tides is assumed to be larger than that for the semi-diurnal tides poleward of 30°. Both modifications are shown to improve agreement with observational estimates of diapycnal diffusivities based on microstructure measurements and circulation indices. We also assess impacts of different spatial distributions of the barotropic energy loss. Estimates based on satellite altimetry lead to larger diffusivities in the deep ocean and hence a stronger deep overturning circulation in our climate model that is in better agreement with observation based estimates compared to those based on a tidal model.


Abstract Several diatom species produce resting stages as part of their life cycle. These resting stages accumulate in the sediments where they can remain for a long time before being re-suspended in the water column and switching to active growth. Until now, the abundance and diversity of viable diatom resting stages have been assessed using the Serial Dilution Culture (SDC) method. In the present study, surface sediment samples from the Gulf of Naples were used to compare results obtained with the SDC method with those provided by HTS metabarcoding based on DNA extracted from the same sediment sample; the marker used was the V4 region of 18S rDNA. HTS metabarcoding showed a marked dominance of polar centric diatoms, among which Chaetoceros species were the most represented, in terms of both sequence and ribotype number. Almost all the most abundant ribotypes identified with metabarcoding matched records of species observed in SDCs. In some cases, however, this marker region could not distinguish between morphologically and phylogenetically distinct species, e.g., Skeletonema pseudocostatum and S. tropicum. As expected, molecular analysis provided a higher number of ribotypes as compared to the number of taxa recorded by SDC. Despite the well-known biases of both methodologies for quantitative assessments, our results show that DNA metabarcoding via HTS sequencing is a promising approach to explore the diversity of diatom resting stages. This study also confirms the importance of curated reference sequences to fully interpret the diversity stored in environmental sediment samples.


The Special Criminal Court consists of three judges sitting without a jury and hears cases when the ordinary courts are 'inadequate'. Generally this has involved terrorist offences, but recently it has been used against organized crime gangs – most notably those cases arising from the murder of Veronica Guerin. The author draws heavily on government archives and examines the justifiability of interfering with the right to trial by jury. Controversially, the author contends that the importance of the right to trial by jury has been grossly overstated, arguing that the key issue is not the presence or otherwise of a jury but rather the ability of any given trial process to deliver a fair trial. This book is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of the Special Criminal Court since Professor and former President Robinson's 1974 monograph.


For over a century, the controversial issue of ornament has oscillated between the two extreme conditions of being condemned and praised. Although current architecture receives ornament enthusiastically due to its design potentials, it still remains as a problematic and critical topic, as it maintains its blurry and slippery character. The aim of this study is to construct the theoretical framework of or nament in the twenty-first century architectural domain. The paper intends to in vestigate the reemergence of this-yet-ambiguous issue to evaluate its new aspects, and redefine its limits in contemporary architectural theory and practice. Being much more than an intricate architectural element, an in-depth study of ornament overlaps its reemergence with social, cultural, and economical status quo . Through the examination of specific contemporary case studies, this study makes a layered reading of architectural ornament as an instrument of image-driven contemporary culture within spectacle-laden public sphere. In contemporary architecture, the digital, structural, sensual, representational, and symbolic facets stratify ornament metaphorically and literally, making it an intense medium of impression and expression. Ornamental buildings emerge as embodiments of consumption, exhibition, and public attention, by contributing to image-making, commercial success, and marketing strategy, in addition to the performance of ornament as a challenging designerly instrument.