Abstract. High strength concrete or nano concrete, it is often brittle, so it is necessary to study the solutions to increase the plasticity to obtain the structure to ensure the bearing capacity. The main advantage of steel fibers concrete is that it makes concrete with high flexibility, high tensile and compressive flexural strength, with bending components such as beams, the tensile area makes the concrete easier to form cracks and makes the structure quickly damaged. In this paper used the experimental method in order to determine the mechanical properties of nano concrete such as the tensile bending strength, the splitting tensile strength, for nano concrete samples with steel fibers and without steel fibers. In addition to the study also identified the deformation stress state of the two types of nano concrete and nano concrete with steel fibers. The use of steel fibers in nano concrete in the experiment made nano concrete increase plasticity, increase tensile bending strength, increase the splitting tensile strength and further enhance the advantages of new materials: steel fibers nano concrete materials.


The Cenozoic rocks lying in the Province of Tacna (18° S), southern Perú, represent approximately 600 m of stratigraphic thickness. This stacking groups the Sotillo (Paleocene), Moquegua Inferior (Eocene), Moquegua Superior (Oligocene), Huaylillas (Miocene) and Millo formations (Pliocene), and these are the sedimentary fill of the Moquegua Basin. The sediments of the three latter formations are organized into nine sedimentary facies and five architectural elements. Their facies associations suggest the existence of an ancient highly channelized multi-lateral fluvial braided system, with upward increase of pyroclastic and conglomeratic depositions. The heavy mineral spectra make each lithostratigraphic unit unique and distinguishable, being the sediments of the Moquegua Superior Formation rich in garnets, titanites and zircons; while the sediments of the Huaylillas and Millo formations in clinopyroxenes. This mineral arrangement becomes an excellent tool for stratigraphic correlations between outcrops and subsurface stratigraphy (by means of well cores studies) and allow to sketch out a new stratigraphic framework and a complex of rocky blocks bounded by normal faults, often tilted. The sediment mineralogy also suggests that the rocks conforming the Western Cordillera were the main source of sediments for the Moquegua Basin in Tacna. In this context, the detritus of the Moquegua Superior Formation derives mainly from the erosion of the rocks forming the Coastal Basal Complex (Proterozoic), the Ambo Group (Carboniferous) and the Junerata/Chocolate Formation (Early Jurassic). The Huaylillas Formation is a pyroclastic and sedimentary unit which components derived mainly from the Huaylillas volcanism (Miocene) and partly from the denudation of the Toquepala Group (Late Cretaceous). The Huaylillas Formation widely contrasts to the underlying Moquegua Superior Formation due its mineralogy and facies. Finally, the detritus of the Millo Formation derived mostly from the rocks forming the Barroso Formation (Pliocene), and their facies represent a higher contrast in relation to the underlying units due its notorious conglomerate facies.


Background: Gender confirming primary breast augmentation is becoming more common. The purpose of this study was to compare the demographic and anatomical differences in cis-female and trans-female populations. Methods: This was a retrospective analysis of trans-female patients and cis-female patients undergoing primary breast augmentation at a single institution. Analysis included patient demographics and preoperative chest measurements including sternal notch to nipple distance (SSN), breast width (BW), nipple to inframammary fold distance (N-IMF), and nipple to midline distance (N-M). Continuous variables were compared using independent t tests, and discrete variables were compared using Pearson's &khgr;2 tests. Results: Eighty-two trans-female and 188 cis-female patients undergoing primary breast augmentation were included. Trans-female patients were older (40.37 versus 34.07), more likely to have psychological comorbidities (50% versus 12.23%), and had a higher body mass index, 27.46 kg/m2 versus 22.88 kg/m2 (P = 1.91E-07), than cis-female patients. Cis-female patients most commonly had an ectomorph body habitus (52% versus 26%), whereas trans-female patients most commonly had an endomorph body habitus (40% versus 7%). Pseudoptosis or ptosis was more commonly seen in cis-female patients (P = 0.0056). There were significant differences in preoperative breast measurements including sternal notch to nipple distance, BW, and N-M between groups, but not in N-IMF. The ratio of BW/N-IMF was statistically significant (P = 2.65E-07 on right), indicating that the similarity in N-IMF distance did not adjust for the difference in BW. Conclusions: The trans-female and cis-female populations seeking primary breast augmentation have significant demographic and anatomical differences. This has implications for surgical decision-making and planning to optimize outcomes for trans-female patients.


The European Union membership of Bulgaria since January 2007 imposes higher requirements to the national waste management system and demands changes in the current waste management practices. In this context it is of great interest to study the contemporary and possible future development of the Bulgarian municipal solid waste management system. A systems analysis was carried out to provide better understanding of the Bulgarian municipal solid waste management and to analyze the possibilities for its future development in a sustainable way. Five different scenarios were constructed and compared using the ORWARE model which is a tool for environmental systems analysis that predicts ecological and economic impacts in a life-cycle perspective. The first describes the present municipal waste management system using landfilling as the only municipal solid waste treatment option. The other four describe possible future developments including business as usual and different combinations of municipal solid waste treatment options including landfilling, composting and incineration. Material recycling was included in all future scenarios. The results from the ORWARE simulations show that landfilling has the overall highest environmental impacts as compared to the other treatment methods. The introduction of composting and incineration proved to has a positive impact on the environment and provides different benefits in terms of recovered nutrients, heat and electricity production. Material recovery and recycling allows the recovery of different materials but is highly energy intensive. European and Bulgarian policies, legislation and different publications were studied to understand the factors that shape the current and future development of municipal solid waste management. Further, the application of tools incorporating life-cycle thinking, like ORWARE, was put in a broader perspective, i.e. their use in the policy and decision making process. The results from the research show that environmental policies in the European Union are changing and the focus has changed from managing specific pollutants or activities to managing resources in long term life-cycle perspective. The present concept of waste is outdated in a sustainable society and waste should be considered as a resource. In the future waste management will become a synonym to resource extraction. The present national environmental policy making does not consider global environmental consequences due to the fact that it is focused on achieving local environmental targets. The incorporation of global life-cycle perspective in the policy making process will allow the consideration of the environmental and social effects irrelevant of where they arise. Tools, like ORWARE, that incorporate life-cycle thinking are and will be used in environmental policy making. This is proved by many cases of their successful application in aiding local and national authorities to make their decisions. Even though problems may exist in terms of the required skills and knowledge, examples show that good cooperation between policy makers, scientists and other experts will be the key for their extensive and successful application.


"It is a statement of evil" (Knight 18). "The Whole play may be writ down as a wrestling of destruction with creation" (Knight 140). "It contains the decisive orientation of Shakespearean good and evil" (Traversi 86). The above statements serve to prove that Macbeth is Shakespeare's most profound and mature vision of evil. In this play, Shakespeare presents the overspreading influence of evil over the guilty and ambitious minds which lead them to commit the most treacherous villainy that affect not only the man and the state, but the family and the physical universe as well. But this evil is not the one that finally triumphs, Shakespeare in this play also provides the essential morality and courage which in their progression defeat the evil and restore the natural order of things. This paper endeavors to present the various viewpoints from which this evil can be interpreted. It shows how Shakespeare has depicted the transformation of a good person to a ghastly figure. The effect of evil in Lady Macbeth is also analyzed. The paper also tries to examine whether this evil is purely psychological or has an exterior form. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/afj.v4i0.12940 The Arts Faculty Journal Vol.4 July 2010-June 2011 pp.185-194


Against postcolonial and cultural readings of Chinua Achebe's works, this article approaches Achebe's fiction and non-fiction using Freud's theory on narcissism and creative writers as well as Otto Rank's views on art and the artist. It highlights the narcissistic formation of the ego ideal of Achebe and explains its growth according to Freud's views on the psychology of repression and wish-fulfillment. This assumption is built upon a reading of Achebe's novels and some of his non-fiction to argue that Achebe followed in his works the ideals he internalized during his childhood and narcissistically repressed. An analysis of some of Achebe's works is used to support our argument that Achebe's attempts to prescribe the direction of African art and letters as well as his didactic concern with the value and effect of African literature all testify to the writer's narcissistic repression and the family ideals founded on such repression within a colonial, missionary setting. Achebe's use of English language in his fiction and criticism and his following of Christianity support the same notion of ego ideal we postulate. Equally significant is the notion of "ambivalence" we find in Achebe's treatment of themes like language, tolerance, and religion and which we can justify using the same theory we posit and in terms of conflicting ideals. The article interrogates whether we can come up with the term "the intellectual ego" and connect it with the authors and scholars and their works as the literary and artistic theories they embrace are a manifestation of the ideals they practice or simply aspire to.


In this paper, Beam Pattern Scanning (BPS), a transmit diversity technique, is compared with two well known transmit diversity techniques, space-time block coding (STBC) and space-time trellis coding (STTC). In BPS (also called beam pattern oscillation), controlled time varying weight vectors are applied to the antenna array elements mounted at the base station (BS). This creates a small movement in the antenna array pattern directed toward the desired user. In rich scattering environments, this small beam pattern movement creates an artificial fast fading channel. The receiver is designed to exploit time diversity benefits of the fast fading channel. Via the application of simple combining techniques, BPS improves the probability-of-error performance and network capacity with minimal cost and complexity.
In this work, to highlight the potential of the BPS, we compare BPS and Space-Time Coding (i.e., STBC and STTC) schemes. The comparisons are in terms of their complexity, system physical dimension, network capacity, probability-of-error performance, and spectrum efficiency. It is shown that BPS leads to higher network capacity and performance with a smaller antenna dimension and complexity with minimal loss in spectrum efficiency. This identifies BPS as a promising scheme for future wireless communications with smart antennas.


This article contributes to the growing scholarship on how ethnic inequality can dampen the provision of public goods and services. On the one hand, it pushes beyond purely economic inequality to include status inequality between population groups. On other hand, it moves away from the provision of social services, conceptualized through budgetary allocations, to their effective functioning. We study one of the most serious challenges to the effective functioning of social services: the absenteeism of service providers. We provide experimental evidence that in a situation of status inequality between groups, people are more likely to be tolerant of absenteeism among service providers when the intended beneficiaries are perceived to belong to low-status ethnic groups. In particular, we present results from two complementary randomized survey experiments in India. Both show that respondents are more tolerant of teacher absenteeism when schools serve low- rather than high-caste children.


Abstract From the late 18th century to the end of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918, Vienna's two Greek Orthodox communities administered a remarkable number of endowments. By founding endowments the benefactors acted between several spaces and subspaces. The transgression of boundaries by endowments addressed to the benefactors' hometowns in the Ottoman Empire as well as the instability of these boundaries in the 19th century led to various problems in the interaction with the state authorities. But also endowments given to Viennese institutions were sometimes problematic, depending on the benefactors' character as either Ottoman or Habsburg subjects. In contrast to Ottoman subjects, Habsburg subjects could also endow real estate and thus show their integration into the Viennese bourgeoisie. In this article we discuss the legal frameworks for the administration of endowments in the two Greek communities in Vienna as well as its practical realization in interaction with the Habsburg authorities.


We develop uniformly valid con?dence regions for regression coefficients in a high-dimensional sparse least absolute deviation/median regression model. The setting is one where the number of regressors p could be large in comparison to the sample size n, but only s « n of them are needed to accurately describe the regression function. Our new methods are based on the instrumental median regression estimator that assembles the optimal estimating equation from the output of the post l1-penalized median regression and post l1-penalized least squares in an auxiliary equation. The estimating equation is immunized against non-regular estimation of nuisance part of the median regression function, in the sense of Neyman. We establish that in a homoscedastic regression model, the instrumental median regression estimator of a single regression coefficient is asymptotically root-n normal uniformly with respect to the underlying sparse model. The resulting con?dence regions are valid uniformly with respect to the underlying model. We illustrate the value of uniformity with Monte-Carlo experiments which demonstrate that standard/naive post-selection inference breaks down over large parts of the parameter space, and the proposed method does not. We then generalize our method to the case where p1 » n regression coefficients are of interest in a non-smooth Z-estimation framework with approximately sparse nuisance functions, containing median regression with a single target regression coefficient as a very special case. We construct simultaneous con?dence bands on all p1 coefficients, and establish their uniform validity over the underlying approximately sparse model.


Holograms that are predominantly in use today as replicable devices for display, security, or packaging can generally be divided into two categories: either surface relief rainbow holograms, which include three dimensional images and intricate grating patterns, or reflection type volume holograms. The Aztec structure is a special surface relief device that combines aspects of both of these types. Its fabrication by holographic means requires techniques of both surface and volume holograms, and thus it is technically more difficult to make than either separately. The structure is deeper than the standard surface relief hologram, and its profile has the characteristic of several well defined steps, such that, when viewed on edge, resemble a stepped pyramid. Thus, replication of the Aztec structure requires special high resolution techniques to faithfully record the submicron features of the stepped profile, and thus is more difficult to manufacture. The visual characteristics of the Aztec structure are similar to the volume hologram, in that single colors, rather than rainbow colors, can be viewed. Also, a combination of single colors can be encoded into a single master, yielding unique visual effects.


Global environmental, social and economic challenges drive the need for new and improved solutions for food production and consumption. Food production within a sustainability corridor requires innovations exceeding traditional paradigms, acknowledging the complexity arising from sustainability. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how to direct further activities, to develop technologies as potential solutions for questions related to climate change, loss of soil fertility and biodiversity, scarcity of resources, and shortage of drinking water. One approach that promises to address these problems is controlled environment agriculture. Aquaponics (AP) combines two technologies: recirculation aquaculture systems (RAS) and hydroponics (plant production in water, without soil) in a closed-loop system. One challenge to the development of this technology is the conversion of the toxic ammonium produced by the fish into nitrate, via bacteria in a biofilter, to provide nitrogen to the plants. However, as this Special Issue shows, there are many other challenges that need to be addressed if the goal of the technology is to contribute to more sustainable food production systems.


This paper analyzes the problem of a contest designer who chooses a starting time and a deadline of the contest to maximize discounted total effort by the contestants. Each contestant secretly decides how much effort to exert between the starting time and the deadline. At the deadline, the contestant who exerted most effort wins a prize, which consists of the endowment of the designer and collected interest. The contest has a unique Nash equilibrium. In the main model, the designer should announce the contest immediately with a short deadline to promote intense competition. I analyze how the optimal starting time and deadline change for a variable contest prize, different types of asymmetries, a Tullock lottery contest success function, and different goal functions of the designer.


The throughput of a disk subsystem is critical to the performance of a computer system. The 4.3BSD UNIX operating system provides a good example for looking at the heuristics that are used to optimize the positioning of the read-write heads of a disk drive. In this paper we investigate the heuristics used in the BSD hp disk driver. These heuristics are driven by three parameters that can be changed by the system manager. We investigate the interaction of these parameters with the BSD fast file system. This provides a way to see the effects of the BSD fast frle system. Finally we present the results of monitoring three active frle systems during day-to-day use, to see what effect these heuristics can have. @ Computing Systems,Yol.2. No. 3 . Summer 1989 251


Purpose: Breastfeeding is a key child survival strategy important for the long-term health of both the mother and child. The number of women in paid employment has increased exponentially, yet very few of these women continue breastfeeding as recommended by the World Health Organisation. The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify the factors affecting breastfeeding practices in the workplace. Objectives of the study are to: 1: Describe managers' attitudes to and knowledge about providing breastfeeding support. 2: Identify mothers' attitudes towards breastfeeding and the workplace environment. 3: Describe the practices of the breastfeeding mothers in the workplace. 4: Identify factors that influence breastfeeding practices within the workplace environment Method The theoretical frameworks adopted were the Situation- Specific Theory of Breastfeeding and the BASNEF model. The frameworks together with the literature review provided the background which informed this study. The research was a case study of two multi -national companies in Durban, KwaZulu Natal; participants were mothers and managers in the companies. Purposive sampling was used for selecting eight women who participated in the focus groups, two follow up interviews were conducted and five managers were interviewed. Data collection techniques also included a reflexive journal and field observation. After a thorough review of the data, the main themes which emerged were used to guide the discussion and answer the objectives of the study. Results The two companies reflected a scenario of pressures in the workplace environment affecting women's choices regarding combining work and breastfeeding; societal pressures were dictating acceptable behaviour. Breastfeeding was not a priority for employers, no breastfeeding policy existed. Breastfeeding mothers were isolated and employers and employees were not engaging on the issue. Conclusions and Recommendations Simple enabling factors within the workplace would allow mothers, their infants and employers to enjoy the benefits of supporting breastfeeding in the workplace; this would be a win-win situation. Government, non-governmental organisations and society have a responsibility to overtly protect, support and promote breastfeeding in society and in the workplace.


Motion detection is typically spared in blindsight, which results from damage to the striate cortex (area V1) of the brain that is sufficient to eliminate conscious visual awareness and severely reduce sensitivity to luminance contrast, especially for high spatial and low temporal frequencies. Here we show that the discrimination of motion direction within cortically blind fields is not attributable to feature tracking (the detection of changes in position or shape), but is due instead to the detection of first-order motion energy (spatiotemporal changes in luminance). The key to this finding was a version of the line motion illusion entailing reverse-phi motion in which opposing motion directions are simultaneously cued by motion energy and changes in stimulus shape. In forced-choice tests, a blindsighted test subject selected the direction cued by shape change when the stimulus was presented in his intact field, but reliably selected the direction cued by motion energy when the same stimulus was presented in his blind field, where relevant position information was either inaccessible or invalid. Motion energy has been characterized as objectless, so reliance on motion energy detection is consistent with impaired access to shape information in blindsight. The dissociation of motion direction by visual field (cortically blind vs. intact) provides evidence that two pathways from the retina to MT/V5 (the cortical area specialized for motion perception) are functionally distinct: the retinogeniculate pathway through V1 is specialized for feature-based motion perception, whereas the retinocollicular pathway, which bypasses V1, is specialized for detecting motion energy.


OBJECTIVES
We sought to determine the preventive healthcare needs of incarcerated women in the following areas: cervical cancer and breast cancer screening, sexually transmitted infection (STI) screening, hepatitis screening and vaccination, and smoking cessation.

METHODS
A cross-sectional interview survey of a random sample of 100 incarcerated women at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections (RIDOC) in Cranston, Rhode Island, was conducted.

RESULTS
Participants were 62% white, 11% African American, 13% Hispanic, and 14% of mixed race. Mean age was 35 years. Of those surveyed, 67% reported having had a Papanicolou (Pap) smear in the past year, the strongest predictor of which was having received a Pap smear while incarcerated. Of the inmates >40 years old, 58% reported having had a mammogram in the past 2 years. The majority (88%) reported testing for STIs in the past, and 39% desired testing during their current incarceration. As for hepatitis C, 70% had been tested previously and 37% of those reported testing positive. Hispanics were less likely than whites to have been tested for hepatitis C (OR 0.1). Over half (54%) of the women who reported testing positive for hepatitis C also reported having completed the hepatitis A and B vaccine series. Among smokers (80% of all survey participants), 61% were interested in quitting. Those who had been incarcerated multiple times were less likely to want to quit smoking (OR 0.1).

CONCLUSIONS
Incarceration presents a unique opportunity to provide preventive healthcare to high-risk, medically underserved women.


The condensation of complex silicates with pyroxene and olivine composition under conditions prevailing in molecular clouds has been experimentally studied. For this purpose, molecular species comprising refractory elements were forced to accrete on cold substrates representing the cold surfaces of surviving dust grains in the interstellar medium. The efficient formation of amorphous and homogeneous magnesium iron silicates at temperatures of about 12 K has been monitored by IR spectroscopy. The gaseous precursors of such condensation processes in the interstellar medium are formed by erosion of dust grains in supernova shock waves. In the laboratory, we have evaporated glassy silicate dust analogs and embedded the released species in neon ice matrices that have been studied spectroscopically to identify the molecular precursors of the condensing solid silicates. A sound coincidence between the 10 microm band of the interstellar silicates and the 10 microm band of the low-temperature siliceous condensates can be noted.


Chaoborus larvae inhabit frequently the water column of lakes, when they can be mistaken for small fish. Because larvae ascend up to the blind zone of downward-looking echo sounding at night, quantitative acoustic estimation of them is possible only with upward-looking approach. For this reason, the mobile hydroacoustic upward-looking system (120 and 38 kHz split-beam echosounder) in combination with a direct catch method (trawling) was tested to investigate the night community of invertebrates and juvenile fish in the surface layer of the Římov reservoir (Czech Republic). In the target strength range of invertebrates (smaller than -59 dB), the 38 kHz echosounder recorded only a small proportion of targets while the 120 kHz echosounder recorded distinct peaks corresponding to high densities of Chaoborus (target strength, TS range -70 to -60 dB, average TS -66 to -64 dB). At 120 kHz frequency, the TS distribution of smaller cohort of juvenile fish (<25 mm in length) overlapped the TS-distribution of Chaoborus. The number of these smaller juvenile fish was so small compared with the number of Chaoborus that they did not seriously bias acoustic Chaoborus estimate. The correlation between the density of Chaoborus with small contamination of juvenile fish larvae from trawling and acoustic recording made with the 120 kHz echosounder was high (R2= 0.88), but the acoustic densities from trace counting appeared to underestimate Chaoborus abundance when the density was > 1.5 ind.m-3.


Crystallization of isotactic polypropylene (iPP) from the melt in the presence of poly(ethyleneterephthalate) (PET) fibers has been shown to produce preferential nucleation at the fiber surfaces leading to formation of columnar or transcrystalline growth. The crystalline development of PP has been examined by using optical microscopy. Polarized confocal micro-Raman spectroscopy was carried out to investigate the qualitative molecular orientation of alpha and beta transcrystalline regions around PET fibers embedded in a PP matrix. Uncoated PET fibers generate alpha transcrystallinity (α-TC) due to its strong α-nucleation ability. By coating the reinforcing PET fibers with the appropriate nucleating agent, one induces beta transcrystallinity (β-TC) in the PET fiber-reinforced iPP composites. α-TC layers have been also observed with the use of PET sheets as nucleating substrates. The spectroscopic results reveal that lamellar orientation in alpha transcrystalline structures differs significantly from the beta form. Furthermore, two different molecular orientations in the α-TC have been detected.


Abstract. In TROICA (TRanscontinental Observations Into the Chemistry of the Atmosphere) campaigns (1999–2008), the simultaneous observations of near surface 222 Rn concentrations and atmospheric boundary layer thermal structure were performed along the Trans-Siberian Railway across northern Eurasia from Moscow to Vladivostok, including central, southern and far eastern parts of Russia. The data on 222 Rn and temperature vertical distribution are used to estimate 222 Rn regional scale soil fluxes based on calculations of nocturnal 222 Rn accumulation rates in the surface layer under inversion conditions. An effect of seasonal soil thawing on 2–4 times surface 222 Rn concentration increase from summer 1999 to autumn 2005 is observed. The estimated 222 Rn regional averaged fluxes vary over Russia from 29 ± 8 mBq m −2 s −1 in its so-called European territory to 95 ± 51 mBq m −2 s −1 in the southern area of Siberia. The highest 222 Rn fluxes are derived in the regions of high tectonic activity and orogenic belts of central and eastern Siberia and in far eastern Russia. The observed high 222 Rn flux variations in specific events show a strong effect of both soil and atmospheric conditions on 222 Rn near-surface abundance and the derived seasonal patterns over the continent.


Abstract. We study an ensemble of six multi-year global Bayesian
carbon dioxide ( CO2 ) atmospheric inversions that vary in terms of assimilated
observations (either column retrievals from one of two satellites or surface
air sample measurements) and transport model. The time series of inferred
annual fluxes are first compared with each other at various spatial scales.
We then objectively evaluate the small inversion ensemble based on a large
dataset of accurate aircraft measurements in the free troposphere over the
globe, which are independent of all assimilated data. The measured
variables are connected with the inferred fluxes through mass-conserving
transport in the global atmosphere and are part of the inversion results.
Large-scale annual fluxes estimated from the bias-corrected land retrievals
of the second Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) differ greatly from the prior
fluxes, but are similar to the fluxes estimated from the surface
network within the uncertainty of these surface-based estimates. The OCO-2-based and surface-based inversions have similar performance when projected in the
space of the aircraft data, but the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two
flux estimates vary within the northern and tropical parts of the
continents. The verification data also suggest that the more complex and
more recent transport model does not improve the inversion skill. In
contrast, the inversion using bias-corrected retrievals from the Greenhouse
Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) or, to a larger extent, a non-Bayesian
inversion that simply adjusts a recent bottom-up flux estimate with the
annual growth rate diagnosed from marine surface measurements both estimate much
different fluxes and fit the aircraft data less. Our study highlights a way
to rate global atmospheric inversions. Without any general claim regarding the
usefulness of all OCO-2 retrieval datasets vs. all GOSAT retrieval datasets,
it still suggests that some satellite retrievals can now provide inversion
results that are, despite their uncertainty, comparable with respect to credibility to
traditional inversions using the accurate but sparse surface network and
that are therefore complementary for studies of the global carbon budget.


This paper is primarily focused on the characterization of iron and cobalt nanoscale oxides synthesized by a method based on reaction of finedispersedAl flakeswith dichloroethane in paraffin mediumin the presence of iron and cobalt chlorides at different calcined temperatures forming catalytic complexes. This chemical-based synthesis route is briefly described, and the feasibility of obtaining such oxides. Characterization was done byX-ray fluorescence microscopy (XRFM), X-ray diffractometer (XRD), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) studies which revealed, respectively, the presence of oxides and their nanoscale structures, including the elemental distribution and mass thickness of the these elements over the layers.


Over the recent years, the exploration of the notion of 'social imagination' has been carried out by searching for the essence, for that archetypal collective deposits that are positioned along a line that goes from Jung to Bachelard to Durand. As a result, research has usually relied on the idea of a universal "imagination", which derives from disciplines such as – among others – psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience. And yet, due to the development of these studies, scholars have discussed the sociologists' task, questioning whether they have to search for the essential core of the symbolic system or to identify the particular historical and cultural meaning that this absolute system takes on from time to time. This paper intends to inspect the appropriateness of talking about the study of the "imaginations" rather than that of the "imagination". At first, we illustrate the causes of the historical-geographical differentiation of imaginaries. Then, we enquire into the role of the ideological structure and of the social, spatial, religious and economic contexts as preconditions for the construction of different and therefore specific archetypes. The investigation is performed by considering the American imagination system in contrast to the Catholic-European one. In particular, two main factors are taken into account: the re-functionalisation of Lotman's archetypal structure, i.e., the relationship between the space of consciousness and the outer space, which is expressed in the myth of the hero's return home; and the re-functionalisation of the archetype of the hero in the conception of the American superhero


1. A large dose of oestrogen elevated the blood pressure in male Westar rats. 2. Plasma renin substrate and renin activity increased significantly but plasma renin concentration was unchanged. 3. The increase in blood pressure induced by oestrogen was significantly reduced by salt loading, plasma renin concentration was suppressed and the increase in plasma renin activity was reduced. 4. The increase in plasma renin activity induced by the increase of plasma renin substrate concentration may play a role in oestrogen-induced elevation of blood pressure.


Traffic prediction is critical for the success of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, most spatio-temporal models suffer from high mathematical complexity and low tune-up flexibility. This article presents a novel spatio-temporal random effects (STRE) model that has a reduced computational complexity due to mathematical dimension reduction, with additional tune-up flexibility provided by a basis function capable of taking traffic patterns into account. Bellevue, WA, was selected as the model test site due to its widespread deployment of loop detectors. Data collected during the 2 weeks of July 2007 from 105 detectors in the downtown area were used in the modeling process and traffic volumes predicted for 14 detectors for the entire month of July 2008. The results show that the STRE model not only effectively predicts traffic volume but also outperforms three well-established volume prediction models, the enhanced versions of autoregressive moving average (ARMA) and spatiotemporal ARMA, and artificial neural network. Even without further model tuning, all the experimental links produced mean absolute percentage errors between 8% and 16% except for three atypical locations. Based on lessons learned, recommendations are provided for future applications and tune-up of the proposed STRE model.


Some information is beneficial; it makes people's lives go better. Some information is harmful; it makes people's lives go worse. Some information has no welfare effects at all; people neither gain nor lose from it. Under prevailing executive orders, agencies must investigate the welfare effects of information by reference to cost-benefit analysis. Federal agencies have (1) claimed that quantification of benefits is essentially impossible; (2) engaged in "breakeven analysis"; (3) projected various endpoints, such as health benefits or purely economic savings; and (4) relied on private willingness-to-pay for the relevant information. All of these approach0es run into serious objections. With respect to (4), people may lack the information that would permit them to say how much they would pay for (more) information; they may not know the welfare effects of information; and their tastes and values may shift over time, in part as a result of information. These points suggest the need to take the willingness-to-pay criterion with many grains of salt, and to learn more about the actual effects of information, and of the behavioral changes produced by information, on people's experienced well-being.


Although a large part of the Zimbabwean population is living in and dependent on semi- arid and sandy-soil areas, the cultivation of the wetlands is still severely restricted by law. As during colonial times, environmental arguments are used to prevent communal farmers from using the wetlands.
The question is not whether or not the wetlands should be used, but how they should be used. In this paper we hope to show that a sustainable and deliberate use of the wetlands by communal farmers is desirable and possible. Access to wetlands can give farmers an opportunity to stabilize their production and by doing so improve their food security. A change in the legislation is needed for this to be possible.
Hopefully, the importance of the (potential) use of the wetlands and water harvesting will be more widely recognized by policy makers and others involved in rural development in the communal areas.
To contribute to the debate about wetlands we present a case study of Mr. Phiri Maseko's form and the Zvishavane Water Resources Project (ZWRP). Community-based water projects are the main focus of the ZWRP.


There is a need to simplify screening tests for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) so patients can be identified earlier and more efficiently. Glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) has been recommended by some international organisations as a diagnostic tool for detecting T2DM and impaired glucose regulation (IGR, also termed prediabetes and includes impaired fasting glucose and/or impaired glucose tolerance). The HbA1c cut-point of ≥6.5% (48 mmol/mol) has been selected as diagnostic for T2DM, while the cut-points for IGR are debated by the different international organisations: an International Expert Committee has suggested using HbA1c 6.0–6.4% (42–46 mmol/mol); however, the American Diabetes Association has recommended using HbA1c 5.7–6.4% (39–46 mmol/mol). Some countries will adopt a new method of reporting HbA1c values in millimoles per mole (mmol/mol). Use of HbA1c has some logistical advantages over using an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). As patients do not need to fast, appointments do not need to be limited to the morning. The HbA1c result reflects longer term glycaemia and is less affected by recent physical/emotional stress. However, there is some debate as to whether HbA1c should replace fasting plasma glucose or the OGTT. As the two tests detect different people, some individuals with diabetes detected on OGTT will no longer be classified as having T2DM using HbA1c ≥6.5% criteria. Furthermore, some medical conditions can result in HbA1c assay measurements not reflecting glycaemic control over the last 2–3 months; these include haematological disorders, renal failure, and chronic excess alcohol consumption.


Purpose The phase III Iressa Survival Evaluation in Lung Cancer (ISEL) trial compared gefitinib with placebo in 1,692 patients with refractory advanced non–small-cell lung cancer. We analyzed ISEL tumor biopsy samples to examine relationships between biomarkers and clinical outcome after gefitinib treatment in a placebo-controlled setting. Methods Biomarkers included epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene copy number by fluorescence in situ hybridization (n ϭ 370); EGFR (n ϭ 379) and phosphorylated Akt (p-Akt) protein expression (n ϭ 382) by immunohistochemistry; and mutations in EGFR (n ϭ 215), KRAS (n ϭ 152), and BRAF (n ϭ 118). Results High EGFR gene copy number was a predictor of a gefitinib-related effect on survival (hazard ratio [HR], 0.61 for high copy number and HR, 1.16 for low copy number; comparison of high v low copy number HR, P ϭ .045). EGFR protein expression was also related to clinical outcome (HR for positive, 0.77; HR for negative, 1.57; comparison of high v low protein expression HR, P ϭ .049). Patients with EGFR mutations had higher response rates than patients without EGFR mutations (37.5% v 2.6%); there were insufficient data for survival analysis. No relationship was observed between p-Akt protein expression and survival outcome, and the limited amount of data collected for KRAS and BRAF mutations prevented any meaningful evaluation of clinical outcomes in relation to these mutations. Conclusion EGFR gene copy number was a predictor of clinical benefit from gefitinib in ISEL. Additional studies are warranted to assess these biomarkers fully for the identification of patients most likely to benefit from gefitinib treatment.


'He will live in his "Irish Melodies", they will go down to posterity with the music; both will last as long as Ireland, or as music and poetry' - Lord Byron. In this enthralling new biography of Thomas Moore, Linda Kelly evokes the life and times of a great Irish writer - romantic poet, political satirist, pioneering biographer and above all creator of the "Irish Melodies", those heartfelt lyrics set to traditional Irish airs by which he is best remembered. Tom Moore, a Dublin grocer's son, was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, at the time of the doomed Irish rising of 1798. The experience intensified his sense of identity as an Irish Catholic, and though his charm and talents won him entry to the highest reaches of English society, he never lost sight of his own country's causes, and through his songs and satires became one of Ireland's most eloquent and persuasive advocates. Immensely successful in his lifetime, though always dogged by poverty, Moore was ranked with Walter Scott and Byron; his oriental epic Lalla Rookh was more widely translated than any other poem of the period. But like most modern readers Moore himself was in no doubt about the pre-eminence of the Irish Melodies, still known and loved on both sides of the Atlantic. The recent discovery of Moore's original journals provides fascinating new material on Moore's social and literary life, not least the vexed episode of the burning of Byron's memoirs. Linda Kelly draws extensively on these to give a warm and insightful picture of one of the most delightful figures of the age, capturing the charm of Whig society and casting new light on his relationship with Byron.


This dissertation develops and utilizes a methodology for combining data drawn from the manuscript census returns and the county tax rolls to study landless farmers during the period from 1850 until 1880 in three Texas Brazos River Valley counties: Fort Bend, Milam, and Palo Pinto. It focuses in particular on those landless farmers who appear to have had no option other than tenant farming. It concludes that there were such landless farmers throughout the period, although they were a relatively insignificant factor in the agricultural economy before the Civil War. During the Antebellum decade, poor tenant farmers were a higher proportion of the population on the frontier than in the interior, but throughout the period, they were found in higher numbers in the central portion of the river valley. White tenants generally avoided the coastal plantation areas, although by 1880, that pattern seemed to be changing. Emancipation had tremendous impact on both black and white landless farmers. Although both groups were now theoretically competing for the same resource, productive crop land, their reactions during the first fifteen years were so different that it suggests two systems of tenant farming divided by caste. As population expansion put increasing pressure on the land, the two systems began to merge on terms resembling those under which black tenants had always labored.


Religion in Vogue provides readers with a unique approach to the study of popular culture and American religion. Through its analysis of numerous primary sources ranging from fashion magazines to runway shows, the book traces how Christian symbols and imagery became an increasingly prominent part of the fashion industry and designer apparel. Examining this trajectory illuminates the longstanding and evolving relationship between Christianity and fashion. To capture this complexity, each chapter focuses on a specific element of fashion that mediates Christian ideas and images, including print articles, advertisements, jewelry, and fashion designs. Religion in Vogue examines in-depth religious elements in fashion advertisements, the popularity of cross jewelry, Catholic inspirations in designer collections, and, of course, the appearance of the divine on designer garments. Chronicling this trajectory highlights how the fashion industry constructs a vibrant textual, visual, and material discourse on Christianity that exists alongside and intersects with more dominant and familiar religious narratives. This fashionable religion, an aestheticized Christianity, offers spiritual seekers a way to be simultaneously stylish and religious. In doing so, the world of fashion both shapes and reflects trends toward religious individualism and religious eclecticism that have dominated the religious landscape of the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first. Religion in Vogue helps us better understand the changing American religious landscape in a novel and fascinating way.


Introduction: This study was conducted for the purpose of determining the breastfeeding attitudes of pregnant women and factors which affect the breastfeeding. Methods: This study is a cross-sectional and descriptive study. The study sample consisted of 152 pregnant monitored in obstetric clinics at a university hospital in Manisa. The study data were collected by using two forms "Pregnant Information Form" and "Breastfeeding Attrition Prediction Tool". Results: The mean age of pregnant women was 27.69±5.62 years. When the sub-scale score mean of the pregnant women are investigated, it has been determined that Positive Breastfeeding Attitudinal Scale (PBS) score averages 242.11±57.04, Negative Breastfeeding Attitudinal Scale (NBS) score averages 142.01 ± 52.07, Social and Professional Support Scale (SPS) score averages 209.49 ± 52.56 and Breastfeeding Control Scale (BFC) score averages 38.76 ± 6.78. Conclusions: The results illustrated that with a university degree and from nuclear families and multipara and aged pregnant women had positive attitudes towards breastfeeding. It was also noted that multipara and aged pregnant women had higher control perceptions of breastfeeding. Original Research Article Sen and Kılıc; AJPCB, 2(1): 1-7, 2019; Article no.AJPCB.48134 2


Cell migration initiates by extension of the actin cytoskeleton at the leading edge. Computational analysis of fluorescent speckle microscopy movies of migrating epithelial cells revealed this process is mediated by two spatially colocalized but kinematically, kinetically, molecularly, and functionally distinct actin networks. A lamellipodium network assembled at the leading edge but completely disassembled within 1 to 3 micrometers. It was weakly coupled to the rest of the cytoskeleton and promoted the random protrusion and retraction of the leading edge. Productive cell advance was a function of the second colocalized network, the lamella, where actomyosin contraction was integrated with substrate adhesion.


We used interpretive description to describe how everyday life close to death was experienced and dealt with in families with one member who had a life-threatening illness. We performed 28 individual, couple, and group interviews with five families. We found two patterns, namely, "being me in a family living close to death" and "being us in a family living close to death." "Being me" meant that every individual in the family had to deal with the impending death, regardless of whether or not he or she was the person with the life-threatening illness. This was linked to ways of promoting the individual's self-image, or "me-ness." This pattern was present at the same time as the pattern of "being us," or in other words, being a family, and dealing with impending death and a new "we-ness" as a group. "Striving for the optimal way of living close to death" was the core theme.


Many mature term-based or pattern-based approaches have been used in the field of information filtering to generate users' information needs from a collection of documents. A fundamental assumption for these approaches is that the documents in the collection are all about one topic. However, in reality users' interests can be diverse and the documents in the collection often involve multiple topics. Topic modelling, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), was proposed to generate statistical models to represent multiple topics in a collection of documents, and this has been widely utilized in the fields of machine learning and information retrieval, etc. But its effectiveness in information filtering has not been so well explored. Patterns are always thought to be more discriminative than single terms for describing documents. However, the enormous amount of discovered patterns hinder them from being effectively and efficiently used in real applications, therefore, selection of the most discriminative and representative patterns from the huge amount of discovered patterns becomes crucial. To deal with the above mentioned limitations and problems, in this paper, a novel information filtering model, Polysemy based semantic approach is proposed.


Sometimes the crack of the bat or the roar of the crowd fails to capture the meaning of sports as athletes themselves understand it. Books about sports have ignored this dimension of the subject, particularly the athletes' own autobiographical accounts. In "Sporting Lives", the first book to examine the two popular realms of sports and autobiography, James Pipkin looks at recurring patterns found in athletes' accounts of their lives and sporting experiences, examining language, metaphor, rhetorical strategies, and other elements to analyze sports from the inside out."Sporting Lives" takes a fresh look at memoirs from baseball, football, basketball, golf, and other sports to explore how American athletes see themselves: not only how those images mesh with popular perceptions of them as heroes or celebrities but also how their accounts differ from those of sports journalists and other outsiders. Drawing on the life stories of such well-known figures as Wilt Chamberlain, Babe Ruth, and Martina Navratilova - both as-told-to and self-authored works - Pipkin follows players from the "echoing green" of eternal youth to the sometimes cultlike and isolated status of fame, interpreting recurring patterns both in the living of their lives and in the telling of them. He even considers Dennis Rodman's four autobiographies to show how the contradictions of his self-portrayals reflect the Janus-faced quality of sports in the era of celebrity culture.As Pipkin shows, the life of the athlete involves more than mere athleticism; it is also a world of nostalgia and sentiment, missed opportunities and lost youth. He sheds light on athletes' common obsession with youth and body image - including gender and racial considerations - and explores their descriptions of being "in a zone," that transcendent state when everything seems to click. And he considers the time that all athletes dread, when their bodies begin to betray them...and the cheering stops.While the lives of athletes may often suggest the magic of Peter Pan, Pipkin's engaging study reveals that they are in many ways more like the Lost Boys. "Sporting Lives" shows that the meaning of sports is intertwined with the telling. It is both an eminently readable book for fans and a critically sophisticated analysis that will engage scholars of literature, sports or media studies, and American popular culture.


During recent years there has been a growing interest in using non-invasive biomarkers to understand and monitor the airway inflammation in subjects with respiratory tract disorders and mainly asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Sputum induction is generally a well-tolerated and safe procedure and a European Respiratory Society Task Force has published a comprehensive review on sputum methodology. Induced sputum cell count and, to a lesser extent, mediator measurements have been particularly well validated. In asthma, the sputum and the cell culture supernatant can be used for the measurement of a variety of soluble mediators, including eosinophil-derived proteins, nitric oxide (NO) derivatives, cytokines and remodelling-associated proteins. Sputum eosinophilia (> 3%) is a classic feature of asthma although half of the patients seems to be non eosinophilic. Measuring the percentage of sputum eosinophils has proved to be useful in the clinical arena in helping to predict short term response to inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) and tailor the dose of ICS in the severe patients but there is scope for the application of other induced sputum markers potentially useful in clinical practice. The widespread application of induced sputum in asthma across the spectrum of disease severity has given insight into the relationship between airway function and airway inflammation, proposed new disease phenotypes and defined which of these phenotypes respond to current therapy, and perhaps most importantly provided an additional tool to guide the clinical management of asthmatic patients. To date sputum induction is the only non-invasive measure of airway inflammation that has a clearly proven role in asthma management.


The formation of unisexual flowers in maize requires the selective elimination and sexual maturation of floral organs in an initially bisexual floral meristem. Elimination of pistil primordia occurs in the primary and secondary florets of the tassel spikelets, and in the secondary florets of ear spikelets. Ill-fated pistil cells undergo a cell death process associated with nuclear degeneration in a specific spatial-temporal pattern that begins in the subepidermis, eventually aborting the entire organ. The sex determination genes tasselseed1 and tasselseed2 are required for death of pistil cells. tasselseed1 is required for the accumulation of TASSELSEED2 mRNA in pistil cells. All pistil primordia express TASSELSEED2 RNA but functional pistils found in ear spikelets are protected from cell death by the action of the silkless1 gene. silkless1 blocks tasselseed-induced cell death in the pistil primordia of primary ear florets. A model is proposed for the control of pistil fate by the action of the ts1-ts2-sk1 pathway.


This thesis proposal addresses support for utilizing an existing formal analysis tool when predictable rule-based systems are developed. One of the main problems of the rule-based paradigm is that it is hard to analyze the behavior of rule sets, which is conflicting with the high predictability requirements typically associated with real-time systems. Further, analysis tools developed for rule-based systems typically address a specific platform or a specific part of the development chain.In our approach, rules are initially specified in a high-level language. We enable a powerful analysis tool not designed for rule based development, to be utilized for analyzing the rule base. This is done by transforming the set of rules, with maintained semantics, to a representation suitable for the target analysis tool. Our approach provides non-experts in formal methods with the ability to formally analyze a set of rules.


Compacted graphite iron is the material of choice for engine cylinder heads of heavy-duty trucks. Compacted graphite iron provides the best possible compromise between optimum mechanical properties, compared to flake graphite iron, and optimum thermal conductivity, compared to spheroidal graphite iron. The vermicular-shaped graphite particles, however, act as stress concentrators, and, as a result of delamination from the metal matrix, they are responsible for crack initiation during the thermomechanical fatigue cycles occurring through engine startup and shutdown cycles. Scratch tests driven over the matrix and into the graphite particles were performed in order to characterize the strength of the metal–graphite interface. Samples extracted from a cylinder head in as-cast condition were compared to samples subjected to a heat-treatment at 700 ◦C for 60 h. The former samples were composed of a primarily pearlitic matrix and graphite particles (~11.5 vol %), whereas, after annealing, a certain pearlite fraction decomposed into Fe and C, producing a microstructure with graphite–ferrite interfaces, exhibiting a partially spiky morphology. The scratch test revealed that the ferrite–graphite interfaces with spiky nature exhibited a stronger resistance to delamination compared to the ferrite–graphite interfaces with smooth morphology. One reason for the high interface strength is the mechanical interlocking between graphite spikes and ferrite, increasing the contact area between the two phases.


Mycoplasma, Ureaplasma, and obligate intracellular bacteria (Anaplasma, Chlamydia, Coxiella, Ehrlichia, Orientia, Rickettsia, and Tropheryma) differ from others by several characteristics. This includes the lack of efficiency for characterization using Gram stains and, except for Mycoplasma and Ureaplasma species and to a limited extent Coxiella burnetii and Tropheryma whipplei, the obligatory requirement for intracellular growth within a eukaryotic host cell. Thus, the most frequently used tests in clinical microbiology laboratories, Gram staining and axenic culture, are inefficient for detection and diagnosis. As a result, this has often been accomplished by an alternative staining method, such as Giemsa and Wright stains of clinical samples, by histopathologic or direct fluorescent-antibody analysis of biopsy samples; or most often by detection of antibody responses using a variety of serologic tests. The application of nucleic acid tests is now the standard practice for some of these bacteria. Additionally, improvements in axenic and cell culture methods have significantly enhanced their detection and the ability to render laboratory-based diagnoses for the diseases that they cause.


Graph is an important data representation which appears in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. Effective graph analytics provides users a deeper understanding of what is behind the data, and thus can benefit a lot of useful applications such as node classification, node recommendation, link prediction, etc. However, most graph analytics methods suffer the high computation and space cost. Graph embedding is an effective yet efficient way to solve the graph analytics problem. It converts the graph data into a low dimensional space in which the graph structural information and graph properties are maximumly preserved. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature in graph embedding. We first introduce the formal definition of graph embedding as well as the related concepts. After that, we propose two taxonomies of graph embedding which correspond to what challenges exist in different graph embedding problem settings and how the existing work address these challenges in their solutions. Finally, we summarize the applications that graph embedding enables and suggest four promising future research directions in terms of computation efficiency, problem settings, techniques and application scenarios.


Indonesia participates in various free trade agreements with its main trading partners and it raises a research problem namely whether the participation would create benefits for Indonesia economic performances. Then, the research problem generates research questions that are what are the impacts of free trade agreements several aspects particularly for economic, social, and environment. Main objectives of this research will focus to assess the impacts of free trade agreements on: (i) economic aspects such as economic growth, export and import performances, balance of trade, terms of trade, investment, inflation, government expenditure and consumption, and sector output; (ii) social aspect such as labor market, wages, income gap between skilled and unskilled labor, social welfare; and (iii) environment aspect. Method of the research employs an economic model of computable general equilibrium on international trade, namely Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP Model 8 version). There are two policy simulations of tariff reduction namely; (i) Simulation I, tariff of agriculture products reduced by 65% and tariff of non-agriculture products reduced by 85%; (ii) Simulation II, tariff of agriculture products reduced by 80% and tariff of non-agriculture products reduced by 100% The research found that in general, impact of free trade agreement benefit for Indonesia economic performances, it indicated by economic variables that contribute positively to the economic performances are greater than economic variables that contribute negatively to the economic performances. The positive economic variables are economic growth, export performance, terms of trade, balance of trade, investment, government expenditure and consumption, wages, social welfare. While the negative economic variables are import performance, inflation, sector output, labor market, income gap of skilled and unskilled labors, emission proliferation.Research limitations related to the secondary data sources that depend on data published by international and national institutions as well as the data that already embodied in the GTAP Model. Policy implication to the government policy namely: (i) to undertake economic and trade reform to improve competitiveness; (ii) to undertake deeply comprehensive study before participation in the FTA; (iii) to give assistances for loser business particularly for small and medium enterprises; (iv) to socialize actively about the FTA to related business community.


Using the technique of enrichment of contractive type mappings by Krasnoselskij averaging, presented here for the first time, we introduce and study the class of enriched nonexpansive mappings in Hilbert spaces. In order to approximate the fixed points of enriched nonexpansive mappings we use the Krasnoselskij iteration for which we prove strong and weak convergence theorems. Examples to illustrate the richness of the new class of contractive mappings are also given. Our results in this paper extend some classical convergence theorems established by Browder and Petryshyn in [Browder, F. E., Petryshyn, W. V., Construction of fixed points of nonlinear mappings in Hilbert space, J. Math. Anal. Appl., 20 (1967), 197–228] from the case of nonexpansive mappings to that of enriched nonexpansive mappings,thus including many other important related results from literature as particular cases.


This research might help you... To consider the purposes of the activities in your classroom. If you want pupils to reflect on something you will need to give appropriate time, stimulus and means of response To use reading and discussing stories as a means of enabling pupils to think about things outside their immediate experience To put designing and making activities in a historical context which has personal appeal and involvement To link questions to designing and making activities in a way that enables pupils to develop a wider appreciation of technology I have been struck by how many children in primary school see technology in a limited way ; limited in fact to their own designing and making in school . Through these activities they had difficulty in grasping a wider view of technology. In this article I describe my attempts to widen their perception of technology .


Popular reaction against the uncomfortable aspects of modern mass tourism has led to the emergence of new forms of cross-cultural travel. One important form is traveling, in which self-described "travelers" aim to dissociate themselves from tourism altogether. As travelers, rather than tourists, these people present themselves as engaged in a morally superior alternative that does not create the same problems as tourism. This article shows that in the light of critiques of mass tourism, traveling in fact exacerbates existing problems raised by these critiques, in the domains of economic inequity, mobility, and representation. The failure of traveling to overcome these problems of tourism lies in the travelers' fixation on having "authentic" experiences and in their interpretation of the authentic non-West as being outside modernity.


We report the successful molecular-beam epitaxial growth of 10 stacked layers of GaSb/GaAs quantum rings using a new procedure. Exact control of the arsenic flux during capping helps to reduce the strong group-V As–Sb exchange reactions, enabling the rings to be capped at the same growth temperature (480 °C) without dissolution. X-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy indicate excellent structural quality and uniformity with no threading dislocations. This is due to the reduction in the average strain through the quantum-ring formation. The total ring density in the stacks is 1 × 1011 cm–2. An unusually long-wavelength quantum-ring photoluminescence peak of 1.3 μm is observed at low temperature, which is attributed to a reduction in the quantum-ring charging due to lower unintentional p-doping in the GaAs cap layer. The impact that this effect will have on future device designs in solar cells and lasers is also discussed.


A guide to the University of Virginia's collections related to Thomas Jefferson, with additional links to texts and information resources about Jefferson.


ABSTRACT This article outlines a general history of the intellectual origins and development of geopolitical thought. It provides categories for assessing contemporary expressions of this phenomenon, and then discusses the applicability of these tools to the Baltic Sea region. The article focuses on eliciting and juxtaposing contrasts between the three classical bodies of literature that evolved largely in parallel, and ends up briefly commenting on a fourth, partly "critical" approach. The main takeaway is that considering all four geopolitical approaches before applying any of them to the Baltic Sea realm encourages analysts to embrace a more holistic and dynamic viewpoint than each of the alternatives individually can offer. Such a conceptualization promises to forge analytical linkages between a series of relevant, geographically contingent circumstances including resources, arenas and communities that represent prerequisites and opportunities in crisis, conflict, or war.


The far-field pattern of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) is an important issue in practical applications. We used a Monte Carlo photon-tracing method for the package design of flip-chip bonded power LEDs. As a first-order approximation, we propose using a plane light source model to calculate the far-field pattern of encapsulated LEDs. The far-field pattern is also studied by use of a more detailed model, which takes the structure of all epitaxial layers of a flip-chip bonded power LED into consideration. By comparing the simulation results with the experimental data, we have concluded that the plane light source model is much less time-consuming and offers fairly good precision for package design.


The paper tries to look at the bane of development in the Nigerian state and how rule of law and good governance could be the panacea for the development problem the country is going through. Using a frame work of analysis that emphasizes the linkage between institutions and their capacities to bring about development, the paper discovers that the practice of rule of law enhances good governance and development. It concludes that for Nigerian state to develop, it has to allow the practice of the rule of law in its entirety.


Recent violence in India towards minority Muslim and Dalit communities in response to their alleged killing of cows is shocking in its brutality. Those responsible maintain the cow is sacred to Hindus and a threat to its life is an attack on Hinduism itself. They claim a deep sense of hurt at what they see to be the historic violation of their religion. In contrast, liberal commentators argue that right-wing forces have become emboldened since Hindu nationalists came to power in 2014. Yet, Hindu nationalism alone cannot explain the widespread belief that people whose livelihoods depend on cattle are beyond the democratic norms of tolerance. Rather, we must consider 'affect' and the role of history to understand the currency of cow protection in the cultural politics of hurt in contemporary India.


In this work we present an integrated platform based on an InP membrane adhesively bonded to a silicon wafer. The platform allows for flexible design of wafer scale active and passive nanophotonic circuits. Advantages of this platform are the flexible fabrication process, large variety of integrated active and passive devices in one photonic layer, high index contrast of devices and therefore small footprint of complex circuits. We demonstrated several building blocks and devices, fabricated in the platform: semiconductor optical amplifiers, lasers and several passive devices, exploiting the high index contrast. Potential of the platform offers the integration of novel high speed devices using regrowth approach.


Adaptation and resilience are two concepts originally developed in dissimilar problem contexts but which are of significant importance for our ability to respond to a changing climate. While both concepts encompass processes of change they differ in several important areas. This article discusses the relationship between the two concepts and highlights three issues concerned with our ability to respond to and manage change. First, although adaptation responses can help to build resilience, they just as easily can undermine resilience. Second, the magnitude of change may be outside our abilities to adapt, and thus it is not always possible to maintain system resilience. Finally, resilience is not a normative concept. The desirability of a resilient system, or community, must be considered in light of social goals and how benefits and risks are distributed. Better appreciation of the relationship between the concepts of adaptation and resilience will provide more effective tools to plan for, and respond to, current and future change. WIREs Clim Change 2011 2 113–120 DOI: 10.1002/wcc.91


The Radiant Heating markets especially, the hydronic segment are growing rapidly in North America due to homeowners' increasing demand for comfort and the steady rise in residential construction. Radiant systems are promising technologies for energy saving in commercial and residential building sectors together with improving occupant thermal comfort. Such a technology is different from the more standard all-air systems and thus can be termed Space Conditioning. However, the thermal performance of radiant systems in buildings has not been fully understood and accounted for. This is primarily due to lack of any standard testing mechanism. The central thrust of this paper is to experimentally investigate questions relating to thermal performance of radiant systems, thus also contribute towards evolving a new standard for testing mechanisms. Products from 12 different radiant floor systems were chosen from the market. Having defined each with similar control parameters such as flow rate, supply water temperature and similar design parameters like size, insulation etc., they are separately tested in a well insulated test setup. Experiments on the time variations for each test floor were performed at supply water temperatures ranging between 100F – 140F with a 10F increment at each stage. Having gathered data through the Data Acquisition System (DAS), the data is analyzed and compared between all systems. The paper concludes by providing recommendations for experimentally testing thermal energy performance, thermal uniformity and thermal stability of radiant floor heating technology.


Mechanisms by which the brain monitors and modulates performance are an important focus of recent research. The conflict-monitoring hypothesis posits that the ACC detects conflict between competing response pathways which, in turn, signals for enhanced control. The N2, an ERP component that has been localized to ACC, has been observed after high conflict stimuli. As a candidate index of the conflict signal, the N2 would be expected to be sensitive to the degree of response conflict present, a factor that depends on both the features of external stimuli and the internal control state. In the present study, we sought to explore the relationship between N2 amplitude and these variables through use of a modified Eriksen flankers task in which target–distracter compatibility was parametrically varied. We hypothesized that greater target–distracter incompatibility would result in higher levels of response conflict, as indexed by both behavior and the N2 component. Consistent with this prediction, there were parametric degradations in behavioral performance and increases in N2 amplitudes with increasing incompatibility. Further, increasingly incompatible stimuli led to the predicted parametric increases in control on subsequent incompatible trials as evidenced by enhanced performance and reduced N2 amplitudes. These findings suggest that the N2 component and associated behavioral performance are finely sensitive to the degree of response conflict present and to the control adjustments that result from modulations in conflict.


The research was focused on measuring the level of biomass carbon productivity in the Central American countries. To make these measurements we used the IPCC Tier 1 method to determine annual increase carbon storage in biomass carbon loss by wood removals and carbon loss by burning fuel extraction and to measure its impact on productivity forest approach was used for data analysis enclosures (DEA), estimating Malmquist indices. The growth rate of total factor productivity forest (PTFF) was 0.03% on average in all countries, it shows that El Salvador recorded a growth rate of 1%, 0.04% Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua, 0.03 % Change in Costa Rica and Honduras, 0.01%, while Cuba and Panama were indifferent in the growth rate.


Earthquake early warning systems provide warnings to end users of incoming moderate to strong ground shaking from earthquakes. An earthquake early warning system, ShakeAlert, is providing alerts to beta end users in the western United States, specifically California, Oregon, and Washington. An essential aspect of the earthquake early warning system is the development of a framework to test modifications to code to ensure functionality and assess performance. In 2016, a Testing and Certification Platform (TCP) was included in the development of the Production Prototype version of ShakeAlert. The purpose of the TCP is to evaluate the robustness of candidate code that is proposed for deployment on ShakeAlert Production Prototype servers. TCP consists of two main components: a real‐time in situ test that replicates the real‐time production system and an offline playback system to replay test suites. The real‐time tests of system performance assess code optimization and stability. The offline tests comprise a stress test of candidate code to assess if the code is production ready. The test suite includes over 120 events including local, regional, and teleseismic historic earthquakes, recentering and calibration events, and other anomalous and potentially problematic signals. Two assessments of alert performance are conducted. First, point‐source assessments are undertaken to compare magnitude, epicentral location, and origin time with the Advanced National Seismic System Comprehensive Catalog, as well as to evaluate alert latency. Second, we describe assessment of the quality of ground‐motion predictions at end‐user sites by comparing predicted shaking intensities to ShakeMaps for historic events and implement a threshold‐based approach that assesses how often end users initiate the appropriate action, based on their ground‐shaking threshold. TCP has been developed to be a convenient streamlined procedure for objectively testing algorithms, and it has been designed with flexibility to accommodate significant changes in development of new or modified system code. It is expected that the TCP will continue to evolve along with the ShakeAlert system, and the framework we describe here provides one example of how earthquake early warning systems can be evaluated.


This paper presents a fast concurrent binary search tree algorithm. To achieve high performance under contention, the algorithm divides update operations within an eager abstract access that returns rapidly for efficiency reason and a lazy structural adaptation that may be postponed to diminish contention. To achieve high performance under read-only workloads, it features a rebalancing mechanism and guarantees that read-only operations searching for an element execute lock-free. We evaluate the contention-friendly binary search tree using Synchrobench, a benchmark suite to compare synchronization techniques. More specifically, we compare its performance against five state-of-the-art binary search trees that use locks, transactions or compare-and-swap for synchronization on Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron and Oracle SPARC. Our results show that our tree is more efficient than other trees and double the throughput of existing lock-based trees under high contention.


During the obligate vernalization response of Arabis alpina, gibberellin promotes flowering in cold and this is modulated by the PEP1 transcription factor. Regulation of flowering by endogenous and environmental signals ensures that reproduction occurs under optimal conditions to maximize reproductive success. Involvement of the growth regulator gibberellin (GA) in the control of flowering by environmental cues varies among species. Arabis alpina Pajares, a model perennial member of the Brassicaceae, only undergoes floral induction during vernalization, allowing definition of the role of GA specifically in this process. The transcription factor PERPETUAL FLOWERING1 (PEP1) represses flowering until its mRNA levels are reduced during vernalization. Genome-wide analyses of PEP1 targets identified genes involved in GA metabolism and signaling, and many of the binding sites in these genes were specific to the A. alpina lineage. Here, we show that the pep1 mutant exhibits an elongated-stem phenotype, similar to that caused by treatment with exogenous GA, consistent with PEP1 repressing GA responses. Moreover, in comparison with the wild type, the pep1 mutant contains higher GA4 levels and is more sensitive to GA prior to vernalization. Upon exposure to cold temperatures, GA levels fall to low levels in the pep1 mutant and in wild-type plants, but GA still promotes floral induction and the transcription of floral meristem identity genes during vernalization. Reducing GA levels strongly impairs flowering and inflorescence development in response to short vernalization treatments, but longer treatments overcome the requirement for GA. Thus, GA accelerates the floral transition during vernalization in A. alpina, the down-regulation of PEP1 likely increases GA sensitivity, and GA responses contribute to determining the length of vernalization required for flowering and reproduction.


The analysis of univariate or multivariate time series provides crucial information to describe, understand, and predict climatic variability. The discovery and implementation of a number of novel methods for extracting useful information from time series has recently revitalized this classical field of study. Considerable progress has also been made in interpreting the information so obtained in terms of dynamical systems theory. In this review we describe the connections between time series analysis and nonlinear dynamics, discuss signal‐to‐noise enhancement, and present some of the novel methods for spectral analysis. The various steps, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of these methods, are illustrated by their application to an important climatic time series, the Southern Oscillation Index. This index captures major features of interannual climate variability and is used extensively in its prediction. Regional and global sea surface temperature data sets are used to illustrate multivariate spectral methods. Open questions and further prospects conclude the review.


This illuminating Handbook presents the state-of-the-art in the scientific field of experience economy studies. It offers a rich and varied collection of contributions that discuss different issues of crucial importance for our understanding of the experience economy. Each chapter reflects diverse scientific viewpoints from disciplines including management, mainstream economics and sociology to provide a comprehensive overview.


During the European sovereign debt crisis of 2011–13, some nations faced with rising borrowing costs adopted commitments to treat bondholders as priority claimants. That is, if there were a shortage of funds, bondholders would be paid first. In this article, we analyse the prevalence and variety of these types of commitments and ask whether they impact borrowing costs. We examine a reform that was widely touted at the height of the Euro sovereign debt crisis in 2011, in which Spain enshrined in its constitution a strong commitment to give absolute priority to public debt claimants. We find no evidence that this reform had any impact on Spanish sovereign bond yields. By contrast, our examination of the US Commonwealth of Puerto Rico suggests that constitutional priority promises can have an impact, at least where the borrower government is subject to supervening law and legal institutions.


In this study, a laboratory scale system of Moving Bed Biofilm Reactor (MBBR) was used to treat municipal wastewater from a domestic community in Baghdad City to get the water free from BOD for reuse in the irrigation or discharge to the river. The aim of the described experimentation was the comparison of a low cost MBBR and an activated sludge system (AS); the other aim from this research is to derive successful MBBR wastewater reuse projects in Iraq. Laboratory experiments were conducted in two parts, firstly at BOD5 load of about (150-200) mg/l, filling ratio of plastic elements in the MBBR reactor was 40%. Aerobic reactor consumed most of the biodegradable organic matter. The BOD5 removal efficiencies were 78 and 90% for MBBR & AS respectively. Second part when BOD5 load about (900-1300) mg/l used (synthetic wastewater)، filling ratio is 67%. The removal efficiencies of BOD reached 73 % for AS and about 88% for MBBR.


Though reinforcement learning has greatly benefited from the incorporation of neural networks, the inability to verify the correctness of such systems limits their use. Current work in explainable deep learning focuses on explaining only a single decision in terms of input features, making it unsuitable for explaining a sequence of decisions. To address this need, we introduce Abstracted Policy Graphs, which are Markov chains of abstract states. This representation concisely summarizes a policy so that individual decisions can be explained in the context of expected future transitions. Additionally, we propose a method to generate these Abstracted Policy Graphs for deterministic policies given a learned value function and a set of observed transitions, potentially off-policy transitions used during training. Since no restrictions are placed on how the value function is generated, our method is compatible with many existing reinforcement learning methods. We prove that the worst-case time complexity of our method is quadratic in the number of features and linear in the number of provided transitions, O(|F|2|tr samples|). By applying our method to a family of domains, we show that our method scales well in practice and produces Abstracted Policy Graphs which reliably capture relationships within these domains.


[1] Suprathermal electrons (>70 eV) form a small fraction of the total solar wind electron density but serve as valuable tracers of heliospheric magnetic field topology. Their usefulness as tracers of magnetic loops with both feet rooted on the Sun, however, most likely fades as the loops expand beyond some distance owing to scattering. As a first step toward quantifying that distance, we construct an observationally constrained model for the evolution of the suprathermal electron pitch-angle distributions on open field lines. We begin with a near-Sun isotropic distribution moving antisunward along a Parker spiral magnetic field while conserving magnetic moment, resulting in a field-aligned strahl within a few solar radii. Past this point, the distribution undergoes little evolution with heliocentric distance. We then add constant (with heliocentric distance, energy, and pitch angle) ad-hoc pitch-angle scattering. Close to the Sun, pitch-angle focusing still dominates, again resulting in a narrow strahl. Farther from the Sun, however, pitch-angle scattering dominates because focusing is effectively weakened by the increasing angle between the magnetic field direction and intensity gradient, a result of the spiral field. We determine the amount of scattering required to match Ulysses observations of strahl width in the fast solar wind, providing an important tool for inferring the large-scale properties and topologies of field lines in the interplanetary medium. Although the pitch-angle scattering term is independent of energy, time-of-flight effects in the spiral geometry result in an energy dependence of the strahl width that is in the observed sense although weaker in magnitude.


Non-Performing Loans (NPLs) gained attention of economists and researchers since the last three to four decades; the time when banking sector experienced the increasing trend in the NPL's and started facing crises. The importance of the financial sector cannot be ignored or argued as economic growth in any country cannot take place without a sound financial sector. Factors of ex-post credit risk are a matter of considerable magnitude for supervisory establishments related to management of banks and financial permanence. Non-Performing Loans (NPLs) are the result of occurrence of ex-post In the literature NPLS are termed as major cause of bank failures which may eventually result in hurting the economy. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) stated that NPLs can be marked as beginning of the banking crisis. A loan will be classified as non-performing if the borrower has ceased to pay the principal and interest, as stated in the loan repayment contract. Non-performing loans (NPLs) are such loans and advances on which markup or principal is over due by 90 days or more from the due date. In banking industry the issue of NPLs is quite significant, minimization of NPLs is indispensable for development of the banking industry and subsequently also for the economic development.


Applying a comparative perspective, the paper examines questions related to corporate criminal responsibility in Finland and Estonia. Corporate criminal liability was introduced in 1995 in Finland and in 2001 in Estonia, via regulations implemented in conjunction with comprehensive reform to the penal codes of these countries. Both the legislation and the legal practices of the two manifest many similarities, partly in principle and partly de facto. However, differences can be noticed – i.a., in the ways in which allocation of the individual's criminal liability for organisational crime is regulated, alongside how the maximum sentences and the determination of punishments are regulated.


A woman tells her roommate that she is going out to dinner with Frank that evening. The next morning her battered body is found along a country road outside of town. In Frank's trial for her murder, is her statement to her roommate admissible to place Frank with her that night? Since the Court's 2004 Crawford decision, the confrontation clause is inapplicable to nontestimonial hearsay such as this. American jurisdictions are widely divided on the question of admissibility under their rules of evidence, however. Many say absolutely not. A sizeable number unequivocally say yes. A small number say yes, but condition admissibility on the proof of corroborating evidence that Frank met her. Although this third compromise approach has much to recommend it, the author argues that, as presently framed, it violates the rule adopted in the Supreme Court's 1990 decision in Idaho v. Wright applying the confrontation clause. The author makes several other novel arguments. First, she argues that Wright continues to apply to nontestimonial hearsay, but via the due process clause. Next she suggests that jurisdictions may constitutionally achieve the same result, however, in one of two ways: (1) they could codify the corroboration requirement in their definition of the applicable evidence rule, the state of mind hearsay exception; or (2) through their case law, they could admit the hearsay statement without requiring corroborating evidence, but invoke a corroboration requirement when evaluating the sufficiency of the evidence, for due process reasons, at the close of the case.


The past couple of decades have witnessed Buddhist communities both continuing the modernization of Buddhism and questioning some of its limitations. This fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing religious landscape illuminates the aspirations and struggles of younger North American Buddhists during a period that the book identifies as a distinct stage in the assimilation of Buddhism to the West. The author observes both the emergence of new innovative forms of deinstitutionalized Buddhism that blur the boundaries between the religious and secular, and a revalorization of traditional elements of Buddhism such as ethics and community that were discarded in the modernization process. Based on extensive ethnographic and textual research, the book ranges from mindfulness debates in the Vipassana network to the sex scandals in American Zen, while exploring issues around racial diversity and social justice, the impact of new technologies, and generational differences between baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial teachers.


ABSTRACT This article seeks to move beyond the critical politicizing impulse that has characterized anthropologies of development since the 1990s towards a more open-ended commitment to taking seriously the diverse moral and imaginative topographies of development. It explores how members of four small Bidayuh villages affected by a dam-construction and resettlement scheme in Sarawak draw on both historically inflected tropes of gifting and Christian moral understandings in their engagements with Malaysia's peculiar brand of state-led development. These enable the affected villagers not to resolve the problems posed by Malaysian developmentalism, but to ambiguate them and actually hold resolution at bay. I conclude by considering the implications of such projects of ambiguation for the contemporary anthropology of development.


This paper describes a new parallel program tuning framework, with a new approach for tuning. The application exposes tuning parameters while an adaptive runtime system tunes the values of the parameters as the program executes. The parameters are allowed to vary throughout the duration of a run of a program. This provides two benefits over using a static set of parameters for each program run. The first is that parameters affecting performance may need to vary throughout the program run to achieve maximum performance. The second benefit is that many parameter configurations can be tested in a single run of an application. This approach amortizes the cost of startup across many evaluations of configurations in the parameter space. The framework can tune parameters across multiple modules in a parallel application. It can collectively optimize the parameters, called Control Points, exposed by the application, the runtime system, and libraries. This paper describes preliminary work using Control Points with two programs, a finite difference scheme, and a pipelined filtering application. Results from an exhaustive search of the configuration space are provided as a basis for determining which types of search strategies would be effective. The optimal configurations for control points vary between different parallel systems.


Household waste recycling methods differ between UK local authorities in several ways. This includes; containers used for collection, frequency of collection, what materials are collected and the processing of materials after collection, amongst other aspects. Increased pressure is put upon local authorities to increase waste prevention and rates of reuse and recycling in order to meet UK and EU legislation. Local authorities are meeting this through several methods, including introduction of new items to the household waste service (for example collection of food waste), or introduction of an entirely new system with different containers and collection frequencies. This occurred during 2012 in Cheshire West and Chester Council (CWCC).
Meeting legislation is a legal obligation, making it of high priority. However, whatever system is in place, the local authority will rely on the household participation. Therefore the public perception of household waste recycling methods is also of high priority.
Perception of a system may differ depending on the system in place. In addition to this, perceptions may differ for several reasons including; the age of residents, number living within an individual household and household type (for example terraced compared to detached). With the system change being rolled out towards the end of 2012, this study used 2 postal surveys in the village of Saughall, within CWCC.
These surveys assessed the perceptions of residents on the household waste method in place before the new system was rolled out, and after. Analysis showed a major negative perception towards the new system. It is taken into account whether CWCC accounted for the perception of residents before a new system was decided upon.


This paper describes the computation of reach sets for discrete-time linear control systems with time-varying coefficients and ellipsoidal bounds on the controls and initial conditions. The algorithms construct external and internal ellipsoidal approximations that touch the reach set boundary from outside and from inside. Recurrence relations describe the time evolution of these approximations. An essential part of the paper deals with singular discrete-time linear systems


Changes in the flux of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) into and out of lakes are important to the biogeochemistry of aquatic environments. The ability to estimate or model DOC fluxes and concentrations in lakes and other surface waters is of great benefit for investigations of aquatic systems. Spatial attributes of catchments were derived using GIS techniques and combined with published DOC mass balance models from 20 small study catchments and seven lakes to estimate DOC concentrations for hydrologically connected lakes (i.e. connected by surface or ground waters) of the Muskoka River Watershed, a large tertiary watershed (904 lakes) in southern Ontario. Predicted DOC concentrations were very dependent on the method used to estimate wetland area. when a Rapid Assessment Technique (RAT) was used to estimate wetland area, predicted and observed DOC concentrations were linearly related. Most of the DOC residuals were< 1 mg L ―1 . Inclusion of riparian wetlands or small lakes in the contributing catchments resulted in a slight improvement of model predictions, but not beyond the variability of the model. Model predictions of DOC were reasonable (according to model fit and residuals), especially considering it was a regional-scale study, but substantial variability was still unaccounted for. Applying the model to other regions with similar landscapes (i.e. other watersheds on the Precambrian Shield in North America and Nordic countries) is feasible.