To guard against urban sprawl, many communities in the United States have begun enacting policies to preserve open space, often through local voter referenda. New Jersey sponsors such municipal action through the Green Acres Program by providing funding and low interest loans to towns that choose, through a referendum, to increase property taxes and spend the money raised on open space preservation for the purposes of conservation and/or recreation. Understanding which factors contribute to the appearance and success of these measures is important for policy makers and conservation advocates, not only in New Jersey, but across the United States. Although previous literature has examined this issue, this is the first study to account for spatial dependence/spatial autocorrelation and to explore dynamic issues through survival analysis. The traditional two stage model from the literature is extended by incorporating a Bayesian spatial probit for the first stage and a maximum-likelihood spatial error model in the second stage. A Cox – proportional hazard model is used to examine the timing of referenda appearance. Spatial dependence is found in the second stage of the analysis, indicating future studies should account for its influence. There is not strong evidence for spatial dependence or correlation in the first stage. The survival model is found to be a useful complement to the traditional probit analysis of the first stage.


Brand Image is one of the most vital parts of any organization that makes the world believe their products or services. It creates a pre assumption in the mind before reaching or consuming it. It is said too that the Lion has branded itself means the image established like creates the fear when one just gets an imagination. The different imagination of different brand is the outcome of its performance in the market. The study presented here in this study is the preliminary part of the deeper concept of Brand Image. Though, the study is the small part of the many broader dimensions explored by many researchers then too is the idea here to build the platform for the better understanding of the Brand Image in the context of university and academic institutions where many authors say academic institutions are not prone to have any exercise for building their Brand Image. The literature review is based on the idea of finding the Brand Image during past years when the concept was evolving and the current scenario. Conceptually the study has taken the literature across the world and across industries but the specific narrowed down discussion is carried for Kurdistan region.


III-Nitride semiconductor materials have been widely used for light emitting didoes (LEDs) for a wide range of lighting applications due to their excellent chemical stability and direct wide band gap energy nature. InGaN/GaN LEDs are conventionally grown on sapphire substrates with lateral contact device structure. However, LEDs fabricated with lateral contact device structure suffer from current crowding issue at the mesa boundary and contact edge when current flowing from the p-type GaN to n-type GaN, resulting in localized heating which reduces the internal quantum efficiency. In addition, sapphire substrates are relatively expensive and have a low thermal conductivity of 35 W/mK. Therefore, domestic LED lighting manufacturers have recently changed their interests to growing InGaN/GaN LEDs on Silicon (Si) substrates rather than sapphire substrates. Si substrates not only have higher thermal conductivity (i.e. 149 W/mK), but are also cheaper than sapphire substrates. However, Si substrates are light absorbing; if LEDs fabricated with conventional lateral contact structure the emitted light, which travels toward the Si growth substrate, is absorbed and wasted. To resolve this issue, the vertical LED (VLED) structure is adopted for InGaN/GaN LED grown on Si substrates. The original Si growth substrate is removed and the InGaN/GaN LED epitaxy is bonded on to a Si carrier substrate with a reflectivity p-type ohmic contact. In this thesis, a complete fabrication process of InGaN/GaN grown on Si VLEDs with a novel reflective p-contact was developed and characterized. A reflective p-type ohmic contact of Ni/Ag/Ni was developed to act as a mirror, which prevents the light absorption by the Si carrier substrate. This contact has a high reflectivity of 75% and a low contact resistivity of 6.3x10-5 Ωcm2 after annealing in an oxygen environment for 2 minutes at 450 ℃ to form an ohmic contact to p-GaN. The light output power of our VLED using Ni/Ag/Ni contact is approximately 20 mW higher than the VLEDs without any reflectors fabricated by Xiong et. al.. Although the forward voltage of our VLEDs is 0.5 V higher than VLEDs made by Xiong et. al., this can be attributed to our Si carrier substrates do not have any thickens reduction process. The impact of the thickness of Si carrier substrate on the electrical and optical performance of the VLED was also characterized. By using a Si carrier substrate with a thickness of 475 μm rather than 675 μm, the quantum confined stark effect was reduced and the external quantum efficiency was improved by 4 %. Also, the operational voltage was reduced to 5.7 V from 6.7 V at the drive current of 300 mA. Finally, a KOH surface roughen process for the N face n-GaN was devised to resolve the total internal reflection issue at the interface between the n-GaN and air. The light output power of the VLED increased from 53 mW to 97 mW after etching in 4M KOH solution at 100 ℃ for 3 minutes.


A current working model is that Alzheimer's disease actively spreads from diseased to healthy neurons, mediated by transfer of extracellular, abnormal, disease-specific forms of the microtubule-associated protein tau. It is currently unclear whether transfer of tau between neurons is a toxic gain-of-function process in dementia, or reflects a constitutive biological process. We report two mechanisms of entry of monomeric tau to neurons: a rapid early dynamin-dependent phase, and a second, slower actin-dependent phase, suggesting that monomeric tau enters neurons via rapid saturable clathrin-mediated endocytosis and also by bulk endocytosis. Aggregated tau entry is independent of actin polymerisation and largely dynamin dependent, consistent with clathrin-mediated endocytosis and distinct from macropinocytosis, the major route for aggregated tau entry reported for non-neuronal cells. Anti-tau antibodies abrogate tau entry into neurons, with tau carrying antibody with it into neurons, indicating that antibody binding is insufficient to prevent neuronal tau entry.


Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training is the latest, updated version of the highly acclaimed publication from the leaders in training at lynda.com. In this book, readers will find carefully developed lessons and exercises that teach readers to create interactive Web sites and rich media, with the latest version of the Flash authoring tool. Given the extensive changes to the Flash interface and function, the step-by-step approach is much needed to help present things to a beginner in a very clear, easy-to-follow way. In it, they ll learn how to use the full set of creative drawing, animation, and interactive tools including drawing and color tools, animation basics, symbols and instances, motion, bitmaps, buttons, movie clips, sound, components and forms, and video. Not only that but readers will learn how to use the new powerful integration features with Photoshop and Illustrator and discover new Shape Primitives (expanding your ability to use and manipulate shapes), a new Pen tool that functions like that found in Illustrator, a new ability to convert animations to ActionScript 3, a brand new unified interface matching that of others in the Creative Suite, and much more. Accompanied by a CD-ROM loaded with classroom-proven exercises and QuickTime training videos, this book ensures ensures readers will master the key features of Adobe Flash CS3 in no time. PUBLISHER NOTE: We have received some complaints from readers about the quality of the binding of Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training (ISBN: 0-321-50983-8). We have checked all copies of the inventory in our warehouse and found just a few copies with this problem. If you have received a defective copy of this book we recommend that you return it to the bookstore/reseller from which you purchased it.


Measuring the IR transmission through a loosely packed powder layer offers a cheap and experimentally simple method for the quantitative and qualitative analysis of surface-treated powders. It is, however, practically impossible to obtain a perfectly smooth and even powder layer—a fact that introduces large errors in the quantitative determination. To cope with this problem, one derives an equation, by means of which it is possible to carry out the determination irrespective of the layer-thickness variations. The equation is based on the use of an "internal thickness standard." The theory is illustrated with, and supported by, a series of determinations of a silane coupling agent on a phlogopite powder. As predicted by the theory, a linear relationship is obtained when the absorbance ratio of the silane and the standard is plotted against the relative amount of silane. The quantification limit of the method lies in the monolayer range, depending on the powder surface area and the specific silane absorptivity. The method is thought to work equally well with powder mixtures.


Mental effort is a limited resource which must be invested to perform mental tasks. The amount of mental effort investment that an individual experiences during task performance can be measured afterwards with the help of self-rating scales. Earlier research suggests that integration of information about somatic state changes is crucial for the self-evaluation of mental effort investment. Damage to the pathways which convey information about somatic state changes can lead to an inability to self-evaluate mental effort investment, while conceptually similar evaluations of task difficulty can still be performed. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activation, while subjects rated their mental effort investment and the difficulty of a previously performed task. Our results show stronger activation of the left anterior insular cortex (aIC) during evaluation of mental effort. Additionally, the activity in left aIC during task performance was modulated by changes in task demand in a similar way as the self-ratings of mental effort. We argue that aIC does not only play a role in the integration of self-related information during self-evaluation of mental effort investment, but that left aIC might also be involved in the experience of mental effort during task performance.


Background & Objective : Obesity is one of the most important global health priorities as far as it increases illnesses and disorders the life quality . Alpha-1-Antitrypsin (AAT) is the most abundant serum protease inhibitor and prevents tissue degradation through proteases. Hence, its defect or deficiency significantly increases the risk of various diseases. AAT may be involved in the development and complications of obesity. The present study then was performed to determine the activity of AAT in the obese people compared to those with normal weight. Materials & Methods : In this cross- sectional study, determining the AAT's activity was performed through Trypsin-Inhibitor-Capacity (TIC) in healthy individual who were referred to the laboratory of Dr.Shariati in Fasa Hospital in April 2013. Serum of 150 people with normal weight (Body Mass Index, BMI, ranges between 18.5 and 24.9) and the serum of 140 obese people (BMI more than 30) were surveyed. The data were analyzed by SPSS software using t-test and Pearson correlation coefficient. Results : The serum amount of TIC in obese people (1.774±0.618 µmol/min/ml) was significantly lower than its amount in people with normal weight (3.047±0.498 µmol/min/ml) (P-value<0.001). There was a significant negative correlation between TIC and weight (P<0.001, R=-0.686). In addition, no significant correlation was observed between TIC and age sex and height. Conclusion : The results showed that AAT in obese people was less in healthy individuals compared with the ones with normal weight. Therefore, it can be stated that AAT can be introduced as a clinical biomarker and be a potential target for treating obesity.


In recent years, there has been considerable interest in modelling and simulating interdependencies among critical infrastructures. For most cases, agent-based frameworks are employed for these types of simulation. In this paper, we present a new approach for interdependencies simulation that we have used in the infrastructures interdependencies simulator (I2Sim). I2Sim implementation is based on the matrix partitioning technique named multi-area Thevenin equivalent (MATE). The MATE model has been used for large-scale real-time power system simulation and is an efficient alternative to the existing agent-based critical infrastructure simulation frameworks. Another distinguishing feature of I2Sim is that, it is based on a cell-channel model where interdependencies among different infrastructures can be represented through a formal technique based on the extension of Leontief input-output model. In this paper, we present the implementation architecture of I2Sim. We also discuss some simulation results to show the usefulness of our approach.


Educated Londoners in the early 1800s, frightened by crime, tended to demonize the city's criminals, attributing sophistication, organisation and vigour to them. In reality, conventional Metropolitan crime was the product of acute social disorganisation, most of its exponents coming from a marginalised stratum of the urban lower working class. Change in Metropolitan policing was heavily oriented towards combating the unsophisticated, opportunistic, street crime and public disorder that characterised this group's deviance, and (independently of this) at promoting new standards of public order and decorum. The new police made an important, if sometimes exaggerated, contribution to the major reduction in Metropolitan street crime, pickpocketing, robbery, theft from shop fronts, assaults etc. that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. They also contributed significantly to the reduction in most other forms of deviance, as well as dramatically enhancing public order. However, historically, the significance of a simple police presence on the streets has been greatly exaggerated. The Metropolitan force were most effective against crime indirectly, promoting social discipline in a manner that closely accords with modern 'broken windows' theory. They were much less successful in directly combating conventional crime. As this became increasingly apparent in the decades after 1829, many came to believe that the institutional result achieved in 1829, and characterised by the triumph of the 'Peelite' school of preventative policing, was inherently flawed. This prompted further change, in particular, a major reassessment of the importance of detective work. Additionally, although a 'broken windows' approach to policing was fairly effective, it had an inescapable darker side. The imposition of new standards of public behaviour and order impinged on many 'traditional' and popular aspects of urban working class life, exciting bitter antipathy amongst the policed. It threatened long accepted civil liberties, which were increasingly attenuated during the century, and impinged on rights to 'due process', which, for minor offences, were greatly reduced. Even more alarmingly, the 'broken windows' approach to urban policing was the raw material for police abuse of power, whether in the form of corruption, perjury or brutality. This was, in part, the price paid for the radically improved personal and public security of the late Victorian period.


Environmental pollution is a worldwide issue that affects the human being health, water pollution is one of the causes of this phenomenon. Dyes represent the raw materials in many industries such as textile, paper, plastic and leather industries as well as they considered as toxic water pollutants. The adsorption method is one of the most effective methods for removing dyes from polluted water. In this search, ecofriendly food waste (eggshell) was used as an adsorbent for removing methylene blue dye (MB) from waste water. In this research, eggshell morphology was studied using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Energy-Dispersive X-ray (EDX). The stability of the eggshell adsorbent was tested by Thermal Gravimetric Analysis (TGA). Whereas checking with various MB dye concentration for eggshell the maximum adsorption was noticed at (8ppm) and this concentration was used for further optimization. MB solutions was prepared at pH 7.2 and at 21℃ same conditions as in Tigris River water which was used to compare the activity of the eggshells adsorbent using analytical standard MB solutions and on the other hand using real sample solutions. The results show that using eggshells adsorbent with standards solution and real sample solutions of MB provide the same general trends with respect to MB removal. Consequently, using eggshell as an ecofriendly adsorbent was successfully tested to be used with both MB analytical standard solutions and real river MB solutions.


Diabetic nephropathy is strongly associated with both increased oxidative stress and kidney tissue hypoxia. The increased oxidative stress causes increased kidney oxygen consumption resulting in kidney tissue hypoxia. To date, it has been difficult to determine the role of kidney hypoxia, per se, for the development of nephropathy. We tested the hypothesis that kidney hypoxia, without confounding factors such as hyperglycemia or elevated oxidative stress, results in nephropathy. To induce kidney hypoxia, dinitrophenol (30 mg per day per kg bodyweight by gavage), a mitochondrial uncoupler that increases oxygen consumption and causes kidney hypoxia, was administered for 30 consecutive days to rats. Thereafter, glomerular filtration rate, renal blood flow, kidney oxygen consumption, kidney oxygen tension, kidney concentrations of glucose and glycogen, markers of oxidative stress, urinary protein excretion, and histological findings were determined and compared with vehicle-treated controls. Dinitrophenol did not affect arterial blood pressure, renal blood flow, glomerular filtration rate, blood glucose, or markers of oxidative stress but increased kidney oxygen consumption, and reduced cortical and medullary concentrations of glucose and glycogen, and resulted in intrarenal tissue hypoxia. Furthermore, dinitrophenol treatment increased urinary protein excretion, kidney vimentin expression, and infiltration of inflammatory cells. In conclusion, increased mitochondrial oxygen consumption results in kidney hypoxia and subsequent nephropathy. Importantly, these results demonstrate that kidney tissue hypoxia, per se, without confounding hyperglycemia or oxidative stress, may be sufficient to initiate the development of nephropathy and therefore demonstrate a new interventional target for treating kidney disease.


This paper tests and compares five distinct methods for estimating the term structure. The Unsmoothed Fama-Bliss method is an iterative method by which the discount rate function is built up by computing the forward rate necessary to price successively longer maturity bonds. The Smoothed Fama-Bliss "smooths out" these discount rates by fitting an approximating function to the "unsmoothed" rates. The McCulloch method fits a cubic spline to the discount function using an implicit smoothness penalty, while the Fisher-Nychka-Zervos method fits a cubic spline to the forward rate function and makes the smoothness penalty explicit. Lastly, the Extended Nelson-Siegel method, introduced in this paper, fits an exponential approximation of the discount rate function directly to bond prices. ; The tests demonstrate the dangers of in-sample goodness-of-fit as the sole criterion for judging term structure estimation methods. A series of residual analysis tests are introduced to detect misspecification of the underlying pricing equation relating the term structure to bond prices. These tests establish the presence of unspecified, but nonetheless systematic, omitted factors in the prices of long maturity notes and bonds. ; Comparisons of the five term structure estimation methods using these parametric and non-parametric tests finds that the Unsmoothed Fama-Bliss does best overall. Differences with some alternatives may not be economically significant given the much larger number of parameters this method estimates. Users seeking a parsimonious representation of the term structure should consider either the Smoothed Fama-Bliss or the Extended Nelson-Siegel methods. One method was found to be unacceptable. The Fisher-Nychka-Zervos cubic spline method performs poorly relative to the alternatives, both in- and out-of-sample. Furthermore, it systematically misprices short maturity issues and suffers from instability in the estimated term structure.


When we use the wisdom of the crowds, we usually rank the answers according to their popularity, especially when we cannot verify the answers. However, this can be very dangerous when the majority make systematic mistakes. A fundamental question arises: can we build a hierarchy among the answers \textit{without any prior} where the higher-ranking answers, which may not be supported by the majority, are from more sophisticated people? To address the question, we propose 1) a novel model to describe people's thinking hierarchy; 2) two algorithms to learn the thinking hierarchy without any prior; 3) a novel open-response based crowdsourcing approach based on the above theoretic framework. In addition to theoretic justifications, we conduct four empirical crowdsourcing studies and show that a) the accuracy of the top-ranking answers learned by our approach is much higher than that of plurality voting (In one question, the plurality answer is supported by 74 respondents but the correct answer is only supported by 3 respondents. Our approach ranks the correct answer the highest without any prior); b) our model has a high goodness-of-fit, especially for the questions where our top-ranking answer is correct. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a thinking hierarchy model with empirical validations in the general problem-solving scenarios; and the first to propose a practical open-response based crowdsourcing approach that beats plurality voting without any prior.


Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a widespread human tropic B cell virus that is linked to several malignancies. EBV modulates the transcriptome of B lymphocytes to drive immortalisation and viral persistence. EBV nuclear antigens (EBNA) 2,3A, 3B and 3C are transcriptional regulators of both viral and cellular genes and are the primary drivers of the immortalisation and the continued proliferation of infected B-cells. EBNA 2 activates all EBV gene promoters and cellular growth control genes while EBNA3A, 3B and 3C activates or represses transcription. EBNA2 and 3 proteins do not bind directly to DNA. They bind through cellular DNA-binding proteins like RBP-Jκ and PU.1. The focus of this research was to investigate how EBNA 2 promotes immortalisation through the epigenetic reprogramming of cellular genes and how EBNA 3A, 3B and 3C antagonise or cooperate with EBNA 2 in gene regulation. Previous ChIP-seq results in our lab identified significant binding sites for EBNA 2 and EBNA 3s. I targeted three important novel shared EBNA 2 and EBNA 3s binding sites; the integrin ITGAL, cell cycle kinase WEE1 and transcription repressor CTBP2 genes. I investigated if these shared sites are functional as EBNA 2 response elements in reporter assay by transiently transfecting the endogenous promoter and any associated long range enhancer region of genes and performing luciferase assays. EBNA 2 activates the ITGAL promoter and EBNA 3s inhibits the activation while WEE1 and CTBP2 does not respond in reporter assay. I also performed site-directed mutagenesis to determine which cellular transcription factor was important for the activation of EBNA 2 at the ITGAL promoter. RBP-Jk site mutation disrupted the EBNA 2 activation. Another research focus was EBNA 2 association with gene activation and repression. BCR components CD79A and CD79B are involved in signal transduction and the regulation of B-cell growth and survival and transcription factor EBF1 plays an important role in B cell differentiation. I investigated the association of EBNA 2 with these repressed gene targets and if EBF1 plays a role in the mechanism of repression using reporter assay. CD79A and CD79B activates EBNA 2 and EBF1 does not significantly repress the activation in luciferase reporter assay. EBNA 2 have been mapped binding to enhancers at a new target gene interferon response factor 4 IRF4 and microarray data implicates EBNA 2 in its activation. When IRF4 expression is reduced in EBV transformed cells, cell proliferation rate is decreased and apoptosis enhanced so this activation may be important for B-cell transformation by EBV. I carried out reporter assays to determine if the site is EBNA 2 responsive and whether it interacts with the IRF4 promoter and enhancers. EBNA 2 slightly activates the promoter and enhancers.


As national and local economies become more globalized, many rural areas are going to find it more difficult to compete for private capital investments. A traditional tool, modifications to tax policy, of state and local governments will not be as effective (for many communities it has never been effective) in the future. These communities will need to seek other avenues of growth. However, for many rural communities even alternative avenues will not lead to enhanced economic opportunity.


Objective: research is devoted to the development of criteria and methods for prognosis of the next recurrence of exacerbation of ulcerative colitis (UC) after the patient discharged from hospital. Material and Methods: During a period of a year 38 patients with UC were supervised. The criteria used in the prognosis of recurrence included results of the evaluation of quality of life (SF-36 questionnaire), the analysis of the autonomic nervous system (coefficient Hildebrant and Kerdo index) and the level of stressful load procedure Holmes-Rage. Results. It has been established that the risk factors for recurrence include low quality of life on the scale of RP, SF and MH SF-36, the coefficient Hildebrant >5.6 units, Kerdo index 314 points. Conclusion: The obtained data have been processed by multivariate mathematical statistics and the obtained analytical expression allows to prognose the time of recurrence of ulcerative colitis.


Intraspecific cooperation and interspecific mutualism often feature a marked asymmetry in the scope for exploitation. Cooperation may nevertheless persist despite one-sided opportunities for cheating, provided that the partner vulnerable to exploitation has sufficient control over the duration of interaction. Here we develop a simple, game theoretical model of this form of partner control. We show that as a victim's ability to terminate an encounter increases, selection can favour reduced exploitation, resulting in a switch from parasitism to mutualism. For a given level of control, exploitation is likely to be less intense and the interaction to last longer when there are greater mutualistic benefits to be gained, and when the benefits of cheating are lower relative to the costs inflicted on the victim. Observations of interactions between cleaner-fish and non-predatory species of client are shown to match these predictions.


Neural architectures are prominent in the construction of language models (LMs). However, word-level prediction is typically agnostic of subword-level information (characters and character sequences) and operates over a closed vocabulary, consisting of a limited word set. Indeed, while subword-aware models boost performance across a variety of NLP tasks, previous work did not evaluate the ability of these models to assist next-word prediction in language modeling tasks. Such subword-level informed models should be particularly effective for morphologically-rich languages (MRLs) that exhibit high type-to-token ratios. In this work, we present a large-scale LM study on 50 typologically diverse languages covering a wide variety of morphological systems, and offer new LM benchmarks to the community, while considering subword-level information. The main technical contribution of our work is a novel method for injecting subword-level information into semantic word vectors, integrated into the neural language modeling training, to facilitate word-level prediction. We conduct experiments in the LM setting where the number of infrequent words is large, and demonstrate strong perplexity gains across our 50 languages, especially for morphologically-rich languages. Our code and data sets are publicly available.


Abstract
This thesis focuses on the rationale for visual arts education in the context of Singapore. It does so by examining key policy documents and interviewing key stakeholders.

In the mid 1960s, Singapore was separated from the Federal of Malaya, leaving the country in uncertainty because of the lack of natural resources. Also the withdrawal of the British colony had left the Singapore economy in turmoil. The only pragmatic solution for the government was to resort to human capital to develop the economy, which mainly centred on promoting science, engineering, commerce and technology learning. Mathematics and science were given the highest priority as these subjects offered skills that were desirable for the economy.

In the 1990s, the government realised that for the Singapore economy to continue to grow steadily, foreign talent would play a crucial role. One way to attract these talents was to develop Singapore into a vibrant arts and cultural scene. The government began to pay attention to arts education as it was felt that the arts could offer skills for potential cultural manpower to contribute in the cultural industry for the purpose of enticing talents to work, live and contribute to the Singapore economy.

There has therefore been a shift in attitudes to the arts. The conflicting interests motivated me to seek to establish the rationale for visual arts education in Singapore. The research was carried out using two research methods: documentary analysis to examine key documents pertaining to the Ministry of Education (MOE) arts syllabuses and Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA) reports and qualitative interviews to seek the views of the art teachers, arts scholars/academics and policy makers.

The research findings show that the rationale for visual arts education is related to three broad areas: (i) the development of personal developmental skills (ii) the development of 'extended logic', 'self-confidence' and 'art history' (iii) the contribution to the cultural and creative economy. These three areas at first appear to be in conflict but are in fact inter-connected. The thesis makes recommendations for the coherent presentation of arts policy in Singapore.


A protein involved in redox signaling disassembles actin filaments and alters their reassembly. Cell behavior is controlled by extracellular signals that work through signal transduction pathways to regulate the organization of the actin cytoskeleton. Some of these extrinsic signals positively affect the cytoskeleton and induce actin polymerization, but extrinsic signals that negatively regulate and disassemble actin filaments also exist. A family of multidomain proteins, the MICALs, directly associates with Semaphorins, cell surface receptors involved in negative or repulsive cues. Working with purified proteins and in vivo, Hung et al. now find that actin filaments serve as a direct substrate for Mical's enzymatic activity. Mical posttranslationally alters actin at its methionine 44 residue, which disrupts the association between actin monomers and cutting actin filaments. Altering the methionine 44 residue makes actin resistant to Mical-mediated disassembly in vitro and in vivo in Drosophila. R.-J. Hung, C. W. Pak, J. R. Terman, Direct redox regulation of F-actin assembly and disassembly by Mical. Science 334, 1710–1713 (2011). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The concept of tourism clusters is becoming central within the tourism development planning process and the EU perceives cluster arrangements as the preferred form of introducing innovations in different economic fields, including tourism. The Polish Tourism Organization (POT) is to launch the subprogram aimed at the commercialization of the tourism product and intensification of SMEs' integration processes (vertical and horizontal ones), which shall boost the innovativeness of Polish tourism regions and enterprises. The main purpose of this article is to find rationale for tourism cluster formation in Polish TDAs and to formulate the definition and main attributes of the tourism cluster. The problem of clusters' impact on SMEs' productivity and the destinations competitiveness will be discussed on the basis of economic theory using the case study and the field work method as well as the literature study.


Patrick Hennessey's "The Junior Officers' Reading Club" is a lucid, witty account of all the horror, boredom and exhilaration of war. Patrick Hennessey is pretty much like any other member of Generation X: he spent the first half of the noughties reading books at university, going out, listening to early-90s house on his iPod and watching war films. He also, as an officer in the Grenadier guards, fought in some of the most violent combat the British army has seen in decades. Telling the story of how a modern soldier is made, from the testosterone-heavy breeding ground of Sandhurst to the nightmare of Iraq and Afghanistan, "The Junior Officers' Reading Club" is already being hailed as a modern classic. "Soldiers who can write are as rare as writers who can strip down a machinegun in 40 seconds". (Christopher Hart, "Sunday Times"). "An extraordinary memoir...Hennessey has a reporter's eye for detail and a soldier's nose for bullshit". (John Shirley, "Guardian"). "High tempo, full-on, honest and revealing". (Patrick Bishop, "Evening Standard"). "The most accomplished work of military witness to emerge from British war-fighting since 1945". (Boyd Tonkin, "Independent"). "Remarkable ...conveys vividly what it's like to experience combat". (Jeremy Paxman, "Daily Telegraph", Books of the Year). Patrick Hennessey (b. 1982) joined the Army in January 2004, undertaking officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst where he was awarded the Queen's Medal and commissioned into The Grenadier Guards. He served as a Platoon Commander and later Company Operations Officer from the end of 2004 to early 2009 in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia and the Falkland Islands and on operational tours to Iraq in 2006 and Afghanistan in 2007, where he became the youngest Captain in the Army and was commended for gallantry.


With the creation of the BBC in 1922, wireless sets ceased to be obscure devices for military and commercial communication, and became household goods to entertain the British middle classes. Wireless amateurs, electrical engineers, inventors, and specialized physicists engaged in a cultural exchange among themselves and with the general public to explain and understand the mechanisms and possibilities of the new technology. This created a new arena for discussions on the existence of the ether at a time when highly esoteric physics (mainly relativity, but also quantum physics) had triggered a debate about its very existence. In this paper I explore the ways in which the ether saw its popularity renewed by its link to the modern wireless technologies. I argue that far from being part of an old, outdated physics, radio broadcasting was instrumental for the ether to remain popular, and even an element of modernity, among many wireless amateurs, engineers, and the general public in the 1920s and early 1930s.


One out of four of the world's population lives in absolute poverty. Twenty percent of these poor live in sub-Saharan Africa. Seventy percent of the absolute poor live in rural areas (Mikos 2001). These statistics paint a picture of a world in tremendous need of development. South Africa is no stranger to this development crisis. Approximately fifty percent of the country's population lives in poverty, unemployment rates are 26.6 percent and HIV/AIDS is the cause of an estimated 1,000 deaths per day (USAID 2006). This paper focuses on development solutions, investigating whether or not participatory development approaches are effective strategies and identifying the strengths and weaknesses as well as the methods implemented by organizations using these tactics. The creation and evolution of development theory is first discussed as well as the current thinking and ideas on development paradigms. After a detailed analysis of development theory, I place South Africa in context, explaining the country's development strategies post-1994 and showing how they have transformed throughout the first decade of democracy. I then focus on a rural development NGO in Cape Town, the Social Change Assistance Trust (SCAT), using it as a case study to critique the implementation of a participatory approach to rural development. Finally, using this case study (in the context of the South Africa), I identify successes and challenges associated with the implementation these methods. With these objectives in mind, I hope to answer my research questions and discover effective development strategies. SCAT's mission is to: "improve the quality of life of people living in rural communities with the aim of them living in a vibrant and sustainable environment" (SCAT Strat 2007). To do this it uses four strategies: institution building, capacity building, mobilizing resources, and developing intellectual capital. SCAT partners with over 50 local development agencies (LDAs) across South Africa in isolated rural communities, working in conjunction to realize sustainable progress. SCAT's tactics include: grantmaking, fieldwork, and the process of becoming a learning organization, each of which is instrumental in its success. By listening, linking, and learning, SCAT, and other organizations like it, can transform the process of rural development in South Africa and together create lasting and effective change.


Human activities have reshaped patterns of island biogeography for many groups of amphibians and reptiles. In Trinidad, an island in the West Indies with only one native Anolis lizard species, four additional anole species have been introduced since the 1800s. The most recent introduction, Anolis wattsi, native to Antigua, has become established despite the presence of
multiple species of resident anoles. We used genetic data (mitochondrial DNA) to infer the geographic origin and genetic structure of introduced A. wattsi on Trinidad. We then gathered published data to compare eco-morphological traits of all anole species currently established on the island. We found three mtDNA haplotypes in Trinidad that clustered with two
different clades from the northern part of the native range in Antigua, rejecting the hypothesis that the lizards originated in the pineapple-growing region of the south. However, a lack of fine-scale population structure precluded precise identification of the origin in Antigua of haplotypes introduced to Trinidad. Compared to the other anole species on Trinidad, A. wattsi is smaller, perches lower, and has a higher field body temperature. Thus, the successful establishment and spread of A. wattsi should not be surprising given the success of two previous introductions of anole species that were more similar ecomorphologically to the native species and each other, and the fact that Trinidad has relatively few anole species for its size.


Despite considerable literature on the Bush administration's war on terrorism rhetoric, little attention has been paid to its discourse of moral disengagement, leaving an important and still relevant gap that this paper aims to address. Rather than approaching this gap in terms of an archival historical analysis that is disconnected from the present, it proposes an exploratory revisit of the rhetoric that the benefits of hindsight might enrich and, we argue, aid in understanding connections to the current post-invasion turmoil and the gradual ISIS takeover. Having subjected nineteen presidential speeches to qualitative content analysis, we identified a number of moral disengagement mechanisms: moral justification, advantageous comparisons, and attribution of blame, dehumanisation of the enemy, the use of sanitizing language, diffusion of responsibility and minimization of harm. We also identified novel themes relating to American excellence/patriotism, religious ideals and fear- arousing appeals, offering original contributions to the existing literature and advancing our understanding of dynamic, real-world, and highest stakes moral disengagement whose parallels can be identified in today's political discourses. The detailed analysis unveils the apparent paradox of propagating moral disengagement through a thread of arguments that interweave diversity with uniformity, complexity with simplicity, in effect alerting the reader to the processes of moral desensitisation that the past, current and future "warmongering" political discourses may often rely upon.


While second generation sequencing led to a vast increase in sequenced data, the shorter reads which came with it made assembly a much harder task and for some regions impossible with only short read data. This changed again with the advent of third generation long read sequencers. The length of the long reads allows a much better resolution of repetitive regions, their high error rate however is a major challenge. Using the data successfully requires to remove most of the sequencing errors. The first hybrid correction methods used low noise second generation data to correct third generation data, but this approach has issues when it is unclear where to place the short reads due to repeats and also because second generation sequencers fail to sequence some regions which third generation sequencers work on. Later non hybrid methods appeared. We present a new method for non hybrid long read error correction based on De Bruijn graph assembly of short windows of long reads with subsequent combination of these correct windows to corrected long reads. Our experiments show that this method yields a better correction than other state of the art non hybrid correction approaches.


With the axiomatic revolutionary in the multimedia equip devices, culminated in the proverbial proliferation of the image and video data. Owing to this omnipresence and progression, these data become the part of our daily life. This devastating data production rate accompanies with a predicament of surpassing our potentials for acquiring this data. Perhaps one of the utmost prevailing problems of this digital era is an information plethora.
Until now, progressions in image and video retrieval research reached restrained success owed to its interpretation of an image and video in terms of primitive features. Humans generally access multimedia assets in terms of semantic concepts. The retrieval of digital images and videos is impeded by the semantic gap. The semantic gap is the discrepancy between a user's high-level interpretation of an image and the information that can be extracted from an image's physical properties. Content- based image and video retrieval systems are explicitly assailable to the semantic gap due to their dependence on low-level visual features for describing image and content. The semantic gap can be narrowed by including high-level features. High-level descriptions of images and videos are more proficient of apprehending the semantic meaning of image and video content.
It is generally understood that the problem of image and video retrieval is still far from being solved. This thesis proposes an approach for intelligent multimedia semantic extraction for search and retrieval. This thesis intends to bridge the gap between the visual features and semantics. This thesis proposes a Semantic query Interpreter for the images and the videos. The proposed Semantic Query Interpreter will select the pertinent terms from the user query and analyse it lexically and semantically. The proposed SQI reduces the semantic as well as the vocabulary gap between the users and the machine. This thesis also explored a novel ranking strategy for image search and retrieval. SemRank is the novel system that will incorporate the Semantic Intensity (SI) in exploring the semantic relevancy between the user query and the available data. The novel Semantic Intensity captures the concept dominancy factor of an image. As we are aware of the fact that the image is the combination of various concepts and among the list of concepts some of them are more dominant then the other. The SemRank will rank the retrieved images on the basis of Semantic Intensity.
The investigations are made on the LabelMe image and LabelMe video dataset. Experiments show that the proposed approach is successful in bridging the semantic gap. The experiments reveal that our proposed system outperforms the traditional image retrieval systems.


Livestock production is a chief contributor to many significant and intractable environmental problems. This Article examines the causal role of livestock (especially beef) production in global climate change, predator control in the western United States, and winter elk feeding in Wyoming. It argues that ending livestock grazing on western public lands is a cost effective first step for dealing with these problems and is readily achievable under existing law. Removing livestock would lead to improved watershed conditions and make reintroduction of predators politically feasible, which would promote further recovery of landscapes impacted by native ungulate populations. Ending public-land grazing would facilitate the closure of (arguably unlawful) elk feedgrounds, which contribute to unnaturally high elk populations and promote the spread of diseases. Closing the feedgrounds would improve conditions on these sites and slow the spread of disease. Collectively, these measures would promote ecosystem restoration, which would enhance prospects for coping with climate change.


Information System (IS) success continues to be an important theme in IS research.
However, the majority of IS success studies have adopted a very narrow and deterministic approach. A number have adopted a form of factoring approach such as
model based on Critical Success Factors (CSFs) which is an instance of positivism paradigm research despite the fact that their findings fail, to some extent, to reflect the
dynamic reality and complexity of the implementation and success of IS projects. The work reported here is a qualitative study of IS success and failure in the context of the implementation of a series of Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) projects dating from 1992 to 2005 by a Saudi Arabian private organisation. It focuses on understanding the perceptions of IS success of two major groups of internal stakeholders: end users and project team members. Accordingly, 57 semi-structured interviews were conducted and most were audio recorded. Data were analysed using the Grounded Theory Method (GTM) underpinned by Pettigrew's ideas of contextualisim and the use of NVivo software.
This research makes a contribution to the interpretive literature on IS success, as it shows the competence of interpretive research in reflecting the reality of the
implementation process. Therefore, it is an empirical confirmation of the findings of authors who criticise the deterministic positivist tradition of the factoring approach and its competency to reflect the reality. Additionally, it emphasises the importance of the work of Pettigrew that has been mainly developed based on contextualisim for investigating organisational change. Moreover, it contributes to the literature on ERP systems by demonstrating the dynamic and complex nature of their implementation activities and context. Therefore, it gives emphasis to the importance of continual inclusion of the implementation context in the exploration process. The importance of the inclusion of different stakeholders' views and time of evaluation in IS evaluation is also stressed. Finally, it contributes to the literature on IT in developing countries, particularly in wealthy ones as it highlights a lack of expertise in implementing ERP systems, despite the availability of the required financial resources. Accordingly, it exposes the role of the absence of strict management accountability during ERP projects, particularly in regard to continuous management support.


Monitoring the drug resistance of bacteria is necessary at regional, national and international levels. Over a two-week period in October 1978, 2561 strains of Escherichia coli and coliforms were isolated from stool specimens obtained from 19 civilian institutions (1338 strains) and from 9 army training camps (1223 strains) located all over Switzerland. Only a few of the donors had undergone recent antimicrobial therapy. The bacterial strains were rapidly distributed among 7 Swiss army microbiological field laboratories and tested for resistance against ampicillin, gentamycin, tetracycline and cotrimoxazole by standard disc diffusion techniques. Criteria for the interpretation of inhibition zones were adapted from WHO and NCCLS guidelines. E. coli ATCC 25922 served as a control strain. The overall resistance rates of E. coli and coliforms were 18% for ampicillin, 0.3% for gentamycin, 33% for tetracycline and 4% for cotrimoxazole. Multiple drug resistance patterns involving these four drugs plus sulfisoxazole, streptomycin, kanamycin, chloramphenicol, cefalothin and colistin were analyzed. Many combinations of drug resistances occurred in far higher numbers than was expected from individual drug resistance frequencies, a fact which suggested linkage of resistance genes. The resistance frequencies observed were shown by several tests of reproducibility to be subject to a modest overall error of approximately 20%.


A large body of research has identified cognitive skills associated with overall mathematics achievement, focusing primarily on identifying associates of procedural skills. Conceptual understanding, however, has received less attention, despite its importance for the development of mathematics proficiency. Consequently, we know little about the quantitative and domain-general skills associated with conceptual understanding. Here we investigated 8–10-year-old children's conceptual understanding of arithmetic, as well as a wide range of basic quantitative skills, numerical representations and domain-general skills. We found that conceptual understanding was most strongly associated with performance on a number line task. This relationship was not explained by the use of particular strategies on the number line task, and may instead reflect children's knowledge of the structure of the number system. Understanding the skills involved in conceptual learning is important to support efforts by educators to improve children's conceptual understanding of mathematics.


Driving is a complex activity that requires multi-level skilled operations (e.g., acceleration, braking, turning). Analyzing driving behavior can help us assess driver performances, improve traffic safety, and, ultimately, promote the development of intelligent and resilient transportation systems. While some efforts have been made for analyzing driving behavior, existing methods can be improved via representation learning by jointly exploring the peer and temporal dependencies of driving behavior. To that end, in this paper, we develop a Peer and Temporal-Aware Representation Learning based framework (PTARL) for driving behavior analysis with GPS trajectory data. Specifically, we first detect the driving operations and states of each driver from GPS traces. Then, we derive a sequence of multi-view driving state transition graphs from the driving state sequences, in order to characterize a driver's driving behavior that varies over time. In addition, we develop a peer and temporal-aware representation learning method to learn a sequence of time-varying yet relational vectorized representations from the driving state transition graphs. The proposed method can simultaneously model both the graph-graph peer dependency and the current-past temporal dependency in a unified optimization framework. Also, we provide effective solutions for the optimization problem. Moreover, we exploit the learned representations of driving behavior to score driving performances and detect dangerous regions. Finally, extensive experimental results with big trajectory data demonstrate the enhanced performance of the proposed method for driving behavior analysis.


A delayed response of the winter North Atlantic oscillation (NAO) to the 11-year solar cycle has been observed and modeled in recent studies. However, the mechanisms creating this 2−4- year delay to the solar cycle have still not been well-understood. This study examines the effects of the 11-year solar cycle and the resulting modulation in the strength of the winter stratospheric polar vortex. A coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model is used to simulate these effects by introducing a mechanis- tic forcing in the stratosphere. The intensified stratospheric polar vortex is shown to induce positive and negative ocean temperature anomalies in the North Atlantic Ocean. The positive ocean tem- perature anomaly migrated northward and was amplified when it approached an oceanic frontal zone approximately 3 years after the forcing became maximum. This delayed ocean response is similar to that observed. The result of this study supports a previ- ous hypothesis that suggests that the 11-year solar cycle signals on the Earth's surface are produced through a downward penetration of the changes in the stratospheric circulation. Furthermore, the spatial structure of the signal is modulated by its interaction with the ocean circulation.


Since 1980, a project on integrated pest management in rice has been operating in seven countries of the South/South East ASian Region through the Food and Agriculture Organisation. Austral1a has been an instigator and act1 va finanOial '\nd technical supporter of the project. An important part of the program has been the management of brown plant hopper (SPH). This insect has become a major pest of rice only since the introduction of intensified rice cropping systems and the reduction in BPR predator populations through the overuse of broad spectrum pesticides. Initially the project was directed towards conf1rm1ng the underlying technical base of IPM. However in recent times, the focus has nhifted towards extension, to give the farmer practical tools which will enable him to more effectively manage pest problems in the rice crop. This sh1ft has highlighted the need for a deeper understanding of soc10 economic factors affecting farmer adoption of the technology, and the policies necessary'to susta1n an IPM approach. Recent policy changes in a number of parti~tpating countries including reducing insecticide imports and subsidies h1ghlight the importance of policy measures. IPM needs to be profitable at farmer level for the short and long term f;;.ational econom1c benefits which flow from IPM to be realised. Paper


The transition from postindustrialism to knowledge-based economy requires a fundamental transformation of education system. Therefore, in the last decade, national governments and education institutions have been challenged by new demands set by the European Union and UNESCO to re-orient a traditional disciplinary paradigm of education towards Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). It is a more contextualized approach to education, which seeks to systematically and innovatively address complex socio-economic and environmental issues of a contemporary globalized society. ESD relies on a joined-up and cross-discipline thinking and practice which serves to uniquely and creatively configurate ideas from different fields. Thus, the new paradigm of education recognizes the importance of developing innovative and creative thinking of learners, as well as a strong interrelation between sustainable development and innovation. The current paper aims to identify the role of ESD in fostering innovativeness of students from different engineering fields at technical universities. Moreover, it seeks to reconsider the concepts of innovativeness and creative thinking in terms of a new paradigm of knowledge. It also questions whether teachers' and students's attitudes toward these competences could possibly have some effects on developing them in students. Finally, it seeks to check a hypothesis that there is a correlation between lecturers' attitudes toward students' creative capabilities and students' self-evaluation. The relevance of the research lies in the fact that in the face of local and global challenges, universities are reluctant or slow to transform the traditional paradigm of education into a new one. There is a lack of consistency in implementing the principles of ESD in curricula of universities. Very often technical universities show inadequate attention to interdisciplinary and context-specific model of learning as well as such general purpose competences as innovativeness and creative thinking. This threatens universities to become technocratic institutions. The present study employs qualitative descriptive and explanatory research methods. An extensive research and a critical evaluation of international and Lithuanian literature on the field have been done in order to offer the current perspective on the issue. What is more, a pilot survey on the students of Lithuanian technical universities supplementes the qualitative research by providing with their opinions on the issue. The results of a theoretical study points out to some limitations of a traditional disciplinary paradigm which fails to foster students' creativity and innovativeness at technical universities at their full potential. Similarly, the findings of the students' survey support the results of the qualitative study. However, they also reveal a significant potential of ESD to spawn these general purpose competences, which, in a long-term, could contribute to sustainable development at the national and global levels DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eis.0.7.4143


A highly accessible, step-by-step guide to Adobe Illustrator CS6 Illustrator CS6 Digital Classroom includes 12 self-paced lessons that contain essential skills and explore new features and capabilities of Adobe Illustrator. Every lesson is presented in full color with step-by-step instructions. Learning is reinforced with video tutorials and lesson files on a companion DVD that was developed by a team of expert instructors and Illustrator experts. Each video tutorial demonstrates and explains the concepts and features covered in the lesson. This training package shows how to create and produce vibrant graphics using this robust vector drawing application.Offers a complete training package combining a full-color, step-by-step instructional book with lesson files and video training from expert instructorsOffers the basics for tapping into the power of Adobe Illustrator to create and produce brilliant art for all types of mediaContains full-color, step-by-step instructions that make learning complicated tasks less intimidatingDemonstrates how to quickly get up to speed using Illustrator to create sophisticated page layouts and work in a dynamic publishing environmentJam-packed with information, the book and DVD take you from the basics through intermediate level topics. You'll get the information you need in a clear, approachable manner.NOTE: DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of the e-book file, but are available for download after purchase.


Abstract. Models without an explicit time dependence, called singular models, are widely used for fitting the distribution of temperatures at which water droplets freeze. In 1950 Levine developed the original singular model. His key assumption was that each droplet contained many nucleation sites, and that freezing occurred due to the nucleation site with the highest freezing temperature. The fact that freezing occurs due to the maximum value out of a large number of nucleation temperatures, means that we can apply the results of what is called extreme-value statistics. This is the statistics of the extreme, i.e. maximum or minimum, value of a large number of random variables. Here we use the results of extreme-value statistics to show that we can generalise Levine's model to produce the most general singular model possible. We show that when a singular model is a good approximation, the distribution of freezing temperatures should always be given by what is called the generalised extreme-value distribution. In addition, we also show that the distribution of freezing temperatures for droplets of one size, can be used to make predictions for the scaling of the median nucleation temperature with droplet size, and vice versa.


As data warehouses grow to the point where one hundred gigabytes is considered small, the computational efficiency of data-mining algorithms on large databases becomes increasingly important. Using a sample from the database can speed up the data-mining process, but this is only acceptable if it does not reduce the quality of the mined knowledge. To this end, we introduce the "Probably Close Enough" criterion to describe the desired properties of a sample. Sampling usually refers to the use of static statistical tests to decide whether a sample is sufficiently similar to the large database, in the absence of any knowledge of the tools the data miner intends to use. We discuss dynamic sampling methods, which take into account the mining tool being used and can thus give better samples. We describe dynamic schemes that observe a mining tool's performance on training samples of increasing size and use these results to determine when a sample is sufficiently large. We evaluate these sampling methods on data from the UCI repository and conclude that dynamic sampling is preferable.


What is the problem and what is known about it so far? People who are malnourished are not able to fight infection as well as people who are well nourished. The ability of the body to fight infection is called immunity or immune function. Some believe that supplementing food intake with vitamin and minerals will improve immune function. Although many people take vitamin and mineral supplements, it is uncertain whether these supplements have health benefits. Why did the researchers do this particular study? To find out whether people who take vitamin and mineral supplements have fewer infections and feel healthier than people who do not take supplements. Who was studied? 130 adults who were at least 45 years old, lived in North Carolina, and had not taken vitamin or mineral supplements during the previous month. Of the 130 study patients, 51 had type 2 diabetes. This is important because people with type 2 diabetes are at risk for vitamin and mineral deficiency and are at higher risk for certain types of infection. How was the study done? The researchers assigned patients at random to take either a pill that contained vitamins and minerals or a placebo pill every day for 1 year. The vitamin and mineral pill contained amounts of vitamins and minerals similar to those found in most commercially available multivitamin and mineral supplements. The placebo looked, smelled, and tasted like the supplement but contained only calcium, magnesium, and vitamin B2. The researchers then followed patients for 1 year and asked them to record in a diary any infections they developed and the number of days they missed work because of an infection. They also asked patients about their physical and mental health, using a standard survey. What did the researchers find? Patients taking the placebo pill reported more infections and more days missed from work due to infection than did patients taking the vitamin and mineral pill. This finding was strongest in people who had type 2 diabetes. Of the people with diabetes, 93% of those taking placebo reported an infection compared with only 17% of those taking the vitamin and mineral supplement. Self-reported physical and mental health was similar in both groups. What were the limitations of the study? This study did not determine the true nutritional status of the patients, so it is uncertain whether the benefits of the vitamin and mineral supplement were due to its effects on nutrition. In addition, this study included no patients younger than 45 years and only 33 patients over age 65. What are the implications of the study? A daily multivitamin and mineral supplement appears to reduce the number of infections, especially in persons with type 2 diabetes, a group that is at risk for vitamin and mineral deficiencies.


Abstract A periodised case study is offered of a number of engagements undertaken by the Centre for Communication, Media and Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, between 1985 and 2012, in facilitating resistance, policy, development and analysis. How cultural and media studies travelled to South Africa and how the centre negotiated the intersections between the humanities and social sciences, health and the physical sciences, is examined in terms of the epistemological alliances and conflicts that emerged. New paradigms ranging from appropriations of African philosophy and critical indigenous methodologies are discussed in an environment where new nationalisms are emerging. The story of the centre offers the fulcrum around which to discuss specific paradigmatic shifts. A new imaginary for the humanities and social sciences for a rapidly changing South Africa is then briefly proposed.


Sentiment analysis of online user generated content is important for many social media analytics tasks. Researchers have largely relied on textual sentiment analysis to develop systems to predict political elections, measure economic indicators, and so on. Recently, social media users are increasingly using additional images and videos to express their opinions and share their experiences. Sentiment analysis of such large-scale textual and visual content can help better extract user sentiments toward events or topics. Motivated by the needs to leverage large-scale social multimedia content for sentiment analysis, we propose a cross-modality consistent regression (CCR) model, which is able to utilize both the state-of-the-art visual and textual sentiment analysis techniques. We first fine-tune a convolutional neural network (CNN) for image sentiment analysis and train a paragraph vector model for textual sentiment analysis. On top of them, we train our multi-modality regression model. We use sentimental queries to obtain half a million training samples from Getty Images. We have conducted extensive experiments on both machine weakly labeled and manually labeled image tweets. The results show that the proposed model can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art textual and visual sentiment analysis algorithms alone.


Prescribing is an essential part of physicians' daily work, a professional and ethical responsibility. It implies a complex decision-making process that is conditioned not only by physicians' academic and cultural background but also by other factors such as pharmaceutical market width, medicines promotion by the pharmaceutical industry, access to independent information, medical care context in which the physician works and continuous education programmes or incentives from healthcare provider organisations. Left to pharmaceutical market whims, prescribing is known to be shifted towards newer and usually more expensive medicines.1 The most appropriate drugs for patients should be selected according to principles well described in the WHO 'Guide to good prescribing', such as comparative effectiveness, safety, convenience and cost.2 The rational use of medicines is defined as 'the prescription of the most appropriate medicine to the patient in need of them, at an adequate dose and time duration, and giving to the patient the needed information to use them'; it was agreed at a WHO conference in 1985.3 Although rational drug prescription does not guarantee that medicines expenditure is limited, this concept may represent a crucial step towards a more efficient use of drugs.4

Intensive marketing of new and more expensive drugs, demographic changes, rising patient expectations or stricter clinical targets have pushed pharmaceutical expenditure to increase more rapidly than any other component of health care.5 Concomitantly, the excessive volume of marketing and …


Embedded sensors and actuators are revolutionizing the way we perceive and interact with the physical world. Current research on such Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) has focused mostly on distributed sensing and data gathering. The next step is to move from passive information extraction from the physical world towards an active framework where information is retrieved, processed, and acted upon in situ. As an example of such sensor-actuator systems that provide large-scale, distributed coordination, we consider Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), with the goal of increasing travel safety and efficiency. The proliferation of wireless technologies enables different actors (e.g., pedestrians, motorists, traffic operators) to communicate with each other cheaply, efficiently, and securely. By embedding computational intelligence, communication and control into such ITSs, it will be possible to build collaborative transportation applications that help solve, for example, congestion and parking problems. This thesis explores the following question: To what extent is it possible to build distributed ITS systems that rely exclusively on local communication between nodes? The potential benefits of building such systems without infrastructure are numerous, including lower fixed and variable costs, avoiding regulatory hurdles, lower entry barriers for new players, and more control over privacy. On the other hand, self-organized ITSs without infrastructure have to operate under challenging conditions: large scale, high mobility, lack of end-to-end connectivity, ephemeral contacts between wireless nodes, and heterogeneous node capabilities. Although the networking research community has invested a significant effort in designing service abstractions that mimic traditional IP connectivity on top of wireless ad hoc networks, the ITS scenarios considered in this work are too challenging to implement such a service model. The main goal of this thesis is to design communication service models and their underlying protocols that can operate in collaborative transportation applications, and to demonstrate their effectiveness through analysis of traffic data and through realistic simulations. A key point is that the ITS applications we consider can rely on more limited service primitives, because they do not require a general any-to-any delivery service with strict performance guarantees. We first define the collaborative transportation applications of interest. Then we quantify their potential benefits and discuss their functional requirements. Next, we focus on the problem of the collection of large-scale mobility data. We propose a new method for collecting such data and introduce a novel mobility data mining framework, which is necessary to study collective mobility patterns in the context of wireless ad hoc networking. Relying on the analysis of real-life mobility traces, we find that despite the high node mobility, clusters of time-stable connectivity emerge and last at specific locations. Outside such clusters the connectivity between nodes remains sparse. This leads us to the proposal of a new mobility model that captures in an elegant way two phenomena observed in reality, i.e., emergence of stable clusters and network partitioning. This mobility model, called Heterogeneous Random Walk (HRW), appears to be the worst-case mobility model for many mobility-assisted protocols. Moreover, we show that the HRW mobility model predicts the performance of an epidemic dissemination protocol more accurately than other, similarly parsimonious models. Based on the lessons learned from the mobility data analysis, we propose a new abstraction that allows us to capture collective mobility patterns. This abstraction, called a Mobility Map, can be shared globally among mobile nodes and it can be used to improve communication in mobile partitioned networks (MPNs). Notably, we present a new geocasting protocol called GeoMobCast, which uses Mobility Maps to minimize message delay. This protocol is designed to provide the users of the collective transportation applications with the required communication service. Finally, we turn our attention on the real-life implementation of the distributed ITS that leverage short-range wireless communication. To this extent, we present the results of our experimental work with wireless sensor network technologies. We also present the necessary simulation toolbox designed to implement and evaluate collaborative transportation applications.


Tradition has taught women to view menopause as the "beginning of the end", the beginning of a decline in health, where they will have to handle the effects of illness, disability and dependency. Women have fought the effects of aging and menopause through botox injections, plastic surgery, and use in vitro fertilization and hormone replacement therapy to maintain the ability to reproduce and continue feeling young. Despite these efforts to maintain what we see as "valuable life", genetic studies have revealed the potential for another purpose to the menopausal period in a woman's life, the ability to grandparent and the evolutionary advantages of this. In this light, menopause should perhaps not be viewed as the "beginning of the end", but rather the "end of the beginning". In a proposed grandparent hypothesis, grandmothers increase the growth of infants by assisting in providing for food for nursing mothers and infants which ultimately accelerates infants' growth, allowing for them to be weaned sooner, and thus allowing the female to reproduce more. Recent genetic literature suggests that menopause may offer the selection for alleles, specifically the CD33 allele, which may protect against cognitive decline in post-reproductive humans, allowing humans to grandparent. Without these alleles, cognitive decline in the post-reproductive population may decrease the ability of grandparents to provide food and contribute knowledge to their offspring, and deters resources to the care of the aged and demented, thus hindering their grandchildren's reproductive success. This suggests that there is a genetic need for menopause, and serves as an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of thought from reversing menopause to viewing it as another important stage of a woman's life, which genetics may have selected for in order to sustain the continuation of our species.


The ability of Antarctic krill Euphausia superba Dana to withstand the overwintering period is critical to their success. Laboratory evidence suggests that krill may shrink in body length during this time in response to the low availability of food. Nevertheless, verification that krill can shrink in the natural environment is lacking because winter data are difficult to obtain. One of the few sources of winter krill population data is from commercial vessels. We examined length-frequency data of adult krill (>35 mm total body length) obtained from commercial vessels in the Scotia-Weddell region and compared our results with those obtained from a combination of science and commercial sampling operations carried out in this region at other times of the year. Our analyses revealed body-length shrinkage in adult females but not males during winter, based on both the tracking of modal size classes over seasons and sex-ratio patterns. Other explanatory factors, such as differential mortality, immigration and emigration, could not explain the observed differences. The same pattern was also observed at South Georgia and in the Western Antarctic Peninsula. Fitted seasonally modulated von Bertalanffy growth functions predicted a pattern of overwintering shrinkage in all body-length classes of females, but only stagnation in growth in males. This shrinkage most likely reflects morphometric changes resulting from the contraction of the ovaries and is not necessarily an outcome of winter hardship. The sex-dependent changes that we observed need to be incorporated into life cycle and population dynamic models of this species, particularly those used in managing the fishery.


Large-volume travertine deposits in the southeastern Colorado Plateau of New Mexico and Arizona, USA, occur along the Jemez lineament and Rio Grande rift. These groundwater discharge deposits reflect vent locations for mantle-derived CO 2 , which was conveyed by deeply sourced hydrothermal fluid input into springs. U-series dating of stratigraphic sections shows that major aggradation and large-volume (2.5 km 3 ) deposition took place across the region episodically at 700–500 ka, 350–200 ka, and 100–40 ka. These pulses of travertine formation coincide with the occurrence of regional basaltic volcanism, which implies an association of travertine deposits with underlying low-velocity mantle that could supply the excess CO 2 . The calculation of landscape denudation rates based on basalt paleosurfaces shows that travertine platforms developed on local topographic highs that required artesian head and fault conduits. Episodic travertine accumulation that led to the formation of the observed travertine platforms represents conditions when fault conduits, high hydraulic head, and high CO 2 flux within confined aquifer systems were all favorable for facilitating large-volume travertine formation, which was therefore controlled by tectonic activity and paleohydrology. By analogy to the active Springerville–St. Johns CO 2 gas field, the large volumes and similar platform geometries of travertine occurrences in this study are interpreted to represent extinct CO 2 gas reservoirs that were vents for degassing of mantle volatiles into the near-surface system.


Poor-performing schools are consistently seen as a barrier to attracting middle and upper income families to center city neighborhoods. Although some strategies have used magnet schools to attract families to these locations, few have considered the effects of school performance on their project. School performance is highly tied to socioeconomic status, making it difficult to create a high-performing school in a low-income neighborhood. However, there is little research on magnet school performance and how it relates to student socioeconomic status. This thesis establishes what ties magnet schools have to neighborhood socioeconomic status and creates a model to predict magnet school performance and student body average family income. Geo-coded student address data from the Guilford County, NC school system is combined with income and racial data and school characteristic variables to create a profile of each magnet school in the district. The results of this study are good news for neighborhood revitalization projects. This research proves that magnet school performance is independent of neighborhood socioeconomic status and that many of these schools perform well because they serve students from middle and upper income households. As these schools are often competitive and accept a limited number of students, a high performing magnet school with an attendance zone that gives seating priority to children in a targeted neighborhood may attract middle and upper income families to purchase homes there, raising property values, increasing the tax base and slowing the affects of sprawl.


The Sistema Interamericano de Metrologia (SIM) is one of five major regional metrology organizations (RMOs) recognized by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM). SIM is composed of the national metrology institutes (NMIs) located in the 34 member nations of the Organization of American States (OAS). Its goal is to create a unified measurement network that extends to the entire SIM region, ensuring the uniformity of measurements and strengthening traceability throughout North, Central, and South America back to the International System (SI) of units. To help reach this goal, SIM sponsors working groups in ten different metrological fields, including time and frequency. Developing a unified time and frequency measurement network in the SIM region has been a challenging task, but much progress has been made in recent years and many obstacles have been overcome. This paper summarizes work done by the SIM Time and Frequency metrology working group from 2004 to 2010. It discusses the challenges faced by the working group, the progress made by individual laboratories, and the important role played by metrology education. It also provides an overview of two major achievements of the working group, the SIM Time Network (SIMTN) and the SIM Time (SIMT) scale.


This study explored general chemistry students' thinking processes about molecular polarity and related concepts. The study employed a mixed-method design to reveal how general chemistry students use their conceptual frameworks and mental models to solve problems about molecular polarity. The quantitative phase collected students' background information, scores of course exams, as well as understanding and misconceptions about concepts of molecular geometry, polarity, and prerequisite concepts for a large sample size. The qualitative phase was guided by a theoretical framework of personal constructivism and a case study methodology. The primary data sources were video-taped interviews to document students' explanations and thinking processes. The secondary data sources were students' constructed artifacts and their responses to the items on the three diagnostic instruments. Grounded theory approach, employing a comparative method, was used for data analysis. Findings of the quantitative study indicated results of inferential statistics and identified students' misconceptions associated with concepts of electronegativity, chemical bonding, bond polarity, molecular shape, polarity of molecules, intermolecular force, and ionic lattices. For qualitative findings, I characterized high-, moderate-, and low-scoring students' mental-modeling ability, conceptual frameworks, and features of mental models while solving problems about molecular geometry and polarity. The major findings include that there is a positive interaction between an individual's level of content knowledge and mental-modeling ability, where one may facilitate or hinder the other. In addition, three prerequisite concepts were identified that may explain students' failure for learning about molecular geometry and polarity. I also found that metacognitive ability plays a significant role in a successful mental-modeling process. This study provides empirical evidence for how students' content knowledge, mental-modeling ability, and construction and use of mental models influence their understanding about molecular polarity. The findings have implications for college chemistry education for teaching concepts of molecular polarity.


A widespread view in political science is that minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively, more in line with a median-oriented and 'consensual' vision of democracy. Yet there is only little empirical evidence for it. We study legislative coalition-building in the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, which was ruled by a minority government between 2010 and 2012. We compare the inclusiveness of legislative coalitions under minority and majority cabinets, based on 1028 laws passed in the 1985–2017 period, and analyze in detail the flexibility of legislative coalition formation under the minority government. Both quantitative analyses are complemented with brief case studies of specific legislation. We find, first, that the minority cabinet did not rule more inclusively. Second, the minority cabinet's legislative flexibility was fairly limited; to the extent that it existed, it follows a pattern that cannot be explained on the basis of the standard spatial model with policy-seeking parties.


In this paper we examine the main challenges in promoting an effective market economy. While the paper ranges widely across the spectrum of economic institutions and policies, the central theme is the importance of macroeconomic stability for economic growth in the medium and long run. Macroeconomic stability may be seen as a public good. Its provision is among the essential responsibilities of the state both in modern market economies and in economies transforming themselves into modern market economies. Following this brief introduction, Section II considers four key aspects of the economic environment of the coming decades: increasing internationalisation; market-orientation; diminished government role; high real interest rates. Section III reviews the reasons why macroeconomic stability matters for economic performance and summarises the key empirical evidence supporting the existence of a causal link. Section IV deals with the design of domestic and international policies and institutions to promote macroeconomic stability and Section V asks how national governments and international institutions can take advantage of the current relatively stable global macroeconomic environment to improve medium-term economic performance and promote long-term growth. Section VI concludes. While our discussion will range broadly both theoretically and empirically, we shall emphasise lessons for, and experience from, countries attempting to create a market economy.


The Lusaka Securities exchange (LuSE) is one of the developing stock markets in Africa. As of 2015 it had only 22 listed companies with the market capitalization of about 5849 million dollars. There are a number of sectors that contribute to the growth of the stock market in Zambia. This study focused on the insurance sector, the pension funds mobilized contributions from the working population and invested in various assets among them is equity. According to the pension scheme investment guidelines (2011), pension funds are mandated to invest not less than 5% but not more than 70% of their total investment in equity. Hence, one would expect pension funds to have a good effect on the Zambian capital market. However the impact cannot be conclusive without undertaking a study to assess the effect of pension funds and capital market. Therefore, this study was an attempt to investigate the long run effect of pension fund's investment on the Lusaka securities exchange performance. The study used quarterly data for the period ranging from January 2009 to December 2015, and employed the cointegration and Vector Error Correction; the results prove the existence of long run relationships between the pension funds and the market capitalization. This relationship implies that if pension funds are encouraged to invest more in equity, it will contribute to the growth of capital market, hence developing. Recommendations have been made to policy markers on how they can use the sector to improve the performance of the capital market.


Most research on the association between school resources and student outcomes has concentrated on finances as measured in dollars. This study takes a fresh look at the issue by focusing on the allocation of real resources, defined as the personnel and materiel used to increase student learning, which are more relevant measures of a school's instructional conditions. Our findings indicate that prediction models that combine real resource and environmental variables forecast as much as two thirds of the variation in student outcome data, as measured by achievement gain scores and college aspiration rates. The ability to predict the college aspirations of high school students after including real resources improves by 14%, suggesting practical and statistical significance. Although socioeconomic status remains the greatest predictor of college aspirations, resource quality as measured by the percentage of faculty with master's and doctoral degrees is not far behind. These findings should lead to a reevaluation of school district human resource practices with regard to recruiting and hiring, professional development, personnel evaluation, and employee compensation, with important implications for student data collection and school funding litigation. We expect the findings to inform school-level decision making and accountability for principals, superintendents, local boards of education, and state policymakers.


Nutrients present in the feedstuffs are not completely
available to the animal body. Large portions of the nutrients
are excreted In the faeces because of being not digested In the
alimentary tract. Therefore, the digestibility of the feedstuff
is defined as the portion of a feed or nutrient of feed which is
not recovered In faeces, i.e., the portion which has been absorbed
by the animal. When the digestibility is expressed in
percentage it is known as digestibility coefficient. Digestibility
coefficients are calculated for dry matter, crude protein, crude
fibre, ether extract and nitrogen-free extract. Digestibility
of gross energy present in the food can also be determined. The
digestibility coefficients normally determined are the apparent
digestibility coefficients since the nutrients found in the
faeces contain small proportion of nutrients from the previously
utilized food In the form of mucosal debris, unspent enzymes ate.


The aim of this thesis is to analyse the cryogenic process for cooling superconducting radio frequency accelerator test cavities in the LEP accelerator at CERN. A liquefaction cryoplant is analysed, including the production of liquid helium at 4.5 K, the systems for distribution and regulation of liquid helium, and the radio frequency field used for accelerating particles. After discussing regulation problems and modifications planned for a new cavity installation in 1992, different techniques for specifying the control programs for the new installation are evaluated. Various diagramming techniques, standards and methodologies, and Computer Aided Software Engineering-tools, are compared as to their practical usefulness in this kind of process control. Finally, in accordance with anticipated requirements, possible ways of making high and low level control program specifications are suggested.


This volume analyses contemporary capitalism and its crises based on a theory of capitalist evolution known as the social structure of accumulation (SSA) theory. It applies this theory to explain the severe financial and economic crisis that broke out in 2008 and the kind of changes required to resolve it. The editors and contributors make available new work within this school of thought on such issues as the rise and persistence of the 'neoliberal' or 'free-market' form of capitalism since 1980 and the growing globalization and financialization of the world economy. The collection includes analyses of the US economy as well as that of several parts of the developing world.


Biomimicry, adapting and implementing nature's designs provides an adequate first-order solution to achieving superior mechanical properties. However, the design space is too vast even using biomimetic designs as prototypes for optimization. Here, we propose a new approach to design hierarchical materials using machine learning, trained with a database of hundreds of thousands of structures from finite element analysis, together with a self-learning algorithm for discovering high-performing materials where inferior designs are phased out for superior candidates. Results show that our approach can create microstructural patterns that lead to tougher and stronger materials, which are validated through additive manufacturing and testing. We further show that machine learning can be used as an alternative method of coarse-graining – analyzing and designing materials without the use of full microstructural data. This novel paradigm of smart additive manufacturing can aid in the discovery and fabrication of new material designs boasting orders of magnitude increase in computational efficacy over conventional methods.


The 1965 Merchant Ivory Productions film Shakespeare Wallah depicts a British theatrical troupe performing Shakespeare in post-independence India. Although the film situates the viewer's sympathy with the British members of the troupe, the filmmakers also present the troupe ironically, showing how they are floundering and nostalgic in the face of a liberated India. The film is made more complex by the fact that the actors playing the central roles were themselves members of the Shakespeareana troupe that had actually toured Shakespearean productions across India both before and after independence; several of the actors were essentially playing themselves. The film and its characters—both the real and fictionalized versions—thus adopt a highly ambivalent attitude toward postcolonialism and the role of Shakespeare in India. This article begins with an overview of interculturalism and cultural imperialism as they relate to Shakespeare in Asia and then explores how these different modes of postcolonial cross-cultural interaction are depicted and performed in this fascinating film.