2,6-Diaminopyridine based functional polymers poly(N-(6-aminopyridin-2-yl)acrylamide) (PNAPAAm) and poly(N-(6-acetamidopyridin-2-yl)acrylamide) (PNAcAPAAm) were synthesized via free radical polymerization and in addition PNAcAPAAm was synthesized by reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization for comparison. The obtained polymers displayed upper critical solution temperature (UCST)-type reversible thermoresponsiveness in water/alcohol mixtures. The UCST phase transition behaviour of the obtained functional polymers was studied using temperature dependent turbidimetry, dynamic light scattering and 1H-NMR measurements. The phase transition temperature of the polymers was tunable by varying either the concentration of the polymer solution, the nature of the alcohol or the composition of the solvent mixture. The cloud point temperature of PNAcAPAAm was found to decrease with increasing alcohol content (MeOH, EtOH and iPrOH) in water/alcohol mixtures. Past a critical amount of EtOH or iPrOH in water, the cloud point temperature of PNAcAPAAm increased upon further addition of EtOH or iPrOH. Such functional polymers with tunable UCST behaviour can be applicable in drug delivery, sensing, personal care and microfluidic applications.


This fascinating and deeply researched book examines how, beginning under Khrushchev in 1953, a generation of Soviet citizens moved from the overcrowded communal dwellings of the Stalin era to modern single-family apartments, later dubbed khrushchevka. Arguing that moving to a separate apartment allowed ordinary urban dwellers to experience Khrushchev's thaw, Steven E. Harris fundamentally shifts interpretation of the thaw, conventionally understood as an elite phenomenon. Harris focuses on the many participants eager to benefit from and influence the new way of life embodied by the khrushchevka, its furniture, and its associated consumer goods. He examines activities of national and local politicians, planners, enterprise managers, workers, furniture designers and architects, elite organizations (centrally involved in creating cooperative housing), and ordinary urban dwellers. "Communism on Tomorrow Street" also demonstrates the relationship of Soviet mass housing and urban planning to international efforts at resolving the "housing question" that had been studied since the nineteenth century and led to housing developments in Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America as well as the USSR.


Bridge scour is the removal of sediment around bridge foundations and can result in the failure of the bridge. Scour monitoring is performed to identify unacceptable scour on bridges considered to be scour critical and determine when scour reaches elevations that could cause potential bridge failure. Two types of monitoring are available: portable monitoring and fixed monitoring. Prior to this project, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) was only using portable monitoring devices, which requires the deployment of personnel to make physical measurements of scour depths. For some scour critical bridges, especially during high-water events, fixed instrumentation capable of continuous scour monitoring was preferred, but MnDOT lacked the experience or expertise to install this type of equipment. This project installed fixed monitoring equipment at two bridge sites and monitored them for three years to determine the effectiveness and reliability of fixed scour monitoring deployments. Several device options were installed to allow MnDOT to analyze the installation and performance of different types of sensors. Both systems operated for the three years with some outages due to various causes but overall performance was acceptable. The outages were mostly related to power issues and communication issues. Valuable lessons were learned through the deployment, which may be applied to future installations. The deployment executed in this project has provided the confidence to deploy other fixed scour monitoring equipment at key bridges around the state of Minnesota. In addition, the data collected during deployment of the scour monitoring equipment have been stored and provide insight into scour processes. These data can be used by other research groups for design or research purposes.


Purpose. To determine whether macular thickness is associated with ethnicity, gender, axial length (AL), and severity of myopia in a cohort of young adults from the Correction of Myopia Evaluation Trial (COMET). Methods. Eleven years after their baseline visit, 387/469 (83%) subjects returned for their annual visit. In addition to the protocol-specific measures of spherical equivalent refractive error (SER) and AL, high-resolution macular imaging also was performed with optical coherence tomography (RTVue). From these scans, full-thickness values for the central (1 mm), parafoveal (1 to 3 mm), and perifoveal (3 to 5 mm) annular regions were calculated. Gender, ethnicity, AL, and SER were examined for associations with macular thickness using univariate and multivariable linear regression analyses. Results. In the 377 subjects with usable data (mean age = 21.0 ± 1.3 years), the mean SER ± SD was −5.0 ± 1.9 D and mean AL was 25.4 ± 0.9 mm. Mean foveal thickness was 252.0 ± 20.1 &mgr;m in the center, 315.6 ± 14.0 &mgr;m in the parafovea, and 284.4 ± 12.9 &mgr;m in the perifovea. In the best-fit multivariable model that adjusted for gender, ethnicity, and AL, females had significantly thinner maculas than males for all three regions (p < 0.0001), with the largest difference in the center (12.8 &mgr;m, 95% confidence interval: 9.2 to 16.4). The effect of ethnicity was strongest in the central fovea, with African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and mixed ethnic groups having thinner maculas than whites (all p values < 0.005). Increased AL was significantly associated with slightly thicker central foveas (p = 0.001) and thinner parafoveal (p = 0.02) and perifoveal (p < 0.0001) regions. Conclusions. In this ethnically diverse cohort of moderate and high myopes, females and African-Americans were found to have the thinnest central foveas. Whether such thinning in the macula as a young adult is a risk factor for future disease remains to be determined.


Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging variance, which hinders the use of conventional convergence analysis techniques that rely on the existence of the second-order moments. In this paper, we provide convergence guarantees for SGD under a state-dependent and heavy-tailed noise with a potentially infinite variance, for a class of strongly convex objectives. In the case where the $p$-th moment of the noise exists for some $p\in [1,2)$, we first identify a condition on the Hessian, coined '$p$-positive (semi-)definiteness', that leads to an interesting interpolation between positive semi-definite matrices ($p=2$) and diagonally dominant matrices with non-negative diagonal entries ($p=1$). Under this condition, we then provide a convergence rate for the distance to the global optimum in $L^p$. Furthermore, we provide a generalized central limit theorem, which shows that the properly scaled Polyak-Ruppert averaging converges weakly to a multivariate $\alpha$-stable random vector. Our results indicate that even under heavy-tailed noise with infinite variance, SGD can converge to the global optimum without necessitating any modification neither to the loss function or to the algorithm itself, as typically required in robust statistics. We demonstrate the implications of our results to applications such as linear regression and generalized linear models subject to heavy-tailed data.


There's more than one way to copy. The process of copying can be laborious or easy, expensive or cheap, educative or unenriching. But the two intellectual property regimes that make copying an element of liability, copyright and trade secrecy, approach these distinctions differently. Copyright conflates them. Infringement doctrine considers all copying processes equally suspect, asking only whether the resulting product is substantially similar to the protected work. By contrast, trade secrecy asks not only whether but also how the defendant copied. It limits liability to those who appropriate information through means that the law deems improper. This Article argues that copyright doctrine should borrow a page from trade secrecy by factoring the defendant's copying process into the infringement analysis. To a wide range of actors within the copyright ecosystem, differences in process matter. Innovators face less risk from competitors if imitation is costly than if it is cheap. Consumers may value a work remade from scratch more than they do a digital reproduction. Beginners can learn more technical skills from deliberately tracing an expert's creative steps than from simply clicking cut and paste. The consequences of copying, in short, often depend on how the copies are made.Fortunately, getting courts to consider process in copyright cases may not be as far-fetched as the doctrine suggests. Black-letter law notwithstanding, courts sometimes subtly invoke the defendant's process when ostensibly assessing the propriety of the defendant's product. While these decisions are on the right track, it's time to bring process out into the open. Copyright doctrine could be both more descriptively transparent and more normatively attractive by expressly looking beyond the face of a copy and asking how it got there.


We present a case of a 32-year old patient with acute recurrent perimyocarditis associated with thyrotoxicosis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported case of acute recurrent pericarditis associated with increased thyroid hormones in the bloodstream and accompanied by a significant increase in cardioselective enzymes and reduced ejection fraction. Although some authors have described a single episode of myopericarditis mimicking acute coronary syndrome, it was not recurrent. Clinical improvement and normalization of laboratory results following the successful management of thyrotoxicosis, suggests a possible link between these two clinical entities-myopericarditis and thyrotoxicosis.


This paper presents elastic buffers (EBs), an efficient flow-control scheme that uses the storage already present in pipelined channels in place of explicit input virtual-channel buffers (VCBs). With this approach, the channels themselves act as distributed FIFO buffers under congestion. Without VCBs, and hence virtual channels (VCs), deadlock prevention is achieved by duplicating physical channels. We develop a channel occupancy detector to apply universal globally adaptive load-balancing (UGAL) routing to load balance traffic in networks using EBs. Using EBs results in up to 12 % (17 % for low-swing channels) improvement in peak throughput per unit power compared to a network using VC flow control. The power saved by eliminating VCBs is used to make channels wider, providing increased throughput that more than offsets the degradation caused by increased blocking without VCs. EB networks have identical zero-load latency to VC networks and have considerably simpler router logic as a VC allocator is not required.


Accepted: 13.03.2013 The aim of the study is to determine the effectiveness level of the coaching skills of school administrators on the school becoming a learning organization. The population of the study consists of teachers who are working at public and private secondary schools affiliated to Ministry of National Education, Kutahya Province National Education Directorate in the academic year of 2011-2012. The method of convenience sampling was used in the study. In the research, as a means of data collection, Learning School Perception Scale taken from Subas (2010) and Coaching and Management Skills Scale from Yeltan (2007) were used. As a result of the research, a significant difference was found between the coaching skills of the school administrators and the school's becoming a learning organization.


The Amulet user interface development environment makes it easier for programmers to create highly interactive, graphical user interface software for Unix, Windows and the Macintosh. Amulet uses new models for objects, constraints, animation, input, output, commands, and undo. The object system is a prototype instance model in which there is no distinction between classes and instances or between methods and data. The constraint system allows any value of any object to be computed by arbitrary code and supports multiple constraint solvers. Animations can be attached to existing objects with a single line of code. Input from the user is handled by "interactor" objects which support reuse of behavior objects. The output model provides a declarative definition of the graphics and supports automatic refresh. Command objects encapsulate all of the information needed about operations, including support for various ways to undo them. A key feature of the Amulet design is that all graphical objects and behaviors of those objects are explicitly represented at run time, so the system can provide a number of high level built-in functions, including automatic display and editing of objects, and external analysis and control of interfaces. Amulet integrates these capabilities in a flexible and effective manner.


Our study analyzes the security and privacy properties of an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD). Introduced to the U.S. market in 2003, this model of ICD includes pacemaker technology and is designed to communicate wirelessly with a nearby external programmer in the 175 kHz frequency range. After partially reverse-engineering the ICD's communications protocol with an oscilloscope and a software radio, we implemented several software radio-based attacks that could compromise patient safety and patient privacy. Motivated by our desire to improve patient safety, and mindful of conventional trade-offs between security and power consumption for resource-constrained devices, we introduce three new zero-power defenses based on RF power harvesting. Two of these defenses are human-centric, bringing patients into the loop with respect to the security and privacy of their implantable medical devices (IMDs). Our contributions provide a scientific baseline for understanding the potential security and privacy risks of current and future IMDs, and introduce human-perceptible and zero-power mitigation techniques that address those risks. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first in our community to use general-purpose software radios to analyze and attack previously unknown radio communications protocols.


The objectives of this experiment were to induce prostate atrophy by ligating prostate vessels and nerves and evaluate the histological changes in the prostates. Animal material consisted of 10 normal (healthy) crossbred dogs. The branches of the prostate artery, prostate veins, prostate innervating nerves, and hypogastric and pelvic nerves were ligated and then cut for each of the dogs under general anesthesia. Three months after surgery, the dogs were euthanased by with an overdose of sodium pentobarbital. Prostate length, depth, width and weight were measured during surgery (induction) and after euthanasia. Two hemi-cross-sections of each prostate, the left and right mid portions, were taken for histological examination. There were significant differences in prostate length and weight measured during surgery and after euthanasia. In the histopathological examination, there was a decrease in compound tubular alveolar glands for all dogs, whereas there was an increase in fibrous tissue formation throughout the prostates. In conclusion, although there was a statistical decrease in the mean prostate length and weight measured during surgery and after euthanasia, this was considered to be negligible in clinical practice for reducing the size of an enlarged prostate.


This paper draws on the narrative of a Samburu woman, whom we call Sasha, from northern Kenya. She has been living with rectoand vesico-vaginal fistula for more than ten years. Her homeland is characterized by abject poverty, patriarchy and traditional practices involving witchcraft, which is intertwined with the teachings of Christian evangelist missionaries that traverse the last two centuries. Sasha's research interview offered representations of the broader social and political aspects affecting women with vaginal fistula and how this influences their lived experiences. We suggest that this condition is more than a biomedical issue, which we explain through our interpretive feminist analysis of Sasha's story. An African feminist lens enables attention towards the influences of patriarchy, African ethnicities and underdevelopment of the African continent.


Social networks on Internet cannot be regarded as media environments simply; they are discursive environments, where individuals actively commune and construct their identities. The present study represents an attempt to analyze the role of virtual communities of practice play in members' identity, lifestyle and consumption practices. It is also aimed to find out how member types differ from each other in terms of their commitment to the community, identity, lifestyle and consumption. A survey was conducted with members Bilincli Hippiler Toplulugu, a virtual "community of practice". The findings reveal that life projects, meanings and practices that are produced and consumed in the context of the researched virtual community are sited in central consumption context of, specifically, core and active members, and have identity construction and authorization functions in members' life trajectories. These findings poses that although virtual communities did not take attention in Turkey, they get importance in analyzing consumer behavior with its effects on consumption practices.


Online advertising opportunities are sold through auctions, billions of times every day across the web. Advertisers who participate in those auctions need to decide on a bidding strategy: how much they are willing to bid for a given impression opportunity. Deciding on such a strategy is not a straightforward task, because of the interactive and reactive nature of the repeated auction mechanism. Indeed, an advertiser does not observe counterfactual outcomes of bid amounts that were not submitted, and successful advertisers will adapt their own strategies based on bids placed by competitors. These characteristics complicate effective learning and evaluation of bidding strategies based on logged data alone. The interactive and reactive nature of the bidding problem lends itself to a bandit or reinforcement learning formulation, where a bidding strategy can be optimised to maximise cumulative rewards. Several design choices then need to be made regarding parameteri-sation, model-based or model-free approaches, and the formulation of the objective function. This work provides a unified framework for such " learning to bid " methods, showing how many existing approaches fall under the value-based paradigm. We then introduce novel policy-based and doubly robust formulations of the bidding problem. To allow for reliable and reproducible offline validation of such methods without relying on sensitive proprietary data, we introduce AuctionGym: a simulation environment that enables the use of bandit learning for bidding strategies in online advertising auctions. We present results from a suite of experiments under varying environmental conditions, unveiling insights that can guide practitioners who need to decide on a model class. Empirical observations highlight the effectiveness of our newly proposed methods. AuctionGym is released under an open-source license, and we expect the research community to benefit from this tool.


It is characteristic of realists to separate ontology from epistemology and of idealists to mix the two things up. By 'idealists' here I am mainly referring to the British neo-Hegelians ('objective idealists') but the charge of mixing up ontology and epistemology can be made against at least one 'subjective idealist', namely Bishop Berkeley, as his wellknown dictum 'esse ispercipi' testifies. The objective idealists rejected the correspondence theory of truth and on the whole accepted a coherence theory. The qualification is needed here because H. H. Joachim, in The Nature of Truth, found the coherence theory unable to deal with the problem of error.


Wireless data communications, especially to and from portable mobile devices, is one of the fastest growing paradigms in the field of computer communications. This fast paced growth of wireless communication devices is making some communication frequency bands overcrowded. There exists legacy frequency spectrum that remains under utilized. As a result, there are great inefficiencies in how the overall available frequency spectrum is utilized, motivating the need for new technologies to solve this issue. Cognitive Radio (CR) is an emerging technology proposed over the past decade in order to deal with spectrum inefficiency and to help improving wireless communication performance. A CR has the capability to scan across the spectrum to find under utilized channels and use them for communications under some stipulated conditions. A key aspect of CRs is the "cognition" gained through a spectrum scanning process. The benefit of this cognition is apparent and well studied in terms of achieving better communication performance on selected spectrum and detecting the presence of primary users of licensed spectrum. The benefits in terms of reduced energy consumption in secondary users, however, due to easier channel access and less contention have not been quantified in prior work. Spectrum scanning to gain cognition is a power intensive process and the costs incurred in terms of energy lost need to be accounted for. Thus, it is not clear whether a cognitive radio based node would be more energy efficient than any conventional radio node, and if so, under what circumstances. As a result, the focus of this work is on the ad hoc Wireless LAN scenario that works in the highly congested ISM bands. In this dissertation three important contributions to research on ad-hoc WLAN cognitive radios are presented. First, a comprehensive survey on prior research in cognitive radio networks with a focus on the implications for energy consumption is presented. Second, the energy consumption of a radio that uses the CR technique is modeled and analyzed for a static scenario with fixed channel conditions and node populations. As part of this work four novel spectrum scanning algorithms are proposed and analytically evaluated for their energy consumption. Finally, the energy consumption of a radio that employs the CR technique through one of our four spectrum scanning schemes is studied through simulations for dynamic scenarios that include diverse channel conditions and varying node populations.


An optical fiber strain sensing technique, based on Brillouin Optical Time Domain Reflectometry (BOTDR), was used to obtain the full deformation profile of a secant pile wall during construction of an adjacent basement in London. Details of the installation of sensors as well as data processing are described. By installing optical fiber down opposite sides of the pile, the distributed strain profiles obtained can be used to give both the axial and lateral movements along the pile . Measurements obtained from the BOTDR were found in good agreement with inclinometer data from the adjacent piles. The rela tive merits of the two different techniques are discussed.


Summary form only given. One of the touted benefits of the semantic Web is that it will make searches more precise and efficient by leveraging metadata about Web-delivered content. Faceted metadata retrieval is an approach to providing users access to large collections of semistructured data and content that promises an improvement in usability over that available using more traditional search methods. We illustrate how the online proceedings for the 2003 Dublin Core Conference were implemented by combining traditional and innovative knowledge organization techniques. The 2003 Dublin Core Conference Proceedings served as a test-bed for generating a faceted metadata retrieval interface from instance metadata, ontologies, and controlled vocabularies expressed in RDF and RDF Schema. We share lessons learned in the design and implementation of the proceedings, and in particular focus on emerging best practices for representing and sharing metadata using Dublin Core Metadata recommendations, new interpretations of traditional Library and Information Science information retrieval techniques, and implementations of semantic Web standards.


OBJECTIVE
Bee venom has been reported to have antinociceptive and anti-inflammatory effects in experimental studies. However, questions still remain regarding the clinical use of bee venom. This report describes the successful outcome of bee venom treatment for refractory postherpetic neuralgia.

PATIENT
A 72-year-old Korean man had severe pain and hypersensitivity in the region where he had developed a herpes zoster rash 2 years earlier. He was treated with antivirals, painkillers, steroids, and analgesic patches, all to no effect.

INTERVENTION
The patient visited the East-West Pain Clinic, Kyung Hee University Medical Center, to receive collaborative treatment. After being evaluated for bee venom compatibility, he was treated with bee venom injections. A 1:30,000 diluted solution of bee venom was injected subcutaneously along the margins of the rash once per week for 4 weeks.

RESULTS
Pain levels were evaluated before every treatment, and by his fifth visit, his pain had decreased from 8 to 2 on a 10-point numerical rating scale. He experienced no adverse effects, and this improvement was maintained at the 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year phone follow-up evaluations.

CONCLUSION
Bee venom treatment demonstrates the potential to become an effective treatment for postherpetic neuralgia. Further large-sample clinical trials should be conducted to evaluate the overall safety and efficacy of this treatment.


The purpose of this research is to explore the applicability of Capacitively-Coupled Resistivity (CCR) as an improvement on traditional drilling and sampling methods for subsurface soil investigations. The CCR method could be used to identify critical locations for drilling and sampling such as expansive clay layers and anomalies (sinkholes, unknown landfills, etc.) rather than uniformly sampling across a site. CCR surveys were performed at Alpena, Arkansas along a highway expansion project changing US 62 from a two lane to four lane highway, and at Alton, Illinois along the Mel Price Levee, a 5.2 mile levee along a portion of the Mississippi River. A geometrics OhmMapper was used to acquire the CCR resistivity data with emphasis placed on investigating the near surface material properties (05 meters). The Alpena site was comprised of silt, clay and suspected bedrock with a deep water table, while the Alton site was comprised of clay and sand with a shallow water table. The survey was performed at both sides of the highway at Alpena and along the landside and riverside of the levee at Alton. The resulting resistivity plots revealed continuous subsurface soil information and emphases the impact of water level when interpreting the resistivity results as significant changes in the resistivity ranges for fine and coarse grain soils are possible for different moisture conditions. The measured soil resistivity values at the Alpena site with a deep water table were much higher than the values at the Alton site with the shallow water table. The accuracy of the CCR method was assessed by identifying the number of locations where the soil type predicted by CCR matched the existing boring and CPT logs. Resistivity from CCR was able to distinguish between areas of predominantly finegrained material and coarse-grained material but limitations exist in separating soils with similar grain sizes (silts and clays).


The problem of worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis of complex CPUs is addressed in this paper using a proposed architectural modification. The virtual trace controller (VTC) constrains execution to follow only the paths that have been considered by the WCETanalysis model, allowing the WCET to be determined safely by measurement. Each path has a constant execution time regardless of CPU complexity because the VTC enforces predictable operation.This paper evaluates the VTC using benchmark programs and the M5 simulator.The results show that guaranteed throughput is increased for many programs using the constrained CPU model versus an idealized in-order design, indicating that the VTC can make complex CPU designs operate predictably without reducing throughputto the level of a simple CPU design. Additional results providemore information about the implications of each of the VTC features.Of all the restrictions introduced for predictability,disabling memory forwarding has the greatest effect on the maximum throughput, although conditional branches can also be significant. This paper suggests ways to improve the VTC to increase the guaranteed throughput.


We perform a series of simplified numerical experiments to explore how rotation impacts the three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamics of core-collapse supernovae. For our systematic study, we employ a light-bulb scheme to trigger explosions and a three-flavor neutrino leakage scheme to treat deleptonization effects and neutrino losses from the proto-neutron-star interior. Using a 15 M☉ progenitor, we compute 30 models in 3D with a wide variety of initial angular momentum and light-bulb neutrino luminosity. We find that the rotation can help the onset of neutrino-driven explosions for the models in which the initial angular momentum is matched to that obtained in recent stellar evolutionary calculations (∼0.3–3 rad s−1 at the center). For the models with larger initial angular momentum, the shock surface deforms to be more oblate due to larger centrifugal force. This not only makes the gain region more concentrated around the equatorial plane, but also makes the mass larger in the gain region. As a result, buoyant bubbles tend to be coherently formed and rise in the equatorial region, which pushes the revived shock toward ever larger radii until a global explosion is triggered. We find that these are the main reasons that the preferred direction of the explosion in 3D rotating models is often perpendicular to the spin axis, which is in sharp contrast to the polar explosions around the axis that were obtained in previous two-dimensional simulations.


In this unique book, David Fillingim explores country music as a mode of theological expression. Following the lead of James Cone's classic, "The Spirituals and the Blues, Fillingim looks to country music for themes of theological liberation by and for the redneck community. The introduction sets forth the book's methodology and relates it to recent scholarship on country music. Chapter 1 contrasts country music with Southern gospel music--the sacred music of the redneck community--as responses to the question of theodicy, which a number of thinkers recognize as the central question of marginalized groups. The next chapter "The Gospel according to Hank," outlines the career of Hank Williams and follows that trajectory through the work of other artists whose work illustrates how the tradition negotiates Hank's legacy. "The Apocalypse according to Garth" considers the seismic shifts occuring during country music's popularity boom in the 1980s. Another chapter is dedicated to the women of country music, whose honky-tonky feminism parallels and intertwines with mainstream country music, which was dominated by men for most of its history. Written to entertain as well as educate and advance, "Redneck Liberation will appeal to anyone who is interested in country music, Southern religion, American popular religiosity, or liberation theology.


Purpose The aim of this study was to provide an overview of a single-institution, 30-year surgical experience with the soft tissue management of orbitotemporal neurofibromatosis. Lessons learned are highlighted in case presentations. Methods From 1981 to 2011, all patients who presented to the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital Craniofacial Center with craniofacial neurofibromatosis and orbitotemporal involvement were retrospectively reviewed. The medical records of those patients who underwent surgical correction were reviewed for age, extent of involvement, procedures performed, histologic confirmation, and acute complications. All patients were grouped according to the Jackson Classification. The electronic photobank was queried to evaluate results. Results Thirty-five patients presented to our center with orbitotemporal neurofibromatosis during the study period. Thirty-one patients underwent surgical management of their disease. The average age was 25 years (range 4 to 57 years). Over half of our patients (n = 18) presented with concomitant disease of the cheek. The 2 most common procedures performed were lateral canthopexy (n = 24) and upper eyelid excision (n = 24). The only acute complication recorded was a postoperative hematoma on the fourth postoperative day following simultaneous lateral canthopexy and upper eyelid excision which required operative evacuation. Conclusions In orbitotemporal neurofibromatosis, tissue hyperextensibility and tumor weight adversely affect outcomes. Treatment of concomitant disease of the cheek should be prioritized in order to provide periorbital support prior to addressing the delicate structures of the eyelids. Preservation of the lateral canthal unit and levator muscle, despite neurofibroma infiltration, is critical to maximize outcomes following debulking procedures of the eyelid and orbit.


The Swedish WASA base was erected in the Norwegian sector of Antarctica during the 1988-89 summer season. The base was on a nunatakk and consisted of a dwelling house with full living facities for 10 people and a machine building. The sanitary system consisted of indoor running hot and cold water, a dishwasher, a washing machine, two showers, a sauna and two dry toilets. All sanitary installations were, at the time of delivery, standard manufacturered versions chosen to be water conservative. The specific water demand for 1989-90 summer season was 62.8 litres (1) or 16.6 gallons (gal) per day. Of that 1/3 was used in the kitchen and 1/4 each for laundry and showers/sauna. The total specific use increased about 66% compared with the 1988/89 season. The probable reason for this was that the transfer of water to the inlet unit changed from a labour intensive technology system to a pumping and transportation device. The dishwasher and washing machine used about 32 % of this total figure. A further 21 % for personal hygiene, so nearly half of the total use was related to the taps. Further reduction in water demand should therefore be oriented towards alternatives such as aerators, timer restrictors or extremely low flow taps.


As investors begin to adopt Active Alpha Investing, their demand for hedge funds is likely to increase. In order to fully embrace this style of investing, investors need a framework to analyze hedge fund risk and return. This article proposes such a framework. The framework identifies the impact of market returns versus active returns, the differences in active returns across hedge fund strategies, as well as the relative confidence that investors place in alternative strategies. Hedge funds will continue to play an important role in investor portfolios and this framework is designed to help investors isolate the key decisions that they must make.


This paper reports the literacy skills of 63 children selected as being at genetic risk of dyslexia compared with 34 children from families reporting no history of reading impairment. Fifty-seven per cent of the at-risk group were delayed in literacy development at 6 years compared with only 12% of controls. The "unimpaired" at-risk group were not statistically different from controls on most cognitive and language measures at 45 months, whereas the literacy-delayed group showed significantly slower speech and language development, although they did not differ from controls in nonverbal ability. Letter knowledge at 45 months was the strongest predictor of literacy level at 6 years. In addition, early speech and language skills predicted individual differences in literacy outcome and genetic risk accounted for unique variance over and above these other factors. The results are discussed in terms of an interactive developmental model in which semantic and phonological skills support early reading acquisition.


In an era of globalisation and hyper-urbanisation, cities are rapidly emerging as drivers of social, cultural and economic change. Cities are imbibing the values of urbanism: the absence of intimate and personal relationships, and human relations which are largely anonymous, superficial and transitory. The concept of community neighbourhoods in urban living is gradually disappearing, which has led to more challenges for urban planners, designers and the architects. As architecture and urban planning are expressions of social and cultural milieus, this research focuses on contemporary urban planning approaches, with a theoretical framework that assesses the social cohesiveness and sustainability of neighbourhood communities. Academic literature in key areas of urban social sustainability, social cohesiveness and urban neighbourhood planning guides the theoretical framework. The key attributes of social cohesiveness identified by primary research are social interactions, sense of community and social ties. The aim of the study is to assess and analyse the role of the physical planning of the built forms, layout and design in creating socially cohesive neighbourhoods in the multicultural city of Dubai. The study focuses on four selected neighbourhoods in Dubai to analyse the extent of social cohesiveness evident and present and within these neighbourhoods. The study involves mixed methods: with quantitative, qualitative, spatial and observation analysis examining the physical factors of the neighbourhood and its impact on social cohesiveness. The findings of the study conclude that physical layout and built form contribute towards social cohesiveness among residents. There is a willingness of the residents to be part of a socially cohesive society; and if opportunities are provided through urban planning, this can help foster a socially cohesive multicultural society in Dubai. The study concludes that the role of urban planners, architects are important in building socially cohesive neighbourhoods in Dubai. The study seeks to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on building socially cohesive urban neighbourhoods; more specifically, in the context of Dubai's transient multicultural expatriate population. Keywords: built environment, culture, Dubai, expatriates, housing, neighbourhood, social sustainability, social cohesiveness


The effect of mammary gland-specific expression of the polyomavirus middle T antigen was examined by establishing lines of transgenic mice that carry the middle T oncogene under the transcriptional control of the mouse mammary tumor virus promoter/enhancer. By contrast to most transgenic strains carrying activated oncogenes, expression of polyomavirus middle T antigen resulted in the widespread transformation of the mammary epithelium and the rapid production of multifocal mammary adenocarcinomas. Interestingly, the majority of the tumor-bearing transgenic mice developed secondary metastatic tumors in the lung. Taken together, these results suggest that middle T antigen acts as a potent oncogene in the mammary epithelium and that cells that express it possess an enhanced metastatic potential.


We consider the problem of estimating multiple filters from convolutive mixtures of several unknown sources. We propose to exploit both the time-frequency (TF) sparsity of the sources and the sparsity of the mixing filters. Our framework consists of: a) a clustering step to group the TF points where only one source is active, for each source; b) a convex optimisation step, to estimate the filters using TF cross-relations that capture linear constraints satisfied by the unknown filters. Experiments demonstrate that the approach is well suited for the estimation of sufficiently sparse filters.


Journalists reporting war have increasingly been embedded with military units, especially in the recent Iraq War (e.g. Cottle, 2006: 76; Tumber, 2004). Being 'on the ground' amongst the action might suggest that the news produced is more strongly 'grounded in reality' than reports constructed in the newsroom from news 'off the wire'. However, this investigation of seven armistice reports from the Sydney Morning Herald spanning a century (1902-2003) suggests that there has been a gradual shift away from strongly grounded, accountable reporting towards engaging, crafted prose. Across the archive of these texts, the patterning of circumstantial elements reflects shifts in the priority placed upon specificity of time and place. These grammatical patterns are indices of contextual differences in the demands of technology and process through which news reports have been produced. An example is the shift from lists of telegraphic corantos to 'integrated' articles published under a specific reporter's byline. One conclusion that can be drawn from this is that as the reporter's 'voice' mediates between reader and events, there is some sacrifice of the readers' ability to reconstruct the unfolding of events. This conclusion prompts us to problematise the mediation of war in the news about armistice.


Up to 40% of patients with chronic low back pain that could benefit from surgery have a bacterial infection that could be treated simply and cheaply with antibiotics, research has found.

The first of two studies in the European Spine Journal found Propionibacterium acnes , an anaerobic bacteria, in 43% of patients undergoing primary surgery for lumbar disc herniation.1 Hanne Albert and colleagues at the University of Southern Denmark also found that new bone oedema (Modic type 1 changes) developed in adjacent vertebrae of 80% of discs infected with the anaerobic bacteria.

Previous studies had shown that Modic changes were six times as common in people with low back pain as in the general population. This was mostly thought to be the result of mechanical reasons, but it was known that under some circumstances infections played a role. Conventional treatments for back pain such as exercises, injections, and manipulation were ineffective in patients with Modic changes.

The study of 61 patients found a highly significant association between …


This paper considers the applicability of modern theories of language to data from pre-modern language varieties. Specifically, I address the extent to which Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper's (1989) taxonomy of directive head acts is valid for use in descriptions of these speech acts in Early Modern Spanish. In order to address this issue, data from two distinct primary sources was collected: first, a series of familiar letters written in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and second, a collection of short farces widely discussed as representing the popular speech of the time. The results of this study indicate that speakers in the sixteenth century displayed a strong preference for direct request strategies, at odds with conclusions drawn about modern Spanish in the literature. Though the head act taxonomy is found to be useful for analyzing the Early Modern data, I caution that it cannot be assumed that speakers in different periods appraise potential face-threatening acts similarly.


This paper presents a study of the effectiveness of integrating unequal channel spacing and duobinary modulation format as a good alternative of conventional non-return to zero (NRZ) modulation format to further suppress four-wave mixing (FWM) crosstalk in a four 10-Gbps channels wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) system. The study is conducted using VPI Transmission Maker Simulator. The results show that duobinary modulation has a better performance in suppressing FWM than conventional NRZ, and that using unequal spacing with duobinary modulation further improves the suppression of FWM products in WDM systems.


Considering that he worked a stint as a screen writer, it will come as little surprise that Faulkner has often been called the most cinematic of novelists. Faulkner's novels were produced in the same high period as the films of classical Hollywood, a reason itself for considering his work alongside this dominant form. Beyond their era, though, Faulkner's novels--or the ways in which they ask readers to see as well as feel his world--have much in common with film. That Faulkner was aware of film and that his novels' own "thinking" betrays his profound sense of the medium and its effects broadens the contexts in which he can be considered. In a range of approaches, the contributors consider Faulkner's career as a scenarist and collaborator in Hollywood, the ways his screenplay work and the adaptations of his fiction informed his literary writing, and how Faulkner's craft anticipates, intersects with, or reflects upon changes in cultural history across the lifespan of cinema. Drawing on film history, critical theory, archival studies of Faulkner's screenplays and scholarship about his work in Hollywood, the nine essays show a keen awareness of literary modernism and its relation to film.


Since the Tax Reform Act of 1986 there has been uncertainty about the tax treatment of fees for investment advice paid by estates and trusts. The language of Internal Revenue Code sections 67(a) and 67(e) has been construed as either allowing a full deduction for such fees or imposing a 2% of adjusted gross income (AGI) floor before fees are deductible. This article describes a court case that ends the uncertainty for some taxpayers. In William J. O'Neill, Jr., Irrevocable Trust v. CIR, y; 98 T.C. 227 (1992), the Tax Court held that investment advice fees were subject to a 2% floor. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, allowing the fees to be deducted in their entirety (William J. O'Neill, Jr., Irrevocable Trust v. CIR, 994 F2d 302 [6th Cir. 1993]). In a 1994 action on decision, the Internal Revenue Service said it did not acquiesce to the Sixth Circuit's decision. Consequently, investment advice fees are fully deductible for estates and trusts within the Sixth Circuit, which includes Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. CPA practitioners in the Sixth Circuit therefore should consider amending the estates and trusts tax returns for 1994, 1995 and 1996 that limit deductions for investment advice fees to amounts above 2% of AGI. Taxpayers outside the Sixth Circuit may rely on the court's O'Neill decision. However, since the Tax Court is not formally bound by the decision outside the Sixth Circuit, outside taxpayers may want to evaluate whether substantial authority exists before making a challenge. JUST THE FACTS The William J. O'Neill, Jr., Trust was formed in 1965 under Ohio law. None of the trustees was an investment expert or willing to serve unless an investment adviser was hired. From 1979 to 1991, the trustees received investment advice from a professional investment management company. On its 1987 Form 1041, U.S. Fiduciary Income Tax Return, the trust deducted in full the investment fees it had paid. The trustees declined compensation for their services. During an audit of the trust's 1987 return, the IRS allowed the deduction for the fees only to the extent they exceeded 2% of the trust's AGI. The trust challenged the IRS decision in Tax Court. THE ISSUE The deductibility question arose because section 67(e) generally requires the AGI of an estate or trust to be "computed in the same manner as in the case of an individual." Under section 67(a), investment fees for individuals are miscellaneous itemized deductions subject to a 2% floor. A trust or estate's administrative expenses, "costs... which would not have been incurred if the property were not held in such trust or estate," are fully deductible for purposes of determining AGI. The investment advice fees were construed by the IRS to be subject to the 2% floor and by the trust to be a fully deductible administrative expense. THE TAX COURT DECISION In Tax Court, the trust advanced two arguments to support its position. Role of local law. In the absence of Treasury regulations and little legislative history on section 67(e), local law determines what constitutes an administrative expenditure. Ohio statutes require trustees to invest trust assets and prescribe the type and quality of investments they can make. As with most states, Ohio law holds trustees to the "prudent person" standard of care, under which trustees' investment decisions are evaluated in light of all circumstances to determine whether they acted honestly, in good faith and with the degree of care and prudence ordinary persons would exercise in transacting their affairs. The trust argued that Ohio trustees must seek investment advice if they are to fulfill their fiduciary obligations. Hence, investment advice fees are fully deductible trust administration expenses. Source of payments. The other argument was that investment advice payments should be given the same tax treatment regardless of whether they are paid from the trust or directly by the trustees. …


Traditionally, Crohn's disease has been associated with a Th1 cytokine profile, while Th2 cytokines are modulators of ulcerative colitis. This concept has been challenged by the description of tolerising regulatory T cells (Treg) and by proinflammatory Th17 cells, a novel T cell population characterised by the master transcription factor RORγt, the surface markers IL23R and CCR6, and by production of the proinflammatory cytokines IL17A, IL17F, IL21, IL22 and IL26, and the chemokine CCL20. Th17 cells differentiate under the influence of IL1β, IL6, IL21 and IL23. Recent studies indicate that TGFβ is essential not only for the development of murine Th17 cells but also for differentiation of human Th17 cells. TGFβ reciprocally regulates the differentiation of inflammatory Th17 cells and suppressive Treg subsets, with the concomitant presence of proinflammatory cytokines favouring Th17 cell differentiation. Several studies demonstrated an important role of Th17 cells in intestinal inflammation, particularly in Crohn's disease. Genome-wide association studies indicate that IL23R and five additional genes involved in Th17 differentiation (IL12B, JAK2, STAT3, CCR6 and TNFSF15) are associated with susceptibility to Crohn's disease and partly also to ulcerative colitis. Taken together, both Th1 and Th17 cells are important mediators of inflammation in Crohn's disease, although activities previously ascribed to IL12 may be mediated by IL23. Anti-IL12/IL23p40 antibody therapy, which targets both Th1 and Th17 cells, is effective in Crohn's disease. However, the complex relationship between Th1 and Th17 cells has not been completely analysed. This will be of great importance to delineate the specific contributions of these cells to Crohn's disease and other autoimmune diseases.


Received Aug 30, 2021 Revised Dec 10, 2021 Accepted Dec 24, 2021 The accelerated modern day urban development is accompanied by an increasing production of solid waste. While managing solid waste on an industrial scale presents different technological challenges, managing household waste requires decentralized solutions dealing with the associated logistic and technical difficulties. In this review, we identify the research trends on household waste recycling by providing a brief description of the main technologies, and the traditional formats commonly used for solid waste (SW) separation. We identify two main threads: the SW management systems within a smart city framework and the design of domestic waste classification systems based on intelligent mechanisms tailored to user psychology. Among the main conclusions, we verify a growing interest in the subject of SW separation in domestic applications, mainly through solutions based on automation and internet of things (IoT). Also, we detected a increasing interest in the analysis of psychological aspects and in citizen education in relation to the importance of recycling, since without this notion the success of proposed solutions might be limited.


Traditional houses are regarded as the best examples of energy efficient design due to their climate responsive design approach. Thus, traditional Diyarbakir houses in the hot-dry climate zone provide passively comfortable indoor environments without consuming excessive energy by their proper design parameters. Especially, during summer period, cooling loads are reduced by virtue of their climate responsive design despite high outdoor temperatures and intensity of solar radiation. In this study, the effect of solar heat gain on heating-cooling loads in courtyard buildings derived from central courtyard plan with different A/V ratios is evaluated. Moreover, the alterations of indoor conditions between seasonal parts, which are placed around the central courtyard in order to obtain optimum amount of solar gain, are analyzed. As a result, the efficiency of heating-cooling load provided by climate responsive design is aimed to be highlighted by considering the passive building performance of courtyard buildings in hot-dry climate zones in relation to solar heat gain.


Abstract Introduction: Treatment with antidepressants and antipsychotics, though effective, is unspecific as agents that differ greatly in their biochemical and pharmacological actions have virtually the same efficacy. Half of the patients with initial improvement show incomplete response, while a large proportion of patients exhibit a refractory clinical picture which is resistant to all treatment modalities. Methods: Our analyses were based on a reference study of 2 848 depressive inpatients under monotherapeutic treatment with 7 different antidepressants or placebo, along with a naturalistic study of depressive and schizophrenic patients (296 inpatients, 363 outpatients) under today's "standard" polypharmaceutic treatment regimens. Results: The empirical data suggested the following predictors of response: (1) severity at baseline, (2) early onset of improvement, (3) unwanted side-effects, and (4) medical comorbidity. A combination of these predictors with Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) methods has direct clinical relevance. Discussion: Evidence-based approaches to personalized treatment help improving the unsatisfactory situation patients and clinicians are faced with, given today's incomplete treatments and the fact that the mechanisms by which antidepressants and antipsychotics ultimately exert their therapeutic effects are only marginally understood.


The general management literature has long focused on the agency risks involved in the relationship between general managers and shareholders. Shareholders can deploy contractual and noncontractual mechanisms to reduce these inefficiencies. This study examines—based on a broad international sample of investment contracts—how the use of contractual and noncontractual mechanisms is related to the degree of risks associated with the venture's development stage as well as how these practices differ across countries. Hypotheses are tested using a proprietary data set of 265 hand-collected investment contracts associated with ventures in the United States, Israel, and nine European countries. Findings suggest that the use of mitigating contractual and noncontractual mechanisms is related to the degree of agency risks and that these practices vary across countries. This study draws implications for how investors can best deploy their capital in different institutional settings while nurturing their relationships with managers and entrepreneurs.


In this paper we present a new approach to the automation of usability evaluation for interactive systems. Design ideas or complete systems are modeled as a conditional state machine. Then, user interactions with the system are simulated on the basis of tasks, by first searching for possible solution paths and then generating deviations from these paths under consideration of user groups and system attributes. The approach has been implemented into a workbench which supports the modeling of the system and the evaluation of the simulations. We present first results for the reliability of the approach in modeling interactions with a spoken dialog system.


The following is a chapter from my recently released book, The End of Straight Supremacy: Realizing Gay Liberation. This chapter challenges the straight supremacist assumptions at the root of the gay movement's marriage obsession. Rooted in the politics and theories of early Gay liberation and Radical feminism, Shannon Gilreath's The End of Straight Supremacy presents a cohesive theory of Gay life under straight domination. Beginning with a critique of formal equality law centered on the "like-straight" demands of liberal equality theory as highlighted in Lawrence v. Texas, Gilreath goes on to criticize the "gay rights" movement itself, challenging the assimilation politics behind the movement's blithe acceptance of discrimination in the guise of free speech and pornography in the name of sexual liberation, as well as same-sex marriage and transsexuality as tools of straight hegemony. Ultimately, Gilreath rejects both the liberal demand for Gay erasure in exchange for meager legal progress and the gay establishment agenda. In so doing, he provides both the vocabulary and analysis necessary to understand and to resist straight supremacy in all its forms. In The End of Straight Supremacy, Gilreath calls Gays and their allies to the difficult task of rethinking what liberation and equality really mean. The reader will quickly notice my use of irregular capitalization. I used "Gay," capitalized, to refer to that which is Gay-identified. I use "gay," lower-case, as in "gay pornography" or "gay establishment," to distinguish that which is essentially straight supremacist in origin and operation.


Where were the women in Geology? This book is a first as it unravels the diverse roles women have played in the history and development of geology as a science predominantly in the UK, Ireland and Australia, and selectively in Germany, Russia and US. The volume covers the period from the late eighteenth century to the present day and shows how the roles that women have played changed with time. These included illustrators, museum collectors and curators, educationalists, researchers and geologists. Originally as wives, sisters or mothers many were assistants to their male relatives. This book looks at all these forgotten women and for the first time historians and scientists together explore the contribution they made to this male-dominated subject. There are individual profiles on remarkable women: Catherine Raisin, Dorothea Bate, Cuvier's daughters, Grace Prestwich, Annie Greenly, Nancy Kirk, Margaret Crosfield, Ethel Skeat, Maria Ogivlie Gordon, Marie Stopes, Anne Phillips, Muriel Arber and Etheldred Bennett. Pulling together this extensive research uncovered common issues and generated emergent themes. The Editors have brought this new research together under these themes and tried to answer the question Where were the women in Geology? They go on to discuss how these role models can be applicable to today's society.


Eight low-lying levels of Eril 4f 6s have been observed to be grouped according to their energy in four close pairs. The.centers of gravity of the pairs correspond to the energies of the four lowest levels of the coreAf 12 the spacings between the two compornts of the pairs depend on the Coulomb interaction between the s electron and core, and are determined by the single Slater integral G 5 (4r,6s). The levels of the core can be fitted very closely with integrals Fk(lf,Llf) whose ratios one to another are the seine as those for a hydrogenic Li-f eigenfunction. The integral F2(Ll-f,Ll-f) is found to be 427 cm', and ., the spin-orbit coupling constant, 2257 cm . The spacings are fitted moderately well by a value of 1780 cm 1 for G5; discrepancies are ascribed to configuration interaction. The g values of the levels are found to agree closely with those calculated on the basis of perfect Jj coupling.


Prominent figures in the legal world have recently attacked the doctrine of Chevron deference, suggesting that Chevron is unconstitutional because it interferes with a court's duty to exercise "independent judgment" when interpreting statutes. This Article shows that Chevron's critics are mistaken. Chevron deference, properly understood, does not prevent courts from interpreting statutes. An interpretation that concludes that a statute delegates power to an executive agency is still an interpretation. The power implicitly delegated to an agency by an ambiguous statute is not the power to interpret the statute, but the power to make a policy choice within the limits set by the possible meanings of the statute.


Background/Context The goal of inclusive education is universally recognized as the fundamental restructuring of schools to engage hospitably with all forms of difference, including ability. However, inclusion, at least in practice, has come to mean the physical placement of students with disabilities in general education classrooms. The conundrum of inclusion as currently implemented is that its entanglement with place weakens the possibility of the required large-scale transformation of school spaces. Additionally, analyses of place and disability/inclusion generally assume the concept of place to represent a fixed, stable entity with determinate boundaries, making it difficult to disrupt the linkage between place and disability. Purpose/Objective This article is an attempt to explore a new conception of place that would permit educators to engage with student learning differences without associating them with fixed environments. Rather than consider place as a fixed, naturalized entity, I draw on theorists who develop the spatial dimension of human experience alongside the social and temporal. Within this theoretical perspective, school places are not merely containers within which events take place; rather, they are formed in the interaction of webs of ideas and people. The research questions for this article, therefore, were as follows: How is place constructed within the discourse of teachers? To what extent do such constructions reflect prevailing notions of special education or inclusion as a place? Research Design Data for this article drew primarily on 19 interviews I conducted with nine educators during the course of a series of ethnographically-oriented studies conducted between 2005 and 2014. Each of the studies addressed in this article was conducted in schooling sites in the U.S. where general and special education teachers were supporting students with a range of disabilities in inclusive classrooms. Teacher interview data from a nine-month professional development sequence in inclusive practices were also used for this article. The development of categories during data analysis for this article emerged from triangulating interview data with extensive field notes maintained for each site. Findings Data analysis disclosed that teachers participated in maintaining the boundaries of places through their conceptions of students as learners, even as their own professional identities were produced via the historically mediated beliefs and practices that were implicated within those places. As educators struggled to create places of inclusion, the identities of such places differed depending on the logic in which they were anchored: student connectedness or learning need. Conclusions Supported by an alternate conceptualization of learning need, I draw on the linkage between teacher identity and place to propose that a diasporic sensibility can enable different relations between the two, making inclusion a spatially fluid project involving changing networks of people and experiences.


Abstract. This study demonstrates that alkaline earth elements in enamel of hippopotamids, in particular Ba and Sr, are tracers for water provenance and hydrochemistry in terrestrial settings. The studied specimens are permanent premolar and molar teeth found in modern and fossil lacustrine sediments of the Western Branch of the East African Rift system (Lake Kikorongo, Lake Albert, and Lake Malawi) and from modern fluvial environments of the Nile River. Concentrations in enamel vary by two orders of magnitude for Ba (120–9336 μg g−1) as well as for Sr (9–2150 μg g−1). The variations are partially induced during post-mortem alteration and during amelogenesis, but the major contribution originates ultimately from the variable water chemistry in the habitats of the hippopotamids which is controlled by the lithologies and weathering processes in the watershed areas. Amelogenesis causes a distinct distribution of MgO, Ba and Sr in modern and fossil enamel, in that element concentrations increase along profiles from the outer rim towards the enamel–dentin junction by a factor of 1.3–1.9. These elements are well correlated in single specimens, thus suggesting that their distribution is determined by a common, single process, which can be described by closed system Rayleigh crystallization of bioapatite in vivo. Enamel from most hippopotamid specimens has Sr/Ca and Ba/Ca which are typical for herbivores. However, Ba/Sr ranges from 0.1 to 3 and varies on spatial and temporal scales. Thus, Sr concentrations and Ba/Sr in enamel differentiate between habitats having basaltic mantle rocks or Archean crustal rocks as the ultimate sources of Sr and Ba. This provenance signal is modulated by climate change. In Miocene to Pleistocene enamel from the Lake Albert region, Ba/Sr decreases systematically with time from 2 to 0.5. This trend can be correlated with changes in climate from humid to arid, in vegetation from C3 to C4 biomass as well as with increasing evaporation of the lake water. The most plausible explanation is that Ba mobility decreased with increasing aridification due to preferential deposition with clay and Fe-oxide-hydroxide or barite on the watershed of Lake Albert.


Forest tenure reforms have granted smallholders and communities formal rights to land and forest resources. This article explores the various ways in which these local actors engage with timber markets in the context of such reforms. I argue that the economic benefits that communities can capture from the use of forest resources, mainly timber, are mediated by two sets of factors that are beyond the process of tenure reform. The first set of factors relate to communities' capacity to interact with other actors-intermediaries and companies-in timber markets, and the second to specific conditions of market development. Interactions between community capacity and market conditions shape the ways in which smallholders and communities engage with timber markets, thereby influencing the benefits they can obtain from commercial use of their timber forests. This article focuses on forest communities that have acquired legal tenure rights in Latin America; specifically four communities located in tropical landscapes in Bolivia, Brazil, and Nicaragua. The types of engagement revealed by the analysis should be taken into account in differentiated public policies in order to improve the outcomes of forest tenure reforms.


LECA zeolite, a novel material containing zeolite crystallised on light expanded clay aggregates (LECA) substrates with the aid of a hydrothermal process, was used in ionic exchange applications. LECA zeolite combines the porosity, low density and good mechanical properties of LECA substrates with the microporosity and ion-exchange properties of zeolites. In the present work, the dynamic ionic exchange of heavy metals was studied in a bed reactor filled with well-characterised LECA zeolite. Measurements were carried out of the parameters that describe the performance of the plug flow ionic exchange bed reactors (PFIEBR) during dynamic ionic exchange in LECA zeolite columns, removing Pb2+, Cu2+, Co2+ and Ni2+ from water solutions. The results indicated that Pb2+ is particularly selectively exchanged in comparison with Cu2+, Co2+ and Ni2. The selectivity decreased in the following order Pb2+ > Cu2+ > Co2+ ≅ Ni2+. The results indicated that LECA zeolite could be effectively used in heavy metal removal from wastewater.


Previous studies have confirmed the adverse impact of fading correlation on the mutual information (MI) of two-dimensional (2D) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. More recently, the trend is to enhance the system performance by exploiting the channels degrees of freedom in the elevation, which necessitates the derivation and characterization of three-dimensional (3D) channels in the presence of spatial correlation. In this paper, an exact closed-form expression for the Spatial Correlation Function (SCF) is derived for 3D MIMO channels. The proposed method resorts to the spherical harmonic expansion (SHE) of plane waves and the trigonometric expansion of Legendre and associated Legendre polynomials. The resulting expression depends on the underlying arbitrary angular distributions and antenna patterns through the Fourier Series (FS) coefficients of power azimuth and elevation spectrums. The novelty of the proposed method lies in the SCF being valid for any 3D propagation environment. The developed SCF determines the covariance matrices at the transmitter and the receiver that form the Kronecker channel model. In order to quantify the effects of correlation on system performance, the information-theoretic deterministic equivalents of the MI for the Kronecker model are utilized in both mono-user and multi-user cases. Numerical results validate the proposed analytical expressions and elucidate the dependence of the system performance on azimuth and elevation angular spreads and antenna patterns. Some useful insights into the behavior of MI as a function of downtilt angles are provided. The derived model will help evaluate the performance of correlated 3D MIMO channels in the future.


The concept of 'ageism' has often been thought to be of limited moral concern, especially in comparison to other forms of discrimination such as racism and sexism. Nevertheless, there are also those who believe that ageism is morally significant, and there are diametrically opposed views within liberal and egalitarian theory as to whether age discrimination is or is not just. This thesis has two objectives. Firstly, it seeks to overcome the apparent vagueness of the concept that has given rise to such diametrically opposed views concerning ageism by examining exactly what the phenomenon involves. It defines the wrongfulness of much age discrimination as originating in either the nature of the reasons for which people discriminate against the old or the nature of the consequences for the individuals affected. In the course of the thesis I make several important distinctions, the most important of which are between the social and moral worth of a person, and between the synchronic and diachronic interests of a person. These distinctions allow us to distinguish between a culturally oppressive ageism and ageism that is justified by reasons of equality and efficiency. The former is intrinsically morally wrong, the latter extrinsically wrong. The second aim of the thesis is to develop an anti-ageist ethical principle capable of challenging both forms of ageism in a comprehensive way, and which is consistent with a broader liberal egalitarian political theory. This is achieved by drawing on the distinction between the irreducible nature of each person's synchronic and diachronic interests. I have identified the principle that we should protect the synchronic interests of older persons with a democratic social egalitarianism that seeks to equalise the social relations between citizens rather than concentrating upon an equality of distribution. It is in this way that I also connect the debate about the morality (or otherwise) of age discrimination with debates within contemporary liberal egalitarian philosophy.


To make reliable, safe, and effective use of data outside the context of its collection, we require an adequate understanding of its meaning. In data-intensive science, as in many other applications of computing, this necessitates the association of each item of data with complex, detailed metadata. The most important, most useful piece of metadata is often a description of the form used in data acquisition. This paper discusses, with examples, the requirements for standard metamodels or languages for forms, sufficient for the automatic association of form data with a computable description of its semantics, and also for the automatic generation of form structures and completion workflows. It explains how form models in specific domains can be used to facilitate data sharing, and to improve data quality, and semantic interoperability.


A wide variety of protein and peptidomimetic design tasks require matching functional three-dimensional motifs to potential oligomeric scaffolds. Enzyme design, for example, aims to graft active-site patterns typically consisting of 3 to 15 residues onto new protein surfaces. Identifying suitable proteins capable of scaffolding such active-site engraftment requires costly searches to identify protein folds that can provide the correct positioning of side chains to host the desired active site. Other examples of biodesign tasks that require simpler fast exact geometric searches of potential side chain positioning include mimicking binding hotspots, design of metal binding clusters and the design of modular hydrogen binding networks for specificity. In these applications the speed and scaling of geometric search limits downstream design to small patterns. Here we present an adaptive algorithm to searching for side chain take-off angles compatible with an arbitrarily specified functional pattern that enjoys substantive performance improvements over previous methods. We demonstrate this method in both genetically encoded (protein) and synthetic (peptidomimetic) design scenarios. Examples of using this method with the Rosetta framework for protein design are provided but our implementation is compatible with multiple protein design frameworks and is freely available as a set of python scripts (https://github.com/JiangTian/adaptive-geometric-search-for-protein-design).


We study the limitations and their origins in the nonlinear effects mitigation in fiber-optic communication systems. The carrier frequencies uncertainty and their stochastic variations are identified as the major impeding factor for successful inter-channel nonlinear impairments management. Furthermore, the results clearly point out to the significant benefits of employing fully frequency referenced carriers in transmission, with frequency combs representing an immediately available solution. Finally, frequency referenced transmitters and/or receivers are shown as critical for availing longer reach at high spectral efficiencies in transmission.


Aims. The fueling and feedback of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are important for understanding the co-evolution between black holes and host galaxies. Mergers are thought to have the capability to bring gas inward and ignite nuclear activity, especially for more powerful AGNs. However, there is still significant ongoing debate on whether mergers can trigger AGNs and, if they do, whether mergers are a significant triggering mechanism.
Methods. We selected a low-redshift (0.005 <  z <  0.1) sample from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and a high-redshift (0 <  z <  0.6) sample from the Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey. We took advantage of the convolutional neural network technique to identify mergers. We used mid-infrared (MIR) color cut and optical emission line diagnostics to classify AGNs. We also included low excitation radio galaxies (LERGs) to investigate the connection between mergers and low accretion rate AGNs.
Results. We find that AGNs are more likely to be found in mergers than non-mergers, with an AGN excess up to 1.81 ± 0.16, suggesting that mergers can trigger AGNs. We also find that the fraction of mergers in AGNs is higher than that in non-AGN controls, for both MIR and optically selected AGNs, as well as LERGs, with values between 16.40 ± 0.5% and 39.23 ± 2.10%, implying a non-negligible to potentially significant role of mergers in triggering AGNs. This merger fraction in AGNs increases as stellar mass increases, which supports the idea that mergers are more important for triggering AGNs in more massive galaxies. In terms of merger fraction as a function of AGN power we find a positive trend for MIR selected AGNs and a complex trend for optically selected AGNs, which we interpret under an evolutionary scenario proposed by previous studies. In addition, obscured MIR selected AGNs are more likely to be hosted in mergers than unobscured MIR selected AGNs.


Recent research into academic self-concept has included investigations into domain-specific self-concepts. Examples include Lau et al (1999) within English, Marsh et al. (1997) within physical education and Vispoel (2003) within Music. They have all indicated these subjects to be multidimensional in nature, consisting of distinct sub-domains. This is an important finding and helps teachers and researchers to understand how pupils feel about themselves as learners. In contrast there have been few, if any, studies about this within the subject area of science. Up to now self-concept in science has been conceived as a uni-dimensional construct.Using structural equation modeling this study explored the multidimensional and hierarchical nature of self-concept in science. The outcomes show that science self-concept of secondary aged pupils is heterogeneous in nature and presents a consistent, stable and valid set of measures for the ways in which school pupils feel about themselves when learning science. It argues that learners have a multidimensional self-concept ?profile? which represents their psychological response to being a learner of science. An instrument has been developed and validated for the measurement of science self-concept for secondary aged pupils (11 ? 16 years). Carrying out model fit analysis using LISREL 8, the instrument has been shown to be extremely robust in measures of fit and construct validity, and has also shown itself to be invariant across sex and age subgroups


Abstract This paper provides a brief introduction to women's dress practices in the Sultanate of Oman. We explore women's clothing practices as dialogues with religious and regional communities. Our introduction provides concrete examples of how dress practices from neighbouring communities, such as coastal Iran, neighbouring India, and the East African island of Zanzibar, have been appropriated and reformulated to express regional Omani identities. We discuss veiling practices in order to show how these practices reflect regional and generational identities which Western observers often misunderstand as signifying oppression, but are in fact rich in many-layered meaning for local women (e.g. marital status and tribal affiliation). The data for this study were obtained through semi-structured interviews with local women, which were conducted by a research team that included student-translators who belonged to the villages and Bedouin camps visited for the purpose of this study in 2010 and 2011.


After almost ten years, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes ended before it began. In a 5-4 decision (split among ideological lines), the U.S. Supreme Court decertified the Dukes class from the starting gate, ending the country's largest employment discrimination class-action lawsuit against the country's largest corporation. In the months following the Court's controversial decision, lawyers and academics have been scrambling to assess the impact of the case on procedural class action and substantive discrimination law. This Note posits that Dukes misapplied procedural class action law and seemingly overturned well-settled employment discrimination precedent. As a result, the Court's imprudent decision will likely limit the ability for Title VII plaintiffs to ever bring forth their collective claims of workplace discrimination. By erecting barriers to Title VII class litigation, the Supreme Court drastically curtailed the rights of everyday workers and inhibited the effectiveness of the legal system by allowing procedural rules to disrupt the truth-seeking function of litigation. Over the past few years, the American public has grown frustrated at the notion that large companies are too big to fail. With its decision in Dukes, the Supreme Court effectively decided that some corporations are also too big to be held accountable under Title VII.


As a visual artist undertaking doctoral studies in education, the author required a research method that integrated her studio practice into her research process, giving equal weight to the visual and the linguistic. Her process of finding such a method is outlined in this article, which touches on arts-based research and practice-led research, and her ultimate approach of choice, collage. Collage, a versatile art form that accommodates multiple texts and visuals in a single work, has been proposed as a model for a "borderlands epistemology": one that values multiple distinctive understandings and that deliberately incorporates nondominant modes of knowing, such as visual arts. As such, collage is particularly suited to a feminist, postmodern, postcolonial inquiry. This article offers a preliminary theorizing of collage as a method and is illustrated with images from the author's research/visual practice.


Eukaryotic cells carry two genomes, nuclear (nDNA) and mitochondrial (mtDNA), which are ostensibly decoupled in their replication, segregation and inheritance. It is increasingly appreciated that heteroplasmy, the occurrence of multiple mtDNA haplotypes in a cell, plays an important biological role, but its features are not well understood. Until now, accurately determining the diversity of mtDNA has been difficult due to the relatively small amount of mtDNA in each cell (< 1% of the total DNA), the intercellular variability of mtDNA content and copies of mtDNA pseudogenes in nDNA. To understand the nature of heteroplasmy, we developed Mseek, a novel technique that purifies and sequences mtDNA. Mseek yields high purity (> 98%) mtDNA and its ability to detect rare variants is limited only by sequencing depth, providing unprecedented sensitivity and specificity. Using Mseek, we confirmed the ubiquity of heteroplasmy by analyzing mtDNA from a diverse set of cell lines and human samples. Applying Mseek to colonies derived from single cells, we find heteroplasmy is stably maintained in individual daughter cells over multiple cell divisions. Our simulations suggest the stability of heteroplasmy is facilitated by the exchange of mtDNA between cells. We also explicitly demonstrate this exchange by co-culturing cell lines with distinct mtDNA haplotypes. Our results shed new light on the maintenance of heteroplasmy and provide a novel platform to investigate various features of heteroplasmy in normal and diseased tissues.


Irregular development among regions is one of the fundamental realities of China, especially in social and economic progress. Moreover, there is no exception in the development of population and energy. In this paper, we explore the characteristics of the seven most prominent patterns of regional population–energy development distribution. Furthermore, analysis is made of problems associated with sustainable population–energy development. The concluding section identifies policy implications for sustainable regional population–energy development.


Generally in hospitals, intensive care units (ICUs) have high rates of false arrhythmia alarms independent of their brands and prices. These falsely issued alarms disrupt patients' rest, drain hospital resources, and desensitize the hospital staff to potential emergency situations, which is named as "false alarm fatigue". It has been estimated that 43% of life threatening electrocardiogram (ECG) alarms issued by bedside monitors are false, with some categories of alarm being as high as 90%. In our study, we consider the alarms triggered by four life threatening conditions. These alarms are usually triggered by ECG and pulsatile waveforms recorded by monitoring equipment, which have standard alarm triggering criteria such as instantaneous thresholds on the predictor values. Most of the ICU false alarms are caused by single channel artifacts. In this study, we aim to fuse ECG features with information from other independent signals and get more robust alarm algorithms for ICUs. Pulsatile waveforms, which are highly correlated signals, can be used to corroborate the alarm category and to suppress significant number of false ECG alarms in ICUs. Photoplethysmogram (PPG), arterial blood pressure (ABP) or both PPG and ABP can be used for this purpose. These waveformsare the least noisy pressure signal available in certain ICUs and rarely contain ECG-related artifacts. We implement four different algorithms that use information from ECG, PPG and ABP waveforms, and compare the results.


We study how autonomous robots can learn by themselves to improve their depth estimation capability. In particular, we investigate a self-supervised learning setup in which stereo vision depth estimates serve as targets for a convolutional neural network (CNN) that transforms a single still image to a dense depth map. After training, the stereo and mono estimates are fused with a novel fusion method that preserves high confidence stereo estimates, while leveraging the CNN estimates in the low-confidence regions. The main contribution of the article is that it is shown that the fused estimates lead to a higher performance than the stereo vision estimates alone. Experiments are performed on the KITTI dataset, and on board of a Parrot SLAMDunk, showing that even rather limited CNNs can help provide stereo vision equipped robots with more reliable depth maps for autonomous navigation.


Extracted from text ... T
Beating burnout:
the stress menace
The face of the work place is changing rapidly.
The greatest changes occur in the way
information is accessed. The rate at which
new information becomes available more
than doubles every two years.
Society is increasingly exposed to immense
technological advances causing
new levels of deconstructive stress which
take their toll on people's health. If we
want to survive, we need to actively manage
the stressful forces and circumstances
that govern our lives.
Alix Needham, in her book, The Stress
Management Kit, highlights three types of
stress to be consciously managed:
_ Physical ..


Cationic tensides are important oleochemicals that are used to prevent adulteration of pharmaceutical preparations and personal care products, as well as being the conditioning agents in domestic fabric softeners. The widespread use of these materials requires quantitative methods for characterising them in raw materials and fully formulated products, whilst "down-the-drain" release necessitates similar methods for trace environmental analysis. Unfortunately, current methods used to quantify
cationic tensides are generally non-specific, problematic, or are ill-suited to environmental analysis. There is currently no generic method that can be applied to the
quantitation of these materials in all necessary matrices.

The aim of this work was to develop new liquid chromatographic (LC) methods for the analysis of the cationic preservative and fabric conditioner actives, before
attempting to build the foundations of generic cationic tenside analysis. The development of a new normal phase LC method is reported for the quantitation of the
cationic actives present in domestic fabric conditioners. The method yielded high resolution and repeatability, and allowed the quantitation of the homologues endemic in
commercial samples. Subsequent hyphenation with mass spectrometry demonstrated the potential for the quantitation of these materials in environmental matrices.

-The optimisation and validation of a reverse phase LC method for the analysis of cationic tenside preservatives is reported. Excellent repeatability and resolution were
again attained, whilst the new method was also found to demonstrate the inherent sensitivity required for trace environmental analysis. Subsequent hyphenation
unfortunately showed that method sensitivity was compromised by ion-suppression, highlighting the need for compromise in the development of LC/MS methods.

For both methods, stationary and mobile phase parameters were varied to assess the influence on analyte resolution, and also to gauge the potential for developing a
generic liquid chromatographic method for the analysis of these materials. It was observed that many of the commonly held beliefs on the analysis of cationic tensides by
reverse phase LC were misconceived. As a result, new insights were made into cationic tenside analysis, which should facilitate the development of a generic LC method
applicable to the quantitation of cationic tensides and their hydrophilic biodegradation products in the future.


Reactions of [Co(N(SiMe3)2)2thf ] with 2.1 equiv. of MesSH (Mes = C6H2-2,4,6-(CH3)3) yield dark brown crystals of the one dimensional chain compound 1[Co(SMes)2]. In contrast reactions of [Co(N(SiMe3)2)2thf] with 2.1 equiv. of PhSH result in the formation of a dark brown almost X-ray amorphous powder of 'Co(SPh)2'. Addition of aliquots of CH3OH to the latter reaction resulted in the almost quantitative formation of crystalline ammonia thiolato complexes either [Co(SPh)2(NH3)2] or 1 1[Co(SPh)2NH3]. Single crystal XRD reveals that 1 1 [Co(SPh)2NH3] forms one-dimensional chains in the crystal via μ2-SPh bridges whereas [Co(SPh)2(NH3)2] consists at a first glance of isolated distorted tetrahedral units. Magnetic measurements suggest strong antiferromagnetic coupling for the two chain compounds 1[Co(SMes)2] (J = −38.6 cm ) and 1[Co(SPh)2NH3] (J = −27.1 cm ). Interestingly, also the temperature dependence of the susceptibility of tetrahedral [Co(SPh)2(NH3)2] shows an antiferromagnetic transition at around 6 K. UV-Vis-NIR spectra display d–d bands in the NIR region between 500 and 2250 nm. Thermal gravimetric analysis of [Co(SPh)2(NH3)2] and 1[Co(SPh)2NH3] reveals two well separated cleavage processes for NH3 and SPh2 upon heating accompanied by the stepwise formation of 'Co(SPh)2' and cobalt sulfide.


We propose two novel Branch-and-Bound (BB) methods to efficiently solve exact MAPMRF inference on problems with a large number of states (per variable) H. By organizing the data in a suitable structure, the time complexity of our best method for evaluating the bound at each branch is reduced from O(H) to O(H). This permits searching for the MAP solution in O(BH +Q) instead of O(BH) (without using the data structure), where B is the number of branches and Q is the one-time cost to build the data structure which is proportional to H. Our analysis on synthetic data shows that, given a limited time budget, our method solves problems that are characterized by a much larger number of states when compared to stateof-the-art exact inference algorithms (e.g., Marinescu and Dechter (2007); Sontag et al. (2008)) and other baseline BB methods. We further show that our method is well suited for computer vision and computational biology problems where the state space (per variable) is large. In particular, our approach is an order of magnitude faster on average than Sontag et al.'s Cluster Pursuit (CP) on human pose estimation problems. Moreover, given a time budget of up to 20 minutes, our method consistently solves more protein design problems than CP does. Finally, we successfully explore different branching strategies and ways to utilize domain knowledge of the problem to significantly reduce the empirical inference time.


Americans today face no shortage of threats to their financial well-being, such as job and retirement insecurity, health care costs, and spiraling college tuition. While one might expect that these concerns would motivate people to become more politically engaged on the issues, this often doesn't happen, and the resulting inaction carries consequences for political debates and public policy. Moving beyond previously studied barriers to political organization, American Insecurity sheds light on the public's inaction over economic insecurities by showing that the rhetoric surrounding these issues is actually self-undermining. By their nature, the very arguments intended to mobilize individuals—asking them to devote money or time to politics—remind citizens of their economic fears and personal constraints, leading to undermobilization and nonparticipation. Adam Seth Levine explains why the set of people who become politically active on financial insecurity issues is therefore quite narrow. When money is needed, only those who care about the issues but are not personally affected become involved. When time is needed, participation is limited to those not personally affected or those who are personally affected but outside of the labor force with time to spare. The latter explains why it is relatively easy to mobilize retirees on topics that reflect personal financial concerns, such as Social Security and Medicare. In general, however, when political representation requires a large group to make their case, economic insecurity threats are uniquely disadvantaged. Scrutinizing the foundations of political behavior, American Insecurity offers a new perspective on collective participation.


INTRODUCTION: Based on the premises that maternal health in developing countries is socially constructed and that valid insights into this phenomenon can be gained from local knowledge, we developed a participatory, community-based review of maternal mortality and severe morbidity in rural Indonesia. OBJECTIVES: The study aimed to demonstrate the utility of the 'community-perspective' as a valid source of information for health planning. The objectives were to engage with community groups to conduct critical assessments of quality of, and access to, care in obstetric emergencies, and to develop recommendations for local health planning. METHODS: Four independent village-based groups conducted a series of structured assessments of cases of maternal death and disability. Key care processes were identified through qualitative analysis of the discussion narratives. RESULTS: In the cases reviewed, the health insurance scheme, designed to protect poor families from the catastrophic costs of care, was widely used but often negatively affected access to good quality care. The schemes were seen to be inadequately socialised, inequitably distributed, complex, bureaucratic and led to multiple delays and discriminatory care in time-limited emergencies. The schemes were also reportedly used by families not officially classified as poor, but likely to find care unaffordable. Other problems included poor birth preparedness, the lack of midwives in villages, and shortages in emergency transport. A series of recommendations were generated for health insurance reform, more complete resourcing of village health workers, and continued investments in community health infrastructure. CONCLUSIONS: The reviewers conferred rich and vivid data that allowed for a detailed analysis of the complex relationships between individual providers and women as they interacted in the health system. The reviews suggested that the social and structural determination of maternal health a may be a useful point of departure for health planning and reform. Community-based participatory research can provide useful information for the social organisation of care.


Effective school administrators are keys to large-scale, sustainable education reform. Rapid changes in technology have led to new possible ways for managing and leading schools. Leadership within the context of these changes becomes a crucial agenda among school leaders all over the world. Technology Leadership is seen as the relationship between leadership and technology, whereupon the administrators must play a more proactive role in implementing technology, and more specifically strive to interface the human and information technology components. Many point to the problem of overemphasis on the technological aspect at the exclusion of the human resources function. The use of a Model of Technology Leadership, which is based on the standard set by National Educational Technology Standard for Administrators (NETS-A, 2002), is proposed. NETS-A, 2002, was initiated by International Society for Technology in Education. This paper discusses both the model and standards mentioned. It also explores the concept of Technology Leadership against the backdrop of current structure and processes in the education institution. It also reports on the findings of a survey on Administrators as Technology Leaders among 63 administrators of Secondary Schools in Negeri Sembilan. The findings explored show the existence of Technology Leadership elements in school; but school administrators scored average on the Leadership and Vision and Teaching and Learning variables and below average on the Productivity and Professional Practice variable. The t-test scores revealed that neither school location nor administrators' gender significantly influence the level of technology leadership.Keywords: Technology Leadership; Model of Technology Leadership; Administrators as Technology Leaders