Abstract The LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) struggle against the Sri Lankan Government has taken different forms at different times since early 1970s. However, developments since 2006 have had an adverse impact on the LTTE and its efforts to seek a solution through violent means. The LTTE's numerical strength has fallen and it is also not doing too well in drafting recruits and procuring arms. The territory under its control is shrinking visibly: from the loss of the East and now with the intrusion of the Sri Lankan troops deep inside Killinochchi. The global war on terrorism (GWOT) and the ascendancy of the Sri Lankan Security Forces (SLSF) have contributed for the present quagmire. Despite the support from Tamils in Sri Lanka and diaspora, the LTTE's depleting profile raises certain fundamental questions about the efficacy and its existence. While the LTTE is weakened, it is doubtful that it will be completely dislodged from the Sri Lankan scene. There is even less reason to believe that the LTTE would concur with the government conceding its armed struggle for Eelam to save its strength. The argument in this article is mainly about the importance of taking into account the LTTE's profile in the post-2006 scenario.


The creators of the LSI-R contend that this risk assessment is a `gender neutral' tool while feminist scholars remain skeptical as to the LSI-R's empirical ability to predict female recidivism as the tool was developed on male-centered theories. Research findings on the gender effect on the predictive validity of LSI-R are mixed. Very little research is available as to the effect of offense type on the tool's predictive utility. Using the disaggregated data by gender and offense types, this research aimed to determine the moderating effects of gender and offense type on the predictive utility of the Level of Service Inventory- Revised (LSI-R). This dissertation divided offense type into four categories: sex offense, person offense, property offense and drug offense. This dissertation used a sample of offenders (n=2,917) from the Kansas Department of Corrections (KDOC) who released in fiscal year 2008 (July 1, 2007- June 30, 2008). Data was collected for these offenders for a 36 month follow-up period to assess for any instances of recidivism. After controlling for offense type, logistic regression analyses showed that the LSI-R is the valid risk assessment for both male and female offenders. With the major research question of moderating effect of gender, this study found that the different subscales predict recidivism between genders. Regardless of offense type, the LSI-R total score proved to be a significant predictor of recidivism. Like the moderating effect of gender, the moderating effect of offense type in the predictive validity of LRI-R was supported. Though this dissertation found support for the predictive utility of the LSI-R across gender and offense type, no statistically significant subscale predicting recidivism for female property offenders was found. Furthermore, because statistically significant subscale predictors of recidivism varied across offense type and gender, it is recommended that future research further examines the predictive validities of subscales. Given the finding of this study that only few subscales reached the statistical significance to predict recidivism across offense type and gender, other factors should be considered to assess need and risk. Replication of this study using different samples is recommended.


Abstract Trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy (TF-CBT) is beneficial for individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); however, a subset of clients struggle to engage with traditional methods, due to high levels of avoidance and dissociation. This paper aims to describe an adapted approach to imaginal reliving and prolonged exposure, to facilitate subsequent cognitive updating. The paper demonstrates the technique with veterans, who are a client group that may struggle with some aspects of traditionally implemented TF-CBT. Two case studies are described, both with PTSD symptoms stemming from traumatic military experiences. An adapted exposure technique is utilized to address the barriers of high dissociation, poor access to trauma-related cognitions and fixed intrusive imagery. The approach involved three stages: (1) reliving the trauma outdoors, (2) manipulating the perspectives of the imagery, and (3) restructuring the narrative with new perspectives. Both clients showed decreased dissociation and improved toleration of their traumatic imagery. Improvement of PTSD symptoms and quality-of-life functioning was observed for both clients on objective measures. Adapting TF-CBT to have a stronger emphasis on grounding and allocentric processing may be helpful for a subset of patients with PTSD that present with high levels of dissociation and avoidance. Further research and investigation into alternative populations is needed.


Due to channel mismatches in time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters (TIADCs), estimation and compensation methods are required to restore the resolution of the individual converters. Whereas several methods exist for linear mismatches, nonlinearity mismatches have not been widely investigated. This brief presents an adaptive background estimation method for nonlinearity mismatches in two-channel TIADCs. It utilizes a normalized least-mean-square algorithm and assumes slight oversampling as well as a polynomial nonlinearity model that is appropriate when smooth errors dominate. Furthermore, two implementation strategies are proposed to enhance its ability for different applications. The estimation performance of the proposed method is evaluated through behavioral-level simulations.


Introduction: Collagen cross-linking is a useful adjunct in preventing corneal ectasia after laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis (LASIK). This study aimed to evaluate whether prophylactic cross-linking in IntraLase LASIK affects optimum visual outcome and recovery time in the immediate post-surgery period and is associated with any side effects.
Methods: This was a retrospective case study on the right eyes of 100 Chinese subjects aged 18 to 40 years who underwent IntraLase LASIK. Fifty subjects who underwentcross-linking after completing LASIK (Group A) were compared with 50 subjects who did not undergo LASIK (Group B). Cases were evaluated for pre- and post-operative spherical equivalent, uncorrected distance visual acuity (UDVA) and corrected distance visual acuity (CDVA), recovery time and presence of side effects.
Results: At 1 week post-LASIK, mean (SD) UDVA of Group A subjects was poorer than Group B, at 1.05 (0.19) vs 1.17 (0.19) (p = 0.036); however, there was no significant difference in CDVA (p = 0.095). By 1 month post-LASIK, differences in both UDVA and CDVA were insignificant (p = 0.055, 0.106, respectively). Mean recovery time was 2.72 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.64-4.7) days longer in Group A (p = 0.010), although by 1 month post-LASIK, both groups were able to achieve CDVA equal to or better than that achieved pre-LASIK. Incidence of mild inflammation and dry eyes post-LASIK was similar in both groups (p = 1.00, 0.749, respectively); no other complications were observed.
Conclusion: No differences in visual outcomes at and occurrence of side effects at 1 month post-LASIK were observed between subjects who underwent cross-linking prior to refractive surgery and those who did not. However, the group that underwent cross-linking had a slightly longer mean recovery time. Our study supports prophylactic cross-linking as a safe procedure that does not affect immediate visual outcomes among the Chinese population when used in adjunct with LASIK surgery.


Mammals show a very low level of variation in vertebral count, particularly in the neck. Phenotypes exhibited at various stages during the development of the axial skeleton may play a key role in testing mechanisms recently proposed to explain this conservatism. Here, we provide osteogenetic data that identify developmental criteria with which to recognize cervical vs. noncervical vertebrae in mammals. Except for sloths, all mammals show the late ossification of the caudal-most centra in the neck after other centra and neural arches. In sloths with 8–10 ribless neck vertebrae, the caudal-most neck centra ossify early, matching the pattern observed in cranial thoracic vertebrae of other mammals. Accordingly, we interpret the ribless neck vertebrae of three-toed sloths caudal to V7 as thoracic based on our developmental criterion. Applied to the unusual vertebral phenotype of long-necked sloths, these data support the interpretation that elements of the axial skeleton with origins from distinct mesodermal tissues have repatterned over the course of evolution.


The interleukin 9 (IL-9) pathway has recently been associated with the asthmatic phenotype including an eosinophilic tissue inflammation. The mechanism by which IL-9 affects eosinophils (eos) is not known. To investigate whether this cytokine has a direct activity on the development of eos and eosinophilic inflammation, a model of thioglycolate-induced peritoneal inflammation was used in IL-9 transgenic (TG5) and background strain (FVB) mice. In this model, a transient eosinophilic infiltration in the peritoneal cavity was observed in FVB mice 12 to 24 hours after thioglycolate injection that coincided with peak IL-5 and IL-9 release. In contrast, TG5 mice developed a massive eosinophilia that persisted at high levels (81% of total cells) even 72 hours after thioglycolate injection. Release of eosinophilic major basic protein (MBP), IL-4, and IL-5 to the peritoneal cavity of these mice was significantly increased when compared with the control FVB strain. To study the mechanism by which IL-9 exerts its effect on eos, bone marrow or peritoneal cells were cultured in the presence of IL-5, IL-9, or their combination in vitro. IL-5 alone was able to generate significant numbers of eos in TG5 but not FVB mice, whereas a combination of IL-5 and IL-9 induced marked eosinophilia in both strains indicating a synergism between these 2 cytokines. These data suggest that IL-9 may promote and sustain eosinophilic inflammation via IL-5-driven eos maturation of precursors.


This article develops a theory for balancing free speech against other express and implied constitutional values. It posits that free speech considerations should be connected to the underlying purpose of constitutional governance. When deciding difficult cases, involving competing rights, judges should examine 1) whether unencumbered expression is likely to cause constitutional, statutory, or common law harms; 2) whether the restricted expression has been historically or traditionally protected; 3) whether a government policy designed to benefit the common good weighs in favor of the regulation; 4) the fit between the disputed speech regulation and the public end, and 5) whether some less restrictive alternative exists for achieving it.Recent Roberts Court's free speech jurisprudence has gone in the opposite direction, becoming increasingly formalistic. Cases dealing with violent video games, cruelty to animals, aggregation of campaign financing, and lies about military achievements have applied a categorical approach that is inadequately contextual. The recently developed categorical test undervalues important normative considerations and a variety of free speech doctrines.On the normative side, free speech is not a separate value but one that fits within a sophisticated structure of constitutional law. After developing an ethical theory about the value of speech to a representative democracy and discussing it in the context of several balancing doctrines, this Article applies the framework to campaign financing legislation and copyright doctrine.


This book offers a new account of particle verbs in German and Dutch by looking at the conditions under which a non-morphological structure may exhibit "word-like" properties. It shows that although particles are represented as phrasal complements of their verbs, they lack the functional structure which is usually associated with phrases. The author uses the concept of a "local domain", which can be established by terminal nodes both in syntax and in morphology, to demonstrate why the impoverished syntactic structure of particle verbs shares important features of complex words derived in morphology. The analysis is substantiated through a detailed study of the syntactic, semantic, and morphological properties of particle verbs. Special attention is given to the relevance of local domains for the association of lexical information about sound and meaning with terminal nodes in morphological and syntactic structures.


This article argues the realist critique of experimental design to evaluate interventions in complex social systems is valid but incomplete. It argues for experimental approaches to testing realist theory and for estimating effect sizes. The paper aims to provide a means for scientific understanding of the relative value of interventions in different contexts, for whom and to what effect. The paper is grounded in a realist philosophy of science and a realist approach to evaluation. It argues for the use of experimental design to test and estimate the magnitude of an outcome in a hypothesised realist Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) configuration. The approach requires that program theory (rather than the program) is the unit of analysis. It also requires that context – crucial for a mechanism firing – is brought into the effect size equation, while at the same time attempts are made to control for the effects of other mechanisms. The focus of this paper is on the general approach rather than a particular method. The approach was applied in an evaluation of a youth mentoring program. The method used was a matched-pair, pre and post-test, control group quasi-experimental design. The results of our application of the approach were limited but provided insight about the extent to which a particular mentoring mechanism, when properly targeted, could generate outcomes for certain students. This approach to evaluation is consistent with underlying principles of scientific realism and theory testing and provides a means for generating evidence about the value of interventions in complex social systems, for whom and to what extent.


"The return of a classic paddling guide." More than a how-to camping and paddling guide, Song of the Paddle is a philosophical guide to outdoor living. Written by the acclaimed paddler and outdoorsman, Bill Mason, the book leads readers on a journey of exploration and discovery. Mason writes from an intensely subjective viewpoint and the advice is practical and sound. He emphasizes the difference in perception between camping (rough) and outdoor living (comfort). Each page is packed with hard-won tips and tricks for enjoying the great outdoors. No detail is ignored -- from keeping campfire smoke out of your eyes to ensuring children are safely occupied around the campsite. Chapters include: Traveling solo, in groups and with family Campsites, tents and camping gear Camp fires, fireplaces and stoves Cooking in the wild Outdoor clothing options Packing equipment and food Survival tips and first aid Canoes for wilderness tripping Paddling and portaging skills Mason's personal accounts and details of memorable expeditions are certain to kindle the reader's sense of adventure. Abundantly illustrated by photographs and sketches, novice campers and seasoned paddlers alike will get more out of their outdoor experience thanks to Song of the Paddle.


The $n$-th Heilbronn number, $H_n$, is the largest value such that $n$ points can be placed in the unit square in such a way that all possible triangles defined by any three of the points have area at least $H_n$. In this note we establish new bounds for the first Heilbronn numbers. These new values have been found by using a simple implementation of simulated annealing to obtain a first approximation and then optimizing the results by finding the nearest exact local maximum.


In this Article, Eleanor Brown seeks to shift the framework through which we view Afrocentric academies. In the spirit of Justice Clarence Thomas's concurrence in Missouri v. Jenkins, Brown proposes that Afrocentrism represents an innovative educational response to the crisis in urban black communities. Applying social psychological literature, she argues that poor urban environments are ill equipped to provide the intersubjective reinforcement that is essential to healthy identity formation. A significant proportion of black youth have developed an alternative means of validating themselves, adopting a core of "oppositional" or "gangsta" norms that they associate with being authentically "black." A primary feature of these norms is the rejection of mainstream opportunity-enhancing behaviors, such as educational achievement and law abidance. Drawing on the philosophical insight that black youth who privilege a detrimental picture of themselves are essentially being misrecognized, Brown suggests that Afrocentrism may be viewed as an attempt to recognize properly black youth. She outlines an Afrocentric curriculum that articulates a vision of black culture as constituted by a history of political struggle and promises to meet the intersubjective needs of black youth. Addressing several liberal criticisms, including the concerns that Afrocentrism undermines healthy participation in the body politic and constrains individual autonomy, Brown concludes by offering a compromise: Liberal educational goals should predominate during primary education and an Afrocentric curriculum should guide secondary education.


To perform model selection in the context of multivariable regression, automated variable selection procedures such as backward elimination are commonly employed. However, these procedures are known to be highly unstable. Their stability can be investigated using bootstrap-based procedures: the idea is to perform model selection on a high number of bootstrap samples successively and to examine the obtained models, for instance in terms of the inclusion of specific predictor variables. However, from the literature such bootstrap-based procedures are known to yield misleading results in some cases. In this paper we aim to thoroughly investigate a particular important facet of these problems. More precisely, we assess the behaviour of regression models--with automated variable selection procedure based on the likelihood ratio test--fitted on bootstrap samples drawn with replacement and on subsamples drawn without replacement with respect to the number and type of included predictor variables. Our study includes both extensive simulations and a real data example from the NHANES study. The results indicate that models derived from bootstrap samples include more predictor variables than models fitted on original samples and that categorical predictor variables with many categories are preferentially selected over categorical predictor variables with fewer categories and over metric predictor variables. We conclude that using bootstrap samples to select variables for multivariable regression models may lead to overly complex models with a preferential selection of categorical predictor variables with many categories. We suggest the use of subsamples instead of bootstrap samples to bypass these drawbacks.


The 2011 M w 6.6 Fukushima earthquake occurred in Iwaki City, ∼250  km southwest of the epicenter of the 2011 M w 9.0 Tohoku (Japan) earthquake, and produced two subparallel ∼15–23‐km‐long surface rupture zones with distinct displacements along two pre‐existing normal faults: the Shionohira and Yunodake faults, which strike north‐northwest–south‐southeast and northwest–southeast (both dipping southwest), respectively. Field investigations and structural analysis of the coseismic shear zones developed within the Shionohira and Yunodake fault zones, reveal that (1) the coseismic shear zones consist of a fault core that includes a narrow fault gouge zone of <10  cm in width (generally 1–5 cm), a fault breccia zone of <50  cm in width, and a damage zone of 5–50 m in width that is composed of cataclastic rocks, fractures, and subsidiary faults; (2) the foliations characterized by S‐C fabrics developed in the shear zones indicate a dominantly normal fault‐slip sense, consistent with that observed along the coseismic surface ruptures; and (3) veinlet cataclastic rocks composed of unconsolidated fault gouges and fine‐grained materials occur as simple discrete veinlets and multiple, cross‐cutting, interconnected networks of veinlets. These newly documented structural characteristics for two coseismic fault/shear zones and associated cataclastic rocks indicate that the locations of coseismic slip zones associated with the 2011 Fukushima earthquake were controlled by pre‐existing fault/shear zones central to the Shionohira and Yunodake faults, which have repeatedly moved as seismogenic normal faults since the timing of formation of associated cataclastic rocks. Our results demonstrate that the structural analyses of coseismic shear/fault zones provide a powerful tool to study the nature and active faulting history of seismological faults.


The purpose of this study was to make an intercomparison and assessment of cross sections for electrons in water used in electron track structure codes. This study is intended to shed light on the extent to which the differences between the input data and physical and chemical assumptions influence the outcome in biophysical modeling of radiation effects. Ionization cross sections and spectra of secondary electrons were calculated by various theories. The analyses were carried out for water vapor cross sections, as these are more abundant and readily available. All suitable published experimental total ionization cross sections were fitted by an appropriate function and used for generation of electron tracks. Three sets of compiled data were used for comparison of total excitation cross sections and mean excitation energy. The tracks generated by a Monte Carlo track code, using various combinations of cross sections, were compared in terms of radial distributions of interactions and point kernels. The spectrum of secondary electrons emitted by the ionization process was found to be the factor that has the most influence on these quantities. A different set of cross sections for excitation and elastic scattering did not affect the electron track structure as much as did ionization cross sections. It is concluded that all codes, using different cross sections and in different phase, currently used for biophysical modeling exhibit close similarities for energy deposition in larger size targets while appreciable differences are observed in B-DNA-size targets. We recommend fitted functions to all available suitable experimental data for the total ionization and elastic cross sections. We conclude that most codes produce tracks in reasonable agreement with the macroscopic quantities such as total stopping power and total yield of strand breaks. However, we predict differences in frequencies of clustering in tracks from the different models.


Four Canberra-based projects were examined to explore the significance of interpersonal skills in technical occupations. The importance of interpersonal skills and demands for teamwork, cooperation and collaboration during projects was confirmed. The implications of skill terminology, career practitioner advice, occupational information, and gendered career choices are explored. The research points to the need to shift thinking about skill distinctions to give greater recognition to interpersonal skills in technical occupations.


The use of transgenic plants in agriculture provides many economic benefits, but it also raises concerns over the potential impact of transgenic plants on the environment. We here examined the impact of transgenic high-methionine soybean ZD91 on the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal community structure in rhizosphere soil. Our investigations based on clone libraries were conducted in field trials at four growth stages of the crops each year from 2012 to 2013. A total of 155 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) of AM fungi were identified based on the sequences of small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA) genes. There were no significant differences found in AM fungal diversity in rhizosphere soil during the same growth stage between transgenic soybean ZD91 and its non-transgenic parental soybean ZD. In addition, plant growth stage and year had the strongest effect on the AM fungal community structure while the genetically modified (GM) trait studied was the least explanatory factor. In conclusion, we found no indication that transgenic soybean ZD91 cultivation poses a risk for AM fungal communities in agricultural soils.


A time-domain standing-wave model is proposed and developed to analyze the gain-coupled DFB laser. In this model, the optical field is decomposed into a set of eigenmodes, which are longitudinal cavity modes obtained when the laser is biased near threshold, i.e., threshold "hot-"cavity modes. As such, the spatial and temporal dependence of the optical field is separated with optical modes describing the spatial dependence and their amplitudes governing the temporal evolution of the field. Important effects such as the variation of the coupling coefficient with the injection level and the spatial hole burning can all be taken into account.


[1] We demonstrate how Multiangle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) space-based aerosol products provide complementary information, characterizing (1) transported desert dust plume extent over water, (2) aerosol optical thickness (AOT) evolution, and (3) particle size sensitivity and fraction spherical evolution for the thicker parts of these plumes. MODIS provides more extensive coverage, whereas MISR's multiangle retrievals include dust properties and fill in areas where glint precludes MODIS optical depth retrievals, increasing by up to 50% dust plume surface area coverage compared to MODIS-only observations. These results can be used to improve dust aerosol representations in climate, forecast, and transport models. Extensive comparison of MISR and MODIS AOT retrievals with Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) observations in dusty regions show accuracies of about 20%; MISR Angstrom exponent is predominantly less than 1, in reasonably good agreement with AERONET. For four selected North African dust transport events, combined MISR and MODIS observations map systematic changes in retrieved plume surface area, on the basis of AOT contours; these reflect differences in aerosol dispersion and removal rates that must be reproduced by models. Within MISR retrieval uncertainties, Angstrom exponent and AOT fraction spherical are lower in the optically thicker parts of the plume by up to 30% and increase as the plume is transported across the ocean, as would be expected; retrieved single-scattering albedo values are ∼0.98 for all stages of plume evolution. For the cases studied, AERONET shows similar property patterns at points on either side of the Atlantic and indicates ∼15% decrease in aerosol coarse mode effective radius during transoceanic transport.


In a seminal paper of almost 20 years ago, R.J. DiPerna and P.-L. Lions initiated the theory of renormalized solutions to study the well-posedness of Ordinary Differential Equations and Transport Equations with discontinuous coefficients. In a recent work L. Ambrosio solved the long-standing open problem of extending this theory to BV coefficients, the most common functional-analytic closure of classical functions with jump discontinuities.

Besides its intrinsic interest, Ambrosio's Theorem has been used to solve relevant problems in Partial Differential Equations and it opened the way to a series of new questions.


This paper addresses the issue of automatic Bangla corpus creation, which will significantly help the processes of Lexicon development, Morphological Analysis, Automatic Parts of Speech Detection and Automatic grammar Extraction and machine translation. The plan is to collect all free Bangla documents on the World Wide Web and offline documents available and extract all the words in them to make a huge repository of text. This body of text or corpus will be used for several purposes of Bangla language processing after it is converted to Unicode text. The conversion process is also one of the associated and equally important research and development issue. Among several procedures our research focuses on a combination of font and language detection and Unicode conversion of retrieved Bangla text as a solution for automatic Bangla corpus creation and the methodology has been described in the paper.


The worldwide increase in type 2 diabetes (T2D) is becoming a major health concern, thus searching for novel preventive and therapeutic strategies has become urgent. In last decade, the paralogous transcription factors MondoA and carbohydrate response element-binding protein (ChREBP) have been revealed to be central mediators of glucose sensing in multiple metabolic organs. Under normal nutrient conditions, MondoA/ChREBP plays vital roles in maintaining glucose homeostasis. However, under chronic nutrient overload, the dysregulation of MondoA/ChREBP contributes to metabolic disorders, such as insulin resistance (IR) and T2D. In this review, we aim to provide an overview of recent advances in the understanding of MondoA/ChREBP and its roles in T2D development. Specifically, we will briefly summarize the functional similarities and differences between MondoA and ChREBP. Then, we will update the roles of MondoA/ChREBP in four T2D-associated metabolic organs (i.e., the skeletal muscle, liver, adipose tissue, and pancreas) in physiological and pathological conditions. Finally, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges of MondoA/ChREBP as drug targets for anti-diabetes. By doing so, we highlight the potential use of therapies targeting MondoA/ChREBP to counteract T2D and its complications.


Background: Hope is considered to be important for health, recovery, and rehabilitation outcomes in a range of healthcare populations. Little is known about hope in people following stroke, and even less is known about hope in people with aphasia following stroke as they are commonly excluded from research in this field. Aims: This study aimed to explore how hope was experienced by people with aphasia following stroke during the post-acute period of rehabilitation, and to identify factors influencing the experience of hope. Methods & Procedures: This study utilised an Interpretive Description methodology. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with five people with aphasia. Supported conversation techniques were used to facilitate full contribution of participants. Data were analysed using a number of approaches—coding, thematic analysis, narrative construction, diagramming, and memoing. Outcomes & Results: Hope was experienced in two ways. Simply 'having' hope was a broad but passive sense of hope which appeared to be the primary, constant form of hope. Actively hoping was an active, future-oriented form of hope that was experienced intermittently by participants. The experience of hope appeared dynamic and complex and seemingly influenced by three primary factors: uncertainty about the future; viewing hope as double-sided; and a sense of disruption. These were in turn influenced by a person's past experiences, present reality and perceived future. Conclusions: Hope is considered important by people with aphasia. It appears related to how people engage in rehabilitation and may be influenced by clinicians. As such, it is a concept that therapists should be aware of. Suggestions for how clinicians may consider and address hope are provided and discussed.


1 Clonal populations face a trade‐off between sexual recruitment and vegetative growth and, once established, may undergo continuous declines in genotypic diversity if their sexual recruits make poor competitors. The geological history of delta formation in the Lower Mississippi River Valley was used to age eight S. alterniflora marshes for use in a space‐for‐time substitution ranging over 1500 years, in order to determine the long‐term effects of clonal growth on genotypic diversity in natural populations. 2 We also predicted that highly heterozygous clones are competitively superior, leading to an increase in the overall level of genetic diversity as a marsh ages and/or to an increasingly positive relationship between clone size and individual heterozygosity, and that the clumping of ramets within clones will occur over increasingly large distances as populations age, while the clumping of genetically related clones will become less pronounced as intraclonal competition begins to obscure the initial effects of localized seedling recruitment. 3 Using molecular markers to differentiate clones, we documented a decline in clonal richness at the rate of approximately 1% 100 years−1 that was accompanied for the first 300–500 years by an increase in the distance over which clumping of ramets within genets occurred. Older populations, in the 500–1500‐year range, showed evidence of clone fragmentation. 4 The spatial clustering of kin was observed for only two marshes, and exhibited no clear relationship with marsh age. 5 Whereas the overall level of genetic diversity was consistent among marshes and showed no clear relationship with marsh age, the relationship between heterozygosity and individual clone size became increasingly pronounced within older marshes. 6 Our results suggest that under natural conditions S. alterniflora marshes will rarely reach ages sufficient for the loss of all clonal diversity, or for the effects of inbreeding and drift to pose a significant threat to population viability.


Integrated watershed management allows decision-makers to balance competing objectives, for example agricultural production and protection of water resources. Here, we developed a spatially-explicit approach to support such management in the Cañete watershed, Peru. We modeled the effect of grazing management on three services – livestock production, erosion control, and baseflow provision – and used an optimization routine to simulate landscapes providing the highest level of services. Over the entire watershed, there was a trade-off between livestock productivity and hydrologic services and we identified locations that minimized this trade-off for a given set of preferences. Given the knowledge gaps in ecohydrology and practical constraints not represented in the optimizer, we assessed the robustness of spatial recommendations, i.e. revealing areas most often selected by the optimizer. We conclude with a discussion of the practical decisions involved in using optimization frameworks to inform watershed management programs, and the research needs to better inform the design of such programs.


Environmentalists were outraged earlier this month after the Republican-led Congress used an obscure law to erase a new regulation aimed at reducing the environmental damage caused by coal mining. The votes to undo the so-called stream protection rule, released last month on President Barack Obama9s last day in office, were "a disgraceful opening salvo from this Congress, as they begin to try and do the bidding of big polluters," Michael Brune, executive director of the San Francisco, California–based Sierra Club, said in a statement. But the demise of the rule, which took regulators years to craft, drew a less impassioned reaction from a scientist on the front lines of the fight over coal mining. The rule had been watered down in its final form, they say, and would not have barred one of the most destructive mining practices in Appalachia: blasting away mountaintops to uncover coal seams and piling the debris in adjacent stream valleys. And because the rule9s demise won9t do much to ease the economic headwinds buffeting the United States9s coalfields, it is unlikely to unleash a mining boom. Still, environmentalists are bracing for more bad news. The stream rule was killed as part of an ongoing purge of science-based regulations approved late in the Obama administration. Using an obscure law, Republicans are expected to repeal about a half-dozen regulations. Potential targets include rules designed to reduce emissions of methane, a potent warming gas, improve the energy efficiency of vehicles and appliances, and new land use planning guidelines for public lands.


Utilization of wind turbines as economic and green production units, poses new challenges to the power system planners, mainly due to the stochastic nature of the wind, adding a new source of uncertainty to the power system. Different types of distribution and correlation between this random variable and the system load make conventional method inappropriate for modeling such a correlation. In this paper, the correlation between the wind speed and system load is modeled using Copula, a mathematical tool recently used in the field of the applied science. As the effect of the correlation coefficient is the main concern, the copula modeling technique allows simulating various scenarios with different correlations. The conducted simulations in this paper reveal that the wind speed correlation with the load has a significant effect on the system reliability indices, such as Expected Energy Not Served (EENS) and Loss Of Load Probability (LOLP). Moreover, in this paper the effect of the correlation coefficient on the Effective Load Carrying Capability (ELCC) of the wind turbines is analyzed, too. To perform the aforementioned simulations and analyses, the modified RBTS with an additional wind farm is used.


Soil fertility is among the most important criteria that affect crop yield and quality. Nitrogen stress due to the low soil fertility and the lack of nitrogen availability is a major factor limiting the crop productivity in arid and semiarid environments, where fertilization is not optimized in terms of timing and quantity. Managing nitrogen fertilization is one of the most important criteria in the precision agriculture, which helps to improve crop production, environment conditions, and farmer's economy. It is very important to apply N fertilizers with efficient methods allowing to the nutrient use efficiency and avoiding nitrogen losses and environment contamination. Nowadays, remote sensing methods using spectral and thermal approaches have been proposed as potential indicators to rapid identification of crop nitrogen status by providing information about vegetation canopy properties across large areas. The use of remote sensing methods to schedule nitrogen fertilization can help farmers to practice a more sustainable agriculture, minimizing risks of losing the harvest by providing an adequate rate of nitrogen when the crops' needs and at a specific location.


Over the past years, social media have impacted emergency management and disaster response in numerous ways. The access to live, continuous updates from the public brings new opportunities when it comes to detecing, coordinating and aiding in an emergency situation. The thesis present a research of social media during an emergency situation. The goal of the study is to discover how data from social media can be used in emergency management and determine if existing analysis services can be proven useful for the same occasion. To achieve the goal, a dataset from Twitter during the Paris attacks 2015 was collected. The dataset was analyzed using three different analysis tools; IBM Watson Discovery service, Microsoft Azure Text Analytics and an own developed Keyword Frequency Script. The results indicate that data from social media can be used for emergency management, in form of detecting and providing important information. Additional testing with larger datasets is needed to fully demonstrate the usefulness, in addition to interviews with emergency responders and social media users.


A support vector classifier (SVC) approach was employed in predicting the risk of progression of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS), a condition that causes visible trunk asymmetries. As the aetiology of AIS is unknown, its risk of progression can only be predicted from measured indicators. Previous studies suggest that individual indicators of AIS do not reliably predict its risk of progression. Complex indicators with better predictive values have been developed but are unsuitable for clinical use as obtaining their values is often onerous, involving much skill and repeated measurements taken over time. Based on the hypothesis that combining common indicators of AIS using an SVC approach would produce better prediction results more quickly, we conducted a study using three datasets comprising a total of 44 moderate AIS patients (30 observed, 14 treated with brace). Of the 44 patients, 13 progressed less than 5/spl deg/ and 31 progressed more than 5/spl deg/. One dataset comprised all the patients. A second dataset comprised all the observed patients and a third comprised all the brace-treated patients. Twenty-one radiographic and clinical indicators were obtained for each patient. The result of testing on the three datasets showed that the system achieved 100% accuracy in training and 65%-80% accuracy in testing. It outperformed a "statistically equivalent" logistic regression model and a stepwise linear regression model on the said datasets. It took less than 20 min per patient to measure the indicators, input their values into the system, and produce the needed results, making the system viable for use in a clinical environment.


"Das Ende des Mitleids: Steinkohlebergbau, Gefahren am Arbeitsplatz und Risikopolitik in Grosbritannien, ca. 1970-1990". This article employs the concept of risk as a lens through which to explore discursive constructions of the nature of coal mining and coal miners in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on a diverse primary source base, ranging from songs and poetry to parliamentary debates and government files, it contextualises and refines labour historian Dick Geary's observation about the "death of sympathy" for the miners in the coal strike of 1984/85. It argues that over the course of the period, coal miners turned from an object of risk into its subject; they were transformed, in political discourse, from heroes and victims into enemies of the state and society. Although the notion that coal miners were a "special case" on account of the hazardous working conditions in which they laboured, continued to resonate in popular culture throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the political bargaining power of the "blood on the coal" argument became progressively eroded after its successful application in the strikes of 1972 and 1974. By the time of the strike of 1984/85, Conservative opponents of the miners' cause had turned the argument on its head: The very hazardous working conditions were
taken as proof of an obstinate refusal of the industry to go with the times. The real danger, they argued, were not health hazards, but the miners themselves.


Partial-label learning (PLL) is a peculiar weakly-supervised learning task where the training samples are generally associated with a set of candidate labels instead of single ground truth. While a variety of label disambiguation methods have been proposed in this domain, they normally assume a class-balanced scenario that may not hold in many real-world applications. Empirically, we observe degenerated performance of the prior methods when facing the combinatorial challenge from the long-tailed distribution and partial-labeling. In this work, we first identify the major reasons that the prior work failed. We subsequently propose SoLar, a novel Optimal Transport-based framework that allows to refine the disambiguated labels towards matching the marginal class prior distribution. SoLar additionally incorporates a new and systematic mechanism for estimating the long-tailed class prior distribution under the PLL setup. Through extensive experiments, SoLar exhibits substantially superior results on standardized benchmarks compared to the previous state-of-the-art PLL methods. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/hbzju/SoLar .


This senior project will focus on creating a suitable testing procedure for the provided solar panel system. The testing parameters will be based on the expected 60W output power of the system. The complete procedure will provide a thorough analysis of the power flow and overall efficiency of the system. This senior project report will discuss the importance of this experiment in the Electrical Engineering curriculum, the system requirements and parameters tested in the design, and the provided results based on the test conditions. In addition, this report will include the complete testing procedure and recommendations for possible future additions to the testing procedure.


This paper provides a solution for the design optimization of two-dimensional impedance structures for a given elec-tromagnetic field distribution. These structures must provide electromagnetic compatibility between antennas located on a plane. The optimization problem is solved for a given attenuation of the complete field. Since the design optimiza-tion gives a complex law of impedance distribution with a large real part, we employ the method of pointwise synthesis for the optimization of the structure. We also consider the design optimization case where the structure has zero im-pedance on its leading and trailing edges. The method of moments is used to solve the integral equations and the nu-merical solution is presented. The calculated impedance distribution provides the required level of antenna decoupling. The designs are based on the concept of soft and hard surfaces in electromagnetics.


Alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT) is the most abundant proteinase inhibitor within the circulation and AAT deficiency is a genetic disorder characterised by serum levels of less than 11μmol/L. The Z mutation is the most common AAT allele associated with the disease and causes the most severe plasma deficiency, as the mutant protein polymerizes and accumulates within the endoplasmic reticulum of hepatocytes. The retained polymers are associated with cirrhosis and reduced serum levels of AAT contribute to the development of chronic pulmonary disease in AAT deficient individuals. This article will review the importance of AAT as a serine anti-protease, the clinical manifestations of AAT deficiency and specific treatment of the disease. Current therapies including AAT replacement and treatment with synthetic or alternative protease inhibitors are reviewed, along with possible future therapies including those focusing on targeting AAT polymer formation or based on gene therapy.


Synchronous Mirroring (SM) is a standard approach to building highly-available and fault-tolerant enterprise storage systems. SM ensures strong data consistency by maintaining multiple exact data replicas and synchronously propagating every update to all of them. Such strong consistency provides fault tolerance guarantees and a simple programming model coveted by enterprise system designers. For current storage devices, SM comes at modest performance overheads. This is because performing both local and remote updates simultaneously is only marginally slower than performing just local updates, due to the relatively slow performance of accesses to storage in today's systems. However, emerging persistent memory and ultra-low-latency network technologies necessitate a careful re-evaluation of the existing SM techniques, as these technologies present fundamentally different latency characteristics compared than their traditional counterparts. In addition to that, existing low-latency network technologies, such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), provide limited ordering guarantees and do not provide durability guarantees necessary for SM. To evaluate the performance implications of RDMA-based SM, we develop a rigorous testing framework that is based on emulated persistent memory. Our testing framework makes use of two different tools: (i) a configurable microbenchmark and (ii) a modified version of the WHISPER benchmark suite, which comprises a set of common cloud applications. Using this framework, we find that recently proposed RDMA primitives, such as remote commit, provide correctness guarantees, but do not take full advantage of the asynchronous nature of RDMA hardware. To this end, we propose new primitives enabling efficient and correct SM over RDMA, and use these primitives to develop two new techniques delivering high-performance SM of persistent memories.


Gas industries in the United Arab Emirates are vastly growing in order to mainly cope with the increasing demand for energy productions as well as for the wise utilization of gas associate with the crude oil. Environmental problems coupled with gas employment necessitates the development of a management techniques that can lead to better control of emissions from gas processing companies since some of these emissions are unavoidable for safety reasons. This study suggests a framework to be used to control emissions from Abu Dhabi Gas Liquefaction Company (ADGAS) in Das Island, which represents a typical major gas processing company in the region, through investigations of the impact of introducing a modification scheme, within the unit processes, on the quality of the surrounding atmosphere. A baseline study for current emissions and ground level concentrations of four pollutants (sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulates) was established.A computer model was then used to simulate the proposed modifications in order to reduce ground level concentrations that exceed regulatory standards. Two main approaches were considered to minimize ground level concentrations. First, reducing flow of gas into the flares by adding compressors to recover any excess gas from going into the flares during operations. Second, upgrading sulphur recovery units to a higher efficiency and some other reduction can also be accomplished through sweetening of fuel gas directed to utilities. The study concluded that the rates of emitted gas at ADGAS Liquefied Natural Gas Plant are exceeding the exposure limits under all emergency and current nonnal operation conditions. Gas turbines and boilers were proved to be the major sources for nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide, while both sulphur recovery units and gas turbines are contributing to the emission of sulphur dioxide. In the meantime, upgrading of the sulphur recovery units to 97.5% resulted in 30% decrease in sulphur dioxide concentration. A significant decrease in nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide as well as particulate concentrations resulted from adding a third boil-off-gas compressor.


The complex nature of industrial design, which combines functional and aesthetic elements, allows for different modes of protection, with cumulative, separate or partially overlapping regimes applicable according to different legal systems. The legal framework is rapidly changing, especially in Europe where the principle of cumulation of a special sui generis regime for protecting industrial design with copyright rules has been established. Over the last decade, the national courts of some Member States construed the "cumulative regime" with a peculiar meaning, while other courts enforced design rights in line with the interpretation given by the Court of Justice of the European Union. The copyright/design interface is presented here to a wider, non-specialist audience, taking as a starting point the notion of industrial design derived from design studies, on the borderline between art and science. Other challenges which will need to be confronted urgently over the coming years are also raised.


In this paper, we propose algorithms for online submodular optimization with tracking regret bounds. Online submodular optimization is a generic framework for sequential decision making used to select subsets. Existing algorithms for online submodular optimization have been shown to achieve small (static) regret, which means that the algorithm's performance is comparable to the performance of a fixed optimal action. Such algorithms, however, may perform poorly in an environment that changes over time. To overcome this problem, we apply a tracking-regret-analysis framework to online submodular optimization, one by which output is assessed through comparison with time-varying optimal subsets. We propose algorithms for submodular minimization, monotone submodular maximization under a size constraint, and unconstrained submodular maximization, and we show tracking regret bounds. In addition, we show that our tracking regret bound for submodular minimization is nearly tight.


Short-term memory generally refers to the temporary internal representation of a limited amount of information. Trygg Engen's early results on olfactory short-term memory were so dissimilar to those found in other sensory systems that they led him to question the very existence of this type of memory (Engen, 1987). His later work, however, suggests that he came to support the concept of olfactory short-term memory (Engen, Gilmore, & Mair, 1991), though he felt that it functioned quite differently from other memory systems (Herz & Engen, 1996). Although a variety of general models regarding the nature of short-term memory exist (e.g., Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Jonides et al., 2008), most recognize the role of attention as an integral part of the memory process. Likewise, general models of attention include short-term memory as a fundamental component (Knudsen, 2007). So, in other sensory systems, attention has been shown to both determine the contents of memory (Broadbent, 1958) and be guided by short-term memory in perceptual tasks (Downing, 2000). The question remains, however, as to whether olfactory short-term memory enjoys the same two-way relationship with attention. The most recent model of olfactory memory (Wilson & Stevens, 2006) does not include attention as an aspect of the memory process. An examination of the literature gives evidence that although olfactory short-term memory has some unique characteristics when compared to memory for other types of stimuli, attention is still a highly relevant component.


Reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS) are closely involved in the mechanism of skeletal muscle ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury. This study was designed to determine the effects of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) inhibitor 1400W on the reperfused cremaster muscle in extracellular superoxide dismutase knockout (EC‐SOD−/−) mice. The muscle was exposed to 4.5 h of ischemia, followed by 90 min of reperfusion. Mice received either 3 mg/kg of 1400W or the same amount of phosphate‐buffered saline (PBS, as a control) subcutaneously at 10 min before the start of reperfusion. 1400W treatment markedly improved the recovery speed of vessel diameter and blood flow in the reperfused cremaster muscle of EC‐SOD−/− mice compared to controls. Histological examination showed reduced edema in the interstitial space and muscle fiber, and reduced density of nitrotyrosine (a marker of total peroxinitrite (ONOO−) level) in 1400W‐treated muscles compared to controls. Our results suggest that iNOS and ONOO− products are involved in skeletal muscle I/R injury. Reduced I/R injury by using selective inhibition of iNOS perhaps works by limiting cytotoxic ONOO− generation, a reaction product of nitric oxide (NO) and superoxide anion (O2−). Thus, inhibition of iNOS appears to be a treatment strategy for reducing clinical I/R injury. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc. Microsurgery 25:606–613, 2005.


A novel about the life of German cabaret singer and film actress Ingrid Caven, who was once director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's star, and his wife, muse to Yves Saint Laurent, and a protege of Pierre Berge. Consisting of memories, mixing real and invented people and events, Ingrid Caven reveals the cold heart of the European counterculture of the 1970s, an era of celebrity glitz, cocaine-fueled excess, gay bathhouses, and young idealists-turned-terrorists. Ingrid Caven was an immediate bestseller in France, where it sold over 235,000 copies in its first year of publication. It has been translated into 18 languages. Jean-Jacques Schuhl is a Parisian dandy who lives with Ingrid Caven and who had not published a book for twenty years until this one.


The removal of Alphazurine FG (AF) dye from water by an electrocoagulation process has been studied. The effect of some operational parameters, such as anode material, current density, initial dye concentration, pH of solution, conductivity, and inter-electrode distance, on the removal efficiency was investigated. Iron and aluminum were used as anodes in the electrocoagulation cell. It was found that the efficiency of the iron anode was better than that of the aluminum anode for AF removal. The factors that affected the removal efficiency were the current density and the initial dye concentration. The removal efficiency increased from about 35% at 25 A m–2 to about 97% at 100 A m–2, during 4 min of electrocoagulation. The results exhibited pseudo-first-order kinetics for AF removal by electrocoagulation. In addition, a mathematical model was successfully established for predicting the removal efficiency. A comparison between the model results and experimental data gave a high correlation coefficient (R2 = 0.9925), which indicates that the model is able to predict the removal efficiency of AF.


Trinity University is a transformational liberal arts and sciences university with selected professional and preprofessional programs. In pursuit of this mission, Trinity is committed to the highest levels of academic and professional excellence in teaching, research, learning, service, leadership, and personal integrity. Trinity embraces innovation in all pursuits: rigorous and relevant courses, supportive mentoring relationships, and a wealth of learning opportunities wherever they occur. Trinity prepares its graduates to pursue lives of meaning and purpose.


The skuas (Aves: Charadriiformes, Stercorariidae) consist of two assemblages. On the basis of size, plumage, and distributional similarities, each of the two assemblages has long been considered monophyletic, and this traditional hypothesis has commonly been manifested in the recognition of two genera, Stercorarius and Catharacta; conversely, more recently collected molecular and ectoparasite evidence yields an alternative hypothesis, in which one member of Stercorarius, Stercorarius pomarinus, is more closely related to the forms in Catharacta than to the other Stercorarius sp. In this study we used skeletal morphology to test the competing hypotheses of skua phylogeny. Cladistic analysis of 141 osteological characters provided strong support for the molecular/ectoparasite hypothesis. However, those skeletal data did not support a sister-taxon relationship between S. pomarinus and Catharacta skua, as inferred from mitochondrial DNA sequence data; instead, they resolved pomarinus as the sister of a monophyletic Catharacta. Additionally, our skeletal evidence did not support a sister-group relationship between skuas and auks, as constraining skua/auk monophyly increased the tree length by nearly 5%.

© 2009 The Linnean Society of London, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2009, 157, 612–621.


The field of metagenomics has developed insight into many of the complex microbial communities responsible for maintaining life on this planet. Sequencing efforts often uncover novel genetic content; this is most evident for viral metagenomics, in which upwards of 90% of all sequences demonstrate no sequence similarity with present databases. For the small fraction which can be identified, the top BLAST hit is often posited as being representative of the phage taxon. However, as previous research has shown, the top BLAST hit is sometimes misinterpreted. Furthermore, the appearance of a particular gene homolog is frequently not representative of the presence of the particular taxon in question. To circumvent these limitations, we have developed a new method for the analysis of metaviromic datasets. BLAST hits are weighted, integrating the sequence identity and length of alignments as well as a phylogenetic signal. A genic rather than genomic approach is presented in which each gene is evaluated with respect to its information content. Through this quantifiable metric, predictions of viral community structure can be made with greater confidence. As a proof-of-concept, the approach presented here was implemented and applied to seven metaviromes. While providing a more robust means of evaluating metaviromic data, the tool is versatile and can easily be customized to investigations of any environment or biome.


This study is situated in a globalising world where cultural flows of people, practices and ideas are part of everyday life (Appadurai, 2001). Literature in the field of intercultural studies (e.g. Angrosino, 2007; Liamputtong, 2010, 2008) and the connected field of culture and identity (e.g. Crewe & Maruna, 2006; Hopper, 2007; Lawler, 2008) show that these cultural flows have some generalisable impacts on the way life is lived across the world, but they are also experienced in particular and diverse ways by individuals throughout the world. The study examines these flows through two inter-connected perspectives. From one perspective this thesis is a narrative-based inquiry into the effects of globalisation on middle-class Tamil peoples living in Chennai, India and Melbourne, Australia. From another perspective it is a critically reflexive account of one person's efforts over a period of five years to understand and forge intercultural relationships with an 'other' culture in this globalising world. From both perspectives, the study is about 'transformation' for middle-class Tamils in Chennai, and Melbourne, and for the author, as the researcher. My PhD journey began as an investigation into the mediating impact of the English language upon cultures and cultural practices of Tamils living in two geographically distanced parts of the world. However, soon into the study I came to agree with a range of researchers, such as Crystal (2003, 2006, 2008), Graddol (2010), Kirkpatrick (2010) and Pennycook (1994, 2003, 2007), who point to globalisation and globalising practices as the major driving force behind the newly attained status of English as a (or the) global language. And so my reading broadened and a more complex picture emerged. Thus I became sensitized to the influence of globalisation on cultures, cultural practices and the language of the Tamil peoples in Chennai (and on Tamil diasporic communities in Australia). I explored the concept of globalisation through a range of theorists (e.g. Chirico, 2014; Robertson, 1992; Robertson & White, 2007; Turner, 2010b) and, importantly, Eriksen's (2014) key concepts and dimensions of globalisation. I worked with Appadurai's (1996, 2001) 'global cultural flows' to explain the shifts and transitions in national and international economies, political interactions, and an increasing sense of compressed time and place. The study is underpinned by a humanistic philosophy in the interpretive paradigm. I work with social constructivist theories associated with the social construction of meaning (Creswell, 2013; Denzin & Lincoln, 2008). The work of Burr (2003) and Gergen and Gergen (2001, 2004, 2009) are particularly important in the way I position myself as an intercultural researcher (see also A. Gray, 2003). Conscious of the tendencies in 'insider/outsider' debates to descend into simple dualism, I have taken on the role of 'invited guest' in my investigation 'into' these cultures and cultural practices. This methodological stance enabled me to participate in the daily activities, interactions and events of some Tamils in the course of my learning about the explicit and tacit aspects of Tamil cultures. However, I am mindful of Said's (1978) warnings of the dangers of propagating colonialist approaches to power, exploitation, and control in research. My strategy, in this respect, has been to develop a distinctly reflexive narrative-based inquiry that draws rigorously on theorised notions of narrative, story and experience throughout this thesis (Etherington, 2004, 2007, 2009). I conclude that the linguistic and cultural practices of the middle-class Tamil participants in Chennai, India, as in Melbourne, Australia, are being significantly influenced by a range of globalising flows that can be seen to be in a state of profound "transition and transformation". Individual Tamils and Tamil communities in Chennai are beginning to challenge the deeply held view of traditional cultures as being static, prompting them to engage in new identity work as they are impacted upon, and to some extent, engage with these global flows. In Melbourne, the middle-class Tamil families are in a complex process of transitioning into Australian social and cultural life, while consciously attempting to maintain what they see as 'their' traditional cultural practices. Globalising flows are having particular but quite diverse impacts on the identities and cultural practices of middle-class Tamil families, such that the deeply felt notion of the 'joint' family is changing, as indeed it has been changing over the course of the last one hundred years. My experience as an intercultural researcher, even one who was to a significant extent an 'invited guest', is that the journey of intercultural research is a slow and complicated one that requires time, patience and resilience in order to build understandings of an other's cultures and cultural practices in a globalising world. I learned that I needed to be continually and reflexively open to difference and to transformation in 'the other' and 'the self', and to the ways in which my own background and cultures are unavoidably mediating the ways in which I learned about and understood the experiences and cultures of the middle class Tamil communities. This PhD study demonstrates what is possible in a globalising world when participating in intercultural encounters. It also reveals that these encounters can lead to further engagement through patience, attitudes of inclusiveness and reciprocity, understanding, and sensitivity.


Spatially-variable processes can be an important element of host–parasite interactions, but their longer term demographic and evolutionary effects depend on the magnitude of variation in space, the scale at which variation occurs and the degree to which such processes are temporally stable. Here, we use multiple years of data from a study of two closely related tit species (Paridae), infected with two congeneric species of avian malaria (Plasmodium), to evaluate the roles of extrinsic and intrinsic factors in driving spatial heterogeneity in infection risk, and to address questions of scale and temporal stability in these vector-driven host–parasite interactions. We show that the two malaria parasite species exhibit markedly different spatial epidemiology: P. relictum infections are effectively randomly distributed in space, with no temporal consistency, whereas P. circumflexum infections exhibit pronounced spatial structuring that is stable over the six years of this study and similar in both host species. We show that both conspecific and heterospecific host density contribute to elevated infection risk, but that the main determinants of elevated risk of P. circumflexum infection risk are habitat features probably associated with vector distribution and abundance. We discuss the implications of these findings, both for our understanding of the epidemiology of malaria in the wild, but also in terms of the longer-term evolutionary and demographic consequences that spatially variable parasite-mediated selection may have on host populations.


Economic analysis can be a guide to determining the level of actions taken to reduce nitrogen (N) losses and reduce environmental risk in a cost-effective manner while also allowing consideration of relative costs of controls to various groups. The biophysical science of N control, especially from nonpoint sources such as agriculture, is not certain. Widespread precise data do not exist for a river basin (or often even for a watershed) that couples management practices and other actions to reduce nonpoint N losses with specific delivery from the basin. The causal relationships are clouded by other factors influencing N flows, such as weather, temperature, and soil characteristics. Even when the science is certain, economic analysis has its own sets of uncertainties and simplifying economic assumptions. The economic analysis of the National Hypoxia Assessment provides an example of economic analysis based on less than complete scientific information that can still provide guidance to policy makers about the economic consequences of alternative approaches. One critical value to policy makers comes from bounding the economic magnitude of the consequences of alternative actions. Another value is the identification of impacts outside the sphere of initial concerns. Such analysis can successfully assess relative impacts of different degrees of control of N losses within the basin as well as outside the basin. It can demonstrate the extent to which costs of control of any one action increase with the intensity of application of control.


With the Public Financial Management and Control Law, the public financial management and control system has been changed within the framework of a new understanding. This new systemis built on the concepts of efficiency, effectiveness, economy, transparency and accountability. One of the innovation that this new public financial management systems is the Performance Based Budgeting system. The basic tools of this system are the annual report, strategic plan and performance report. Performance audit is both an integral part of the performance-based budgeting system and an important tool to guide this system. Performance audits of state agencies under the general management in Turkey is carried out by the Turkish Court of Accounts(TCA). The TCA fulfills the performance audit task by evaluating the quality of performance information in the basic tools of the performance-based monitoring process of public administrations. Public universities with special budgets, which are one of the public administrations within the scope of general government, are also subject to the performance audit of the TCA. The public is assured about the accuracy and reliability of non-financial performance information, which is based on the service delivery of the universities by the performance audit conducted by the TCA. The performance audit of the TCA is an integral part of both the guiding and budgeting process in terms of showing the improper practices of universities in the performance-based budgeting process and providing suggestions for correcting them. This study aims to research the results of a performance audit of the state universities conducted by TCA For this purpose, the results of the performance audits of 38 universities, which were conducted in 2017, were examined using content analysis. As a result of the analysis, it has been determined that there are universities that do not meet both the reporting requirements and the criteria for the content of performance information.


In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court held that challenges to partisan gerrymanders presented a nonjusticiable political question. This decision threatened to discard decades of work by political scientists and other experts, who had developed a myriad of techniques designed to help the courts objectively and unambiguously identify excessively partisan district maps. Simulated redistricting promised to be one of the most effective of these techniques. Simulated redistricting algorithms are computer programs capable of generating thousands of election-district maps, each of which conforms to a set of permissible criteria determined by the relevant state legislature. By measuring the partisan lean of both the automatically generated maps and the map put forth by the state legislature, a court could determine how much of this partisan bias was attributable to the deliberate actions of the legislature, rather than the natural distribution of the state's population.Rucho ended partisan gerrymandering challenges brought under the U.S. Constitution—but it need not close the book on simulated redistricting. Although originally developed to combat partisan gerrymanders, simulated redistricting algorithms can be repurposed to help courts identify intentional racial gerrymanders. Instead of measuring the partisan bias of automatically generated maps, these programs can gauge improper racial considerations evident in the legislature's plan and demonstrate the discriminatory intent that produced such an outcome. As long as the redistricting process remains in the hands of state legislatures, there is a threat that constitutionally impermissible considerations will be employed when drawing district plans. Simulated redistricting provides a powerful tool with which courts can detect a hidden unconstitutional motive in the redistricting process.


Voice biometrics for user authentication is a task in which the object is to perform convenient, robust and secure authentication of speakers. Recently we have investigated the use of state-of-the-art text-independent and text-dependent speaker verification technology for user authentication and obtained satisfactory results within a framework of a proof of technology. However, the use we have made of a quite large development set limits the practical potential of our system. In this work we investigate the ability to build an accurate user authentication system with the limitation of having a small development set.


A Moomintroll is small and shy and fat, and has a Moominpappa and a Moominmamma. Moomins live in the forests of Finland. One day Moominpappa is feeling at a loss. He has no idea what to do with himself because it seems everything has already been done. So he takes his family off to start a new life in a lighthouse on a tiny, rocky island far out to sea. It's rather quiet and lonely at first, but as they begin to explore their unusual surroundings the Moomins discover some funny and surprising new things about themselves.


Abstract Variations in utricle morphology may be responsible for different tolerances to ocean acidification (OA) within the macroalgal genus Halimeda, an important sediment producer on reefs. However, differences in species' utricle morphology and their relationship to calcification and crystal formation have not been well articulated. In the present study, we characterized the utricle morphologies of six Halimeda species. Primary utricle ultrastructure was quantitatively and qualitatively compared to tissue inorganic content and crystal microstructure. Morphologies differed across species and several morphometric relationships were revealed. Primary utricle size (r2=0.70) and diffusion pathway length (r2=0.87) had inverse relationships with inorganic content based on regression analyses, and corresponded to crystal microstructure form. Species with large utricles and long diffusion pathways contained more narrow (~0.15 μm) aragonite needles and minimal micro-anhedral crystal formations. In contrast, species with small utricles and short diffusion pathways elucidated aggregates of micro-anhedral crystals and wider aragonite needles (~0.30 μm). Species' utricle characteristics generally corresponded to specific evolutionary lineages. Thus, characteristics of Halimeda utricle morphology may control long-term adaptive responses to OA, an idea articulated in the broader literature.


Aims Depression is the most common neuropsychiatric disturbance in Parkinson's disease. Evidence is accumulating that motor subtype may be a critical risk factor for the development of depression throughout the disease and that the gender prevalence seen for common depression may not hold for patients with Parkinson's disease. Here we set out to analyse a database containing information about motor subtype, gender and depression in a large pool of well-characterised patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease. Methods Standardised neurological and psychiatric tests were administered to 224 patients (154 male) suffering from idiopathic Parkinson at the Parkinson Centre Nijmegen (ParC) of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre (UMCN) in the Netherlands. ParC is an outpatient centre recognised as Centre of Excellence by the National Parkinson Foundation. The data were collected during a 3-day programme for diagnosis and the development of an individual multidisciplinary treatment programme. Data were statistically analysed using SPSS. Results Of the 224 patients, 74 (33%) suffered from the tremor-dominant subtype, 129 (56%) had a bradykinetic/rigidity subtype and 24 (11%) patients were diagnosed as having a postural instability and gait disorder subtype. Overall and for each of the subtypes, there was a significant higher prevalence of males in the group (minimum t(255)=12.9; p=0.000). We therefore corrected subsequent analyses for this difference in prevalence. Duration of illness did not differ between groups. Our statistical analysis further indicated that the prevalence of depression did not differ between male and female in any of the groups both for minor and major depression. Conclusions Our data contained a homogenous set of patients suffering from idiopathic Parkinsons disease in a mild to moderate stage. We could not replicate recent evidence of a predominance of depression in the postural instability and gait disorder subtype in this sample possibly due the stage of the disease. Our data, however, do suggest that contrary to the general population there is an equal prevalence of male and female patients suffering from minor or major depression. These results may suggest that there is a different pathophysiology underlying depression in Parkinson's diseases independent of subtype.


Discounting can have a drastic impact on the valuation of future environmental impacts, particularly over long periods of time. Especially profound problems are raised by the use of discounting over multiple generations, leading even some economists and a number of legal scholars to reject its use in the intergenerational context. These problems are indeed troubling, given the possibility that discounting might lead to the nearly complete neglect of the interests of distant generations by the present one. (The classic example is the "Cleopatra" hypothetical, in which it is not worthwhile for Cleopatra to skip a helping of dessert in order to save a child's life today.) Nevertheless, as this paper shows, the logic of discounting is not easily avoided. This paper demonstrates that the standard economic technique of exponential discounting follows from three modest assumptions: (1) environmental benefits have positive value in all future time periods; (2) benefits are additive, so that the benefit during any given time period is equal to the total benefits during its sub-periods; and (3) the preference for permanent solutions over temporary ones does not vary depending with the starting date. Given these modest and seemingly morally acceptable assumptions, exponential discounting is unavoidable. Relaxing these assumptions generates two alternative methods of discounting. If we relax the assumption that benefits are additive, the model allows the assignment of "perpetuity" values - that is, of bonuses for resources with the capacity for indefinite viability. For example, we might attach a higher intrinsic value in each time period to a species which is still viable rather than one that is doomed. This bonus value, which can be thought of as the value of the environmental benefit at infinity, is not subject to discounting. Alternatively, relaxing the third assumption allows the use of hyperbolic discounting. The switch from exponential to hyperbolic discounting is known to have important practical consequences for analysis of problems such as global climate change. Hyperbolic discounting essentially involves a declining discount rate, reducing its impact on far-future benefits. As it turns out, these modified discounting techniques fit naturally with situations involving cooperation across generations, rather than one-shot decisions. These techniques also ameliorate, although they do not completely eliminate, the ethical concerns over discounting across multiple generations.


Background: Prospective studies on the relationship between organizational merger and mental health have been conducted using subjective health indicators. The objective of this prospective occupational cohort study was to examine whether a negative change during an organizational merger is an independent predictive factor of psychiatric morbidity. Method: Survey data on organizational characteristics, health, and other factors were collected prior to (1996) and after the merger (2000); register data on psychiatric morbidity at baseline (1/1994—9/2000) and during the follow-up (10/2000—12/2005). Participants were 6 511 (77% men) industrial employees aged 21—65 with no register-based diagnosed psychiatric events prior to the follow-up (the Still Working Study). During the follow-up, 252 participants were admitted to hospital due to psychiatric disorders, were prescribed a psychotropic drug, or attempted or committed suicide. Results : A negative self-reported change in the work organization during the merger was associated with increased risk of post-merger psychiatric event (Hazard Ratio 1.60; 95% Confidence Interval 1.19-2.14). This association was independent of mental health-related factors measured before the merger announcement, such as demographic characteristics, occupational status, personal orientation to life, self-rated health, self-reported psychiatric morbidity, or chronic disease. Conclusions: A negative change in work organization during an organizational merger may elevate the risk for post-merger psychiatric morbidity.


Diseases and Diagnoses discusses why such social problems as addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, racial predisposition for illness, surgery and beauty, and electrotherapy, all of which concerned thinkers a hundred years ago, are reappearing at a staggering rate and in diverse national contexts. In the twentieth century such problems were viewed as only historical concerns. Yet in the twenty-first century, we once again find ourselves confronting their implications.
In this fascinating volume, Gilman looks at historical and contemporary debates about the stigma associated with biologically transmitted diseases. He shows that there is no indisputable way to measure when a disease or therapy will reappear, or how it may be perceived at any given moment in time. Consequently, Gilman focuses on the socio-cultural and political implications that the reappearance of such diseases has had on contemporary society. His approach is to show how culture (embedded in cultural objects) both feeds and is fed by the claims of medical science-as for example, the reappearance of "race" as a cultural as well as a medical category.
If the twentieth century was the "age of physics," in the latter part of the past century and certainly in the twenty-first century biological concerns are recapturing central stage. Achievements of the biological sciences are changing the public's sense of what constitutes cutting-edge science and medicine. None has captured the public imagination more effectively than the mapping of the human genome and the promise of genetic manipulation, which fuel what Gilman calls a "second age of biology." Although not without controversy, the role of genetics appears to be key. Gilman puts contemporary debates in historical context, showing how they feed social and cultural concerns as well as medical possibilities.


Abstract interpretation is a general framework for expressing static program analyses. It reduces the problem of extracting properties of a program to computing an approximation of the least fixpoint of a system of equations. The de facto approach for computing this approximation uses a sequential algorithm based on weak topological order (WTO). This paper presents a deterministic parallel algorithm for fixpoint computation by introducing the notion of weak partial order (WPO). We present an algorithm for constructing a WPO in almost-linear time. Finally, we describe Pikos, our deterministic parallel abstract interpreter, which extends the sequential abstract interpreter IKOS. We evaluate the performance and scalability of Pikos on a suite of 1017 C programs. When using 4 cores, Pikos achieves an average speedup of 2.06x over IKOS, with a maximum speedup of 3.63x. When using 16 cores, Pikos achieves a maximum speedup of 10.97x.


Let g be a slowly increasing function of locally bounded variation defined on Rc, 1 cd. We investigate when g can be an activation function of the hidden-layer units of three-layer neural networks that approximate continuous functions on compact sets. If the support of the Fourier transform of g includes a converging sequence of points with distinct distances from the origin, it can be an activation function without scaling. If and only if the support of its Fourier transform includes a point other than the origin, it can be an activation function with scaling. We also look for a condition on which an activation function can be used for approximation without rotation. Any nonpolynomial functions can be activation functions with scaling, and many familiar functions, such as sigmoid functions and radial basis functions, can be activation functions without scaling. With or without scaling, some of them defined on Rd can be used without rotation even if they are not spherically symmetric.


The purpose of this dissertation is to examine and assess the role of Philip Henry Kerr, eleventh Marquis of Lothian, the British ambassador to the United States from August 1939 to December 1940. While much of the historiography of Anglo-American relations during the Second World War focuses on the Roosevelt-Churchill axis, this dissertation contends that Lord Lothian played a vital, if not the principal, role in creating that axis and in forging closer relations during the vital months before Pearl Harbor. More generally, this dissertation contends that Lothian is a vital, if not the principal, architect of the "Special Relationship." Anglo-American relations during the interwar years were characterized by an underlying discord, caused by economic disparity, naval rivalry, and divergent approaches to international security. By December 1940, however, relations were stronger and closer, as many Americans came to appreciate that Britain's survival was critical to keeping the United States out of the war. Although not exclusively responsible, Lothian played a significant role in affecting this transformation in public opinion. First, he established a British public relations apparatus and initiated a vigorous publicity campaign in the United States, which generated greater awareness of Britain's increasingly dire military predicament and more widespread popular support for Britain. Second, Lothian helped to broker the celebrated Destroyers-for-Bases deal, by which the United States agreed to provide Britain with fifty destroyers in return for land rights in various British possessions in the Western Hemisphere. Third, Lothian helped to lay the foundations for the Lend-Lease program. Following a brief autumn visit to Britain, he intimated to the American press that London was running out of cash with which to purchase American military supplies. He also urged Churchill to outline the realities of Britain's position in a long, detailed letter to Roosevelt. These two initiatives presented the Roosevelt administration with a comprehensive view of Britain's desperate situation that compelled the president to take action. The result was the Lend-Lease Act, which provided Britain with a program of American assistance, hardly compatible with neutrality, and ultimately became the foundation of the AngloAmerican alliance during the Second World War.


Despite international attention, pediatric obesity continues to burden healthcare. Much research has been done to identify barriers to the successful reduction of childhood overweight and obesity, however, a more condensed and accessible compilation of these barriers was lacking. A literature review was done to identify the barriers healthcare providers perceive to the prevention and management of pediatric obesity. It was performed in Fall of 2013 from the following databases: PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL, ERIC, and SocIndex. Two independent reviewers selected relevant articles, developed a coding template, and extracted themes. Barriers to the prevention and management of pediatric obesity fell into three overarching categories with 17 individual themes. The first category addressed external factors that inhibited providers from discussing the topic. The second category focused on barriers to interpersonal communication. The last category described provider perceptions of the caregiver. Healthcare providers perceive numerous barriers to the effective prevention and management of pediatric obesity. An elemental discrepancy exists in determining roles and responsibilities of providers when addressing pediatric obesity. Moving forward, a discussion amongst key stakeholders is necessary to develop synchronized perceptions, goals, and strategies. Community Health Centers (CHCs) and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) are growing in importance and provide a new venue to tackle pediatric obesity. CHCs are unique in their structure and relationship with the federal government and thus should be examined for potential opportunities and barriers that, if targeted and addressed, could help progress the fight against pediatric overweight and obesity.


Today, e-learning and various online education applications are used in more countries and educational institutions than ever before. However, as the industry grows, so do issues of ethical concern such as plagiarism, electronic voyeurism, and licensing. BEthical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning outlines a systems approach as the framework to guide all ethical perspectives in Open and Distance Learning System (ODLS). This important title provides academicians, students, and professionals with ethical insight into the world of e-learning through fascinating case studies that elucidate the issues through real-world examples.


This paper outlines the background to the conflict in the Sudan. It provides a brief summary of international humanitarian law, before introducing the ICRC and its relationship to international humanitarian law. The 'dual and special' role of the ICRC in the Sudan is examined, leading to the conclusion that, in the context of civil war, for the organisation to subordinate one of its dual roles to the other is to endanger the very raison d'etre of the organisation itself.


A fundamental responsibility of the National Park Service (NPS) is to ensure that park resources are preserved, protected, and managed in consideration of the resources themselves and for the benefit and enjoyment by the public. Through the inventory, monitoring, and study of park resources, we gain a greater understanding of the scope, significance, distribution, and management issues associated with these resources and their use. This baseline of natural resource information is available to inform park managers, scientists, stakeholders, and the public about the conditions of these resources and the factors or activities which may threaten or influence their stability. There are several different categories of geologic or stratigraphic units (supergroup, group, formation, member, bed) which represent a hierarchical system of classification. The mapping of stratigraphic units involves the evaluation of lithologies, bedding properties, thickness, geographic distribution, and other factors. If a new mappable geologic unit is identified, it may be described and named through a rigorously defined process that is standardized and codified by the professional geologic community (North American Commission on Stratigraphic Nomenclature 2005). In most instances when a new geologic unit such as a formation is described and named in the scientific literature, a specific and well-exposed section of the unit is designated as the type section or type locality (see Definitions). The type section is an important reference section for a named geologic unit which presents a relatively complete and representative profile. The type or reference section is important both historically and scientifically, and should be protected and conserved for researchers to study and evaluate in the future. Therefore, this inventory of geologic type sections in NPS areas is an important effort in documenting these locations in order that NPS staff recognize and protect these areas for future studies. The documentation of all geologic type sections throughout the 423 units of the NPS is an ambitious undertaking. The strategy for this project is to select a subset of parks to begin research for the occurrence of geologic type sections within particular parks. The focus adopted for completing the baseline inventories throughout the NPS was centered on the 32 inventory and monitoring networks (I&M) established during the late 1990s. The I&M networks are clusters of parks within a defined geographic area based on the ecoregions of North America (Fenneman 1946; Bailey 1976; Omernik 1987). These networks share similar physical resources (geology, hydrology, climate), biological resources (flora, fauna), and ecological characteristics. Specialists familiar with the resources and ecological parameters of the network, and associated parks, work with park staff to support network level activities (inventory, monitoring, research, data management). Adopting a network-based approach to inventories worked well when the NPS undertook paleontological resource inventories for the 32 I&M networks. The network approach is also being applied to the inventory for the geologic type sections in the NPS. The planning team from the NPS Geologic Resources Division who proposed and designed this inventory selected the Greater Yellowstone Inventory and Monitoring Network (GRYN) as the pilot network for initiating this project. Through the research undertaken to identify the geologic type sections within the parks of the GRYN methodologies for data mining and reporting on these resources were established. Methodologies and reporting adopted for the GRYN have been used in the development of this type section inventory for the Klamath Inventory & Monitoring Network. The goal of this project is to consolidate information pertaining to geologic type sections which occur within NPS-administered areas, in order that this information is available throughout the NPS to inform park managers...


NANOFILTRATION WITH ORGANIC SOLVENTS AND ITS POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS TO ORGANIC SYNTHESES by José Antonio Whit Experimental results on the nanofiltration (NF) separation behavior of three different solventcompatible membranes are presented for three organic solutes of molecular weights 351, 826 and 1355 in methanol; the manufacturer-specified molecular weight cut-offs (MWCO) of the membranes are 250, 400 and 700. Membranes were primarily tested at 440 psig, at different concentrations of the solutes in methanol; the effect of varying the applied pressure was also briefly explored. The solvent permeation flux and the solute rejection were time dependent for an extended initial period; the membranes had to be compacted to achieve steady-state results. Furthennore, the manufacturer-specified MWCO was found to be an insufficient indicator of the separation capabilities of the membranes. Organic syntheses which involve species of diverse molecular weights and dimensions, such as those found in the pharmaceutical industry, could benefit from the availability of solvent-compatible NF membranes. A mathematical model was developed to illustrate the effects of external coupling of the operation of a batch/semibatch reactor with a NF unit. A hypothetical reaction system consisting of two parallel reactions was considered. Numerical simulations of the governing equations with realistic parameters, showed that the reaction conversion, selectivity and final product concentration could be improved considerably via this external reactor-membrane separator coupling. NANOFILTRATION WITH ORGANIC SOLVENTS AND ITS POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS TO ORGANIC SYNTHESES