Perceptions of the Tourism and Hospitality Industry by Singapore Polytechnic Hospitality Students – An Exploratory Study by Justin Matthew Pang Dr. Kurt A. Stahura, Associate Professor Hotel Management Department, College of Hotel Administration University of Nevada, Las Vegas Many Singapore polytechnic students are not keen to join the hospitality line even after being enrolled in a 3-year hospitality program. Many students find the nature of the job too stressful and strenuous. Students have also cited reasons such as long working hours, shift work, dealing with unpredictable circumstances in the job environment and having lower starting remuneration as compared other industries (K. Ong, personal communications, June 16, 2010). Other perceived qualitative reasons that have been given by students for not joining the industry would be the semi-professional nature of the hospitality industry as compared to other industries such as education, law, engineering and business-related industries (Khan, 1992). Students especially from a semi-traditional Asian-Singapore context are not encouraged to join the hospitality line because their parents do not support their decision as the jobs in this industry is seen as one which is 'servitude' and have little prospects of promotion from rank-and-file. The polytechnics also play a major role in influencing the choice of career of their students through their faculty, curriculum, resources and links to the industry. Therefore Singapore hospitality schools would need to manage student expectations prior to and during the course of studies to encourage students to stay within the industry after graduation. Industrial practitioners must also re-look at their job environment, practices, wages and welfare treatment of their staff so that they can retain and grow human capital to prevent a dearth of manpower in the hospitality and tourism industry.


An anthology of exemplary readings by some of the twentieth century's foremost literary critics, Close Reading presents a wide range of responses to the question at the heart of literary criticism: how best to read a text to understand its meaning. The lively introduction and the selected essays provide an overview of close reading from New Criticism through poststructuralism, including works of feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, new historicism, and more.

From a 1938 essay by John Crowe Ransom through the work of contemporary scholars, Close Reading highlights the interplay between critics—the ways they respond to and are influenced by others' works. To facilitate comparisons of methodology, the collection includes discussions of the same primary texts by scholars using different critical approaches. The essays focus on Hamlet , "Lycidas," "The Rape of the Lock," Ulysses, Invisible Man, Beloved, Jane Austen, John Keats, and Wallace Stevens and reveal not only what the contributors are reading, but also how they are reading.

Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois's collection is an essential tool for teaching the history and practice of close reading.

Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Andrew DuBois, Stanley Fish, Catherine Gallagher, Sandra Gilbert, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar, Fredric Jameson, Murray Krieger, Frank Lentricchia, Franco Moretti, John Crowe Ransom, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Helen Vendler


This paper describes the work of the NGO SPARC and its grass roots partners in Mumbai (together known as the Alliance), with particular reference to the implications of their work for children and child-focused organizations. Although the Alliance does not specifically target children, its efforts to find the most practical solutions to the problems of urban poverty often involve close attention to children's needs. A particular example is described: the community toilet blocks developed in Mumbai and other Indian cities that include special toilets for young children. By ensuring that the particular needs of the youngest community members are met, this component ensures that the toilet blocks work better for everyone. The paper suggests that responding to children within the context of more general community-led development efforts may result in more effective, grounded and enduring solutions than those achieved through separate projects for children.


Substance abuse is a complex health problem with global public health significance. It is thought to be a result of a combination of factors, including genetics, the environment, and exposure to substances. It has a significant public health impact on mortality and health. Deaths from overdoses, certain cancers, and accidents are linked to substance abuse. Drug and alcohol abuse does not only affect the addict. Family members, friends, and community members are also impacted by the addict's behavior. Substance abuse also contributes to other societal costs such as lost wages, healthcare expenses, and criminal justice costs. Treatment for substance abuse is difficult and complex. One of the main goals of treatment is to prevent relapse. This is particularly challenging in the outpatient treatment setting where clients are exposed to the stressors of everyday life while in treatment. At a local intensive outpatient therapy program, treatment professionals identified some challenges that they encounter while providing treatment. A public health intervention could be implemented to mitigate some of these challenges and improve rehabilitation service delivery.


The economic development of South Korea is often considered a model for developing countries. We use 1975 and 1990 data in a general equilibrium framework with a highly disaggregated sector specification to evaluate the opportunity cost of its agricultural protection. We show that although agriculture's share of the gross domestic product (GDP) declined between 1975 and 1990, the cost of agricultural protection, as measured by the loss in GDP, did not fall. The larger gap between domestic and world prices for the protected sectors exacerbated the distortions in resource allocation. Simulated removal of 1990 agricultural border protection reduced the share of agricultural GDP to the level actually observed in 1996, demonstrating how protection can impede economic structural development. The public policy implication is for developing countries to adopt policies that help the agricultural sector become competitive. Otherwise, as in Korea, the resource costs of delaying adjustment grow over time.


In this article we present the development and validation of two new measures of psychological well-being: the Comprehensive Inventory of Thriving (CIT) and the Brief Inventory of Thriving (BIT). These measures were developed with two specific goals in mind: (1) to measure a broad range of psychological well-being constructs and represent a holistic view of positive functioning; and (2) to predict important health outcomes that are useful for researchers and health practitioners. The CIT includes 18 subscales with 54 items in total, covering a broad range of well-being components. The BIT has 10 items in total and can serve as an indicator of psychological well-being and a brief screening tool of mental health. The new measures were evaluated in five samples of a total of 3,191 US participants with diverse demographics. The CIT and BIT had excellent psychometric properties and exhibited convergent validity with existing measures of psychological well-being and discriminant validity with measures of ill-being. Both measures contributed over and above existing measures of psychology well-being in predicting a variety of health outcomes, including self-reported and objective health status, physical functioning, and health behaviors. In addition, we showed the relative importance of thriving compared to ill-being for health outcomes and the benefits of assessing individuals' positive functioning beyond ill-being. Potential uses of the new measures are discussed.


A refracting system consisting of two lenses is designed to transform an annular Gaussian laser beam into a circular Bessel beam. The slopes of the input and output surfaces fit well with a sixth-order polynomial. A smooth variation of the radii of curvature of the resulting aspheric surfaces is very attractive for easy machining of the surfaces. The diffraction-free length for the designed system is 59.4735 m at 633 nm.


Objective We reviewed cohort studies to determine the magnitude and temporal direction of the association between recent intimate partner violence (IPV) and a range of adverse health outcomes or health risk behaviours. Design Systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods Medline, EMBASE and PsycINFO were searched from the first record to November 2016. Recent IPV was defined as occurring up to and including the last 12 months; all health outcomes were eligible for inclusion. Results were combined using random-effects meta-analysis. Results 35 separate cohort studies were retrieved. Eight studies showed evidence of a positive association between recent IPV and subsequent depressive symptoms, with a pooled OR from five estimates of 1.76 (95% CI 1.26 to 2.44, I2=37.5%, p=0.172). Five studies demonstrated a positive, statistically significant relationship between depressive symptoms and subsequent IPV; the pooled OR from two studies was 1.72 (95% CI 1.28 to 2.31, I2=0.0%, p=0.752). Recent IPV was also associated with increased symptoms of subsequent postpartum depression in five studies (OR=2.19, 95% CI 1.39 to 3.45, p=0.000), although there was substantial heterogeneity. There was some evidence of a bidirectional relationship between recent IPV and hard drug use and marijuana use, although studies were limited. There was no evidence of an association between recent IPV and alcohol use or sexually transmitted infections (STIs), although there were few studies and inconsistent measurement of alcohol and STIs. Conclusions Exposure to violence has significant impacts. Longitudinal studies are needed to understand the temporal relationship between recent IPV and different health issues, while considering the differential effects of recent versus past exposure to IPV. Improved measurement will enable an understanding of the immediate and longer term health needs of women exposed to IPV. Healthcare providers and IPV organisations should be aware of the bidirectional relationship between recent IPV and depressive symptoms. PROSPERO registration number CRD42016033372.


Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) has become a worldwide concern and is a major issue especially in developing countries due to environmental problems, such as air, soil and water pollution and generation of greenhouse gases from open dumping sites. The MSW management is going through a critical phase due to the non-availability of suitable facilities to treat and dispose of the increasing amount of MSW generated daily specially in metropolitan cities. Municipal authorities generally fail to provide adequate services due to insufficient funds and ineffective legislation. The current MSWM practices including collection, transportation, treatment and disposal systems of India have been presented in this paper. It also highlights the recommendations for improvement in existing system to achieve the goal of sustainable solid waste management considering technological, institutional and financial factors.


Objectives: The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of Nd-YAG laser of (1064 and 532) nm wavelength in modification of zirconia implant surface roughness in order to enhance the progress of Osseo integration.

Materials and methods: Zirconia block (inCoris, Sirona) used in preparation of experimental samples. The cutting was made by CADlCAM technique. The sectioned samples were polished by using diamond paste, then sintered to get discs of (10.2) mm of diameter and thickness respectively. Q-switched Nd-YAG laser used in different parameters in this study. For (1064) nm wavelength, the used flounce was (38.22)J\cm², frequency (10) Hz and the exposure time was (3, 5 and 7) seconds in three separate trials. For (532) nm wavelength, the used flounce was (19.11)J\cm², frequency (10)Hz and the exposure time was (3, 5 and 7) second in three separate trials. All irradiated samples were assessed by scanning electron microscope and atomic force microscope for surface topography and surface roughness changes respectively.

Results: The SEM images showed increased surface porosity of irradiated samples, cracks free surfaces for both wavelengths. AFM results revealed increased surface roughness directly with exposure time for both wavelengths.

Conclusion: Q-switched Nd-YAG laser of (1064 and 532) nm wavelengths can be used for modification of zirconia implant surface.


Estimating the directions-of-arrival (DOAs) of propagating plane waves is a problem of interest in a variety of applications including radar, mobile communications, sonar, and seismology. The widely studied uniform linear array (ULA) can only provide estimates of source bearings relative to the array axis. A planar. array is required if estimates of source azimuth and elevation are required (2D angle estimation). Uniform circular arrays (UCAs) have several properties that make them attractive for 2D angle estimation; e.g., directional patterns synthesized with UCAs can be electronically rotated in the plane of the array without significant change of beam shape. Two signal subspace algorithms for 2D angle estimation with UC.4s have been developed. Both algorithms operate in beamspace and employ phase mode excitation based beamformers. The first algorithm, UCA-RB-MUSIC, offers numerous advantages over element space MUSIC. These advantages include reduced computation due to the ability to compute subspace estimates via a real-valued eigenvalue decomposition and the applicability of ULA techniques such as Root-MUSIC. The second algorithm, UCA-ESPRIT, represents a significant advance in the area of 2D angle estimation. It is a novel closed-form algorithm that provides automatically paired source azimuth and elevation angle estimates via the eigenvalues of a matrix. The eigenvalues have the form p = sin 8 e j d , where 8 and q5 are the elevation and azimuth angles, respectively. UCA-ESPRIT avoids expensive search procedures and is thus superior to existing 2D angle estimation algorithms with respect to computational complexity. The statistical performance of element space MUSIC, UCA-RB-MUSIC, and UCA-ESPRIT has been analyzed. Computer simulations that demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithms and validate the performance analysis results are presented.


The counting model problem in Boolean formulas is #P-complete, i.e., there is no known deterministic algorithm in the classical computability model (Turing machine) that makes this count in polynomial time. The difficulty persists even imposing more restrictive conditions on the syntactic clases of Boolean formulas. In this paper we present a treatable family within the syntactical class 2_-3MON. The identification of this family is done by using the hypergraph associated with simple structures such as chains and cycles. Then, matrix operators acting over these structures are identified; these operators lead to efficient algorithms that perform the model counting on the identified family in linear time for the number of clauses in the instantiated formula; unlike hypergraphic invariant based methods (such as tree width), which perform the count in cubic time.


Financial capital is an important component of rural community development and a key aspect of community resilience. Yet residents often transfer their wealth into investment vehicles such as GICs and bonds that are external to their community. This exodus of financial capital is often in contrast to a deep commitment to the local community in which these residents lived and worked for the majority of their lives. With a focus on the Town of Olds, Alberta, this project seeks to understand the possibilities for local financial capital retention for community development. We compare several approaches to capital retention that include the transition towns movement, community currency and community bonds; we explore perspectives from municipal, provincial, and federal levels of government; we seek insights from the representatives of local financial institutions; and we survey residents of the Town of Olds about their views on local investment. Results indicate a willingness to invest locally among residents, with support from town leaders, governments, and financial institutions. Yet several key barriers exist. These barriers include a limited understanding of financial vehicles for local investment (e.g., community bonds) and the availability of other attractive non-local options to secure financial capital (e.g., loans at attractive rates). JEL codes: R51, R11, Q38


The technological revolution brought up with the advent of Internet demands that delivery of library services stay in tune with the technological advancements. Search technologies have evolved a long way from text based searching into voice recognized natural language queries. Technology Giants like Google, Apple and Microsoft have filled this marketplace with their products and services to tap the potentials. Integration of the Natural Language tools with existing library solutions provides an exciting potential for traditional libraries to expand their service base. For the users too, this provides a very meaningful experience to access the library resources in their natural language besides expanding into areas where traditional search mechanisms for resources may not lead into.


"Ten interviews with minor league baseball players were conducted to determine whether they utilized task, ego, or both goal orientations. Goal shifting, goal setting, and situational influences were also examined. The players reported a moderate to high task combined with moderate to high ego goal orientations. They also reported setting general and specific process, performance, and outcome goals. Their achievement goals shifted according to maturity, level in professional baseball, performance, and time in season. They reported the climate within the minor league to be task-involving. The climate shifted based on level in professional baseball, and performance. However, they reported that the climate within the minor league had little influence on them. "--Abstract from author supplied metadata.


A comprehensive guidebook for practical employee commute options (ECO) was compiled for employers in New York State to provide them the technical expertise to develop an ECO program. This ECO guidebook is a result of literature search, employer survey, and the participation of advisory committee members consisting of people from the agencies that will be enforcing the state regulations that implement the federal Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and representatives of several organizations that have experience working with employers on commuter transportation in the New York metropolitan area. This study identified guaranteed ride home programs, parking management, and the commitment of upper management as three essential factors that will make an ECO program succeed. The strength of this ECO guidebook is an extensive discussion of each commute option and support strategy as well as a discussion of the entire process of developing and implementing an ECO program and the background of successful ECO programs. The description of each commute option or support strategy contains such topics as definitions, candidate employees, employee and employer benefits, employer's role, employer and employee costs, detailed implementation steps, successful cases, additional resources and readings, and sample program implementation schedules. A summary of the findings from the literature search and employer survey is presented, the responsibilities of the employee transportation coordinator are discussed, and the guidebook is introduced briefly.


These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In "Rhinoceros" we are shown the innate brutality of people as everyone, except for Berenger, turn into clumsy, unthinking rhinoceroses. "The Chairs" depicts the futile struggle of two old people to convey the meaning of life to the rest of humanity, while "The Lesson" is a chilling, but anarchically funny drama of verbal domination. In these three 'antiplays' dream, nonsense and fantasy combine to create an unsettling, bizarre view of society.


This paper investigates how physical, organisational, institutional, cognitive, social, and ethnic proximities between inventors shape their collaboration decisions. Using a new panel of UK inventors and a novel identification strategy, this paper systematically explores the net effects of all these 'proximities' on co-patenting. The regression analysis allows us to identify the full effects of each proximity, both on choice of collaborator and on the underlying decision to collaborate. The results show that physical proximity is an important influence on collaboration, but is mediated by organisational and ethnic factors. Over time, physical proximity increases in salience. For multiple inventors, geographic proximity is, however, much less important than organisational, social, and ethnic links. For inventors as a whole, proximities are fundamentally complementary, while for multiple inventors they are substitutes. JEL Classification: O31, O33, R11, R23


We propose a simple solution to use a single Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model to translate between multiple languages. Our solution requires no changes to the model architecture from a standard NMT system but instead introduces an artificial token at the beginning of the input sentence to specify the required target language. Using a shared wordpiece vocabulary, our approach enables Multilingual NMT systems using a single model. On the WMT'14 benchmarks, a single multilingual model achieves comparable performance for English→French and surpasses state-of-theart results for English→German. Similarly, a single multilingual model surpasses state-of-the-art results for French→English and German→English on WMT'14 and WMT'15 benchmarks, respectively. On production corpora, multilingual models of up to twelve language pairs allow for better translation of many individual pairs. Our models can also learn to perform implicit bridging between language pairs never seen explicitly during training, showing that transfer learning and zero-shot translation is possible for neural translation. Finally, we show analyses that hints at a universal interlingua representation in our models and also show some interesting examples when mixing languages.


This paper compares methods of active stabilization of an optoelectronic microwave oscillator (OEO) based on inser- tion of a source of optical group delay into an OEO loop. The per- formance of an OEO stabilized with either a high- optical cavity or an atomic cell is analyzed. We show that the elements play a role of narrow-band microwave filters improving an OEO stability. An atomic cell also allows for locking the oscillation frequency to particular atomic clock transitions. This reports a proof-of-prin- ciple experiment on an OEO stabilization using the effect of elec- tromagnetically induced transparency in a hot rubidium atomic vapor cell.


ARTS AND TECHNOLOGIES Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology. Edited by Amanda Bayley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xviii, 374 p. ISBN 9780521863094. $104.] Music examples, bibliography, discography, index. It is a daunting task to assess the 125 year history of recorded music, and equally daunting to assemble a theoretical and methodological framework that will continue to be relevant and useful for musicological and interdisciplinary scholarship in the twenty-first century. This volume provides a diverse sampling of contemporary scholarly approaches to grappling with such a history. The anchor for the articles in this edited collection is the concept of transformation as it unfolds in the history of recorded music in the twentieth century. Four transformations receive special attention: the shifting ontology of the musical object itself, changing technologies and recording practices, new kinds of mediations between performer and listener, and the emergence of new genres. Amanda Bayley, this collection's editor, is a British scholar who has recently been conducting ethnographic research in the recording of contemporary classical music and the creative process of classical performance. Bayley's commitment to interdisciplinarity is apparent both in her own research and in the chapters she assembled for this volume. Thirteen of the sixteen chapters are by British scholars, with fairly even disciplinary representation of musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, and theory. Three chapters focus on the use of recordings by musicologists (including, but hardly limited to, ethnomusicologists). Stephen Cottrell's contribution is a useful overview of recordings as analytic resources for musicologists and as pedagogical tools for musicians. He defines phonomusicology as "the study of recorded music, including its contexts of production and patterns of consumption" (pp. 15-16), and establishes a schema to represent the relation between musical practices and recording technologies. This section of the chapter was less convincing than the good overview of different modes of visualizing sound (with a particular focus on Charles Seeger's melograph and its use in musicology) in the following section. The chapter would make a good addition to a syllabus for a transcription and analysis class, and I will be using it in my "Visualizing Sound" class next year. A related concern forms the basis of Jonathan P. J. Stock's article, which is ostensibly about "how ethnomusicologists use recordings as tools in their research projects" (p. 187). It is structured around four "case studies" that show how 1) interview recordings possess generative value; 2) lesson/rehearsal recordings serve as tools for learning performance practice and as documents of ornamentation and ensemble interactional conventions; 3) recordings function as historical documents that supplement (or even contradict) theoretical assumptions about the music; and 4) the practice of playing back field recordings while in the field can be used as a research method. Stock focuses primarily on his own field research in China. Such accounts have become more common in the literature during the last decade as published articles and monographs started to include self-reflexive "fieldwork methodology" sections. However, Stock references hardly any other ethnomusicologist's work, with the exception of Anthony Seeger's fieldwork among the Suya, and as such this article is not necessarily representative of how other ethnomusicologists use recordings. John Baily traces the evolution of field recordings as ethnomusicological tools alongside the development of a world music industry. The article provides a succinct and well-cited history starting with the earliest ethnomusicological field recording proj - ects, moving to the construction by the record industry in the 1920s of niche markets that catered to particular immigrant groups, extending through the rise and expansion of the Folkways label, and finally the 1980s emergence of the world music genre. …


A central tenet of sex discrimination law is the protection of gender nonconformity: unless a feature of biological sex requires it, regulated entities may not expect that individuals will conform their gender performance to the stereotypes of their sex. This doctrine is critical to promoting the anti-stereotyping aims of sex discrimination law by allowing gender nonconformers from aggressive women to caregiving fathers to challenge expectations that would limit them to the gender performance that accords with their sex. Courts have extended gender nonconformity protection to transgender persons in cases where discrimination is due to gender performance.

Notwithstanding its partial success, the gender nonconformity doctrine has been the wrong path for pursuing transgender rights. The doctrine has led to losses when transgender persons are discriminated against not for their gender performance, but for seeking recognition as their identified sex rather than the sex they were assigned at birth. Transgender plaintiffs are likely to continue to lose under the doctrine when seeking such recognition in the long list of contexts—like bathrooms, dress codes, sports, schools, and beyond—that are still lawfully sex segregated. Even transgender plaintiffs' successes under the doctrine are Pyrrhic victories. Under the gender nonconformity doctrine, a plaintiff who was designated male at birth but who identifies as female is an effeminate man rather than a woman. The doctrine thus reinforces the notion that transgender persons are their birth-designated sex, contrary to substantial medical and legal authority, and to transgender persons' own identity. And treating transgender plaintiffs as gender nonconformers risks harm not only to transgender rights but to protection for gender nonconformity by raising the bar to prove such claims, even in paradigm cases.

These losses and harms are not inevitable. They all stem from one error—misunderstanding transgender status as a matter of gender rather than sex—that can be corrected. The Supreme Court decision this term in Bostock v. Clayton County holding that transgender discrimination is sex discrimination under federal employment discrimination law without relying on the gender nonconformity doctrine begins to show us how. But while Bostock's textual approach avoids the pitfalls of the gender nonconformity doctrine, it places transgender discrimination outside the core anti-stereotyping concerns of sex discrimination law. This is harmful legally when courts have to balance transgender rights against religious freedom, and socially when transgender rights are seen to compete with women's rights. So while courts should follow Bostock's turn away from gender nonconformity in recognizing transgender discrimination across sex discrimination law, they should uphold what Bostock denies: that transgender discrimination is of a piece with well-recognized forms of sex discrimination and that protecting transgender rights promotes sex discrimination law's historic role in fighting sex stereotypes.


Purpose: As factors influencing human word perception are important in the construction of speech perception tests used within the speech and hearing sciences, the purposes of this study were as follows: first, to develop algorithms that can be used to calculate different types of word metrics that influence the speed and accuracy of word perception and, second, to create a database in which those word metrics were calculated for a large set of Swedish words.Method: Based on a revision of a large Swedish phonetic dictionary, data and algorithms were developed by which various frequency metrics, word length metrics, semantic metrics, neighborhood metrics, phonotactic metrics, and orthographic transparency metrics were calculated for each word in the dictionary. Of the various word metric algorithms used, some were Swedish language reimplementations of previously published algorithms, and some were developed in this study.Results: The results of this study have been gathered in a Swedish word metric database called the AFC-list. The AFC-list consists of 816,404 phonetically transcribed Swedish words, all supplied with the word metric data calculated. The full AFC-list has been made publicly available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.Conclusion: The results of this study constitute an extensive linguistic resource for the process of selecting test items in new well-controlled speech perception tests in the Swedish language.Supplemental Material S1. List of all phonetic characters used in the AFC-list along with their corresponding Unicode hexadecimal code, underlying phonemes, as well as example transcriptions.Supplemental Material S2. Swedish positional segment probability (PSP) data as well as standardized positional segment probability (S-PSP) data.Supplemental Material S3. Swedish position-specific biphone probability (PSBP) data as well as standardized position-specific bi-phone probability (S-PSBP) data.Supplemental Material S4. AFC-list syllabification clusters (ASC).Supplemental Material S5. Swedish stress and syllable structure based normalized phonotactic probability (SSPP) data.Supplemental Material S6. Swedish pronunciation-to-grapheme rules used in the current study.Supplemental Material S7. Swedish grapheme-to-pronunciation orthographic transparency (G2P-OT) data.Supplemental Material S8. Swedish grapheme-initial letter-to-pronunciation orthographic transparency (GIL2P-OT) data.Supplemental Material S9. Swedish pronunciation-initial phone-to-grapheme orthographic transparency (PIP2G-OT) data.Supplemental Material S10. A tab-delimited text file (UTF-8) containing the AFC-list.Supplemental Material S11. A Microsoft Access database file containing the AFC-list.Supplemental Material S12. Description of all columns used in the AFC-list.Witte, E., & Kobler, S. (2019). Linguistic materials and metrics for the creation of well-controlled Swedish speech perception tests. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62, 2280–2294. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_JSLHR-S-18-0454


Curbing Texting While Driving More teens are wearing seatbelts, and fewer are driving after drinking alcohol--but nearly one-third of high school students are texting behind the wheel, according to a survey of 15,000 U.S. high school students (Eaton et al. 2012). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Teens make up the largest group of distracted drivers, and 11% of teen drivers in fatal auto accidents were reported as distracted at the time of the crash. Nearly half of U.S. teens say they have been in a car when the driver was texting (Madden and Lenhart 2009). Upperclassmen, the students most likely to drive, are the worst violators: 58% of seniors and 42.9% of juniors said they had texted at least once while driving in the month before the study (Eaton et al. 2012). The concentration needed for safe driving makes texting safely at the same time impossible, research shows. A driver's reaction time doubles when sending or reading a text (Cooper, Yager, and Chrysler 2011). Sending or reading a text takes a driver's eyes off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds. At 55 mph, that's like driving the length of a football field blindfolded (Olson et al. 2009). "The human brain just isn't capable of doing several things at once and giving full attention to all of them," says D'Arcy Lyness, an adolescent psychologist and behavioral health editor at KidsHealth.org. Classroom activity This activity--for the classroom, gym, or athletic field--demonstrates how distracting texting on the move can be. First, mark a winding obstacle course (traffic cones or string work well). Along the course, place 10 or so small objects such as paper clips. Half the students should walk the course while texting and half without phones. Instruct walkers to stay close to one side of the course--without touching markers or crossing course lines but picking up all objects--as quickly as possible. Use two cell phones: One for you to send simple questions related to classwork (for example: "F = m x ?" or "chem. symbol for sodium = ?") and one for texters to answer while they are walking. Make sure to text the same number of questions to each texter. (The number of correct answers is not relevant.) Ask two students to help with data collection: One to time classmates and the other to observe and record whether each student is a texter or safe walker, as well as the number of times course markers are touched, the number of times course lines are crossed, the number of objects collected, and the time taken to complete the course. …


Data volumes in communication networks increase rapidly. Further, usage of social network applications is very wide spread among users, and among these applications, Facebook is the most popular. In this paper, we analyse user demands patterns and content popularity of Facebook generated traffic. The data comes from residential users in two metropolitan access networks in Sweden, and we analyse more than 17 million images downloaded by almost 16,000 Facebook users. We show that the distributions of image popularity and user activity may be described by Zipf distributions which is favourable for many types of caching. We also show that Facebook activity is more evenly spread over the day, compared to more defined peak hours of general Internet usage. Looking at content life time, we show that profile pictures have a relatively constant popularity while for other images there is an initial, short peak of demand, followed by a longer period of significantly lower and quite stable demand. These findings are useful for designing network and QoE optimisation solutions, such as predictive pre-fetching, proxy caching and delay tolerant networking.


Desktop grids, which use the idle cycles of many desktop PC's, are currently the largest distributed systems in the world. Despite the popularity and success of many desktop grid projects, the heterogeneity and volatility of hosts within desktop grids has been poorly understood. Yet, host characterization is essential for accurate simulation and modelling of such platforms. In this paper, we present application-level traces of four real desktop grids that can be used for simulation and modelling purposes. In addition, we describe aggregate and per host statistics that reflect the heterogeneity and volatility of desktop grid resources.


The severe diarrhoeal disease cholera is caused by the gram-negative bacterium Vibrio cholerae and continues to be a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Like many Vibrio species V. cholerae inhabits an aquatic ecosystem, and most V. cholerae isolates do not possess the ability to cause cholera. Of more than 200 known serotypes, only O1 and O139 serogroups are highly pathogenic and acknowledged to cause epidemic disease.1 The O1 serogroup can be divided into two groups: classical and El Tor, with the first cholera pandemic, beginning in Asia in 1817, and the subsequent five pandemics probably caused by the classical biotype. The seventh and present pandemic began in 1961 caused by the El Tor biotype.2 In 1992 a novel O-serogroup, O-139, emerged to cause epidemic cholera.3 All V. cholerae O1 and O139 serogroups encode the major virulence factors cholera toxin and toxin coregulated pilus, the latter being encoded on a pathogenicity island, named Vibrio Pathogenicity Island-I (VPI-1).4 Several other genomic regions have been identified that occur mainly among epidemic O1 and O139 serogroup isolates, including the so-called Vibrio seventh pandemic island-I (VSP-I) encoding ORFs VC0175 to VC0185, VSP-II encoding ORFs VC0490 to VC0516 and VPI-2 encoding ORFs VC1758 to VC1809.5–7 A microarray analysis of V. cholerae El Tor isolates was used to identify VSP-I and VSP-II encompassing genes that are possibly responsible for the unique characteristics of the seventh pandemic (El Tor) strains.5 An evolutionary genetic analysis of clinical and environmental isolates suggested that pandemic strains arose from a common O1 serogroup progenitor through the successive acquisition of new virulence regions.8

VPI-2 is a 57.3 kb region which consists of 52 ORFs present in all toxigenic O1 and O139 serogroup isolates, but lacking in non-O1 and non-O139 nontoxigenic isolates.6 VPI-2 encodes a type-I restriction modification system, a nan-nag region of genes involved in sialic acid metabolism that may play a nutritional role,9 a sialidase/neuraminidase known to convert intestinal higher-order gangliosides to GM1,10 and a region with homology to Mu phage. In addition, VPI-2 contains several genes that code for hypothetical proteins. One of these proteins, VC1805, is a 148 amino acid protein with no function revealed so far through sequence analysis. VC1805 is also encoded in the reduced 20 kb VPI-2 region present among most O139 serogroup isolates that are missing ORFs VC1761 to VC1788.6 A paralogue of VC1805 exists within VSP-II, VC0508 a 147 residue protein that shares 59% amino acid sequence identity with VC1805. A search of the sequence database using PSI-BLAST reveals homologues of VC1805 in several Vibrio species: V. vulnificus, V. splendidus, V. alginolyticus and V. fischeri, and orthologues in Altermonas macleodii, Aeromonas hydrophilia, and some Shewanella species. In addition, PSI-BLAST reveals that the adjacent hypothetical protein VC1804, with 104 residues, is a homologue of VC1805 sharing 26% sequence identity. Similarly the hypothetical protein VC0509 is a homologue of the adjacent protein VC0508. The four proteins VC0508, VC0509, VC1804, and VC1805 are therefore likely to share the same protein fold and be functionally related.

As part of a structural genomics approach to understanding the function of hypothetical proteins within V. cholerae genomic islands we have determined the crystal structure of VC1805 to a resolution of 2.1 A using heavy atom isomorphous replacement. The structure reveals a similarity to the human mitochondrial protein p32 that is known to have several binding partners, including the human complement system protein C1q. This study shows that VC1805 does bind C1q, suggesting potential biological roles for the protein and its homologues.


Old age has been central to public health rationalities and contestations of the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic. This article thinks through what age is and does in pandemic times by juxtaposing four domains of ethical publicity in which age comes to matter: (1) mass fatality of old persons under conditions of variable unpreparedness; (2) circulation of social-Darwinist argument for herd immunity through culling of the weak; (3) everyday challenges of late life care as these are amplified under quarantine; and (4) long-term conditions of economic and political impasse and environmental collapse, experienced as failure of older generations and abandonment of younger ones, a situation here termed generational affect. It asks to what extent the figure of the cullable old renders racialized disparities natural and makes sense through a generational affect in which the world feels as if the survival of the young is in question.


[1] The transport of stratospheric air into the troposphere within deep convection was investigated using the Met Office Unified Model version 6.1. Three cases were simulated in which convective systems formed over the UK in the summer of 2005. For each of these three cases, simulations were performed on a grid having 4 km horizontal grid spacing in which the convection was parameterized and on a grid having 1 km horizontal grid spacing, which permitted explicit representation of the largest energy-containing scales of deep convection. Cross-tropopause transport was diagnosed using passive tracers that were initialized above the dynamically defined tropopause (2 potential vorticity unit surface) with a mixing ratio of 1. Although the synoptic-scale environment and triggering mechanisms varied between the cases, the total simulated transport was similar in all three cases. The total stratosphere-to-troposphere transport over the lifetime of the convective systems ranged from 25 to 100 kg/m2 across the simulated convective systems and resolutions, which corresponds to ∼5–20% of the total mass located within a stratospheric column extending 2 km above the tropopause. In all simulations, the transport into the lower troposphere (defined as below 3.5 km elevation) accounted for ∼1% of the total transport across the tropopause. In the 4 km runs most of the transport was due to parameterized convection, whereas in the 1 km runs the transport was due to explicitly resolved convection. The largest difference between the simulations with different resolutions occurred in the one case of midlevel convection considered, in which the total transport in the 1 km grid spacing simulation with explicit convection was 4 times that in the 4 km grid spacing simulation with parameterized convection. Although the total cross-tropopause transport was similar, stratospheric tracer was deposited more deeply to near-surface elevations in the convection-parameterizing simulations than in convection-permitting simulations.


Abstract
 The ultrastructure of Gomphonema gautieri (Van Heurck) Lange-Bert, et Metzeltin was studied based on a small population from a small Swedish, slightly acid, eutrophic river. The observations were compared with the holotype slide of G. augur var. gautieri Van Heurck, as the species was originally described in 1885. The valves are characterized in having a typical clavate outline with the largest width near the broadly rounded headpole. The species can be separated from G. augur Ehrenb. by its larger valve dimensions, the presence of broad shoulders on the headpole and the lower number of areolae per stria. Based on these differences, a separation of both taxa is justified.


Traditional treatment methods for cervical cancer are often not cancer-specific and are associated with adverse side effects. Our lab focuses on developing vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) as an oncolytic agent due to the natural ability of this virus to target susceptible cancer cells. We are interested in augmenting the oncolytic activity of VSV by treating resistant cancer cells with natural compounds. We hypothesize that Moringa oleifera, which has previously demonstrated anticancer and anti-inflammatory properties, will promote killing of resistant cervical cancer cells by VSV by activating immune cells and promoting anti-tumor immunity. Of the five extracts of M. oleifera examined (aqueous, butanolic, ethanolic, hydroethanolic, and methanolic), the ethanolic extract promoted C4-II and HeLa cell killing alone and in combination with a wild-type strain (rwt) of VSV by decreasing activation of pro-survival pathways. The methanolic extract promoted killing of SiHa cervical cancer cells by the rM51R-M VSV strain. Furthermore, STAT1 levels decreased in VSV-infected cells, suggesting M. oleifera may inhibit induction of an antiviral response. M. oleifera stimulated maturation of dendritic cell (DC) subsets and pro-inflammatory cytokines following infection by VSV, indicating the pretreatment with M. oleifera has the potential to promote clearance of virus infected cervical cancer cells.


The physical theory, of testing optics by the Ronchi sine grating interferometer is developed. In the experiment a sine grating splits the third-order wavefront of the zone plate under test into three displaced wavefronts, which then interfere with one another to form interference fringes. The intensity distribution of the interference pattern can be recorded for various positions of the sine grating. By subtracting the contribution of the inherent diffractive aberration of the sine grating, the value of the spherical aberration associated with the third-order wavefront of the zone plate under test can be determined. Theory and experiment are compared.


Experimental and field evidence show that people perceive and evaluate new risks differently from risks that are common. In particular, people get used to the presence of certain risks and become less eager to avoid them. We explain this observation by including risks in the reference states of individuals, which requires a more general concept of the reference state than has previously been considered in the literature. We find two effects. First, the inclusion of the risk in the reference state changes its evaluation. A risk being present on the market induces a self-enforcing process of increasing acceptance of this risk without any new information becoming available or people's tastes changing. We term this the risk inclusion effect. Second, a risk with lower inherent (reference-independent) utility may be preferred to a risk with higher inherent utility if individuals are more used to accepting the former than the latter. This leads to ineffcient decisions if habituation is seen as contributing less to welfare than inherent utility. Both effects have implications for the optimal regulation of risks.


Although industrial enterprises require to be evaluated based on traditional performance measures (cost, time and quality), non-traditional performance measures are urgent to be used and adopted. In this paper, a non-conventional competitive manufacturing strategy (NCCMS) is suggested and presented through three non-traditional performance measures such as: industrial complexity, industrial leanness and industrial agility. Minimising complexity; maximising leanness and agility are considered the major objectives. These performance measures are implicitly including the traditional competitive measures beside strategic and tactic performance measures. The novelty of this paper is the development of NCCMS by including complexity performance measure as a new dimension integrating and interacting with agility and leanness. This paper is also used to develop a theoretical approach with practical application to integrating the major objectives into one aggregate performance measure index. This index is so called the NCCMS index. Estimation levels of complexity, agility and leanness in industrial enterprises are firstly evaluated individually by using a fuzzy logic methodology; integrating between two objectives and aggregating or interacting between the three objectives by using analytical hierarchical process (AHP). A real-life case study is used to illustrate the proposed approach. The results show that the complexity measure is important and urgent to be minimised for achieving agility and leanness.


The paper presents findings from 560 interviews with undergraduates on 10 campuses distributed across the US, as part of Project Information Literacy (PIL). Overall, the findings suggest that students use a "less is more" approach to manage and control all of the IT devices and information systems available to them while they are in the library during the final weeks of the term. In the hour before we approached them for an interview, more respondents had checked for messages (e.g., Facebook, email, texts, IMs) more than any other task while they were in the library. A majority of respondents who had checked for messages during the previous hour had also prepared assignments and/or studied for courses. More respondents reported using library equipment, such as computers and printers, more than they had used any other library resource or service. Over half the sample considered their laptop their most essential IT device and most had a Web browser and, to a lesser extent, a word processing application running at the time of the interviews. Most students were using one or two Web sites at the time of the interviews, but there was little overlap among the Web sites they were using. A large majority of the respondents could be classified as "light" technology users, i.e., students who use one or two IT devices to support one or two primary activities (at the time of the interviews). A preliminary theory is introduced that describes how students' technology usage may be influenced by locale (i.e., the campus library) and circumstance (i.e., crunch time). Recommendations are made for how campus-wide stakeholders — faculty, librarians, higher education administrators, and commercial publishers — can work together to improve pedagogies for 21st century undergraduates.


Sugar beets grown in the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota are the most important source of American-made sugar. Contemporary sugar production and consumption provoke some bitter disagreements. Local growing and processing of sugar beets is an essential economic driver in the Red River Valley region, yet these gains would not be possible without massive federal subsidies. Moreover, genetically modified sugar beets are refined into a substance that is directly linked to national epidemics of diabetes and obesity. This article explores lessons the author learned by moonlighting as a truck driver for the sugar beet harvest. Rather than dismiss industrial food as fake on the one hand or "foodie culture" as entitled on the other, the author looks for how the quest for authenticity can transcend this divide. He argues that food work offers ways to see differently the priorities of people invested in both local food and industrial food systems.


Tufts University School of Medicine is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians. Tufts University School of Medicine designates this educational activity for a maximum of 8 category 1 credits toward the AMA Physician's Recognition Award. Each physician should claim only those credits that he/she actually spent in the educational activity.


The idea of sustainable management has recently gained growing attention in the agribusiness sector. This is mainly due to a widespread discontent with the industrialization of agricultural production and food processing and growing public pressure on agribusiness firms to implement more sustainable management practices. In this paper we present the results of an explorative empirical study of sustainability management in German agribusiness firms. The study shows that agribusiness firms have developed a broad understanding of sustainability management and perceive a multi-facetted spectrum of societal demands they have to meet. The most important arguments for implementing more sustainable management practices are that companies have to make sure that they are trusted by society in the long run and that the perception of a company by external stakeholders has become more and more important. The companies surveyed know quite a number of sustainability programmes and standards, but the number of companies that actually participate in these initiatives is much smaller. Nonetheless, the majority of the respondents feels that their company is more successful with regard to sustainability management than industry average.


Developmental diet is known to exert long-term effects on adult phenotypes in many animal species as well as disease risk in humans, purportedly mediated through long-term changes in gene expression. However, there are few studies linking developmental diet to adult gene expression. Here, we use a full-factorial design to address how three different larval and adult diets interact to affect gene expression in 1-day-old adult fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) of both sexes. We found that the largest contributor to transcriptional variation in young adult flies is larval, and not adult diet, particularly in females. We further characterized gene expression variation by applying weighted gene correlation network analysis (WGCNA) to identify modules of co-expressed genes. In adult female flies, the caloric content of the larval diet associated with two strongly negatively correlated modules, one of which was highly enriched for reproduction-related processes. This suggests that gene expression in young adult female flies is in large part related to investment into reproduction-related processes, and that the level of expression is affected by dietary conditions during development. In males, most modules had expression patterns independent of developmental or adult diet. However, the modules that did correlate with larval and/or adult dietary regimes related primarily to nutrient sensing and metabolic functions, and contained genes highly expressed in the gut and fat body. The gut and fat body are among the most important nutrient sensing tissues, and are also the only tissues known to avoid histolysis during pupation. This suggests that correlations between larval diet and gene expression in male flies may be mediated by the carry-over of these tissues into young adulthood. Our results show that developmental diet can have profound effects on gene expression in early life and warrant future research into how they correlate with actual fitness related traits in early adulthood.


The VCAP5-DCD Official Cert Guide presents you with an organized test preparation routine through the use of proven series elements and techniques. Do I Know This Already? quizzes open each chapter and enable you to decide how much time you need to spend on each section. Exam topic lists make referencing easy. Chapter-ending exam preparation tasks help you drill on key concepts you must know thoroughly. Master VMware VCAP5-DCD exam topics Assess your knowledge with chapter-opening quizzes Review key concepts with exam preparation tasks Practice with realistic exam questions on the DVD The VCAP5-DCD Official Cert Guide focuses specifically on the objectives for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5Data Center Design exam. VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) Paul McSharry shares preparation hints and test-taking tips, helping you identify areas of weakness and improve both your conceptual knowledge and hands-on skills. Material is presented in a concise manner, focusing on increasing your understanding and retention of exam topics. The companion DVD contains a powerful Pearson IT Certification Practice Test engine that enables you to focus on individual topic areas or take a complete, timed exam. The assessment engine also tracks your performance and provides feedback on a module-by-module basis, laying out a complete assessment of your knowledge to help you focus your study where it is needed most. Well-regarded for its level of detail, assessment features, comprehensive design scenarios, and challenging review questions and exercises, this official study guide helps you master the concepts and techniques that will enable you to succeed on the exam the first time. The VCAP5-DCD Official Cert Guide is part of a recommended learning path from VMware that includes simulation and hands-on training from authorized VMware instructors and self-study products from VMware Press. To find out more about instructor-led training, e-learning, and hands-on instruction offered worldwide, please visit www.vmware.com/training. PAUL MCSHARRY (VCP, VCAP, VCI, MCSE, MCITP, CompTIA CTT+ and Microsoft MCT credentials), has more than 15 years of IT experience and is an independent virtualization consultant and instructor based in the United Kingdom. When not working in the field, he is often found instructing VMware-authorized classes for various VMware authorized training providers. He has been awarded the vExpert designation for his work within the VMware community and blogs at http://www.elasticsky.co.uk. The official study guide helps you master many of the topics on the VCAP5-DCD exam, including Understanding the design process and associated terminology Creating the design, information gathering, and logical design presentation Making meaningful choices in virtualization design Creating logical designs and the process to evolve them into the final physical design Comprehending project execution and the order of delivery, task validation, and project documentation Preparing for the exam with tips and strategy Reviewing the VCAP-DCD experience


Play performs an important position in holistic child development. Bangladesh has made a commitment to extending the opportunity for play based learning in early years settings, but this is not without its problems. The imposition of western norms and expectations around the concept of play clash with the economic realities of families and schools in Bangladesh. This study explores the views and concepts of pre-primary teachers on their understanding and integration of play-based learning in pre-primary contexts of Bangladesh. A qualitative approach was adopted using semi-structured interviews with open questions to probe participants' teaching-learning experiences. Although play is considered important for child development, enabling children's social, emotional, mental, cognitive and intellectual skills, several challenges, both conceptual and environmental, mean the adoption of a playful approach is constrained and in need of revision. A key theme that emerges is the ingenuity and self-reliance of teachers, working amidst a number of constraints and with minimal training. Self-reflection and learning from the children in their classes are important processes with which teachers engage in the transition to an adoption of more playful conceptions of the curriculum.


This paper describes the implementation of the Boussinesq-type model and extends its application to the tsunami wave runup on the clustered islands (multiple adjacent conical islands), in turn, an extensively validated two-dimensional Boussinesq-type model is employed to examine the interaction between a propagating solitary wave and multiple idealised conical islands, with particular emphasis on a combination effect of two adjustable parameters for spacing interval/diameter ratio between the adjacent conical islands, S/D, and the rotating angle of the structural configuration,θ on maximum soliton runup heights. An extensive parameter study concerning the combination effect of alteringθ and S/D on the maximum soliton runup with the multi-conical islands is subsequently carried out and the distributions of the maximum runup heights on each conical island are obtained and compared for the twin-island cases. The worst case study is performed for each case in respect of the enhancement in the maximum wave runup heights by the multi-conical islands. It is found that the nonlinear wave diffraction, reflection and refraction play a significant role in varying the maximum soliton runup heights on multiconical islands. The comparatively large maximum soliton runups are generally predicted for the merged and bottom mounted clusteredislands. Furthermore, the joints of the clustered-merged islands are demonstrated to suffer the most of the tsunami wave attack. The conical islands that position in the shadow regions behind the surrounding islands are found to withstand relatively less extreme wave impact. Although, these numerical investigations are considerable simplifications of the multi conical islands, they give a critical insight into certain important hydrodynamic characteristics of the interaction between an extreme wave event and a group of clustered conical islands, and thus providing a useful engineering guidance for extreme wave mitigation and coastal development. Copyright © 2012 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE).


I want caregivers who are solid, well-rounded, well-grounded people and who relate well to other people. That probably means they have a pretty good sense of humor. I would also expect any doctor with a sense of humor sometimes to find humor in some of the more difficult aspects of patient care, and even to make jokes about very serious things—about tragedies, poor prognoses, deaths. Humor can also be put to good use in human interactions—it's not just something I'd expect to see in normal, healthy human interactions; it can be an exceptionally powerful tool for moving a conversation forward, and for bringing people in the conversation together. But of course, it has to be used properly. I don't want my doctor to ridicule me. This is the topic taken up in this issue by Katie Watson, an ethicist and sometime comedian. Specifically, Watson asks if doctors may ever engage in gallows humor— humor that makes light of difficult situations—and if they sometimes may, then when may they, and what kinds of jokes are acceptable? Watson offers some considerations for sorting out acceptable from unacceptable joking, but for me, what is compelling about the article is less its effort to bring order to a somewhat puzzling aspect of human interaction, but its acceptance of the complexity of human interaction and the difficulty of fully ordering it—even of fully understanding it, even when it's right in front of you. Watson leads off with an example of medical gallows humor and concludes by applying her list of considerations to it, yet the conclusion she reaches has a tentative feel: we are on "thin ice," she allows. There is a considerable literature examining different possible models for the physician-patient relationship, and while that work is valuable, it is also valuable to be reminded of the limits of models. In the lead article in this issue, philosopher Daniel Groll comes even closer to the literature on models of the physician-patient relationship. Indeed, he develops a model for understanding one aspect of physician-patient relationships—namely, disagreements between clinicians and patients about the course of treatment. Groll argues, in effect, that one common model of the physician-patient relationship is mistaken. We should not suppose that, in making a treatment decision, the physician's job is to supply purely technical information, and the patient alone is able to decide what is best to do. Both of these articles aim, in a way, to give physicians a richer, more substantial, less mechanical, and more human role. They may laugh at the tragedies that arise in patient care. They know more about good patient care than is sometimes admitted. But Nell Kirst's installment of the Report's In Practice column offers, perhaps, a check. Part of the challenge of the physician's role is the built-in limitation of it—and this is part of a rich understanding of the relationship. "The price we pay for being allowed into the sacred spaces of our patients' lives," she writes, "is that, in the end, they are the authors and the heroes of their own stories, and we are only bit players."—GEKn THE HASTINGS CENTER


Do you approve of censoring the works of great writers? Some might contend that to bowdlerize a great writer's work would be to diminish its overall quality. Others, like Thomas Bowdler, whose eraser danced over every Shakespeare play, would argue that all modest people should be able to read a great work without blushing. For attacking the classics, Mr. Bowdler has been immortalized as the world's best-known, self-appointed literary censor. And because of his efforts the term bowdlerize has become eponymous with his name. Alternatively, the word bikini-defined as a two-piece bathing suit for women-has been a linguistic mystery since 1947 when these suits were first seen on the beaches of the French Riviera, a year after the United States began testing atom bombs on the Bikini atoll of the Marshall Islands. Some shocked people said that the impact of the scanty swimsuit on male beach loungers was like the devastating effect of the atomic bomb. Whoosh! A simpler and more credible notion is that the daring swimsuits resembled the attire worn by women on the Bikini atoll. Created about a century ago, the term eponym is itself a coinage from two Greek words, epi, "on" or "upon," and onuma, "a name." But its broadened meaning, as dictionaries set it out, refers to a word derived from a proper name. For instance, Salisbury steak-a popular diner menu item created from common hamburger and dressed up with brown gravy to make it more appealing-is named after James H. Salisbury, an English physician who promoted a diet of ground beef. A Dictionary of Eponyms explores the origins of hundreds of these everyday words from Argyle socks to zeppelins. Written in an entertaining and anecdotal style, and with a foreword by Edwin Newman, the book includes a brief biography of the individual whose name became associated with an item or concept as well as information on how and when the name entered the language. If you've ever wondered just where terms like cardigan sweater, pamphlet, and robot come from, Morton Freeman does more than simply define them-he brings them to life.


This article shows that Error-Driven Constraint Demotion (EDCD), an error-driven learning algorithm proposed by Tesar (1995) for Prince and Smolensky's (1993/2004) version of Optimality Theory, can fail to converge to a correct totally ranked hierarchy of constraints, unlike the earlier non-error-driven learning algorithms proposed by Tesar and Smolensky (1993). The cause of the problem is found in Tesar's use of mark-pooling ties, indicating that EDCD can be repaired by assuming Anttila's (1997) permuting ties instead. Proofs show, and simulations confirm, that totally ranked hierarchies can indeed be found by both this repaired version of EDCD and Boersma's (1998) Minimal Gradual Learning Algorithm.


There is a great need today for distribution of medical information. The amount of information is growing quickly, and information that could potentially influence clinical practice fails to reach health care professionals. The supply of information to health care has from the start been the main goal of medical informatics. However, with very few exceptions, the systems developed to support the formalization and distribution of medical knowledge, i.e. decision-support or expert systems, have not attained clinical use. Thus, since there is an unsatisfied need for information and the methods developed so far have been successful to only a limited extent, it is important to gain insight into both how decision-support systems are used and which of their properties may influence the usability.This thesis describes aspects of the use of medical decision-support systems by looking at two prototype implementations of such systems. The prototypes concerned bacterial endocarditis and urinary tract infections respectively. The first prototype system was evaluated and a theory of the use of the system was developed, thereby leading to further theorization and the development of a new system design. The goal of the system designs was to facilitate the interpretation and assessment of generated advice. This kind of support was realized by applying an expertext system model, a model that supports triangulation of decision-support methods and information sources. To organize the information in an expertext environment, a common terminological domain model was used in the second system design. In the theorization, a special focus was on contextual aspects of system use. Differences between knowledge provider and end-user contexts concerning the use of decision-support systems were analyzed. The importance of support for multi-perspective interpretation of system output such as is present in our system designs was confirmed.


The proteoglycan of articular cartilage provides this tissue with its elastic properties, and the structure of these molecules plays a major role in determining the resilience of the tissue to compression. In the present paper we have shown that the structure of the proteoglycan subunits in human articular cartilage changes considerably between the fetus and the mature adult. These changes occur gradually and are essentially complete by the end of growth. With increasing age the following changes were most pronounced: 1) a decrease in the proteoglycan content of the cartilage, 2) a decrease in the size of the proteoglycan subunit, 3) an increase in keratan sulfate relative to chondroitin sulfate, 4) an increase in 6-sulfation relative to 4-sulfation along the chondroitin sulfate chains, 5) an increase in protein relative to glycosaminoglycan, and 6) a decrease in serine and glycine and an increase in arginine content of the core protein. The susceptibility of the proteoglycan to proteolytic degradation by pepsin also showed age-related variations, but papain always produced the same degradation products. Irrespective of age, the majority of the proteoglycan subunits possessed the ability to interact with hyaluronic acid. Thus, although large structural changes take place in the glycosaminoglycan attachment region of the proteoglycan, the hyaluronic acid-binding region would appear to be relatively invariable. Decreases in the concentration, size, and charge of the proteoglycan would be expected to lower the elastic properties of the older cartilage.


Background and Objectives: A high prevalence of non-specific neck or shoulder pain exists among university students. A few studies had been conducted in Malaysia to study the prevalence and possible risk factors associated with non-specific neck pain among college students. The purposes of this study were to study the prevalence, the anatomical locations and disability grading of myofascial trigger points in non-specific neck or shoulder pain among university students. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted. Subjects were selected according to the screening questionnaires. Eligible subjects were examined. Disability levels of the subjects were graded using Neck Disability Index (NDI) and Shoulder Pain and Disability Index (SPADI). MTrPs palpations were done on 6 anatomical locations to locate MTrPs. Flat palpation technique and pincer palpation techniques were used. Results: Among 350 participants, 59.7% participants reported having neck or shoulder pain. Out of 208 participants, 51% participants were having MTrPs with non-specific neck or shoulder pain. In general, both left and right upper trapezius showed the highest percentage of MTrPs which are 94.79% (n=91) respectively, followed by right neck extensors72.97% (n=70) and both left and right levator scapulae63.54 %( n=61). According to disability grading of NDI and SPADI, most subjects showed low levels of associated disability. Conclusions: A high prevalence (51%) of MTrPs with non-specific neck or shoulder pain existed among university students. Upper trapezius, neck extensor and levator scapulae were found to be the muscles that prone to develop MTrPs. Majority of the participants (62.5%) fell under the category of mild disability.


How large should local governments be, and what are the implications of changing the scale of local governments for the quality of local democracy? These questions have stood at the centre of debates among scholars and public sector reformers alike from antiquity to the present. This monograph offers the first systematic cross-national investigation of these questions using empirical evidence gathered specifically for this purpose. Results provide insights that offer important touchstones for reform activities and academic research efforts in many countries


Helicobacter pylori, a cause of peptic ulcer disease and certain types of gastric cancers, has usually been cultured on diverse agar-based media, resulting in a requirement for 2 to 4 days of growth at 37 degrees C. We have developed a novel broth medium consisting of a base medium supplemented with 2% newborn calf serum, Mg2+, Cu2+, Fe2+, Zn2+, Mn2+, and 1 mg of lysed human erythrocytes per ml. This medium supports rapid growth of H. pylori, with a doubling time of about 50 min. Optimal growth was obtained in a pH range higher than that supporting most other gram-negative bacteria (at pH 8.5). H. pylori cultured in this supplemented broth retains the spiral morphology seen in both histological sections and cultures from agar-based media and also retains a high urease activity. After 18 h in this broth, H. pylori transforms to a coccal form with a complete loss of urease activity. Previously these cocci have been reported to be senescent, since they could not be subcultured on agar medium. Our experiments suggest that some of the cocci can revert back to the spiral morphology with full recovery of urease activity when subcultured in fresh microaerobic broth medium.


The platinum-catalyzed and halide-promoted hydroamination of ethylene with aniline is reported for the first time in the presence of simple sodium halides in water. Compounds K2PtX4 (X = Cl or Br), PtX2 or PtX4 (0.3% mol) in the presence of an aqueous solution of excess NaX and aniline under ethylene pressure (25 bar) affords N-ethylaniline with 60–85 turnovers after 10 h at 150 °C. The best result (TON = 85) was obtained in the presence of excess NaBr, whereas a slightly lower activity was observed with NaCl (60 cycles) and practically no activity with NaF or NaI (2–4 cycles). The reaction also produces N,N-diethylaniline (up to 1 cycle) and 2-methylquinoline (up to 8 cycles) as by-products. The influence of added H+ and different oxidizing agents was also examined.


A comprehensive reference for an executable UML and the advantages of modeling This book presents the most up-to-date technology for rapidly developing information systems using the object-oriented paradigm and models, and establishes an executable profile of UML for such model-driven development. As a software developer, architect, or analyst, you'll benefit from learning how information systems can be developed more efficiently using the object-oriented paradigm and model-driven approach. Written by an expert who is uniquely qualified in the topic, this Wrox reference offers a profile of UML that is formal and executable, instead of the relational paradigm or its incomplete coupling with object orientation. It provides a comprehensive tutorial on model-driven development and UML. Provides an in-depth tutorial on using model-driven development and UML for building information systems, with extensive examples Includes tutorials and critics of traditional IS modeling paradigms, such as the relational paradigm, entity-relationship modeling, and the widely used incomplete coupling of object orientation with relational databases Covers basic object-oriented concepts with UML semantics, like classes and data types, attributes, associations, generalizations, operations and methods Proposes new powerful concepts for rapid development of information systems including contemporary user interfaces, such as programming by demonstration and others Model-Driven Development with Executable UML offers a thorough education in this complex topic.


Background and methodology The ovarian cycles of females living and interacting together may synchronise due to pheromones released from axillary secretary glands, the highest concentration of which is produced in the mid-follicular phase, prior to ovulation. The objective of this study was to find evidence for menstrual synchrony in a group of female students living together and to obtain a correlation between the ability to smell the putative pheromone, 5α-androst-16-en-3α-ol (3α-androstenol), found in apocrine secretions and menstrual synchrony. This cross-sectional study involved 88 students who completed a standard questionnaire and whose sense of smell was measured using ten varying thresholds. The menstrual history, friendship scale and menstrual hygiene score was determined for the participants. Results A total of 59.1% of the subjects studied were found to have menstrual synchrony. There was no significant association between menstrual synchrony and smelling threshold. However, a significant correlation was found between menstrual synchrony and personal hygiene score (p<0.01). Conclusions The phenomenon of menstrual synchrony may be related to various factors. The results failed to demonstrate any significant difference between synchronised and non-synchronised subjects in detecting the steroid by sense of smell. However, the odours associated with menstrual blood or vaginal discharge might have an affect on menstrual synchrony.


Jung's seminar on Kundalini yoga, presented to the Psychological Club in Zurich in 1932, has been widely regarded as a milestone in the psychological understanding of Eastern thought and of the symbolic transformations of inner experience. Kundalini yoga presented Jung with a model for the developmental phases of higher consciousness, and he interpreted its symbols in terms of the process of individuation. With sensitivity toward a new generation's interest in alternative religions and psychological exploration, Sonu Shamdasani has brought together the lectures and discussions from this seminar. In this volume, he re-creates for today's reader the fascination with which many intellectuals of prewar Europe regarded Eastern spirituality as they discovered more and more of its resources, from yoga to tantric texts. Reconstructing this seminar through new documentation, Shamdasani explains, in his introduction, why Jung thought that the comprehension of Eastern thought was essential if Western psychology was to develop. He goes on to orient today's audience toward an appreciation of some of the questions that stirred the minds of Jung and his seminar group: What is the relation between Eastern schools of liberation and Western psychotherapy? What connection is there between esoteric religious traditions and spontaneous individual experience? What light do the symbols of Kundalini yoga shed on conditions diagnosed as psychotic? Not only were these questions important to analysts in the 1930s but, as Shamdasani stresses, they continue to have psychological relevance for readers on the threshold of the twenty-first century. This volume also offers newly translated material from Jung's Germanlanguage seminars, a seminar by the indologist Wilhelm Hauer presented in conjunction with that of Jung, illustrations of the cakras, and Sir John Woodroffe's classic translation of the tantric text, the Sat-cakra Nirupana.--Princeton University Press


Many public sector organisations worldwide have implemented performance management systems to improve performance. Performance management was initially designed by the private sector in Western countries and then adopted by the public sector. Now, performance management has become a global reform also implemented in the public sector of countries in transition such as Russia. A system of performance management has been designed and introduced by the federal government of the Russian Federation in 2007 as a part of the Administrative reform agenda.

Success in implementing the performance management in the public sector organisations has varied. The thesis explores the experience of implementing a system of performance management in the local governance of the Russian Federation for the period of time 2013-2014. It addresses a series of questions prompted by the process of implementation. First, the thesis explores the actual process of performance management implementation in the context of the Russian local government. Second, it provided the insights on the attitudes and perceptions of the local authority managers regarding the performance management purpose and implementation. Third, it explores the major challenges encountered during the process of the implementation.

Drawing upon theoretical assumptions of the policy transfer theory, institutional theory and the integrated approach to performance management system, this thesis proposes a richer understanding of the Russian local government performance management implementation in practice as it is looking at the same phenomenon from different angles.

The thesis employs a single method qualitative case study approach. Data is collected mainly through semi-structured interviews, with support of documentary research and participant observations. Study particularly looks at the local governance of the Russian public sector by using Krasnoyarsk City Administration as a case study.

The study gives effect to the basic principles and values of public administration in relation to the implementation of performance management system. The study contributes to the current theories and debate on the mainstreaming and institutionalizing of public service delivery to determine organisational performance by governmental institutions. Particularly, this contributes to the existing body of knowledge regarding challenges encountered during the implementation of Performance Management System in the public sector organisations. It adds to understanding of the public managers' experience of implementing a performance management system in local government and it contributes to the research in this field conducted in transition countries.


We identified the genes encoding the proteins for the transport of glucose and maltose in Neisseria meningitidis strain 2C4-3. A mutant deleted for NMV_1892(glcP) no longer grew on glucose and deletion of NMV_0424(malY) prevented the utilization of maltose. We also purified and characterized glucokinase and α-phosphoglucomutase, which catalyze early catabolic steps of the two carbohydrates. N. meningitidis catabolizes the two carbohydrates either via the Entner-Doudoroff (ED) pathway or the pentose phosphate pathway, thereby forming glyceraldehyde-3-P and either pyruvate or fructose-6-P, respectively. We purified and characterized several key enzymes of the two pathways. The genes required for the transformation of glucose into gluconate-6-P and its further catabolism via the ED pathway are organized in two adjacent operons. N. meningitidis also contains genes encoding proteins which exhibit similarity to the gluconate transporter (NMV_2230) and gluconate kinase (NMV_2231) of Enterobacteriaceae and Firmicutes. However, gluconate might not be the real substrate of NMV_2230 because N. meningitidis was not able to grow on gluconate as the sole carbon source. Surprisingly, deletion of NMV_2230 stimulated growth in minimal medium in the presence and absence of glucose and drastically slowed the clearance of N. meningitidis cells from transgenic mice after intraperitoneal challenge.


Abstract. Tropical forests are a strong source of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) to the atmosphere which can potentially impact the atmospheric oxidation capacity. Here we present airborne and ground-based BVOC measurements representative for the long dry season covering a large area of the northern Amazonian rainforest (6–3° N, 50–59° W). The measurements were conducted during the October 2005 GABRIEL (Guyanas Atmosphere-Biosphere exchange and Radicals Intensive Experiment with the Learjet) campaign. The vertical (35 m to 10 km) and diurnal (09:00–16:00) profiles of isoprene, its oxidation products methacrolein and methyl vinyl ketone and methanol and acetone, measured by PTR-MS (Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry), have been used to empirically estimate their emission fluxes from the forest canopy on a regional scale. The mixed layer isoprene emission flux, inferred from the airborne measurements above 300 m, is 5.7 mg isoprene m−2 h−1 after compensating for chemistry and ~6.9 mg isoprene m−2 h−1 taking detrainment into account. This surface flux is in general agreement with previous tropical forest studies. Inferred methanol and acetone emission fluxes are 0.5 mg methanol m−2 h−1 and 0.35 mg acetone m−2 h−1, respectively. The BVOC measurements were compared with fluxes and mixing ratios simulated with a single-column chemistry and climate model (SCM). The inferred isoprene flux is substantially smaller than that simulated with an implementation of a commonly applied BVOC emission algorithm in the SCM.


To meet the new and rapidly changing demands facing today s higher education managers and leaders from department chairs to trustees this book offers guidance on how to effectively discharge their responsibilities and how to develop their skills for managing their relationships with internal and external stakeholders. It also provides a broad understanding of the structure and functions of their institution and of the appropriate loci of decision-making. The authors go beyond the positions of leadership to emphasize the qualities of creativity, commitment, collaboration, delegation and courage that are essential to steer a unit, college or university through successful and enduring changeRecognizing that the hallmark of higher education in the United States is a diversity of institutional types, this book enables the reader to relate issues of environment, organization and management to his or her specific institution, from not only the presidential perspective, but from the vantage point of trustees, provosts, vice presidents, deans, and department heads. By covering all these functions as well as the role of external stakeholders in a single volume, this book offers readers a comprehensive view of how institutions respond to external forces and internal issues, and how these impact organizational structure, functions and decision-making in their roles, and the institution at large.The book is informed by these three essential principles: Sound institutional decisions must be based on a clearly articulated mission and set of core values; Successful institutional adaptation to a changed environment must be grounded and aligned with the fundamental mission and core values; and Successful academic leaders must be able to create and foster partnerships, bringing diverse individuals and interests together around a shared vision and mission grounded in common values.This handbook is divided into five units. The first introduces the reader to the scholarly field of higher education and establishes the contextual framework for the rest of the book. The second investigates the multifaceted and often complex relationships that exist between institutions of higher learning and the external constituencies. The third focuses how college and university presidents and their board of trustees keep an institutional mission focused while adapting to changes in the environment, while the fourth analyzes how colleges and universities fulfill their core mission through shared democratic partnerships. The concluding unit concerns how effective academic leaders implement their institution s academic mission. Both scholarly and accessible, this book is intended to be of interest to a broad audience, ranging from graduate students in higher education administration programs to members of institutional governing boards, and everyone in leadership positions in between.All of the authors have completed graduate work in a higher education administration program, and collectively have had experience with academic administration at every level through to the university presidency. Two of the authors are currently faculty in leading higher programs teaching classes in administration and organizational theory and have published widely in the scholarly field. One has been a member of a governing board."Study questions suitable for leadership training and graduate courses are provided online. See hot link at top right of this page.""


Myelin is a critical component of the vertebrate nervous system, both increasing the conduction velocity of myelinated axons and allowing for metabolic coupling between the myelinating cells and axons. An increasing number of studies demonstrate that myelination is not simply a developmentally hardwired program, but rather that new myelinating oligodendrocytes can be generated throughout life. The generation of these oligodendrocytes and the formation of myelin are influenced both during development and adulthood by experience and levels of neuronal activity. This led to the concept of adaptive myelination, where ongoing activity‐dependent changes to myelin represent a form of neural plasticity, refining neuronal functioning, and circuitry. Although human neuroimaging experiments support the concept of dynamic changes within specific white matter tracts relevant to individual tasks, animal studies have only just begun to probe the extent to which neuronal activity may alter myelination at the level of individual circuits and axons. Uncovering the role of adaptive myelination requires a detailed understanding of the localized interactions that occur between active axons and myelinating cells. In this review, we focus on recent animal studies that have begun to investigate the interactions between active axons and myelinating cells and review the evidence for—and against—the ability of neuronal activity to alter myelination at an axon‐specific level.


The aim of this thesis is to analyse the impact of the "meso model" on Ghana's cocoa sector in general and the practices and opportunities for smallholder cocoa farmers in particular. Additionally, Ghana's efforts to embrace globalisation are examined. The theoretical framework of this thesis is the neo-structuralism paradigm out of which an analytical framework was distilled to assess the impact of the 1993 reforms. The qualitative methodology was mainly used to collect data but some quantitative techniques were also used to enhance the collection and analysis of the data. Ghana was adjudged the "Star Pupil" of Africa by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank after implementing bold economic reforms in 1983 and the cocoa sector reforms in 1993. But ironically Ghana stood up to the IMF and the Bank by refusing to dismantle its cocoa marketing board (COCOBOD) as was recommended by them under the Washington Consensus and rather adopted a" meso model" of partial liberalisation of the cocoa sector after skilful negotiations.
The thesis makes a significant, original contribution to knowledge in the field of economic development through the following key findings: Firstly, the output of cocoa farmers in general is a function of not only the price paid to them but also the overall environment created for production. Secondly, the" meso model" Ghana adopted challenges the "One Size Fits All" Washington Consensus development model because it enhanced cocoa farmers' output and income, and Ghana's cocoa export and foreign revenue enabling it to attain economic growth and development. Thirdly, the use of mobile phones by cocoa farmers contributes to the reduction in their transport cost and transforms their mode of operations. Finally, Ghana's efforts to embrace globalisation and to integrate into the global economy have been impressive albeit urban bias.


This paper will analyse the power relations involved in social movement research, exploring alternative epistemological practices that resist and subvert academic conventions in order to create new modes of knowing. I will critique the production of a knowledge that aims at liberation and emancipation by conducting research 'about' or 'on behalf of' social movements, and I will show how this approach might lead to their very subjection. It will be argued that, in order to avoid the reproduction of power relations they seek to resist, research practices need to go beyond dialectical modes of knowing, departing from assumptions of the subject/object of knowledge, of objective/subjective research and from the hierarchy between theory and praxis. A precedent is found in the research approaches of post-colonial, activist, and queer studies that seek to experiment different modes of knowing, based not on observation and participation, but on learning from the experience of resistance in social movements: in this way resistant practices become an epistemological perspective rather than an object of study, and research can become a tool of resistance.


Thrombolytic therapy might reduce venous thromboembolism-related mortality and morbidity, but it could also increase the risk of major bleeding. We systematically reviewed the literature to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of thrombolytics in patients with pulmonary embolism (PE) and/or deep venous thrombosis (DVT). We searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane databases for relevant randomized controlled trials up to February 2019. Multiple investigators independently screened and collected data. We included 45 studies (4740 participants). Pooled estimates of PE studies indicate probable reduction in mortality with thrombolysis (risk ratio [RR], 0.61; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.40-0.94) (moderate certainty) and possible reduction in nonfatal PE recurrence (RR, 0.56; 95% CI, 0.35-0.89) (low certainty). Pooled estimates of DVT studies indicate the possible absence of effects on mortality (RR, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.26-2.28) (low certainty) and recurrent DVT (RR, 0.99; 95% CI, 0.56-1.76) (low certainty), but possible reduction in postthrombotic syndrome (PTS) with thrombolytics (RR, 0.70; 95% CI, 0.59-0.83) (low certainty). Pooled estimates of the complete body of evidence indicate increases in major bleeding (RR, 1.89; 95% CI, 1.46-2.46) (high certainty) and a probable increase in intracranial bleeding (RR, 3.17; 95% CI 1.19-8.41) (moderate certainty) with thrombolytics. Our findings indicate that thrombolytics probably reduce mortality in patients with submassive- or intermediate-risk PE and may reduce PTS in patients with proximal DVT at the expense of a significant increase in major bleeding. Because the balance between benefits and harms is profoundly influenced by the baseline risks of critical outcomes, stakeholders involved in decision making would need to weigh these effects to define which clinical scenarios merit the use of thrombolytics.


Drawing on cultural geographical work on mobilities and landscape, this article examines parkour in Singapore, a context in which everyday mobile practices are conventionally understood to be heavily constrained and disciplined. As an urban mobile practice that involves bodily adaptation to and dynamic interaction with the prevailing built environment, parkour reveals complex relationships between the self and the landscape. For its practitioners, the doing of parkour holds potential not only for reimagining what Singapore's urban landscape is or can be but also for reconfiguring understandings of themselves. The term landscaping captures the continuous and concurrent shaping of self and landscape through parkour; landscapes affect individual bodies and are actively (re)constituted through embodied movement. The article engages parkour in more-than-representational terms. By segueing between discursive and phenomenological approaches to mobilities and landscape, a dual emphasis on corporeal experience and representational frameworks highlights how both create and/or regulate such mobile bodies and practices within the landscape.


Since 2011 the increasing arrivals of asylum seekers forced the Italian State to organise a wider and more widespread reception system for refugees and asylum seekers. This paper aims to highlight some of the shadows and few lights that characterize this system, showing its social effects on the population hosted. The analysis proposed is based on the study of official documents, laws and statistics produced by Italian state, interviews with some migrants that lived in reception centres and the participation of the author in the campaign 'LasciateCIEntrare (Let us in)' as an activist. After the analysis, some suggestions are proposed about possible policies able to overcome this reception system, also through a radical change in the Italian housing policy oriented to guarantee housing access as a universal social right.