This is an accessible, fascinating book that unravels the mysteries and beauty of mathematics. It covers 250 milestones in mathematical history, from the magic squares from centuries ago to the discovery of pi. Each topic is lavishly illustrated and includes formulas and concepts, facts about scientists' lives and real-world applications of the theorem. Mathematics' infinite mysteries and beauty unfold in this fascinating book. Beginning millions of years ago with ancient 'ant odometers' and moving through time to our modern-day quest for new dimensions, it covers 250 milestones in mathematical history. Among the numerous delights readers will learn about in this inviting anthology include: cicada-generated prime numbers, magic squares from centuries ago, the discovery of pi and calculus and the butterfly effect. Each topic gets a lavishly illustrated spread with stunning colour art, along with formulas and concepts, fascinating facts about scientists' lives and real-world applications of the theorems.


Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explain how the "objective" institutionalized barriers (of which social, human and financial capital are decisive factors) and the subjective performance of new migrant entrepreneurs jointly affect their business attitudes and observed behavior.

Design/methodology/approach
The paper's analysis of individualized performance factors (dependent on how "objective" institutionalized barriers are subjectively construed) – in line with the theory of planned behavior – enables a response to recent calls to embrace complexity and pluralism in entrepreneurship through applying social constructivist lenses. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 Eritrean entrepreneurs, and the empirical data were subjected to grounded theory analytical procedures and interpretative phenomenological analysis theoretical coding.

Findings
Six core beliefs mitigated entrepreneurial attitudes independently from the objectivized institutionalized barriers: know-how needs to be acquired formally; available sources of financing are internal, and scarce; market expertise is in the books, rather than in the market; blending in the host country's culture is uncalled for, and the resulting difficulty of operating in the "foreign" market is a price worth paying; risk is to be avoided at all cost; and strong intra-communal bonds need not entail support for their business activity, rendering external contacts hardly necessary or trustworthy.

Originality/value
The paper concludes with recommendations potentially informing policies and targeted interventions by highlighting that any policy intervention or an attempt at structural change of conditions in which new migrant entrepreneurship unfolds should consider entrepreneurs as "performing" individuals, as well as representatives of wider cultural, economic and social dynamics relating to these "objective" institutionalized barriers.


The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument on the Curiosity rover has detected evidence of oxychlorine compounds (i.e., perchlorates and chlorates) in Gale crater, which has implications for past habitability, diagenesis, aqueous processes, interpretation of in situ organic analyses, understanding the martian chlorine cycle, and hazards and resources for future human exploration. Pure oxychlorines and mixtures of oxychlorines with Mars-analog phases have been analyzed for their oxygen (O2) and hydrogen chloride (HCl) releases on SAM laboratory analog instruments in order to constrain which phases are present in Gale crater. These studies demonstrated that oxychlorines evolve O2 releases with peaks between ~200 and 600 °C, although the thermal decomposition temperatures and the amount of evolved O2 decrease when iron phases are present in the sample. Mg and Fe oxychlorines decompose into oxides and release HCl between ~200 and 542 °C. Ca, Na, and K oxychlorines thermally decompose into chlorides and do not evolve HCl by themselves. However, the chlorides (original or from oxychlorine decomposition) can react with water-evolving phases (e.g., phyllosilicates) in the sample and evolve HCl within the temperature range of SAM (<~870 °C). These laboratory analog studies support that the SAM detection of oxychlorine phases is consistent with the presence of Mg, Ca, Na, and K perchlorate and/or chlorate along with possible contributions from adsorbed oxychlorines in Gale crater samples.


The laboratory e-tutor is a bespoke collection of self-running presentations in Adobe Communicator on Blackboard, written for the second year thermodynamic and fluid dynamic laboratories. The e-tutor has significantly changed the way laboratories are taught in Engineering by providing a bespoke step by step video guidance to each experiment in the form of an interactive presentation. Building upon the existing LabView computer based data collection and processing, the e-tutor uses the existing PCs attached to each experiment. It enhances the paper instruction sheet that is handed out at the beginning of each laboratory session by providing a multi-media content that enables students to start and run safely through the experiment and data analysis, developing their independent learning and their confidence in performing hands on engineering tasks. Students liked very much the blended learning environment of an e-tutor and a member of staff at hand to ask clarifications if in doubt and embraced the new technology seamlessly. Academic staff are able to focus on stimulating the critical appraisal of the experimental results by the students, which makes laboratories more enjoyable by students and staff.


The hard clam (meretrix lusoria) cultivated industry has been developed vigorously for recent years in Taiwan, and seawater quality determines the cultivated environment. The pH concentration variation affects survival rate of meretrix lusoria immediately. In order to monitor seawater quality, solid-state sensing electrode of ruthenium-doped titanium dioxide (TiO2:Ru) is developed to measure hydrogen ion concentration in different cultivated solutions. Because the TiO2:Ru sensing electrode has high chemical stability and superior sensing characteristics, thus it is applied as a pH sensor. Response voltages of TiO2:Ru sensing electrode are readout by instrument amplifier in different sample solutions. Mean sensitivity and linearity of TiO2:Ru sensing electrode are 55.20 mV/pH and 0.999 from pH1 to pH13, respectively. We expect that the TiO2:Ru sensing electrode can be applied to real environment measurement, therefore we collect two sample solutions by different meretrix lusoria cultivated ponds in the Yunlin, Taiwan. The two sample solutions are both measured for 200 seconds after calibration of standard pH buffer solutions (pH7, pH8 and pH 9). Mean response voltages of sample 1 and sample 2 are -178.758 mV (Standard deviation=0.427 mV) and -180.206 mV (Standard deviation =0.399 mV), respectively. Response voltages of the two sample solutions are between pH 8 and pH 9 which conform to weak alkali range and suitable meretrix lusoria growth. For long-term monitoring, drift of cultivated solutions (sample 1 and sample 2) are 1.16 mV/hour and 1.03 mV/hour, respectively. Keywords—Co-sputtering system, Hard clam (meretrix lusoria), Ruthenium-doped titanium dioxide, Solid-state sensing electrode.


Abstract. Soil studies commonly comprise the uppermost meter for tracing, e.g., soil development. However, the maximum rooting depth of various plants significantly exceeds this depth. We hypothesized that deeper parts of the soil, soil parent material and especially paleosols provide beneficial conditions in terms of, e.g., nutrient contents, thus supporting their utilization and exploitation by deep roots. We aimed to decipher the different phases of soil formation in Dutch drift sands and cover sands. The study site is located at Bedafse Bergen (southeastern Netherlands) in a 200-year-old oak stand. A recent Podzol developed on drift sand covering a Plaggic Anthrosol that was piled up on a relict Podzol on Late Glacial eolian cover sand. Root-free soil and sediment samples, collected in 10–15 cm depth increments, were subjected to a multi-proxy physical and geochemical approach. The Plaggic Anthrosol revealed low bulk density and high phosphorous and organic carbon contents, whereas the relict Podzol was characterized by high iron and aluminum contents. Frequencies of fine (diameter  ≤  2 mm) and medium roots (2–5 mm) were determined on horizontal levels and the profile wall for a detailed pseudo-three-dimensional insight. On horizontal levels, living roots were most abundant in the uppermost part of the relict Podzol with ca. 4450 and 220 m−2, significantly exceeding topsoil root abundances. Roots of oak trees thus benefited from the favorable growth conditions in the nutrient-rich Plaggic Anthrosol, whereas increased compactness and high aluminum contents of the relict Podzol caused a strong decrease of roots. The approach demonstrated the benefit of comprehensive root investigation to support interpretation of soil profiles, as fine roots can be significantly underestimated when quantified at the profile wall. The possible rooting of soil parent material and paleosols long after their burial confirmed recent studies on the potential influence of rooting to overprint sediment–(paleo)soil sequences of various ages, sedimentary and climatic settings. Potential consequences of deep rooting for terrestrial deep carbon stocks, located to a relevant part in paleosols, remain largely unknown and require further investigation.


Background and aim: The concentration of fluoride in drinking water resources is very important in peoples' health issue. One of the main resources of fluoride intake for people is drinking water. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the fluoride concentration in rural drinking water resources of Bardaskan County using geographic information system. Methods: In this descriptive/cross-sectional study, the samples were collected from 30 drinking water resources in Bardaskan in 1393 and fluoride concentration was determined. In order to interpolation of fluoride concentration, the Kriging, Radial Basis Functions, Local Polynomial Interpolation and Global Polynomial Interpolation methods were used. The best interpolation method was determined RMSE. The zoning maps were prepared using geostatistical methods in GIS software. Results: The mean concentration of fluoride in studied resources was 0.562 ± 0.058 mg/L. The minimum and maximum concentrations of fluoride were 0.06 and 1.43 mg/L, respectively. According to the zoning maps, the fluoride concentration was higher in the center of studied area than the overall mean. The simple Kriging method with RMSE of 0.16916 was the best method for zoning of fluoride in the studied area. Conclusion: Based on the results of present study, the fluoride concentration in drinking water resources is in desirable level and there is no concern regarding the fluoride concentration in drinking water.


The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) is among the most endangered canids in the world, with only 300-500 individuals left in the wild. The most severe threats for the remaining populations are habitat fragmentation, hybridisation with domestic dogs, and diseases (rabies and canine distemper virus). The present MSc by Research applies DNA fingerprinting (microsatellite genotyping) based on existing faecal samples collected between 2007 and 2010 to (i) determine the standing amount of genetic variation after recent rabies outbreaks, (ii) reveal the family structure within and between packs using genetic parentage analysis, comparing the obtained results with existing data from field observations and (iii) investigate the effects of recent rabies outbreaks on the genetics of the population. In total, 43 individuals were successfully characterised based on seven microsatellite loci, demonstrating that faecal samples collected several years before analysis are a valuable source for DNA. This is approximately between 10% and 20% of the total population of Ethiopian wolves. Parentage through software analysis in Colony found posterior probabilities of no less than 1.00 for all six offspring individuals analysed. The parentage assignments revealed that offspring regularly moved between packs, which may be attributed to the loss of individuals through rabies during the period of investigation. Analysis found through Coancestry determined that four out of six pairs of parents were above the mean pair-wise relatedness coefficient. It was found that inbreeding avoidance was not a contributing factor to producing offspring in the population. The results of this study contribute to our understanding of the social system of the Ethiopian wolf, document the consequence of disease outbreaks to pack structure, and should be useful to devise future in-situ management plans towards stabilising the existing amount of genetic variation.


This paper examines the effect of competition on product quality when product quality is unobserved before purchase. Using a dataset that records the actual broadband internet speed consumers receive as well as the speed the provider claims is being delivered, I find that an additional broadband competitor raises the ratio of actual to claimed speeds for incumbents by between 23 and 32 percent within the first 6 months, but that this effect attenuates after 18 months. This increase is due to improvements in the actual speed, and not just reductions in the claimed speed. I recover the causal effect of competition on product misrepresentation by leveraging the launch of a broadband-capable satellite in mid-2012 and exploiting exogenous variation in the suitability for satellite internet across U.S. counties. I provide suggestive evidence that the reduction in firms' strategic misrepresentation of their products led to reduced misallocation of consumers across internet plans.


Contemporary analytical economists normally date their origins from the late eighteenth century. We argue herein that a pseudo-scientificity (which omits normative information), combined with an overriding ethnocentrism, tends to lead the disciplinary agents of economics to ignore much economic thought outside the American-British-Continental axis. The argument is developed beginning with Joseph A. Schumpeter's classic, The History of Economic Analysis, which set what appears to have remained a trend in history of economic thought and analysis texts, by ignoring Arab/Islamic scholars. At present, entire economies are organised, more or less, on Islamic principles. Islam is explicitly concerned with material life and provides numerous guidelines for the conduct of economic affairs for millions of people. While it is not the aim of this paper to examine the methodological or epistemological content of these principles, we argue that, at the very least, the history of economic thought should incorporate the work of Arab/Islamic thinkers. The material foundation of Islam cannot be understood by students of a discipline which continues to promote a positivist, Cartesian, mathematical formalism, at the expense of understanding its contextual origins. The economies in which hundreds of millions of people live, work and produce, are being guided, for better or worse, by the epistemological premises of Islam. Until these premises are comprehended, and then critically evaluated, economists educated in the industrial west continue to marginalise themselves and their students in a manner which is no longer excusable.


Article Type Research Article Authors Farajollahi M.1 PhD, Najafi H.* PhD, Nosrati Hashi K.2 BSc, Najafiyan S.3 BSc C I T A T I O N L I N K S Article History Received: February 19, 2013 Accepted: May 11, 2013 ePublished: June 7, 2013 Correspondence Address: Payam-e-Noor University, Up the Jahangardi deer, Khalkhal, Iran. Postal Code: 56817-33653 Phone: +985116653955 Fax: +985118683001 firstname.lastname@example.com *Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Education, Tehran Branch, Payam-e-Noor University, Tehran, Iran. 1Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Education, Tehran Branch, Payam-e-Noor University, Tehran, Iran. 2Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Educational Sciences & Psychology, Isfahan University, Isfahan, Iran. 3Department of Training, Khalkhal Branch, Payam-e-Noor University, Khalkhal, Iran. [1] Educational psychology. [2] Cognitive psychology. [3] Memory psychology. [4] Cogitative and learning styles: Theories and tests. [5] Working with emotional intelligence. [6] Are cognitive still in styles. [7] Cognitive styles: An overview and integration: Educational psychology. [8] A putative treatment interaction and cognitive styles. [9] Styles and pedagogy in post-learning: A systematic and critical review. [10] Field independent and field dependent impact of learning styles on students' achievement Payam-e-Noor university. [11] Filed-dependent and filed-independent cognitive styles and their educational implication. [12] An analysis of student's. [13] The hand book of emotional intelligence: Theory development, assessment and application at home, school and workplace. [14] A study of the relationship between learning styles of field independence-dependence in student's humanities and mathematical sciences. [15] Field independence-dependence and self steam in preadolescents: Dose gender makes a difference.


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In this paper we present a set of observations concerning the analysis and assessment of human bio-behavior during gait process. In the first part of the paper the fundamental and theoretical considerations of the gait process are approached and aspects connected to malfunctions are expressed. In the second part of the paper we present the modeling methodology using the LifeMOD software, while in the third part the results and conclusions are presented.


1753 Aim: Quantitative analysis of PET studies requires standardized and advanced image processing and analysis tools. The aim of this work was to develop a software tool that provides the user with a series of (semi-)automated image analysis and PET based segmentation methods to quantitatively analyse tracer uptake in oncology and lymphoma PET/CT studies. Methods and results: ACCURATE is developed in IDL version 8.4 (Harris Geospatial Solutions, Bloomfield, USA) and runs under the IDL virtual machine, which is freely available. ACCURATE allows for DICOM input of both PET and CT data. It includes several image processing steps such as rebinning/resampling, cropping and smoothing. After loading and processing PET/CT images, lesions can be delineated using a range of segmentation
 Methods: fixed sized segmentations (squares, cubes, circles, spheres), manual free hand segmentation, fixed SUV thresholds; % of SUVmax or SUVpeak isocontours with or without local contrast correction; a gradient based method and 2 majority vote based implementations. During the extraction of quantitative uptake features, such as SUVmax, SUVpeak, SUVmean, metabolic volume and total lesion glycolysis and various other 1st order statistics, 4 different partial volume correction methods can be applied. Moreover the tool can provide the user with more than 250 radiomics output features, with either relative and/or fixed SUV binning. In addition, optimized semi-automated workflows for quickly and easily assessing total tumor burden are available. The tool has also functionality to extract time activity curves from dynamic PET studies which can be used for full quantitative kinetic analysis. Finally, the tool can deal with correct SUV calculations for long-lived isotopes, i.e. it allows for decay correction over multiple days. Several data sanity checks have been incorporated, such as swapping of weight and height and other data plausibility checks. Liver uptake can be quickly previewed and verified. Results obtained with ACCURATE have been verified using simulations, phantom studies and a head-to-head comparison with other (commercially available) image analysis tools using clinical datasets. Conclusions: ACCURATE allows for quick and reliable analysis of (FDG) PET/CT studies using state of the art segmentation and image processing methods. The tool is particularly suited for exploring the effects of image processing, segmentation strategies and partial volume corrections on the quantitative evaluation of oncology or lymphoma PET studies. New functionality beyond state the art will be continuously added. The tools will be made freely available (firstname.lastname@example.com)


An elephant's trunk is so nimble, it can pick up a single blade of grass, and yet so strong, it can knock over a tree. Giraffes have eyelashes. Sloths hang from trees for days at a time without going to the bathroom. These are just some of the insights featured in Life-Size Zoo. Acclaimed wildlife photographer Toyofumi Fukuda visited Japan's premier zoos to capture remarkably vivid and detailed close-up photographs of 21 animals, from pandas and meerkats to giraffes, rhinos, and elephants (adult and baby). Each photograph is accompanied by a profile including body length, weight, and natural habitat, as well as fun facts about the animal.


A method for the automated design, specification, and implementation of protocol architectures is introduced. A natural-language-like protocol architecture specification technique, called Archetype, is formulated. This technique aids the design by enabling an unambiguous specification of the protocol architecture on the level of the communications technologies used, without involvement in the complex implementation details of these technologies. The author defines a data-driven concurrent execution model and specifies the generation of executable specifications from abstract protocol architecture specifications. The exploitation of parallelism in the execution model enables the fulfilment of performance constraints placed on protocol architectures. An architecture based on a single X.25-level 3-like protocol is used as an illustrative example. >


Accurate representations of subsurface flow in hydrologic models of permafrost terrain during spring thaw require an understanding of soil thaw and soil thaw rates. Field data, including daily photographs for snowcover estimation and meteorological measurements, and measurements of soil thaw depth, soil temperature and soil moisture content, were acquired on an organic-covered hillslope in Granger Basin, Yukon Territory, to quantify relationships between net radiation and soil thaw energy. The infiltration and freezing of meltwater into the soil likely contributes to pre-thaw warming. When this energy (1.82 MJ m−2 d−1) is taken into consideration, the daily mean contribution to soil thaw from net radiation is approximately 9%. Accounting for a period of refreezing that occurred during the study period and distributing the energy across the hillslope, the measured and estimated soil thaw depths compared well ( R 2=0.92 and slope = 1.09). This research contributes to the understanding of active layer development, sheds insight into the role of infiltrating and freezing meltwater on soil thaw and provides an approach for the estimation of soil thaw based on a direct link between surface net radiation and the subsurface energy regime.


Since the Lead-cooled Fast Reactor (LFR) has been conceptualized in the frame of GEN IV International Forum (GIF), ENEA is strongly involved on the HLM technology development.Currently ENEA has implemented large competencies and capabilities in the field of HLM thermal-hydraulic, coolant technology, material for high temperature applications, corrosion and material protection. In this frame, the HELENA facility is well instrumented and it represents a loop working in pure lead for experiments in the field of corrosion for LFR structural materials, component test, and thermal-hydraulic investigations. The components and the process of the facility has been also depicted in some details. The scheduled working activities has been described and the main steps focused.A prototypical mechanical pump has been designed and manufactured to properly work in pure lead at high temperatures. The long-run test on the component will be isothermal at 400°C with low oxygen content <10−8 % in weight; the oxygen content will be monitored continuously. The pump will be gradually driven to the reference mass flow rate 35 kg/s and this mass flow rate will be maintained for 1500 h, i.e. 2 months about. After this, the pump is stopped and the loop is drained. Then, the pump impeller is disassembled by the body and it is analyzed for corrosion. Then, a test on the ball valves is carried out for a few months. At the end of 2014, the facility is upgraded with the insertion of the FPS in the heating section and with the secondary side. A 19-pin wire-spaced Fuel Pin bundle Simulator (FPS) is installed to measure clad temperature and heat transfer coefficients in different conditions in the different ranks of sub-channels of the MYRRHA bundle. Therefore a test matrix on the forced convection condition in the wire-spaced bundle will be carried out.A 7 tube/shell-and-tube Heat Exchanger couples the primary lead loop with the secondary side with water in pressure at 100 bar. The tube-in-tube technology with lead tube side, water shell side, steel powder in the gap is adopted. Bubble tubes with flowing Argon are adopted to measure pressure losses in the different branches of the loop. Several thermocouples monitor the loop in different points. An ancillary gas system ensures the cover gas.The paper reports the description of the experiments, the proposed test matrix and description the technological solution adopted for the HELENA implementation.Copyright © 2014 by ASME


We describe a distributed datastore tailored for edge computing that provides session consistency between otherwise eventual consistent replicas. Existing solutions for session consistency assume that the client is associated with the same replica through a session. However, in edge computing use-cases, a client interacts with multiple replicas housed on different datacenters over time, either as a result of application partitioning, or client mobility. Our core algorithmic innovation is our client reconciliation algorithm that enforces session consistency by tracking and migrating only the clientaffected keys between the replicas. Our results show that our approach provides session consistency at a fraction of the latency and bandwidth costs of a strongly consistent system, and with reasonable migration costs.


Introduction Faecal calprotectin (FC) is a marker of intestinal inflammation, used to investigate gastrointestinal symptoms for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The normal range and significance of mild elevations in FC remains under debate. This study aimed to determine endoscopic findings and conditions associated with levels of 50–200. Methods Data was collected retrospectively. Details of patients with FC of 50–200 received by St Richard's Hospital pathology department over an 11 month period were obtained. Results were reviewed with clinical information from clinic letters and investigations that were available 9 months after the FC collection period. Results 189 patients had a FC of 50–200, with 109 having clinical information available. The remaining 80 not seen in secondary care were excluded. Of the 109 patients included, mean FC was 102.7, 73 were female and mean age 47.3 years. The most prevalent symptoms were abdominal pain (46.8%) and diarrhoea (64.2%). 82 (75.2%) patients underwent endoscopy, (54 colonoscopies, 32 flexi-sigmoidoscopies), with 10 procedures done before. 47 (57.3%) patients had normal endoscopies, with 34 (63%) colonoscopies being normal. Abnormalities included inflammation, ulcers, diverticulosis and polyps with low grade dysplasia. 51 patients had mucosal biopsies at recent endoscopy, with 12 showing inflammation. From these 12 patients; mean FC was 135.9, though 3 had FC < 100, 4 were diagnosed with IBD (mean FC = 167.5), 2 followed up for possible IBD, 1 had collagenous colitis, 3 had non-specific colitis and 2 had infective colitis. All patients with IBD or possible IBD had FC ≥ 100, with mean FC of 158.3. Patients with no inflammation on biopsy had mean FC of 100.3. Clinic letters showed 37 (33.9%) patients had a diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), with mean FC of 97. 21 (19.3%) patients with normal investigations lacked a formal diagnosis, being mostly discharged or not followed up. Many patients avoided endoscopy as alternative diagnoses were made. Other diagnoses included chronic pancreatitis (5.5%), gastroenteritis (5.5%), coeliac disease (2.8%), diverticulosis (5.5%) or symptoms improved (3.7%). Conclusion FC levels of 50–200 have a low association with subsequent diagnosis of IBD (3.6%). Many patients were diagnosed with IBS or had normal investigations indicating a functional condition. In this range of FC, patients with inflammation on biopsy had a higher FC than those with negative biopsies (p < 0.05). Inflammation caused by IBD had a higher FC than other causes of inflammation. Negative predictive values of FC 50–99 were higher than FC 100–200 with regards to excluding IBD (100% v 91.8%) and mucosal inflammation if undergoing endoscopy (95% v 81.6%). Many patients with FC 50–200 were not referred to secondary care. This study suggests a low rate of missed IBD is likely as a result. Disclosure of Interest None Declared


Several studies have described the biceps brachii muscle as one of the muscles in the upper limb with most frequent anatomical variations. They also reported the presence of this anomaly in varying frequency in different populations. The aim of this study was to assess the anatomical description of the third head of biceps brachii muscle and its abnormal innervation in human autopsies which would be of value for the surgical approach in the arm. Forty arms (20 cadavers) were dissected. The upper arm and axilla region of all cadavers were dissected carefully, then the biceps brachii muscle and surrounding structures were clearly demonstrated to show any muscle variations and abnormalities of its nerve supply, then different photographs were collected. The present study demonstrated the third head of the biceps brachii muscle in 6 out of 40 specimens (15%). The third head of biceps brachii was dominant in the right arm (4 specimens) in contrast to two specimens in the left arms and the muscle was innervated by the median nerve instead of normal innervations by the musculocutaneous nerve. In conclusion, the present study of anatomical variations of the biceps brachii muscle in the arm may contribute to a better developmental understanding and surgical approach.

 Key words: Biceps brachii, anatomical variation, median and musculocutaneous nerves, human autopsy.


High performance aromatic polymers such as PEEK and PEK are widely
used in composite and related applications. However, their high rate
thermomechanical properties are not well understood. This thesis
describes a series of investigations into their mechanical behaviour over
a large range of strain rates (10-3 -103 s-1
) and temperatures (20-200°
C) which were carried out in order to more fully understand their
properties and to assess the applicability of standard polymer property
models to their behaviour. The experiments involved the design and
construction of two novel sets of high rate test apparatus. These were a
cross-bow based system which enabled high strains to be obtained at
strain rates of 103 s-1 and a drop-weight system based around a high
speed camera which enabled direct measurements of radial strain and
observation of sample behaviour to take place. The cross-bow apparatus
incorporated a laser-photodiode system to enable direct strain
measurements to be made and thus had an advantage over
conventional Hopkinson bars of direct, rather than derived, strain
measurements with a sufficiently energetic projectile to produce large
deformations. These systems were used in addition to standard
hydraulic ram and dropweight equipment. A heater unit to enable tests to
be carried out over the desired temperature range was also designed
and constructed and used with all the above systems.
A comprehensive set of Differential Scanning Calorimetry and X-ray
tests were carried out on samples before and after mechanical testing in
order to provide structural data to aid the interpretation of the mechanical test results


Guided by the problematic integration theory, the purpose of this study was to determine what probabilistic and evaluative orientations were formed during post-disaster decision-making following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the 2011 Tuscaloosa Tornado, the 2011 Mississippi Delta flooding, and a pair of tornados in Hattiesburg Mississippi in 2013 and 2017. A series of focus groups were conducted in communities impacted by these disasters. Five different themes emerged when coding the focus group data for probabilistic and evaluative orientations formed: (1) Distrust, (2) Disorientation, (3) Desperation, (4) Disparity, and (5) Disconnection. The broader implications of this study shed light on how people handle personal uncertainty, especially in situations where their lives have been dramatically shifted in a negative way.


While there is substantial evidence to suggest that wilderness therapy (WT) is beneficial for individuals with mental illnesses, little research explores how such programs can be used to augment transitional support to adults who are currently in acute clinical care. This article provides evidence to show that WT has a positive impact on the recovery and transition of this population. Twenty-four inpatients participated in a three-day, two-night WT camp supported by a registered nurse, two Certified Therapeutic Recreation Specialists, and two recreation therapy student interns. Results indicate the WT program positively impacted clients' positive moods, social skills, daily living, and coping skills, while providing a break from an institutional setting. A therapeutic recreation (TR) practice perspective, described through the APIED process (assessment, planning, implementation, evaluation, and documentation) is presented. Subscribe to TRJ


In the CO2 capture from power generation, the energy penalties for the capture are one of the main challenges. Nowadays, the post-combustion methods have energy penalties lower than the oxy-combustion and pre-combustion technologies. One of the main disadvantages of the post-combustion method is the fact that the capture of CO2 at atmospheric pressure requires quite big equipment for the high flow rates of flue gas, and the low partial pressure of the CO2 generates an important loss of energy. The Allam cycle presented for NETPOWER gives high efficiencies in the power production and low energy penalties. A simulation of this cycle is made together with a simulation of power plants with pre-combustion and post-combustion capture and without capture for natural gas and for coal. The simulations give lower efficiencies than the proposed for NETPOWER. For natural gas the efficiency is 52% instead of the 59% presented, and 33% instead of 51% in the case of using coal as fuel. Are brought to light problems in the CO2 compressor due the high flow of CO2 that is compressed until 300bar to be recycled into the combustor.


Next generation wireless architectures are expected to enable slices of shared wireless infrastructure which are customized to specific mobile operators/services. Given infrastructure costs and the stochastic nature of mobile services' spatial loads, it is highly desirable to achieve efficient statistical multiplexing amongst network slices. We study a simple dynamic resource sharing policy which allocates a 'share' of a pool of (distributed) resources to each slice-Share Constrained Proportionally Fair (SCPF). We give a characterization of the achievable performance gains over static slicing, showing higher gains when a slice's spatial load is more 'imbalanced' than, and/or 'orthogonal' to, the aggregate network load. Under SCPF, traditional network dimensioning translates to a coupled share dimensioning problem, addressing the existence of a feasible share allocation given slices' expected loads and performance requirements. We provide a solution to robust share dimensioning for SCPF-based network slicing. Slices may wish to unilaterally manage their users' performance via admission control which maximizes their carried loads subject to performance requirements. We show this can be modeled as a "traffic shaping" game with an achievable Nash equilibrium. Under high loads the equilibrium is explicitly characterized, as are the gains in the carried load under SCPF vs. static slicing. Detailed simulations of a wireless infrastructure supporting multiple slices with heterogeneous mobile loads show the fidelity of our models and range of validity of our high load equilibrium analysis.


Though there is much work on how inconsistency in databases should be managed, there is good reason to believe that end users will want to bring their domain expertise and needs to bear in how to deal with inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose the concept of inconsistency management policies (IMPs). We show that IMPs are rich enough to specify many types of inconsistency management methods proposed previously, but provide end users with tools that allow them to use the policies that they want. Our policies are also capable of allowing inconsistency to persist in the database or of eliminating more than a minimal subset of tuples involved in the inconsistency. We present a formal axiomatic definition of IMPs and present appropriate complexity results, together with results linking different IMPs together. We extend the relational algebra (RA) to incorporate IMPs and present theoretical results showing how IMPs and classical RA operators interact.


OF THESIS DIAPHRAGMATIC BREATHING AND ITS EFFECT ON INHIBITORY CONTROL Evidence suggests that slow paced diaphragmatic breathing (DB) can significantly affect prefrontal cortex functions through increasing an individual's physiological self-regulatory capacity. The current research demonstrates the effects of paced DB on inhibitory control, which is considered to be a reliable measure of behavioral self-regulation. Eighty healthy participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (20 males and females each). Participants were instructed on either DB at a pace of six-breaths per minute (BPM) or instructions on environmental awareness and asked to breathe at 12 BPM. Following training, all participants completed a computerbased task designed to examine inhibitory processes. Physiological recordings of heart rate (HR), BPM, and HRV were collected at baseline, during the breathing training, during the cued go/no-go task, and after the cued go/no-go task. The findings demonstrated that the DB condition had significantly lower BPM, HR, and higher HRV (p's<0.05) during active training than the environmental awareness condition. Furthermore, the DB condition performed significantly better on the measure of inhibition than the environmental awareness condition (p<0.05). The use of DB as a reliable method to increase physiological self-regulatory capacity and improve behavioral self-regulation, measured as inhibitory control, should continue to be explored.


Responses of woody plant communities on native rangelands in the western South Texas Plains to fire are not clearly understood. Our objective was to compare woody plant cover, density, and diversity on burned and nontreated rangelands. Five rangeland sites that received 2 dormant-season burns, 5 rangeland sites that received a combination of 1 dormant-season and 1 growing-season burn, and 5 sites of nontreated rangeland were selected on the Chaparral Wildlife Management Area, Dimmit and La Salle Counties, Tex. Woody plant cover was estimated using the line intercept method, and stem density was estimated in 25-x 1.5-m plots. Species richness did not differ among treatments. Percent woody plant cover was reduced by 50 and 41 % on winter and winter-summer combination burned sites, respectively. Honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa Torr.), twisted acacia (Acacia schaffneri S. Wats.), Texas persimmon (Diospyros texana Scheele), lotebush [Ziziphus obtusifolia (Hook.) T. & G.], wolfberry (Lycium berlandieri Dunal), and tasajillo (Opuntia leptocaulis Cand.) canopy cover was greatest on nontreated sites. Woody plant density declined by 29 and 23% on winter and winter-summer combination burned sites, respectively. Density of guayacan (Guajacum angustifolium Engelm.), wolfberry, and tasajillo was less on all burning treatments. Percent cover of spiny hackberry (Celtis pallida Torr.) and density of Texas pricklypear (Opuntia engelmannii Salm-Reif.-Dyck) declined on winter burned sites. Inclusion of summer fire into the burning regime did not increase declines in woody plants. Fire created a post-fire environment which resulted in the decline of many woody plant species. It is unclear to what degree other environmental factors such as herbivory and competition between woody plants and among woody and herbaceous vegetation may have interacted with fire in producing woody plant declines. Fire may be a useful tool in managing woody vegetation on native south Texas rangelands, while maintaining woody plant diversity.


Background: Policy and practice in early years provision in education, health and social care has advanced in recent times to emphasise parents as partners in supporting children's learning. Speech and language therapists (SLT) work closely with parents of pre-school children with language learning difficulties to enable them to promote language development in the home. There is growing evidence that indicates that parents can be taught how to become effective facilitators of language skills. Nevertheless, little is known about parents' or SLTs' conceptions of their roles when working together, and how these may change during intervention.
Aims: To explore parents' and SLTs' conceptions of their respective roles in intervention for pre-school children with primary speech and language needs and to determine the extent to which parents' conceptions of roles change whilst working with SLTs .
Methods: A two phase, mixed methods study was conducted using semi structured interviews and questionnaires, with parents and SLTs in England. A smaller subset of parents participated in a longitudinal study to track any changes in their conceptions during intervention. The data were analysed using thematic network analysis for first level themes, framework analysis for comparing themes over time and statistical analysis for the questionnaire responses. Over 65 parents and 70 SLTs participated in the study during both phases, providing the perspectives of a wide range of participants.
Results: Findings suggested that before involvement with speech and language therapy, parents had a clear conception of their advocacy role, which prompted them to secure help. However, they did not have a firm conception of their role in supporting their children's language learning and did not anticipate adopting an intervener role. Parents expressed considerable variation in their conception of their intervener role. During intervention, some parents described changing this conception and adopting an increasingly involved role as implementer and adaptor of intervention. Moreover, in some cases, they described substantial changes in their approach to parenting, suggesting wider changes in their conception of role.
SLTs had clearly formulated conceptions of their own roles as assessor, intervener and negotiator, but varied in the extent to which they involved parents as co-workers in intervention. SLTs had two conceptions of their own role as intervener: treat and plan and advise/coach. SLTs expressed intentions to help parents change their understanding of their role, but the parent education role remains largely implicit in SLT practice.
Conclusions and implications: Parents described conceptions of their roles as advocate, intervener and taking responsibility. They described important changes in their conceptions of roles, suggesting that a process of conceptual change occurred associated with greater involvement in intervention. SLTs varied in their own role conception, with intervener roles that related to lower or high level of parent involvement. Implications for the SLT practice include developing a more explicit role as parent educators, in order to enhance parental understanding as well as behaviour in supporting their children's language development.
This report presents independent research funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) reference number RP-PG-0109-10073. The views and opinions expressed by author in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the NHS, the NIHR, NIHR CCF, the Programme Grants for Applied Research programme or the Department of Health. The views and opinions expressed by the interviewees in this publication are those of the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect those of the author, those of the NHS, the NIHR CCF Programme Grants for Applied Research programme or the Department of Health.


Abstract:Young people were at the forefront of the millions-strong 2011 uprising against the corrupt and authoritarian rule of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Eight years since this uprising, many of these young people find themselves besieged, disengaged, and disgruntled amid a resurgence of militarized authoritarianism. This article examines the state of Egypt's youth and argues that through the dynamics of dissociation, disenchantment, and desecration, these youth are creatively confronting and deflating the state's propaganda using digital artistic productions such as suggestive caricatures, sarcastic memes, and video pranks. Although such expressions are often seen as lacking political resonance or outcomes, they take on a particular import against the backdrop of a stark and resilient youth boycott of invitations to state-sponsored electoral and political participation. Given that many scholars were blindsided by the rapid and sustained revolutionary mobilizations of 2010 and 2011, it would be wise not to overlook the effects of low-grade humorous online dissent on the long-term development of political culture, and particularly a burgeoning grassroots culture of democracy, in Egypt and other countries affected by the Arab Spring.


Background
MITO-8 showed that prolonging platinum-free interval by introducing non-platinum-based chemotherapy (NPBC) does not improve prognosis of patients with partially platinum-sensitive recurrent ovarian cancer. Quality of life (QoL) was a secondary outcome.

Patients and methods
Ovarian cancer patients recurring or progressing 6-12 months after previous platinum-based chemotherapy (PBC) were randomized to receive PBC or NPBC as first treatment. QoL was assessed at baseline, third and sixth cycles, with the EORTC C-30 and OV-28 questionnaires. Mean changes and best response were analysed. Progression-free survival, response rate, and toxicity are also reported for proper interpretation of data. All analyses were based on intention-to-treat.

Results
Out of the 215 patients, 151 (70.2%) completed baseline questionnaire, balanced between the arms; thereafter, missing rate was higher in the NPBC arm. At mean change analysis, C30 scores were prevalently worse in the NPBC than PBC arm, statistical significance being attained for emotional functioning, global health status/QoL, fatigue, and dyspnoea (effect sizes ranging from 0.30 to 0.51). Conversely, as for OV28 scale, the other chemotherapy side-effects item was significantly worse with PBC at three and six cycles, with a larger effect size (0.70 and 0.54, respectively). At best response analysis, improvement of emotional functioning and pain and worsening of peripheral neuropathy and other chemotherapy side-effects were significantly more frequent in the PBC arm. Progression-free survival (median 9 versus 5 months, P = 0.001) and objective response rate (51.6% versus 19.4%, P = 0.0001) were significantly better with PBC. Allergy, blood cell count, alopecia, nausea, musculoskeletal, and neurological side-effects were more frequent and severe with PBC; hand-foot skin reaction, rash/desquamation, mucositis, and vascular events were more frequent with NPBC.

Conclusion
MITO-8 QoL analysis shows that deterioration of some functioning and symptom scales is lower with PBC, with improvement of emotional functioning and pain, despite worsening of toxicity-related items.

ClinicalTrials.gov
NCT00657878.


This study provides information on bathymetric and longitudinal distribution heterogeneity of the rockfish Helicolenus dactylopterus in the southern Tyrrhenian Sea. Data were drawn from experimental bottom trawl (1996-2002) plus bottom trap (2001-02) surveys. The frequency of occurrence and mean relative density (N/km2) and biomass (kg/km2) indexes were calculated for two survey seasons (spring and autumn), four geographic sectors and three depth strata. MANOVA was used to test fish abundance among years, sectors and strata. Analysis of the length-frequency distributions was carried out by two-way (gears and depths) ANOVA, post hoc multiple comparisons for testing differences among depths and Student's t test for testing differences between gears. Length-weight relationship was also estimated and the allometric coefficient was tested with the Student's t test. The results showed a significant positive bathymetric gradient of sizes both for trawl and trap surveys; at same depths, fish caught by traps were significantly longer than those caught by trawl. In spring surveys, significant differences were found among strata for both abundance indexes; in autumn surveys, significant differences between depth strata were found only for density indices. The distribution and abundance patterns of H. dactylopterus along the southern Tyrrhenian Sea was homogeneous among sectors. Length-weight relationship showed a significant positive allometric growth.


With the population of postgraduates increasing in China, their academic study has attracted the attention of second language acquisition researchers. But the research into postgraduates' motivation and autonomy is unfortunately scarce. This study explores the relationship between learning motivation and learner autonomy among English-major postgraduates based on the questionnaire administered to 117 participants. In view of the complicatedness of the postgraduates' academic study, both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivations were further divided into two types. The results show that: 1) four types of motivation differ significantly and the strongest is motivation for job; 2) although each type of motivation positively correlates with the perceived autonomy, yet only type of intrinsic motivation and one type of extrinsic motivation has predictive power for the perceived autonomy. It indicates that binary classification of motivation does not work well in predicting the postgraduates' perceived autonomy.


Over the past two decades there has been a prevailing shift in economic policy in many countries. This reflects the continuing rise of neo-liberalism – the doctrine that economic policy should 'leave it to the market' and that governments should retreat from market intervention. This book provides a balanced and comprehensive appraisal of these important policy developments. The authors examine the most notable trends in neo-liberal economic policy such as the withdrawal from the use of fiscal measures and the reliance on monetary policy. They discuss the neo-liberal view that the causes of unemployment lie in the operation of the labour market, in particular its inflexibility. They also assess the increasing inclination towards the liberalisation and deregulation of markets, most notably financial markets.


This work demonstrates an application of different real-time speech technologies, exploited in an online gaming scenario. The game developed for this purpose is inspired by the famous television based quiz-game show, "Who wants to be a millionaire", in which multiple-choice questions of increasing difficulty are asked to the participant. Text-to-speech synthesis is used to read out the questions and the possible answers to the user, while an automatic speech recognition engine is exploited to get input from the player, in order to proceed through the game. The speech data is recorded from the user with the help of a real-time voice activity detector to select speech segments from the input audio data. The developed Java application allows an automatic insertion of new multiple-choice questions, of different complexity, which could then be selected during the game.


Aim: In the last few years there has been a significant increase in the number social science research studies on anti-doping. Few studies have directly examined how athletes (and others) perceive anti-doping rules and processes, nor knowledge of doping practices. The aims of the present research are to assess current levels of doping knowledge amongst elite athletes and their support personnel (defined here as coaches and other support staff at the athlete's club or organisation), and to investigate knowledge of the practice of doping in Australian sport. Here the 'practice' of doping is defined as the commission of anti-doping rule violations.

Design: A mixed method approach, with an initial on-line survey, followed by in-depth interviews. Method: A total sample of 433 athletes, coaches and support staff completed an online survey, with 98 of those participants also completing a face-to face interview. Results: Attitudes toward doping were overwhelmingly negative, with both athletes and support personnel advocating strong sanctions for deliberate doping, with slightly greater leniency for cases of accidental doping. A wide range of strategies for avoiding the detection of doping were described, including evasion, test tampering and the use of making agents. There were major gaps in knowledge about doping amongst both athletes and support personnel, such as a poorunderstanding of the potential benefits of doping and a widespread perception that doping was a problem for 'other' sports, even though many expressed views that athletes or teams that they were directly competing against were currently doping.

Conclusion: Athletes and support staff share a number of potentially damaging expectancies about doping: specifically: doping is common (almost normalised in some sports), banned substances are relatively easy to obtain, and doping is unlikely to be detected. These expectancies, combined with a set of largely unrealistic expectations about the efficacy of both legal nutritional supplements and banned substances, suggest that current anti-doping campaigns are failing to deter doping. Instead, it is to be expected that doping will continue to proliferate amongst elite athletes, and also to become increasingly common amongst community level athletes and even non-athletes.


IN VITRO METHODS TO PREDICT AEROSOL DRUG DEPOSITION IN NORMAL ADULTS By Renishkumar R. Delvadia, B. Pharm., M.Pharm. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2012 Major Director: Peter R Byron, Ph.D. Professor & Chair, Department of Pharmaceutics School of Pharmacy This research was aimed at the development and validation of new in vitro methods capable of predicting in vivo drug deposition from dry powder inhalers, DPIs, in lung-normal human adults. Three physical models of the mouth, throat and upper airways, MT-TB, were designed and validated using the anatomical literature. Small, medium and large versions were constructed to cover approximately 95% of the variation seen in normal adult humans of both genders. The models were housed in an artificial thorax and used for in vitro testing of drug deposition from Budelin Novolizer DPIs using a breath simulator to mimic inhalation profiles reported in clinical trials of deposition from the same inhaler. Testing in the model triplet produced results for in vitro total lung deposition (TLD) consistent with the complete range of drug deposition results reported in vivo. The effect of variables such as in vitro flow rate were also predictive of in vivo deposition. To further assess the method's robustness, in vitro drug deposition from 5 marketed DPIs was assessed in the "medium" MT-TB model. With the exception of Relenza Diskhaler, mean values for %TLD+SD differed by only < 2% from their literature in vivo. The relationship between inhaler orientation and in vitro regional airway deposition was determined. Aerosol drug deposition was found to depend on the angle at which an inhaler is inserted into the mouth although the results for MT deposition were dependent on both the product and the formulation being delivered. In the clinic, inhalation profiles were collected from 20 healthy inhaler naïve volunteers (10M, 10F) before and after they received formal inhalation training in the use of a DPI. Statistically significant improvements in Peak Inhalation Flow Rate (PIFR) and Inhalation Volume (V) were observed following formalized training. The shapes of the average inhalation profiles recorded in the clinic were found to be comparable to the simulated profiles used in the in vitro deposition studies described above. In conclusion, novel in vitro test methods are described that accurately predict both the average and range of aerosol airway drug deposition seen from DPIs in the clinic.


Increasing variability of rainfall patterns requires detailed understanding of the pathways of water loss from ecosystems to optimize carbon uptake and management choices. In the current study we characterized the usability of three alternative methods of different rigor for quantifying stand-level evapotranspiration (ET), partitioned ET into tree transpiration (T), understory transpiration, interception, and soil evaporation (E S) and determined their sensitivity to drought, and evaluated the reliability of soil moisture measurements by taking into account deep soil moisture dynamic. The analyses were conducted in an early- and in a mid-rotation stand of loblolly pine, the predominant species of southern US forest plantations. The three alternative methods for estimating ET were the eddy covariance measurements of water vapor fluxes (ET EC), the water table fluctuation (ET WT), and the soil moisture fluctuation (ETSM). On annual and monthly scales, the three methods agreed to within 10-20%, whereas on a daily scale, the values of ET SM and ETEC differed by up to 50% and ETSM and ET WT differed by up to 100%. The differences between the methods were attributed to root water extraction below measurement depth and to the sampling at different spatial scales. Regardless of the method used, ET at the early-rotation site was 15-30% lower than that at the mid-rotation site. The dry years did not affect ET at the mid-rotation site but reduced significantly ET at the early-rotation site. Soil moisture trends revealed the importance of measuring water content at several depths throughout the rooting zone because less than 20% of the water is stored in the top 30 cm of soil. Annually, E S represented approximately 9 and 14% of ETEC at the mid-rotation site and the early-rotation site, respectively. At the mid-rotation site, T accounted for approximately 70% of ET EC. Canopy interception was estimated to be 5-10% of annual precipitation and 6-13% of total ETEC. At the early-rotation site, T accounted for only 35% of ET EC. At this site, transpiration from subdominant trees and shrubs represented 40-45% of ET EC, indicating that understory was a significant part of the water budget. We concluded that the eddy covariance method is best for estimating ET at the fine temporal scale (i.e., daily), but other soil moisture and water table-based methods were equally reliable and cost-effective for quantifying seasonal ET dynamics. FOR .S CI. 58(5):497-512.


Firms often face choices about when to upgrade and what to upgrade to. We discuss this in the context of upgrading to a new technology (for example, a new computer system), but it applies equally to the upgrading of processes (for example, a new organizational structure) or to individual choices (for example, buying a new car). This paper uses an experimental approach to determine how people address such problems, with a particular focus on the impact of information flows. Specifically, subjects face a multi-round decision, choosing when (if ever) to upgrade from the status quo to either a safe or a risky new technology. The safe technology yields more than the status quo, and the risky technology may yield either less than the status quo or more than the safe technology. Every round, subjects who have not yet upgraded receive noisy information about the true quality of the risky technology. Our focus on the timing of endogenous choice is novel and differentiates the results from previous experimental papers on herding and cascades. We find that, in the single-person decision problem, subjects tend to wait too long before choosing (relative to optimal behavior). In the second treatment, they observe payoff-irrelevant choices of other subjects. This turns out to induce slightly faster decisions, so the "irrationality" of fads actually improves profits in our framework. In the third and final treatment, subjects observe payoff-relevant choices of other subjects (that is, others who have the same value for the risky technology but independent private signals). Behavior here is very similar to the second treatment, so having "real" information does not seem to have a strong marginal effect. Overall we find that social learning, whether or not the behavior of others is truly informative, plays a large role in upgrade decisions and hence in technology diffusion.


The following contribution examines the influence of mangas and animes on the social perception and cultural understanding of robots in Japan. Part of it is the narrow interaction between pop culture and Japanese robotics: Some examples shall serve to illustrate spill-over effects between popular robot stories and the recent development of robot technologies in Japan. The example of the famous Astro boy comics will be used to help investigate the ethical conflicts between humans and robots thematised in Japanese mangas. With a view to ethical problems the stories shall be subsumed under different categorical aspects.


Building on the theoretical frameworks of frame and stance, this paper aims to demonstrate how play framing is manipulated in culturally meaningful contexts of Japanese conversations among friends and to show the consequences it brings to social life. This study particularly focuses on speech style shifts across speakers as one of the linguistic play-framing devices. The notion of "complementary stylistic resonance" as a special kind of pragmatic resonance is introduced to investigate how speech participants meta-linguistically signal their common stance of constructing a play frame. It was observed that in play they characteristically use the speech style of each imagined persona in a complementary social relationship such as "teacher and student," "husband and wife," and "American male and female in the dubbing register." The ideologies of those dichotomized social roles are spontaneously evoked between the speakers through meta-language practice, resulting in solidifying their ideologies. Furthermore, in play, speech styles of those social roles are exaggerated and maximally contrasted within the pairs so that their identities are easily recognized by the speech partners to successfully co-construct the play at hand and to enhance its humorous effects. Although there may be a gap between ideology and reality, complementary stylistic resonance in play helps speech participants reconstruct their language ideologies of socially salient roles in local language practice, which serves as the concrete and dynamic ground for the process of recreating a larger cognitive and interactive dimension of culture.


We address the problem of finding the shortest path between two points in an unknown real physical environment, where a traveling agent must move around in the environment to explore unknown territory. We introduce the Physical-A* algorithm (PHA*) for solving this problem. PHA* expands all the mandatory nodes that A* would expand and returns the shortest path between the two points. However. due to the physical nature of the problem, the complexity of the algorithm is measured by the traveling effort of the moving agent and not by the number of generated nodes, as in standard A*. PHA* is presented a a two-level algorithm, such that its high level, A*, chooses the next node to be expanded and its low level directs the agent to that node in order to explore it. We present a number of variations for both the high-level and low-level procedures and evaluate their performance theoretically and experimentally. We show that the travel cost of our best variation is fairly dose to the optimal travel cost, assuming that the mandatory nodes of A* are known in advance. We then generalize our algorithm to the multi-agent case, where a number of cooperative agents are designed to solve the problem. Specifically, we provide an experimental implementation for such a system. It should be noted that the problem addressed here is not a navigation problem, but rather a problem of finding the shortest path between two points for future usage.


This thesis is concerned with an investigation of twistorial structures present in curved Lorentzian space-times. Chapter 1 introduces the basic definitions and some theorems that will be used later in the text. Chapter 2 investigates generalised connections that arise in twister theory. First the Cartan con-formal connection is studied, and some of the geometry underlying it is shown to be that used by Fefferman and Graham C133. Also a condition that a space-time is conformal to vacuum is given. Secondly the theory of the Chern connection associated to a C.R. manifold is developed in such a way as to make the calculation of the connection associated to a twistor C.R. manifold straight forward. A new proof of the Chern theorem of existence and uniqueness is given. The Chern connection of a twistor C.R. manifold is then calculated, and discussed. In particular S-dimensionai C.R. manifolds arising as twistor C.R. manifolds are characterised. Canonical structures peculiar to the twister case are discussed. Applications of C.R. manifold theory to algebraically special space-times are suggested. Chapter three analyses how various twistorial structures behave in linearised general relativity. First, deformations of the space of complex null geodesies corresponding to variations of the conformal structure of space-time are shown to be generated by hami1tonians. Those that correspond to variations in the metric satisfying the field equations are given, along with hamiltonians corresponding to different fields and field equations. Beneralisations to nonlinear equations are discussed. These ideas are applied to hypersurface twisters in linearised theory, using fiat hypersurfaces and Cech cohoeology. Expressions are obtained for the deformation of the complex structure of the spaces and their evolution. The results are generalised to non flat hypersurfaces using Dolbeault cohomolcgy. It is shown that certain canonically defined forms on the spin bundle are preferred Dolbeault representatives for derivatives of the twister cohomology classes corresponding to the linearised field. In chapter four I generalise the results of chapter three to curved space using the Chern connection. In particular twistorial formulations of the constraint equations are given, and a formula for the evolution that satisfies the the vacuum evolution equations is given in terms of an "infinity" twistor and a "time" twister. This is then discussed. In chapter five I make some comments on the interpretation of a three form on the spin bundle discovered by B.A.J. Sparling as the gravitational hami1tonian. I then use this to show that one can give an interpretation of Penrose's quasi-local angular momentum twistor in terms of the canonical formalism.


UNLABELLED
PURPOSE PF THE STUDY: The purpose of the study was to describe the phenomenon of 'waiting to know'. It is a phenomenon uniquely experienced by persons who had been exposed to patients with Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever (Ebola) but who have not yet exhibited signs and symptoms of the disease.

RESEARCH METHOD/ANALYSIS
The phenomenological human science approach was used using the four life worlds as guides for reflection. These are spatiality, corporeality, temporality, and relationality.

PARTICIPANTS
Seven health care personnel were selected through professional networking. They were preferred because of their exposure to patients with Ebola during the epidemic at Mbarara, Uganda.

RESULTS/FINDINGS
Written descriptions of the experience of 'waiting to know' whether exposure to patients with Ebola causes these participants to be infected, were obtained and analysed. Through immersion with the written descriptions, the following themes emerged: helplessness in anticipation and fear of dying or premature death; agonizing and languishing over losing relatives, friends, and loved ones; trusting no one, and; helplessness and hopelessness with the persistence of time.


The socio-economic impact of HIV/AIDS combines to create a vicious cycle of poverty and HIV/AIDS in which affected households are caught up. This paper focuses on evidence from a longitudinal household impact study currently being conducted in two sites in the Free State province of South Africa. The impact of HIV/AIDS on households is being assessed by means of a cohort study of households affected by the disease, and compared with a control group of households not currently affected by the disease. This paper focuses on an analysis of the data collected during the first three rounds of interviews. Descriptive analyses, mobility profiling and regression analysis are employed in exploring poverty dynamics in affected and non-affected households. The incidence, depth and severity of poverty are relatively worse amongst affected households, especially affected households that have suffered illness or death in the recent past. The intensity of income mobility increases as the probability of households being affected by illness or death increases. Affected households, particularly those facing a greater burden of morbidity or mortality, are more likely to experience variations in income and to experience chronic poverty. Not only conventional determinants of poverty (e.g. human capital, access to labour markets, and physical capital), but also HIV/AIDS-related determinants (e.g. mortality. morbidity and the orphaned crisis) play a role in explaining why some households remain poor while other households are upwardly mobile and can escape poverty. The evidence underscores the importance in the longer term of economic policies focused on job creation and education in addressing chronic poverty in the face of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with a social safety net targeting HIV/AIDS-related poverty impacts being important in the short to mediumterm. 1 This research paper is sponsored by USAID and administered by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Inc. under a subcontract agreement from Nathan Associates Inc.


Femtocell networks, consisting of a conventional macro cellular deployment and overlaying femtocells, forming a hierarchical cell structure, constitute an attractive solution to improving the macrocell capacity and coverage. However, the inter- and intra-tier interferences in such systems can significantly reduce the capacity and cause an unacceptably high level of outage. This paper treats the uplink interference problem in orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA)-based femtocell networks with partial cochannel deployment. We first propose an inter-tier interference mitigation strategy without the femtocell users power control by forcing the femto-interfering macrocell users to use only some dedicated subcarriers. The non-interfering macrocell users, on the other hand, can use either the dedicated subcarriers, or the shared subcarriers which are also used by the femtocell users. We then propose subcarrier allocation schemes based on the auction algorithm for macrocell users and femtocell users, respectively, to independently mitigate the intra-tier interference. The proposed interference mitigation scheme for femtocell networks offers significant performance improvement over the existing methods by substantially reducing the inter- and intra-tier inferences in the system.


Automated driving needs unprecedented levels of reliably and safety before marked deployment. The average human driver fatal accident rate is 1 every 100 million miles. Automated vehicles will have to provably best these figures. This paper introduces the notion of dream-like mechanisms as a simulation technology to produce a large number of hypothetical design and test scenarios — especially focusing on variations of more frequent dangerous and near miss events. Grounded in the simulation hypothesis of cognition, we show here some principles for effective simulation mechanisms and an artificial cognitive system architecture that can learn from the simulated situations.


What are the effects of strategic surprise on foreign policy? We apply mechanisms from cognitive psychology and foreign policy analysis — the hindsight bias and policy engagement — to theorize about how political leaders attribute blame for strategic surprises and the consequences for their foreign policies. We argue that leaders who are hardly engaged with policy matters related to a surprise will tend to believe that it should have been foreseen, attribute blame to domestic culprits and favour significant changes in foreign policy. Conversely, those more involved with policy planning will blame an adversary's deception and resist policy change. We illustrate these hypotheses empirically by examining the cases of the Truman administration's reaction to the 1949 Soviet nuclear test and the Johnson administration's reaction to the 1967 Chinese thermonuclear explosion. Despite their similar international and domestic political environments, the two presidents reacted quite differently to the two surprises. Truman, who was weakly engaged with nuclear matters prior to 1949, authorized major policy changes and reorganized the Central Intelligence Agency. Conversely, Johnson's deeper involvement in nuclear matters led him to attribute blame for the surprise to Chinese deception. He sought to use the 1967 test to advance his ongoing efforts to secure the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The findings suggest that the variables of policy engagement and the hindsight bias can predict how leaders' foreign policies will respond to surprises regarding nuclear weapons proliferation and potentially other shifts in the balance of power.


Abstract This article argues that there are complex connections between imagined and lived experiences of "Britishness" in Hanif Kureishi's (re)constructions of the past in his memoir My Ear at His Heart. These connections are inextricably tied to Kureishi's relationships with the father figures in his life, and as such they can provide interpretive insights into both his work and the process of authorial self-fashioning. The focus of the article is on how Kureishi "imagines" a past, a father, an India and a migratory experience through the writings of his father, and on the way in which these affect his development as author, individual, and British subject. Ultimately, it is suggested this process enables Kureishi to rethink himself, his work, his father and his past, although not without issues and tensions, as all these dimensions collapse into the unreliable domain of memory. Kureishi's process of identity formation is seen here as an "archaeology of subjectivity", in the sense that he constructs a self and a persona, in large part by excavating through the self-constitutive memories of the previous generation.


Probabilistic model checking is a technique for formally verifying quantitative properties of systems that exhibit stochastic behaviour. In this chapter, we show how this approach can be applied to the study of biological systems such as biochemical reaction networks and signalling pathways. We present an introduction to the state-of-the-art probabilistic model checking tool PRISM using a case study based on the Fibroblast Growth Factor (FGF) signalling pathway.


On 17 SEPTEMBER 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, our founding fathers sent to the states a document for ratification, the Constitution of the United Staes. To this day that document remains remarkably intact, having been amended only 27 times since ratification. Any discussion about the appropriation process must begin there. The Constitution directs that "the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States."1 Further, the Constitution explains that the Congress provides the revenues for the country"All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills."2 the Constitution also addresses Congress's role with respect to the military. In part, that section provides that "the Congress shall have power... to raise and support armies, but no appropriate of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years."3 Out Constitution establishes the Congress as the branch of the American government responsible for providing funds for the nation's defense. While the first Congress did not envision a separate authorization and appropriation process, it estabished the protocols by which both processes operate. Spending bills still must originate in the House. Both houses still have to agree, word for word, with what is sent to the president to be signed into law. If the president vetoes the bill, the constitutional process for overriding this veto still exists untouched. Having said all that, there remain nuances in the process to be examined and explained. This process of appropriating funds for the national defense consists of a series of dynamic events that seldom occur exactly the same way from year to year. Certain events recur every year, but how they occur or when depends on congressional leadership, administration leadership and national events or externalities impacting Congress. The appropriate process formally begins the first Monday in February with the submission or the president's budget to Congress and ends with the president signing the Defense Appropriations Bill into law, ideally prior to the beginning of the new fiscal year on 1 October. The article explains and provides insight into the process of appropriating funds by the Congress. The evnets that lead up to the president's signature can be generally categorized as: Budget justification by the services House and Senate "marks" documented on committee bills and reports. "Heartburn" appeals and conference. Bill signing by the president. Visually, the process is depicted by the figure on page 27. The Army's budget is included in the publication of the president's budget after it has been carefully consideredd by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Office of Management and Budget and the White House Budget Office. This budget provides programming and financing information for all Army appropriations, but it does not contain detailed justification materials that are necessary for the Army budget justification before Congress. Army budget justification begins with the submission of budget-supporting information to justify or validate the Army's funding requests to Congress. All services go through this process and must coordinate with the Department of Defense. At the service level, the Army prepares and submits Budget Justification Books (J Books). These are prepared in the budget office for each appropriation with extensive support from the entire Army staff (ARSTAF) and secretariat. The appropriations covered by J Books include military personnel (pay), operations and maintenance, research and development, the five procurement accounts, military construction, environment and chemical demilitarization. US Army Reserve and Army National Guard versions of the operations and maintenance and the personnel accounts also have separate J Books. Committee professional staffers use the J Books to conduct analyses and make recommendations to the members of the Appropriation Subcommittees on Defense and Military Construction. …


The Fantasy, as the term suggests, is a genre that composers have found congenial for exploring innovative and imaginative processes. Works in this genre are numerous in the solo piano literature, and extend even to works for piano and orchestra and to
chamber music with piano. I was curious to explore how a specific genre of music maintained similar characteristics but evolved over time. A fantasy is primed to be inventive and I wanted to see how composers from different eras and backgrounds would handle their material in this genre. I have learned that composers worked through formal developments while making innovations within this genre.
The heart of my dissertation is presented through the recording project. Because ofthe abundance ofpiano fantasies, many works had to be excluded from this project for time's sake. On two compact discs, I have recorded approximately two hours of solo piano music. I have included some shorter fantasies to magnify significant developments from era to era, country to country, and composer to composer. The first disc has
recordings of eighteenth and nineteenth-century fantasies: Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 903 by J.S. Bach (1685-1750); Fantasia inC major, H. XVII, 4 by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809); Fantasy inc minor, K. 475 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-

1791); Fantasia inf-sharp minor, Op. 28 by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847); and Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat major, Op. 61 by Frederic Chopin (1810-1849). On the second disc I have included mid-19th, 20th and 2151-century piano fantasies: Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H by Franz Liszt (1811-1886); Fantasia Baetica by Manuel de Falla (1876-1946); Three Fantasies by William Bergsma (1921-1994); Fantasy, Aria and Fugue by Frederic Goossen (1927-2011); and Piano Fantasy ("Wenn ich einmal sol! scheiden") by Richard Danielpour (b. 1956).
The accompanying document includes program notes for each of the pieces recorded. They were recorded on a Steinway "D" in Dekelboum Concert Hall at the University of Maryland by Antonino D'Urzo ofOpusrite Productions. This document is available in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland and the CO's are available through the Library System at the University of Maryland.


In violent times, some novelists abandon literature altogether, taking to the streets or barricades; others, of course, bring the streets and barricades into their fiction, exposing suffering and injustice, arguing, pleading, and persuading. Those who do neither will stand accused of complacency, perhaps collaboration; like Christ, people intent on justice often believe that those who are not for them are against them. In our time South Africa has been one of those places that seem to compel writers into action and, as a professor at the University of Cape Town, J. M. Coetzee has spent much of his adult life in a country where, for many years, guerillas were locked in combat with a repressive state. And though the university was doubtless far more sheltered than some dusty township in Soweto, it was no less vulnerable to the apocalyptic civil war many reasonable people were predicting. In such circumstances, Coetzee's failure to engage politics directly brought him much criticism; Nadine Gordimer, for example, argued that indirection, allegory, and distance in his novels kept Coetzee safe, preventing his work from being banned by the old South African censorship.(1) Yet of course Coetzee's novels frequently attend to the cruelest realities. From the bombing and defoliating of Dusklands to the labor camps and burning settlements of The Life and Times of Michael K. and The Age of Iron, history in his novels has been marked by violent invasions, by mutilated bodies, by civil war. Standing apart from this history, but somehow engaged and responsible and guilty, is the figure of the writer, perhaps a colonial administrator with a taste for archeology, perhaps the employee of a think tank, fingering a photo of a sergeant from Texas raping a Vietnamese child. Such figures tell us that Coetzee has always agonized over the question of where writers stand in relationship to public atrocity, what responsibilities they bear for it, and how they might usefully respond. But the quality of a writer's political engagements, he told an interviewer, should not be measured in the simple way Gordimer suggests; a naive realism only reproduces the injustice it describes, licking wounds rather than offering a critical alternative to the mind set that produced injustice in the first place. In place of such realism, Coetzee offers a more sophisticated, ironic narrative, one capable of "demythologizing history."(2) Such narratives, he says, are not "supplementary" to history; that is, they cannot be checked against it, as a teacher might check a child's homework against the answer book; rather they are a rival, sometimes even an enemy discourse. Thus the point of an ironic narrative is not so much that it substitutes a more accurate version of history and politics for the received one as that it lays bare the unacknowledged assumptions that shape both stories. Coetzee's impulse to assess the relationship between writers and public violence becomes even more evident in The Master of Petersburg, where he turns to the theme of terrorism. This time, however, the fictional figure of the writer is played not by an obscure bureaucrat or a cancer-ridden professor writing her last letters to a daughter in America, but by Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of the first and perhaps master terrorist novel. In Demons, Dostoevsky became the first of a distinguished line of writers, one that grew to include Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Andre Malraux and such contemporary novelists as Doris Lessing and Don DeLillo, to use the relationship between terrorists and writers or intellectuals to question the writer's responsibility for violence. The historical Dostoevsky had transformed the notorious Sergei Nechaev into the sociopath Peter Verkhovensky; Coetzee invents an encounter between a fictional Dostoevsky and Nechaev that thoroughly destabilizes the relationship between the novelist, by middle age a staunch czarist, and his subject. Although never simply doubles for each other, Dostoevsky and Nechaev, in Coetzee's version, are drawn into a dialogue that points to their disturbing similarities. …


This article seeks to explore a politics of becoming. Emphasizing the dynamics of both time and the affects produced with it, we engage by following the questions that are taken up, which bubble through the middle and which niggle at the margins of our thoughts. In sensing out the imperatives that seek to tie emotions to subjects, we argue that there is also an imperative for researchers and scholars to inquire into their own and we do so with a specific project in mind—that of reconstituting the conditions of hope that we want to argue are key for any educative role. Deleuze's three syntheses of time have enabled us to consider both retrospective and prospective trajectories in ways that prevent any simple linear, mechanistic, or deterministic patterning. As we reevaluate and explore emotion's reliance on subjectivity, we also search for the impersonal affects that connect.


Annals of Information Systems comprises serialized volumes that address a specialized topic or a theme. AoIS publishes peer reviewed works in the analytical, technical as well as the organizational side of information systems. The numbered volumes are guest-edited by experts in a specific domain. Some volumes may be based upon refereed papers from selected conferences. AoIS volumes are available as individual books as well as a serialized collection. Annals of Information Systems is allied with the 'Integrated Series in Information Systems' (IS2).  Proposals are invited for contributions to be published in the Annals of Information Systems. The Annals focus on high quality scholarly publications, and the editors benefit from Springer's international network for promotion of your edited volume as a serialized publication and also a book. For more information, visit the Springer website at http:// www.springer.com/west/home/authors  Or contact the series editors by email:  Ramesh Sharda: firstname.lastname@example.com or Stefan Voß: email@example.com


A miniature solid-state varifocal lens based on Alvarez principle with lens elements having free-form surfaces is reported. The Alvarez lens elements are implemented with diamond-turning and replication molding processes. They are integrated with electrostatically-driven MEMS comb-drive actuators fabricated using SOI micromachining. Dynamic tuning of focal length more than 1.5 times (from 3 mm to 4.65 mm) is experimentally demonstrated with only small MEMS-driven lateral movements of 40 μm. Such varifocal lens may be useful in miniature cameras for autofocus and zooming due to its advantages including ease of packaging and fast tuning speed.


Introduction: The existence of a stratum corneum reservoir has been demonstrated for several topically applied products. Knowledge of the reservoir properties of frequently used products is necessary for the determination of the optimal treatment procedure. It was the aim of this study to determine the reservoir properties of diclofenac after a single topical application with and without occlusion. Methods: Three different groups of 12 healthy volunteers , free of local or systemic treatment with any drugs entered the study. Volunteers were asked to maintain their normal daily activities, but to omit swimming and extensive showering during the duration of the experiments. A commercially available 1% diclofenac (Voltaren Emulgel®, Novartis) formulation was applied on a circular demarcated skin area of 7cm2 on the volar forearms at a concentration of 12mg/cm2. The product was applied under occlusion during 20 minutes. At the same time an open application (same modalities) was performed. Diclofenac stratum corneum bioavailability was assessed using the methyl nicotinate (MN) test. A nicotinate response was performed respectively 90 minutes (group 1), 6 and 24 hours (group 2) and 32 and 48 hours (group 3) after diclofenac application on the diclofenac treated sites but equally at an untreated skin site. The erythema response was quantified with the Minolta Chromameter operating in the L*a* b* mode. Measurements were carried out before diclofenac application, before nicotinate application and every 5 minutes up to 1 hour post nicotinate application. From the measurements in function of time recorded at the different time intervals the area under the response curve was calculated. Areas under the response curve at the different measurements times (respectively at 1.5, 6, 24, 32 and 48 hours post diclofenac application Results: The nicotinate response was suppressed at all measurement intervals (respectively at 1.5, 6, 24, 48 hours). There was no difference between the nicotinate responses at the diclofenac pretreated skin sites when comparing the different measurement times (1.5 versus respectively 6, 24 and 48 hours) neither for the open application (p > 0.05) nor for the application under occlusion (p > 0.05). When comparing the open application with the application under occlusion at the respective measurement times no significant differences were detected (p < 0.05 at all measurement times). Discussion: Our results indicate that even 48 hours after a single 20 minutes application diclofenac is still present in the stratum corneum. A similar response was measured after open application compared to application under occlusion. Occlusion is generally accepted as a penetration enhancing factor. The lack of discrimination between the open diclofenac application and the application under occlusion may be an indication for a diclofenac saturation in the stratum corneum.


In this collection, the essays examine the critical role that judgments about noise and sound played in framing the meaning of civility in British discourse and literature during the long eighteenth century. The volume restores the sonic dimension to conversations about civil conduct by exploring how censured behaviours and recommended practices resonated beyond the written word. As the contributors show, understanding changing perceptions and valuations of noise and sound allows us to chart how civility was understood in the context of significant political, social and cultural change, including the development of urban life, the extension of empire and the consolidation of legal procedure. Divided into three parts, Sound, Space and Civility in the British World demonstrates how both noise and sound could be recognized by eighteenth-century Britons as expressions of civility. The essays also explore the audible implications of uncivil conduct to complicate our understanding of the sonic range of politeness. The uses of sound and noise to interrogate British colonial anxieties about the distinction between civility and incivility are also investigated. Taken together, the essays identify the emergence of civility as a development that radically altered sonic attitudes and experiences, producing new notions of what counted as desirable or undesirable sound.


Distributed quantum information processing requires a reliable quantum memory and a faithful carrier of quantum information. Atomic qubits have very long coherence times and are thus excellent candidates for quantum information storage, whereas photons are ideal for the transport of quantum information as they can travel long distances with a minimum of decoherence. We discuss the theoretical and experimental combination of these two systems and their use for not only quantum information transfer but also scalable quantum computation architectures.


This paper addresses the problem of configuring active queue management systems (e.g. WRED and RIO) for service level specifications in internetworks. In particular, we focus on assured forwarding (AF) for non-responsive flows in differentiated services networks. The difficulty is to determine the correct queue level thresholds that will result in correct drop rates for various AF precedence levels under any combination of offered loads. A new active queue management scheme based on a control algorithm is proposed that senses not only queue levels but also rates of queue levels changes and per flow bit rates to converge automatically to an optimal set of transmit fractions. The scheme has been implemented and tested on a network processor. Results show that the new active queue management scheme protects assured aggregated flow rates during periods of congestion. For non-responsive traffic the buffer occupancy level remains low during 250% offered load.


This article, and the four that follow, consider some of the ways in which China, Russia, India and Brazil have responded both to US hegemony and to the changing character of international society. This article sets out some of the major analytical questions that emerge when thinking about the foreign policy options of these countries and some of the principal conceptual and theoretical categories within which those questions may be usefully framed. The first section examines the reasons for taking these countries as a group. The second section provides a brief overview of two of the most common theoretical perspectives from which the systemic pressures on these countries have been understood. The third considers their actual and potential strategies and options under five headings: their status as regional powers; their behaviour within and towards international institutions; their relations with the United States; collaboration among them and evidence for the possible emergence of balancing behaviour; and the links between economic development and foreign policy.


We present a contactless optical sensor based on the laser-self-mixing effect for real-time measurement of linear and transverse displacements of a moving stage. The sensor is able to measure linear displacements of up to 400 mm along the main optical axis while simultaneously estimating straightness and flatness deviations up to 1 mm. The sensor exploits two identical coplanar nonparallel self-mixing interferometers and requires only one reference plane. The reduction in the number of optical elements allowed by the self-mixing configuration and the intrinsic stiffness of the adopted geometry result in a compact, low-cost, and easy-to-align setup.


This essay reviews Orly Lobel's article The New Cognitive Property: Human Capital Law and the Reach of Intellectual Property. It commends Professor Lobel for outlining the contours of the "new" field of human capital law, and for emphasizing the potential consequences of the growing enclosure of cognitive capacities in contemporary markets. From this starting point the essay makes two modest suggestions for researchers. First, it suggests that those building on Lobel's work consider more contextual description and evaluation of human and intellectual capital production systems. Doing so would avoid overly abstract, macro-level analysis that is often divorced from reality and from the critical nuances that shape actors' individual and collective motivations and behavior. It would also avoid excessive reliance on overly specific, micro-level analysis, which can be anecdotal. Second, the essay emphasizes the importance of establishing normative baselines prior to evaluating or prescribing reform.