Homology of fin lepidotrichia in osteichthyan fishes

Lepidotrichia are dermal elements located at the distal margin of osteichthyan fins. In sarcopterygians and actinopterygians, the term has been used to denote the most distal bony hemisegments and also the more proximal, scale-covered segments which overlie endochondral bones of the fin. In certain sarcopterygian fishes, including the Rhizodontida, these more proximal, basal segments are very long, extending at least half the length of the fin. The basal segments have a subcircular cross section, rather than the crescentic cross section of the distal lepidotrichial hemisegments, which lack a scale cover and comprise short, generally regular, elements. In rhizodonts and other sarcopterygians, e.g. Eusthenopteron, the basal elements are the first to appear during fin development, followed by the endochondral bones and then the distal lepidotrichia. This sequence contradicts the 'clock-face model' of fin development proposed by Thorogood in which the formation of endochondral bones is followed by development of lepidotrichia. However, if elongate basal 'lepidotrichia' are not homologous with more distal, jointed lepidotrichia and if the latter form within a distal fin-fold and the former outside this fold, then Thorogood's 'clock-face' model remains valid. This interpretation might indicate that the fin-fold has been lost in early digited stem-tetrapods such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega and elongate basal elements, but not true lepidotrichia, occur in the caudal fins of these taxa.

Judicial (in)activism in Australia's secular commonwealth

his article addresses two aspects of Australia's soft secular government. The first aspect explains how, and asks why, judges have been inactive in helping to draw the contours of secular government in Australia. The principal reason is that much of the social regulation that provokes the interest of faith-based groups is the constitutional concern of the States, and no State Constitution claims to coordinate relations between church and state. Moreover, the electorate has twice refused to pass referenda, in 1944 and 1988, for extending a constitutional demand of secular governance to the States. However, this is not so for the Commonwealth. It falls under the restrictions of section 116 of the federal Constitution, which states: The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion ('the establishment clause') or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion ('the free exercise clause'), and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth. As will be explained, while methods of legal interpretation suggest that section 116's establishment clause could place mild demands of non-discrimination on the federal Parliament, judicial inactivity in policing such demands on the Commonwealth, paradoxically, has arguably been secured by judicial activism in the High Court. A second aspect of secular government addressed is the High Court's disposal of 'the separation of church and state' as a constitutional principle in Australia. The contrast, of course, is to the United States, where for sixty years 'separation' has been given uneven recognition as a rule of constitutional law, and has undoubtedly driven the development of hard forms of secular governance in that country. The centrepiece of American secular government is the 1971 decision in Lemon v Kurtzman, where the US Supreme Court held that valid legislation had to pass three tests, ie: First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion .. . finally, the statute must not foster 'an excessive government entanglement with religion. The third 'entanglement' prong of Lemon is the modern, less ambitious, form of the 'wall of separation', prohibiting too close an engagement between church and state. As this paper will demonstrate, 'entanglement's' destiny shows how unlikely it is that 'separation' can survive as a meaningful constitutional principle in the USA. And, it will also be argued that 'separation' has even poorer prospects for import to Australia.

Mentoring for population health in general practice divisions

This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a three-way model of service development mentoring. This population health mentoring program was funded by the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing to enable staff from eight Divisions of General Practice in South Australia to gain a sound understanding of population health concepts relevant to their workplace. The distinguishing features of service development mentoring were that the learning was grounded within an individual's work setting and experience; there was an identified population health problem or issue confronting the Division of General Practice; and there was an expectation of enhanced organisational performance. A formal evaluation found a consensus among all learners that mentoring was a positive and worthwhile experience, where they had achieved what they had set out to do. Mentors found the model of learning agreeable and effective. Division executive officers recognised enhanced skills among their "learner" colleagues, and commented positively on the benefits to their organisations through the development of well researched and relevant projects, with the potential to improve the efficiency of their population health activities.

Introduction of routine outcome measures: staff reactions and issues for consideration

The aim of this study was to explore clinician reactions to (i) the introduction of routine outcome measures and (ii) the utility of outcomes data in clinical practice. Focus group discussions (n = 34) were conducted with mental health staff (n = 324) at approximately 8 months post implementation of routine outcome measures. A semi-structured interview schedule was used to collect data on two key issues; reactions to the introduction of outcome measures and factors influencing the utility of outcomes data in clinical practice. Data from the discussion groups were analysed using content analysis to isolate emerging themes. While the majority of participants endorsed the collection and utilization of outcomes data, many raised questions about the merits of the initiative. Ambivalence, competing work demands, lack of support from senior medical staff, questionable evidence to support the use of outcome measures, and fear of how outcomes data might be used emerged as key issues. At 8 months post implementation a significant number of clinical staff remained ambivalent about the benefits of outcome measurement and had not engaged in the process. The shift to a service model driven by outcomes and case-mix data will take time and resources to achieve. Implications for nursing staff are discussed.

Risk factors for schizophrenia. Follow-up data from the Northern Finland 1966 Birth Cohort Study

This paper updates single risk factors identified by the Northern Finland 1966 Birth Cohort Study up to the end of year 2001 or age 34. Impaired performance (e.g., delayed motor or intellectual development) or adverse exposures (e.g., pregnancy and birth complications, central nervous system diseases) are associated with an increased risk for schizophrenia. However, upper social class girls and clever schoolboys also have an increased risk to develop schizophrenia, contrasted to their peers. Individuals who subsequently develop schizophrenia follow a developmental trajectory that partly and subtly differs from that of the general population; this trajectory lacks flexibility and responsiveness compared to control subjects, at least in the early stages. We propose a descriptive, lifespan, multilevel systems model on the development and course of schizophrenia.

Independent component analysis for domain independent watermarking

A new principled domain independent watermarking framework is presented. The new approach is based on embedding the message in statistically independent sources of the covertext to mimimise covertext distortion, maximise the information embedding rate and improve the method's robustness against various attacks. Experiments comparing the performance of the new approach, on several standard attacks show the current proposed approach to be competitive with other state of the art domain-specific methods.

The effect of ageing on in vivo human ciliary muscle morphology and contractility

Purpose. To assess the effect of ageing on in vivo human ciliary muscle morphology and contractility during accommodation. Methods. Seventy-nine subjects, aged 19–70 years were recruited. High-resolution images were acquired of nasal and temporal ciliary muscle in the relaxed state, and at stimulus vergence levels of -4 and -8 D, using anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS-OCT). Objective refractions and axial lengths were also recorded. Linear regression analysis was performed to determine the effect of age on nasal and temporal ciliary muscle morphologic characteristics. Results. Ciliary muscle anterior length decreased significantly with age both nasally (R = 0.461, P = 0.001) and temporally (R = 0.619, P < 0.001) in emmetropic eyes. In a subset of 37 participants, ciliary muscle maximum width increased significantly with age, by 2.8 µm/year nasally (R = 0.54, P < 0.001) and 3.0 µm/year temporally (R = 0.44, P = 0.007), while the distance from the inner apex of the ciliary muscle to the scleral spur decreased significantly with age on both the nasal and temporal aspects (R = 0.47; P = 0.004 and R = 0.43; P = 0.009, respectively). During accommodation, changes to ciliary muscle thickness and length remained constant throughout life. Conclusions. The human ciliary muscle undergoes age-dependent changes in morphology that suggest an antero-inwards displacement of muscle mass, particularly in emmetropic eyes. However, the morphologic changes observed appear not to affect the ability of the muscle to contract during accommodation, even in established presbyopes, thus supporting a lenticular model of presbyopia development.

Lexical database enrichment through semi-automated morphological analysis

Derivational morphology proposes meaningful connections between words and is largely unrepresented in lexical databases. This thesis presents a project to enrich a lexical database with morphological links and to evaluate their contribution to disambiguation. A lexical database with sense distinctions was required. WordNet was chosen because of its free availability and widespread use. Its suitability was assessed through critical evaluation with respect to specifications and criticisms, using a transparent, extensible model. The identification of serious shortcomings suggested a portable enrichment methodology, applicable to alternative resources. Although 40% of the most frequent words are prepositions, they have been largely ignored by computational linguists, so addition of prepositions was also required. The preferred approach to morphological enrichment was to infer relations from phenomena discovered algorithmically. Both existing databases and existing algorithms can capture regular morphological relations, but cannot capture exceptions correctly; neither of them provide any semantic information. Some morphological analysis algorithms are subject to the fallacy that morphological analysis can be performed simply by segmentation. Morphological rules, grounded in observation and etymology, govern associations between and attachment of suffixes and contribute to defining the meaning of morphological relationships. Specifying character substitutions circumvents the segmentation fallacy. Morphological rules are prone to undergeneration, minimised through a variable lexical validity requirement, and overgeneration, minimised by rule reformulation and restricting monosyllabic output. Rules take into account the morphology of ancestor languages through co-occurrences of morphological patterns. Multiple rules applicable to an input suffix need their precedence established. The resistance of prefixations to segmentation has been addressed by identifying linking vowel exceptions and irregular prefixes. The automatic affix discovery algorithm applies heuristics to identify meaningful affixes and is combined with morphological rules into a hybrid model, fed only with empirical data, collected without supervision. Further algorithms apply the rules optimally to automatically pre-identified suffixes and break words into their component morphemes. To handle exceptions, stoplists were created in response to initial errors and fed back into the model through iterative development, leading to 100% precision, contestable only on lexicographic criteria. Stoplist length is minimised by special treatment of monosyllables and reformulation of rules. 96% of words and phrases are analysed. 218,802 directed derivational links have been encoded in the lexicon rather than the wordnet component of the model because the lexicon provides the optimal clustering of word senses. Both links and analyser are portable to an alternative lexicon. The evaluation uses the extended gloss overlaps disambiguation algorithm. The enriched model outperformed WordNet in terms of recall without loss of precision. Failure of all experiments to outperform disambiguation by frequency reflects on WordNet sense distinctions.

Summary of the 10th International workshop on Models@run.time

The 10th anniversary of the workshop Models@run.time was held at the 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems. The workshop took place in the city of Ottawa, Canada, on the 29th of September 2015. The workshop was organized by Sebastian Gtz, Nelly Bencomo, Gordon Blair and Hui Song. Here, we present a summary of the discussions at the workshop and a synopsis of the topics discussed and highlighted during the workshop. The workshop received the award for the best workshop at the MODELS 2015 conference out of 18 workshops in total. The award was based upon the organization, program, web site timing and the feedback provided by the workshop participants.

Investigating Turkey's national innovation and learning system

The national systems of innovation (NIS) approach focuses on the patterns and the determinants of innovation processes from the perspective of nation-states. This paper reports on continuing work on the application of an NIS model to the development of technological capability in Turkey. Initial assessment of the literature shows that there are a number of alternative conceptualisations of NIS. An attempt by the Government to identify a NIS for Turkey shows the main actors in the system but does not pay sufficient attention to the processes of interactions between agents within the system. An operational model should be capable of representing these processes and interactions and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the NIS. For industrialising countries, it is also necessary to incorporate learning mechanisms into the model. Further, there are different levels of innovation and capability in different sectors which the national perspective may not reflect. This paper is arranged into three sections. The first briefly explains the basics of the national innovation and learning system. Although there is no single accepted definition of NIS, alternative definitions reviewed share some common characteristics. In the second section, an NIS model is applied to Turkey in order to identify the elements, which characterise the country’s NIS. This section explains knowledge flow and defines the relations between the actors within the system. The final section draws on the “from imitation to innovation” model apparently so successful in East Asia and assesses its applicability to Turkey. In assessing Turkey’s NIS, the focus is on the automotive and textile sectors.

Trend analysis in scientometrics

The thesis investigates the properties of two trends or time series which formed a:part of the Co-Citation bibliometric model "X~Ray Crystallography and Protein Determination in 1978, 1980 and 1982". This model was one of several created for the 1983 ABRC Science Policy Study which aimed to test the utility of bibliometric models in a national science policy context. The outcome of the validation part of that study proved to be especially favourable concerning the utility of trend data, which purport to model the development of speciality areas in science over time. This assessment could have important implications for the use of such data in policy formulation. However one possible problem with the Science Policy Study's conclusions was that insufficient time was available in the study for an in-depth analysis of the data. The thesis aims to continue the validation begun in the ABRC study by providing a detailed.examination of the characteristics of the data contained in the Trends numbered 11 and 44 in the model. A novel methodology for the analysis of the properties of the trends with respect to their literature content is presented. This is followed by an assessment based on questionnaire and interview data, of the ability of Trend 44 to realistically model the historical development of the field of mobile genetic elements research over time, with respect to its scientific content and the activities of its community of researchers. The results of these various analyses are then used to evaluate the strenghts and weaknesses of a trend or time series approach to the modelling of the activities of scientifiic fields. A critical evaluation of the origins of the discovered strengths and weaknesses.in the assumptions underlying the techniques used to generate trends from co-citation data is provided. Possible improvements. to the modelling techniques are discussed.

Antecedents and consequences of market orientation : an examination in the joint ventures' relational context

Market oriented behaviours have been found to be important predictors of business success across a wide array of studies. Despite their potential importance, research into market oriented behaviours in the joint venture (JV) context is very scarce. This study represents a novel attempt to address this gap by examining a set of antecedent factors which arises from sources outside a traditional firm’s boundary. An extensive review and synthesis of the market orientation and JV literature yielded a set of context-specific antecedent factors relevant to the JV’s relational context. In accordance with the perspective offered by the transaction cost theory, a system of hypotheses about the effects of these antecedent factors on JV’s market oriented behaviours was developed. In order to test these hypotheses, empirical evidence was collected by means of a mail survey to international joint ventures operating in the coastal regions of mainland China. A sample of 191 JV firms was collected as a result. Following well established procedures for scale development and purification as recommended in the methodology literature, the scales were critically trimmed and reviewed for their psychometric properties. The conceptual model was tested with a structural equation model. Results suggested that a number of context-specific antecedents are in fact important determinants of JVs’ level of market oriented behaviours. In addition, the linkage between market oriented behaviours and market performance was also successfully established.

The interaction between the implementation of an occupational health and safety management system and safety culture:a case study in the rubber industry

A prominent theme emerging in Occupational Health and Safety (OSH) is the development of management systems. A range of interventions, according to a prescribed route detailed by one of the management systems, can be introduced into an organisation with some expectation of improved OSH performance. This thesis attempts to identify the key influencing factors that may impact upon the process of introducing interventions, (according to B88800: 1996, Guide to Implementing Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems) into an organisation. To help identify these influencing factors a review of possible models from the sphere of Total Quality Management (TQM) was undertaken and the most suitable TQM model selected for development and use in aSH. By anchoring the aSH model's development in the reviewed literature a range ofeare, medium and low level influencing factors were identified. This model was developed in conjunction with the research data generated within the case study organisation (rubber manufacturer) and applied to the organisation. The key finding was that the implementation of an OSH intervention was dependant upon three broad vectors of influence. These are the Incentive to introduce change within an organisation which refers to the drivers or motivators for OSH. Secondly the Ability within the management team to actually implement the changes refers to aspects, amongst others, such as leadership, commitment and perceptions of OSH. Ability is in turn itself influenced by the environment within which change is being introduced. TItis aspect of Receptivity refers to the history of the plant and characteristics of the workforce. Aspects within Receptivity include workforce profile and organisational policies amongst others. It was found that the TQM model selected and developed for an OSH management system intervention did explain the core influencing factors and their impact upon OSH performance. It was found that within the organisation the results that may have been expected from implementation of BS8800:1996 were not realised. The OSH model highlighted that given the organisation's starting point, a poor appreciation of the human factors of OSH, gave little reward for implementation of an OSH management system. In addition it was found that general organisational culture can effectively suffocate any attempts to generate a proactive safety culture.

Investigative framework for research into the design of manufacturing processes

This paper is based a major research project run by a team from the Innovation, Design and Operations Management Research Unit at the Aston Business School under SERC funding. International Computers Limited (!CL), the UK's largest indigenous manufacturer of mainframe computer products, was the main industrial collaborator in the research. During the period 1985-89 an integrated production system termed the "Modular Assembly Cascade'' was introduced to the Company's mainframe assembly plant at Ashton-under-Lyne near Manchester. Using a methodology primarily based upon 'participative observation', the researchers developed a model for analysing this manufacturing system design called "DRAMA". Following a critique of the existing literature on Manufacturing Strategy, this paper will describe the basic DRAMA model and its development from an industry specific design methodology to DRAMA II, a generic model for studying organizational decision processes in the design and implementation of production systems. From this, the potential contribution of the DRAMA model to the existing knowledge on the process of manufacturing system design will be apparent.

Self-training from labeled features for sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis concerns about automatically identifying sentiment or opinion expressed in a given piece of text. Most prior work either use prior lexical knowledge defined as sentiment polarity of words or view the task as a text classification problem and rely on labeled corpora to train a sentiment classifier. While lexicon-based approaches do not adapt well to different domains, corpus-based approaches require expensive manual annotation effort. In this paper, we propose a novel framework where an initial classifier is learned by incorporating prior information extracted from an existing sentiment lexicon with preferences on expectations of sentiment labels of those lexicon words being expressed using generalized expectation criteria. Documents classified with high confidence are then used as pseudo-labeled examples for automatical domain-specific feature acquisition. The word-class distributions of such self-learned features are estimated from the pseudo-labeled examples and are used to train another classifier by constraining the model's predictions on unlabeled instances. Experiments on both the movie-review data and the multi-domain sentiment dataset show that our approach attains comparable or better performance than existing weakly-supervised sentiment classification methods despite using no labeled documents.