Energy compensation in the real world: Good compensation for small portions of chocolate and biscuits over short time periods in complicit consumers using commercially available foods

While investigations using covert food manipulations tend to suggest that individuals are poor at adjusting for previous energy intake, in the real world adults rarely consume foods of which they are ill-informed. This study investigated the impact in fully complicit consumers of consuming commercially available dark chocolate, milk chocolate, sweet biscuits and fruit bars on subsequent appetite. Using a repeated measures design, participants received four small portions (4 × 10-11 g) of either dark chocolate, milk chocolate, sweet biscuits, fruit bars or no food throughout five separate study days (counterbalanced in order), and test meal intake, hunger, liking and acceptability were measured. Participants consumed significantly less at lunch following dark chocolate, milk chocolate and sweet biscuits compared to no food (smallest t(19) = 2.47, p = 0.02), demonstrating very good energy compensation (269-334%). No effects were found for fruit bars (t(19) = 1.76, p = 0.09), in evening meal intakes (F(4,72) = 0.62, p = 0.65) or in total intake (lunch + evening meal + food portions) (F(4,72) = 0.40, p = 0.69). No differences between conditions were found in measures of hunger (largest F(4,76) = 1.26, p = 0.29), but fruit bars were significantly less familiar than all other foods (smallest t(19) = 3.14, p = 0.01). These findings demonstrate good compensation over the short term for small portions of familiar foods in complicit consumers. Findings are most plausibly explained as a result of participant awareness and cognitions, although the nature of these cognitions cannot be discerned from this study. These findings however, also suggest that covert manipulations may have limited transfer to real world scenarios.

Old truths and new politics:Does truth commission 'publicness' impact democratization?

This article analyzes the relationship between truth and politics by asking whether the 'publicness' of a truth commission - defined by whether it has public hearings, releases a public report, and names perpetrators - contributes to democratization. The article reviews scholarship relevant to the potential democratizing effects of truth commissions and derives mechanisms that help explain this relationship. Work from the transitional justice field as well as democratization and political transition more generally is considered. Using a newly-constructed Truth Commission Publicness Dataset (TCPD), the analysis finds that even after statistically controlling for initial levels of democracy, democratic trends in the years prior to a commission, level of wealth, amnesties and/or trials, the influence of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and different cutoff points for measuring democratization across a number of models, more publicness predicts higher levels of democracy years after the commission has finished its work. The more public a truth commission is, the more it will contribute to democratization. The finding that more public truth commissions are associated with higher levels of democratization indicates particular strategies that policymakers, donors, and civil society activists may take to improve prospects for democracy in a country planning a truth commission in the wake of violence and/or government abuse. © The Author(s) 2012.

Acidity compensation of electrochemical measurements for on-site monitoring of heavy metals

This paper presents an electrochemical instrumentation system capable of real-time in situ detection of heavy metals. A practical approach to introduce acidity compensation against changes in amplitude of the peak currents is also presented. The compensated amplitudes can then be used to predict the concentration level of heavy metals. The system uses differential pulse anodic stripping voltammetry, which is a precise and sensitive analytical method with excellent limits of detection. The instrument is capable of detecting lead, cadmium, zinc, nickel and copper with good sensitivity and precision. The system avoids expensive and time-consuming procedures and may be used in a variety of situations to help environmental assessment and control. 

Commission 15: Physical Studies of Comets and Minor Planets

This report of the business meeting of Commission 15 at the 2009 IAU GA is based on notes provided by Walter Huebner, past president, and on the minutes taken by Daniel Boice, secretary of Commission 15 in the triennium 2006 to 2009, with additional notes from the current secretary, Daniel Hestroffer. The business meeting was split into two sessions, the first held on 5 August and the second held on 11 August. This report presents the minutes of the two Commission 15 business-meeting sessions held during General Assembly XXVII.

Markievicz Commission Report: Gender equality document

Report on implementation of the candidate gender quota in the Fianna Fail Party.

Capital Markets Union and ending short-termism: lessons from the European Commission's public consultationÂ

The European Commission’s initiative to establish a Capital Markets Union is in sharp conflict with the more radical goals of downsizing significantly certain financial activities and firms that have become too-big-to-fail and too-big-to-govern and of ending or at least drastically limiting extreme speculation and short-termism in finance and the real economy in order to increase financial stability. The recent public consultation on the Commission’s Green Paper Building a Capital Markets Union gives evidence of how weak such demands are compared to calls for deeper capital markets with more ‘shadow banking’ and rebuilding (sound) securitisation. The consultation is an example of how framing the problem and the refined better regulation agenda influence post-crisis financial reregulation and help to marginalize more radical ideas demanding a return to a more traditional banking model and transforming finance back to serving the real economy.

Beyond managerial talent: ‘key group’ identification and differential compensation practices in multinational companies

With the maturation of strategic human resource management scholarship, there appears to be a greater call to move from monolithic workforce management to a more strategic and differentiated emphasis on employees with the greatest capacity to enhance competitive advantage. There has been little consideration in the literature as to whether organizations formally identify key groups of employees based on their impact on organizational learning and core competences. Using survey evidence from 260 multinational companies (MNCs), this paper explores the extent to which key groups of employees are formally recognized and whether they are subject to differential compensation practices. The results demonstrate that just in excess of half of these MNCs identify a key group. There was considerable differentiation in the compensation practices between these key groups, managers and the largest occupational group in the workforce. The results give rise to questions worthy of future investigation, namely whether the differentiated approaches used lead to improved performance outcomes.

IQ Imbalance in Multiuser Systems: Channel Estimation and Compensation

In this paper, we consider the uplink of a single-cell multi-user single-input multiple-output (MU-SIMO) system with in-phase and quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI). Particularly, we investigate the effect of receive (RX) IQI on the performance of MU-SIMO systems with large antenna arrays employing maximum-ratio combining (MRC) receivers. In order to study how IQI affects channel estimation, we derive a new channel estimator for the IQI-impaired model and show that the higher the value of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) the higher the impact of IQI on the spectral efficiency (SE). Moreover, a novel pilot-based joint estimator of the augmented MIMO channel matrix and IQI coefficients is described and then, a low-complexity IQI compensation scheme is proposed which is based on the
IQI coefficients’ estimation and it is independent of the channel gain. The performance of the proposed compensation scheme is analytically evaluated by deriving a tractable approximation of the ergodic SE assuming transmission over Rayleigh fading channels with large-scale fading. Furthermore, we investigate how many MSs should be scheduled in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with IQI and show that the highest SE loss occurs at the optimal operating point. Finally,
by deriving asymptotic power scaling laws, and proving that the SE loss due to IQI is asymptotically independent of the number of BS antennas, we show that massive MIMO is resilient to the effect of RX IQI.

Estimation of unemployment rates in small areas of Portugal: a best linear unbiased prediction approach versus a hierarchical Bayes approach

The high level of unemployment is one of the major problems in most European countries nowadays. Hence, the demand for small area labor market statistics has rapidly increased over the past few years. The Labour Force Survey (LFS) conducted by the Portuguese Statistical Office is the main source of official statistics on the labour market at the macro level (e.g. NUTS2 and national level). However, the LFS was not designed to produce reliable statistics at the micro level (e.g. NUTS3, municipalities or further disaggregate level) due to small sample sizes. Consequently, traditional design-based estimators are not appropriate. A solution to this problem is to consider model-based estimators that "borrow information" from related areas or past samples by using auxiliary information. This paper reviews, under the model-based approach, Best Linear Unbiased Predictors and an estimator based on the posterior predictive distribution of a Hierarchical Bayesian model. The goal of this paper is to analyze the possibility to produce accurate unemployment rate statistics at micro level from the Portuguese LFS using these kinds of stimators. This paper discusses the advantages of using each approach and the viability of its implementation.

La parole en action : dissensus sur les accommodements raisonnables lors des auditions en commission parlementaire au Québec (2010-2011)

La question du pluralisme religieux est au Québec, l’objet de désaccords et de variations dans son mode de régulation et ses instruments d’action publique. La consultation publique sur le projet loi n° 94, Loi établissant les balises encadrant les demandes d’accommodement dans l’Administration gouvernementale et dans certains établissements, est au cœur de ceux-ci. En se basant sur l’analyse des séances d’auditions publiques en commission parlementaire qui ont eu lieu au Québec entre mai 2010 et janvier 2011 sur le projet de loi n° 94, cette thèse vise à interroger les enjeux liés à la publicisation des prises de positions et de l’échange d’arguments entre différents acteurs. À partir d’une méthodologie par théorisation enracinée et d’un cadre conceptuel qui se rattache à la communication publique, cette thèse cherche à mettre en évidence quelques-unes des propriétés des interactions verbales et non verbales qui composent et incarnent cette activité délibérative. Elle approche ces interactions du point de vue de leur publicisation en s’appuyant sur deux principes : la participation publique en tant qu’un instant de la construction du problème public et l’audition publique en commission parlementaire comme maillon d’un réseau dialogique qui participe à la publicisation du désaccord sur les accommodements raisonnables. Mettant l’accent sur l’usage du langage (verbal, non verbal et para verbal), l’objectif de cette thèse est de mieux comprendre comment des groupes minoritaires et majoritaires, engagés dans une arène publique où les points de vue par rapport aux accommodements raisonnables sont confrontés et mis en visibilité, gèrent leur situation de parole publique. La démarche de recherche a combiné deux stratégies d’analyse : la première stratégie d’inspiration conversationnelle, qui observe chaque séquence comme objet indépendant, a permis de saisir le déroulement des séances d’audition en respectant le caractère séquentiel des tours de parole La deuxième stratégie reviens sur les principaux résultats de l’analyse des séances d’auditions pour valider les résultats et parvenir à la saturation théorique pour élaborer une modélisation. L’exploitation des données selon cette approche qualitative a abouti au repérage de trois dynamiques. La première fait état des contraintes discursives. La seconde met en évidence le rôle des dimensions motivationnelles et socioculturelles dans la construction des positionnements et dans l’adoption d’un registre polémique. La troisième souligne la portée de la parole publique en termes d’actualisation des rapports de pouvoir et de confirmation de son caractère polémique. La modélisation proposée par cette thèse représente le registre polémique comme un élément constitutif de l’engagement argumentatif des acteurs sociaux mais qui est considérablement enchâssé dans d’autres éléments contextuels et motivationnels qui vont orienter sa portée. En tant qu’elle est exprimée dans un site dialogique, la parole publique en situation d’audition publique en commission parlementaire est en mesure de créer de nouvelles intrigues et d’une possibilité de coexister dans le dissensus. Le principal apport de cette thèse est qu’elle propose une articulation, concrète et originale entre une approche de la parole publique en tant que révélatrice d’autre chose que d’elle-même (nécessaire à tout éclaircissement des points de vue dans cette controverse) et une approche de la parole publique en tant que performance conduisant à la transformation du monde social. D’où, le titre de la thèse : la parole en action. Mots clefs : parole publique, discours, arène publique, pluralisme religieux, accommodements raisonnables, controverses, dissensus, théorisation enracinée

Joint compensation of IQ-imbalance and carrier phase sychronization errors in communication receivers

This work addresses the joint compensation of IQimbalances and carrier phase synchronization errors of zero- IF receivers. The compensation scheme based on blind-source separation which provides simple yet potent means to jointly compensate for these errors independent of modulation format and constellation size used. The low-complexity of the algorithm makes it a suitable option for real-time deployment as well as practical for integration into monolithic receiver designs.

Adaptive compensation of analog front-end I/Q mismatches in digital receivers

I and Q Channel phase and gain misniatches are of great concern in communications receiver design. In this paper we analyse the effects of I and Q channel mismatches and propose a low-complexity blind adaptive algorithm to minimize this problem. The proposed solution consists of two, 2-tap adaptive filters, arranged in Adaptive Noise Canceller (ANC) set-up, with the output of one cross-fed to the input of the other. The system works as a de-correlator eliminating I and Q mismatch errors.