Mine Action Development Funding in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Mine action seeks to eliminate the lingering effects of contamination from landmines and explosive remnants of war, but the need for development in these communities often trumps clearance and mine-risk education activities. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, where clearance activities are expected to continue until 2019, the Swiss Development Cooperation and Handicap International are exploring new ways for mine action to integrate development efforts into more traditional mine-action efforts

Communication Deficiencies from Chimp to Child

Equating speech with language is a fallacy, declare these authors. They describe a plastic word non-speech response approach that opens a whole new vista for teaching the language-deficient child to communicate

Constitutional Change in Texas During the Reconstruction, 1865-1876

In the decade following the Civil War the Texas political scene was dominated by revisionist activity with regard to the state's constitution. In that period the organic law of the state was altered three times, twice because of the exigencies of National Reconstruction and a third time to satisfy the retrenchment impulses partially stimulated by the Reconstruction experiment. None of the three constitutions written during this ten year period can be properly understood in isolation from the other two, nor can any of them be correctly interpreted separate from the serious post-war political, social, and economic issues faced by the entire nation. Hence, a uniform study of the three constitutions in their local context and their relations to national problems of the period provides a field of significant research and evaluation. It is the purpose of this study to analyze the constitutional changes of the Reconstruction era in Texas in their historical perspective, giving special attention to both the internal political structures and the socio-economic considerations dominant during that period

Heterologous Expression of a Membrane-Spanning Auxin Importer: Implications for Functional Analyses of Auxin Transporters

Biochemical studies of plant auxin transporters in vivo are made difficult by the presence of multiple auxin transporters and auxin-interacting proteins. Furthermore, the expression level of most such transporters in plants is likely to be too low for purification and downstream functional analysis. Heterologous expression systems should address both of these issues. We have examined a number of such systems for their efficiency in expressing AUX1 from Arabidopsis thaliana. We find that a eukaryotic system based upon infection of insect cells with recombinant baculovirus provides a high level, easily scalable expression system capable of delivering a functional assay for AUX1. Furthermore, a transient transfection system in mammalian cells enables localization of AUX1 and AUX1-mediated transport of auxin to be investigated. In contrast, we were unable to utilise P. pastoris or L. lactis expression systems to reliably express AUX1

Chemical and structural characterization of char development during lignocellulosic biomass pyrolysis

The chemical and structural changes of three lignocellulosic biomass samples during pyrolysis were investigated using both conventional and advanced characterization techniques. The use of ATR-FTIR as a characterization tool is extended by the proposal of a method to determine aromaticity, the calculation of both CH2/CH3 ratio and the degree of aromatic ring condensation ((R/C)u). With increasing temperature, the H/C and O/C ratios, XA and CH2/CH3 ratio decreased, while (R/C)u and aromaticity increased. The micropore network developed with increasing temperature, until the coalescence of pores at 1100 °C, which can be linked to increasing carbon densification, extent of aromatization and/or graphitization of the biomass chars. WAXRD-CFA measurements indicated the gradual formation of nearly parallel basic structural units with increasing carbonization temperature. The char development can be considered to occur in two steps: elimination of aliphatic compounds at low temperatures, and hydrogen abstraction and aromatic ring condensation at high temperatures

Challenges in Representation Learning: A report on three machine learning contests

The ICML 2013 Workshop on Challenges in Representation Learning focused on three challenges: the black box learning challenge, the facial expression recognition challenge, and the multimodal learning challenge. We describe the datasets created for these challenges and summarize the results of the competitions. We provide suggestions for organizers of future challenges and some comments on what kind of knowledge can be gained from machine learning competitions.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure