The Function of State and Diplomatic Privileges and Immunities in International Cooperation in Criminal Matters: The Position in Switzerland

In so far as diplomats are concerned, their immunity from legal process arises under customary international law and treaty law (i.e., the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations,\u27 the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations,2 and the New York Convention on Special Missions\u27 (or New York Convention )). All three conventions state in their preliminaries that diplomatic immunity and privilege arise from international custom and that their function is not to benefit individuals, but to ensure the smooth and efficient performance of their duties in the interest of comity and of friendly relations between sovereign nations

Shaft Signals Corresponding to Cracked Rotor Bars of Induction Machines

Ratings of induction machines range from tens of thousands horsepowers to fractional horsepowers. Unexpected downtime of large Induction motors, such as those used in power plants, can be very costly. Cracked rotor bars of induction machines may overheat rotors, lower outputs, and cause non-retrievable damages.Center for Electromechanic

An Investigation into the Pedagogical Features of Documents

Characterizing the content of a technical document in terms of its learning utility can be useful for applications related to education, such as generating reading lists from large collections of documents. We refer to this learning utility as the "pedagogical value" of the document to the learner. While pedagogical value is an important concept that has been studied extensively within the education domain, there has been little work exploring it from a computational, i.e., natural language processing (NLP), perspective. To allow a computational exploration of this concept, we introduce the notion of "pedagogical roles" of documents (e.g., Tutorial and Survey) as an intermediary component for the study of pedagogical value. Given the lack of available corpora for our exploration, we create the first annotated corpus of pedagogical roles and use it to test baseline techniques for automatic prediction of such roles.Comment: 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA) at EMNLP 2017; 12 page

A proteomic investigation of Fusobacterium nucleatum alkaline-induced biofilms

Background: The Gram negative anaerobe Fusobacterium nucleatum has been implicated in the aetiology of periodontal diseases. Although frequently isolated from healthy dental plaque, its numbers and proportion increase in plaque associated with disease. One of the significant physico-chemical changes in the diseased gingival sulcus is increased environmental pH. When grown under controlled conditions in our laboratory, F. nucleatum subspecies polymorphum formed mono-culture biofilms when cultured at pH 8.2. Biofilm formation is a survival strategy for bacteria, often associated with altered physiology and increased virulence. A proteomic approach was used to understand the phenotypic changes in F. nucleatum cells associated with alkaline induced biofilms. The proteomic based identification of significantly altered proteins was verified where possible using additional methods including quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR), enzyme assay, acidic end-product analysis, intracellular polyglucose assay and Western blotting. Results: Of 421 proteins detected on two-dimensional electrophoresis gels, spot densities of 54 proteins varied significantly (p < 0.05) in F. nucleatum cultured at pH 8.2 compared to growth at pH 7.4. Proteins that were differentially produced in biofilm cells were associated with the functional classes; metabolic enzymes, transport, stress response and hypothetical proteins. Our results suggest that biofilm cells were more metabolically efficient than planktonic cells as changes to amino acid and glucose metabolism generated additional energy needed for survival in a sub-optimal environment. The intracellular concentration of stress response proteins including heat shock protein GroEL and recombinational protein RecA increased markedly in the alkaline environment. A significant finding was the increased abundance of an adhesin, Fusobacterial outer membrane protein A (FomA). This surface protein is known for its capacity to bind to a vast number of bacterial species and human epithelial cells and its increased abundance was associated with biofilm formation. Conclusion: This investigation identified a number of proteins that were significantly altered by F. nucleatum in response to alkaline conditions similar to those reported in diseased periodontal pockets. The results provide insight into the adaptive mechanisms used by F. nucleatum biofilms in response to pH increase in the host environment.Jactty Chew, Peter S Zilm, Janet M Fuss and Neville J Gull

Measuring the Effects of Prosthetic Tactile Pacing on Overt Stuttering Frequency in Adults Who Stutter

While the cause has been historically enigmatic, persistent stuttering exhibits distinct behavioral, neural and genetic characteristics. Throughout many years, a variety of motoric treatments have attempted to ameliorate overt stuttering behaviors; however, most therapeutic options provide unstable, effortful, and/or unnatural sounding results with high relapse rates. Conversely, research documents natural sounding speech coupled with stable and effortless reductions in overt stuttering frequency when a person who stutters is exposed to speech feedback of a second speech signal (i.e. choral speech). The most prolific clinical use of this technology is a prosthetically introduced auditory second speech signal; yet its current application has several technological and environmental limitations, and may not be tolerated well by users. Conversely, the tactile modality may be more comfortable relative to prosthetic implementation and thus better suited for activities of daily living. Prosthetic tactile speech feedback, in the form of a tactile second speech signal, is still a young technology and is currently in development. However, an immediate and inexpensive alternative to real-time speech feedback of a tactile second speech signal may be vibrotactile pacing administered through a smartphone application. Thirteen adults with persistent stuttering participated in this study, which included data collection sessions once a week for four weeks over videoconference. Participants read three ~300 syllable, junior high passages under three different speaking conditions, including a control, a deactivated phone, and a activated smartphone application; moments of overt stuttering were counted by the primary investigator as well as a trained research assistant. The results of this study demonstrate a main effect of the tactile pacing smartphone application on overt stuttering frequency. Bonferroni post hoc analysis reveals significant differences between the control speaking condition and the vibrotactile smartphone application (p=.000) as well as between the deactivated smartphone and the vibrotactile smartphone application (p=.033). Based on these data, an inexpensive tactile pacing smartphone application, such as the StutterLess application used in this study, might be an inexpensive and beneficial prosthetic treatment option

A feasibility study of a hypersonic real-gas facility

A four month feasibility study of a hypersonic real-gas free flight test facility for NASA Langley Research Center (LARC) was performed. The feasibility of using a high-energy electromagnetic launcher (EML) to accelerate complex models (lifting and nonlifting) in the hypersonic, real-gas facility was examined. Issues addressed include: design and performance of the accelerator; design and performance of the power supply; design and operation of the sabot and payload during acceleration and separation; effects of high current, magnetic fields, temperature, and stress on the sabot and payload; and survivability of payload instrumentation during acceleration, flight, and soft catch