Scotland and Ulster connections in the seventeenth century : Sir Robert Adair of Kinhilt and the Scottish Parliament under the covenanters

It has long been recognized that a culture of mobility has existed in Scottish society. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the main destinations for Scottish migrants were Poland, Scandinavia, and Ulster, although there were many other destinations too

The Scottish Parliament and the monarchy in the context of the monarchy and the Anglo-Scottish dynastic union, 1603-1707

This journal article depicts the Scottish Parliament and the monarchy in the context of the monarchy and the Anglo-Scottish dynastic union, 1603-170

'Across the pond'—a response to the NICE guidelines for management of multi-morbidity in older people

No abstract available

Dental equipment test during zero-gravity flight

The overall objectives of this program were to establish performance criteria and develop prototype equipment for use in the Health Maintenance Facility (HMF) in meeting the needs of dental emergencies during space missions. The primary efforts during this flight test were to test patient-operator relationships, patent (manikin) restraint and positioning, task lighting systems, use and operation of dental rotary instruments, suction and particle containment system, dental hand instrument delivery and control procedures, and the use of dental treatment materials. The initial efforts during the flight focused on verification of the efficiency of the particle containment system. An absorptive barrier was also tested in lieu of the suction collector. To test the instrument delivery system, teeth in the manikin were prepared with the dental drill to receive restorations, some with temporary filling materials and another with definitive filling material (composite resin). The best particle containment came from the combination use of the laminar-air/suction collector in concert with immediate area suction from a surgical high-volume suction tip. Lighting in the treatment area was provided by a flexible fiberoptic probe. This system is quite effective for small areas, but for general tasks ambient illumination is required. The instrument containment system (elastic cord network) was extremely effective and easy to use. The most serious problem with instrument delivey and actual treatment was lack of time during the microgravity sequences. The restorative materials handled and finished well

Health maintenance facility: Dental equipment requirements

The objectives were to test the effectiveness of the Health Maintenance Facility (HMF) dental suction/particle containment system, which controls fluids and debris generated during simulated dental treatment, in microgravity; to test the effectiveness of fiber optic intraoral lighting systems in microgravity, while simulating dental treatment; and to evaluate the operation and function of off-the-shelf dental handheld instruments, namely a portable dental hand drill and temporary filling material, in microgravity. A description of test procedures, including test set-up, flight equipment, and the data acquisition system, is given

Properties of the mixed μ problem and its bounds

Upper and lower bounds for the mixed μ problem have recently been developed, and here we examine the relationship of these bounds to each other and to μ. A number of interesting properties are developed and the implications of these properties for the robustness analysis of linear systems and the development of practical computation schemes are discussed. In particular we find that current techniques can only guarantee easy computation for large problems when μ equals its upper bound, and computational complexity results prohibit this possibility for general problems. In this context we present some special cases where computation is easy and make some direct comparisons between mixed μ and “Kharitonov-type” analysis methods

The Track Record on Takings Legislation: Lessons from Democracy\u27s Laboratories

This report by the Georgetown Environmental Law & Policy Institute, entitled The Track Record on Takings Legislation: Lessons from Democracy\u27s Laboratories, examines the experiences of Florida, Oregon, and several other states with legislation implementing the property rights agenda. The report is the first comprehensive effort to systematically identify and evaluate the on-the-ground consequences of so-called takings compensation laws. The major findings of the report are that the takings agenda has undermined community protections by forcing a roll back of existing legal rules and/or by exerting a chilling effect on new legislative activity, special interests such as developers and timber companies have been the primary beneficiaries of takings legislation, the takings laws have fomented and exacerbated neighbor-neighbor conflicts over land use issues, the takings agenda has conferred large windfalls on certain owners either in the form of taxpayer-funded awards or special exemptions from the rules that apply to the rest of the community, and the property rights agenda has undermined the democratic process. Contrary to a common argument made by proponents of this type of legislation, requiring the government to pay to regulate does not lead government officials to make a more nuanced appraisal of the costs and benefits of regulations, apparently because the salience of fiscal costs to government officials far outweighs the relatively more diffuse political benefits of community and homeowner protection

A Codebook Generation Algorithm for Document Image Compression

Pattern-matching-based document-compression systems (e.g. for faxing) rely on finding a small set of patterns that can be used to represent all of the ink in the document. Finding an optimal set of patterns is NP-hard; previous compression schemes have resorted to heuristics. This paper describes an extension of the cross-entropy approach, used previously for measuring pattern similarity, to this problem. This approach reduces the problem to a k-medians problem, for which the paper gives a new algorithm with a provably good performance guarantee. In comparison to previous heuristics (First Fit, with and without generalized Lloyd's/k-means postprocessing steps), the new algorithm generates a better codebook, resulting in an overall improvement in compression performance of almost 17%