Christmas Lights... and the Light of Christmas

Excerpt: My views on the meaning of Christmas have undergone two major changes. The first came as a six-year-old when I realized that Santa Claus, reindeer, and Frosty the Snowman were different from baby Jesus, donkeys, and manger scenes. After all, Christmas is the celebration of Jesus\u27 birth, not just a worldwide holiday filled with festivities and lights

Ethnic Discrimination in Germany's Labour Market: A Field Experiment

This paper studies ethnic discrimination in Germany's labour market with a correspondence test. To each of 528 advertisements for student internships we send two similar applications, one with a Turkish-sounding and one with a German-sounding name. A German name raises the average probability of a callback by about 14 percent. Differential treatment is particularly strong and significant at smaller firms at which the applicant with the German name receives 24 percent more callbacks. Discrimination disappears when we restrict our sample to applications including reference letters which contain favourable information about the candidate’s personality. We interpret this finding as evidence for statistical discrimination.correspondence test, hiring discrimination, ethnic discrimination

Devonian Sandstone Lithostratigraphy, Northern Arkansas

Two areas of Devonian sandstone development may be recognized in northern Arkansas. In northwestern Arkansas, the Clifty Formation comprises a massively bedded, super mature quartz arenite of Middle Devonian age overlain by thinner bedded, phosphatic quartz arenite and chert breccia of the Sylamore Sandstone Member, Chattanooga Shale (Upper Devonian). This sequence overlies Ordovician strata (Powell or Everton) and is succeeded by the Chattanooga Shale and strata of Lower Mississippian age. In north-central Arkansas, the Clifty Formation is absent and the Chattanooga Shale may develop sandstone at its base and top. Occasionally the Chattanooga Shale is absent and the entire interval may be Upper Devonian sandstone. These Upper Devonian sandstones are phosphatic, mature quartz arenites referred to the Sylamore Member except where they overlie the Chattanooga Shale. In these cases, the sandstone is recognized as an informal upper member of the Chattanooga. Reports of Lower Mississippian Sylamore Sandstone in north-central Arkansas are regarded as misidentification of the Bachelor Formation (Middle Kinderhookian

Iraqi Prisoners in Norway: Educational Background, Participation, Preferences and Barriers to Education

The article aimed to develop knowledge of the educational background, participation and preferences of Iraqi prisoners in Norwegian prisons and obstacles to participating in education. The study is based on interviews with 17 prisoners in three prisons. An important finding is that war and political unrest appear to have been significant causes for respondents to leaving education at various stages. As a result only half of them have as much as one final exam and only three respondents have a certificate of education. Even if the respondents want an education while in prison, and although education is offered in all prisons there is a lack of information about educational opportunities in an understandable language and long waiting time for a place at school. An implication of the study is that the criminal administration system and the educational authorities must take into account the multicultural reality by facilitating education and training offers accordingly

Cinque's functional verbs in French

This article focuses on the syntax of a number of subcategories of verb in French which are compatible with a following bare infinitive and which express various kinds of grammatical tense, mood, modality, aspect and voice, as well as such (more lexical?) notions as perception, causation and locomotion. The article starts by cataloguing a number of properties that these verbs display, and outlines various traditional accounts. It then sketches recent proposals by Cinque (1999, 2006a) [Cinque, Guglielmo, 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Oxford University Press; Cinque, Guglielmo, 2006a. Restructuring and Functional Heads. Oxford University Press] regarding functional clause structure. Finally, the article uses Cinque’s framework to account for the properties identified

Open Set Logo Detection and Retrieval

Current logo retrieval research focuses on closed set scenarios. We argue that the logo domain is too large for this strategy and requires an open set approach. To foster research in this direction, a large-scale logo dataset, called Logos in the Wild, is collected and released to the public. A typical open set logo retrieval application is, for example, assessing the effectiveness of advertisement in sports event broadcasts. Given a query sample in shape of a logo image, the task is to find all further occurrences of this logo in a set of images or videos. Currently, common logo retrieval approaches are unsuitable for this task because of their closed world assumption. Thus, an open set logo retrieval method is proposed in this work which allows searching for previously unseen logos by a single query sample. A two stage concept with separate logo detection and comparison is proposed where both modules are based on task specific CNNs. If trained with the Logos in the Wild data, significant performance improvements are observed, especially compared with state-of-the-art closed set approaches.Comment: accepted at VISAPP 201

Nosemosis disease of honey bees

Nozemoza je kozmopolitski rasprostranjena nametnička bolest koji uzrokuju vrste roda Nosema. Donedavno ih se svrstavalo u skupinu praživotinja, no novija taksonomska istraživanja su otkrila da su bliži carstvu gljiva. Nozemozu medonosne pčele (Apis mellifera) uzrokuju dvije vrste: Nosema apis i Nosema ceranae. One parazitiraju u epitelnim stanicama tankog crijeva, a rasprostranjuju se specifično građenim sporama. Vrsta Nosema apis otkrivena je 1907. no sama bolest na području Europe poznata je i od prije (Broz, 1904.). Kontinuirana istraživanja koja se provode na pčelama u novije vrijeme otkrila su da je vrsta Nosema ceranae sa svog domadara iz Azije, Azijske medonosne pčele, prešla na Europsku medonosnu pčelu i proširila se po cijelom svijetu. Zbog iznesenih činjenica može se reći da je vrsta N. ceranae zapravo invazivna vrsta. Ispitivanja ove bolesti i njenih uzročnika potrebno je još provoditi jer sa velikom vjerojatnošću možemo kazati da je ona jedan od glavnih razloga masovnog nestajanja pčelinjih zajednica.Nosemosis is a worldwide spread parasitic disease caused by species of the genus Nosema. Until recently, they where classified in a group of protozoa, but latest taxonomic studies have revealed that they are closer to the realm of fungi. Nosemosis is caused by two species: Nosema apis and Nosema ceranae. They are parasites on the epithelial cells of the small intestine, and are distribuited by specific spores. Nosema apis was first discovered in 1907. but the disease itself was observed even sooner (Broz, 1904.). Continuous research carried out on the bees in recent years revealed Nosema ceranae moved from its Asian carrier, Asian honeybee, to the European honeybee and spread throught the world. Due to the presented facts it can be said that Nosema ceranae is actually an invasive species. Future research of Nosemosis is important to implement because with high probability we can say that it is one of the main reasons of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)

FeederAnt - An autonomous mobile unit feeding outdoor pigs

Small robots and the concept of decentralized animal husbandry make it possible to renew the principles of organic agriculture. The farm animals will be able to use the same type of housing and are placed integrated with the fields. This is expected to achieve a better utilization of nutrients and a better survival rate for useful insects and micro organisms. The small fields are flexible and could fit to the variation in soil structure topography. This type of precision agriculture has the possibility of increasing biodiversity. The paper presents the concept of an autonomic feeding system for outdoor piglets. Initial results are presented using a remote controlled feeding unit (a prototype of the FeederAnt) to feed several pens with piglets. The FeederAnt drives into the grass paddocks twice a day and position itself in a new location for each feeding. This will help to distribute the manure from the animals evenly over the grass paddock to prevent point leaching of nutrients. The FeederAnt replaces many stationary feeding tables and reduce the amount of daily manual feeding routines. Further, it is expected that the problem with vermins will be solved since no feed residues will be left within the pens.

Focus expressions in Yom

This paper deals with the means for expressing the pragmatic category of focus in Yom, which is an Oti-Volta language of the Yom-Nawdem group spoken by about 74,000 people (Gordon 2005, online version) in the department of Donga in Northern Benin. The study is based on results of my field research carried out in March/April 2005 in Djougou (Benin), within the framework of the project “Focus in Gur and Kwa languages”. Main aim of this fieldwork was to study the expression of focus in Yom. Regarding the basic grammatical structure of the language, I mainly rely on various publications by Beacham (1969, 1991, and 1997)