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Michael Cook looks at the role of an embedded Public Health Information Specialist highlighting the ways the core evidence, information and knowledge skills are used to progress Public Health activity in local government settings. Acknowledging the current pandemic, he explores how COVID-19 has dominated all aspects of health and social care, and outlines how evidence services have work within these complex Public Health systems to lead the local response and recovery efforts.

This study explores the benefits, disadvantages, and barriers for the internationalization of regional small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the adoption of electronic commerce (e-commerce). Interviews were conducted with directors of ten Australian regional SMEs for exploring their use of e-commerce in the internationalization process. This led to the identification and validation of benefits, disadvantages, and barriers for the internationalization of regional SMEs with the use of e-commerce. A better understanding of these benefits, disadvantages, and barriers would help e-commerce stakeholders develop appropriate strategies and policies for driving the adoption of e-commerce for the internationalization of regional SMEs.

Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) is a major concern for CMOS reliability. In this paper extraction methods for threshold voltage shift from drain current versus gate voltage transfer curve and from single drain current value in NBTI characterization of PMOS 3.3 V device in a 180 nm CMOS process were compared with good agreement from ultra-fast measurements at microsecond time scale. The analysis provides validation methodology of spot drain current measurement for fast determination of threshold voltage shift in NBTI characterization for the specific technology and device. After validation, spot current method can be applied to standard testers as well as test systems with fast measurement capabilities.

As we develop more assistive and automated game design systems, the question of how these systems should be integrated into game development workflows, and how much adaptation may be required, becomes increasingly important. In this paper we explore the impact of software engineering decisions on the ability of an automated game design system to understand a game's codebase, generate new game code, and evaluate its work. We argue that a new approach to software engineering may be required in order for game developers to fully benefit from automated game designers.

Most generative systems built in game development are parameter-driven, but the relationship between parameters and the output of the system is often unclear. This makes them frustrating to use for both experts and novices, and as a result generators are often filtered post-hoc, or tweaked through time-consuming trial and error. In this paper we introduce two analytical techniques: smoothness and codependence. We show how these features help analyse the impact of a parameter change on a generative system and suggest ways this could feed back into more intelligent tools that make working with procedural generators more precise and pleasant.

The PowerFlex 750-Series products with TotalFORCE control are Architecture Class AC drives, bus supplies, and common bus inverters for the Low Voltage market from 160kW to 6000kW. An Opal-RT Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) system was chosen to perform a wide variety of product software and hardware verification and validation during the product design phase and will be used for regression testing over the life of the product. As with any simulation, fidelity and accuracy of the simulation must adequately match the product itself in order to guarantee usefulness and confidence in any testing and verification. This paper demonstrates through simulation and experimental results that the HIL system provides an accurate and flexible test and verification platform for the PowerFlex 755TM Common Bus Inverter.

This paper describes past preservation efforts with agricultural literature in the United States, as well as current projects, challenges, and trends. Starting in the early 1990s, preservation of U.S. historical agricultural publications experienced a period of coordinated scholarly evaluation and funding. In 1993 the combined efforts of the United States Agricultural Information Network and librarians at Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library produced the National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature. It was an ambitious effort to save the nation's historical print-agricultural literature from deterioration. This effort ranged from nationally significant scholarly works, such as the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture, to significant state and local literature. A multiphase project on state and local literature was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Later, in the wake of the nation's financial crisis of 2008, NEH-sponsored funding ended and staffing levels in many libraries declined as the large-scale digitization of library collections was being undertaken by Microsoft and Google. With the advent of HathiTrust Digital Library and other collaborative efforts, the challenges and opportunities for preserving and accessing the nation's agricultural literature have evolved and changed dramatically. Today, new partnerships and initiatives around the country, such as the Center for Research Libraries–sponsored Project Ceres, are continuing and refocusing earlier efforts.

The workshop program at the Eleventh Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment was held November 14–15, 2015 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. The program included 4 workshops (one of which was a joint workshop): Artificial Intelligence in Adversarial Real-Time Games, Experimental AI in Games, Intelligent Narrative Technologies and Social Believability in Games, and Player Modeling. This article contains the reports of three of the four workshops.

PurposeWe sought to identify factors predictive of or associated with receipt of speech/language services during early childhood. We did so by analyzing data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; Andreassen & Fletcher, 2005), a nationally representative data set maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. We addressed two research questions of particular importance to speech-language pathology practice and policy. First, do early vocabulary delays increase children's likelihood of receiving speech/language services? Second, are minority children systematically less likely to receive these services than otherwise similar White children?MethodMultivariate logistic regression analyses were performed for a population-based sample of 9,600 children and families participating in the ECLS-B.ResultsExpressive vocabulary delays by 24 months of age were strongly associated with and predictive of children's receipt of speech/language services at 24, 48, and 60 months of age (adjusted odds ratio range = 4.32–16.60). Black children were less likely to receive speech/language services than otherwise similar White children at 24, 48, and 60 months of age (adjusted odds ratio range = 0.42–0.55). Lower socioeconomic status children and those whose parental primary language was other than English were also less likely to receive services. Being born with very low birth weight also significantly increased children's receipt of services at 24, 48, and 60 months of age.ConclusionExpressive vocabulary delays at 24 months of age increase children’s risk for later speech/language services. Increased use of culturally and linguistically sensitive practices may help racial/ethnic minority children access needed services.

Clonal hematopoiesis (CH) is an age-related phenomenon linked to increases in cardiac mortality, all-cause mortality and myeloid malignancies. The magnitude of risk rivals that of known risk factors like high cholesterol or hypertension. Unlike those settings, CH has no ready intervention to mitigate it. Theoretically, bone marrow transplantation (BMT) might impact the abundance of disease driving clones, but the risks of that therapy as currently practiced are too extreme. Further, it is not clear that this intervention would impact atherosclerosis. We have defined antibody drug conjugates (ADC) against CD45 that enable high levels of chimerism in transplant settings. These ADC have been well tolerated in pre-clinical models and do not involve genotoxins that might incur long term risks. We therefore tested if CD45-ADC could be used to deplete Tet2 deficient HSPCs and their mature progeny and if that in turn could impact atherosclerotic disease. CH-related atherosclerosis was modeled in LDLR knockout mice bearing wild-type (WT) or 20% Tet2-/- hematopoietic cells. After week 6 of 12, the mice received one dose of isotype- or CD45-ADC followed by WT bone marrow infusion. 6 weeks later there was a 3-fold reduction of Tet2-/- cells and 75% of peripheral blood was derived from the WT graft. Notably, a single dose of ADC reduced the number of CD11b+ myeloid cells in the atherosclerotic plaques of both the WT and Tet2 mutant hosts. In the Tet2-/- hosts, the area of the aortic plaques strikingly regressed. These data indicate that ADC treatment can deplete plaque macrophages associated with disease. It can enable regression of atherosclerosis while replacing the disease causing mutant clones. If ADC conditioning proves itself clinically, the potential for extending BMT to clonal hematopoiesis may have broad based health benefits.

Designing game rulesets is an important part of automated game design, and often serves as a foundation for all other parts of the game, from levels to visuals. Popular ways of understanding game rulesets include using AI agents to play the game, which can be unreliable and computationally expensive, or restricting the design space to a set of known good game concepts, which can limit innovation and creativity. In this paper we detail how ANGELINA, an automated game designer, uses an abductive analysis of game rulesets to rapidly cull its design space. We show how abduction can be used to provide an understanding of possible paths through a ruleset, reduce unplayable or undesirable rulesets without testing, and can also help discover dynamic heuristics for a game that can guide subsequent tasks like level design.

High resistance polysilicon resistors have been characterized by DC and pulsed I-V sweep measurements, resistance vs. temperature, and DC and pulsed voltage stress/measurement cycling. The combination of these measurements along with resistor linearity and electro-migration rules are used to determine the maximum safe-operating area. It is shown that the resistance shifts at high current conditions cannot be explained by electromigration alone, and are instead attributed to migration of dopants, Si, or hydrogen, either singly or in combination, both due to high self-heating. The results are used to create voltage and current checks within SPICE models allowing for robust design at maximum operating conditions. IR-OBIRCH physical analysis was performed and shows asymmetric changes to the resistor head regions.

The AIIDE-14 Workshop program was held Friday and Saturday, October 3–4, 2014 at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The workshop program included five workshops covering a wide range of topics. The titles of the workshops held Friday were Games and Natural Language Processing, and Artificial Intelligence in Adversarial Real-Time Games. The titles of the workshops held Saturday were Diversity in Games Research, Experimental Artificial Intelligence in Games, and Musical Metacreation. This article presents short summaries of those events.

Epistles of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, the founder of the Wahhābī movement in eighteenth-century Najd, are preserved in profusion in Wahhābī sources. One of them is a short epistle, clearly intended for a lay audience, that sets out basic Wahhābī dogma in terms of four principles (qawāʿid). This epistle is preserved by Wahhābī sources in several different versions; none of them are dated, making it hard to establish how the text evolved over time. The present study is based on two dated external witnesses to the text of the epistle. One is taken from an unpublished Baṣran refutation of 1745, and is translated here. The other is found in a Yemeni chronicle under the events of the year 1212/1797f. Thanks to these two fixed points, it is possible to construct a plausible account of the evolution of the text over the intervening decades. From this it is clear that while written transmission played a significant part in the evolution of the text, some of the more dramatic changes are the result of oral intervention. Moreover the role of orality is confirmed by evidence suggesting the extensive use of the epistle in oral settings, an illustration of the strong concern of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb to spread his message among the laity.

The revolution caused by the advancement of technology, globalization and internet-enabled manufacturing is rapidly changing the manufacturing industry and requires engineers with different and more diverse knowledge than provided by traditionally-based curricula. In order to fill the emerging gap in engineering education we, educators, have to start thinking about preparing students for the future. This paper describes our efforts to address the 21st century workforce challenges and opportunities. We present a novel multidisciplinary education approach through a case study example from a recently implemented course. This course was part of a larger institution-wide industry-university partnership to address the education gap in industrial and manufacturing engineering programs, beginning with the Connected Enterprise Concepts (CECs). The program started with developing a multi-faceted partnership with local companies and leaders in the manufacturing industry, and cross-disciplinary collaboration between Faculty members from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). We present the framework within which this course, the first of its kind, was initiated, designed and implemented. We will also provide the initial results of students' survey and propose a way to address the challenges.

This article reports on a large scale randomized controlled trial to study the efficacy of a web-based intelligent tutoring system for the structure strategy designed to improve content area reading comprehension. The research was conducted with 128 fifth-grade classrooms within 12 school districts in rural and suburban settings. Classrooms within each school were randomly assigned to intervention or control groups. The intervention group used the intelligent web-based tutoring system for the structure strategy (ITSS) for 30 to 45 min each week as a partial substitute for the language arts curriculum for the entire school year. The structure strategy teaches students how to read and comprehend expository texts by identifying the text structure and creating strategic mental representations of the text. The web-based tutoring system delivered the structure strategy training with modeling, practice tasks, assessment, and feedback. The control classrooms used the school's language arts curriculum for ...

The Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) was held October 14–18, 2013, at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Workshops were held on the two days prior to the start of the main conference, giving attendees a chance to hold in-depth discussions on topics that complement the themes of the main conference program. This year the workshops included the First Workshop on AI and Game Aesthetics (1 day), The Second Workshop on AI in the Game Design Process (1 day), The Second International Workshop on Musical Metacreation (2 day), The Sixth Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (2 day).

An important step towards reducing humankind's reliance on unsustainable energy is by improving energy efficiency in a home or building. One solution to energy-intensive homes is to take environmental measurements in-house that can alert the owner of what rooms and conditions have high-energy waste (e.g., unnecessary air-conditioning or lighting). This paper describes the development and performance of a low-cost, easy-to-use and easy-to-maintain wireless sensor network suited for home environmental monitoring. Low-cost and ease-of-use are achieved through a single open-source software element developed for use on a home computer and a low-cost sensor node element that can be simply placed and turned on. Ease-of-maintenance is achieved by prolonging the sensor's battery life and minimising user interaction. Data is retrieved from the sensor and aggregated to central location automatically when the home PC/sink node is turned on. There is no further interaction is required by the user beyond initialising the application.

Mediums such as fine art and poetry are common subjects in computational creativity---but what about something closer to home? Can computers be as creative in programming as they are in poetry?

A review of the origins and development of English local record offices in the period after World War II, based on the personal experience of the author. The paper deals with the climate of opinion, the work of relevant public bodies, such as the National Register of Archives, the British Records Association, government action and published studies. It covers the origins of records management, professional training and staffing.

This chapter addresses the dating of traditions in early Islamic religious literature. The first and second centuries of Islam, a large part of the available material consists of traditions-much shorter texts whose real or supposed authorship and provenance are indicated by a chain of authorities, the isnad. Since this literary form comprises so much of our material, and embraces such a range of subject matter, anyone concerned with the first two centuries of Islam needs to know when this material originated. And since a tradition exposes far less surface area to dating probes than a book, he will not easily get to know. But if the authors proceed in such a fashion, they should be clear what they are doing. Eschatology is one of the rare fields in which they can hope to find traditions susceptible of hard dating on external grounds.

Michael J Cook,1 Basant K Puri2 1Independent researcher, Dorset, UK; 2Department of Medicine, Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College London, London, UK Abstract: The clinical diagnosis of Lyme borreliosis can be supported by various test methodologies; test kits are available from many manufacturers. Literature searches were carried out to identify studies that reported characteristics of the test kits. Of 50 searched studies, 18 were included where the tests were commercially available and samples were proven to be positive using serology testing, evidence of an erythema migrans rash, and/or culture. Additional requirements were a test specificity of ≥85% and publication in the last 20 years. The weighted mean sensitivity for all tests and for all samples was 59.5%. Individual study means varied from 30.6% to 86.2%. Sensitivity for each test technology varied from 62.4% for Western blot kits, and 62.3% for enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay tests, to 53.9% for synthetic C6 peptide ELISA tests and 53.7% when the two-tier methodology was used. Test sensitivity increased as dissemination of the pathogen affected different organs; however, the absence of data on the time from infection to serological testing and the lack of standard definitions for “early” and “late” disease prevented analysis of test sensitivity versus time of infection. The lack of standardization of the definitions of disease stage and the possibility of retrospective selection bias prevented clear evaluation of test sensitivity by “stage”. The sensitivity for samples classified as acute disease was 35.4%, with a corresponding sensitivity of 64.5% for samples from patients defined as convalescent. Regression analysis demonstrated an improvement of 4% in test sensitivity over the 20-year study period. The studies did not provide data to indicate the sensitivity of tests used in a clinical setting since the effect of recent use of antibiotics or steroids or other factors affecting antibody response was not factored in. The tests were developed for only specific Borrelia species; sensitivities for other species could not be calculated. Keywords: test sensitivity, 2 tier test, two-tier test, ELISA test, Western Blot, test specificity

In this study, Bayes’ theorem was used to determine the probability of a patient having Lyme disease (LD), given a positive test result obtained using commercial test kits in clinically diagnosed patients. In addition, an algorithm was developed to extend the theorem to the two-tier test methodology. Using a disease prevalence of 5%–75% in samples sent for testing by clinicians, evaluated with a C6 peptide enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), the probability of infection given a positive test ranged from 26.4% when the disease was present in 5% of referrals to 95.3% when disease was present in 75%. When applied in the case of a C6 ELISA followed by a Western blot, the algorithm developed for the two-tier test demonstrated an improvement with the probability of disease given a positive test ranging between 67.2% and 96.6%. Using an algorithm to determine false-positive results, the C6 ELISA generated 73.6% false positives with 5% prevalence and 4.7% false positives with 75% prevalence. Corresponding data for a group of test kits used to diagnose HIV generated false-positive rates from 5.4% down to 0.1% indicating that the LD tests produce up to 46 times more false positives. False-negative test results can also influence patient treatment and outcomes. The probability of a false-negative test for LD with a single test for early-stage disease was high at 66.8%, increasing to 74.9% for two-tier testing. With the least sensitive HIV test used in the two-stage test, the false-negative rate was 1.3%, indicating that the LD test generates ~60 times as many false-negative results. For late-stage LD, the two-tier test generated 16.7% false negatives compared with 0.095% false negatives generated by a two-step HIV test, which is over a 170-fold difference. Using clinically representative LD test sensitivities, the two-tier test generated over 500 times more false-negative results than two-stage HIV testing.

Rules are at the core of many games. So how about generating them? This chapter discusses various ways to encode and generate game rules, and occasionally game entities that are strongly tied to rules. The first part discusses ways of generating rules for board games, including Ludi, perhaps the most successful example of automatically generated game rules. The second part discusses some more tentative attempts to generate rules for video games, in particular 2D games with graphical logic. Most approaches to generating game rules have used search-based methods such as evolution, but there are also some solver-based approaches.

Quantitative depth based on binocular resolution of visibility constraints is demonstrated in a novel stereogram representing an object, visible to 1 eye only, and seen through an aperture or camouflaged against a background. The monocular region in the display is attached to the binocular region, so that the stereogram represents an object which is only partially visible to the eye that sees it. The results show that this feature is necessary for quantitative depth, which is not found for a fully visible monocular object in the same location, and that depth in these displays, although very precise, is not based on fusional Stereopsis. The findings provide clear support for the existence of a process of da Vinci Stereopsis, but one more sophisticated than the one proposed by K. Nakayama and S. Shimojo (1990).

This paper introduces a research agenda on “integrated management and services for urban development records, archives and information”, a national research project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. It discusses seven aspects of the agenda: background to the research, the research aims, the research objectives and questions, focuses and hypothesis of the project, analytical framework and methodology of the project, research plans, and the expected outcomes for the study.

X-ray scattering of biological macromolecules in solution is an increasingly popular tool for structural biology and benefits greatly from modern high-brightness synchrotron sources. The upgraded MacCHESS BioSAXS station is now located at the 49-pole wiggler beamline G1. The 20-fold improved flux over the previous beamline F2 provides higher sample throughput and autonomous X-ray scattering data collection using a unique SAXS/WAXS dual detectors configuration. This setup achieves a combinedq-range from 0.007 to 0.7 Å−1, enabling better characterization of smaller molecules, while opening opportunities for emerging wide-angle scattering methods. In addition, a facility upgrade of the positron storage ring to continuous top-up mode has improved beam stability and eliminated beam drift over the course of typical BioSAXS experiments. Single exposure times have been reduced to 2 s for 3.560 mg ml−1lysozyme with an average quality factorI/σ of 20 in the Guinier region. A novel disposable plastic sample cell design that incorporates lower background X-ray window material provides users with a more pristine sample environment than previously available. Systematic comparisons of common X-ray window materials bonded to the cell have also been extended to the wide-angle regime, offering new insight into best choices for variousq-space ranges. In addition, a quantitative assessment of signal-to-noise levels has been performed on the station to allow users to estimate necessary exposure times for obtaining usable signals in the Guinier regime. Users also have access to a new BioSAXS sample preparation laboratory which houses essential wet-chemistry equipment and biophysical instrumentation. User experiments at the upgraded BioSAXS station have been on-going since commissioning of the beamline in Summer 2013. A planned upgrade of the G1 insertion device to an undulator for the Winter 2014 cycle is expected to further improve flux by an order of magnitude.

Developing videogames is a complicated activity that involves a lot of creative domains. Many of these domains we often associate with creativity, like the production of art of music, but writing code is perhaps more often considered functional than creative. In this chapter, we examine how software can be designed to creatively explore and invent new game ideas through automatic inspection, modification and execution of game code. We’ll look at an example system that can explore a game’s codebase to invent new game mechanics, and then show how the system can use those mechanics to design levels and playtest them.

The notion that software could be independently and use- fully creative is becoming more commonplace in scientific, cultural, busi- ness and public circles. It is not fanciful to imagine creative software embedded in society in the short to medium term, acting as collabora- tors and autonomous creative agents for much societal benefit. Techno- logically, there is still some way to go to enable Artificial Intelligence methods to create artefacts and ideas of value, and to get software to do so in interesting and engaging ways. There are also a number of socio- logical hurdles to overcome in getting society to accept software as being truly creative, and we concentrate on those here. We discuss the various communities that can be considered stakeholders in the perception of computers being creative or not. In particular, we look in detail at three sets of stakeholders, namely the general public, Computational Creativ- ity researchers and fellow creatives. We put forward various philosophical points which we argue will shape the way in which society accepts cre- ative software. We make various claims along the way about how people perceive software as being creative or not, which we believe should be addressed with scientific experimentation, and we call on the Computa- tional Creativity research community to do just that.

Traumatic injury to a joint is known to increase the risk for the development of secondary osteoarthritis, but it is unclear how this process occurs. The existence of such a discrete event that can lead to an increased risk of osteoarthritis has spurred interest in developing in vitro models of traumatic joint injury. The current authors review some of the recent insights gained from these model systems into the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis, including the evidence for an initial, irreversible insult to chondrocytes during mechanical injury, the occurrence of apoptotic chondrocyte death, and attempts to identify the effects of trauma on chondrocyte metabolic response. Results also are presented from the authors' ongoing studies of the degradative pathways initiated by traumatic mechanical loads, the mechanism by which chondrocytes are affected during compression, and possible contributions of the joint capsule to posttraumatic cartilage degradation.

Perspective is usually considered a monocular pictorial cue, distinct from other cues such as occlusion and stereopsis. We cut across these distinctions by asking whether purely binocular (cyclopean) contours, created by stereoscopically shifting a region of homogeneous texture nearer or further than its surround, can act as a linear-perspective cue and whether the contours' ability to do this is influenced by their surface belongingness. We found that the left/right orientation of cyclopean trapezoids nearer than a surround strongly influenced perceived slant, showing that perspective constraints are applied to stereoscopically derived contours. Further regions, however, appeared as surfaces seen through a trapezoidal aperture. Because the aperture “owned” the trapezoidal contours, their orientation had little effect on perceived slant. We conclude that the application of perspective constraints depends critically on how contours are classified by stereo-specified occlusion relationships among surfaces and that perspective, stereopsis, and occlusion are not distinct processing systems.

Outlines an institutional framework for identifying and rewarding excellence in teaching, drawing on an initiative developed at the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside. Describes the strategies adopted by the excellence in teaching working group, the outcomes of the project, and identifies how these have been implemented in the university’s promotions policy. Case study offers a framework for practitioners involved in raising the quality and profile of teaching in higher education through a recognition of the achievement of excellence.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a statement of the author's personal opinion on some of the effects of media discussion of issues with a records component.Design/methodology/approachIn the discussion, appraisal of records for retention and the access to be given to users of these are singled out. Effects of electronic records management are included.FindingsAccountability is seen as being the main principle in the appraisal of public records, but is extended to the private sector in such matters as environmental protection. Access is effected by the opening of the hitherto secret records of Eastern Europe, but also by new legal provision for data protection and freedom of information.Originality/valuePrinciples for further development of professional action in records and archives management are suggested.

In The Hollow Man (1935), John Dickson Carr’s larger than life detective Dr. Gideon Fell rails against the pursuit of realism in detective fiction: A few people who do not like the slightly lurid insist on treating their preferences as rules. They use, as a stamp of condemnation, the word ‘improbable’. And thereby they gull the unwary into their own belief that ‘improbable’ simply means ‘bad’. Now, it seems reasonable to point out that the word improbable is the very last which should ever be used to curse detective fiction in any case. A great part of our liking for detective fiction is based on a liking for improbability.2

It was one of those rare moments of affirmation. The instant I read Michael Dirda’s description of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2) as ‘the first “grown-up” book I ever read — and it changed my life’, it reawakened distant memories of my own.2 This remarkable story bade me enter a world of adventure beyond even my own childish fantasies, the world of the detective which, despite the many directions that books have taken me since, I have never entirely abandoned. For someone growing up in a working-class town in the post-war decades, this Dartmoor seemed a far-off magical land full of mystery, terror and intrigue, entirely alien to the greyness of urban life. Here was a place, a primeval landscape, inhabited by spectral hounds, desperate convicts, ancient legends, cunning murderers, and Corinthian heroes taken straight from the Gothic canon — a kind of reincarnated Wuthering Heights. No amount of subsequent scholarly know-how can ever make up for the thrill of that first reading, which will stay with me always.

In Poe’s ‘The Gold-Bug’, (1843) the main protagonist, William Legrand, is bitten by a bug he has discovered on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. Eventually, the half-crazed Legrand uses the insect as a means to uncover the lost treasure of Captain Kidd, the infamous pirate. The story involves the use of cryptography with a detailed description of a method for solving a simple substitution cipher using letter frequencies. Although the discovery of the treasure restores Legrand’s fortunes, the heart of the story is the obsession induced by the pursuit of the hoard. Even after the treasure has been found, Legrand seems as interested in demonstrating how he broke the cipher, which seems to be the focus for his mania, as in the pecuniary reward it brings. The title, in fact, is a neat play on words; although Legrand is physically bitten by the bug, it is also a reference to his mental state.

This chapter has the following objectives: to briefly review the legal history of agricultural co-operation in America; to describe the evolution of entities from small community-oriented forms of collective action to their complex organizational forms today; to succinctly define their legal status and formal recognition of agricultural co-operatives; to review the different types of agricultural co-operatives found in the United States; to review the governance roles of the primary stakeholders in agricultural co-operatives; to view, through multiple lenses of corporate governance literature, the types of stakeholder governance of agricultural co-operatives in America and draw implications for the different types of agricultural co-operatives utilizing frameworks drawn from the corporate-governance schools of thought.

It is now the stuff of legend in the world of detective fiction. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), a man lies dead at No. 3, Lauriston Gardens, Brixton, and above the body on the wall, written in blood, is the word ‘Rache’. After his accustomed examination of the scene, Holmes makes the following pronouncement: There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore-leg. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the finger-nails of his right hand were remarkably long.1

Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) is one of the most celebrated ghost stories of modern times. Adapted for television in 1989, it continues to attract interest and is now the subject of a recent major film. One of the main reasons for the story’s impact is its overwhelmingly tragic, yet compelling, central theme, the death of children and the appalling consequences which flow from it. It is a subject that is at once profoundly and universally affecting, not just because of the tragedy of a life unfulfilled, but because the death of children is the death of the future. It stops the tide of life in its tracks and conjures up the nightmare world of P. D. James’s novel, The Children of Men, where no children are born to an infertile population. From a literary perspective, the story has one of the iconic spectres of contemporary fiction, the figure of the woman in black herself, doomed to pass on her own grief to all who witness her melancholy presence.

1 In the sixth century of the Muslim era the Hanbalite scholar Abui 'l-Farag ibn al-Gawzl (d. 597) wrote a book to encourage his lazy contemporaries to greater efforts in the memorisation of Tradition.' God, he argued, had singled out the Muslims to memorise Koran and Tradition, whereas those who had been before them had been dependent on written sources and were incapable of memorisation. The Jews, for example, had conferred on Ezra2 the title "son of God" merely because he knew the Torah by heart; among Muslims, by contrast, a seven-year-old child could recite the Koran from memory. The same contrast obtained in the field of Tradition. "Nobody among the nations transmits the words and deeds of their Prophet in a reliable fashion apart from us; for among us Tradition is transmitted from one generation to another, and the reliability of [each] transmitter is examined until the tradition has been traced back to the Prophet. Other nations have their traditions from written sources of which the writers and transmitters are unknown."3 ? 2 Ibn al-Oawzi's exhortation suggests two basic points about the "oral Tradition" of Islam. The first concerns the significance of its oral character. For Ibn al-(awzi, as for the Muslim traditionists in general, this oral character was more than an occasion for the display of

MacCHESS (“Macromolecular diffraction at CHESS”) is an NIH funded facility at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source; we provide a user facility with exceptional staff support. A special MacCHESS strength is developing new x-ray methods to benefit the entire structural biology community.Crystallography - High-flux monochromatic beamlines equipped with large CCD detectors, air bearing-based goniometers, selection of 100-µm or 20-µm beam size, cryocooling, excellent crystal centering systems, and crystal automounters are available. BSL-2 biohazards can be handled. Methods for collecting and processing multi-crystal data sets are under development.BioSAXS - A dedicated beamline features a dual SAXS/WAXS setup using 2 Pilatus detectors and an integrated computer-controlled flow system including robotic sample loading from 96-well trays, a capillary cell with a replaceable insert, and a convenient graphical interface. An HPLC system allows sample preparation immediately before taking data. Microfluidic “lab-on-a-chip” units are under development. Periodic workshops are held to educate users in the intricacies of BioSAXS.Pressure cryocooling - A new method for cryocooling crystals under pressure reduces both cooling-induced degradation and the need for penetrating cryoprotectants, and can stabilize mobile ligands and possibly reaction intermediates. We offer pressure-cooling as a service to CHESS users, while continuing to develop the method. Several sample mounting techniques are now available, and the technique has promise for use with biological samples other than crystals.More information - To request beamtime, fill out a simple on-line proposal form at http://www.chess.cornell.edu. Mail-in service is available for crystallography. We welcome a chance to collaborate on “non-standard” experiments. For more information, contact User Administrator Kathy Dedrick (kd73@cornell.edu).