Co-Ni-Ga and Co-Ni-Al alloys are expected to be good ferromagnetic shape memory alloys (FSMAs) owing to their higher ductility resulting from the presence of γ-phase precipitates and higher stability in preparation since they do not contain the highly volatile element Mn. Co-Ni- Ga alloys have a wide range of martensitic transformation and Curie temperatures. In order to explore the possibility of obtaining Co-Ni-Ga alloys with room temperature ferromagnetic martensitic phase, two series of compositions, viz., Co70-xNixGa30 (20 ≤ x ≤ 26) and CoxNi25Ga75-x (43 ≤ x ≤ 50) were taken up for investigation. Polycrystalline ingots of these alloys were prepared by arc melting followed by homogenization and quenching at ice water. Analysis of room temperature X-ray diffraction patterns revealed that most of these alloys had a single-phase (tetragonal) structure typical of a martensitic phase, while some of the alloys exhibited a two-phase (cubic and tetragonal) structure due to the presence of both martensite and austenite phases. All alloys having single martensite phase at room temperature showed martensitic transformation at elevated temperature as well as a linear change of the characteristic martensitic transformation temperatures (As, Af, Ms and Mf) with the number of valence electron to atom ratio (e/a). As, Af, Ms and Mf showed distinctive variations when aged in the martensite phase and austenite phase. All the alloys were ferromagnetic at room temperature and the Curie temperature was determined by high temperature ac magnetic susceptibility and magnetization measurements. The typical twin lamellar structure of martensite phase was observed by optical microscope and the development of the cubic γ-phase along with the parent β′-phase was investigated for different ageing temperatures and annealing temperatures. These studies provide useful information about the potential of these alloys for actuator applications.


Following the liberalization reforms of the late 80s and early 90s, several emerging market economies have experienced large and persistent trade deficits. This paper focuses on the Argentine experience, examining the extent to which trade imbalances in the 1990s resulted from income and relative price movements, as well as from shifts in foreign trade elasticities associated with structural changes. New estimates of export and import equations are presented using a broader set of variables than previous studies and distinguishing between intra and extra MERCOSUR trade. We find that considerable export sensitivity to world commodity prices, domestic absorption, and economic activity in Brazil, combined with a high income elasticity of imports, are key determinants of Argentina's trade balance.


In this paper we have exposed the managerial vertical integration between production and sales companies in the functional marketing channels in order to successfully meet the needs of the end customer and higher profits for all members in the vertical chain. The classic principle of domination of marketing and business logistics represents an acceptable requirements in coordination, in terms of increased integration between production and sales companies. In the exposed situation, one-sided, insulated access strategies of marketing in terms of classical domination of marketing placement company represents an outdated approach. Often have graded covered value concepts of coordination raised the issue, which integrating principle should be taken into account when considering the relationship between the level of channel marketing to marketing procurement, business logistics and marketing investments. Such integration activities, which touch upon all levels of functional systems marketing channels, while procedural observation leads to the integrated process of creating the basic properties of a combination of marketing mix from production to the customer. Forming a connected, but also customer-oriented processes in the implementation of vertically and horizontally integrated concept of "package" offering all organizational units is the task of management in the process of creating usage and traffic levels of its components. In its framework a coordination can be established of organizational units integrated gradually covered by a set of values, which is no longer under control and domination by marketing investments. This set of features to create a combination of marketing mix includes complex, more functional relationships of exchange, which coordinates the "brain" for the definition of desire. Such a center is installed in the management of the key features of the "package" offer of production to customers, so that we can talk about a simple system of management of vertical co-operative marketing. The system of domination under the vertical cooperation increases the number of seats between the company and implemented functions through process-oriented mode in a series of properties to create a combination of marketing mix. Consequently, vertical cooperation follows the motive of restructuring business processes with respect to natural, customer-based process at firsthand. The multistage vertical distribution management system seems like a successfully agreed principle of coordination. It fits the motif of the restructuring of business processes, in order to increase the effective creation of a series of use and traffic combination of marketing mix. Organizational definition of such vertical cooperation can be realized through various concepts such as total quality management and customer proximity. At the same time, it doesn not lead to the integration of present organizational units, but only to their co-operative harmonization. In these circumstances the approach inherent MTK (Total Quality Management) becomes very prominent, in order to place a quality cooperative marketing and business logistics between production and retail companies. As an integrative principle of successful restructuring while supporting the total effectiveness of a functional system of marketing channels, we shall mention the pervasive concept of management oriented customers. The realization of the concept in functional systems of marketing channels indicates the need for the establishment of cooperative forms. In a tiered system of marketing channel tehere is a constant need for the whole company organizational units of production, trade and services (intermediaries in the distribution, service organizations in marketing), so there is the question of institutionalizing their coordination. In cooperation between the large manufacturing and retail companies including the internal business process-oriented organization management marketing mix investments, a powerful team in charge of the process is formed. If you include more organizational units in cooperation on customer-oriented management, a multilateral harmonizationmust follow, a company in the network values are referred to a kind of coordination. Such a network of companies is formed as an organizational form suitable just for medium-sized companies with complementary "package" offer, or a combination of its components which would meet the complex problems of customers. In this case, a coordination occurs of at least two participants in a functional channel marketing, so that in this case we can speak of his network. The management system in such a network takes, as a rule, the key company as a switchboard for defining desire. However, on this occasion the management system can be done through a team process, which consists of associate companies represented in the network to create the basic properties of a combination of marketing mix. A functional network marketing channel represents a successful harmonized form of vertical cooperation in highly complicated reproduction. By its integration, in particular, medium-sized companies can solve the problem by establishing a critical mass of cooperation. Thus opens a real space for an objective consideration of the effective management of relationships with customers and within its framework the role of retail and manufacturing companies. On the other hand, on the basis of exposed indisputable facts it can be stated that there is no rationalization and successful growth and development, if sales and production companies do not use a reliable and modern information technology for the establishment of cooperation in the framework of the management system. That way they can quickly react to the "critical mass". Therefore, selling the company should be concentrated on the sensor reliable coverage of sales, automatic messaging and continuously promoting the development of products. Manufacturers need to commit to synchronizing the production, reliable unfolding operations and integrated product delivery. The aim of the strategy is the implementation of supply information and logistic instruments and measures to the real range offered to consumers, at the right place at the right time, in the right quantity, the right quality and at the lowest cost. Supply should be demand-oriented in the context of effective relationships with consumers.


Integrating mathematics into science classrooms has been part of the conversation in science education for a long time. However, studies on student learning after incorporating mathematics in to the science classroom have shown mixed results. Understanding the mixed effects of including mathematics in science has been hindered by a historical focus on characteristics of integration tangential to student learning (e.g., shared elements, extent of integration). A new framework is presented emphasizing the epistemic role of mathematics in science. An epistemic role of mathematics missing from the current literature is identified: use of mathematics to represent scientific mechanisms, Mechanism Connected Mathematics (MCM). Building on prior theoretical work, it is proposed that having students develop mathematical equations that represent scientific mechanisms could elevate their conceptual understanding and quantitative problem solving. Following design and implementation of an MCM unit in inheritance, a large-scale quantitative analysis of pre and post implementation test results showed MCM students, compared to traditionally instructed students) had significantly greater gains in conceptual understanding of mathematically modeled scientific mechanisms, and their ability to solve complex quantitative problems. To gain insight into the mechanism behind the gain in quantitative problem solving, a small-scale qualitative study was conducted of two contrasting groups: 1) within-MCM instruction: competent versus struggling problem solvers, and 2) within-competent problem solvers: MCM instructed versus traditionally instructed. Competent MCM students tended to connect their mathematical inscriptions to the scientific phenomenon and to switch between mathematical and scientifically productive approaches during problem solving in potentially productive ways. The other two groups did not. To address concerns about teacher capacity presenting barriers to scalability of MCM approaches, the types and amount of teacher support needed to achieve these types of student learning gains were investigated. In the context of providing teachers with access to educative materials, students achieved learning gains in both areas in the absence of face-to-face teacher professional development. However, maximal student learning gains required the investment of face-to-face professional development. This finding can govern distribution of scarce resources, but does not preclude implementation of MCM instruction even where resource availability does not allow for face-to-face professional development.


Basing on the results of their studies, analysis of 894 patients with tuberculosis of the lymph nodes and nonspecific lymphadenopathy treated in 1983-1993, medical literature, the authors investigate the place of lymphadenopathies in medical practice: new data on the patients, pathogenesis and pathomorphosis of tuberculous and nonspecific lymphadenopathies, diagnostic techniques. Updated approaches to this disease led to a 17.8% decrease in the percentage of cases with unclear etiology.


Spatial transcriptomics enables spatially resolved gene expression measurements at near single-cell resolution. There is a pressing need for computational tools to enable the detection of genes that are differentially expressed (DE) within specific cell types across tissue context. We show that current approaches cannot learn cell type-specific DE due to changes in cell type composition across space and the fact that measurement units often detect transcripts from more than one cell type. Here, we introduce a statistical method, Cell type-Specific Inference of Differential Expression (C-SIDE), that identifies cell type-specific patterns of differential gene expression while accounting for localization of other cell types. We model spatial transcriptomics gene expression as an additive mixture across cell types of general log-linear cell type-specific expression functions. This approach provides a unified framework for defining and identifying gene expression changes in a wide-range of relevant contexts: changes due to pathology, anatomical regions, physical proximity to specific cell types, and cellular microenvironment. Furthermore, our approach enables statistical inference across multiple samples and replicates when such data is available. We demonstrate, through simulations and validation experiments on Slide-seq and MER-FISH datasets, that our approach accurately identifies cell type-specific differential gene expression and provides valid uncertainty quantification. Lastly, we apply our method to characterize spatially-localized tissue changes in the context of disease. In an Alzheimer's mouse model Slide-seq dataset, we identify plaque-dependent patterns of cellular immune activity. We also find a putative interaction between tumor cells and myeloid immune cells in a Slide-seq tumor dataset. We make our C-SIDE method publicly available as part of the open source R package https://github.com/dmcable/spacexr.


BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE
The DNA fingerprinting is used to determine the relationship between species in the same genus or between genera related to the same family. The aim of this study was to determine the relationships between two samples related to the same family Convolvulaceae, representing two genera, Cressa Linn. and Cuscuta Yunck. by RAPD, ISSR and SCoT molecular techniques (PCR based DNA fingerprint).

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The RAPD, ISSR and SCoT based DNA fingerprinting techniques were implemented to identify the fingerprint diversity between two genera, Cressa Linn. and Cuscuta Yunck-belonging to the family Convolvulaceae.

RESULTS
Applying of RAPD technique revealed that using OP-A02, OP-A09, OP-A10, OP-C04 and OP-M01 primers recorded 60, 83.33, 100, 50 and 70.66% polymorphism, respectively. On the other hand, ISSR technique recorded 40, 50, 100, 66.67, 33.33 and 37.5% polymorphism with 44B, HB-08, HB-09, HB-10, HB-11 and HB-12 primers, respectively. However, amplification of SCoT technique, SCoT 1, SCoT 2, SCoT 3, SCoT 4, SCoT 6, SCoT 8, SCoT 10 and SCoT 12 primers recorded 33.33, 28.57, 14.28, 66.66, 25, 40, 42.85 and 50%, respectively . The total polymorphism recorded 73.33, 54.58 and 37.7% for RAPD, ISSR and SCoT techniques, respectively.

CONCLUSION
The result of this study indicated that SCoT technique was more efficient and sustainable for distinguish between two genera under investigation.


i Abstract Crohn's disease is a chronic, inflammatory condition of the bowel. The aetiology of Crohn's has not been fully elucidated, but is believed to arise from the interaction between the gut microbiota, the host immune system and environmental factors. A majority of Crohn's disease patients will require a bowel resection as a result of disease, which causes significant morbidity and impacts on quality of life. While surgery can ameliorate clinical symptoms, the disease often initially recurs at the site of the resection. This may be sub-clinical initially, and can be identified endoscopically. This thesis investigates the immunological and microbiological characteristics of postoperative Crohn's disease recurrence in, addressing serologic markers, the faecal microbiome and the possible contribution of Proteus species to gastrointestinal disease. Serologic markers, while disappointing for prediction of disease recurrence, did have some utility for identifying patients at the highest risk of disease recurrence. I also demonstrated lower rates of antibody positivity in Crohn's patients who smoke for the first time, indicating that these results should be interpreted with caution in current and past smokers. I have further evaluated the faecal microbiome in the setting of post-operative disease using metagenomic techniques. This work showed that after resection for Crohn's disease, enrichment of the bacterial family Lachnospiraceae is associated with maintenance of disease remission, while patients enriched for the Enterobacteriaceae are more likely to recur. Recurrence may result from a higher abundance of enteric pathobionts such as Proteus, Klebsiella, Serratia, and Escherichia. The Lachnospiraceae are an important family of butyrate producing bacteria in the gut, and depletion of this bacterial family may perpetuate the expansion of Enterobacteriaceae via environmental perturbation and ecologic shifts. These findings indicate possible protective and pathogenic bacteria in post-operative recurrence. Finally, I addressed the potential contribution of Proteus species (from the Enterobacteriaceae family) to gastrointestinal diseases including to inflammatory bowel disease. Proteus spp. are low-abundance commensals of the human gut that harbour significant pathogenic potential. Preliminary evidence of a pathogenic role in the gut should stimulate further investigation.


ABSTRACT We investigated the characteristics of interwing aerodynamic interactions across the span of the high aspect ratio, flexible wings of dragonflies under tethered and free-flying conditions. This revealed that the effects of the interactions on the hindwings vary across four spanwise regions. (i) Close to the wing root, a trailing-edge vortex (TEV) is formed by each stroke, while the formation of a leading-edge vortex (LEV) is limited by the short translational distance of the hindwing and suppressed by the forewing-induced flow. (ii) In the region away from the wing root but not quite up to midspan, the formation of the hindwing LEV is influenced by that of the forewing LEV. This vortex synergy can increase the circulation of the hindwing LEV in the corresponding cross-section by 22% versus that of the hindwing in isolation. (iii) In the region about half-way between the wing root and wing tip there is a transition dominated by downwash from the forewing resulting in flow attached to the hindwing. (iv) A LEV is developed in the remaining, outer region of the wing at the end of a stroke when the hindwing captures the vortex shed by the forewing. The interaction effects depend not only on the wing phasing but also on the flapping offset and flight direction. The aerodynamics of the hindwings vary substantially from the wing root to the wing tip. For a given phasing, this spanwise variation in the aerodynamics can be exploited in the design of artificial wings to achieve greater agility and higher efficiency. Summary: Interwing aerodynamic interactions vary across the span of the high aspect ratio wings of dragonflies. This spanwise variation in aerodynamics could be exploited in the design of micro-air vehicles.


An investigation was made to determine the effects of varying the spacing between the nozzle blades and the turbine blades of a turbo-jet engine on turbine-blade vibration for four turbine-blade designs of different degrees of stiffness. In general, there was a tendency toward increase in occurrence of vibration with decrease in spacing. The effect was most evident in the case of the turbine blades that had greater stiffness.


High-throughput molecular technologies have greatly enhanced our understanding of biological processes by characterizing expression changes of genes (microarray and RNA-Seq data) and proteins (proteomics data), or transcription factor targets and epigenetics states (ChIP-chip and ChIP-Seq data). Among them, transcriptome studies based on microarrays or RNA-Seq have the ability to identify genes involved in the response to environmental change or specific stressors, thereby helping us to infer the underlying biological processes.
During my PhD, I mainly focused on transcriptomic data analysis, using in most cases the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a model taxon. In particular, I have addressed seven specific projects: i) development of ABSSeq, an improved detection approach of differential gene expression for RNA-Seq data; ii) development of aFold, a method to fully moderate fold-change of RNA-Seq data and to improve gene ranking and visualization; iii) development of WormExp, a knowledge-based approach for interpreting gene sets in C. elegans; iv) exploration of the regulation of the C. elegans immune system using curated data sets from WormExp; v) characterization of putative major effectors (GATA transcription factors) in the C. elegans innate immune system; vi) comparison of the immune response of C. elegans at protein and transcript level.
In general, our work facilitates high-throughput data analysis via improving pattern inference and interpretation, which in practice provides new insights into the immune system of C. elegans.


While research on alternatives to growth at the level of the economy as a whole is accumulating, few studies have related the criticism of growth to the business level. This paper starts to address this gap by investigating mechanisms of growth for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), presenting a case study that applies Q methodology and interviews with owner-managers of both growing and non-growing SMEs in Austria. Some mechanisms stimulating growth are identified across SMEs including contributing to innovativeness and motivation of employees. Others are only of relevance for some SMEs: competition, financial stability and a desire for market power. The owner-managers of non-growing SMEs hold values and pursue goals that free them from mechanisms of growth or prevent them from being triggered. Moreover, they exhibit a strong identification with their SME, operate in niche markets and strive for financial independence. This illustrates that a growth imperative is neither inevitable nor are growth mechanisms always operative, but depend upon structures and institutions.


ABSTRACT Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) is a gammaherpesvirus that has been associated with primary effusion lymphoma and multicentric Castleman's disease, as well as its namesake Kaposi's sarcoma. As a gammaherpesvirus, KSHV is able to acutely replicate, enter latency, and reactivate from this latent state. A key protein involved in both acute replication and reactivation from latency is the replication and transcriptional activator (RTA) encoded by the gene Orf50. RTA is a known transactivator of multiple viral genes, allowing it to control the switch between latency and virus replication. We report here the identification of six alternatively spliced Orf50 transcripts that are generated from four distinct promoters. These newly identified promoters are shown to be transcriptionally active in 293T (embryonic kidney), Vero (African-green monkey kidney epithelial), 3T12 (mouse fibroblast), and RAW 264.7 (mouse macrophage) cell lines. Notably, the newly identified Orf50 transcripts are predicted to encode four different isoforms of the RTA which differ by 6 to 10 residues at the amino terminus of the protein. We show the global viral transactivation potential of all four RTA isoforms and demonstrate that all isoforms can transcriptionally activate an array of KSHV promoters to various levels. The pattern of transcriptional activation appears to support a transcriptional interference model within the Orf50 region, where silencing of previously expressed isoforms by transcription initiation from upstream Orf50 promoters has the potential to modulate the pattern of viral gene activation. IMPORTANCE Gammaherpesviruses are associated with the development of lymphomas and lymphoproliferative diseases, as well as several other types of cancer. The human gammaherpesvirus, Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV), is tightly associated with the development of Kaposi's sarcoma and multicentric Castleman's disease, as well as a rare form of B cell lymphoma (primary effusion lymphoma) primarily observed in HIV-infected individuals. RTA is an essential viral gene product involved in the initiation of gammaherpesvirus replication and is conserved among all known gammaherpesviruses. We show here for KSHV that transcription of the gene encoding RTA is complex and leads to the expression of several isoforms of RTA with distinct functions. This observed complexity in KSHV RTA expression and function likely plays a critical role in the regulation of downstream viral and cellular gene expression, leading to the efficient production of mature virions.


This paper considers alternate measures of overweight in the U.S. that are sensitive to changes in the body-mass index (BMI) distribution, more robust to measurement error and continuous in the body-mass index (BMI) at the overweight threshold. The measures suggest that standard prevalence rates may be understating the severity of the problem. Since 1971, overweight prevalence has increased by 40% while the distribution-sensitive measure has increased by 174%. They also provide some useful insight into socioeconomic differences in overweight. For example, overweight prevalence rates for the poor and the rich have been very similar over the last 30 years, with the rich have a slightly higher rate in the most recent 2001- 2002 data. In contrast, the distribution sensitive measures reveal that overweight rich people exceed the overweight threshold by 23% while the overweight poor exceed the threshold by a much greater amount (31%) on average.


We report on fabricating ErxY2-xSiO5 nanocrystals using ErCl3⋅6H2O and YCl3⋅6H2O solutions and Si nanowires grown by VSL method. Use of crystalline host allows incorporation of up to 25 at. % Er without clustering and loss of optical activity, and use of Y enables continuous mixing of Er and Y for controlling cooperative upconversion. We obtain a cooperative upconversion coefficients of (2.2±1.1)×10 cm/s and (5.4±2.7)×10 cm/s at an Er concentration of 1.2×10 cm and 2.0×10 cm, respectively. These values are up to 10 times lower at 10 times higher Er concentration than those reported for Er-doped silica, and shows that up to 69 dB/cm gain could be achieved for ultra-compact optical amplification. Also, we report on the deposition of ErxY2-xSiO5 thin film on Si substrate using ion beam sputter deposition. Rapid thermal annealing at 1100 °C is enough to form crystal phase the film and activate most of Er ions.


This paper presents structures with multiple equilibrium configurations arising from the combination of a state of prestress and unilateral contacts. A design problem is posed where preloaded elastic springs and unilateral constraints are embedded throughout a mechanism. The spring parameters are designed such that multiple target configurations are immobilized due to contact. In each of these configurations, the spring forces maintain compressive reaction forces, immobilizing the structure. Each immobilized configuration can rigidly resist perturbation forces up to some finite magnitude where contact is lost. Hence, this case of multiple configurations in equilibrium due to the combination of prestress and contact is referred to as multi-configuration rigidity. Two examples of structures exhibiting multi-configuration rigidity are presented. First, a four bar linkage with a single kinematic degree of freedom is used to introduce the concept. In the context of the linkage, multi-configuration rigidity is compared to multi-stability, exhibiting the key differences between the two concepts. Then, a 24-degree-of-freedom kirigami surface is presented that can morph between flat and spherical configurations, motivated by RF antenna applications. By embedding torsional springs and fold angle stops throughout the structure, flat and spherical configurations are made rigid. Actuation between the configurations can easily be achieved by snapping the structure between the rigid configurations.


The ability of two isolates of the nematode-trapping fungus Duddingtonia flagrans to reduce the numbers of gastrointestinal nematode larvae on herbage was tested in three plot studies. Artificially prepared cow pats containing Ostertagia ostertagi eggs, with and without fungal spores, were deposited on pasture plots two or three times during the grazing season in 1995, 1996 and 1997. The herbage around each pat was sampled fortnightly over a period of 2 months and the number of infective larvae was recorded. At the end of the sampling period, the remainder of the faecal pats was collected to determine the wet weight, dry weight, and content of organic matter. The infective larvae remaining in the pats were extracted. Faecal cultures showed that both fungal isolates significantly reduced the number of infective larvae. Significantly fewer larvae were recovered from herbage surrounding fungus-treated pats compared with control pats in all three experiments, reflecting the ability of the fungus to destroy free-living larval stages in the faecal pat environment. After 8 weeks on pasture there were no differences between control and fungus-treated pats with respect to wet weight, dry weight, and organic matter content. This indicates that the degradation of faeces was not negatively affected by the presence of the fungus.


The competence regulon of Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) is crucial for genetic transformation. During competence development, the alternative sigma factor ComX is activated, which in turn, initiates transcription of 80 'late' competence genes. Interestingly, only 16 late genes are essential for genetic transformation. We hypothesized that these late genes that are dispensable for competence are beneficial to pneumococcal fitness during infection. These late genes were systematically deleted, and the resulting mutants were examined for their fitness during mouse models of bacteremia and acute pneumonia. Among these, 14 late genes were important for fitness in mice. Significantly, deletion of some late genes attenuated pneumococcal fitness to the same level in both wild‐type and ComX‐null genetic backgrounds, suggesting that the constitutive baseline expression of these genes was important for bacterial fitness. In contrast, some mutants were attenuated only in the wild‐type genetic background but not in the ComX‐null background, suggesting that specific expression of these genes during competence state contributed to pneumococcal fitness. Increased virulence during competence state was partially caused by the induction of allolytic enzymes that enhanced pneumolysin release. These results distinguish the role of basal expression versus competence induction in virulence functions encoded by ComX‐regulated late competence genes.


This article analyses the conceptual link between law and compliance, exploring the different theories and types of compliance (corporate, state and regulatory) and how they can be found today within the EU legal public procurement framework.
The analytical focus is on Directive 2014/24/EU and within it how sustainable requirements have increased the level of compliance required, particularly regulatory compliance. Compliance was already present in previous EU public procurement frameworks, but its extent on Directive 2014/24/EU leads the authors to consider the current legal framework as subject to substantial regulatory compliance obligations external to the process of procurement. In short, procurement has been transformed in a way to enforce regulatory obligations that are not intrinsic to the process of buying.
This leads to the conclusion that questions such as the cost and trade offs from imposing compliance obligations to public and private bodies warrant further research, particularly at the legal, economic and political science intersection.


Robotic-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (RATS), which aims to increase accuracy, and uniportal video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (U-VATS), which aims to decrease invasiveness, have been reported as new surgical methods for pulmonary resection. The advantages of robotic-assisted surgery include a threedimensional surgical view, elimination of physiological tremors, and enabling surgical manipulation in a natural orientation because of the presence of forceps that move in the same manner as human wrist joints. Therefore, it allows some surgeries that are not feasible with the manual thoracoscopic techniques performed by human hands available currently. Its disadvantages include the lack of tactile sensation, an increased number of ports, the high cost, and unproven commensurate patient benefits. The advantages of uniportal surgery include a lower level of postoperative pain and faster patient recovery because of the single incision, whereas the fact that all surgical instruments are inserted via a single incision, thereby limiting surgical manipulation and decreasing surgical safety and accuracy, represents a disadvantage of this technique. Although many reports have indicated that both robotic-assisted surgery and uniportal surgery are more useful than conventional thoracoscopic surgery, sufficient demonstration based on a high level of evidence remains to be achieved. In the future, the safety, level of invasion, and oncological long-term results of these new surgical methods should be compared with those of conventional surgical methods and investigated regarding their utility.


Australian primary school teachers face two major
challenges in their implementation of the national
curriculum for English: literary study and multimodality.
Whilst teachers and students frequently engage
with texts like literary picture books, the requirement
that teachers build children's understandings of
texts as patterned, aesthetic constructs is new. And
it is especially demanding for teachers without specialized
training in either literature or multimodality.
They must learn to manage the expanded 'reservoir'
of meaning in school English and develop 'repertoires'
of semiotic understanding in the course of fulltime
teaching (Bernstein, 2000). This paper emerges
from a larger study that aimed to meet the challenge
of literary study in English by introducing practicing
teachers to a semiotic toolkit inspired by systemic
functional grammatics. Grammatics, as Halliday
(2002) interprets it, distinguishes the theory from the
practice of grammar, the metalanguage from language
in use. In our project, systemic functional grammatics
included study not just of clause-level choices
in language but their role in larger discourse frames
and, via analogy, in images and multimodal texts. We
made use of the 'resemblance' between focalization
in print narratives and in bi-modal narratives picture
books. Adapting semiotic principles like stratification
and metafunction to national curriculum notions
of 'levels of analysis' and 'threads of meaning', we
used systemic functional (SF) theory to open up the
potential of literature study for English teachers in
NSW and Victoria, attempting to build understanding
about the 'uses' of grammatics for a relatively uninformed
group of 'users' (Martin et al., 2013). Because
of the need to manage the theory-practice nexus in
professional learning, we attempted to characterize
'knowledge about' images in narrative in accessible
and systematic ways and to relate this to pedagogic
'know-how' in primary teaching and assessment of
narrative.
The paper introduces the analytical framework
we developed to represent and develop knowledge
and know-how in primary school literature study. It
shows how we used the framework to benchmark
teacher starting-points as they commented on students'
responses to a picture book called The Great
Bear by Armin Greder and Libby Gleeson (1999). It
overviews input provided to teachers in workshops
based on SF principles such as system, stratification
and metafunctions. Finally, it overviews our initial findings
based on our analysis of follow-up interviews
with two teachers as they reflected on students'
responses to The Tunnel, by Anthony Browne (1989).
Changes are arrayed on clines produced to account
for shifts in teacher knowledge and know-how. Early
results of our project are very encouraging, providing
evidence of significant if varied growth in teachers'
orientations to narrative meaning and increased levels
of meta-semiotic awareness. The paper concludes
with reflections on the use of SF grammatics for
meeting the challenges of literature study in primary
school English in an era of multimodality


OBJECTIVES
Suture line disruption is a serious complication after aortic surgery. We previously reported in a canine model that basic fibroblast growth factor-incorporated biodegradable polyglycolic acid (PGA) felt prevented tissue derangement at the anastomotic site. This study sought to evaluate the safety and durability of this biodegradable felt.

METHODS
Between January 2007 and December 2011, 67 patients who consented to undergo aortic surgery with the basic fibroblast growth factor-incorporated PGA felt were enrolled (Group P). As a control, we retrospectively reviewed the charts of 129 patients who underwent aortic surgery using a polytetrafluoroethylene felt during the same registration period (Group N). On the basis of 18 preoperative covariates, 60 well-matched patient pairs were identified using propensity matching, and their clinical indices were compared.

RESULTS
Among the matched pairs, in-hospital mortality and postoperative complication rates did not statistically differ between the groups. During a median follow-up of 4.8 years, the rate of anastomotic aneurysm was 1.7% (1 patient) in both groups. The rates of overall survival and freedom from aortic events did not differ between the groups. In total, 65 anastomoses in Group P and 54 anastomoses in Group N were monitored via computed tomography, and the diameters of the juxta-anastomotic sites in Group N were more likely to be increased than those in Group P {dilatation ratio [(post-discharge diameter - predischarge diameter)/predischarge diameter × 100 (%)]: 4.3% ± 0.6% vs 2.5% ± 0.5%, P = 0.01}.

CONCLUSIONS
The basic fibroblast growth factor-incorporated PGA felt was as safe and durable as conventional felt for reinforcement in aortic surgery. The attenuation of juxta-anastomotic aortic dilatation by PGA felt reinforcement may provide more beneficial effects on long-term outcomes.


In summer 2015, the "Evolutionary Medicine Conference 2015: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Health and Disease" takes place at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich, Switzerland. This international conference is the first of its kind in Europe and brings together eight distinguished keynote speakers from all over the world as well as experts from different disciplines (including medicine, anthropology, molecular/evolutionary biology, paleopathology, archeology, history, psychology, epidemiology, and other fields) to debate the evolutionary origins of diseases and on how the knowledge of the past informs the present and the future. In addition, the conference programme includes round tables on how to bring Evolutionary Medicine into the medical curriculum and clinical practice, and on the future and the challenges of the field. This single article contains all accepted abstracts for keynote lectures, minisymposia, oral and poster presentations (peer-reviewed and accepted by the scientific committee as of May 2015). This collection provides a sense of the breadth of evolutionary medicine in this year of its development. But it also brings into focus the challenge of applying and integrating the wide variety of research areas and perspectives using the conceptual framework provided by evolutionary thinking.


others,3 emphasise the need for a standardised stimulus and a standardised means of measuring the dermographic response. Only with standardised testing procedures can we estimate with confidence (a) the incidence of dermographism among patients and nonpatients and (b) the relationship between dermographism and other cutaneous responses (for example, chronic urticaria and hyperreactivity to intradermal allergy testing).)


Abstract We propose a three dimensional generalization of the geometric McKay correspondence described by Gonzales-Sprinberg and Verdier in dimension two. We work it out in detail in abelian case. More precisely, we show that the Bridgeland-King-Reid derived category equivalence induces a natural geometric correspondence between irreducible representations of G and subschemes of the exceptional set of G-Hilb. This correspondence appears to be related to Reid's recipe.


Transaction costs have attracted considerable attention in the theoretical literature on residential mobility. Transaction costs are thought to cause suboptimal consumption of housing but may also negatively affect labor market outcomes. In the current paper, we demonstrate empirically for the Netherlands that transaction costs have a strong negative effect on the owners' probability of moving. Under a range of different specifications, it appears that a 1 percent-point increase in the value of transaction costs-as a percentage of the value of the residence-decreases residential mobility rates by (at least) 8 percent. The estimates imply that ownership to ownership mobility rates would be substantially higher in the absence of the current 6 percent "ad valorem" buyer transaction tax. Our estimates are consistent with the observation that in the Netherlands "ad valorem" transaction costs mainly consist of buyer transaction costs. Copyright Blackwell Publishers, 2005


Fe-Co alloy nanoparticles are studied in this work of different composition condition. Fe1-xCox nanoparticles were synthesized by a physical method with well-developed crystal structure, uniform size, and high saturation magnetization. Their magnetic property is found to be a function of composition, which indicates successful control of the synthesis process. Exchange bias was found for Fe1-xCox core-oxide shell particles after natural oxidization in air. It was a result of interfacial coupling between Fe/Co and their oxides. The property of the surface oxide varies with composition and so does the coupling strength. Oxidation and interparticle interactions lead to much different magnetic response of nanoparticles compared to un-oxidized, non-interacting ones.


A detailed guide to conducting research on companies, nonprofits, charities, and industries. Look up NAICS codes, find competitors, industry profiles, financial ratios by industry.


The concept of entrepreneurship is a relatively recent concept introduced into educational programs and educational literature and the current study was conducted to determine the entrepreneurship characteristics possessed by pre-service teachers who are expected to educate future generations. The study employed the descriptive survey model. The sampling of the study is comprised of 239 pre-service science teachers from the universities of Kırıkkale and Amasya. The collected data were subjected to exploratory factor analysis (EFA) through SPSS program package and KMO value was found to be .910 and α reliability value of each factor was calculated to be ranging from .76 to .92. The exploratory factor analysis revealed that the scale is made up of four factors and then confirmatory factor analysis was carried out to confirm the factor structures of the scale. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis conducted by using maximum likelihood technique without putting any restrictions, the values of goodness of fit indices were found as follows; χ2sd=344= 650.1, p<.001, χ2/d = 1.89, RMSEA= 0.061, GFI= 0.89, AGFI= 0.91, CFI= 0.9 and IFI= 0.89. As a conclusion, 28-item Science Laboratory Entrepreneurship Scale explaining 52.136% of the total variance was developed.


The composition of lipids was studied in the luminescent bacterium Photobacterium mandapamensis under the conditions of maximal luminescence. The synthesis of total lipids and poly-beta-hydroxybutyric acid (PHBA) was investigated in dynamics under the conditions of batch cultivation. The major class of lipids was polar lipids (84.3%) represented by phospholipids (phosphatidyl ethanolamine, phosphatidyl glycerol, cardiolipin, lysocardiolipin, lysophosphatidyl ethanolamine) and a minor nonidentified phospholipid. The fraction of neutral lipids was represented mainly by free fatty acids (about 5%), tri- and diglycerides (in trace amounts), and two nonidentified classes, apparently, hydrocarbons and waxes. A correlation was established between the luminescence of the bacterium and the content of PHBA.


Cultural differences in decision making styles were explored using the conflict model of decision making (Janis and Mann, 1977). Six hundred and seventy three university students in Australia, Malaysia, and Singapore (Mean age of 20.2 years; SD=5.4) were tested on the Melbourne Decision Making Questionnaire (Mann, Burnett, Radford, and Ford, 1997) to explore cultural, gender, and age differences between these three countries. Vigilance scores were higher for Malaysian and Australian respondents compared to Singaporeans. Hyper-vigilance scores were higher for Malaysian while buckpassing and procrastination scores were lower for Malaysian than for Australian and Singaporean respondents. Women reported higher scores on hyper-vigilance than males for all three countries. However, buck-passing scores were significantly higher for women than men only for the Australian respondents. There were significant positive correlations between vigilant decision making and age, and significant negative correlations between non-vigilant decision making patterns and age. A country analysis indicated that these results were significant for the Australian and the Malaysian sample only. These results are discussed in terms of cultural differences, some of which are reflected in the Hofstede (2001) comparison of cultures on beliefs, values, and behaviours. Further research is suggested that may reflect aspects of the global shift towards more common patterns of thinking across culture, which is influenced by access to media and internet information, as well as increased travel and commerce in an attempt to understand how local decisions may have global impacts. Implications of this research suggest that culture may be too broad a concept and that other more sensitive variable should be examined when conducting cross-cultural research.


Multiprocessor interconnection networks are proposed which have the characteristic that each processor or memory module can connect to a group of its near neighbors and adjacent directly connected groups include some of the same processors or memories. These overlapping connectivity networks are attractive especially for a very large number of processors which cannot be provided with full connectivity but need to operate by communication between processors. Applications for overlapping connectivity networks include neural computers and dataflow computers. Bandwidth formulas are derived using a probabilistic approach, including when intermediate processors are used in the interconnection path. A general cell design is presented capable of representing various overlapping connectivity networks. >


Ion traps are routinely directly coupled to mass analyzers, where they serve to suitably cool and shape an ion population prior to pulsed extraction into the analyzer proper. Such devices benefit from high duty cycle and transmission but suffer slow ion processing times caused by a compromise in the buffer gas pressure range that suitably dampens the ion kinetic energy without causing excessive scatter during extraction or within the analyzer. A rectilinear RF quadrupole ion trap has been characterized, conjoining a pressurized collision region with a pumped extraction region, and an unbroken RF interface for seamless ion transfer between them. Auxiliary electrodes mounted between the RF electrodes provide DC voltage gradients that serve to both guide ions through the device and position them at the extraction slot. The influence of the auxiliary DC upon the trapping RF field was measured, and suitable parameters were defined. A mode of operation was developed that allowed parallel processing of ions in both regions, enabling a repetition rate of 200 Hz when the device was coupled to a high-resolution accurate-mass analyzer.


The statistical problem of estimating the bandwidth parameter of a Gauss-Markov (GM) process from a realization of fixed and finite duration T at selectable sampling interval /spl Delta/ is addressed in this paper. As the observation time, T, is fixed and finite, the variance of estimated autocorrelation and continuous-time parameter does not vanish as /spl Delta/ approaches 0. This necessitates a second-order Taylor expansion in deriving the parameter estimator bias and variance. The second-order Taylor expansion produces better bias and variance results than a first-order one does. The distribution of the estimator is also discussed. According to the gradient change of the variance, a key result is that three sample size regions, which are termed finite, large, and very large, corresponding to substantial, gradual, and very slight decrease in the variance of the parameter estimator, respectively, are quantified. In terms of analysis BW, the three regions are (-23,-35),(-35,-55), and (-55,-/spl infin/) dB. The characterization of the tradeoff between the variance decrease and sampling rate results in a practical guideline for choosing sampling rate. These results are applied to the prediction problems of a time invariant GM process to show their value.


Glucocorticoids are widely used in clinical therapy. However, they cause adverse effects including insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes, which are characterised by decreased glucose transport into the muscles and fat. How glucocorticoids inhibit glucose transport remains unclear. Insulin stimulates glucose uptake via the insulin receptor substrate (IRS)-1 / phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K) / protein kinase B (AKT) pathway and promotes the redistribution of GLUT4 from intracellular storage compartments to the plasma membrane (PM). Insulin-stimulated phosphorylation of AKT substrate of 160 kDa (AS160), a Rab-GTPase activating protein is downstream of AKT and appears to be essential for exposure of GLUT4 at the PM and glucose uptake. This is mediated through the association of phosphorylated AS160 (at the key residue T642) with 14-3-3 in the cytosol. The mildly insulin-responsive GLUT1 mediates basal glucose uptake in adipocytes. It is also subject to regulated trafficking like GLUT4. This study aimed to determine the level at which glucocorticoids inhibit glucose uptake in adipocytes. Effects of the synthetic glucocorticoid dexamethasone (Dex) and the natural glucocorticoid cortisol, on GLUT1 and GLUT4 function were examined. Candidates for the glucocorticoid-mediated inhibition of GLUT1- and GLUT4-mediated glucose uptake were investigated. These were glycogen synthase kinase (GSK) 3β (an AKT substrate) for GLUT1-mediated glucose transport; and adaptor protein containing PH domain, PTB domain, and leucine zipper motif (APPL)-1 (an AKT-interacting protein) and AS160 for GLUT4-mediated glucose transport. Dex and cortisol significantly decreased basal glucose uptake by 50% (p<0.05) in SGBS and 3T3-L1 adipocytes. Similarly, insulin-stimulated glucose uptake was decreased by 50% (p<0.001 for SGBS; p<0.05 for 3T3-L1) and 30% (p<0.05 for both) at 1 nM and 100 nM insulin respectively. Similar results were observed with differentiated primary human preadipocytes and human adipose explants. Dex-mediated inhibition of basal glucose uptake was limited to insulin-sensitive cell types implying that glucocorticoids may regulate GLUTs at steps common to GLUT1 and GLUT4 trafficking. Dex-mediated reduction in glucose uptake correlated with the reduction in basal and insulin-stimulated expression of GLUT1 and GLUT4 to the PM without changes in total GLUT1/4 expression. Dex did not alter total expression or phosphorylation of proximal insulin-signalling molecules up to and including AKT but increased FOXO1 expression, and modified GSK3β-S9 phosphorylation. Dex did not alter total APPL1 expression or subcellular distribution. Dex significantly decreased 1nM-insulin stimulated AS160-T642 phosphorylation by 50% (p<0.05) in SGBS and 3T3-L1 adipocytes via the glucocorticoid repector (GR). This correlated with reduced AS160:14-3-3 interaction. Similar results were obtained for AS160-T642 basal phosphorylation. At 1nM insulin, AS160-T642 phosphorylation is maximal at sub-maximal glucose uptake, i.e. AS160 phosphorylation significantly contributes to glucose uptake. RU486 significantly prevented but did not fully abrogate the Dex-mediated reduction in glucose uptake suggesting additional Dex-induced defects. In conclusion, glucocorticoids inhibit glucose uptake at a level distal to AKT by GR-dependent mechanisms. A role for GSK3β or APPL1 in glucocorticoid-mediated inhibition of glucose uptake requires further investigations. FOXO1 represents a suitable candidate for mediating the Dex-induced defects. Of significance, perturbation in AS160-T642 phosphorylation contributes to Dex-mediated inhibition of glucose uptake. Thus, AS160 presents a novel therapeutic target in the improvement of glucocorticoid-mediated inhibition of glucose uptake.


Smart energy systems integrate renewables and demand response. Most European electricity markets coordinate the resulting time-varying flexibility in demand and supply by organising day-ahead trade with Walrasian mechanisms, using simultaneous call auctions and sealed bids. These mechanisms give bidders no information on each other's values and flexibilities until after clearing. In this paper we simulate two alternative day-ahead market mechanisms which share information, such that bidders obtain a better position before entering the intraday market. One mechanism uses an ascending shared market price signal rather than sealed bids. The other auctions off future timeslots consecutively rather than simultaneously. We perform a case study on 400 households with electric vehicles, either with or without volatile wind generation. Results show that a price-taking flexible consumer can obtain higher utility in the market with simultaneous ascending-price auctions, because online price information reduces uncertainty over available energy and prices.


This paper describes the fabrication and characterization of a sapphire based fiber optic microphone designed for the harsh environment of gas turbine engines. The performance requirements are driven by turbine inlet temperatures that have risen in excess of 1500 °C. The harsh environment makes conventional instrumentation unsuitable for time‐accurate, continuous, direct measurements. The use of commercially available sapphire substrates and optical fibers allows for performance in extremely high temperature environments due to the high melting point and matched coefficient of thermal expansion. The sensor is based on a fiber optic lever transduction mechanism with a remote photodiode optical readout allowing for isolation of the electronics from the harsh environment. The microphone's diaphragm consists of a thin sapphire substrate with a sputtered titanium/platinum reflective surface. The back cavity is formed by macro‐machining of a 1‐mm‐thick sapphire substrate. The diaphragm and back cavity are joine...


: Percussion of the chest cannot detect small lesions (< 3 cm in diameter) and lesions situated deep in the lung (5-7 cm away from the outside of the thoracic wall). The value of percussion as a test to detect a pathological pulmonary situation in comparison with chest radiography is evaluated in only a few studies. Chest percussion appears to be of limited value; especially the sensitivity is very low. Moreover, the inter- and intra-observer errors are high. The value of percussion to detect cardiomegaly is only investigated in one recent study in a selected patient population. In this study the predictive values as well as the reproducibility appear to be moderate.


I. INTRODUCTION The recently enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Affordable Care Act" or "ACA") (1) provides federal and state regulators with an opportunity to address inefficiencies in the health insurance market. Health insurance markets in many areas of the country have a confusing array of benefit choices that make it difficult for consumers to effectively comparison-shop. This lack of transparency contributes to inefficiency in the market. Rationales exist in support of encouraging a multitude of benefit choices. First, it allows consumers greater choice in finding a health insurance product that fits their needs. Second, it encourages health insurers to innovate new products and benefit designs. Third, the health insurance market, like other markets, works best when it is not overregulated. Conversely, several rationales support standardizing benefit choices. First, as noted above, when consumers are faced with a confusing array of products, they may not be able to comparison-shop. As a result, the market does not efficiently arrive at correct pricing. Second, consumers tend to underestimate their own risk of illness and whether their insurance will cover needed medical services. This can result in tragedy for individual consumers, as well as costs to society, when the uninsured and underinsured cannot pay for medical care they receive. Third, a wide array of confusing benefit choices contributes to inflated administrative costs. For example, consumers, providers, and insurers dispute claims due to confusion over covered services. These inefficiencies in the health insurance market are among the many cost drivers resulting in increasing premiums. Health insurance premium increases impact many people. For the majority of Americans who have coverage through an employer, high rate increases have resulted in decreased benefits. As employers struggle to pay premium rate increases, many have opted for health plans that provide less actual coverage. Employees see fewer benefits covered, with employers reducing or cutting drug, physical therapy, and other benefits. Employers are also shifting more costs to employees, with higher deductibles, co-payments, and coinsurance. And lower annual and lifetime maximum benefit caps have limited the amount of coverage on the backend. Consumers worry, for good reason, that their coverage will not be sufficient when they need it most. For those without health insurance, premium rate increases have contributed to making many of them uninsured. Rate increases put affordable, quality coverage further out of reach for the uninsured. The consequences of being uninsured or underinsured are well documented. Those lacking coverage decline or delay care, resulting in worse health outcomes. And medical debt continues to be a leading reason for personal bankruptcy. (2) The Affordable Care Act seeks to increase the quality and affordability of health insurance by layering together a number of core components, as described in Section V. Benefit structures are a key to the success of the commercial market reforms in the Affordable Care Act. The benefits in a health insurance contract determine which particular medical services will be covered, and to what degree. All states regulate health insurance policies to some extent, most often setting some minimum benefits for certain types of policies sold. However, most states have not standardized benefit choices, and there has been no basic set of national minimum standards. States have weighed competing arguments for benefit flexibility and choice, on one hand, and benefit standardization and uniformity on the other hand. With some notable exceptions, markets in most states reflect compromises that have resulted in a wide variety of benefit choices that are often confusing. These compromises have contributed to market inefficiencies and consumer underinsurance. The Affordable Care Act reflects a distinct move towards greater standardization. …


The paper studied the development of the agro-food sector trade in the Republic of Moldova and the European Union. Also, within this study tehre were identified the possibilities and limits of trade in the agro-food sector development to demonstrate the importance of agriculture for the economic development of the Republic of Moldova. To accomplish this, it was conducted an analysis during the period 2003-2013. Various reserach methods such as: analysis and synthesis, comparison method, induction and logical inference were used to determine the possibilities and limits to growth competitiveness and efficiency of the sector. The new opportunities of the EU market on one side (hand) and the Republic of Moldova on the other side (hand) will boost investments, stimulate the modernization of agriculture and improvement of working conditions.


A mass spectrometry method has been developed for selective detection of glycopeptides at the low (≤25) picomole level during chromatography of glycoprotein digests and for differentiation of O‐linked from N‐linked oligosaccharides. The technique involves observation of diagnostic sugar oxonium‐ion fragments, particularly the HexNAc+ fragment at m/z 204, from collisionally excited glycopeptides. Collision‐induced fragmentation can be accomplished in either of two regions of a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer equipped with an atmospheric pressure, electrospray (ES) ionization source. If collisions before the first quadrupole are chosen, it is possible to enhance formation of carbohydrate‐related fragment ions without distorting the distribution of peptide and glycopeptide signals by increasing the collisional excitation potential only during that portion of each scan in which the low mass carbohydrate‐related ions are being detected. This procedure, requiring only a single quadrupole instrument, identifies putative glycopeptide‐containing fractions in the chromatogram but suffers from a lack of specificity in the case of co‐eluting peptides. Increased specificity is obtained by selectively detecting only those parent ions that fragment in Q2, the second collision region of the triple quadrupole, to produce an ion at m/z 204 (HexNAc+). Only (M + H)+ ions of glycopeptides are observed in these liquid chromatography‐electrospray tandem mass spectrometry (LC‐ESMS/MS) "parent‐scan" spectra. N‐linked carbohydrates are differentiated from O‐linked by LC‐ESMS/MS analysis of the digested glycoprotein prior to and after selective removal of N‐linked carbohydrates by peptide N:glycosidase F. These methods, which constitute the first liquid chromatography‐mass spectrometry (LC‐MS)‐based strategies for selective identification of glycopeptides in complex mixtures, facilitate location and preparative fractionation of glycopeptides for further structural characterization. In addition, these techniques may be used to assess the compositional heterogeneity at specific attachment sites, and to define the sequence context of the attachment site in proteins of known sequence. The strategy is demonstrated for bovine fetuin, a 42‐kDa glycoprotein containing three N‐linked, and at least three O‐linked carbohydrates. Over 90% of the fetuin protein sequence was also corroborated by these LC‐ESMS studies.


Stable matching in a community consisting of N men and N women is a classical combinatorial problem that has been the subject of intense theoretical and empirical study since its introduction in 1962 in a seminal paper by Gale and Shapley [GS62]. In this paper, we study the number of stable pairs, that is, the man/woman pairs that appear in some stable matching. We prove that if the preference lists on one side are generated at random using the popularity model of Immorlica and Mahdian [IM15], the expected number of stable edges is bounded by N + N ln N , matching the asymptotic bound for uniform preference lists. If in addition that popularity model is a geometric distribution, then the number of stable edges is O(N) and the incentive to manipulate is limited. If in addition the preference lists on the other side are uniform, then the number of stable edges is asymptotically N up to lower order terms: most participants have a unique stable partner, hence non-manipulability.


Abstract: The electromyographic signals observed at the surface of the skin are the sum of many small action potentials generated in the muscle fibres. After the signals are processed, they can be used as a control source of multifunction prostheses. The myoelectric signals are represented by wavelet transform model parameters. For this purpose, four different arm movements (elbow extension, elbow flexion, wrist supination and wrist pronation) are considered in studying muscle contraction. Wavelet parameters of myoelectric signals received from the muscles for these different movements were used as features to classify the electromyographic signals in a fuzzy clustering neural network classifier model. After 1000 iterations, the average recognition percentage of the test was found to be 97.67% with clustering into 10 features. The fuzzy clustering neural network programming language was developed using Pascal under Delphi.


This article proposes a methodology to improve the magneto-electric effect of a poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-trifluoroethylene) P(VDF-TrFe) copolymer, doped with nanoparticles of nickel (Ni) and nickel iron (NiFe). The preparation of the composite films were achieved through the solvent casting approach. First, P(VDF-TrFe) powders and (Ni and NiFe) nanoparticles are dispersed in dimethyl formamide (DMF) as a solvent to form a homogeneous solution. Then, the solution obtained is deposited on a flexible substrate by a spin coating process. After that, the NiFe doped composites are corona polarized, to improve the magneto-electric response of these composites. The purpose of this work is to investigate the influence of the magnetic charges added in the P(VDF-TrFe) copolymer, and to reveal the effect of corona charging (polarization) on the magneto-electric behavior of the used composites. The obtained results in this article show that both the doping and the electric polarization (piezo coefficient) significantly affect the generated alternating current during the application of an alternating magnetic field. However, the magneto-electric response of composites increases by doping and charging via corona poling effect and also by increasing the excitation frequency and the magnetic field amplitude. In addition, the magneto-electric responses of all composites after corona polarization were also discussed. This indicates that the magneto-electric coefficient and the current can be increased with polarized composites. A good response is observed for P(VDF-TrFe) + 3% Ni with a piezoelectric coefficient d33 = 21.2 (pC/N)


Aim Warfarin, which is widely used for preventing thromboembolic events, can cause major and minor side effects. The aim of this trial is to evaluate the effect of nurse home-support program on self-management of patients receiving warfarin therapy. Method A randomized, controlled trial was conducted using 36 selected and eligible patients who had 12-month home-visit follow-ups. The bleeding risk score, potential and preventable warfarin-related complications, patients' self-management behaviors, and anticoagulation satisfaction were examined. Data analyses were performed using parametric and nonparametric tests, split-plot analysis of variance, multiple regression analysis, and Bland and Altman plots test. Results The bleeding risk score was an effective variable for assessing patient satisfaction (p<0.05). The self-management group demonstrated decreased bleeding risk at the end of the trial. The Duke Anticoagulation Satisfaction Scale mean score represents a statistically significant improvement in the self-management group (p<0.05). Patients' self-management behaviors improved significantly in the self-management group compared to the control group (p<0.05). The number of international normalized ratio values within the target range was significantly higher in the self-management group (174/432) than in the control group (82/432). The self-management group showed significant reductions in both thromboembolic events. Conclusion This trial demonstrated evidence that use of nursing home care is effective in developing self-management behaviors, improving patient satisfaction, and preventing complications in patients receiving warfarin therapy. This model could be easily adopted and implemented by home care services and health organizations.


Coherent optical single-carrier frequency-division-multiplexing (CO-SCFDM) is a promising candidate for future high-speed long-haul optical fiber transmission system. Being a modified form of coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM), the CO-SCFDM can inherit the advantages such as low computation complexity and high flexibility, while suffers less nonlinear impairment due to much lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate 1.08 Tb/s polarization-division multiplexing (PDM) CO-SCFDM transmission over 3170 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) with Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) only. The back-to-back and nonlinear transmission performances for CO-OFDM and CO-SCFDM are also compared.


Abstract A process geomorphological investigation was started in 1999 to study present denudation rates and the mutual relationship of chemical and mechanical fluvial denudation in periglacial environments. Latnjavagge (9 km2; 950–1440 m a.s.l.; 68°20′N, 18°30′E) was chosen as a representative drainage basin of the arctic-oceanic mountain area in northernmost Swedish Lapland. Atmospheric solute inputs, chemical denudation, and mechanical fluvial denudation were analyzed. During the arctic summer field seasons of 2000, 2001, and 2002 measurements of daily precipitation, solute concentrations in precipitation, and in melted snow cores, taken before snowmelt, were recorded. In addition, solute and suspended sediment concentrations in creeks were analyzed, and bedload tracer movements were registered during the entire summer seasons (end of May until beginning of September). Results show a mean annual chemical denudation net rate of 5.4 t km−2 yr−1 in the entire catchment. Chemical denudation in Latnjavagge is less than one third of chemical denudation rates reported for Kärkevagge (Swedish Lapland) but seems to be at a similar level as in a number of other subarctic, arctic, and alpine environments. Mechanical fluvial denudation is lower than chemical denudation. Most sediment transport in channels occurs in the early summer season during a few days with snowmelt generated runoff peaks. The main sediment sources in the drainage basin are mobilized channel bed pavements exposing fines, ice patches/fields, and material mobilized by slush flows. The calculated mean mechanical fluvial denudation rate is 2.3 t km−2 yr−1 at the inlet of lake Latnjajaure, situated in Latnjavagge close to the outlet of the valley. A very stable vegetation cover and rhyzosphere in this environment mainly explain the low value. The mean mechanical fluvial denudation rate at the outlet of the entire Latnjavagge drainage basin, below lake Latnjajaure, is only 0.8 t km−2 yr−1. Both chemical and mechanical fluvial denudation show low intensity. The results from Latnjavagge support the contention that chemical denudation is a somewhat important denudational process in periglacial environments.


: The article contains a complex hygienic assessment of the technological processes, labour conditions and equipment in processing and use of lithium, niobium and tantalum based monocrystals. Major hazardous factors were established with a set of preventive measures elaborated.


We examine six alternative plans which might be discussed in an effort to increase consumer savings through the personal income tax system in the United States. These plans attempt to affect savings through an increase in the real rate of return either by direct tax cuts on savings or by indexing tax rates against inflation. The paper presents estimates of static and dynamic resource allocation effects for the six plans, and compares them to results obtained in earlier work on the impacts of more sweeping reforms. A medium-scale numerical general equilibrium model is used which integrates the U. S. tax system with consumer demand behavior by household and producer behavior by industry.


New methods for efficient and unambiguous interconnection between electronic position sensitive detectors and target units based on nuclear photographic emulsion films have been developed. The application to the OPERA experiment, that aims at detecting νμ⇌ντ oscillations in the CNGS neutrino beam, is reported in this paper. In order to reduce background due to latent tracks collected before installation in the detector, on-site large-scale treatments of the emulsions (''refreshing'') have been applied. Changeable Sheet (CSd) packages, each made of a doublet of emulsion films, have been designed, assembled and coupled to the OPERA target units (''ECC bricks''). A device has been built to print X-ray spots for accurate interconnection both within the CSd and between the CSd and the related ECC brick. Sample emulsion films have been extensively scanned with state-of-the-art automated optical microscopes. Efficient track-matching and powerful background rejection have been achieved in tests with electronically tagged penetrating muons. Further improvement of in-doublet film alignment was obtained by matching the pattern of low-energy electron tracks. The commissioning of the overall OPERA alignment procedure is in progress.


Objective To estimate prevalence and explore potential causes and consequences of compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue in UK emergency medicine consultants. Methods A sequential mixed-methods design. Cross-sectional e-survey to all UK NHS emergency medicine consultants (n=1317) including Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) (compassion satisfaction/fatigue), followed by interviews with consultants scoring above (n=6) and below (n=6) predefined ProQOL thresholds. Results 681 (52%) consultants responded. Most (98%) reported at least 'average' compassion satisfaction. Higher scores were associated with type of workplace (designated trauma centres faring better) and number of years worked as a consultant (gradually worsen over time, except 20 years onwards when it improves). Consultants with lower (worse) compassion satisfaction scores were more likely to report being irritable with patients or colleagues and reducing their standards of care (a third reported these behaviours at least monthly) and were more likely to intend to retire early (59% had such plans). Key features distinguishing 'satisfied' from 'fatigued' interviewed consultants included having strategies to deal with the high work intensities associated with their role and having positive views of the team within which they worked. The degree of variety in their roles and the ability to maintain empathy for their patients were also distinguishing features between these groups. Conclusions Findings support an urgent review of workforce and resources in emergency medicine and suggest that a multifactorial approach to identification, prevention and treatment of occupational stress in the workforce is required that considers individual, job and organisational factors, particularly those that impact on perceived control and support at work.


: The histological diagnosis of mesothelioma may be difficult, especially when only a small biopsy is available. The epithelial form of mesothelioma can closely resemble an adenocarcinoma, so much so that it is often difficult or impossible to distinguish between them by light microscopy. This paper examines the results of staining 30 cases of the epithelial form of mesothelioma by various techniques for mucus. The slides were evaluated according to the intensity and extent of staining, the color of the reaction, the location of the staining (intra- or extra-cellular), and the reproducibility and reliability of the technique.


The guidance and control accuracy of most aerodynamic and space vehicles is limited primarily by the noise disturbances which enter the guidance system. Present theory for the minimization of these noise effects does not take into account the forced kinematic time variations, such as is due to time-varying range, which occur in most guidance problems. Such time variations occur in interplanetary flight, satellite rendezvous, interception of missiles or bombers, and so forth. In this paper an analytical approach is presented for the optimization of systems which are forced both to be time varying and to operate with inputs contaminated with noise. Two objectives are the establishment of the theoretical optimum performance and a method of synthesizing the optimum control system. Effects of restrictions on the capability of the output element in addition to the noise and the forced time variation are considered. Although an exact analytical solution of the problem does not appear feasible, it is shown how approximate solutions utilizing time-varying control systems can be found. The method is illustrated by a hypothetical example of a homing missile attacking a bomber.


Abstract We use work histories retrospectively reported and matched to register data from the Swedish unemployment office to assess: 1) the prevalence of measurement error in reported spells of unemployment; 2) the impact of using such spells as the response variable of an exponential model; and 3) strategies for the adjustment of the measurement error. Due to the omission or misclassification of spells in work histories we cannot carry out typical adjustments for memory failures based on multiplicative models. Instead we suggest an adjustment method based on a mixture Bayesian model capable of differentiating between misdated spells and those for which the observed and true durations are unrelated. This adjustment is applied in two manners, one assuming access to a validation subsample and another relying on a strong prior for the mixture mechanism. Both solutions demonstrate a substantial reduction in the vast biases observed in the regression coefficients of the exponential model when survey data is used.


We compare the timeliness of the information signals produced by investor-paid credit rating agencies (Egan and Jones), issuer-paid credit rating agencies (Standard and Poor's), and by sell-side equity analysts, and study the predictive power of this information for the bond and equity markets and for firm investment levels. We conjecture that the three information producing intermediaries differ in two important dimensions: first, in their compensation structure, giving rise to differences in their incentives to produce and transmit timely information signals; and second, in their information consuming clientele, giving rise to differences in the aspects of firms' future cash flow distribution on which they focus. We develop testable hypotheses based on the above two differences. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find the following. First, information signals produced by the investor-paid rating agency are the most timely, and anticipates those produced by the issuer-paid agency and equity analysts. Second, while investor-paid agency rating changes have the greatest predictive power for bond yield spreads, equity analyst recommendations have the greatest predictive power for excess stock returns. Third, credit rating changes by the investor-paid rating agency have the greatest predictive power for firms' investment levels.


The JCE publication history exceeds 600 peer reviewed cancer education articles. Two methodological approaches were used for a retrospective perspective of JCE quality: Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Citation Analysis (CA). The Journal Impact Factor comparison included only medical or health journals with an educational focus. Citation Analysis was conducted to identify attributes of most cited JCE articles and their cancer education focus. Despite concerns in the literature about the merits of both methods, results provided useful insights about JCE quality. Results will guide quality improvement plans and assist authors interested in publishing their cancer education research results in the JCE.


The literature shows there is no validated procedure to measure the tensile properties in different regions along the length of human tendons. The slippery surfaces and non-homogeneous properties of tendons reduce the probability of success when using traditional methods. So, there is a need to implement an experimental technique that ensures accurate measurement of the mechanical properties of human tissue. The development of new technologies allows us to face problems with new approaches. Computer vision is a trending topic in the development of new technology, one of its branches is digital image correlation (DIC). DIC is a non-contact technique used for tracking pixels along a group of sequential images and, when combined with tensile testing, can be used to track sample deformation and strain at discrete points in space. This work develops a technique that analyzes bovine tendons using digital image correlation and custom-designed 3D printed clamps. The advantage of DIC is that it analyzes the deformation of the tendon throughout the complete sample, allowing us to quantify the mechanical properties in different regions within the tendon. First, a 3D printed clamp is designed considering the challenges of gripping soft tissue. The clamp prevents damage to the tissue during testing. A random speckle pattern is created on the surface of a roller using open CAD software named OpenSCAD. The bovine tendons are painted with the roller and tested in a uniaxial load frame. These results can be used in the future to repeat this technique with human Achilles tendons to quantify the tensile properties of the tendon and aid in the design and material selection of prosthetic tendons for people suffering from injury or disease.


The red palm weevil (RPW), Rhynchophorus ferrugineus Olivier (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), is a pest from Southeast Asia accidentally introduced into North Africa and Europe two decades ago. In Sicily, RPW was recorded for the first time in 2005, then, in few years, it established becoming the most severe pest of ornamental palm species in urban, monumental and country areas. In this paper, we first report the history of its introduction and spread. Then, we reviewed the preventative and curative strategies that have been implemented with variable degrees of success in containing the invasive alien pest. Finally, we focus on the development of new strategies to detect early infestations and to prevent or contain RPW attacks.


Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess personal exposure to fibres, crystalline silica, silicon carbide (SiC) and sulphur dioxide in the Norwegian SiC industry. Methods: Approximately 720 fibre samples, 720 respirable dust samples and 1400 total dust samples were collected from randomly chosen workers from the furnace, processing and maintenance departments in all three Norwegian SiC plants. The respirable dust samples were analysed for quartz, cristobalite and non-fibrous SiC content. Approximately 240 sulphur dioxide samples were collected from workers in the furnace department. Results: The sorting operators from all plants, control room and cleaning operators in Plant A and charger, charger/mix and payloader operators in Plant C had a geometric mean (GM) of fibre exposure above the Norwegian occupational exposure limit (OEL) (0.1 fibre cm−3). The cleaner operators in Plant A had the highest GM exposure to respirable quartz (20 μg m−3). The charger/mix operators in Plant C had the highest GM exposure to respirable cristobalite (38 μg m−3) and the refinery crusher operators in Plant A had the highest GM exposure to non-fibrous SiC (0.65 mg m−3). Exposure to the crystalline silica and non-fibrous SiC was generally low and between 0.4 and 2.1% of the measurements exceeded the OELs. The cleaner operators in Plant A had the highest GM exposure to respirable dust (1.3 mg m−3) and total dust (21 mg m−3). GM exposures for respirable dust above the Norwegian SiC industry-specific OEL of 0.5 mg m−3 were also found for refinery crusher operators in all plants and mix, charger, charger/mix and sorting operators in Plant C. Only 4% of the total dust measurements exceeded the OEL for nuisance dust of (10 mg m−3). Exposure to sulphur dioxide was generally low. However, peaks in the range of 10–100 p.p.m. were observed for control room and crane operators in Plants A and B and for charger and charger/mix operators in Plant C. Conclusion: Workers in the SiC industry are exposed to a mixture of several agents including SiC fibres, quartz, cristobalite, non-fibrous SiC and sulphur dioxide. Exposure levels were generally below the current Norwegian OELs; however, high exposure to fibres and respirable dust still occurs in the furnace department.


Shannon's separation theorem gives a conceptually and practically appealing way to construct an optimal communication system in two independent steps, namely source compression and channel coding. However, sometimes it is worth considering {\em joint} source/ channel coding instead. In fact, for certain source/channel pairs, not using any code at all already achieves the optimum performance. For a larger class ${\mathbb S}$ of source/channel pairs, there exists a single-letter code with optimal performance. In this paper, we consider the class of {\em discrete memoryless} source/channel pairs for which a code of finite block length $M$ achieves optimal performance. Somewhat contrary to (initial) intuition, it seems that this class is not larger than ${\mathbb S}$.


One of the most powerful consequences of the feminist movement these last two decades is a redefinition of rape and the about-face this has brought in social institutions' treatment of rape victims. The news media also have increased their attention to rape issues and victims, but the quality of the reporting has been uneven. This suggests the need for academic journalism programs to refine the ways they prepare journalism students to cover sexual assault.The purpose of this essay is to explore the issues and problems that have emerged in news reporting of rape and to propose an approach to improving journalism training on rape-related issues. I will also evaluate the adequacy of journalism texts and other materials in relationship to the teaching of these issues.Personal dimensionsTeachers, like reporters, do not arrive at their daily work desks unaffected by who they are and what they know. My own views of sexual assault and how it is reported are greatly shaped by my association with the feminist anti-rape movement beginning in 1977, when I took time out of a career in journalism and public relations to manage first a community rape-crisis center and then a combined women's shelter and rape-crisis service in Washington state. A major aspect of these services was to raise public awareness and understanding of sexual assault. Toward these ends, our center made routine efforts to generate informed news stories by the local radios station and newspapers. Like other social movements (Kielbowicz and Scherer 1986), we needed the mainstream media to communicate new messages about sexual assault, as well as to tell the stories of victims (i.e., the recently harmed) and survivors (i.e., those who had lived through and come to an analysis of their experience).Events, such as an annual "Rape Awareness Week," and "Take Back the Night" marches, and press releases on the number of clients we served, police arrests and prosecution rates formed the basis for regular media contact. We also put the local criminal justice system's poor response to sexual-assault crimes on public display for the first time, thus giving reporters a new story line. From time to time, our staff facilitated reporter-client interviews, and we responded to press requests for comment on particular criminal cases.These important "news interventions" laid the foundation for increasingly regular and better-informed news stories on sexual assault. Movement leaders believed that better reporting was largely responsible for a positive shift in public support for rape victims' rights being lobbied by rape-crisis centers. The Washington state legislature passed new laws establishing a statewide office for sexual. assault services in 1979, extended the statute on child sexual abuse reporting in 1981, and, after several years f failed attempts, removed the marital exclusion from the state rape law in 1982. Public support for this last effort surged dramatically after one savvy female reporter from a major Seattle television station included in her evening newscast footage of a veteran state senator standing on the Senate floor asking: "Well, if you can't rape your own wife, who can you rape?"In the editorial journalism and media-theory classes that I presently teach, I emphasize the importance of being well versed in the issues raised by contemporary social movements. A reporter's personal and professional knowledge plays an important role in the development of news (Hall 1980); With regard to sexual assault, this means that journalism educators should understand why:[T]he press must stop being afraid of feminism. At the moment, the mainstream press is so unwilling to consult feminist sources that it has effectively crippled its chance of covering sex crimes properly, for it is in the fields of feminist sociology, medicine, and anthropology that an understanding of these crimes lies ... Rape cannot be understood without mentioning the role of women and the way men are trained to see them as objects of prey . …


Under this commercial name a rock has recently been brought into the market for road metal. It is quarried in the Borrowdale Series underlying the Mountain Limestone forming Twistleton Scars on the north-west, near to Dale Barn, and Raven Scars on the south-east; extending thus quite across the Dale above Ingleton, having a thickness of about 400 yards, with a sharp dip to the south-west.

This rock has given rise to much discussion locally, as to its origin. It has been variously described in published records as a conglomerate, a trap, a felspathic ash, and as a metarmorphic slate.

As to the texture of the rock, no one of its components is conspicuously larger than the average of its fellows; each layer exhibits a uniform grain, but the layers graduate from about one-eight of an inch down to the finest granules. This marked uniformity along successive planes points to the sorting action of gravity exerted upon materials held in aqueous suspension. Sedimentation is further in evidence by the parallelism of all the longer axes and the stratification arising therefrom. Beneath the microscope most of the ingredients are seen to be sharply angular, nevertheless a fair proportion are well-rounded and water-worn.

The detritus of a quartzite has supplied many of the elastic elements. Next to this come crystals of quartz and felspars, both orthoclase and plagioclase, the latter being the more abundant, relatively, in the finer-grained layers. Ancient lavas, both acidic and basic, devitrified sphaerulitic rhyolites, augite, andesites, and deep-seated micropegmatite ...


We estimate the effects of the 2005 ban on vending machines in French schools using the 1998 and 2006 INCA nutrition surveys. These surveys contain no information on the presence of vending machines in schools attended by respondents, but the adoption of a Difference-in-Difference design, and a Regression Discontinuity Design enable us to obtain indirect estimates of the policy impact. Results are consistent and suggest that the measure has had a small but significant impact on teenager nutrition, especially in terms of reduced fat intakes.


The human microbiome comprises the microorganisms that inhabit the various locales of the human body and plays a vital role in human health. The composition of a microbial population is often quantified through measures of species diversity, which summarize the number of species along with their relative abundances into a single value. In a microbiome sample there will certainly be species missing from the target population which will affect the diversity estimates.We employ a model based on the hierarchical Pitman-Yor (HPY) process to model the species abundance distributions over multiple microbiome populations. The model parameters are estimated using a Gibbs sampler. We also derive estimates of species diversity as a function of the HPY parameters.We show that the Gibbs sampler for the HPY model performs well in the simulation study. We also show that the estimates of diversity from the HPY model improve over naïve estimates when species are missing. Similarly the HPY estimates tend to perform better than the naïve estimates when the number of individuals sampled from a population is small.


4H-SiC diodes with 0.60 mm2 nickel silicide Schottky contacts were fabricated on commercial epitaxial layers. At room temperature, the diodes have specific on-resistances (RON-SP) down to 10.5 mΩcm2 and blocking voltages (VBL) up to 4.6 kV, which is equal to 93 % of the calculated parallel plane breakdown voltage for used epitaxial structure. The corresponding figure-of-merit, defined as (VBL)2/RON-SP, is equal to 2015 MW/cm2 and is among the highest FOM values reported to date. The diodes demonstrated stable operation at forward current of 1 A and VBL value in excess of 3.3 kV at ambient temperatures up to 200 °C.


The ichthyofauna of ocean margin regions is characterised by a succession of different species occurring at different depths. This study was aimed at determining whether the resultant pattern of species richness with depth is a consequence of local factors in a given region or whether it simply reflects the global pattern of fish species distribution in the oceans. Along the ocean margin of the temperate NE Atlantic Ocean in the Porcupine Seabight and Abyssal Plain region, 48 degrees-53 degrees N, a total of 108 demersal fish species were identified from 187 trawls at depths from 240 to 4865 m. Fitting of species accumulation curves predicted an asymptote of 120, indicating that the fauna is 90% described. Baited cameras detected 22 scavenging species with a predicted asymptote of 24 species. Scavenging species represented a constant 22.7% (SD 3.5%) of the total species richness throughout the depth range studied. Species richness per trawl varied between a maximum of 16 at 1600 m and 4 on the abyssal plain > 4000 m with no significant influence of sea floor slope (a measure of topographic heterogeneity). Total species richness was 48 at 1600 m and 10 on the abyssal plain. There is a clear transition between slope species above 3000 m and abyssal species below. The depth at which peak species richness occurs (1100-2000 m) coincides with the depth of the permanent thermocline, presence of Mediterranean overflow water (MOW), seasonally strong currents, resuspension of particulate matter, high biomass of benthic filter feeders and pelagic biomass impinging on the slope. We suggest that these factors increase habitat and resource heterogeneity, thus supporting a wider range of fish species. The local pattern of species richness was compared with the global distribution of maximum depths of marine fish species from FishBase. Globally all three Classes of fishes, Agnatha, Chondrichthyes and Osteichthyes, showed a logarithmic decrease in species with depth, with the deepest observed species in each class occurring at 3003 m, 4156 m and 8370 m, respectively. In contrast, the local distribution of species maximum depths is idiosyncratic with a mean of 16.6 species maxima per 500 m at 1000-3000 m depth followed by three species per 500 m at 3500-4000 m and 11 species per 500 m at 5000 m. It is concluded that global patterns of species richness, as a source of recruitment, exert a weak influence on local patterns of species richness. Rather, global species richness is the sum of numerous regional and local patterns, each determined by characteristic environmental conditions.


This paper presents a resource management strategy for control tasks that maximizes control performance within the available resources by readjusting the task periods at runtime. A feedback scheduler is used to determine on-line the optimal task periods considering the response over a finite time horizon of the plants controlled by arbitrary linear control laws. We show how this problem can be expressed as an optimization problem, where the objective function relates the sampling periods to the transient responses of the controlled plants, and where restrictions are based on EDF schedulability constraints. For the general case, the solution of the optimization problem is computationally expensive, and thus, an approximate procedure to be executed on-line has been developed. We present simulation results that validate the presented approach


We document externalities of the civic unrest experienced in Ferguson, MO following the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. Difference-in-differences and synthetic control method estimates compare Ferguson-area schools to neighboring schools in the greater St. Louis area and find that the unrest led to statistically significant, arguably causal declines in students' math and reading achievement. Attendance is one mechanism through which this effect operated, as chronic absence increased by five percent in Ferguson-area schools. Impacts were concentrated in elementary schools and at the bottom of the achievement distribution and spilled over into majority black schools throughout the area.