Bilayer lipid membranes (BLMs) are formed from phospholipid molecules which self-assemble into a lipid bilayer with 4 to 9 nm thickness when submerged in an aqueous solution. This is due to their amphiphilic nature, meaning that one part of the molecule is hydrophilic, or attracted to water, and one part is hydrophobic, or repelled by water. They are the primary structural component of cell membranes in living organisms and therefore are useful for modeling the properties of cell membranes since they share many of the same chemical and physical properties. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the maximum pressure that can be withstood by a BLM formed over a porous substrate, which will be referred to as the failure pressure. This work represents the first time that this quantity has been measured and reported. The failure pressure is investigated in several complementary ways, including mechanical, electrical, and optical measurements and modeling. The phospholipids that are tested include 1-Stearoyl-2-Oleoyl-sn-Glycero-3-Phosphatidylcholine (SOPC) and mixtures of SOPC and cholesterol (CHOL), which was chosen because cholesterol is known to increase the strength of SOPC BLMs. A new test methodology was developed to measure the failure pressure of BLMs. A custom test fixture was used to pressurize BLMs while measuring the applied pressure with a high degree of precision and repeatability. The BLMs were tested in an electrolyte solution over substrates that contained a single pore and also substrates that contained an array of many pores. SOPC BLMs were tested over single pore substrates with pore sizes ranging from 5 to 20 μm, and this resulted in failure pressures from 67 to 19 kPa, respectively. For single pore tests, the addition of 50 mol% cholesterol to SOPC resulted in a 56% higher failure pressure on average than SOPC alone. For multi pore substrates, SOPC BLMs were tested using pore sizes between 0.05 and 10 μm, which yielded bulk failure pressures of 380 to 1.5 kPa, respectively. For multi pore tests, SOPC/CHOL-50 mol% resulted in a 47% higher bulk failure pressure on average. A model was developed to predict the pressurization curve of BLMs and was applied to both the single and multi pore tests. It was found that the failure pressure of BLMs follows a distribution which was well modeled by a Weibull distribution with a positive skew. Parameters such as the Weibull shape parameter were determined by fitting the model to the experimental pressurization curves and it was found that the shape of the Weibull distribution was nearly the same for every pore size. Using the pressurization model it was estimated that the percentage of failed BLMs that were pressurized over a multi pore substrate ranged from 4% to 33%. The model also coupled the bulk failure pressure of BLMs formed over multiple pores to the failure pressure of a single BLM, showing that the bulk failure pressure of multiple BLMs is smaller than the failure pressure of a single BLM because it represents the failure of only the weakest BLMs in a group. Electrical impedance was measured before and after pressurization of the BLMs, and these measurements were modeled by assuming that the BLMs act as a resistor and a capacitor configured in parallel. In general, the impedance magnitude dropped by two to three orders of magnitude after BLM pressurization, which was a result BLMs failing and opening conductive pathways through the subsequently empty pores. It was found that normalized conductance values for SOPC BLMs were between GBLM/A = 4 × 10−12 and 2 × 10−8 S/cm2, and normalized capacitance values varied between CBLM/A = 3 × 10−14 and 1 × 10−10 F/cm2. In the literature these values ranged from GBLM/A = 10−1 to 10−9 S/cm2 and CBLM/A = 10 −6 to 10−8 F/cm2, having a wide range of values due to the many variations of experimental test procedures. Visual images of BLMs were produced using fluorescence microscopy. Images were recorded before and after pressurization of SOPC BLMs formed over a multi pore substrate. As predicted by the pressurization model, it was found that some but not all BLMs fail after pressurization. It was also found that BLMs fail over the center of a pore, and leave remnants around the perimeter of the pore.


This paper presents a study on the practicality of operating system (OS) kernel debloating---reducing kernel code that is not needed by the target applications---in real-world systems. Despite their significant benefits regarding security (attack surface reduction) and performance (fast boot times and reduced memory footprints), the state-of-the-art OS kernel debloating techniques are seldom adopted in practice, especially in production systems. We identify the limitations of existing kernel debloating techniques that hinder their practical adoption, including both accidental and essential limitations. To understand these limitations, we build an advanced debloating framework named \tool which enables us to conduct a number of experiments on different types of OS kernels (including Linux and the L4 microkernel) with a wide variety of applications (including HTTPD, Memcached, MySQL, NGINX, PHP and Redis). Our experimental results reveal the challenges and opportunities towards making kernel debloating techniques practical for real-world systems. The main goal of this paper is to share these insights and our experiences to shed light on addressing the limitations of kernel debloating in future research and development efforts.


This paper is a response to the article of Professor Zbigniew Spendel, who belongs to the group of "anonymous" reviewers and who referred to the earlier statements of the author, in her article Ethics in research and impunity of anonymous reviewers ["Nauka" nr 1/2013]. Advocating the allegations raised in his article An ethics, a psychology or a philosophy of science? ["Nauka" nr 3/2013], Lilla Moroz-Grzelak pointed out a number of important issues raised by Professor Spendel in his polemic concerning the problem of impunity of anonymous reviewers. The main aspects are the issue of intellectual property and a significant matter of mentality and the human response to criticism. Lilla Moroz-Grzelak referred to the method of argumentation used by Professor Spendel who challenged the statements, which are not present in the original paper. In addition she noted the fact that Professor's opinions do not offer actual solution to the problem and are an example for discussion, in which the main issue becomes merely the background for not essential speeches and innuendos against anyone who dared to have a different opinion.


Objective: Despite early dietary treatment phenylketonuria patients have lower IQ and poorer executive functions compared to healthy controls. Cognitive problems in phenylketonuria have often been associated with phenylalanine levels. The present study examined the cognitive profile and mental health in adult phenylketonuria, in relation to phenylalanine levels and tetrahydrobiopterin treatment. Method: Fifty-seven early treated adult patients with phenylketonuria and 57 healthy matched controls (18–40 years) performed IQ subtests and executive function tests from the Amsterdam Neuropsychological Tasks. They also completed the Adult Self-Report on mental health problems. Analyses of variance were performed to examine group differences. Results: Patients with phenylketonuria had normal IQs although lower than controls. They performed poorer on working memory, inhibitory control, and sustained attention tasks. Patients reported Depressive and Avoidant Personality problems more frequently. Specifically, patients with childhood and lifetime phenylalanine ≥360 &mgr;mol/L had poorer cognitive and mental health outcomes than controls. In a subset of patients, comparisons between patients on and off tetrahydrobiopterin showed that nontetrahydrobiopterin users (matched for childhood, pretreatment phenylalanine) were slower (on number of tasks) and reported more mental health problems. Conclusions: Adult patients had lower IQ and poorer executive functions than controls, resembling problems observed in younger patients with phenylketonuria, as well as more internalizing problems. Group differences and phenylalanine-outcome associations were smaller than those observed in younger populations. A subset of nontetrahydrobiopterin users, matched for childhood phenylalanine level, had a poorer outcome on some tests than tetrahydrobiopterin users, which might indicate an impact of tetrahydrobiopterin treatment beyond lowering phenylalanine. However, clinical relevance needs further investigation.


The angular dispersion-type non-scanning Fabry-Perot was applied to an ethanol-water mixture in order to investigate its acoustic properties such as the sound velocity and the absorption coefficient. The scattered light from the mixture was analyzed by using the charge-coupled-device area detector, which made the measurement time much shorter than that obtained by using the conventional scanning tandem multi-pass Fabry-Perot interferometer. The sound velocity showed a deviation from ultrasonic sound velocities at low temperatures accompanied by the increase in the absorption coefficient, indicating acoustic dispersion due to the coupling between the acoustic waves and some relaxation process. Based on a simplified viscoelastic theory, the temperature dependence of the relaxation time was obtained. The addition of water molecules to ethanol reduced the relaxation time, consistent with dielectric measurements. The present study showed that the angular dispersion-type Fabry-Perot interferometer combined with an area detector could be a very powerful tool in the real-time monitoring of the acoustic properties of condensed matter.


Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Sorafenib, a molecular-targeted drug, is a multi-target oral anti-neoplastic drug that is used as a first-line treatment for patients with advanced Human HCC. An increase in the expression of the cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) protein and sequential production of prostaglandin (PG) E2 were previously shown to significantly enhance carcinogenesis. Although the synergistic and/or additive effects of various COX inhibitors have been demonstrated in HCC, those of a combination of sorafenib and COX inhibitors remain unclear. The aim of the present study was to examine the antitumor effects of a combination of sorafenib and COX inhibitors on HCC HepG2 cells. Various COX inhibitors suppressed HepG2 cell survival, and exhibited a combined effect with sorafenib. However, COX-2 selectivity had little relevance. The co-administration of COX inhibitors and sorafenib increased the frequency of apoptosis. Moreover, the combination of sorafenib and diclofenac significantly increased Bax protein expression levels. The results of the present study indicate that COX inhibitors can be administered in combination with sorafenib for HCC therapy.


In this paper we investigate the interaction between the accelerator muscle (the muscle that powers tongue projection) and the entoglossal process (the tongue's skeletal support) that occurs during tongue projection in chamaeleonid lizards. Previous work has shown that there is a delay of about 185 ms between the onset of accelerator muscle activity and the onset of tongue projection. In conjunction with anatomical observations, in vitro preparations of the accelerator muscle mounted on isolated entoglossal and surrogate processes were stimulated tetanically, and the resulting movements were recorded on video at 200fields s-'. Three results indicate that morphological features of the entoglossus and the accelerator muscle delay the onset of tongue projection following the onset of accelerator contraction: (1) the entoglossus is parallel-sided along the posterior 90 % of its shaft, only tapering at the very tip, (2) the sphincter-like portion of the accelerator muscle, which effects tongue projection, makes up the posterior 63 % of the muscle and does not contact the tapered region of the entoglossus at rest, and (3) accelerator muscles mounted on the entoglossus undergo longitudinal extension and lateral constriction for 83ms following the onset of electrical stimulation, before projecting off the entoglossus. I t is proposed that, during elongation of the accelerator muscle, the sphincter-like region ultimately comes into contact with the tapered region of the entoglossus, causing the onset of projection. This conclusion is supported by the observation that the time between the onset of stimulation and the onset of projection was longer in preparations with surrogate entoglossal processes that had no tapered tip and shorter with surrogate processes that had a tapered tip about four times as long as the natural entoglossus. Tetanically stimulated accelerator muscles reached 90 % of peak force 110 ms after the onset of stimulation, indicating that the 185 ms delay between the onset of accelerator activity and the onset of projection seen in vivo allows the accelerator to achieve peak force prior to the onset of projection. Thus, the delay


We propose a new LP relaxation for obtaining the MAP assignment of a binary MRF with pairwise potentials. Our relaxation is derived from reducing the MAP assignment problem to an instance of a recently proposed Bipartite Multi-cut problem where the LP relaxation is guaranteed to provide an O(log k) approximation where k is the number of vertices adjacent to non-submodular edges in the MRF. We then propose a combinatorial algorithm to efficiently solve the LP and also provide a lower bound by concurrently solving its dual to within an e approximation. The algorithm is up to an order of magnitude faster and provides better MAP scores and bounds than the state of the art message passing algorithm of [1] that tightens the local marginal polytope with third-order marginal constraints.


Purpose: To uncover the signaling pathways underlying follicular lymphoma–follicular dendritic cells (FL–FDC) cross-talk and its validation as new targets for therapy. Experimental Design: FL primary cells and cell lines were cocultured in the presence or absence of FDC. After 24 and 48 hours, RNA was isolated from FL cells and subjected to gene expression profiling (GEP) and data meta-analysis using DAVID and GSEA softwares. Blockade of PI3K pathway by the pan-PI3K inhibitor BKM120 (buparlisib; Novartis Pharmaceutical Corporation) and the effect of PI3K inhibition on FL–FDC cross-talk were analyzed by means of ELISA, RT-PCR, human umbilical vein endothelial cell tube formation, adhesion and migration assays, Western blot, and in vivo studies in mouse FL xenografts. Results: GEP of FL–FDC cocultures yields a marked modulation of FL transcriptome by FDC. Pathway assignment by DAVID and GSEA software uncovered an overrepresentation of genes related to angiogenesis, cell adhesion, migration, and serum-response factors. We demonstrate that the addition of the pan-PI3K inhibitor BKM120 to the cocultures was able to downregulate the expression and secretion of proangiogenic factors derived from FL–FDC cocultures, reducing in vitro and in vivo angiogenesis. Moreover, BKM120 efficiently counteracts FDC-mediated cell adhesion and impedes signaling and migration induced by the chemokine CXCL12. BKM120 inhibits both constitutive PI3K/AKT pathway and FDC- or CXCL12-induced PI3K/AKT pathway, hampers FDC survival signaling, and reduces cell proliferation of FL cells in vitro and in mouse xenografts. Conclusions: These data support the use of BKM120 in FL therapy to counteract microenvironment-related survival signaling in FL cells. Clin Cancer Res; 20(13); 3458–71. ©2014 AACR.


The current financial crisis has been characterized as a "Minsky" moment, and as such provides the conditions required for a reregulation of the financial system similar to that of the New Deal banking reforms of the 1930s. However, Minsky's theory was not one that dealt in moments but rather in systemic, structural changes in the operations of financial institutions. Therefore, the framework for reregulation must start with an understanding of the longer-term systemic changes that took place between the New Deal reforms and their formal repeal under the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act. This paper attempts to identify some of those changes and their sources. In particular, it notes that the New Deal reforms were eroded by an internal process in which commercial banks that were given a monopoly position in deposit taking sought to remove those protections because unregulated banks were able to provide substitute instruments that were more efficient and unregulated but unavailable to regulated banks, since they involved securities market activities that would eventually be recognized as securitization. Regulators and the courts contributed to this process by progressively ruling that these activities were related to the regulated activities of the commercial banks, allowing them to reclaim securities market activities that had been precluded in the New Deal legislation. The 1999 Act simply made official the de facto repeal of the 1930s protections. Any attempt to provide reregulation of the system will thus require safeguards to ensure that this internal process of deregulation is not repeated.


In Turning South Again the distinguished and award-winning essayist, poet, and scholar of African American literature Houston A. Baker, Jr. offers a revisionist account of the struggle for black modernism in the United States. With a take on the work of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute surprisingly different from that in his earlier book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker combines historical considerations with psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and whiteness studies to argue that the American South and its regulating institutions—particularly that of incarceration—have always been at the center of the African American experience.

From the holds of slave ships to the peonage of Reconstruction to the contemporary prison system, incarceration has largely defined black life in the United States. Even Washington's school at Tuskegee, Baker explains, housed and regulated black bodies no longer directly controlled by slave owners. He further implicates Washington by claiming that in enacting his ideas about racial "uplift," Washington engaged in "mulatto modernism," a compromised attempt at full citizenship. Combining autobiographical prose, literary criticism, psychoanalytic writing, and, occasionally, blues lyrics and poetry, Baker meditates on the consequences of mulatto modernism for the project of black modernism, which he defines as the achievement of mobile, life-enhancing participation in the public sphere and economic solvency for the majority of African Americans. By including a section about growing up in the South, as well as his recent return to assume a professorship at Duke, Baker contributes further to one of the book's central concerns: a call to centralize the South in American cultural studies.


Objective: To assess the extent and nature of newspaper coverage of tobacco related issues in Australia in 2001. Design: Content analysis of newspaper articles. Subjects: All articles (n=1188) at least seven lines long and containing at least one paragraph focused on tobacco in all major Australian national and State capital city newspapers (n=12) in 2001. Main outcome measures: Number of articles, month of publication, State in which newspaper published, prominence of article, type of article, article theme, and slant of article relative to tobacco control objectives. Results: The number of tobacco articles varied considerably in different months over the course of the year, from a low of 51 in December to a peak of 180 in May. The most frequent theme was secondhand smoke issues (30% of articles), with the second most dominant theme related to education, prevention, and cessation programmes and services (20%). Events that were covered were predominantly positive for tobacco control: 62% of articles were related to events that were positive, compared with 21% that were negative for tobacco control objectives. Excluding news articles, the opinions expressed by the authors of articles were also mainly positive (61%) rather than negative (22%) for tobacco control objectives. The amount of coverage of and population exposure to tobacco focused articles showed considerable variation across different Australian States, with Victoria having the highest frequency and rate of articles and the most media impressions per capita throughout 2001. Conclusions: Coverage of events and opinions related to tobacco in Australian newspapers in 2001 was generally positive for tobacco control objectives. Given that over 2 million individuals (out of a population of 19 million) were potentially exposed to tobacco related newspaper articles per day in Australia, this represents good news for tobacco control advocates. The variation in news coverage in different States and at different times in the year, however, illustrates how a combination of local events and advocacy efforts may at times combine to make tobacco more newsworthy. Understanding which tobacco issues are most likely to be covered and the nature of the coverage about them provides valuable feedback for tobacco control advocates and is a useful gauge of actual events as well as the tobacco related agendas promoted by the press.


One of the goals of the Right to Buy (RTB) was to stimulate labour migration by removing the debilitating effect of social housing on geographical mobility. This is the first study to examine rigorously whether the Right to Buy legislation did indeed 'free-up' those in social housing who bought their homes. Using longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and panel regression models we show that the probability of a RTB-owner making a long distance move falls between that of social renters and owner occupiers. However, the difference between RTB-owners and neither homeowners nor social renters is significant. Social renters are significantly less likely to move over long distances than traditional owners. The results also suggest that RTB-owners are less likely than traditional owners to move for job related reasons, but more likely than social renters.


This study presents the results of a bench-scale experiment on the formation of aldehydes as by-products of the ozonation process. The objective of this research was to investigate the influence of ozonation conditions during the process on aldehyde production. The results support a hypothesis that aldehydes are formed via a direct pathway. Higher pH and/or the addition of hydrogen peroxide during ozonation decreases the production of aldehydes.


Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.


Epidemiological evidence about the accuracy of diagnostic tests, the power of prognostic markers, and the efficacy and safety of interventions is the cornerstone of evidence-based health care.1 Practitioners of evidence-based health care require critical appraisal skills to judge the validity of this evidence. The Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) Working Group members are international leaders in teaching critical appraisal skills, and their users' guides for appraising the validity of the healthcare literature2 have long been the basis of teaching programmes worldwide. However, we found that many of our students took a reductionist "paint by numbers" approach when using the Working Group's guides. Students could answer individual appraisal questions correctly but would have difficulty assessing overall study quality. We believe this is due to a poor understanding of epidemiological study design. So over the past 15 years of teaching critical appraisal, we have modified the EBM Working Group approach and developed the Graphic Appraisal Tool for Epidemiological studies (GATE) frame to help our students conceptualise the whole study as well as its component parts. GATE is a visual framework that illustrates the generic design of all epidemiological studies (figure 1⇓). We now teach critical appraisal by "hanging" studies and the EBM Working Group's appraisal questions on the GATE frame.

 Figure 1
 The GATE frame.

This notebook outlines the GATE approach to critical appraisal, illustrated throughout using the Heart and Estrogen/progestin Replacement Study (HERS), a randomised, double blind, placebo controlled trial of the effect of daily oestrogen plus progestin on coronary heart disease (CHD) death in postmenopausal women.3 A detailed critical appraisal of HERS using a GATE-based checklist is available online.4

The GATE frame incorporates a triangle, circle, square, and arrow (figure 1⇑), labelled with the acronym PECOT (or PICOT).

The triangle (figure 2⇓) represents the population studied: "P" …


This paper describes an on-going design-based research project that aims to develop an instructional process to facilitate pre-service teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) development as they learn to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) in their teaching content subjects. In conjunction with an initiative to prepare pre-service teachers for integrating interactive whiteboard (IWB) in their teaching subjects, an instructional process comprising of tutor modelling, hands-on exploration, and group-based design was implemented. The data collected during this first implementation cycle (Cycle 1) was used to enhance the second implementation cycle (Cycle 2) through the inclusion of classroom-based case studies, subject-based design ideas and opportunities for peer sharing. The findings from both implementation cycles reveal that strategies such as tutor modelling and hands-on exploration of ICT tools appeared to be more advantageous for fostering technological knowledge and technological pedagogical knowledge. Group-based design experiences supported the pre-service teachers to formulate TPACK. The paper concludes with a discussion about the future developments of these TPACK-fostering ICT instructional processes.


We report the synthesis and biochemical evaluation of selective inhibitors of class II (zinc-dependent) fructose bisphosphate aldolases. The most active compound is a simplified analogue of fructose bisphosphate, bearing a well-positioned metal chelating group. It is a powerful and highly selective competitive inhibitor of isolated class II aldolases. We report crystallographic studies of this inhibitor bound in the active site of the Helicobacter pylori enzyme. The compound also shows activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates.


Minimize Power Consumption and Enhance User Experience Essential for high-speed fifth-generation mobile networks, mobile cloud computing (MCC) integrates the power of cloud data centers with the portability of mobile computing devices. Mobile Cloud Computing: Architectures, Algorithms and Applications covers the latest technological and architectural advances in MCC. It also shows how MCC is used in health monitoring, gaming, learning, and commerce. The book examines computation within a mobile device; the evolution, architecture, and applications of cloud computing; the integration of mobile computing and cloud computing; offloading strategies that address constraints such as poor battery life; and green technologies to optimize mobile power consumption. It also presents various resource allocation schemes of MCC, the architecture and applications of sensor MCC, the new concept of mobile social cloud, security and privacy issues in MCC, and different types of trust in MCC. In addition, the book explains how to integrate MCC with vehicular networks, compares economic models, and explores the application of MCC to mobile learning, vehicle monitoring, digital forensic analysis, health monitoring, and other areas. The book concludes with a discussion of possible solutions to challenges such as energy efficiency, latency minimization, efficient resource management, billing, and security.


Abstract
 Predation is an important process in modern oceans and in the evolutionary history of marine ecosystems. Consequently, it has been hypothesized that shelled prey modified their ornamentation in response to predation. However, bivalve ornamentation has also been argued to be important in maintaining a stable life position in the sediment and in burrowing. To test whether concentric ribs were effective against drilling by carnivorous gastropods, we examined drill hole position and completeness for four Cenozoic bivalve species that differ in rib strength (Astarte radiata, A. goldfussi, Lirophora glyptocyma, and L. latilirata). The percentage of drill holes located between the ribs increases with increasing rib strength, whereas the percentage of drill holes on top of ribs decreases. This result suggests that gastropods select the drill hole site more effectively as rib strength increases, thereby saving time and energy, and that natural selection favors gastropods that select drill hole sites between ribs. Because of this greater stereotypy, the percentage of drill holes that are incomplete is generally lower in strongly ribbed species. The proportion of drill holes located on top of ribs is greater for incomplete than complete holes, implying that ribs can be effective against predators, but only when selected as the drilling location. We show that ribs are most effective against drilling predation for bivalves with moderately sized ribs, between which gastropods have difficulty siting drill holes. Concentric ribs are unlikely to have evolved as an adaptation against drilling predation because concentric ribs evolved in the Paleozoic and were already common in the Mesozoic, whereas drilling frequency increased later, in the Late Cretaceous—Paleogene. Moreover, rib strength of North American Astarte did not change through this time interval. Thus, the ribs considered here are a likely exaptation to drilling given their effectiveness at deterring drilling predation on bivalves with moderate ribs.


Virunga National Park (covering an area of 790,000 ha) comprises an outstanding diversity of habitats, ranging from swamps and steppes to the snowfields of Rwenzori at an altitude of over 5,000 m, and from lava plains to the savannahs on the slopes of volcanoes. Mountain gorillas are found in the park, some 20,000 hippopotamuses live in the rivers and birds from Siberia spend the winter there. © UNESCO


This paper presents a preliminary study towards the applications of IEC 61499 Function Block standard in distributed motion control systems, where synchronization is of crucial importance. In particular, an investigation on the possibilities of applying event-driven function blocks in the time-based motion control system has been performed on the SIDEL SL90 packaging machine's control system. To achieve the required high-precision time synchronization and to provide the reference time, the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol has been implemented in this work as the essential part of the packaging control system. A time-complemented event-based control framework has also been proposed.


Drawing mainly on qualitative evidence gathered from interviews with migrant handymen and with labour-using households in the UK, this paper analyses how this migration typifies economic and social divisions within Europe and embodies conflicting tensions between economic and social policies at an interpersonal level. By supplying household services, migrant handymen enable labour-using households to alleviate time pressures and conflicts in time priorities arising from tensions between economic expectations regarding working hours and work commitment, and social expectations regarding contemporary ideas of active parenting. Similarly to the outsourcing of feminized domestic labour and care, these tensions are in part resolved for labour-using households by extending class divisions across national boundaries while leaving gender divisions changed but not transformed and in some instances exacerbating work/ life tensions among the migrants. These broad findings are complicated by differential desires and capabilities around fathering practices among fathers in labour-using households and among the migrants, and economic differentiation among the migrant population. Although we cannot tell from our study whether such movement reinforces or redresses uneven development, what we can say is that existing cohesion policies are insufficient to redress uneven development, and individual responses including migration can reinforce existing social divisions. Further, existing social policies for promoting gender equality fail to recognize or redress the deeply embedded gendered norms.


In 1756 the Corporation of London began the removal of the houses that had lined the passage over London Bridge since the twelfth century, houses which had turned the Bridge into a 'living' structure and ensured its status as one of London's great medieval icons. The 'death' of the inhabited London Bridge, a key element in the construction of the Capital's medieval identity, was a highly symbolic moment in the progressive demise of the pre modern metropolis more generally. The aim of this thesis is to elucidate the factors that led to the London Bridge Improvement Act of 1756, the parliamentary legislation obtained by the Corporation to facilitate the removal of the houses. Previous analyses of the Act have placed it within the narrative of the 'spirit of improvement'. Yet the role of urban governance and finance in the process of improvement has received virtually no detailed analysis. This despite the fact that the historiography of Improvement Acts suggests that the structural characteristics of early modern urban administration, and in particular urban finance, were crucially important factors in terms of the motivation for, and execution of, improvement schemes. This thesis provides a greater understanding of the way in which the Corporation of London managed the Bridge and financed its upkeep. It does so in order to demonstrate how aspects of urban governance the transition from aldermanic oligarchy to a commoner democracy, the bureaucratic structure for financial management, and the financial necessities of governance played a crucial role in the advent of the London Bridge Improvement Act. To achieve this, the thesis utilises the records associated with the London Bridge House Estates, the most extant and complete financial and administrative series within the Corporation's archives. It undertakes for the first time a schematic collection and detailed analysis of financial data, property records and administrative accounts relating to an urban governmental body in the early modern period. In pursuing this argument, and engaging in such an analysis, this research suggests that we should look beyond simply social and cultural factors, and in particular pay closer attention to the often mundane concerns that decisively influenced decision making within urban organisations, when seeking to explain the process of early modern urban development more generally.


A non-iterative spatial phase-shifting algorithm based on principal component analysis (PCA) is proposed to directly extract the phase from only a single spatial carrier interferogram. Firstly, we compose a set of phase-shifted fringe patterns from the original spatial carrier interferogram shifting by one pixel their starting position. Secondly, two uncorrelated quadrature signals that correspond to the first and second principal components are extracted from the phase-shifted interferograms by the PCA algorithm. Then, the modulating phase is calculated from the arctangent function of the two quadrature signals. Meanwhile, the main factors that may influence the performance of the proposed method are analyzed and discussed, such as the level of random noise, the carrier-frequency values and the angle of carrier-frequency of fringe pattern. Numerical simulations and experiments are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method and the results show that the proposed method is fast, effectively and accurate. The proposed method can be used to on-line detection fields of dynamic or moving objects.


From speculative theology to the exegesis of Aquinas, to contemporary North American philosophy and Catholic social and ethical thought, to the thought of Benedict XVI, this work argues the crucial importance of the proportionate natural end within the context of grace and supernatural beatitude. Long argues that, in the effort to avoid naturalism, Henri de Lubac unwittingly consummated the loss of nature as a normative principle within theology, both doctrinally and exegetically with respect to the teaching of Aquinas. The author argues that this constitutes an understandable but grave error. De Lubac's view of the matter was adopted and extended by Hans Urs von Balthasar in The Theology of Karl Barth, in which Balthasar argues that Aquinas could not even consider pure nature because it was impossible for him even to make the conceptual distinction implied by this problem,a view contradicted by Aquinas's text. Long argues that in The Theology of Karl Barth, Balthasar's account evacuates nature of its specific ontological density and treats it as mere createdness as such,a kind of dimensionless point terminating the line of grace. Given the loss of natura within theological method, its recovery requires philosophic instrumentalities. In its third chapter this book argues that by reason of its lack of any unified philosophy of nature or metaphysics, the analytic thought so widespread in Anglophone circles is merely a partial metaphilosophy and so cannot replace the role of classical Thomism within theology. The fourth chapter argues against those who construe affirmation of a proportionate natural end as equivalent to social Pelagianism or minimalism in the public square, engaging the work of Jacques Maritain, Jean Porter, and David Schindler, Sr. In an appendix, the author examines the early thought of Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI, and its development toward the Regensburg Lecture.


Reasoning about intentional action is a pervasive and critical skill in the human cognitive repertoire. Intentions have taken center-stage in discussions of how humans parse perceptual input, understand language, make moral judgments, and predict the behavior of conspecifics. In the quest to engineer machine intelligence, intentions have largely either been ignored entirely, or have been given oversimplified construals as either preference-orders over actions, or as simple predicates in computational theories of action. In this paper, we will motivate the need for intelligent systems capable of reasoning about the intentions of others by presenting a number of germane application areas, including those which deal with the integration of intentionrecognition with other cognitive processes including dialogue processing. We then briefly review the relevant psychological literature on the development and operation of the human capacity to recognize and reason about the intentions of others. In doing so, we will extract a number of desiderata for the development of computational models of intention-recognition. We will then show how these requirements motivate principled design choices for the construction of intelligent systems. Finally, we will close with a brief description of Polyscheme, a computational cognitive architecture which we feel sufficiently addresses the computational challenges entailed by our desiderata.


This dissertation examines rural, Southern culture's strained relationship with academia, specifically as it relates to the composition classroom, which is the place where students are formally introduced to academic discourse and standard, "public" literacy practices. Operating from John Dewey's principle of "warranted assertibility," I analyze the multiple ways in which the urban North has interpreted and defined the rural South in an effort to more accurately determine the population's cultural currency. Using Kenneth Burke's identification theory and George Herbert Mead's interactionist theory, I investigate historical, ethnographic and theoretical data in order to understand how American rhetorical identification with or dis-identification from rural, Southern populations influences the culture's treatment in academic circles. Using the work of W.J. Cash, Allen Batteau, Barbara Ching, Gerald Creed and others, I theorize how and why rural, Southern culture has become a national symbol of anti-intellectualism and thus a blind spot in most cultural studies efforts. This investigation also calls into question the ways in which academics designate marginalized "others." Academia has become so preoccupied with global cultures that many regional literacies have been left unexamined and at times, devalued as too familiar or local for serious academic consideration. Ralph Waldo Emerson's belief that the "near explains the far" grounds my argument that we should continually turn our attention to local as well as global cultures in the spirit of Berthoff's dialectical model. The rural, white, South has long been regarded as ideologically dominant when in fact it is one of the most economically, culturally, and academically marginalized populations in the U.S. I follow through the consequences of these associations for rural, Southern students as they consider and develop their academic identities in the university through the relation of personal experience and the ethnographic study of a former composition student who also hails from the rural South. Using a dialogic model, my ethnographic study operates as a kind of collaborative literacy narrative: the student and I speak from our own experiences as rural, Southern women at different stages in the academy. This form of scholarship is a new way for teachers to engage with students from a common background using sameness rather than difference as the impetus for research. Since geographic or home literacy values factor in to our classroom contexts, the denigration of the rural Southerner - or any unrecognized marginal group - can and should inform the work we do as rhetoric and composition teachers. I argue that marginalized students are often intimately acquainted with "double-consciousness," what Paulo Freire calls conscientizacao, or critical consciousness, which if acknowledged and used, could help students who see themselves as culturally disadvantaged feel more competent and engaged in the composition classroom. Louise Rosenblatt's reader-response theory explains how a student's "experiential reservoir" affects not only her sense of self in the academy but her composing behaviors in the university as well. Currently, the rural South figures into our work minimally, perhaps as part of a cursory inclusion of regional texts. In this dissertation, I describe how we might take this population's literacies more seriously by examining the ways in which rural educators have engaged their students. In much the way feminist pedagogy begins from the premise of an alternative, feminine way of knowing, I argue that the literacies of rural, Southern populations can similarly ground our pedagogy through Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy. Freire's pedagogy, which can be traced to rural contexts, is often misinterpreted as revolutionary and impractical when in fact it was designed to address blind spots such as the marginalization of populations such as the rural, Southern university student. Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School serves as an example of critical pedagogy at work in contexts beyond Freire's Brazil. A rural Southerner, Horton used local knowledge and ways of knowing to more effectively engage and mobilize his students. From these examples, I articulate the possibility of a "rural" pedagogy in the composition classroom. Though philosophically defined by rural, Southern epistemologies and literacies, this pedagogical theory is designed to be re-made to address any classroom population.


Fifty years of hyporheic zone research have shown the important role played by the hyporheic zone as an interface between groundwater and surface waters. However, it is only in the last two decades that what began as an empirical science has become a mechanistic science devoted to modeling studies of the complex fluid dynamical and biogeochemical mechanisms occurring in the hyporheic zone. These efforts have led to the picture of surface‐subsurface water interactions as regulators of the form and function of fluvial ecosystems. Rather than being isolated systems, surface water bodies continuously interact with the subsurface. Exploration of hyporheic zone processes has led to a new appreciation of their wide reaching consequences for water quality and stream ecology. Modern research aims toward a unified approach, in which processes occurring in the hyporheic zone are key elements for the appreciation, management, and restoration of the whole river environment. In this unifying context, this review summarizes results from modeling studies and field observations about flow and transport processes in the hyporheic zone and describes the theories proposed in hydrology and fluid dynamics developed to quantitatively model and predict the hyporheic transport of water, heat, and dissolved and suspended compounds from sediment grain scale up to the watershed scale. The implications of these processes for stream biogeochemistry and ecology are also discussed.


An interesting puzzle is that trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s has been associated with a sharp increase in the skill premium in both developed and developing countries. This is in contrast with neoclassical theory, according to which trade should increase the relative return of the relatively abundant factor. We develop a simple model of trade with capital market imperfections, and show that trade can increase the skill premium in both the North and the South, and both in the short run as well as in the long run. We show that trade with a skill-intensive economy has two effects: it reduces the skilled wage, and thus discourages non talented agents out of the skilled labor force; and it reduces the cost of subsistence, thus allowing the talented offspring of unskilled workers to go to school. This compositional effect has a positive effect on the observed skill premium, possibly strong enough to counterweight the decrease in the skilled wage.


This essay is part of a collection of papers focused on the legal, policy and human challenges posed by the global growth of megacities in Latin America. The contention of this essay is that the problem of urban informality presents in some ways a classic "commons" problem. Informal settlements are able to thrive in cities across the world because, in spite of the existence of fairly well developed planning and land use rules, undeveloped urban land is "up for grabs" to land speculators (who purchase the land and then subdivide it) and ultimately to as many settlers as the land can accommodate. The framework that I offer here casts the commons problem in the context of informal settlements as in part created by "regulatory slippage." By de facto removing unappropriated land from regulatory reach it reverts, in practice, back to its natural, unregulated state where there is little or no restriction on its use. Illegal subdividers and the individual purchasers who occupy the land are in a sense recreating the commons drama, or tragedy. Much like the herdsman in Hardin's tragedy scenario, in the case of informal settlements, individual users (e.g. pirate subdividers) have no incentive not to continue to (over) populate and consume the land while externalizing the cost of that use to others. As a result, urban land is being quickly consumed and its availability is slowly disappearing. Moreover, the costs eventually imposed on the local populace from the establishment and existence of informal settlements-i.e. the costs of upgrading, formalizing, and integrating the settlements into the urban metropolis-might be better (or more efficiently) spread through a different mechanism for using peripheral urban land to house the poor. The analytical traction that the Tragedy of Commons offers is to allow us to do so along the spectrum of public and private governance choices and the tradeoffs that they entail. This essay explores these choices, their tradeoffs, and offers some thoughts about each in the context of informal settlements.


Optical tomography of turbid media has so far been limited by systems that require fixed geometries or measurements employing fibers. We present a system that records noncontact optical measurements from diffuse media of arbitrary shapes and retrieves the three-dimensional surface information of the diffuse medium. We further present a novel method of combining this composite data set and obtain accurate fluorescence reconstructions. This approach offers significant experimental simplicity and yields high-information-content datasets. The performance of this novel tomographic approach is demonstrated with experimental reconstructions of phantoms.


This paper is an attempt to partially delineate the salient features of Shi'ite political thought. It seeks to clarify that Islam is an allembracing religion consisting of a set of laws and injunctions which are requisites for the establishment of an ideal society. The paper presents a brief discussion about governance during the period of occultation of the twelfth Imam, the role of the supreme Leader and the essential qualifications for administrators of the law, especially for the one at the top of the pyramid of power.


This research investigates the effects of four oral antiretroviral drugs on erythrocyte catalase activity and the relative stability of the erythrocyte membrane in wistar rat. Sixty (60) rats with average body weight 100 grams were allowed to acclimatize for two weeks and were distributed into four (4) groups. Blood samples were collected from the experimental animals by cardiac puncture. Catalase activity was determined spectrophotometrically, allowing the enzyme to split H2O2 for different periods of time. The osmotic fragility of the erythrocytes was determined by measuring the release of haemoglobin from blood added to tubes containing serially diluted phosphate buffered saline (PBS, pH 7.4). Results revealed that catalase activity decreases significantly (p<0.05) in the presence of lamivudine (from 17.13±3.01to 16.40±2.04) efavirenz (from 17.05±1.18 to 16.41±1.11) abacavir sulfate (from 16.36±0.28 to 15.60±2.18); nevirapine caused non-significant (p>0.05) decrease. All drugs investigated increased the mean corpuscular fragility of rat erythrocyte membrane. Efavirenz and abacavir caused significant (p<0.05) increases from 0.34±0.03 to 0.543±0.10 and 0.34±0.00 to 0.45±0.05 respectively, while the increases from 0.33±0.0 to0.40±0.02 and from 0.34±0.06 to 0.42±0.08 respectively in the presence of nevirapine and lamivudine were not significant (p>0.05). All the drugs investigated destabilized the rat erythrocyte. All drugs investigated may reduce the ability of the erythrocyte to withstand oxidative stress, and they have the capacity to increase the permeability of the erythrocyte membrane and can compromise the integrity and functionality of the erythrocyte.


We study the results of a massive nationwide correspondence experiment sending more than 83,000 fictitious applications with randomized characteristics to geographically dispersed jobs posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers. Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names. The magnitude of this racial gap in contact rates differs substantially across firms, exhibiting a between-company standard deviation of 1.9 percentage points. Despite an insignificant average gap in contact rates between male and female applicants, we find a between-company standard deviation in gender contact gaps of 2.7 percentage points, revealing that some firms favor male applicants while others favor women. Company-specific racial contact gaps are temporally and spatially persistent, and negatively correlated with firm profitability, federal contractor status, and a measure of recruiting centralization. Discrimination exhibits little geographical dispersion, but two digit industry explains roughly half of the cross-firm variation in both racial and gender contact gaps. Contact gaps are highly concentrated in particular companies, with firms in the top quintile of racial discrimination responsible for nearly half of lost contacts to Black applicants in the experiment. Controlling false discovery rates to the 5% level, 23 individual companies are found to discriminate against Black applicants. Our findings establish that systemic illegal discrimination is concentrated among a select set of large employers, many of which can be identified with high confidence using large scale inference methods. Patrick M. Kline Department of Economics University of California, Berkeley 530 Evans Hall #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720 and NBER email@example.com Evan K. Rose Becker Friedman Institute University of Chicago Chicago, IL firstname.lastname@example.com Christopher R. Walters Department of Economics University of California, Berkeley 530 Evans Hall #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 and NBER firstname.lastname@example.com


Highly efficient deep-blue emitters, especially those matching the NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) blue standard CIE (Commission Internationale de L'Eclairage) coordinate of (0.14, 0.08), are crucial for full-colour displays and white lighting. However, deep-blue emitters with excellent electroluminescence performance are rare. According to the strategy of developing highly luminescent solids by constructing aggregation-induced emission (AIE) systems, two AIE-type blue emitters, mTPE-PPI and mTPE-DPI, have been synthesized by integrating a triphenylethylene (TPE) group with one or two phenanthro[9,10-d]imidazole (PI) groups. The adoption of the PI unit with a large optical bandgap, the meta-linkage of the PI and the TPE units on a benzene ring, and the twisted molecular conformations of present AIE systems endow these compounds with bright blue emission in the solid state. In addition, these compounds are capable of transporting both electrons and holes and possess appropriate HOMO and LUMO levels for carrier injections. These features enable them to serve as excellent blue-emitting materials in OLEDs. A non-doped OLED based on mTPE-PPI displayed deep-blue light with the CIE coordinate of (0.15, 0.09) and a maximum external quantum efficiency (EQEmax) of 2.30%. An analogous device with mTPE-DPI as the emitting layer emitted blue light (CIE: 0.15, 0.14) with a high EQEmax of 3.69% and low efficiency roll-off. Further improvement of device performance has been achieved by the doping technique. The doped device of mTPE-DPI was able to realize deep-blue emission (CIE: 0.15, 0.10) matching well the blue standard, meanwhile reaching a EQEmax of 5.52% that represents the highest value reported for deep-blue OLEDs based on AIE compounds.


This thesis is concerned with heat flow asymmetry through composites of water and aqueous solutions. Central to this exploration are the behaviour of heat transfer in
the vicinity of the density maximum and the behaviour of the temperature of maximum density of aqueous solutions. Both of these topics are investigated by cooling a rectangular enclosure of the test fluid in a quasi-steady state manner. During cooling, the temperature at select points within the liquid is monitored and the flow of heat at both isothermal walls is measured. As the liquid cools through its density maximum the normal single-cell convection that occurs in the presence of a horizontal temperature gradient changes to a double cell configuration in the vicinity of the density maximum. This transition manifests itself in changes in the horizontal temperature profile across the cavity and in the rate of cooling of the fluid. A measurement technique to study the behaviour of the temperature of maximum density of aqueous solutions is described in this thesis that relies on these changes.
These changes are investigated experimentally and numerically.
The study of the behaviour of heat transfer and the temperature of maximum density of aqueous solutions revealed that heat transfer is reduced in the vicinity of the density maximum and that the temperature of maximum density of aqueous solutions depends on the nature and concentration of the solute. Both of these results are
exploited in the study of heat flow asymmetry through a device that consists of two cubic enclosures side by side; one enclosure contains water with a density maximum
at 4oC and the other enclosure contains a saline solution with a density maximum at 2oC. A temperature gradient, which spans both of these temperatures of maximum
density, is applied horizontally across the composite system, resulting in different rates of heat transfer through the device depending on the gradient direction.
Experiments performed with a 12cm x 6cm x 6cm container yield heat transfer rates of 0.55W and 0.19W depending on the direction of the temperature gradient, resulting in a rectification factor of 65.4%. Asymmetrical heat transfer rates are also found in composite systems of water and solids when the temperature gradient spans the temperature of maximum density of the water. Results from computational fluid dynamics confirm the experimental results, and are used to investigate the influence of such parameters as temperature gradient and container aspect ratio on the
rectification factor.


Four real-time visual feedback computer tools for singing lessons (SINGAD, ALBERT, SING & SEE, and WinSINGAD), and the research carried out to evaluate the usefulness of these systems are reviewed in this article. We report on the development of user-functions and the usability of these computer-assisted learning tools. Both quantitative and qualitative studies confirm the efficiency of real-time visual feedback in improving singing abilities. Having addressed these findings, we suggest further quantitative investigations of (1) the detailed effect of visual feedback on performance accuracy and on the learning process, and (2) the interactions between improvement of musical performance and the type of visual feedback and the amount of information it presents, the skill level of the user and the teacher's role.


One of the major problems in developing countries is maintenance of roads. Well maintained roads contribute a
major portion to the country's economy. Identification of pavement distress such as potholes and humps not only
helps drivers to avoid accidents or vehicle damages, but also helps authorities to maintain roads. This paper
discusses previous pothole detection methods that have been developed and proposes a cost-effective solution to
identify the potholes and humps on roads and provide timely alerts to drivers to avoid accidents or vehicle damages.
Ultrasonic sensors are used to identify the potholes and humps and also to measure their depth and height,
respectively. The proposed system captures the geographical location coordinates of the potholes and humps using
a global positioning system receiver. The sensed-data includes pothole depth, height of hump, and geographic
location, which is stored in the database (cloud). This serves as a valuable source of information to the government
authorities and vehicle drivers. An android application is used to update the pics of location on the android
application named "meri sadak" so that measures can be taken to evade accidents. Alerts are given to the driver and
simultaneously pics are updated on application.


Variability selection (abbreviated as VS) is a process considered to link adaptive change to large degrees of environment variability. Its application to hominid evolution is based, in part, on the pronounced rise in environmental remodeling that took place over the past several million years. The VS hypothesis differs from prior views of hominid evolution, which stress the consistent selective effects associated with specific habitats or directional trends (e.g., woodland, savanna expansion, cooling). According to the VS hypothesis, wide fluctuations over time created a growing disparity in adaptive conditions. Inconsistency in selection eventually caused habitat‐specific adaptations to be replaced by structures and behaviors responsive to complex environmental change. Key hominid adaptations, in fact, emerged during times of heightened variability. Early bipedality, encephalized brains, and complex human sociality appear to signify a sequence of VS adaptations—i.e., a ratcheting up of versatility and responsiveness to novel environments experienced over the past 6 million years. The adaptive results of VS cannot be extrapolated from selection within a single environmental shift or relatively stable habitat. If some complex traits indeed require disparities in adaptive setting (and relative fitness) in order to evolve, the VS idea counters the prevailing view that adaptive change necessitates long‐term, directional consistency in selection. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is legendary for presenting dazzling new technologies at the annual genome meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and last month's 1996 gathering was no exception. Lander unveiled applications for a "DNA chip," developed by Affymetrix, a biotechnology company in Santa Clara, California. Built with the same techniques as computer chips, the DNA chip holds thousands of tailor-made stretches of DNA. And although its first use will be in evaluating markers for genetic mapping, the chip could one day be a versatile tool for rapidly scanning entire genomes.


This article examines gender mainstreaming in Sweden, which is an interesting case because several favorable conditions make its implementation likely. It addresses two main questions: (1) to what extent has gender mainstreaming been implemented and (2) what are the consequences? The article first discusses the pros and cons of gender mainstreaming as reflected in the international feminist debate. It then briefly describes the favorable conditions of the Swedish case and subsequently maps out the introduction of gender mainstreaming since 1994, focusing on the process and its politics. It concludes with a discussion of the Swedish experience in terms of the promise and pitfalls of gender mainstreaming identified in the feminist debate and the implications of the Swedish case for feminist theorizing on gender mainstreaming.


In this chapter, a hybrid modeling procedure of Li-ion battery modules is presented. From experimental results, the parameters of an electrical circuit have been determined by means of time- and frequency-domain tests. In this way, the dynamic behavior of the battery-pack is modeled. The tests have been performed at the whole battery-pack, instead of a single-cell approach, in order to consider the packaging effects of multicell devices. The real performance of the battery-pack under dynamic applications associated with distribution grids has been simulated using a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experimental setup. According to simulation results, the hybrid model follows the battery-pack response with high accuracy.


We demonstrate the feasibility of using flow cytometry (FC) to identify the Hodgkin and Reed-Sternberg (HRS) cells of classical Hodgkin lymphoma (CHL). Initial flow cytometric studies of the HRS cell line L1236 demonstrated potentially useful antigens for identifying HRS cells. L1236 cells spontaneously bound normal T cells, analogous to the T-cell rosetting of HRS cells seen in tissue sections of CHL, but these interactions could be blocked by using a cocktail of unlabeled antibodies to 4 adhesion molecules. Among 27 lymph nodes involved by CHL, FC enabled HRS cells to be identified in 89%, whereas none of 29 non-CHL neoplasms or 23 reactive lymph nodes demonstrated HRS populations. Of the CHL cases, 82% demonstrated interactions between HRS cells and T cells that could be disrupted with blocking antibodies. Flow cytometric cell sorting experiments demonstrated typical HRS cytomorphologic features among the purified cells. FC may offer an alternative to immunohistochemical analysis in confirming the diagnosis of CHL in certain cases, and, through cell sorting, it provides a means of rapidly isolating pure HRS cells.


Google plans to digitize the books from five of the world's biggest libraries into a keyword-searchable book-browsing library. Some publishers and authors allege that this constitutes a massive piracy of their copyrights in books not yet in the public domain. But I argue that Google Book Search may be a fair use for two interrelated reasons: it is unlikely to reduce the sales of printed books, and it promises to improve the marketing of books via an innovative book marketing platform featuring short previews. Books are an experience good in economic parlance, or a product that must be consumed before full information about its contents and quality becomes available. This makes new technologies that are capable of rapidly searching and previewing relevant passages from books a development that the law should encourage, not burden or restrain. After introducing the topic, I describe Google's ambitious plan to scan and index up to 15 million library books by 2010, and provide short previews of a few lines each to help users decide whether to buy the books or check them out from a library. I then argue that the fair use limitation on exclusive rights has historically protected efforts such as Google's to address the economic problem of marketing experience goods like books, albums, movies, or games, which consumers must decide whether to buy without assessing their quality and characteristics beforehand. Fair use partially resolved this problem by permitting the unauthorized dissemination of extracts of another's work in a catalogue, review, abridgement in a periodical, or other work of criticism or commentary. The bulk of the Article analyzes the copyright and fair use implications of lawsuits challenging Google Book Search, filed by several publishers and a putative class of up to 8,000 published authors. I contend that by reproducing excerpts from scanned books for the purpose of improving access to information about books on the internet, Google is making a transformative use of the books that should qualify as a fair use. Courts have recognized that copyright owners are not entitled to gain a monopoly over the market for information about their works, or to suppress efforts to improve the public's access to information and high-quality research tools. Google Book Search is distinguishable from prior attempts to disseminate complete copies of protected works, from newspaper articles in the Free Republic case to songs in the Napster and MP3.com cases. Insofar as most works being scanned by Google have already been published, and are nonfictional and fact-based, these facts also strongly support Google's fair use arguments. Most importantly, the evidence so far is that Google Book Search will dramatically improve, rather than detract from, the sales of books that it permits users to find, preview, and purchase. Google Book Search has tripled the sales of many books, and other online previews of books have also markedly increased sales. Total book sales are up substantially in the period after Google began scanning copyrighted books, indicating a fair use under the Sony Betamax case and other precedents. I conclude by analyzing the antitrust implications of the struggle between copyright owners and technology companies for control over digital marketing and distribution technologies. Joint ventures between major copyright holders may be the only viable alternative for the foreseeable future to technology company search technologies such as Google Book Search, just as MusicNet and Movielink proved to be the only viable alternative for many years to peer-to-peer digital media search technologies. Such joint ventures may facilitate price-fixing and suppression of digital media output, dangers that courts considering the legality of Google Book Search should explore carefully. At the same time, I suggest reasons for courts to be skeptical about publishing industry assertions that by scanning books, Google will seize control over all the content in the world.


Social marketing is a commonly used strategy in global health. Social marketing programmes may sell subsidized products through commercial sector outlets, distribute appropriately priced products, deliver health services through social franchises and promote behaviours not dependent upon a product or service. We aimed to review evidence of the effectiveness of social marketing in low- and middle-income countries, focusing on major areas of investment in global health: HIV, reproductive health, child survival, malaria and tuberculosis. We searched PubMed, PsycInfo and ProQuest, using search terms linking social marketing and health outcomes for studies published from 1995 to 2013. Eligible studies used experimental or quasi-experimental designs to measure outcomes of behavioural factors, health behaviours and/or health outcomes in each health area. Studies were analysed by effect estimates and for application of social marketing benchmark criteria. After reviewing 18 974 records, 125 studies met inclusion criteria. Across health areas, 81 studies reported on changes in behavioural factors, 97 studies reported on changes in behaviour and 42 studies reported on health outcomes. The greatest number of studies focused on HIV outcomes (n = 45) and took place in sub-Saharan Africa (n = 67). Most studies used quasi-experimental designs and reported mixed results. Child survival had proportionately the greatest number of studies using experimental designs, reporting health outcomes, and reporting positive, statistically significant results. Most programmes used a range of methods to promote behaviour change. Programmes with positive, statistically significant findings were more likely to apply audience insights and cost-benefit analyses to motivate behaviour change. Key evidence gaps were found in voluntary medical male circumcision and childhood pneumonia. Social marketing can influence health behaviours and health outcomes in global health; however evaluations assessing health outcomes remain comparatively limited. Global health investments are needed to (i) fill evidence gaps, (ii) strengthen evaluation rigour and (iii) expand effective social marketing approaches.


Clinical introduction A 28-year-old man with extensive travel history to developing countries was hospitalised for intermittent sharp chest pains, worst when supine and with inspiration. Two weeks prior to presentation, he had suffered a flu-like illness with a sore throat, which was resolving. Physical examination was notable for mild fever and tachycardia with cervical lymphadenopathy and painful bilateral knee and wrist effusions. Cardiac auscultation was remarkable for a soft early-peaking systolic murmur over the aortic area with a decrescendo early diastolic murmur along the left sternal edge. There was mild leucocytosis, elevation of serum troponin and acute-phase reactants with an ECG showing sinus tachycardia. Echocardiographic windows were extremely limited but suggested the presence of pericardial effusion and aortic regurgitation. Cardiac MRI was performed (figure 1). Viral, microbiological and autoimmune testing was remarkable only for significant elevation of antistreptolysin-O titres (1450 IU rising to 1940 IU, normal <200 IU). Pericardiocentesis revealed an exudative effusion, which was negative by cytology and microbiological analysis, including for tuberculosis and fungi. Question The most appropriate next step is? Coronary angiography Endomyocardial biopsy Treatment with colchicine for 3 months Treatment with corticosteroids Treatment with high-dose salicylates and long-term penicillin For the answer see page 808 For the question see page 769


Statistical models for networks have been typically committed to strong prior assumptions concerning the form of the modeled distributions. Moreover, the vast majority of currently available models are explicitly designed for capturing some specific graph properties (such as power-law degree distributions), which makes them unsuitable for application to domains where the behavior of the target quantities is not known a priori. The key contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce the Fiedler delta statistic, based on the Laplacian spectrum of graphs, which allows to dispense with any parametric assumption concerning the modeled network properties. Second, we use the defined statistic to develop the Fiedler random field model, which allows for efficient estimation of edge distributions over large-scale random networks. After analyzing the dependence structure involved in Fiedler random fields, we estimate them over several real-world networks, showing that they achieve a much higher modeling accuracy than other well-known statistical approaches.


Efficiency of an arterial network could be enhanced by optimizing the user costs of the network incurred due to delay and other socio-economic factors. Until recently, research mostly focused on minimizing vehicular delay to optimize user costs. Currently no tool exists to balance delays to both vehicles and pedestrians. This research developed a methodology that employed known techniques and available tools to identify optimal signal co-ordination plans. The optimal signal timings determined can minimize the total delay to both vehicles and pedestrians. Pedestrian delay patterns were obtained from previous research. Delay data for vehicles was based on modeling peak-hour traffic conditions in urbanized areas of a hypothetical city. The signal optimization software Synchro Version 3.2 was used to investigate the variations in vehicle delay with different signal coordination plans and offsets. Delays to vehicles and pedestrians with respect to various offsets were analyzed. The results evinced that the best offsets for vehicles and pedestrians were not necessarily the same. Consequently a signal coordination plan to benefit both should consider the total user costs of the system. Higher user costs could be encountered if pedestrian progression was not considered and only vehicles were considered. Results showed that the highest total pedestrian delay could spike up the user costs more than the highest total vehicular delay. The offset generating the optimal user cost could be different from the best offset for vehicles or pedestrians. A balance could be achieved between pedestrian delay and vehicular delay to arrive at an optimal signal coordination plan. Significant implications of such a trade-off are discussed in view of current transportation trends.


In this paper we propose a new incremental spike sorting model that automatically eliminates refractory period violations, accounts for action potential waveform drift, and can handle "appearance" and "disappearance" of neurons. Our approach is to augment a known time-varying Dirichlet process that ties together a sequence of infinite Gaussian mixture models, one per action potential waveform observation, with an interspike-interval-dependent likelihood that prohibits refractory period violations. We demonstrate this model by showing results from sorting two publicly available neural data recordings for which a partial ground truth labeling is known.


How popular is soccer worldwide? Here's one indicator: 3.2 billion people-nearly half of the planet's population-tuned in to watch the 2010 World Cup on television. Soccer matches attract a gargantuan number of fans from around the globe due to the popularity of the sport itself but also because of the nationalism it inspires and the entertainment spectacle of the big games. Distinguished authors and sports authorities, Charles Parrish and John Nauright, examine how soccer impacts societies worldwide by shaping national identities, providing common ground for diplomatic issues, and forging economic and social development.  This one-volume geographic guide studies the places in which soccer has a major impact, examining each region's teams, major tournaments, key players, and international performance. The authors organize the book geographically by region and country, with entries reviewing the history of the sport and cultural impact on the area. Each profile concludes with fascinating game-based statistics, such as winners of major tournaments and top goal scorers. The book covers 20 countries including England, Brazil, Egypt, the United States, Cameroon, and Korea.


Approximately one-third of the c. 1200 polycystine radiolarian names currently recognized as valid in deep-sea research (Cenozoic sediments and plankton) come from the first century of taxonomic studies (c. 1840–1930). German scientists dominated early research on radiolarian biology and taxonomy. C. G. Ehrenberg's initial work was followed by E. Haeckel's mammoth monographic works, particularly his Challenger report. Other important early workers were D. Rüst on Mesozoic and Palaeozoic forms and A. Popofsky on plankton and sediment materials, with smaller contributions by J. Müller, E. Stöhr, F. Dreyer and H. Mast. Excluding Haeckel, these workers together published over 2000 species names. A fraction (5–25%) of these names are still used today in deep-sea research, with a tendency for more prolific authors to have higher modern usage rates. Haeckel's legacy is different. He published over 5000 species names, but only a few percent are still used. The reasons for his species names no longer being used seem to include both factors common to disuse of names from other early authors (inadequate text descriptions, poor or absent illustration, no preserved original materials) but also due to substantial duplication of species and genus names, created by imposition of a partially artificial high level taxonomy. Based on Haeckel's own writings and by analogy to other parts of Haeckel's work, it is suggested that Haeckel's desire to discover and show evolutionary relationships lay behind this flawed approach to taxonomy.


Navigation systems are constantly demanding for exploding system performance and minimizing system size. They require higher accuracy, reliability, robustness against jamming, impossibility to intercept and ability to fit very small compartments. Low-cost inertial sensors are described by high noise and large doubts in the outputs such as bias, scale factor, drift and nonorthogonality. So, errors associated with a low-cost microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in terms of position, velocity and attitude grow rapidly in standalone mode. If decent performance can be reached with low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU), the cost of real applications can be reduced and the growth of new applications may be made feasible. The technique to advance the accuracy is supplementing the IMU with some aiding sources; for example, global positioning system (GPS) or digital compass. This motivates the system-integrators to enhance the performance by integrating the long-term GPS accuracy with the short-term INS accuracy. Key-Words: IMU, INS, GPS, Kalman filters; navigation states.


The findings of previous studies indicate that the genes required for metabolism of the pesticide 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) are typically encoded on broad-host-range plasmids. However, characterization of plasmid-cured strains of Burkholderia sp. strain RASC, as well as mutants obtained by transposon mutagenesis, suggested that the 2,4-D catabolic genes were located on the chromosome of this strain. Mutants of Burkholderia strain RASC unable to degrade 2,4-D (2,4-D- strains) were obtained by insertional inactivation with Tn5. One such mutant (d1) was shown to have Tn5 inserted in tfdARASC, which encodes 2,4-D/alpha-ketoglutarate dioxygenase. This is the first reported example of a chromosomally encoded tfdA. The tfdARASC gene was cloned from a library of wild-type Burkholderia strain RASC DNA and shown to express 2,4-D/alpha-ketoglutarate dioxygenase activity in Escherichia coli. The DNA sequence of the gene was determined and shown to be similar, although not identical, to those of isofunctional genes from other bacteria. Moreover, the gene product (TfdARASC) was purified and shown to be similar in molecular weight, amino-terminal sequence, and reaction mechanism to the canonical TfdA of Alcaligenes eutrophus JMP134. The data presented here indicate that tfdA genes can be found on the chromosome of some bacterial species and suggest that these catabolic genes are rather mobile and may be transferred by means other than conjugation.


BACKGROUND
Chronic vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) continues to be evaluated as an adjunctive treatment for medically intractable seizures. A previous randomized controlled trial of 114 patients demonstrated a significant decrease in seizure frequency during 3 months of VNS at effective stimulation levels.

OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the efficacy of 1 year of VNS therapy for the treatment of medically refractory partial seizures and the relationship between initial and long-term response.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
All patients exiting the randomized controlled study of VNS for treatment of medically refractory partial seizures were offered indefinite treatment extension as part of an open-label trial. One hundred (88%) of 114 patients completed 12 months of VNS treatment at effective stimulation levels. Fourteen patients discontinued VNS treatment prior to 1 year, principally because of the treatment's lack of efficacy. These 14 patients were retained in the present analysis using an intent-to-treat approach. Antiepileptic drug use was monitored throughout the trial. Seizure frequency was analyzed in 4 sequential 3-month treatment periods.

RESULTS
Compared with pretreatment baseline, there was a significant decrease in seizure frequency during each of the 3-month treatment periods. Seizure frequency was reduced by a median of 20% during the first 3 months of VNS treatment and by 32% during stimulation months 10 through 12. Response during the first 3 months of VNS treatment was a statistically significant predictor of response at months 10 through 12. The observed reduction in seizure frequency was not explained by overall changes in antiepileptic drug use.

CONCLUSIONS
The results indicate that VNS remains an effective adjunctive therapy for medically refractory partial seizures over a period of at least 1 year. Response during the first 3 months of treatment is predictive of long-term response.


Governments subsidies R&D through a mix of interdependent mechanisms, but subsidy interactions are not well understood. This paper provides the first quasi-experimental evaluation of how R&D subsidy interactions impact firm behavior. I use funding rules and policy changes in the UK to show that direct grants and tax credits for R&D are complements for small firms but substitutes for larger firms. An increase in tax credit rates substantially enhances the effect of grants on R&D expenditures for small firms. For larger firms, it cuts the positive effect of grants in half. I explore the mechanisms behind these findings and provide suggestive evidence that complementarity is consistent with easing financial constraints for small firms. Substitution by larger firms is most consistent with the subsidization of infra-marginal R&D expenditures. I rule out some alternative explanations. Subsidy interactions also impact the types of innovation efforts that emerge: with increases in both subsidies, small firms steer efforts increasingly towards developing new goods (i.e., horizontal innovations) as opposed to improving existing goods (i.e., vertical innovations). Accounting for subsidy interactions could substantially improve the effectiveness of public spending on R&D.


Transit times through hydrologic systems vary in time, but the nature of that variability is not well understood. Transit times variability was investigated in a 1 m3 sloping lysimeter, representing a simplified model of a hillslope receiving periodic rainfall events for 28 days. Tracer tests were conducted using an experimental protocol that allows time‐variable transit time distributions (TTDs) to be calculated from data. Observed TTDs varied with the storage state of the system, and the history of inflows and outflows. We propose that the observed time variability of the TTDs can be decomposed into two parts: "internal" variability associated with changes in the arrangement of, and partitioning between, flow pathways; and "external" variability driven by fluctuations in the flow rate along all flow pathways. These concepts can be defined quantitatively in terms of rank StorAge Selection (rSAS) functions, which is a theory describing lumped transport dynamics. Internal variability is associated with temporal variability in the rSAS function, while external is not. The rSAS function variability was characterized by an "inverse storage effect," whereby younger water is released in greater proportion under wetter conditions than drier. We hypothesize that this effect is caused by the rapid mobilization of water in the unsaturated zone by the rising water table. Common approximations used to model transport dynamics that neglect internal variability were unable to reproduce the observed breakthrough curves accurately. This suggests that internal variability can play an important role in hydrologic transport dynamics, with implications for field data interpretation and modeling.


: Intensity, duration and frequency (IDF) curves are necessary tools for the design and construction of hydraulic projects. However, the pluviographic records that are needed to determine IDF curves do not exist or are scarce. This research presents the regionalization of IDF curves for the department of Boyacá, Colombia, which consists of 16 towns including the provincial capital Tunja. For regionalization, adjustment parameters (U and alpha) of the IDF curve stations in the study area were used. Similar regionalization is used for the interpolation of intensities. In the case of regionalization by the parameters found for the construction of the IDF curves, estimation methods were used with the means of the ordinary moments and the maximum likelihood. Regionalization and interpolation of the data were performed with Arcgis software. Within the development of the project, we developed the best choice to provide a level of reliability, e.g., to determine which of the options and ways to regionalize was the best option. The resulting isoline maps were made in the case of the regionalization intensities, and each map is associated with a different return period and duration to build IDF curves in the studied area. In the case of the regionalization maps, the parameters associated with each individual parameter were performed last. The results show that using the data from the IDF curves is more accurate and reduces errors in the design. With the methods proposed in this study, the IDF curves can be built for any site of interest that does not have pluviometric stations.


Research Methods in Linguistics. By LIA LITOSSELITI. LONDON: CONTINUUM, 2010. PP. 240. HARDBACK $120.00. Research Methods in Linguistics is an accessible introduction to the discipline and is a suitable guide for beginning-level graduate and undergraduate students. The text is composed of ten chapters authored by leaders in the discipline in the United Kingdom and, although many of the names may be new to beginning level students in the United States, contributors such as Paul Baker, Angela Creese, and Judith Baxter quickly establish themselves as authoritative voices in the fields of corpus linguistics, multilingualism, and discourse analysis, respectively. Research Methods in Linguistics opens with a concise introduction by Lia Litosseliti in which she contextualizes the book within a framework set forth by comprehensive texts that seek to both inform the novice researcher of the relationship between various research paradigms while allowing more informed readers to reflect on current debates on the use of various methodologies in linguistic research and the possibilities for interaction among these methods. The remainder of the book is organized into three parts: Part I, Issues, guides readers through the process of forming and operationalizing research questions and ends with a discussion on the benefits and challenges to different types of research: quantitative, qualitative, and a mixed-methods approach. Part II, Quantitative and Corpus Research Methods inducts the reader into the world of quantitative linguistics and tackles issues such as the building and applications of corpora and data analysis. Part III, Qualitative Research Methods, is intentionally the largest section of the book according to Litosseliti in order to reflect the prevalence of such methods currently in the field. This section is composed of five chapters that initiate the reader into the fields of discourse analysis, linguistic ethnography, multimodal and narrative analysis. Each chapter of the book opens with a chapter outline that essentially summarizes the key topics of discussion. Chapters are divided into subsections that are aptly titled to direct the reader through what is at times an abundance of information, thus contributing to the accessibility of the text for beginning students. The intent of the book is not to provide a thorough discussion but rather to give a broad overview of the methods presented, therefore each chapter concludes with a short list of suggested readings which provide detailed coverage of the topic. Each of the self-contained chapters concludes with an independent list of references in addition to the suggested readings. In Chapter One, Research Questions in Linguistics, Jane Sunderland provides descriptive instruction on the formation of research questions, providing illustrative examples from her own field of expertise of sociolinguistics and gender. Sunderland guides the reader between the distinction between various types of research questions, for example primary vs. secondary, methodological vs. theoretical, and empirical vs. speculative questions. In addition, Sunderland provides practical guidance for budding researchers, for example, advising them to document and justify all methodological decisions related to the research design. In the second chapter, Quantitative, Qualitative, or Both? Combining Methods in Linguistic Research, Jo Angouri adopts a pragmatist's stance, which propones methodologies that represent a collection of techniques, in her discussion of issues relevant to conducting research within a specific paradigm. Angouri discusses at length the nomenclature of methodological triangulation and differentiates between its meaning as a technical term and as a concept of mixed methods designs as a whole, and draws upon her expertise in the field of business discourse to exemplify both the benefits and challenges of mixed-methods research. The third chapter, Quantitative Methods: Concepts, Frameworks, and Issues, introduces readers to the general characteristics of quantitative research and provides a thorough distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods. …


In Law section 1 of article 1 of No.31 year 2000 about Industrial Desain is formulated congeniality of Industrial Desain creation about form, composition or configuraton mark with lines or colour, or colour and line, or aliance from to which in form of three dimension or two dimension giving aesthetic impression and can be realized in pattern three dimension or two dimension and also can wear to yield product, goods, industrial commodity, or handicraft. Relate to congeniality of Industrial Desain above. Industrial Desain Subyek all worker which having of rights and obligations of Industrial Desain, or more clear as formulated in section 6 law of No.31 year 2000 about Industrial Desain that:

(1) Rightful claimant obtain;get Rights of Desain Industrial is Pendesain or the abandonee of Pendesain
(2) In the case of Pendesain consist of some people collectively/together, Rights of Desain passed to Industrial them collectively, is unless promised is other.

Later;Then Obyek of Industrial Desain in Law of No.31 Year 2000 about Industrial Desain namely : Goods or commodity representing desain in the form of creation concerning form, configuraton, composition mark with lines and or colour both for making an impression on aesthetic or present the beauty and or which in form of two or three dimension used in course of industry. As for target of formed its law of No.31 year 2000 about this Industrial Desain is to protect judicially Industrial Desain all Pendesain, so that all pendesain obtaining rights of Desain its Industrial can protect judicially. As for procedures obtain;get Rights of Desain Industrial is by application of registration as which is formulated in section 10 Law of no.31 year 2000 namely; Rights of Desain Industrial given on the basis of Application. In writing of this skripsi of writer lift problems for example:

1. How effectiveness execution of Law of No.31 year 2000 about industrial desain in protecting small worker face global emulation in Town of Blitar?
2. Factors what pursuing effectiveness execution of Law of No.31 year 2000 about industrial desain in protecting small worker face global emulation in Town of Blitar?
As for method which is used in this writing is method of yuridis sosiologis namely which dot weigh against to study existing problems in society. Data obtained by spreading of Kuisoner and also interview later then analyst use method analyse diskriptif qualitative.
Pursuant to research analysis and solution of writer of showing that execution of Law of No.31 year 2000 about Industrial Desain at Worker of Kendang in District Of Kepanjenkidul Town of Blitar not yet efektiv. Because during the time all Worker of Kendang still a lot do not know Law of No. 31 year 2000 about Industrial Desain and do not one even also Worker of Kendang registering Its his Desain.
Factors resistor of execution of Law of No.31 year 2000 about the Industrial Desain between is other: (1) Lack of socialization concerning Law of No.31 year 2000 about Industrial Desain, (2) expense of costly assumed registration by all Worker/ pendesain, (3) all worker/pendesain not yet comprehended technically/procedures registration of Industrial Desain, (4) Procedure registration of circumlocutary and complicated Industrial Desain, (6) Worker more is making account of economic requirement aspect/just money


Based on a survey of state TANF directors in 41 states and DC, researchers conclude that the level of collaboration between TANF and child welfare agencies in many states is a great accomplishment when compared with the limited efforts before welfare reform. For instance, 31 state TANF agencies have provided either written or verbal guidance to local TANF agencies on coordinating TANF work plans with child welfare plans. Twenty of the TANF agencies surveyed have documented policies for sharing information with child welfare agencies; 13 states have colocated TANF and child welfare staff; and 25 created joint planning or steering committees. Addressing the needs of targeted populations -- relative caregivers, sanctioned clients, families approaching time limits, and victims of domestic violence -- has been the impetus for several unique programs described in the brief.


Distributed training of deep nets is an important technique to address some of the present day computing challenges like memory consumption and computational demands. Classical distributed approaches, synchronous or asynchronous, are based on the parameter server architecture, i.e., worker nodes compute gradients which are communicated to the parameter server while updated parameters are returned. Recently, distributed training with AllReduce operations gained popularity as well. While many of those operations seem appealing, little is reported about wall-clock training time improvements. In this paper, we carefully analyze the AllReduce based setup, propose timing models which include network latency, bandwidth, cluster size and compute time, and demonstrate that a pipelined training with a width of two combines the best of both synchronous and asynchronous training. Specifically, for a setup consisting of a four-node GPU cluster we show wall-clock time training improvements of up to 5.4x compared to conventional approaches.