Filipinos are a deeply religious people. Many past events of historical interest attest to the significant role of religion in their everyday life. Early Filipinos were animists who believed in the existence of a supreme being whom the Tagalogs referred to as Bathala. The Ilocanos call him Kabunyan and he is called Laon or Aba by the Bisayas. This animism was further strengthened by the early migrants from Island Southeast Asia who were themselves animists. Like them, our ancestors worshipped the sun (the source of life and energy), the birds, the trees, the mountains and the hills, and the rivers, brooks, and lakes. The early religious worship included the veneration of the spirits a nd the ancestors. The early Filipinos believed in the cult of the dead and, in addition, the cult of the spirits. They also believed in the offering of sacrifices to appease their gods. In the absence of temples, sacrifices and the accompanying rituals took place in their own homes, at sea or the rivers. or sometimes in the mountains and open fields. Our forefathers believed in the underworld where creatures that can cause unexplainable misery lived. However, there were also powerful talisman or agimat that were used against these creatures. Moreover, Filipinos had beliefs that normally guided their way of life. With these beliefs, they devised means to counteract the consequences and effects that might befall them in some extreme cases. These beliefs persisted even with the introduction of Christianity, which was coupled with new expressions and things associated with the new faith. Folk Christianity was born out of the weaving of Christianity and traditional folk beliefs. In the mid-1980s, the Chinese feng shui (literally wind and water) found its way in the country, particularly in building construction. Today, the consideration oftraditional building beliefs that often preceded a construction seemed to have been lost and forgotten. This paper would like to recollect on these various superstitious beliefs and how they influenced house architecture before the feng shui era. These will include the site selection procedure, the months, days and seasons for building a house, the rituals before starting construction, and the beliefs and their attendant consequences of good health and family life, as well as protection from evil spirits.


PURPOSE
Extraocular muscle (EOM) paths are constrained by connective tissue pulleys serving as functional origins. The quantitative structural features of pulleys and their intercouplings and orbital suspensions remain undetermined. This study was designed to quantify the composition of EOM pulleys and suspensory tissues.

METHODS
Five human orbits, ages 33 weeks gestation to 93 years, were imaged intact by magnetic resonance (MRI), serially sectioned at 10 micro m thickness, and stained for collagen, elastin, and smooth muscle (SM). With MRI used as a reference, digital images of sections were geometrically corrected for shrinkage and processing deformations, and normalized to standard normal adult globe diameter. EOM pulleys, interconnections, suspensory tissues, and entheses were quantitatively analyzed for collagen, elastin, and SM thickness and density.

RESULTS
Rectus and inferior oblique pulleys had uniform structural features in all specimens, comprising a dense EOM encirclement by collagen 1 to 2 mm thick. Elastin distribution varied, but was greatest in the orbital suspension of the medial rectus pulley and in a band from it to the inferior rectus pulley. This region corresponded to maximum SM density. Structural features of pulleys, intercouplings, and entheses were similar among specimens. The major mechanical couplings to the osseous orbit were near the medial and lateral rectus pulleys.

CONCLUSIONS
Quantitative analysis of structure and composition of EOM pulleys and their suspensions is consistent with in vivo MRI observations showing discrete inflections in EOM paths that shift predictably with gaze. Focal SM distributions in the suspensions suggest distinct roles in stiffening as well as shifting rectus pulleys.


This paper discusses the scalar politics of the water rights adjudication process in New Mexico (US). Over the past 150 years, water governance in New Mexico has gradually shifted away from communal management towards more individualised 'water rights'. This paper addresses the consequences of this shift for water users while also addressing the literature on the politics of scale and scalar politics. Actors engaged in water governance mobilise scale, and scalar politics operate in different settings, depending on the priorities of the stakeholders. Using interviews, archival research, and institutional ethnography, I illustrate how scale of various kinds is fundamental to the process of water rights adjudication and water governance in the state of New Mexico. Although the academic sense of the politics of scale remains contested, these debates seem largely abstract to most water users, even if they materially and rhetorically engage in multiple levels of scalar politics. The framing of scale arguments ranges from the biopolitics of individual water rights holders, to the new regionalisation of ditches due to adjudication, to considerations at the larger watershed level.


The aim of the article is to problematise and discuss the usefulness of the chronological I as a new analytical approach for studying the doing of identity in storytelling. The chronological I can be both a rhetorical resource for narrators and a new analytical tool for studying the process of doing identity. The article suggests that the chronological I adds a new analytical dimension to different types of narrative analysis. The article takes its point of departure in the understanding of the narrator as using time as a rhetorical resource for telling or doing identity in ongoing interactions. In this discursive narrative approach, narratives are viewed as socially situated actions in a context in which the narrator has to relate to culturally accepted agreements about responsibility and agency. The data for this article is based on interviews with twelve individuals exposed to workplace bullying. As this topic is sensitive, there is a need for narrators to manage their accountability when asked to account for their agency or non agency in the reported events.


A major criticism of Hegel's philosophy is that it fails to comprehend the experience of the body. In this book, John Russon shows that there is in fact a philosophy of embodiment implicit in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Russon argues that Hegel has not only taken account of the body, but has done so in a way that integrates both modern work on embodiment and the approach to the body found in ancient Greek philosophy. Although Russon approaches Hegel's Phenomenology from a contemporary standpoint, he places both this standpoint and Hegel's work within a classical tradition. Using the Aristotelian terms of 'nature' and 'habit,' Russon refers to the classical distinction between biological nature and a cultural 'second nature.' It is this second nature that constitutes, in Russon's reading of Hegel, the true embodiment of human intersubjectivity. The development of spirit, as mapped out by Hegel, is interpreted here as a process by which the self establishes for itself an embodiment in a set of social and political institutions in which it can recognize and satisfy its rational needs. Russon concludes by arguing that self-expression and self-interpretation are the ultimate needs of the human spirit, and that it is the degree to which these needs are satisfied that is the ultimate measure of the adequacy of the institutions that embody human life. This link with classicism - in itself a serious contribution to the history of philosophy -provides an excellent point of access into the Hegelian system. Russon's work, which will prove interesting reading for any Hegel scholar, provides a solid and reliable introduction to the study of Hegel.


This study examines the persistent poverty that exists among African Americans in the United States. It explains why African Americans in the United States are much more likely to live and/or remain in poverty than any other population group. This study is based on the premise that the governmental system has affected African Americans through the use of public policies. This study demonstrates how the outcome of public policies, programs and institutional practices has impacted the lives of African Americans. The primary focus of this study is to challenge the long-standing, incorrect, misdirected, flawed paradigm that was designed to eliminate poverty through the use of federal antipoverty policies and programs. President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty Great Society Legislation was used as a single case study approach to analyze and gather data to determine if antipoverty programs and policies have helped or hindered African Americans, in moving in or out of poverty. Although, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society Legislation was notable and made an honest attempt to eliminate poverty, it suffered from the same fatal flaws of trying to fix/blame the individual instead of blaming the structural failures within the governmental system. In this research, the results show that failed federal policies and programs have caused African Americans to remain poor and underprivileged in the United States. Failed policies have also created a culture of poverty among poor African Americans, meaning that they have learned to adapt to a lifestyle that allows them to deal with poverty, while sharing common problems such as having the lowest income levels with the least amount of education. The results show that African Americans are persistently poor because of the structural failures within the governmental system, not because of an individual's characteristics. The conclusions drawn from the findings suggest that: the old paradigm must be challenged and changed; there is a systemic problem within United States governmental institutions and it's political, economic, and social structures failed to satisfy the needs of the poor. Poverty was not lessened or eliminated among African Americans, they continue to have the highest poverty rates when compared to white Americans, and they continuously face barriers to employment, access to health care and medical services, educational attainment, unaffordable housing and inequality. This study will challenge the United States governmental system, its policies and programs that were created to minimize or eliminate poverty. This study is instrumental because it will reconceptualize poverty and propose a prevailing paradigm shift in United States public policy. It will provide the federal government with prescriptions to look at poverty differently, focusing on the failures within the structure of government instead of blaming the powerless individual.


Establishing tolerance levels for the presence of unwanted materials that may inadvertently become co-mingled with products that are acceptable in markets is a problem for regulators that requires arbitrary lines in the sand to be drawn. While the degree of tolerance is ultimately an arbitrary value—because the full information necessary to make a non-arbitrary decision is never forthcoming—decision making can be informed by theory, existing information, and where gaps in information lie. Where tolerances have been established that do not appear to have been informed, they should be re-examined if for no other reason than they may impose unnecessary costs on society. Zero tolerance has been imposed by regulators in a number of jurisdictions for unwanted materials that could co-mingle with products acceptable in the market. One such case is the European Union's (EU) policy of zero tolerance for co-mingling of unapproved genetically modified (GM) materials with agri-food products. This article uses two case studies related to the regulation of GM materials in the EU to examine the implications of zero tolerance. While the topic of the regulation of modern biotechnology has been the subject of much debate in the EU and globally, there appears to be little discussion of zero tolerance. Given that zero tolerance imposes considerable externalities on non-EU agri-food sectors as well as in the EU itself, it may be time to re-examine zero tolerance in an informed way.


DGAP1 of Dictyostelium discoideum is a cell cortex associated 95 kDa protein that shows homology to both RasGTPase-activating proteins (RasGAPs) and RasGAP-related proteins. When tested for RasGAP activity, recombinant DGAP1 protein did not promote the GTPase activity of human H-Ras or of Dictyostelium RasG in vitro. Instead, DGAP1 bound to Dictyostelium Rac1A and human Rac1, but not to human Cdc42. DGAP1 preferentially interacted with the activated GTP-bound forms of Rac1 and Rac1A, but did not affect the GTPase activities. Since Rho-type GTPases are implicated in the formation of specific F-actin structures and in the control of cell morphology, the microfilament system of mutants that either lack or overexpress DGAP1 has been analysed. DGAP1-null mutants showed elevated levels of F-actin that was organised in large leading edges, membrane ruffles or numerous large filopods. Expression of actin fused to green fluorescent protein (GFP) was used to monitor the actin dynamics in these cells, and revealed that the F-actin cytoskeleton of DGAP1-null cells was rapidly re-arranged to form ruffles and filopods. Conversely, in DGAP1-overexpressing cells, the formation of cellular projections containing F-actin was largely suppressed. Measurement of cell migration demonstrated that DGAP1 expression is inversely correlated with the speed of cell motility.


[1] There are several dozen papers that study the effects of cloud horizontal inhomogeneity on the retrievals of cloud optical thickness, but only a few of them deal with cloud droplet sizes. This paper is one of the first comprehensive attempts to fill this gap: It takes a close theoretical look at the radiative effects of cloud 3-D structure in retrievals of droplet effective radii. Under some general assumptions, it was found that ignoring subpixel (unresolved) variability produces a negative bias in the retrieved effective radius, while ignoring cloud inhomogeneity at scales larger than a pixel scale (resolved variability), on the contrary, leads to overestimation of the domain average droplet size. The theoretical results are illustrated with examples from Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of cumulus (Cu) and stratocumulus (Sc) cloud fields. The analysis of cloud drop size distributions retrieved from both LES fields confirms that ignoring shadowing in 1-D retrievals results in substantial overestimation of effective radii which is more pronounced for broken Cu than for Sc clouds. Collocated measurements of broken Cu clouds by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) are used to check simulations and theory with observations. The analysis of ASTER and MODIS data and associated derived products recommends against blindly using retrieved effective radii for broken cloud fields, especially if one wants to relate aerosol amounts to cloud droplet sizes.


We have extended the use of shadow Moiré technique to be implemented in simple curved surfaces by using a flexible grating. Dynamic visual inspection of surface micro-damages is significantly favored by the use of well adapted pliable gratings compared to the use of flat reference gratings. The experimental set-up consists of a plastic foil with a printed Ronchi grating stretched between three points which adapts to any cylindrical or conical convex surface independently of the relative orientation grating/surface. Static quantification of defects profiles is also possible with an attached CCD camera. Visual detection of defects in the range of ~30 microm in depth is obtainable.


Abstract. Providing reliable estimates of streamflow and hydrological fluxes is a major challenge for water resources management over national and transnational basins in South America. Global hydrological models and land surface models are a possible solution to simulate the terrestrial water cycle at the continental scale, but issues about parameterization and limitations in representing lowland river systems can place constraints on these models to meet local needs. In an attempt to overcome such limitations, we extended a regional, fully coupled hydrologic–hydrodynamic model (MGB; Modelo hidrológico de Grandes Bacias) to the continental domain of South America and assessed its performance using daily river discharge, water levels from independent sources (in situ, satellite altimetry), estimates of terrestrial water storage (TWS) and evapotranspiration (ET) from remote sensing and other available global datasets. In addition, river discharge was compared with outputs from global models acquired through the eartH2Observe project (HTESSEL/CaMa-Flood, LISFLOOD and WaterGAP3), providing the first cross-scale assessment (regional/continental  ×  global models) that makes use of spatially distributed, daily discharge data. A satisfactory representation of discharge and water levels was obtained (Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency, NSE > 0.6 in 55 % of the cases) and the continental model was able to capture patterns of seasonality and magnitude of TWS and ET, especially over the largest basins of South America. After the comparison with global models, we found that it is possible to obtain considerable improvement on daily river discharge, even by using current global forcing data, just by combining parameterization and better routing physics based on regional experience. Issues about the potential sources of errors related to both global- and continental-scale modeling are discussed, as well as future directions for improving large-scale model applications in this continent. We hope that our study provides important insights to reduce the gap between global and regional hydrological modeling communities.


Random number generation is a key element of stochastic simulations. It has been widely studied for sequential applications purposes, enabling us to reliably use pseudo-random numbers in this case. Unfortunately, we cannot be so enthusiastic when dealing with parallel stochastic simulations. Many applications still neglect random stream parallelization, leading to potentially biased results. Particular parallel execution platforms, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), add their constraints to those of Pseudo-Random Number Generators (PRNGs) used in parallel. It results in a situation where potential biases can be combined to performance drops when parallelization of random streams has not been carried out rigorously. Here, we propose criteria guiding the design of good GPU-enabled PRNGs. We enhance our comments with a study of the techniques aiming to correctly parallelize random streams, in the context of GPU-enabled stochastic simulations.


Human papillomavirus (HPV)-negative (-ve) oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinomas (OPSCCs) are associated with poorer overall survival (OS) compared to HPV-positive (+ve) OPSCCs. The major obstacle to improving outcomes of HPV -ve patients is the absence of good biomarkers. Herein, we investigated the role of centrosome amplification (CA) as a prognostic marker in HPV –ve OPSCCs. We first quantitatively assessed CA in OPSCC tumor samples and found that HPV -ve OPSCCs exhibit higher CA compared to HPV +ve OPSCCs, and was associated with poor OS even after adjusting for potentially confounding variables. Further, the expression of genes associated with hypoxia and CA was significantly higher in HPV -ve OPSCCs than in HPV +ve OPSCCs. We further uncovered a mechanism by which hypoxia-induced HIF-1α downregulates miR-34a resulting in cyclin D1 overexpression and rampant CA in HPV -ve OPSCCs. Our findings demonstrate that assessment of CA may aid in therapeutic decision-making for these patients. INDEX WORDS: Head and neck cancers, Oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinomas, HPVnegative, HPV-positive, Centrosome amplification, Hypoxia HYPOXIA-INDUCED CENTROSOME AMPLIFICATION UNDERLIES AGGRESSIVE DISEASE COURSE IN HPV-NEGATIVE OROPHARYNGEAL SQUAMOUS CELL CARCINOMA


Microgrid provides an effective means to promote renewable energy utilization via deploying multiple distributed generations (DGs) with energy storage systems (ESSs), loads, control devices and protect devices, which can operate in either islanded mode or grid-connected mode. In order to coordinate the output of different DGs and realize the potential of renewable energy, energy management and economic dispatch of micro‐ grid is needed. Both distributed energy resources (DERs) and user loads in microgrid have uncertainty characteristics; so the randomness of the wind speed and solar radiation intensity are modeled by interval mathematics and the interval output of the wind turbine and photovoltaic (PV) generation system are obtained. Then, a microgrid economic optimization model based on interval optimization method is proposed. Next, com‐ bined with the time-of-use characteristic, issue of the power exchange with the external grid has been considered. Finally, Considering the effect of ESS, this chapter discusses the impacts of uncertainty of renewable energy power and load power on optimization results, as well as the effects of the degree of load uncertainty or load fluctuation on scheduling results. The results verify the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method in dealing with uncertainty optimization problem of microgrid.


Film; 55mins; Blind Carbon Copy is a metaphysical drama juxtaposing language and images with a dialogue of disembodiment. Performance and meaning are rendered tautologically redundant through repetition and difference. Blind Carbon Copy includes a performance undertaken by six actors, a dancer, a baby, various life drawing sessions and two bands; one based around guitar and drums, the other electronics. Where does concrete meaning lie and what takes precedent in these moments? The actors perform a script collaged from personal email correspondence in which slippery detached terms like 'here' and 'there' seem to refer to both different places and different psychological states. It was produced during a 3 month production residency funded by Film London. Frieze review Mia Jankowicz March 2009: http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/matthew_noel_tod/ Essay by William Fowler, BFI: http://www.picture-this.org.uk/library/essays1/2008/blind-carbon-copy


This poster presents work on the relationships between early communicative gestures and vocabulary knowledge in Swedish children aged 12 to 18 months. The role of gestures in early communicative development was studied using vocabulary measurements collected with the Swedish versions of the MacArthur-Bates CDI infant and toddler forms. In a larger study, correlations were calculated among communicative skills over 6-month intervals from child age 1;0 to 2;6 in a sample with varying numbers of children at different ages. The poster presents results from the first pairwise comparison using cross-sectional and cross-lagged correlations. Variables included gestures, receptive and productive vocabulary at 1;0, and productive vocabulary and the syntactic/grammatical measure M3L at 1;6 (n = 321). Gestures at 1;0 were more strongly correlated with receptive than productive vocabulary at the same age, and weakly correlated with productive vocabulary at 1;6. Additional analysis divided the gesture scale into "empty-hand" gestures and "object actions", following Sansavini et al. (2010). Empty-hand gestures were found to be more related to productive vocabulary, while object-actions were more related to reception. Despite differences in methodology, results of the present study confirm some findings by Sansavini et al. Further analysis of the Swedish data showed that empty-hand gestures were significantly, but weakly, correlated with the percentage of nouns in children's vocabularies at 1;6, whereas children's use of object-actions were similarly correlated with the percentage of verbs. Results of this analysis may indicate that empty-hand gestures, which most often are deictic gestures, help infants enhance their knowledge of objects and their names, while activities with objects help them understand the concepts related to actions, particularly verbs. Such knowledge has implications for both parents and other caregivers who are invested in stimulating the language development of young children.


In May 2013 the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) handed down its first judgment on business rescue in the case of Oakdene Square Properties (Pty) Ltd v Farm Bothasfontein (Kyalami) (Pty) Ltd and Others [2013] 3 All SA 303 (SCA). This case is of significance in that it has confirmed an interpretation of the meaning of 'business rescue' that embraces the protection of creditors. In the light of the new business rescue regime being viewed as a shift away from more traditional creditor-oriented insolvency procedures that may be traced back to South Africa's English law roots, this case gives reassurance to creditors that their interests, although no longer of paramount importance, are afforded protection by the very definition of what business rescue seeks to achieve.


In this paper, we investigate a two-phase two-way relay protocol for a scenario without channel coding or channel estimation. The considered configuration represents practical sensor networks, where the nodes wish to exchange some low rate messages (e.g. 1 bit) via a shared relay under a strict complexity or latency constraint (corresponding to our assumptions of no-coding and no-channel estimation). A new scheme which incorporates a single-threshold non-coherent energy detection and a digital network coding process at the relay node is proposed. The energy detection is optimized for both phases of the protocol and a threshold that exhibits no error floors is derived in a closed form. Numerical results validate the efficiency of the proposed scheme and introduce the two-way relay channel as an efficient structure also for non-coherent and uncoded systems.


Three-dimensional integration is a solution that vertically stacks multiple layers of silicon chips by Through-Silicon-Vias (TSVs) to enhance the performance of microelectronic devices. The tapered TSV profile can help to overcome the technical difficulties. However, an easily overlooked issue is that tapered TSV can cause wafer warpage during the fabrication processes. Wafer warpage can cause chip misalignment and impose additional deformation. In an effort to investigate the TSV geometric effect, a large number of finite element analysis (FEA) simulations were performed to quantify the thermal stress distribution and the thermally induced curvature. It was found that the tapered geometry alone can induce significant wafer bending, which has not been reported by other researchers. The effect of taper angle, TSV radius, TSV pitch, and wafer thickness were quantitatively studied. In addition, the incorporations of anisotropic silicon property and intermediate layers between the copper TSV and silicon into the numerical models were assessed. Thermally induced stress concentration around copper TSV near the wafer surface can lead to degradation of the device performance by affecting the carrier mobility in transistors. This piezoresistivity effect can cause serious reliability concerns. The size of keep-out zone (KOZ), which is identified as a threshold of 5% carrier mobility change, was also quantified for various transistor types in different channel directions.


The burgeoning literature on democratic civil society, civic engagement, and associational life has focused largely on voluntary civic organizations in which citizens choose to associate on the basis of what they already share. Those groups serve important functions in a democratic society. But those groups, by definition voluntary and largely beyond the scope of antidiscrimination law, cannot be relied upon to bring individuals together across social cleavages of ethnicity and identity. In a diverse but still-too-divided society, that is an important mediating function, and it is one that the workplace is uniquely situated to serve. The antidiscrimination laws have had a significant impact on the workplace; for most adults, it is likely to be the most racially diverse place in which they spend much time. At work, individuals cooperate and converse day after day, and form ties of familiarity and empathy with individuals from different groups. Social science research confirms the tendency of this kind of cooperative interaction to foster more positive intergroup attitudes and relations. The workplace is thus a uniquely important locus of associational life in a diverse democratic society. This article makes the case for this proposition, links it to contemporary discussions of social capital, public discourse, and social integration, and contends with the problems of hierarchy and economic compulsion that might seem to disqualify the workplace from the domain of civil society, but that prove to be more ambiguous in their significance for the distinct mediating function of the workplace.


The early 1930s saw a wave of Fascism sweep across Europe. It had a varied impact across many European countries; Germany, Italy and eventually Spain; were engulfed into the movement whilst Britain managed to resist. In Britain, the Fascist movement is considered to have been a minor threat to British politics but became a significant focus of conflict in a climate of fear about the rise of European Fascism. Though always a minority movement British fascism did gain support in three main areas - in parts of Yorkshire, south Lancashire and in London – where it posed major concerns for the British government. This raises the question of who supported fascism in these districts and why? This dissertation aims to understand the appeal that resonated with some of the inhabitants of Britain's key fascist regions of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and East London. Each region was an area of local strength for the British Union of Fascists, at a time where European Fascism was an increasing concern to national security. This work aims to understand the extent to what some constituents of these key regions supported Mosley's economic recommendations to address the unemployment crisis. Also, to what degree did Mosley's recruitment strategies succeed in gathering local support and which local policies assisted with the party's popularity? This study explores the local motivations and the nature of local recruitment, evaluating the events that shaped the success of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley's militant approach often led to abrupt decisions, directional party changes and internal disruption, this study reveals the effects of such leadership at a local level. A variety of primary sources have been used to draw these conclusions, they include the extensive number of speeches delivered by BUF executives, party materials and pamphlets, 6 autobiographies of party members, public labour surveys as well as readings from speeches delivered at the House of Commons. Part of the appeal lies in the way Mosley adjusted his speech to correlate with local interests. Its decline may be due to how he later lost sight of his original political and economic visions, becoming too entwined in notions of anti-Semitism, which ultimately resulted in a less engaged dwindling membership.


Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have emerged as a core technology for incorporating human knowledge because of their capability to capture the relational dimension of information and of its semantic properties. The nature of KGs meets one of the vocational pursuits of academic institutions, which is sharing their intellectual output, especially publications. In this paper, we describe and make available the Polito Knowledge Graph (PKG) –which semantically connects information on more than 23,000 publications and 34,000 authors– and Geranium, a semantic platform that leverages the properties of the PKG to offer advanced services for search and exploration. In particular, we describe the Geranium recommendation system, which exploits Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to suggest collaboration opportunities between researchers of different disciplines. This work integrates the state of the art because we use data from a real application in the scholarly domain, while the current literature still explores the combination of KGs and GNNs in a prototypal context using synthetic data. The results shows that the fusion of these technologies represents a promising approach for recommendation and metadata inference in the scholarly domain.


OBJECTIVE
To examine the accuracy of self-perception of weight gain and its correlates in a multiethnic reproductive-age population of women.

METHODS
A total of 608 women (balanced by contraceptive methods and race/ethnicity) self-reported their perceptions of weight gain at baseline and every 6 months thereafter for 36 months. Data regarding body weight, height, and other covariates were also obtained. Women with at least two follow-up visits were included in the final analysis. Generalized estimating equations (GEE) models were used to examine correlates of the accuracy of self-perception of weight gain over time.

RESULTS
Overall, 466 women had at least two follow-up visits with 1744 total observations over 36 months. In total, 44%, 30%, 19%, 12%, and 8% observations had at least 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 kg weight gain in 6 months while 59%, 67%, 73%, 78%, and 85% of women accurately recognized it, respectively. Depot medroxyprogesterone (DMPA) users were more likely than nonhormonal method users (69%/51%, 76%/59%, 81%/63%, 85%/59%, and 93%/71%), and blacks more likely than whites (70%/51%, 76%/59%, 83%/65%, 90%/68%, and 95%/78%) (p<0.05 for all) to recognize weight gains of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 kg. The differences remained significant after adjusting for covariates using GEE. A significant difference was also observed between DMPA and oral contraceptive users.

CONCLUSIONS
Inability to recognize weight gain is common among young women. Both race/ethnicity and contraceptive methods influence the accurate perception of weight gain. Clinicians should provide patient-specific counseling to address the frequent inaccuracies to recognize weight gain.


The growing interest in ecology has had the unexpected effect of granting new relevance to a theology interested not so much in the salvation of humans as in the salvation of the whole creation – non-humans included. Since science studies has for many years probed several alternatives to the modernist divide between subject and object, it is interesting to combine the tools of science studies and theology to elicit a new contrast between nature and creation. Using tools from an anthropological inquiry of the moderns, the article draws a different connection between religion and science that bypasses the notion of nature.


Private consumption capabilities form only one facet of comprehensive living standards assessments, but they are an important facet whose measurement should be done well. Measurement is complex due to a multitude of methodological choices, which often interact with imperfect data and a desire for comparability through time. This paper outlines ideas underpinning these choices with particular attention to the tensions between consistency and specificity. We also highlight a series of limitations associated with typical cost of basic needs approaches. Finally, we reaffirm that a 'sensibly eclectic' approach, employing multiple methods, is the best available mode for addressing these limitations.


The article analyses tale type The Woman as Wolf , which is one of the most popular folk tales in the Estonian Folklore Archives and is represented there both in the form of a fairy tale and in the form of a legend. The vast majority of the versions of The Woman as Wolf were written down in the first part of the 20th century within Estonia and where recorded from Estonians. The article introduces the content of the tale, the origin of the first records from the early 19th century, and the dissemination area of the tale, which remains outside Western Europe: apart from the Estonian versions there are Sami, Karelian, Vepsian, Livonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian versions. While in almost all the Estonian versions the main protagonist is transformed into a wolf, in most of the versions written down in other areas and ethnic groups, another animal or bird replaces the wolf. The author is of the opinion that the Finnic area is central to the distribution of the folk tale The Woman as Wolf . The animal the woman is transformed into in the plot would not have been a wolf in earlier times. The article provides an explanation why the wolf is predominant in Estonian written sources. For that purpose the ways in which the wolf and werewolf were perceived in earlier Estonian folk belief are introduced. At the end of the article interpretation of the folk tale is provided. The author states that the plot and some of the motifs found in this folk tale reflect the difficulties women had in submitting to the norms and values of patriarchal order within their society.


When it comes to making tough decisions in dynamic environments, decision makers usually do not make the optimal choices (Moxnes, 2004). In order to help decision makers understand the consequences of their decisions modelers usually reveal the structure of their models through Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD). Here I have run a small pilot experiment comparing an alternative method of model structure, model behavior visualization called Force Directed Graphs (FDG) in an attempt to determine which is the more effective aid to decision makers. Participants in this study were asked to make decisions in a dynamic system, and were given either a CLD of the underlying model, or a FDG as an aid. The results of this study were inconclusive as to which was more effective, but it appeared that FDG users had better strategy, but were on the whole unable to translate that into optimal decision making. This paper also discusses changes to be applied to its experimental design before this study can be run in full.


The sense of touch has much importance in technology-mediated human emotion communication and interaction. Many researchers around the world are aiming to leverage the sense of touch in the communication medium between multi-user 3D virtual world and real environment. Driven by the motivation, we explored the possibilities of integrating haptic interactions with Linden Lab's multi-user online virtual world, Second Life. We enhanced the open source Second Life viewer client in order to facilitate the communications of emotional feedbacks such as human touch, encouraging pat and comforting hug to the participating users through real-world haptic stimulation. These emotional feedbacks that are fundamental to physical and emotional development in turn can enhance the users interactive and immersive experiences with the virtual social communities in the Second Life. In this paper, we describe the development of a prototype that realizes the aforementioned virtual-real communication through a haptic-jacket system. Some of the potential applications of the proposed approach includes distant lover's communication, remote child caring, and stress recovery.


We present discriminative Gaifman models, a novel family of relational machine learning models. Gaifman models learn feature representations bottom up from representations of locally connected and bounded-size regions of knowledge bases (KBs). Considering local and bounded-size neighborhoods of knowledge bases renders logical inference and learning tractable, mitigates the problem of overfitting, and facilitates weight sharing. Gaifman models sample neighborhoods of knowledge bases so as to make the learned relational models more robust to missing objects and relations which is a common situation in open-world KBs. We present the core ideas of Gaifman models and apply them to large-scale relational learning problems. We also discuss the ways in which Gaifman models relate to some existing relational machine learning approaches.


Markov jump processes play an important role in a large number of application domains. However, realistic systems are analytically intractable and they have traditionally been analysed using simulation based techniques, which do not provide a framework for statistical inference. We propose a mean field approximation to perform posterior inference and parameter estimation. The approximation allows a practical solution to the inference problem, while still retaining a good degree of accuracy. We illustrate our approach on two biologically motivated systems.


Abstract. Hummingbird is a novel ultra-lightweight cryptographic algorithm aiming at resource-constrained devices. In this work, an enhanced hardware implementation of the Hummingbird cryptographic algorithm for low-cost Spartan-3 FPGA family is described. The enhancement is due to the introduction of the coprocessor approach. Note that all Virtex and Spartan FPGAs consist of many embedded memory blocks and this work explores the use of these functional blocks. The intrinsic serialism of the algorithm is exploited so that each step performs just one operation on the data. We compare our performance results with other reported FPGA implementations of the lightweight cryptographic algorithms. As far as author's knowledge, this work presents the smallest and the most efficient FPGA implementation of the Hummingbird cryptographic algorithm.


Despite vast economic growth in developing countries in the past few years, infant mortality continues to plague underdeveloped regions, particularly rural regions of India.  Many of these deaths are caused by a lack of education and motivation in regard to utilization of antenatal and neonatal care services to prevent and treat consequences of unhygienic umbilical cord care. For years, high incidences of neonatal tetanus have plagued rural areas of India as a result of cultural practices that encourage topical applications of cow dung to cut umbilical stumps either directly or by using ghee heated with cow dung to warm umbilical dressings.  In order to increase public awareness of the practical ineffectiveness of tetanus toxoid vaccinations in treating the consequences of unhygienic umbilical cord care, cultural aspects that contribute to mothers' utilization of antenatal care services in rural India should be identified in order to understand sociological factors that affect neonatal mortality rates in rural India so that intervention efforts may be targeted appropriately to effectively eradicate neonatal tetanus.  A variety of sociology and public health articles and journals that outline factors deeply engrained in Indian culture that inhibit mothers from accessing health care services hypothesize why legislations that promote availability of vaccines have proved rather ineffective in reducing mortality rates were reviewed.  These sources generally attribute lack of utilization of health care services to predisposing variables (such as age, ethnicity, caste, education level, and occupation), enabling variations (distance to health facility, means of transport), and a lack of perceived need of care. An analysis of the reasons behind hesitation and reluctance to use antenatal and neonatal care services can help target intervention efforts to appropriately reach at-risk demographic groups.  While immunization is understood as effective in treating the immediate effects of unhygienic umbilical cord care, education of young, uneducated and unemployed, lower caste, Hindu women before they get pregnant can encourage use of available health care resources. It is only by understanding embedded cultural factors that policies can be constructed to effectively reduce maternal and neonatal mortality rates in rural India.


We synthesize ferromagnetic Co nanowire, and Co/Pd multisegment nanowires encapsulated inside multi-walled carbon nanotubes CNTs (MWCNTs) by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). High-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), selected area electron diffraction (SAED) patterns and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) were used to characterize the microstructures and elemental analyses of the nanowires. Quantitative magnetization measurements of Co nanowires encapsulated inside MWCNTs were experimentally established by TEM off-axis electron holography at room temperature. The MWCNTs grew up to 100-110 nm in diameter and 1.5-1.7 mum in length. The typical bright-field TEM images revealed both Co nanowire and Co/Pd multisegment nanowires encapsulated inside vertically aligned MWCNTs on the same substrate. The composition of metal encapsulated inside MWCNTs were characterized by EDS. Experimental results revealed that the Co nanowire encapsulated inside MWCNT was always presented as the face-centered-cubic (fcc) Co structure. The component of magnetic induction was then measured to be 1.2 plusmn 0.1 T based on TEM off-axis electron holography results, which is lower than the expected saturation magnetization of fcc Co bulk of 1.7 T. The partial oxidation of the ferromagnetic metal during the process and the magnetization direction may play an important role in the determination of the quality of the remanent states. The ferromagnetic metal nanowires encapsulated inside CNTs demonstrate very high potential in providing the required magnetic properties, low dimensionality, and small volume for future nanoscale devices.


Analysis of the breakdown-statistics of the Hungarian crude and gas pipeline system dating back more than 20 years shows the main sources of the errors. In order to prevent these, the authors have started a program of state monitoring of pipelines by means of the common use of on-line and above-ground methods. Related expenses are as high as 8% of maintenance costs. Manual handling and analyzing of the available and continually increasing data nowadays is already complicated. To solve the problem, the authors have decided to develop an integrated information system that integrates the technical data with the up-to-date GIS applications, thus providing a wide-range application possibility for the operating staff. Integrity analysis is supported by the system, which shows the various examination results in a comparable way, their change in time can be followed, and there is a possibility of automatically comparing them synchronously with map displaying. The system is able to receive and process the results of outer examination (for example such as of an intelligent pipe scraper), but the synchronous transmission into outer systems is also possible. The development of the information system and especially the input of the data into the system is possible only atmore » great costs, but the usefulness of the application and the turnover of the investment can be, even if only indirectly, proved.« less


AIM
This paper reports phase II of a pilot study that aimed to determine whether self-insertion of a speculum by women undergoing a pap smear would be more comfortable and lead to an improvement in satisfaction and a decrease in anxiety associated with this procedure.

BACKGROUND
Research demonstrates that pelvic examinations are considered by most women to be unpleasant and are routinely associated with embarrassment, apprehension, fear and often some level of discomfort and/or pain.

DESIGN
The study used quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques. Phase I (described elsewhere) tested the newly developed Speculum Self-Insertion Satisfaction Questionnaire for content validity, internal consistency and clarity. Phase II pilot study tested the technique of speculum self-insertion. Women's general level of anxiety was measured using the State Trait Anxiety Inventory, both before and after they performed the self-insertion procedure. Women's satisfaction and acceptance of the procedure was measured using the Speculum Self-Insertion Satisfaction Questionnaire and explored through the use of qualitative research techniques.

PARTICIPANTS
A total of 198 women attending family planning clinics in Perth, Western Australia, between September and December 2003 were invited to participate in the study. One hundred and thirty-three women agreed to self-insert their own speculum.

RESULTS
The study demonstrated that speculum self-insertion was acceptable to most women, especially younger women. Nearly 91% of women either agreed or strongly agreed that they were satisfied with the experience of self-insertion and would choose to self-insert the speculum again. This included the women who had not previously had a speculum examination. The quality of specimen collected was not detrimentally affected by speculum self-insertion.

CONCLUSIONS
The results of this pilot research, while needing to be replicated in a larger study, demonstrate that offering women the opportunity to self-insert a speculum during a routine pelvic examination is an acceptable, innovative, simple and cost-neutral change in clinical practice that increases women's comfort and satisfaction and potentially makes sexual health screening less threatening to women of all ages.

RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE
Speculum self-insertion may encourage women's attendance at clinics for regular screening. Early diagnosis and treatment will result in better health outcomes for women, families and the community at large.


Identifying risk factors and those at risk for falls is necessary. The first purpose of the dissertation was to validate the Comprehensive Falls Risk Screening Instrument (CFRSI) that weights falls risk factors and includes the subscale scores of history, physical, vision, medication, and environment, and a total falls risk score. The CFRSI total falls risk score was compared to subscale scores, physical activity, physical function, health-related quality of life (HRQL), and history of falls (Study 1). The second purpose of the dissertation was to determine associations between the CFRSI total falls risk score, race, education, and income (Study 2). Data were collected at falls risk screenings conducted at 10 community organizations with 286 older adults (M age=74.2 years, SD=10.0, 75.9% female, 52.9% White/Caucasian, 52.4% low-income status, and 43.1% low educational level).
The total falls risk score was associated with all risk subscale scores (r=.25, p<.01 to r=.69, p<.01), total physical activity score (r=-.30, p<.01), total physical function score (r=.30, p<.01), and total HRQL scores (r=-.44, p<.01 to r=-.24, p=.03). Fallers (n=90) had higher total falls risk scores (M=41.03, SD=9.38) than non-fallers (n=188; M=34.06, SD=10.05), t(276)=5.53, p<.001). Discriminant function analysis indicated the most important predictor of falling status (i.e., fallers and non-fallers) was the history risk score (r=.96).
A 2x2x2 factorial ANOVA only revealed a significant main effect for education (F[1,205]=10.19, p=.002), indicating that the total falls risk score was greater for participants with a lower educational level (M=41.1) than for those with a higher educational level (M=34.5). ANCOVA revealed that individuals with low-income reported higher falls risk scores (M=39.2) than individuals with high-income (M=34.5) when controlling for race (F[1,204]=10.4, p=.001,c2=.05). There were no significant differences between fallers and non-fallers by education (÷2[1,N=262]=.03, p=.86) or income (÷2[1,N=212]=.38, p=.54), but there were differences by race (÷2[1,N=267]=6.44, p=.0). White/Caucasians (63.2%) were more likely to fall than African American/Black/Others (36.8%). Results provide evidence of the construct validity of the CFRSI and that sociodemographic factors such as education, income, and race are important when identifying older adults at risk for falls, determining applicability of falls risk screening instruments, and implementing falls reduction programs.


Data analysts need to routinely transform data into a form conducive for deeper investigation. While there exists a myriad of tools to support this task on tabular data, few tools exist to support analysts with more complex data types. In this study, we investigate how analysts process and transform large sets of XML data to create an analytic data model useful to further their analysis. We conduct a set of formative interviews with four experts that have diverse yet specialized knowledge of a common dataset. From these interviews, we derive a set of goals, tasks, and design requirements for transforming XML data into an analytic data model. We implement Natto as a proof-of-concept prototype that actualizes these design requirements into a set of visual and interaction design choices. We demonstrate the utility of the system through the presentation of analysis scenarios using real-world data. Our research contributes novel insights into the unique challenges of transforming data that is both hierarchical and internally linked. Further, it extends the knowledge of the visualization community in the areas of data preparation and wrangling.


BACKGROUND AND AIM The immunosuppressive properties of 6-mercaptopurine and its parent compound azathioprine are mediated by their intracellular metabolism into active 6-thioguanine (6-TG) metabolites. Measurement of erythrocyte 6-TG metabolite levels has been proposed as a useful clinical tool for assessing treatment efficacy in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). AIM The purpose of the study was to establish a therapeutic index of treatment efficacy based on measurement of erythrocyte 6-TG metabolite levels, and apply it clinically to guide therapy. METHODS Heparinised blood was obtained from 82 adult patients with IBD on long term (more than three months) antimetabolite therapy (63 Crohn's disease; 19 ulcerative colitis). Erythrocyte 6-TG metabolite levels were measured using reverse phase high performance chromatography, and correlated with treatment efficacy. In 22 patients with refractory Crohn's disease despite long term azathioprine therapy, their dosage was increased by 25 mg/day at eight week intervals as needed. Serial erythrocyte 6-TG metabolite levels were measured at each clinic visit and correlated with treatment efficacy. RESULTS Clinical remission, as defined by a low disease index score in patients weaned off or on a low alternate day dose (<20 mg on alternate days) of corticosteroid, was achieved in 68% of patients on long term antimetabolite therapy. Treatment efficacy correlated with erythrocyte 6-TG levels greater than 250 pmol/8×108 red blood cells in patients with colonic and fistulising Crohn's disease (p<0.01) but not in patients with ileocolonic disease. Eighteen of 22 patients with incompletely responsive Crohn's disease achieved disease remission by optimising their dose of azathioprine therapy. Median (range) erythrocyte 6-TG metabolite levels increased from 194 (67–688) to 303 (67–737) pmol/8×108 red blood cells (p<0.05). Clinical response associated well with a reduction in corticosteroid requirements. Mean (SEM) white blood cell count decreased from 8.6 (0.9) to 6.9 (0.6) ×103/μl with adjustment in azathioprine dosage. No patient incurred azathioprine induced leucopenia. CONCLUSION Measurement of erythrocyte 6-TG metabolite levels is helpful in determining the adequacy of azathioprine dosage and can be used to optimise the dose of antimetabolite therapy to achieve an improved clinical response without inducing leucopenia. Patients who are clinically refractory to azathioprine therapy despite achieving high erythrocyte 6-TG levels (>250) should be considered for adjunct or alternative forms of immunosuppressive therapy or surgery.


The 5890, 5895Å Na D absorption lines are sometimes found to be strongly enhanced in nearby galaxies, compared to what is predicted by the best-fitting models for the stellar continuum. The resulting Na D absorption excess could be caused either by intrinsically stronger absorption feature in the stellar continuum, due to stellar-population effects that are unaccounted by current population synthesis models, interstellar absorption or both. Using the sample of Jeong et al. (2013) and modelling the excess Na D absorption by means of physically motivated line-profile we derived the kinematics of such an excess absorption. Further drawing from the properties of the host galaxies we address the origin of such an enhanced Na absorption. In the galaxies, where no ionised-gas emission is detected and no reddening by dust is present, the Na D spectral profile is observed to be broader than the stellar line-of-sight velocity distribution, suggesting that most likely in these galaxies the Na D excess arise from stellar photospheric absorption. Conversely, objects with an Na D excess profile narrower than the stellar photospheric lines and exhibiting some reddening by dust have also a small red shift associated to their kinematics, a behaviour that can be explained in terms of interstellar absorption occurring in dust lanes that are not always perfectly settled. In objects with a strong reddening by dust and ionised-gas emission, indicating the presence of a considerable interstellar medium, we can find Na D excess profiles that are clearly blue-shifted, an indication for outflowing cold-gas. In our sample, we found that the objects, hosting outflows, are most likely generally, showing features of intense star-formation activity, or are with nebular emission, powered by a mix of star-forming and nuclear activity, with the latter sometimes attributed to accretion onto a supermassive black hole. Per se, the presence of an active galactic nucleus was found not to be relevant in driving such outflows.


Background: The production of ethanol by a Consolidated Bioprocessing (CBP) strategy, which simultaneously combines cellulase production, lignocellulosic biomass hydrolysis and fermentation of released sugars to ethanol in one bioreactor, is a promising technology for cost reduction in the biological processing of biomass, specially using agroindustrial residues. Clostridium thermocellum is an anaerobic, thermophilic, strictly fermentative gram positive bacterium that meets all the requirements for CBP. Results: Ethanol concentration obtained in the non-stirred fermentation process in flasks with raw bagasse was two times greater than that in the stirred system. The results observed using a pretreated sugarcane bagasse in non-stirred flasks regarding ethanol concentration, were slightly lower than with raw bagasse. The sparging of exogenous H 2 into the medium at atmospheric pressure inside the bioreactor showed to be unfavourable to achieve higher ethanol yields. Conclusions: The strain investigated is a promising candidate for thermophilic fermentative ethanol production from dried ground raw sugarcane bagasse in a CBP strategy, although the alcohol concentrations need to be further improved. In future studies, it is recommended to investigate different modes of operation of the fermentation process, including pressurized conditions, as well as to use wet raw sugarcane bagasse aiming to achieve additional improvement in ethanol production and to reduce the costs of the process .


Results on penetration loss measurements in the THz frequencies between 0.1-2 THz are reported. The measurements were conducted with time domain spectroscopy using the TeraView TeraPulse 4000 measurement equipment. We concentrate on the frequency-dependent penetration characteristics of various materials typical for indoor environments, providing both qualitative and quantitative assessment. The results show that the lower end of the THz band (<; 0.5 THz) suffers only modest loss in comparison to the higher frequencies. For the materials considered in this paper, plastic, glass and hard-board, the exact penetration properties are both frequency- and material-dependent. The incident angle to the material increases the penetration loss through increased path length inside the material. The exact values of these losses are provided.


Bacterial black spot of mango (Mangifera indica) caused by Xanthomonas citri pv. mangiferaeindicae (Xcm), is an economically important disease in tropical and subtropical areas (3). Xcm can infect a wide range of mango cultivars and induces raised, angular, black leaf lesions, sometimes with a chlorotic halo. Fruit symptoms appear as small, water-soaked spots on the lenticels that become star-shaped, erumpent, and exude an infectious gum (3). The bacterium can also cause latent infections (2). Immature mango fruit with black spots on the epidermis were collected in August 2012 from mango trees of the cvs. Raposa and Pirie at a residence in Pukalani, Hawai'i, on the island of Maui. Similar symptoms were seen on a tree of the mango cv. Common (also known as 'Spanish' or 'Lahaina') at a nearby golf course. Mango fruit with black lesions, and leaves showing black lesions with yellow halos, were collected in August 2012 from mango trees of the cv. Haden at a residence in Kaimuki, Hawai'i, on the island of O'ahu. Xanthomonas-like bacterial colonies were isolated on TZC agar. Suspect colonies were non-pigmented on YDC agar. A fruit strain of the bacterium from Maui (A6081A) and a strain from each of a fruit (A6081B) and a leaf (A6082) from O'ahu were each gram-negative, oxidative, positive for both starch and esculin hydrolysis, and negative for nitrate reduction, resulting in presumptive identification as a Xanthomonas sp. The three strains were further characterized by Microlog (Biolog, Inc. Hayward, CA), which showed the closest match with X. campestris. In addition, 16S rDNA PCR assays showed the closest match (99% similarity) with X. citri strains, and RIF marker analysis of dnaA (4) grouped the three strains with Xcm strain LMG 941 (Accession No. CAHO01000002.1). Hypersensitivity responses typical of xanthomonads were observed when these strains were infiltrated into tobacco leaves, whereas no response was observed using sterile water. Leaves of 3-week-old mango seedlings were infiltrated using 10 μl (~108 CFU/ml) of each strain suspended in sterilized water (six to eight inoculations per leaf, four leaves per plant, and three replicate plants per strain). The negative control treatments consisted of inoculation with sterile water, as well as an incompatible pathogen, X. hortorum pv. vitians (A6076), isolated from lettuce. Typical symptoms of bacterial black spot were observed for all strains assayed approximately 2 weeks after inoculation. No lesions were observed on the negative control plants. Koch's postulates were satisfied following reisolation and identification of the Xanthomonas strains from the infected plant tissues, using the biochemical and PCR methods described above. Results for strains from the two islands confirmed published descriptions of the pathogen, indicating that the pathogen causing symptoms on these mango trees is Xcm (1). Cultures and infected plant samples were sent to USDA APHIS and CPHST NPGLB facilities where this identification was confirmed. To our knowledge, this is the first report of bacterial black spot of mango in Hawai'i or anywhere in the United States. It is unknown whether this disease is a new occurrence or has not been reported previously. The origin of the primary inoculum is unknown. References: (1) B. Manicom and F. Wallis. Int. J. Syst. Bacteriol. 34:77, 1984. (2) O. Pruvost et al. Microbial Ecol. 58:928. (3) O. Pruvost et al. Plant Dis. 95:774, 2011. (4) K. Schneider et al. PLoS 6:e18496, 2011.


Objective: In this study we implemented the "flipped classroom" model to enhance active learning in medical students taking neurosciences module at Aga Khan University, Karachi. Methods: Ninety eight undergraduate medical students participated in this study. The study was conducted from January till March 2017. Study material was provided to students in form of video lecture and reading material for the non-face to face sitting, while face to face time was spent on activities such as case solving, group discussions, and quizzes to consolidate learning under the supervision of faculty. To ensure deeper learning, we used pre- and post-class quizzes, work sheets and blog posts for each session. Student feedback was recorded via a likert scale survey. Results: Eighty four percent students gave positive responses towards utility of flipped classroom in terms of being highly interactive, thought provoking and activity lead learning. Seventy five percent of the class completed the pre-session preparation. Students reported that their queries and misconceptions were cleared in a much better way in the face-to-face session as compared to the traditional setting (4.09 ±1.04). Conclusion: Flipped classroom(FCR) teaching and learning pedagogy is an effective way of enhancing student engagement and active learning. Thus, this pedagogy can be used as an effective tool in medical schools.


Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) offer considerable potential for biomedical applications including drug screening and cell replacement therapies. Clinical translation of hPSCs requires large quantities of high quality cells, so scalable methods for cell culture are needed. However, current methods are limited by scalability, the use of animal‐derived components, and/or low expansion rates. A thermoresponsive 3D hydrogel for scalable hPSC expansion and differentiation into several defined lineages is recently reported. This system would benefit from increased control over material properties to further tune hPSC behavior, and here a scalable 3D biomaterial with the capacity to tune both the chemical and the mechanical properties is demonstrated to promote hPSC expansion under defined conditions. This 3D biomaterial, comprised of hyaluronic acid and poly(N‐isopropolyacrylamide), has thermoresponsive properties that readily enable mixing with cells at low temperatures, physical encapsulation within the hydrogel upon elevation at 37 °C, and cell recovery upon cooling and reliquefaction. After optimization, the resulting biomaterial supports hPSC expansion over long cell culture periods while maintaining cell pluripotency. The capacity to modulate the mechanical and chemical properties of the hydrogel provides a new avenue to expand hPSCs for future therapeutic application.


This paper builds a stochastic model of the processes that give rise to observed patterns of representation and bias in congressional and state legislative elections. The analysis demonstrates that partisan swing and incumbency voting, concepts from the congressional elections literature, have determinate effects on representation and bias, concepts from the redistricting literature. The model shows precisely how incumbency and increased variability of partisan swing reduce the responsiveness of the electoral system and how partisan swing affects whether the system is biased toward one party or the other. Incumbency, and other causes of unresponsive representation, also reduce the effect of partisan swing on current levels of partisan bias. By relaxing the restrictive portions of the widely applied "uniform partisan swing" assumption, the theoretical analysis leads directly to an empirical model enabling one more reliably to estimate responsiveness and bias from a single year of electoral data. Applying this to data from seven elections in each of six states, the paper demonstrates that redistricting has effects in predicted directions in the short run: partisan gerrymandering biases the system in favor of the party in control and, by freeing up seats held by opposition party incumbents, increases the system's responsiveness. Bipartisan-controlled redistricting appears to reduce bias somewhat and dramatically to reduce responsiveness. Nonpartisan redistricting processes substantially increase responsiveness but do not have as clear an effect on bias. However, after only two elections, prima facie evidence for redistricting effects evaporate in most states. Finally, across every state and type of redistricting process, responsiveness declined significantly over the course of the decade. This is clear evidence that the phenomenon of "vanishing marginals," recognized first in the U.S. Congress literature, also applies to these different types of state legislative assemblies. It also strongly suggests that redistricting could not account for this pattern.


Currently, herpetofauna worldwide is facing enormous threats; the number of threatened species is increasing at an alarming rate and many species have gone extinct. Despite efforts of institutions and researchers to understand and address the causes of declines and raise awareness of herpetofauna conservation, there has been no systematic study to evaluate the allocation of funding for basic and applied research relevant to conservation, relative publication rates, and the relationship of these measures to a degree of threat among herpetological groups. This study addresses this gap and identifies strengths and weaknesses of herpetological research and conservation over the last 10 years (2008-2018). Frogs had the highest grant-publication index (1384), followed by lizards (695), turtles (678), snakes (461.5), salamanders (366.5), crocodiles (164), caecilians (25.5), worm lizards (23) and tuatara (10). Nonetheless, when the grant-publication index is divided by the number of threatened and data-deficient species within each group, it demonstrates that, proportionally and in ascending order, salamanders, snakes, lizards, worm lizards, frogs and caecilians are in most need of knowledge and on-going funding for their conservation and survival. I was able to document a continued shift in attention in herpetological research owing to the emergence of chytridiomycosis and the global decline of amphibians. Despite some caveats, these findings should represent a proxy for the allocation of research and conservation effort on herpetofauna worldwide. I suggest priorities for research and how to better direct efforts to herpetofauna conservation.


The aim of this project is to examine how specialisation in diagnostic radiography has occurred. In particular, this research aims to examine the contemporary ethos of specialism in diagnostic radiography; how the higher status of technology has developed over patient-centredness; the impact of the working relationship between radiology and diagnostic radiography on this development; the relationship between gender and the nature of occupation in the development of diagnostic radiography. Qualitative data was collected using 31 semi-structured interviews that took the form of oral histories where possible. The time-span covered is 1932-2001. Findings show that a paradigm shift is required. Defining specialism and expert practice is difficult, as both are negotiated constructs that tend to have local meaning. Not all specialisms in diagnostic radiography increase professional autonomy and management has a key role to play in the development of radiography as a profession to enable full engagement with consultant status. To a great extent, diagnostic radiography and its associated specialisms is governed by an emphasis on technology rather than the patient. This emphasis has roots in power difference between radiologists and radiographers and within the hierarchy of radiography. Radiologists have controlled radiographers to provide a service to radiology rather than the patients, and, although this is still evident in some hospitals, it is changing. Task offloading from radiologists to radiographers confuses the notions of specialism and radiography is in danger of seeking professional development through emulating radiology rather than using radiographic caring skills and expanding practice with a humanistic and patient focused emphasis. Radiography emerged as a pioneering, elite profession that could originally be regarded as a specialism of nursing. Technology and medicine gradually reduced radiographic practice to have a technological and quantitative focus. There is now a demand to once again broaden radiographic practice to actively contribute to a patient-centred service in an autonomous, more qualitative and self-directed manner. A collection of oral histories has been a direct result of this research. Specialisms are a broad area of diagnostic radiography and rather than focus on technological areas of practice, a more holistic range of specialisms could be embraced to enable the profession to progress.


This study assessed the frequency of good and poor sport behaviors as perceived by young athletes, parents, and coaches. A secondary goal was to examine related sportspersonship attitudes. A total of 803 young athletes in the fifth through eighth grades, representing 10 different sports, completed a behavioral and attitudinal survey, as did 189 of their parents and 61 of their coaches. The sample was drawn from three regions of the United States. Specific behavioral and attitudinal frequency data suggest that there are significant ethical problems occurring in many youth sport programs. Results are discussed in relation to the concepts of collective norms and moral atmosphere.


The time history and spatial dependence of seismic-wave propagation on the ground surface and through the ionosphere following the 2011 off the Pacific coast of Tohoku Earthquake were reconstructed from dense seismic networks and from Global Positioning System (GPS) array observations, respectively. Using total electron content (TEC) data recorded by a dense GPS receiver network, the near-source ionosphere perturbations induced by this giant earthquake were analyzed and high-resolution images of seismic-wave propagation in the ionosphere are presented. Similar spatial images of ground motions were reconstructed from observations by a dense seismic array. Observations of this event provide, for the first time, the opportunity to compare near-source ground motions with the near-field seismo-traveling ionosphere disturbance (STID) excited by the ground motions. Based on the results, the nature of the source rupture and seismic-wave propagation are discussed. Both seismic and ionosphere observations indicate that seismic energy propagated radially outward initially from the hypocenter, but that the circular shape of the propagation front became gradually distorted as the source rupture became extended. Coherent wavefronts from the two analyses show contrasting patterns during the later stage of propagation, possibly due to different patterns of spatial variations in the physical properties of the solid earth and of the ionosphere.


The space–bandwidth product (SW) is fundamental for judging the performance of an optical system. Often the SW of a system is defined only as a pure number that counts the degrees of freedom of the system. We claim that a quasi-geometrical representation of the SW in the Wigner domain is more useful. We also represent the input signal as a SW in the Wigner domain. For perfect signal processing it is necessary that the system SW fully embrace the signal SW.


Most of what we collectively think we know about the Japanese economy is urban legend. In fact: - The keiretsu do not exist, and never did. An entrepreneurial research institute in the 1950s created the rosters to sell to Marxist economists looking for the monopoly capital that their theory told them would dominate their bourgeois capitalist world. Western scholars hoping for examples of culture-specific forms of economic organization then brought them back to the U.S. - The zaibatsu did not succeed pre-war because they bought politicians, exploited the poor, or manipulated disfunctional capital markets. They succeeded for all the usual varied reasons a few firms succeed in any modern economy. They acquired the (pejorative) zaibatsu label because they happened to be thriving when muckraking journalists in the 1920s and 30s came looking for someone to blame for the depression. - Japanese firms have no main bank system, and never did. Economists popularized the idea as an anecdote on which to peg their mathematical models, and non-economists use it (like the keiretsu) as yet another putatively culture-bound economic phenomenon. - Japanese firms are neither short of outside directors nor badly governed. The charges simply represent yet another variant on populist journalism. Like firms in other competitive capitalist countries, Japanese firms survive only if they adopt governance mechanisms appropriate to the markets within which they must compete. - The Japanese government never seriously guided or intervened in the Japanese economy. When the economy boomed, politicians and bureaucrats did take credit. They had created the success through their own far-sighted leadership, they claimed. Marxist scholars dominated Japanese social science departments, and they were not about to suggest instead that market competition might account for the success. Happy as they were to find an example of successful government intervention, neither were most Western scholars of Japan.


1. Sodium tartrate labelled with 14 C was given orally and parenterally to man and rats, and by direct injection into the caecum in rats. From the differences in urinary excretion after oral and parenteral administration intestinal absorption of tartrate was calculated as 18% of the dose in man and 81% in rats. Urinary tartrate was equivalent to 14% of the dose in man and 70% in rats, the difference between absorption and urinary excretion representing metabolism in body tissues. 2. Both man and the rat excreted part of the 14 C as respiratory carbon dioxide. This occurred to a small extent after parenteral injection, suggesting metabolism of tartrate by body tissues, but was greater after oral or intracaecal administration, indicating that the main site of tartrate metabolism is the intestine. 3. Several genera of intestinal bacteria were shown to liberate [ 14 C]carbon dioxide from labelled tartrate, and in a faecal incubation system l-tartrate, the natural isomer, was metabolized five times as rapidly as d-tartrate. 4. Oral sodium l-tartrate, 1·5 mmol day —1 kg —1 , was given to two subjects and was shown to alkalinize the urine like sodium salts of other organic acids which are metabolized in the body. The reduction in renal hydrogen ion excretion showed that an average of 84% of the dose was metabolized. 5. Only 5% of labelled tartrate given by mouth appeared in faeces, and pharmacological doses of unlabelled l-tartrate had little or no aperient effect. 6. No evidence of toxicity of l-tartrate was encountered.


The Drug Interventions Programme (DIP) process begins with the police arresting and drug testing potential drug using offenders. If offenders test positive for Class A drugs they are served with a Required Assessment (RA) by the police. This is a compulsory legal sanction for the individual to attend up to two appointments (initial/follow-up RA) with a drugs worker. During these assessments the drugs worker will assess the individual's drug use and offending behaviour and, if necessary, encourage them to engage with drug treatment services. This drug testing profile for Wirral presents drug testing data between April 2013 and March 2016, with an emphasis on the most recent financial year (2015/16). This profile contextualises Merseyside Police drug testing data by providing numbers and trends of drug using offenders identified through this route into the DIP system and a demographic overview of the client group. This profile also provides recommendations for local government, commissioners and service providers, in terms of the efficient use of resources and effective services locally and across Merseyside.


In this paper we present a software tool for elicitation and management of process metadata. It follows our previously published design idea of an assistant for researchers that aims at minimizing the additional effort required for producing a sustainable workflow documentation. With the ever-growing number of linguistic resources available, it also becomes increasingly important to provide proper documentation to make them comparable and to allow meaningful evaluations for specific use cases. The often prevailing practice of post hoc documentation of resource generation or research processes bears the risk of information loss. Not only does detailed documentation of a process aid in achieving reproducibility, it also increases usefulness of the documented work for others as a cornerstone of good scientific practice. Time pressure together with the lack of simple documentation methods leads to workflow documentation in practice being an arduous and often neglected task. Our tool ensures a clean documentation for common workflows in natural language processing and digital humanities. Additionally, it can easily be integrated into existing institutional infrastructures.


Imitation Learning (IL) is a popular paradigm for training agents to achieve complicated goals by leveraging expert behavior, rather than dealing with the hardships of designing a correct reward function. With the environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), most of the existing IL algorithms are contingent on the availability of expert demonstrations in the same MDP as the one in which a new imitator policy is to be learned. This is uncharacteristic of many real-life scenarios where discrepancies between the expert and the imitator MDPs are common, especially in the transition dynamics function. Furthermore, obtaining expert actions may be costly or infeasible, making the recent trend towards state-only IL (where expert demonstrations constitute only states or observations) ever so promising. Building on recent adversarial imitation approaches that are motivated by the idea of divergence minimization, we present a new state-only IL algorithm in this paper. It divides the overall optimization objective into two subproblems by introducing an indirection step and solves the subproblems iteratively. We show that our algorithm is particularly effective when there is a transition dynamics mismatch between the expert and imitator MDPs, while the baseline IL methods suffer from performance degradation. To analyze this, we construct several interesting MDPs by modifying the configuration parameters for the MuJoCo locomotion tasks from OpenAI Gym.


The work includes summaries of the mechanics of wear in sliding systems under light loading, and severe wear mechanisms under metal cutting conditions. Applications of different wear mechanisms to cutting tool wear, and the problems associated with defining cutting tool life and failure criteria are discussed.Applications of dimensional analysis to the metal cutting problem are presented and include sections on: tool temperature, tool life / cutting speed relationships, tool life / temperature and temperature / time relationships, Colding's three dimensional tool life equation and.an analysis of the Taylor constant.The development of empirical cutting tool life equations is reviewed and includes Taylor type relationships, equations based on the concept of the chip equivalent and Colding's tool life equation. The effectsof cutting conditions, tool geometry, tool material and workpiecematerial on cutting tool life are considered.The fundamentals of sawing are outlined and the variations of modern power hacksaw and bandsaw machines discussed. This section includes a description of modern saw blades and saw blade nomenclature.A comprehensive review of previous work carried out on both the power hacksaw and bandsaw operations shows the present state ofknowledge in this field.The experimental work based on an adaptation of Colding's three dimensional tool life equation forms the first thorough investigation of bandsaw blade wear and its effects on cutting rates and economics. Relationships between the wear rate of the band and relevant parameters such as band speed, machine load and geometry of the workpiece are shown. Wear rate and cutting rate have been expressed in terms of a cutting constant, which defines the penetration of the teeth and its decay with use. A computer based simulation of the bandsaw operation has been developed and used to investigate the influence of relevant engineering parameters on productivity and cutting economics. The data obtained from the simulation model has been used to determine cutting rates and costs of bandsaw operations using constant feed rate and constant thrust load principles. The data is based on tests carried out on workpiece material classified as difficult to cut and trends obtained are believed to be typical of those that would beobtained when cutting the more common materials. For the firsttime, direct comparisons are made between carbon blades and high speed steel bi-metal blades under various bandsaw conditions, and the bandsaw and power hacksaw operations are directly compared.The investigation results in the following conclusions. The bandsaw operation may be a low cost, high cutting rate operation when high speed steel bi-metal blades are used under optimised operating conditions. High speed steel bi-metal blades should be preferredto carbon. A bandsaw machine operating with constant feed rate is superior to one operating with a constant thrust load system.A reduction in the total cost per cut can usually be obtained by optimising feed rates at the expense of blade life. The bandsaw operation can be as economical as the power hacksaw operation whilst achieving a higher cutting rate.


Most nonlethal methods available for reducing blackbird (Icteridae) damage to sunflowers rely on fright responses (e.g., propane cannons, distress calls, pyrotechnics, raptor silhouettes) that birds quickly learn to ignore. Chemicals that cause taste or feeding aversions have potential to overcome the spatial and behavioral limitations of frightening methods. Anthraquinone (AQ) is an effective feeding repellent as a seed treatment to deter birds from eating freshly planted grains. In the United States, foliar application of AQ is not permitted on food crops except on small experimental plots. In August 2013, we applied 37.4 L/ha of an aqueous mix consisting of 15.1 L of a prototype AQ product (active ingredient = 25%) per 41.7 L water (5.6 kg AQ/ha). We applied the AQ product by high-clearance ground sprayer on 0.4-ha in a sunflower field in North Dakota. Sunflower development was at the R5.1 to R5.3 stages, or 10 to 14 days before usual onset of blackbird damage. We kept another 0.4-ha plot adjacent to the treated plot as an untreated reference. In early September, we placed 3 red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) in 6 netted enclosures (2.4 m x 2.4 m x 2.4 m) in each plot. Supplemental rations of cracked corn and water were provided daily throughout the testing period that ended October 1, 2013. Treated enclosures had significantly greater damage (247.4 ± 5.8 cm2) than reference enclosures (214.0 ± 8.6 cm2). Statistical significance implied that AQ increased blackbird damage to sunflowers, contrary to the results of other studies. However, residue analysis of the backs of sunflower heads, bracts (our target areas for the spray), and achenes indicated that AQ residues may have been too low to produce a repellent effect. Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of AQ as a blackbird repellent is context-dependent when applied under commercial-grower conditions.


Cancer has become a growing health threat due to the emergence of multidrug resistance and the increasing diversity of cancer cells. The continuous investigation into the development of anticancer agents and treatments is crucial because the current treatments can cause adverse side effects and are often ineffective. Anticancer derived medicinal plants are a potential source of treatment. However, the abundance of medicinal plant species can cause several problems, like the adulteration. The author aims to demonstrate DNA Barcoding technique as a tool to perform phylogenetic positions of Mangifera and Impatiens species grown in Sumatra. The phylogenetic positions of the plants are supported by the review on the active secondary metabolites from Mangifera and Impatiens. The current study is based on unpublished work on DNA Barcoding technique, an established modern technique to identify the phylogenetic position and also adulteration in medicinal plants. The review on the active secondary metabolites including the mechanism of action as anticancer is based on pertinent papers that were retrieved using relevant keywords in PubMed and Science Direct. Work using DNA Barcoding technique confirmed that Mangifera and Impatiens from Sumatra are closely related to Momordica foetida and Impatiens balsamina from other areas, indicating that they may share the same anticancer traits with those species. The mechanism of action of Mangifera and Impatiens includes inhibition of the cell cycle, cytotoxicity activity, apoptosis and leading to cell death, and anti-angiogenesis activity. Further research on both species is needed to identify their relevant chemical components to potentially develop anticancer drugs, either as a single compound or as a drug combination with minimal side effects and also to determine possible adverse reactions.


This study explored experiences and representations of breastfeeding reported by British Muslim women. Six mothers who breastfed their infants for at least 3 months were interviewed on two occasions, namely during the breastfeeding period and again once the provision of breast milk to the infant had ceased. Accounts were analysed using a social constructivist version of interpretative  phenomenological analysis. Participants utilised interwoven constructions of breastfeeding which fused Islamic and biomedical understandings. Breastfeeding was simultaneously viewed as beneficial to the child's health and as a deeply spiritual act through which the mother's attributes as a 'good Muslim' nourished the child and promoted his or her moral development. Making reference to sacred texts such as the Qur'an and Hadith, the women believed that they would be rewarded for breastfeeding by Allah, and that some past sins would be forgiven. Helping breastfeeding mothers was viewed as a collective responsibility involving family and community members. Lactation was supported by ritualised practices relating to the consumption and restriction of certain foods, whereas breastfeeding problems such as pain and infection were managed in consultation with health professionals. The importance of maintaining standards of modesty caused challenges for participants feeding in public, but the segregation of men and women in the domestic sphere when socialising, and the wearing of dress coats, such as the abayah, facilitated discrete feeding at home. It is important that those working with BritishMuslim mothers have an awareness of these constructions to ensure the provision ofhigh-quality andculturally sensitive healthcare and education in the perinatal period.Methodological issues relating to reflexivity and data collection and analysis paradigms within culturally embedded accounts of the lived experience of intimate embodied practices such as breastfeeding are also considered.


This article attempts to provide a basis upon which to preserve the Federal Circuit's current lawmaking primacy. Given the large body of preexisting literature on Chevron, USA, Inc v. Natural Resources Defense Council, it does not address whether Chevron allocates power between agencies and the courts optimally. Rather, the article examines how the PTO's statutory interpretations should be reviewed under Chevron. In Section I, the article places the examination in context by describing the Chevron decision and its general implications. Section II of the article examines how Chevron should be applied specifically in the context of reviewing statutory interpretations of the PTO. The article observes that the Federal Circuit has so far avoided deferring to the PTO by emphasizing Congress' intent as a limitation on the PTO's lawmaking power. Under Chevron, however, Congress' intent governs only where Congress has expressed itself clearly on the precise question at issue. The article argues that the PTO is outside the class of Federal agencies to whose statutory interpretations the judiciary owes deference. The PTO performs few of the traditional functions of Federal agencies. It is, in fact, structurally isolated from so much of the patent system that the assumptions of agency expertise responsible for Chevron are inapplicable. There is also evidence that Congress has affirmatively decided to give lawmaking power in the patent field to the courts and not the PTO. As a result, the article concludes, the courts need not defer to the PTO's statutory interpretations even in those situations where the statutory language is ambiguous.


In this thesis, we attack a challenging problem in the field of character animation: synthesizing interactions among multiple virtual charact ers in real-time. Although there are heavy demands in the gaming and animation industri es, no systemic solution has been proposed due to the difficulties to model th e complex behaviors of the characters. We represent the continuous interactions among characters as a discrete Markov Decision Process, and design a general objective function t o evaluate the immediate rewards of launching an action. By applying game theory su ch as tree expansion and min-max search, the optimal actions that benefit the character the most in the future are selected. The simulated characters can inter act competitively while achieving the requests from animators cooperatively. Since the interactions between two characters depend on a lo t of criteria, it is difficult to exhaustively precompute the optimal actions fo r all variations of these criteria. We design an off-policy approach that samples and precomputes only meaningful interactions. With the precomputed policy, the optimal movements under different situations can be evaluated in real-time. To simulate the interactions for a large number of character s with minimal computational overhead, we propose a method to precompute s hort durations of interactions between two characters as connectable patche s. T patches are concatenated spatially to generate interactions with multipl e characters, and temporally to generate longer interactions. Based on the optional instructions given by the animators, our system automatically applies concatena tions to create a huge scene of interacting crowd. We demonstrate our system by creating scenes with high quali ty interactions. On one hand, our algorithm can automatically generate artis tic scenes of interactions such as the fighting scenes in movies that involve hundr eds of characters. On the other hand, it can create controllable, intelligent cha racters that interact with the opponents for real-time applications such as 3D compute r games.


The pandemic of coronavirus has quickly impacted the entire world, and the government has responded with a lock down The lock down involves shutting of schools and colleges and a shift from traditional classrooms to online classes and e-learning This has a lot of benefits such as flexible timings, convenience, no commute et cetera However, these are contradicted by no practical classes, no personal attention from staff and a strayed student teacher relationship A questionnaire survey consisting of 12 questions was prepared and circulated through an online survey portal among 100 dental students in India The questions were prepared to analyse the perception of dental students towards online classes Online classes have changed the education system for the time being Students are involved in e-learning through online education portals and online platforms, which helps them to efficiently utilise their time Despite the advantages that online classrooms have, results show that dental students prefer traditional classrooms over them © 2020 Ubiquity Press All rights reserved


There has been a dramatic increase in the interest and profile of endovascular aneurysm repair over the past 10 years. The early results following endovascular repair are promising, however, the durability of this technique is not yet known. Leaving that issue aside for the time being, there is increasing controversy with regard to who is best qualified to perform the intervention—vascular surgeons, interventional radiologists, or cardiologists. Dr. Kim Hodgson, a vascular surgeon, and Dr. Stuart Geller, an interventional radiologist, will be debating the question, "Who should be performing endovascular interventions?" Each will have 10 minutes to make an argument on behalf of their respective specialty, followed by three to four minutes of rebuttal. The debate will then be open to the floor for general discussion.


Many people believe that a university education leads to the liberalization of students' worldviews. The author aimed to investigate whether such differences occur across disciplines and whether they are due to self-selection or socialization within disciplines. The author conducted 3 correlational studies of university students (N = 223, N = 531) and alumni (N = 143). The results clearly supported the self-selection hypothesis and suggested that students from all disciplines generally endorse liberal or left-wing attitudes. These findings have theoretical implications for the study of belief system development (primarily the impressionable years hypothesis), and they contribute to a greater understanding of how a university education affects the sociopolitical orientations of students.