Digital shearography (DS) is a whole-field non-contacting optical method for nondestructive testing (NDT) of subsurface flaws and strain measurement. In this paper, we describe a novel phaseshifting technique in DS for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and NDT of quasi dynamic behaviour of objects subject to varying loads. A Wollaston lens, a precise wave plate device and a polariser are employed to introduce constant phase differences between two shearing wavefronts. The wave plate device is in front of the polariser, which has a transmissive wavefront distortion of less than 1/8 wavelength. Phase difference can be adjusted by rotating the polariser. The rotation for angle adjusting can be easily carried out according to the requirement of the phase shifting. In this technique, the phase shifting is performed only on the static images of the object before deformation or loading. By setting the angle of the polariser to 0o, -60o and 60o, three speckle patterns with the defined phase differences are captured, and are referred to as initial speckle patterns I1,0, I1,-60 and I1,60. Afterwards, the polariser is reset to 0o before loading. The speckle pattern I0 is treated as a base pattern, and will be subtracted from the subsequent speckle patterns which are captured in the quasi dynamic deformation process.During the quasi dynamic deformation process, the optical path and the entire optical set-up will be kept unchanged, and a series of speckle patterns (Im,0 , m=2,3,…..) which carry the deformation information will be quickly captured. In the meantime, fast image subtractions will be performed. The speckle fringes (Im,0 -I1,0 ) will be displayed in real-time. In detailed post-processing, phase of differences method (PDM) [1] is used to extract phase information from the speckle images Im,0 -I1,0 , I1,0 , I1,-60 and I1,60 . Specifically, when a three phase step technique is employed, the phase of the fringe pattern (Im,0-I1,0) can be calculated from (Im,0 -I1,0 )+ I1,0 -I1,-60 , (Im,0 -I1,0 ), and (Im,0 -I1,0 )+ I1,0 -I1,60 . Because this temporal phase shifting is not performed in the deformation process, the technique is suitable for NDT and NDE of quasi dynamic deformation behaviour of an object.The technique only requires three speckle patterns with phase differences prior to the object deformation. When a varying or quasi dynamic load is applied on the object, no physical phase shifting is needed to be conducted when sequential speckle patterns are recorded by a digital camera during the deformation process. Compared with the (5, n) temporal phase shifting techniques [2] using a PZT driver, the proposed technique has three main advantages. Firstly, it does not need a tedious calibration process for phase shifting. Secondly, the optical set-up is relatively simple. Thirdly, the speckle fringe patterns which will reflect the underlying defect can be displayed in realtime. Compared with the spatial phase shifting techniques using a phase mask [3, 4] which are at the sacrifice of a weakened light intensity, the current technique is a light intensity loss-free method.Compared with conventional polarisation phase shifting techniques [5], it does not need a complicated light path splitter or an expensive split grating, nor does a micro polarizer array. As an application of the proposed technique, a non-contacting inspection of an impact defect in a composite panel and its mechanical behaviour under different loading conditions is provided. During the experiment, three phase shifted images were recorded before thermal loading was applied. Subsequent image series during thermal stressing were recorded to analyse the continuous deformation behaviour over time. Experimental results are shown in Fig.1 and Fig.2, where Fig.1 depicts the unwrapped phase pattern, while Fig.2 shows the derivative of W (out-of-plane displacement) with respect to x axis as of Fig.1. This experiment demonstrated the feasibility of the technique.It should be noted that, when deformation is too large, de-correlation will occur, which will result in poor visibility of the fringe patterns (In,0 - I1,0 ), or the fringe patterns will disappear completely. This problem usually happens in a quasi dynamic test, and was not resolved in [2]. Our future work will focus on calculating the phase of speckle fringes (In,0 . - Im0 , here n>m>1) by reconstructing new speckle pattern Im,-60 and Im,60 using only the fringe (Im,0 - I1,0) and the initial phase shifting speckle patterns I1,0 , I1,-60 and I1,60 . This will be based on the analysis of the relationships between the intensity, the phase and the amplitude of the speckle and fringes patterns.


The need of polygonal elements to represent the domain is gaining interest among structural engineers. The objective is to perform static analysis and topology optimization of a given continuum domain using the rational fraction type shape functions of six node hexagonal elements. In this paper, the main focus is to perform the topology optimization of two-dimensional plate structures using Evolutionary Swarm Intelligence Firefly Algorithms (ESIFA) and three-dimensional shell structures using optimality criteria. The optimization of plates carrying in plane loading is performed with minimum weight as objective. Two different types of shell structures are optimized using maximum strain energy as criteria. The optimal distribution of the material in the design domain obtained using six node hexagon elements is compared with the optimal distribution of material obtained using quadrilateral elements. A few problems from the literature have been solved and this study has proved that hexagon element gives better results over traditional quadrilateral elements.


While many modern societies are noted for their diversity, the resulting challenge is to determine how citizens from different backgrounds and cultures can see themselves and each other as equals, and be treated equally. In Genuine Multiculturalism, Cecil Foster shows that a society's failure to bridge these differences is the tragedy of modern living and that pretending it is possible to mechanically develop fraternity and solidarity among diverse groups is akin to seeking out comedy. Arguing that genuine multiculturalism is the search for social justice by individuals who have been trapped by ascribed identities or newcomers who have been shut out of perceived ethnic homelands, Foster details how this process, in essence, is the story of the Americas. Reconceptionalizing the terms of multiculturalism, he offers an intervention into Canada's claim that its definition and practice are based on recognizing equality of citizenship. Identifying genuine multiculturalism as an ongoing work in progress, rather than a tightly defined policy position, Foster challenges readers to imagine a greater and more harmonious ideal. A necessary theoretical reconsideration of diversity within society, Genuine Multiculturalism refocuses the debate about ideals and practices in modern societies.


Objective: To design and test an improvised tracheotomy speaking valve fabricated from recycled parts of an anesthesia airway breathing circuit.
Methods:
Design: Surgical Instrumentation
Setting: Tertiary Private Hospital
Subjects: Speaking valves fabricated from discarded anesthesia breathing circuit parts were pilot-tested on 3 patients: one with vocal fold paralysis, another with a supraglottic mass and one post hemi-laryngectomy.
Results:  The improvised tracheotomy speaking valve was inexpensive and relatively easy to assemble. All three patients tolerated speech well through the speaking valve and were pleased to reestablish their means of verbal communication. Maximum Phonation Time (MPT) averaged 8 seconds for all three subjects.
Conclusion:  In our local setting, improving the quality of life of tracheotomized patients should be accessible to all, hence the value of an improvised speaking valve. It provides a more affordable means of restoring speech and because it is made from recycled materials, it is eco-friendly. Our improvised speaking valve is also a cheaper but viable alternative to more expensive commercially available ones.  Clinical trials with standardized feedback questionnaires, multi-observer perceptual evaluation with a system such as the GRBAS and/or vocal acoustic measures in a speech laboratory should be made to assess long term use, efficiency and safety measures.
Keywords: tracheotomy, tracheostomy, speaking valve, speaking device


BACKGROUND: Immediate breast reconstruction with silicone implant after subcutaneous mastectomy became a valid option among doctors and patients based on the simplicity of the surgical maneuvers, shorter surgical period, minimal scarring and immediate aesthetic results. Submuscular implants also have been advocated despite its more aggressive surgical procedures. Both also may bring secondary already described diversification's problems. An in attempt to reduce this kind of problems, in this article, a modification of the circumvertical mastopexy, reduction mammoplasty pattern for mastectomy and immediate breast implant reconstruction is described. METHODS: The skin between the medial and lateral vertical skin incision lines is de-epithelialized, providing a dermal barrier over the prosthesis to reinforce the vertical suture line. CONCLUSIONS: The technique ensures a safe reconstruction with gratifying aesthetic results.


The effectiveness of unsupervised domain adaptation degrades when there is a large discrepancy between the source and target domains. Gradual domain adaptation (GDA) is one promising way to mitigate such an issue, by leveraging additional unlabeled data that gradually shift from the source to the target. Through sequentially adapting the model along the"indexed"intermediate domains, GDA substantially improves the overall adaptation performance. In practice, however, the extra unlabeled data may not be separated into intermediate domains and indexed properly, limiting the applicability of GDA. In this paper, we investigate how to discover the sequence of intermediate domains when it is not already available. Concretely, we propose a coarse-to-fine framework, which starts with a coarse domain discovery step via progressive domain discriminator training. This coarse domain sequence then undergoes a fine indexing step via a novel cycle-consistency loss, which encourages the next intermediate domain to preserve sufficient discriminative knowledge of the current intermediate domain. The resulting domain sequence can then be used by a GDA algorithm. On benchmark data sets of GDA, we show that our approach, which we name Intermediate DOmain Labeler (IDOL), can lead to comparable or even better adaptation performance compared to the pre-defined domain sequence, making GDA more applicable and robust to the quality of domain sequences. Codes are available at https://github.com/hongyouc/IDOL.


This book discusses large margin and kernel methods for speech and speaker recognitionSpeech and Speaker Recognition: Large Margin and Kernel Methods is a collation of research in the recent advances in large margin and kernel methods, as applied to the field of speech and speaker recognition. It presents theoretical and practical foundations of these methods, from support vector machines to large margin methods for structured learning. It also provides examples of large margin based acoustic modelling for continuous speech recognizers, where the grounds for practical large margin sequence learning are set. Large margin methods for discriminative language modelling and text independent speaker verification are also addressed in this book.Key Features:Provides an up-to-date snapshot of the current state of research in this field Covers important aspects of extending the binary support vector machine to speech and speaker recognition applications Discusses large margin and kernel method algorithms for sequence prediction required for acoustic modeling Reviews past and present work on discriminative training of language models, and describes different large margin algorithms for the application of part-of-speech tagging Surveys recent work on the use of kernel approaches to text-independent speaker verification, and introduces the main concepts and algorithms Surveys recent work on kernel approaches to learning a similarity matrix from data This book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in speech processing and machine learning fields.


The purpose of cooperation is to obtain mutual benefit. The basic process on cooperation is exchanging something that an individual cannot product. It means that cooperation can be decomposed into two processes: give and take. So, social network combined with give and take process becomes a complex system that represents cooperation. However, there was no method to measure cooperation numerically based on the complex system model before. Online messenger is an appropriate tool because it works on social network. With the number of messages sent or received on messenger, cooperative score is measurable in real time. To do it, the following three elements should be considered. First, cooperation means that both give and take need to be equally distributed among people in an organization. This measurement is available from entropy in information theory. However, without the amount of activity in give and take process, the equal distribution is not enough to present cooperative score. Last, the biased activity with a large amount of activity must be inhibited. Without the third element, only competition is led for selfish benefit. The example in the paper shows that cooperative score equation is proper to be applied if there are countable information in give and take process. With this cooperative scoring system, organizations could easily detect cooperativeness among teams and employee in real time.


The occurrence of a right-lateral strike-slip earthquake in 1911 is inconsistent with the calculated ![Graphic][1] static stress decrease imparted by the 1906 rupture at that location on the Calaveras fault, and 5 yr of calculated post-1906 viscoelastic rebound does little to reload the fault. We have used all available first-motion, body-wave, and surface-wave data to explore possible focal mechanisms for the 1911 earthquake. We find that the event was most likely a right-lateral strike-slip event on the Calaveras fault, larger than, but otherwise resembling, the 1984 M w 6.1 Morgan Hill earthquake in roughly the same location. Unfortunately, we could recover no unambiguous surface fault offset or geodetic strain data to corroborate the seismic analysis despite an exhaustive archival search. We calculated the static and dynamic Coulomb stress changes for three 1906 source models to understand stress transfer to the 1911 site. In contrast to the static stress shadow, the peak dynamic Coulomb stress imparted by the 1906 rupture promoted failure at the site of the 1911 earthquake by 1.4–5.8 bar. Perhaps because the sample is small and the aftershocks are poorly located, we find no correlation of 1906 aftershock frequency or magnitude with the peak dynamic stress, although all aftershocks sustained a calculated dynamic stress of ≥3 bar. Just 20 km to the south of the 1911 epicenter, we find that surface creep of the Calaveras fault at Hollister paused for ∼17 yr after 1906, about the expected delay for the calculated static stress drop imparted by the 1906 earthquake when San Andreas fault postseismic creep and viscoelastic relaxation are included. Thus, the 1911 earthquake may have been promoted by the transient dynamic stresses, while Calaveras fault creep 20 km to the south appears to have been inhibited by the static stress changes.

 [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif


Recent advancements in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies have allowed us to monitor the gene expression of individual cells. This level of detail in monitoring and characterization enables the research of cells in rapidly changing and heterogeneous environments such as early stage embryo or tumor tissue. However, the current scRNA-seq technologies are still facing many outstanding challenges. Due to the low amount of starting material, a large portion of expression values in scRNA-seq data is missing and reported as zeros. Moreover, scRNA-seq platforms are trending toward prioritizing high throughput over sequencing depth, which makes the problem become more serious in large datasets. These missing values can greatly affect the accuracy of downstream analyses. Here we introduce scINN, a neural network-based approach, that can reliably recover the missing values in single-cell data and thus can effectively improve the performance of downstream analyses. To impute the dropouts in single-cell data, we build a neural network that consists of two sub-networks: imputation sub-network and quality assessment sub-network. We compare scINN with state-of-the-art imputation methods using 10 scRNA-seq datasets with a total of more than 100,000 cells. In an extensive analysis, we demonstrate that scINN outperforms existing imputation methods in improving the identification of cell sub-populations and the Quality of transcriptome landscape visualization.


Background Patient portals provide patients with the tools to better manage and understand their health status. However, widespread adoption of patient portals faces resistance from patients and providers for a number of reasons, and there is limited evidence evaluating the characteristics of patient portals that received positive remarks from patients and providers. Objective The objectives of this systematic review are to identify the shared characteristics of portals that receive favorable responses from patients and providers and to identify the elements that patients and providers believe need improvement. Methods The authors conducted a systematic search of the CINAHL and PubMed databases to gather data about the use of patient portals in the management of chronic disease. Two reviewers analyzed the articles collected in the search process in order remove irrelevant articles. The authors selected 27 articles to use in the literature review. Results Results of this systematic review conclude that patient portals show significant improvements in patient self-management of chronic disease and improve the quality of care provided by providers. The most prevalent positive attribute was patient-provider communication, which appeared in 10 of 27 articles (37%). This was noted by both patients and providers. The most prevalent negative perceptions are security (concerns) and user-friendliness, both of which occurred in 11 of 27 articles (41%). The user-friendliness quality was a concern for patients and providers who are not familiar with advanced technology and therefore find it difficult to navigate the patient portal. The high cost of installation and maintenance of a portal system, not surprisingly, deters some providers from implementing such technology into their practice, but this was only mentioned in 3 of the 27 articles (11%). It is possible that the incentives for meaningful use assuage the barrier of cost. Conclusions This systematic review revealed mixed attitudes from patients and their providers regarding the use of patient portals to manage their chronic disease. The authors suggest that a standard patient portal design providing patients with the resources to understand and manage their chronic conditions will promote the adoption of patient portals in health care organizations.


Within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), ECMWF is currently producing the ERA5 reanalysis which embodies a detailed record of the global atmosphere, land surface and ocean waves from 1950 onwards. This new reanalysis will replace the highly successful ERA-Interim reanalysis that was started in 2006 (spanning 1979 onwards), and will also encompass the period covered by ERA-40. ERA5 is based on the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) Cycle 41r2 which was operational in 2016. Therefore, ERA5 benefits from a decade of developments in model physics, numerics and data assimilation. In addition to a significantly enhanced horizontal resolution of 31km, compared to 80kmfor ERA-Interim, ERA5 has a number of innovative features. These include hourly output throughout, and an uncertainty estimate (3-hourly at half the horizontal resolution). The step forward regarding quality and level of detail is evident. Forecasts from ERA5 analyses show a gain of up to one day in skill with respect to ERA-Interim. One important novelty of ERA5 is the availability within 5 days of real time which will serve users that need recent meteorological information in combination with a long and consistent climate record. Such guaranteed timeliness requires that the ERA5 reanalysis is generated as an operational product. The operational services in the Copernicus Programme build upon the massive European investments in mature science and technology. For climate reanalysis, this is a two-way interaction for ECMWF. On the one hand, ERA5 benefits greatly from the leverage of the developments in the IFS. On the other hand, the operational model development at ECMWF benefits from reanalysis. One excellent example of this is the Research and Development work performed within the European-Commission funded research projects ERA-CLIM and ERA-CLIM2. This paper provides an overview of ECMWF's atmospheric, ocean and land reanalysis activities. In particular, it presents the ERA5 reanalysis system and its performance. It also describes challenges that were encountered and their practical solutions. The outcomes of the ERA-CLIM and ERACLIM2 projects will be summarized. Subsequent developments in, and plans for, the IFS in support of future reanalyses, aligned with the ECMWF strategy, are described.


The dayside ionosphere of the Saturnian satellite Titan is generated mainly from photoionization of N2 and CH4. We compare model-derived suprathermal electron intensities with spectra measured by the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer/Electron Spectrometer (CAPS/ELS) in Titan's sunlit ionosphere (altitudes of 970–1250 km) focusing on the T40, T41, T42, and T48 Titan flybys by the Cassini spacecraft. The model accounts only for photoelectrons and associated secondary electrons, with a main input being the impinging solar EUV spectra as measured by the Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energy and Dynamics/Solar EUV Experiment and extrapolated to Saturn. Associated electron-impact electron production rates have been derived from ambient number densities of N2 and CH4 (measured by the Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer/Closed Source Neutral mode) and related energy-dependent electron-impact ionization cross sections. When integrating up to electron energies of 60 eV, covering the bulk of the photoelectrons, the model-based values exceed the observationally based values typically by factors of ∼3 ± 1. This finding is possibly related to current difficulties in accurately reproducing the observed electron number densities in Titan's dayside ionosphere. We compare the utilized dayside CAPS/ELS spectra with ones measured in Titan's nightside ionosphere during the T55–T59 flybys. The investigated nightside locations were associated with higher fluxes of high-energy (>100 eV) electrons than the dayside locations. As expected, for similar neutral number densities, electrons with energies <60 eV give a higher relative contribution to the total electron-impact ionization rates on the dayside (due to the contribution from photoelectrons) than on the nightside.


Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) worldwide are seen as the cornerstones of national economies. In South Africa they acquire government support as a means of restructuring the national economy and to reduce poverty. In local government, SMMEs are an integral part of local economic development strategies to reduce persistent spatial inequalities that are most obvious when comparing towns with townships. If SMME development could be driven by local municipalities, spatial inequalities would be reduced and the pace of local economic-base restructuring increased. Sadly, municipalities fail to take advantage of their intergovernmental relations roles and as a result rely on SMME development support interventions from national and provincial spheres of government. SMMEs have the potential to reduce unemployment, generate income, create assets, contribute to skills development, reduce the rate of crime and (often violent) service delivery protests, and attract investments in local municipalities. They thus have the potential to contribute to the local economic-base restructuring of South African local government.


This thesis examines religious toleration in the Roman world throughout the republic and empire and its connection to Roman political power. While studies have examined the role religion played in Roman political success, few have looked at the reactions of the Romans in multiple situations involving religious groups that were incompatible with Roman society in order to draw broad conclusions about the nature of Roman religious toleration and how it was meant to maintain Roman supremacy. By examining a number of such groups, this study aims to outline the place of religion in the Roman political system, to show why certain religious groups were met with various forms of hostility, and finally to consider what these incidences reveal about Roman religious toleration and the place of religion in Rome's political landscape. This study finds that Roman religion had very specific characteristics and was a pillar of the Roman state, so that when a religious group caught the attention of the Roman authorities and did not fit the requirements of the Roman state religion, it was perceived as a threat to Rome's position of power. Each group examined received different treatment from Rome depending on other stresses endangering Roman political stability and the structure and practices of the group in question. Those that could be made into acceptable Roman cults were permitted to exist in their new form while others were completely rejected. Allowing groups to continue in any form, though, was done so under the supervision of the senate or emperor which shifted power back to the Roman state and re-established its control over the religious and hence political sphere. Such treatment of religious groups should not be called toleration and this thesis helps to correct such misjudgements which deny the importance that religion played in Roman political power.


As opposed to conventional air vehicles that have fixed wings, small birds and insects are known to flap their wings at higher angles of attack. The vortex produced at the tip of the wing, known as the leading-edge vortex (LEV), plays an important role to enhance lift during its flight. In this thesis, we analyze the influence of these vortices on aerodynamic forces that could be beneficial to micro-air vehicle performance and efficiency. The flow structures associated with simple harmonic motions of an airfoil are first investigated. The characteristics of the time-averaged and fluctuating forces are explained by analyzing vortical flow features, such as vortex lock-in, leading-edge vortex synchronization, and vortex formation time. Specific frequency regions where the wake instability locks in to the unsteady motion of the airfoil are identified, and these lead to significant changes in the mean forces. A detailed study of the flow structures associated with the LEV acting either in- or out-of-phase with the quasi-steady component of the forces is performed to quantify the amplification and attenuation behavior of the fluctuating forces. An inherent time scale of the LEV associated with its formation and detachment (LEV formation time) is shown to control the time-averaged forces. With these results, several optimal flow control problems are formulated. Adjoint-based optimal control is applied to an airfoil moving at a constant velocity and also to a reciprocating airfoil with no forward velocity. In both cases, we maximize lift by controlling the pitch rate of the airfoil. For the former case, the static map of lift at various angles of attack is additionally examined to find the static angle that provides maximum lift and also to confirm whether the optimizations perform according to the static map. For the latter case, we obtain a solution of the optimized motion of the flapping airfoil which resembles that of a hovering insect.


The evaluation of drilling prospects is frequently based on seismic amplitude anomalies. To decipher "true" seismic prospects from "false" ones, we used poroviscoelastic (PVE) models, as opposed to other formalisms such as acoustic, elastic, viscoelastic, and poroelastic models, that provided a solution that takes into account solid and fluid attenuation mechanisms separately to model the earth's response to the propagation of a seismic wavefield. Here, a PVE impedance modeling scheme was tested using seismic and well-log data collected on a conventional gas reservoir in the Canadian Arctic. Comparisons between seismic-to-well ties achieved using acoustic and PVE media indicated that the latter provided more realistic synthetic seismograms. Although prestack analysis revealed that the present lithological context was of class I amplitude variation with offset (AVO), the seismic signature observed was of class III AVO. Consequently, the increase in amplitude with offset was interpreted to be induced not by a lithological change (i.e., shale to sand) combined with a gas-charged interval, but rather by an increase in porosity within the sandstone reservoir itself where the gas has accumulated. Frequency variation with offset analysis using spectral decomposition, image low-frequency shadows on the far offsets attributed to the gas accumulation that were correlative with the AVO anomaly. This highlighted the importance of far offsets in anomalous amplitude and frequency events attributed to the occurrence of gas reservoirs observed on stacked data and that these events can be missed if seismic hydrocarbon indicators were solely investigated on stacked data. Finally, the method of analysis emphasized the importance of combining indirect arguments coming from the observation of prestack and stacked seismic data in the time and frequency domains for reducing risk to an acceptable level before a prospect can be drilled.


While modern forests have their origin in the diversification and expansion of angiosperms in the Late Cretaceous and early Cenozoic, it is unclear whether the rise of closed-canopy tropical rainforests preceded or followed the end-Cretaceous extinction. The "canopy effect" is a strong vertical gradient in the carbon isotope (δ13C) composition of leaves in modern closed-canopy forests that could serve as a proxy signature for canopy structure in ancient forests. To test this, we report measurements of the carbon isotope composition of nearly 200 fossil angiosperm leaves from two localities in the Paleocene Cerrejón Formation and one locality in the Maastrichtian Guaduas Formation of Colombia. Leaves from one Cerrejón fossil assemblage deposited in a small fluvial channel exhibited a 6.3‰ range in δ13C, consistent with a closed-canopy forest. Carbon isotope values from lacustrine sediments in the Cerrejón Formation had a range of 3.3‰, consistent with vegetation along a lake edge. An even-narrower range of δ13C values (2.7‰) was observed for a leaf assemblage recovered from the Cretaceous Guaduas Formation, and suggests vegetation with an open canopy structure. Carbon isotope fractionation by Late Cretaceous and early Paleogene leaves was in all cases similar to that by modern relatives, consistent with estimates of low atmospheric CO2 during this time period. This study confirms other lines of evidence suggesting that closed-canopy forests in tropical South America existed by the late Paleocene, and fails to find isotopic evidence for a closed-canopy forest in the Cretaceous.


This paper explores whether and how the design and practice of greenways meets the sustainable development needs of food and fuel. It outlines three predominant design typologies of greenways: connector design, containment design and composite network design. It also advocates for composite network design typology of greenways for its scalar versatility enabling neighbourhood to city level applications and illustrates the sustainable development outcomes related to socio-cultural, ecological and economic wellbeing as generated through green network design at neighbourhood scale, and. It articulates greenways as synergistic landscapes that create harmony amongst the urban system with broader biophysical system. Essentially, the paper calls for a renewed approach to greenways design and planning practice in order to start meeting sustainable development challenges more effectively and advocates for landscape synergism as the overarching ethos.


PURPOSE
Measuring quality of care for symptom management and ascertaining patient goals offers an important step toward improving palliative cancer management. This study was designed to identify systematically the quality measures and the evidence to support their use in pain, dyspnea, depression, and advance care planning (ACP), and to identify research gaps.

METHODS
English-language documents were selected from MEDLINE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health, PsycINFO (1995 to 2005); Internet-based searches; and contact with measure developers. We used terms for each domain to select studies throughout the cancer care continuum. We included measures that expressed a normative relationship to quality, specified the target population, and specified the indicated care. Dual data review and abstraction was performed by palliative care researchers describing populations, testing, and attributes for each measure.

RESULTS
A total of 4,599 of 5,182 titles were excluded at abstract review. Of 537 remaining articles, 19 contained measures for ACP, six contained measures for depression, five contained measures for dyspnea, and 20 contained measures for pain. We identified 10 relevant measure sets that included 36 fully specified or fielded measures and 14 additional measures (16 for pain, five for dyspnea, four for depression, and 25 for ACP). Most measures were unpublished, and few had been tested in a cancer population. We were unable to describe the specifications of all measures fully and did not search for measures for pain and depression that were not cancer specific.

CONCLUSION
Measures are available for assessing quality and guiding improvement in palliative cancer care. Existing measures are weighted toward ACP, and more nonpain symptom measures are needed. Additional testing is needed before the measures are used for accountability, and basic research is required to address measurement when self-report is impaired.


Salt gradient solar ponds can play an important role in management of river salinity in semiarid locations such as the Colorado River Basin. A mathematical model and solution procedure are presented for investment timing of expansion of a salt gradient pond system. An application of the model is presented for several sites in the upper Colorado River basin where planned fossil fuel electric generating plants are located near existing source of saline or brackish water. The concept involves use of both concentrated brine waste streams from the power plants and the existing low quality water sources for the pond system water and salt demands. The salt gradient pond can: (1) Replace a power plant's customary zero discharge evaporation; (2) produce additional energy; and (3) remove much more salt from the river system than the conventional evaporation pond. An economic model solution procedure and application are presented for expansion of salt gradient solar pond systems. Such systems have important potential for salinity management applications, when used in conjunction with thermal/electric plants near sources of saline water.


Relativistic collisionless shocks in electron-ion plasmas are thought to occur in the afterglow phase of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and in other environments where relativistic flows interact with the interstellar medium. A particular regime of shocks in an unmagnetized plasma has generated much interest for GRB applications. In this Letter, we present ab initio particle-in-cell simulations of unmagnetized relativistic electron-ion shocks. Using long-term 2.5-dimensional simulations with ion-electron mass ratios from 16 to 1000, we resolve the shock formation and reach a steady state shock structure beyond the initial transient. We find that even at high ion-electron mass ratios initially unmagnetized shocks can be effectively mediated by the ion Weibel instability with a typical shock thickness of ~20 ion skin depths. Upstream of the shock, the interaction with merging ion current filaments heats the electron component, so that the postshock flow achieves near-equipartition between the ions and electrons, with the electron temperature reaching 50% of the ion temperature. This energy exchange helps to explain the large electron energy fraction inferred from GRB afterglow observations.


Despite the importance of lipooligosaccharides (LOS) in the pathogenicity of campylobacteriosis, little is known about the genetic and phenotypic diversity of LOS in C. coli. In this study, we investigated the distribution of LOS locus classes among a large collection of unrelated C. coli isolates sampled from several different host species. Furthermore, we paired C. coli genomic information and LOS chemical composition for the first time to identify mechanisms consistent with the generation of LOS phenotypic heterogeneity. After classifying three new LOS locus classes, only 85% of the 144 isolates tested were assigned to a class, suggesting higher genetic diversity than previously thought. This genetic diversity is at the basis of a completely unexplored LOS structure heterogeneity. Mass spectrometry analysis of the LOS of nine isolates, representing four different LOS classes, identified two features distinguishing C. coli LOS from C. jejuni's. GlcN-GlcN disaccharides were present in the lipid A backbone in contrast to the GlcN3N-GlcN backbone observed in C. jejuni. Moreover, despite that many of the genes putatively involved in Qui3pNAcyl were absence in the genomes of various isolates, this rare sugar was found in the outer core of all C. coli. Therefore, regardless the high genetic diversity of LOS biosynthes is locus in C. coli, we identified species-specific phenotypic features of C. coli LOS which might explain differences between C. jejuni and C. coli in terms of population dynamics and host adaptation. Depositories (where applicable) The whole genome sequences of C. coli are publicly available on the RAST server (http://rast.nmpdr.org) with guest account (login and password 'guest') under IDs: 195.91, 195.96-195.119, 195.124-195.126, 195.128-195.130, 195.133, 195.134, 6666666.94320


A work in which a noted critic addresses the problem of silence in contemporary experimental poetry. Silence, as Susan M Schultz argues, is an intellectual and aesthetic force, largely unacknowledged, that is a characteristic feature of much avant-garde poetry, from Hart Crane to Susan Howe; a strategy deployed by various poetic, academic, and aesthetic partisans in efforts to quell competing discourse; and also a potent aesthetic strategy in itself. In a collection of case studies, Schultz examines specific incidents of silence and the impasses it creates in the poetic and academic landscape. She looks at the issue of professionalism, in both poetic practice and the academy, which has become the caretaker of much of modern and contemporary poetry and their competing values. She explores clothing and fashion as central metaphors for this professionalism (what are the 'outfits' and intellectual fashions of the day?), especially the metaphor of language as clothing in the poetry of Laura Riding, Charles Bernstein, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Schultz further explores the problem of formalism in the work of Riding and Crane, whose extremity in experimentation led to their silencing by the poetic establishment, a problem later overcome by poets such as John Ashbery and Bernstein. And she examines silence as an aesthetic strategy in itself, particularly in the work of Howe, who wrestles with the Puritan legacy of male "pro-fessors" in the clergy ministering to female "con-fessors." The result is an extended meditation on the precarious balance among competing forces - formalism, professionalism, gender, and voice - in understanding and liberating poetic discourse from the realms of silence and the impasses it creates.


ADD in the Workplace: An Overview. Seeking an Adult ADD Career/Workplace Assessment. Taking Charge of Your ADD: Job Performance. Taking Charge of Your ADD: Social Skills. ADD and Learning Disabilities. ADD and Personality Type at Work. Success Strategies in the Workplace. An ADD-Friendly Work Environment. The Ideal Boss. Reasonable Workplace Accomodations. Alternatives to a "9-5" Job. Women with ADD in the Workplace. ADD and the American Disabilities Act. Achieving Success in the Workplace. Appendix: ADD Workplace Questionnaire. Resources.


Available empirical data relating to quality generally and the application of quality assurance principles to language education at tertiary-level are scanty. This study explores how higher education institutions in Ghana apply QA mechanisms to enhance the teaching and learning of English for Academic Purposes. It examines how institutional contexts and cultures of the four case study institutions impact their QA processes. First, the rhetorical tensions and the apparent lack of consensus on the definition of the term "quality" are acknowledged alongside the enviable status of English as a "global lingua franca"; the relevance and pervasiveness of the EAP discipline in tertiary educational circles within and without Ghana and the resultant need for quality assurance and enhancement in its teaching and learning. One particular component of quality in higher education: the need for ensuring that programmes and services are fit for the purpose for which they were designed, and that the "clients" (students) are getting value for their money serves as the focus of the empirical research. The QA dimension of the research attempts to answer the question of whether students provide written feedback on their teaching and whether this is acted upon by the case study institutions in order to improve the EAP course. A combination of qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method approaches and documentary research is adopted to provide the framework for exploring QA and quality issues at each of the institutions involved in this study. The study first considers the quality challenges of higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa and Ghana within the context of policy. Subsequently, the unique features of each case study institution are quantified. To enhance the depth of understanding so as to establish each case study institution's QA mechanisms and processes for enhancing EAP teaching and learning, a comparative/multiple case study approach is adopted. The blend of methods facilitated exploring the issues and the drawing of conclusions as the strengths of each complements the other. The assessment of QA practices used in the teaching and learning of EAP in the case institutions revealed a number of interesting similarities and differences in terms of institutional context, quality culture, quality assurance mechanisms, pedagogy, and curriculum designs. Based on these findings, suggestions for EAP teaching quality enhancement in the case study institutions are subsequently made. Unique practices identified in the institutions are recommended for replication in other tertiary educational institutions. Suggestions for further and future research are also made followed by a brief account of the author's professional and personal development during the DBA programme.


Small limiting apertures of endoscopes cause gross speckles when using coherent light sources in holographic endoscopy. Thus, for a high optical signal-to-noise ratio, imaging systems with high numerical apertures and low f/Nos. are required, which under given geometrical constraints can be provided in particular by gradient-index rod lenses. For additional speckle reduction the limiting aperture has to be enlarged within the given outer diameter of the instrument. This can be achieved by using the same gradient-index rod lens for both imaging and illumination, so that no separate illuminating fiber bundle is necessary. Holographic recording problems due to reflections of the illuminating object beam from the end faces can be solved by appropriate positioning and shaping of the rod as well as by holographic subtraction.


This dissertation addresses the critical relationship between the tourism sector and sustainable development, examining global trends and the problems they raise, exploring the current set of solutions being implemented, and offering some new ideas for better managing the relationship. Among these, the most important and comprehensive is the "Climate and Sustainable Tourism Model" a framework developed to encapsulate many of the issues explored in this dissertation and offering insights for policy makers seeking to develop better solutions. Moreover, this dissertation acknowledges the continuing importance of market-based solutions for harmonizing the development of the tourism sector with the demands of sustainability. Likewise, it offers the "Development Cycle Model for Sustainable Ecotourism" and the "Environmental Impact Assessment Model for Community-Based Ecotourism Development," each of which diagrams complex dynamics that can offer better outcomes if understood and managed correctly. For a variety of reasons, this dissertation concludes by offering suggestions for how the Kingdom of Thailand and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which rely heavily on tourism, can adopt these innovative ideas and reap considerable rewards.


The advent of media-sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube has drastically increased the volume of community-contributed multimedia resources available on the web. These collections have a previously unimagined depth and breadth, and have generated new opportunities - and new challenges - to multimedia research. How do we analyze, understand and extract patterns from these new collections? How can we use these unstructured, unrestricted community contributions of media (and annotation) to generate "knowledge". As a test case, we study Flickr - a popular photo sharing website. Flickr supports photo, time and location metadata, as well as a light-weight annotation model. We extract information from this dataset using two different approaches. First, we employ a location-driven approach to generate aggregate knowledge in the form of "representative tags" for arbitrary areas in the world. Second, we use a tag-driven approach to automatically extract place and event semantics for Flickr tags, based on each tag's metadata patterns. With the patterns we extract from tags and metadata, vision algorithms can be employed with greater precision. In particular, we demonstrate a location-tag-vision-based approach to retrieving images of geography-related landmarks and features from the Flickr dataset. The results suggest that community-contributed media and annotation can enhance and improve our access to multimedia resources - and our understanding of the world.


Congestive heart failure and cirrhosis are the most common causes of transudative pleural effusions, while pneumonia and malignancy are responsible for the majority of exudative effusions. Plain chest fibs are valuable in confirming the presence of an effusion, providing dues to the cause, and directing the method of pleural fluid sampling. Thoracentesis is safe and simple, and it is diagnostic in about 75% of cases. Pleural biopsy is indicated for unexplained exudative effusions, most of which are found to result from malignancy or tuberculosis. Medical thoracoscopy, if available, is the procedure of choice for patients with these effusions. Thoracoscopy permits visually directed pleural biopsies and allows for therapeutic intervention at the time of diagnosis, obviating the need for subsequent invasive procedures.


This dissertation comprises the results of five microscopical studies addressing issues related to sexual reproduction. The main focus of the first two studies (Chapters 1-2) on water snail hybrids lies on chromosomal differences and their potential involvement in isolation mechanisms between these hybridizing species. The two studies on the yellow dung fly Scathophaga stercoraria were aimed at investigating either anatomical structures (Chapter 3) or physiological processes (Chapter 4) involved in sperm transport and utilization with special reference to the potential of female control of these processes. The Chapter 5 consists of supporting material on the karyotype of Scathophaga stercoraria.


INTRODUCTION In 1997, the National Congress of the Dominican Republic approved Law 24-97 Against Domestic Violence in a bid to alter the state's response to violence against women. (1) Law 24-97 introduced important changes to the country's Criminal Code, criminalizing violent and discriminatory conduct in an effort to guarantee women equal protection and equal benefit of the law. (2) The need for state action was urgent. A letter submitted to the Senate in 1996 in support of the draft bill that would later become Law 24-97 noted that murder was the sixth most common cause of death among Dominican women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, that one in six Dominican homes experienced some type of violence, and that eighty percent of women who sought health care did so as a result of domestic violence. (3) Prior to 1997, the Dominican Criminal Code was in dire need of reform. Substantive provisions in the Code dated back to the introduction of the Codigo de Instruccion Criminal y Codigo Penal (1826), modeled on the Napoleonic Codes and introduced following the Haitian occupation of 1821. (4) Although the Code was modified after Dominican independence in 1844, for the most part it remained antiquated. (5) To eliminate remnants of an authoritarian and patrimonial past, legislative reform, especially in the area of criminal law and criminal procedure, was deemed crucial to democratic reform. (6) As one commentator has noted, criminal law reform signifies "la muestra de la renovacion democratica latinoamericana," or "proof of the renewal of Latin American democracy." (7) From the perspective of violence against women, domestic and international forces combined to catalyze the radical legislative transformation that culminated in the approval of Law 24-97. Within the Dominican Republic, an organized feminist movement emerged in the late 1970s to mid-1980s, agitating for change within universities, in the courts and the legislature, and through the media. (8) Civil society organizations specializing in gender issues also appeared at the same time, pressing for change, providing services to women that had not been publicly available, and reaching outside the country for international support. (9) Several highly publicized cases of violence against women engaged the public conscience when it became shockingly clear that women fleeing their assailants were routinely turned away by police and denied access to judicial institutions for protection and redress, often with deadly results. (10) One case in particular sparked a public debate, questioning the established view that violence against women, especially violence within the family, was a "private affair." (11) Press reports told the story of a woman who had repeatedly pleaded with police for protection from her abusive husband but was ignored. Her husband subsequently locked the woman and her two children into a bedroom and set fire to the family home, burning them alive. (12) There was also growing pressure from abroad. The Dominican Republic ratified several international conventions requiring member states to institute measures combating violence against women. In 1982, the Dominican Republic ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women ("CEDAW"), (13) and in 1996 it ratified the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women ("Convention of Belem do Patti"). (14) The Preamble to Law 24-97 mentions both of these international human rights instruments. (15) With Law 24-97, the Dominican Republic succeeded in criminalizing most forms of violence against women. This was the first, and perhaps easiest, step in the state's battle to eradicate violence against women. However, there remains an urgent need to promote the safety and security of survivors of violence and to foster public confidence in the administration of justice. …


Japan has been experiencing serious economic and financial difficulties since the 1990s. However, Japanese economy is still the second largest in the world, preceded only by the United States. Therefore, the performance of the Japanese economy significantly affects the world, particularly Asian countries. Furthermore, Japanese experiences in the 1990s are valuable for international readers because of the following reasons. First, Japan experienced serious financial crises in the 1990s. Unfortunately, Japan's non-performing loans were exceptionally large. Therefore, understanding what caused the disastrous financial situation in Japan and how Japan has tried to solve the financial crises is instructive for countries wishing to avoid these problems. Second, Japan is said to be the first country to struggle with prolonged deflation. With the end of Cold War, many countries are facing the risk of deflation nowadays. Therefore, how the Bank of Japan has conducted its monetary policy in the deflationary economy is an important example for all central bankers and those interested in monetary policy. Now, it is notable that current Japanese economic and financial system is quite different from a decade ago. This special issue aims to discuss the current features of the Japanese monetary policy and financial system. Six papers consist of this special issue. Five of these papers cover banks, security firms, mutual funds, public financial institutions, and non-bank finance-related companies. And one paper deals with a current monetary policy issue. Here, we briefly summarize these papers. Professor Kondo investigates how Japanese banks did change or did not change their lending behavior in the post bubble period. It is well known that Japanese banks as well as financial authorities failed to recognize in the early 1990s how serious the financial difficulties that Japan faced were. Consistent with this common argument, Professor Kondo finds that banks continued to lend huge funds to real estate companies and construction companies in the early 1990s in spite of the fact that the burst of the bubble economy had seriously damaged these companies. In the late 1990, however, banks changed their lending behaviors and decreased loans to such financially troubled firms. This paper provides an evidence to show the sluggish response of Japanese banks to the burst of the bubble economy. Professors Harimaya and Okuyama investigate how the cost efficiency of Japanese securities firms changed during the financial reform from 1999 to 2002. Their paper is unique in terms of the following reasons. First, they consider not only traditional securities companies, but also the online securities companies, which employ a quite different business model from traditional ones. Second, they estimate cost functions by using an advanced statistical technique. Namely, the generalized translog cost function, which can take zero outputs into consideration, is used. Third, as their sample period is the time that so-called Japanese Financial Big Bang was conducted, their research can shed light on the effect of this Big Bang reform on efficiency of securities companies. The paper finds that the economy of scale was observed for online firms, while it was only weakly observed for major firms. Also, about half of the online firms enjoyed product-specific economies of scale in terms of brokerage commissions. Professor Fujiwara investigates the efficiency of the mutual funds. In the United States and European countries, so-called closed-end fund puzzle has often been observed. Unfortunately, as Japan prohibited the closed-end fund until 1998, there are few studies on the closed-end fund puzzle in the Japanese financial market. Professor Fujiwara overcomes this data unavailability by considering an Exchange Traded Fund (namely, the Nikkei 300 ETF). …


The term gestalt, when used in the context of general systems theory, assumes the value of "systemic touchstone", namely a figure of reference useful to categorize the properties or qualities of a set of systems. Typical gestalts used, e.g., in biology, are those based on anatomical or physiological characteristics, which correspond respectively to architectural and organizational design choices in natural and artificial systems. In this paper we discuss three gestalts of general systems theory: behavior, organization, and substance, which refer respectively to the works of Wiener, Boulding, and Leibniz. Our major focus here is the system introduced by the latter. Through a discussion of some of the elements of the Leibnitian System, and by means of several novel interpretations of those elements in terms of today's computer science, we highlight the debt that contemporary research still has with this Giant among the giant scholars of the past.


Word vectors are at the core of many natural language processing tasks. Recently, there has been interest in post-processing word vectors to enrich their semantic information. In this paper, we introduce a novel word vector post-processing technique based on matrix conceptors (Jaeger 2014), a family of regularized identity maps. More concretely, we propose to use conceptors to suppress those latent features of word vectors having high variances. The proposed method is purely unsupervised: it does not rely on any corpus or external linguistic database. We evaluate the post-processed word vectors on a battery of intrinsic lexical evaluation tasks, showing that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art alternatives. We also show that post-processed word vectors can be used for the downstream natural language processing task of dialogue state tracking, yielding improved results in different dialogue domains.


The directional sensitivity of the retina, known as the Stiles-Crawford effect (SCE), originates from the waveguide property of photoreceptors. This effect has been extensively studied in normal and pathologic eyes using highly customized optical instrumentation. Here we investigate a new approach based on a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWS), a technology that has been traditionally employed for measuring wave aberrations (phase) of the eye and is available in clinics. Using a modified research-grade SHWS, we demonstrate in five healthy subjects and at four retinal eccentricities that intensity information can be readily extracted from the SHWS measurement and the spatial distribution of which is consistent with that produced by the optical SCE. The technique is found sufficiently sensitive even at near-infrared wavelengths where the optical SCE is faint. We demonstrate that the optical SCE signal is confined to the core of the SHWS spots with the tails being diffuse and non-directional, suggesting cones fail to recapture light that is multiply scattered in the retina. The high sensitivity of the SHWS to the optical SCE raises concern as to how this effect, intrinsic to the retina, may impact the SHWS measurement of ocular aberrations.


Provincial English Anglican and nonconformist church music, commonly known as psalmody, underwent profound changes during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1700 the music in most parish churches was limited to a few
unaccompanied metrical psalm tunes, sung slowly and unrhythmically by an apathetic congregation. Attempts at reform led to the introduction of organs and choirs of charity children in towns, and to the growth of a florid, distinctive style of vernacular music in less affluent rural areas. This was often composed and taught by itinerant singing masters and was Performed by a mixed group of singers and instrumentalists. It continued to flourish in country parishes until it was gradually ousted by the Oxford Movement in the mid nineteenth century. Similar developments occurred later in nonconformity with more congregational participation.

This thesis discusses the available musical and literary sources and places psalmody in its historical and musical
context,before tracing developments within the
Anglican and nonconformist traditions. The organisation, size and vocal range of choirs is considered but the main focus is on the use of voices and instruments. The problems
of the correct allocation of parts is investigated in some detail, because this has important: performance implications and was further complicated when instruments
began to be introduced in the later 1700s. The scoring of large-scale instrumental pieces is also analysed. Finally, the didactic introductions of psalmody tune books are
examined since,until the mid eighteenth century,they provided essential performance instructions on tempi, dynamics,ornamentation and voice production.

The main purpose, of this dissertation is to gain a better understanding of psalmody during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in order to inform modern performance and to provide evidence that will stimulate further research.

A music anthology and two CDs containing music recordings
and a database are included.


The Knr4 protein, known to be involved in the regulation of cell wall assembly in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, strongly interacts with the tyrosine tRNA synthetase protein encoded by TYS1 as demonstrated by the genetic two-hybrid system and a biochemical pull-down experiment using GST--Tys1p fusion. Data reported here raise the possibility that this physical interaction between these proteins is required for dityrosine formation during the sporulation process. In addition, it is shown that the efficiency of spores formation was drastically reduced in diploid cells homozygous for the disruption of KNR4 or for a temperature-sensitive mutation of TYS1, although this effect could be independent of their protein interaction. Altogether, these data provide novel functions of Knr4p and Tys1p to those that were known before.


Abstract This paper develops a lobbying-by-firms model that draws on a more realistic characterization of the lobbying process; influence-seeking requires both money to 'buy access' and managerial time to 'utilize access'. This, more realistically grounded, modeling approach furnishes theoretical support for why one encounters different numbers of lobbying firms of varying sizes in different industries, without casting the (unrealistic) lifeline of the 'money-buyspolicies' assumption or (unrealistically) casting out the role of money from the lobbying process. Theoretical legs are also furnished for the empirical finding of a negative and statistically significant (at the 1% level) relationship between industry concentration and "direct lobbying" by the industry. Additional insights emerge from the model regarding how a cap on the lobbying-contributions of firms results, in fact, in an expansion of the amount of access-time purchased by some firms, and how a decline in the world price of an industry's good can generate greater inequality in access to politicians.


Bovine feedlots are intensive production systems of significant importance in Mexico, United States of America and Canada. Respiratory diseases are the single most important cause of morbidity and mortality in feedlot cattle. Herein, the gross and microscopic findings in the lungs of cattle with unusually persistent pneumonia unresponsive to aggressive antibiotic treat ment in feedlots localized in General Escobedo, Nuevo Leon; Morelia, Michoacan; Mexicali, Baja California, and Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico are described. Eight chronic suppurative bronchopneumonia cases with multifocal areas of casseous necrosis were selected. Microscopically, these lesions were bronchocentric and characterized by foci of necrosis surrounded by a pyogranulomatous reaction. Immunohistochemical studies revealed positive reaction to Mycoplasma bovis in all cases. Gross and microscopic lesions associated with M. bovis pneumonia have a conspicuous pattern. This is the first report of M. bovis causing pneumonia in feedlot cattle in Mexico.


During the aerosolization process at the sea surface, halides are incorporated into aerosol droplets, where they may play an important role in tropospheric ozone chemistry. Although this process may significantly contribute to the formation of reactive gas phase molecular halogens, little is known about the environmental factors that control how halides selectively accumulate at the air-water interface. In this study, the production of sea spray aerosol is simulated using electrospray ionization (ESI) of 100 nM equimolar solutions of NaCl, NaBr, NaI, NaNO(2), NaNO(3), NaClO(4), and NaIO(4). The microdroplets generated are analyzed by mass spectrometry to study the comparative enrichment of anions (f(X(-))) and their correlation with ion properties. Although no correlation exists between f(X(-)) and the limiting equivalent ionic conductivity, the correlation coefficient of the linear fit with the size of the anions R(X(-)), dehydration free-energy ΔG(dehyd), and polarizability α, follows the order: R(X(-))(-2) > R(X(-))(-1) > R(X(-)) > ΔG(dehyd) > α. The same pure physical process is observed in H(2)O and D(2)O. The factor f(X(-)) does not change with pH (6.8-8.6), counterion (Li(+), Na(+), K(+), and Cs(+)) substitution effects, or solvent polarity changes in methanol- and ethanol-water mixtures (0 ≤ x(H(2)O) ≤ 1). Sodium polysorbate 20 surfactant is used to modify the structure of the interface. Despite the observed enrichment of I(-) on the air-water interface of equimolar solutions, our results of seawater mimic samples agree with a model in which the interfacial composition is increasingly enriched in I(-) < Br(-) < Cl(-) over the oceanic boundary layer due to concentration effects in sea spray aerosol formation.


The design and realization of a stigmatic grazing-incidence instrument for space applications to solar imaging spectroscopy is presented. We propose an optical layout in which imaging and spectral capabilities are decoupled by the use of crossed cylindrical mirrors. The design consists of a double telescope and a spectrograph: telescope I consists of a single cylindrical mirror with parabolic section, focusing the radiation on the entrance slit of the spectrograph in the spectral dispersion plane; telescope II consists of two cylindrical mirrors with aspherical section in Wolter configuration focusing the radiation on the spectrograph focal plane in the direction perpendicular to the spectral dispersion plane; the spectrograph consists of a grazing-incidence spherical variable-line-spaced grating with flat-field properties. Telescope II is crossed with respect to the grating and telescope I, i.e., is mounted with its tangential planes coincident with the grating equatorial plane, to decouple spectral and spatial focusing properties. The spectral resolution is preserved also for off-axis angles. The instrument that has been realized operates in the 4-26 nm spectral range and has a field of view of 0.5 deg to image the full Sun disk.


An elevated plasma concentration of homocysteine, a sulfur-containing amino acid derived from methionine, has been recognized as an independent risk factor for the development of vascular disease (Kang et aL, 1992). Methionine is adenylated by methionine adenosyltransferase to form S-adenosylmethionine, an important biological methyl donor. Numerous methyltransferases catalyze the transfer of a methyl group from S-adenosylmethionine to a methyl acceptor, producing a methylated product and S- adenosylhomocysteine which is subsequently hydrolysed to form adenosine and homocysteine. Homocysteine has several possible fates: 1) remethylation to form methionine via either the cobalamin-dependent methionine synthase (using N⁵-methyltetrahydrofolate as a methyl donor) or betaine:homocysteine methyltransferase (using betaine as a methyl donor); 2) catabolism by the transsulfuration pathway, ultimately forming cysteine; 3) export to the extracellular space. Two vitamin B₆-dependent enzymes comprise the transsulfuration pathway: cystathionine β-synthase, which condenses homocysteine with serine to form cystathionine, and cystathionine y-lyase, which cleaves cystathionine to cysteine, NH₄⁺ and α-ketobutyrate. -- Altered flux through the remethylation or transsulfuration pathways as a result of genetic mutations or impaired vitamin status has been shown to affect plasma homocysteine levels (Ubbink et al, 1993; Kluijtmans et al., 1999). In recent years it has also become apparent that certain hormones can affect homocysteine metabolism. It has been shown that hypothyroid patients tend to have elevated plasma homocysteine and that these levels are normalized when thyroid levels are restored by thyroxine treatment
(Nedrebo et aL, 1998; Hussein et al, 1999). Altered homocysteine metabolism has been observed in diabetes mellitus. Diabetic patients (Types 1 and 2) with signs of kidney dysfunction (i.e. elevated creatinine levels) tend to have increased plasma homocysteine (Hultberg et al, 1991). However in the absence of renal dysfunction, Type 1 diabetic patients exhibit decreased plasma homocysteine relative to normal subjects (Robillon et al., 1994). In this thesis we investigated the hormonal regulation of homocysteine metabolism in rats in hope that we could illuminate a possible mechanism for altered plasma homocysteine levels in human hypothyroidism and Type 1 diabetes mellitus. -- In Chapter 3, hypothyroidism was induced in one study by addition of propythiouracil (PTU) to the drinking water for 2 weeks. In a second study, thyroidectomized and sham-operated rats were used with thyroid hormone replacement via mini-osmotic pumps. Unlike the human hypothyroid patients, both groups of hypothyroid rats exhibited decreased total plasma homocysteine (30% in PTU rats, 50% in thyroidectomized rats) versus their respective controls. Thyroid replacement normalized homocysteine levels in the thyroidectomized rat. Increased activities of the hepatic trans-sulfuration enzymes were found in both models of hypothryoidism. These results provide a possible explanation for the decreased plasma homocysteine concentrations. The hypothyroid rat cannot be used as a model to study homocysteine metabolism in hypothyroid patients. -- The purpose of our second study (Chapter 4) was to investigate homocysteine metabolism in a type 1 diabetic animal model and to examine whether insulin plays a role in its regulation. Diabetes was induced by intravenous administration of streptozotocin (100 mg/kg) to rats. Depending on the experiment, we observed a 30-70 % reduction in plasma homocysteine in the untreated diabetic rat. Treatment with insulin of the diabetic rat raised plasma homocysteine concentrations. Transsulfuration and remethylation enzymes were measured in both liver and kidney. We observed an increase in the activities of the hepatic transsulfuration enzymes (cystathionine β-synthase and cystathionine y-lyase) in the untreated diabetic rat. Insulin treatment normalized the activities of these enzymes. The renal activities of these enzymes were unchanged as was the proportion of plasma homocysteine metabolized by the kidney. These results suggest that insulin is involved in the regulation of plasma homocysteine concentrations by affecting the hepatic transsulfuration pathway. -- The increased hepatic cystathionine β-synthase activity in the untreated-diabetic rat was associated with elevated mRNA levels. Similar to its activity, cystathionine β-synthase mRNA levels were reduced by insulin administration. To further investigate the regulation of cystathionine β-synthase we incubated rat hepatoma cells (H4IIE) with various hormones. Cystathionine β-synthase mRNA, protein, and activity were induced in triamcinolone stimulated H4IIE cells. This induction was prevented by insulin incubation. CPT-cAMP, an analogue of cAMP, also induces cystathionine β-synthase mRNA levels in cultured cells. Co-incubation of insulin with CPT-cAMP prevents any increase in mRNA levels. These experiments provide evidence of the direct regulation of cystathionine β-synthase by insulin and its counter-regulatory hormones. -- Given the broad regulatory effects of glucagon on amino acid metabolism and the fact that plasma glucagon levels are often elevated in Type 1 diabetes we investigated the effect of glucagon on homocysteine metabolism in the rat (Chapter 5). Male Sprague Dawley rats were treated with glucagon (4 mg/kg/day in three divided doses) for 2 days while control rats received vehicle injections. Glucagon treatment resulted in a 30% decrease in total plasma homocysteine and increased hepatic activities of glycine N-methyltransferase, cystathionine β-synthase and cystathionine y-lyase. Enzyme activities of the remethylation pathway were unaffected. The 90% elevation in activity of cystathionine β-synthase was accompanied by a two-fold increase in its mRNA level. Hepatocytes prepared from glucagon-injected rats exported less homocysteine, when incubated with methionine, than did hepatocytes of saline-treated rats. Flux through cystathionine β-synthase was increased five-fold in hepatocytes isolated from glucagon-treated rats as determined by production of ¹⁴CO₂ and 1-¹⁴C-α-ketobutyrate from L-[1-¹⁴C]methionine. Methionine transport was elevated two-fold in hepatocytes isolated from glucagon-treated rats resulting in increased hepatic methionine levels. Hepatic concentrations of S-adenosylmethionine and S-adenosylhomocysteine, allosteric activators of cystathionine β-synthase, were also increased following glucagon treatment. These results indicate that glucagon can regulate plasma homocysteine through its effects on the hepatic transsulfuration pathway. -- This thesis provides clear evidence that glucagon lowers plasma homocysteine while insulin has the opposite effect. The mechanism for this reciprocal regulation has been outlined in detail. Taken together, it is clear that these metabolic hormones can be very important in controlling plasma homocysteine levels and that the liver is the site of this hormonal regulation.


In "The Edible South," Marcie Cohen Ferris presents food as a new way to chronicle the American South's larger history. Ferris tells a richly illustrated story of southern food and the struggles of whites, blacks, Native Americans, and other people of the region to control the nourishment of their bodies and minds, livelihoods, lands, and citizenship. The experience of food serves as an evocative lens onto colonial settlements and antebellum plantations, New South cities and Civil Rights-era lunch counters, chronic hunger and agricultural reform, counterculture communes and iconic restaurants as Ferris reveals how food--as cuisine and as commodity--has expressed and shaped southern identity to the present day.The region in which European settlers were greeted with unimaginable natural abundance was simultaneously the place where enslaved Africans vigilantly preserved cultural memory in cuisine and Native Americans held tight to kinship and food traditions despite mass expulsions. Southern food, Ferris argues, is intimately connected to the politics of power. The contradiction between the realities of fulsomeness and deprivation, privilege and poverty, in southern history resonates in the region's food traditions, both beloved and maligned.


Efficiency gains in transport operation benefit transport operators by increasing competitive advantage. Moreover, they increase social welfare through reduction in trade costs. A popular method to measure efficiency is data envelopment analysis (DEA), a programming-based technique. This chapter summarizes key DEA models used in transportation and international trade research. The authors explain divergent DEA models, such as CCR, BCC, and directional distance function. They go on to cover some of the recent applications, for example bootstrapped truncated regression, to find determinants of efficiency. In each section, they review relevant studies in the transportation or international trade sector. Lastly, they suggest directions for future research.


It is often difficult for external agents understanding to what extent the preferences of a government are directed towards welfare enhancing policies and reforms. I develop a principal-agent model in which a domestic lobby attempts to in.uence the government.s policy choices by means of monetary transfers while the weight the government attaches to public welfare is private information. I observe that asymmetric information generally leads to a larger policy distortion in equilibrium. This simple setting serves as a benchmark for the comparison with a commom agency framework. An International Financial Institution giving policy conditional aid to the government is included as an additional principle in the analysis. Its policy objective is in conflict with the lobby's one. Whether the equilibrium distortion results lower or higher depends on the range of uncertainty over the government's preferences and on the degree of benevolence of the government.


The Middle Class Tax Relief Act of 2012 mandated the creation of the Nation's first nationwide, high-speed communications network dedicated for public safety. The law instantiated a new federal entity, the Federal Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), to build, maintain, and operate a new Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. This network has the potential to equip first responders with a modern array of network devices. Mobile applications stand to be an important resource that will be utilized by this network. However, current mobile application developers may not be aware of the unique needs and requirements that must be met for operation on FirstNet's network. It would benefit the public safety community to leverage the mobile application vetting services and infrastructures that already exist. These services currently target the general public and enterprise markets. This document is intended to be an overview of existing mobile application vetting services and the features these services provide and how they relate to public safety's needs. It is also meant to aid public safety organizations when choosing which mobile application vetting services are used to evaluate relevant mobile applications.


U.S. urban centers are currently experiencing explosive growth in commercial dockless bike-sharing services. Tens of thousands of bikes have shown up across the country in recent months providing limited time for municipal governments to set regulations or assess their impact on government-funded dock-based bike-sharing programs. Washington, D.C. offers an unprecedented opportunity to examine the activity patterns of both docked and dockless bike-sharing services given the history of bike-sharing in the city and the recent availability of dockless bike data. This work presents an exploratory step in understanding how dockless bike-sharing services are being used within a city and the ways in which the activity patterns differ from traditional dock station-based programs.


We describe a public good experiment, a type of economic experiment commonly used to examine feelings of prosociality—that is, behaviour which is positive, helpful and intended to promote social acceptance and friendship—and community cohesion, carried out in Rwanda. Contributions in different parts of the country are affected by the local intensity of the 1994 genocide, with more generous contributions being made in areas where violence was greater. This supports earlier research indicating that conflict experience leads to greater prosociality. However, we also find that people who have not, themselves, been targets of violence give lower contributions than people who have. The considerable group‐related and regional differences in social behaviour may have implications for the country's policies to deal with social cohesion.


When Matthew Flinders and Robert Brown met the trepanging fleet from Makassar off north-eastern Arnhem Land in 1803 and interviewed Pobassoo, its 'old Commander', they asked a very well-informed question; according to Brown, 'They [that is, the trepangers] denied having any of their celebrated Poison wch they call Ippo, on board'. Given the long and complicated history of the European understanding of this poison, it is not clear how Flinders and Brown picked up the common association of 'ippo', or more usually in Malay 'upas', with Makassar. The significance of the question in this discussion, however, is that it demonstrates how these British observers of the trepang industry in northern Australia were able to place the trepangers within a known context. Neither Flinders nor Brown had ever visited Makassar - or would in the future, but they knew this detail about the world of South Sulawesi and the Indonesian archipelago more generally. It is a useful point from which to begin a survey of the changing attitudes of those who saw this industry in action, before turning to the outlook of those who have studied it subsequently.


ABSTRACT To assess the importance of TonB-dependent iron transport systems to growth of Shigella in vivo, a tonB mutant ofShigella dysenteriae was isolated and tested in cultured cells. The tonB mutant invaded epithelial cells, but did not form plaques in confluent monolayers of Henle cells, indicating an inability of this mutant to spread from cell to cell. The rate of intracellular multiplication of the tonB mutant was reduced significantly compared to that of the wild type. The loss of virulence in the tonB mutant was not due to loss of either Shu or Ent, the TonB-dependent systems which allow for transport of heme and ferrienterobactin, respectively. A shuA mutant lacking the outer membrane receptor for heme, an entB mutant defective in enterobactin synthesis, and a shuA entB double mutant each were able to invade cultured cells, multiply intracellularly, and form wild-type plaques. The ability of S. dysenteriae to access iron during intracellular growth was assessed by flow cytometric analysis of an iron- and Fur-regulated shuA-gfp reporter construct. Low levels of green fluorescent protein expression in the intracellular environment were observed in all strains, indicating that iron is available to intracellular bacteria, even in the absence of TonB-dependent iron transport. The failure of the tonBmutant to grow well in an iron-replete intracellular environment suggests that TonB plays a role in addition to heme- and siderophore-mediated iron acquisition in vivo, and this function is required for the intracellular growth and intercellular spread ofS. dysenteriae.


Energy storage electrodes exhibit significant capacity and
performance degradation with cycling owing to extensive decrepitation of anodes
associated with lithiation-delithiation induced volumetric expansion and
contraction. Microcrack formation in the active material and solid electrolyte
interphase layer contribute to deleterious effects including hindered
diffusion, particle isolation, and loss of cyclable active material inventory,
with detrimental performance ramifications. Unabated solid electrolyte
interphase growth in conjunction with irregular plating on metal/intercalation
electrodes can also pose serious safety issues like short-circuit, compromising
the integrity of the system. In this work, degradation originating from coupled
mechano-electrochemical-transport interactions have been identified with
detailed insights into the physical mechanisms contributing to this
degradation. Strategies to ameliorate degradation damage inside these systems
have been enumerated, with emphasis on graphite and silicon intercalation
anodes and lithium metal anode.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the rate of development of septic arthritis after elective arthroscopy and evaluate associations between various factors and development of this complication in horses.

DESIGN
Retrospective case series.

ANIMALS
682 horses that underwent arthroscopic procedures at the University of Illinois Veterinary Teaching Hospital from 1994 to 2003.

PROCEDURES
Information pertaining to signalment, joints treated, whether antimicrobials were administered, and development of postoperative septic arthritis was collected from medical records. Horses with a primary problem of septic arthritis or wounds involving joints were excluded. The following factors were evaluated to determine their roles in joint sepsis: breed, sex, joint, and preoperative and intra-articular administration of antimicrobials. Telephone interviews with clients were used to determine whether unreported septic arthritis had developed.

RESULTS
8 of 932 (0.9%) joints in 7 of 682 (1.0%) horses that underwent arthroscopy developed postoperative septic arthritis. Follow-up information after discharge from the hospital was available for 461 of the 682 horses, and of those, 8 of 627 (1.3%) joints in 7 of 461 (1.5%) horses developed septic arthritis. Breed and joint treated were significant risk factors for development of postoperative septic arthritis, with draft breeds and tibiotarsal joints more likely than others to be affected. Sex, preoperatively administered antimicrobials, and intra-articularly administered antimicrobials were not associated with development of postoperative septic arthritis.

CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE
Results can be used for comparison with data from other institutions and surgical facilities. Additional precautions should be undertaken when arthroscopic surgery involves draft breeds and tibiotarsal joints.


In the post-9/11 climate, the role of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) states in Europe's regional security environment and international politics has become more than ever a focus for attention, but remains ill-understood. This book provides a framework for the analysis of Middle Eastern foreign policies in general, and for understanding these states' relations with Europe in particular.

The book fills a gap in the literature on Euro-Middle Eastern relations by adopting a south-to-north perspective, using the tools of Foreign Policy Analysis to examine the determinants of the foreign policies of the MENA states themselves: only thus can one hope to arrive at a genuine understanding of what underlies these states' evolving policy orientations and behaviour towards Europe.

The volume starts by laying out a conceptual framework for analysis, and examining the domestic, regional, and international environments that condition MENA foreign policies. Actual policy output is then systematically investigated through a wide range of country case studies ranging from the Maghreb and the Mashreq to the Gulf and Turkey. Europe is treated throughout both as a target of those foreign policies, and as part of the environment that shapes them.

The result of a two-year project sponsored by the European University Institute's Mediterranean Programme, the book helps bridge the divide between Middle East expertise and the discipline of International Relations. The systematic comparative analysis of MENA states' foreign policy with special reference to Europe throws new light on questions about 'Third World' foreign policy.


This paper studies the influence of education on labor and geographic mobility. Mobility is an important equilibrating factor in a changing economy. Therefore, any factor that induces mobility also alleviates the symptoms of disequilibrium, and any factor that inhibits mobility also impedes economic adjustments. Does the high level of education in modern industrial societies help or hurt economic transitions? Economic theory provides conflicting arguments. On the one side, the theory of firm-specific capital predicts that education increases job duration and therefore inhibits job mobility (Jovanovic, 1979). On the other side, education should increase mobility in markets with imperfect information because better educated persons should be better able to collect and process information, reducing search and transactions costs. In a PSID subsample consisting of 736 individuals, we observed labor and geographic mobility from 1968 to 1982 and related it to the level of education at 1968. It appears that labor and geographic mobility are governed by quite different behavioral mechanism. Education strongly affects future labor and geographic mobility, but in opposite ways. A high level of education inhibits labor mobility, but increases geographic mobility.


This paper considers a frequency-domain synchronization/channel decoding procedure for systems employing TCH-based training blocks (Tomlison, Cercas and Hughes). Using the fact that an N-point Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) can be partitioned into M smaller DFTs we present a procedure for simultaneous decoding/despreading and synchronization that can switch between 16 bit-length and 256 bit-length cyclic codes.


In February 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama visited Capital City Public Charter School in northwest Washington, D.C. They were greeted at the front entrance of the school by 5th-grade students and given a brief tour before taking a seat in the library to read The Moon Over Star to a group of 2nd graders. This was the First Family's first official public-school visit, just a few short weeks after President Obama was sworn into office. Obama's enthusiastic support for charter schools was one of the things that set him apart from his Democratic predecessors and marked him as a "proreform" Democrat. Even accounting for the usual political exaggeration, the president seemed pretty impressed by what he saw: "The outstanding work that's being done here ... is an example of how all our schools should be," said Obama. "I've asked Arne Duncan to ... make sure that we're reforming our schools, that we're rewarding innovation the way that it's taking place here." Little noticed at the time, the school the White House chose for the visit wasn't exactly a typical urban charter. Based on the Expeditionary Learning model and begun by a group of parents in 2000, Capital City is located in an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse part of northwest Washington, rather than in a highpoverty area. It recruits a mix of black, Latino, and white families, in contrast to the homogeneous groups of low-income minority students urban charters generally serve. Last but not least, its teaching approach is designed to work with both advanced and struggling students, and intended to foster abstract skills like creativity, depth of thought, and problem solving, rather than focusing on remediation and basic reading and math skills. Fueled by a confluence of interests among urban parents, progressive educators, and school reform refugees, a small but growing handful of diverse charter schools like Capital City has sprouted up in big cities over the past decade: others are High Tech High in San Diego; E. L. Haynes in Washington, D.C.; Larchmont Charter School and Citizens of the World Prep in Los Angeles; Summit in Northern California; the five-school Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) network; Community Roots, Brooklyn Prospect Charter School, and Upper West Success Academy in New York City; and Bricolage Academy, planned for New Orleans (see sidebar, page 33). These schools attract children of city workers, project residents, New York Times reporters, and government officials, and simultaneously attempt to address the weaknesses of "no-excuses" charter schools, progressive education, and school segregation: "Usually in the places that are all about accountability it doesn't feel like there is a ton of learning going on as the primary outcome," says Josh Densen, a former KIPP teacher who is set to open Bricolage Academy next year. "In schools where it's all about learning, discovery, and projects and teamwork, there seems to me to be an absence of or a reluctance to have any kind of accountability." While it is too soon to say whether they are effective over time or at scale, these diverse charter schools are revealing themselves to be popular, controversial, and--not surprisingly--complicated to operate. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Diversity at Community Roots On a sunny fall afternoon, a group of 5th graders at Community Roots in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, looked over a short passage about the Montgomery bus boycott, practicing how to find extra information in captions and headlines. Some were struggling to get started or needed a review of the basic concepts from one of the two teachers in the room. Others zoomed ahead and were encouraged to think about more advanced ideas like inference and themes. Some had on fashionable ankle boots, while others wore threadbare T-shirts. Their names ranged from Gabe to Ilios to Amira to Bella. …


The financing of higher education is a major problem in Africa. In this paper, we examine the financing of University Education in Botswana in the context of the report of the second National Commission on Education. The proposals on cost sharing and cost efficiency are explored and suggestions are offered on how the Grant/Loan Scheme should be modified to achieve greater equity and efficiency in the system. Finally, recommendations are made on how the University of Botswana might adopt a more organisationally responsive approach to self-funding and thus reduce its high level of dependence on Government subvention.


Abstract. Orienteering maps must be clear and readable due to demands on competitors to accurately navigate under time pressure. Colour is used to indicate runnability (ease of traversing through terrain) and distinguish between features, many of which would be omitted from other types of topographic mapping. Use of colour can be a barrier to participation for the 8% of men and 0.4% of women who have colour vision deficiencies (CVD), commonly known as 'colour blindness' (Birch, 1993). Map use by those with CVD is lower than in the general population (Olson and Brewer, 1997) partly due to frustrations differentiating between map symbols which appear identical or may not even be visible.Colours on orienteering maps are controlled by international specifications (the International Specification for Orienteering Maps, ISOM 2017 (IOF Map Commission, 2017) and the International Specification for Sprint Orienteering Maps, ISSOM 2006 (IOF Map Commission, 2006)) and chosen to be unambiguous to those with CVD. However, Long and Junghans (2008) found that some of the specified colours could be easily confused by people with common types of CVD. Additionally, maps for lower levels of competition are often made by club members who have little or no formal cartographic training. Specifications are frequently used incorrectly, and printers rarely calibrated with the official test sheet. Mapper inexperience and issues with the underlying specifications combine to give a poor experience to orienteers (or potential orienteers) with CVD.In a preliminary investigation into the accessibility of orienteering maps, four experienced orienteers with CVD were interviewed about the use of colour on both ISOM and ISSOM orienteering maps. Based on issues they reported, four versions of one ISOM map were produced to test alternative colours for certain symbols. Participants were asked to rank the four map images in order of readability. The map images were then input into Coblis, a free, online colour vision simulator (https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/). The outputs from Coblis were ranked by people with no CVD. Correlation between how images were ranked indicates that Coblis produces a useful simulation of what is seen by those with CVD and is suitable for informing the design of orienteering maps. It is suggested that orienteering mappers should adopt this or a similar tool to check and improve accessibility of maps before printing. Colour vision simulators could also contribute to a larger review of map specifications for accessibility, including developing ways to modify individual maps for competitors with rare vision anomalies.Table 1 shows the four map images as they were created, and a simulation of how they would appear to a person with a deuteran anomaly – an inability to detect green light – the most common type of CVD (Long and Junghans, 2008). 'A' shows a map drawn to specification, while 'B', 'C', and 'D' test two variations for the colours of the course overprint and the map areas designated "out of bounds". All participants (those with CVD looking at the original images, and those without looking at the simulated images) stated that 'D' was the easiest to read.


From the first nine chapters of Chronicles it becomes clear that not only Samuel-Kings were used as sources by the Chronicler, but also the Pentateuch. The Chronicler was certainly one of the earliest readers of the Pentateuch (in whatever form) after the exile. The peculiarity of the Chronicler's version of Israelite history starting with "Adam" has been noted by many scholars. It seems as if the Chronicler particularly found the genealogies in Gen 1-11 useful to legitimize a universal context for negotiating the identity of All-Israel in the late Persian Period. This contribution will examine some of the Chronicler's genealogies in synoptic comparison with the genealogies of the Urgeschichte in order to determine how and why this exilic literature was used in Chronicles at a later stage in the literary history of the Hebrew Bible, as well as to establish what we can learn about the literary history of the Pentateuch from the Chronicler's usage.