During the past two decades, convective scale models have advanced sufficiently to study the dynamic and microphysical processes associated with mesoscale convective systems. The basic features of these models are that they are non-hydrostatic and include a good representation of microphysical pro cesses. The Goddard Cumulus Ensemble (GCE) model has been extensively applied to study cloud-environment interactions, cloud interaction and merg ers, air-sea interaction, cloud draft structure and trace gas transport. The GCE model has improved significantly during the past decade. For example, ice-microphysical processes, and solar and infrared radiative transfer pro cesses have been included. These model improvements allow the GCE model to study cloud-radiation interaction, cloud-radiation-climate relations and to develop rain retrieval algorithms for Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). In Part I, a full description of the GCE model is presented, as well as several sensitivity tests associated with its assumptions. In Part II (Simpson and Tao, 1993), we will review GCE model applications to cloud precipitating processes and to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a joint U.S.-Japan satellite project to measure rain and latent heat release over the global tropics.


Aromatase activity in the acromegaly is a critical marker of decided sexual behavior. There is a confirmation demonstrated that aromatase activity is associated with testosterone and estradiol levels. The goal was to explore the relationship between GH, IGF-1, testosterone, estradiol and aromatase activity in patients with active acromegaly. In this study sixty males (age 20-60) years were enrolled. Serum of testosterone, estradiol, GH, IGF-1 and aromatase activity measured in both groups. The results revealed that mean of serum aromatase activity and estradiol levels were significant differences decrease in active acromegaly when compare with the control group and aromatase activity important correlate with IGF-1 and estradiol necessary correlate with GH/ IGF-1 and T/E2. While GH, IGF-1-1, GH/ IGF-1, testosterone and T/E2 were significant differences increase in active acromegaly when compare with the control group and GH was necessary to correlate with GH/IGF-1 in patients group.


In this review, we compared the potential of mesenchymal stem cells derived from bone marrow, adipose tissue and umbilical cord as suitable sources for regeneration of inner ear hair cells and auditory neurons. Our intensive literature search indicates that stem cells in some of adult mammalian tissues, such as bone marrow, can generate new cells under physiological and pathological conditions. Among various types of stem cells, bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells are one of the most promising candidates for cell replacement therapy. Mesenchymal stem cells have been reported to invade the damaged area, contribute to the structural reorganization of the damaged cochlea and improve incomplete hearing recovery. We suggest that bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells would be more beneficial than other mesenchymal stem cells.


Background A range of natural factors, invasive animals and human activity have been severely affecting stability of the ecosystem, resulting in the annihilation of plants habitats and so plant endangerment or even extinction. In Qatar, urgent action needs to be taken to stop decline of desert plant species as well as an effective strategy should be applied to reverse and save these wild endangered plants. Otherwise, they will be faced with the danger of their extinction in near future. Therefore, it is very important to have knowledge of protection measures, such as replanting and propagating through tissue culture technology, to protect the biodiversity in Qatar. Plant in-vitro culture systems have been used as an alternative approach to propagate and conserve a large number of rare and endangered plant species that show difficulties to be propagated using conventional methods of propagation. It was reported that standard culture environment could be effectively employed for short-term in-vitro conservation of different plant germplasm, through increasing intervals between subcultures especially in slow growing plant species. Objectives In the current study, conservation of rare and endangered desert plants using in-vitro culture were developed. Generally, these plants are not easy to be propagated by classical horticultural methods. Different techniques including micro-propagation, in vitro seed germination, and regeneration from callus were applied to propagate and conserve three endangered plant species in Qatar; Leptadenia pyrotechnica, Glossonema varians and Prosopis cineraria. Methods Collection of endangered plant species Location of the endangered plant species were identified and the plant parts- seeds, stem, shoots, roots, nodal cuttings or whole plant- depending on its type and availability, were collected. Surface sterilization of the collected material The plant materials were washed with tap water to remove dust and debris, then were soaked in 70% ethanol for 1–2 min, then were treated with sodium hypochlorite or Clorox for 10–20 min followed by rinsing 3–5 times with sterilized distilled water under aseptic conditions. In-vitro plants formation Organ culture using nodal sections of the plants were cultured on hormone-free MS medium (0.5X) for in vitro plants formation. For seeds were cultured on medium containing gibberellic acid (GA3) for efficient seeds germination. In this way, in vitro plants were established and multiplied to produce large number of healthy clones. In case seeds or nodal cuttings are not available, other plant parts like leaf or root were used as explants to initiate callus tissues. Results Seeds of Leptadenia pyrotechnica were collected, surface sterilized and germinated under aseptic condition using 0.5X MS media. In-vitro employing tissue culture via callus and shoot induction using different growth regulators was explored. Seedlings from in-vitro germination of the seed were used as explants. The results revealed that the highest callus production was obtained using 2.0 mg/L BAP. In addition, 0.5 mg/L and 2.0 mg/L NAA were good for callus initiation, compared to other hormones. Seedlings of Glossonema varians were collected were used as an explant for callus induction. Several plant growth regulator were used to initiate callus including 2, 4, D, NAA and BAP and their combinations. The results showed that the best plant growth regulators to induce callus were 1.5 mg/l IBA and 2 mg/l BAP. Prosopis cineraria, is a famous tree in Qatar. It is not easy to be propagated by classical horticultural methods. Seed dormancy was broken by scratching via sand paper. Several plant growth regulator were used to initiate callus including 2, 4, D, NAA and BAP and their combinations. The results showed that the best plant growth regulators to induce callus were both 2.0 mg/l 2, 4, D and 1.5 mg/l IBA. The obtained callus will be treated to regenerate new plantlets. Adventitious shoots and roots formation will be induced and a large number of in vitro plants will be produced. The in-vitro grown clones will be hardened (acclimatized) for greenhouse and later field conditions. The in-vitro plants will be removed from the cultures; medium will be removed by washing with running water and sown in pots. The pots will be covered with plastic sheets to keep high humidity and gradual removal of the plastic will harden the plants for greenhouse.Conclusions Recently, in-vitro culture technique of desert plants has received importance because it can be used for the fast propagation and ex situ conservation of endangered plants. The success of micro-propagation and in vitro conservation of the selected endangered plants depends on the best choice of the explants, the efficiency of the sterilization method and correct plant growth regulator. The best in-vitro conservation of the selected plant species is in MS media with the following plant hormones 2, 4, D, NAA. IBA and BAP. Acknowledgements «This study was made possible by UREP grant # UREP19-209-1-037 from the Qatar national research fund (a member of Qatar foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the author(s).»


The processes of symbiotic germination and seedling development were analysed in the myco-heterotrophic orchid Corallorhiza trifida, seeds of which were buried in 'packets' either adjacent to or at varying distances from adult plants in defined communities of ectomycorrhizal tree species. Germination occurred within eight months of burial under Betula-Alnus and within seven months under Salix repens. It was always associated with penetration of the suspensor by a clamp-forming mycorrhizal fungus. Four distinct developmental stages were defined and the rates of transition through these stages were plotted. There was no evidence of a relationship between extent of germination or rate of development and the presence of naturally distributed plants of C. trifida at the spatial scale of 1 m. The best germination and the most rapid rate of development of C. trifida seedlings occurred in a Salix repens community located at a considerable distance from any extant C. trifida population. Determination of internal transcribed spacer (ITS) RFLPs and of gene sequences of the fungi involved in symbiotic germination and growth of C. trifida, revealed them to belong exclusively to the Thelephora-Tomentella complex of the Thelephoraceae. These fungi are known also to be ectomycorrhizal associates of trees. It is hypothesized that the rate of growth of the C. trifida seedlings is determined by the ability of the fungal symbionts to transfer carbon from their ectomycorrhizal co-associates.


In this work, we studied human head motions during upper extremity motor task, conducted in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. The experiments were performed on a mock up of the MRI bench. Three kinds of linear movements in the caudal-cranial, left-right and anterior-posterior directions, a reaching movement as well as single joint movements at shoulder, elbow and wrist, were investigated at three different speeds with the right arm. Optical markers tracked by a high-precision motion tracking system were used to detect head and arm movements. For each task, the head moved principally in the direction of right-caudal-posterior to left-cranial-anterior, parallel to the line from the right shoulder joint to the head. No principal rotation axis was observed. The translational and rotational head motions were 1.7 ∼ 8.4 mm and 0.15° ∼ 0.96°, respectively. We then applied a special head fixation to stabilize the head, and repeated all the experiments. The translational and rotational head motions were significantly suppressed by 78% and 73%, to the range of 0.3 ∼ 2.4 mm and 0.04°. ∼ 0.39°


Genes encoded by Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) are highly polymorphic, contributing significantly to vertebrate immune response. In this report, MHC locus encoded DQA and DQB genes have been characterized in buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), a livestock species of highest commercial importance in the Indian subcontinent. Full-length sequencing of buffalo DQA1, DQA2 revealed a single open reading frame (ORF) of 768, encoding 256 amino acids while DQB gene locus was 774 nucleotides long, encoding a polypeptide of 258 amino acids. Sequence characterization helped in documentation of expression of a third locus DQA3, for the first time in buffalo. Expression of MHC Class II genes was evaluated across peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of mastitis affected (n=17) and non-affected (healthy, n=17) Murrah buffaloes, as well as after in-vitro challenging of PBMCs of animals of both the groups with Gram-negative bacterial ligand, lipopolysaccharide. SYBRGreen dye based real-time PCR assay using RNA purified and reverse transcribed from PBMCs, indicated more than two fold higher basal expression of DQA (2.3) and DRA (2.3) genes in non-mastitis buffaloes compared to those with mastitis. Further, melt-curve analysis by assessing shift of peak helped in identification of diverged alleles that were confirmed to be arising through gene duplication. There was significant difference in the expression of DQA and DQB molecules in PBMCs of mastitis and non-mastitis groups examined after in-vitro LPS challenge. Further, it was also established that duplicated DQ loci might have an effect on lower mastitis occurrence in buffaloes, as observed through association studies. PBMCs, thus, exhibited a unique ability to regulate surface expression of MHC class II molecules during mastitis in buffalo and will be helpful in better understanding the role of these molecules in mastitis occurrence and possible resistance in bovines. Real-time PCR assay could be used in identification of allelic diversity as well as duplication among MHC genes. This is the first report on MHC Class II genes expression and association with disease resistance in buffalo.


Modulation classification of digital communications signals plays an important role in both military and civilian sectors. It has the potential of replacing several receivers with one universal receiver. An automatic modulation classifier can be defined as a system that automatically identifies the modulation type of the received signal given that the signal exists and its parameters lie in a known range. This thesis addresses the need for a universal modulation classifier capable of classifying a comprehensive list of digital modulation schemes. Two classification approaches are presented: a decision-theoretic (DT) approach and a neural network (NN) approach. I First classifiers are introduced that can classify ASK, PSK, and FSK signals. A decision tree is designed for the DT approach and a NN structure is formulated and trained to classify these signals. Both classifiers use the same key features derived from the intercepted signal. These features are based on the instantaneous amplitude, instantaneous phase, and instantaneous frequency of the intercepted signal, and the cumulants of its complex envelope. Threshold values for the DT approach are found from the minimum total error probabilities of the extracted key features at SNR of 20 to -5dB. The NN parameters are found by training the networks on the same data. The DT and NN classifiers are expanded to include CPM signals. Signals within the CPM class are also added to the classifiers and a separate decision tree and new NN structure are found for these signals. New key features to classify these signals are also introduced. The classifiers are then expanded further to include multiple access signals, followed by QAM, PSK8 and FSK8 signals. New features are found to classify these signals. The final decision tree is able to accommodate a total of fifteen different modulation types. The NN structure is designed in a hierarchical fashion to optimise the classification performance of these fifteen digital modulation schemes. Both DT and NN classifiers are able to classify signals with more than 90% accuracy in the presence of additive white Gaussian within SNR ranging from 20 to 5dB. However, the performance of the NN classifier appears to be more robust as it degrades gradually at the SNRs of O and -5dB. At -5dB, the NN has an overall accuracy of 73.58%, whereas the DT classifier achieves only 47.3% accuracy. The overall accuracy of the NN classifier, over the combined SNR range of 20 to -5dB, is 90.7% compared to 84.56% for the DT classifier. Finally, the performances of these classifiers are tested in the presence of Rayleigh fading. The DT and NN classifier structures are modified to accommodate fading and again, new key features are introduced to accomplish this. With the modifications, the overall accuracy of the NN classifier, over the combined SNR range of 20 to -5dB and 120Hz Doppler shift, is 87.34% compared to 80.52% for the DT classifier.


This thesis explores the manifest content of the U.S. Executive framing effort intended to persuade the U.S. Congress, United Nations Security Council, and the American people that there was no greater threat to US national security than the continuing reign of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Through analysis of individual and group contributions to the three dominant themes created by the executive leadership, namely, the link between the regime of Saddam Hussein and terrorism, the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and the status of the regime and Saddam Hussein as an outlaw, I illuminate the process used to gain support for the unprecedented policy of preemptive war. The results of my analysis differ with previous literature on the subject which primarily considers the Bush administration's effort to be a campaign of lies, intended to lead the American people and the international community to believe a threat existed that the Bush Administration knew was not credible. In contrast to that conclusion, my analysis of the framing effort indicates that the marketing campaign for the Iraq War capitalized on world events, timing, the credibility of the particular speaker and their office and the amplifying effect of the media, making a campaign of lies unnecessary and the process they used replicable. Therefore, this analysis may justify heightened scrutiny for comparable policies in the future, even when the statements and argumentation an administration makes are primarily accurate and verifiable.


Background and aims: Exposure and vulnerability to racial discrimination is not solely a function of
race but the intersection of race and gender, with Black men experiencing more discrimination than
Black women. This phenomenon is explained by the subordinate male target hypothesis, suggesting
that majority men specifically target men of color. If that is the case, implicit bias would be most
common among the majority men. The current cross-sectional study investigated race by gender
differences in implicit bias against Blacks.
Methods: Data came from Harvard University's Project Implicit, an online survey, conducted during
2006-2016. Data included 444422 implicit association tests (IATs) which were taken by Blacks
(n=56384) and Whites (n=388038). Using IAT, the dependent variable was implicit bias against
Blacks. Independent variables were race, gender, and age. Using SPSS, linear regressions were utilized
to test the additive and multiplicative effects of race and gender on implicit bias against Blacks.
Results: Race (b = 0.39; 95% CI = 0.38-0.39) and gender (b = 0.05; 95% CI = 0.05-0.05) were
associated with IAT score suggesting higher implicit bias against Blacks among Whites and men. A
significant interaction was found between race and gender (b = 0.05; 95% CI = 0.04-0.07), suggesting
the highest level of implicit bias against Blacks among White men.
Conclusion: It is not solely race and gender but their intersection that shapes social distribution of
implicit bias against Blacks. This finding extends the previous literature showing that not solely race or
gender but their intersection influences exposure to discrimination.
Keywords: Ethnic groups, Racism, Racial discrimination, Race, Whites, Blacks, African Americans,
Gender, Bias, Implicit bias


It is shown that coating graphene-silicon (Gr/Si) Schottky junction based solar cells with graphene oxide (GO) improves the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the cells, while demonstrating unprecedented device stability. The PCE has been shown to be increased to 10.6% (at incident radiation of 100 mW cm(-2)) for the Gr/Si solar cell with an optimal GO coating thickness compared to 3.6% for a bare/uncoated Gr/Si solar cell. The p-doping of graphene by the GO, which also serves as an antireflection coating (ARC) has been shown to be a main contributing factor to the enhanced PCE. A simple spin coating process has been used to apply GO with thickness commensurate with an anti-refection coating (ARC) and indicates the suitability of the developed methodology for large-scale solar cell assembly.


In order to study the micromechanism of silver migration that influences the dielectric properties and reliability of Zn0.95Mg0.05TiO3+0.25TiO2 (ZMT″) with 1 wt% 3ZnO–B2O3 multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), various silver (Ag)–palladium (Pd) ratios of conductors were used as inner electrodes. It was found that the electrical resistance of a MLCC sample with pure Ag as inner electrodes was degraded drastically to compared with the Ag/Pd inner electrodes at measuring temperatures ranging from 25°C to 175°C. It may be explained that the pure Ag migrates easily into the dielectric layer along the grain boundary during co-firing. The ZMT″ MLCCs exhibited increasing dielectric constant and insulation resistance considerably with increasing sintering temperature. Moreover, the results also indicate that Ag diffusion changes the dielectric properties and decreases the breakdown voltage. A ZMT″ MLCC with a high Ag content in the inner electrode exhibits poor reliability, and the effect of Ag+ migration is markedly enhanced when the activation energy of the ZMT″ dielectric is considerably lowered due to the excessive formation of oxygen vacancies and the semiconducting Zn2TiO4 phase when Ag+ substitutes for Zn2+ during co-firing.


The 1985 judgment in O'Brien v. O'Brien, holding that a medical license was marital property, is probably the most well-known family law decision ever rendered by the New York Court of Appeals. But despite the enthusiastic reception it initially received from many reformers, it has been a spectacular failure. Not only has it been rejected by the courts of every other state, but its legislative repeal has been sought by mainstream New York bar associations, and its abandonment recently recommended by a commission appointed by the Chief Justice who originally championed it. This essay, a condensed version of which will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming book Family Law Stories, traces the history of the case to learn why New York, which had been among the most conservative states in the nation in its treatment of marital property, became the only state to adopt this revolutionary view. The answer appears to be a combination of political will with a peculiar New York legal provincialism that led both the court, and leading New York commentators, to misperceive the very ordinary provisions of the state's new equitable distribution law as unique and radical. Relying on a close examination of the record, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and interviews with some of the principals, the essay also uncovers previously unknown parts of the O'Briens' story that suggest that while the decision was more unjust than most legal scholars have assumed, its full effect was avoided by a secret settlement that reduced its impact on the O'Briens.


It is presented that the introduction of an alkyne linkage could be an important tool for fine-tuning the electronic and optoelectronic properties of certain donor–acceptor (D–A) conjugated polymers. Extensive optoelectronic studies in an alternating copolymer consisting of diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP) and ethynylene linkage (TDPPTTB) and comparison over its fully cyclic DPP analogues, such as phenyl (TDPPTP) and thiophene (TDPPTT) rings reveals the role of the ethynylene moiety when it is introduced into the polymer backbone. The ethynylene moiety decreases the donor character of the thiophenes that flank the DPP therefore the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) level of TDPPTTB is situated between the HOMO levels of the TDPPTP and TDPPTT. The optical band gap (Eoptg) of TDPPTTB is fixed between the Eoptg of TDPPTT and TDPPTP with a significant blue-shift in its absorption maximum. Furthermore, detailed studies on the electronic properties of TDPPTTB have been performed in Field Effect Transistors (FETs) using various dielectric materials. Transistors based on TDPPTTB films annealed at 120 °C show ambipolar behaviour, similar to TDPPTP and TDPPTT, with carrier mobilities of 0.03 cm2 V−1 s−1 for holes and 0.02 cm2 V−1 s−1 for electrons.


This paper is the first to document empirically that urban shopping areas have a pronounced centre where the rents are the highest, and a negative rent gradient. We use this insight to build and test empirically a simple theoretical model of the competition between the residential and the retail land in a city. The model predicts that rents and occupancy rates on the edges of shopping areas are most sensitive to changes in economic conditions. Demand shocks may lead to transformations between retail and residential land use, mostly at the edge, and to a contraction or expansion of shopping areas. The model predictions are tested on unique data on the location and characteristics of all retail and non-retail properties within 300 largest shopping areas in the Netherlands in 2004-2014, a period including the Great Recession. With every 100 metre distance from the centre of a shopping area rents fall, on average, by 15 percent. Shopping streets, areas located on attractive sites and areas offering free parking have a flatter distance decay. The vacancy rate on the edge of a shopping area is almost twice as high as in the centre. During the Great Recession some 2% of the retail properties were transformed into other use, mostly on the edges of the shopping areas.


This paper presents modelling and simulation of an autonomous DC microgrid in Matlab Simulink environment. The proposed microgrid system consists of a wind turbine, solar PV array and DC loads. The wind turbine is interfaced to the microgrid with a rectifier and a buck converter which are controlled to maintain a constant DC bus voltage. While the PV array is connected via a boost converter which extracts maximum power from the circuit. The microgrid system also consists of a centralized Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) which is connected via a bidirectional buck-boost converter. The overall stability of the microgrid is maintained by the control action of the BESS. Finally, simulation study of the microgrid with the proposed control methodologies is carried out for various operating conditions.


Extracted from text ... 22 Management Today May 2006
Success:
it's a brain of two halves
KKnowledge is no longer power. A self-help
book has become an unexpected hit with
the prediction that success in the 21st century
will depend on the ability to tear up
the rules and think laterally.
The book, A Whole New Mind, argues
that we need to develop the 'soft' skills in
the right side of the brain. These, says
Daniel Pink, the author, will eclipse the
analytical ability controlled by the left side.
The traditional knowledge based professions
that control the Western world -
banking, law, management and ..


Thomas Wentworth landed in Ireland in 1633 - almost 100 years after Henry VIII had begun his break with Rome. The majority of the people were still Catholic. William Laud had just been elevated to Canterbury. A Yorkshire cleric, John Bramhall, followed the new viceroy and became, in less than one year, Bishop of Derry. This 2007 study, which is centred on Bramhall, examines how these three men embarked on a policy for the established Church which represented not only a break with a century of reforming tradition but which also sought to make the tiny Irish Church a model for the other Stuart kingdoms. Dr McCafferty shows how accompanying canonical changes were explicitly implemented for notice and eventual adoption in England and Scotland. However within eight years the experiment was blown apart and reconstruction denounced as subversive. Wentworth, Laud and Bramhall faced consequent disgrace, trial, death or exile.


Accounting practices of Hongkong and Shanghai Bank from 1865 to 1876 fostered its repertoire of precocial identities. Hongkong and Shanghai bank used these identities to act opportunistically in commercial dealings with the British colonial administration of Hong Kong, the public of the United Kingdom, and the Emperor of China and his Chinese administration. This paper argues HSBC varied its financial reporting practices to manage its identities in public spaces in different cultural constituencies in order to ensure its longer term survival. The approach taken is to use the example of HSBC's Foochow loan to demonstrate its use of financial reporting to sustain its various identities. Documents pertaining to the published financial statements of Hongkong and Shanghai Bank between 1865 and 1876 are examined for the accounting practices and policies used. Secondary sources were also analysed. Hongkong and Shanghai Bank uniquely positioned itself to be simultaneously viewed as a conservative bank based on Scottish banking principles and a trusted local bank of the people of Hong Kong. It was the only bank acting in these three capacities. It achieved this by varying financial reporting practices to manage stakeholders' confidence. Only sources written in English were utilised in this study, as English texts dominate the historical records. However Chinese language representations are not present in this analysis. This study challenges meta-narrative explanations of the banking sector in colonization.


Sustainable energy management involves the provision of energy supply that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their needs. Sustainable energy strategies must involve energy savings on the demand side, plus on the supply side, efficiency improvements in energy production and the replacement of fossil fuels by various forms of renewable energy. This paper analyzes the issues involving utilization of different energy sources. Formulating a dynamic optimization problem, expressions are derived for optimal energy supply prices from each of three energy sources, wind energy, hydroelectric power, and fossil fuels. Based on the economic characteristics of the energy sources, an optimal solution is derived that involves both periods of specialization in a single energy source as well as the simultaneous utilization of three available sources.


Scatter matrix and its normalized counterpart, referred to as shape matrix, are key parameters in multivariate statistical signal processing, as they generalize the concept of covariance matrix in the widely used Complex Elliptically Symmetric distributions. Following the framework of <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">[1]</xref>, intrinsic Cramér–Rao bounds are derived for the problem of scatter and shape matrices estimation with samples following a Complex Elliptically Symmetric distribution. The Fisher Information Metric and its associated Riemannian distance (namely, CES-Fisher) on the manifold of Hermitian positive definite matrices are derived. Based on these results, intrinsic Cramér–Rao bounds on the considered problems are then expressed for three different distances (Euclidean, natural Riemannian, and CES-Fisher). These contributions are therefore a generalization of Theorems 4 and 5 of <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">[1]</xref> to a wider class of distributions and metrics for both scatter and shape matrices.


Cultural landscapes in the United Kingdom are derived from mainly agricultural activity of the last five thousand years. Wilding projects are a recent phenomenon which have received attention in both the academic and public domains. As a result a tension is emerging between those that perceive these areas as ideal for wilding experimentation and the environmental, economic and social benefits already provided by upland farming systems. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to explore some of the experiences of farmers involved a rewilding project to emphasise the importance of fully appreciating, collaborating and recognising how upland farming systems operate and their wider socio-economic benefits. It is evident that intrinsic characteristics of UK upland farming systems such as its relationship with the physical environment, indigenous livestock breeds, stratification, hefting, social capital and cultural heritage play important roles in wider political and social agendas which must not be brushed aside in our pursuit of wilding. Second, there are practicalities of wilding or part wilding landscapes that are currently managed for extensive livestock production, particularly with respect to grazing management which require a deeper appreciation of how hill farming operates. It is unlikely, due to broader agendas such as biodiversity production, food security, rural sustainable development, ecosystem services and cultural heritage, that wilding and upland farming will develop in mutual exclusivity; either they will share the same land or they will be geographically contiguous and thus one will affect the management of the other. By actively learning from pilot projects like Wild Ennerdale, we can develop fully collaborative multifunctional land use of which wilding is one facet.


Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is an invasive tomographic imaging modality, providing images of coronary arteries and other blood vessels. Over the last 20 years IVUS has evolved into an excellent adjunct to coronary angiography. Although coronary angiography continues to be the standard tool to assess the coronary artery lumen, angiography does not supply direct information about the plaque and vessel wall. IVUS provides complementary diagnostic information about the artery wall which cannot be obtained by angiography alone.

IVUS systems contain a special transducer mounted catheter and an electronics console to reconstruct the image. The ultrasound signal is produced in the transducer by passing an electrical current through the piezoelectric (pressure-electric) crystalline material (usually ceramic) that expands and contracts when electrically excited. After reflection from tissue, part of the ultrasound energy returns to the transducer and is converted into the image. High ultrasound frequencies (20–40 MHz) are employed resulting in an axial resolution in the range of 80–150 μm and lateral resolution of 200–250 μm.1

### Catheter technology

Currently available monorail rapid exchange intracoronary ultrasound catheters have an outer diameter of between 2.6–3.5 French (0.87–1.17 mm diameter) which can be advanced through a 6 French guide catheter. Two transducer designs are commonly used: the mechanically rotating transducer and the electronically switched phased array system.

Mechanical systems consist of a drive cable to rotate a single transducer at the catheter tip at 1800 rpm (30 revolutions per second), sweeping an ultrasound beam perpendicular to the catheter. At approximately 1° increments, the transducer sends and receives ultrasound signals. In mechanical catheter systems, the imaging transducer is inside a protective sheath, through which the imaging catheter is advanced and pulled back.

Electronic systems , also referred to as the solid state IVUS system, have multiple transducer elements (up to 64) arranged in an annular array rather than a single rotating transducer. The transducers …


The demand of electricity in India is increasing exponentially at the rate of 8-9% per annum. However, the installed power generation capacity of India as on 31st October 2012 was 209276 MW with a peak power shortage of more than 12%. In addition, the demand of electricity is increasing due to increased population, urbanization and comfort level of the peoples. These indicate that India's future energy requirements are going to be very high. In this paper an attempt has been made for generation forecasting by using a hybrid model of neural networks and fuzzy logic, for the hybrid model input monthly generation of CSPGCL Thermal Unit of CG has been collected from Chhattisgarh State Electricity Board , India .The results obtained from hybrid model has been validated with the actual value and found accurate. The average testing error in the forecasted value is 0.064 in comparison with the desired value.


Automatic detection of linguistic negation in free text is a demanding need for many text processing applications including Sentiment Analysis. Our system uses online news archives from two different resources namely NDTV and The Hindu. While dealing with news articles, we performed three subtasks namely identifying the target; separation of good and bad news content from the good and bad sentiment expressed on the target and analysis of clearly marked opinion that is expressed explicitly, not needing interpretation or the use of world knowledge. In this paper, our main focus was on evaluating and comparing three sentiment analysis methods (two machine learning based and one lexical based) and also identifying the scope of negation in news articles for two political parties namely BJP and UPA by using three existing methodologies. They were Rest of the Sentence (RoS), Fixed Window Length (FWL) and Dependency Analysis (DA). Among the sentiment methods the best F-measure was SVM with the values 0.688 and 0.657 for BJP and UPA respectively. On the other hand, the F measures for RoS, FWL and DA were 0.58, 0.69 and 0.75 respectively. We observed that DA was performing better than the other two. Among 1675 sentences in the corpus, according to annotator I, 1,137 were positive and 538 were negative whereas according to annotator II, 1,130 were positive and 545 were negative. Further we also identified the score of each sentence and calculated the accuracy on the basis of average score of both the annotators.


Objective:The objective of this paper is to compare mortality outcomes between patients treated at a trauma center in France and matched patients in the United States. Background:Although trauma systems in France and the United States differ significantly in prehospital and inhospital management, previous comparisons have been challenged by the lack of comparable data. Methods:Coarsened exact matching identified matching patients between a single center trauma database from Lyon, France, and the National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB) of the United States. Moderate to severely injured [injury severity score (ISS) > 8] adult patients (age ≥ 16) presenting alive to level 1 trauma centers from 2002 to 2005 with blunt or penetrating injuries were included. After matching patients, multivariate regression analyses were performed to determine difference in mortality between patients in Lyon and the NTDB. Results:A total of 1043 significantly injured patients were presented to the Lyon center. Matching eligible patients with complete records were sought from 219,985 patients in the NTDB. The unadjusted odds of mortality at the Lyon center was 2.5 times higher than that of the NTDB [95% confidence interval (CI) = 2.18–2.98]. However, the Lyon center received patients with higher ISS, lower Glasgow Coma Score (GCS), and lower systolic blood pressure (SBP) (all P < 0.001). After 1:1 matching, 858 patient pairs were produced, and the odds of mortality became equivalent [odds ratio (OR) = 1.3, 95% CI = 0.91–1.73]. Similar results were found in multiple subset analyses. Conclusions:Trauma patients admitted to a single French trauma center had an equal chance of survival compared with similarly injured patients treated at US trauma centers.


The importance of quantifying existing ecosystem services, assessing the impacts of various land use decisions and ultimately evaluating the overall costs and benefits of different land use patterns having internalized ecosystem services, is now widely recognized and such work is at the forefront of current landscape management planning. We aim to quantify ecosystem services derived from different land uses within the Atibainha Reservoir catchment in Brazil, determine the spatial distribution of ecosystem services and quantify the impacts of land use changes on the provision of ecosystem services. Four ecosystem services were considered: carbon sequestration, mitigation of sediment delivery into the reservoir, purification of water and maintenance of soil fertility. Results indicate strong increase in the provision of ecosystem services among the main land uses in the following order: urban area/bare soil; pastures; plantation of eucalyptus and native forests. The most important services provided by native forests, when compared with bare soil, were carbon sequestration and prevention of sedimentation, with an additional 864 569 tons of carbon stored in forest biomass in 30 years, and prevention of 244 511 tons of sediment delivery into the reservoir per year, respectively, from 7624 ha of lands around the reservoir. Spatial variation in the provision of ecosystem services were mapped to develop a tool to support decision making at the landscape scale. Results and maps from the decision support tool can support policies that ensure effective land‐use planning and can serve as the basis for the development of payment for ecosystem service schemes in the region. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Leading authority on the Islamic world and influential advisor to the Obama administration Vali Nasr shows that the West s best hope of winning the battle against Islamic extremists is to foster the growth of a vibrant new Muslim middle class. This flourishing of Muslim bourgeoisie is reshaping the mind-set, politics, and even the religious values of Muslims in much the same way the Western bourgeoisie lead the capitalist and democratic revolution in Europe. Whereas extremism has grown out of the dismal economic failures of the authoritarian Islamic regimes, Nasr explains, the wealth and aspirations of this Islamic critical middle put them squarely at odds with extremism. They have ushered in remarkable transformations already in Dubai, Turkey, and Indonesia, and they are the key to tipping the balance in both Iran and Pakistan. As he writes the great battle for the soul of the Muslim world will be fought not over religion but over market capitalism. "


There are 13 university libraries in the Netherlands. Together with the Royal Library in The Hague and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam they form an association, the Association UKB. The UKB is a voluntary association with no formal legal basis. It is a platform for discussing and developing joint policy in the area of scientific information provision and services in the Netherlands. Her main interests include designing a national information infrastructure, organising loans between libraries, developing digital information services, granting consortium-related licenses, agreeing on pricing policies with respect to publishers, co-ordinating collection development and shared cataloguing and indexing. The UKB co-operates closely with PICA, a Dutch corporation for library automation and information, which was founded by a number of Dutch libraries and is now merged with OCLC. Especially in the field of licensing, the UKB has taken a number of important actions over the last few years: For example, it was on the UKB's initiative that various licensing deals with information providers were concluded. This paper deals with the results achieved so far and reviews some of the experienced successes and problems.


We focus on the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem in intelligent and transparent optical networks operating under no wavelength conversion constraint for end-to-end connections in distributed environments. We propose and demonstrate what we believe to be a novel wavelength assignment algorithm based on hop counts and relative capacity loss, called modified distributed relative capacity loss (MDRCL). It consists of grouping end-to-end routes with the same number of hops in MDRCL tables. Unlike the distributed relative capacity loss (DRCL) algorithm, MDRCL offers a new strategy for wavelength assignment, including the destination node in its analysis and assuming one, more than one, or even all potential routes from source node to destination nodes combined by the same number of hops in its tables. We present simulation results of dynamic traffic in a hypothetical meshed network in terms of blocking probabilities as a function of network load. We show that our MDRCL algorithm outperforms the traditional wavelength assignment algorithms.


In this paper we discuss how model reduction affects the stability and computational complexity of controllers for nanopositioning systems. A robust H∞ multiple-input multiple-output controller is designed and implemented for the lateral stage of an atomic force microscope. A modelbased controller can often be of high order and may be difficult to run in real-time on hardware with limited computational power. The resulting controller can be considered to be stiff, which is characterized by a large spread of eigenvalues. Continuous-time systems running in real-time are often solved using explicit Runge-Kutta (ERK) methods, which easily becomes unstable for stiff systems. We show how small the time-step for a given controller needs to be for a selection of ERK methods. We also consider how model reduction affects the computational complexity of the controller, and show how the reduction can alter the placement of the eigenvalues and thus the required step-size for implementability. We demonstrate that the original 18th-order H∞ controller can be reduced to a 10th-order controller without any significant reduction in performance or stability, which results in a 46.7% reduction in execution time, partly because the order reduction enables the use of a simpler solver type.


Paris Hilton, heiress of the Hilton hotel chain fortune, is well-known from several reality-TV shows, a music career, and frequent appearances in tabloids all over the world. Often by her side, the Chihuahua Tinkerbell has become one of the world's most famous now living pets, and she is the author of her biography, written in first person singular. The relation between Hilton and Tinkerbell seems almost archetypical – it appears to be the perfect incarnation of the bourgeois pet-owner, moving her dog around in an expensive handbag as an accessory without any regard to the real pet behind the Gucci collar. Nevertheless, there is a peculiar focus on Tinkerbell in different forms of celebrity media; people seem to be especially moved by this dog and her destiny.In a discourse analysis of books, tabloid articles, reality show episodes, interviews and images from celebrity magazines, it is shown that imagery and text cooperate to produce Tinkerbell as a person. This is done through a number of different discursive techniques and among them is the linguistic prosthesis. This concept refers to the way people speak for animals, i.e. ascribe them a voice in first person singular, and it is often done in order to make sense of the animal's behavior. By giving an animal a voice, the animal is made intoan active, social subject, but in the case of Tinkerbell, the voice of the produced canine subject is often heavily normative. It is used to criticize her mistress' sometimes unreliable behavior, to question the mistreatment of pets, and to express a general critique against life in the lap of luxury. In the interplay between text and pet a certain form of common sense is produced and disseminated.The discussion is divided in two sections. First, it is argued that popular media's fixation with Tinkerbell stems from the way the pet as a social phenomenon trifle with common dichotomies such as nature/culture, authenticity/simulation, wilderness/civilization, speech/speechlessness, child/adult and poor/rich. Second, the relation between representations of animals in media, such as wildlife films and TV-shows on dog-training and veterinary clinics, is discussed in relation to the epistemology of the reality show genre.


Looking specifically at taxes, Brookings Senior Fellow William Gale and Research Assistant Aaron Krupkin write that the US does not have a good tax system that raises the revenues needed ?to finance government spending in a manner that is as simple, equitable, and growth-friendly as possible.? Noting that often simply discussing a tax proposal publicly can kill it, they highlight five general areas where tax policy could be improved: raising long-term revenue; increasing environmental taxes; reforming the corporate tax; treating low- and middle-income earners equitably and efficiently; and ensuring the appropriate taxation of high-income households. ?Comprehensive tax reform is easy to talk about, but hard to do. The pursuit of sweeping tax simplification is a noble goal, but quixotic.?


The total prohibition against foreign ownership of Philippine mass media exemplifies a broader polemic on nationalism - as a legitimate priority for constitutional protection, as opposed to being an appealing mass strategy for political rhetoric. Within this theoretical setting, I propose a differentiated analysis of the issue of foreign ownership prohibition in mass media. I draw three (3) brief lines of critique against the total prohibition of foreign ownership of Philippine mass media. First, I dispute the traditional "public interest" justification for barring any form of foreign ownership in mass media in the Philippines, showing that the fear of "foreign influence" over media content is dependent on an asserted political truth that is in no way self-evident, much less materially relevant from apparently (and already) "internationalized" Philippine media practices. Second, I question the implicit assumption that foreign ownership restrictions improve economic growth through wholly-owned Filipino companies, showing that there is no strict causal nexus between total exclusion of foreign ownership and the improvement of shareholder value of Philippine mass media companies. In fact, as many empirical studies affirm, at least some degree of foreign ownership, even in media sectors, has tended to improve domestic economic growth in developing countries, through the infusion of necessary capital and the dismantling of monopolistic structures. Third, and most crucially, I argue that the constitutionalization of the complete prohibition against foreign ownership merely creates a convenient ideological cover that locks in specific and entrenched oligarchic interests which have long since dominated Philippine mass media. Instead of being a significant constitutional policy, "nationalism" acquires disutility through its reduction to mere inflammatory political rhetoric, as in the case of the foreign ownership prohibition in mass media. The latter not only stifles open competition in providing the service of access to information, but more problematically, denies genuine contestation in a fully democratic marketplace of ideas envisioned in the 1987 Philippine Constitution. By pre-committing the Philippines to an absolute and total constitutional prohibition against foreign ownership of mass media, the 1986 Constitutional Commissioners inadvertently achieved perverse results antithetical to the goals of national development and social equality. Thus, in order to avoid this disingenuous locking in of special interests in Philippine mass media in the guise of nationalist rhetoric, I advocate a de-constitutionalization of the total prohibition of foreign ownership in Philippine mass media and advertising, in order to turn the issue over to more flexible and open legislative processes of speech and debate, and concomitantly, to cyclically-repeated exercises of public auditing. Part I juxtaposes the constitutional and legal framework of foreign ownership with the present structure of Philippine mass media ownership, pointing out key political and legal institutions that have traditionally protected specific family or oligarchic interests in Philippine mass media. Part II discusses public interest, economic, and sociological lines of critique against the constitutional prohibition against any foreign ownership in Philippine mass media. Part III then argues the proposal for de-constitutionalization, and concludes that the presence or extent of any foreign ownership restriction in Philippine mass media can be better debated, vetted, and adjusted through the dynamic interaction between legislative controls and the unprecedented expansion of judicial review under the 1987 Philippine Constitution.


We propose a novel, motion planning based approach to approximately map the energy landscape of an RNA molecule. Our method is based on the successful probabilistic roadmap motion planners that we have previously successfully applied to protein folding. The key advantage of our method is that it provides a sparse map that captures the main features of the landscape and which can be analyzed to compute folding kinetics. In this paper, we provide evidence that this approach is also well suited to RNA. We compute population kinetics and transition rates on our roadmaps using the master equation for a few moderately sized RNA and show that our results compare favorably with results of other existing methods.


Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist's copyright.


Background/aims There is a substantial shortage of donor tissue for endothelial keratoplasty worldwide. Using two endothelial grafts of one donor cornea may potentially increase the pool of suitable donor tissue for Descemet membrane endothelial keratoplasty (DMEK). This study evaluates the technical feasibility of obtaining two DMEK grafts with a different (semicircular) shape, but similar surface area as a 'conventional' 8–9 mm circular transplant from a single donor cornea and to evaluate the viability of these grafts stored in organ-culture medium up to 5 weeks after graft preparation. Methods Ten human corneas not suitable for transplantation were used for preparation of semicircular-shaped grafts (hemi-DMEK grafts). The viability of these hemi-DMEK grafts was measured by evaluating the endothelial cell density (ECD) with light microscopy before and immediately after preparation and during five additional weeks of organ culture. Results Hemi-DMEK preparation was successful in all cases. All grafts formed a roll. A small area denuded of cells was observed after preparation along the straight edge of the DM roll. The mean ECD was 2654 (±65) cells/mm2 before and 2651 (±94) cells/mm2 immediately after hemi-DMEK preparation and declined gradually from 2518 (±133) cells/mm2 after 1 week to 1847 (±170) cells/mm2 after 5 weeks of organ-culture storage. Discussion Preparation of two hemi-DMEK grafts from one single human donor cornea is technically feasible, and the grafts can be stored after preparation in organ-culture similar to standard circular DMEK grafts. Hemi-DMEK may have the potential to double the availability of donor endothelial tissue for DMEK.


Aim Recent evidence suggests that an undetectable troponin level at emergency department (ED) presentation can rule out the presence of myocardial infarction (MI) in low-risk patients. The aim of this study was to investigate whether an undetectable troponin I (TnI) level at presentation using a contemporary troponin assay can accurately rule out MI at various front-door thrombolysis in myocardial infarction (fTIMI) score cut-offs. Methods Planned substudy of a prospective observational cohort study of patients presenting to ED with chest pain without ECG evidence of ischaemia who underwent a 'rule out' acute coronary syndrome process. Clinical, investigational and outcome data were collected. A contemporary TnI assay (Siemens TnI Ultra) was used. Primary outcome of interest was diagnostic accuracy for MI of undetectable initial TnI at presentation at various fTIMI scores (sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value (NPV)). Results 1076 patients were studied, of whom 156 had a final diagnosis of MI (14.5%). For patients with undetectable TnI and fTIMI scores 0, 0–1, 0–2 and 0–6, sensitivities were 98.7%, 98.1%, 97.4% and 97.4%, respectively, specificities were 22.6%, 41.7%, 53.8% and 69.9%, respectively, and NPV were 99%, 99.2%, 99.2% and 99.4%, respectively. If early presenters (<2 h of symptoms) were excluded, undetectable initial troponin had 100% sensitivity (95% CI 95.2% to 100%) and NPV (95% CI 98.8% to 100%). Conclusions Using a contemporary TnI assay, undetectable initial TnI has high but not perfect sensitivity and NPV, unless early presenters are excluded. Trial registration number ACTRN12612000990820.


Surgery aims to improve a patient's medical condition.
However, surgery is a major life event with the risk
of negative consequences, like peri- and postoperative
complications, prolonged hospitalization and delayed recovery
of physical functioning. One of the major common
side effects, functional decline, before (in the "waiting"
period), during and after hospitalization is impressive, especially
in frail people.
Preoperative screening aims to identify frail, highrisk
patients at an early stage, and advice these high-risk
patients to start supervised preoperative home-based exercise
training (prehabilitation) as soon as possible. Depending
on the health status of the patient and his/her
outcomes during the screening and the type of surgery,
prehabilitation should focus on respiratory, cardiovascular
and/or musculoskeletal parameters to prepare the patient
for surgery. By improving preoperative physical fitness,
a patient is able to better with stand the impact of
major surgery and this will lead to a both reduced risk of
negative side effects and better short term outcomes as a
result. Besides prehabilitation hospital culture and infrastructure
should be inherently activating so that patients
stay as active as can be, socially, mentally and physically.
In the first part of this chapter the concept of prehabilitation
and different parameters that should be trained
will be described. The second part focuses on the "Better
in, Better out" (BiBo™) strategy, which aims to optimize
patient's pre-, peri- and postoperative physical fitness.
Prehabilitation should comprise "shared decisions" between
patient and physical therapist regarding experience
and evidence based best options for rehabilitation goals,
needs, and potential of the individual patient and his/her
(in) formal support-system. Next, a case will describe the
preoperative care pathway. This chapter will close with
conclusions about how moving people before and after
surgery will improve their outcomes.


This study presents an evaluation of the performance of the dynamically dimensioned search (DDS) algorithm when calibrating the hydrological component of the Visualizing Ecosystems for Land Management Assessments (VELMA) ecohydrological model. Two calibration strategies were tested for the initial parameter values: (1) a 'high-cost strategy', where 100 sets of initial parameter values were randomly chosen within the overall parameter space, and (2) a 'low-cost strategy', where a unique set of initial parameter values was derived from the available field data. Both strategies were tested for six different values of the maximum number of model evaluations ranging between 100 and 10,000. Results revealed that DDS is able to converge rapidly to a good parameter calibration solution of the VELMA hydrological component regardless of the parameter initialization strategy used. The accuracy and convergence efficiency of the DDS algorithm were, however, slightly better for the low-cost strategy. This study suggests that initializing the parameter values of complex physically based models using information on the watershed characteristics can increase the efficiency of the automatic calibration procedures.


Abstract. An analysis of cloud overlap based on high temporal and vertical resolution retrievals of cloud condensate from a suite of ground instruments is performed at a mid-latitude atmospheric observation facility. Two facets of overlap are investigated: cloud fraction overlap, expressed in terms of a parameter " α " indicating the relative contributions of maximum and random overlap, and overlap of horizontal distributions of condensate, expressed in terms of the correlation coefficient of condensate ranks. The degree of proximity to the random and maximum overlap assumptions is also expressed in terms of a decorrelation length, a convenient scalar parameter for overlap parameters assumed to decay exponentially with separation distance. Both cloud fraction overlap and condensate overlap show significant seasonal variations with a clear tendency for more maximum overlap in the summer months. More maximum overlap is also generally observed when the domain size used to define cloud fractions increases. These tendencies also exist for rank correlations, but are significantly weaker. Hitherto unexplored overlap parameter dependencies are investigated by analyzing mean parameter differences at fixed separation distance within different layers of the atmospheric column, and by searching for possible systematic relationships between alpha and rank correlation. We find that for the same separation distance the overlap parameters are significantly distinct in different atmospheric layers, and that random cloud fraction overlap is usually associated with more randomly overlapped condensate ranks.


The output power from a 25-mm-diameter (volume, 0.49 L) and a 40-mm-diameter (volume, 1.9 L) copper-vapor laser (nominally 20- and 65-W devices, respectively) was approximately doubled to >50 and >100 W , respectively, by addition of small partial pressures of both H(2) and HCl to the neon buffer gas. The specific output powers of these lasers are believed to be records for any copper-vapor lasers of this size.


The primary objective of this dissertation is to develop a black box optimization
tool. The algorithm should be able to solve complex nonlinear, multimodal, discontinuous
and mixed-integer power system optimization problems without any
model reduction. Although there are many computational intelligence (CI) based
algorithms which can handle these problems, they require intense human intervention
in the form of parameter tuning, selection of a suitable algorithm for a given
problem etc. The idea here is to develop an algorithm that works relatively well on
a variety of problems with minimum human effort. An adaptive particle swarm
optimization algorithm (PSO) is presented in this thesis. The algorithm has special
features like adaptive swarm size, parameter free update strategies, progressive
neighbourhood topologies, self learning parameter free penalty approach etc.
The most significant optimization task in the power system operation is the
scheduling of various generation resources (Unit Commitment, UC). The current
practice used in UC modelling is the binary approach. This modelling results in a
high dimension problem. This in turn leads to increased computational effort and
decreased efficiency of the algorithm. A duty cycle based modelling proposed in
this thesis results in 80 percent reduction in the problem dimension. The stern uptime
and downtime requirements are also included in the modelling. Therefore,
the search process mostly starts in a feasible solution space. From the investigations
on a benchmark problem, it was found that the new modelling results in high
quality solutions along with improved convergence.
The final focus of this thesis is to investigate the impact of unpredictable nature
of demand and renewable generation on the power system operation. These quantities
should be treated as a stochastic processes evolving over time. A new PSO
based uncertainty modelling technique is used to abolish the restrictions imposed
by the conventional modelling algorithms. The stochastic models are able to incorporate
the information regarding the uncertainties and generate day ahead UC
schedule that are optimal to not just the forecasted scenario for the demand and
renewable generation in feed but also to all possible set of scenarios. These models
will assist the operator to plan the operation of the power system considering
the stochastic nature of the uncertainties. The power system can therefore optimally
handle huge penetration of renewable generation to provide economic operation
maintaining the same reliability as it was before the introduction of uncertainty.


About the Author. Acknowledgments. Introduction. Code Samples from the Book. Oracle and Security. The "Unbreakable" Marketing Campaign. Independent Security Assessments. The Future. Chapter 1 Overview of the Oracle RDBMS. Architecture. Processes. The File System. The Network. Database Objects. Users and Roles. Privileges. Oracle Patching. Wrapping Up. Chapter 2 The Oracle Network Architecture. The TNS Protocol. The TNS Header. Inside the Packet. Getting the Oracle Version. The Listener Version and Status Command. Using the TNS Protocol Version. Using the XML Database Version. Using TNS Error Text. Using the TNS Version TTC Function. Wrapping Up. Chapter 3 Attacking the TNS Listener and Dispatchers. Attacking the TNS Listener. Bypassing 10g Listener Restrictions. The Aurora GIOP Server. The XML Database. Wrapping Up. Chapter 4 Attacking the Authentication Process. How Authentication Works. Attacks Against the Crypto Aspects. Default Usernames and Passwords. Looking in Files for Passwords. Account Enumeration and Brute Force. Long Username Buffer Overflows. Wrapping Up. Chapter 5 Oracle and PL/SQL. What Is PL/SQL? PL/SQL Execution Privileges. Wrapped PL/SQL. Wrapping and Unwrapping on 10g. Wrapping and Unwrapping on 9i and Earlier. Working without the Source. PL/SQL Injection. Injection into SELECT Statements to Get More Data. Injecting Functions. Injecting into Anonymous PL/SQL Blocks. The Holy Grail of PLSQL Injection. Investigating Flaws. Direct SQL Execution Flaws. PL/SQL Race Conditions. Auditing PL/SQL Code. The DBMS-ASSERT Package. Some Real-World Examples. Exploiting DBMS-CDC-IMPDP. Exploiting LT. Exploiting DBMS-CDC-SUBSCRIBE and DBMS-CDC-ISUBSCRIBE. PLSQL and Triggers. Wrapping Up. Chapter 6 Triggers. Trigger Happy: Exploiting Triggers for Fun and Profit. Examples of Exploiting Triggers. The MDSYS.SDO-GEOM-TRIG-INS1 and SDO-GEOM-TRIG-INS1 Triggers. The MDSYS SDO-CMT-CBK-TRIG Trigger. The SYS.CDC-DROP-CTABLE-BEFORE Trigger. The MDSYS.SDO-DROP-USER-BEFORE Trigger. Wrapping Up. Chapter 7 Indirect Privilege Escalation. AHop, a Step, and a Jump: Getting DBA Privileges Indirectly. Getting DBA from CREATE ANY TRIGGER. Getting DBA from CREATE ANY VIEW. Getting DBA from EXECUTE ANY PROCEDURE. Getting DBA from Just CREATE PROCEDURE. Wrapping Up. Chapter 8 Defeating Virtual Private Databases. Tricking Oracle into Dropping a Policy. Defeating VPDs with Raw File Access. General Privileges. Wrapping Up. Chapter 9 Attacking Oracle PL/SQL Web Applications. Oracle PL/SQL Gateway Architecture. Recognizing the Oracle PL/SQL Gateway. PL/SQL Gateway URLs. Oracle Portal. Verifying the Existence of the Oracle PL/SQL Gateway. The Web Server HTTP Server Response Header. How the Oracle PL/SQL Gateway Communicates with the Database Server. Attacking the PL/SQL Gateway. The PLSQL Exclusion List. Wrapping Up. Chapter 10 Running Operating System Commands. Running OS Commands through PL/SQL. Running OS Commands through Java. Running OS Commands Using DBMS-SCHEDULER. Running OS Commands Directly with the Job Scheduler. Running OS Commands Using ALTER SYSTEM. Wrapping Up. Chapter 11 Accessing the File System. Accessing the File System Using the UTL-FILE Package. Accessing the File System Using Java. Accessing Binary Files. Exploring Operating System Environment Variables. Wrapping Up. Chapter 12 Accessing the Network. Data Exfiltration. Using UTL-TCP. Using UTL-HTTP. Using DNS Queries and UTL-INADDR. Encrypting Data Prior to Exfiltrating. Attacking Other Systems on the Network. Java and the Network. Database Links. Wrapping Up. Appendix A Default Usernames and Passwords. Index.


This article introduces the concept of co-non-linearity. Co-non-linearity is an example of a common feature in time series (Engle and Koziciki, 1993, J. Bus. Econ. Statist.) and an extension of the concept of common nonlinear components (Anderson and Vahid, 1998, J. Econometrics). If some time series follow a non-linear process but there exists a linear relationship between the levels of these series that removes the non-linearity, then this relationship is said to be a co-non-linear relationship. In this article I show how to determine the number of such co-non-linear relationships. Furthermore, I show how to formulate hypothesis tests on the co-non-linear relationships in a full maximum likelihood framework.


The research is related with information needs among student. It will focus on students at UiTM Puncak Perdana. The research is about factors contributing to information needs among students in UiTM Puncak Perdana. From the Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia state that "information as a concept has a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, connmtnication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and
representation". From the definition, we know that information was use every time. As the student, we always closed with information by searching for our priority. What is information-literate? The American Library Association's (ALA) Presidential Committee
on Information Literacy, Final Report states that, "To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information" (1989). From the definition, the student should know the when information is needed and they also able to search the location of information, know the value of information, and use the information effectively.


[1] A physically based aerosol climatology is important to address questions of global climate change. We evaluate the aerosol climatology used in the GISS ModelE (Schmidt et al., 2006), by characterizing and comparing the geographic distribution and seasonal variability of aerosol optical depth (AOD) and particle size via Angstrom exponent (A) against available satellite and ground-based measurements, i.e., MODIS, MISR, POLDER, AVHRR, and AERONET data. There are a number of model parameters, particularly those related to aerosol size specification, that can be better constrained by comparison to satellite data. Our comparison shows that there are large differences in the satellite and ground-based global distributions of AOD. The differences between the observations increase for the Angstrom exponent. Given the uncertainties associated with satellite retrieval results, the agreement in the distributions of global optical depth between GCM aerosols and satellite data is qualitatively reasonable. However, the Angstrom exponent of the GCM aerosol is clearly biased low compared to satellite data, implying that the GCM aerosol sizes are overestimated. There is qualitative agreement of the ModelE aerosol single scattering albedo ϖ with TOMS Aerosol Index (AI) and AERONET data. The comparisons show insufficient aerosol absorption at most locations, suggesting a possible underestimation of black carbon distributions in the GCM. However, a more quantitative comparison first requires a readjustment of the GCM aerosol size specification.


This study focus on the insulating thermal properties of an insulating composed of textile waste in order to exploit the many advantages by the implementation of such material: matter gain, environmental and ecological advantages, creation of job sites and finding a new field of exploitation of recycled textile waste.

In this work, we have used two structures of textile waste samples comminuted: Textile linters of waste, "WL", and a tablecloth of textile waste, "WT" to insulate the building by blowing or by recovery. This paper describes the results of research of hydrous behavior of such support and its impact on thermal properties, in particular, the diffusion coefficient of water vapor, the kinetic absorption, the moisture uptake and its effect on the thermal conductivity. Compared with other insulators, they present competitive thermal properties: Their conductivities varied between 0.033-0.059 w/mK for tablecloth and 0.039-0.063 W/mK for the linters respectively, when the relative humidity varies from 50% to 90%. Spite of their loss of insulation ability with increasing relative humidity, they could be considered, always, as civil construction insulation materials. They react rapidly to absorb a considerable rate of humidity (15.5% for the Tablecloth and 23.6% for linters of their dried weight), so moderate the climate by capturing the excess of moisture. Their diffusion coefficients of water vapor


Introduction The aim of this study is to examine how political ideology and cultural representation in grade-seven Chinese language/culture textbooks have influenced the formation of Taiwanese students' national identity with respect to four different political leaders: Chiang Kai-shek (1970s), Chiang Ching-kuo (1980s), Lee Teng-hui (1990s), and Chen Shui-bian (2000s). This research reveals the relationship between politics and education by examining Chinese textbooks in Taiwan. Using an in-depth qualitative research methodology this study codes and classifies the ideological and thematic perspectives of these textbooks, and seeks to explicate the differences in the Taiwanese political outlook and its effect on the school discourse formation in relation to national identity construction. This paper is organized into six sections, section 1 offers the background of the study which will lay the foundation for comprehending how the historical and sociopolitical contexts of Taiwan have influenced school discourse formation which, in turn, affected Taiwanese identity construction. Section two discusses the theoretical framework by introducing Foucault's (1979) concept of discourse which emphasizes that discourse is formed and reflected through political power, and Fairclough's (1992) dialectic view of discourse as determined by social structure while also contributing to social change. Fairclough's dialectic view of discourse and social structure provides a means to investigate the relationship between school discourse and sociopolitical changes in recent Taiwanese society. Also presented are Apple's (2000) view of textbooks as official or selected knowledge, and Kramsch's (1998) concept of discourse community which play significant roles in influencing one's collective identity formation. In addition, this section also addresses Brown's (2004) notion of national identity which indicates that national identities are socially constructed based on common sociopolitical experiences rather than common ancestry/culture. Section three presents the data collection and the methodology of this project. Section four offers empirical results. Section five offers the interpretation of this study based on the empirical findings with respect to the four different political leaders from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Finally, the last section concludes this paper by addressing the issue that the Chinese textbooks underwent three conceptual changes in terms of the political, cultural, and global aspects in relation to national identity construction. Background of the Study Known historically as Ilha Formosa, the beautiful island, by the Portuguese who voyaged to Taiwan in the mid-1500s, Taiwan is located in East Asia between the Pacific Ocean and the Taiwan Strait, roughly 100 miles off the coast of China. The first residents in Taiwan were the Aborigines of Southeast Asia, the Austronesian people, whose language belong to the Austronesian Malaya family. According to the oldest site of archaeological discovery in Chang-bin, a rural township located in Taidong County in southeast Taiwan, the original Aboriginal people might have inhabited Taiwan for nearly fifty thousand years (Chiang, 2005; Huang, 2005). From 1626 to 1642, the Dutch and Spanish had occupied Taiwan. During the Dutch and Spanish rule, although the Taiwanese Aborigines were distributed all over the island and constituted the majority of the population, they had still not formed a confederated political organization connecting the tribes (Chiang, 2005). In the early 1660s, Chinese people began to immigrant to this island. In 1683, the Chinese government (Qing dynasty) took over Taiwan. In the nineteenth century, more Chinese people had immigrated to Taiwan from the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong in southern China. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the ethnic groups of Taiwan were mainly divided into two groups. One group was made up of Taiwanese Aborigines. …


We report on the deposition of individual gold nanorods from an optical trap using two different laser wavelengths. Laser light, not being resonant to the plasmon resonances of the nanorods, is used for stable trapping and in situ alignment of individual nanorods. Laser light, being resonant to the transversal mode of the nanorods, is used for depositing nanorods at desired locations. The power and polarization dependence of the process is investigated and discussed in terms of force balances between gradient and scattering forces, plasmonic heating, and rotational diffusion of the nanorods. This two-color approach enables faster printing than its one-color equivalent and provides control over the angular orientation (±16°) and location of the deposited nanorods at the single-nanorod level.


Using full vector finite element method and super-mode theory, we analyzed the feasibility to fabricate micro-fiber-coupler-based optical polarizer. Our theoretical analysis showed that there exist a set of optimal pairs of two coupler geometric parameters, i.e. the coupling length and the micro-fiber diameter of the coupler, that can result in high performance polarizers. Experimentally, we fabricated three such coupler-based polarizers using the dual fiber drawing technique and characterized their performance. Our experimental measurement results confirmed our theoretical prediction in several aspects. When the diameter of the coupler-forming micro-fiber is relatively small (~3.5μm), the degree of polarization (DOP) of the fabricated polarizer was found relatively low (~50%) even over some coupling length range. However, when the diameter of the coupler-forming micro-fiber is larger (about 5μm to 9μm), a much higher DOP (>91.4%) and better linear polarization extinction ratio (LPER) of ~60dB could be achieved. The measured geometric parameters of two polarizer samples that showed high polarizing performance agreed very well with our theoretical values. Furthermore, we also demonstrated that such a coupler-based polarizer can be used as an optical filter as well. The filter exhibited an extinction ratio as high as 20dB at the center wavelength and the full width at half maximum (FWHM) was 10nm.


Core mineral spectrometer is one of the advanced and important tools for core
 digitalization, altered mineral mapping, ore deposits exploring, and ore-searching
 in surrounding mine and beneficiation process. In this letter, a new core mineral
 spectrometer (CMS 350) is designed and developed. The basic principle, structural
 design, function module, key components, data acquisition, and processing methods of
 CMS 350 are introduced. In addition, some applications and results of CMS 350 in
 Zijin Mining are presented to validate the performance of CMS 350.


Differential binding of transcription factors (TFs) at cis-regulatory loci drives the differentiation and function of diverse cellular lineages. Understanding the regulatory interactions that underlie cell fate decisions requires characterizing TF binding sites (TFBS) across multiple cell types and conditions. Techniques, e.g. ChIP-Seq can reveal genome-wide patterns of TF binding, but typically requires laborious and costly experiments for each TF-cell-type (TFCT) condition of interest. Chromosomal accessibility assays can connect accessible chromatin in one cell type to many TFs through sequence motif mapping. Such methods, however, rarely take into account that the genomic context preferred by each factor differs from TF to TF, and from cell type to cell type. To address the differences in TF behaviors, we developed Mocap, a method that integrates chromatin accessibility, motif scores, TF footprints, CpG/GC content, evolutionary conservation and other factors in an ensemble of TFCT-specific classifiers. We show that integration of genomic features, such as CpG islands improves TFBS prediction in some TFCT. Further, we describe a method for mapping new TFCT, for which no ChIP-seq data exists, onto our ensemble of classifiers and show that our cross-sample TFBS prediction method outperforms several previously described methods.


With the publication of this issue, JON begins its second year as a fully peer-reviewed source of high-quality scientific and engineering articles describing the state-of-the-art of optical networking. In his Editorial, editor-in-chief Richard A. Linke examines where the field of optical networking stands and how JON is doing in fulfilling its mission.


Multiple fungal species have been associated with root rot of soybean (Glycine max) in the United States, but root rot in Minnesota (MN) also occurs in plants not known to be infected with previously reported pathogens (1). Soybean plants that lacked foliar symptoms, but exhibited taproot and lateral root necrosis were observed in 15 fields from nine counties in MN during 2007 and 2008. Plants were arbitrarily dug up at the R3 growth stage in July as part of a root rot study. Roots were washed, surface disinfested in 0.5% NaOCl for 3 min, rinsed in deionized water, dried, and embedded in potato dextrose agar (PDA). Thirty isolates with morphological characteristics consistent with those of Clonostachys rosea were recovered in total from necrotic lesions on different plants from all fields (3). For further morphological characterization, cultures were grown on PDA for 1 week at 24°C in the dark. Colonies were 39 to 46 mm in diameter, yellowish-white, and the surface was felty to tomentose with thick aerial hyphae. Primary conidiophores were Verticillium-like with two to three levels. The stipe length measured 65 to 105 μm and the base width was 5 μm. Primary conidia were smooth, hyaline, slightly curved, with an average length and width of 7 to 9 × 2.6 to 3 μm. Secondary conidiophores were penicillate with two or three whorls of phialides. The stipe length measured 50 to 75 μm, base width was 5 μm, and penicillus height was 25 to 35 μm. Secondary conidia were 5 to 6 × 2.5 μm. Perithecia were not produced. The identity of isolates was confirmed by sequencing the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) locus using the primers ITS1F/ITS4. BLAST analysis of the sequences in the NCBI database resulted in a 99.8 to 100% match for both C. rosea and its teleomorph Bionectria ochroleuca (e.g., HM751081, GU256766). Each isolate was tested for pathogenicity on soybean by initially growing it on sterile sorghum grain for 2 weeks at 23°C. Sterile sorghum was used for control plants. Seeds of soybean 'AG2107' were planted in 11.4-cm square pots containing pasteurized potting mix and a 25-cm3 layer of infested or sterile sorghum placed ~1 cm below the seeds. Two replicate pots containing four plants each were used per treatment and the experiment was repeated once. Root rot was assessed 28 days after planting in a greenhouse at 23°C day and 18°C night with a 14-h photoperiod. Twenty-eight of 30 C. rosea isolates caused taproot necrosis on inoculated plants in both experiments, whereas control roots did not exhibit necrosis. Approximately 6% of inoculated plants also developed interveinal chlorosis and marginal necrosis on trifoliates. Isolations were attempted from roots of all plants, and the isolates recovered from inoculated plants were identified as C. rosea based on morphology and ITS sequences. This fungus was not isolated from control plants. C. rosea was also isolated from petioles of symptomatic trifoliates, indicating systemic colonization of the plants. To our knowledge, this is the first report of C. rosea causing root rot of soybean and systemically colonizing soybean. This fungus may have been previously isolated from asymptomatic soybean plants and identified as Gliocladium roseum (2). The impact of this fungus on soybean production is unknown. References: (1) G. Hartman et al. Compendium of Soybean Diseases. 4th ed. The American Phytopathological Society, St. Paul, MN, 1999. (2) J. D. Mueller and J. B. Sinclair. Trans. Brit. Mycol. Soc. 86:677, 1986. (3) H.-J. Schroers et al. Mycologia 91:365, 1999.


Michael Young has christened the oligarchy of the future "Meritocracy." Indeed, the word is now part of the English language. It would appear that the formula: IQ+Effort=Merit may well constitute the basic belief of the ruling class in the twenty-first century. Projecting himself into the year 2034, the author of this sociological satire shows how present decisions and practices may remold our society. It is widespread knowledge that it is insufficient to be somebody's nephew to obtain a responsible post in business, government, teaching, or science. Experts in education and selection apply scientific principles to sift out the leaders of tomorrow. You need intelligence rating, qualification, experience, application, and a certain caliber to achieve status. In a word, one must show merit to advance in the new society of tomorrow. In a new opening essay, Young reflects on the reception of his work, and its production, in a candid and lively way. Many of the critical ambiguities surrounding its original publication are now clarified and resolved. What we have is what the Guardian of London called "A brilliant essay." and what Time and Tide described as "a fountain gush of new ideas. Its wit and style make it compulsively enjoyable reading from cover to cover."


Environmental velocity has emerged as an important concept but remains theoretically underdeveloped, particularly with respect to its multidimensionality. In response, we develop a framework that examines the variations in velocity across multiple dimensions of the environment (homology) and the causal linkages between those velocities (coupling). We then propose four velocity regimes based on different patterns of homology and coupling and argue that the conditions of each regime have important implications for organizations.


It has long been recognized that volumetric dissipation of the plasma heat flux from a fusion power system is preferable to its localized impingement on a material surface. Volumetric dissipation mitigates both the anticipated very high heat flux and intense particle-induced damage due to sputtering. Recent projections to a tokamak demonstration power plant suggest an immense upstream parallel heat flux, of order 20 GW m−2, implying that fully detached operation may be a requirement for the success of fusion power. Building on pioneering work on the use of lithium by Nagayama et al and by Ono et al as well as earlier work on the gas box divertor by Watkins and Rebut, we present here a concept for a lithium vapor box divertor, in which lithium vapor extracts momentum and energy from a fusion-power-plant divertor plasma, using fully volumetric processes. At the high powers and pressures that are projected this requires a high density of lithium vapor, which must be isolated from the main plasma in order to avoid lithium build-up on the chamber walls or in the plasma. Isolation is achieved through a powerful multi-box differential pumping scheme available only for condensable vapors. The preliminary box-wise calculations are encouraging, but much more work is required to demonstrate the practical viability of this scheme, taking into account at least 2D plasma and vapor flows within and between the vapor boxes and out of the vapor boxes to the main plasma.


On the most elementary level, you and I (human beings) were created with five main mechanisms (or parts):
 • A body which is termed as the main structure of the human being.
 • A sensory system that takes certain information around the body and the immediate environment.
 • A muscle system to aid the body move easily.
 • A control base to trigger the muscles and sensors.
 • A brain system that develops sensory data and tells the muscles what to do in other words the way forward.
 Obviously, we likewise have some imperceptible qualities, for example, intellect and ethics, among others but on an absolute corporeal level. Robots, on the other hand, can be created with five main mechanisms or more.

 This research aims at implementing robots in some tedious jobs that as supposed to be executed by human beings in various factories and industries. This study also presents the practical and tentative model for Extenics replications of the moveable mechanical device (robot) useful on VIPRO stage.

 Momentary antiquity and indication of the pertinent hypothetical ideas are provided. The intelligent boundary for drawn-out switch uses a novel element for synthetic intelligence which is drawn-out control (Extenics) to expand DHFPC switch rapid enactment of mobile robots.

 Applying Extenics specific methods and application in vague interplanetary result in a novel, advanced application for the VIPRO stage which can be used to feign and device innovative switch approaches of moveable robots.


Static networks have been shown to foster cooperation for specific cost–benefit ratios and numbers of connections across a series of interactions. At the same time, psychopathic traits have been discovered to predict defective behaviours in game theory scenarios. This experiment combines these two aspects to investigate how group cooperation can emerge when changing group compositions based on psychopathic traits. We implemented a modified version of the Prisoner's Dilemma game which has been demonstrated theoretically and empirically to sustain a constant level of cooperation over rounds. A sample of 190 undergraduate students played in small groups where the percentage of psychopathic traits in each group was manipulated. Groups entirely composed of low psychopathic individuals were compared with communities with 50% high and 50% low psychopathic players, to observe the behavioural differences at the group level. Results showed a significant divergence of the mean cooperation of the two conditions, regardless of the small range of participants' psychopathy scores. Groups with a large density of high psychopathic subjects cooperated significantly less than groups entirely composed of low psychopathic players, confirming our hypothesis that psychopathic traits affect not only individuals' decisions but also the group behaviour. This experiment highlights how differences in group composition with respect to psychopathic traits can have a significant impact on group dynamics, and it emphasizes the importance of individual characteristics when investigating group behaviours.


We propose a new, general, method for spatial filtering by beam-forming. The desired filter, specified analytically on an n-dimensional sphere, is extended to n+1-dimensional Euclidean space. A continuous beamforming function is then obtained by the n+1-dimensional Fourier transform of the extended filter. The beamforming weight at a given array element corresponds then to a sample of the function at the array element location., The scheme is a generalisation of focused beamforming on a single point by phase difference alignment. The analytic framework allows tractable, stable determination of beamforming weights, and for clear filter specification. By avoiding approximating a Dirac, desired areas can be covered with reduced side lobes. Multiple areas may be targeted simultaneously. In communications applications, channel information updates can be reduced, and movement accounted for. A WiFi demonstration shows that more flexible beam-shapes can be beneficial for real-life examples, factoring in attenuation.


Metastasis is associated with poor prognosis in breast cancer patients. Not all cancer cells within a tumor are capable of metastasizing. The microRNA-200 (miR-200) family, which regulates the mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition, is enriched in the serum of patients with metastatic cancers. Ectopic expression of miR-200 can confer metastatic ability to poorly metastatic tumor cells in some settings. Here, we investigated whether metastatic capability could be transferred between metastatic and nonmetastatic cancer cells via extracellular vesicles. miR-200 was secreted in extracellular vesicles from metastatic murine and human breast cancer cell lines, and miR-200 levels were increased in sera of mice bearing metastatic tumors. In culture, murine and human metastatic breast cancer cell extracellular vesicles transferred miR-200 microRNAs to nonmetastatic cells, altering gene expression and promoting mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition. In murine cancer and human xenograft models, miR-200-expressing tumors and extracellular vesicles from these tumors promoted metastasis of otherwise weakly metastatic cells either nearby or at distant sites and conferred to these cells the ability to colonize distant tissues in a miR-200-dependent manner. Together, our results demonstrate that metastatic capability can be transferred by the uptake of extracellular vesicles.


Problem. Both pastors and biologists frequently interact with individuals. These contacts often involve conversations that deal with an individual's feelings, behaviors, and the relationship between mind and body. Thus, how seminarians and biologists perceive psychology will greatly affect such interactions. Therefore it is important to know how both professionals perceive psychology. This is not all that different from the research biologists perform as they learn about the brain. Because of the interrelatedness between these two professions, what are the perceptions of psychology among seminary and biology students at Andrews University? -- Method. The data gathered from the responses of biology and seminary students at Andrews University to the Perceptions of Psychology Questionnaire were analyzed through the SPSS statistical procedures. Descriptive statistics tables are provided to show measures of central tendency and variability of perceptions of psychology. -- Results. The results showed that the participants' educational background and demographics played a role in their perceptions of psychology. Seminary students were older, and had a much higher exposure to the writings of Ellen G. White and church teachings on psychology. Biology students, as a group, were much younger, and lacked the background in these areas. Answers given reflected these differences. -- Conclusions. The results showed that there are significant differences among those two groups in their: positive beliefs about psychology, positive affect about psychology, exposure to the writings of Ellen G. White on psychology, knowledge about the writings of Ellen G. White on psychology, knowledge about the writings of Adventist writers on psychology, and in how comfortable they felt seeking psychological services. Respondents in both groups also tended to have similar answers to the questions relating to: understanding the mind using psychology, using psychology to help understand mankind, and explaining human behavior using theories of psychology.


The most notable capital structure theories today are the traditional pecking order theory, tradeoff theory and market timing theory. The first two theories hypothesize a semi-strong efficiency in the capital markets, whereas the market timing theory sees the capital market more or less inefficient. Thus, market timing theory allows the idea of managerial persons to be able to time the market, i.e. issue debt when it is cheap and issue equity when it is cheap. This kind of opportunistic behavior is not allowed by the pecking order or the trade-off theory. But then, why do we witness fluctuations in the general securities issuance behavior in the market? The prior research has been focusing on explaining this behavior with ex post realized returns but it has been recognized by several studies (e.g., Froot & Frankel, 1989; Gebhardt, Lee, & Swaminathan, 2001; Hou, van Dijk, & Zhang, 2012) that such estimates are extremely noisy. Thus, I will be using a new, more robust measure for cost of capital named implied cost of capital (ICC) which equates the market value of equity and the forecasted future earnings of a given firm in a valuation model. In addition, I will be employing a firm-level ICC. My data is acquired for U.S. based publicly traded companies for each year from 1974 to 2013. Using financial statement data for a period of minimum six years, I compute my own earnings forecasts applying a regression model introduced by Hou, Van Dijk, and Zhang (2012) and Lee, So, and Wang (2010) as opposed to using analyst forecasts that can biased. After computing the forecasts, apply them to three separate valuation models, and solve for the required market return R (discount rate in the models) which represents the implied cost of capital. These three estimates are used to compute a synthetic implied cost of capital index with equal weights after which it is converted into implied equity risk premium by subtracting the real interest rate. As a result of my statistical models, I find that firm management follows the level of their firm specific cost of capital and make financing decisions based on this. This behaviour has become even more explicit during the last few years. However, they seem to follow the market-level cost of capital more closely. Changes in the tax rate and growth opportunities seem to also affect the financing behaviour which lends power to the traditional trade-off theory. When testing for the importance of the traditional pecking order theory, it seems to have lost most of its power to explain the securities issuance decisions after the late 1970s.