OBJECTIVE
Duchenne muscular dystrophy is the commonest genetic myopathy but there exist a large number of inherited neuromuscular diseases which individually are very rare and where clinical information is not widely available. This review is based on the author's experience in a pediatric muscle clinic and provides practical guidance and treatment plans for frequently encountered problems.

SOURCES
A MEDLINE search was conducted to retrieve recent articles relevant to the management of children with inherited myopathies and neuropathies. A patient cohort (n = 200) was evaluated using descriptive statistics.

SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS
Duchenne muscular dystrophy accounted for almost half of the diagnoses, followed by spinal muscular atrophy (12%), Becker muscular dystrophy and myotonic dystrophy (7% each). Sixteen patients (9%) had an unknown myopathy.

CONCLUSIONS
As with other chronic illnesses, these patients should be regularly reviewed by health professionals from an early age to increase life expectancy and improve quality of life. It is useful for physicians to take a structured approach when looking after children with neuromuscular disorders and to monitor all affected organ systems.


This paper is an exploration of female relationships using feminist and psychoanalytic approaches in reading a British play "Neaptide." The findings provide us a unique way of explaining the bondage between mother-daughter relationships, and it also tells us that in the play "Neaptide" Sarah Daniels offers a positive future to her two female protagonists because both have been rescued by their mother Joyce. Daniels uses the Demeter-Persephone myth to illustrate the limited choices that her female character Joyce has in handling her family crisis. Like Demeter,Joyce keeps her family together by delivering them from male domination: Val from her unhappy marriage
with Colin, and Claire and Poppy from the devious and ruthless Lawrence. Claire's bold and honest public confession of herself as a lesbian has clearly entailed suffering and sacrifice. However, Joyce has made the right decision to help both her daughters to get out of their predicaments.


The financial crisis that swept across northern Europe in 1763 bears an uncanny resemblance to more recent episodes of financial market turbulence - in particular, to the events of autumn 1998 when mature financial markets were caught in a severe liquidity crisis, culminating in the near collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. We highlight the salient features of the 1763 crisis, propose a stylized model of the events, and draw parallels between the events of 1763 and 1998. Whilst the financial landscape has changed fundamentally in the intervening two hundred or so years, the policy lessons have a resonance that transcend this gap in time. The potentially devastating effects of liquidity risk, the limits to hedging and financial engineering, and the importance of timely crisis management by the authorities are all lessons that have currency today as they did in 1763.


The purpose of this review was to determine the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, both generally and in Australian settings. A systematic search for papers on research conducted internationally and in Australia within the last 5 years was undertaken using the Academic Search Complete, PsycINFO databases. From the 1,231 records retrieved from the two databases, 26 papers included studies that met the selection criteria. None of these papers contained research from Australia. Evidence from a small number of studies provides tentative support for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis in the treatment of patients with some depressive, anxiety, and personality disorders. The variable quality of this research, and the absence of control conditions in most studies, however, means that making more definitive statements about the effectiveness of psychoanalysis difficult at this time. The findings of studies on long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy suggest that (a) favourable outcomes may be able to be achieved for people with a range of conditions, including mood, anxiety, sexual dysfunction, and personality disorders; (b) the outcomes achieved seem to be equivalent to those gained through the use of other psychotherapies; and (c) the effects of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy may endure long after the termination of treatment. Short-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy may be effective for the treatment of depressive disorders. The quality of studies in this area prevents the drawing of more definitive conclusions with respect to other conditions. Given that researchers often use the terms psychoanalytic and psychodynamic interchangeably, however, practitioners should be cognisant of the work on the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapies. This work is supportive of the use of psychodynamic psychotherapy for depressive disorders, some anxiety disorders (most notably, generalised anxiety disorder), somatic symptoms and some somatoform disorders (e.g., hypochondriasis), and some personality disorders (mainly borderline and Cluster C personality disorders). The benefits of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapies typically seem to endure well beyond the termination of treatment. In general, the outcomes achieved with these treatments appear to be equivalent to those gained through other psychotherapies. More definitive conclusions about the value of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy cannot be drawn at this time. For a variety of reasons (e.g., the challenges associated with researching treatments that occur over long periods of time) there has been insufficient research conducted on the effectiveness of these psychotherapies, especially psychoanalysis. More research is required to strengthen the evidence base on the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.


e-Assessment is of strategic importance to the UK since it forms an integral part of the e-learning movement which is a major global growth industry. This paper reports results from a project commissioned by JISC which set out to develop a Roadmap for e-assessment.
This methodological approach was drawn from a range of 'roadmap? methodologies collected by Glenn and Gordon (2003). It facilitated the identification of the enabling factors and barriers to the use e-assessment through the construction of a survey which probed a number of experts opinions.
The analysis of the various sources suggest that in England and Wales it is policy pressure which is a main driver and it is affecting more of the FE sector than the HE sector. In the HE sector institutions have more control over the rate and uptake of e-assessment as they award their own degrees. However, there is a recognition in HE that with larger classes and less tutorial time, tutors can keep track of their students? progress through e-assessment systems. They can adjust their lectures accordingly after they have picked up the misconceptions of a cohort through e-assessment feedback. At a personal level teachers/enthusiasts are addressing pedagogical problems through e-assessment.
The barriers identified at a superinstitutional level, for example the . DfES, funding bodies, and examining bodies, are that of regulation, confidentiality and testing of these systems before they go across the UK. While the main drivers at a superinstitutional level are to move towards a new generation of learners engaged in self-reflection who will be able to identify their own learning needs. One of the major drivers for institutions to adopt e-assessment practices is that of student retention. HE and FE also see benefits with respect to attendance and achievement. This paper outlines the methods used and describes key barriers which will have to be overcome if e-Assesment is to be effectively deployed across UK HE and FE sectors.


I. INTRODUCTION: THE GROWTH OF E-COMMERCE The Internet Tax Freedom Act1 defines Electronic Commerce (e-commerce) as, "any transaction conducted over the Internet or through Internet access, comprising the sale, lease, license, offer, or delivery of property, goods, services, or information, whether or not for consideration, and includes the provision of Internet access."2 Until recently, the government did not track the growth of e-commerce sales.3 However, in its first official estimate of online retail sales in the spring of 2000, the Department of Commerce estimated that online retail sales4 in the fourth quarter of 1999 were $5.3 billion, accounting for 0.63% of total retail sales during the fourth quarter of 1999.5 In its second report, the Commerce Department estimated that while total retail sales had decreased between the fourth quarter of 1999 and the first quarter of 2000, the percent of total retail sales accounted for by e-commerce had risen from 0.63% to 0.70%.6 By the time the Commerce Department released its first quarter estimate for 2001, it was estimated that ecommerce retail sales accounted for 0.91% of total retail sales, reflecting a general increase in the share of e-commerce retail sales over the course of the year.7 As ecommerce sales continue to grow, many state and local governments contend that, despite arguments to the contrary, e-commerce sales should not be left untaxed.8 In an effort to help the reader understand the states' position on sales taxation of e-- commerce, this Note explains the core concepts of state and local sales and use taxes and the law governing their application. After the background materials have been set forth, the Note introduces and analyzes the Advisory Commission Report to Congress and three relevant suggestions from its majority proposal.9 In order to add depth to the issues raised in the Commission's proposal, this Note subsequently examines, first, an effort by the states to create a streamlined sales tax system,10 and second, a Senate Bill" introduced after the Commission's Report to Congress was submitted. The analysis leads to the determination that, considering the uncertainty of future e-commerce growth and the impact it will have on state and local revenue collection, and the lack of a consensus-- backed uniform sales tax structure, all parties involved are best served by an extension of the moratorium on state and local sales and use taxation. II. BACKGROUND A. The Sales and Use Tax The sales tax is "a tax on gross receipts from the sale or lease of tangible personal property as well as certain services."12 For example, when a consumer purchases a sweater from a retail store at the local mall, that purchase will be subject to a sales tax (assuming the retail store is located in a state that collects sales taxes). While imposed on consumers, sellers usually collect the sales tax.13 So, when a consumer purchases a sweater from a retail store, that retail store collects the tax at the time of purchase and remits the collected funds to the proper authority.14 A sale made by a seller not located in the state where the sale was made is subject to a use tax.15 Every state that has a sales tax also has a use tax.16 The use tax is a "tax imposed directly on the consumer by the state in which the purchased property or service is used."17 So, if a consumer in Iowa purchases a sweater from a mail-order retailer based in Delaware, that retailer will collect a use tax for the state of Iowa, so long as the retailer has a sufficient nexus to the state of Iowa.18 The Supreme Court defined nexus in the context of taxation in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota.19 The Quill opinion is discussed in greater detail below,20 but it is relevant now to note that the nexus requirement under the Commerce Clause means a business must have a physical presence within that state in order to be subject to a use tax21 (although the physical presence required is not very substantial). …


This essay seeks to analyze the recent reconfigurations of French nationalism, taking as an entry point the legal treatment of veiled Muslim women and prostitutes over the past two decades. We argue that the bodies of prostitutes and veiled Muslim women, both of which have been targeted by successive legal interventions in order to exclude them from the public space, have become central political sites for the state to assert its sovereign power and trigger nationalist feelings. This comparative analysis of gendered "lawfare" (which John Comaroff has defined as the judicialization of politics and the resort to legal instruments to commit acts of political coercion) provides insights into a new form of nationalism that strives to foster "sexual liberalism" as a core value of citizenship in order to enforce a virile nationalism, prescribe new sexual normativities, and criminalize immigrants and those living at the social margins.


La gelosa di se stessa is the fourth of the six melodramas collected in 1709 by Arcangelo Spagna and published in Rome (Domenico Antonio Ercole), as the third volume of his librettos, but its writing dates back to at least 1689, the date of a previous printed edition, shortly after the opera appeared on stage, a few months before at the palace at the Quattro Fontane of the Prince of Palestrina. It is not to be excluded, however, and this is dealt with in the first pages of this essay, the existence of still earlier editions, especially if we compare the two printed texts, already very divergent between them, and the two manuscripts, both at the Vatican Apostolic Library, to which the manuscript of the score must certainly be added for further problematization. The second section of this paper gets to the heart of the theme that interests us most here, namely the examination of Spagna's adaptive interventions with respect to what undoubtedly represents its main hypotext, Tirso de Molina's La celosa de sí misma. The analysis is conducted on the latest printed edition of the melodrama, to be considered as the version that the author wanted to pass on to posterity, as the authorized literary text, still intervening much compared to the previous edition of 1689 on which perhaps, being more linked to the stage event, he hadn't had much control.


In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s and '70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change "cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals," he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other "cultural revolutionaries" who made their mark. For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke today's "culture wars." The Long March fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.


PURPOSE: Collaborative project delivery methods are believed to contribute to faster completion times, lower overall project costs and higher quality. Contracts are expected to influence the degree of collaboration on a given project since they allow or restrict certain lines of communication in the decision-making process. Various delivery systems rank differently on the spectrum of collaboration. The purpose of this study is to test if collaborative project delivery methods impart value. Ideally the most extreme forms of project delivery methods, that is, Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) and Design-Bid-Build (DBB), should be compared to test the effects of collaboration on benefits to the owner. Due to difficulty in obtaining data on IPD and similarly scaled DBB projects, for this study, their close cousins, CM-at-Risk (CMR) and Competitive Sealed Proposal (CSP) were compared. METHODOLOGY: The study compared cost performance and reducible change orders of 17 CMR and 13 CSP projects by the same owner. FINDINGS: The overall cost performance is more reliable for CMR than for CSP projects. The cost of reducible change orders for all three categories (errors, omissions and design modifications) are lower for CMR than for CSP projects IMPLICATIONS: This study is expected to help boost confidence in the benefits of collaborative project delivery methods. It is also likely that the results will encourage acceptance of IPD for public projects.


We report measurements of ultrahigh quality factors (Q-factors) of the optical whispering-gallery modes excited via a tapered optical-fiber waveguide in single glycerol–water microdroplets standing on a superhydrophobic surface in air. Owing to the high contact angle of the glycerol–water mixture on the superhydrophobic surface (>155°), microdroplets with the geometry of a truncated sphere minimally distorted by gravity and contact line pinning effects could be generated. Q-factors up to 2.3×106 were observed for such droplets with radii of 100–200  μm exposed to the ambient atmosphere in a closed chamber with controlled relative humidity. Placement of microdroplets in a constant humidity environment permitted prolonged characterization of Q-factors for individual microdroplets. We found that the Q-factors in air were stable over more than 1 h and their measured values were limited mostly by the thermally induced droplet shape fluctuations.


Low-rank tensor methods for the approximate solution of second-order elliptic partial differential equations in high dimensions have recently attracted significant attention. A critical issue is to rigorously bound the error of such approximations, not with respect to a fixed finite dimensional discrete background problem, but with respect to the exact solution of the continuous problem. While the energy norm offers a natural error measure corresponding to the underlying operator considered as an isomorphism from the energy space onto its dual, this norm requires a careful treatment in its interplay with the tensor structure of the problem. In this paper we build on our previous work on energy norm-convergent subspace-based tensor schemes contriving, however, a modified formulation which now enforces convergence only in $L_2$. In order to still be able to exploit the mapping properties of elliptic operators, a crucial ingredient of our approach is the development and analysis of a suitable asymmetric preconditioning scheme. We provide estimates for the computational complexity of the resulting method in terms of the solution error and study the practical performance of the scheme in numerical experiments. In both regards, we find that controlling solution errors in this weaker norm leads to substantial simplifications and to a reduction of the actual numerical work required for a certain error tolerance.


The object of the study was to investigate, establish and quantify the relationship between contrast sensitivity, intraocular light scatter and glare. The aim was to establish the effects on vision, in an effort to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the visual world of subjects prone to increased light scatter in the eye. Disability glare refers to the reduction in visual performance produced by a glare source. The reduction in visual performance can be explained by intraocular scattered light producing a veiling luminance which is superimposed upon the retinal image. This veiling luminance lowers contrast thus sensitivity to the stimulus declines. The effect of glare of luminance and colour contrast sensitivity for young and elderly subjects was examined. For both age groups, disability glare was greatest for the red-green stimulus and least for the blue-yellow. The precise effect of a glare source on colour discrimination depends upon the interaction between the chromaticity of the glare source and that of the stimulus. The effect of a long wavelength pass (red) and a short wavelength pass filter (blue) on disability glare was examined. Disability glare was not significantly different with the red and blue filters, even in the presence of wavelength dependent scatter. An equation was derived which allowed an intrinsic Light Scatter Factor (LSF) to be determined for any given glare angle (Paulsson and Sjostrand, 1980). Corrections to the formula to account for factors such as pupil size changes are unnecessary. The results confirm the suitability of measuring the LSF using contrast threshold with and without glare, provided that appropriate methods are used. Using this formula an investigation into the amount of wavelength dependent scatter indicated that wavelength dependent scatter in normal young, elderly or cataractous eyes is of little or no significance. Finally, it seemed desirable to investigate the effect ultraviolet (UV) radiation has on intraocular light scatter and subsequently visual performance. Overall the results indicated that the presence or absence of UV radiation has relatively little effect on visual function for the young, elderly or cataract patient.


Private security is a multi-disciplined industry, requiring a diverse range of knowledge across many domains. Additionally and perhaps due to the diversity of private security, security has not been effectively defined. Security has many meanings dependant on applied context and concept definition. But security is developing into a discipline that does contain a rich knowledge structure, demonstrated to a degree through the increasing educational offerings of security at the tertiary level. Therefore, if security has not been appropriately defined can a security body of knowledge be presented? The study on which this article is based critiqued international tertiary security courses (n = 104) to consider what may define a security body of knowledge. Security experts selected international tertiary security courses (n = 7) to provide source data for content analysis. From these selected security courses a table of security concepts (n = 2001) was extracted, resulting in a final knowledge categorisation (n = 13) of private security. Security knowledge categories included the following : criminology; business continuity management; facility management; fire science; industrial security; information and computer security; investigations; physical security; security principles; risk management; security law; security management and security technology. Additionally, these security categories were integrated into previous work to propose a 'Science of Security Framework'. The development and presentation of the security knowledge categories and security framework will aid, in part, the consensual development of a security body of knowledge.


Fashion has never been more fashionable than it is today, but for a century the arrival of the new edition of British Vogue as it hit the newsstands has been eagerly awaited: a trustworthy barometer of style and culture and mirror of society: 'reporting on fashion, beauty, people, plays, decoration, manners and attitudes', as one of its former editors, Beatrix Miller wrote in 1976.

Miller acknowledged that British Vogue's mirror reflected only a limited section of society, but, like the modern world itself, the magazine has had to move with the changing times and embrace new technology: that it maintains its image of exclusivity and its position as the ultimate arbiter of taste in an overcrowded media market, is testament to its drive and adaptability.

British Vogue was launched in the middle of the First World War, a traumatic event that temporarily halted the struggle for female enfranchisement. Afterwards, in 1918, in recognition of their contribution to the war effort women over thirty were given the vote. Since then British Vogue has witnessed some of the most significant changes in women's lives and society's as a whole, reflecting them through its documentation of fashion and the appearance of women.

In this talk, that takes place near International Women's Day, Cally Blackman, lecturer at Central Saint Martins and author of several books on fashion, will explore the rich sources of Vogue's archive and the National Portrait Gallery's collection in order to chart fashion and the representation of women in society during the last one hundred years.


Understanding how species are distributed in the environment is increasingly important for natural resource management, particularly for keystone and habitat forming species, and those of conservation concern. Habitat suitability models are fundamental to developing this understanding; however their use in management continues to be limited due to often-vague model objectives and inadequate evaluation methods. Along the Northeast Pacific coast, canopy kelps (Macrocystis pyrifera and Nereocystis luetkeana) provide biogenic habitat and considerable primary production to nearshore ecosystems. We investigated the distribution of these species by examining a series of increasingly complex habitat suitability models ranging from process-based models based on species' ecology to complex Generalised Additive Models applied to purpose-collected survey data. Seeking limits on model complexity, we explored the relationship between model complexity and forecast skill, measured using both cross-validation and independent data evaluation. Our analysis confirmed the importance of predictors used in models of coastal kelp distributions developed elsewhere (i.e., depth, bottom type, bottom slope, and exposure); it also identified additional important factors including salinity, and interactions between exposure and salinity, and slope and tidal energy. Comparative results showed that cross-validation can lead to over-fitting, while independent data evaluation clearly identified the appropriate model complexity for generating habitat forecasts. Our results also illustrate that, depending on the evaluation data, predictions from simpler models can out-perform those from more complex models. Collectively, the insights from evaluating multiple models with multiple data sets contribute to the holistic assessment of model forecast skill. The continued development of methods and metrics for evaluating model forecasts with independent data, and the explicit consideration of model objectives and assumptions, promise to increase the utility of model forecasts to decision makers.


The location where the Gulf Stream separates from the American coast and turns eastward is called its northwall. The interannual fluctuations of the northwall are significantly correlated with the North Atlantic Oscillation with a lag of two years. When the Azores High and the Icelandic Low pressures are taken as independent variables, the latter dominates the relationship with the northwall, and the influence of the Azores High pressure is insignificant. This is consistent with the hypothesis that the major oceanic control of the northwall is in the southward flow of Labrador Sea Water into the Slope Sea. The alternative mechanism that the interaction of westward propagating Rossby waves with the American coast is responsible for northwall fluctuations is considered less likely because its initiation requires perturbations of the eastward winds in the mid‐Atlantic region, and they are very likely dependent on the Azores High. The analysis suggests that the time lag between perturbations of the Icelandic Low and the northwall varies between one and three years.


Property and structure data from binary and ternary silicate and aluminosilicate melts and glasses often reveal simple and systematic relationships to composition and temperature. Properties whose dominant structural control is the abundance of fully polymerized Q 4 -species, exhibit smooth variations with silica content. Such properties include activation energies associated with transport. Properties that depend on the type and abundance of coexisting structural species in depolymerized melts, either show smooth functional relationships to melt polymerization, NBO/T, or exhibit pronounced minimum or maximum values at intermediate NBO/T-values. The former properties include those, which are related to the availability of configurational states. The latter group includes those whose behavior is controlled by the energetics of mixing of the individual structural species. An example is enthalpy of mixing. Crystal-liquid element partition coefficients also exhibit behavior governed by thermodynamics of mixing of the structural species of the melt. Aluminum in most silicate melts is in tetrahedral coordination at ambient pressure and substitutes for silicon. The Al 3+ Si 4+ substitution lowers (Si,Al)-O-(Si,Al) bond energy. In principle, the value of properties that depends on bridging oxygen bond strength, decreases, therefore, with increasing Al/(Al+Si). Properties that depend on the proportion of polymerized and depolymerized Q n -species in the melt can show minima or maxima in relationships to Al/(Al+Si) because the abundance of the Q n -species in depolymerized silicate melts depends on the bulk melt Al/(Al+Si). Transport properties fall in this category. It is possible that Al-distribution between Q n -species in depolymerized aluminosilicate melts depends on temperature. It is likely, therefore, at least for high-temperature viscosity, its temperature-dependence is non-Ahrrenian. Other melt transport properties that are functionally related to viscous flow ( e.g. , diffusivity, electrical, and thermal conductivity) may also show non-Ahrrenian temperature-dependence at high temperature.


Objective: The purpose of this study was to explore the meaning of domestic elder abuse phenomenon. Materials & Methods: A qualitative study using hermeneutic phenomenological approach was employed with community dweller elders, five men and nine women (68 to 87 years of age) living in Tehran. In-depth interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using van Manen methods. Results: The emerged themes were "being neglected", "being psychological ly abused", "curtailment of personal autonomy ", "being financially abused", "being bodily abused" and "abandonment". Conclusion: The experience of the elderly showed that Domestic Elder Abuse is a pain and suffering inflicted on older people by their family members via the perpetration of an excruciating action or refusal or failure to provide their necessary needs which can include single/ repetitive, intentional/ unintentional actions. Elderly abuse might occur. At his/her own home or the home of a family member with whom the elderly lives. The above findings can help the healthcare providers to define the domestic elderly abuse, to distinguish abuse among elderly, and to develop specific assessment tools for screening domestic elderly abuse and its early detection and prevention.


Continuous random variables are widely used to mathematically describe random phenomenon in engineering and physical sciences. In this paper, we present a higher-order logic formalization of the Standard Uniform random variable. We show the correctness of this specification by proving the corresponding probability distribution properties within the HOL theorem prover and the proof steps have been summarized. This formalized Standard Uniform random variable can be transformed to formalize other continuous random variables, such as Uniform, Exponential, Normal, etc., by using various Non-uniform random number generation techniques. The formalization of these continuous random variables will enable us to perform error free probabilistic analysis of systems within the framework of a higher-order-logic theorem prover. For illustration purposes, we present the formalization of the Continuous Uniform random variable based on our Standard Uniform random variable and then utilize it to perform a simple probabilistic analysis of roundoff error in HOL.


ABSTRACT As governments seek to consult their citizens over matters of policy, it becomes increasingly important for citizens to receive relevant information in a medium that they can use, and will want to use, in forming their opinion upon consultative issues. In e-participation, there is a clear requirement to understand how technology can support informed debate on issues, but there are two main obstacles in achieving this. The first is that the deliberation is often on complex issues, and therefore typically there are many arguments and counter arguments to consider, which, when presented in linear text, can be confusing for the public at large. Second, it is not obvious that many people actually have the necessary critical thinking skills to deliberate on issues. Argumentation systems have been used successfully in the domains of law and education, where they have been developed in response to a need for innovative and effective ways of teaching critical thinking, presenting and defending a point of view, and providing complex information in an organized and easily accessible fashion. Their use in the political domain is only just emerging. The purpose of this article is to make clear how e-participation can gain from the use of argumentation systems.


Marking the centenary of the birth of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), this book offers a new approach to the Bauhaus artist and theorist's multifaceted life and work—an approach that redefines the very idea of biographical writing.

In Laszlo Moholy-Nagy , Louis Kaplan applies the Derridean deconstructivist model of the "signature effect" to an intellectual biography of a Constructivist artist. Inhabiting the borderline between life and work, the book demonstrates how the signature inscribed by "Moholy" operates in a double space, interweaving signified object and signifying matter, autobiography and auto-graphy. Through interpretative readings of over twenty key artistic and photographic works, Kaplan graphically illustrates Moholy's signature effect in action. He shows how this effect plays itself out in the complex of relations between artistic originality and plagiarism, between authorial identity and anonymity, as well as in the problematic status of the work of art in the age of technical reproduction. In this way, the book reveals how Moholy's artistic practice anticipates many of the issues of postmodernist debate and thus has particular relevance today. Consequently, Kaplan clarifies the relationship between avant-garde Constructivism and contemporary deconstruction.

This new and innovative configuration of biography catalyzed by the life writing of Moholy-Nagy will be of critical interest to artists and writers, literary theorists, and art historians.


In the early days of programming the concept of subroutines, and through this software reuse, was invented to spare limited hardware resources. Since then software systems have become increasingly complex and developing them would not have been possible without reusable software elements such as standard libraries and frameworks. Furthermore, other approaches commonly subsumed under the umbrella of software reuse such as product lines and design patterns have become very successful in recent years. However, there are still no software component markets available that would make buying software components as simple as buying parts in a do-it-yourself hardware store and millions of software fragments are still lying un(re)used in configuration management repositories all over the world. The literature primarily blames this on the immense effort required so far to set up and maintain searchable component repositories and the weak mechanisms available for retrieving components from them, resulting in a severe usability problem. In order to address these issues within this thesis, we developed a proactive component reuse recommendation system, naturally integrated into test-first development approaches, which is able to propose semantically appropriate, reusable components according to the specification a developer is just working on. We have implemented an appropriate system as a plugin for the well-known Eclipse IDE and demonstrated its usefulness by carrying out a case study from a popular agile development book. Furthermore, we present a precision analysis for our approach and examples of how components can be retrieved based on a simplified semantics description in terms of standard test cases.


Besides the genetic aberrations the interaction between the tumor cell and its microenvironment plays an important role in the leukemogenesis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Stimulation via extracellular factors is important for the survival of the CLL cell, since without this the CLL cell is driven into apoptosis when taken out of its micromilieu. Preliminary analyses showed that Macrophage Migration Inhibitory Factor (MIF), a chemokine with pro-inflammatory properties, is overexpressed in CLL. As MIF exerts regulatory control on cellular growth, -differentiation and apoptosis, this work tests the hypothesis whether MIF has a contribution in the pathomechanism of CLL development. To this end, we used the Eu-T-cell leukemia 1 (TCL1) mouse model (Bichi et al., 2002) in which B-cell specific overexpression of TCL1 leads to accumulation and organ infiltration by CD5+IgM+ mature B cells. The transgenic mice develop a CLL-like disease, which is manifested by leukemia, lymphadenopathy, hepatosplenomegaly, bone marrow infiltration as well as premature death after 8 to 15 months. The impact of MIF is tested in vivo by breeding the TCL1+/+ mouse to the MIF-/- mouse (Fingerle-Rowson et al., 2003). In this work, TCL1+/wt MIF+/+ and TCL1+/wt MIF-/- mice were compared with each other regarding the rate of leukemia development, tumor burden, hematopathological alterations, overall survival, cytogenetic changes as well as proliferative capacity and apoptosis. The known MIF cell surface receptors CD74/CD44 and CXCR2 are also expressed on the murine B cells. TCL1+/wt MIF+/+ mice show already in the pre-leukemic phase a higher number of CD5+IgM+ cells, and the development of a peripheral leukemia starts about three months earlier in TCL1+/wt MIF+/+ mice compared to TCL1+/wt MF-/- animals (p = 0.02). At the age of 12 months, organs like liver and spleen are infiltrated to a higher degree by small, mature and malignant B lymphocytes in the TCL1+/wt MIF+/+ than in the MIF-deficient mice. One reason for this could be the increased accumulation of CD68+ macrophages in the leukemia infiltrated spleens and bone marrow of the MIF wildtype mice (p < 0.0001). "nurse-like" cells (NLCs) act to protect the leukemic cells from apoptosis. This fits the observation that the rate of spontaneous apoptosis is elevated in the MIF-deficient leukemia infiltrated spleens in vivo, and that a trend towards higher rates of apoptosis can be seen in splenocytes of the TCL1+/wt MIF-/- mice ex vivo. These MIF-dependent effects even affect overall survival since in the MIF-/- mice, the overall median survival is prolonged by 80 days (TCL1+/wt MIF+/+ 380 days vs. TCL1+/wt MIF-/- 460 days, p = 0.04). An analysis of genomic aberrations by spectral karyotyping (SKY) of metaphases from leukemic splenocytes shows distinct genetic damages like trisomy, tetraploidy, translocations and deletions in both genotypes. An overexpression of the tumor suppressor p53 presumably due to an inactivating gene mutation was found in TCL1+/wt MIF+/+ mice at a higher frequency than in TCL1+/wt MIF-/- mice. Our analysis of the Eu-TCL1 mouse model shows that this is a valuable model for the validation of potential target molecules in the pathogenesis of CLL. We are able to demonstrate that MIF acts as a tumor promoter primarily by influencing the micromilieu in the early as well as in the late phase of leukemkia development. Further analyses are on the way which focus on the role of MIF in the function of the nurse-like cells in CLL and other tumor entities and which test the interaction of MIF and Akt.


A program pioneered by Earl Shorris in New York for educating the poor and marginalised in the humanities has been employed successfully in Australia under the title Clemente Australia for promoting both personal agency and social inclusion. Personal agency and social inclusion are ever present goals for societies and communities but they are particularly relevant today, at a time of increasing number of people who are unemployed, homeless, refugees or are experiencing multiple disadvantage. Students and staff involved in the program have reported upon student self improvements which are indicators of enhanced personal agency and social inclusion. A number of rationales have been advanced for these successes of the program, ranging from empowerment and engagement to changing habitus. The paper, drawing upon social cognitive theory, presents an integrative rationale and framework explaining the development of personal agency and social inclusion promoted by the program and expressed in their becoming "political", engaged with people at every level of society. In terms of this integrative rationale, Clemente Australia builds ideas of hope, meaning, and identity into the personal narratives of participants through reflection on their personal and vicarious experiences in the program and the competencies and changed expectancies that these bring. This integrative view can illuminate participants' reports of the program and suggest ways of making it more effective.


Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon return with spirited offensive strategies for feisty resident aliens. A resident alien knows who the enemy is, and here is a guide to the Christian initiation, practice, and discipline that is required for a people at war with the world. Some Christian liberals think that resident aliens are sectarian, and that they wish to withdraw from engagement with the world. God forbid! The book is thus full of stories of resident aliens who have been baptized, trained, and conditioned -- like Marines in boot camp -- to be new citizens and find a new home in the distinctly Christian community. Some Christian conservatives want a "to do" list that lays out the program for becoming a congregation or small group of resident aliens. Or perhaps they want a list of beliefs that might be defended. You won't find that here, for these desires are what ails the disestablished church. A list of options and choices, or an elective program for "wannabe" resident aliens, is an accommodation to the false god of freedom. Resident aliens are imitated and understood by telling their stories, by enfleshing their practices in the narrative that becomes part of the unfolding Christian story.


This is the first book to provide a hard-headed economic view of the voluntary approaches to environmental issues, especially toxic chemicals, waste disposal and global warming, that have become prominent in recent years. Corporate environmental initiatives are seen as a tool for influencing the behaviour of environmental activists, legislators, and regulators, though they may have ancillary benefits such as attracting 'green' consumers or reducing costs. Equally, government voluntary programs are seen as a way to achieve modest environmental results when political resistance to mandatory policies is high. Rigorous analysis is illustrated with numerous case studies drawn from the US, Europe, and Japan, while technical details are relegated to appendices, and each chapter highlights implications for corporate strategy and public policy. Although rooted in economic theory, this book will appeal to business strategists and policy practitioners, as well as scholars and researchers.


Naturally occurring iron metal is exceedingly rare on the surface of the Earth. Thus, it is little wonder that civilizations dating back thousands of years used iron meteorites—naturally occurring alloys of Fe, Ni, Co and a variety of trace elements—to manufacture knives, fishhooks, adzes, and amulets, among other objects. Perhaps the best known of these is the meteoritic metal blade of a dagger found with the mummified body of King Tutankhamun (Egypt's 18th dynasty boy pharaoh who ruled ~1332–1323 BC). Unfortunately, the rarity of these materials typically makes it impossible to apply destructive techniques that might allow researchers to not only confirm a meteorite origin, but also identify the meteorite used during manufacturing. Fortunately, the inhabitants of what is today the central United States produced meteorite artifacts in abundance, allowing for the kind of analyses that provides clues to 2,000-year-old trade routes.


Improved efficiency is the task of the hour. Environmental challenges, which include climate change, global warming and greenhouse gas emission have been fuelling the need to increase energy efficiency in electrical rotating machinery. Furthermore, there is a need to establish a level platform for motor manufacturers globally where they can produce electric machines according harmonized standards. Not only does this establish trust with the market, but it allows legislators to enact policies which promote energy conservation and facilitate governments to provide incentives to organizations which make energy efficiency their priority. A comparison of induction motor efficiency test methods according to the IEC 60034-2-1 and IEEE 112 standards is presented in this paper. A standard DOL squirrel cage induction motor rated at 5.5 kW is tested according to the IEC and IEEE preferred standards. Data collected from tests carried out on the 5.5 kW 4-pole motor is used to calculate the efficiency for the various IEC and IEEE tests. The data obtained shows a similar variation in values of efficiency, stray load losses and excitation losses for the same machine, but calculated using different standards. These differences result from how stray losses are treated and calculated in the standards. As a result, there is a need to harmonize the international standards.


Using spatial media to understand, navigate and act on the world is an integral element in being a connected, technology-using individual. Apple users discovered just how critical spatial media are to their everyday life when updating their mobile devices to the iOS6 operating system on 19 September 2012. Following the long process, users discovered that the Google maps application had been replaced with Apple's own maps application. The new application, built on OpenStreetMap, brought much derision due to its curious inaccuracies, such as labelling Berlin as 'Schoeneiche' (Butcher, 2012). The changes brought consternation and discontent; Apple swiftly allowed Google Maps to be reinstalled as an app on iOS devices in December 2012. Evidence suggests though many users continued to use Apple's app following improvements (Arthur, 2013). The disruption of spatial media services caused a major public relations incident for Apple, but also created angst for media users as these applications have become critical for the continually connected mobile media user and disrupted their perceived ability to cope in the everyday world. The behaviour of using spatial media and the epistemologies that this engenders are therefore critical features of our data- and information-infused world. This chapter investigates some of the emerging issues and theoretical approaches related to this behavioural and epistemological shift.


Introduction Drug overuse is a serious problem for health care, and one of the biggest problems for the socio-economic well-being of different communities. The elderly tend to use more drugs due to changes in their cognitive and physiological factors. One of the best ways to evaluate the health level of elderly people is to evaluate their self-medication. This study was conducted to investigate self-medication among the elderly in Shahr-e-Kord. Methods This cross-sectional study was conducted on 350 people older than 65 in Shahr-e-Kord in 2015. Sampling was done in two stages. In the first stage, the city of Shahr-e-Kord was divided into four areas using geographical maps. Eighty-eight people were selected from each area. The research instrument was a questionnaire called the Health Belief Model (HBM). The data were analyzed using SPSS version 20, the chi-squared test, the independent-samples t-test, and the Pearson correlation coefficient. Results No significant relationship was observed between the prevalence of self-medication with demographic variables and level of awareness. But there was a significant difference between sensitivity, perceived severity, and perceived barriers and educational level. There also was a significant difference between the perceived benefits and their income level. There also was a significant difference between the level of awareness, sensitivity, severity, benefits, and barriers of people with and without a history of self-medication (p < 0.05). Conclusion Due to the adverse effects of self-medication and the high prevalence of this activity among the elderly, it is recommended that a training program be developed and implemented to change the knowledge and beliefs of the elderly about self-medication.


Aphasia has significant consequences on communication in activities of daily living and comprehensive aphasia assessments are an important clinical tool for gathering diagnostic and treatment information. A comprehensive aphasia assessment is still the most used tool utilized when the aim is to collect as much clinically useful information as possible using one single test. Despite the availability of several major comprehensive aphasia tests for the English-speaking population, there are only a few comprehensive tests that have been developed for the majority of the world's popular languages including Arabic (Ivanova & Hallowell, 2013). Clinicians in Jordan are challenged by the lack of availability of a formal aphasia test for people with aphasia (PWA) speaking a Jordanian dialect of Arabic. The aim of this study was to examine the content validity of a newly developed Jordanian-Arabic Aphasia Test (JAAT) by formulating an experimental process of content validation. The study consisted of three experiments: the first experiment aims to validate the visual stimuli used in the JAAT; the second to identify troublesome in need of modification; and the third is an examination of content validity of the JAAT. The JAAT consists of 12 subtests divided into four parts with a total of 112 items that assess verbal fluency, auditory comprehension, repetition, and naming. For the first experiment, 164 non-brain damaged (NBD) Jordanian-Arabic speakers distributed by age, sex, and level of education were asked to match 132 pictures with target words to determine whether the images accurately represent the words they were drawn to depict. In the second experiment the JAAT was administered to 20 NBD Jordanian Arabic speakers who were 60 years of age or more to identify item outliers that are less than ideal for use with PWA. As for the third experiment and the focus of this study, 21 subject matter experts (SME) in the field of speech-language pathology were asked to rate the JAAT using an online questionnaire. The content of the JAAT was appraised using three parameters—clinical applicability, linguistic relevance, and cultural sensitivity. Furthermore, a Content Validity Index (CVI) with a criterion set for 80% was used based on ratings of 7 or 6 indicating response choices of strongly agree and agree respectively on the online questionnaire. Results of the first experiment demonstrated that the majority of the items in the JAAT were validated by NBD Jordanian Arabic speakers and found to accurately represent the target words. In the second experiment, as expected, senior Jordanian-Arabic speakers performed correctly on most items of the JAAT; with 8 items shown to be difficult for more than one-fourth of examinees. These items were modified before being readmitted in the JAAT for content validation. Results of the third experiment showed that the SMEs rated the JAAT's clinical applicability, linguistic relevance, and cultural sensitivity positively with significant CVI values. Two subtests in the JAAT were found to require further modifications and the test's capacity to identify other disorders was found to be lacking. Additionally, the JAAT needs to go through some modification to improve its potential to identify severity levels of PWA. The results of this study signal the importance of implementing a scheme of content validation and item development process that paves the way for better test construction practices.


In this paper we describe the development of ShrinkyCircuits, a novel electronic prototyping technique that captures the flexibility of sketching and leverages properties of a common everyday plastic polymer to enable low-cost, miniature, planar, and curved, multi-layer circuit designs in minutes. ShrinkyCircuits take advantage of inexpensive prestressed polymer film that shrinks to its original size when exposed to heat. This enables improved electrical characteristics though sintering of the conductive electrical layer, partial self-assembly of the circuit and components, and mechanically robust custom shapes Including curves and non-planar form factors. We demonstrate the range and adaptability of ShrinkyCircuits designs from simple hand drawn circuits with through-hole components to complex multilayer, printed circuit boards (PCB), with curved and irregular shaped electronic layouts and surface mount components. Our approach enables users to create extremely customized circuit boards with dense circuit layouts while avoiding messy chemical etching, expensive board milling machines, or time consuming delays in using outside PCB production houses.


Author guidelines for journals could help to promote transparency, openness, and reproducibility Transparency, openness, and reproducibility are readily recognized as vital features of science (1, 2). When asked, most scientists embrace these features as disciplinary norms and values (3). Therefore, one might expect that these valued features would be routine in daily practice. Yet, a growing body of evidence suggests that this is not the case (4–6).


Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently achieved a great deal of attention due to its numerous attractive applications in many different fields. Sensors and WSNs possesses a number of special characteristics that make them very promising in many applications, but also put on them lots of constraints that make issues in sensor network particularly difficult. These issues may include topology control, routing, coverage, security, and data management. In this thesis, we focus our attention on the coverage problem. Firstly, we define the Sensor Energyefficient Scheduling for k-coverage (SESK) problem. We then solve it by proposing a novel, completely localized and distributed scheduling approach, naming Distributed Energy-efficient Scheduling for k-coverage (DESK) such that the energy consumption among all the sensors is balanced, and the network lifetime is maximized while still satisfying the k-coverage requirement. Finally, in related work section we conduct an extensive survey of the existing work in literature that focuses on with the coverage problem. INDEX WORDS: Wireless sensor network, Coverage problem, k-coverage, Localized and distributed algorithm, Energy-efficiency, Fault-tolerance, Robustness AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT DISTRIBUTED ALGORITHM FOR k-COVERAGE PROBLEM IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS


This paper discusses a workshop method suitable for use in projects with a participatory design approach. Participatory design is sometimes criticised for focussing too much on what users say. The method described here takes that into account by having users not only talk, but also do acting and make lo-fi prototypes. The method has been used in several different projects. The structure of the workshops is designed to enable the participants to express themselves by saying, doing and making. People express different aspects through different channels and by enabling people to express themselves not only by talking but also by acting and constructing artefacts we create a richer understanding of their needs and desires as well as their context and situation. The method often gives 'good' results that are foundations for further design work.


At the core of the economic analysis of contract law lies the concept of options. According to this concept, parties are expected to perform their contractual duties if, and only if, the legal price of breach (i.e. damages) is higher than the cost of performance. This Article challenges this concept, and shows that peoples' performance decisions are driven by non-instrumental forces such as moral commitments, social norms, and motivated reasoning. To demonstrate this point, this Article presents a series of three experimental surveys that measure and compare participants' attitudes toward breaching a contract. Participants answered questions in the context of one of several variations of the same hypothetical scenario. While the expected cost of a breach was identical in every variation, they differed along several dimensions, such as the source of uncertainty regarding paying damages (uncertainty stemming from an ambiguous contract vs. uncertainty stemming from lax enforcement) and the type of contract (negotiated contract vs. standard form contract). The results confirmed our hypothesis and showed that performance decisions are affected by a diverse set of variables aside from the monetary incentives set by the legal system. Based on these findings, the Article revisits some of the basic questions of contract law and sheds new light on an array of policy issues.


From Bach's choral works composed for performance in the Thomas-Kirche Leipzig to Stockhausen's electronic music designed specifically for caves, the course of Western music has been closely connected to the spaces in which it has been performed. In this remarkable study, Michael Forsyth - designer of concert halls, architect, and violinist - examines the effect of musical taste and style on architecture and the reciprocal influence that buildings and their acoustics have had on musical performance and composition.Buildings for Music opens with a description of the purpose - built music rooms in Britain and Germany from the 17th century. From there it moves to the evolution of the opera house in Italy and France, analyzing these buildings in terms of the acoustic requirements of 18th-century music in the classical style. The great 19th-century concert halls and opera houses are then described in relation to the development of Romantic music. In seeking the reasons for their excellence and flaws, the book dispels a number of acoustic myths.The final part of the book outlines the growth of acoustic science and the parallel emergence of the 20th-century concert hall and of modern music. The influence of recording techniques and cinema design are also discussed. In closing, Forsyth looks to a future that may find its inspiration in electronics and the adjustable auditorium.Michael Forsyth teaches and researches architecture at the University of Bristol. He has broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on concert hall acoustics, and is a frequent contributor to the Architects' Journal.


This thesis examines performance of PE-backed companies on a sector-by-sector basis in the Nordics. In addition, this thesis provides a holistic overview of the performance of PE-backed companies across three dimensions: Financial and Operational Performance, Insolvency Risk and Employment. The analysis is based on a sample of 248 portfolio companies from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden between 2004 and 2013, measured relative to a control group of non-PE-backed companies identified through propensity score matching. We find that portfolio companies in the industrial sector have higher growth in turnover and significant improvements in operational profitability compared to sector peers. Furthermore, portfolio companies in Cleantech and ICT & Technology exhibit significant higher growth in turnover post-transaction, while no differences in operational profitability are identified. For portfolio companies in the energy-, consumerand health care & life science sector we find no significant differences in growth or operational profitability. However, our results suggest that portfolio companies in Transportation perform significantly worse in terms of operational profitability. The results from the overall assessment of the Nordic PE industry depicts higher growth for portfolio companies, while the change in insolvency risk is neutral compared to peers. Lastly, PE-backing appears to have a positive effect on job creation, while wage levels are unaffected.


Rotaviruses cause severe gastroenteritis in mammals, including humans and livestock. Most rotavirus proteins have known functions, either as a mediator of virus replication or as a component of the infectious virus particle. The function of nonstructural protein 1 (NSP1) was unknown. However, it has been suggested that the function of NSP1 involved interactions with cellular proteins. Using the NSP1 encoded by a bovine rotavirus as the bait protein of a yeast-two hybrid interaction trap, interferon regulatory factor 3 (IRF3) was identified as an NSP1-interacting protein. Due to the importance of IRF3 in initiating an interferon response, we hypothesized that NSP1 acts to antagonize the interferon system. A comprehensive set of experiments yielded the following observations. Interferon-β (IFNβ) induction was blocked in wild-type, but not NSP1 null, infected cells. Expression of NSP1 in the absence of infection resulted in proteasome-mediated degradation of IRF3. A cysteine-rich zincbinding region near the amino-terminus of all known NSP1 sequences resembles a domain found in hundreds of E3 ubiquitin ligases. Mutational analysis of the zinc-binding domain was consistent with NSP1 acting as an E3 enzyme. The NSP1 of a murine strain of rotavirus also interacted with IRF3. The NSP1 proteins encoded by the bovine and murine rotavirus strains showed low sequence homology (37% identity), which indicated that directing degradation of IRF3 may be a common property of NSP1 proteins from many different rotavirus strains. Screening of simian, bovine, and porcine rotavirus strains indicated that the porcine strain OSU was the only wild-type strain that was unable to direct IRF3 degradation. Characterization of OSU showed that this strain was able to block IFNβ induction by antagonizing NFκB signaling, rather than IRF3 signaling. While analyzing NFκB signaling in rotavirus infected cells, we found that the F box protein, βTrCP, of the Skp1/Cul1/F box multi-subunit E3 enzyme was targeted for degradation by OSU NSP1 and the NSP1 of a bovine rotavirus strain. Together, the results presented in this dissertation have determined that rotavirus NSP1 functions as an interferon antagonist by directing the proteasome-mediated degradation of IFNβ induction signaling components, most likely by acting as an E3 ubiquitin ligase.


Abstract Hereditary angioedema (HAE) caused by a deficiency of C1 esterase inhibitor enzyme (C1-INH) is a very rare, autosomal dominantly inherited genetic disorder, characterized by recurrent peripheral angioedema, painful abdominal attacks and episodes of laryngeal edema. Abdominal attacks are frequent symptoms in adult HAE patients, occurring in more than 90% of the cases. Angioedema in the bowel or abdomen can occur in the absence of cutaneous manifestations and may be easily misdiagnosed unless the clinician has a high degree of awareness to include HAE in the differential diagnosis. Misdiagnosis is associated with inadequate treatments, including unnecessary surgical procedures. Any patient who presents recurrent episodes of swelling should be evaluated for HAE caused by C1-INH deficiency. New therapies could save lives and dramatically improve their quality of life.


We show analytically and with rigorous computational electrodynamics how inhomogeneous surface plasmon polaritons (ISPPs) can be generated by refraction of ordinary SPPs at metal–metal interfaces. ISPPs, in contrast with SPPs, propagate and decay in different directions and can therefore exhibit significantly different intensity patterns. Our analytical arguments are based on a complex generalization of Snell's law to describe how SPPs moving on one metal surface are refracted at an interface with a second, different metal surface. The refracted waveform on the second metal is an ISPP. Under suitable circumstances the decay of an ISPP can be almost perpendicular to the propagation direction, leading to significant confinement. It is also found that ISPPs on the second metal can retain information about the SPPs on the first metal, a phenomenon that we term "dispersion imprinting". The complex Snell's law predictions are validated with 3-D finite-difference time-domain simulations, and possible means of ex...


This study analyses the adequacy of the Australian Offshore Marine Oil Spill Contingency Plan in responding to petroleum platform-sourced oil spills, in light of the Montara Oil Spill in the Timor Sea in August 2009. After a consideration of the causes of the Montara Oil Spill, this study outlines the regulatory and response framework for marine oil spills in Australia, outlining the three pillars of oil spill planning, namely preparedness, training and response. The study then analyses the adequacy of the NatPlan and the National Marine Oil Spill Contingency Plan to address petroleum platform-sourced oil spills. This analysis highlights the weaknesses in oil spill preparedness, training and response to oil spills from oil installation-sourced oil pollution. In addition, it highlights the discord between the aim of the oil company to cap the leak, and the National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority to preserve life through the implementation of a 'no go' zone around the Montara platform. In responding to the weaknesses identified in this critical analysis, this study also offers possible changes to Australia's oil spill response strategy to ensure that the response to future petroleum platform-sourced oil spills are best practice.


Comprehensively explores sexually transmitted diseases, from epidemiology, causative pathogens, clinical impact, and immunology, to management strategies utilizing new strategies of genomics and next-generation diagnostic tools Sexually transmitted infections (STI) are very common worldwide. More than 20 different STIs have been identified, and about 19 million men and women are infected each year in the United States alone. This book looks at the complete picture of common STIs— how they form, evolve, and transmit, as well as how they can be treated and managed with modern techniques, medicines, and tools. Diagnostics to Pathogenomics of Sexually Transmitted Infections runs the spectrum of discussion ranging from introduction of causative pathogen, their pathogenesis to epidemiology, immunology, to anatomy and physiology of human genitalia and management strategies. The book offers in-depth chapter coverage on effect of probiotics on reproductive health; mucosal immunity in sexually transmitted infections; the role of circumcision in preventing STIs; Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV); genital herpes; molluscum contagiosum; genital warts; chlaymydia trachomatis; donovanosis; gonorrhoea; treponematoses; genital mycoplasms; bacterial vaginosis; vulvovaginal candidiasis; chlaymydia; scabies; chancroid, yeast infections; and more. - Comprehensively compiles most of the major sexually transmitted infections - Presents updated information on clinical aspects of sexually transmitted infections - Examines the priorities in pathogenesis of human sexually transmitted infections and discusses new strategies of genomics and next-generation diagnostic tools used for detection of such pathogens - Explores the future of rapid molecular diagnostic techniques and the challenges posed in the diagnosis of human STIs - Includes bench to bedside content that will appeal to both basic and clinical researchers By offering the latest knowledge about recent advances in sexually transmitted infections in an interdisciplinary fashion, Diagnostics to Pathogenomics of Sexually Transmitted Infections is the perfect book for virologists, microbiologists, infectious disease experts, vaccinologists, biomedical researchers, clinicians, pharmacologists, and public health specialists.


Available sources on Nigeria have shown certain facets which, if not properly analysed, are easily overlooked. Such issues include: falls in government revenue, the re-emergence of pre-colonial currencies, the re-emergence of certain elements of slavery (which had supposedly been suppressed), patterns of migration, the reduction of both salaries and even `tax ratesi?½, unemployment, food shortages, the pawning of children, the monopoly of import/export trade by syndicates/European firms), the difficulty of collecting taxes, the attempt to `diversifyi?½ the economy, and so forth. Even more obscure facets appear - such as the lending of funds by Native Authority Treasuries to foreign countries. In fact, `lendingi?½ or `investingi?½ government bonds was a standard practice of colonial administrative units, and indeed was well recognized in the debates over the profit and loss of `Empirei?½, but the consequences of this action on the local economy are very often ignored. In this paper, I am making use of Northern Nigeria as a case study. I hope to utilize the records available to illustrate some of the effects on ordinary Nigerians of the economic changes and policies of the 1930s.


Abstract. Iron fertilization is explored by tracking dissolved iron (DFe) through its life cycle from injection by external sources (birth) to burial in the sediments (death). We develop new diagnostic equations that count iron and phosphate regenerations with each passage through the biological pump and partition the ocean's DFe concentration according to the number of its past and future regenerations. We apply these diagnostics to a family of data-constrained estimates of the iron cycle with sources σ in the range 1.9–41 Gmol yr−1. We find that for states with σ > 7 Gmol yr−1, 50 % of the DFe inventory has not been regenerated in the past and 85 % will not be regenerated in the future. The globally averaged mean number of past and future regenerations scale with the bulk iron lifetime τ ~ σ−1tot and have ranges of 0.05–2.2 and 0.01–1.4, respectively. Memory of birth location fades rapidly with each regeneration, and DFe regenerated more than ~ 5 times is found in a pattern shaped by Southern Ocean nutrient trapping. We quantify the natural fertilization efficiency at any point r in the ocean as the global export production resulting from the DFe at r, per iron molecule. We show that this efficiency is closely related to the mean number of future regenerations that the iron will experience. At the surface, the natural fertilization efficiency has a global mean in the range 0.7–7 (mol P) (mmol Fe)−1 across our family of state estimates and is largest in the central tropical Pacific, with the Southern Ocean having comparable importance only for high iron-source scenarios.


Background: There is lack of information on the impact of Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic on routine cancer care delivery. Aims and Objectives : To evaluate the change in Day Care Chemotherapy (DCC) and Out Patient Department (OPD) patient numbers before and after COVID-19 national lockdown. Material and Methods: Demographic data, diagnosis, type and frequency of chemotherapy delivered in Day Care between 1st February 2020 to 31st July 2020 were retrieved. Out Patient Department daily patient numbers were collected during above period. Descriptive statistics, Odds ratio, Chi-square and Student T test were used to measure change in pattern of DDC and OPD patient numbers before and after 24th March 2020 (day of Lockdown). Pearson correlation coefficient was used to measure the strength of correlation between rise in COVID-19 cases and patient numbers. Results: 3192 DCC and 8209 OPD visits were recorded in 126 working days. Median age was 47 years( SD + 19.06). Breast (17%) and Gall bladder( 15%) were the most common cancers receiving chemotherapy. There was a significant decrease in number of DCC delivered in post COVID lockdown [ mean 21.97 ( + 9.7)] compared to pre COVID lockdown [mean 33.30 (+11.4)], t=4.11, p = 0.001.Similarly, there was a significant decrease in number of OPD visits in post COVID lockdown [ mean 47.13 ( + 18.8)] compared to pre COVID lockdown [mean 89.91 (+30.0)], t=7.09, p = 0.001. The odds of receiving weekly chemotherapy over non weekly regimes significantly decreased post COVID lockdown with Odds ratio of 0.52 (95% CI, 0.36-0.75) with Chi square of 12.57, p =0.001. Daily COVID cases in State and OPD patient number were found to be moderately positively correlated on Pearson correlation coefficient, r = 0.35 ,p =0.001. Conclusion: There was a significant fall in patient visit and chemotherapy cycles immediately after lockdown. The numbers increased later despite rise in COVID-19 cases.


Commercialisation and commodification have transformed the meaning and experience of mothering in the post war period, with the greater availability of labour saving devices and the stylising of pregnancy and baby-hood characterising perceptions of the contemporary period. The material culture of pregnancy and new motherhood is an important site for the construction of identities and the performance of cultural distinction between women. The Making of Modern Motherhood is an ESRC funded study documenting and exploring the diversity and coherence of motherhood as a contemporary identity. The study brings together methodologies and analytic frameworks from sociology and cultural studies in order to explore the dynamic relationship between the very different situations that constitute motherhood and the common popular culture through which mothering is represented and consumed. In this paper we explain how we combined disciplinary traditions, synthesising an analysis of pregnancy magazines, visual documentations of expectant mothers' preparations for birth, and the interview accounts of 62 women. We focus on the way in which age operates as a canonical category for the construction of contemporary mothering as 'too early', 'too late' or 'just right' – and the ways in which these categories resonate with popular representations of mothering.


The IEEE P1687 (IJTAG) standard proposal aims at providing a standardized interface between on-chip embedded logic (instruments), such as scan-chains and temperature sensors, and the IEEE 1149.1 standard which provides test data transport and test protocol for board test. A key feature in P1687 is to include Select Instrument Bits (SIBs) in the scan path to allow flexibility in test architecture design and test scheduling. This paper presents algorithms to compute the test time in a P1687 context. The algorithms are based on analysis for flat and hierarchical test architectures, considering two test schedule types - concurrent and sequential test scheduling. Furthermore, two types of overhead are identified, i.e. control data overhead and JTAG protocol overhead. The algorithms are implemented and employed in experiments on realistic industrial designs.


A theoretical model is presented to predict effective thermal conductivity of real two phase materials from the values of thermal conductivity of the constituent phases and their volume fraction. Here we develop a numerical expression for effective thermal conductivity of Cu-solder system in two phase system is being comprised of contributions from both the phases with interfacial layer. A new correlation term F is introduced for highly conducting phase, non-linear fl ow of heat fl ux lines and random distribution of the phases. Here, we get best fi tting relation for F. Comparison of the proposed relation with different models has also been made. The values predicted by the proposed model are in close and good agreement with experimental values and more accurate than those obtained from existing models.


The Harmonoise reference model has been developed in order to predict long-term average sound levels in road and railway situations that are geometrically relatively simple but physically complex. The present paper describes all steps of calculations with this powerful model which includes several advanced numerical propagation methods to calculate the coupled effects of atmosphere, ground surface and obstacles on sound waves. The reference model employs a statistical description of the atmosphere, based on local meteorological data, as well as various impedance models for ground surfaces and other absorbing surfaces. Validations against in situ longterm measurements have been achieved in several sites; agreement between reference model and experimental results ranges from excellent in flat terrain situations down to fairly good in more complex configurations (hilly, viaduct).


In non-magnetic cataclysmic variables (CVs) a white dwarf accretes matter from a main-sequence secondary star via an accretion disc. The dynamical behaviour of the accretion disc determines the accretion rate onto the white dwarf. Thermal instabilities in the accretion disc associated with the ionisation of hydrogen can lead to a limit-cycle behaviour in which the disc switches quasi-periodically between high and low accretion states. This thermal limit-cycle model is the generally accepted explanation for dwarf nova outbursts observed in many CVs. The process of disc accretion in non-magnetic CVs is subject to a number of external conditions, namely mass transfer variations of the secondary star, stream overflow and irradiation by the white dwarf. In this thesis I develop a model for time-dependent disc accretion onto white dwarfs and analyse the influence of these external conditions on the accretion process.I examine the effects of mass transfer variations by deriving real mass transfer variations from light curve monitoring of the disc-less CV AM Her. These mass transfer variations I include in simulations of disc accretion onto white dwarfs in non-magnetic systems and find that the mass accretion rate of the disc relaxes to an equilibrium with the prevailing mass transfer rate on a rather short timescale. I conclude that the observed changes in outburst duration and outburst magnitude are caused by nearly simultaneous variations of the mass loss rate from the secondary.I also present a new model for the stripping of the stream by the accretion disc, and find that stream overflow can have subtle effects on the evolution of the accretion disc only if the amount of overflowing stream material exceeds 25% of the mass transfer rate. I conclude that solely very large stream overflow fractions can change the outbursts of dwarf novae. For realistic amounts of stream overflow the overall outburst behaviour is marginally changed.The accretion disc is mostly influenced by the white dwarf irradiation. I present a self-consistent model for irradiated accretion discs and find that efficient irradiation in dwarf nova systems causes small "echo" outbursts following the larger ones immediately. This result contrasts with the observations of dwarf nova outbursts. As an explanation for this discrepancy I suggest that the reprocessing efficiency of disc irradiation is rather small. This is in agreement with results I obtain from detailed simulations of irradiated discs in post novae. These systems are excellent laboratories for studying the effects of disc irradiation because the white dwarf heated during the nova eruption provides a much stronger irradiation of the disc than in normal dwarf novae. I derive time-limits for the occurrence of dwarf nova outbursts in post novae and present detailed simulations of the evolution of irradiated discs in post novae.In addition to the developed theory of irradiated discs around white dwarfs, I show preliminary results of an intensive observing campaign on the post nova system V446 Her. Finally, discussing the influence of disc irradiation on the post nova evolution in the light of the current working hypothesis leads me to put forward a new scenario.


The article considers screening human populations with two screening tests. If any of the two tests is positive, then full evaluation of the disease status is undertaken; however, if both diagnostic tests are negative, then disease status remains unknown. This procedure leads to a data constellation in which, for each disease status, the 2 × 2 table associated with the two diagnostic tests used in screening has exactly one empty, unknown cell. To estimate the unobserved cell counts, previous approaches assume independence of the two diagnostic tests and use specific models, including the special mixture model of Walter or unconstrained capture–recapture estimates. Often, as is also demonstrated in this article by means of a simple test, the independence of the two screening tests is not supported by the data. Two new estimators are suggested that allow associations of the screening test, although the form of association must be assumed to be homogeneous over disease status. These estimators are modifications of the simple capture–recapture estimator and easy to construct. The estimators are investigated for several screening studies with fully evaluated disease status in which the superior behavior of the new estimators compared to the previous conventional ones can be shown. Finally, the performance of the new estimators is compared with maximum likelihood estimators, which are more difficult to obtain in these models. The results indicate the loss of efficiency as minor.


Genetic risks in breast cancer remain only partly understood. Here, we report the results of a genome-wide association study of germline DNA from 4,658 women, including 252 women experiencing a breast cancer recurrence, who were entered on the MA.27 adjuvant trial comparing the aromatase inhibitors (AI) anastrozole and exemestane. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) of top significance were identified in the gene encoding MIR2052HG, a long noncoding RNA of unknown function. Heterozygous or homozygous individuals for variant alleles exhibited a ∼40% or ∼63% decrease, respectively, in the hazard of breast cancer recurrence relative to homozygous wild-type individuals. Functional genomic studies in lymphoblastoid cell lines and ERα-positive breast cancer cell lines showed that expression from MIR2052HG and the ESR1 gene encoding estrogen receptor-α (ERα) was induced by estrogen and AI in a SNP-dependent manner. Variant SNP genotypes exhibited increased ERα binding to estrogen response elements, relative to wild-type genotypes, a pattern that was reversed by AI treatment. Further, variant SNPs were associated with lower expression of MIR2052HG and ERα. RNAi-mediated silencing of MIR2052HG in breast cancer cell lines decreased ERα expression, cell proliferation, and anchorage-independent colony formation. Mechanistic investigations revealed that MIR2052HG sustained ERα levels both by promoting AKT/FOXO3-mediated ESR1 transcription and by limiting ubiquitin-mediated, proteasome-dependent degradation of ERα. Taken together, our results define MIR2052HS as a functionally polymorphic gene that affects risks of breast cancer recurrence in women treated with AI. More broadly, our results offer a pharmacogenomic basis to understand differences in the response of breast cancer patients to AI therapy. Cancer Res; 76(23); 7012-23. ©2016 AACR.


Human lactoferrin has been found to be decreased or absent in most breast cancer and leukemia cells. In order to examine the lactoferrin gene for both structural alterations and the degree of methylation, we isolated a 2117-kilobase complementary DNA from human breast tissue. This complementary DNA was used to probe DNA extracted from normal peripheral blood, leukemia cells from patients, leukemia cell lines, and breast cancer cell lines. Immunocytochemical staining of these cells confirmed the decreased production of lactoferrin in malignancy. MspI restriction enzyme fragment patterns demonstrated genetic polymorphism which occurred in DNA from both normal and malignant cells. Polymorphism was also noted with XbaI. In this case, there were two fragment patterns that were only found in DNA from malignant cells. The degree of DNA methylation was also evaluated. The methylation pattern of DNA extracted from malignant cells was highly variable and generally less methylated than DNA extracted from normal WBCs. It is possible that the decrease in lactoferrin associated with cancer is multifactorial and includes gene structural changes as well as altered regulation. Further study is needed to determine whether the changes found in this study are the result of the malignancy or contribute to its onset or maintenance.


Situated at the southern edge of the Tibetan Plateau (TP), the Hindu-Kush-Himalayas-Gangetic (HKHG) region is under the clear and present danger of climate change. Flash-flood, landslide, and debris flow caused by extreme precipitation, as well as rapidly melting glaciers, threaten the water resources and livelihood of more than 1.2 billion people living in the region. Rapid industrialization and increased populations in recent decades have resulted in severe atmospheric and environmental pollution in the region. Because of its unique topography and dense population, the HKHG is not only a major source of pollution aerosol emissions, but also a major receptor of large quantities of natural dust aerosols transported from the deserts of West Asia and the Middle East during the premonsoon and early monsoon season (April–June). The dust aerosols, combined with local emissions of light-absorbing aerosols, that is, black carbon (BC), organic carbon (OC), and mineral dust, can (a) provide additional powerful heating to the atmosphere and (b) allow more sunlight to penetrate the snow layer by darkening the snow surface. Both effects will lead to accelerated melting of snowpack and glaciers in the HKHG region, amplifying the greenhouse warming effect. In addition, these light-absorbing aerosols can interact with monsoon winds and precipitation, affecting extreme precipitation events in the HKHG, as well as weather variability and climate change over the TP and the greater Asian monsoon region.


Experiential learning is all the rage in legal education today. And yet, educators throughout history have known that involving students in their learning and exposing them to practical applications of what they are learning increases student engagement and retention. But legal education is coming to this way of thinking somewhat late. This article, based on a presentation that the authors gave at the AALS conference in New York in January of 2014, suggests that technology opens up new possibilities for law schools by allowing students from different schools to participate in complex inter-school simulations that can, if carefully prepared, teach important lessons about lawyering skills, behavior, and provide rich opportunities for the development of professional identity. It can, in short, deepen and enrich the experiential learning opportunities that law schools offer. The article does not propose that law school faculty should teach or grade students from another school, but that the faculty can collaborate on problems that are more elaborate and complex than could realistically be produced within one school, and that students from different schools can work together as co-counsel, or in opposition to each other, in a variety of projects, with students from other schools serving as judges or arbitrators, witnesses, and clients.


Retroviral infections create a large population of cells, each defined by a unique proviral insertion site. Methods based on short-read high throughput sequencing can identify thousands of insertion sites, but the proviruses within remain unobserved. We have developed Pooled CRISPR Inverse PCR sequencing (PCIP-seq), a method that leverages long reads on the Oxford Nanopore MinION platform to sequence the insertion site and its associated provirus. We have applied the technique to three exogenous retroviruses, HTLV-1, HIV-1 and BLV, as well as endogenous retroviruses in both cattle and sheep. The long reads of PCIP-seq improved the accuracy of insertion site identification in repetitive regions of the genome. The high efficiency of the method facilitated the identification of tens of thousands of insertion sites in a single sample. We observed thousands of SNPs and dozens of structural variants within proviruses and uncovered evidence of viral hypermutation, recombination and recurrent selection.


Peanut allergy (PA) is associated with marked quality‐of‐life (QoL) impairment. However, data are lacking on the experience and impact of living with PA from the perspectives of persons with PA (PwPA) and their caregivers. Allergy to Peanuts imPacting Emotions And Life study 1 (APPEAL‐1) was a pan‐European survey investigating these perspectives. This first of two articles reports clinical characteristics of PwPA and PA management practices.


Due to the mounting demand for energy and increasing population of the world, switching from nonrenewable fossil fuels to other energy sources is not an optionit is a necessity. Focusing on a cost-effective option for the generation of electricity, Wind Energy: Renewable Energy and the Environment covers all facets of wind energy and wind turbines. The book begins by outlining the history of wind energy, before providing reasons to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. After examining the characteristics of wind, such as shear, power potential, and turbulence, it discusses the measurement and siting of individual wind turbines and wind farms. The text then presents the aerodynamics, operation, control, applications, and types of wind turbines. The author also describes the design of wind turbines and system performance for single wind turbines, water pumping, village systems, and wind farms. In addition, he explores the wind industry from its inception in the 1970s to today as well as the political and economic factors regarding the adoption of wind as an energy source. Since energy cannot be created nor destroyedonly transformed to another formwe are not encountering an energy crisis. Rather, we face an energy dilemma in the use of finite energy resources and their effects on the environment, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels. Wind Energy explores one of the most economical solutions to alleviate our energy problems.


We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. Results obtained by a panel model with spatial correlation indicate that the relevance of common business cycle factors is rather stable over the past two decades in the euro area and the US. Ongoing business cycle convergence often detected in cross-country data is not confirmed at the regional level. The degree of synchronization across the euro area is similar to that to be found for the US states. Thus, the lack of convergence does not seem to be an impediment to a common monetary policy.


Topic-focused multi-document summarization aims to produce a summary biased to a given topic or user profile. This paper presents a novel extractive approach based on manifold-ranking of sentences to this summarization task. The manifold-ranking process can naturally make full use of both the relationships among all the sentences in the documents and the relationships between the given topic and the sentences. The ranking score is obtained for each sentence in the manifold-ranking process to denote the biased information richness of the sentence. Then the greedy algorithm is employed to impose diversity penalty on each sentence. The summary is produced by choosing the sentences with both high biased information richness and high information novelty. Experiments on DUC2003 and DUC2005 are performed and the ROUGE evaluation results show that the proposed approach can significantly outperform existing approaches of the top performing systems in DUC tasks and baseline approaches.


Many cerium based ternary compounds of Ce-T-X-type, where T is a transition metal and X is a p-element, exhibit unusual physical phenomena such as heavy-Fermi (HF) liquid or non-Fermi-liquid types of behaviour in a metallic state or a Kondo-lattice/valencefluctuation type of state. The stability of paramagnetic or magnetically ordered ground state in such compounds strongly depends on the on-site hybridization energy among conduction and f electrons, the bare f-level position in the conduction band, the magnitude of intrasite Coulomb interaction and the number of electrons occupying the f-shell.
CeRhSn has attracted great interest during the last years due to its non-Fermi liquid character of low-temperature physical properties [1–6], having been explained in terms of the Griffiths phase. Moreover, in this system, Ce is in a mixed valence state and the Ce 4f states strongly hybridize with the conduction band. It is interesting to examine in detail the effect of stoichiometry and crystal structure on the formation of different ground states of the compound in the system Ce–Rh–Sn. Here, we present a study of a new compound CeRh2Sn4 which has not been investigated so far.


Medicaid is the single largest public health insurer in the United States, covering upwards of 70 million Americans. Crucially, Medicaid is also an intergovernmental program that yokes poverty to federalism: the federal government determines its broad contours, while states have tremendous discretion over how Medicaid is designed and implemented. Where some locales are generous and open handed, others are tight-fisted and punitive. In Fragmented Democracy, Jamila Michener demonstrates the consequences of such disparities for democratic citizenship. Unpacking how federalism transforms Medicaid beneficiaries' interpretations of government and structures their participation in politics, the book examines American democracy from the vantage point(s) of those who are living in or near poverty, (disproportionately) Black or Latino, and reliant on a federated government for vital resources.


The main objective of this study is to explore the emerging practice of CSR in Bangladesh. As this is the first comprehensive study of CSR in Bangladesh it is primarily exploratory in nature. Using the lens of stakeholder theory the study examines whether the current practice of CSR in Bangladesh is motivated by a desire to discharge accountability to all relevant stakeholders or is mainly driven by the imperative of strategic management of powerful stakeholders only with a view to advancing corporate economic interests. In investigating this question, a qualitative analysis of corporate social disclosures is made in order to examine corporate attitudes towards social, ethical and environmental issues as represented in the texts of annual reports. The sample of reports analysed comprises 79 top listed companies (including six multinationals) as well as eight public sector companies under the control of Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corporation (BCIC). In addition to this analysis of published reports 34 semi-structured interviews with managers and stakeholder groups have been carried out to critically examine their perceptions towards the phenomenon of CSR in Bangladesh. The results of the study show that Bangladeshi companies make very few social disclosures. The majority of the companies studied do not address the crucial issues of corruption, child labour, equal opportunities and poverty alleviation. Analysis of disclosures indicates that companies attach far more importance to the economically dominant stakeholders such as, shareholders, customers and employees ignoring the rights of social stakeholders such as local community, natural environment and the wider society. The interviews with managers emphasised the paramount importance of strategic management of key economic stakeholders. Interviews with various stakeholder groups suggest that they view the corporate response to social, ethical and environmental issues as essentially cosmetic and part of a public relations campaign. While both the managerial group and the stakeholder groups indicated a belief that CSR would increase in future, inter alia, the driving force behind such increase appears to be strong pressure from `outside' forces such as parent companies of multinationals, international buyers and international agencies. The study concludes that in their pursuit of CSR corporations are basically motivated by their desire to strategically manage their key powerful stakeholders. They achieve this, sadly, often at the expense of economically weak social stakeholders.


Stereotactic radiosurgery and fractionated stereotactic radiotherapy are new technological advances in the delivery of radiation therapy to brain lesions. These advances give new hope for some patients. The nurse in radiation oncology plays an essential role in explaining the complex treatment process to the patient and monitoring patients for side effects of treatment. This article discusses the roles of stereotactic radiosurgery and fractionated stereotactic radiotherapy, treatment planning and delivery, side effects, and nursing implications.


Abstract This paper contextualizes the struggles and contributions of Black motherhood and reproductive justice under police surveillance in Baltimore, Maryland. We conducted semi-structured interviews with mothers regarding their experiences and perceptions of policing in their community during the aftermath of the police-involved death of Freddie Gray. While the literature disproportionately focuses on Black males, little knowledge is known about the struggles and contributions of Black mothers in matters concerning police brutality and the fight against institutional violence. There still remains the question regarding the role of and impact on Black mothers during matters of institutional violence against Black children. We fill this gap by highlighting narratives and lived knowledges within a Black motherhood perspective. Primary themes show that Black women are subject to terror from police and system agents, they face reproductive justice issues, as they are criminalized as mothers—and are affected mentally, but they employ various resistance strategies that strengthen their resilience. Results indicate that Black women are the backbone and martyrs of their communities, but this comes at a tremendous cost because they remain largely unprotected and subject to immeasurable institutional violence and judgment against their mothering strategies.