A systems-level analysis shows that, after their oncogenic signaling pathways are perturbed, tumor cells become more sensitive to DNA-damaging chemotherapy. Because of the complexity and interconnectedness of signaling pathways, it is often difficult to predict how the therapeutic targeting of a single component will affect the overall response of the treated cell (see commentary by Erler and Linding). This is even more relevant for tumor cells, in which oncogenic factors can cause rewiring of signaling networks. Chemotherapeutic agents that induce the DNA damage response (DDR) are typically used to kill tumor cells; however, the effects of aberrant growth factor signaling, for example, can lead to resistance. Lee et al. took a systems-level approach to examine the interplay between growth factor signaling and the DDR in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) cells, which respond poorly to standard therapies. Multiple combinations of chemotherapeutic agents and inhibitors of signaling pathways were compared in terms of dosage and timing, and the effects of these treatments on the viability, proliferation, and apoptosis of the TNBC cells were assessed. The greatest extent of apoptosis was caused by pretreatment with inhibitors of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) signaling before treatment with the DNA-damaging agent doxorubicin; simultaneous treatment with these compounds was not as potent. Prolonged (6 hours) EGFR inhibition led to changes in the expression of many genes, which suggested that the oncogenic potential of some TNBC cells is dependent on EGFR signaling. Various signaling components were assessed by protein microarrays and Western blotting analysis, enabling the authors to construct mathematical models to describe the cellular phenotypes. Some models predicted that enhanced apoptosis after EGFR inhibition was mediated by caspase 8 activation, which was suppressed by oncogenic EGFR signaling, and this prediction was experimentally verified. Finally, the staggered application of EGFR inhibitor and doxorubicin induced cell death in lung cancer cell lines in a capase 8–dependent manner. Together, these data suggest that the timed application of signaling inhibitors causes the rewiring of signaling pathways in tumor cells and makes them more susceptible to subsequent DDR-inducing therapy. M. J. Lee, A. S. Ye, A. K. Gardino, A. M. Heijink, P. K. Sorger, G. MacBeath, M. B. Yaffe, Sequential application of anticancer drugs enhances cell death by rewiring apoptotic signaling networks. Cell 149, 780–794 (2012). [Online Journal] J. T. Erler, R. Linding, Network medicine strikes a blow against breast cancer. Cell 149, 731–733 (2012). [Online Journal]


Abstract Background: Occupational therapy has long emphasized the concepts doing, being, becoming and belonging, and a notion of balance between them. Measures of these concepts are in a developing stage. Aim: This study aimed to develop and examine the properties of the Norwegian version of the Occupational Wholeness Questionnaire (N-OWQ), which is proposed to measure being, becoming, and belonging, in addition to occupational wholeness as a higher-order concept. Methods: An anonymous sample of 248 persons over the age of 18 years completed the N-OWQ along with sociodemographic information. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was performed on the scale items when examining factor structure. Item reduction was based on considerations of communalities, factor loadings, scale consistency if item deleted, and conceptual issues. Internal consistency was assessed with Cronbach's α. Results: Following the PCA, the 'Being' and 'Becoming' scales merged into one five-item 'Self' scale (Cronbach's α 0.77). The 'Belonging' scale items were split into two scales comprised by three items each: 'Closeness' (Cronbach's α 0.70) and 'Relatedness' (Cronbach's α 0.73). Conclusions: The revised N-OWQ merged the 'Being' and 'Becoming' items into one factor, whereas the 'Belonging' items were split into two distinct factors. Internal consistency for all scales were satisfactory.


An analysis of the Strehl ratio and the optical transfer function as imaging quality parameters of optical elements with enhanced focal length is carried out by employing the Wigner distribution function. To this end, we use four different pupil functions: a full circular aperture, a hyper-Gaussian aperture, a quartic phase plate, and a logarithmic phase mask. A comparison is performed between the quality parameters and test images formed by these pupil functions at different defocus distances.


Meningococcal sepsis is the most frequent cause of purpura fulminans (1). From a clinical point of view, acrolocated erythematous lesions are rapidly followed by necrotic-hemorrhagic blue-blackish areas sharply demarcated by an erythematous border from the healthy skin (2). The lesions, sometimes consisting of blisters, can deepen till to the osseous tissue. Laboratory examinations show reduced coagulation factors due to their consumption because of thrombosis of the small vessels, induced by the toxins of meningococcus. After the initial antibiotic treatment (intravenous soluble penicillin G or cephalosporins) and support treatment, aimed at correcting the acid-basic and electrolytic balance, the plasmatic and blood volume and the deficiency of coagulation factors (4), a dermatological treatment aimed at removing the necrotic tissue (3), preventing the secondary infections and repairing the ulcerated lesions is necessary.


This paper presents five studies on the development and validation of a scale of intellectual humility. This scale captures cognitive, affective, behavioral, and motivational components of the construct that have been identified by various philosophers in their conceptual analyses of intellectual humility. We find that intellectual humility has four core dimensions: Open-mindedness (versus Arrogance), Intellectual Modesty (versus Vanity), Corrigibility (versus Fragility), and Engagement (versus Boredom). These dimensions display adequate self-informant agreement, and adequate convergent, divergent, and discriminant validity. In particular, Open-mindedness adds predictive power beyond the Big Six for an objective behavioral measure of intellectual humility, and Intellectual Modesty is uniquely related to Narcissism. We find that a similar factor structure emerges in Germanophone participants, giving initial evidence for the model's cross-cultural generalizability.


During collective migration events, groups of cells must balance adhesion to one another with the ability to make and break contacts with the substrate. Border cell migration in Drosophila oogenesis is a collective migration in which six to eight cells delaminate from the epithelium surrounding the egg chamber and migrate as a cluster to the anterior end of the oocyte. New studies from Melani et al. and Llense and Martín-Blanco show that the Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) and signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) signaling pathways are required to fine-tune the balance between adhesion and migration in border cells. In the first study, Melani et al. found that border cells lacking Hindsight (Hnt), a transcription factor that inhibits JNK signaling, failed to delaminate and had greater than normal amounts of the adhesion proteins Armadillo (Arm, a β-catenin homolog) and DE-Cadherin (Cad) on their surfaces. When Hnt was overexpressed in border cells, the amount of Arm and Cad on the cell surfaces was less than normal, and the clusters dissociated so completely that migration failed. The Llense and Martín-Blanco study found that JNK signaling modulated abundance of the adherens junction component Bazooka and the cytoskeletal adapter D-Paxillin in border cells. Both studies showed that mutations in JNK pathway components caused border cell clusters to dissociate without completely disrupting their migration, indicating that precise control of JNK signaling is required to regulate adhesion between border cells but not between the border cells and the substrate. Melani et al. also determined that Hnt overexpression reduced STAT activation in the border cells, and mutations in STAT pathway components caused migration defects without dissociation. Finally, the authors demonstrated that the human homolog of Hnt was required for collective migration of breast epithelial cells in a wound-healing assay. These papers provide evidence that the JNK and STAT signaling pathways contribute to distinct aspects of collective migration and that the strength of adhesion between migrating cells is proportional to JNK signaling activity. M. Melani, K. J. Simpson, J. S. Brugge, D. Montell, Regulation of cell adhesion and collective cell migration by Hindsight and its human homolog RREB1. Curr. Biol. 18, 532-537 (2008). [PubMed] F. Llense, E. Martín-Blanco, JNK signaling controls border cell cluster integrity and collective cell migration. Curr. Biol. 18, 538-544 (2008). [PubMed]


This study investigated whether cultural factors and aspects of a stressor determined Vietnamese American and European American adolescents' coping responses. Between- and within-person differences in the link between coping tendencies and patterns and psychological adjustment were also examined. It was hypothesized that individual and stressor-related factors would differentially determine adolescents' coping responses. Moreover, it was predicted that support seeking would be more adaptive for females than males and that avoidant coping would be less detrimental for Vietnamese American adolescents than for European American adolescents as these coping strategies are more aligned with the ways in which they have been socialized. It was also expected that adolescents with more variability in their patterns of coping and more overall deployment of coping strategies would be better adjusted than those with less coping variability and lower coping average levels, respectively. Findings showed that females and Vietnamese Americans used more avoidant coping than males and European Americans, respectively, whereas there were no group differences in support seeking. Adolescents who strongly endorsed emotional restraint reported higher levels of avoidant coping and less support seeking. Also, adolescents who strongly valued family obligation tended to use more support-seeking strategies. In terms of aspects of the stressor, adolescents used more avoidant coping for stressors that they perceived as highly stressful. This association was moderated by gender such that females engaged in high levels of support seeking regardless of how stressful they perceived an event. Adolescents also tended to use more avoidant coping for conflict-related stressors. This association was moderated by ethnicity such that Vietnamese American adolescents reported using more avoidance for interpersonal conflicts compared to European American adolescents. For family-related stressors, adolescents engaged in less support seeking. Between- and within-person differences in the link between coping response and internalizing symptoms showed that more avoidance coping was associated with more distress at both the individual and occasion levels. In contrast, support seeking was associated with less distress at the individual level but not at the occasion level. Despite individual and gender differences in the average use of coping strategies, gender and ethnicity did not moderate the associations between coping strategies and adjustment. Lastly, coping variability did not predict psychological adjustment, but mean levels of coping were related to internalizing symptoms depending upon whether examined at the individual or occasion level. The strengths of the current study include the simultaneous examination of between- and within-person differences in the link between coping responses and internalizing symptoms. Additionally, this study was the first to exam adolescents' dispersion of coping strategies employed in conjunction with overall amounts of coping at both the individual and occasion level. Implications for interventions relating to coping skills training were discussed.


In the melee of global politics, cultural tourism has seldom received attention. Yet tourism has developed into a significant industry for economies around the globe. Within tourism, ecological and cultural tourism sectors have grown dramatically. However, much of this growth has progressed in a rather unorganized fashion. Little planning has been done, leading to the detriment of sensitive cultures and ecosystems. While New Zealand seemingly could have fallen into this exploitative trap because of its unique cultural and environmental assets, the country has taken prominent steps to balance the protection of indigenous Maori culture with attempts to realize the economic gains tourism can provide. Central to New Zealand's plans is the innovative "Tourism Strategy 2010." Written in 2000 by a panel of government ministers and private business owners, the plan develops a comprehensive vision for tourism in the next ten years. Its goal is to realize an additional NZ$11.1 billion dollars (US$7.2 billion) in revenue over projections without reform. Over the past two years the strategy seemed to be working. New Zealand has been named the top tourist destination by the Lonely Planet travel guide series. International visitor arrivals are up 14.3 percent while expenditures by international visitors are up 28.8 percent. Since international tourism contributes 4.5 percent of New Zealand's gross domestic product and one in ten jobs are related to tourism, a concerted effort toward maximizing revenue makes sense. Driving this boom is an extensive grassroots economic training program coupled with intense targeted marketing and international advertising. New Zealand keeps meticulous visitor statistics that allows it to profile and target tourists in different countries according to their interests. It accomplishes this through exit surveys at major airports that track visitor stay and expenditure. With this data, New Zealand has spent millions to attract specific groups of people and promote general awareness of its tourism options through such diverse venues as advertisements in the London Under-ground and specials on the US-based Discovery Channel. In a competitive world, New Zealand is using easily obtainable data to find its tourist niche. New Zealand also fuels its growth through internal development. To accomplish this goal, programs have been developed that provide start-up information, advice, and funding with special emphasis on Maori and cultural enterprises. …


Outbreaks of epidemic diseases pose serious public health risks. To overcome the hurdles of sub-optimal disease surveillance reporting from the health facilities to relevant authorities, the Ministry of Health in Kenya piloted mSOS (mobile SMS-based disease outbreak alert system) in 2013–2014. In this paper, we report the results of the qualitative study, which examined factors that influence the performances of mSOS implementation. In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 disease surveillance coordinators and 32 in-charges of rural health facilities that took part in the mSOS intervention. Drawing from the framework analysis, dominant themes that emerged from the interviews are presented. All participants voiced their excitement in using mSOS. The results showed that the technology was well accepted, easy to use, and both health workers and managers unanimously recommended the scale-up of the system despite challenges encountered in the implementation processes. The most challenging components were the context in which mSOS was implemented, including the lack of strong existing structure for continuous support supervision, feedback and response action related to disease surveillance. The study revealed broader health systems issues that should be addressed prior to and during the intervention scale-up.


Politicians, journalists, and the public have expressed rising concern about the decline - or percieved decline - in middle-class jobs. The U.S. work force is viewed as increasingly divided between a prosperous minority that enjoys ever-rising wages and a less affluent majority that struggles harder each year to make ends meet. To determine whether and why this view of the job market is accurate, labor market economists anaylze trends in the distribution of jobs and wages over the past two decades and attempt to forecast the future course of American earnings inequality. McKinley L. Blackburn, David E. Bloom, and Richard B. Freeman assess the reasons behind the deterioration of earnings and job opportunities among less skilled men. They consider the impact of changes in industrial structure, declines in unionization, and trends in the level and quality of schooling for men who have limited skills and education. Gary Burtless examines the effect of the business cycle, within and across different regions of the United States, on earnings inequality and analyzes the effects of demographic change on inequality over the past twenty years. Rebecca M. Blank studies the rise of part-time employment and its impact on wages, fringe benefits, and the quality of jobs. Linda Dachter Loury focuses on the effect of the baby boom and baby bust on demand for schooling among new labor market entrants. If young entrants are discouraged from seeking college training by the high cost or low payoff of schooling, the long-term impact will be a gradual decline in the skills of the U.S. work force. Robert Mofitt analyzes the effect of welfare state programs on the growth of low-wage jobs, and the extent towhich the welfare reforms of the eighties have affected low-income workers.


This study examined internal factors that affect savings mobilization for growth of women- owned MSEs. Many women- owned MSEs have received financial and other assistance from various donors to start their business, but their inability to reduce reliance on external sources to grow had remained unexplained. The study hypothesized that the main constraints to savings mobilization for growth of women owned MSEs arose from internal and the characteristics of the woman entrepreneurs. The target population were 3,030 women entrepreneurs who had received assistance from the WEDCO project in Kisumu and Kakamega districts in Kenya. Multistage sampling procedure was used to select 300 individual women participants. Questionnaires, interviews and observations were used to collect primary data. Data was analyzed through correlation analysis, chi-square tests, ANOVA, and means. The major findings of the study were that the number of dependants; education level; cultural and religious attachments; endowed management skills; age and marital status had a significant relationship with the savings propensity amongst the women entrepreneurs.


We consider Bayesian optimization of the output of a network of functions, where each function takes as input the output of its parent nodes, and where the network takes significant time to evaluate. Such problems arise, for example, in reinforcement learning, engineering design, and manufacturing. While the standard Bayesian optimization approach observes only the final output, our approach delivers greater query efficiency by leveraging information that the former ignores: intermediate output within the network. This is achieved by modeling the nodes of the network using Gaussian processes and choosing the points to evaluate using, as our acquisition function, the expected improvement computed with respect to the implied posterior on the objective. Although the non-Gaussian nature of this posterior prevents computing our acquisition function in closed form, we show that it can be efficiently maximized via sample average approximation. In addition, we prove that our method is asymptotically consistent, meaning that it finds a globally optimal solution as the number of evaluations grows to infinity, thus generalizing previously known convergence results for the expected improvement. Notably, this holds even though our method might not evaluate the domain densely, instead leveraging problem structure to leave regions unexplored. Finally, we show that our approach dramatically outperforms standard Bayesian optimization methods in several synthetic and real-world problems.


For Intermittent Preventive Treatment of Malaria in Children (IPTc) to be accepted and sustainable as a malaria control strategy it must be affordable and cost effective as well as safe and acceptable. Thus, several of the IPTc studies have included an economic component. These studies range from randomised controlled trials to operational research studies. In addition, modelling was used to supplement the information available from the trials and to provide predictions where the trials could not, for practical reasons, provide estimates. Both financial and economic costs associated with IPTc delivery have been investigated to help forecast how introducing the intervention may impact health budgets, and to help determine the cost effectiveness of IPTc compared to other malaria interventions.
In this report we present the costs and cost-effective of IPTc using three different drug regimens and various delivery strategies. Across all studies, the financial cost per IPTc course range from US$0.24 to US$3.44 and the economic cost per course from US$0.31 to US$3.44. These costs are within the range of the costs associated with delivering existing malaria control interventions. The cost effectiveness of the intervention was comparable, but marginally higher than other prevention strategies, however possibilities exist for reducing the costs of IPTc by scaling up and by incorporating delivery of IPTc with the delivery of other interventions such as the distribution of Vitamin A or Community and Home Management of Malaria. Supervision, training and remuneration of CHWs and IPTc drug delivery have been identified as the main cost components and key determinants to the success of the delivery strategy. There is scope for the costs associated with supervision and training to be reduced if IPTc is integrated into existing routine activities. Alternatively, in settings where supervision and training of CHWs is weak, IPTc may offer an opportunity to strengthen both these important aspects of service delivery which will offer benefits beyond reducing malaria morbidity and mortality.


Vietnam's integration with the international economy has increased significantly over the past decade, aided by substantial liberalization of trade, and appears set to increase further as trade-expanding measures take full effect. This dramatic shift in Vietnam's trading patterns has important implications for the environment and use of natural resources. This paper offers a systematic analysis of the trading and investment patterns to give a broader understanding of the environmental implications of greater openness of the economy during the past decade. The results suggest increasing manufacturing and export activity in water and toxic pollution-intensive sectors compared with the less pollution-intensive sectors. The story is, on the surface, consistent with the changing composition of Vietnamese production and exports away from traditional sectors and toward pollution-intensive manufacturing (especially leather and textiles). The paper also highlights the need to consider strengthening environmental policies while further trade liberalization is being contemplated through Vietnam's joining of the World Trade Organization.


Following the Legal Services Act 2007, which permitted the delivery of legal services through Alternative Business Structures (ABS), the Solicitors Regulation Authority required all regulated legal service firms to appoint Compliance Officers for Legal Practice (COLPs). COLPs are charged with taking reasonable steps to ensure that firms comply with their obligations, which entails interpreting what outcomes‐focused regulation (OFR) requires of the firm. Yet despite their importance, little is known about how compliance roles operate within legal service firms. We addressed this gap through a series of qualitative interviews that explored COLPs' views of their roles, their attitudes to regulation, in particular to OFR, and to achieving compliance. We found that COLPs are a key regulatory mechanism in the context of firm‐based regulation and OFR and have a critical role to play in protecting and promoting professional values in both ABS and non‐ABS entities.


ABSTRACT It is often difficult to predict the response to telaprevir-pegylated interferon (PEG-IFN)-ribavirin triple therapy and the appearance of telaprevir-resistant variants. The present study determined the predictive factors of a sustained virological response (SVR) to 12- or 24-week triple therapy (T12PR12 or T12PR24, respectively) in 194 Japanese patients infected with hepatitis C virus genotype 1b (HCV-1b). The study also evaluated whether ultradeep sequencing technology can predict at baseline the emergence of resistant variants after the start of therapy. Analysis of the data of the entire group indicated that an SVR was achieved in 78% of the patients. Multivariate analysis identified IL28B rs8099917 (genotype TT), the substitution of amino acid (aa) 70 (Arg70), response to prior treatment (naive or relapse), PEG-IFN dose (≥1.3 μg/kg of body weight), and treatment regimen (T12PR24) as significant determinants of SVR. Among patients of the T12PR24 group, 92% with genotype TT achieved an SVR, irrespective of a substitution at aa 70. In patients with the non-TT genotype, an SVR was achieved in 76% of those with Arg70, while only 14% of patients with the non-TT genotype, Gln70(His70), and nonresponse to ribavirin combination therapy achieved an SVR. Ultradeep sequencing was conducted for 17 patients who did not achieve an SVR to determine the emergence of resistant variants during therapy. De novo resistant variants were detected in 16 of 17 patients (94%), regardless of the variant frequencies detected at baseline. In conclusion, the results indicate that the response to triple therapy can be predicted by the combination of host, viral, and treatment factors and that it is difficult to predict at baseline the telaprevir-resistant variants that emerge during triple therapy, even with the use of ultradeep sequencing.


This paper is about care, insider positions and mothering within feminist research. We ask questions about how honest, ethical and caring can we really be in placing the self into the research process as mothers ourselves. Should we leave out aspects of the research that do not fit neatly and how ethical can we claim to be if we do? Moreover, should difficult differences, secrets and silences that emerge from the research process and research stories that might 'out' us as failures be excluded from research outcomes so as to claim legitimate research? We consider the use of a feminist methods as crucial in the reciprocal and relational understanding of personal enquiry. Mothers invest significant emotional capital in their families and we explore the blurring of the interpersonal and intrapersonal when sharing mothering experiences common to both participant and researcher. Indeed participants can identify themselves within the process as 'friends' of the researcher. We both have familiarity within our respective research that has led to mutual understanding of having insider positions. Crucially individuals' realities are a vital component of the qualitative paradigm and that 'insider' research remains a necessary, albeit messy vehicle in social research. As it is we consider a growing body of literature which marks out and endorses a feminist ethics of care. All of which critique established ways of thinking about ethics, morality, security, citizenship and care. It provides alternatives in mapping private and public aspects of social life as it operates at a theoretical level, but importantly for this paper also at the level of practical application.


There are many formal approaches to specifying how the mental state of an agent entails that it perform particular actions. These approaches put the agent at the center of analysis. For some questions and purposes, it is more realistic and convenient for the center of analysis to be the task environment, domain, or society of which agents will be a part. This paper presents such a task environment-oriented modeling framework that can work hand-in-hand with more agent-centered approaches. Our approach features careful attention to the quantitative computational interrelationships between tasks, to what information is available (and when) update an agent's mental state, and to the general structure of the task environment rather than single-instance examples. This framework avoids the methodological problems of relying solely on single-instance examples, and provides concrete, meaningful characterizations with which to state general theories. Task environment models built in our framework can be used for both analysis and simulation to answer questions about how agents should be organized, or the effect of various coordination algorithms on agent behavior. This paper is organized around an example model of cooperative problem solving in a distributed sensor network.


Semantic annotation enables the inclusion of semantic information (ontology concepts), readable through software agents, into the most varied types of documents available on the Web. This operation facilitates search and access to relevant information. However, it is not an easy task, since the content to be annotated can be associated to multiple large ontologies. This article presents an approach based on the association of techniques and methods of ontology modularization, that enables the construction of a structure composed of concepts over one or more ontologies. This reduced structure is useful for automated semantic annotation of scientific texts. In addition, the structure attends a research specific interest. In order to evaluate this approach, a software tool was implemented. An experiment in the biomedical field, on a Corpus of 500 scientific papers, was conducted and showed good results, conforming the applicability of this approach.


Different materials reflect light in different ways, and this reflectance interacts with shape, lighting, and viewpoint to determine an object's image. Common materials exhibit diverse reflectance effects, and this is a significant source of difficulty for image analysis. One strategy for dealing with this diversity is to build computational tools that exploit reflectance symmetries, such as reciprocity and isotropy, that are exhibited by broad classes of materials. By building tools that exploit these symmetries, one can create vision systems that are more likely to succeed in real-world, non-Lambertian environments. In this paper, we develop a framework for representing and exploiting reflectance symmetries. We analyze the conditions for distinct surface points to have local view and lighting conditions that are equivalent under these symmetries, and we represent these conditions in terms of the geometric structure they induce on the Gaussian sphere and its abstraction, the projective plane. We also study the behavior of these structures under perturbations of surface shape and explore applications to both calibrated and uncalibrated photometric stereo.


If we consider worldwide maritime shipping as a system, we observe that a large number of independent rational agents play a role in achieving predominant positions and in increasing market share: port authorities, shipping service providers, shipping companies and commodity producers. The maritime industry can, from this perspective, be defined as a Complex System composed of relatively independent parts that constantly search, learn and adapt to their environment while their mutual interactions shape hidden but recognisable patterns. In this work we examined the world maritime system through the Complex Adaptive System (CAS). Although CAS has been widely applied to the study of biological and social systems, its application in maritime shipping is scant, therefore our objective is to examine international trade shipping characteristics as a CAS and identify emerging global trends in the international maritime industry. We conclude presenting some of the goals that will be achieved by applying CAS approach in maritime trade: the construction of a tenable ontological framework will allow scholars to have a compressive view of the maritime industry and test the reliability of standard economic theories.


Contact-based simulations are a very popular tool for the analysis of opportunistic networks. They are used for evaluation of networking metrics, for quantifying the effects of infrastructure and for the design of forwarding strategies. However, little evidence exists that the results of such simulations accurately describe the performance of opportunistic networks, as they commonly ignore some important factors (like limited transmission bandwidth) or they rely on assumptions such as infinite user cache sizes. In order to evaluate this issue, we design a testbed with a real application and real users; we collect application data in addition to the contact traces and compare measured performance to the results of the contact-based simulations. We find that contact-based simulations significantly overestimate delivery ratio, while the captured delay tends to be 2-3 times lower than the experimentally obtained delay. We show that assuming infinite cache sizes leads to misinterpretation of the effects of backbone on an opportunistic network. Finally, we show that contact traces can be used to analytically estimate the delivery ratios and the impact of backbone, through the dependency between a user centrality measure and her delivery ratio.


Targeted observations are generally taken in regions of high baroclinicity, but often show little impact. One plausible explanation is that important dynamical information, such as upshear tilt, is not extracted from the targeted observations by the data assimilation scheme and used to correct initial condition error. This is investigated by generating pseudo targeted observations which contain a singular vector (SV) structure that is not present in the background field or routine observations, i.e. assuming that the background has an initial condition error with tilted growing structure. Experiments were performed for a single case‐study with varying numbers of pseudo targeted observations. These were assimilated by the Met Office four‐dimensional variational (4D‐Var) data assimilation scheme, which uses a 6 h window for observations and background‐error covariances calculated using the National Meteorological Centre (NMC) method. The forecasts were run using the operational Met Office Unified Model on a 24 km grid. The results presented clearly demonstrate that a 6 h window 4D‐Var system is capable of extracting baroclinic information from a limited set of observations and using it to correct initial condition error. To capture the SV structure well (projection of 0.72 in total energy), 50 sondes over an area of 1×106 km2 were required. When the SV was represented by only eight sondes along an example targeting flight track covering a smaller area, the projection onto the SV structure was lower; the resulting forecast perturbations showed an SV structure with increased tilt and reduced initial energy. The total energy contained in the perturbations decreased as the SV structure was less well described by the set of observations (i.e. as fewer pseudo observations were assimilated). The assimilated perturbation had lower energy than the SV unless the pseudo observations were assimilated with the dropsonde observation errors halved from operational values. Copyright © 2010 Royal Meteorological Society


ABSTRACTThe Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled to Chemistry (WRF-Chem model) was modified with an online primary PM2.5 source-apportionment method to simulate a severe aerosol pollution episode that occurred over the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region of China from October 29 to November 8, 2015. The temporal and spatial distributions and transport characteristics of this episode were examined, and the quantified primary PM2.5 contributions by various geographical source regions to the BTH region were also analyzed in this study. The results showed that pollution in this region was mainly due to the combined effects of the synoptic conditions, terrain, and boundary layer characteristics. Before the heavy pollution event, the most parts of the BTH region were controlled by northwest wind, and the local primary PM2.5 contribution to the BTH region accounted for 90.7%. During the heavy pollution period, the BTH region was under isobaric synoptic conditions with light horizontal winds and a stable temperature stratification structure and a lower PBLH, allowing pollutants to accumulate easily in the region. Large quantities of pollutants were transported to the BTH region from Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, and Henan provinces via the southerly wind, accounting for 11.6%, 9.2%, 6.7%, 11.8%, respectively. Furthermore, pollutants accumulated more significantly under a stable boundary layer structure and the northwest-southeast terrain structure. Therefore, regional contributions increased, and other polluted areas, especially the long-distance transport from a source in the Yangtze River Delta city group region, contributed about 15.9%. It should be noted that the percentage of primary PM2.5 within the total PM2.5 in the study period almost exceeded 50%, and in the BTH region nearly surpassed 60%. To a certain extent, primary PM2.5 can help characterize total PM2.5.


Abstract. To elucidate the mechanism for how the East Asian Monsoon (EAM) variability have influenced the isotope proxy records in Japan, we explore the primary driver of variations of precipitation isotopes at multiple temporal scales (event, seasonal and inter-annual scales). Using a new 1-year record of the isotopic composition of event-based precipitation and continuous near-surface water vapor at Nagoya in central Japan, we identify the key atmospheric processes controlling the storm-to-storm isotopic variations through an analysis of air mass sources and rainout history during the transport of moisture to the site, and then apply the identified processes to explain the inter-annual isotopic variability related to the EAM variability in the historical 17-year long Tokyo station record in the Global Network of Isotopes in Precipitation (GNIP). In the summer, southerly flows transport moisture with higher isotopic values from subtropical marine regions and bring warm rainfall enriched with heavy isotopes. The weak monsoon summer corresponds to enriched isotopic values in precipitation, reflecting higher contribution of warm rainfall to the total summer precipitation. In the strong monsoon summer, the sustaining Baiu rainband along the southern coast of Japan prevents moisture transport across Japan, so that the contribution of warm rainfall is reduced. In the winter, storm tracks are the dominant driver of storm-to-storm isotopic variation and relatively low isotopic values occur when a cold frontal rainband associated with extratropical cyclones passes off to the south of the Japan coast. The weak monsoon winter is characterized by lower isotopes in precipitation, due to the distribution of the cyclone tracks away from the southern coast of Japan. In contrast, the northward shift of the cyclone tracks and stronger development of cyclones during the strong monsoon winters decrease the contribution of cold frontal precipitation, resulting in higher isotopic values in winter precipitation. Therefore, year-to-year isotopic variability in summer and winter Japanese precipitation correlates significantly with changes in the East Asian summer and winter monsoon intensity (R=-0.47 for summer, R=0.42 for winter), and thus we conclude that the isotope proxy records in Japan should reflect past changes in the East Asian Monsoon. Since our study identifies the climate drivers controlling isotopic variations in summer and winter precipitation, we highlight the retrieval of a record with seasonal resolution from paleoarchives as an important priority.


Drugs is an acronym of a narcotic , psychotropic and medicine dangerous. Often also called narcotic napza that is, psychotropic and other addictive substances. The term is good drugs and napza referring to a group of compounds and in general they risk having addicted to for the end user. At first drugs used among all these medically as an anesthetic drug to perform the operation, but along its development drugs abused by parties who are not responsible for consumed. Specifically for provinsi Lampung own, according to the directorate of Polda investigation Lampung drugs, been an increase in the drug cases from year to year, whether it is in terms of the number of cases and the number of suspects, so that required digital mapping drug cases to facilitate officers priority determining areas counseling as a continuation of prevention. Methods used to conducting data collection is a method of documentation, this method used to get information dari direktorat drug investigation Polda Lampung relating to data to scatter the number of cases, the number of suspects and of drugs as evidence in each province police lampung. This research is a result of application geographic information system the spread of drug cases locations in Lampung provinsi. This application is also helping the community to obtain data on drug cases, the number of suspects, the amount of goods evidence for each all Lampung Police. Key word: Geographical information system, the spread of the location of drug cases.


Over one billion people across the globe live in extreme poverty, struggling to survive on less than one U.S. dollar per day. The persistently low levels of aggregate welfare and human development in developing countries have recently caught the attention of many politicians and social observers. As the developed nations and multinational organizations ofthe world are called upon to increase development assistance to these impoverished countries, a question must be asked: Will increased foreign aid effectively raise human development in developing countries? While many studies have analyzed the impact of development aid on economic growth in developing nations, few have addressed the impact of development aid on more comprehensive areas of development. Analyzing data on 87 developing countries from 1980 to 2000, this study employs two-stage least squares estimation to evaluate the impact of foreign aid on the Human Development Index (HOI), a composite index of development and aggregate welfare, while controlling for the level of pro-poor public expenditure within a developing country. In addition, an interaction term between foreign aid and a measure of macroeconomic policies is utilized to determine if economic policy has an impact on the effectiveness of development assistance. This study finds that greater foreign aid is associated with lower levels of HDI after controlling for GDP and pro-poor public expenditure. In addition, the study concludes that macroeconomic policies do not influence the level ofHOI in developing countries.


Microbial depolymerization processes of exogenous type are studied by modeling and simulation. A mathematical model is transformed to remove a temporal factor of a degradation rate, and an inverse problem is solved numerically to determine the molecular factor using weight distributions with respect to the molecular weight before and after cultivation of a microbial consortium on plyethylene glycol. An initial value problem is solved numerically to simulate the transition of the weight distribution with a temporal factor that represents the microbial population. A novel technique is used to find suitable values of parameters that appear in the time factor of the degradation rate, and the numerical results are introduced.


"Reading this book has filled a gap in my education. I feel a sense of completion, understand that UNIX is really a style of community. Now I get it, at least I get it one level deeper than I ever did before. This book came at a perfect moment for me, a moment when I shifted from visualizing programs as things to programs as the shadows cast by communities. From this perspective, Eric makes UNIX make perfect sense." --Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming Explained, Test Driven Development, and Contributing to Eclipse"A delightful, fascinating read, and the lessons in problem-solvng are essential to every programmer, on any OS." --Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++Writing better software: 30 years of UNIX development wisdomIn this book, five years in the making, the author encapsulates three decades of unwritten, hard-won software engineering wisdom. Raymond brings together for the first time the philosophy, design patterns, tools, culture, and traditions that make UNIX home to the world's best and most innovative software, and shows how these are carried forward in Linux and today's open-source movement. Using examples from leading open-source projects, he shows UNIX and Linux programmers how to apply this wisdom in building software that's more elegant, more portable, more reusable, and longer-lived.Raymond incorporates commentary from thirteen UNIX pioneers: Ken Thompson, the inventor of UNIX. Ken Arnold, part of the group that created the 4BSD UNIX releases and co-author of The Java Programming Language. Steven M. Bellovin, co-creator of Usenet and co-author of Firewalls and Internet Security. Stuart Feldman, a member of the Bell Labs UNIX development group and the author of make and f77. Jim Gettys and Keith Packard, principal architects of the X windowing system. Steve Johnson, author of yacc and of the Portable C Compiler. Brian Kernighan, co-author of The C Programming Language, The UNIX Programming Environment, The Practice of Programming, and of the awk programming language. David Korn, creator of the korn shell and author of The New Korn Shell Command and Programming Language. Mike Lesk, a member of the Bell Labs development group and author of the ms macro package, the tbl and refer tools,lex and UUCP. Doug McIlroy, Director of the Bell Labs research group where UNIX was born and inventor of the UNIX pipe. Marshall Kirk McKusick, developer of the 4.2BSD fast filesystem and a leader of the 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD teams. Henry Spencer, a leader among early UNIX developers, who created getopt, the first open-source string library, and a regular-expression engine used in 4.4BSD.


Forestry is an economically important industry in South Africa, involving extensive exotic plantations of Eucalyptus, Pinus and Acacia species. These tree species have fungal associations, such as ectomycorrhizas, that have become locally naturalized. The forestry industry is increasingly faced with problems of long-term sustainability, increasing soil acidity and depletion of soil nutrients. It is, therefore, essential that the fundamental importance of the ectomycorrhizal (ECM) symbioses in the nutrient cycling, growth, health and survival of these tree species should not be ignored. Research on the species diversity of ECM fungi associated with forestry plant species has been hampered by the difficulty of identifying the fungi involved in the symbiosis. This investigation focused on the ECM fungi associated with Pinus patula (Schlecht. et Cham.) grown in managed plantations in the Sabie region, Mpumalanga province, South Africa. ECM roots were morphotyped and DNA was extracted. The internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region was amplified using the ITS 1F and ITS 4 primers. The sequences were BLASTed using the GenBank and UNITE databases. Twenty-seven extractions were successfully amplified representing 17 different morphotypes. Of the 27 sequences, 21 were identified as ECM fungi and, from the BLAST results, eleven different ECM species could be identified. Selected ECM root types were morphologically and anatomically described according to root morphology, mantle structure, specialized hyphae and rhizomorph arrangement. Seven dominant field types were described and identified as two Amanita species, Scleroderma citrinum, a suilloid species, Thelephora terrestris, a tometelloid species and one resembled an Albatrellus species.


. Abstract The Remapping Asia project, to which this paper is a contribution, investigates broad spatial changes in the ways that East Asia's political and social life are organized and economies operate. Such changes are attributable to planned action of governments, firms, and other organized groups and to the unorganized but in some measure predictable behavior of myriad families and individuals. The project's particular interest is in processes of regionalization—both through the deliberate construction of political institutions and through the largely unplanned emergence of regional affiliations and identities. Demographic factors play a potentially significant part both in promoting and in impeding regional integration. Such factors include the existing population size relativities; the uneven onset, pace, and outcomes of demographic transition across the region, affecting population growth and age structure; the rapid urbanization that is underway and the emergence of urban-in-dustrial corridors; and the rapid expansion of numbers of middle-class consumers coinciding with the persistence and sometimes strengthening of cultural identity, creating a complex layering of values and affiliations. These factors are explored from a comparative perspective, contrasting East Asia with other major world regions. Particular attention is paid to demographic aspects of the changing China– Japan relationship, a fundamental dynamic in the region, and to the tension between economy and culture as principles of regional organization.


The maximum-stable-set and maximum-clique problems are operations research problems that arise in numerous areas such as social networking, electrical engineering, environmental forest planning, bioinformatics clustering and prediction, and computational chemistry. The doubly nonnegative relaxation is known to provide high-quality bounds on the size of the global optimal solution of both problems. However, it is an expensive conic optimization problem to solve in general. We propose an integrated interior-point cutting-plane method to efficiently handle the large number of nonnegativity constraints in the relaxation. The approach is based on a recent interior-point algorithm that selectively adds inequalities in a dynamic fashion. We present computational results showing the significant benefits of the integrated algorithm in comparison to a standard interior-point cutting-plane method.


Background: Recently, there has been a great concern about the consumption of dyes because of their toxicity, mutagenicity, carcinogenicity, and persistence in the aquatic environment. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the feasibility of using Lemna minor for Acid Blue 292 (AB292) dye removal from aqueous solution and to determine the optimal conditions. Methods: This experimental study was conducted in the batch systems to investigate the effects of parameters such as contact time, initial concentration of dye, pH and Lemna minor biomass dose. Isotherms and kinetic studies of dye adsorption were performed using equilibrium data. Results: According to the results, a maximum removal efficiency of 98.5% was obtained at pH of 3 and the contact time of 90 min; initial dye concentration 10 mg/L and adsorbent dose 3g/L. The adsorption data was best fitted to the Langmuir isotherm and pseudo-second order kinetic model. Conclusion: The results showed that Lemna minor could be used as a cost-effective adsorbent for removing AB292 dye from textile wastewater efficiently.


An increasing product differentiation coupled with an increasing availability of electronic data has boosted the number of hedonic price analyses applied to food and agricultural products. Most of these studies estimate the first stage of a complete two-stage model as proposed by ROSEN. However, there are also a few studies that estimate the second stage, i.e. supply and demand functions for characteristics. The present paper reviews both the theoretical and applied literature on Rosen's two-stage model in the context of food and agricultural economics. Based on these findings, a theoretical model for specialty coffee auction data is proposed and tested empirically. The empirical model comprises non-linear hedonic bid functions at stage one and an inverse demand function for one characteristic, the sensory quality score (SQS), at stage two. The first-stage results indicate a high variability of the marginal price of the SQS across different auctions, i.e. across time and space. The second-stage results suggest that the marginal prices of the SQS increased in the analysed period 20032009 and that country-of-origin and buyer effects are important. The highest marginal prices are paid for Rwandan and Honduran coffee. At first glance, this is surprising, since at the first stage Honduran coffees are almost always sold at discounted prices compared to coffees of other origins. However, it seems that the SQS is a much more important quality cue for a coffee origin with a low reputation than for a coffee origin with a well-established reputation in the marketplace.


The objective of this research work was to develop a method for reclaiming the used engine oil which is time efficient, environment friendly and economical. The used oil was reclaimed using polymeric flocculants. Different cationic copolymers of polyamines like poly (adipic acid-co-epoxy propyldiethylene triamine) solution (polyamine 1), poly (dimethylamine-co-epichlorohydrin-co-ethylenediamine) solution (polyamine 2) and poly (dimethylamine-co-epichlorohydrin) solution (Polyamine 3) were used for reclaiming. The yield of oil reclaimed by using polymeric flocculants using polyamine 2 was 84% and the solvent recovered from reclaimed oil was 74%. It was observed that polymeric flocculants successfully removed the contaminants from the used engine oil. The physical and chemical properties like flash point, aniline point, color, total acid number (TAN), total base number (TBN), specific gravity and API gravity, refractive index (RI), kinematic viscosity and viscosity index of the reclaimed oil were characterized and compared with used engine oil and standard engine oil. The results indicated that all the impurities were removed from the used engine oil successfully using polymeric flocculants.


This is unquestionably the greatest book on knots and rope work ever published, yet it is a valuable reference for anyone from eight to eighty. First published in 1939, it quickly becameand has remained for more than a half centurythe classic in its field. Truly comprehensive in scope, this encyclopedia begins with a history of knots and rope making and proceeds into the how-to of tying and of making useful and decorative articles with rope. More than 3,600 knots are described and illustrated in 348 full-page plates.


This paper analyses the drivers behind some of the different types of proliferation of armed groups in power and politics that have taken place in the Middle East and North Africa after 2011. Based on thick empirical description and analysis of the highly distinct ways that armed groups have proliferated in Egypt and in Libya since 2011, the paper pinpoints two key dynamics: first, a process of "militarization of contention" in which regime-orchestrated repression drives forth a transformation of contentious politics from non-violent to armed forms of action. Second, a process of "militia-ization of politics" in which warfare, foreign interventions and the weakness of nascent state institutions drives forth a process in which armed actors are allowed to consolidate and expand their influence politics without necessarily sharing ideology or political agendas. The paper ends by drawing a number of policy-oriented conclusions with the aim to inspire international and local actors who seek to engage in tackling these threats and challenges.


Objective: To refine the Graded and Redefined Assessment of Strength, Sensibility and Prehension (GRASSP) as a measure of upper limb impairment following cervical SCI. Method: A cross-sectional study assessed a cohort of neurologically stable patients with tetraplegia using a preliminary version of the GRASSP. Regression analysis was performed to determine the association between subcomponents of the GRASSP (impairment) and measures of function. The GRASSP was modified based on results. Results: Eliminated static two-point discrimination, tone, and one muscle. Conclusion: The GRASSP Version I consists of Semmes Weinstein monofilaments, manual muscle testing, and qualitative and quantitative prehension testing.


Water sustainability needs an integrated approach to meet the water need of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need of water. It includes water security and water scarcity. The water demand is increasing every year, while the planet's capacity to sustain increasing demands for water is challenged. The main global water problems fall into three categories. The first is too much of it, secondly is too little of it and thirdly, it is too dirty. The first category is due to extensive flooding, the second category is due to serious drought and the third category is due to pollution and misuse of water which needs water quality management. Nowadays, there are 1.2 × 109 people live in areas of water scarcity and 2.6 billion people in global are lacking safe water supply. There are (6 to 8) × 106humans being are killed each year from water-related disasters and disease. In Indonesia, there is about 37 × 106 people lack access to safe water due to water quality issue. In this paper, emerging trends in water quality management to support water sustainability and the water-energy nexus will be discussed.


The author suggests that, due to the trends of unobtrusive technology and more intrusive information, the next phase of computing technology will develop nonlinearly. He states that, in the long run, the personal computer and the workstation will become practically obsolete because computing access will be everywhere: in the walls, on your wrist, and in 'scrap' computers (i.e., like scrap paper) lying about to be used as needed. The current research on ubiquitous computing is reviewed. >


This paper provides a critique of the concept of the throwaway society. Drawing on two years of intensive qualitative research, we argue that the concept of the throwaway society does not bear scrutiny. Rather than throwing things away households are shown consistently to engage in simultaneous practices of saving and wasting when getting rid of consumer objects. Saving and wasting are shown to be critical to materialising identities and the key social relations of family and home. Focusing on self, the couple relation, and the mother–child relation, we show how wasting things is intimately connected to the narration of self and to the enactment of specific love relations. The paper also shows how wasting things is central to moving home, constituting a surplus and then an excess of household possessions. The paper concludes by arguing that to understand the increasing amount of matter being turned to waste in the UK requires a focus on love relations and mobility, and not on the trajectories of things themselves.


AIM
The present study investigated regional differences in response behaviour for the Patient Health Quetionnaire-9. We tested for measurement invariance and differential item and test functioning between formerly divided East- and West-Germany: the former German Democratic Republic and Federal Republic of Germany. Diverging socialization experiences in socialist versus capitalist and collectivist versus individualist systems may affect culturally sensitive assessments of mental health.

SUBJECT AND METHODS
To test this empirically, we used factor analytic and item-response-theoretic frameworks, differentiating between East- and West-Germans by birthplace and current residence based on several representative samples of the German general population (n = 3 802).

RESULTS
Across all survey, we discovered slightly higher depression sum scores for East- versus West-Germans. The majority of items did not display differential item functioning-with a crucial exception in the assessment of self-harm tendencies. The scale scores were largely invariant exhibiting only small amounts of differential test functioning. Nonetheless, they made up on average about a quarter of the observed group differences in terms of effect magnitude.

CONCLUSION
We explore possible causes and discuss explanations for the item-level differences. Overall, analyses of East- and West-German depressive symptom developments in the wake of reunification are feasible and statistically grounded.


OBJECTIVE--Amphetamine-like appetite suppressants, particularly fenfluramines, have been implicated in the aetiology of primary pulmonary hypertension. At one specialist centre in France 20% of patients with primary pulmonary hypertension had been exposed to fenfluramine. The prevalence of primary pulmonary hypertension associated with fenfluramines and other appetite suppressants in the United Kingdom is unknown. This study was performed to measure prior exposure to appetite suppressants in patients with primary pulmonary hypertension. SETTING--Heart lung transplantation centres in England. PATIENTS--United Kingdom residents with proven primary pulmonary hypertension referred for consideration of heart lung transplantation. METHODS--Case surveillance study, obtaining data from the hospital and general practitioner's notes and directly from the patients or their relatives. RESULTS--55 patients were identified. Drug histories were available from hospital records in all patients, from the general practitioner's notes in 51, and from the patients or relatives in 44. Of these, 3 female patients had been exposed to appetite suppressants (2 fenfluramine, 1 diethylpropion): 2 have since died. In each case exposure was brief and apparently predated the development of symptoms by several years. CONCLUSIONS--Exposure of patients with severe primary pulmonary hypertension to fenfluramine and other appetite suppressants is uncommon in the United Kingdom unlike in France, where most of the cases associating primary pulmonary hypertension with fenfluramine use have originated. This may reflect more conservative prescribing of these agents in the United Kingdom.


In recent years, constitutional scholars interested in "popular constitutionalism" have examined the role of citizens in interpreting and transforming the Constitution. This article analyzes the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment led by Alice Paul's Congressional Union and National Woman's Party (NWP). To evaluate the impact of Paul's unyielding campaign of wartime picketing and prison protests in convincing President Wilson to endorse the federal amendment and to work on its behalf, the article scrutinizes the relationship between Paul's more militant tactics and the conciliatory posture adopted by her rival Carrie Chapman Catt and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The article offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Paul's strategy that incorporates the insights of research on American political development, social movements, and presidential leadership, and draws on the archival records of the NWP, presidential papers, and contemporary newspaper coverage. Paul's more contentious, unruly methods played a decisive role in obtaining the necessary congressional votes in the House and Senate during Wilson's second term. Paul refused to merely to play the role of the insider lobbyist. She instead perfected the an outsider strategy by appealing directly to voters and the public — first through parades, deputations, petitions, and other well-publicized events, and later through much more oppositional activities, such as anti-incumbent campaigns, pickets, and prison protests. Paul had an astute sense of the power of emotional appeals, and it was this feature of her outsider strategy that made the NWP such a formidable force in the suffrage movement. A kind of insider-outsider dynamic — with Catt eventually serving as the more cooperative suffrage leader, and Paul as the contentious outsider — appears to have been the crucial combination needed to gain Wilson's help in pushing suffrage through Congress in 1918-19. Paul's most controversial tactics — the picketing and protests in 1917 — were implemented with such ruthless determination that Wilson and other opponents in Congress began searching for a way to end the standoff. Paul's resort to civil disobedience may have appeared unruly to her political opponents and the public, but it was in reality a tactic, like all of her strategies, chosen and deployed after a careful consideration of its political impact. That Wilson gave Catt and NAWSA all of the public credit for the shift should not obscure the crucial role that Paul's campaign played in creating this pressure. Given this success, Alice Paul deserves more recognition as a leading exemplar of the transformative model of constitutional citizenship.


Since announcing its foreign policy "pivot to Asia" shortly after the election of Barack Obama, the United States has made extensive use of its institutional and discursive power to encourage denationalization among developing countries whose economies chiefly rely on manufacturing and trade—part of its global strategic goal of expanding the hegemony of finance capital at the lowest possible cost. The development of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) is a case in point. This article analyzes the TPP's strategy in targeting China, pointing out that the TPP is a battle for the terms of economic development and discourse in the twenty-first century, as well as an illustration of the ideology of technocracy and soft power. Lastly, we criticize the TPP's erosion of economic sovereignty, which would effectively relegate the economies of developing countries to a form of semi-colonial extraterritoriality. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


Today, end-users have many opportunities to consume Internet-based services relevant for their private and professional life.However, the easy consumption of new services is not reflected on the data side. The availability of new services potentiallyincreases pre-existing data interoperability issues since the same data is scattered over even more locations. Looking at thesimple example of basic personal contact data, users need to manually re-enter again and again this data to be able to registerand consume services. The research described in this paper is the preliminary result of an ongoing design science researchproject addressing the topic of end-user-driven interoperability. We present a software artifact and the results of anexperiment evaluating contact data interoperability within multiple Internet-based services.


Paris, 19 October 2012 As part of its on-going review of compliance with the AML/CFT standards, the FATF has to date identified the following jurisdictions which have strategic AML/CFT deficiencies for which they have developed an action plan with the FATF. While the situations differ among each jurisdiction, each jurisdiction has provided a written high-level political commitment to address the identified deficiencies. The FATF welcomes these commitments.


Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a disease of the myocardium caused by mutations in sarcomeric proteins with mechanical roles, such as the molecular motor myosin. Around half of the HCM-causing genetic variants target contraction modulator cardiac myosin-binding protein C (cMyBP-C), although the underlying pathogenic mechanisms remain unclear since many of these mutations cause no alterations in protein structure and stability. As an alternative pathomechanism, here we have examined whether pathogenic mutations perturb the nanomechanics of cMyBP-C, which would compromise its modulatory mechanical tethers across sliding actomyosin filaments. Using single-molecule atomic force spectroscopy, we have quantified mechanical folding and unfolding transitions in cMyBP-C domains targeted by HCM mutations that do not induce RNA splicing alterations or protein thermodynamic destabilization. Our results show that domains containing mutation R495W are mechanically weaker than wild-type at forces below 40 pN and that R502Q mutant domains fold faster than wild-type. None of these alterations are found in control, nonpathogenic variants, suggesting that nanomechanical phenotypes induced by pathogenic cMyBP-C mutations contribute to HCM development. We propose that mutation-induced nanomechanical alterations may be common in mechanical proteins involved in human pathologies.


A bright outlook for carbon coupling In contemporary organic chemistry, it is straightforward to forge bonds between unsaturated carbons (i.e., carbons already engaged in double bonds) using cross-coupling catalysis. The protocol runs into some trouble, however, if one or both starting carbon centers are saturated (purely single-bonded). Tellis et al. and Zuo et al. independently found that combining a second, light-activated catalyst with a nickel cross-coupling catalyst could achieve selective coupling of saturated and unsaturated reagents (see the Perspective by Lloyd-Jones and Ball). Their methods rely on single-electron transfer from the light-activated catalyst to the saturated carbon, thereby enhancing its reactivity more effectively than the twoelectron mechanisms prevailing in traditional protocols. Science, this issue p. 433, p. 437; see also p. 381 Combining two catalysts, one light-activated, facilitates bond formation between saturated and unsaturated carbons. [Also see Perspective by Lloyd-Jones and Ball] The routine application of Csp3-hybridized nucleophiles in cross-coupling reactions remains an unsolved challenge in organic chemistry. The sluggish transmetalation rates observed for the preferred organoboron reagents in such transformations are a consequence of the two-electron mechanism underlying the standard catalytic approach. We describe a mechanistically distinct single-electron transfer-based strategy for the activation of organoboron reagents toward transmetalation that exhibits complementary reactivity patterns. Application of an iridium photoredox catalyst in tandem with a nickel catalyst effects the cross-coupling of potassium alkoxyalkyl- and benzyltrifluoroborates with an array of aryl bromides under exceptionally mild conditions (visible light, ambient temperature, no strong base). The transformation has been extended to the asymmetric and stereoconvergent cross-coupling of a secondary benzyltrifluoroborate.


This paper investigates the feasibility of using an alternator as means of harvesting energy from a stationary exercise bicycle. A switch mode converter was designed to regulate the current in the alternator rotor winding, thus regulating the power required to pedal, and consequently the power output of the bike. The complete controller design consists of this power stage, a control circuit, a startup circuit and an overvoltage protection circuit. A functional overview of the entire controller is presented in the paper, along with in-depth descriptions of the specific subcircuits designed. The system is self-starting and does not require an external power source. There are two modes of operation: Voltage regulated 12V output for connection to a standard inverter, and unregulated output for charging of a 24V battery, with direct linear control of the rotor current, thus simulating road bike gearing. Prototype bikes were built and used at several events, and the functionality was experimentally verified.


Computing driving directions in road networks is a fundamental problem. Although it can be solved in essentially linear time by Dijkstra's algorithm, this is not fast enough to enable interactive queries on large-scale inputs. Instead, modern algorithms typically work in two stages: first an offline preprocessing routine computes some auxiliary data, which is then used to answer exact queries in real time. The past decade has seen a surprisingly diverse set of techniques that follow this approach, mostly relying on the fact that road networks tend to have a strong hierarchy. These methods work very well when minimizing driving times, but are much less efficient with other cost functions. We present a practical algorithm that has no such drawbacks, and can compute shortest paths on continental road networks with arbitrary metrics (cost functions). Our customizable route planning approach works in three stages. The first, metric-independent preprocessing, uses graph partitioning to define the topology of a multilevel overlay graph, which is the same regardless of the cost function. The second stage, customization, uses the metric to compute the actual costs of the overlay arcs. Finally, the query stage uses the output of the first two stages to compute shortest paths in real time (milliseconds). The first stage uses a recent partitioning algorithm based on the notion of natural cuts, which are sparse regions separating much denser areas. It may take a few minutes (or even hours), but only needs to be run (or updated) when new road segments are built. Metric changes (which are much more frequent) require running only customization, which takes a second or less even on continental road networks. Since it does not rely on strong hierarchies, CRP is robust to metric changes. Unlike most other methods, it can also handle turn costs (and restrictions) quite naturally, with little effect on performance and space usage. It is thus ideal for a real-world routing engine, and is indeed in use by Bing Maps. This extended abstract includes results first published at SEA 2011 and SEA 2013.


A remote fiber-optic methane gas sensor system is proposed and demonstrated with accurate gas concentration measurement and good mitigation of cross gas sensitivity. We use a polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber (PM-PCF)-based Sagnac loop filter to slice the spectrum of a broadband light source so as to precisely match several absorption lines of the methane gas within the near-infrared band. Meanwhile, a compact and cost-effective gas cell with multiple reflections is designed to enhance the interaction between the light beam and the methane gas to be detected, which also subsequently increase the system sensitivity. Due to the insensitive temperature dependence of the PM-PCF-based comb filter, we can obtain gas concentration measurement with a sensitivity of ~410 ppm. Moreover, by intentionally pumping the acetylene gas into the gas cell during the methane gas concentration measurement, the power variation caused by the interfering gas with 100% concentration is only equals to 0.7% of the power variation induced by the 100% concentration methane gas. Thus, effective mitigation of cross gas sensitivity is experimentally verified. The proposed fiber-optic methane gas sensor system is verified with low cost, compact size, potential capability of multipoint detection, and high sensitivity.


Long considered to be ectopic breast tissue representing the caudal remnants of the milk ridges, anogenital mammary-like glands are nowadays thought to represent a normal constituent of the anogenital area. Lesions involving these glands, benign or malignant, epithelial or stromal manifest a striking similarity to their mammary counterparts. This review addresses the recent literature on lesions of anogenital mammary-like glands and our personal experience with various lesions related to these structures. Discussed are the normal anatomy and histology of these glands as well as the clinical presentation, histopathological and immunohistochemical features, molecular biological aspects, and differential diagnosis of various lesions involving anogenital mammary-like glands, including lactating adenoma, hidradenoma papilliferum, hidradenocarcinoma papilliferum, fibroadenomas, phyllodes tumor, pseudoangiomatous stromal hyperplasia, extramammary Paget disease, and other carcinomas. In addition, "nonspecific" epithelial or stromal changes some of which can be likened to similar changes occurring in a range of benign breast disease, including sclerosing adenosis, columnar cell lesions, ductal lesions and various metaplastic changes affecting epithelium and myoepithelium are discussed. Although lesions of anogenital mammary-like glands are often discussed in many dermatopathology textbooks in the context of cutaneous adnexal neoplasms we advocate that the best approach to the diagnosis of these lesions is to relate them to analogous well recognized lesions occurring in the breast, that is, through the eyes of a breast pathologist. This will enable their recognition, precise classification and should introduce greater uniformity in how they are reported in the literature so that more meaningful clinicopathological comparisons and correlations may be made.


Despite much recent research, there is still little systematic information about the phenomenology of panic attacks, and their possible causes remain obscure. We investigated panic attacks in the natural environment using an event sampling approach. Twenty-seven panic attack patients and 19 matched normal conrols kept panic attack and self-exposure diaries for 6 days and wore an ambulatory heart rate/physical activity recorder for 3 days. Patients reported 175 attacks, generally of moderate severity. The most frequent symptoms were palpitations, dizziness/lightheadedness, dyspnea, nausea, sweating, and chest pain/ discomfort. The results did not support the classification of panic attacks recently proposed by Sheehan and Sheehan, which requires three symptoms as a cutoff for panic attacks. Panic attacks classified by the patients as situational (i.e., occurring in feared situations) were more severe and occurred in situational contexts different from spontaneous attacks, but were otherwise phenomenologically similar. Heart rates did not change during spontaneous attacks and were only mildly elevated during situational attacks or during the 15 minutes preceding these attacks. These heart rate changes were interpretable as effects of anxiety, although physical activity showed a similar pattern of changes. Some normal control subjects reported on the panic diary primarily situational anxiety episodes that were phenomenologically similar to, albeit less severe than, the patients' episodes. Panic patients may sometimes fail to perceive environmental triggers for their attacks because many sometimes fail to perceive environmental triggers for their attacks because many attacks classified as spontaneous occurred in classical "phobic" situations. Furthermore, the comparison of concurrent diary and retrospective interview and questionnaire descriptions showed that panic patients have a tendency toward retrospective exaggeration. Implications for the assessment, definition, and classification of panic attacks are discussed.


Conversations about police reform in lawmaking and legal scholarship typically take a narrow view of the multiple, complex roles that policing plays in American society, focusing primarily on their techniques of crime control. This Article breaks from that tendency, engaging police reform from a sociological perspective that focuses instead on the noncriminal functions of policing. In particular, it examines the role of policing in the daily maintenance of racial residential segregation, one of the central strategies of American racial inequality. Unlike previous work that touches on these issues, this Article argues that police reformers and police leaders should adopt an anti-segregation approach to policing. It also offers legal frameworks and policy prescriptions that flow from an anti-segregation ethic in police governance.

This Article begins by setting forth a rich account of residential segregation, clarifying the distinction between easily measurable proxies for segregation and the type of segregation with which law and policy should be concerned: the spatial separation that confines, subordinates, and dominates. It then identifies and illustrates six mechanisms through which American policing perpetuates residential segregation, drawing from sociological research, including qualitative narratives collected in Dallas County, Texas; Cuyahoga County, Ohio; and Baltimore, Maryland. Next, the Article sketches the architecture of anti-segregation policing, offering legal frameworks based on fair housing law and federal and state consent decrees, as well as a non-exhaustive set of practical approaches police departments could take to advance an anti-segregation agenda. Finally, the Article engages a fundamental question central to police transformation movements today: Is meaningful police reform, including anti-segregation policing, possible in a society that is structured through race?


We study the effects on financial markets and real economic activity of changes in risk related to political events and policy announcements in Italy during the 2013-2019 period that saw the rise to power of populist parties. We focus on events that have implications for budgetary policy, debt sustainability and for Euro membership. We use changes in the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) spreads on governments bonds around those dates as an instrument for shocks to policy and institutional risk – political risk for short – in the context of Local Projections - IV. We show that shocks associated with the rise of populist forces or their policies have adverse and sizable effects on financial markets. These negative effects were moderated by the European institutions and domestic constitutional constraints. In addition, Italian political developments generate international spillover effects on the spreads of other eurozone countries. Finally, political risk shocks have a negative impact on the real economy, although the accommodating stance of monetary policy helped in cushioning them.


This paper describes a unifying framework for both formant tracking and speech synthesis using Hidden Markov Models (HMM). The feature vector in the HMM is composed by the first three formant frequencies, their bandwidths and their delta with time. Speech is synthesized by generating the most likely sequence of feature vectors from a HMM, trained with a set of sentences from a given speaker. Higher formant tracking accuracy can be achieved by finding the most likely formant track given a distribution of the formants of every sound. This data-driven formant synthesizer bridges the gaps between rulebased formant synthesizers and concatenative synthesizers by synthesizing speech that is both smooth and resembles the speaker in the training data.


The taxation of goods and services by a state is considered efficient when consumer welfare is maximized subject to the condition that the local government raises a specified amount of revenues. According to the Ramsey principle of optimal taxation of commodities, an efficient commodity tax induces little change in consumer behavior and does not fall on a good that is relatively important in the budgets of the poor. Therefore, the optimal commodity tax is one that consumers cannot easily avoid, a characteristic that leads to the conclusion that a particular tax's efficiency will be greater the more insensitive is consumer demand to the price of that good. States are increasingly relying on the taxation of wireless services as a source of revenue. For example, the average wireless consumer in New York pays a 16 percent tax on his wireless bill, which is nearly double that of the average business tax in New York. In fact, the average state tax rate on wireless services exceeds the average state tax on general business services by 2.34 percentage points. States have not, however, analyzed consumer demand for wireless services to determine whether it is efficient to tax wireless services with such intensity. In this paper, we estimate the own-price elasticity of demand for wireless service using a survey dataset of wireless consumption. Using data on wireless consumption between 1999 and 2001, we find that the own-price elasticity of demand for wireless services is between -1.12 and -1.29. With these elasticity estimates, we find that reducing the taxation of wireless services by one dollar would improve economic welfare by between $1.23 and $1.95. This empirical finding calls into question the wisdom of the high taxes that many states impose on wireless services.


Organic waste to energy (OWtE) technologies have been developed and implemented in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) countries. However, they are still far away to significantly contribute not only to treat the ever-increasing waste volumes in the region but also to supply the regional energy demand and meet their national carbon emission goals. The technical complexity of these technologies aligned with lack of research, high investment costs and political deficiencies have not allowed for an appropriate implementation of OWtE in the region, where the applicability of large-scale plants remains to be demonstrated. This research presents the state-of-the art of OWtE technologies in the context of the LAC countries based on archival research method; as well as the challenges and opportunities that the region is facing for an adequate implementation of these technologies. The main findings show that OWtE have the potential to improve waste and energy systems in the region by reducing environmental impacts along with a series of social and economic benefits, such as increasing access to a sustainable energy supply. Diverse researches indicate principally anaerobic digestion, fermentation (bioethanol, biodiesel, etc.), microbial fuel cells, gasification and pyrolysis as efficient technologies to treat solid organic wastes and produce bioenergy.


The basis for Christian theology, the Bible, has come under considerable attack by decontructionalists in their attempt to disregard authorial intent and to prove that understanding the meaning of an author's words is an impossible task. Kevin J. Vanhoozer is an evangelical scholar who has done much in defense of authorial intent and has found fertile philosophical ground in Speech Act theory. This essay looks at Vanhoozer's use of J.L. Austin's variety of Speech Act theory to determine if Vanhoozer uses Austin correctly, then turns to Vanhoozer's bibliological use of Austin whereby he analogically applies Austin's Triadic formula of a speech act to the Trinitarian formula of the inspiration and interpretation of Scripture.


This paper examines the issue of medical uncertainty in Chinese gynecology by analyzing how classical medicine defined and explained different forms of false pregnancy. Besides recognizing that false pregnancies could mimic true ones, Chinese gynecology also recognized that true fetuses could deviate from the normal course of gestation and thus mimic false pregnancies. Therefore, the paper argues that the perceived difficulty of distinguishing between true and false pregnancies was intimately linked to the belief that female reproductive energies were easily subverted by external pathogens and internal imbalances. Special attention is given to the syndrome known as Ghost Fetus, which was originally explained as the product of human-ghost intercourse but later understood primarily as the result of excessive female emotion. During the Qing, furthermore, discussions of Ghost Fetus and other forms of false pregnancy frequently merged into discussions of female depletion and menstrual irregularity. The paper concludes that these changes in the definition of Ghost Fetus are part of a larger change in gender norms during the Ming-Qing that increasingly focused on female emotionality and physical debility.


This article presents findings from the 2006 Public Libraries and the Internet study and other research that demonstrate the impact of public Internet access in public libraries on the communities and individuals that the libraries serve. This article focuses on the importance of public library Internet access in times of emergencies and for a range of electronic government (e–government) services at the individual and community–wide levels. Public access computing and Internet access in public libraries function as a first choice, first refuge, and last resort in a range of emergency and e–government circumstances, allowing individuals to engage successfully in essential e–government services such as registering for Medicare or other benefits and filing tax information. With this key centrality as agents of government services, public libraries increasingly play significant roles in times of emergencies, like the aftermath of a hurricane, in which communities rely on the public library Internet access to request aid, try to find missing family and friends, file Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and insurance claims, and begin rebuilding their lives. This article also discusses the need to revise government policy related to the role of public libraries in their support of e–government as public libraries increasingly serve as agents of e–government.


Over the past decades, practitioners from various disciplines have sought out to improve students' learning by employing the flipped classroom approach to learning. Many practitioners have seen immense increase in students learning by requiring students to gain exposure to learning prior attending the class, often online and in video format. Class time is then devoted to collaborative exercises, discussions, assignments and projects. With advances in technology, many online resources and applications allow students to access the materials at own pace, time, and place as well as to actively engage and participate in the learning process. Furthermore, considering of making the students learning experience more interesting and fun, thus, gamification strategy is integrated with the flipped classroom approach. However, to date, no study of this combination has been undertaken particularly in respect to English as a Second Language (ESL) in Malaysia and in an English Grammar course. Therefore, this study reports on students' experiences and challenges that they have been facing for 14 weeks of BIL1033 English Grammar 1 course. The participants in the study were 90 Diploma students taking BIL1033 course at Sultan Idris Education University, Perak, Malaysia. Data was collected by means of questionnaire, students' reflection journals, focus group interviews, and semester course evaluation. Results indicate that students really enjoy most of the English Grammar flipped lessons. They like to learn English Grammar via Kahoot and Quizziz. The class activities are full of fun and bring joy to learning. The findings from the students' reflection journals and focus group interviews also revealed that they are always excited to come to English Grammar class because of collaborative activities and games. Individual and team-based competitions encourage students to communicate with each other and engage them with the content through gaming elements. This study implies that a combination of both flipped classroom and gamification places the responsibility for learning English Grammar on the shoulders of students while giving them greater motivation to experiment knowledge that they have grasped in various other tasks.


International business scholars are increasingly calling for more awareness of the local context in which international entrepreneurs pursue business opportunities. In this paper, we respond to this call, arguing that an entrepreneur's business network engenders self-sustaining dynamics that bear upon the entrepreneurial opportunity itself. We conclude that the dynamics that we observe can be interpreted as 'multidimensional embeddedness'. Through a qualitative inquiry, we study how a Korean entrepreneur seeking to establish an agri-business venture in Cambodia embeds himself in the local business environment as a means to create an opportunity structure. We analyze how the international business venture initially thrived but ultimately failed, attributing these outcomes to the entrepreneur's multidimensional embeddedness in the wider business environment. In so doing, we contribute a critical perspective to entrepreneurship research, widening the prevailing individualistic focus on entrepreneurship by engaging with the societal context within which an opportunity structure develops. We also extend international business studies by explaining how the opportunity structure underlying international ventures impacts upon opportunity pursuit, beyond the entrepreneur's control.


Concrete is a ubiquitous material in urban environments and increasingly used by industry and the maker movement. However, there is little research about its affordance and its potential for embedded User Interfaces (UI). In our ongoing work, we investigate different manufacturing processes and design strategies to change and adapt the affordances of concrete to make it appear interactive. We tested three interface elements, a button, a scroll wheel, and a slider, with 33 participants in a lab elicitation study. Each was created in two versions following two design strategies, one with a more natural look, the other more abstract. Five participants then bodystormed ideas with the prototypes in an outdoor environment. Based on our explorations, we discuss design considerations for creating concrete interfaces including the potential of both design strategies and present different application scenarios.


Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by a complex set of clinical assessments. We use an unsupervised machine learning model called a Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machine (CRBM) to learn the relationships between covariates commonly used to characterize subjects and their disease progression in MS clinical trials. A CRBM is capable of generating digital twins, which are simulated subjects having the same baseline data as actual subjects. Digital twins allow for subject-level statistical analyses of disease progression. The CRBM is trained using data from 2395 subjects enrolled in the placebo arms of clinical trials across the three primary subtypes of MS. We discuss how CRBMs are trained and show that digital twins generated by the model are statistically indistinguishable from their actual subject counterparts along a number of measures.


On the battlefields of Iraq, the U.S. military's A-10 Thunderbolt jet was a fearsome tank killer able to survive punishing hits from antiaircraft fire. Now, one retired Thunderbolt is taking on a new scientific mission that fits its nickname. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has given a $10.9 million grant to a U.S. Navy university to transform the warplane into an aircraft capable of withstanding stomach-churning winds, pounding hail, and lightning strikes as it probes the heart of heavy weather. The grant, made 23 September, caps a 6-year effort to replace a propeller-driven T-28 military trainer that was grounded in 2005 after 35 years of storm chasing.


Background—Although atrial fibrillation (AF) has been linked to underlying coronary artery disease (CAD), data supporting this association have been based on ECG and clinical history for the definition of CAD rather than direct visualization of atherosclerosis. Methods and Results—The prevalence of CAD among patients with paroxysmal or persistent AF and without history of CAD was evaluated using multislice computed tomography. Multislice computed tomography was performed in 150 patients with AF (61±11 years, 67% males, 58% asymptomatic) with predominantly low (59%) or intermediate (25%) pretest likelihood of CAD. CAD was classified as obstructive (≥50% luminal narrowing) or not. A population of 148 patients without history of AF, similar to the AF group as to age, gender, symptomatic status, and pretest likelihood, served as a control group. Logistic regression analysis was applied to evaluate the relationship between demographic and clinical data and the presence of obstructive CAD. On the basis of multislice computed tomography, 18% of patients with AF were classified as having no CAD, whereas 41% showed nonobstructive CAD and the remaining 41% had obstructive CAD. Among patients without AF, 32% were classified as having no CAD, whereas 41% showed nonobstructive CAD and 27% had obstructive CAD (P=0.010 compared with patients with AF). At logistic regression analysis, age, male gender, and the presence of AF were significantly related to obstructive CAD. Conclusion—A higher prevalence of obstructive CAD was observed among patients with AF, confirming the hypothesis that AF could be a marker of advanced coronary atherosclerosis.


An atomic force microscope equipped with a functionalized tip can map out the electronic and structural properties of individual chemical bonds. Recently developed operation modes for the atomic force microscope (AFM)—in particular, frequency modulation AFM (FM-AFM) (1)—have made it possible to image, manipulate (2), and chemically identify (3) both conducting and insulating surfaces (4) with atomic-scale resolution. On page 1326 of this issue, Gross et al. (5) push the limits of the imaging capabilities of AFM still further by using a functionalized tip—a metal tip with a carbon monoxide (CO) molecule at the apex—to map the subtle differences in charge density and bond length associated with nonequivalent C-C bonds in three complex molecular systems, and to correlate them with their bond order. The ability to determine fundamental properties of individual chemical bonds could affect many technologically relevant fields such as catalysis, photovoltaics, and molecular electronics.