The densely populated area extended from the North Kivu province in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to North Burundi and East Rwanda is vulnerable to several geohazards, such as landslides triggered by geodynamical processes (climate, seismicity, volcanism) and possibly worsen by anthropic actions. Located in the East African rift valley, the region is also characterized by a strong seismicity, with an increasing number of people and infrastructures exposed. In addition, east DRC hosts the two most active African volcanoes: Nyiragongo and Nyamulagira. Their activity can have serious impacts, as in 2002 when Nyiragongo directly endangers the ~800.000 inhabitants of Goma city, located ~15 km to the south. Linked to passive volcanic degassing, SO2 and CO2 discharge may also increase the population vulnerability. GeoRisCA is a project, funded by the Belgian scientific policy, which aims at studying the geo-risks in this region (DRC, Rwanda, Burundi), in order to support regional and local risk management. A key contribution of GeoRisCA is to work together with the national and local institutions on assessing and outlining the vulnerabilities by taking into account exposure to perturbations and adaptive capacity or resilience of the systems. On one hand, the exposure is identified as the potential degree of loss of a given element or set of elements at risk; i.e., the susceptibility of people, infrastructures and buildings with respect to a hazard. On the other hand, the resilience of the individual, the household, the community, is its adaptive capacity to absorb disturbance and reorganize into a fully functioning system by anticipation, response, adaptation and recovery. It focuses mainly on land use and on socio-economic and demographic factors that increase or attenuate the impacts of hazards, and evolve with time (e.g. improved education, increased income, denser social networks and evolution of coping mechanisms). The output of GeoRisCA will be a comprehensive but simple methodology for reliable geo-risks measurement and mapping, designed as decision supporting tools for existing disasters preparedness and mitigation institutions.


Sepsis has recently been redefined as a potentially lethal organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host organism's response to infection. Due to the high mortality rate and hospitalization costs, early diagnosis is necessary, as it allows more aggressive treatment to be applied in the first 6 hours following detection. There are a lot of clinical and biological parameters used as biomarkers to asses the severity of sepsis and the mortality risk. Nevertheless, there is no "standard" biomarker, nor a combination of biomarkers with predictive value, which enable the early detection of sepsis, prior to the onset of clinical signs. Moreover, markers such as the number of leukocytes and neutrophils, C-reactive protein or procalcitonin have been shown to have low specificity, especially when used individually. The authors review the literature data regarding the main categories of sepsis biomarkers: proinflammatory citokines, acute-phase proinflammatory mediators, cell-surface biomarkers, and receptor biomarkers. The combination of three of them seems to be the most effective in diagnosing the early-phase of sepsis: IL-6, procalcitonin and soluble triggering receptor expressed on mieloid cells-1 (sTREM-1).


Recent developments in (near) real-time sensor applications have the potential to provide operators and managers with useful information on drinking water distribution supply and need of its maintenance. A systematic methodology based on causal inference from observational data is proposed to increase knowledge of water supply distribution systems equipped with sensor networks. This methodology can be used to help identify deviations from expected operation of water supply and sensor infrastructure, using only observational data. We outline the first steps of two distinct procedures that use data from a sensor network, to infer a map of a causal dependence structure. These procedures are applied to scenario studies where an unexpected change in operation occurs, i.e. a valve status is different and a sensor bias is introduced. A draft outline of future steps is given that could improve and validate the methodology.


OBJECTIVE
We aimed to replicate a previous study of 1-year-olds that reported a deficit in motor development associated with moderate alcohol use during lactation, using a different but comparable population.

METHODOLOGY
The mental development of 915 18-month-old toddlers from a random sample of a longitudinal population-based study in the United Kingdom was measured using the Griffiths Developmental Scales. Frequent self-administered questionnaires during and after pregnancy provided maternal data. The dose of alcohol available to the lactating infant was obtained by multiplying the alcohol intake of the mother by the proportion of breast milk in the infant's diet. We compared this dose with the Griffiths Scales of Mental Development, taking into account potentially confounding variables.

RESULT
Three of the Griffiths scales increased slightly but significantly with increasing infant alcohol exposure; there was no association in the remaining 2 or average of the scales.

DISCUSSION
We were unable to replicate the earlier deficit in motor skills associated with lactation alcohol use. One reason may be that the dose of alcohol reaching the lactating infant is small, and tests of infants and toddlers have limited ability to pick up small effects. Studies of older children may resolve the question of the safety of drinking while nursing.


Data analysis is changing fast. Driven by a vast range of application domains and affordable tools, machine learning has become mainstream. Unsupervised data analysis, including cluster analysis, factor analysis, and low dimensionality mapping methods continually being updated, have reached new heights of achievement in the incredibly rich data world that we inhabit. Statistical Learning and Data Science is a work of reference in the rapidly evolving context of converging methodologies. It gathers contributions from some of the foundational thinkers in the different fields of data analysis to the major theoretical results in the domain. On the methodological front, the volume includes conformal prediction and frameworks for assessing confidence in outputs, together with attendant risk. It illustrates a wide range of applications, including semantics, credit risk, energy production, genomics, and ecology. The book also addresses issues of origin and evolutions in the unsupervised data analysis arena, and presents some approaches for time series, symbolic data, and functional data. Over the history of multidimensional data analysis, more and more complex data have become available for processing. Supervised machine learning, semi-supervised analysis approaches, and unsupervised data analysis, provide great capability for addressing the digital data deluge. Exploring the foundations and recent breakthroughs in the field, Statistical Learning and Data Science demonstrates how data analysis can improve personal and collective health and the well-being of our social, business, and physical environments.


To better characterize the two clinicopathologic types of squamous cell carcinoma, human papillomavirus (HPV) positive and negative, and their adjacent skin changes, we performed cytomorphometric analysis on 12 HPV-positive squamous cell carcinomas and adjacent vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia and 22 HPV-negative squamous cell carcinomas and adjacent squamous cell hyperplasia and lichen sclerosis. Our results were that 83% (10 of 12) HPV-positive carcinomas and 78% (7 of 9) adjacent vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia were aneuploid, compared with 59% (13 of 22) HPV-negative carcinomas, 6% (1 of 16) squamous cell hyperplasias and 0% (0 of 20) lichen scleroses. Seventy-five percent (9 of 12) HPV carcinomas and 78% (7 of 9) vulvar intraepithelial neoplasias showed two aneuploid peaks, but no HPV-negative carcinoma or non-neoplastic epithelial lesion showed multiple aneuploid peaks. Fifty percent of squamous cell hyperplasias (8 of 16) and lichen scleroses (10 of 20) adjacent to HPV-negative carcinomas were hypodiploid. The mean DNA indices were: 1.70 for the dominant tumor cell population of HPV-positive carcinoma, 1.64 for the dominant population of vulvar intraepithelial intraepithelial neoplasia, 1.41 for HPV-negative carcinoma, 0.85 for squamous cell hyperplasia and 0.83 for lichen sclerosis. In conclusion, the higher rate of aneuploidy, higher mean DNA index, and presence of multiploid peaks in HPV-positive carcinomas and adjacent vulvar intraepithelial neoplasias compared with the lower rate of aneuploidy, lower mean DNA index, absence of multiploid peaks of HPV-negative carcinomas and tendency to hypodiploidy in squamous cell hyperplasia and lichen sclerosis support the hypothesis that there are two clinicopathologic types of vulvar carcinoma, with different pathogenetic mechanisms. The similarities in ploidy findings between vulvar HPV-positive carcinomas and vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia and those previously published for cervical carcinoma and cervical intraepithelial neoplasia support the view that these two cancers are analogous and have similar pathogenetic mechanisms. The frequent finding of hypodiploidy in squamous cell hyperplasia and lichen sclerosis next to HPV-negative carcinomas requires further investigation of the molecular pathogenesis of this cancer type.


Searching for network width is an effective way to slim deep neural networks with hardware budgets. With this aim, a one-shot supernet is usually leveraged as a performance evaluator to rank the performance \wrt~different width. Nevertheless, current methods mainly follow a manually fixed weight sharing pattern, which is limited to distinguish the performance gap of different width. In this paper, to better evaluate each width, we propose a locally free weight sharing strategy (CafeNet) accordingly. In CafeNet, weights are more freely shared, and each width is jointly indicated by its base channels and free channels, where free channels are supposed to loCAte FrEely in a local zone to better represent each width. Besides, we propose to further reduce the search space by leveraging our introduced FLOPs-sensitive bins. As a result, our CafeNet can be trained stochastically and get optimized within a min-min strategy. Extensive experiments on ImageNet, CIFAR-10, CelebA and MS COCO dataset have verified our superiority comparing to other state-of-the-art baselines. For example, our method can further boost the benchmark NAS network EfficientNet-B0 by 0.41\% via searching its width more delicately.


Objective: In the present study, effect of Ocimum sanctum leaves aqueous extract on the memory impairment and memory enhancing activity in zebrafish is studied using rivastigmine as the standard drug and scopolamine as the memory impairing agent. Methods: Zebrafishes were procured from local aquarium store, aqueous extract of Ocimum sanctum leaves was used as a test drug whereas rivastigmine as a standard drug. Scopolamine was used to induce memory impairment. Two behavioral tests, namely, Inhibitory Avoidance Test and color bias avoided with appetite conditioning T-Maze test were employed for evaluating the memory impairment and memory enhancement activity. Latency is the parameter measured in Inhibitory Avoidance Test whereas Time spent in the food containing green arm and average total number of entries into short arms were the parameters evaluated in T maze test. Results: The latency period of (SOTE) Ocimum sanctum pre-treated scopolamine group was found to be 42 sec whereas 9 sec in (STE) scopolamine alone treated group. The time spent in green arm by the former group was found to be 93 sec whereas 67 sec by latter group. The average total number of entries into short arms by former group was 14 whereas 17 by the latter group. Conclusion: The results of the present study contribute to the ability of OS leaves extract in ameliorating the memory impairment effects of scopolamine and can be used as a potential drug for neurodenegerative diseases like Alzheimer's Disease.


The same scholar who provided the comparative study of African languages with a new impetus as a result of his classificatory work, Joseph H. Greenberg, also made quint-essential contributions to the field of language typology. When Greenberg was working on his doctoral dissertation on the pre-Islamic religion of the Hausa at Yale University (USA), he also began to develop some groundbreaking ideas on inductive methods in linguistics. His intellectual impetus apparently derived from the research of Yale anthropologists, who were trying to come to grips with variation between cultures in the way kinship terminology is organised on the basis of a worldwide comparison of kinship systems. Greenberg transferred this inductive method onto the comparative study of languages (as stated in an interview published in Newman 1991). In a way, Greenberg continued a tradition started by 19th century scholars like Friedrich von Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Muller and others, as well as 20th century scholars like the eminent Edward Sapir, Nikolai Sergejewitch Trubetzkoy, or Roman Jakobson, who also based their theories on an ever increasing corpus of data on languages from different parts of the world. Below, we shall discuss both the value and the potential danger of language typology as a supplementary method in the historical-comparative study of languages.


Today 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities. This entails an excessive exploitation of natural resources, an increase in pollution, and an increase in the demand for food. One way of reducing the ecological footprint of cities is to introduce agricultural activities to them. In the current food and agriculture model, the fragmentation of the city and the countryside means energy use, CO2 emissions from transport, and large-scale marketing requirements. Rooftop Eco.Greenhouses (RTEG) consist of a greenhouse connected to a building in terms of energy, water, and CO2 flows; it is a new model for a sustainable production, an eco-innovative concept for producing high quality vegetables and improving the sustainability of buildings in cities. The main objective of this study is to examine the barriers and opportunities regarding the implementation of RTEG in Mediterranean cities in Europe. The work method consisted of discussion seminars involving an interdisciplinary group of experts in the area of agronomy, architecture, engineering, environmental sciences, industrial ecology, and other related disciplines. The barriers and opportunities of RTEG take into account social, economic, environmental, and technological aspects and were determined and analyzed according to three scenarios of implementation: residential buildings, educational or cultural buildings, and industrial buildings. We would highlight the interconnection of the building and the greenhouse as an opportunity of RTEG, making use of water, energy, and CO2 flows between both, as well as the decrease in food transportation requirements. The methodology applied to the study was positive due to the interdisciplinary participation of experts which facilitated a global vision of the implementation of the project.


In 2004, the Argentine Province of Cordoba implemented lay participation in criminal decisions by means of Law 9182. It adopted a mixed tribunal with a lay majority for criminal trials in which aberrant crimes and corruption are alleged. The tribunal, composed of eight lay jurors and three professional judges, deliberates and decides jointly by majority vote.
The law was passed in a context of national debate concerning efficient measures to fight against insecurity and crime. These debates were inspired by a social movement which demanded harsher penalties and judicial reform as means to improve urban safety. The movement understood citizen participation in criminal justice decisions as a tool to adjust punishment levels to social demands and as a way to correct the guarantee-based approach generally held by magistrates, which was considered to be too benign.
However, the arguments considered in the provincial legislature when the initiative was presented were quite different. During the parliamentary debate, it was evident that one of the principal aims of the law was to restore the judiciary's prestige.
After more than a decade of lay participation in criminal trials, it is interesting to analyze whether the institution of mixed tribunals has fulfilled the expectations held by those who promoted this innovation.
This review of the Cordoba experience of mixed tribunals summarizes the main findings of a research program initiated in 2008. It is focused on three issues: (1) the differences between jury and judge decisions, and the actual levels of lay participation obtained when judges and juries sit and deliberate together, (2) the tensions between the judges' guarantee-based approach and the social demand for penal harshness connected to fear of crime, and (3) the contribution of lay participation in the courts toward legitimizing the judiciary, a key issue in a society where trust in justice is chronically low.
Data sources are varied, and include a set of 279 sentences decided between 2005 and 2014, as well as interviews to lawyers, magistrates and common citizens who served as jurors. Data obtained in two public opinion studies, conducted in 1993 and 2011 were also used to discuss the effects of lay participation on the legitimacy of the judiciary.


Spatiotemporal distributions of rare microbial taxa were examined in 384 samples from the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site, in the northwestern Sargasso Sea. Sequences were partitioned into 6 mutually exclusive sets based on abundance (abundant, rare, and very rare) and frequency of detection (frequent and infrequent). Analyses of variance for taxa that were frequently present, across all levels of abundance, demonstrated environmental filtering, indicating that gradients in environmental factors, such as season and depth, drive community assembly for rare taxa, as they do for abundant taxa. All abundant nodal taxonomic units (NTUs) had spatiotemporal periods of rarity, providing a clear demonstration of the role of fluctuating reproductive success in population dynamics, and the role of rare populations as seed banks. An inverse relationship between the number of rare taxa and physical stratification indicates that transport by mixing drives increased community diversity throughout most of the year. Populations of selected copiotrophic taxa varied in episodic patterns that were not tightly entrained to season and depth, indicating that these populations are not governed by the same rules of community assembly that apply to most other taxa and may be adapted to exploit infrequent, unknown disturbances. Overall, the findings support the perspective that the success of most rare populations was driven by the same fundamental patterns of spatiotemporal variation that drove the success of dominant populations, but also indicate potentially important roles for transport by mixing and atypical life histories in determination of community composition.


Cost recovery is a key tenet of the Water Framework Directive, but scalar implications of this in the domestic water sector are rarely addressed. It is more expensive to supply water services to rural populations owing to cost of provision across areas which are extensive yet sparsely populated; however, residents in rural areas often have lower incomes than urban populations. Taking the case of Portugal, the paper shows that, under conditions of cost recovery, prices will increase for populations in rural areas, a situation which is likely to worsen in future given out-migration from these areas. The discussion has a broader bearing on issues of even regional development and can contribute to a general understanding of how forming water policies in times of demographic change can be addressed from a policy and governance perspective.


Autoencoders learn data representations through reconstruction. Robust training is the key factor affecting the quality of the learned representations and, consequently, the accuracy of the application that use them. Previous works suggested methods for deciding the optimal autoencoder configuration which allows for robust training. Nevertheless, improving the accuracy of a trained autoencoder has got limited, if no, attention. We propose a new approach that improves the accuracy of a trained autoencoders results and answers the following question, Given a trained autoencoder, a test image, and using a real-parameter optimizer, can we generate better quality reconstructed image version than the one generated by the autoencoder?. Our proposed approach combines both the decoder part of a trained Resitricted Boltman Machine-based autoencoder with the Competitive Swarm Optimization algorithm. Experiments show that it is possible to reconstruct images using trained decoder from randomly initialized representations. Results also show that our approach reconstructed better quality images than the autoencoder in most of the test cases. Indicating that, we can use the approach for improving the performance of a pre-trained autoencoder if it does not give satisfactory results.


Aim: To explore the prevalence, phenomenology, and background of leisure sickness, i.e., the condition of people developing symptoms of sickness during weekends and/or vacations. Method: In order to obtain an estimate of its prevalence, a representative Dutch sample consisting of 1,128 men and 765 women was asked to indicate to what extent they recognized themselves in our description of weekend and vacation sickness. For the investigation of the phenomenology and background of this condition and the characteristics of the patients suffering from it, questionnaire data were collected in new samples consisting of 114 cases and 56 controls. Questions referred to symptoms, onset, duration, appreciation of weekend and vacation activities, and appraisal of work and workload. Results: In the case of male respondents, 3.6 and 3.2% recognized themselves in the description of the weekend and the vacation syndrome, respectively, compared with 2.7 and 3.2% women. Most frequently reported symptoms were headache/migraine, fatigue, muscular pains, and nausea. In addition, viral infections (flue-like, common cold) were often reported in relation to vacations. Cases had generally suffered from leisure sickness for over 10 years and the onset was associated with stressful conditions. They attributed their condition to difficulties with the transition from work to nonwork, stress associated with travel and vacation, as well as workload and personality characteristics. There were no significant group differences in the appreciation of weekend and leisure activities or lifestyle during days off. Most striking differences were found with respect to experienced workload, sense of responsibility, and inability to relax. Conclusion: Leisure sickness is a relatively common condition. Specific lifestyle factors or leisure activities seem to be less relevant for its development. Concerning risk factors, the data tend to point to high workload and person characteristics, namely, the inability to adapt to the nonworking situation, a high need for achievement, and a high sense of responsibility with respect to work. Future studies should be designed for testing specific hypotheses concerning the underlying mechanisms and evaluating the effectiveness of psychological and/or physical activity interventions.


Objective: To evaluate the demineralization potential of qat extracts at composite restoration interface. Methods: Class V cavities were prepared on the buccal surface of thirty extracted sound premolars and were restored with a nanohybrid composite (Grandio, VOCO, Germany). Specimens were subsequently coated with nail varnish exposing 2mm of enamel around the restoration margin. The specimens were divided into three equal groups of 10 and were then immersed in acid gel and qat extracts (10 and 20) for 4 weeks. All specimens were removed and washed using deionized water and later examined by direct vision and stereomicroscope prior to sectioning. Specimens were then immersed in distilled water for 24 hours, following which the sections were examined under polarized light microscope and demineralized area was measured as outer and wall lesion in the coronal and cervical part of restoration using image analyzer software (Image-Pro Version 4.5). Data were subjected to One-way MANOVA. Results: All specimens immersed in acid gel and qat extracts (10 and 20) exhibit demineralization at the restoration interface. The One-way MANOVA also indicated significant differences between the three groups on the different restoration interface (P<.05) and Tukey multiple comparison test was also performed as illustrated in the table below. Conclusion: 10 and 20 qat caused significantly lower demineralization at restoration interface compared to acid gel. This study was supported by a research grant from University of Malaya, P02182007a.


A wavelet domain, nonlinear inverse scattering approach is presented for imaging subsurface defects in a material sample, given observations of scattered thermal waves. Unlike methods using the Born linearization, our inversion scheme is based on the full wave-field model describing the propagation of thermal waves. Multiresolution techniques are employed to regularize and to lower the computational burden of this ill-posed imaging problem. We use newly developed wavelet-based regularization methods to resolve better the edge structures of defects relative to reconstructions obtained with smoothness-type regularizers. A nonlinear approximation to the exact forward-scattering model is introduced to simplify the inversion with little loss in accuracy. We demonstrate this approach on cross-section imaging problems by using synthetically generated scattering data from transmission and backprojection geometries.


Abstract Objective: The objective of this study was to determine the iron, folate and vitamin B12 status of pregnant teenagers in the Limpopo Province. Design: This is a descriptive study with analytical components. Methods: Pregnant teenagers aged between 12 and 21 years were recruited from Mankweng, Dikgale, Makotopong and Kganya clinics in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. Dietary data and blood were collected for the analysis of iron, folate and vitamin B12 status. Outcome measures: Blood was collected for the analysis of iron, folate and vitamin B12 status. Dietary data were collected using a repeated 24-hour recall questionnaire and a food frequency questionnaire, and demographic data were also collected using a standard questionnaire. Results: The mean and standard deviation for iron, folate, vitamin B12 and vitamin C were 6.5 mg ± 3.3, 155.3 µg ± 92.7, 2.3 µg ± 2.8 and 31.2 mg ± 36.2 respectively. The prevalence of anaemia was high (36%), with iron deficiency anaemia being the most prevalent (57%) as compared to either folate (9%) or vitamin B12 (7%) deficiency anaemia. There was a significant difference (p = 0.03) in serum folate between teenagers who were receiving folic acid supplements and those who were not receiving any such supplements. Conclusions: More than a third of the teenagers were anaemic and this is considered to be high. These teenagers need nutrition education so that they will be able to choose nutritious food, especially at a critical stage such as pregnancy.


The surface plasmon polariton-enhanced Raman spectra of size-selected C16, C18, and C20 clusters isolated in nitrogen matrices are presented along with the calculated vibrational frequencies for the ring and linear chain isomers. The Raman spectra, recorded at a range of excitation wavelengths from 457.9 to 670 nm, show strong resonance enhancement for the three clusters. The calculated vibrational frequencies for ring and linear chain isomers and the cage and bowl structures for C20 are compared to the experimental frequencies. Systematic shifts in the series of peaks in the 200 cm−1 region for C16, C18, and C20 suggest that the observed isomers have the same geometry, thereby ruling out the bowl and cage isomers for C20. The measured spectra appear to be most consistent with the linear chain isomer. This high-energy isomer may be produced during neutralization of the deposited cluster ions.


Recent methods for knowledge grounded dialogs generate responses by incorporating information from an external textual document. These methods do not require the exact document to be known during training and rely on the use of a retrieval system to fetch relevant documents from a large index. The documents used to generate the responses are modeled as latent variables whose prior probabilities need to be estimated. Models such as RAG, marginalize the document probabilities over the documents retrieved from the index to define the log-likelihood loss function which is optimized end-to-end.

In this paper, we develop a variational approach to the above technique wherein, we instead maximize the Evidence Lower bound (ELBO). Using a collection of three publicly available open-conversation datasets, we demonstrate how the posterior distribution, which has information from the ground-truth response, allows for a better approximation of the objective function during training. To overcome the challenges associated with sampling over a large knowledge collection, we develop an efficient approach to approximate the ELBO.

To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to apply variational training for open-scale unsupervised knowledge grounded dialog systems.


The successful implementation of character education curriculum as the Indonesian national curriculum and Islamic education as the education system in Aceh is very dependent on the ability of teachers. The ability of teachers is an important aspect in achieving the learning objectives. One of the capabilities that the teachers need is the ability to identify important Islamic character grown in students and in accordance with the subject matter. This paper aims to propose new ideas on teachers' ability to identify Islamic values in learning Science and Biology. This paper describes the research results which is a part of a larger study with regard to the implementation of Islamic learning of science-biology in junior high school. The ability of teachers to identify Islamic values in learning science-Biology was observed after teachers received training and mentoring. The data of the teachers' ability  to identify Islamic values in learning Science and Biology were obtained through observation of Learning Implementation Plan or RPP and semi-structured interviews. The data were analyzed descriptively. The results showed the teacher is able to identify Islamic values that are relevant to materials in Science and Biology. Islamic values were obtained by teachers from a variety of sources of information. The implication of this study is the ability to identify Islamic values in learning science-biology needs to be developed through training and mentoring. Teachers need to be motivated to use a variety of resources. It is useful to acquire knowledge with regard to Islamic values which are closely related to the material being taught.


Abstract This article examines the evolution of democratic practice in Brazil. The article begins with a discussion on the country's performance in terms of social equality, violence, and weak economy after the consolidation of democracy in 1985. Based on historical evidence, the article offers explanations concerning the weak performance in Brazil. The case of Brazil provides a challenge to the theory of open access order of North and his colleagues in the sense that open access to political organizations and activities does not necessarily lead to either better political representation or better economic performance. The case of Brazil also shows that open access to economic organizations and activities in the absence of the necessary institutions in the areas of property rights protection and contract enforcement, the financial market, the rule of law, and human resources accumulation does not lead to long-term economic growth.


AIMS
This study examined how family, peer and school factors are related to different trajectories of adolescent alcohol use at key developmental periods.

DESIGN
Latent class growth analysis was used to identify trajectories based on five waves of data (from grade 6, age 12 to grade 11, age 17), with predictors at grades 5, 7 and 9 included as covariates.

SETTING
Adolescents completed surveys during school hours.

PARTICIPANTS
A total of 808 students in Victoria, Australia.

MEASUREMENTS
Alcohol use trajectories were based on self-reports of 30-day frequency of alcohol use. Predictors included sibling alcohol use, attachment to parents, parental supervision, parental attitudes favourable to adolescent alcohol use, peer alcohol use and school commitment.

FINDINGS
A total of 8.2% showed steep escalation in alcohol use. Relative to non-users, steep escalators were predicted by age-specific effects for low school commitment at grade 7 (P = 0.031) and parental attitudes at grade 5 (P = 0.003), and age-generalized effects for sibling alcohol use (Ps = 0.001, 0.012, 0.033 at grades 5, 7 and 9, respectively) and peer alcohol use (Ps = 0.041, < 0.001, < 0.001 at grades 5, 7 and 9, respectively). Poor parental supervision was associated with steep escalators at grade 9 (P < 0.001) but not the other grades. Attachment to parents was unrelated to alcohol trajectories.

CONCLUSIONS
Parental disapproval of alcohol use before transition to high school, low school commitment at transition to high school, and sibling and peer alcohol use during adolescence are associated with a higher risk of steep escalations in alcohol use.


As a contribution to current discussions about securing a legacy from the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, this article considers whether there are lessons for public policy implementation around volunteer involvement. Drawing on the case of the Team London Ambassadors Programme which encompassed 8,000 volunteers during the Games period, the article considers the scope for an expanded role for UK public sector organisations in the recruitment, training and management of volunteers in the future.


Splat's class project is taking care of chicken eggs in this I Can Read book from New York Times bestselling author-artist Rob Scotton. When Splat takes the chicks home overnight, they hatch and run loose around his house! They pop up in the bathroom, hide inside his socks, and fall asleep in the paint box! Will Splat be able to round them all up? Beginning readers will practice words in the quick and chick word family in this easy-to-read addition to the Splat series. Splat the Cat and the Quick Chicks is a Level One I Can Read book, which means it's perfect for children learning to sound out words and sentences.


Polymethacrylate hydrogels are useful scaffolds for tissue engineering and cell-based therapies provided they can be modified to give good cell adhesion characteristics. They have advantages over non-swollen materials, such as good diffusion properties, tunable moduli and porosities. However, conventional non-charged hydrogels are essentially non-adhesive for cells and they are poor substrates for cell culture. In a previous volume in this series of symposia from the Polymer Networks Group, we described how both amphiphilic conetworks and alkyl-aminated hydrogels were excellent substrates for cell culture.([1]) In this article we report our most recent work on understanding how to modify hydrogels for cell attachment. We report how the choice of photoinitiator affects the viability of human dermal fibroblasts (HDFs). Next, we provide further results involving the use of an enzyme deprotection strategy that can be carried out after copolymerization of a GRGDS methacrylate monomer. We show that the peptide enhanced the culture of HDFs in serum when the peptide was attached to poly(1,2-propane diol methacrylate-co-ethane diol dimethacrylate). On the other hand, poly(n-butyl methacrylate-co-ethane diol dimethacrylate) networks adsorb larger amounts of protein non-specifically, and they are reasonable substrates for adhesion of HDFs without peptide modification. Attachment of GRGDS to an example of these networks did not increase the attachment and proliferation of HDFs in serum containing media. We also describe the attachment of fibrinogen/fibrin coatings by the transglutaminase mediated reaction of alkyl amines attached to a poly(1,2-propane diol methacrylate-co-ethane diol dimethacrylate-co-dodecyl methacrylate) network. This work illustrates the reactivity of alkyl-aminated hydrogels in transglutaminase catalyzed reactions, although the addition of the fibrin coating did not improve the performance of the material for cell culture which was already good on these hydrogels.


Notwithstanding its secondary holding that there is "no constitutional impediment" to requiring disclosure of those who fund independent campaign expenditures, the case for campaign finance disclosure is not as clear as Citizens United would suggest. The Supreme Court tends to assume rather than explain the "informational interest" that is cited to support disclosure. Without a clear constitutional justification, that interest does less than it might to define the means and ends of disclosure policy, and to defend that policy against constitutional challenge. This article excavates the existing constitutional foundations for campaign finance disclosure, and roots the informational interest in a republican idea of corruption as factionalism that predates the narrow transactional conception of corruption dominant in contemporary political speech debates. That idea, explicated by James Madison in the Federalist and embodied in the Constitution, motivates an antifactional informational interest both broader and narrower than is presently conceived. It is broader in the sense that informing voters through disclosure of a wide range of interests in political campaigns is critical to the full function of the Constitution's antifactional machinery. It is narrower in the sense that the interest is in disclosing interests - factions - and not other information that voters may find valuable for other reasons. Rooted in the broad importance and narrow purpose of antifactionalism, a deeper informational interest may better serve the First Amendment's republican values without violating its libertarian command. An antifactional reconception of the informational interest may help solve, or at least clarify, several puzzles in the First Amendment doctrine of campaign finance law. First, targeting interests instead of individuals for disclosure relieves the latent tension generated by the Court's embrace of political anonymity in McIntyre. Second, understanding corporations as factions provides a sounder basis on which to distinguish corporate political actors from others after Citizens United. Third, the republican concern about faction offers a coherent rationale for drawing lines between domestic and foreign political speakers, whether the "foreigners" come from a different district, a different state, or a different country. Fourth, by recognizing corruption as the private benefit of factions at the expense of the general welfare, rather than the personal benefit of an officeholder at the expense of a faction, the antifactional interest calls for at least as robust a disclosure system for issue advocacy as it does for express advocacy of candidates.


Abstract To investigate the comparative abilities of six different bioclimatic models in an independent area, utilizing the distribution of eight different species available at a global scale and in Australia. Global scale and Australia. We tested a variety of bioclimatic models for eight different plant species employing five discriminatory correlative species distribution models (SDMs) including Generalized Linear Model (GLM), MaxEnt, Random Forest (RF), Boosted Regression Tree (BRT), Bioclim, together with CLIMEX (CL) as a mechanistic niche model. These models were fitted using a training dataset of available global data, but with the exclusion of Australian locations. The capabilities of these techniques in projecting suitable climate, based on independent records for these species in Australia, were compared. Thus, Australia is not used to calibrate the models and therefore it is as an independent area regarding geographic locations. To assess and compare performance, we utilized the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves (AUC), true skill statistic (TSS), and fractional predicted areas for all SDMs. In addition, we assessed satisfactory agreements between the outputs of the six different bioclimatic models, for all eight species in Australia. The modeling method impacted on potential distribution predictions under current climate. However, the utilization of sensitivity and the fractional predicted areas showed that GLM, MaxEnt, Bioclim, and CL had the highest sensitivity for Australian climate conditions. Bioclim calculated the highest fractional predicted area of an independent area, while RF and BRT were poor. For many applications, it is difficult to decide which bioclimatic model to use. This research shows that variable results are obtained using different SDMs in an independent area. This research also shows that the SDMs produce different results for different species; for example, Bioclim may not be good for one species but works better for other species. Also, when projecting a "large" number of species into novel environments or in an independent area, the selection of the "best" model/technique is often less reliable than an ensemble modeling approach. In addition, it is vital to understand the accuracy of SDMs' predictions. Further, while TSS, together with fractional predicted areas, are appropriate tools for the measurement of accuracy between model results, particularly when undertaking projections on an independent area, AUC has been proved not to be. Our study highlights that each one of these models (CL, Bioclim, GLM, MaxEnt, BRT, and RF) provides slightly different results on projections and that it may be safer to use an ensemble of models.


In recent years code obfuscation has attracted research interest as a promising technique for protecting secret properties of programs. The basic idea of code obfuscation is to transform programs in order to hide their sensitive information while preserving their functionality. One of the major drawbacks of code obfuscation is the lack of a rigorous theoretical framework that makes it difficult to formally analyze and certify the effectiveness of obfuscating techniques. We face this problem by providing a formal framework for code obfuscation based on abstract interpretation and program semantics. In particular, we show that what is hidden and what is preserved by an obfuscating transformation can be expressed as abstract interpretations of program semantics. Being able to specify what is masked and what is preserved by an obfuscation allows us to understand its potency, namely the amount of obscurity that the transformation adds to programs. In the proposed framework, obfuscation and attackers are modeled as approximations of program semantics and the lattice of abstract interpretations provides a formal tool for comparing obfuscations with respect to their potency. In particular, we prove that our framework provides an adequate setting to measure not only the potency of an obfuscation but also its resilience, i.e., the difficulty of undoing the obfuscation. We consider code obfuscation by opaque predicate insertion and we show how the degree of abstraction needed to disclose different opaque predicates allows us to compare their potency and resilience.


ABSTRACT
Experimental, clinical, and epidemiological studies have demonstrated a strong association between inflammation and cancer. Evidence has emerged in the last two decades that at the molecular level most chronic diseases, including cancer, are caused by a dysregulated inflammatory response. Moreover, tumor stroma induces an inflammatory microenviroment that sustains tumor growth. Cytokines and chemokines secreted by stromal and cancer cells can have a two-sided effect as they can influence both leukocyte infiltration in tumor sites and the malignant phenotype of neoplastic cells. Thyroid cancer cells express several cytokines and chemokines that are modulated by the RET/PTC-ras-BRAF-ERK pathway. Among those, we focused on CXCL1 and VEGF. In this thesis, we show that thyroid cancer cell feature on CXCR2/CXCL1 autocrine loop that sustains proliferation, survival and invasiveness. Moreover, we focus on VEGF-A. Using chemoattraction assays, we show that thyroid cancer cells attract mast cells through the release of VEGF-A. Human mast cells, injected in the tail vein of athymic mice, were recruited to xenografts of human thyroid cancer cells. Human thyroid carcinomas feature a remarkable mast cell infiltrate whose intensity correlates with the invasive phenotype. Co-injection of human mast cells and 8505-C cells accelerated the growth of thyroid carcinoma xenograft in athymic mice and this effect could be blocked by sodium cromoglycate (Cromolyn), a specific mast cell inhibitor. We also show that thyroid cancer cells stimulate histamine release and cytokine synthesis in human mast cells. Moreover, mast cell-released mediators enhanced the proliferation, survival and invasive behavior of thyroid cancer cells in vitro.


How can preschool teachers approach multiplicity and complexity in the preschool? The aim of this article is to discuss two approaches to education, one based on design and the other on open reflection, and to propose 'situational sensitivity' as a concept connected within the latter approach. Special attention is paid to the ethical encounter with the child. The first approach is characterised by learning study, didactic analysis, advocate planning, and educational designs, and is guided by a logic which reduces multiplicity. The second approach to education, exemplified here in the 'Wondering Together' project, stresses a more open, reflective attitude that welcomes multiplicity. I argue that situational sensitivity is an expression of that open, welcoming logic. Situational sensitivity supports the concept of bildung, the development of the whole person, by educating towards the knowledge necessary for understanding the world and by honouring the child's experience and perspective.


The study of the movement toward political liberalisation and democratisation in Taiwan is exceptionally interesting. First, the KMT is the only example of a ruling Leninist party which has successfully transformed itself into a competitive party while in power. Second, the KMT is the only case of a Leninist party in a capitalist setting. Third, Taiwan's international political status is unique. Furthermore, the Taiwanese case raises broader theoretical issues about the process of democratisation. In particular, Taiwan's political development might also raises important comparative questions with those countries that are of one-party system and that have pursued similar development strategies.

A variety of theories have been considered to study the origins and process of Taiwan's democratisation. Modernisation theory posits that Taiwan's democratic transition was a consequence of rapid economic growth and social change; the transition approach focuses on the institutional efforts of the political opposition; one form of democratisation theory emphasises the key role of an individual leader, in this case Chiang Ching-kuo; and the structural approach calls for attention to the analysis of external influence.

However, most of the existing predominant theories in the study of Taiwan's democratisation only provide static analyses of Taiwan's movement toward democratisation. They seem insufficient to explain how Taiwan's democratic threshold was actually crossed As a result, this study is aimed at re-examining the origins and process of Taiwan's democratic transition through a different approach, i.e the factionalism approach, which primarily assumes a situation where political elites and political institutions rely exclusively upon clientelist ties to structure political action.

My fundamental research hypothesis is: the change of the KMT's clientelist alliance relations with its institutional clients in the local units, i.e. local factions was the most crucial factor of Taiwan's democratisation. In other words, I presuppose that the key to Taiwan's democratic transition was the conflict and disunion within the KMT's ruling structure. The fracture of the clientelist alliance relations between the KMT and local factions in the late 1970s, when the KMT central authority adopted a faction replacement policy to reduce the overall power of local factions, provided fertile ground for the rise of the political opposition whose strategic interaction with the regime finally drove Taiwan toward democracy.

Thus, this study focuses on the processes by which changes occurred in the clientelist alliance (patron-client) relations between the KMT and local factions as part of the movement toward democracy The factionalism approach leads to an investigation of the relationships among the KMT's mainlander ruling elites, among Taiwan's indigenous elites, and between the KMT regime and local factions. Through the analysis of changes of the clientelist relationships between the KMT and local elites, the questions of how the KMT's authoritarian rule over Taiwan could be maintained for four decades and how the democratic threshold in Taiwan was finally crossed can be explained This study offers a new as well as fresh contribution to the study of Taiwan's democratisation.


A central issue in Grid computing is the fact that resources (compute and communication fabrics) may vary over time, and thus scheduling decisions made by super (meta) schedulers may be pre-empted locally in response to a number of local conditions. Current superschedulers/scheduling schemes (such as AppLeS) develop essentially static schedules which are non-responsive to fabric dynamicism, and thus a task set scheduled by typical superschedulers is largely incapable of taking advantage of dynamic enhancements to the fabric or (worse) to pre-emption by an aggressive local scheduling decision. In the worst case, such pre-emption can result in premature termination of a task set. We present a novel superscheduling schema based on the widely-popular AppLeS and Globus Grid middleware which addresses the issue of dynamic rescheduling of Grid applications when an a priori schedule is challenged locally within the fabric. Specifically, we are concerned with the difficult problem of migrating dependent task sets robustly. We explore the use of non-blocking coordinated checkpointing and demonstrate that, subject to certain conditions, dependent task sets may be migrated robustly. Additionally, we show how AppLeS can be extended to function as a high-performance superscheduler i.e., as a superscheduler concerned with group performance rather than individual application performance. Finally, we demonstrate certain performance characteristics of the scheme using a Grid simulation tool developed at the University of Connecticut.


The effect of electrode configuration on electrokinetic strengthening of soft clays was assessed using a circular electrokinetic experimental setup with multiple electrode rods instead of a conventional rectangular setup with two plate electrodes. The experiments were carried out in three configurations where CaCl2 was used as a stabilizing agent in all, but the position of the anode was changed. In the first experiment the anode was in the central compartment, and in the second and third it was in the peripheral compartment, with the third experiment also having Ca(OH)2 added to the soil along with CaCl2. In the first experiment with the application of 10 V for 10 days, a 49% increase in shear strength was obtained in the cathode region. In the areas close to the anode and in the middle section, however, the shear strength was decreased by 26 and 11% respectively. In the second and third experiments the shear strength was increased in all regions (close to anode, middle, close to cathode) by 36, 60 and 137% and 25, 48 and 123% respectively. These results showed that the configuration with the anode positioned in the peripheral compartment works much better in obtaining an increase in shear strength throughout the sample.


A committee of six scientific organizations from Argentina developed guidelines for the management of patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP).The objective of this study was to evaluate the level of adherence with the recommended care suggested by the guidelines in patients hospitalized with CAP in Argentina. Using quality indicators the management of 436 patients who were hospitalized in 12 Argentinean institutions was evaluated. The care given among the following areas was reviewed: need for hospitalization, need for oxygen therapy, empiric antibiotic therapy, switch therapy, hospital discharge, and prevention. The level of adherence was classified as optimal (>90%), intermediate (60% to 90%), and low (<60%).The selection of the empiric antibiotic therapy and the administration of antibiotics between the first 8 hours after arrival had an adherence greater to 80%. A low level of adherence was found in the areas of switch therapy (53%), prevention of CAP with pneumococcal vaccine (51%) and smoking cessation offered (29%). Using quality indicators it is possible to identify specific areas of management in patients with CAP to a low level of adherence with national guidelines. In Argentina interventions to improve switch therapy and prevention of CAP should be developed.


Co{sub 80}Sm{sub 20}/Fe{sub 65}Co{sub 35} bilayer and multilayer films with Cr underlayers and overlayers have been fabricated and studied. All the samples prepared have in-plane anisotropy and the hysteresis loops were simple single loops for {ital t}{sub FeCo}{le}300 A indicating that the two phases are strongly exchange coupled. The magnetization of these samples is found to increase with increasing FeCo layer thickness for a fixed CoSm layer thickness. The coercivity, anisotropy constant, and anisotropy field for films with fixed CoSm layer thickness were found to decrease with increasing FeCo layer thickness. The magnetization squareness values of the hysteresis loops in the direction parallel to the film plane, for different CoSm and FeCo layer thicknesses, were found to be close to {ital S}{approx}0.75. The energy products for these samples vary from about 6 MG Oe at room temperature to 26 MG Oe at 30 K. The shape and the behavior of the initial loops and the minor loops suggest that wall pinning is the dominant coercivity mechanism in these films. Reversible demagnetization curves were measured and found to be consistent with the behavior expected for ``exchange-spring`` magnets.


Multi-device services need to be adapted to various devices to accommodate users. When deciding how to adapt a multi-device service, several parameters such as device capabilities, usage context, purpose of use, and usability need to be considered. Here, these parameters are discussed and based on the discussion basic design guidelines for multi-device services are presented.


Peptide-functionalized thin films exhibit significant potential for integration into implantable devices and cell-based technologies. A new type of neuroactive peptide-modified silica was developed using sol–gel reaction chemistry to produce thin films from four different peptide silane precursors. Peptide silanes containing binding sequences from laminin (YIGSR and KDI), fibronectin (RGD), and EGF repeats from laminin and tenascin (NID) were produced using standard solid-state FMOC peptide synthesis conditions and the covalent attachment of 3′-(aminopropyl)trimethoxysilane (APTMS), using carbonyldiimadazole (CDI) as a linking molecule. Precursor formation was confirmed with MALDI-MS. Thin films were produced by dip-coating using the peptide precursors combined with hydrolyzed tetramethoxysilane. Atomic force microscopy indicated that the surface topography was not affected by low concentrations of peptide precursor (0.0025 mol%), but higher concentrations of peptide precursor (0.01 mol%) resulted in features that were 50–75 nm in height. The height features observed were consistent in size with previously determined topographical morphology supportive of neuronal cell lines. The surfaces were biologically active and modulated the phenotype of the embryonic carcinoma stem cell line, P19. Combinations of the peptide silanes resulted in altered cell types after retinoic acid treatment. More neurons were observed on RGD/YIGSR and RGD/YIGSR/NID surfaces compared to tetramethoxysilane (TMOS) controls. More supporting cells were observed compared to collagen coated tissue culture plates. In addition, neurites were significantly longer on the peptide ormosils compared to controls. This work demonstrates a novel method for producing biologically active peptide ormosils using peptide-modified precursors.


Vietnam has joined the globalization trend to make itself an inviting market for foreign investment. However, working with foreigners and expanding business abroad can be a risky venture. The diversity among business cultures frequently leads to confusion, misunderstandings, and failures in cross-cultural endeavors. There is hence a need to study business negotiation in a cross-cultural setting. Among the investing countries, America has always been on top of the list, with a strong strategic partnership for years and billions of U.S. dollars in registered invested capital. Many studies have been conducted to understand this important partner, yet none of them so far have addressed nonverbal communication during negotiations between Vietnamese and American businesses. This paper examines through reviewing related studies on the proxemics within a traditional Vietnamese company, specifically the choice of negotiation site (e.g. location) and the room arrangement of that site to see how American people perceive them and how they affect the negotiation process.


Dynamic response of a multilayered model of a pavement subject to moving load is presented along with an analysis of wave phenomena. Wave reflections in the layer boundaries cause pulsation of stresses and strains in layers which magnitudes depend on wave velocity, layer thickness and wave impedance of the layer. Neglecting the wave influence in the analysis of can cause that premature fatigue damage of pavement may not be recognized. The qualitative analysis as well as graphs of deflections, stresses and strains in pavement layers as well as the influence of the Poisson ratio on the pavement deflections are presented. Results of the investigation show the possibility of the reduction of negative influence of the volume wave coming from moving vehicles during pavement exploitation and indicate the possibility of minimization of the pavement destruction process by proper modelling and construction of pavement layers.


Purpose: Cell-based approaches were used to identify genetic markers predictive of patients' risk for poor response prior to chemotherapy. Experimental Design: We conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) associated with cellular sensitivity to carboplatin through their effects on mRNA expression using International HapMap lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCL) and replicated them in additional LCLs. SNPs passing both stages of the cell-based study were tested for association with progression-free survival (PFS) in patients. Phase 1 validation was based on 377 ovarian cancer patients receiving at least four cycles of carboplatin and paclitaxel from the Australian Ovarian Cancer Study (AOCS). Positive associations were then assessed in phase 2 validation analysis of 1,326 patients from the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium and The Cancer Genome Atlas. Results: In the initial GWAS, 342 SNPs were associated with carboplatin-induced cytotoxicity, of which 18 unique SNPs were retained after assessing their association with gene expression. One SNP (rs1649942) was replicated in an independent LCL set (Bonferroni adjusted P < 0.05). It was found to be significantly associated with decreased PFS in phase 1 AOCS patients (Pper-allele = 2 × 10−2), with a stronger effect in the subset of women with optimally debulked tumors (Pper-allele = 4 × 10−3). rs1649942 was also associated with poorer overall survival in women with optimally debulked tumors (Pper-allele = 9 × 10−3). However, this SNP was not significant in phase 2 validation analysis with patients from numerous cohorts. Conclusion: This study shows the potential of cell-based, genome-wide approaches to identify germline predictors of treatment outcome and highlights the need for extensive validation in patients to assess their clinical effect. Clin Cancer Res; 17(16); 5490–500. ©2011 AACR.


To the Editor:—I read with keen interest the article published in the September 2001 issue of ANESTHESIOLOGY entitled "The Anesthesiologist in Critical Care Medicine," especially since I am currently enrolled in a critical care fellowship after having completed my anesthesiology residency. I agree for the most part with the positions of the authors, especially regarding the profound difference between the situation in the United States, where anesthesiologists have all but abandoned the field of critical care medicine, and that in Europe, where they are at the forefront of it. However, I was appalled to see that the main criterion used by the authors to evaluate the success of a discipline, such as otorhinolaryngology, is the reduction in the number of "international" medical graduates. This hypocritical denomination aside (what was wrong with "foreign"?), I feel that in a country whose success stems in great part from diversity and in which discrimination is illegal, residency candidates should be evaluated on their abilities and their character, not based on where they attended medical school. Evidence of discrimination in resident recruitment has been found in other specialties. I do not think that the education I received in a French medical school is in any way inferior to the one that students get in this country. If there are any objective data that show that "international" medical graduates are not as good physicians as their American-educated counterparts or that the patients they treat have worse outcomes, more complications, longer lengths of stay, or higher expenditures, I would like to be made aware of it. Until such time, I feel that it is unfairly biased to consider that a specialty fares better or worse based on the number of "international" medical graduates entering residency programs.


Almonds (Prunus amygdalus) represent an important crop in most Mediterranean countries. A new and devastating disease of almond trees in Lebanon was recently reported, characterized by the development of severe witches'-brooms on which no flowers or fruits developed, and leading to tree death within a few years. A phytoplasma was detected in diseased trees by PCR amplification of rRNA operon sequences, and RFLP patterns of amplified DNA indicated that the phytoplasma belonged to the pigeon pea witches'-broom (PPWB) group. In the present work, the presence of a phytoplasma in symptomatic plants was confirmed by electron microscopy; this phytoplasma was graft-transmissible to almond, plum and peach seedlings. The phytoplasma was characterized by sequence analysis of rRNA genes and was shown to be different from the phytoplasmas previously described in the PPWB group. A 16S rDNA phylogenetic tree identified the almond tree phytoplasma as a member of a distinct subclade of the class Mollicutes. Oligonucleotides have been defined for specific detection of the new phytoplasma. The almond phytoplasma from Lebanon was shown to be identical to a phytoplasma that induces a disease called 'almond brooming' in Iran, but different from another PPWB-group phytoplasma that infects herbaceous annual plants in Lebanon. Based on its unique properties, the name 'Candidatus Phytoplasma phoenicium' is proposed for the phytoplasma associated with almond witches'-broom in Lebanon and Iran.


Most recent studies of religion and society have focussed on
the period from c. 1880 to 1914, basing their investigations
upon late-Victorian newspaper censuses of churchgoing. This
thesis aims to study the development of religion in its
economic and social context in a large northern industrial
parish over a longer period of time from c. 1740 to 1914. In
religious terms this period extends from the mid-eighteenth
century Evangelical Revival to the decline of organised
religion in the early twentieth century. In economic and
social terms the period is characterised by the transformation
of the parish from a semi-rural, proto-industrial society
dominated by a relatively small but expanding market town, into
a predominantly urban advanced industrial society dominated by
a medium-sized textile manufacturing town and several smaller
urban centres of textile production; supporting a wide
diversity of associated industries and trades, but still
containing within its boundaries sharply contrasting urban and
semi-rural environments.

The thesis aims to assess how religious expression within the
parish of Halifax was affected by the changing economic and
social environment, in particular the urban-industrial
experience, and how religion helped shape the new urbanindustrial
society during the period from the middle of the
eighteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. It
argues that whilst the pessimistic view of a moribund Georgian
Church of England can no longer be sustained by the Halifax
evidence, the Established Church nevertheless lacked the
logistical resources to respond effectively to the new urbanindustrial
society as it emerged within the parish in the lateeighteenth
and early-nineteenth centuries, providing an
opportunity for the growth of Evangelical Nonconformity,
especially Methodism. It maintains that Evangelical
Nonconformity and an Anglican Church renewed by Evangelical
incumbencies during the period 1790-1827 and reformed as a consequence of national legislation in the 1840s played a vital
role within the expanding urban-industrial society, surviving
the experience of industrialisation and urbanisation and
displaying a remarkable vibrancy, despite underlying downward
trends in churchgoing in the late-Victorian era. It suggests
that the causes of the decline of organised religion during
this period were complex, but related more to the onset of
industrial-urban stagnation and decline than to the experience
of industrial-urban expansion.


The English National Health Service (NHS) started to implement reforms in 2016 to create a culture of openness, transparency, and accountability across the entire hospital system. However, there is a debate among policy makers and researchers about whether and to what extent openness is related to significant improvements in health system performance or lower mortality rates. Drawing on data from 137 English acute trusts (or hospital systems) for the period 2012-14, we used multivariate regression models to test whether mortality rates, taken from the Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator, were lower in hospitals that had higher levels of openness among staff members, a measure derived from the NHS National Staff Survey. When we adjusted for hospital operating capacity, our results showed that a one-point increase in the standardized openness score was associated with a 6.48 percent reduction in hospital mortality rates. These findings have important policy implications: They offer empirical evidence to support further efforts to increase openness in the English hospital system, since doing so has improved health care quality.


The 1980s saw the wider availability and growing consumption of illicit drugs. The increase in drug trafficking and drug use has occurred despite increasing international action to prevent it. In describing the situation as a "drug problem", policy-makers have responded to the concern as if it were a single issue. However, the drug phenomenon is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. It is the concern of numerous state and non-state actors, it necessitates multi-lateral co-operation among governments, it involves the participation of numerous departments of government and a complex web of issues exists which affect and are affected by the phenomenon. In this sense the "drug problem" clearly demonstrates the characteristics of interdependence.

The undeniable growth of interdependence in the world in the last half-century has caused a rethink of the traditional Realist approach to international relations. Neorealists were principally responsible for introducing the concept of an international regime as a means of revamping the power politics philosophy of Realism. In this approach, international regimes are understood to rise and fall in line with the powers of the state-actors comprising them. An alternative approach to international relations challenges the belief that change in world politics is defined in terms of changes in state power and that the emergence of regimes is similarly defined. The Global Politics approach asserts that agendas are determined by the attempt of actors to allocate values authoritatively on specific issues by forming issue-systems. According to this approach, issue-systems, consisting of all actors for whom a particular issue is salient, can be abstracted from the international system as a whole.

Previously the two concepts of international regimes and the concept of issues forming issue-systems have developed in isolation and have suffered from lack of clarification. In order to develop a theoretical framework for an analysis of the drug phenomenon this research has attempted to clarify and develop the concept of an "issue", central to both concepts, for an understanding of international regimes which gives them an independent impact on world politics. In developing the concept of an issue, an understanding of the nature and role of values and norms in international affairs, lacking development in current regime literature will be seen as central.


We report a very simple, robust, and reliable on-chip fabrication method of a chemoresistive sensor based on silicon nanowires (NWs). Our method permits the use of nanowires without the need of their removal and transfer to a support different from the growth substrate. Our method, completely based on the silicon technology platform, exploits nanowires directly grown onto a selected area, over and between pre-patterned, interdigitated electrodes defined on oxidized silicon. The fabricated sensor is capable to detect NO2 down to a few ppb levels operating at room temperature. The sensor characteristics benefit of the presence of self-welded nanowires.


Granular materials e.g., gravel, sand, snow, and metallic powders are important to many engineering analysis and design problems. Such materials are not always randomly arranged, even in a natural environment. For example, applied strain can transform a randomly distributed assembly into a more regular arrangement. Deviations from random arrangements are described via material symmetry. A random collection exhibits textural isotropy whereas regular patterns are anisotropic. Among natural materials, snow is perhaps unique because thermal factors commonly induce microstructural changes, including material symmetry. This process temperature gradient metamorphism produces snow layers that can exhibit anisotropy. To adequately describe the behavior of such layers, mathematical models must account for potential anisotropy. This feature is absent from models speci cally developed for snow, and, in most granular models in general. Material symmetry is quanti ed with fabric tensors in the constitutive models proposed here. Fabric tensors statistically characterize directional features in the microstructure. For example, the collective orientation of intergranular bonds impacts processes like conduction and loading. Anisotropic, microstructural models are analytically developed here for the conductivity, di usivity, permeability, and sti ness of granular materials. The methodology utilizes homogenization an algorithm linking microscopic and macroscopic scales. Idealized geometries and constitutive assumptions are also applied at the microscopic scale. Fabric tensors tying the granular arrangement to a ected material properties are a natural analysis outcome. The proposed conductivity model is compared to measured data. Dry dense snow underwent temperature gradient metamorphism in a lab. Both the measured heat transfer coe cient and a developing ice structure favored the direction of the applied gradient. Periodic tomography was used to calculate microstructural variables required by the conductivity model. Through the fabric tensor, model evolution coincides with measured changes in the heat transfer coe cient. The model also predicts a di erent conductivity in directions orthogonal to the gradient due to developing anisotropy. Models that do not consider directional microstructural features cannot predict such behavior because they are strictly valid for isotropic materials. The conclusions are that anisotropy in snow can be signi cant, fabric tensors can characterize such symmetry, and constitutive models incorporating fabric tensors o er a more complete description of material behavior.


Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles are capable of placing a nuclear warhead at more than 5,000 km away from its launching base. With the lethal power of a nuclear warhead a whole city could be wiped out by a single weapon causing millions of deaths. This means that the threat posed to any country from a single ICBM captured by a terrorist group or launched by a 'rogue' state is huge. This threat is increasing as more countries are achieving nuclear and advanced launcher capabilities. In order to suppress or at least reduce this threat the United States created the National Missile Defense System which involved, among other systems, the development of long-range interceptors whose aim is to destroy incoming ballistic missiles in their midcourse phase. The Ballistic Missile Defense is a high-profile topic that has been the focus of political controversy lately when the U.S. decided to expand the Ballistic Missile system to Europe, with the opposition of Russia. However the technical characteristics of this system are mostly unknown by the general public. The Interception of an ICBM using a long range Interceptor Missile as intended within the Ground-Based Missile Defense System by the American National Missile Defense (NMD) implies a series of problems of incredible complexity: - The incoming missile has to be detected almost immediately after launch. - The incoming missile has to be tracked along its trajectory with a great accuracy. - The Interceptor Missile has to implement a fast and accurate guidance algorithm in order to reach the incoming missile as soon as possible. - The Kinetic Kill Vehicle deployed by the interceptor boost vehicle has to be able to detect the reentry vehicle once it has been deployed by ICBM, when it offers a very low infrared signature, in order to perform a final rendezvous manoeuvre. - The Kinetic Kill Vehicle has to be able to discriminate the reentry vehicle from the surrounding debris and decoys. - The Kinetic Kill Vehicle has to be able to implement an accurate guidance algorithm in order to perform a kinetic interception (direct collision) of the reentry vehicle, at relative speeds of more than 10 km/s. All these problems are being dealt simultaneously by the Ground-Based Missile Defense System that is developing very complex and expensive sensors, communications and control centers and long-range interceptors (Ground-Based Interceptor Missile) including a Kinetic Kill Vehicle. Among all the technical challenges involved in this interception scenario, this thesis focuses on the algorithms required for the guidance of the Interceptor Missile and the Kinetic Kill Vehicle in order to perform the direct collision with the ICBM. The involved guidance algorithms are deeply analysed in this thesis in part III where conventional guidance strategies are reviewed and optimal guidance algorithms are developed for this interception problem. The generation of a realistic simulation of the interception scenario between an ICBM and a Ground Based Interceptor designed to destroy it was considered as necessary in order to be able to compare different guidance strategies with meaningful results. As a consequence, a highly representative simulator for an ICBM and a Kill Vehicle has been implemented, as detailed in part II, and the generation of these simulators has also become one of the purposes of this thesis. In summary, the main purposes of this thesis are: - To develop a highly representative simulator of an interception scenario between an ICBM and a Kill Vehicle launched from a Ground Based Interceptor. -To analyse the main existing guidance algorithms both for the ascent phase and the terminal phase of the missiles. Novel conclusions of these analyses are obtained. - To develop original optimal guidance algorithms for the interception problem. - To compare the results obtained using the different guidance strategies, assess the behaviour of the optimal guidance algorithms, and analyse the feasibility of the Ballistic Missile Defense system in terms of guidance (part IV). As a secondary objective, a general overview of the state of the art in terms of ballistic missiles and anti-ballistic missile defence is provided (part I).


For centuries, scientists have been fascinated by the role of the Sun in the Earth's climate system. Recent discoveries, outlined in this book, have gradually unveiled a complex picture, in which our variable Sun affects the climate variability via a number of subtle pathways, the implications of which are only now becoming clear. This handbook provides the scientifically curious, from undergraduate students to policy makers with a complete and accessible panorama of our present understanding of the Sun-climate connection. 61 experts from different communities have contributed to it, which reflects the highly multidisciplinary nature of this topic. The handbook is organised as a mosaic of short chapters, each of which addresses a specific aspect, and can be read independently. The reader will learn about the assumptions, the data, the models, and the unknowns behind each mechanism by which solar variability may impact climate variability. None of these mechanisms can adequately explain global warming observed since the 1950s. However, several of them do impact climate variability, in particular on a regional level. This handbook aims at addressing these issues in a factual way, and thereby challenge the reader to sharpen his/her critical thinking in a debate that is frequently distorted by unfounded claims.


Maze, or labyrinth, caves are high-porosity zones in karst. Reticular networks may arise through different speleogenetic processes. Here, we present and discuss an apparently multi-stage labyrinthal development in a stripe karst setting in the Norwegian Caledonides. Okshola (the upper part of the Okshola-Kristihola cave system at Fauske, Nordland) displays a network of preserved, essentially phreatic tubes intersected by four distinct, vadose inlet passages. The cave developed along a low-angle fracture (thrust) zone, which is sub-parallel with the foliation. Scallops in the walls of phreatic conduits demonstrate that water flow was directed down-dip into the rock mass, and thus that the phreatic network developed during the last active stage as a groundwater recharge zone. This flow function is consistent with the proximal location of the cave with respect to former topographically directed glacial flow. Cyclic and strong fluctuations in the hydraulic regime are evident from cave interior deposits. We suggest that Okshola developed in concert with the glacial erosion of the surface topography and that a process of caprock stripping resulted in progressive lowering of both sink and spring levels. Morphology, together with radiometric datings, indicate that speleogenesis commenced several glacial cycles ago.


Background Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is characterised by increased left ventricular wall thickness leading to exercise intolerance and heart failure. Peak oxygen consumption (peak VO2) on cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) is often used as a functional marker alongside B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP). However, CPET is complex and time-consuming, access may be limited, and peak VO2 can be influenced by physical deconditioning and motivation. Our aims were to determine the association between BNP and submaximal exercise parameters, ventilatory efficiency (VE/VCO2) and anaerobic threshold; and to determine whether f these were effective surrogate markers of functional status in patients with HCM. Methods We retrospectively reviewed data for all patients with HCM in our local cardiomyopathy service. A diagnosis of HCM was based on LV hypertrophy >15 mm as per current ESC guidelines. Patients underwent contemporaneous echocardiography, CPET using maximal treadmill ergometry and BNP measurement at sequential annual clinic visits [1 (18%), 2 (52%), 3 (20%) or ≥4 visits (10%)] yielding data from 252 observations over 8 years for 119 individual patients. Univariable and multivariable linear regression was used to investigate variables associated with the results of CPET. Robust standard errors were used to correct for multiple observations from the same patients. Results In our cohort of 119 patients (mean age 49±17 years, 66% men), mean LVEF was 75±7%, maximal wall thickness was 19±5 mm, and left ventricular outflow tract obstruction was present in 15%. The mean peak V02 was 26±8 L/min, mean VE/VCO2 slope was 30±6 and median BNP was 93.5 ng/L (IQR 43.5–232.5). On univariable analysis, several markers were found to predict peak VO2; age (β²=−4.5; 95% CI −6.1 – −3.0; p<0.00001), male sex (β²=5.2; 95% CI 2.3 – 8.1; p<0.001), LV ejection fraction (β²=−2.1; 95% CI −3.6 – −0.6; p<0.01), BNP (β²=−4.0; 95% CI −5.8 – −2.2; p<0.0001) and echocardiographic markers of diastolic dysfunction, for example, E/E lateral ratio (β²=−3.4; 95% CI −4.8 – −2.0; p<0.00001). Predictors of VE/VCO2 were age (β²=1.5; 95% CI 0.6 – 2.3; p<0.01), BNP (β²=2.4; 95% CI 1.5 – 3.4; p<0.00001) and similar echocardiographic markers of diastolic dysfunction. Multivariable analysis revealed that BNP was associated with peak VO2 (β²=−2.0; 95% CI −3.0 – −1.1; p<0.0001) but also age, male sex, indexed RV end-?diastolic volume and body weight, whilst BNP was independently associated with VE/VCO2 (β²=0.8; 95% CI 0.1 – 1.6; p<0.001), and to a lesser extent, anaerobic threshold (β²=−1.4; 95% CI −2.2 − −0.6; p=0.001). Conclusion In this cohort, BNP is independently associated with VE/VCO2, a marker of ventilation-perfusion mismatch, which is known to provide a more reliable assessment of exercise intolerance irrespective of effort level. These results therefore support a role for BNP as an useful marker of submaximal exercise capacity and for consideration in guiding prognosis.Abstract 127 Figure 1 Association between BNP and peak VO2(A) and VE/VCO2 (B) inpatients with HCM.Abstract 127 Figure 2 Association between BNP and anaerobic threshold n HCM


Background: Interest in understanding the socialisation processes that student nurses are exposed to during clinical practice has endured and is warranted given that first year undergraduates have to adapt and develop intellectually, socially, emotionally and culturally to ensure successful transition and acculturation into higher education. In addition, when first year undergraduates are also student nurses, they must display versatility and tenacity in pursuing a professional identity often in complex, changing and reforming health care and educational environments. In the UK at present the main curricula design consists of equal parts theory and practice and undergraduate student nurses experience clinical placements much sooner than their predecessors. This transitional period has received less investigation and therefore, this study aims to redress this imbalance.

Purpose: To explore the impact of initial clinical experiences on the professional socialisation of student nurses. The intention has been to allow the student nurses to 'tell it as it is' about their experiences of becoming a nurse, the essence of which could generate a substantive grounded theory.

Setting: Two placement areas, consisting of a rural District General Hospital and a large inner city Hospital that reflect diverse socio-economic areas in the north west of England.
Method: A classic grounded theory approach (Glaser 1978) was used. The sample consisted of twenty-six (26) student nurses recruited from four (4) intakes over a two year period. Diary keeping was the main data collection method and seven (7) key informants from the first two intakes volunteered to take part in an in-depth interview during the second or third year of their course.

Findings: The substantive grounded theory of Finessing Incivility, explains how undergraduate student nurses respond to prevailing concerns regarding their student status, learning opportunities and a lack of professional benevolence during the initial clinical placement. In order to resolve these concerns and relocate their status back to a student from a worker, they maintain values, remain resilient and display and use finesse to broker for learning opportunities and resolve their concerns. The usefulness and originality of the theory is the conceptual explanation it offers of the psychosocial processes that student nurses engage in, and with, during practice that has not been previously noted.

Limitations: Although the solicited diary accounts were requested daily, the possibility exists that they were kept less frequently, filled in retrospectively, or not at all (Hyland 1996, Bowling 2002). A larger sample would have negated potential effects of attrition. In addition, and in the absence of participant observation, the accounts are accepted as truthful, although the risk exists that the students exaggerated or distorted their accounts to demonstrate how bad they felt concerning their experiences.

Discussion: The theory has yielded insight into the complexities involved in becoming a professional nurse. The theory of 'finessing incivility' has implications for nurse educators and other allied health professionals during practice and field exposure. Exploring the experiences of other allied health students with regard to the concepts of finessing and resilience in response to incivility and loss of student status merits further investigation as do the perceptions of mentors involved with student nurses during the initial placement.


Managers of public water companies present themselves and are seen as public servants maximizing public welfare. Because water is rarely allocated through market mechanisms, this maximization requires that managers cooperate in a bureaucratic version of a social dilemma. Members of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MET, a consumer cooperative) face just such a dilemma: MET's member agencies make policies as members (setting prices, for example) that they obey as consumers.This chapter reports the results of experiments that quantified cooperation among MET's member agency managers (MAMs) using public goods games. The results indicate that MAMs are neither relatively nor absolutely cooperative in comparison to, respectively, groups of students and a threshold efficiency consistent with maximizing social welfare. Additional results on type indicate that MAMs have a larger share of cooperators and free-riders than students, but MAMs are twice as likely to be free-riders as cooperators. MAM also appear to engage in cheap talk: Their responses to trust questions (stated preference) have no correlation with their experimental behavior (revealed preference); student preferences are correlated.


Over 90 percent of all microprocessors are now used for real-time and embedded applications, and the behavior of many of these applications is constrained by the physical world. Higher-level programming languages and middleware are needed to robustly and productively design, implement, compose, integrate, validate, and enforce real-time constraints along with conventional functional requirements and reusable components. It is essential that the production of real-time embedded systems can take advantage of languages, tools, and methods that enable higher software productivity. The Java programming language has become an attractive choice because of its safety, productivity, its relatively low maintenance costs, and the availability of well trained developers.

Although it features good software engineering characteristics, standard Java is unsuitable for developing real-time embedded systems, mainly due to under-specification of thread scheduling and the presence of garbage collection. These problems are addressed by the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ). The intent of this specification is the development of real-time applications by providing several additions such as extending the Java memory model and providing stronger semantics in thread scheduling.

Interest in real-time Java in both the research community and industry has recently increased significantly, because of its challenges and its potential impact on the development of embedded and real-time applications. The goal of the proposed workshop is to gather researchers working on real-time and embedded Java to identify the challenging problems that still need to be solved in order to assure the success of real-time Java as a technology, and to report results and experiences gained by researchers.


Hardware in HPC environments in recent years has become ever more heterogeneous in order to improve computational performance and as an aspect of managing power and energy constraints. This increase in heterogeneity requires middleware abstractions to eliminate additional complexities that it brings. In this paper we present a self-adaptation framework which includes aspects such as automated configuration, deployment and redeployment of applications to different heterogeneous infrastructure. This therefore not only mitigates complexity but aims to take advantage of the existing heterogeneity. The overall result of this paper is a generic event driven self-adaptive system that manages application QoS at runtime, which includes the automatic migration of applications between different accelerated infrastructures. Discussion covers when this migration is appropriate and quantifies the likely benefits.


Two main channels have been identified to be responsible for microbiological contamination of raw milk and milk products. Firstly, contamination has occurred due to udder infection from the cow or the blood which harbours most bacteria that come in contact with the raw milk. Secondly, via external factors (may include faeces, skin, contaminated water, environment etc.) which are associated with the operation of milking. There is direct contact with the milk and/or surfaces before, during or after the milking, posing public health risk and economic decline. The aim of this study was to examine the bacteriological quality of bulk tank raw milk samples collected from two different size dairy farms (Farm 1 and Farm 2) of different housing forms (cubicle loose and deep litter) in Hajdú-Bihar County, Hungary in July, 2017. Three samples were taken from each farm, and the total plate count, coliform count, Escherichia coli count, Staphylococcus aureus count, and yeast and mould count were determined in them.
The results clearly showed low level of all measured bacteria group load in Farm 1 samples in comparison to Farm 2 with the exception of coagulase-negative Staphylococcus (CNS) which represented high level in general, indicating significant difference (P<0.05). The mean value of total plate count in Farm 2 samples was higher (1.0 × 105 CFU/mL) than Farm 1 samples (2.8 × 104 CFU/mL). There was a significant difference (P<0.05) in mean count of coliforms in raw milk samples between Farm 1 and Farm 2. Similarly, results of E. coli were significantly different (P<0.05) with mean count of 1.44 × 102 CFU/mL and 2.02 × 103 CFU/mL for Farm 1 and Farm 2 respectively.
Results of Staphylococcus aureus also showed significant difference (P<0.05) with mean count of 9.7 × 101 CFU/mL for Farm 1 and 6.28 × 102 CFU/mL for Farm 2. The mean of mould count recorded was 1.07 × 102 CFU/mL and 4.93 × 102 CFU/mL for Farm 1 and Farm 2 respectively. The recorded mean of yeast count was 1.68 × 103 CFU/mL and 3.41 × 103 CFU/mL for Farm 1 and Farm 2 respectively; however, both farms showed no significant difference (P>0.05) in terms of mean of mould and yeast count. Although Farm 2 produced six times lower milk quantity than Farm 1, the measured microbial parameters were high. Both farms' microbiological numbers were higher above the permitted limit values as stated by Regulation (EC) No 853/2004, Hungarian Ministry of Health (MoH) 4/1998 (XI. 11.).
This could be an indication of non-conformance to effective GMP, ineffective pre–milking disinfection or udder preparation, poor handling and storage practice, time and temperature abuse and inadequate Food Safety Management System Implementation. Therefore, our recommendation is as follows; establish control measures for pre- and postharvest activities involved in the milking process which would be an effective approach to reduce contamination of the raw milk by pathogenic microorganisms from these farms, strict sanitation regime and hygiene protocol be employed and applied to cows, all equipment, contact surfaces and minimize handling of the milk prior, during and after milking. This will also serve as scientific information to the producers for continual improvement in their operations.


This case study was conducted to determine the benefits of a multi-dimensional study abroad program that included a community service component. It encompassed the following aspects of the study abroad experience: motivation for travel, language learning research, the role of autonomy in language learning, and cultural awareness, behaviors, and attitudes. The researcher acted as a participant and an observer through ongoing ethnographical observations as the program took place. The researcher also implemented an oral assessment to determine the subjects' language skills, and conducted one-on-one interviews with participants about the culture of Costa Rica and the comprehensive impact of the study abroad experience. To assess what aspects of the program facilitated and impeded target language fluency, the researcher collected information on student participation in the everyday lives of the natives, their living accommodations, the number of hours per week of formal second language (L2) instruction, and the opportunities for consistent, daily conversation in the target language.


Our understanding of the adaptive processes that shape sensorimotor behavior is largely derived from studying isolated movements. Studies of visuomotor adaptation, in which participants adapt cursor movements to rotations of the cursor's screen position, have led to prominent theories of motor control. In response to changes in visual feedback of movements, explicit (cognitive) and implicit (automatic) learning processes adapt movements to counter errors. However, movements rarely occur in isolation. The extent to which explicit and implicit processes drive sensorimotor adaptation when multiple movements occur simultaneously, as in the real world, remains unclear. Here we address this problem in the context of speech and hand movements. Participants spoke in-time with rapid, hand-driven cursor movements. Using real-time alterations of vowel sound feedback, and visual rotations of the cursor's screen position, we induced sensorimotor adaptation in one or both movements simultaneously. Across three experiments (n = 60, n = 48 and n = 76, respectively), we demonstrate that visuomotor adaptation is markedly impaired by simultaneous speech adaptation, and the impairment is specific to the explicit learning process in visuomotor adaptation. In contrast, visuomotor adaptation had no impact on speech adaptation. The results demonstrate that the explicit learning process in visuomotor adaptation is sensitive to movements in other motor domains. They suggest that some forms of speech adaptation may lack an explicit learning process altogether.


Aims: The antihypertensive effect intravenous injection of Cronin has been observed in our previous study. In this study, the effect of intraperitoneal (ip) injection of Crocin on hypertension induced by angiotensin II (Ang II) with dose of 50 ng/kg was investigated in rats. Materials & methods: In current excremental study, thirty male Wistar rats were randomly divided into 5 groups: Control (Cont), Ang II50, Losartan (Los) + Ang II, (Cro) 100 + Ang II and Cro200 + Ang II (n = 6 in each group). To induce hypertension, Ang II (50 ng/kg, i.v) was administered. Los (10 mg/kg, i.v) and Cro (100 and 200 mg/kg, ip) were administered 30 min before Ang II. Systolic blood pressure (SBP), mean arterial pressure (MAP) and heart rate (HR) after cannulation of the artery were continuously recorded by power lab system then,(Δ;difference before and after injection) were calculated and compared between the groups. Differences were considered significant when P< 0.05. Findings: Ang II significantly increased SBP, MAP and decreased HR in several minutes (P<0.001). Losartan reduced these effects of angiotensin II. Pre-treatment with crocin (ip) significantly attenuated increased SBP and MAP induced by AngII (P<0.01) but it has not important effect on HR Conclusion: Injection of crocin (ip) and it's effect on the AT1 receptor reduces hypertension induced by the dose of 50 ng/kg of Ang II, which is comparable to that of Losartan. Therefore, the cardiovascular effect of crocin probably is mediated by this receptor of AngII.