Cardiac ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury is accompanied by intracellular acidification that can lead to cytosolic and mitochondrial calcium overload. However, the effect of cytosolic acidification on mitochondrial pH (pHm) and mitochondrial Ca2+ (Cam2+) handling is not well understood. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that changes in pHm during cytosolic acidification can modulate Cam2+ handling in cardiac mitochondria. pHm was measured in permeabilized rat ventricular myocytes with the use of confocal microscopy and the pH-sensitive fluorescent probe carboxyseminaphthorhodafluor-1. The contributions of the mitochondrial Na+/H+ exchanger (NHEm) and the K+/H+ exchanger (KHEm) to pHm regulation were evaluated using acidification and recovery protocols to mimic the changes in pH observed during I/R. Cam2+ transport in isolated mitochondria was measured using spectrophotometry and fluorimetry, and the mitochondrial membrane potential was measured using a tetraphenylphosphonium electrode. Cytosolic acidification (pH 6.8) resulted in acidification of mitochondria. The degree of mitochondrial acidification and recovery was found to be largely dependent on the activity of the KHEm. However, the NHEm was observed to contribute to the recovery of pHm following acidification in K+-free solutions as well as the maintenance of pHm during respiratory inhibition. Acidification resulted in mitochondrial depolarization and a decrease in the rate of net Cam2+ uptake, whereas restoration of pH following acidification increased Cam2+ uptake. These findings are consistent with an important role for cytosolic acidification in determining pHm and Cam2+ handling in cardiac mitochondria under conditions of Ca2+ overload. Consequently, interventions that alter pHm can limit Cam2+ overload and injury during I/R.


As they compete for developers, mobile app ecosystems have been exposing a growing number of APIs through their software development kits. Many of these APIs involve accessing sensitive functionality and/or user data and require approval by users. Android for instance allows developers to select from over 130 possible permissions. Expecting users to review and possibly adjust settings related to these permissions has proven unrealistic. In this paper, we report on the results of a study analyzing people's privacy preferences when it comes to granting permissions to different mobile apps. Our results suggest that, while people's mobile app privacy preferences are diverse, a relatively small number of profiles can be identified that offer the promise of significantly simplifying the decisions mobile users have to make. Specifically, our results are based on the analysis of settings of 4.8 million smartphone users of a mobile security and privacy platform. The platform relies on a rooted version of Android where users are allowed to choose between "granting", "denying" or "requesting to be dynamically prompted" when it comes to granting 12 different Android permissions to mobile apps they have downloaded.


We have applied the sol-gel process to generate optical microstructures in glass using in-house developed sol-gel materials. The synthesis of our sol-gel glass materials is based on the formation of particles of controlled size from organo-metallic compounds. The overall shrinkage during annealing of the gel material is negligible and does not imply crack formation. Silica, titania and binary oxides of silica titania oxide sol-gel materials have been used. A two-step pattern transfer is employed to replicate the structure in glass: first a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) replica is obtained from a Si, polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) or polyimide (PI) master structure, and secondly, a layer of sol-gel material is applied on the PDMS 'soft-replica' to get diffractive micro-/nano-structures in glass after drying and annealing. These structures are characterised. by a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and by an optical diffraction setup.


Report of a meeting of the Tectonic Studies Group held on 19 May 1986 at the Department of Earth Sciences, Leeds University. The meeting was organized by R. D. Law, R. J. Knipe, S. Bowler and G. E. Lloyd. This meeting was arranged to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in the relationships between deformation histories and crystallographic fabric development in plastically deformed rocks. This resurgence of interest has been due largely to recent advances in both mathamatical modelling of fabric development and the development of analytical techniques for measuring crystallographic preferred orientation. The meeting was attended by some 40 participants, of whom 75% came from either mainland Europe or North America. The meeting was opened by S. M. Schmid who presented a general introduction to: (1) the principles of crystallographic preferred orientation (fabric) development, 2) recent advances in analytical techniques for the measurement of crystallographic fabrics, and (3) calcite fabric development associated with experimental simple shear deformation. In this introductory paper the importance of integrating microstructural and crystallographic fabric studies was emphasized. Such integrated studies within quartz mylonite belts indicate significant departures from plane strain (simple shear) deformation. This theme was followed by Behrmann who reviewed recently published petrofabric evidence from the Moine thrust zone and Betic Cordilleras for partitioning of deformation within thrust sheets into domains of non-coaxial and essentially coaxial flow. Behrmann argued that this type of deformation, which incorporated sub-vertical shortening and movement parallel stretching, may be a reflection of gravity induced spreading of the


The NMDA receptor is a heteromeric ligand-gated ion channel in the central nervous system (CNS). There are three families of NMDA receptor subunits with various combinations of NRl, NR2A-D and NR3A֊B subunits producing unique receptors with distinctive pharmacological and biochemical properties. Pharmacological and functional properties of the NMDA receptor are highly dependent on the composition of the receptor complex. The NMDA receptor is the focus of drug development for therapy and prevention of numerous neurological and psychiatric disorders. The focus of this thesis was to investigate NMDA receptor subtype selectivity of NMDA antagonists, in particular, RGH-896, a novel NR2B֊selective antagonist. The study has utilised radioligand binding competition binding assays with RGH-896 in native, recombinant and immunopurified NMDA receptor preparations. In addition, ligand autoradiography has been employed to quantify and delineate the regional distribution of [^3H] RGH-896 binding sites in rodent and human brain tissue. This study provides the first evidence that [3H] RGH-896 binds to a distinct binding site which displays a significantly lower affinity for spermidine compared to the [^3H] Ro 25,6981 binding site. In addition, the low sensitivity of [^3H] MK-801 for unlabelled RGH-896 compared to prototypical NR2B ligand ifenprodil is further evidence for the difference in binding sites. Novel immunopurification studies using [3H] RGH-896, in contrast to [3H] CP 101,606, binds to NR2B-containing receptors irrespective of NMDA receptor subunit combinations. Ligand autoradiography in human brain has shown a surprising overall preservation of NR2B receptors in dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) patients compared to age matched controls in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). However, this study has revealed the first evidence of an upregulation of NR2B receptors in ACC of DLB cases related to severity of auditory, but not visual hallucinations.


Background Deletion of the B-cell neoplasia-associated gene with multiple splicing (BCMS) maps to 13q14 is the most common genetic abnormality in B-chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (B-CLL) patients. Previously, CLL patients with del 13q14.1 were known to have a favourable outcome. However, recent research has shown that increased percentage of cells with del 13q may lead to a poor prognosis or may exert an adverse effect on the biological characteristics of this disease. Objectives To assess the influence of the number of malignant cells carrying del 13q14 (BCMS) on the clinical characteristics and prognosis of CLL patients. Patients and methods Fluorescence in-situ hybridization technique using a locus-specific identifier 13q14 probe was applied on 76 peripheral blood samples of B-CLL patients, in addition to the routine panel of probes (locus-specific identifier 17p13,11q23 and centromeric 12) together with immunophenotyping using the routine panel for lymphoproliferative disorder. Results Deletion of 13q14 was detected in 40/76 (52.6%) patients. Those patients with greater than 84% positive cells for the deletion had a statistically significant association with advanced clinical Rai staging, lymphocyte doubling time less than 12 months, lower Hb level, higher total leucocytic count and lower platelet count. Follow-up of all patients showed that 30/76 (39.5%) patients showed a good therapeutic response; 28/30 (93.4%) of the patients were positive for 13q14 (BCMS) deletion, with a percent of cells ranging from 12 to 67%. The remaining 46/76 (60.5%) patients showed a poor therapeutic response; 12/46 (26.1%) of these patients were 13q14 (BCMS) positive, with a percent of positive cells ranging from 84 to 96%. Deletions in 17p13 were detected in 8/76 (10.5%), trisomy 12 was found in 10/76 (13.1%) and 11q23 rearrangements were found in 12/76 (15.7%) patients. Conclusion The prognostic significance of del 13q14 is dependent on the percentage of positive cells for this deletion. A high number of losses in 13q14 are associated with a poor prognosis.


The municipality of Samso will work with the project Biogas 2020 to establish one
biogas plant on Samso. In this connection, Samso Energy Academy has been assigned the task
The result of the study is disseminated in this report and in a presentation at the Energy Academy on November 30, 2017.
All quotes are anonymous in the report. The quotes are chosen as they are considered as special
When implementing something, often a lot of things happen
to promote the involvement of citizens and other relevant actors on Samso in
invisible work outside of, for example, the ones determined
public meetings. This work also has a value and may have the investigation.
biogas project.
influence on how the biogas is perceived. Therefore, can
This study is produced for Samso Energy Academy. The investigation
has stretched from June 2017 to November 2017. The purpose of the survey has been
The report consists of different elements. First, there will be an introduction of
It is important to see the types in a new light quite literally the context of the study. Next, an introduction to the data material will produce concrete qualitative knowledge about what elements are included in conversations about
to sometimes glance at the shadow sides. For that to
accompanied by first analytical insight. Then comes three different themes: value, narrative, understanding. The three themes are central to the conversations about biogas at Samso.
This report should not be seen as an exhaustive description of biogas conversations on Samso. Instead, the study should be understood as a cultural photograph taken on Samso by a certain group of people at a particular moment.
I would like to thank everyone who has been so kind and helpful to contribute to this report and to all the people I was lucky to get acquainted with during my stay at Samso in September 2017.
Sarah Moller Andersen
Copenhagen, October 2017.
biogas on Samso. The product of the study is a cultural survey of which
Being invisible is far from the same as being passive.
themes, patterns and relationships at stake in the discussions about biogas. This knowledge can be used to qualify the dialogue, about biogas, between citizens, associations, companies and organizations on Samso. The first step towards optimizing the biogas dialogue on Samso is to have an overview of what is being discussed in the current conversations


The classical pastoral was an accredited genre in antiquity usually associated with a series of contrasts between the country and the city or between the supposedly natural and artificial worlds. With the decline in allegorical writing, however, the Restoration's neo-classical translators, especially Thomas Creech (Theocritus, l684) and John Dryden (1697), offered a pastoral with most of the potentially ironic commentaries on contemporary life either softened or erased altogether. Creech's Theocritus is free of the Doric alternations between the Heroic (Idyll I) and Rustic (idylls h and 5). Dryden's Eclogues pay homage to a transcendent classicism calculated to contrast with post-Revolution beliefs in limited traditions of authority. These two images of the classical pastoral provide one facet unacceptable to neσ-classicism (Theocritean rusticity) and one which casts doubt on its bucolic status altogether (Virgilian artifice). This dualism in the classical legacy is seen as rooted in opposed definitions of "simplicity", one a lyrical and affective quality, the other paying testimony to the classical past by imitating what was taken to be its bolder and enduring melodies. The foundation of the Modern variety, as exemplified by Ambrose Philips (1709), lies in its depiction of indigenous shepherds and their freedom from the classical, but not the rustic (Spenser and Theocritus). Alexander Pope's Pastorals (1709), on the contrary, demonstrate an Ancient preoccupation with a current culture's indebtedness to its traditional sources of inspiration. His Strephons or Alexises wander amongst Windsor/Mantuan groves. The disappearance of much fresh neo-classical pastoral writing is then studied, especially in the mock-forms of the years I7IO-I6, particularly John Gay's The Shepherd's Week (I7l4). Within the Ancient pastoral Gay discovers sentiments incommensurate with contemporary rural poverty and so obviously redundant mimetically, but also an "unofficial" gusto in Theocritus and less imitated material that points forward to the particularity of the georgic. In short, Gay's mock-pastoral work, in the service of the prevailing Landed Interest, not only uncovers urban corruption but also the deceptions of the Ancient mode. In Purney's Theocritean pastorals (1717) and Ramsay's Scots Doric (1723-28), it is the Theocritean example which survives, not the more celebrated Eclogues of Virgil.


Hydroelectric reservoirs bury significant amounts of organic carbon (OC) in their sediments. Many reservoirs are characterized by high sedimentation rates, low oxygen concentrations in bottom water and a high share of terrestrially derived OC, and all of these factors have been linked to a high efficiency of OC burial. However, investigations of OC burial efficiency (OCBE, i.e., the ratio between buried and deposited OC) in reservoirs are limited to a few studies, none of which include spatially resolved analyses. In this study we determined the spatial variation in OCBE in a large subtropical reservoir and related it to sediment characteristics. Our results show that the sediment accumulation rate explains up to 92 % of the spatial variability in OCBE, outweighing the effect of other variables, such as OC source and oxygen exposure time. OCBE at the pelagic sites varied from 48 to 86 % (mean 67 %) and decreased towards the dam. At the margins, OCBE was lower (9–17 %) due to the low sediment accumulation in shallow areas. Our data show that the variability in OCBE both along the rivers–dam and the margin–pelagic axes must be considered in whole-reservoir assessments. Combining these results with a spatially resolved assessment of sediment accumulation and OC burial in the studied reservoir, we estimated a spatially resolved mean OC burial efficiency of 57 %. Being the first assessment of OCBE with such a high spatial resolution in a reservoir, these results suggest that reservoirs may bury OC more efficiently than natural lakes.


UWB radar for detection and positioning of human beings in complex environment has been developed and manufactured. Novelty of the radar lies in its large operational bandwidth (11.7 GHz at -10 dB level) combined with high time stability. Detection of respiratory movement of a person in laboratory conditions has been demonstrated. Based on experimental results human being radar return has been analysed in the frequency band from 1 GHz until 12 GHz. Novel principle of human being detection is considered and verified experimentally


Objectives: NHIS is a survey to understand the general health of the resident civilian non-institutionalized population in Taiwan. Once the regular survey system is well established, it will provide information in making timely health related policies. Method: The survey incorporated a multi-stage stratified systematic sampling scheme. If first divided 359 townships/districts of Taiwan into 7 strata according to their geographical location and degree of urbanization. Townships or districts in each stratum were selected with selection probability proportional to their sizes (PPS). In each selected township/district, lins (the smallest administrative unit) were selected with PPS. Four households were selected randomly from each selected lin. Each member in the selected household was to be interviewed. Results: Altogether, 6,592 households (26,658 persons) were sampled from the whole Taiwan area. Due to the small population sizes of mountainous areas and off-shore islands, these areas were oversampled. In mountainous areas, another 608 households (2,797persons) were sampled. In off-shore islands, 432 households (1,954 persons) were sampled. This resulted in equal probability samples. Development of questionnaires was based on the DOH needs of health indicators and the nature and nurture factors affecting health. The final version of questionnaire was composed of 5 parts: questionnaire for household, for individuals older than 12 years, for individuals younger than 12 years, self-administered questionnaire for teenagers between 12 and 19 years, WHO quality of life for adults aged between 20 and 65. Conclusion: This survey was well designed. The demographic characteristics of the samples were consistent with the population. The response rate was 91.1% for households and 94.2% for individuals. The information gathered by this survey was very valuable in designing health related programs and policies.


This paper shows how predation breaks the links between an economy's aggregate resourceendowment and aggregate consumption and between the interpersonal distribution of endowments and the interpersonal distribution of consumption. We construct a general-equilibrium model in which some people (the privileged) are well endowed with resources and other people (the unprivileged) are poorly endowed with resources and in which each person can choose to be either a producer or a predator. Here, the choice by some to be predators decreases decreases aggregate consumption, both because the predators' resources are wasted and because producers sacrifice production by allocating resources to guarding against predators. Analyzing this model we find that the minimum equilibrium ratio of predators to producers depends on the technology of predation. Also, the equilibrium ratio of predators to producers equals its minimum value if and only if the ratio of unprivileged to privileged people is not larger than this minimum value. These properties imply that, in contrast to a model that abstracts from predation, the fully egalitarian distribution of resources does not satisfy the Rawlsian criterion of maximizing the consumption of the person with the lowest consumption. (In fact, the fully egalitarian distribution is not even Pareto efficient). Instead, the Rawlsian criterion selects an unegalitarian distribution of resources in which the ratio of unprivileged to privileged people equals the minimum ratio of predators to producers and in which unprivileged have only the minimum possible endowment of resources. In the resulting Rawlsian equilibrium, only unprivileged people choose to be predators rather than producers and because both the ratio of predators to producers and the amount of resources predators waste are minimized aggregate consumption is maximized.


This thesis project has focused on studying AF's business concept Energy Collaboration, which is their way of selling energy efficiency services. Thereforeongoing projects have been analyzed. The purpose was to determine achieved energy efficiency, costs and profitability for the studied projects. It was concluded that the Energy Collaboration is a good way of selling energy efficiency services, since the customer takes no risk and energy savings of about 15-25 % can be achieved with simple measures. AF's costs for binding capital in projects were calculated and the result showed that it is possible for AF to use this concept and still make a good profit. However, it is important not to run too many measures at the same time, since it will result in lower profitability for AF. The thesis did also include two studies of energy efficient measures. The first one dealt with how to install an air/water heat pump to lower a building's use of energy.This was carried out through simulation. Therefore, a code in MATLAB was written for this purpose, and this model was used to evaluate the potential energy savings from the heat pump installation. An existing dimensioning program from NIBE was also used for comparison. The results showed that a district heating price of 0.80SEK/kWh is needed in order for this measure to become profitable. The second study was about presence control of lighting in a museum that was part of an ongoing Energy Collaboration. The study was done mostly in theory, except foran inventory of the current building, and potential energy efficiency and costs were calculated. The results showed that it is profitable to realize this measure in the Energy Collaboration, and the most profitable solution is to wait for all the older measures to be paid off before the presence control installation is carried out.


We believe that"all men are created equal". With the rise of the police shootings reported by media, more people in the U.S. think that police use excessive force during law enforcement, especially to a specific group of people. We want to apply multidimensional statistical analysis to reveal more facts than the monotone mainstream media. Our paper has three parts. First, we proposed a new method to quantify fatal police shooting news reporting deviation of mainstream media, which includes CNN, FOX, ABC, and NBC. Second, we analyzed the most comprehensive US fatal police shooting dataset from Washington Post. We used FP-growth to reveal the frequent patterns and DBSCAN clustering to find fatal shooting hotspots. We brought multi-attributes (social economics, demographics, political tendency, education, gun ownership rate, police training hours, etc.) to reveal connections under the iceberg. We found that the police shooting rate of a state depends on many variables. The top four most relevant attributes were state joined year, state land area, gun ownership rate, and violent crime rate. Third, we proposed four regression models to predict police shooting rates at the state level. The best model Kstar could predict the fatal police shooting rate with about 88.53% correlation coefficient. We also proposed classification models, including Gradient Boosting Machine, Multi-class Classifier, Logistic Regression, and Naive Bayes Classifier, to predict the race of fatal police shooting victims. Our classification models show no significant evidence to conclude that racial discrimination happened during fatal police shootings recorded by the WP dataset.


It's easy enough to install Wireshark and begin capturing packets off the wire--or from the air. But how do you interpret those packets once you've captured them? And how can those packets help you to better understand what's going on under the hood of your network? Practical Packet Analysis shows how to use Wireshark to capture and then analyze packets as you take an indepth look at real-world packet analysis and network troubleshooting. The way the pros do it. Wireshark (derived from the Ethereal project), has become the world's most popular network sniffing application. But while Wireshark comes with documentation, there's not a whole lot of information to show you how to use it in real-world scenarios. Practical Packet Analysis shows you how to: Use packet analysis to tackle common network problems, such as loss of connectivity, slow networks, malware infections, and more Build customized capture and display filters Tap into live network communication Graph traffic patterns to visualize the data flowing across your network Use advanced Wireshark features to understand confusing packets Build statistics and reports to help you better explain technical network information to non-technical users Because net-centric computing requires a deep understanding of network communication at the packet level, Practical Packet Analysis is a must have for any network technician, administrator, or engineer troubleshooting network problems of any kind.


This volume addresses the historical structures and current dynamics of Oman's regionalization processes and their political, economic and social dimensions. It is based on an interdisciplinary and trans-regional dialogue between scholars from different social sciences and area studies such as political science, economics, management, economic and social geography, history, social anthropology and linguistics as well as Middle East/West Asian, gulf and African studies, and develops four major axes of research: Oman�s integration into global and regional flows of goods, capital, people and ideas; The multi-scaled political negotiation of such integration (or disintegration) processes; Consequences of suchlike processes and forms of regionalization for (translocal) actors; Ideas and strategic communication of regional belonging and the constitution of regions. Each chapter deals with one or more of these issues. Part I deals with concepts of regionalisation and region-building and presents different approaches that accentuate certain dimensions of these processes and come from different disciplinary backgrounds. Part II focuses on the translocal, transnational and (trans)regional movement of people, their practices and imaginations, be they contemporary labour in- and out-migrants, returnees from Eastern Africa or nomadic tribal members. Part III takes a closer look particularly at economic issues and regionalisation processes that are mainly based on multiple trade links, regional development policies or politics of regionalism. Part IV analyses political and socio-cultural issues in regional and global perspectives.


Travel agency call centers are intended to complement advisory services of the bricks-and-mortar travel agencies by providing remote advisory services. Currently, they are ill-prepared for giving such advisory services due to their limitations in several areas of their work practice. This article presents the organizational as well as information and communication-related issues in work practice that need to be addressed preparing call centers to sufficiently give advice at the phone using an Internet connection. Resulting design requirements concern trust, information quality, joint problem-solving, and user satisfaction. In order to test the derived design requirements, the TeleSmarttravel system was implemented and evaluated in a preliminary use at a real travel agency call center. Results indicate that a visually enhanced, collaboratively used advisory support system can beneficially influence the advisory for both the agent and the customer and therefore opens new opportunities for an innovative multi-channel advisory approach.


Abstract What scholars referred to as a climate change litigation 'explosion' in 2015 has today become an established movement which is unlikely to stop in the near future: worldwide, over a thousand lawsuits have been launched regarding responsibility for the dangers of climate change. Since the beginning of this trend in transnational climate litigation scholars have warned that the separation of powers is threatened where judges interfere with the politically hot issue of climate change. This article uses Jürgen Habermas's political theory on deliberative democracy to reconstruct the tension between law and politics generated by these lawsuits. This reconstruction affords a better understanding of the implications of climate change litigation: while the role of the judiciary as such remains unchanged, the trend is likely to influence the democratic legitimacy of judicial lawmaking on climate change, as it indicates an increasing realization that a sound environment is a constitutional value and is therefore a prerequisite for democracy.


The platelet receptor CLEC-2 binds to the snake venom toxin rhodocytin and the tumor cell surface protein podoplanin. Binding of either of these ligands promotes phosphorylation of a single tyrosine residue in the YXXL motif in the intracellular domain of CLEC-2. Phosphorylation of this tyrosine initiates binding of spleen tyrosine kinase (Syk) and triggers further downstream signaling events and ultimately potent platelet activation and aggregation. However, it is unclear how a single YXXL motif can interact efficiently with Syk, which usually recognizes two tandem YXXL repeats presented as an immunoreceptor tyrosine-based activation motif (ITAM). Using bioluminescence resonance energy transfer, coimmunopreciptitation, recombinant protein expression and analytical gel filtration chromatography, surface plasmon resonance, Western blotting, multiangle light scattering (MALS), and analytical ultracentrifugation, we show that CLEC-2 exists as a non-disulfide-linked homodimer which could allow each Syk molecule to interact with two YXXL motifs, one from each CLEC-2 monomer.


Good syndrome, characterized by both thymoma and hypogammaglobulinemia, is a rare immunodeficient disorder. We experienced a case of Good syndrome accompanied by myasthenia gravis (MG). A 58-year-old man was admitted to our hospital because of muscle weakness and fatigability. Based on the presence of anti-acetylcholine receptor (AChR) antibody and thymoma, he was diagnosed as having MG. Peripheral blood lymphocyte count was normal, but gammaglobulin levels were markedly decreased (IgG 283 mg/dl, IgA 17 mg/dl, IgM 1 mg/dl). Clinical remission of MG was achieved by thymectomy followed by high-dose corticosteroids. Despite monthly intravenous immunoglobulin supplementation, he suffered from repeated respiratory tract infections and candidiasis. Body CT revealed adrenal tumor and pancreatic cancer with liver metastasis, and he died of bacterial pneumonia. Immunological evaluations showed complete lack of CD19+ B cell in the peripheral blood and responses of peripheral blood mononuclear cells to mitogens. Peripheral blood T cells responded to a suboptimal concentration of a recombinant AChR fragment: this pattern of AChR-induced T cell response was typical of MG patients. We failed to detect IgG autoantibodies reactive with B cells in his serum. Patients with Good syndrome represent imbalance of immune responses, leading to both immunodeficiency and autoimmunity.


Motivated by recent interstellar medium studies, we present high quality MMT and Gemini spectroscopic observations of H ii regions in the nearby spiral galaxies NGC 628 and NGC 2403 in order to measure their chemical abundance gradients. Using long-slit and multi-object mask optical spectroscopy, we obtained measurements of the temperature sensitive auroral lines [O iii] λ4363 and/or [N ii] λ5755 at a strength of 4σ or greater in 11 H ii regions in NGC 628 and 7 regions in NGC 2403. These observations allow us, for the first time, to derive an oxygen abundance gradient in NGC 628 based solely on "direct" oxygen abundances of H ii regions: 12 + log(O/H) = (8.43 ± 0.03) + (−0.017 ± 0.002) × Rg (dex kpc−1), with a dispersion in log(O/H) of σ = 0.10 dex, from 14 regions with a radial coverage of ∼2–19 kpc. This is a significantly shallower slope than found by previous "strong-line" abundance studies. In NGC 2403, we derive an oxygen abundance gradient of 12 + log(O/H) = (8.48 ± 0.04) + (−0.032 ± 0.007)× Rg (dex kpc−1), with a dispersion in log(O/H) of σ = 0.07 dex, from seven H ii with a radial coverage of ∼1–10 kpc. Additionally, we measure the N, S, Ne, and Ar abundances. We find the N/O ratio decreases with increasing radius for the inner disk, but reaches a plateau past R25 in NGC 628. NGC 2403 also has a negative N/O gradient with radius, but we do not sample the outer disk of the galaxy past R25 and so do not see evidence for a plateau. This bi-modal pattern measured for NGC 628 indicates dominant contributions from secondary nitrogen inside of the R25 transition and dominantly primary nitrogen farther out. As expected for α-process elements, S/O, Ne/O, and Ar/O are consistent with constant values over a range in oxygen abundance.


Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) holds great potential for sample-efficient learning on challenging long-horizon tasks. In particular, letting a higher level assign subgoals to a lower level has been shown to enable fast learning on difficult problems. However, such subgoal-based methods have been designed with static reinforcement learning environments in mind and consequently struggle with dynamic elements beyond the immediate control of the agent even though they are ubiquitous in real-world problems. In this paper, we introduce Hierarchical reinforcement learning with Timed Subgoals (HiTS), an HRL algorithm that enables the agent to adapt its timing to a dynamic environment by not only specifying what goal state is to be reached but also when. We discuss how communicating with a lower level in terms of such timed subgoals results in a more stable learning problem for the higher level. Our experiments on a range of standard benchmarks and three new challenging dynamic reinforcement learning environments show that our method is capable of sample-efficient learning where an existing state-of-the-art subgoal-based HRL method fails to learn stable solutions.


In 1660 a small group of men, led by Sir Robert Moray, met in London with a secret plan to reshape the world. They were members of the 'Invisible College', better known today as the Freemasons Emerging from the horrors of the Civil War, Britain was a society torn apart by political difference, religious ferment and was still immersed in medieval superstition. It was a country which burnt alive at least one hundred elderly women a year on suspicion of witchcraft. Yet this group, who had recently been sworn enemies, managed to bridge their social and cultural differences to found a new organization dedicated to the scientific study of nature, the Royal Society. Robert Lomas reveals in compelling detail how the secret tenets and traditions of the Freemasons laid the groundwork for a new revolution, that gave the world modern, experimental science and founded what is still, 350 years later, the pre-eminent scientific institution in the world.


An important new development within the European ENSEMBLES project has been to explore performance-based weighting of regional climate models (RCMs). Until now, although no weighting has been applied in multi-RCM analyses, one could claim that an assumption of 'equal weight' was implicitly adopted. At the same time, different RCMs generate different results, e.g. for various types of extremes, and these results need to be combined when using the full RCM ensemble. The process of constructing, assigning and combining metrics of model performance is not straightforward. Rather, there is a considerable degree of subjectivity both in the choice of metrics and on how these may be combined into weights. We explore the applicability of combining a set of 6 specifically designed RCM performance metrics to produce one aggregated model weight with the purpose of combining climate change information from the range of RCMs used within ENSEMBLES. These metrics capture aspects of model performance in reproducing large-scale circulation patterns, meso-scale signals, daily temperature and precipitation distributions and extremes, trends and the annual cycle. We examine different aggregation procedures that generate different inter-model spreads of weights. The use of model weights is sensitive to the aggregation procedure and shows different sensitivities to the selected metrics. Generally, however, we do not find compelling evidence of an improved description of mean climate states using performance-based weights in comparison to the use of equal weights. We suggest that model weighting adds another level of uncertainty to the generation of ensemble-based climate projections, which should be suitably explored, although our results indicate that this uncertainty remains relatively small for the weighting procedures examined. (Less)


Background: Glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible visual loss worldwide. In Saudi Arabia, it accounts for blindness in 3% of the population above the age of 40 years. Moreover, Hospital-based observations and studies acknowledge the distribution of various subtypes of glaucoma in the kingdom. Nevertheless, there is a paucity of studies which designed to assess general population level of awareness regarding glaucoma in Saudi Arabia. This study aimed to assess general population knowledge and level of awareness in the western region of Saudi Arabia, Taif city.
Methods: A cross-sectional survey was carried out in a public place in Taif City, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the glaucoma awareness week in 2018.  A total of 409 respondents participated and completed the study questionnaire. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used for data analysis, where descriptive data was expressed as numbers and percentages, and the Chi-square (χ2) test was applied to test the relationship between variables. Quantitative data was expressed as mean and standard deviation (Mean ± SD), and Mann-Whitney (U) test was applied to compare medians for groups not normally distributed. A p-value of <0.05 was considered as statistically significant.
Results: Of the 409 interviewees participated, 62% were females with a mean age of (26 ±13) years, where the majority of males and females participants had a secondary school education (40% and 42% respectively). Most of the male and female respondents have heard of glaucoma before (63.1% and 61.1 respectively). Male participants defined glaucoma as a group of diseases that can damage the eye's optic nerve and result in vision loss and blindness (41.1%), while the majority of females defined glaucoma as a slow drainage of fluid within the eye which causes fluid to build up leading to increased intraocular pressure within the eye (39%). Male participants ranked family members as the primary sources of information about glaucoma (41%) followed by medical campaigns (24.2%), while female respondent's ranked medical campaigns as the primary source of information (34.1%), followed by family members (33%). Female respondents in this study showed a high level of awareness concerning glaucoma disease compared to male respondents.
Conclusion: While there is relatively good awareness level among the population in Taif city, further studies in different regions of the country on different population sectors are needed to assess knowledge and awareness level for a better understanding of the population's age distribution, demographic differences regarding glaucoma awareness.


This paper investigates the functional role of Electronic Market Places (EMPs) in the process of business management. Our results are based on twenty-eight semi-structured interviews of people directly concerned with EMP development projects such as EMP directors, EMP buyers, EMP sellers and software companies. In terms of range, this qualitative research covers nearly twenty EMPs in different sectors of activity. The paper shows that under the term EMP lies a great variety of situations, and notably the relative setback of public EMPs. In most cases, EMPs play the role of computer companies which have to manage transactional streams in private virtual spaces. The interest for sellers and buyers to outsource the management of the exchange process to an EMP operator is put in question. Up to now, outsourcing only concerns supply and buying departments, but we can think that EMP could cover other domains upstream (products design) or downstream (logistic support) of the exchange process. The outsourcing issue leads us to describe the functional role of EMPs as new middlemen in the web value chain. To conclude, the paper provides a number of elements to help explain the obstacles of electronic B2B exchanges managed through EMP operators.


One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Mark Rothko (1903-1970) created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting over the course of his career. Rothko also wrote a number of essays and critical reviews during his lifetime, adding his thoughtful, intelligent, and opinionated voice to the debates of the contemporary art world. Although the artist never published a book of his varied and complex views, his heirs indicate that he occasionally spoke of the existence of such a manuscript to friends and colleagues. Stored in a New York City warehouse since the artist's death more than thirty years ago, this extraordinary manuscript, titled The Artist's Reality, is now being published for the first time. Probably written around 1940-41, this revelatory book discusses Rothko's ideas on the modern art world, art history, myth, beauty, the challenges of being an artist in society, the true nature of "American art," and much more. The Artist's Reality also includes an introduction by Christopher Rothko, the artist's son, who describes the discovery of the manuscript and the complicated and fascinating process of bringing the manuscript to publication. The introduction is illustrated with a small selection of relevant examples of the artist's own work as well as with reproductions of pages from the actual manuscript. The Artist's Reality will be a classic text for years to come, offering insight into both the work and the artistic philosophies of this great painter.


The T cell Immunoglobulin Domain and Mucin Domain 3 (TIM-3) is a type I glycoprotein expressed primarily on the surface of activated T cells and myeloid cells. The extracellular domain of TIM-3 consists of an IgV domain and a mucin domain with several sites for N- and O-linked glycosylation. The IgV domain is important for binding of TIM-3 to two of its known ligands, a β-galactoside binding lectin known as galectin-9 (Gal-9) and phosphatidylserine, a marker of early apoptosis. The cytoplasmic tail of TIM-3 has six conserved tyrosines, although their role in modulating downstream signaling pathways has yet to be determined. TIM-3 is widely regarded as a negative regulator of effector T cell function and viability. TIM-3 is also upregulated on exhausted T cells and is postulated to have a role in the development and/or maintenance of T cell exhaustion. However, the exact regulation of T cells by TIM-3 has not been fully established for several reasons. TIM-3 and at least one of its ligand is expressed on both T cells and antigen presenting cells (APC). Therefore, it is not clear whether TIM-3 antibodies or Tim-3 Ig fusion proteins block the ligation of TIM-3 on T cells or on APCs to enhance effector T cell function. Additionally, gal-9 can also induce apoptosis in cells lacking the expression of TIM-3 and has been shown to positively regulate other cell types such as dendritic cells and mast cells. As TIM-3 is becoming an increasingly attractive therapeutic target because of its ability to reverse exhaustion in T cells, it is important to determine the regulatory nature of TIM-3 on T cells. To do this, we expressed Tim-3 ectopically in Tim-3- Jurkat T cells and observed that Tim-3 enhances instead of inhibits signaling downstream of the T-cell receptor and co-stimulator, CD28. Then, using a series of truncation and point mutants of Tim-3, we determined that Y256 and Y263 are the most crucial of the six conserved tyrosines in mediating Tim-3 signaling. Another unexpected finding was that in addition to apoptosis, gal-9 also induces the secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines from T helper subsets independently of Tim-3.


Every service member experiences and is affected by deployment differently; there are, however, trends in the ways that service members are affected and ways in which they cope. The researcher explored the effect of deployment on religious and spiritual beliefs and the ways that service members use their religious and spiritual beliefs to make meaning of their experiences. Interviews were conducted with seven participants (n=7), primarily chaplains, who had discussed religious and spiritual matters with post-9/11 service members during deployment. This study found that deployment has an effect on the religious and spiritual beliefs of service members, and they use their beliefs to cope and to make meaning of their experiences. Service members cope through prayer, worship, good luck charms, reading Scripture, and discussions with others. The participants described how, why, and when service members make meaning and events where meaning was difficult to find. These findings indicate that social workers should assess for the religious and spiritual needs of service members because of the role that these beliefs play in coping and making meaning. Social workers should then make referrals if the needs of service members are beyond their scope of practice. MEANING MAKING AND DEPLOYED SERVICE MEMBERS ii


The purpose of legislation
like the Endangered Species Act is to provide a means to conserve the
ecosystems of endangered and threatened species, but not all species that may
appear to need conservation are granted protection. An estimated 100 million
sharks are killed each year largely due to exploitation, yet few shark species
are ever granted protection under state or federal endangered species acts. The
Northeastern Pacific population of the Great White Shark is no exception.
Despite the numerous threats facing the white shark, NOAA denied a petition to
list it as an endangered or threatened species under the federal Endangered
Species Act. In light of the pending California decision to list the white
shark under its state endangered species act, this paper considers whether or
not such extreme protections are necessary. This paper first discusses the
threats facing the white shark, the listing processes of both the federal and
the California endangered species acts, and NOAA's 12-month negative finding.
Finally, this paper concludes that endangered species protections are not
warranted in the case of the Northeastern Pacific white shark because of prior
government intervention and conservation efforts already in place.


By S. ARDEMAN, I. CIIANARIN AND A. \V. FRANKLAND T HE Pelger-Huet anomaly of Ieukocytcs is characterized by the ence of tii oval, indented or bibbed ( "pincc-nez" ) nucleus in the neutrophil polymorphonuclear leukocytes which replaces the normal nuclear segmentation of these cells ( Pelger' ) . It is inherited as an autosomal dominant characteristic ( Hu#{235}t2 ) , the incidence being 1 in 6000 of the population ( DavidSOfl:i ) . By contrast, rnegaloblastic anemia is characterized by an increase in the number of lobes in the neutrophil nucleus. The combination of addisonian pernicious anemia in a family with the Pelger-Hu#{235}t anomaly enabled us to observe the effect of the megalol)lastic process on the morphology of the cells exhibiting the Pelger-Hu#{235}t trait. This paper reports our observations.


The use of personal computers (PCs) continues to increase every year. According to a 1999 figure, 50 percent of all US households owned PCs, a figure that continues to rise every year. With continuous development of sophisticated software, PCs are becoming increasingly powerful. In addition, the price of a PC continues to steadily decline. Furthermore, the typical life of a PC in the workplace is approximately two to three years while in the home it is three to five years. As these PCs become obsolete, they are replaced and the old PCs are disposed of. It is estimated that between 14 and 20 million PCs are retired annually in the US. While 20 to 30% of the units may be resold, the others are discarded. These discards represent a significant potential source of lead for the waste stream. In some communities, waste cathode ray tubes (CRTs) represent the second largest source of lead in the waste stream after vehicular lead acid batteries. PCs are, therefore, not suitable for dumping in landfills. Besides, several components of a PC can be reused and then there are other valuable materials that can also be harvested. And with the advent of product stewardship, product recovery is the best solution for manufacturers. Disassembly line is perhaps the most suitable set up for disassembling PCs. However, planning and scheduling of disassembly on a disassembly line is complicated. In this paper, we discuss some of the complications including product arrival, demand arrival, inventory fluctuation and production control mechanisms. We then show how to overcome them by implementing a multi-kanban mechanism in the PC disassembly line setting. The multi-kanban mechanism relies on dynamic routing of kanbans according to the state of the system. We investigate the multi-kanban mechanism using simulation and demonstrate that this mechanism is superior to the traditional push system in terms of controlling the system's inventory while maintaining a decent customer service level.


A new optical setup for increasing the intensity of atomic fluorescence flame spectrometry is presented. The arrangement consists of two concave spherical mirrors and an elliposidal mirror whose primary focus is located at the flame position, and secondary at the entrance slit of the monochromator. Approximately 10 times gain in the measured intensities was obtained. The system is also useful for flame emission work, for which about five times gain was observed. With a low background flame such as the air–H2 for the N2−H2 diffusion flame and 400 µ slits, calcium can be detected at the level of 0.005 µg/ml. Moreover, the observed thermally assisted anti-Stokes fluorescence of In and Ga can be of analytical importance since the detection limits with a total consumption burner and the air-H2 flame were found to be 0.015 and 0.02 µg/ml, respectively. Detection limits in atomic fluorescence for Cr, Tl, In, and Fe are also presented.


Many consider gravity-flow irrigation inefficient and deride its use. Yet, there are cases where gravity-flow irrigation can play an important role in highly productive and profitable agriculture. This perspective article reviews the literature on the profitability and efficiency of gravity systems. It then reviews the history of water management in Yuma, Arizona, which is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the United States. Through extensive changes in irrigation technologies, changes in production practices, and investments in irrigation infrastructure, Yuma agriculture dramatically shifted from perennial and summer-centric crop production to winter-centric, multi-crop systems that are focused on high-value vegetable crops. These innovations have led to improvement in various irrigation efficiency measures and overall water conservation. Return flows from the system, which were once characterized as an indicator of inefficiency, provide valuable environmental services to the Colorado River Delta ecosystem. Yuma's history illustrates that innovative gravity-flow systems can be productive and water-conserving, and that a system-wide perspective is critical in evaluating irrigation systems.


The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) was recently introduced by the U.S. Census Bureau as an alternative measure of poverty that addresses many shortcomings of the official poverty measure (OPM) to better reflect the resources households have available to meet their basic needs. The Census SPM is available only in the Current Population Survey (CPS). This paper describes a method for constructing SPM poverty estimates in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), for the biennial years 1998 through 2010. A public-use dataset of individual-level SPM status produced in this analysis will be available for download on the PSID website. Annual SPM poverty estimates from the PSID are presented for the years 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010 and compared to SPM estimates for the same years derived from CPS data by the Census Bureau and independent researchers. We find that SPM poverty rates in the PSID are somewhat lower than those found in the CPS, though trends over time and impact of specific SPM components are similar across the two datasets.


Sialic acid-binding immunoglobulin-like lectins (Siglecs) are expressed in various immune cells and most of them carry signaling functions. High-affinity synthetic sialoside ligands have been developed for various Siglecs. Therapeutic potentials of the nanoparticles and compounds that contain multiple numbers of these sialosides and other reagents such as toxins and antigens have been demonstrated. However, whether immune responses can be regulated by monomeric sialoside ligands has not yet been known. CD22 (also known as Siglec-2) is an inhibitory molecule preferentially expressed in B lymphocytes (B cells) and is constitutively bound and functionally regulated by α2,6 sialic acids expressed on the same cell (cis-ligands). Here, we developed synthetic sialosides GSC718 and GSC839 that bind to CD22 with high affinity (IC50 ~100 nM), and inhibit ligand binding of CD22. When B cells are activated by B cell antigen receptor (BCR) ligation, both GSC718 and GSC839 downregulate proliferation of B cells, and this regulation requires both CD22 and α2,6 sialic acids. This result suggests that these sialosides regulate BCR ligation-induced B cell activation by reversing endogenous ligand-mediated regulation of CD22. By contrast, GSC718 and GSC839 augment B cell proliferation induced by TLR ligands or CD40 ligation, and this augmentation requires CD22 but not α2,6 sialic acids. Thus, these sialosides appear to enhance B cell activation by directly suppressing the inhibitory function of CD22 independently of endogenous ligand-mediated regulation. Moreover, GSC839 augments B cell proliferation that depends on both BCR ligation and CD40 ligation as is the case for in vivo B cell responses to antigens, and enhanced antibody production to the extent comparable to CpG oligonuleotides or a small amount of alum. Although these known adjuvants induce production of the inflammatory cytokines or accumulation of inflammatory cells, CD22-binding sialosides do not. Thus, synthetic sialosides that bind to CD22 with high-affinity modulate B cell activation through endogenous ligand-dependent and independent pathways, and carry an adjuvant activity without inducing inflammation.


Nanomedicine is an emerging medical area that utilizes nanoparticles for the detection and treatment of diseases. The ubiquitous place of gold in Nanomedicine stems from its chemical ability to serve in an unoxidized state at the nano size level when most surfaces of other metals get oxidized. In addition to our ongoing interest on the development of hybrid gold nanoparticles for use in imaging and therapy of human cancers, we are also actively interested in the fabrication of biocompatible gold nanoparticles conjugated to Avastin for use in the treatment of choroidal neaovascularization associated with Pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE) and age related macular degeneration (AMD) ophthalmic diseases. Herein, we report design and development of Avastin conjugated Gold nanoparticles (Super Avastin) for the treatment of PXE and AMD.


Two shoreline modification projects were designed that use a new application of an old idea to provide erosion protection and improve shoreline access and aesthetics. The innovation consists of a buried revetment. In both cases, the gravel face of the water-facing slope is the primary defense against wave erosion. Should the wave energy increase beyond the ability of the gravel slope to cope, erosion can continue to the buried revetment. The buried revetment is designed to arrest local shoreline erosion from storm-generated waves until a maintenance program is initiated to restore the shore or beach to its natural-looking, original, and low-energy equilibrium condition. The revetment can be buried by filling over an existing revetment at the shoreline or by trenching in a new revetment. A brief description of the two projects and a discussion of the buried revetment concept is presented. General design and permitting guidelines are discussed. The types of revetment materials available and the advantages and disadvantages of each type are outlined.


1. A method is described for distinguishing the ribonucleoproteins of the nucleolus and parachromatin of ascitic tumor cells of the mouse. 2. In these cells the transfer of ribonucleoprotein from the nucleus to the cytoplasm can occur in two ways. (a) At the end of prophase the nucleolus separates from the chromosomes and nucleolar fragments are released into the cytoplasm. (b) During prophase the parachromatin is aggregated to form parachromatin bodies which are discharged into the cytoplasm, where they can be detected during metaphase, anaphase, and telophase. 3. A metachromatic form of RNA is demonstrable, and may be synthesized, in close relation to the chromosomes during prophase, metaphase, and anaphase. During telophase the distribution of metachromatic RNA changes, the chromatin loses its metachromasia, and intranuclear metachromatic parachromatin becomes evident.


In this study a semi-reduced reaction scheme developed previously was used to derive a 26 step reduced mechanism, using the sensitivity approach and the steady state approximation (QSS) with Chemkin code. This 26 step model has been implemented in a CFD combustion code (Star-CD/Kinetics) to study combustion process in homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) engines. The first results obtained have confirmed the very rapid combustion phase and fast heat release with completely homogeneous mixtures, for a wide range of operating conditions. This numerical approach has been used first to study the effects of natural thermal stratification when the mixture is initially homogeneous. In a second step, the different possible methods to control the heat release rate have been studied. The stratification with several homogeneous regions of different composition is shown to be very efficient; the limits of this process are discussed.


The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the "coupling-constitution fallacy". In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model to an absolute minimum, we are able to illustrate how the coupling-constitution fallacy is in fact based on an inadequate understanding of the constitutive role of nonlinear interactions in dynamical systems theory.


The optical constants of crystal quartz in the far infrared (10–400 cm−1) are presented along with the dispersion parameters for the two ordinary-ray bands measured in this study. The asymmetric Fourier-transform method was used for the quantitative measurement of the refractive indices of quartz. The advantages of this method as compared with the channeled-spectrum method usually employed for refractive-index measurements in the far infrared are discussed. The extrapolated, zero-frequency refractive indices of quartz are n0(0)=2.106±0.001 and ne(0)=2.154±0.001. A pseudocoherence effect is described which permits the measurement of the difference of the principle refractive indices in a birefringent sample without the use of a polarizer.


The reality that has been presented in rap music and its celebrity culture has always been connected with two extremes: the reality of the "thug" life of the streets on the one hand and with a specific sort of "American Dream" reality that presents climbing from bottom to top on the other hand. This article explores the reasons why trap music, which originated as a type of rap music in the south of the USA, is now with its specific mixture of hedonism and nihilism, darkness and joy, becoming the music of our times. It argues that this is not a coincidence: the two-fold reality, the cruel reality of living "in a trap" on the one hand and the idealized, dreamy reality full of gold and diamonds on the other hand, is the main allegory of "real" life in late capitalism. How to get out of the trap? In the article, I investigate some crucial problems of contemporary theory regarding class and racial differences and argue that we can extract farreaching social, political, and theoretical statements through interpretation of music that is often presented as apolitical, vacant, and of poor quality. Interpretation of contemporary development in pop culture will be combined with readings of theorists such as Foucault, Mbembe, Balibar, Marx, Moretti, and Deleuze and Guattari. I argue that identification with trap music, even if it seems conformist and non-critical, is producing paradoxical minoritarian universalism, that could, if we understand the universalization of a dream of individual success as an implicit request for egalitarian society, present certain emancipatory potential.


Ecological guilds have been widely applied for understanding the structure and functioning of aquatic ecosystems. This study describes the composition and the spatio-temporal changes in the structure of the fish fauna and the movements between the estuary and the coast of a tropical estuary, the Itapissuma/Itamaracá Complex (IIC) in northeastern Brazil. Fish specimens were collected during the dry and rainy seasons in 2013 and 2014. A total of 141 species of 34 families were recorded. Almost half of the species (66 species, 47%) were exclusive to the estuary and 50 species (35%) to the coast; 25 (18%) were common to both environments. Marine species were dominant in both richness and biomass as they explore the environment during part of their life cycle, whereas estuarine species were dominant in abundance. Marine stragglers displayed a higher richness, abundance and biomass in the coastal waters. The estuarine environment was dominated by zoobenthivores in terms of richness, while detritivores prevailed in abundance and biomass. Zoobenthivores had the highest richness and abundance in coastal waters, while piscivores had the highest biomass. The IIC supports a rich fauna with a diverse trophic structure and is an important feeding and development area for migratory species.


Background: We propose a set of criteria for diagnosis of intracranial infectious aneurysm (IA). The proposed diagnostic criteria contain a mandatory criterion (demonstration of intracranial aneurysm by neuroimaging) and 12 supportive criteria drawn from three domains. Domain A encompasses infection, such as infective endocarditis, meningitis, cavernous sinus thrombophlebitis or orbital cellulitis. Domain B encompasses angiographic features of the aneurysm, such as multiplicity, distal location, fusiform shape, change in size or appearance of new aneurysm at follow-up angiogram. Domain C encompasses other features, such as age <45 years, recent history of fever, lumbar puncture or cerebral haemorrhage. Each criterion is given 1 point and the sum under each domain (A sum , B sum and C sum ) and total score are calculated. Methods: We evaluated these criteria in 25 patients with confirmed IA and in another 111 consecutive patients with non-infectious aneurysm. The sensitivity, specificity and receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves were calculated for these cohorts. Results: The highest ROC was for total score (0.997). A total score of 3 had high sensitivity (96%) and specificity (100%), as well as a positive predictive value of 100% and negative predictive value of 99.4%. A total score of 2 had high sensitivity (100%) but low specificity (87.4%). Other combinations had lower ROC areas, sensitivities and specificities. Conclusion: Diagnosis of IA would be clinically compelling if three or more of the proposed supportive criteria are satisfied, or clinically probable if two proposed supportive criteria are satisfied apart from the mandatory criteria.


There is an emerging interest in the development of sustainable materials with high performance. Cellulose is promising in this regard as it is a renewablere source with high specific properties, which can be utilized as strong reinforcements in novel biocomposites. However, to fully exploit the potential ofcellulose, its inherent hydrophilic character has to be modified in order toimprove the compatibility and interfacial adhesion with the more hydrophobicpolymer matrices commonly used in composites.In this study, the grafting of poly(e-caprolactone) (PCL) and poly(L-lactide)(PLLA) from cellulose surfaces, via ring-opening polymerization (ROP) of e-caprolactone and L-lactide, was investigated. Both macroscopic and nano-sizedcellulose were explored, such as filter paper, microfibrillated cellulose (MFC),MFC-films, and regenerated cellulose spheres. It was found that thehydrophobicity of the cellulose surfaces increased with longer graft lengths, andthat polymer grafting rendered a smoother surface morphology.To improve the grafting efficiency in the ROP from filter paper, both covalent(bis(methylol)propionic acid, bis-MPA) and physical pretreatment (xyloglucanbisMPA)were explored. The highest grafting efficiency was obtained with ROPfrom the bis-MPA modified filter papers, which significantly increased amountof polymer on the surface, i.e. the thickness of the grafted polymer layer.MFC was grafted with PCL to different molecular weights. The dispersability innon-polar solvent was obviously improved for the PCL grafted MFC, incomparison to neat MFC, and the stability of the MFC suspensions was better maintained with longer grafts. PCL based biocomposites were prepared from neat MFC and PCL grafted MFCwith different graft lengths. The polymer grafting improved the mechanical properties of the composites, and the best reinforcing effect was obtained when PCL grafted MFC with the longest grafts were used as reinforcement.A bilayer laminate consisting of PCL and MFC-films grafted with different PCL graft lengths displayed a gradual increase in the interfacial adhesion with increasing graft length.The effect of grafting on the adhesion was also investigated via colloidal probeatomic force microscopy at different temperatures and time in contact. A significant improvement in the adhesion was observed after polymer grafting.


This article aims to share learning about the use of Restorative Practices in an Irish community setting. It will begin by offering a definition of Restorative Practices and an outline of relevant research in this area. It will go on to describe the origins and content of the Restorative Practices Programme implemented by the Childhood Development Initiative in Tallaght West since 2010; and to share some of the findings of the independent evaluation carried out by the Child and Family Research Centre at the National University of Ireland, Galway, between 2011 and 2012. A case study of how restorative practices have assisted in resolving conflict in a community setting is then presented. The article concludes with some of the main learning by stakeholders to the Tallaght West Restorative Practices Programme and an outline of plans for the immediate future.


The European countries joining to the Schengen area had the effect elimination of internal border controls between Schengen member countries, that use permenent provisions of the Schengen acquis, being a single external border where operational checks are carried out according to a set of clear rules on immigration, visas, the asylum, as well as some decisions concerning police cooperation, judicial or customs. This means that the border crossing can be made at any time through many places, and citizens of member countries who are traveling in the Schengen area must present a valid ID. Overcoming internal border can be equated with a journey through the country.


This thesis maintains that, in spite of many differences and oppositions between the theologies of Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, so far as the problem of authentic humanity is concerned, the two theologians complement rather than exclude each other. Furthermore, the thesis shows that their understandings of humanity, though deeply rooted in the Christian tradition, can provide a genuine dialogue with non-Christian approaches to the realization of authentic humanity. The first chapter is a comparative survey of the two theologians' encounters with human inauthenticity during the First World War. After this 'Introductory' part, the following two chapters are concerned with divine intervention as the foundation and beginning of authentic humanity. This consists of a study of Barth's interpretation of the doctrine of reconciliation and of Tillich's interpretation of the doctrine of justification. The study demonstrates that Earth's Christological objectivity and Tillich's existential concern complement each other, so that together they build up a more comprehensive understanding of God's salvific act in Christ and its transforming power in human experience than does either in its own. The next two chapters are concerned with the realization of authentic humanity. Tillich's idea of unambiguous life is studied from an interdisciplinary perspective and compared with Martin Heidegger's philosophy, Abraham H. Maslow's humanistic psychology, Karl Marx's politics and Zen Buddhism. Then Barth's doctrine of the Christian life as the realization of man's ontological determination is studied under the categories of the God-man and man-man relationships. Again we find that Tillich's interdisciplinary concern and Barth's delineation of the Christian life in the presence of a living God and guided by a personal Spirit also complement each other, so that together they constitute a comprehensive picture of authentic humanity, which may be called a 'Christian personalist' view of anthropology.


Death is the absolute destiny for all living beings in this universe. There is
nerve in our soul when we remember about death. It is because there is an
existential principal of anti-nothingness in the deepest of human existence to
refuse death. It can make human falls into the "possessing principle" and forgets
on the "existing principle", which more responsible, polite, easy to forgive, love
and peace. The title of this research is "Reconstruction of the Meaning of Death
According to Martin Heidegger and Syekh Siti Jenar (Comparative Study of
Existentialism Philosophy)" that purposed to know what Martin Heidegger and
Syekh Siti Jenar's thought about death; what is the factor and background that
influenced Martin Heidegger and Syekh Siti Jenar's thought about death; what is
the reconstruction of death. This research uses the method of synthetic analytical,
by historical and philosophical approach.
According to Martin Heidegger, death is a condition when Dasein stopped
as Being-in-the-world; it is also "a possibility to die", in which Dasein is always
facing its "future" in heading to die. The conception of death in Heidegger's
thought influenced by some factors and background; Heidegger lived in a crisis
era of The World War II, he also influenced by many figures such as Aristotle,
Husserl, Wilhelm Dilthey, Kierkegaard, St. Augustine Hippo, Karl Barth, Duns
Scotus, Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Holderlin.
In other side, for Siti Jenar, death is only a transit for spirit in the physical
world. It covers all human when he separated from God (The Eternal Live) and
trapped in this physical world (the grave world). Syekh Siti Jenar's thought about
death influenced by his teachers such as, Syekh Datuk Kahfi, Aria Damar, and his
companions such as Ahmad al-Mubasyarah. Siti Jenar also influenced by other
figures of Moslem and Sufism, such as al-Kharaj, al-Qusyairi, Ibnu 'Arabi, al-
Ghazali, al-Thawasin, al-Hallaj, al-Busthami, and al-Jilli. Siti Jenar mixed the
concept of death from many notions and cultures with his spiritual experience. He
lived in a crisis of era transition; from Majapahit to Islam Demak.
The writer reconstructs the meaning of death in Heidegger and Siti Jenar's
conception that death is a condition of human in or out of this world that is a
transit of his existence or his spirit from nothingness-towards-nothingness, from
separation-towards-unity with God. This definition can resolve some weakness
spots of Heidegger and Siti Jenar's thought about death, it is that an act of
pessimistic will transform to be optimistic because we aware that we will unite
with God, and an act of passive will transform to be active when we aware that we
are thrown, because by this awareness, human will use his time as good as
possible. Thereby, the veil of pessimistic of death that can appear in Heidegger's
thought and the veil of passivism of death that can appear in Siti Jenar's thought
can be avoidable. If someone has already able to be optimistic and active, then he
will easy to achieve or at least to run his life authentically as the real human
(manusia sejati).


Abstract The in vitro genotoxic potential of methanol extract of Senecio trapezuntinus in human lymphocytes was investigated. Blood samples were obtained from six healthy donors, non-smoking volunteers, who were incubated and exposed to increasing concentrations of Senecio trapezuntinus (0.002, 0.01, 0.05 and 0.1 mg/mL). Senecio trapezuntinus induced micronucleus, decreased mitotic and proliferation indexes in human lymphocytes (P<0.01 for 0.05 and 0.1 mg/mL). While the decreases of mitotic and proliferation indexes indicate that Senecio trapezuntinus is an antiproliferative and antimitotic agent, the rise of micronucleus shows that Senecio trapezuntinus at high concentrations may become carcinogenic and genotoxic.


The recently proposed context-dependent deep neural network hidden Markov models (CD-DNN-HMMs) have been proved highly promising for large vocabulary speech recognition. In this paper, we develop a more advanced type of DNN, which we call the deep tensor neural network (DTNN). The DTNN extends the conventional DNN by replacing one or more of its layers with a double-projection (DP) layer, in which each input vector is projected into two nonlinear subspaces, and a tensor layer, in which two subspace projections interact with each other and jointly predict the next layer in the deep architecture. In addition, we describe an approach to map the tensor layers to the conventional sigmoid layers so that the former can be treated and trained in a similar way to the latter. With this mapping we can consider a DTNN as the DNN augmented with DP layers so that not only the BP learning algorithm of DTNNs can be cleanly derived but also new types of DTNNs can be more easily developed. Evaluation on Switchboard tasks indicates that DTNNs can outperform the already high-performing DNNs with 4-5% and 3% relative word error reduction, respectively, using 30-hr and 309-hr training sets.


Degree completion dental hygiene students often find it difficult to adapt to a totally online environment because there is no face-to-face communication. How to study and "uncovering" material is very important in the computer-based environment. One method to enhance learning-centered teaching is the use of rubrics. A rubric is a scoring tool that provided the specific requirements for an assignment by describing the specific parts of an assignment and what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable levels of performance for each part. This poster will demonstrate sample rubrics for theory-based and service-learning within the online environment. The requirements for an effective rubric will be described. Rubrics can save teachers many hours of grading while providing meaningful and timely feedback to students. Students may use rubrics for self-evaluation of their own work before submission of their assignments. Rubrics provide a "fair" way of evaluating student learning. Rubrics have been shown to allow online students to adapt to the degree completion program and to have a better understanding of what is expected of them as critical thinkers and evidence-based learners.


In the presence of European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes, the Lisbon Council launched Intellectual Property and Innovation: A Framework for 21st Century Growth and Jobs. In this timely report, ten leading European intellectual property thought leaders offer strategic advice on how to enhance the existing intellectual property regime for the digital age – and in turn boost innovation, encourage creativity and generate much-needed growth and jobs. Ian Hargreaves, professor of digital economy at Cardiff University and author of the high-level Digital Opportunity report prepared for UK Prime Minister David Cameron, contributed the Foreword. The study was co-edited by Prof. Hargreaves and Paul Hofheinz, president of the Lisbon Council.


This study aimed to test the proposed model of educational aspirations of Taiwanese Aboriginal adolescents by applying the developmental-contextual model of career development as its framework. It simultaneously examined the relationships among the contextual variables (i.e., family socioeconomic status (SES), social welfare resources, parental educational support, and school support), the individual-level variable (i.e., school self-concept), and educational aspirations in the proposed model. Data were collected from a questionnaire survey of 851 Taiwanese Aboriginal senior high school students and were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The findings empirically supported the proposed model which explained 36% of the variance in educational aspirations. We found that educational aspirations were influenced by parental educational support and school self-concept, which were, in turn, influenced by school support and parental educational support; school support and parental educational support were influenced by social welfare resources, which were, in turn, influenced by family SES. Overall, the results confirmed that the proposed model based on the developmental-contextual framework was effective in explaining the development of Taiwanese Aboriginal adolescents' educational aspirations.


Gardening writer Ursula Buchan has combined forces with garden photographer Andrew Lawson to explore the English garden and capture its richness and diversity. Focusing on gardens that are open to visitors, she explains the historical trends and the work of garden makers of the past that have shaped the English gardens we see today. With a wealth of outstanding examples, illustrated with 350 photographs, she describes many garden styles - formality, the landscape tradition, the Arts and Crafts style, the cottage garden and recent phenomena such as New Naturalism. Colour, water, ornament and foreign influences are among the themes she considers, as well as such defining characteristics as the very English urge to grow flowers and the nation's love of roses.


Machine translation is a computational procedure that seeks to provide the translation of utterances from one language into another language. Research and development around this grand challenge is bringing this technology to a level of maturity that already supports useful practical solutions. It permits to get at least the gist of the utterances being translated, and even to get pretty good results for some language pairs in some focused discourse domains, helping to reduce costs and to improve productivity in international businesses. There is nevertheless still a way to go for this technology to attain a level of maturity that permits the delivery of quality translation across the board. The goal of the QTLeap project is to research on and deliver an articulated methodology for machine translation that explores deep language engineering approaches in view of breaking the way to translations of higher quality. The deeper the processing of utterances the less language-specific differences remain between the representation of the meaning of a given utterance and the meaning representation of its translation. Further chances of success can thus be explored by machine translation systems that are based on deeper semantic engineering approaches. Deep language processing has its stepping-stone in linguistically principled methods and generalizations. It has been evolving towards supporting realistic applications, namely by embedding more data based solutions, and by exploring new types of datasets recently developed, such as parallel DeepBanks. This progress is further supported by recent advances in terms of lexical processing. These advances have been made possible by enhanced techniques for referential and conceptual ambiguity resolution, and supported also by new types of datasets recently developed as linked open data. The project QTLeap explores novel ways for attaining machine translation of higher quality that are opened by a new generation of increasingly sophisticated semantic datasets and by recent advances in deep language processing.


We consider the situation where N nodes share a common access point. With each node i there is an associated buffer and channel state that change in time. Node i dynamically chooses both the power and the admission control to be adopted so as to maximize the expected capacity, which depends on the actions and states of all the players, given its power and delay constraints. The information structure that we consider is such that each player knows the state of its own buffer and channel and its own actions. It does not know the states of, and the actions taken by other players. Using Markov Decision Processes we analyze the single player optimal policies under different model parameters. In the context of stochastic games we study the equilibria of the N player scenario.


Objective: The present study was undertaken in young patients of ischemic heart disease (IHD) to assess clinical, biochemical and angiographic profile, conventional and newer risk factors, and correlation of risk factors with significant and nonsignificant coronary artery disease (CAD). Materials and Methods: This was a hospital-based cross-sectional study conducted in 70 cases of young IHD (male ≤35 years and females ≤40 years). Patients were evaluated for clinical, biochemical and angiographic profiles, and conventional risk factors such as dyslipidemia, hypertension (HT), diabetes mellitus (DM), and family history of premature CAD (PCAD). Newer risk factors such as lipoprotein (a) (Lp [a]), homocysteine, and plasma fibrinogen were also assessed in some (n = 44) cases. Results: Mean age of patients was 32.97 ± 3.93 years; 11 (15.7%) were women. Various risk factors such as tobacco/gutka chewing, HT, smoking, DM, and family history of PCAD were observed in 35.7%, 22.8%, 17.1%, 11.5%, and 8.6% of patients, respectively. Nearly 77.6% of patients presented with anterior wall myocardial infarction and 61.4% were having moderate left ventricular dysfunction on echocardiography. Total cholesterol (TC), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), triglycerides (TGs), and TC/high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (TC/HDL-C) were increased in 38.6%, 41.4%, 32.9%, and 25.7% patients, respectively. Newer risk factors such as Lp (a), homocysteine, and plasma fibrinogen were elevated in 61.4%, 77.3%, and 18.2% of patients, respectively. On coronary angiography, single-vessel disease was found in more than half of the patients (57.1%) followed by double-vessel disease (11.5%) and triple-vessel disease (7.1%). Coronary angiogram was normal in 24.3% of patients. Positive family history of PCAD, serum TGs, TC/HDL-C, and LDL-C/HDL-C were significantly (P < 0.05) associated with significant CAD as compared to nonsignificant CAD, whereas no such correlation was found in relation to newer risk factors. Conclusion: Indian males in South Asian population appear more prone to develop CAD; therefore, screening for risk factors should start at an earlier age. Smoking and tobacco chewing cessation, promotion of physical activities, and healthy dietary pattern have to be strongly encouraged in this vulnerable group.


Innovative contracting methods are being constantly refined to meet the challenges facing state departments of transportation (DOTs) in their efforts to rehabilitate the nation's infrastructure. These contracting methods emphasize best value practices and attempt to minimize construction cost and service disruptions to the traveling public. The importance of innovative contracting methods stems from the flexibility they offer to state DOTs in the procurement and delivery of construction. One innovative contracting method that appears to be underutilized is flexible start date contracts which allow contractors to schedule their work during dates that optimize schedules and minimize the public impact of their projects. The present paper describes an exploratory investigation of flexible start/fixed duration contracting. The paper presents the current practices of a number of state DOTs along with a case study of the Paseo Bridge rehabilitation project in Kansas City, Missouri. The results of this investigation demonstrated the advantages of flexible start/fixed duration contracting and its potential benefits in large transportation projects in urban settings.


The wind power industry has expanded greatly during the past few years, has served a growing market, and has spawned the development of larger wind turbines. Different designs and technical advances now make it possible to erect wind turbines offshore. The fast expansion of the wind power market faces some problems. The new designs are not always fully tested, and the designed 20-year lifetime is typically never achieved before the next generation of turbines are erected. This paper presents results from an investigation of failure statistics from four sources, i.e., two separate sources from Sweden, one from Finland, and one from Germany. Statistics reveal reliability performance of the different components within the wind turbine. The gearbox is the most critical, because downtime per failure is high compared to the other components. The statistical data for larger turbines also show trends toward higher, ever-increasing failure frequency when compared to small turbines, which have a decreasing failure rate over the operational years


The three-minute thesis (3MT) competition was founded in the Univeristy of Queensland in 2008, and has since spread globally. The goal of the event is for graduate students to present their research to a non-specialist audience with no props and only one non-animated slide. To top it all off, this presentation must be under three minutes! Why would someone want to do take on this challenge? Czarina Evangelista is a PhD student at Concordia Univeristy's Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology, and she explains the motivation behind her participation and what she learned from the experience.


The paper is based on a research project called "MUTEIS"(Macro-economic and Urban Trends in Europe's Information Society), a research project designed to get a better understanding of the different patterns of growth of cities and their ICT clusters in 12 urban regions across Europe. The research reveals developments over the 1990's, starting a few years before the dot.com hype, end ending with the first signs of the dot.com crises. The paper is based on the results of fieldwork in two different kind of regions in Finland, Ireland, Sweden and The Netherlands. One region being the national frontrunner in taking up ICT, the other being more remote, but apparently successful in ICT too. While Europe as a whole seems to have been slow in its transition towards the new, digital economy, these smaller European economies actually witnessed a rapid uptake in computer- and internet use and in ICT investment more generally over the second half of the 1990's, accompanied by a remarkable growth and employment performance over those same years. However, behind the aggregate stories of success, sometimes initiated by the private sector, sometimes by public authorities, we can see significant differences in the regional and urban development patterns in the field of ICT- and Internet use. We aim to get a better understanding of these disparities. What are the triggers for growth of an ICT-cluster? How does it affect the growth of the region - and vice versa? Which parameters constitute the critical factors for a region's success - or failure? What do the development roadmaps look like? Are they market-driven or government-driven, or rather based on new forms of partnership? How about the impact of the European and national institutional frameworks? Does policy matter? The quantitative part of the analysis is based on statistical data. It describes the size, composition and growth patterns of the ICT sectors over the 1990's. The paper reveals some interesting findings relative to the size, the location and the national hierarchy of urban regions themselves. This is followed by an in-depth analyses of qualitative differences between the ICT-clusters in the urban regions. This part of the paper is based on available data, existing documents and approx. 20 interviews in each region. The successful regions witnessed a more rapid diffusion of IST goods and services throughout their economies, appeared to be better equipped to exploit some of the new digital growth opportunities, adapted existing "old" economic activities to the new e-business environment and more generally learnt more from the new opportunities to exploit those advantages across the European Union. Furthermore, the national policy makers appeared to be more aware of the increasingly limited degrees of freedom of their national policy actions, liberalising more rapidly their national telecommunications monopolies.


PURPOSE
The neurological signs and symptoms in 107 pregnant women with eclampsia in the last five years at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Yuzuncu Yil University School of Medicine are presented.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The medical records of 107 pregnant women with eclampsia in the Clinic of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Yuzuncu Yil University consulted with neurology clinic from September 2005 to December 2010, were evaluated.

RESULTS
The most common symptoms of the patients were seizure, headache, and seeing spots of light. Although neurologic examination was normal in 81 patients, 26 had pathological signs. The most common neurologic pathologic signs determined were alterations in consciousness.

CONCLUSION
In eclamptic patients, brain scanning might reveal pathological results in spite of normal neurological examination. With neurological examination and brain scanning, it may be possible to diagnose and treat severe complications that may otherwise result in maternal mortality.


Why, even in the same high-crime neighborhoods, do robbery, drug dealing, and assault occur much more frequently on some blocks than on others? One popular theory is that a weak sense of community among neighbors can create conditions more hospitable for criminals, and another proposes that neighborhood disorder - such as broken windows and boarded-up buildings - makes crime more likely. But in his innovative new study, Peter K. B. St. Jean argues that we cannot fully understand the impact of these factors without considering that, because urban space is unevenly developed, different kinds of crimes occur most often in locations that offer their perpetrators specific advantages. Drawing on Chicago Police Department statistics and extensive interviews with both law-abiding citizens and criminals in one of the city's highest-crime areas, St. Jean demonstrates that drug dealers and robbers, for example, are primarily attracted to locations with businesses like liquor stores, fast food restaurants, and check-cashing outlets. By accounting for these important factors of spatial positioning, he expands upon previous research to provide the most comprehensive explanation available of why crime occurs where it does.


There is a serious imbalance between the sclerosis of the political system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the automatic adoption of WTO Appellate Body judicial reports. The question is whether the WTO Appellate Body will recognize bilateral political agreements (such as under Free Trade Agreements, FTAs) that modify WTO obligations between two parties. In addressing this question, the Appellate Body decision in Peru-Additional Duty on Imports of Certain Agricultural Products is important. The decision addressed the availability of defenses under FTAs in WTO disputes, as well as under public international law generally. After critically assessing the decision, we set forth a series of judicial and political choices for addressing the interaction of WTO and FTA rules going forward. In particular, we contend that clear modifications of WTO commitments under an FTA should be recognized by WTO panels as a defense, but subject to the FTA itself complying with WTO requirements under GATT Article XXIV. The case is important not only for trade specialists, but generally for policymakers and scholars of global governance in a world of fragmented international treaties.


Native speakers of English show definite and consistent preferences for certain readings of syntactically ambiguous sentences. A user of a natural-language-processing system would naturally expect it to reflect the same preferences. Thus, such systems must model in some way the linguistic performance as well as the linguistic competence of the native speaker. We have developed a parsing algorithm--a variant of the LALR(I) shift-reduce algorithm--that models the preference behavior of native speakers for a range of syntactic preference phenomena reported in the psycholinguistic literature, including the recent data on lexical preferences. The algorithm yields the preferred parse deterministically, without building multiple parse trees and choosing among them. As a side effect, it displays appropriate behavior in processing the much discussed garden-path sentences. The parsing algorithm has been implemented and has confirmed the feasibility of our approach to the modeling of these phenomena.