The paper introduces the use of phase-state modelling as a means of estimating expected benefits or losses when dealing with decision processes under uncertainty of future events. For this reason the phase-space approach to time series, which generally aims at forecasting the expected value of a future event, is here also used to assess the forecasting uncertainty. Under the assumption of local stationarity the ensemble of generated future trajectories can be used to estimate a probability density that represents the a priori uncertainty of forecasts conditional on the latest measurements. This a priori density can then be used directly in the optimisation schemes if no additional information is available, or after deriving an a posteriori distribution in the Bayesian sense, by combining it with forecasts from deterministic models, here taken as noise-corrupted 'pseudo-measurements' of future events. Examples of application are given in the case of the Lake Como real-time management system as well as in the case of rainfall ensemble forecasts on the River Reno.


With the recent discovery of in-plane chemically ordered MAX phases (i-MAX) of the general formula ()2AC comes addition of non-traditional MAX phase elements. In the present study, we use density functional theory calculations to investigate the electronic structure, bonding nature, and mechanical properties of the novel (W2/3Sc1/3)2AlC and (W2/3Y1/3)2AlC i-MAX phases. From analysis of the electronic structure and projected crystal orbital Hamilton populations, we show that the metallic i-MAX phases have significant hybridization between W and C, as well as Sc(Y) and C states, indicative of strong covalent bonding. Substitution of Sc for Y (M2) leads to reduced bonding strength for W–C and Al–Al interactions while M2–C and M2–Al interactions are strengthened. We also compare the Voigt–Reuss–Hill bulk, shear, and Young's moduli along the series of M1  =  Cr, Mo, and W, and relate these trends to the bonding interactions. Furthermore, we find overall larger moduli for Sc-based i-MAX phases.


Humanity's ability to produce enough food is mostly due to adoption of new methods and technologies by the agricultural industries as they became available. New information, communication and high speed processing and precision agriculture technologies have the potential to transform the agricultural industry. These technologies incorporate radio-frequency and microwave radiation into their systems. This book presents an overview of how these technologies are being used in agricultural systems. The main purpose of the book is to provide a glimpse of what is possible and encourage practitioners in the engineering and agricultural industries to explore how radio-frequency and microwave systems might further enhance the agricultural industry. The authors have extensive experience in agricultural and microwave engineering, instrumentation and communication systems.


Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a promising algorithm for near-term quantum machines. It can be used to estimate the ground state energy of a molecule by performing separate measurements of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(N^4)$</tex-math></inline-formula> terms. This quartic scaling appears to be a significant obstacle to practical applications. However, we note that it empirically reduces to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(N^3)$</tex-math></inline-formula> when we partition the terms into linear-sized commuting families that can be measured simultaneously. We confirm these empirical observations by studying the MIN-COMMUTING-PARTITION problem at the level of the fermionic Hamiltonian and its encoding into qubits. Moreover, we provide a fast, precomputable procedure for creating linearly sized commuting partitions by solving a round-robin scheduling problem via flow networks. In addition, we demonstrate how to construct the quantum circuits necessary for simultaneous measurement, and we discuss the statistical implication of simultaneous measurement. Our results are experimentally validated by a ground state estimation of deuteron with low shot budget on a 20-qubit IBM machine.


Translation seems to be a simple process: a translator with a strong command of two languages renders a phrase from Language A into Language B for the purpose of wider communication. Given her intimacy with both languages, it should be a relatively easy task to transport meaning from one language to another. Yet a superficial transformation of language is not enough to create a successful translation; rather, a translator must seek to grasp and communicate the literary heart of a piece, as well as convert the complexities of its linguistic skeleton. I explored translation's double nature by translating a French novel, La femme patiente, into English. After examining the work from a literary point of view, it was apparent that the author, Alain Gagnol, had constructed a prose style meant to underline the unique qualities of his protagonist. Clearly, it was my duty as a translator to maintain Gagnol's French style in the English in order to preserve its literary integrity. But how? One question in particular that appeared repeatedly addresses a translator's fidelity to the source text. How far may a translator stray from the original text while remaining "faithful"? How does maintaining the original author's literary style contribute to fidelity? The other side of translation is a linguistic component, which includes a question of how to find adequate equivalents for seemingly untranslatable words and phrases. If a concept exists and can be expressed effectively in one language, but not in another, how does the translator adapt? It is clear that deep intimacy with the target language and its culture is necessary for a translator in order for her work to be successful.


In this study, modelling of hydrogen production process in microreactors by methanol-steam reforming reaction is investigated. The catalytic reaction of methanol-steam reforming producing hydrogen is simulated considering a 3D geometry for microreactor. To calculate diffusion among species, mixture average correlations are compared to Stephan-Maxwell equations. Reactions occurring inside the microreactor include reforming of methanol with steam, methanol decomposition and a reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The main objectives of this study are prediction of temperature profile along the microreactor using either mixture average method or Stephan-Maxwell one, Comparison between the present predictions and some existing experimental data. Simulation results indicate that Stephan-Maxwell method conforms more suitably to experimental results. The difference is more at lower feed flow rates since when the flow rate increases, mass transfer mechanism changes from diffusion to convection which in turn reduces the difference.


Purpose: To assess the risk of vaccine-associated uveitis (VAU) following SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and evaluate uveitis onset interval and clinical presentations in the patients. Design: A retrospective study from December 11, 2020, to May 9, 2022, using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Participants: Patients diagnosed with VAU following administration of BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech), mRNA-1273 (Moderna), and Ad26.COV2.S (Janssen) vaccine, worldwide. Methods: A descriptive analysis of the demographics, clinical history and presentation was performed. We evaluated the correlation between the three vaccines and continuous and categorical variables. A post-hoc analysis was performed between uveitis onset-interval after vaccination, and age, dose, and vaccine type. Finally, a 30-day risk analysis for VAU onset post-vaccination was performed. ratio (p<0.0001). The post-hoc analysis revealed a significantly shorter interval of onset for the BNT162b2 compared to the mRNA 1273 vaccine (p<0.0001) and the first dose compared to the second dose (p=0.0021). The 30-day risk analysis showed a significant difference between the three vaccines (p<0.0001). Conclusions: The low crude reporting rate and observed-expected ratio suggests a low safety concern for VAU. This study provides insights into possible temporal association between reported VAU events and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, however further investigations are required to delineate the associated immunological mechanisms.


A new technique has been developed to produce plasmas with improved confinement relative to the H98,y2 scaling law (ITER Physics Expert Groups on Confinement and Transport and Confinement Modelling and Database ITER Physics Basics Editors and ITER EDA 1999 Nucl. Fusion 39 2175) on the JET tokamak. In the mid-size tokamaks ASDEX upgrade and DIII-D heating during the current formation is used to produce a flat q-profile with a minimum close to 1. On JET this technique leads to q-profiles with similar minimum q but opposite to the other tokamaks not to an improved confinement state. By changing the method utilizing a faster current ramp with temporary higher current than in the flattop (current overshoot) plasmas with improved confinement (H98,y2 = 1.35) and good stability (βN ≈ 3) have been produced and extended to many confinement times only limited by technical constraints. The increase in H98,y2-factor is stronger with more heating power as can be seen in a power scan. The q-profile development during the high power phase in JET is reproduced by current diffusion calculated by TRANSP and CRONOS. Therefore the modifications produced by the current overshoot disappear quickly from the edge but the confinement improvement lasts longer, in some cases up to the end of the heating phase.


Flow-of-funds accounting permit to monitor the financial sector in terms of flows and stocks and to analyze its relationship with the real sector. These show inter-sectoral financial flows, capture balance sheet positions and all financial transactions by instrument, type and economic sector. In this paper we explain the methodology for the construction of flow-of-funds accounts and we exemplify their use for two source cases of study: the Mexican Crisis (1994-1995) and the Asian Crisis (1997-1998). Using similar sources of data, the same methodology and approach for the construction of all the flow-of-funds matrices allow comparisons among countries relating to the impact, manifestations of these crisis episodes and policy reactions to confront their effects. The use of homogeneous data and methodology also permits to trace contagion effects between countries.


In his famous Manifesto of 1890, Mormon church president Wilford Woodruff called for an end to the more than fifty-year practice of polygamy. Fifteen years later, two men were dramatically expelled from the Quorum of Twelve Apostles for having taken post-Manifesto plural wives and encouraged the step by others. Evidence reveals, however, that hundreds of Mormons (including several apostles) were given approval to enter such relationships after they supposedly were banned. Why would Mormon leaders endanger agreements allowing Utah to become a state and risk their church's reputation by engaging in such activities--all the while denying the fact to the world? This book seeks to find the answer through a review of the Mormon polygamous experience from its beginnings. In the course of national debate over polygamy, Americans generally were unbending in their allegiance to monogamy. Solemn Covenant provides the most careful examination ever undertaken of Mormon theological, social, and biological defenses of the principle. Although polygamy was never a way of life for the majority of Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century, Carmon Hardy contends that plural marriage enjoyed a more important place in the Saints' restorationist vision than most historians have allowed. Many Mormons considered polygamy a prescription for health, an antidote for immorality, and a key to better government. Despite intense pressure from the nation to end the experiment, because of their belief in its importance and gifts, polygamy endured as an approved arrangement among church members well into the twentieth century. Hardy demonstrates how Woodruff's Manifesto of 1890 evolved from a tactic to preservepolygamy into a revelation now used to prohibit it. Solemn Covenant examines the halting passage followed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it transformed itself into one of America's most vigilant champions of the monogamous way.


In Cinema II Deleuze situates the beginnings of what he calls the cinema of "the time-image" in post World War II European cinema, specifically in Italian neo-realism. This is a cinema of duration, whether psychological duration (emphasizing the characters' inability to act) or the duration of things (the characters' failure to act allows things and events to express themselves independently of the characters' subjective interpretation of them). Time is either affective (psychological) or existential (it reveals the being of things by drawing attention to their sheer presence). While the cinema of the time-image can be described as a cinema of reflection or ambience, the majority of the films made over the last few decades are no longer preoccupied with portraying the failure of action or of comprehension (a failure Deleuze attributes to the traumatic war experience), nor do they attempt to remain purely denotative (foregrounding the sheer existence of things, their absurdity). Time in contemporary cinema is not a means to an end but has become the end itself. The new role of the flashback illustrates this trend well. The flashback is most commonly used as a technique for imparting information to the audience about a character's motivation or his/her past; however, in many contemporary films it encompasses the entire film. Its function now is to increase the level of ambiguity in the film, to conflate the present with the past, the real with the unreal. Time is no longer that through which things and people reveal themselves (time as change) but rather the source of a confusion of the real with the imaginary, whether this confusion results from the malfunctioning of memory, or from a discrepancy between the point of view within the story and the point of view from which the story is told, or from an incongruity between different levels of knowledge or self-consciousness within one character or among characters. Errol Morris' documentary A Brief History of Time, based on the book by Stephen Hawking, follows the attempts of Hawking and his colleagues to explain the origin of the universe. Towards the end of the film, the hypothesis is put forward that the universe should not be conceived as originating from a singular point since the laws of physics break down when one tries to explain the universe in terms of singularity. The concept of imaginary time is introduced as a means of avoiding the problem of singularity. In this new model, the universe is smooth and self-contained (visually the model of the universe existing in imaginary time is represented by an elliptical form with no edge, no boundary, no beginning). This model excludes any notion of a creation event. Not only is the universe not created by God, but it is equally incorrect to say that it is created from nothing: there is no "nothing" in the midst of which the universe suddenly springs forth. As one of Hawking's colleagues remarks, in this model the use of verb tenses is no longer appropriate. The theory of imaginary time, or of an infinite universe, bears a striking resemblance to Henri Bergson's idea of pure memory developed in Matter and Memory (1896). Bergson envisions our mental life, and the universe as well, as having no beginning and, instead, infinitely stretched out 'towards' or 'into' pure memory. According to Bergson, deja vu is a privileged experience insofar as it reveals the true nature of our mental life: its infinity, or, what amounts to the same, the infinity of time. In deja vu we remember something that we cannot attribute to our own past, but which seems to come from some anonymous, impersonal past. Since we are too busy meeting the demands of the present, we suppress those memories that are not immediately relevant to our present. If it were not for this narrowing down of our mental life, we would be constantly experiencing deja vii, i.e., reliving an impersonal past. Bergson believes that everything has already happened an infinite number of times and that if we were able to expand our mental life to its true proportions, we would see that time is infinite, that our lives have been repeating themselves infinitely, without beginning or end, and that it is namely because of this infinite repetition that we exist at all. …


The paper provides a discussion of panel data and productivity analysis in applied economic modeling. We discuss a variety of modeling scenarios and justifications for them based on classical economic theory and on more recent advances in production modeling, which formulate methods to decompose productivity growth based on a Solow-type residual (Solow, 1957) into innovation and catch-up. Methods to combine the various estimates based on different empirical specifications that model and estimate productivity growth are then discussed and these provide the econometric approaches we use to estimate world productivity growth. We also provide a counterfactual analysis of a scenario in which the rise in income inequality since the 1970's in the US is tempered by distributing productivity growth to wage compensation growth as had been the case during the post-WWII years to the early 1970's.


Introduction: Due to the complexity of facial asymmetry, the diagnosis of different aspects of asymmetry via conventional radiographs is not precise. In this study, we investigated findings of facial asymmetry by using cone- beam computed tomography (CBCT) images. Materials and Methods: In this descriptive study, we evaluated CBCT fi ndings of 18 pa ents i.e. a group of 14 females and 4 males having a mean age of 22.7 years who referred to a maxillofacial radiology clinic due to facial asymmetry from 2010 to 2011. Findings of asymmetry were investigated using axial, coronal and sagittal views. Results: As detected in axial view, 9 of 18 p aents had yaw in the maxilla. Approximately 14 and 11 pa ents had yaw in the mandible and zygoma respectively. Differences were observed between the medio-lateral dimensions of the condylar heads in 7 pa ents. We also detected the cervical spine devia on in 9 cases. Moreover, a difference in the antero-posterior position of the glenoid fossa in 10 pa ents was observed. In coronal view, "roll" i.e "cant" in the maxilla, mandible and orbital cavi es was found in 14, 12 and 1 patient respectively. Differences in the condylar neck height in 9 pa ents and in the level of the glenoid fossa in 11 pa ents were observed. Conclusion: CBCT is effective in evaluating the details of asymmetry and its effects on facial structures. In addition, three-dimensional approaches for the analysis of asymmetry transform it from a simple and predictable phenomenon into an incredibly complicated process. Pursuing orthodontic treatment plan without considering these complexities and details is not successful.


With global honeybee populations declining there is a concern for the reproduction of plants that rely on biotic pollination, most notably food crops. The purpose of this study was to monitor the behavior and population size of bumblebees (Bombus spp.) and European honeybees (Apis mellifera) on Highbush Blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) farms in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. We evaluated the effects of farm size and bloom time on the pollination efficiency of each species. To make our assessments, we observed their floral handling rates, defined as the number of flowers visited per minute by a single bee, and took population samples, by walking systematically-sampled transects on each farm. Floral handling rate for bumblebees and honeybees was proportional across our two primary variables, with honeybees pollinating an average of 3.5 flowers per minute and bumblebees pollinating 11.2 flowers per minute. Across all farms, honeybees had a total of 1746 counts while bumblebees had only 300, providing a ratio of 5.8:1. Although honeybees were more abundant than bumblebees, there was only an apparent relationship between population counts and bloom time. Data from floral handling rates and abundance counts during mid bloom showed honeybees were three times more abundant than bumblebees, however, bumblebees were more effective pollinators, as measured by bee efficiency rate. Overall, the study indicated the essential role of bumblebees in the pollination of Highbush Blueberry plants.


Secreted semaphorins act as guidance cues in the developing nervous system and may have additional functions in mature neurons. How semaphorins are transported and secreted by neurons is poorly understood. We find that endogenous semaphorin 3A (Sema3A) displays a punctate distribution in axons and dendrites of cultured cortical neurons. GFP–Sema3A shows a similar distribution and co‐localizes with secretory vesicle cargo proteins. Live‐cell imaging reveals highly dynamic trafficking of GFP–Sema3A vesicles with distinct properties in axons and dendrites regarding directionality, velocity, mobility and pausing time. In axons, most GFP–Sema3A vesicles move fast without interruption, almost exclusively in the anterograde direction, while in dendrites many GFP–Sema3A vesicles are stationary and move equally frequent in both directions. Disruption of microtubules, but not of actin filaments, significantly impairs GFP–Sema3A transport. Interestingly, depolarization induces a reversible arrest of axonal transport of GFP–Sema3A vesicles but has little effect on dendritic transport. Conversely, action potential blockade using tetrodotoxin (TTX) accelerates axonal transport, but not dendritic transport. These data indicate that axons and dendrites regulate trafficking of Sema3A and probably other secretory vesicles in distinct ways, with axons specializing in fast, uninterrupted, anterograde transport. Furthermore, neuronal activity regulates secretory vesicle trafficking in axons by a depolarization‐evoked trafficking arrest.


Background The debate about the value of biomedical publications led to recommendations for improving reporting quality. It is unclear to what extent these recommendations have been endorsed by journals. We analyzed whether specific recommendations were included in author instructions, which journal characteristics were associated with their endorsement, how endorsement of the domains changed and whether endorsement was associated with change of impact factor between 2010 and 2015. Methods We considered two study samples consisting of "Hematology" and "Oncology" journals of the Journal Citation Report 2008 and 2014, respectively. We extracted information regarding endorsement of the (1) recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, of (2) reporting guidelines, (3) requirement for trial registration and (4) disclosure of conflicts of interest. Data extraction was done by reading the author instructions before conducting a text search with keywords. We calculated a global generalized linear mixed effects model for endorsement of each of the four domains followed by separate multivariable logistic regression models and a longitudinal analysis. We defined endorsement as the author instructions saying that they approve the use of the recommendations. Results In 2015, the ICMJE recommendations were mentioned in author instructions of 156 journals (67.5%). CONSORT was referred to by 77 journals (33.3%); MOOSE, PRISMA, STARD and STROBE were referred to by less than 15% of journals. There were 99 journals (42.9%) that recommended or required trial registration, 211 (91.3%) required authors to disclose conflicts of interest. Journal impact factor, journal start year and geographical region were positively associated with endorsement of any of the four domains. The overall endorsement of all domains increased between 2010 and 2015. The endorsement of any domain in 2010 seemed to be associated with an increased impact factor in 2014. Conclusion Hematology and oncology journals endorse major recommendations to various degrees. Endorsement is increasing slowly over time and might be positively associated with the journals' impact factor.


This talk will present wearable sensor research carried within CLARITY - Centre for Sensor Web Technologies. The aim of CLARITY is to bridge the molecular and digital worlds. This interdisciplinary research encompasses all stages of development - from novel materials and sensor research right through to end user applications. The research theme is to "Bring information to life" - there is much information that can be harvested about our bodies and the environment we move through using sensor technology, the important question is what to do with all the information? It is vital to develop interactive systems that are accessible and straightforward to use. Two case studies will be presented of systems for use in hospital wards and home settings – a sensor glove for stroke rehabilitation and a breathing feedback system for respiratory rehabilitation and stress management. Another area of research involving smart fabrics for healthcare is on-body chemical analysis. This is a new and challenging concept in the field of smart fabrics and interactive textiles. This work commenced as part of the EU BIOTEX project, and in this paper we present lessons learnt and current developments and findings.

Sensor glove
Carbon-loaded elastomer(CE) sensors have piezo-resitive properties which can be used to detect hand movements. The CE sensors are integrated into an oedema glove which is often worn by stroke patients to reduce swelling in the hand. The glove is used to assess the patient's performance by scoring the movements based on the Fugel-Meyer Assessment system which assesses various motor functions (0 = cannot perform; 1 = performs partially; 2 = performs fully). This method of garment-based sensed information/personalised user feedback would allow an individual to be assessed from home on a continual basis under remote supervision by a trained physical therapist.
Breathing feedback
A vest integrating CE stretch sensors has been developed to measure breathing patterns. Patients with respiratory illnesses often tend to take shallow short breaths which exacerbates chest muscle weakness, and associated reduced oxygen circulation, shortness of breath and fatigue. Proper breathing exercises can help to reduce these symptoms as well as strengthen muscles, improve posture and enhance mental attitude. This paper presents a wearable system which monitors breathing technique and provides straightforward feedback to the user through a graphical interface. An avatar displayed on the screen encourages diaphragmatic breathing while a real-time representation of the user's breathing technique is also displayed. The user's goal is to perform deep diaphragmatic breathing in synchronization with the avatar.
Real-time sweat analysis
Real-time analysis of sweat loss is an exciting prospect for the sports industry. Replacing the fluids and electrolytes lost during exercise is vital to ensure adequate hydration which affects health and performance. We have developed a wearable device to provide immediate feedback to the user regarding the pH level of their sweat. An array of pH indicators are used to create a coloured barcode onto thin layers of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA). The barcode sensor is flexible and can adapt to the contours of the body easily. It is integrated into a sweat band to be placed on different body regions e.g. forearm, wrist or forehead. We have also developed a wearable microfluidic device to sample and analyse small quantities of sweat.


Educating medical students and other health professionals in training on the importance of healthy lifestyles for prevention and treatment of disease is essential to transforming healthcare. At the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville (USC SOM Greenville), we are incorporating the 'Exercise is Medicine' Knowledge, Skills and Abilities into all 4 years of the undergraduate medical curriculum to inform future physicians on the medical benefits of exercise and physical activity. As a partner with the Greenville Health System (GHS), USC SOM Greenville is striving to transform healthcare for the benefit of the people and communities it serves by healing compassionately, teaching innovatively and improving constantly. In addition, USC SOM Greenville and GHS are fostering relationships with the local YMCAs to improve healthcare delivery in upstate South Carolina using the 'Exercise is Medicine' solution. The overarching goal is to demonstrate how physician-counselling and referrals for physical activity and exercise play a well-documented role in primary and secondary prevention for reducing morbidity and mortality from non-communicable chronic diseases. In partnership with the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine (ILM) at Harvard Medical School, USC SOM Greenville also strives to spearhead a ripple effect in exercise curriculum by modelling for other medical school leaders throughout the country on how to adopt similar changes in curriculum and training for medical school students. Physician education regarding the benefits of exercise is vital for transforming healthcare.

Exercise counselling as part of healthcare delivery would have numerous evidence-based benefits for prevention and treatment of multiple non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs) including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and various forms of cancer.1–4 In addition, physician-based exercise counselling likely would have a major impact on reducing associated healthcare costs.5 Unfortunately, the majority of physicians, traditionally trained to manage disease and injury, have not been educated in the medical, …


'Constantine hardly deserves the title of Great which posterity has given him, either by his character or by his abilities. He was highly susceptible to flattery, and fell completely under the influence of any dominating personality who happened to be at his side ...Still less does Constantine deserve the title of saint, which the Eastern Church has bestowed upon him. He was, it is true, according to his lights, a good man on the whole, though his political murders - particularly that of Licinius - shocked even contemporary opinion, and his execution of his wife and son was felt by many to be an inexpiable stain on his character...To the other title which the Orthodox Church has bestowed upon him, "the Peer of the Apostles," he has a better claim, for his career profoundly influenced the history of the Church and the future of Christianity ...Constantine had no doubts about his imperial duty. It was his task to secure God's favour on the empire by securing, by force if necessary, that his subjects worshipped God in a manner pleasing to Him.' Originally published by Macmillan, 1948.


Perovskite based materials have great potentials for various energy applications and the search for new materials for uses in SOFCs has largely been concentrated to this class of compounds. In this search, we have studied perovskite phases in the system La2Co1+z(Ti1-xMgx)1-zO6, with 0 x 0.9 and z = 0.0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6. Crystal structures were characterized by XRD and, for selected compositions, also by NPD and SAED. They exhibit with increasing x, as well as increasing z, a progressive increase in symmetry from monoclinic to orthorhombic to rhombohedral. The main focus in this work has been on the investigation of structure-property relations for compositions with 0.0 x 0.5 and z = 0. The nominal oxidation state of Co increases for these with increasing x, from Co2+ for x = 0 to Co3+ for x = 0.5. Magnetic measurements and XANES studies showed that the average spin state of Co changes linearly with increasing x, up to x = 0.5, in accordance with varying proportions of Co with two fixed oxidation states, i.e. Co2+ and Co3+. The data suggests that the Co3+ ions have an IS spin state or a mixture of LS and HS spin states for all compositions with nominally only Co2+ and Co3+ ions, possibly with the exception of the composition with x = 0.1, 0.2 and z = 0, for which the data indicate that the spin state might be HS. The XANES data indicate furthermore that for the perovskite phases with z = 0 and x > 0.5, which in the absence of O atom vacancies contain formally Co4+, the highest oxidation state of Co is Co3+, implying that the substitution of Ti4+ by Mg2+ for x ³ 0.5 effects an oxidation of O2- ions rather than an oxidation of Co3+ ions. The thermal expansion was found to increase nearly linearly with increasing oxidation state of Co. This agrees well with findings in previous studies and is attributable to an increase in the ionic radius of Co3+ ions with increasing temperature, due to a thermal excitation from a LS to IS or LS/HS spin states. High temperature electronic conductivity measurements indicate that the electronic conductivity increases with an increase of both relative and absolute amount of Co3+. The latter can be attributed to an increase in the number of Co-O-Co connections. Additional high temperature magnetic measurements for selected samples, whose susceptibilities did not follow a Curie law behaviour up to room temperature, showed effective magnetic moments that did approach plateaus even at high temperatures (900 K). Interpretations of these data are, however, hindered by the samples losing oxygen during the applied heating-cooling cycle. The present study has shown that the investigated system is suitable for further studies, of more fundamental character, which could provide further insight of the structure-property relationships that depend on the oxidation state of Co.


Abstract. One-second-resolution zenith radiance measurements from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program's new shortwave spectrometer (SWS) provide a unique opportunity to analyze the transition zone between cloudy and cloud-free air, which has considerable bearing on the aerosol indirect effect. In the transition zone, we find a remarkable linear relationship between the sum and difference of radiances at 870 and 1640 nm wavelengths. The intercept of the relationship is determined primarily by aerosol properties, and the slope by cloud properties. We then show that this linearity can be predicted from simple theoretical considerations and furthermore that it supports the hypothesis of inhomogeneous mixing, whereby optical depth increases as a cloud is approached but the effective drop size remains unchanged.


We consider the use of entropy maximization methods as a tool to generate fading models for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) spatially correlated flat-fading channels. We focus in particular on various assumptions about the degree of knowledge on the full covariance matrix of the channel (namely in the power constraint, rank constraint, and average constraint case). We show that this method can provide closed-form probability density functions in all cases. In a second part, we analyze the statistical properties of the singular values of the resulting fading channel. In general, they are more spread out that in the classical Gaussian i.i.d. case, which incurs less optimistic ergodic capacity figures.


The reduction of structure sizes in microcontollers, environmental conditions or low supply voltages increase the susceptibility of embedded systems to soft errors. As a result, the employment of fault-detection and fault-tolerance measures is becoming a mandatory task even for moderately critical applications. Accordingly, software-based techniques have recently gained in popularity, and a multitude of approaches that differ in the number and frequency of tolerated errors as well as their associated overhead have been proposed. Using type-safe programming languages to isolate critical software components is very popular among those techniques. An automated application of fault-detection and fault-tolerance measures based on the type system of the programming language and static code analyses is possible. It facilitates an easy evaluation of the protection characteristics and costs, as well as the migration of software to new hardware platforms with different failure rates. Transient faults, however, are not bound to the application code secured by the type system, but can also affect the correctness of the type system itself. Thereby, the type system might lose its ability to isolate critical components. As a consequence, it is essential to also protect the type system itself against soft errors. In this paper, we show how soft errors can affect the integrity of the type system. Furthermore, we provide means to secure it against these faults, thus preserving its isolating character. These measures can be applied selectively to achieve a suitable tradeoff between level of protection and resource consumption.


In this paper, the relationship between FDI and foreign trade is investigated by symmetric; Sims (1972), Dolado-LA¼tkepohl (1996), Hacker-Hatemi (2006) and asymmetric; Hatemi-J (2012) causality analysis after the liberalization period 1983-2014 for the Turkish economy. The results of the empirical analysis show that unidirectional positive and statistically significant causality is going from total (goods and services) and only goods export, import and foreign trade (total import and export) to FDI. The conclusion is that findings point out to the existence of complementary relationship between the variables. Consequently, these results support that the government should encourage foreign trade to increase FDI inflows in Turkey.


Relationships between forest cover and streamflow have been studied worldwide, but only a few studies have examined how gradual changes in forest structure and species composition due to logging and climate change affect watershed water yield (Q) and flow regimes. In this study, we analyzed long-term (45 years) hydrologic, climate and forest dynamics data from the subboreal Tahe watershed in northeastern China. Our purpose was to evaluate the effects of forest logging and regeneration on changes in forest biomass and species and to quantify the subsequent impact on mean annual streamflow and flow regime under a changing climate. The study watershed was dominated by old-growth larch (Larix gmelinii Rupr.) during the 1970s, but gradually transformed into young deciduous larch mixed with deciduous broad-leaved birch (Betula platyphylla Sukaczev) during the 2010s. During the same period, the watershed experienced climate change with a significant increase in air temperature of 0.028 ℃/year. We applied eight sensitivity-based techniques to separate the effects of climate change on water yield from those due to forest changes. We used flow duration curves (FDCs) to characterize flow regimes by dividing the study into four key periods based on the proportional change of larch and birch trees. We found that the mean annual streamflow decreased by 10 mm (−16 mm attributed to forest change and +6 mm to climate change) between the 1984–1994 period and the 2006–2016 period when the proportion of birch increased by 20% with a similar total forest volume in the later period. The mean annual streamflow increased from 216 mm to 270 mm (+35.5 mm due to forest change vs +17.7 mm due to climate change) when forest volume decreased by 18.7% (17 m3/ha) between the 1970s and 1984–1994. Water yield changed only slightly (3.5 mm) when forest volume increased by 8.7% (6 m3/ha) from 2000 to 2011. In addition, the magnitude of high flow and low flow increased following deforestation and a shift in species composition from a period (1984–1994) with 70% larch with 30% birch to a later period (2006–2016) with 50% larch with 50% birch. Both high flow and low flow decreased coinciding with a reforestation period (2006–2016). Our results highlight complex interactions among climate, forest structure, total biomass, and plant diversity (trees species composition) in influencing watershed hydrology. Further study is needed to examine the effects of ecohydrological processes such as evapotranspiration in larch and birch forests on hydrologic changes across multiple scales.


I uncover an economic source of exposure to global risk that drives international asset prices. Countries which are more central in the global trade network have lower interest rates and currency risk premia. As a result, an investment strategy that is long in currencies of peripheral countries and short in currencies of central countries explains unconditional carry trade returns. To explain these findings, I present a general equilibrium model where central countries' consumption growth is more exposed to global consumption growth shocks. This causes the currencies of central countries to appreciate in bad times, resulting in lower interest rates and currency risk premia. In the data, central countries' consumption growth is more correlated with world consumption growth than peripheral countries', further validating the proposed mechanism.


Abstract. The cooling trend of the Neogene resulted in the diachronous development of glacial conditions, southern high latitudes glaciating before northern. This cooling culminated in the early Pleistocene (2.54 Ma) onset of major glaciation, during which large areas of high latitude land and sea in both hemispheres were periodically blanketed with ice. However, this onset and its impact at low latitude abyssal depths are elusive. This paper examines the abyssal benthic foraminiferal commun ity in the Atlantic Ocean near the Northern Equatorial Countercurrent, in ODP Hole 926A (Ceara Rise), off the River Amazon. Using an assemblage turnover index (ATI), a related conditioned-on-boundary index (CoBI) and SHE analysis, we show how a change in mean assemblage turnover coincides with the early Pleistocene onset of northern hemisphere major glaciation. The community comprises primarily phytodetritivores (Alabaminenella weddellensis, Epistominella exigua and Globocassidulina subglobosa), the proportional abundances of which differ before and after 2.54 Ma. Coupled with changes in the abundances of Nuttallides umbonifera, Bulimina spp. and Uvigerina spp., alterations in the abundances of the phytodetritivores after 2.54 Ma show that the adjustment in biotic turnover at depth resulted from enhanced organic carbon flux from sea surface water. This was probably related to forced southward repositioning of the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) by the growth of the northern hemisphere ice caps. This was coupled with an increase in bottom current velocity, as shown by a change in the abundance of Cibicidoides wuellerstorfi.


Hydrology is the primary forcing function in wetlands. Therefore, alterations to hydrology, which can result from either natural or anthropogenic causes, can have dramatic effects on wetland structure and function. Structural marsh management, one type of anthropogenic alteration, employs levees and water control structures to reduce or reverse wetland loss and enhance the productivity of natural renewable resources. Its use is becoming increasingly popular in southern Louisiana as a solution to the problem of marsh deterioration despite the fact that very little comprehensive data is available on the effectiveness of this practice. Associated with the use of structural marsh management is the potential problem posed by hurricanes which can deposit large volumes of saline water inside management areas which are then retained by the encompassing levees. The purpose of this dissertation was two-fold: first, to determine if structural marsh management improved primary productivity by reducing salinities and providing water level control; and second, to determine what factors governed the ability of an impounded freshwater marsh to recover from storm-induced exposure to high salinity waters. In order to address the first goal, three pairs of managed and unmanaged marshes were monitored for one growing season during a drawdown year. Marsh pairs were located in the Fina LaTerre Mitigation Bank site, at Rockefeller Refuge, and at Avoca Island, Louisiana. Comparison of the three marsh pairs illustrated that while structural marsh management can effectively accomplish the goals ascribed to it, its use is not uniformly effective in improving soil and water level conditions and increasing primary productivity. It appears that the effectiveness of structural marsh management depends on location, design, marsh type, and sophistication of the plan used. The second goal was accomplished by conducting a greenhouse experiment using mesocosms containing sods of intact freshwater marsh soil and vegetation. The mesocosms were exposed to a simulated saltwater intrusion event followed by establishment of a variety of recovery-phase salinity and water level conditions. Higher salinities during recovery exerted a strong influence on the rate and degree of vegetation recovery resulting in less regrowth and diminished species richness. This effect was exacerbated by flooding.


Industrial regulations are typically designed with a particular policy objective and set of firms in mind. When input-output linkages connect firms across sectors, such "piecemeal" regulations may worsen externalities elsewhere in the economy. Using daily administrative and survey data, we show that in Peru's industrial fishing sector, the world's largest, air pollution from downstream (fishmeal) manufacturing plants caused 55,000 additional respiratory hospital admissions per year as a consequence of the introduction of individual property rights (over fish) upstream. The upstream regulatory change removed suppliers' incentive to "race" for the resource and enabled market share to move from inefficient to efficient downstream firms. As a result, the reform spread downstream production out across time, as predicted by a conceptual framework of vertically connected sectors. We show evidence consistent with the hypothesis that longer periods of moderate air polluting production can be worse for health than concentrating a similar amount of production in shorter periods. Our findings demonstrate the risks of piecemeal regulatory design in interlinked economies.


The basic idea of augmented reality is to augment the view of a user or camera with virtual objects. Real-time camera tracking is an enabling technology for augmented reality. Besides the high estimation precision that is needed to allow for pixel accurate augmentations, mobile augmented reality applications impose further requirements on the tracking method. One important aspect is robustness in the presence of quick and erratic camera motions, which are typical for a handheld or head-mounted camera. This thesis investigates robustness and accuracy of real-time markerless camera tracking for mobile augmented reality applications considering both known and unknown environments of different complexity. The major solution strategies are: visual-inertial sensor fusion, decoupling of pose and structure estimation and unification of computer vision and recursive filtering techniques. First, a model-based camera tracking system that fuses visual and inertial measurements in the extended Kalman filter is developed. It uses an affine illumination invariant image processing method that exploits the pose prediction obtained from the sensor fusion algorithm and a textured CAD model of the environment to predict the appearances of corner features in the camera images. In several experiments, the system is demonstrated to work robustly in realistic environments of different complexity, under varying light conditions, fast and erratic camera motions and even short periods without visible features. Compared to vision-only tracking, the system shows less jitter and the computational costs are reduced both due to an accurate prediction of the feature appearances and locations in the images and a reduced demand on features in general. Tracking in partially known environments is addressed by developing a vision-only system, which requires minimal pre-knowledge about the structure of the target scene and derives 3D information online. The system combines robust and efficient sequential structure from motion methods with a simplified stochastic model and recursive localisation of 3D point features. It scales with the size of the map, since pose and structure estimation are decoupled. Compared to an ordinary sequential structure from motion system, the developed method provides higher accuracy in both camera and feature localisation and significantly less drift. This is demonstrated in different experiments based on simulated data and in realistic mid-scale environments. Based on these results, a conceptual solution for visual-inertial simultaneous localisation and mapping in large-scale environments is developed. The idea is to combine the marginalised particle filter for visual-inertial pose estimation with undelayed feature initialisation and localisation on a per-particle basis. The essential algorithms for pose and structure estimation are developed and a proof-of-concept implementation is evaluated in a simple test environment, demonstrating that the novel tracking strategy unifies and enhances the previous developments.


A classroom experiment is an effective device to introduce and illustrate new economic concepts. This paper describes the author's experience implementing the classic double oral auction experiment in a high school computer lab, in four classes, with students trading in a virtual market for books, using commercial online software designed for college use. The goal was to run each class through this experiment for five rounds, using a standard lab with no special software, in one class period of 50 minutes. I randomly selected one school experiment, and compared the results with a college class that had done the same experiment, according to three indicators - transactions history, aggregate efficiency, and distribution of excess gain. By the fifth round the school students' performance was comparable to that of college students. I conclude that commercial web-based college level economic experiments offer school teachers a viable way to perform experiments.


Shotgun metagenomics provides a powerful assumption-free approach to the recovery of pathogen genomes from contemporary and historical material. We sequenced the metagenome of a calcified nodule from the skeleton of a 14th-century middle-aged male excavated from the medieval Sardinian settlement of Geridu. We obtained 6.5-fold coverage of a Brucella melitensis genome. Sequence reads from this genome showed signatures typical of ancient or aged DNA. Despite the relatively low coverage, we were able to use information from single-nucleotide polymorphisms to place the medieval pathogen genome within a clade of B. melitensis strains that included the well-studied Ether strain and two other recent Italian isolates. We confirmed this placement using information from deletions and IS711 insertions. We conclude that metagenomics stands ready to document past and present infections, shedding light on the emergence, evolution, and spread of microbial pathogens. IMPORTANCE Infectious diseases have shaped human populations and societies throughout history. The recovery of pathogen DNA sequences from human remains provides an opportunity to identify and characterize the causes of individual and epidemic infections. By sequencing DNA extracted from medieval human remains through shotgun metagenomics, without target-specific capture or amplification, we have obtained a draft genome sequence of an ~700-year-old Brucella melitensis strain. Using a variety of bioinformatic approaches, we have shown that this historical strain is most closely related to recent strains isolated from Italy, confirming the continuity of this zoonotic infection, and even a specific lineage, in the Mediterranean region over the cen-


The purpose of the paper is to present the importance of locally embedded personal relationships and individuals' networks for the rise of small and medium enterprises (SMEs)' opportunities in the internationalisation process (especially the market entry phase) as well as their international operations and growth. Above all, the aim of the article is to answer the question what is influencing the actual impact of these resulting opportunities on internationalisation and growth. This paper adopts both a conceptual and empirical approach to the problem based upon a critical review of pertinent literature. Two case studies of companies from industries representing different levels of technological advancement, that is the furniture industry and IT industry, are presented. The theoretical and empirical analysis presented in the article points to the fact that relationships simultaneously facilitate opportunity recognition and themselves constitute such an opportunity. The analysis carried out as part of the case study proves that main factors determining the rise of the opportunity based on locally embedded personal relationships are trust and mutual understanding, in this way emphasising the importance of relational embeddedness. At the same time the realisation of these opportunities and therefore their impact on the internationalisation process and a company's growth requires additional social factors (an entrepreneurial attitude) as well as economic factors (such as quality and competitive prices).


ABSTRACT In remote sensing, it is commonly accepted that land remote-sensing satellite (LANDSAT) top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance is less accurate than atmospheric correction (AC) reflectance, as the former is not calibrated for possible modifications in the electromagnetic radiation signals due to atmospheric scattering and absorption. This article investigates whether LANDSAT data calibrated for TOA reflectance are an appropriate information source for delineating inflow-dependent vegetation (IDV) in regions with an arid and desert climate, such as the Pilbara region in Western Australia. Knowledge of where IDVs are in the landscape underpins planning their protection and define the baseline for their monitoring when water resource management options are considered. The appropriateness of TOA calibration for the delineation of IDV in the Pilbara was assessed through its comparison with IDV maps derived from AC reflectance. Both radiometric calibration methods (TOA and AC) were applied to a multi-date LANDSAT 5 TM (Thematic Mapper) dataset of 10 images acquired in 2009 and 2010. Two methods based on the application of remote-sensing techniques to identify the extent of temporally invariant vegetation were applied for IDV delineation in the study area. The first method, groundwater-dependent ecosystems mapping (GEM), employs a two-date normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) dataset for identifying 'no-change' clusters of land cover and detecting those related to IDV. The second method applies principal component analysis (PCA) to a multi-date NDVI dataset. The first principal component (PC1) typically contains features that remain unchanged over time. This includes vegetation with continuous or frequent access to surface and/or groundwater, such as IDV. To delineate the extent of IDV, a thresholding technique was further employed. Spatial similarity between IDV maps produced from TOA and AC reflectance was quantitatively evaluated by the Kappa coefficient. The results showed that TOA and AC IDV maps are in 'almost perfect' agreement with the Kappa values above 0.83. This suggests that TOA reflectance is equally appropriate to AC reflectance for mapping in arid and desert climate such as in Pilbara. When the GEM- and PCA-based methods are applied in other study areas with arid or desert climate, the accuracy of the delineated IDV extent may vary. Therefore, the results need to be validated using ground-truth information about known IDV occurrences in the area of interest.


Many gene hunters track sequences that inevitably lead to disease. Environmental health researchers seek a different quarry: variations in genes that by themselves might be harmless, but, when a person is exposed to environmental toxins, can amplify that person's risk of illness. Studies of these genes, which often code for enzymes that metabolize toxins or repair DNA damage from carcinogens, could lead to a better understanding of how the genes make people vulnerable and which individuals are at risk.

![Figure][1]

CREDIT: ILLUSTRATION: CAMERON SLAYDEN

The growing list of diseases linked to these environmental susceptibility genes includes asthma, diabetes, lead poisoning, and a lung disease caused by the metal beryllium. Many disorders involve more than one gene: Variants of two genes, for example, boost the risk of bladder cancer 10-fold in people who smoke, according to recent studies at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

To help find these genes and explore how they operate, toxicologists are using DNA arrays—glass chips dotted with gene sequences ( Science , 28 July 2000, p. [536][2]). For instance, Leona Samson's team at Harvard University has found that DNA-damaging chemicals known as alkylating agents turn on or off at least 400 genes in yeast cells, including "totally unexpected" genes involved in novel repair pathways, says Samson. The complete sequence of the human genome will enable scientists to do such toxicogenomic studies with cells from various human organs, notes Michael Gallo of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway. "That's the real beauty of the genome. We can now start to dissect toxic responses at the molecular level," says Gallo.

 [1]: pending:yes
 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.289.5479.536


A full-vectorial theoretical investigation of the recently proposed background-free coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) spectroscopy near transverse interfaces [Phys. Rev. A, 77, 061802(R) (2008)] is presented. In this scheme, the field symmetries of the focused excitation beams are applied to recover the pure Raman spectrum of a medium forming a transverse interface with a nonresonant medium. We show that this method is robust to spatial shift of the excitation volume relative to the interface and does not depend on the linear polarizations states of the pump and Stokes beams. Finally, we extend the applicability of this scheme to a succession of planar interfaces between resonant and nonresonant media, which is potentially interesting for fast chemical analysis in microfluidic devices. Interestingly, this method can be extended to nondegenerated resonant four-wave-mixing processes to remove the nonresonant background.


Purpose of the article: In this article the author deals with the latest trends in the process of employees' recruitment based on application of possibilities provided by the modern information and communication technologies (ICT). ICT substantially change the shape of world people were accustomed to. Due to their massive development different areas of lives, e.g. personnel work and employees' recruitment gets impersonal or virtual form. ICT mostly influence the way of life of younger generations (i.e. Y generation or Millennials generation) since they grew up in mutual connection with them and consider them as a natural part of their personal and working life.
Methodology/methods: The author applies the secondary data of Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic concerning ICT utilization in Slovak households and the results of analysis of Institute for Public Affairs concerning the social networks in Slovakia. Primary research uses the author to identify the relation of Y generation towards IKT modern mediums.
Scientific aim: The main aim of the author is to provide a basis for HR managers in choosing appropriate personnel policy of recruitment young talented people from generation Y. The author on the basis of research identifies and analyzes the relationship of generation Y to modern means of ICT. Preferred compositions can be addressed communication channels for HR managers.
Findings: The author points out possibilities to address potential employers from generation Y by companies by means of modern ICT facilities they prefer (mobile phones and social networks). She found that most members of generation Y communicate through phone. Up to 93.06% of respondents use it for calling and sending SMS. They actively communicate their ideas, feelings and attitudes on social networks. Seven out of ten respondents visit social networks daily. Only 5.50% of respondents are not members of any social network.
Conclusions: The results of research can help personnel managers in the process of employees' recruitment of potential young employees. Modern ICT mediums that prefer to communicate members of Slovak generation Y may be suitable addressable channels to reach them with the offer of job vacancies.


INTRODUCTION
The study identifies the differences between rural health and remote health and describes key distinctive characteristics of remote health.

METHODS
The study used a mixed method approach of interviews and questionnaires (utilising a Likert scale) with expert stakeholders in rural health and remote health. A total of 45 interviews were conducted with experts selected from every state and territory of Australia. Of these, 41 also completed a questionnaire, of which 21 respondents were female, 20 identified predominantly as academics while six, five and five indicated that they worked in policy, advocacy and as a practitioner, respectively. Thirteen worked in rural health, 10 in remote health and 18 in both; 23 participants worked in Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander health. Respondents had worked in rural health or remote health for mean periods of 13 years and 8 years, respectively.

RESULTS
Means for each of 15 characteristics indicated that respondents viewed each characteristic as different in remote health compared to rural health. Interviews confirmed these perceived differences, with particular emphasis on isolation, poor service access and the relatively high proportion of Indigenous residents. Those working in remote and Aboriginal health most strongly identified these distinctions.

CONCLUSIONS
A detailed and rigorous description of the discipline of remote health, and the differences to rural health, will assist policymakers, health planners, teachers and researchers to develop an appropriate workforce, models of service delivery and policy that are relevant, appropriate and effective in order to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources and health outcomes across this vast continent.


Telescopic covers are components which can have a potentially large impact on machine tool feed drive capabilities. Generally speaking, frictional force modelling is a well-established field of interest in which many approaches and challenges have been identified. This paper addresses frictional force modelling of machine tool feed drive telescopic covers. A sequential assembly approach and control system data acquisition are used for friction model parameter estimation and verification. Models of telescopic covers may be used in virtual machine tools. Furthermore, feed drive accuracy and dynamics may be enhanced by compensation of frictional forces in the control system. Other possible applications include component commissioning during machine tool assembly and predictive maintenance.


Quantitative agricultural concessions are generally acknowledged to be one of the more complex post-Brexit issues facing trade negotiators. The challenge is commonly conceptualized as one of 'splitting' existing EU-28 obligations, namely tariff rate quotas (TRQs), between the UK and the remaining EU-27. While an intuitive response to the trading system's goal of maintaining the balance in negotiating concessions, this article questions the consistency of this approach with WTO law and reflects on the potential risks to the EU of renegotiating TRQs. The article further considers the process by which the UK will establish the post-Brexit form of its current obligations, exploring the merits and pitfalls of, on the one hand, negotiating modifications in accordance with GATT Article XXVIII and, on the other, non-negotiated certification of its revised schedules. It concludes that the UK may be prudent to seek Article XXVIII agreement with trading partners on newly articulated concessions and that the EU may be wise to leave current agricultural TRQs undisturbed. In the absence of a bilateral agreement between the UK and EU, the latter may be obliged to increase rather than reduce its quotas to remain in compliance with WTO obligations.


In this paper, an analytical performance study for multi-antenna Cognitive Radio (CR) systems is presented. The two most popular CR approaches, namely, the interweave and underlay system designs, are considered and based on the derived analytical framework, a throughput-based comparison of these two system designs is presented. The system parameters are selected such that a quality of service (QoS) constraint on primary communication, is satisfied. Closed form expressions for the outage probability at the Primary User (PU), as well as expressions for the ergodic rate of the Secondary User (SU) are derived, for both system designs. The derived expressions are functions of key design parameters, such as the sensing time and the detection threshold in the case of interweave CR, and the maximum allowable interference power received by the PU, in the case of underlay CR. Based on the derived expressions, for interweave CR, the sensing parameters, i.e., sensing time and energy detection threshold, are optimized such as to maximize the secondary system rate. By comparing the throughput performance for both system designs, the existence of specific regimes (in terms of primary activity, number of transmit and receive antennas as well as the outage probability of the PU), where one CR approach outperforms the other, is highlighted.


At the present time, there are no binding rules of evidence or set of evidentiary principles to be applied in Senate impeachment trials. Rather, recourse is taken to the evidentiary rules and principles applicable in contemporaneous court proceedings and to precedents from past impeachment trial to provide guidance for Senate Impeachment Trial Committees or for the full Senate on evidentiary questions which arise in the impeachment context. This report compiles evidentiary precedents from the Senate impeachment trials of Judges Harry E. Claiborne, Halsted Ritter, Harold Louderback, and Charles Swayne. The evidentiary rulings and principles gleaned from this examination are arranged in subject matter categories, and within those categories, in reverse chronological order by trial.


The field of magnetic skyrmions has been actively investigated across a wide range of topics during the last decades. In this topical review, we mainly review and discuss key results and findings in skyrmion research since the first experimental observation of magnetic skyrmions in 2009. We particularly focus on the theoretical, computational and experimental findings and advances that are directly relevant to the spintronic applications based on magnetic skyrmions, i.e. their writing, deleting, reading and processing driven by magnetic field, electric current and thermal energy. We then review several potential applications including information storage, logic computing gates and non-conventional devices such as neuromorphic computing devices. Finally, we discuss possible future research directions on magnetic skyrmions, which also cover rich topics on other topological textures such as antiskyrmions and bimerons in antiferromagnets and frustrated magnets.


The paper pursues the thesis, that the phenomenon of anti-genderism is a specific harm for democracy insofar as we understand democracy as a particular way of relating to the Political, namely as the acceptance, that the 'place of power' is 'a void', as Lefort resp. Laclau & Mouffe would denote it. In these premises democracy – and all kind of positions of subjects located in this relation to the Political - becomes a permanent struggle for identity. Against this theoretical background, we want to analyze Ulrich Kutscheras perspective on the differentiation between sex and gender to show how science can become such an articulation of a political struggle for identity and how such a position becomes compatible to right-wing articulations, whereupon we want to ask what consequences arise for democracy against the backdrop of such a confrontation of democracy with an anti-genderistic articulation.


Calorie restriction (CR) is an intervention extending the life spans of many organisms. The mechanisms underlying CR-dependent retardation of aging are still poorly understood. Despite mechanisms involving conserved nutrient signaling pathways proposed, few target processes that can account for CR-mediated longevity have so far been identified. Recently, both peroxiredoxins and vacuolar-ATPases were reported to control CR-mediated retardation of aging downstream of conserved nutrient signaling pathways. In this review, we focus on peroxiredoxin-mediated stress-defence and vacuolar-ATPase regulated acidification and pinpoint common denominators between the two mechanisms proposed for how CR extends life span. Both the activities of peroxiredoxins and vacuolar-ATPases are stimulated upon CR through reduced activities in conserved nutrient signaling pathways and both seem to stimulate cellular resistance to peroxide-stress. However, whereas vacuolar-ATPases have recently been suggested to control both Ras-cAMP-PKA- and TORC1-mediated nutrient signaling, neither the physiological benefits of a proposed role for peroxiredoxins in H2O2-signaling nor downstream targets regulated are known. Both peroxiredoxins and vacuolar-ATPases do, however, impinge on mitochondrial iron-metabolism and further characterization of their impact on iron homeostasis and peroxide-resistance might therefore increase our understanding of the beneficial effects of CR on aging and age-related diseases.


Many workloads for analytical processing in commercial RDBMSs are dominated by snowstorm queries, which are characterized by references to multiple large fact tables and their associated smaller dimension tables. This paper describes a technique for bushy join tree optimization for snowstorm queries in Oracle database system. This technique generates bushy join trees containing subtrees that produce substantially reduced sets of rows and, therefore, their joins with other subtrees are generally much more efficient than joins in the left-deep trees.

The generation of bushy join trees within an existing commercial physical optimizer requires extensive changes to the optimizer. Further, the optimizer will have to consider a large join permutation search space to generate efficient bushy join trees. The novelty of the approach is that bushy join trees can be generated outside the physical optimizer using logical query transformation that explores a considerably pruned search space. The paper describes an algorithm for generating optimal bushy join trees for snowstorm queries using an existing query transformation framework. It also presents performance results for this optimization, which show significant execution time improvements.


We consider proximal splitting algorithms for convex optimization problems over matrices. A significant computational bottleneck in many of these algorithms is the need to compute a full eigenvalue or singular value decomposition at each iteration for the evaluation of a proximal operator. In this paper we propose to use an old and surprisingly simple method due to Jacobi to compute these eigenvalue and singular value decompositions, and we demonstrate that it can lead to substantial gains in terms of computation time compared to standard approaches. We rely on three essential properties of this method: (a) its ability to exploit an approximate decomposition as an initial point, which in the case of iterative optimization algorithms can be obtained from the previous iterate; (b) its parallel nature which makes it a great fit for hardware accelerators such as GPUs, now common in machine learning, and (c) its simple termination criterion which allows us to trade-off accuracy with computation time. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach on a variety of algorithms and problems, and show that, on a GPU, we can obtain 5 to 10x speed-ups in the evaluation of proximal operators compared to standard CPU or GPU linear algebra routines. Our findings are supported by new theoretical results providing guarantees on the approximation quality of proximal operators obtained using approximate eigenvalue or singular value decompositions.


The regulation of assets and infrastructures has always been a central problem of economic theory. The first approach of regulatory and antitrust authorities was to regard assetownership as a source of welfare inefficiency. This was the "monopoly explanation" that was contested by Coase. Developing from Coase's original intuitions, a contractual approach emerged in regulatory economics. This second tradition relies on the concept of transaction costs, or market failures, to justify the role of ownership for welfare and regulatory purposes. Yet, even though in the contractual approach ownership is not regarded as a necessary source of welfare inefficiencies, it still remains the necessary consequence of some dysfunctional characteristic of the market mechanism.
This study addresses the role of asset ownership understood in terms of the owner's subjective use value. The aim is thus to provide a theory of ownership based on a reinterpretation of the concept of value, relying on the classical dualism between value-inexchange and value-in-use. Private ownership of a good or resource becomes relevant for welfare and efficiency purposes whenever assets can be redeployed internally across alternative subjective opportunities by the owner to satisfy their private, subjective, requirements. Through in-house redeployment, the asset owner becomes independent of the performances and requirements of external market mechanisms.
If auto-employment is allowed, then two conditions are satisfied. First, the performance of the market mechanism becomes unnecessary to understand how assets are allocated among alternative uses. This makes market failures and transaction costs a non-necessary requirement to justify asset ownership and to understand its welfare implications. Second, the knowledge of an actor's subjective capabilities in the use and employment of the asset (knowing how an actor prefers to privately use and consume an asset) becomes necessary in order to understand how different ownership patterns affect the set of idiosyncratic opportunities perceived by different potential assets owners.
If auto-redeployment (in-house enjoyment or auto-consumption) is allowed, then we can see that the idiosyncratic opportunities perceived by the actors are not necessarily driven by external market mechanisms, nor by its performance. Yet, they remain relevant in order to derive normative conclusions on the allocative outcomes. This can be seen as a make-or-buy problem where the trade-off between "make" and "buy" can be reinterpreted as a trade-off in value terms, between subjective value-in-use and objective value-in-exchange. The different interpretation of the make option marks the difference between the make-or-buy problem modelled in the contract-based theory of ownership versus a capability based theory of ownership.
The work argues that, whenever physical assets are privately owned and can be employed "in-house", in order to legitimately derive normative conclusions on how privately owned assets ought to be employed in a society, some form of public regulation is always needed in order to overcome the inherent presence of subjective (actor-specific) valuations. For this reason, the work concludes that whenever value in not a monism, the legal framework should always have logical and temporal priority over the competitive mechanism of the market, independently from the performance of the latter.


Tony Abbott is spending this week in North-East Arnhem Land, part of his long-held hope "to be not just the Prime Minister but the Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs". We asked our experts: what stories does the PM need to hear while he's in the Top End? Two things are part of the everyday reality of life for many Australian kids, teens and 20-somethings. One is their avid use of social media to connect with friends and share their feelings via status updates, spending hours glued to their mobile phones. But, sadly, too often the other everyday reality is self-harm and suicide. More than anyone else, that's particularly true for Indigenous Australians. Young Indigenous Australians are enthusiastic users of social media, spending about 20% more time on social media than other Australians their age. Tragically, they also live with a far higher risk of youth suicide. Suicide rates in Indigenous communities have been increasing over the past few decades. In some communities the suicide rates are among the highest in the world – with most of those deaths being young people under 29. While there can be downsides to social media, such as the potential for kids to be bullied or subject to racist abuse, my research into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Identity and Community Online highlights the potential for social media to provide a strong sense of community and support for young people. As one participant in my research says: "We can't undervalue these sorts of virtual communities that we set up." Through posting their thoughts and feelings, or directly reaching out to others, participants said they felt supported by their online network.


Aim: To explore patients' preferences when completing a questionnaire and compare preferences between younger and older patients to inform future research methodology. This research was conducted as part of a larger survey to investigate why those with diabetes declined structured diabetes education (SDE).Methods: Similar questionnaires relating to declining SDE for those with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes were completed either electronically, via telephone, on paper and posted or via personal visit, by 177 patients in Northern Ireland. A Chi-square test for independence was carried out to determine the data collection preferences of both groups.Results: A significant association was found between age and questionnaire preference. Amongst patients with Type 1 diabetes, aged 13-23 years, 56.1% preferred to fill out their questionnaire electronically, followed by a preference for telephone questionnaires (35.1%). Postal completion of questionnaires (8.8%) was a less popular option. Those with Type 2 diabetes, aged 28-83 years preferred telephone completion (45.8%), followed closely by a preference for postal completion (43.3%), with electronic completion (10.8%) being a less popular option in this group. The numbers electing for a personal visit were too small to include in the analysis.Conclusion: Older adults had a preference for having their data collected by telephone, followed by postal methods while younger adults and adolescents preferred electronic data collection methods. The data collection phase of any survey is vital. This study has shown that taking age of the population into account when designing a survey may lead to improved response rates.


Setting out from the short dialogue in which the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, upon being asked "Where are you from?," replied "I am a citizen of the world" (a cosmopolitan), the purpose of this article is to explore cosmopolitanism in Byzantine tradition, which surpasses the actual empire in both space and time and includes even later Orthodox Christian practices. This is done by considering its significance for literary world-making within the framework of languages used in Byzantine tradition, most importantly Greek. Textual examples from the first centuries AD, of importance for later discussions in Byzantium, present Adam, Moses and Christian believers as citizens of the world (cosmopolitans). In subsequent examples from the twelfth century, Orthodox Christian monks are instead called citizens of heaven (ouranopolitans), and the Constantinopolitan writer John Tzetzes records the many languages of the capital of the empire, which often has been described as a cosmopolitan city. Furthermore, examples of hymnography, homilies, and icons from the Orthodox Christian celebration of Pentecost are examined. The Pentecostal miracle offers a multilingual event which unites and enlightens kosmos in contrast to the confusion of tongues in Babel. As a whole, the article is inspired by discussions of cosmopolitanism as a travelling concept and as a controversial concept that encompasses both unity and plurality. It is proposed that cosmopolitanism in Byzantine tradition borders between homogenising (monolingual) and heterogenising (multilingual) modes.


Despite the increasing recognition on the topics of diversity and on the issues of deafness, the teaching and learning of Foreign Language (FL) by deaf students in Brazil still present problems, especially regarding the absence of certified professionals to work with such audience, which makes it a process based on instructional material (IM) available to the teacher, such as the textbook (TB) not yet specifically developed for the education of deaf people. Researches point to the importance of the IMs in teachinglearning of a FL and to the question that their choice/elaboration/adaptation should be conscious and coherent to the group of students they are destined for (TOMLINSON, 2001; ALMEIDA FILHO, 2013; etc.). From this perspective, in a qualitativeinterpretative way and through a case study (YIN, 2005), we investigated, with this study, which characteristics aspects present in the IM and teaching strategies (TE) make them favorable to the learning of English language as FL by deaf students, considering the educational needs of such audience. Therefore, the English language (EL) classes of a mixed group (deaf and hearing students) of the 8th grade of an inclusive public school were observed and recorded in a research journal. In addition, with the aid of questionnaires combined with interviews with deaf students, Brazilian Sign Language educational interpreters and English teacher, we reflected about the types of IMs and TE that are pertinent to this context in order to support the teacher's work and to not leave her/him at the mercy of TB. Based on some authors such as Lacerda, Santos and Caetano (2014), Sousa (2008, 2015) and Almeida Filho (1993, 2013), the analysis of the data suggested that there are two important axes in which the IMs and TE must be based on to be potent in FL education for the deaf: visuality and the parallel between languages, always focusing on the target foreign-language and through a communicative perspective. In addition, resources such as images in their traditional meaning, videos and films, the use of the blackboard, tables, concept maps, illustrated dictionaries, mock-ups, slide shows, digital technologies and the writings in the notebook and in the TB, if supported by the axes described and directed to their target audience, can be very useful and positive to the process of teaching and learning English as FL by deaf students. Finally, the aim was to defend the teaching of EL as a mean of social inclusion, since only inserting deaf students into the school space of hearing ones or guaranteeing the presence of a Brazilian Sign Language interpreter in the classroom, but not allowing them access to methodological resources that could facilitate their learning, does not mean an appropriate inclusion (ROSA, 2006; LACERDA, 2006). It is understood that the results achieved here can greatly contribute to the pedagogical practices of professionals in the area of Special Education and FL teaching, as well as teachers and future teachers of deaf students, with the purpose of presenting them different ways of dealing with these students in the classroom and making them reflect on the importance and role of teaching materials and specific teaching strategies in that context.


In this sweeping challenge to the postmodern critiques of psychoanalysis, Joel Whitebook argues for a reintegration of Freud's uncompromising investigation of the unconscious with the political and philosophical insights of critical theory. Perversion and Utopia follows in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Paul Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy. It expands on these books, however, because of the author's remarkable grasp not only of psychoanalytic studies but also of the contemporary critical climate; Whitebook, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, writes with equal facility on both Habermas and Freud.A central thesis of Perversion and Utopia is that there is an essential affinity between the utopian impulse and the perverse impulse, in that both reflect a desire to bypass the reality principle that Freud claimed to define the human condition. The book explores the positive and negative aspects of the relationship between these impulses, which are ubiquitous features of human life, and the requirements of civilized social existence.Whitebook steers a course between orthodox psychoanalytic conservatism, which seeks simply to repress the perverse-utopian impulse in the name of social continuity and cohesion, and those forms of Freudo-Marxism, postmodernism, and psychoanalytic feminism that advocate its direct and full expression in the name of emancipation. While he demonstrates the limitations of the current textual approaches to Freud, especially those influenced by Lacan, Whitebook also enlists the lessons of psychoanalysis to counteract the excessive rationalism of the Habermasian brand of critical theory, thus making a substantial contribution to current discussions within critical theory itself. His analysis and interpretation of perversion, narcissism, sublimation, and ego bring new insight to these central and thorny issues in Freud, and his discussions of Adorno, Marcuse, Castoriadis, Habermas, Ricoeur, Lacan, and others are equally penetrating.


If you find it hard to sleep, are anxious about tomorrow, are paralysed by fear of failure, then you are not alone. Anxiety disorders are the main mental health problem in the Western world. We are suffering a 'blues' epidemic. Neil Anderson and Rich Miller contend that the only satisfactory long-term solution is a knowledge of God, and a right relationship with him. The fear of God overcomes all other fears. The authors identify how mental strongholds of fear and anxiety develop, then reveal powerful biblical strategies for defeating them in Christ and finding home for tomorrow. This careful, well-researched book is rooted in pastoral experience over many years.


The paper aims at assessing the effects of combined voltage and/or current synchrophasor measurements, and their associated uncertainties, on the accuracy of state estimators adopted in distribution systems. Such an assessment is first carried out with respect to a generic transmission line with the purpose of determining the combination of voltage and/or current synchrophasor measurements that provides the best accuracy of the estimated quantities. A comprehensive analysis on the impact of different measurement uncertainties and operating conditions is included for this specific case. In order to derive general conclusions, the study is then extended to a distribution system composed of the IEEE 13-bus test feeder. For this case, we perform an a-posteriori assessment of the probability distributions of the estimation errors by using a discrete Kalman filter state estimator fed with noisy voltage and/or injected current synchrophasor measurements.


The recent establishment of the 10/40 Gbps technology in DWDM optical links heralds a new era of bandwidth abundance, in response to an explosive growth of services provided through the Internet. Forward error correction (FEC) is one of the key-enabling elements in this long-awaited achievement. Borrowed from the wireless world, FEC was initially introduced in wavelength-division multiplex (WDM) optical-systems to combat amplified spontaneous emission (ASE), a form of noise native in optical amplifiers (OAs). These first generation FEC systems have been associated with a coding-gain of approximately 6 dB. However, as transmission rates gradually scaled towards 10 Gbps, other optical-impairments gained in significance, primarily nonlinear (NL) effects but also chromatic-dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD). FEC turned out to be invaluable in mitigating these impairments as well


The statement presented from the Presidium of the Polish Academy of Sciences, related to natural gas in shale strata (so-called shale gas), was adopted on the 11th of March, 2014. The statement was prepared on the basis of partial reports from the appropriate Committees of the Polish Academy of Sciences. It presents a concise assessment of the current state of the exploration of shale gas, the state of recognition of its resources, as well as selected environmental and economic aspects related to the potential development of shale gas resources in Poland. The statement also presents the opinion of the Polish Academy of Sciences on the scope of necessary scientific and R&D works and their organization, which should aid in the prospecting and exploration of deposits of shale gas, as well as their potential future development.


The cake cutting problem models the fair division of a heterogeneous good between multiple agents. Previous work assumes that each agent derives value only from its own piece. However, agents may also care about the pieces assigned to other agents; such externalities naturally arise in fair division settings. We extend the classical model to capture externalities, and generalize the classical fairness notions of proportionality and envyfreeness. Our technical results characterize the relationship between these generalized properties, establish the existence or nonexistence of fair allocations, and explore the computational feasibility of fairness in the face of externalities.


The question of how to make higher education more inclusive has been a central concern in South Africa and elsewhere over the past two decades. However, in South Africa there remains a disjuncture between policy aimed at promoting inclusivity and the experiences of students and staff in the higher education sector. In this article, the relationship between equity of access and equity of outcomes and the expectations that follow from these policy imperatives are examined from the perspective of Nancy Fraser's normative framework of social justice. In particular, her notion of misframing is used to analyze the current situation in the higher education sector in South Africa. The article concludes that a focus on individual higher education institutions is not sufficient to gain a perspective on the social arrangements required for participatory parity in higher education; and, in fact, such a focus is an instance of misframing and thus a form of injustice.


Snake venoms are aqueous solutions containing peptides and proteins with various biochemical, physiological, and pathophysiological effects. Several snake venom components are used as lead molecules in the development of new active substances for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, clotting disorders, cancer or pain.
 Antibacterial activity has also been attributed to snake venoms and proteins isolated from snake venoms. This study provides information regarding the antibacterial activity of venoms obtained from various snake species from the Elapidae and Viperidae families. Minimum inhibitory and bactericidal concentrations of snake venoms were determined for three Gram-positive (Enterococcus faecalis ATCC 29212, Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 29213, and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 43300) and three Gram-negative (Escherichia coli ATCC 25922, Klebsiella pneumoniae ATCC 13883, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 27853) pathogenic bacteria. The observed effects were correlated with the protein content of each venom, determined using SDS-PAGE analysis and comparison with data available in the literature. Our findings represent a starting point for the selection of snake venoms containing components with potential use as lead molecules in the development of new antibacterial agents, targeting multidrug resistant bacterial strains.


Abstract : The 1999 PLA Conference, which was hosted jointly by the American Enterprise Institute and the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, convened September 10-12, 1999, at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. The goal of this conference was to comprehensively examine Chinese military modernization efforts. The meeting drew together leading experts on the PLA army, navy, air force, missile forces, and national defense industries and included PLA experts with opposing views on the pace and likely success of Chinese military modernization. Lively debate continually probed analytical differences and prejudices, as well as the sources of information upon which conclusions were based. The conference also included a preliminary yet timely examination of the PLA's potential application of information warfare. An initial discussion of the post-Kosovo implications for China's Taiwan strategy and China's foreign military relations also took place.


With the rise of technology, literacy concepts in the 21 century have challenged traditional literacy practices that have relied primarily on print media. Recent research has alerted earlyyears educators to the new understandings and significance of multiliteracies. These new understandings will better prepare classroom practices that purposefully design learning opportunities to accommodate diverse young learners in an era of evolving education. This qualitative case study responds to these imperatives by showcasing a lived story of a grade one teacher who has implemented multiliteracies pedagogy in her classroom. Multiliteracies pedagogy has facilitated her effort in creating meaningful learning opportunities for young children based on their diverse interests and needs. Using a narrative analysis approach, the study suggests that applying multiliteracies pedagogy not only motivates the grade one children to take ownership of their learning but also transforms the way the teacher makes sense of her teaching. The findings highlight those power structures that encourage the teacher to move forward and those that hold her back. The research concludes that teacher education plays a critical role in preparing and supporting an early-years educator to be successful; further, both the educator and the young learners' ambition to engage in actively designing teaching and learning is influenced by the academic expectations from the school board, parents, and resource availability.


Hydrolysis of inulin over zeolite catalysts with various micropore topologies (FER, MFI, MOR, BEA, MWW and FAU) and mesoporosities (pillared MFI (PMFI) and pillared MWW (PMWW)) was studied. The reaction includes cleavage of four types of glycosidic bonds: the terminal glucosyl to fructosyl bond to produce glucose, the terminal sucrosyl to fructosyl bond to form sucrose, and the terminal fructosyl to fructosyl bond and internal fructosyl bonds within the polymer chain to generate fructose. Inulin conversion has shown an initially slow rate followed by pseudo first-order kinetics. Fructose production occurred at a much faster rate than that of sucrose followed by glucose. Rigorous kinetic data analysis showed that the reaction was inclined to proceed on the external surface acid sites of zeolites with cleavage of terminal sucrosyl to fructosyl and terminal fructosyl to fructosyl bonds. The increase in the micropore size in zeolites promoted pore mouth catalysis for the cleavage of the terminal fructosyl to fructosyl bond and terminal glucosyl to fructosyl bond. The mesoporosity in PMFI and PMWW zeolites enhanced external surface and pore mouth catalysis compared to those of their microporous analogues, but did not enable new types of catalytic events. The measured kinetic data were interpreted using a mathematical model based on a network involving parallel and series reactions. Inulin hydrolysis was probed in the transition from external surface to pore mouth catalysis depending on the zeolite topology and mesoporosity in bulky biomass processing. The present study provides guidelines for the utilization of zeolites with variable topologies and porosities for processing inulin and other biomass feedstocks for food and energy applications.


This chapter describes the current situation of entrepreneurship in Haiti and the main obstacles entrepreneurs face in that country. It looks at entrepreneurship from a comparative-economics perspective (stressing quantitative variables) and from an anthropological perspective (stressing qualitative research). The chapter presents some case studies from the city of Jérémie and offers policy recommendations.


We have investigated the antitumor effects of synthetic MMP inhibitor MMI270 against postoperative lung metastasis from colon cancer in nude rat. The KM12SM human colon cancer cells were injected into the cecal wall, and at 5 weeks after the injection, the cecum was removed including the tumor. Then, 30 mg/kg of MMI270 was administered perorally twice per day for 2 or 4 weeks, either immediately after removal or after week 2 after the removal. At week 7 after the removal, lung metastasis was significantly inhibited by the early administration of MMI270 immediately after the tumor removal but not by the late administration. The survival rates were significantly higher in the rats treated by early administration of MMI270 compared to the survival rate in untreated rats. Moreover, no lung metastasis was detected in some rats with 24‐weeks' survival treated by early administration. Lower microvessel density, lower PCNA Index and higher Apoptotic Index in the lung metastases of the rats treated with MMI270 were found compared to those in untreated rats. A beneficial effect of by early administration of MMI270 against postoperative lung metastases may be expected through inhibiting neovascularization of metastases in nude rat. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.