In a 2009 paper by Worm et al., fisheries biologists and conservation biologists found common ground in recommending spatial planning to benefit marine fisheries and biodiversity. Frontiers on land and in the ocean have few users relative to resources; as this ratio increases, governance suitable to the frontier no longer works because people's interests collide and biodiversity is lost. Increasing ocean uses and troubled fisheries are reasons to shift to ecosystem-based marine spatial planning and management, which reflect patterns and processes of both fish and people. protecting places can eliminate fragmentation, spatial and temporal mismatches caused by "siloed" sectoral management, where agencies that regulate different sectors in the same places largely ignore the needs of other sectors. Modern fishery management does not reflect the heterogeneity of fish populations and human uses. By reducing fishing mortality to zero, one spatial tool, marine reserves, restores large female fishes, which produce more eggs, and aids recovery of species in which females become males at larger sizes. Reserves can also maintain fishes' genetic structure. Australia created the "gold standard" for marine spatial planning in great Barrier Reef Marine park, a mosaic of ecosystems with differing availability to fishing. Other nations are adopting this approach. Even the best spatial plans will have problems that cross ecosystem boundaries, but advantages accrue to fishermen who stay within designated areas and let fish come to them. Areas can be deliberately configured to improve both biodiversity conservation and fishery yields and to save on fishermen's fuel costs.


In their book, Gridlock: why global cooperation is failing when we need it most, Hale, Held, and Young argue persuasively why post-World War II institutions delivered the global cooperation anticipated but ended up creating other serious problems for international society. They explain how the successes of earlier cooperation efforts produced greater multipolarity, institutional inertia, institutional fragmentation, and some difficult problems that, in turn, paved the pathways through which the governance gap between the multilateral system and global needs became wide. However, their book, whose thesis revolves around the nature and functions of global institutions, fails to define the term 'institution'. This essay argues that had the authors elaborated institutions, their argument would have been much stronger.


Insuring a sustainable development of wind energy production and consumption is challenging and highly important for /achieving of EU 20/20/20 goals for Bulgaria. Wind energy has been seen as a clean and environmentally friendly in comparison with conventional energy sources, but there are still some conflicts between wind energy project development and environmental protection goals that should be enlighten and solved. One possible way is to enhance the process of wind energy projects' location identification. The current research is focused on identification and classification of criterion that could be used in this process. The legal requirements regarding wind energy projects' location are analyzed and presented. Additional requirements regarding environmental protection and biodiversity conservation are identified and defined as criterion. A set of measurable indicators related to each criteria is established and proposed in this paper.


A new typology of players is proposed based on the classification of actions as either instinctive or contemplative. A person's type is the probability of him choosing a contemplative action. To test the typology, results of 10 games are analyzed. Actions in each game were classified depending on whether their response time was more or less, respectively, than the median response time of all subjects who played the game. It is argued that fast actions are more instinctive and slow actions are more contemplative. A subject's contemplative index (CI) is defined as the proportion of games in which he chose a contemplative action. It is found that for 8 of the 10 games, the CI in the other 9 games is positively correlated with a player's choice of a contemplative action in that game (average Spearman correlation of 9%). The CI is used to shed light on the nature of choice in five additional games. JEL Codes: C72, C91.


Antibiotic resistance has become an increasingly global health problem. This has resulted in a limited number of antibiotics being effective in the treatment of various infections. Antibiotic resistant organisms have been isolated from fish ponds in various studies in different parts of the world. This study was carried out to assess some fish farming practices among catfish and tilapia farmers which may contribute to antibiotic resistance and also to determine the susceptibilities of Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Shigella species, Salmonella typhi and Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolated from fish pond water, catfish gut and tilapia gut from 11 farms and two hatcheries to selected reference antibiotics including penicillin, ampicillin, flucloxacillin, erythromycin, tetracycline, sulphamethoxazole/trimethoprim, cefuroxime, gentamicin, ciprofloxacin and chloramphenicol using the disc diffusion method. With the exception of gentamicin and ciprofloxacin, there was varying resistance of more than 60% to the other antibiotics. Most of the bacterial isolates exhibited high resistance (≥70%) to penicillin, ampicillin, flucloxacillin and tetracycline whilst low resistance was observed in all isolates to gentamicin (1.7 to 5.6%) except in P. aeruginosa. 44 to 92.9% of isolates of organisms showed resistance to more than three antibiotics. The bacterial isolates from the sampled fishes exhibited multidrug resistance although there was no recent history of use of antibiotics in most of the farms studied.

 Key words: Bacterial isolates, antibiotics, antibiotic resistance, fish farms.


The ability to predict pathways for biosynthesis of metabolites is very important in metabolic engineering. It is possible to mine the repertoire of biochemical transformations from reaction databases, and apply the knowledge to predict reactions to synthesize new molecules. However, this usually involves a careful understanding of the mechanism and the knowledge of the exact bonds being created and broken. There is clearly a need for a method to rapidly predict reactions for synthesizing new molecules, which relies only on the structures of the molecules, without demanding additional information such as thermodynamics or hand-curated information such as atom-atom mapping, which are often hard to obtain accurately. We here describe a robust method based on subgraph mining, to predict a series of biochemical transformations, which can convert between two (even previously unseen) molecules. We first describe a reliable method based on subgraph edit distance to map reactants and products, using only their chemical structures. Having mapped reactants and products, we identify the reaction centre and its neighbourhood, the reaction signature, and store this in a reaction rule network. This novel representation enables us to rapidly predict pathways, even between previously unseen molecules. We also propose a heuristic that predominantly recovers natural biosynthetic pathways from amongst hundreds of possible alternatives, through a directed search of the reaction rule network, enabling us to provide a reliable ranking of the different pathways. Our approach scales well, even to databases with > 100,000 reactions. A Java-based implementation of our algorithms is available at https://github.com/RamanLab/ReactionMiner CCS CONCEPTS •Information systems →Data mining; •Applied computing →Bioinformatics;


The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the determinant elements of the Theory of Planned Behavior and realization of fertility intentions. We focus on the time-frame of people's fertility intentions and ask whether a different time-frame of the intention leads to different outcomes. We combine data from the Norwegian Generations and Gender Survey (2007) with information from administrative registers, meaning that we have longitudinal birth histories after the survey for the entire original sample. Preliminary results suggest that parents realize their fertility intentions more often then childless, regardless of the time-frame of their intention. Childless with a short-term fertility intention have a higher hazard ratio for becoming a parent compared to those with a long-term intention. In line with the Theory of Planned Behavior, attitudes, perceived behavioral control and subjective norms affect on the time-frame of fertility intentions, but not the realization of the fertility intentions.


This timely book investigates the dynamic causes, key forms, potential risks and changing regulation of shadow banking in China. Topics discussed include P2P lending, wealth management products, local government debts, and the underground lending market. Taking policy considerations into account, the author provides a comprehensive analysis of the regulatory instruments tackling the systemic risks in relation to China's shadow banking sector. Central bank's role, interest rate formation mechanism, exchange rate reform and further deepening reform of the regulatory regime and financial markets are also thoroughly discussed in the context of China's continuing financial reform.


To achieve representative bacterial surveillance it is important to have effective transport and storage media. In this thesis two transport media, STGG and SGG were evaluated and shown to be suitable for optimal transport and storage of S. pneumoniae. These media will be particularly useful for field studies in developing countries. A previously published serotyping technique based on amplification by PCR and RFLP of the first two genes of the capsulation locus, cpsA and cpsB, was evaluated and modified for use directly on clinical specimens. This method did not produce serotype specific data from a single PCR reaction so an alternative method was devised. PCR amplification of the whole capsulation locus (~20kbp) was adopted followed by restriction digestion to produce different patterns. It was shown that the patterns obtained were capable of discrimination to the serotype level. This technique is fully portable. In conjunction with a study to evaluate azithromycin distribution for the community wide treatment of trachoma, the impact of azithromycin on macrolide resistance in S. pneumoniae was assessed. No increase in macrolide resistance was found among pneumococcal isolates. Significant association was found between resistance to penicillin and co-trimoxazole, both commonly used antibiotics. Co-colonisation was found by isolates of different serotypes in a few carriers. Carriage was not found to last for more than a few months and familial transmission was not found to be an important mechanism of transmission in this population. The population structure of the penicillin non-susceptible pneumococci (PNSP) was studied using penicillin binding protein PCRs and RFLP. The results showed many different PBP genotypes suggesting that the population is polymictic and that there has been recent recombination of PBP genes. Pneumococcal penicillin resistance is thought to be evolving in this community independently of international clones.


Stacked generalization is a general method of using a high-level model to combine lower-level models to achieve greater predictive accuracy. In this paper we address two crucial issues which have been considered to be a 'black art' in classification tasks ever since the introduction of stacked generalization in 1992 by Wolpert: the type of generalizer that is suitable to derive the higher-level model, and the kind of attributes that should be used as its input. We find that best results are obtained when the higher-level model combines the confidence (and not just the predictions) of the lower-level ones.

We demonstrate the effectiveness of stacked generalization for combining three different types of learning algorithms for classification tasks. We also compare the performance of stacked generalization with majority vote and published results of arcing and bagging.


OBJECTIVES
Young people are sleeping less. Short sleep duration has a range of negative consequences including a hypothesized link with psychological distress, which has yet to be studied

DESIGN
Prospective cohort study

SETTING
Community-based sample from Australia

PARTICIPANTS
Twenty thousand (20,822) young adults (aged 17-24) identified through the state vehicle licensing authority. A random sample (n = 5000) was approached for follow-up 12-18 months later, with 2837 providing full data.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE
Psychological distress, determined by a Kessler 10 score > 21, at baseline; and as both onset and persistence of distress at follow-up.

RESULTS
Shorter sleep duration was linearly associated with prevalent psychological distress: relative risk (RR) 1.14 (95% CI 1.12 to 1.15). Only the very short (< 5 h) sleepers among those not distressed at baseline had an increased risk for onset of psychological distress (RR 3.25 [95% CI 1.84, 5.75]). Of 945 cohort participants reporting psychological distress at baseline, 419 (44%) were distressed at follow-up. Each hour less of sleep increased the risk of psychological distress persisting after adjustment for potential confounding variables: RR 1.05 (95% CI 1.01 to 1.10). Long sleep duration showed no association with distress at any time point.

CONCLUSIONS
Self-reported shorter sleep duration is linearly associated with prevalent and persistent psychological distress in young adults. In contrast, only the very short sleepers had a raised risk of new onset of distress. Different approaches to sleep duration measurement yield different results and should guide any interventions to improve subjective sleep duration in young adults.


The tried-and-true prosperity wisdom of these beloved writers, teachers, and thinkers has been relied upon by generations of Americans seeking guidance in hard economic times? and now, for the first time, it is collected in a single, compact paperback volume. Cherished for decades, these timeless writings from self-help and inspirational masters, including Napoleon Hill, Florence Scovel Shinn, James Allen, and Russell Conwell, have touched the lives of literally millions of people, giving them the insight and knowledge to take care of their families and themselves in difficult times. How to Prosper in Hard Times is an easyto-use, one-of-akind volume, combining inspirational advice on attracting prosperity, dealing with hardship, and keeping a positive attitude no matter what. A necessary handbook for our era, How to Prosper in Hard Times is filled with time-tested wisdom that resonates as strongly and as truly today as when it was first written. Featuring: -Prayer for Prosperity by Florence Scovel Shinn -How to Attract Money by Joseph Murphy -Permanent Success is Built on Hardship and Temporary Failure by Napoleon Hill -Seven Remedies for a Lean Purse by George S. Clason -After Failure, What? by Orson Swett Marden -Light on Life?s Difficulties by James Allen -What You Can Do With Your Will Power by Russell H. Conwell -The Optimist?s Creed by Christian Larsen -A full About the Authors section, featuring capsule biographies and bibliographic and historical information


A distributed operating system encourages a style of programming in which independently developed processes interact in a nontrivial fashion at run time. Server processes, for example, must deal with clients that they do not understand, and certainly cannot trust. Interprocess communications can be written in a traditional, sequential language with direct calls to kernel primitives, but the result is both cumbersome and error-prone. Convenience and safety are offered by the many distributed languages proposed to date, but in a form too inflexible for anything other than the pieces of a single distributed program. A new language known as LYNX overcomes the disadvantages of both these previous approaches. Novel features of LYNX address problems encountered in the course of practical experience, writing distributed programs without high-level language support. Chief among these features are a virtual circuit abstraction called the link, and an unconventional coroutine mechanism that allows a server to maintain nested contexts for interleaved conversations with an arbitrary number of clients.


Introduction US tobacco control policies to reduce cigarette use have been effective, but their impact has been relatively slow. This study considers a strategy of switching cigarette smokers to e-cigarette use ('vaping') in the USA to accelerate tobacco control progress. Methods A Status Quo Scenario, developed to project smoking rates and health outcomes in the absence of vaping, is compared with Substitution models, whereby cigarette use is largely replaced by vaping over a 10-year period. We test an Optimistic and a Pessimistic Scenario, differing in terms of the relative harms of e-cigarettes compared with cigarettes and the impact on overall initiation, cessation and switching. Projected mortality outcomes by age and sex under the Status Quo and E-Cigarette Substitution Scenarios are compared from 2016 to 2100 to determine public health impacts. Findings Compared with the Status Quo, replacement of cigarette by e-cigarette use over a 10-year period yields 6.6 million fewer premature deaths with 86.7 million fewer life years lost in the Optimistic Scenario. Under the Pessimistic Scenario, 1.6 million premature deaths are averted with 20.8 million fewer life years lost. The largest gains are among younger cohorts, with a 0.5 gain in average life expectancy projected for the age 15 years cohort in 2016. Conclusions The tobacco control community has been divided regarding the role of e-cigarettes in tobacco control. Our projections show that a strategy of replacing cigarette smoking with vaping would yield substantial life year gains, even under pessimistic assumptions regarding cessation, initiation and relative harm.


INTRODUCTION: Minimally-invasive robotic surgery benefits the surgeon with increased dexterity and precision, more comfortable seating, and depth perception. Indeed, the stereo-endoscopic camera of the daVinci robot provides the surgeon with a high-resolution 3D view of the surgical scene inside the patient body. To leverage this depth information using advanced computational tools (such as augmented reality or collision detection), we need a fast and accurate stereo matching algorithm, which computes the disparity (pixel shift) map between left and right images. To improve this trade-off between speed and accuracy, we propose an efficient multi-scale approach that overcomes standard multi-scale limitations due to interpolation artifacts when upsampling intermediate disparity results from coarser to finer scale. METHODS: Standard stereo matching algorithms perform an exhaustive search of the most similar patch between the reference and target images (along the same horizontal line when images are rectified). This requires a wide search range in the target image to ensure finding the corresponding pixel in the reference image (Figure 1). To optimize this search, we propose a multi-scale approach that uses the disparity map resulting from previous iteration at lower resolution. Instead of directly using the pixel position in the reference image to place the search region in the target image, we shift it by the corresponding disparity value from previous iteration and reduce the width of the search region as it is expected to be closer to the optimal solution. We also add two additional search regions shifted by disparity values at left and right adjacent pixel positions (Figure 2) to avoid errors typically related to interpolation artifacts when resizing disparity map. To avoid important overlaps between different search regions, we only add them where the disparity map has strong gradients. MATERIAL: We used stereo images from the Middlebury dataset (http://vision.middlebury.edu/stereo/data/) and stereo-endoscopic images captured at full HD 1080i resolution using a daVinci S/Si HD Surgical System. Experiments were performed with a GPU implementation on a workstation with 128GB RAM, an Intel Xeon Processor E5-2690, and an NVIDIA Tesla C2075. RESULTS: We compared the accuracy and speed between standard and proposed methods using ten images from the Middlebury dataset that has the advantage to provide ground truth disparity maps. We used the sum of square difference (SSD) as a similarity metric between patches of size 3x3 in left and right rectified images, resized to half their original size (665x555). For the standard method, we set the search range offset and width to respectively -25 and 64 pixels. For the proposed method, we initialize the disparity to 0 followed by five iterations with a search range width of 16. Results in Table 1 show that we managed to improve the average accuracy by 27% without affecting the average computation time of 120ms. CONCLUSION: We proposed an efficient multi-scale stereo matching algorithm that significantly improves accuracy without compromising speed. In future work, we will investigate the benefits of a similar approach using temporal consistency between successive frames and its use in more advanced computational tools for image-guided surgery.


Applying feed-forward neural networks has been limited due to the use of conventional gradient-based slow learning algorithms in training and iterative determination of network parameters. This paper demonstrates a method that partly overcomes these problems by using an extreme learning machine (ELM) which predicts the hydrological time-series very quickly. ELMs, also called single-hidden layer feed-forward neural networks (SLFNs), are able to well generalize the performance for extremely complex problems. ELM randomly chooses a single hidden layer and analytically determines the weights to predict the output. The ELM method was applied to predict hydrological flow series for the Tryggevaelde Catchment, Denmark and for the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, USA. The results confirmed that ELM's performance was similar or better in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) and normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) compared to ANN and other previously published techniques, namely evolutionary computation based support vector machine (EC-SVM), standard chaotic approach and inverse approach.


Did America's fortieth president lead a conservative counterrevolution that left liberalism gasping for air? The answer, for both his admirers and his detractors, is often "yes." In Morning in America, Gil Troy argues that the Great Communicator was also the Great Conciliator. His pioneering and lively reassessment of Ronald Reagan's legacy takes us through the 1980s in ten year-by-year chapters, integrating the story of the Reagan presidency with stories of the decade's cultural icons and watershed moments-from personalities to popular television shows. One such watershed moment was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. With the trauma of Vietnam fading, the triumph of America's 1983 invasion of tiny Grenada still fresh, and a reviving economy, Americans geared up for a festival of international harmony that-spurred on by an entertainment-focused news media, corporate sponsors, and the President himself-became a celebration of the good old U.S.A. At the Games' opening, Reagan presided over a thousand-voice choir, a 750-member marching band, and a 90,000-strong teary-eyed audience singing "America the Beautiful!" while waving thousands of flags. Reagan emerges more as happy warrior than angry ideologue, as a big-picture man better at setting America's mood than implementing his program. With a vigorous Democratic opposition, Reagan's own affability, and other limiting factors, the eighties were less counterrevolutionary than many believe. Many sixties' innovations went mainstream, from civil rights to feminism. Reagan fostered a political culture centered on individualism and consumption-finding common ground between the right and the left. Written with verve, Morning in America is both a major new look at one of America's most influential modern-day presidents and the definitive story of a decade that continues to shape our times.


Planning with partial observability can be formulated as a non-deterministic search problem in belief space. The problem is harder than classical planning as keeping track of beliefs is harder than keeping track of states, and searching for action policies is harder than searching for action sequences. In this work, we develop a framework for partial observability that avoids these limitations and leads to a planner that scales up to larger problems. For this, the class of problems is restricted to those in which 1) the non-unary clauses representing the uncertainty about the initial situation are invariant, and 2) variables that are hidden in the initial situation do not appear in the body of conditional effects, which are all assumed to be deterministic. We show that such problems can be translated in linear time into equivalent fully observable non-deterministic planning problems, and that an slight extension of this translation renders the problem solvable by means of classical planners. The whole approach is sound and complete provided that in addition, the state-space is connected. Experiments are also reported.


The Sultanate of Oman is an arid country with scarce water resources mainly consisting of groundwater. Aflaj are artificial canals constructed centuries ago to transfer horizontally the groundwater to a location at the surface. The water quality of these Aflaj is a very important factor to be considered for healthy and safe use of this water. This paper aimed to study the characteristics of the groundwater through its journey in Aflaj from source point up to its usage point. An experimental programme was adopted to investigate the water quality of Al Hammam Aflaj in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. The results showed that some positions of the Falaj have high content of some elements, such as Ca, above the allowable values of drinking water standards. Results proved that the water of Al Hammam Falaj in general can be used with caution as a drinking water; however, some care and monitoring should be applied regularly. Results of sodium adsorption ratio (SAR) and soluble sodium percentage (SSP) equations revealed that the water Falaj can be used for irrigation for all soil types but cannot be used on soils with restricted drainage due to its relatively high salinity.


The therapeutic alliance is foundational to counseling practice and has amassed strong empirical support as being essential for successful counseling. Counselors generally rely on their own perspective when assessing the quality of the alliance, though the client's perspective has been found to be a better predictor of outcome. Formal methods for eliciting client feedback about the alliance and counseling outcomes have been strongly supported in the literature, yet such limitations as time constraints hinder counselor efforts to gather formal client feedback. Two ultra-brief measures of alliance and outcome, the Session Rating Scale and the Outcome Rating Scale, are feasible methods for counselors to secure client feedback. This article reviews the two measures and makes a case for using empirical means to understand adult clients' views of the therapeutic alliance.


Informal, interpersonal help|that is, resources voluntarily transferred between individuals without a formal contract|can be hugely valuable for people in need, yet evidence from ?fields such as ?finance and medicine suggests that people in need do not always actively seek out suchhelp. Prior work seeking to explain this behavior has largely focused on explanations such as people not recognizing that there is help available or people simply not desiring the help.In this dissertation, I propose another potential explanation for this puzzle. I hypothesize that one reason why people in need may not ask for help is that they incur a psychologicalcost in asking for help|that is, in having a conversation with a potential helper about the fact that they would like to receive help. This \pain of asking" may prevent people from askingeven when they recognize that there is help available, desire that help, and believe that asking would increase their chances of getting the help. Across three papers|a theoretical model and two ?field applications|this dissertationmakes three primary contributions. First, it develops a new framework that describes how people in need decide to ask others for help. Second, it empirically demonstrates the existence and importance of the pain of asking. It shows that not only does asking create psychological costs, but those psychological costs then suppress demand for informal help and can harm economic outcomes. Finally, it offers explanations for what contributes to the pain of asking.Paper 1, written in collaboration with George Loewenstein and drawing on our joint ongoing work with Roland Benabou, lays the theoretical foundation for the dissertation. It ?first develops a game theoretic model that captures communication between a person who wants help and a person who can provide help. It proposes that, under certain conditions, people in need face a pain of asking: holding constant whether help is transferred, they feel worse if they asked for help than if they did not. The model further explains how and when the pain of asking can prevent people in need from asking for help. In particular, it argues that the person in need is uncertain about the would-be helper's generosity toward or valuation of him. He avoids asking out of fear of being rejected and learning through that rejection that the would-be helper does not truly value him. We also present results from several studies, which test and demonstrate support for the predictions of the model.Paper 2 examines the importance of \the ask" in a ?financial setting. I ?first argue that informal loans|loans from friends and family|are a hugely important sector of the economy,yet have received little attention in the literature. Next, I seek to better understand how people decide whether to choose an informal loan over other common alternatives of addressing their ?financial needs. I ?find that although people often believe that informal loans are more economically attractive than other alternatives, they also report that seeking such loans forces them to incur psychological and emotional costs, and in particular the pain of asking. I further ?find that anticipation of the pain of asking seems to predict people's unwillingness to ask their friends and family for ?financial help. While this unwillingness may spare them from incurring some psychological costs, it may also generate economic costs, pushing them towards more expensive methods of addressing their ?financial needs. Finally, Paper 3, joint with George Loewenstein and Amit Tevar, tests whether the pain of asking may have literal life-and-death consequences. In particular, it tests whether the pain ofasking may contribute to end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients' unwillingness to ask friends, family, and strangers for potentially life-saving live kidney donations. As predicted, we ?find that although such patients typically desire and see value in having live kidney donations, only a minority ask potential donors to donate. This pattern of behavior cannot be fully explained by standard economic factors, and instead seems to be driven in large part by the pain of asking.By incorporating social psychology into a game-theoretic analysis, this dissertation deepens our understanding of the powerful psychology of help-seeking and -giving. Together, the three papers offer a new framework describing how people decide to seek informal, interpersonal help; provide corroborating evidence for the importance of the \pain of asking" in a range of settings; and offer explanations for why, precisely, asking is painful. This work may haveimportant implications for fi?elds such as health, education, and public economics, which are often concerned with how to most efficiently allocate resources to help those in need. Because formal and informal help are often substitutes, deepening our understanding of how people decide to pursue informal help may shed light on the optimal amount and distribution of public spending on formal help. It may also inform non-policy strategies for better connectingthose in need to valuable resources. For instance, insights from this research could be used to develop online applications for informal lending or educational materials for ESRD patients seeking live kidney donations.Please address all correspondence to email@example.com do not cite without permission.


This document defines the NSA (No Secrecy Afforded) certificate
extension appropriate for use in certain PKIX (X.509 Pubic Key
Certificates) digital certificates. Historically, clients and servers
strived to maintain the privacy of their keys; however, the secrecy of
their private keys cannot always be maintained. In certain
circumstances, a client or a server might feel that they will be
compelled in the future to share their keys with a third party. Some
clients and servers also have been compelled to share their keys and
wish to indicate to relying parties upon certificate renewal that
their keys have in fact been shared with a third party.


Interferometric measurement techniques such as holographic interferometry and electronic speckle-pattern interferometry are valuable for measuring the deformation of objects. Conventional theoretical models of deformation measurement assume collimated illumination and telecentric imaging, which are usually only practical for small objects. Large objects often require divergent illumination, for which the models are valid only when the object is planar, and then only in the paraxial region. We present an analysis and discussion of the three-dimensional systematic sensitivity errors for both in-plane and out-of-plane interferometer configurations, where it is shown that the errors can be significant. A dimensionless approach is adopted to make the analysis generic and hence scalable to a system of any size.


Recommender systems typically analyze the user behavior to predict the items most likely matching the user preferences. While analyzing the user preferences the observed data must be normalized considering characteristic usage pattern as well as the lifecycles of the items. The normalization is especially relevant in domains characterized by frequently updated item sets and fast changes in the set of users, typical in news recommender scenarios. In this paper, we study approaches for normalizing the collected data in a news recommender system. We analyze live usage data from several German news portals available in the NewsREEL challenge. We discuss the influence of seasonality, day of week and hour of day patterns. We show that applying time series decomposition and normalization methods enable us to model the relevant aspects resulting in the observed item popularity. The derived models are the basis for precisely predicting the interest in concrete items in the future.


While technical failures remain the most common triggers for overruns in metro projects, the causes have not typically been deficiencies in the underlying engineering principles but in project management. This work involves the complementary use of requirements and risk management processes and real options theory. The Crossrail project provides a case study with a scheme design for an underground station at Farringdon being considered in detail. The requirements process documented in this research is capable of providing an interactive format for managing project requirements and importantly, any changes that are made to them. This is achieved using commercial software (Telelogic DOORS®) and it is shown that this process is effective when working on multidisciplinary metro projects. This process is then expanded to consider the interaction between risks on a project. This is identified as being crucial given the impacts that technical, project and external risks can have on each other. The developed risk process therefore allows the interactions between all risks to be recorded and provides a holistic view of all risks for management purposes. The requirements and risk processes are complemented by a fuzzy logic methodology to evaluate global and elemental risks (such as political or client risks). Over 50 external risk factors which are known to have caused overruns on previous projects are identified and the performance of Crossrail is evaluated against each risk factor by way of a questionnaire circulated to industry professionals. An approach to avoiding cost overruns is demonstrated by the application of real options theory where the chosen design for Farringdon station is developed alongside an alternative design. Real options theory is used to value the cost of implementing the design alternative should it be needed during the project construction cycle due to cost increases and the potential occurrence of major risks. This implementation cost is presented as a fixed cost agreed prior to construction rather than being an added cost to the agreed budget once construction has started. It is proposed that using real options in this context can avoid significant cost overruns by predetermining the value of payments to be made for changing from one design to another. This thesis will show how additions and adjustments to existing processes and the inclusion of real options valuation in the procurement of metro projects can help practitioners avoid cost overruns in a metro rail project.


THE EFFECTS OF POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER ON PREGNANCY OUTCOMES. Shari S. Rogal, Megan Smith, Karalee Porschman, Kathleen Belanger, and Kimberly A. Yonkers. Department of Psychiatry, Yale University, School of Medicine, New Haven, CT. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), diagnosed prospectively during pregnancy, on the occurrence of low birthweight (<2500 grams) and preterm delivery (<37 weeks gestational age). A cohort of 1362 women was recruited from prenatal care visits and screened for depression, panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and substance use. Current episodes of PTSD were assessed using the MINI International Neuropsychiatric Interview. Pregnancy outcomes were abstracted from hospital records after delivery, and the data were analyzed using logistic regression. Two hundred sixty two women (33%) were lost to follow-up due to unavailable medical records, leaving 1100 women in the final analyses. Among these 1100 women, 31 (3%) were found to have PTSD during pregnancy. Substance use in pregnancy, panic disorder, major and minor depressive disorders, and prior preterm delivery were significantly associated with PTSD in the sample, while age, language spoken, and race were not. Low birthweight (LBW) was present in 6.5% of sampled women and was not significantly associated with a diagnosis of PTSD in pregnancy when adjusting for potential confounders. However, LBW was significantly associated with minor depressive disorder OR= 1.82 (CI=1.01, 3.29). Preterm delivery occurred in 7.0% of those without and 16.1% of those with PTSD (p=0.055). Because prior preterm delivery data were not available for 33% of women with PTSD, this variable was included only in secondary analyses. However, the association between PTSD and preterm delivery depended on this variable, with OR= 2.82 (0.95, 8.38) before controlling for prior preterm delivery and OR=3.35 (1.04, 10.85) after controlling for prior preterm delivery. These data suggest that a possible association of PTSD and preterm delivery was limited by the low rates of PTSD in this cohort and the inability to control for all confounders. Taken together, these findings provide limited support for the hypothesized association between PTSD and preterm delivery and no support for an association of PTSD with LBW.


The mechanistic target or rapamycin (mTOR) is a ubiquitously expressed kinase that acts through two complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2, to regulate protein homeostasis as well as long lasting forms of synaptic and behavioral plasticity. Alteration of the mTOR pathway is classically involved in neurodegenerative disorders, and it has been linked to dysregulation of cognitive functions and affective states. However, information concerning the specific involvement of the p70 S6 kinase 1 (S6K1), a downstream target of the mTORC1 pathway, in learning and memory processes and in the regulation of affective states remains scant. To fill this gap, we exposed adult male mice lacking S6K1 to a battery of behavioral tests aimed at measuring their learning and memory capabilities by evaluating reference memory and flexibility with the Morris water maze, and associative memory using the contextual fear conditioning task. We also studied their anxiety- and depression-like behaviors by respectively performing elevated plus maze, open field, light-dark emergence tests, and sucrose preference and forced swim tests. We found that deleting S6K1 leads to a robust anxious phenotype concomitant with associative learning deficits; these symptoms are associated with a reduction of adult neurogenesis and neuronal atrophy in the hippocampus. Collectively, these results provide grounds for the understanding of anxiety reports after treatments with mTOR inhibitors and will be critical for the development of novel compounds targeting anxiety.


ABSTRACT Background: To date, no studies have examined the relationship between cognitive disorders and personality disorders. Our aim was to investigate the association between dependent personality disorder (DPD) and cognitive disorders in Central Africa. Methods: Between 2011 and 2012, a cross-sectional multicenter population-based study was carried out in rural and urban areas of the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Republic of Congo (ROC). Participants aged ≥65 years were interviewed using the Community Screening Interview for Dementia (CSI-D). Elderly people who performed poorly (CSI-D cognitive tests score or COGSCORE ≤ 24.5/30) were clinically assessed by neurologists and underwent further psychometric testing. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition and Petersen criteria were required for the diagnosis of dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) respectively. DPD was assessed using the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-4+. Socio-demographic, vascular, and psychological factors were also documented. Multivariate multinomial logistic regression models were used to estimate the associations. Results: Of the 2,002 participants screened, 860 and 912 had data for cognitive status and DPD in CAR and ROC respectively. In fully adjusted models, DPD was significantly associated with MCI in ROC (Odds Ratio (OR) = 2.2, 95% CI: 1.0–4.7) and CAR (OR = 2.1, 95% CI: 1.1–4.0) and with dementia only in ROC (OR = 4.8, 95% CI: 2.0–11.7). Conclusions: DPD was associated with cognitive disorders among elderly people in Central Africa. This association should be confirmed in other contexts. This study paves the way for research on the association between personality and cognitive impairment in Africa.


The reaction of N-benzylbenzamides 6 with SOCl2 under reflux gave the corresponding N-benzylbenzimidoyl chlorides 7. Further treatment with KSeCN in dry acetone yielded imidoyl isoselenocyanates 3 (Scheme 2). These compounds, obtained in satisfying yields, proved to be stable enough to be purified and analyzed. Reaction of 3 with morpholine in dry acetone led to the corresponding selenourea derivatives 8. On treatment with Et3N, the 4-nitrobenzyl derivatives of type 3 were transformed into bis(2,4-diarylimidazol-5-yl) diselenides 9 (Scheme 3). This transformation takes place only when the benzyl residue bears an NO2 group and the phenyl group is not substituted with a strong electron-donating group. A reaction mechanism for the formation of 9 is proposed in Scheme 4. The key structures have been established by X-ray crystallography.


To understand that an object has changed state during an event, we must represent the `before' and `after' states of that object. Because a physical object cannot be in multiple states at any one moment in time, these `before' and `after' object states are mutually exclusive. In the same way that alternative states of a physical object are mutually exclusive, are cognitive representations of alternative object states also incompatible? If so, comprehension of an object state-change involves interference between the constituent object states. Through a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, we test the hypothesis that comprehension of object state-change requires the cognitive system to resolve conflict between representationally distinct brain states. We discover that (1) comprehension of an object state-change evokes a neural response in prefrontal cortex that is the same as that found for known forms of conflict, (2) the degree to which an object is described as changing in state predicts the strength of the prefrontal cortex conflict response, (3) the dissimilarity of object states predicts the pattern dissimilarity of visual cortex brain states, and (4) visual cortex pattern dissimilarity predicts the strength of the prefrontal cortex conflict response. Results from these experiments suggest that distinct and incompatible representations of an object compete when representing object state-change. The greater the dissimilarity between described object states, the greater the dissimilarity between rival brain states, and the greater the conflict. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Psychology First Advisor Sharon L. Thompson-Schill


An approach is presented which provides the tune change locations within a set of Irish Traditional tunes. Also provided are semantic labels for each part of each tune within the set. A set in Irish Traditional music is a number of individual tunes played segue. Each of the tunes in the set are made up of structural segments called parts. Musical variation is a prominent characteristic of this genre. However, a certain set of notes known as 'set accented tones' are considered impervious to musical variation. Chroma information is extracted at 'set accented tone' locations within the music. The resulting chroma vectors are grouped to represent the parts of the music. The parts are then compared with one another to form a part similarity matrix. Unit kernels which represent the possible structures of an Irish Traditional tune are matched with the part similarity matrix to determine the tune change locations and semantic part labels.


This study investigates control strategies for coordinating the variable solar-optical properties of a dynamic building envelope system with a daylight controlled electric lighting system to reduce electricity consumption and increase comfort in the perimeter zone of commercial buildings. Control strategy design can be based on either simple, instantaneous measured data, or on complex, predictive algorithms that estimate the energy consumption for a selected operating state of the dynamic envelope and lighting system. The potential benefits of optimizing the operation of a dynamic envelope and lighting system are (1) significant reductions in electrical energy end-uses - lighting, and cooling due to solar and lighting heat gains - over that achieved by conventional static envelope and lighting systems, (2) significant reductions in peak demand, and (3) increased occupant visual and thermal comfort. The DOE-2 building energy simulation program was used to model two dynamic envelope and lighting systems, an automated venetian blind and an electrochromic glazing system, and their control strategies under a range of building conditions. The energy performance of simple control strategies are compared to the optimum performance of a theoretical envelope and lighting system to determine the maximum potential benefit of using more complex, predictive control algorithms. Results indicate that (1) predictive control algorithms may significantly increase the energy-efficiency of systems with non-optimal solar-optical properties such as the automated venetian blind, and (2) simpler, non-predictive control strategies may suffice for more advanced envelope systems 1 incorporating spectrally selective, narrow-band electrochromic coatings.


Cloudworks (Cloudworks.ac.uk) is a social networking site designed for sharing, finding and discussing learning and teaching ideas and experiences. Design and development of the site has been based on an iterative analysis, development and implementation approach, underpinned by ongoing research and evaluation. To this end, we have been seeking to establish strategies to enable us to systematically position transactions and emerging patterns of activity on the site so that we can more reliably use the empirical evidence we have gathered. In this article we will introduce a framework we have developed for observing and supporting community development on the site. In building our framework we have used empirical evidence gathered from the site, then related it to the literature from a range of disciplines concerned with professional and learning communities. We link research relating to distance learning communities with studies into Computer Mediated Communication, self-organising communities on the web, and wider research about the nature of learning organisations and continuous professional development. We argue that this framework can be used to capture the development of productive communities in the space (i.e. how far cohesive, productive groups can be said to be emerging or not) and also help focus future development of the platform, and provide guidelines for community support.


Rapid melting of sea ice and an increased warming have been observed over the
Arctic since 1990s and is expected to continue in future climate projections. Possible linkage between the Arctic sea ice and the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude
circulation has been studied previously but is not yet fully understood. This dissertation investigates the influence of the Arctic on the mid-latitudes and the underlying
dynamical mechanisms. Specifically, we hypothesize that the stratosphere and its
coupling with the troposphere play an important role in amplifying and extending
the mid-latitude circulation response to arctic warming.

 First, we assess the robustness of the stratospheric pathway in linking the sea
ice variability, specifically over the Barents-Kara Sea (BKS), in late autumn and
early winter to the mid-latitude circulation in the subsequent winter using an ensemble of global climate model simulations. We analyze two groups of models from
the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) archive, one with a
well-resolved stratosphere (high-top models) and the other with a poorly-resolved
stratosphere (low-top models) to distinguish the role of the stratospheric pathway.
It has been found that, collectively, high-top models are able to capture the persistent mid-latitude circulation response in the subsequent winter. The response in
low-top models is, however, weaker and not as long-lasting most likely due to lack
of stratospheric variability. Diagnosis of eddy heat flux reveals that stronger vertical
wave propagation leads to a stronger response in stratospheric polar vortex in high-
top models. The results robustly demonstrate that multi-model ensemble of CMIP5 high-top models are able to capture the prolonged impact of sea ice variability on the
mid-latitude circulation and outperforms the low-top models in this regard.
 We further explore the dynamical linkage between the BKS sea ice loss and
the Siberian cold anomalies using a comprehensive Atmospheric General Circulation
Model (AGCM), with a well-resolved stratosphere, with prescribed sea ice loss over
BKS region. Decomposition of dynamic and thermodynamic components suggests a
dynamically induced warm Arctic cold Siberia pattern in the winter following sea ice
loss over the BKS in late autumn. Specifically, the results show that the meridional
component of the horizontal temperature advection, from the Arctic into the Siberia,
dominates in driving a cold temperature anomaly. Additionally, we conduct targeted
experiments in order to quantitatively measure the role of the stratospheric pathway. We find that the stratosphere plays a critical role in the tropospheric circulation
anomaly characterized by an intensified ridge-trough pattern that is attributable for
the enhanced meridional temperature advection from the Arctic into the Siberia.

 Next, we extend our study to investigate the sensitivity to geographical location
of Arctic sea ice loss and associated warming in modulating the atmospheric circulation. In particular, we assess the linear additivity of the regional Arctic sea ice loss
and Arctic Amplification (AA), using a simplified dry dynamical core model. We find
that the responses to regional AA over three key regions of the Arctic, i.e. Barents-
Kara Sea, East Siberia-Chukchi sea and Baffin Bay-Labrador Sea, separately, show
similar equatorward shift of the tropospheric jet but differences in the stratospheric
polar vortex. In addition, responses to regional Arctic Amplification are not linearly
additive and the residual resembles a positive Northern Annular Mode-like structure. Additional targeted experiments further diagnose the role of the stratosphere
in the non-linearity. It is found that the stratosphere-troposphere coupling plays an
important role in driving the non-linear circulation response to regional AA.

 The findings of our research leads to a systematic understanding of the role of the
stratospheric pathway in modulating the mid-latitude circulation response to Arctic
sea ice loss and accompanied surface warming. Our study suggests that the representation of the stratosphere in climate models plays an important role in correctly
simulating the mid-latitude circulation response and could be accountable for the
some of the discrepancies among recent studies. Additionally, the result indicates
that studying the regional sea ice loss might not provide the full picture of pan-Arctic
sea ice melting and caution the use of regional sea ice to explain the recent trend.


In this letter, we investigate the performance of antenna selection in amplify-and-forward (AF) MIMO two-way relay networks (TWRNs) where a simple unified system outage probability (OP) expression is obtained for Nakagami-m, Rician, and Weibull fading channels. To quantify the error performance of the TWRN, a closed-form expression of the overall symbol-error-rate (OSER) is derived for Nakagami-m fading. In addition, to gain further insights on the diversity order, asymptotic expressions of the system OP and OSER are obtained at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Moreover, the joint optimization problems of power allocation and relay location are considered to minimize the asymptotic system OP. Finally, the analytical findings are validated by the simulations.


The block layout problem for a multi-floor facility is an important sub class of the facility layout problem with practical applications when the price of land is high or when a compact building allows for more efficient environmental control. Several alternative formulations for the block layout problem of a multi-floor facility are presented, where the material handling transportation between floors is executed through elevators. Both elevator types that either service all floors or a limited subset of the floors are considered. The department and floors are modeled as rectangular shapes. The floors may have different dimensions provided the floor projections on the ground floor are nested starting from the ground floor to the top floor. The formulations yield large mixed-integer programming problems. We will report on the results of the numerical experiments to solve these problems with a MIP solver for the base formulation and using various acceleration techniques such as symmetry-breaking constraints and valid inequalities. Insights on the relative difficulty of the problems based on the numerical experiment will also be


Hydrilla verticillata invaded south central Louisiana during the 1970s subsequently becoming the dominant submerged macrophyte in floodplain habitats of the Atchafalaya River Basin. The effects of hydrilla on littoral habitat structure, water quality, fish, and macroinvertebrates have been pervasive, and I hypothesized that dense hydrilla stands would also impact vertebrate predation on resident macroinvertebrates, although predation effects would likely be mediated by bed position. During 2003 and 2004, I conducted exclosure experiments in the Atchafalaya River Basin with artificial substrates to test for variations in hydrilla bed macroinvertebrate communities caused by predation, plant architecture, and bed position. To determine invertebrates consumed by fishes, I also examined stomach contents of potentially invertivorous fishes inhabiting these beds. Results indicate that position and predation are important in structuring macroinvertebrate communities, whereas plant architecture had little effect. My diet analyses indicate that the fishes sampled fall into three categories: 1) those that do not feed on macroinvertebrates; 2) those that feed on small invertebrates (e.g., dipterans); and 3) those that feed on large invertebrates (e.g., decapods) and poeciliid fishes. Further, the diets of the invertivorous fishes coincide with the distributions found in the macroinvertebrate community and, in general, those macroinvertebrates most commonly found in fish diets occurred in greater densities within the bed interior.


We describe the development of feedback control for autonomous underwater gliders. Feedback is introduced to make the glider motion robust to disturbances and uncertainty. Our focus is on buoyancy-propelled, fixed-wing gliders with attitude controlled by means of active internal mass redistribution. We derive a nonlinear dynamic model of a nominal glider complete with hydrodynamic forces and coupling between the vehicle and the movable internal mass. We use this model to study stability and controllability of glide paths and to derive feedback control laws. For our analysis, we restrict to motion in the vertical plane and consider linear control laws. For illustration, we apply our methodology to a model of our own laboratory-scale underwater glider.


Life style disorders are those diseases whose occurrence is primarily based on daily habits of peoples. The main factors contributing to life style disorders includes bad food habits, physical inactivity, wrong body posture, and disturbed biological clock. Lifestyle disorders are a big problem for our society today. Once these were bacteria and viruses, who were the prime till date have the killers, but now a day we human beings are proving biggest killers for ourselves. Today more than five of ten biggest killing diseases are caused by carelessness, ignorance and irregularities of our own. Perhaps we can lower the death rate by ourselves. "In many [western] countries, peoples' diet changed substantially in the second half of the twentieth century, generally with increases in consumption of meat, dairy products, vegetable oils, fruit juice, and alcoholic beverages, and decreases in consumption of starchy staple foods such as bread, potatoes, rice, and maize flour. Other aspects of lifestyle also changed, notably, large reductions in physical activity and large increases in the prevalence of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, cirrhosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, chronic renal failure, osteoporosis, stroke and depression etc. This is a shortened list of the diseases; the whole list is infinite as all the diseases known input from Lifestyle and diet. Modern science through improved sanitation, vaccination, and antibiotics, and medical attention has eliminated the threat of death from most infectious diseases. This means that death from lifestyle diseases like heart disease and cancer are now the primary causes of death. The question now becomes a question of death at what age. In eighteenth-century England, chimney sweeps died in great numbers from scrotal cancer that was then called soot wart. Everybody naturally has to die of something, but lifestyle diseases take people before their time. Too many people are dying relatively young from heart disease and cancer and other lifestyle diseases in modern times. The choice is yours: die young, now or at a ripe old age. Various preventive measures are described in Ayurveda, by


Many application areas that use supervised machine learning make use of multiple raters to collect target ratings for training data. Usage of multiple raters, however, inevitably introduces the risk that a proportion of them will be unreliable. The presence of unreliable raters can prolong the rating process, make it more expensive and lead to inaccurate ratings. The dominant, "static" approach of solving this problem in state-of-the-art research is to estimate the rater reliability and to calculate the target ratings when all ratings have been gathered. However, doing it dynamically while raters rate training data can make the acquisition of ratings faster and cheaper compared to static techniques. We propose to cast the problem of the dynamic estimation of rater reliability as a multi-armed bandit problem. Experiments show that the usage of multi-armed bandits for this problem is worthwhile, providing that each rater can rate any asset when asked. The purpose of this paper is to outline the directions of future research in this area.


This paper assesses total factor productivity (TFP) growth in India, examines the sources of productivity growth, including public and private investment, and estimates the rates of return to public investments in agriculture. The results show that significant TFP growth in the Indian crops sector was produced by investments primarily in research but also in extension, markets, and irrigation. The high rates of return, particularly to public agricultural research and extension, indicate that the Government of India is not overinvesting in agricultural research and investment, but rather that current levels of public investment could be profitably expanded.


In this choral essay we, an assorted group of academics interested in inorganic life and matter, explore a mode of thinking and feeling with our objects of inquiry—chemicals, waste, cement, gas, and the "project" as a particular form of circulation and enactment of materials and things. To experiment with alternative modes of knowing, we went to Puchuncavi, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial compound in Chile, to encounter the inorganic through and with its inorganicness and to attend to the situated, historicized, and political composition of both our materials and our experiences. Thinking of this as a collective provocation, we do not rehearse a conventional argument. Its parts are connected but only partially. There is no dramatic arc but rather an attempt at composing an atmosphere through which our thought and feelings are invoked. We have made visible the authorship behind each of the stories recounted here to celebrate the multivocality of our collaboration and to rehearse a nonabstracted mode of attention to Puchuncavi and the inorganic forces and entities we encountered there. We connect our irritations and speculations with the Anthropocene precisely as a way of summoning the multiple violences, many of them of planetary reach, that have to be denounced when situating our knowledge practices in Puchuncavi. Thinking about the ethico-political challenges of research in territories that have been, and are being, transformed under the weighty history of contamination and that are lived in and lived with by generations of beings (human and otherwise), we call in our concluding remarks for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.


PURPOSE
To develop a research platform called SCORE (Super Computing Online Re-planning Environment) for automatic treatment planning and adaptive radiotherapy re-planning based on GPU.

METHODS
Our software is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) based on the Qt framework that allows users to easily and quickly create a new treatment plan based on a reference plan. It consists of several modules, including loading plan and patient geometry from DICOM RT files, automatic and manual rigid registration, deformable registration for contour propagation, previous plan based automatic plan optimization, physician-driven plan tuning, final dose calculation, and plan exporting in DICOM RT format. For automatic planning, a reference plan is identified from a library of previously delivered plans and it is used to guide the optimization process. For adaptive radiotherapy re-planning, the original plan of the same patient is used as the reference plan to guide the optimization process to generate a new plan on the new patient geometry defined by either a new CT or Cone-Beam CT image. All the computation modules have been implemented in CUDA to achieve high efficiency. The results for each step of the workflow can be visualized for review, revision, and approval.

RESULTS
SCORE has been well tested and validated for prostate and head/neck cancer cases. The validation was done by comparing SCORE plans against the same plans with re-calculated dose distributions and DVHs using a commercial planning system. We found that SCORE can generate clinically optimal treatment plans that are realistic and deliverable. The plans can be automatically created in only a few minutes, followed by another few minutes of physician fine-tuning using an interactive GUI.

CONCLUSION
We have developed a very efficient and user-friendly GPU-based research platform that can be used for clinical research on automatic treatment planning and adaptive radiotherapy re-planning.


Zinc is a ubiquitous heavy metal that binds to proteins involved in critical cellular processes. Apart from its necessary role, excessive release of intracellular free zinc (Zn) is neurotoxic under stressed conditions characteristic of ischemic or epileptic neuronal injury. Our earlier results indicated that Zn-induced cell death is exacerbated in neurons compared to supporting neuroglia, suggesting that astrocytes have means to upregulate Zn buffering mechanisms, i.e. the Zn-binding protein metallothionein (MT). The first aim of this dissertation sought to address whether MT can effectively maintain Zn levels at a non-toxic minimum. From these studies, we have identified a dichotomous role for MT - protective as a Zn buffering agent and detrimental as an oxidant-labile source for toxic Zn. Previous studies demonstrated the role of Zn as a mitochondrial toxin. Although it has been widely speculated that Zn is taken up by the mitochondrial calcium uniporter, the evidence is not entirely convincing. In the second specific aim, we addressed the specific hypothesis that mitochondrial Zn uptake occurs though the uniporter. Using a novel model involving isolated mitochondria pre-incubated with a Zn-selective fluorophore and attached to glass coverslips, we demonstrated for the first time direct visualization of mitochondrial Zn transport. The third specific aim addresses the importance of mitochondria as dynamic intracellular ATP factories, whose intracellular trafficking is critical for neuronal viability. We hypothesized that elevated Zn would attenuate mitochondrial trafficking. Our results revealed that Zn inhibited mitochondrial movement at pathophysiological levels. Intriguingly, acute activation of phosphotidyl inositol 3-kinase was implicated in both Zn-mediated movement inhibition and toxicity, providing a novel role for this traditionally pro-survival signaling pathway.In summary, this dissertation identifies intracellular targets for Zn-mediated neurotoxicity. We specifically emphasize the relevance of mitochondria as a Zn target under two circumstances which are critically dependent on the Zn concentrations established - direct mitochondrial interactions that may involve Zn transport, and indirect mitochondrial interactions that affect intracellular mitochondrial trafficking.


A century after his death, Viennese artist Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) still startles with his unabashed eroticism, dazzling surfaces, and artistic experimentation. In this neat, dependable monograph, we gather all of Klimt's major works alongside authoritative art historical commentary and privileged archival material from Klimt's own archive to trace the evolution of his astonishing oeuvre.With top-quality illustration, including new photography of the celebrated Stoclet Frieze, the book follows Klimt through his prominent role in the Secessionist movement of 1897, his candid rendering of the female body, and his lustrous "golden phase" when gold leaf brought a shimmering tone and texture to such beloved works as The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, also known as The Woman in Gold.


Paper presented at the National Suicide Prevention Conference, 24-27 July 2016, Canberra, Australia. Within Australia, non-clinical telephone and online crisis support services provide readily accessible support without the requirement of referral. Research shows that up to one third of callers to crisis lines and half of all visitors to crisis chat services may be suicidal at the time of contact. Research also shows that contact with these services reduces caller suicidality and facilitates engagement with necessary intervention. The number of contacts to crisis support services in Australia is increasing. An increase in contacts to technology-based crisis services highlights the need to identify the impact of the role on crisis support staff wellbeing, determinants of staff wellbeing in the technology-based crisis support context and the extent to which the wellbeing of crisis support staff impacts their performance and client outcomes. This paper presents the evidence for an integrated model of staff education and service support that is grounded in medical education theory and can be used to underpin future research and staff (1) recruitment, (2) training, (3) skill assessment, (4) personal development and individual processes to maintain wellbeing (e.g. self-care), (5) supervisor training and staff support strategies (e.g. learning, teaching and facilitating a reflective practice model for supervision and staff professional development), and (6) service support strategies (e.g. organisational personal and professional support strategies that compliment staff supervision).


Four different plants of medicinal value namely; Erythrina variegata, Matricaria chamomilla, Psoralea corylifolia and Chenopodium album were selected for evaluation and assessment of therapeutic value. Pharmacognostical, diagnostic and Pharmacological studies were conducted along with standardized methods for quality control and assurance to provide a base line to commercialize their constituents for herbal products. The WHO recommendations for evaluation were utilized for the characterization of these plants.

Three new and 14 known compounds were isolated from Erythrina variegata and a scientific paper was published in the international journal. The smooth muscles studies on crude extract of E. variegata and their fractions had shown inhibitory response. Treatment of tissue with standard drugs along with fractions showed the possible involvement of both adrenergic and muscarinic receptors but the influence of adrenergic receptors or others was more than muscarinic receptors. It is an inhibitory effect which slowed down the action of the smooth muscles. A significant Antioxidant activity (63.5%) of crude extract of E. variegata was noted. Antioxidants are products that hinder the oxidative processes and potential value of antioxidants in eradicating oxidative stress has provoked researchers to investigate for natural compounds with potent antioxidative activity but showing low cytotoxity. Analgesic activity exhibited onset of action with in 30 minutes which lasted for 90 minutes, indicating sedative action of the drug which is CNS depressive effect. Studies concluded that this drug can be utilized as sedative in formulations.

Smooth muscles study of Matricaria chamomilla showed mix type of responses on smooth muscles on various dose strengths. The study suggested to separate active constituents having stimulating and relaxing effects in order to explore possible development of a treatment therapy. M chamomilla showed analgesic activity that started at 30 minutes and continued till 120 minutes on higher dose which may be due to the inhibition of the muscarinic and H2 receptors as seen similar effect in the smooth muscle activity which may lead to provide an effective therapeutic option to protect against NSAIDs induced gastric ulcers. Mice had shown loss of grip (relaxant effect) and tremor for 2-3 seconds on dose modulation during behavioral study. Staphylococcus aureus, Eschererichia coli and Candida albicans were found sensitive to M chamomilla showing importance as an antimicrobial entity.

Study on the crude extract of P. corylifolia and its fractions revealed quick decrease in the normal intestinal movement followed by a gradual increase in the form of curve. These results at different dosage indicated the presence of mix effect. This is because of the presence of more then one phamacologically active constituent. Gross behavioral studies on crude extract of this plant showed slight irritability on lower dose which reflects the CNS stimulatory effect with the increase in spontaneous activity. At higher dose, the passivity was observed. Overall, there was CNS stimulant effect found in P. corylifolia. At the same time, significant Analgesic effect was observed on lower and higher doses.

Smooth muscles studies performed on the crude extract and fractions of C. album revealed its mixed response on the rabbit intestinal muscles. Extract showed relaxing effect initially followed by the contraction of muscle with the increase in dose regimen. Significant antioxidant activity of crude extract of C. album was noted (67.3%). High antioxidant activity can lead to reduction of free oxygen radicals and can help in recovering or can be used in combination therapy to improve quality of life in diseases like cancer, heart/artery disease, essential hypertension, Alzheimer's dementia, cataracts, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, arthritis and inflammatory disease, as well as aging. C. album had shown strong agglutination activity against A+ and O+ leading to possible lectine like action. Studies concluded that the plant has strong stimulant effect acting on central nervous system. Spectroscopic evaluation of these plants was reported first time and chromatograms were attached for standardization of drugs of commercial value.


With New Zealand's road safety targets expiring in December 2001, New Zealand's Road Safety Strategy 2010 was developed to establish a new set of targets backed up by new or improved road safety interventions, and a new performance management framework with accountability assurances for the Strategy's implementation. Initial work on the Strategy began with the development of a robust target-setting model. A realistic and achievable level of safety was determined to form the basis of proposals for the consultation, taking into account current safety performance, anticipated efficiency and effectiveness gains, forecast increased mobility, and a set of new or intensified interventions. Research was undertaken concurrently which looked at world's best practice measures and into strategic directions being developed overseas. A new performance management framework was proposed, which recognised that interventions which address road user behaviour are not the only way to tackle road safety problems. Changing the roads and/or vehicles instead can often be more effective. Three sets of interventions which reflected strategic trade-offs between standards and compliance measures were identified as broad options for improving road safety: an engineering based option; an enforcement based option; and an option with a mix of engineering and enforcement measures. A public consultative process was developed to determine the desired level of safety for 2010, before the final targets could be set. This paper outlines the development process of strategic proposals for New Zealand's road safety effort over the next decade. Government decisions will be made later in 2001. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E206143.


Planning an optimal route in a complex environment requires efficient reasoning about the surrounding scene. While human drivers prioritize important objects and ignore details not relevant to the decision, learning-based planners typically extract features from dense, high-dimensional grid representations containing all vehicle and road context information. In this paper, we propose PlanT, a novel approach for planning in the context of self-driving that uses a standard transformer architecture. PlanT is based on imitation learning with a compact object-level input representation. On the Longest6 benchmark for CARLA, PlanT outperforms all prior methods (matching the driving score of the expert) while being 5.3x faster than equivalent pixel-based planning baselines during inference. Combining PlanT with an off-the-shelf perception module provides a sensor-based driving system that is more than 10 points better in terms of driving score than the existing state of the art. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation protocol to quantify the ability of planners to identify relevant objects, providing insights regarding their decision-making. Our results indicate that PlanT can focus on the most relevant object in the scene, even when this object is geometrically distant.


In this work we propose new ensemble methods for the hierarchical classification of gene functions. Our methods exploit the hierarchical relationships between the classes in different ways: each ensemble node is trained "locally", according to its position in the hierarchy; moreover, in the evaluation phase the set of predicted annotations is built so to minimize a global loss function defined over the hierarchy. We also address the problem of sparsity of annotations by introducing a cost-sensitive parameter that allows to control the precision-recall trade-off. Experiments with the model organism S. cerevisiae, using the FunCat taxonomy and seven biomolecular data sets, reveal a significant advantage of our techniques over "flat" and cost-insensitive hierarchical ensembles.


This article analyses interlinkages between community resilience, transitional corridors and macro-scalar lock-in effects, with specific emphasis on exogenous drivers. Transition theory is used as an approach to analyse resilience pathways. The article suggests that transitional corridors shape decision-making opportunities, which are ultimately mediated by the individual/household within a community and turned into action with tangible effects on resilience/vulnerability 'on the ground'. The importance of macro-structural 'lock-ins' for understanding constraints and opportunities for raising community resilience is highlighted, including in particular political and policy-based decision-making pathways, macro-structural lock-ins, ideological lock-in effects and macro-economic lock-ins. The article concludes by arguing that transitional corridors are key processes for understanding community resilience, and that more empirical work is needed to unravel interlinkages between how the 'boundaries' of these corridors specifically affect community resilience and how communities can help shape or influence these transitional corridors to build more resilient futures. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.


The off-net-cost pricing principle argues that under a broad range of environments a positive "access" charge paid by originating networks to interconnected terminating networks would cause networks to set on-net usage charges equal to off-net rates, and that these charges would fully reflect the access charge. However, other results in the literature provide reasonable conditions under which on-net usage charges will not reflect access charges, but would be set to induce the social surplus maximizing level of on-net usage. This paper harmonizes these two apparently opposing results by showing that retail usage charges depend on two effects. One is a rent seeking effect on the part of networks and the other is an efficient utilization effect. In models in which the rent seeking effect is more important, on-net usage charges will tend to equal their off-net usage charges and incorporate the access charge. In models in which the efficient utilization effect matters more, off-net usage charges will reflect access charges, while on-net usage charges will not be affected by the level of access charges, but instead will tend to be set at the levels that promote efficient on-net utilization.


Leptin Level Variance in Adults With and Without Cancer by ViLisa R. Chatman-Terry BS, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, 1996 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Public Health Walden University May 2019 Abstract In 2018, health statistics revealed that, despite the many preventive measures established, cancer was the second leading cause of death in the United States and the leading cause of death in 22 states, exceeded only by heart disease. With obesity/leptin levels reaching pandemic levels worldwide, and cancer having a well-known association with obesity, both chronic diseases represent a large proportion of public health challenges. Guided by the social ecological model, the purpose of this cross-sectional, quantitative study was to examine if a significant difference exists in leptin levels among adults with different types of obesity-associated and common cancers and those without cancer. Further, using secondary data from the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, theIn 2018, health statistics revealed that, despite the many preventive measures established, cancer was the second leading cause of death in the United States and the leading cause of death in 22 states, exceeded only by heart disease. With obesity/leptin levels reaching pandemic levels worldwide, and cancer having a well-known association with obesity, both chronic diseases represent a large proportion of public health challenges. Guided by the social ecological model, the purpose of this cross-sectional, quantitative study was to examine if a significant difference exists in leptin levels among adults with different types of obesity-associated and common cancers and those without cancer. Further, using secondary data from the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the correlation of cancer risk factors with leptin levels among a multiethnic sample of adults living in the United States was also examined. ANCOVA and multiple linear regression analysis revealed that a significant difference exists in leptin levels among individuals with different types of cancer. A correlation also exists between cancer risk factors and leptin levels in adults with different types of cancer. The results further revealed that those with cancer had higher leptin levels than those without cancer after adjusting for related covariates. Health professional and educators worldwide working together to increase awareness and health literacy to empower not only the current study population, but all populations in adopting healthier lifestyles that will hopefully aid in reducing the risk, incidence, and mortality rates of obesity and cancer at the individual, community, societal and national levels may ultimately lead to positive social change. Leptin Level Variance in Adults With and Without Cancer by ViLisa R. Chatman-Terry BS, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, 1996 Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy


Protection in a humanitarian context can seem a daunting challenge, and many non-specialists may feel it is too complex, technical or risky to take on board in their programmes. Fundamentally, though, protection is about people being safe from the harm others might cause them when conflict or disaster may leave them more vulnerable. This booklet provides an overview of what protection means in practice, who is responsible for making it happen and what those in need of protection can expect of humanitarians. The risks that people face can take many forms and require a range of actions, some more specialised than others. This booklet gives a broad outline for humanitarians in other fields, and also includes links to more detailed resources.


Few studies have focused on caregiving daughters- and sons-in-law. In an exploratory, qualitative study of 16 daughters- and sons-in-law and their 16 spouses, 4 patterns emerged that highlighted the differences in their motivation for involvement in caregiving. Differences related to notions of obligation, reactive versus pro-active involvement, managerial roles in the family, and the differences in the impact of involvement for daughters- and sons-in-law. Caregiving for frail elderly relatives falls predominantly to the women in the family. Research has repeatedly shown that wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law provide the bulk of the care (Coward & Dwyer, 1990; Stone, Cafferata, & Sangl, 1987). Although husbands and sons are sometimes primary caregivers, frequently they defer to their daughters, wives, and sisters (Dwyer & Coward, 1991; Matthews & Rosner, 1988; Montgomery & Kamo, 1989). Family legacy, women's traditional family roles, taboos about providing personal care across genders, attachment in families, and cultural and moral beliefs have been found to influence spouses' and adult children's decisions about involvement in caregiving (Horowitz, 1985a). Most of the research has centered on spouses' and children's experiences and little research has focused specifically on children-in-law. Little is known about whether children-inlaw construct their experiences in the same way as children. Particularly, given that blood-tied filial attachment is not involved in in-law relationships, how do children-in-law explain their decisions to become involved in caregiving? LITERATURE REVIEW Men and women fulfill their filial obligations differently (Horowitz, 1985b; Matthews & Rosner, 1988; Stoller, 1990; Stone, Cafferata, & Sangl, 1987). In exploring obligatory and discretionary motives for caregiving, Walker, Pratt, Shin, and Jones (1989) found that "relationship obligation," or the sense of duty to provide care, was the most frequently mentioned reason for caregiving by the 72 daughters in their study, followed by "moral beliefs" or "the right thing to do" (p. 206). Understanding from previous research that caregiving sons did fewer caregiving tasks than daughters (Birkel& Jones, 1989; Coward, 1987; Horowitz, 1985b; Matthews & Rosner, 1988), Montgomery and Kamo (1989) examined sons' and daughters' feelings of obligation. They found that sons feel as obligated as daughters to provide care, even though they do fewer actual tasks associated with caregiving and tend to assume more managerial roles. Obligation, commitment, norms, and responsibilities have proven to be entwined in complicated fashions in adult children's caregiving accounts (Blieszner & Mancini, 1987; Blieszner & Shifflett, 1989; Walker, Pratt, Shin, & Jones, 1990). Notions of obligation are contextual and vary according to the relationship with the parent or parent-inlaw. Finley, Roberts, and Banahan (1988) found that sons' and daughters' attitudes about their obligation were similar; however, their actions were different. They also found that affection motivated daughters more than it did sons to feel obligated to care for their parents and mothers-in-law (but not fathers-in-law). However, these researchers called for expanded work on in-laws, because the variables that explained children's involvement rarely explained children-in-law involvement. There are few studies that have examined in-law relationships and notions of obligation and affection. In a rare study on daughters-in-law, Kivett (1989) focused on associational solidarity. A1though she found attachment between daughters-in-law and their mothers-inlaw, it was not the driving motivation behind caregiving; rather, notions of obligation were emphasized. Caregiver burden has also been studied extensively in sons and daughters, with contradictory findings. Montgomery and Kamo (1989) found that sons and daughters did not report different levels of burden, which is not consistent with other studies that found that sons experienced less burden than daughters (Horowitz, 1985b). …


The aim of this study is to determine the levels of organochlorine-based pesticides and polychlorinated biphenyls in the edible muscle tissue of blue crabs Callinectes sapidus (Rathbun, 1896) that are harvested from Akyatan Lagoon in the Eastern Mediterranean Region of Turkey. The crabs were harvested in October 2010, January 2011 and March 2011. A total of fifty crabs were studied. A quantitative determination of residue levels was carried out through a Gas Chromatography-Electron Capture Detector (GC-ECD), and compared with acceptable contaminant levels. PCBs were the greatest source of contamination.. The predominant compounds were α-HCH, o,p'-DDE, PCB 28 (2,2',4,4'-PCB) and PCB 52 (2,2',5,5'-PCB), with mean concentrations of 22.39, 59.45, 347.31 and 362.86  ng/gwet weights, respectively. The present work is highly significant and points out a chronic exposure to pollutants in Akyatan Lagoon. This ecosystem is protected under the Ramsar Convention (Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat).


The intention of this study was to examine the experiences of nine Spanish-speaking families in a public kindergarten setting during the 2005-2006 school year to understand how individual agency of parents, access to a community's practices and events, and the resulting interrelationship, shape parent understanding of and participation in school practices and events and ultimately impact student achievement outcomes. In a nation that is becoming increasingly diverse, the Hispanic population is the largest minority group in the country. There are more than two million English-language learners in the U.S. K-3 classrooms with Spanish accounting for almost 80% of the non-English languages (Abedi, Hofstetter & Lord, 2004). The documented trend of educational underachievement of Hispanic students as well as reports of limited parent involvement patterns among diverse families make this study significant both locally and nationally. Added to the landscape of this study are the conditions and provisions of No Child Left Behind with its high-stakes system of accountability, the identification of subgroups based on race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, English language proficiency, and its impact on practices, programming and educators' assumptions. A case study method was chosen to gain an in-depth understanding of the meaning for the participants with the unit of analysis being the families. Using Cummins' (2001) and Hoover-Dempsey & Sandler's (2005; 1997) frameworks as analytical tools, I found that parents placed high value on their children's education and were motivated to be engaged in the process, yet, parents' role construction and the development of a sense of efficacy in the education of their children were totally dependent on opportunities for engaging in the practices within the community and the perceptions of educators who dictate the ensuing micro-interactions that exist. The conditions for the Latino parents reflected both the existence of collaborative and coercive relations of power (Cummins, 2007; 2001). The findings counter negative assumptions held by wider society concerning Latino parents' orientation toward education and challenge a deficit perspective of language-minority parents. Implications for deep educational reform that will lead to the creation of collaborative school environments for culturally and linguistically diverse families are suggested.


Most current mobile and wearable devices are equipped with inertial measurement units (IMU) that allow the detection of motion gestures, which can be used for interactive applications. A difficult problem to solve, however, is how to separate ambient motion from an actual motion gesture input. In this work, we explore the use of motion gesture data labeled with gesture execution phases for training supervised learning classifiers for gesture segmentation. We believe that using gesture execution phase data can significantly improve the accuracy of gesture segmentation algorithms. We define gesture execution phases as the start, middle and end of each gesture. Since labeling motion gesture data with gesture execution phase information is work intensive, we used crowd workers to perform the labeling. Using this labeled data set, we trained SVM-based classifiers to segment motion gestures from ambient movement of the device. We describe initial results that indicate that gesture execution phase can be accurately recognized by SVM classifiers. Our main results show that training gesture segmentation classifiers with phase-labeled data substantially increases the accuracy of gesture segmentation: we achieved a gesture segmentation accuracy of 0.89 for simulated online segmentation using a sliding window approach.


Abstract. We use statistical methods for nonstationary time series to test the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming (AGW), according to which an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations raised global temperature in the 20th century. Specifically, the methodology of polynomial cointegration is used to test AGW since during the observation period (1880–2007) global temperature and solar irradiance are stationary in 1st differences, whereas greenhouse gas and aerosol forcings are stationary in 2nd differences. We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated, and the perceived relationship between these variables is a spurious regression phenomenon. On the other hand, we find that greenhouse gas forcings might have had a temporary effect on global temperature.


Because physical activity is a powerful strategy to prevent, treat and rehabilitate general health,1 the topic of sports and exercise medicine (SEM) is gaining attention among those who decide the undergraduate curriculum in Brazil.2 In Brazil, SEM is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary clinical and academic medical specialty, which can also be structured as a subspecialty (also called additional, secondary or super-specialty) linked to other medical specialities.3 SEM is recognised as a specialty not only to care for elite athletes, but also to promote public health and medical care of everyone who exercises. SEM promotes an active lifestyle to improve the general well-being and health of the population.4

In Brazil, the SEM specialty is classified as a clinical non-surgical specialty that allows direct patient access ('primary contact'). It does not require a previous specialty as prerequisite. SEM is taught in a haphazard manner in Brazilian medical schools—a few provide a dedicated set of lectures, …


Thrombin stimulates multiple functions in cultured endothelial cells (EC), including an increase in cell surface adhesion sites for monocytes and the production of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF). We have initiated studies to define the intracellular signaling pathways involved in these two thrombin-induced EC functions by focusing on the possible roles of the Na(+)-H+ antiporter and guanine nucleotide-binding proteins (G proteins). Amiloride suppressed thrombin-stimulated PDGF production by human aortic EC without affecting either basal PDGF production or overall protein synthesis. The steady-state mRNA levels of PDGF-A and PDGF-B chain were not reduced by amiloride. In replicate EC cultures, amiloride had no effect on thrombin-stimulated monocyte adhesion. In addition, thrombin induction of PDGF production, but not monocyte adhesion, was abrogated in the absence of extracellular sodium. Thrombin stimulation of both monocyte adhesion and PDGF production appeared to involve a pertussis toxin-insensitive G protein. Thrombin induced an increase in [35S]guanosine 5'-O-(3-thiotriphosphate) (GTP gamma S) binding to human EC membranes. GTP gamma S, in the presence of a suboptimal concentration of thrombin, caused maximal stimulation of both monocyte adhesion and PDGF production. The effect of GTP gamma S on PDGF production was at the level of transcription. These results indicate that the EC is capable of responding to a pluripotent agonist such as thrombin through multiple signaling pathways, which converge and diverge to achieve differential cellular responses.