Land needs to be included in economic models since land can move into or out of agricultural production due to several reasons, leading to exceeding or undershooting of the total available agricultural area. For example, land supply to agriculture can be adjusted as a result of idling of agricultural land, conversion of non-agricultural land to agriculture, conversion of agricultural land to urban use and agricultural land abandonment. The correct treatment of this shift in agricultural land is essential for the plausibility of the results of agricultural economy models. Often the mobility of land is only partly or not taken into consideration at all in economic models. Moreover, when land mobility and availability are considered, land is usually implemented as a homogenous entity, disregarding marginal lands and changes in productivity due to land degradation, water stress and climate change. In order to capture the heterogeneity of land in economic models detailed biophysical information needs to be included. Since, land use modeling has mainly been the domain of biophysically oriented disciplines for a long time, much information on the heterogeneity of land is available, but not yet to a full extent used within economic models. Here, we present a method to include detailed biophysical information on land within an extended GTAP model. In Van Meijl et al., 2005 the land supply curve was conceptually implemented into the GTAP model. It was derived on theoretical considerations (see Abler, 2003) and calibrated using expert knowledge and FAO land use projections. In this paper we show that detailed biophysical data concerning land use and associated land productivity provide an empirical foundation of this curve which is consistent with the previously proposed conceptual model.

In this methodology the total agricultural land supply is modeled using a land supply curve which specifies the relation between land supply and a land rental rate in each region. The general idea underlying the land supply curve specification is that the most productive land is first taken into production. However, the potential for bringing additional land into agriculture is limited. If the gap between potentially available agricultural land and land used in the agricultural sector is large, the increase in demand for agricultural land will lead to land conversion to agricultural land and a modest increase in rental rates to compensate for the cost to take this land into production. However, when almost all agricultural land is in use, an increase in demand for agricultural land will mainly lead to high increase of the land rental rates (land becomes scarce). In this case land conversion is difficult to achieve and therefore the elasticity of land supply in respect to land rental rates is low as well. First theoretical considerations are taken from Abler (2003).

In this paper the biophysical data underlying the land supply curve is taken from the modeling framework IMAGE (Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment; Alcamo et al., 1998). IMAGE takes into account marginal lands and changes in the potential land productivity due to changes in land use and climate change. In the IMAGE model, climate and soil conditions determine the crop productivity on a grid scale of 0.5 by 0.5 degrees, allowing the feedback of heterogeneous information of land productivity to the economic framework. From the IMAGE model, a land productivity curve is obtained describing the potential crop productivity (accumulated for all crops) as a function of the accumulated land area. This productivity curve is translated into a land supply curve under the assumption that the land price is a function of the inverse of the land productivity. These curves are generated for each region considered and are limited by an asymptote describing the total availability of agricultural land. This asymptote is provided by IMAGE and equals the available land per world region minus urban area, protected bio-reserves, ice and tundra and so on. When the current agricultural land use is close to the potential land availability, we estimate the asymptote (simultaneously with other parameters of the land supply curve) using only observations concerning the accumulated land area lower then the currently observed agricultural area. This method was used for the EU-15 countries and Japan.

The land supply curve is estimated for 25 countries and regions. The estimated land supply function will be implemented into GTAP model and the simulation experiments will be made to compare results obtained for the standard and extended model. We will conduct a systematic sensitivity analysis (SSA) to test the robustness of our results with regard to the assumed potential availability of land. First findings indicate that the estimated land supply functions lead to different regional behaviors. For instance, the current position of Africa on their land supply curve indicates that agricultural land can still be expanded without a high increase in the rental land price in this region. Small expansions in agricultural land in the EU-15 however will lead to a high increase in real land prices, therefore stimulating intensification processes in agricultural practices.

References:

Abler, D., 2003. Adjustment at the Sectoral Level. An IAPRAP workshop on Policy Reform and Adjustment. The Wye Campus of Imperial College, October 23-25. (http://agadjust.aers.psu.edu/Workshop_files/Abler_presentation.pdf).

Alcamo, J., Leemans, R. and Kreileman, G.J.J., 1998. Global change scenarios of the 21st century. Results from the IMAGE 2.1 model. Pergamon & Elseviers Science, London.

van Meijl H., T. van Rheenen, A. Tabeau and B. Eickhout, 2005. The impact of different policy environments on agricultural land use in Europe. Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment. In Press.


Q: How has the economic crisis affected health in Greece? A: The prevalence of clinical depression and of suicide has increased over the last three years. Also, the prevalence of HIV infection is increasing, perhaps because injection drug use has grown and programmes supporting people who are dependent on such drugs have been slashed. Access to the health services has been reduced and pressure on the public services is greater. People can no longer afford private health care and are going to public hospitals. Hospital admissions have been increased by 28% to 2.2 million in 2013 from 1.6 million admissions in 2009. Many people with health problems, who lack the money, are not seeking health care at all. In addition to poor access, an increase in co-payments for medicines and the imposition of other user chargers have compounded these problems. Hospital budgets are continually being cut, resulting in shortages of medical materials, particularly laboratory materials, undermining the quality of care. People's health and the health system have both suffered. Q: What is being done to protect people from financial ruin and make health services more accessible? A: Unemployment is increasing every year and, today, 27% of the adult population, nearly 1.5 million people, is unemployed. About 18% of the overall population (11 million) no longer has health insurance coverage, as people who become unemployed now lose this after one to two years. This has grave social implications. To address the problem, the government is issuing health vouchers for certain groups, such as low-income families and the disabled. Local governments and the Greek Orthodox Church are also trying to establish "solidarity centres" that would provide basic health services and medicines to those in need. In addition, nongovernmental organizations, which used to attend to immigrant populations, are now providing free health services to Greeks as well. Q: Was the reform long overdue or is it a desperate attempt to address the current budget deficit? A: Our current health policy and any changes to the health sector are determined mainly by the crisis and, in many ways, dictated by the memoranda of the Troika [representatives of Greece's official lenders: the EU, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund]. The fact is that Greece has taken out loans and that obliges us to fulfil certain conditions. Q: Given the anti-Troika demonstrations in Greece in recent years, does it help that the terms of your country's health sector reform are dictated from abroad? A: While there is unease about this situation in Greece, a large part of our society recognizes that the health-care system had reached the point of unsustainability and was in urgent need of reform. Many people are understandably inclined to be negative and say that our health policy is being manipulated by outside forces. But, while the broader terms are being dictated by the Troika --i.e. by how much certain spending should be cut--we have a certain degree of freedom to decide how to implement these cuts and certain policies that were long overdue are now being implemented. Q: If all the cuts stipulated by the Troika are made, can the Greek health system function properly, within the budget foreseen by the memoranda? A: No, not at the moment, because the health system lacks the structural elements needed to allocate and control the money in a more efficient and rational way. It's a paradox. On the one hand, we accept that there was a lot of 'fat' in the health sector, which had to be eliminated, i.e. a lot of unnecessary expenditure that had no effect on the quality of health care. But, on the other hand, these cuts have brought health services and outcomes to a lower level than before, because the structural changes that should have been in place have not been instituted. It's a vicious circle of the need and will for reform on the one hand and the inability of the system to proceed with the required changes, on the other hand. …


Eucalyptus urophylla is an important species in the Brazilian forest sector due to its rapid growth rates and resistance to disease. The aim of this study was to verify Mendelian inheritance, genetic linkage, and genotypic disequilibrium for 15 microsatellite loci, with the goal of producing a robust set of genetic markers. Mendelian inheritance and genetic linkage analyses were carried out using genotypes from maternal trees, and their open-pollinated seeds and genotypic disequilibrium were assessed using adult trees. By comparing heterozygous maternal genotypes and their seeds, we found no significant deviations from the expected 1:1 Mendelian segregation and the expected 1:1:1:1 segregation hypothesis for pairwise loci. For adult trees, we did not find strong evidence of genotypic imbalance for pairwise loci. Our results indicated that the analyzed set of microsatellite loci could be used to carry out analyses of genetic diversity, mating system, and parentage in E. urophylla.


The field of Joyce translation studies has emerged as a discipline of its own and is a new area through which to study Joyce. A few recent compilations on the subject continue the work of Fritz Senn's seminal book, Dislocutions: Reading as Translation, and include the 2007 edition of Joyce Studies in Italy, entitled Joyce and/in Translation, and the 2010 issue of Scientia Traductionis with its multifaceted sections that range from translations of Joycean criticism into Portuguese to essays by Joycean translation scholars and a cross-section of five Portuguese versions of selections from Ulysses. This issue of the JJQ joins the ranks by presenting the newest developments in translation studies that pertain to Joyce and determine the reception of his works outside the English language. Since writing-as-translation is very much at the heart of Joyce's artistic endeavor, one that positioned the writer at the crossroads of European literary and linguistic traditions, the context of translation opens up the discipline of Joyce and Irish studies to include questions of ethics and the politics of language. Essays in this issue join the existing scholarship on Joyce and translation as well as the wider discipline of translation studies. General readers of Joyce, as they reflect on the vast array of dictionaries, lexicons, annotations, and encyclopedias that aid their "translation"-riddled activities, will also catch a glimpse of the workshop of the "outsiders": readers-as-translators and readers-translators.


The current epidemic of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has produced a worldwide health care burden, approaching that imposed by transmittable infectious diseases. COPD is a multidimensional disease, with varied intermediate and clinical phenotypes. This Review discusses the pathogenesis of COPD, with particular focus on emphysema, based on the concept that pulmonary injury involves stages of initiation (by exposure to cigarette smoke, pollutants, and infectious agents), progression, and consolidation. Tissue damage entails complex interactions among oxidative stress, inflammation, extracellular matrix proteolysis, and apoptotic and autophagic cell death. Lung damage by cigarette smoke ultimately leads to self-propagating processes, resulting in macromolecular and structural alterations - features similar to those seen in aging.


The work done during fast recoil of active striated muscle (as in a jump) was measured at 2 and 12 °C by making tetanized frog sartorii shorten from about 2 mm above slack length, l 0 , at high speed(6–9 l 0 s −1 )(1) during a state of isometric contraction and (2) after stretching the muscle, while active, at different speeds and by different amounts. The work done increases with the force developed by the muscle according to a sigmoidal curve, having a point of inflexion that is displaced to greater values of force at 12 °C than at 2 °C. Previous stretching leads to an upward shift of this curve, i.e. to an iso-force gain of energy. This gain increases towards a maximum as the speed and extent of stretching are increased, attaining 60–80% of the total work done from a state of isometric contraction; this fraction decreases when stretching begins from lengths smaller than l 0 . The apparent elastic behaviour of muscle is thus described by a set of curves rather than by a single curve. Active muscle behaves as a more rigid structure when it transmits the generated force to an external load (as in an isometric contraction) and as a more compliant structure when, stretched by an external force, it has the opportunity to store external mechanical energy. Note:


Data were collected on species killed by lions Panthera leo in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe between 1998 and 2004. Lions killed predominantly large to medium-sized herbivores, concentrating on buffalo Syncerus caffer, elephant Loxodonta africana, giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis, wildebeest Connochaetes taurinus and zebra Equus burchelli. These species made up 83% of all lion kills found and 94% of the biomass of kills actually observed. Elephant calves made up an unusually large proportion of lion prey during the study period (23% of kills recorded). All elephants killed were dependent juveniles. Elephant calves appear more vulnerable during the dry months of the year, particularly in years of below average rainfall. Elephant calves are usually well protected. However, high-density aggregations of elephants around limited water sources during the dry season may deplete local food resources, forcing elephant herds to travel large distances between water and forage. Under these circumstances, elephant calves may become lost or separated from family groups, accounting for their high incidence in lion diet.


Pronunciation is generally regarded as an important subskill in FLT. Its quality is usually assessed by impression marking the reading aloud of a piece of text or a number of spontaneous utterances. The drawbacks of this method, however, are its lack of transparency (what exactly is being tested?) and its suscepti-bility to subjectivity.To avoid these drawbacks Cito has developed an alternative method for the assessment of pronunciation: as the student reads a piece of text, the teacher assesses one aspect of pronunciation for each line (8 or 9 words) the student reads. A fair number of such minor decisions (about 40) yield a pretty good insight into a student's pronunciation.The reliability of this atomistic method of assessment was sub-mitted to practical tests and compared with that of traditional assessment procedures. Further research compared the validity of the atomistic method with that of the impression marking procedures involving reading aloud and spontaneous speaking.It is concluded that the atomistic assessment method has three major advantages: a high correlation between various raters in assessing pronunciation; it functions not only as a summative, but also as a diagnostic tool; irrelevant factors that play a role in traditional assessment procedures are largely excluded.


It is generally believed that a cosmological arrow of time must be associated with entropy production. Indeed, in his seminal work on cyclic cosmology, Tolman introduced a viscous fluid in order to make successive expansion/contraction cycles larger than previous ones, thereby generating an arrow of time. However, as we demonstrate in this letter, the production of entropy is not the only means by which a cosmological arrow of time may emerge. Remarkably, systems which are dissipationless may nevertheless demonstrate a preferred direction of time provided they possess attractors. An example of a system with well defined attractors is scalar-field driven cosmology. In this case, for a wide class of potentials (especially those responsible for inflation), the attractor equation of state during expansion can have the form p ≃ − &rgr; ?> , and during contraction p ≃ &rgr; ?> . If the resulting cosmology is cyclic, then the presence of cosmological hysteresis, ∮ p d V ≠ 0 ?> during successive cycles, causes an arrow of time to emerge in a system which is formally dissipationless. An important analogy is drawn between the arrow of time in cyclic cosmology and an arrow of time in an N-body system of gravitationally interacting particles. We find that, like the N-body system, a cyclic Universe can evolve from a single past into two futures with oppositely directed arrows of time.


The advantages in cultivation of exoerythrocytic stages of malaria are fairly obvious. In the first place these stages represent a different portion of the life cycle which can be better understood through methods which permit observation and photography over extended periods of time. Since the exoerythrocytic stages live in cells which may be cultivated for long periods of time—perhaps indefinitely—they offer greater opportunities for certain types of study than the erythrocytic stages which live in cells incapable of reproduction. At the present time methods for separating exoerythrocytic stages from their host cells comparable to those used for erythrocytic stages by Trager have not been worked out. Therefore, the latter methods still present the only approach to the study of the physiology of the extracellular parasite.


This Article considers the constitutionality and propriety of recent appropriations riders passed by the House of Representatives in response to controversial federal court rulings. The riders prohibit the use of any federal funds for the enforcement of court orders issued in specified cases. These enforcement-blocking provisions raise significant separation-of-powers concerns as between Congress and both coordinate branches of the federal government. The Article begins by looking at the controversial First Amendment rulings that triggered the enforcement-blocking riders, and the Congressional debates over the proper way to respond to the rulings. The riders are not merely symbolic protests, but could have a real effect on the ultimate enforcement of a final court order by preventing the U.S. Marshals Service from taking any action to enforce the order. Next, the Article considers whether enforcement-blocking riders violate the separation of powers. This depends on the scope of Congress's power over appropriations, the nature of the Article III judicial power, and the Executive's responsibility for enforcing final court judgments. Each is considered in turn. This portion of the Article concludes that enforcement-blocking provisions raise substantial separation-of-powers concerns because they tread close to the heart of the Article III power and almost certainly impinge on the Executive's duty to enforce final court judgments. Finally, the Article considers the implications of Congress' expansive view of its power over appropriations and its power of constitutional interpretation. Even if each coordinate branch of government should have independent interpretive power vis-a-vis the Constitution, Congress' broad conception of its own power in this regard, in conjunction with its broad appropriations power, could lead to sweeping and untenable consequences. Accordingly, this Article concludes that Congress is constitutionally barred from selectively defunding executive enforcement of final federal court orders.


ABSTRACT

Reliable crossmodal correspondences have been demonstrated between dark and mint chocolates with angular shapes and sharper-sounding speech sounds on one hand, and between milk chocolate with organic shapes and rounder-sounding speech sounds on the other. In the present study, a panel of consumers was presented with four different chocolates: two mints (solid and fondant), one dark and one milk. They either tasted (Experiment 1) or simply imagined tasting (Experiment 2) the chocolates and indicated whether the perceived flavor matched one or other of the items (nonsense words or simple outline shapes) anchoring various line scales by marking a point along each scale. Dark and solid mint chocolates were more angular-shaped and associated with sharp meaningless speech sounds (e.g., "tuki" and "takete"). Mint fondant, by contrast, was considered less angular and more pleasant than dark or solid mints, while milk chocolate was more pleasant and strongly associated with organic shapes and rounded speech sounds (e.g., "lula" and "maluma"). These results corroborate and build upon recent findings concerning sound symbolism in the taste and flavor domain by highlighting the fact that oral-somatosensory textural cues play an important role in determining the crossmodal correspondences that regular consumers have for foodstuffs such as chocolate.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

Whether taste or texture, or some combination of the two sensory attributes, is responsible for the systematic associations between various chocolates and certain angular/sharp or organic shapes and speech sounds remains unclear. The results of the present study demonstrate that both attributes play an important role in determining consumers' crossmodal correspondences. Thus, when conducting research on various food qualities, these two factors should be carefully considered and/or systematically controlled. Additionally, the fact that these results held across different testing protocols (laboratory-based vs. online) confirms the potential utility of internet-based food testing for quantitatively and, importantly, qualitatively valuable/sound data collection (at least for foods that consumers are familiar with). The results of experiments such as those reported here can, in the future, be used to provide insights regarding the speech sounds and abstract imagery that should be associated with specific oral-somatosensory and taste/flavor attributes in commercial food products. Such results may be used to develop abstract imagery for product packaging and/or brand names/logos that more effectively capture the shape/sound symbolic properties of the food concerned.


Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ. The Text with Commentaries and Study Guide. Edited by Donald Bolen and Gregory Cameron. New York: Continuum, 2006. xi + 258 pp. $21.95 (paper). Studying Mary: The Virgin Mary in Anglican and Roman Catholic Theology and Devotion. The ARCIC Working Papers. Edited by Adelbert Denaux and Nicholas Sagovsky. London: T & T Clark, 2007. xii + 277 pp. $130.00 (cloth). The publication in 2005 of Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ, the socalled "Seattle Statement" of the second phase of the Anglican- Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC II), was met with joyful surprise in some sectors of the two communions, outraged concern in others, and, sadlv, ignorance or polite indifference in most. Suffice it to say that the headline of the Times- Picayune of New Orleans - "Divisions That Sparked Reformation Settled" - might be a bit premature. These two books will not assuage all concerns or, on their own, settle any arguments, but they have great potential to address the surprise many felt upon hearing the commissioners' judgment that the Roman Catholic dogmas regarding Mary "can be said to be consonant with teaching of the Scriptures and die ancient common traditions" (Mary, p. 85) and that "issues concerning doctrine and devotion to Mary need no longer be seen as communion-dividing" Mary, p. 87). It may also be hoped that, given the document's call for a shared re-reception by Anglicans and Roman Catholics of Marian doctrine, diese two books might assist in overcoming our ignorance of each ouher and of this text. While both books aim to assist such a re-reception, they are suited to different authences. The 2006 book, bearing the same name as the document, is the more accessible of the two, in both style and price. It begins with the text of the document itself, laid out with ample margins for notation and comment. It is followed by an impressive six-week study guide for use in parishes and in small-scale ecumenical discussions, suggesting a plan for reading the document in prayer and in conversation with Scripture. Four commentaries on the document follow. The first pair comprises a response to the document by Timothy Bradshaw, commissioned by the Anglican Communion Office, and another by Jared Wicks, S. J., commissioned by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. These two responses by theologians who were not members of the Commission provide the service of reading the document horn constructively critical Anglican and Roman Catholic perspectives, respectively. They will be useful in articulating the concerns and questions members of the communions will raise for any process of shared reception, as well as in making clear the real differences diat remain in and through the irenie tone of the document. The next two commentaries are by Charles Sherlock and Sara Butler, M.S.B.T., Anglican and Roman Catholic members of the Commission, respectively, who were central in its deliberations as well as in die drafting of the text. Butlers commentary explores the document's relation to the Roman Catholic Marian dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and U\e Assumption. Sherlock's essay, entitled "The Journey: An Anglican Perspective," is particularly informative, and even moving, in relating the history of the Commission's work on die document and la's own personal history as the selfdescribed "most 'protestant' member of die Commission" (Mary, p. …


South-south flows make up almost half of all emigration from developing countries and roughly a third of international migration worldwide. Nevertheless, international migration theory has focused on explaining south-north migration and has left the dynamics of south-south flows largely unexplored. This paper argues that one key to understanding intercontinental south-south migration is the interplay of immigration policies, and more specifically of access policies. Some migrants from developing countries, who face severe restrictions to reach their preferred destinations in the north, move to accessible destinations in southern regions, either because this opens up opportunities for onward migration to northern countries, or because these countries are relatively attractive in their own right. This paper examines Ecuador's extreme policy of universal visa freedom of 2008 as a quasi-experiment to test the impact of the de facto opening of borders of a Latin American country on south-south migration from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Complementary qualitative findings shed light on the characteristics and motivations of recent extra-continental immigrants in Ecuador.


InDesign CS6: Visual QuickStart Guide highlights the important new features, as well as covering the ones readers have relied on in previous versions of InDesign. Complete coverage of InDesign CS6's new features includes: tools for easily outputting to various devices such as phones and notebooks, including Alternate Layouts, Liquid Layouts, and new content management tools; linked content tools, too more easily allow repurposing of content; PDF forms creation feature, including extensive library resources; enhanced selection and drawing tools. Users will learn how to create and automate documents, import and style text and objects, manage long documents, export files for a wide variety of purposes, and much more.


A generally applicable and computationally efficient description of random irradiance fluctuations induced by single scattering from distributed low-order turbulence (LOT) phase fluctuations is developed for Gaussian beams in the weak scintillation regime. The LOT solution describes irradiance statistics resulting from coarse beam irradiance fluctuations such as beam wander and beam breathing and will generally underestimate the true scintillation owing to the neglect of higher orders. For a subset of beam and turbulence settings that naturally result in non-log-normal irradiance behavior in the weak regime, the LOT solution closely approaches the exact solution and accurately describes the irradiance statistics for any point on the observation plane. For the same settings, beam-wave scintillation theory derived from the Rytov perturbation method yields inaccurate predictions owing to an inherent confinement to log-normal behavior. Examples that naturally exhibit non-log-normal irradiance behavior include focused beams on horizontal paths and collimated beams on ground-to-space paths. The complementary nature of the two scintillation theories (LOT and Rytov) enables a hybrid combination that yields accurate and convenient scintillation predictions for any case exhibiting weak scintillation regardless of irradiance behavior. Comparison of hybrid model predictions with wave optics simulation data reveals excellent agreement.


International commercial arbitration is recognised as the most widely accepted form of dispute resolution in international trade in both the Middle East and the West. But in the Middle East divergent, competing rationalities are constantly close to the surface and repeatedly collide in arbitration cases of international commercial disputes. The Islamic Middle East focus is on maintaining tradition and safeguarding relationships, features that both stand at the heart of the dispute resolution culture of the region. By contrast, in the West, international commercial arbitration is adversarial and individualistic, following the neo-classical model of law. In recent times when the western model has been superimposed on this deeply entrenched dispute resolution culture, hostility and dissatisfaction have resulted. In addition, instances of perceived or actual Western ignorance and bias against Shari'ah have led to even more resentment on the part of the Arab players. Both Islamic law and tribal customs impose a duty of reconciliation on any intervener in a dispute. This third party must attempt to help the disputing parties reach a settlement that is just and fair. This clash of cultures is explored in detail in this thesis which uses Jordan as the case study. Jordan has a rich and embedded tribal history and traditions, which remain very much a part of contemporary society. The tribes of Jordan are critical stakeholders of the state and their customs are presented as key pillars of the identity of a Jordanian. Reconciliation is a positive feature of Middle Eastern dispute resolution dimensions of which this thesis suggests could be incorporated in the international commercial arbitration model, making it more representative of, and responsive to, a wider variety of cultural traditions.


In the mid-1990s, small fruit and vegetable farms in Italy were faced with the challenge of trade liberalization. To help them, the European Union introduced incentives for farmers to sell their produce collectively and to improve their farming processes. This article describes the work of an association of farmers and farming co-operatives, ASSOFRUIT, which has been successful in collectively marketing farm produce. The association's services include the pooling of produce to meet the requirements of large buyers such as supermarkets, directing EU subsidies to improve farm production and move into higher-value crop production, and accessing crop loans. ASSOFRUIT includes a few very large farmers who continue to market some of their produce themselves, and this is seen to benefit the association as a whole. The large farmers' knowledge about prices, market outlets and new opportunities are passed on to the association. The association's success is also attributed to the dynamism of the management team, wh...


Massive datasets and high-capacity models have driven many recent advancements in computer vision and natural language understanding. This work presents a platform to enable similar success stories in Embodied AI. We propose ProcTHOR, a framework for procedural generation of Embodied AI environments. ProcTHOR enables us to sample arbitrarily large datasets of diverse, interactive, customizable, and performant virtual environments to train and evaluate embodied agents across navigation, interaction, and manipulation tasks. We demonstrate the power and potential of ProcTHOR via a sample of 10,000 generated houses and a simple neural model. Models trained using only RGB images on ProcTHOR, with no explicit mapping and no human task supervision produce state-of-the-art results across 6 embodied AI benchmarks for navigation, rearrangement, and arm manipulation, including the presently running Habitat 2022, AI2-THOR Rearrangement 2022, and RoboTHOR challenges. We also demonstrate strong 0-shot results on these benchmarks, via pre-training on ProcTHOR with no fine-tuning on the downstream benchmark, often beating previous state-of-the-art systems that access the downstream training data.


This dissertation is an attempt to understand how Mexico's democratisation process transformed budget accountability and the relationship between the federal, state and municipal governments. With the decline of presidentialism, two major changes occurred: the federal Congress became a more powerful regulator of public expenditure; and a large share of the budget was decentralised to subnational governments. The research objective is to produce an empirical analysis of how it came about that the president lost control over a major share of discretionary budgetary spending while state and municipal authorities increased their financial capacities without strong local systems of checks and balances. The dissertation is focused on two reforms related to budgetary policy: 1) The creation of a new Supreme Audit Institution (SAI) at federal level; and 2) The decentralisation of federal spending to states and municipalities. The creation of a new SAI, the Auditoria Superior de la Federacion (ASF), improved the political autonomy and technical capability of the congressional bureau in charge of ex post budgetary oversight. Through the ASF, the Congress improved its capability to demand an accountable presidency. The second reform was the decentralisation of an important share of government expenditure to state and municipal authorities. This implied the creation of clear norms and transparent formulas for the distribution of public resources among the three levels of government. In the former political system, the President had the unwritten prerogative to decide the geographical allocation of public expenditure, according to unaccountable criteria. The federal Executive had deep pockets and full political power to determine the fiscal surplus or financial bankruptcy of a subnational government. The decentralisation process created rules that forced the President to render financial accounts to subnational governments. For the first time, the Federal Executive had to follow transparent and stable criteria for the transfer of resources to states and municipalities. The decentralisation process rested on the premise that local authorities would allocate public expenditure more efficiently and would maximise social welfare. The decentralisation of public expenditure increased the accountability of the federal government to states and municipalities. However, a central claim in my thesis is that an unforeseen consequence of this process was a lack of accountability of political leaders at subnational levels. With the dusk of presidentialism and the decentralisation of expenditure, governors and municipal presidents gained ample margins of political and financial power. Thorough a census of state SAIs and an Index of Budget Information, the thesis will provide empirical evidence on the importance of accountability institutions in the transfer of spending responsibilities to subnational governments. With weak accountability mechanisms at the local level, there are no guarantees that decentralisation will deliver its theoretical expectations of efficiency and welfare. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).


In 1997, I published the results of a small open study reporting the beneficial effect of omega 3 fatty acid (eicosopentanoic acid-fish oil) supplements in the management of children with cystic fibrosis (CF) and chronic lung disease. 1 One of the five subjects had severe disease and died during the study, and her parameters effectively cancelled the positive effects of the other four, thus distracting from the impact of the potential of this therapy. Now, Karp et al . have demonstrated that the major problem in CF airways is the inability to produce lipoxins, antiinflammatory mediators, which results in an exaggerated pro inflammatory propensity, up-regulating neutrophil response and in turn contributing to persistence of pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. 2 In laboratory experiments using human bronchial epithelial cells, and also a CF mouse model, all of these changes were reversed by adding lipoxins. Another class of anti-inflammatory lipid mediators, 'resolvins', share many of the biological activities of lipoxins. These resolvins are generated from omega 3 fatty acids, and their levels are determined by substrate availability. 3 Patients with CF, and cystic fibrosis transport regulator (CFTR) -/mice show deficiencies in omega 3 fatty acids in tissues expressing CFTR. 4 Thus, supplementing omega 3 fatty acids may increase resolvins and thence reduce inflammation and pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterial load. These reports add a strong basis to the practical application of using omega 3 fatty acids to reduce chronic airway inflammation in CF, and hopefully will encourage a controlled trial of this relatively cheap, neglected and harmless intervention.


A boundary is not that at which something stops, but ...is that from which something begins its presencing. (Bhabha 1994:1) For the purpose of this thesis, the above statement will be central, because implicit in it is a particular awareness of what constitutes exile and the exihc experience, both variously defined boundaries within which to view the historicity of the exiled subject. Bhabha's statement prompts one to reflect on the multi-faceted marginalised situation faced by the exiled subject. It can be argued that Lewis Nkosi, a black exiled South African writer, has remained a largely underresearched writer, particularly in South Africa. His works have not been as widely researched possibly as those of his contemporaries, despite his local and international profile and reputation as an astute scholar and writer, for various reasons which this thesis will explore. His writings and extensive commentaries on African and world literature certainly merit research, particularly in respect of his construction of place and identity. He has been influential in South African letters and frequently cited however, his years outside the country have led to his neglect within South Africa. This thesis hopes to go some way towards recovering Lewis Nkosi as writer and scholar, particularly in terms of his construction of identity, both within South Africa and as exile. This thesis will examine representative texts by this writer, using perspectives of theorists such as Fanon (1986), Bhabha (1994), Said (1983) and Quayson (2002) among other writers who particularly discuss notions of space and place from a post colonial perspective. Reference to Nkosi's own history as well as his non-fictional writing will be seen as relevant in defining what 'home' and 'exile' have meant to Nkosi and how a construction of 'place' enhances the sense of identity. The question to be considered is: how, through his writing both non-fiction and fiction does Nkosi construct identity through place, how, in other words, has he pushed back boundaries as an exile writer? Here the impact that place has on our understanding of who we are will be explored. This thesis will investigate then the development, perception and experience of place and identity in the works of this writer. Nkosi's somewhat nomadic lifestyle in exile makes him an interesting case: the exposure to American and European culture he enjoyed as a writer in exile has not been the norm for most black South African writers. Nkosi's concept of place and identity will be analysed as they developed first in his early journalism days of Ilanga lase Natal and Drum, and subsequently in his primary works of critical essays and later fiction. Nkosi's act of writing is also the place where identity and memory meet, and this study will refer to early literary essays contained in his literary works Home and Exile (1965), The Transplanted Heart (1975) and Tasks and Masks (1981). A reading of these works together with his many earlier articles and reviews as well as his latest novels and dramas, will show the ways in which this writer self-consciously participates in the construction of place and identity, how he explores, through his writing, his sense of place and his identity as a South African exile, and how his perceptions may have changed during his long career as writer. As Nkosi affirms: "all of those are strands of memory about place and it automatically gets into your writing, because I think, it is both the terrain of consciousness and the orientation to reality" (Lombardozzi 2003:331). This dissertation will focus then, on the construction of home, identity and exile in Nkosi's discourse, written over nearly five decades of South Africa's turbulent history, a period during which all these terms were contested sites. Theories of place and identity are inevitably made more complex by the condition of exile, as place and identity are immutably concatenated, so that what is said about place must also include the construction of identity. In this regard theorists on exile such as Grant (1979), Gurr (1981), Seidel (1986), Robinson (1994) and Whitehouse (2000) will be examined, and theorists such as Cartey (1969), Fanon (1986), Owomoyela (1996) and Walter (2003) on the issue of identity will be considered. The thesis will therefore position Nkosi in terms of his generation of exile writers, and how this has impacted on his construction of identity, and will to this end, explore interconnected issues surrounding home, identity and exile.


The importance of molecules with antiradical potency that are produced in the human body has significantly increased. Among others, neurotransmitters and their metabolites act as the first line of defense against oxidative stress in the peripheral endocrine and the central nervous systems. Dopamine (DO), epinephrine (EP), norepinephrine (NE), l-DOPA, catechol, and three metabolites of dopamine (3-methoxytyramine (3-MT), homovanillic acid (HO), and 3,4-dihydrophenylacetic acid (DOPAC)) were investigated for their antiradical potency via computational methods and DPPH assay. Density functional theory calculations were used to determine the most probable reaction mechanism based on the thermodynamic parameters. These results suggested that hydrogen atom transfer (HAT)/proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) and sequential proton loss electron transfer (SPLET) mechanisms are preferable in polar solvents. Several techniques were employed to differentiate between HAT and PCET mechanisms via examination of the transition state structures. Kinetic studies of HAT/PCET and electron transfer (ET) reactions, the second step of SPLET, have proven that ET is much faster for an order of 105-106. Based on this, it was concluded that SPLET was the dominant mechanism for the antiradical activity towards DPPH radicals in polar solvents. The findings suggest that all the investigated molecules can be classified as excellent antiradical scavengers, except for 3-MT and homovanillic acid.


This paper presents an academic perspective on a broad spectrum of ideas and best practices for statistical data collectors to ensure proper stewardship for personal information that they collect, process and disseminate. Academic researchers in confidentiality address statistical data stewardship both because of its inherent importance to society and because the mathematical and statistical problems that arise challenge their creativity and capability. To provide a factual basis for policy decisions, an information organization (IO) engages in a two-stage process: (1) It gathers sensitive personal and proprietary data of value for analysis from respondents who depend on the IO for confidentiality protection. (2) From these data, it develops and disseminates data products that are both useful and have low risk of confidentiality disclosure. The IO is a broker between the respondent who has a primary concern for confidentiality protection and the data user who has a primary concern for the utility of the data. This inherent tension is difficult to resolve because deidentification of the data is generally inadequate to protect their confidentiality against attack by a data snooper. Effective stewardship of statistical data requires restricted access or restricted data procedures. In developing restricted data, IOs apply disclosure limitation techniques to the original data. Desirably, the resulting restricted data have both high data utility U to users (analytically valid data) and low disclosure risk R (safe data). This paper explores the promise of the R-U confidentiality map, a chart that traces the impact on R and U of changes in the parameters of a disclosure limitation procedure. Theory for the R-U confidentiality map is developed for additive noise. By an implementation through simulation methods, an IO can develop an empirical R-U confidentiality map. Disclosure limitation for tabular data is discussed and a new method, called cyclic perturbation, is introduced. The challenges posed by on-line access are explored.


Resnick et al. provide new insight into the biological roles of the enzyme inositol polyphosphate multikinase (IPMK, also called Ipk2). The protein was so named because it phosphorylates multiple sites on water-soluble inositol polyphosphate rings. However, Resnick et al. show that in vitro and in vivo, IPMKs from yeast and mammals have lipid inositol kinase activity. This activity is highly specific for the D-3 position of the inositol ring--even more so than the better known phosphoinositide 3-kinases (PI3Ks), which, in mammals, generate phosphatidylinositol 3,4,5-trisphosphate [PI(3,4,5)P3] in response to activated receptor tyrosine kinases. Unlike PI3K, though, IPMK was found almost exclusively in the nucleus of transfected yeast or human cells. IPMK had been previously implicated in control of gene expression in yeast, and Resnick et al. used experiments in yeast lacking phospholipase C (which consequently have no highly phosphorylated soluble inositol polyphosphates) to show that transcriptional regulatory activity of IPMK appears to result from its lipid kinase activity. Thus, the authors conclude, PI(3,4,5)P3--once thought to be absent in yeast (which lack receptor tyrosine kinases)--may have important roles in regulation of transcription in evolutionarily primitive eukaryotes, and these roles may well be conserved in mammals. A. C. Resnick, A. M. Snowman, B. N. Kang, K. J. Hurt, S. H. Snyder, A. Saiardi, Inositol polyphosphate multikinase is a nuclear PI3-kinase with transcriptional regulatory activity. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 102, 12783-12788 (2005). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The Indonesian waters, located in the tropical area between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, comprise shelf and deep sea areas with their special characteristics. The Java Sea, as one of the shallow waters areas in Indonesia, has an average depth of about 40m, low salinity and high temperature. South of Java is the deep eastern Indian Ocean which is characterized by high salinity and low temperature. Both water masses are interacting and mixing through the Sunda Strait. Although the Sunda Strait is a small passage, its role in influencing the ocean climate variability is quite important and will be discussed as the main topic in this study. The HAMburg Shelf OceanModel (HAMSOM) is used to simulate the long period ocean-climate dynamics in the Java Sea and the eastern Indian Ocean. Numerous simulations and boundary treatments are performed to get results that best agree with the observations. Forcing data from 44 years (1959-2002) NCEP reanalysis are used in the simulation to analyze the variability of current circulation, water mass transport, upwelling south of Java, and the effect of ENSO (in the Pacific Ocean) and DME (in the Indian Ocean) to this area, as well as their interaction. The seasonal variation in the Java Sea is mainly influenced by the monsoon. In January, representing the NW monsoon situation, water from the Southeast China Sea is transported to the Java Sea by (+)2.1Sv and flows out to the eastern part of the Java Sea and the Sunda Strait by (-)1.6Sv and (-)0.5Sv, respectively. In the contrary, in August (representing the SE monsoon situation), the total inflow to the Java Sea from the eastern part of the Java Sea is 1.0Sv and the water flows out to the Southeast China Sea and the Sunda Strait by (-)0.3Sv and (-)0.7Sv respectively. The SST is increased from 28°C during the NW monsoon to 28.5-29°C during the SE monsoon while the SSS is decreased from 32.6psu to 32.2psu. During the whole year, the water mass is transported from the Java Sea to the Indian Ocean through the Sunda Strait with variations of transport between 0.48Sv (minimum) in December and 0.72Sv (maximum) in August/September. The zonal wind during the SE monsoon is the important factor for triggering and propagating the upwelling south of Java. Normally, the upwelling causes the upwards of temperature lower than 24°C (the peak in August) and salinity higher than 34.4psu (the peak in October). The DME and ENSO have influence significantly the variability in the study area. Nevertheless, the strengths of their influence are controlled by the strength of the zonal wind in the eastern Indian Ocean, especially during the SE monsoon. The temperature decreases (increases) during the El Nino (La Nina) years when the zonal wind is stronger (weaker) and reversely the salinity increases (decreases) during the El Nino (La Nina). The strong influence of the DME and ENSO can be identified by the SST/SSS anomaly in the study area when they have the same phase as the strengthening zonal wind. Likewise, the strength of upwelling south of Java depends on the strength of SE wind along the south of Java and its interaction with DME and ENSO events. Under normal conditions, the upwelling causes negative SST and positive SSS anomalies 0.3-0.6°C and 0.2-0.3psu, respectively. In the El Nino (La Nina) years, the anomaly of SST and SSS become lower than -1.0°C and higher than 0.3psu (+1.0°C and -0.3psu), respectively. During the normal years, the variation of SST and SSS anomalies in the Java Sea are about 0.5°C and 0.2psu, respectively. The SST decrease (SSS increase) during the DME and El Nino events because of the transport of water mass with cooler SST (higher SSS) from the eastern Java Sea, while during the La Nina events, the SST increase (SSS decrease) because of the transport of water mass with warmer SST (lower SSS) from the eastern Java Sea. The water mass is still transported through the Sunda Strait from the Java Sea, increased by 0.15-0.2Sv during the El Nino and DME years and decreased by 0.1Sv during the La Nina years.


[1] Melt ponds contribute to the ice-albedo feedback as they reduce the surface albedo of sea ice, and hence accelerate the decay of Arctic sea ice. Here, we analyze the melt pond fraction, retrieved from the MODIS sensor for the years 2000–2011 to characterize the spatial and temporal evolution. A significant anomaly of the relative melt pond fraction at the beginning of the melt season in June 2007 is documented. This is followed by above-average values throughout the entire summer. In contrast, the increase of the relative melt pond fraction at the beginning of June 2011 is within average values, but from mid-June, relative melt pond fraction exhibits values up to two standard deviations above the mean values of 30 ± 1.2% which are even higher than in Summer 2007.


This thesis considers the problem of minimizing cycle time while avoiding collisions within a robot station consisting of multiple industrial robots that collectively should cover a set of tasks, e.g. welding operations, on a workpiece. The cycle time is the time required to perform all tasks. Nowadays, in order to prevent the robots from colliding, their programs usually synchronise by adding synchronisation/interlocking signals when necessary. Here, the aim is instead to partition the space within the station, separating the robots. There are three main advantages in this approach: -the simplicity of the robot programs due to the total absence of synchronisation need; -the stability of the station in case of unexpected events; -lower maintenance cost. The problem is thus to find a space partition allowing all tasks to be performed in a minimal time. In order to retrieve the space partition, an approximate problem is repeatedly solved using the Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition principle and from the solutions provided, generalised Voronoi diagrams are approximated. For each of the resulting candidate partitions the robot module in the software IPS is used to determine the robot station cycle time. Results on existing industrial test cases show that using this approach the cycle time was increased by around 5% as compared with synchronising the robot programs. It is however not determined whether this approach finds an optimal partitioning since the generalised Voronoi diagram is generated from some stationary position of the robots, which might cause nonoptimal paths between these positions.


This study examines the annual cycle of monsoon precipitation simulated by models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6), then uses moist energy diagnostics to explain globally inhomogeneous projected future changes. Rainy season characteristics are quantified using a consistent method across the globe. Model bias is shown to include rainy season onsets tens of days later than observed in some monsoon regions (India, Australia, and North America) and overly large summer precipitation in others (North America, South America, and southern Africa). Projected next-century changes include rainy season lengthening in the two largest Northern Hemisphere monsoon regions (South Asia and central Sahel) and shortening in the two largest Southern Hemisphere regions (South America and southern Africa). Changes in the North American and Australian monsoons are less coherent across models. To understand these changes, relative moist static energy (MSE) is defined as the difference between local and tropical-mean surface air MSE. Future changes in relative MSE in each region correlate well with onset and demise date changes. Furthermore, Southern Hemisphere regions projected to undergo rainy season shortening are spanned by an increasing equator-to-pole MSE gradient, suggesting their rainfall will be increasingly inhibited by fluxes of dry extratropical air; Northern Hemisphere regions with projected lengthening of rainy seasons undergo little change in equator-to-pole MSE gradient. Thus, although model biases raise questions on the reliability of some projections, these results suggest that globally inhomogeneous future changes in monsoon timing may be understood through simple measures of surface air MSE.


Hypertension is a common major risk factor for cardiovascular disease and stroke. It is estimated that in 2010, nearly 78 million US adults (aged ≥20 years) had high blood pressure, but in approximately 50%, hypertension was not adequately controlled.1 Most patients with hypertension are treated by primary care physicians; treatment is effective and includes both lifestyle interventions and relatively inexpensive medications. The importance of detecting and treating hypertension is well-recognized by professional societies and federal agencies.

In their article published in JAMA, the panel members appointed to the Eighth Joint National Committee (JNC 8) report their Evidence-Based Guideline for the Management of High Blood Pressure in Adults.2 This guideline has been long-awaited and much anticipated, with the last revision of the blood pressure guidelines, the JNC 7 report, having been published in JAMA in 2003.3 An update of this decade-old guideline is overdue, considering that about half of the major recommendations in guidelines become outdated in approximately 6 years.4

As the panel members describe in the report,2 the JNC 8 committee was appointed in 2008 by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and was charged with reviewing and synthesizing the most recent available scientific evidence, updating existing clinical recommendations, and providing guidance for clinicians on the best approaches to manage and control high blood pressure to minimize the risk of cardiovascular events and other complications. The panel used rigorous evidence-based methods and developed evidence statements and recommendations for blood pressure treatment based on a systematic review of available randomized controlled trials. The panel focused on 3 critical questions that address thresholds and goals for pharmacologic treatment of hypertension: (1) in adults with hypertension, does initiating antihypertensive pharmacologic therapy at specific blood pressure thresholds improve health outcomes? (2) in adults with hypertension, does treatment with antihypertensive pharmacologic therapy to a specified blood pressure goal lead to improvements in health outcomes? and (3) in adults with hypertension, do various antihypertensive drugs or drug classes differ in comparative benefits and harms on specific health outcomes?

In addition to the 9 recommendations and the treatment algorithm based on their systematic review of the evidence and included in their article,2 the authors also provide the comprehensive evidence review and methods in an online supplement. Importantly, despite the care in formulating their evidence-based guideline, the panel members clearly acknowledge that their recommendations are not a substitute for clinical judgment and emphasize that decisions about care of patients with hypertension must carefully consider and incorporate the clinical characteristics and circumstances of each individual patient.

The guideline underwent extensive review. But reviewing guidelines is different from reviewing other original research reports. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for any peer reviewer or professional society to review the evidence in the same way that a guideline committee aggregated, analyzed, and synthesized the data. A committee, comprising methodologists, statisticians, and content experts, is required to write a high-quality guideline, so expecting a single individual or a professional society to repeat that process is not practical. So how are guidelines reviewed? In this case, as detailed in the report,2 the guideline underwent rigorous initial review by numerous experts and relevant organizations, and based on those reviews, was revised prior to being submitted to JAMA. At JAMA there was broad unanimity among the external peer reviewers and internal editorial reviewers that the guideline was comprehensive, concise, and clear and that it appropriately acknowledged the areas of controversy. The evidence tables and supplemental material were also reviewed and were thought to be comprehensive. In addition, the reviewers were impressed with the diligence with which the committee adhered to the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine for how guidelines should be developed. Following this review, suggestions to improve the guideline were incorporated and inconsistencies were eliminated; the revised guideline is published along with the supporting evidence. In addition, the authors have indicated that they will make the extensive comments from the presubmission guideline review process available to readers on request.

Even though these guidelines are generally based on a rigorous assessment of the available clinical trial evidence for treatment of high blood pressure, some elements of these guidelines may be controversial and most likely will spark discussion. Two other related editorials provide perspectives about these recommendations in the broader context of effect on clinical care and policy. Drs Peterson, Gaziano, and Greenland (the 3 JAMA cardiology editors) discuss the clinical and practical implications of the recommendations, including issues surrounding the threshold for blood pressure treatment, and suggest that the recommendations in the hypertension guideline should be harmonized with other cardiovascular risk recommendations into a single coherent prevention strategy.5 In another editorial, Sox6 examines whether the hypertension guideline fulfills the Institute of Medicine criteria for quality standards for practice guidelines7 and is sufficiently trustworthy that clinicians should have confidence in the recommendations. He applauds the process the panel followed and their willingness to make the reviewers' comments and the panel's responses available on request.

Producing guidelines in the United States has become increasingly more complicated and contentious. This likely reflects the strongly held beliefs of many stakeholders, including physicians and patients. For instance, the Infectious Diseases Society of America was embroiled in complicated legal proceedings after producing guidelines for the management of Lyme disease.8 There was a great deal of reaction from health professionals and the public after the US Preventive Services Task Force released updated recommendations regarding mammography screening in women. Recently, in June 2013, the NHLBI announced its decision to discontinue its participation in the development of clinical guidelines,9 including the hypertension guideline. (Accordingly, as the authors clearly indicate, "This report is therefore not an NHLBI sanctioned report and does not reflect the views of NHLBI."2) Instead, the NHLBI has partnered with and shifted the responsibility for generating guideline products to selected specialty organizations,9 such as the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, whose recently released guidelines on assessment of cardiovascular risk10 and treatment of blood cholesterol to reduce atherosclerotic cardiovascular risk11 have been met with controversy.

Rigorously developed, thoroughly reviewed, evidence-based, trustworthy guidelines are critical to advance clinical medicine and improve health, and biomedical journals have a responsibility to disseminate important guidelines in an objective manner. We are pleased to publish the "2014 Evidence-Based Guideline for the Management of High Blood Pressure in Adults" from the panel members appointed to the Eighth Joint National Committee (JNC 8). We anticipate debate and discussion about the clinical application of these recommendations and the related policy issues. JAMA welcomes this responsibility, and indeed, embraces the opportunity to provide evidence-based recommendations to help clinicians improve the care of their patients.


The strong intuition that the facts concerning the subjectivity of consciousness are simply beyond the grasp of objective science is the highest barrier to an intuitively convincing materialism in the philosophy of mind. We are steeped in a tradition which has it that there is, to state it from the first-person point of view, an epistemic difference in principle between my introspectible experience, which only I can apprehend and know, and the things which everyone can apprehend and which form the domain of the natural sciences. This contrast is sometimes cast as that between the subjective stuff of first-person introspectible consciousness and the objective stuff of the natural sciences. In this essay, I will try to budge the view of the subjective-objective distinction which underlies this tradition from its position as tacit dogma.


Tibet is a land bounded by the world's highest mountains, and it is the repository of an ancient culture. For centuries it was viewed by Europeans as a remote, mystical place populated by Buddhist masters with supernatural powers and profound wisdom. In contrast to this image, it was once a warlike country whose expansionist rulers conquered a vast empire that incorporated much of central Asia and parts of China. Even now the Tibetan Plateau remains a scene of contestation, both ideologically and militarily. Major popular uprisings in 1959, 1988, and 2008 have drawn the attention of the world's media, and its religious teachers often attract large crowds when they travel overseas. The situation in the country remains highly volatile today, as the 2008 uprising-the largest and most widespread in the history of the region-attests. The Historical Dictionary of Tibet is the most comprehensive dictionary published to date on Tibetan history. It covers the history of Tibet from 27,000 BCE to the present through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 1,000 cross-referenced dictionary entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, culture, anthropology, and sociology. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Tibet.


Abstract : Each year the United States spends approximately two billion dollars maintaining pavement markings. In addition, an impending Federal policy establishing a minimum retro-reflectivity value for pavement markings has driven asset managers to develop performance models to effectively and efficiently manage these high quantity, low cost assets. Research over the past decade has sought to identify and understand the many factors influencing pavement marking degradation. Despite the fact that reflective glass beads are foundational to pavement marking retro-reflectivity, little research has specifically considered the impacts of bead type. The purpose of this study is to quantify the impact that bead type has on the degradation rate of waterborne paint and thermoplastic pavement markings in North Carolina. The results of an average value analysis and Wilcoxon rank sum test support the inclusion of bead type as a significant variable in future degradation models and the following two key findings. First, there is a statistically significant difference in the rate of retro-reflectivity degradation between standard beads and large beads for both thermoplastic and waterborne paint pavement markings. Second, thermoplastic pavement markings with standard beads are more economical than those with large beads in areas that experience snow plow operations.


Objective. To identify the possibilities for conciliating work with family life.
Methodology. Quantitative, descriptive study undertaken in 2008. Data was collected through structured interviews with 92 couples residing in a municipality in Rio Grande/RS who complied with the inclusion criteria: insertion of both members in the job market, having at least one child under seven years of age, and signing the terms of free and informed consent.
Results. The possibility of working part-time for family reasons presented a difference between mothers and fathers; for the former it is a possible alternative, and for the latter, not. Flexibility in carrying out the daily hourly workload without having requested permission to the employer much time in advance was viable for both, when the reason was related to the health of their children. The couples indicated that employers did not take into account priorities for families with children to be free on holidays and have days available to see to the children's needs. Resignations, communicated not much in advance due to child health reasons, are possible for the mothers and fathers.
Conclusion. There are difficulties in the support which employing institutions provide to the workers who have family needs, in particular those related to attention and care for their children.


This Article explores the failure of nominations and the delay in confirmation of successful nominations across recent administrations, with a focus on the November 2013 change to the Senate voting rules. Using a new database of all nonroutine civilian nominations from January 1981 to December 2014, there are several key findings. First, approximately one-quarter of submitted nominations between 1981 and 2014 were not confirmed, with a higher failure rate for the last two Presidents. Nominations to courts of appeals and independent regulatory commissions had much higher failure rates than other entities. Second, for confirmed nominations, the time to confirmation has been increasing. President Obama's nominees faced confirmation delays that were more than twice as long as President Reagan's choices. Failure rates of nominations did not always go hand-in-hand with confirmation delays for successful nominations. Although more nominations failed in divided government, confirmation delays were roughly equal when different parties controlled the Senate and the White House. Third, comparing the year after the change to the filibuster rules to the preceding year, confirmation times for the courts decreased but increased for all types of agencies. For many agencies and agency positions, however, significantly fewer nominations failed after the voting change. Even so, these improvements in 2014 — to the confirmation rates for both agency and judicial nominees and to the confirmation pace for judicial picks — are relative: for the average nomination, the failure rate was higher and the confirmation process was slower than under preceding administrations. Fourth, nearly 30 percent of nominees hailed from the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, raising concerns that the confirmation process may be narrowing the pool of top officials. This Article suggests some possible explanations for the findings and further avenues of investigation, and also proposes some reforms.


The bag-of-words (BoW) model treats images as an unordered set of local regions and represents them by visual word histograms. Implicitly, regions are assumed to be identically and independently distributed (iid), which is a poor assumption from a modeling perspective. We introduce non-iid models by treating the parameters of BoW models as latent variables which are integrated out, rendering all local regions dependent. Using the Fisher kernel we encode an image by the gradient of the data log-likelihood w.r.t. hyper-parameters that control priors on the model parameters. Our representation naturally involves discounting transformations similar to taking square-roots, providing an explanation of why such transformations have proven successful. Using variational inference we extend the basic model to include Gaussian mixtures over local descriptors, and latent topic models to capture the co-occurrence structure of visual words, both improving performance. Our models yield state-of-the-art categorization performance using linear classifiers; without using non-linear transformations such as taking square-roots of features, or using (approximate) explicit embeddings of non-linear kernels.


Background: Menstruation is perceived and interpreted differently under different social and cultural norms. There are a number of different practices, conceptions and misconceptions that have been reported in studies conducted in various countries. In Pakistan, there is a dearth of knowledge related to hygienic and unhygienic practices, discomforts, misconceptions related to nutrition, and restrictions imposed during menstruation. Therefore, this study was conducted with the objectives to identify the conceptions and misconceptions about menstruation, explore hygienic and unhygienic practices during menstruation along with the sociocultural and religious restrictions imposed, and the discomforts with its management among adolescents who do not attend schools between the ages of 13-19 years, residing in the squatter settlements of urban Karachi. Based on the study outcomes, the community midwives can be used as vectors to disseminate published information related to management of menstruation. Consequently, midwives can contribute in improving the health indicators of the country. Methodology: The methodology of the study used a qualitative exploratory study design. Three focus group discussions were conducted with 6-8 participants in each group. Six in-depth interviews were conducted with the key informants selected from three focus groups. The participants were non-school going adolescent girls. The data collected were thematically analyzed. Results: The themes that emerged were; lack of knowledge about menstrual physiology, misconceptions about normal menstrual blood flow; discomforts and mismanagement, 46 Journal of Asian Midwives (JAM), Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2016] Published by eCommons@AKU, 2016 unhygienic practices during menstruation, alteration in nutrition, bathing, and socialization in both the religious and social activities. Conclusion: Adolescent girls held misconceptions and beliefs regarding menstruation and its management. Dissemination of the findings to the health professionals will increase their awareness regarding menstrual management which would be helpful for improved reproductive health of the girls.


Introduction: The Health Trainer (HT) role has considerable diversity and polarisation in Public Health service provision across England. Based on a nascent literature on the HT occupational role, the purpose of this study was to build on the understanding of this complex community-based role by exploring the views and perspectives on the occupational role from HTs themselves and their experiences.
Methods: 24 Health Trainers (aged 19-55yrs) were recruited to the study (average: 2.3yrs in service). Semi-structured focus groups (3) allowed participants to discuss their experiences regarding their occupational role and this was digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed through a process of thematic analysis from a concept-driven design.
Results: Key themes highlighted that HT were suffering from an identity crisis and blurring roles with other professionals. Indeed, they felt alienated and undervalued as a workforce and reported difficulty in communicating with other health professionals. The role was more challenging than ever, having to handle unexpected and complex needs of clients, which they felt overwhelmed and insufficiently trained in dealing with. HTs also recognised that career progression was unclear and potentially stagnating.
Conclusion: The data collected displayed considerable insight into the current perspectives of those involved in undertaking HT duties. The views shared by the HTs have revealed the current challenges to the efficiency of the HT service and highlighted the concerns regarding role recognition and career development in the Public Health workforce.


In recent years, cryptocurrencies have increasingly been used in cybercrime and have become the key means of payment in darknet marketplaces, partly due to their alleged anonymity. Furthermore, the research attacking the anonymity of even those cryptocurrencies that claim to offer anonymity by design is growing and is being applied by law enforcement agencies in the fight against cybercrime. Their investigative measures require a certain degree of suspicion and it is unclear whether findings resulting from attacks on cryptocurrencies' anonymity can indeed establish that required degree of suspicion. The reason for this is that these attacks are partly based upon uncertain assumptions which are often not properly addressed in the corresponding papers. To close this gap, we extract the assumptions in papers that are attacking Bitcoin, Monero and Zcash, major cryptocurrencies used in darknet markets which have also received the most attention from researchers. We develop a taxonomy to capture the different nature of those assumptions in order to help investigators to better assess whether the required degree of suspicion for specific investigative measures could be established. We found that assumptions based on user behaviour are in general the most unreliable and thus any findings of attacks based on them might not allow for intense investigative measures such as pre-trial detention. We hope to raise awareness of the problem so that in the future there will be fewer unlawful investigations based upon uncertain assumptions and thus fewer human rights violations.


We test for the presence of evolutionary stasis in a species of Late Cretaceous ammonoid cephalopod, Hoploscaphites nicolletii, from the North American Western Interior Seaway. A comprehensive dataset of morphological traits was compiled across the entire spatial and temporal range of this species. These were analysed in conjunction with sedimentologically and geochemically derived palaeoenvironmental conditions hypothesized to apply selective pressures. All changes in shell shape were observed to be ephemeral and reversable, that is, no unidirectional trend could be observed in any of the morphological traits analysed. Correlations between palaeoenvironmental conditions and morphological traits suggests ecophenotypic processes were at play; however, either environmental changes were too minor and/or provided no isolating mechanism to drive speciation. These data support mechanisms of stasis such as homogenizing gene flow or stabilizing selection under a fluctuating optimum (probably reflecting spatiotemporally heterogeneous palaeoenvironmental conditions). Finally, changes in shell size were not significantly associated with changes in shell‐specific δ18O, despite a correlation between shell size and δ18O averaged across horizons. This suggests a mismatch in scales of geochemical sampling that supports caution when making broad interpretations based on averaged geochemical data.


This study is focused on the reduction of CO2 emissions and costs associated with ultra-low viscosity (ULV) engine oils for passenger vehicles. Specifically, the reduction in life cycle CO2 (LCCO2) emissions from lower-viscosity engine oil and the oil drain interval (ODI) extension were estimated taking into account both mineral engine oil and synthetic engine oil. Furthermore, the cost-effectiveness of ULV engine oils were investigated by performing base-stock cost analysis. When the volatility limit of the Noack test (American Society for testing and materials (ASTM) D5800) was set to 15 wt %, the results indicated that the lower limit of kinematic viscosity at 100 °C (KV100) for mineral engine oil (with Group-III base-stock) and synthetic engine oil (with polyalphaolefin (PAO) base-stock) were approximately 5.3 and 4.5 mm2/s, respectively. Compared to conventional 0W-16 mineral engine oil (KV100 6.2 mm2/s), the effect of reducing LCCO2 emissions on ULV mineral engine oil (ULV-Mineral, KV100 5.3 mm2/s) was estimated at 0.6%, considering 1.5–1.8 L gasoline engines in New European Driving Cycles (NEDC) mode. ULV-Mineral, which continues to use a mineral base-stock, is considered highly cost-effective since its cost is similar to the conventional 0W-16 mineral engine oil. On the other hand, compared with ULV-Mineral, the vehicle fuel efficiency improvement from the use of ULV synthetic engine oil (ULV-PAO, KV100 4.5 mm2/s) was estimated to be 0.5%. However, considering CO2 emissions during engine oil production, the reduction of LCCO2 emission from ULV-PAO compared with ULV-Mineral was estimated to be only 0.1% or less using 2030 standards (assuming a vehicle fuel efficiency of 66.5 g-CO2/km) when ODI is set equivalent (7500 km) to mineral engine oil. As a result, ULV-PAO's cost-effectiveness, considering the cost increase of PAO base-stock, was found to be nominal. Contrariwise, when the characteristics of PAO base-stock with higher oxidation stability are used comparatively with the mineral base-stock while extending the ODI to 15,000 km, the effect of reducing LCCO2 emissions of ULV-PAO was estimated to be 0.7% in 2030, making ULV-PAO a competitive and cost-effective alternative. In other words, the popularization of synthetic engine oil toward 2030 will require the consideration of both viscosity reduction and ODI extension.


Background: Up to 70% of stroke patients experience cognitive impairment in at least one cognitive domain. Guidelines currently recommend that stroke patients be screened as soon as is reasonably practicable for potential cognitive
impairment. For a screening test to be diagnostically valid it needs to demonstrate adequate levels of sensitivity and specificity. Cognitive impairment can be identified globally or as an impairment in a specific cognitive domain.
Research into commonly used screening tests for cognitive impairment has failed to identify a test with adequate levels of sensitivity and specificity for cognitive impairment in an acute stroke population. The Repeatable Battery for
the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) has demonstrated adequate diagnostic validity in differing diagnostic groups and has shown to be appropriate for use with acute stroke patients. However, the RBANS has not yet
been evaluated for sensitivity and specificity for cognitive impairment following stroke.
Aims: The aim of this pilot study was to establish whether an extended study of the diagnostic validity of the RBANS as a sensitive and specific screening test of post stroke cognitive impairment was justified. The study objectives were to
compare the RBANS scores with full neuropsychological test battery overall conclusions for cognitive impairment and non-impairment, to compare the RBANS with measures of impairment in specific cognitive domains, and to
identify RBANS optimum cut-off scores for discrimination of cognitive impairment / non-impairment in an acute stroke population.
Methods: This study used a cross sectional design. Stroke patients admitted to a large city hospital were considered as potential participants. Patients were excluded if they had language impairment as identified by the Sheffield Screening Test, were aged over 80 years old, had had a previous stroke or neurological impairment, and had hearing or sight difficulties that precluded them from completing cognitive testing. Recruited participants completed the RBANS and a 'gold standard' battery of neuropsychological tests. Comparison of the two tests were made to identify levels of sensitivity and specificity on global and domain specific cognitive impairment. Analysis was completed to identify RBANS optimum cut of scores for identifying global and specific cognitive impairment.
Results: 40 participants were recruited. The RBANS demonstrated poor levels of sensitivity (52%) and good levels of specificity (100%) for global cognitive impairment when using the manual recommended cut off scores. Receiver
Operating Characteristic curve analysis identified an optimum cut off score for RBANS Total scale of 102.5 that provided excellent sensitivity (100%) and adequate specificity (83%), and index scores that showed adequate levels of
sensitivity and specificity to domain specific cognitive impairment with the exception of Attention.
Discussion: It was tentatively concluded that the RBANS demonstrated acceptable diagnostic validity, though problems were highlighted with the Attention index and the use of a test of visual memory within the full battery that placed a heavy burden on motor skills. Recommendations were made for potential improvements to the study design and procedure, and it was suggested that further research into the evaluation of the RBANS as a sensitive and specific screening test of post stroke cognitive impairment justified and potentially feasible.


Research has shown the importance of strategies in guiding problem solving behavior. The experiment and model presented here provide further specification of how more optimal strategies come to be adopted with experience. Isomorphs of the Tower of Hanoi were used to allow participants to develop a degree of expertise with a novel task. In the solutions, evidence for at least two strategies is apparent. The results suggest that when strategies are not successful in achieving the goal, other strategies may emerge and eventually come to dominate performance in a task. The ACT-R model of this task captures participant performance by using the same strategies to solve the problems and by gradually switching to more effective ones as simple strategies fail in solving the problems.


This paper is motivated by the idea that the enlargement of the European Union is only one part of an overall process, known as economic integration, which characterizes the involvement of European economies into the global division of labor. Therefore, the paper aims at providing a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the impact of economic integration on employment and labor market dynamics in current EU-member and candidate countries. The ultimate aim of this analysis is the provision of forecasts for future labor market developments in the context of EU-enlargement. To this end, we investigate this nexus not only on an economy-wide level, but analyze whether the impact of integration varies for different sectors (automotive and financial services) of the economy. The estimation results suggest that future integration processes lead to an increase of economywide employment in the accession countries and a small, if any, rise in this outcome variable in the current EU-countries. Moreover, it could be expected that unemployment rates in the accession countries will decline somewhat, whereas those of the current EU-member states will probably experience an increase. Finally, it is very likely that the structure of employment will shift further towards a higher share of service sector employment.


Collecting and using user feedback as a method to support requirements engineering, might undermine user rights. This becomes apparent when looking at related areas, e.g., research in user experience, where collecting user feedback also plays an important role. In such settings, researchers need to ensure that the stakeholders' rights and integrity are respected. This paper identifies and discusses some of the ethical challenges and issues a researcher can face, using an example case. Focusing on user feedback, this case can serve as an example for CrowdRE, i.e. several of our findings might apply to CrowdRE in general. However, further research is needed as our work mainly reflects the challenges experienced by the authors of this paper.


The nuclear magnetic resonance spectra of a series of compounds related to DDT have been studied as they are influenced by ring or aliphatic substituents or by aliphatic structural changes The chemical shift of the benzylic or α proton follows the Hammett equation for ring substituents and the Taft variation of this equation for aliphatic substituents. Alkoxy substituents on the ring show alternation of chemical shift of the —OCH2— group protons with chain length and limiting behavior of the terminal methyl group with chain length. Dehydrochlorination of o,p-DDD produces cis-trans isomers. Coupling constants are shown to be influenced by ring substitution, particularly ortho chlorine.


Let G be a graph of order n and 3≤t≤n/4 be an integer. Recently, Kaneko and Yoshimoto [J Combin Theory Ser B 81(1) (2001), 100–109] provided a sharp δ(G) condition such that for any set X of t vertices, G contains a hamiltonian cycle H so that the distance along H between any two vertices of X is at least n/2t. In this article, minimum degree and connectivity conditions are determined such that for any graph G of sufficiently large order n and for any set of t vertices X⊆V(G), there is a hamiltonian cycle H so that the distance along H between any two consecutive vertices of X is approximately n/t. Furthermore, the minimum degree threshold is determined for the existence of a hamiltonian cycle H such that the vertices of X appear in a prescribed order at approximately predetermined distances along H. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 69: 28–45, 2012


Lightness is one of the key features in a wheelchair; however, light wheelchairs are expensive and therefore not available for everybody who would benefit from using one. In this project, I worked with the new and innovative manufacturing technique of bending carbon-reinforced-plastic. This combines the strength and lightness of carbon fiber with the rather simple and inexpensive technique of bending, resulting in Watson, a very light, yet affordable wheelchair.Apart from wheelchairs that appear either sporty or technical, there are not very many options for the user to choose from. Common wheelchair design widely ignores the lifestyle or social aspirations of the users and rather focuses on the technical performance of the chair as an aid.Watson provides a new approach and takes the social situation and the emotional relationship between the user and wheelchair into consideration. The appearance of it is simplified and discreet, though elegant in detail and affords the user to be in focus. It becomes a personal object rather than an anonymous medical aid.


This Overview has two primary purposes. First, it provides judicial system officials with the arguments in favor of and in opposition to the creation of specialized courts. Second, it offers recommendations for consideration by judicial system officials when they are deliberating whether to establish specialized courts. This Overview also provides a review of types of specialized courts that have been established in court systems in some countries in Europe and the United States. This review should inform discussions by judicial leaders as to what specialized courts might be appropriate for their system.


The chiral smectic C phase of ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs) has a self-assembling helical structure which is regarded as a one-dimensional pseudo-photonic crystal. It is well known that a stopband of a FLC can be tuned in wavelength domain by changing temperature or electric field. We here have demonstrated an FLC stopband with independently tunable wavelength and bandwidth by controlling temperature and incident angle. At highly oblique incidence, the stopband does not have polarization dependence. Furthermore, the bandwidth at highly oblique incidence is much wider than that at normal incidence. The mechanism of the tunable stopband is clarified by considering the reflection at oblique incidence.


Purpose In this study we aimed to develop a non-invasive, in vivo measure of relative s-cone distribution across the human retina. Methods. The target was a 2° disc presented on a CRT display. The disc was flickered at 17.5 Hz, alternating between blue/violet of fixed luminance and yellow of variable luminance The colors differed only in s-cone excitation, the ratio of 1- and m-cone stimulation remaining constant. The subject's task was to find the point of minimum flicker for each trial (and thus equiluminance) by adjusting the luminance of the yellow disc The disc's position relative to a central fixation point was varied at random between trials. Fixation was ensured by monitoring eye-position with an IROG. Results The figure shows the pooled results for five normal subjects (6-9 repeats per subject). is relative luminance (y/b), abscissa is angle on vertical meridian in degrees. Error bars represent ±standard error), (Figure Presented) Conclusions The para-foveal sensation luminance obtained here closely reflects the distribution of s-cones described by Curcio et al (1991: J Comp Neuro 312:610-624). A consistent superior - inferior radial asymmetry with a steeper shoulder on the inferior meridian is present in all our control measurements. Preliminary investigations also suggest that whilst the V-shaped function is broader in older subjects, this technique is a promising tool for investigating pathological changes in s-cone density occurring during the formation of a superior arcuate scotoma in glaucoma.


Context: Microbial control is of paramount importance in Clinical Endodontics. Therefore, cleaning and disinfection of root canals are essential to achieve endodontic success. Aims: The purpose of this study is to compare the efficacy of EndoVac irrigation system and conventional needle (30 gauges side venting needle) irrigation for removal of debris from the root canal walls at coronal, middle and apical third by using the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Settings and Design: An in vitro randomized control trial study. Materials and Methods: A total of 20 mandibular premolars with completely formed roots were selected and randomly divided into two groups - Group 1: Irrigation with the Conventional system and Group 2: EndoVac irrigation. After access opening and working length determination biomechanical preparation completed up to a rotary protaper F4 file. Groupwise irrigation with sodium hypochlorite and ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid was done with each canal in between instrumentation. Then, the teeth were sectioned in buccolingual direction and the halves were sputter-coated with gold palladium and coronal, middle and apical third were examined by SEM at x2000 magnification. Statistical Analysis: Mann-Whitney test for comparison between methods, Kruskal-Wallis test for comparison among thirds and Miller test for individual comparisons. Results: The apical, middle and cervical root canal thirds were evaluated and the results were analyzed statistically by the Mann-Whitney test for comparison between methods, Kruskal-Wallis test for comparison among thirds and Miller test for individual comparisons. Conclusions: EndoVac group resulted in significantly less debris at apical third compared with the conventional needle irrigation group. There was no statistical significant difference found in debris removal at coronal and middle third of root canal wall between the EndoVac group and conventional needle irrigation group.


Background: This study was designed to investigate the anatomical relationship of the different levels of aortic root. Materials and Methods: The morphological features of the aortic root were examined using of 12 adult hearts from fixed male cadavers who had expired due to noncardiac causes by magnetic resonance imaging and applied mathematical analyses to the results. The measurements of the aortic root were done at four levels: at the ventriculoarterial junction (annulus), at the largest level of the Valsalva sinuses (sinus), at the level of commissures (sinotubular junction [STJ]), and at 1 cm above the STJ (aorta ascendens). We derived an equation that allows calculation of the appropriate diameter of the aortic root from four levels. Statistical analysis among the variation of the diameters at the four levels of aortic root was achieved using test one-way analysis of variance. Results: The data showed a geometric pattern of the aortic root. The comparison of the values from four levels showed that the narrowest at the sinotubular junctional level and the widest at the sinus level. Conclusion: The analysis of our data shows that the aortic root has a consistent shape with varying size and that is a definable mathematical relationship between root diameter.


This stuy provides a brief overview in regard to the successful policy that guarantees the right of students with disabilities to obtain a free appropriate public education, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The paper also presents a general background of the Saudi legislation in terms of the major elements of this legislation and its similarities with and differences from the IDEA. Additionally, this paper investigates the problems in implementing the Regulations of Special Education Programs and Institutes (RSEPI) and the reasons behind these issues. Furthermore, the researcher develops a set of regulations that address the elements of problems in the implementation of the RSEPI. This paper also identifies some ways that might be considered by the policy makers, media, educators, and professional organizations that assist in informing the teachers (special and regular), administrators, related service personnel and families of children with disabilities about these regulations. Finally, the researcher modifies and suggests a system of accountability that assists the schools and school districts with complying with the regulations of the RSEPI.


The movement of ribonucleic acid (RNA) from nucleus to cytoplasm has been studied, by autoradiographic techniques, in cells of the human amnion grown in tissue culture. Cells were exposed to cytidine-H3 for 1 hour after which time only the RNA of the nuclei was labelled. After this 1 hour exposure the cells were placed in a medium containing an excess amount of unlabelled cytidine. Periodically, cells from this medium were fixed. Autoradiographs showed that there was a progressive movement of the label from nucleus to cytoplasm, such that after 24 hours essentially all the label was in the RNA of the cytoplasm. A study of the incorporation of the cytidine-H3 in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), in the same population of cells at the same times, indicated that the presence of excess amounts of unlabelled cytidine almost instantaneously inhibited further utilization of cytidine-H3. It is concluded that RNA moves from nucleus to cytoplasm as a complex polynucleotide structure.