Research on Moving Object Databases (MOD) has resulted in sophisticated query mechanisms for moving objects and regions. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) support a wide range of applications that track or monitor moving objects. However, applying the concepts of MOD to WSN is difficult: While MOD tend to require precise object positions, the information acquired in WSN may be incomplete or inaccurate. This may be because of limited detection ranges, node failures or detection mechanisms that only determine if an object is in the vicinity of a node, but not its exact position. In this paper, we study the processing of spatiotemporal queries in WSN. First, we adapt the models used in MOD to WSN while keeping their semantical depth. Second, we propose two approaches for processing such queries in WSN in-network instead of collecting all data at the base station. Our experimental evaluations using simulation as well as a Sun SPOT deployment show that our measures reduce communication by up to 89%, compared to collecting all information at the base station.


Beef composites (C) have combined favourable traits of pure breeds. The objective was to compare the growth rates (GR) of muscle (M) and fat (F) in the primal cuts of serially harvested Beefbooster® C types (SM = C of small breeds, AH = C of Angus and Hereford and GLC = C with Gelbvieh, Limousin or Charolais terminal sires) from 274 - 456 days (d) of age to determine harvest times that reflect an increase M and a decrease F. Analysis of covariance obtained the slopes (GR/d) for M and F within each cut and C type. In the SM and AH the GR of overall F in all primal cuts exceeded that of M by 24.8 g/d and 4.91g/d respectively, while in GLC the gain of M exceeded that of F by 6.77 g/d. We suggest that the SM and AH could be harvested at least 30 d earlier than GLC thereby increasing the proportion of carcass M and decreasing F.


In order to use and model nutritional knowledge in a food recommender system, uncertainties regarding the users nutritional state and thus the personal health value of food items, as well as conflicting nutritional theories need to be quantified, qualified and subsumed into falsifiable models. In this paper, we reflect on different error sources with respect to nutrition and consider how such issues can be tackled in future systems. We discuss the integration of general nutritional theories into information systems as well as user specific nutritional measures and different approaches to evaluating the utility of a given nutritional model.


The problem of forced acoustic oscillations in a pipe is studied theoretically. The oscillations are produced by a moving piston in one end of the pipe, while a variety of boundary conditions ranging from a completely closed to a completely open mouth at the other end are considered. All these boundary conditions are modelled by two parameters: a length correction and a reflexion coefficient equivalent to the acoustic impedance. The linear theory predicts large amplitudes near resonance and nonlinear effects become crucially important. By expanding the equations of motion in a series in the Mach number, both the amplitude and wave form of the oscillation are predicted there. In both the open- and closed-end cases the need for shock waves in some range of parameters is found. The amplitude of the oscillation is different for the two cases, however, being proportional to the square root of the piston amplitude in the closed-end case and to the cube root for the open end.


Quarterly data for the period 1960:1 to 1997:2, conventional tests, a bootstrap simulation approach and a multivariate Rao's F-test have been used to investigate if the causality between government spending and revenue in Finland was changed at the beginning of 1990 due to future plans to create the European Monetary Union (EMU). The results indicate that during the period before 1990, the government revenue Granger-caused spending, while the opposite happened after 1990, which agrees better with Barro's tax smoothing hypothesis. However, when using monthly data instead of quarterly data for almost the same sample period, totally different results have been noted. The general conclusion is that the relationship between spending and revenue in Finland is still not completely understood. The ambiguity of these results may well be due to the fact that there are several time scales involved in the relationship, and that the conventional analyses may be inadequate to separate out the time scale structured relationships between these variables. Therefore, to investigate empirically the relation between these variables we attempt to use the wavelets analysis that enables us to separate out different time scales of variation in the data. We find that time scale decomposition is important for analysing these economic variables.


International education is an area of education that, over the last forty years, has grown in size and significance. International schools are one of many vehicles for the delivery of international education and are growing in number and variety. In addition, the value placed by society on an international education and those curricular programs that promote international education continue to develop. International schools are, therefore, becoming an important and growing area of education. In general terms the amount of research on such schools is limited when compared to national education systems and national schools. The growth in the number of international schools has been accompanied by a growth in the variety of such schools and the diversity of foundations, governance models and missions that support them. This diversity and my experience in international school leadership, allied to my interest in school improvement and school effectiveness as it pertains to the field of international schools, led to an interest in how models of governance impact on international school leadership and – through the leadership – on school improvement and development. This research enquiry is a case study, based on evidence produced through three different research methods; individual school studies, a questionnaire and expert interviews. The use of three methods of data gathering allowed for a complex area to be examined and the results to be triangulated. The results of the case study serve to illuminate the area and to suggest future avenues of research. One area of particular interest that was identified through the study was the interaction within the leadership structures of the schools and the relationships between the head of school, governors and model of governance. It would appear from the results of the study that those models of governance that relied on high numbers of elected parents of students currently attending the school produced a much higher turnover of heads and chairs of boards than did others. The interaction between head, chair of the school board and overall board members also appeared to affect the length of time people served in these posts. Following discussion of such issues, the implications of governance model and rate of turnover for the leadership, development and improvement of international schools are further examined and discussed. The process of conducting this enquiry, while time consuming and demanding, has been of huge benefit to me both personally and professionally. I have enjoyed the challenge and particularly gained from the greater professional insight developed during the study.


Based on a straightforward physical model, a new lightning parameterization has been developed:
A two-plate capacitor represents the basic dipole charge structure of a thunderstorm, which
is charged by the generator current and discharged by lightning. In this approach, the
generator current as well as the discharge strength are parameterized using the graupel-mass field.
If these two quantities
are known, and if the charging and discharging are in equilibrium, then the flash rate is uniquely
determined. This approach remedies shortcomings of earlier theoretical approaches that relate the flash
rate e.g., to generator power. No distinction is made between intracloud and
cloud-to-ground discharges.

In order to test this approach, polarimetric radar
data were used, from which the graupel distribution in observed thunderstorms could be inferred. The lightning
activity was detected using the LINET network. The comparison between
theoretically-predicted and measured flash rates is encouraging: Over a wide range of flash rates,
the theoretical approach yields accurate results for isolated thunderstorms. Two existing
parameterizations, which only use the depth of the clouds as predictor, produce
substantially less accurate forecasts.

These two existing approaches, the one developed in this study, as well as a fourth one based on updraft velocity,
were implemented in the convection-resolving COSMO-DE numerical weather prediction model. With this model,
real-world convective scenarios were simulated. The output of the lightning scheme includes the location and time
of every simulated discharge.
Testing the performance of the
parameterizations with modeled convection is difficult as there is no one-to-one correspondence between
observed and modeled convective clouds. Where a comparison between modeled and observed flash rates of individual clouds
was possible, the results for individual cells were promising.

The comparison of the bulk lightning activity over an area comprising southern Germany and adjacent countries
suggests that none of the four parameterizations captures the overall lightning activity well. This is mainly
because COSMO-DE does not simulate the observed number of cells at the correct times.


Background: Absence or low uptake of Pap smear is probably the main barrier for high incidence of cervical cancer. Aim: To assess the knowledge, practice, attitude, main barriers and motivating factors of Pap smear among Omani women. Methods: Cross-secal survey in a tertiary referral hospital. The participants were divided into three groups: the patients who attended Outpatient Gynecology Department in Sultan Qaboos University Hospital (SQUH), Oman, the female staff from SQUH, College of Medicine and Health Science and College of Nursing at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) and the graduating female students at SQU. Results: There were 204 patients, 133 staff, and 157 students. The knowledge of Pap smear among patients, staff and students was as follows: 56.9%, 56.4% and 23.6%, respectively. Those who had an adequate knowledge, 36.8% patients, 23.3% staff and 0.0% students performed Pap smear. Those who performed Pap smear, 32.4% of patients were reminded by their health professionals and 23.3% of staff understood the importance of Pap smear. The common barrier that prevents the uptake of Pap smear among the three groups was their belief that they have a healthy lifestyle. All the groups (70 – 96%) believed that Pap smear can lead to more successful prevention and treatment for cervical cancer. Conclusions: The findings of this study show poor knowledge and performance of Pap smear and good attitude towards Pap smear. More public health education is required to inform the community about the importance of Pap smear as well as to strengthen the curriculum taught in undergraduate university.


The Schelling model of segregation is an agent-based model that illustrates how individual tendencies regarding neighbors can lead to segregation. The model is especially useful for the study of residential segregation of ethnic groups where agents represent householders who relocate in the city. In the model, each agent belongs to one of two groups and aims to reside within a neighborhood where the fraction of 'friends' is sufficiently high: above a predefined tolerance threshold value F. It is known that depending on F, for groups of equal size, Schelling's residential pattern converges to either complete integration (a random-like pattern) or segregation. The study of high-resolution ethnic residential patterns of Israeli cities reveals that reality is more complicated than this simple integration-segregation dichotomy: some neighborhoods are ethnically homogeneous while others are populated by both groups in varying ratios. In this study, we explore whether the Schelling model can reproduce such patterns. We investigate the model's dynamics in terms of dependence on group-specific tolerance thresholds and on the ratio of the size of the two groups. We reveal new type of model pattern in which a portion of one group segregates while another portion remains integrated with the second group. We compare the characteristics of these new patterns to the pattern of real cities and discuss the differences.


In this research the influence of nitriding temperature on surface structural characteristics and fatigue strength of plain carbon steel (C45) was investigated. The samples were gas nitrided at different temperatures at constant nitriding time. The influence of such surface structural characteristics as case depth, hardness of the compound layer and case hardness on fatigue behaviour of nitrided steel was investigated. Also, the fatigue fracture surfaces nitrided and nonnitrided samples were observed by a scanning electron microscope. It was determined that the hard compound layer and  high compressive residual stresses in the nitrided layer are the two major factors in improving the fatigue strength of plain carbon steel. However, the deep case depth is not necessary to improve fatigue strength of examined steel. Investigation of fatigue fracture surfaces showed that the samples have higher fatigue resistance when the fatigue crack begins to develop under the nitrided (hardened) sample surface at the central part of "fish eye" from structural stress concentrator – nonmetallic inclusion. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.mech.21.5.11399


This encyclopedia is the first of its kind in bringing together philosophy and the social sciences. It is not only about the philosophy of the social sciences but, going beyond that, it is also about the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences.

The subject of this encyclopedia is purposefully multi- and inter-disciplinary. Knowledge boundaries are both delineated and crossed over. The goal is to convey a clear sense of how philosophy looks at the social sciences and to mark out a detailed picture of how the two are interrelated: interwoven at certain times but also differentiated and contrasted at others. The Entries cover topics of central significance but also those that are both controversial and on the cutting-edge, underlining the unique mark of this Encyclopedia: the interrelationship between philosophy and the social sciences, especially as it is found in fresh ideas and unprecedented hybrid disciplinary areas.

The Encyclopedia serves a further dual purpose: it contributes to the renewal of the philosophy of the social sciences and helps to promote novel modes of thinking about some of its classic problems.


Reliable semi-supervised learning, where a small amount of labelled data is complemented by a large body of unlabelled data, has been a long-standing goal of the machine learning community. However, while it seems intuitively obvious that unlabelled data can aid the learning process, in practise its performance has often been disappointing. We investigate this by examining generative maximum likelihood semi-supervised learning and derive novel upper and lower bounds on the degree of bias introduced by the unlabelled data. These bounds improve upon those provided in previous work, and are specifically applicable to the challenging case where the model is unable to exactly fit to the underlying distribution a situation which is common in practise, but for which fewer guarantees of semi-supervised performance have been found. Inspired by this new framework for analysing bounds, we propose a new, simple reweighing scheme which provides a provably unbiased estimator for arbitrary model/distribution pairs--an unusual property for a semi-supervised algorithm. This reweighing introduces no additional computational complexity and can be applied to very many models. Additionally, we provide specific conditions demonstrating the circumstance under which the unlabelled data will lower the estimator variance, thereby improving convergence.


Research on economic base analysis has consistently favored approaches that measure the level of basic employment in all sectors rather than simply assuming that certain sectors (such as manufacturing) are inherently basic. Measurement of economic base in these studies, however, has often used techniques that have a tendency to be imprecise, either underestimat- ing (location quotients) or overestimating (minimum requirements) basic employment. Such techniques are necessary since it is often difficult to identify approaches (other than costly surveys) to identify the level of basic activity in each sector. In this research, I propose an eco- nometric approach to estimate the level of basic employment in a key service industry (lodg- ing) with substantial potential to be part of a region's economic base. The model is run for counties in the State of Nebraska, a state where tourism is not a large part of the economy, and, therefore, standard techniques such as location quotients are unlikely to identify basic employment. The econometric approach was able to isolate the level of basic tourism activity in the each Nebraska county. However, further analysis did not consistently identify a statis- tically significant relationship between basic tourism activity and total employment in Ne- braska counties.


We explore a dialogical conception of experience as experience of otherness, in order to suggest how to put together its socio-linguistic constitution and its phenomenologically non-reflexive nature. Through the analysis of a piece of conversation accounting for the flow of tension during verbal interaction, we argue that the felt and lived character of experience is attached to the positioning efforts among interlocutors within a discursive field. In contrast to attempts at conciliating a normative notion of social discourse with a phenomenological notion of immediate experience, we suggest that experience is discursive in itself insofar as it involves the lived or felt encounter with others, and that it can be accounted for using several, old and new, discourse analysis tools, for instance from Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis.


The nullity of the proceeding in case of representative improperly empoweredThe paper covers a nullity of the proceedings arising out of case where the representative of a party was not duly empowered within the meaning of the article 379 point 2. and the article 401 point 2. of the Polish Code of Civil Procedure. In practice this premise causes a lot of difficulties due to missing law permitting straight approval of procedural actions performed by a representative improperly empowered — having considered that categorical rejection of such an opportunity not always seems to be the right and justified decision. In the contents of the paper attention is paid to the fact that it is incorrect to equate the case in which a person was not able to perform as a proxy with the situation where the representative was improperly empowered. The first case entails the invalidity of the proceedings, while the latter may be subject to legitimization, as a result of a subsequent confirmation of the procedural actions taken by an empowered person. Finally, the issue of the admissibility of reporting such a violation by a party to the proceedings as well as their legal interest in such an action is raised. Such an analysis will permit to indicate the differences between cases along with an attempt to indicate a possible procedure when it occurs.


We report a simple strategy to co-assemble oppositely charged polyelectrolytes across oil–water interfaces; this allows the accumulation of an electrostatic complex at the interface of species that are not surface active by themselves. To this end, we use a new, oil-soluble anionic polymer, poly-(fluorene-co-benzothiadiazole-co-benzoic acid), in combination with a cationic polyelectrolyte that is dissolved in the aqueous phase. When only one of the two charged components is present, no positive adsorption is observed in interfacial tension measurements; by contrast, when both polyelectrolytes are present, in the oil and water phases respectively, a rapid decrease of the interfacial tension is observed, indicating co-adsorption of the cationic and anionic polyelectrolytes. The complexation strength can be tuned through changes in both ionic strength and pH. Confocal microscopy and co-localization analysis further verifies the presence of both polyelectrolytes at the interface. With this approach, emulsions can be stabilized for several weeks; moreover, using the sensitivity of the complex to changes in pH, we are able to reversibly break and make the emulsions on demand.


Theoretically grounded in debates surrounding the production of space and mobility in contemporary cultural discourse, this thesis examines the role of film in these deterritorialised landscapes of theory and practice, in particular the shift from place-based geographies of travel and film to those of 'utopic' displacement. Focussed primarily on examples from contemporary European film, the thesis also considers the broader geo- historical contexts underpinning travel and filmic practices: for example, cinema's nascent links with the democratisation of travel and the construction of a touristic 'mobile virtual gaze' . In so far as these and other examples of 'travel film' can be said to discursively centre the 'voyager-voyeur' in geographies of home and placement, they invoke an 'Ulyssean gaze' of mythic circularity against which the utopic deterritorialisations of migrancy and transnational space are counterposed. It is these utopic horizons of travel - cinematic mobilities that pose dialectical challenges to hegemonic cartographies of place and space which this thesis sets out to explore. Mapping the utopic gaze in early and 'classic' (e)migrant films, I examine the extent to which the frontiers and horizons of utopic travel, predicated in these examples of spatio-temporal distance, could be said to have collapsed in a spatial conflation of presence and absence. In this analysis ellipses in space and time have increasingly displaced the representational spaces of the journey. Looking at a range of examples from contemporary film, I examine the dialectic between a displaced imaginary of utopic hope and the material non-places of transit, refuge and waiting which dominate these cinematic geographies; dialectic which maps affective spaces of stasis and transition. In the deterritorialised landscapes of postmodernity I argue that it is the agential and embodied mobilities of movement-in-itself - psychogeographic, oblique confrontations with hegemonic space - that constitutes the fullest realisation of the utopic. Far from valorising undialectical tropes of the 'open road' or of the rhizomatic, homeless 'nomad', these peripatetic, embodied mobilities are the product of a dialectic of stasis and transition in which the conflict between abstract and lived spaces of mobility is brought to the fore.


"Past successes in African agriculture can point the way to promising avenues for achieving similar success in the future. Drawing lessons from past success requires identifying a range of successful and less successful episodes and then studying and comparing them. To identify a broad range of successful episodes in African agriculture, our analytical team launched an expert survey, polling more than 1,000 African agriculture specialists. In conducting this review, we defined 'success' as: a significant, durable change in agriculture resulting in an increase in agriculturally derived aggregate income, together with reduced poverty and/or improved environmental quality. From the responses, we, together with our advisory group, selected a dozen successful episodes for in-depth review and dispatched case study teams to investigate them. Although these episodes differ widely in terms of instigators of change, points of intervention, levels of subsidy involved, food and export crops, regional diversity, duration, and scale achieved, they suggest ways in which past sucesses can be replicated and scaled up." From Text


South Africa, with its high mobile phone penetration rate and persistent social inequalities, is the target of many "mobiles for development" (M4D) initiatives. By comparing South Africans' stories about mobile phones with the optimistic narrative presented by mobile enthusiasts, this study offers a counterbalance to M4D's claims that mobile phones incontrovertibly enhance economic situations, improve health outcomes, and guarantee safety. Drawing upon a diverse collection of 79 interviews with NGO employees and beneficiaries in Cape Town, this study problematizes the mobile phone success story espoused by M4D enthusiasts and advocates for a reimagining and retelling of the mobiles for development story that fully considers the negative and neutral aspects of technology for development projects.


Every year, almost one million baby girls are "missing" in China. These are the babies predicted to be girls who never appear in national registries. In 2000, more than 5000 baby girls born in China were adopted by U.S. parents and emigrated to the United States. This Article examines the forces that drive adoptions of children from the world's most populous country to its richest from the perspectives of the participants. It analyzes the Chinese, United States, and international laws -- and the violation of these laws -- that make this migration possible.The story is told from three perspectives: the birth mother's, the adoptive parents', and the adoptee's. The tale is thrice-told for several reasons. First, these stories are separated by space and time, and told not only in different voices, but in different languages. Separate tellings highlight the very different contexts that shape these stories and give them meaning. Second, it is thrice-told to show why any single telling is necessarily partial, incomplete, from a legal standpoint. Multiple laws apply here in a wide range of complicated contexts, often with unanticipated consequences. Multiple tellings destabilize and problematize our understanding of the law. Third, and finally, multiple tellings show how each story is deliberately constructed by state and non-state actors to serve multiple, often conflicting, personal and political purposes. Multiple tellings also expose the ways in which legal rhetoric shapes stories and the shape-shifting qualities of the rhetoric itself. This includes the ways in which the needs of the present shape our understanding of the past.


Notions of sexual and gender identities seem to be troubled as people are more forth-coming with sexual and gender practices that stray beyond traditionally defined boundaries. Working within geographical locations; in particular, those that are rural, the authors explore the impact of fundamentalism, traditionalism, and conservatism as curricular elements that support the construction and maintenance of particular sexual and gender identities. Constructions of sex, gender, femininity, and masculinity are called into question and possibilities are offered for imagining identities between and beyond those that are defined through traditionalism, fundamentalism, and conservatism.


A Johanine Ecclesiology? In this research certain theological concepts in the so-called farewell discourses of Jesus in John 13:1-17:26 is systematised. These theological concepts are identified as the unique characteristics belonging to a group of people who is described as "Jesus' own" in the passage referred to. They are characterised as a communion of faith, love, service, joy and peace, prayer, teaching, and unity as well as a community of the Holy Spirit, and missionary. It is shown that the portrayal of this group primarily corresponds to the characteristics of a first century Mediterranean family. A normal relationship between a father and son is activated when analogical references are made to God as Father and Jesus as Son. Normal people receive the status of children of God as well as the unique features that set them apart from the world, through a spirited birth process. An alternative lifestyle is expected of God's family in a hostile world, characterized by hate.


'I had to go back to New York and try to find him. There was a chance he mightn't be there but I had to give it a go because there was one thing I was certain of: he wasn't here'. Anna Walsh is officially a wreck. She's covered in bandages and she's lying in her parents' Good Front Room dreaming of leaving Dublin and getting back to New York. To her friends. To The Most Fabulous Job in the World. And most of all, back to her husband, Aiden. But her family have other ideas (not to mention the usual problems that beset the Walsh sisters). And Aiden, for some reason, seems unwilling to get in touch. What happened to Anna to send her so far from all that she loves? And what happened to her marriage that her husband won't talk to her?


Many species of copepods form dense aggregations, known as swarms. In the laboratory, we experimentally induced 5 different species of copepod to swarm in response to a point source of light. To map out the (X, y, z, t ) positions of swarm members. 2 right-angle views of the 3-dimensional swarm were videotaped. Since images of individual copepods appear indistinguishable on the paired 2-dixnensional projections, an algorithm was developed which matched the temporal changes of the vertical (z) positions of all images from the 2-dimensional projections of the 3-d~mensional copepod movement to produce (X, y, z, t ) positions of each individual. With the temporal/spatial positional data of swarm members, we tested the hypothesis that the fluid disturbance surrounding individual moving copepods. rather than the exoskeleton, maintains minimum separation distance. As the density of the swarm increased, the average nearest-ne~ghbor distance NND decreased, as did the mean mlnimum NND (MNND). For 3 of the 5 species, the MNND was significantly greater than that predicted from a random distribution, and was greater than twice the antennule or prosome length. While occasional physical contact may occur, resulting in escapes or attempted mating, it appears that most swarm members remain outside the f~e ld of self-generated fluid motion in the boundary layers surrounding their neighbors.


A two millimeter-wave signal generation scheme for a bidirectional 60 GHz radio-over-fiber system is theoretically analyzed and numerically verified. Three dual-electrical Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs) and two optical inter-leavers (OILs) are employed, and MZM1, MZM2, and MZM3 are biased at the minimum, maximum, and minimum transmission points, respectively. The two OILs and a fiber Bragg grating are used to separate the subcarriers after transmission. In the scheme, a tunable laser serves as the optical source, and two 60 GHz millimeter-wave signals with modulating data are generated to transmit diversity, and a remote local oscillator is also generated. The analytical models for transmission through a dispersive medium are confirmed by simulations. It is found that chromatic dispersion has little impact on the bit error rate performance when a narrow-linewidth laser and a noise management technique are employed.


Sometimes a speaker repeats an interlocutor's gesture, at least partially. Such 'parallel gesturing' illustrates how gestures can enter into the conversational exchange along with speech. Here we describe examples observed in adult-child conversations (children between 3 and 9 years). Four contexts are noted: (1) adult or child repeats speech and gesture of the other's utterance in displaying understanding; (2) the adult repeats the child's gesture, often with modification, when offering the child a more complete or correct expression of what it just said; (3) the adult repeats the child's gesture when matching the child's expressive style; (4) either adult or child parallels the other's gesture when expressions of similar discourse type are reciprocated. Children, like adults, can pay attention to each other's gestures, as well as to words. Differences between adult and child in how a 'paralleled' gesture is performed shows that gestural performance, like speech, involves maturation.


Protein–surfactant mixtures arise in many industrial and biological systems, and indeed, blood itself is a mixture of serum albumins along with various other surface-active components. Bovine serum albumin (BSA) solutions, and globular proteins in general, exhibit an apparent yield stress in bulk rheological measurements at surprisingly low concentrations. By contrasting interfacial rheological measurements with corresponding interface-free data obtained using a microfluidic rheometer, we show that the apparent yield stress exhibited by these solutions arises from the presence of a viscoelastic layer formed due to the adsorption of protein molecules at the air–water interface. The coupling between instrument inertia and surface elasticity in a controlled stress device also results in a distinctive damped oscillatory strain response during creep experiments known as"creep ringing". We show that this response can be exploited to extract the interfacial storage and loss moduli of the protein interface. The interfacial creep response at small strains can be described by a simple second order system, such as the linear Jeffreys model, however the interfacial response rapidly becomes nonlinear beyond strains of order 1%. We use the two complementary techniques of interfacial rheometry and microfluidic rheometry to examine the systematic changes in the surface and bulk material functions for mixtures of a common non-ionic surfactant, polysorbate 80, and BSA. It is observed that the nonlinear viscoelastic properties of the interface are significantly suppressed by the presence of even a relatively small amount of surfactant (csurf > 10−3 wt.%). Preferential interfacial adsorption of the mobile surfactant at these surfactant concentrations results in complete elimination of the bulk apparent yield stress exhibited by surfactant-free BSA solutions.


Host spacing may benefit the parasites (e.g., enhance parasite transmission) or the hosts (e.g., reduce host infection), with profound consequences in epidemiology and host–parasite dynamics. In this study, we tested parasitism effects of intestinal nematodes on spacing behaviors and spatial recruitment of the Taiwan field mouse (Apodemus semotus). We tracked the locations of resident mice for 84% of the host population, with half of them experimentally reduced of their parasitic infection. We interpolated geo-tagged data on parasite egg counts of the resident mice to create an infection risk landscape and extracted the risks to the locations of newly recruited mice. We performed parentage analysis to identify mother–offspring pairs, which allowed us to test whether in situ recruits moved toward lower-risk areas during natal dispersal. We found that the less-infected mice became spatially aggregated compared to the more heavily infected, and the juvenile recruits occurred preferentially in lower-risk areas compared to the landscape, the residents, and their natal places. The spatial aggregation of less-infected resident mice and the association of juvenile recruits with lower-risk areas could hinder parasite transmission. This study provided some empirical support for a potential link between host recruitment process and parasitism risks.


One of the most widespread patterns of colouration in the animal kingdom is countershading, a gradation of colour in which body parts that face a higher light intensity are darker. Countershading may help counterbalance the shadowing created by directional light, and, hence, reduce 3D object recognition via shape-from-shading. There is evidence that other animals, as well as humans, derive information on shape from shading. Here, we assessed experimentally the effect of optimising countershading camouflage on detection speed and accuracy, to explore whether countershading needs to be fine-tuned to achieve crypsis. We used a computational 3D world that included ecologically realistic lighting patterns. We defined 3D scenes with elliptical 'distractor' leaves and an ellipsoid target object. The scenes were rendered with different types of illumination and the target objects were endowed with different levels of camouflage: none at all, a countershading pattern optimized for the light distribution of the scene and target orientation in space, or optimized for a different illuminant. Participants (N=12) were asked to detect the target 3D object in the scene as fast as possible. The results showed a very significant effect of countershading camouflage on detection rate and accuracy. The extent to which the countershading pattern departed from the optimal pattern for the actual lighting condition and orientation of the target object had a strong effect on detection performance. This experiment showed that appropriate countershading camouflage strongly interferes with visual search by decreasing detection rate and accuracy. A field predation experiment using birds, based on similar stimuli, showed similar effects. Taken together, this suggests that countershading obstructs efficient visual search across species and reduces visibility, thus enhancing survival in prey animals that adopt it. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


This article explores the challenges the researcher faced when undertaking ethnographic fieldwork within a Probation Approved Premises. How access to research sites is achieved is increasingly being discussed, particularly in ethnographic accounts. These discussions often focus on the practical and ethical challenges of entering fieldwork sites. In contrast, how researchers leave study populations or sites is rarely explored, although perhaps as complex and sensitive to negotiate as access. This article reflects upon the practical, ethical and emotional dilemmas experienced by the author when conducting research with sex offenders and staff in a probation hostel. The focus of the article is on how access was gained and how the site and the people who took part in the research were left at the end of the fieldwork. Key issues include: formal and informal gatekeepers to study sites; participants and forms of data; rapport; attachment to researchers and; deciding when to end fieldwork. Issues of gender are alluded to in this article, but will not be focussed on as they will be dealt with in detail elsewhere. It is concluded that negotiating access is different to gaining entry to a research site, and that these negotiations include considerations of the relationship between the researcher, the research and the researched.


ABSTRACT The checkered beetle genera Acanthocollum Opitz and Stegnoclava Opitz are redescribed and the genus Ichnea Laporte is revised for the first time. The monotypic genus Acanthocollum contains A. melanurum (Klug). Stegnoclava includes one previously described species, S. fumigata (Gorham), and two species describe herein, S. velatis Opitz, new species, and S. zorropsis Opitz, new species. Ichnea is comprised of 14 previously described species and five new species. The previously described species are I. aequinoctialis Spinola, I. aterrima (Klug), I. digna Wolcott, I. dimidiatipennis Spinola, I. divisa (Chevrolat), I. frenata (Erichson), I. incerta Gorham, I. lycoides Laporte, I. marginella (Klug), I. mimica Gorham, I. opaca (Klug), I. plumbea Gorham, I. praeusta (Klug), and I. procera Schenkling. The species of Ichnea described herein are I. acanthomelina Opitz, new species, I. atra Opitz, new species, I. callanga Opitz, new species, I. gregata Opitz, new species, and I. gremia Opitz, new species. Seventeen new synonymies are designated: I. aequinoctialis (= I. funesta Gorham, I. histrica Gorham, I. spinolai Corporaal); I. aterrima (= I. mexicana Thomson, I. religiosa Chevrolat, I. vitticollis Kuwert, I. kuwerti Lohde, I. elongata Knull); I. frenata (= I. disjuncta Gorham, I. panamensis Gorham, I. subfasciata Gorham, I. mitella Gorham, I. striaticollis Kuwert, I. confluens Kuwert); I. marginella (Klug) (= Enoplium laterale Klug, Hylecoetus cylindricus Germar); I. plumbea Gorham (= I. helvolicollis Corporaal). The species of Acanthocollum characterized by having a ridge of golden yellow setae on the upper sides of the pronotum. Species of Stegnoclava have the antennal funicle extensively compacted, and in species of Ichnea the distal margin of the pygidium shows a distinct triangular, depigmented mark. Like other epiphloeines, species of Acanthocollum, Stegnoclava, and Ichnea are thought to be predators of lignicolous insects and highly involved in Batesian polymorphism. Two major lines of evolution are apparent within Ichnea, one having evolved toward a lycid type of body form, whereas the other progressed towards a lampyroid configuration. Twenty-one characters were evaluated phylogenetically and analyzed with WINCLADA, in coordination with NONA, to generate a nearly completely resolved species-group level phylogeny. It is postulated that the progenitor of the three genera evolved in South America, with subsequent ancestral stocks extending into Central America following the closure of the Panamanian portal.


India has been among the most successful countries in terms of fostering the emergence of a dynamic pharmaceutical manufacturing sector. There are a number of factors, including government policies and business incentives, that help to explain the evolution of the Indian pharmaceutical sector.
India has a very large population (approximately 1.25 billion), including a large segment of individuals living on low incomes. China's situation is not so dissimilar (approximately 1.4 billion). The factors that may be relevant to establishing a successful pharmaceutical sector in a country with a very large population and a developing market may be different from the factors relevant to a smaller country and/or one experiencing different economic circumstances.
The success of India's pharmaceutical sector today seems largely grounded in dynamic private companies seeking to take advantage of market opportunities. A major driver of revenue growth has been export of generic formulated products to high-value developed country markets, particularly those of the United States and Europe. The revenues from exports have allowed the major Indian generic producers to invest in upgrading of plant and equipment so as to allow conformity with strict regulatory requirements, enabling export expansion.
The India Government has promoted the concept of the pharmaceutical cluster, which provides exemption from import duties for products that are exported, and from local taxes (depending on the state government). Recognizing that Chinese pharmaceutical companies have made significant inroads into India's production and export of APIs, the India Government is actively studying proposals for the creation of API-specific clusters situated nearby to existing petrochemical complexes that will enable Indian API producers to exploit lower costs.
The India Government is anxious to promote transition to R&D on new pharmaceutical products, both small molecule/synthetic chemistry and biological products. It is interested in promoting biotechnological invention as well as the production of biosimilar products. Looked at from the standpoint of rupee/dollar amounts, India Government programs to encourage domestic R&D are very modest in comparison with those of the United States, for example.
One of the key features of India's current success in the pharmaceutical sector is the evolution of a robust "ecosystem" of supporting infrastructure, suppliers and service industries. Such an ecosystem may develop as a natural consequence of dynamic economic activity around a particular industry. The cluster concept in part may be a way to facilitate the development of an "artificial ecosystem" (i.e. one that evolves on the basis of government policy).
This report addresses the dichotomy between India's successful local pharmaceutical manufacturing sector and the situation regarding access to medicines among poorer parts of India's population. The India Government allocates a relatively small proportion of its budget to health care in general, and to medicines procurement in particular. The Government should be doing more in terms of commitment of resources to providing medicines for the poorer parts of the population.


Changes of soil temperature in cotton field covered with plastic film under saline water irrigation were investigated by plot trial. Results showed that saline water irrigation produced a certain influence on soil temperature by changing ground coverage. Soil temperature in the rows with film mulching (RFM) was higher than that in the rows without film mulching (RNFM), especially at seedling stage and in the 5~10 cm soil layer. The daily variation of soil temperature in different positions fitted sinusoidal curve approximately. With the increase in soil depth, the process of soil temperature change became steady, and the appearance time of peak value delayed. During the growing season, the average daily soil temperature in different soil depths in RFM and RNFM was linear positively related to the near-surface air temperature, and the correlation coefficients reached extremely significant level (P<0.01). For one day, if the time-lag effect between soil temperature and air temperature was corrected, the relationship between the soil temperature in different soil depths and the near-surface air temperature gave a good fitted to linear regression equations, and the correlation coefficients reached a significant level (P<0.05). The experimental results provided a theoretical basis for the building of water-heat-salt transfer model and the regulation of water-salt distribution.


This study presents the performance of a non‐native English‐speaking adult using the Nucleus 22 Channel cochlear implant. Included are the subject's (1) history, (2) promontory stimulation results, (3) audiological information, (4) pre‐ and post‐implantation speech recognition test results, (5) post‐implantation auditory phoneme recognition using the wearable speech processor (WSP), the minispeech processor (MSP), and the Spectra processor, and (6) the subject's subjective reports of benefits in terms of communication and social interactions. The subject, a highly motivated and intelligent male who, presented with a profound bilateral, progressive sensorineural hearing loss of unknown etiology, was 59 years old when the right ear was implanted. Prior to implantation the subject was aided in the left ear, but had never been aided in the right ear. The subject's performance using each of three processors is presented for medial vowel recognition and medial consonant recognition using auditory stimulation only. Results are displayed through confusion matrices generated based on the subject's responses to these acoustic stimuli. In summary, the vowel and consonant phoneme recognition of a subject with the Nucleus cochlear implant using various processors is presented. Improved phoneme recognition is demonstrated with filter banking versus feature extraction coding strategies.


This article investigates how concepts from the field of public policy, in particular the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) initially introduced by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, can be applied to the study of foreign policy analysis. Using a most similar comparative case studies design, we examine Switzerland's foreign policy toward South Africa under apartheid for the period from 1968 to 1994 and compare it with the Swiss position toward Iraq after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when the Swiss government imposed—for the first time—comprehensive economic sanctions against another state. The application of the ACF shows that a dominant advocacy coalition in Swiss foreign policy toward South Africa prevented a major policy change in Swiss–South African relations despite external pressure from the international and national political levels. Actually, quite the opposite could be observed: Swiss foreign policy increased its persistence in not taking economic sanctions against the racist regime in South Africa during the 1980s and early 1990s. The ACF, with its analytical focus on policy subsystems and the role of external shocks as potential triggers for change, provided a useful framework for analyzing the factors for policy change and stasis in Swiss foreign relations toward the selected two countries.


Side pumping of double-clad photonic crystal fibers is experimentally demonstrated. Optical access to the multimode cladding is obtained by collapsing the airholes over a short length of fiber while leaving the inner single-mode core undisturbed. Coupling efficiencies greater than 90% are obtained. A side-pumped Yb fiber laser with a slope efficiency of 81% is demonstrated with this method.


Virtual reality is wildly used in computer games, 3D animation, film and advertising. Particle system is an effective method in Virtual reality. However, the particle system uses randomly generated particles and particles attribute to simulate reality, but the real reality particles are often not randomly distributed. The theoretical research of probability theory and random process and practical applications show that the similar normal distribution is the most widely in the actual natural phenomenon and social phenomenon, cloud model is a powerful tool in simulation similar normal distribution, controlling the particles system generate particles and particle attributes based on the cloud mode to simulate the reality is more realistic.


Nanoparticles play a major role in industrial processes and natural phenomena in a variety of fields including chemical engineering, chemistry, physics, public health and biology. Nanoparticles are suspended in fluids during production, handling, processing, and by unintentional and/or undesirable release to the environment. In many cases the suspending fluid is a gas, as for example in large scale production, air pollution, clean room applications and many more. The small size of nanoparticles makes it possible to compare their transport properties to the fluid itself. Brownian particle diffusion is one of the most important mechanisms leading to significant transport rates. Diffusion is well known in mass transfer, however, differences arise because of the wide spectrum of nanoparticle sizes and their morphology (aggregate structure) − a concept understood in particle science and technology but needed in many diverse fields of nanoparticle applications. Nanoparticle transport can be controlled by external force fields because these forces may act exclusively on the nanoparticles and have negligible effects on fluid molecules. These include thermophoresis and forces in electrical fields.


The software industry frequently maintains that software piracy is no more than theft and a cause of huge losses. Courts and other policy makers easily adopt that straightforward argument. Surprisingly, however, many software publishers do not employ any technological measures to protect their software from piracy and many popular software products are distributed without any means of protection and are easily pirated. This lack of protection is puzzling; a solution for that puzzle is the focus of the article. The first part of the article challenges the conventional explanations that are usually given for the failure to protect software and offers an alternative explanation. The paper argues that not protecting software is a profitable strategy based on several elements: the first element is cross-sectional price discrimination in which the lower tiers of customers do not pay for their software. In the face of network effects that exist in many software markets, such a strategy achieves the most expeditious and widest dissemination of software, maximizes the value of the network, may accelerate the tipping of the market in favor of the more dominant publisher and later create higher barriers to entry. The article analyzes the advantages of such implicit price discrimination over explicit price discrimination and the advantages from complaining about piracy over preventing it. The second element is dynamic pricing in a multiple-period setting. At a second stage, due to a lock-in phenomenon, software publishers are able to hold-up potential ex-pirates who face a threat of litigation and charge them higher prices. According to the basic copyright paradigm each pirated copy is a net loss for the copyright holder. According to the proposed network theory some level of piracy generates higher revenues from other customers and over time. The second part of the article explores whether and to what extent legal doctrines, particularly in antitrust and copyright law should respond to these counter-paradigmatic circumstances.


Often derided as unscientific and self-indulgent, psychoanalysis has been an invaluable resource for artists, art critics and historians throughout the twentieth century. Art and Psychoanalysis investigates these encounters. The shared relationship to the unconscious, severed from Romantic inspiration by Freud, is traced from the Surrealist engagement with psychoanalytic imagery to the contemporary critic's use of psychoanalytic concepts as tools to understand how meaning operates. Following the theme of the 'object' with its varying materiality, Walsh develops her argument that psychoanalysis, like art, is a cultural discourse about the mind in which the authority of discourse itself can be undermined, provoking ambiguity and uncertainty and destabilising identity. The dynamics of the dream-work, Freud's 'familiar unfamiliar', fetishism, visual mastery, abjection, repetition, and the death drive are explored through detailed analysis of artists ranging from Max Ernst to Louise Bourgeois, including 1980s postmodernists such as Cindy Sherman, the performance art of Marina Abramovic' and post-minimalist sculpture.

Innovative and disturbing, Art and Psychoanalysis investigates key psychoanalytic concepts to reveal a dynamic relationship between art and psychoanalysis which goes far beyond interpretation. There is no cure for the artist - but art can reconcile us to the traumatic nature of human experience, converting the sadistic impulses of the ego towards domination and war into a masochistic ethics of responsibility and desire.


Economic growth, urban development and the prosperity of the automobile industry have driven a huge shift in global urban transportation from walking to public transportation and then to automobiles. Private mobility has become an important part of residents' daily trips. Cities, especially automobile-dependent cities, face a variety of negative impacts such as increased commuting distances, higher congestion costs, traffic accidents, traffic pollution including climate change, etc. Therefore, how to balance the relationship between people's growing demand for private motorization with the development of urbanization, modernization and motorization and the huge economic, social and environmental costs brought about by them, so as to realize the sustainable development of cities and transportation, is the main problem facing cities around the world. The entry focuses on trends in the sustainable development of urban transportation such as restrictions in private car ownership and use, electrification of urban transportation, intelligent transportation systems (including shared mobility, customized buses and Mobility as a Service/MaaS) and transit-oriented development (TOD). China, as the largest global automobile producer and consumer, represents and leads the growth and evolution of other emerging countries.


The objective of this article is to analyze the processes of establishing activist social communication networks by black social movements in Brazil related to Afro-Brazilians' struggles for citizenship. Recently, these struggles have culminated in the approval of the Racial Equality Act and government affirmative action policies for Brazilian university admissions. Within the scope of these processes, we analyze a specific contemporary experiment in networking by the black movement, developed by Afropress news agency. Initially, we review historic processes of inequality, resistance and mobilization of black populations in Brazil, identifying the establishment of social-communication activist networks starting with the uses black movements make of information and communication technology in their struggles for racial equality and citizenship for Afro-Descendents in the country. Second, from a Latin American cultural studies perspective, we analyze a specific case of internet use by Afropress news agency (www.afropress.com.br), which uses network communication as its main strategy for generating communicative flows to build and add visibility to the socio-cultural experiences of Afro-Brazilians and the agendas of struggles for racial equality.


The p53 protein is one of the most well-known tumor suppressor proteins, and it plays a variety of functions in somatic cells. Once activated, p53 induces cell cycle arrest and inhibits cell proliferation. Since it was found that p53 is highly expressed in murine embryonic stem cells, a cell type that proliferates very fast because of a shortened G1 phase, it remained a mystery whether p53 is active in this cell type.
I observed that a significant part of p53 is localized in the nucleus of murine embryonic stem cells and that the majority of this nuclear p53 is bound to DNA. In addition, the anti-proliferative activity of p53 is compromised in stem cells, and this control is due, at least in part, to the high amount of MDMX that is present in embryonic stem cells. This high amount of MDMX is most likely due to exclusion of exon 7 of the MDMX RNA during retinoic acid induced differentiation. MDMX co-eluted with p53 from sucrose gradient assays and downregulation of MDMX in mESCs increased MDM2 abundance, a transcriptional target of p53, indicating that MDMX controls p53's transcriptional activity in stem cells. P53 is posttranslationally modified in mESCs and these modifications endow a neutral isoelectric point (pI) of a fraction of the p53 protein that is only present in stem cells. Moreover, according to its nuclear localization in mESCs, p53 influences the transcriptome of mESCs. However, in contrast to the anti-proliferative activity that p53 has in differentiated cells, p53 controls transcription of pro-proliferative genes in embryonic stem cells including c-myc and c-jun. Chromatin-Immunoprecipitation showed that p53 binds to the responsive element of these proto-oncogenes. The impeded anti-proliferative activity of p53 and the induction of certain proto-oncogenes by p53 in murine embryonic stem cells can explain why stem cells proliferate efficiently despite having high levels of p53.


There is an inescapable synergy between maximising economic recovery, decommissioning production infrastructure and carbon capture and storage (CCS). There are multiple types of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) which can be applied to particular subsurface oil fields. However, for the UK sector of the North Sea CO2-EOR is the technology with the greatest potential. CO2-EOR involves the injection of liquid CO2 into the mature oil reservoir where, at the subsurface conditions of high temperature and high pressure, it acts as a solvent making the oil less viscous, such that additional quantities can be produced from the oil field. CO2- EOR can be an effective closed cycle system, with CO2 separated from the produced oil and returned to the reservoir for reuse and ultimately for permanent secure storage. SCCS (2015) has shown that the small additional carbon budget necessary for the engineering of offshore CO2-EOR, has no adverse consequence on the embedded carbon reduction budget of onshore electricity generation with CCS to supply millions tonnes of CO2.


Leading theatre historians and practitioners map a theatrical history that moves from the religious tropes of Medieval Iberia to the postmodern practices of twenty-first-century Spain. Considering work across the different languages of Spain, from vernacular Latin to Catalan, Galician, Castilian and Basque. This history engages with the work of actors, directors, designers, publishers, agents, impresarios, architects and ensembles. Indicating the ways in which theatre has both commented on and intervened in the major debates and issues of the day. Chapters consider paratheatrical activities and popular performance, such as the Comedia de Magia and flamenco. Alongside the works of Spain's major dramatists, from Lope de Vega to Federico Garcia Lorca. Featuring revealing interviews with actress Nuria Espert, director Lluis Pasqual and playwright Juan Mayorga, it positions Spanish theatre within a paradigm that recognises its links and intersections with wider European and Latin American practices.


3He/4He ratios in olivine phenocrysts have been measured in 58 Ma basaltic lavas from the Hold with Hope region of northeast Greenland. These lavas constitute a part of the North Atlantic volcanic province. The samples exhibit a wide range of 3He/4He ratios between 1.7 R a and 21 R a ( R a =the atmospheric 3He/4He ratio =1.386 × 10−6), which is comparable to the previously recorded range for Quaternary Icelandic basalts. These He isotope variations may partly result from crustal assimilation, but 3He/4He ratios higher than those of mid-ocean-ridge basalts support early participation of plume-head material at the onset of volcanic activity in the North Atlantic volcanic province. As with the Deccan-Reunion plume and the Ethiopia-Afar plume, this long-term contribution of 3He-rich material is fully consistent with models that ascribe a deep (i.e., deeper than the convective mantle that drives plate tectonics) origin for plume-source material, but contradicts those that postulate a shallow-mantle origin for continental flood basalts and large igneous provinces.


Cassava is regarded as the crop of last resort for millions of marginal farmers and their domestic animals in tropical regions. The Cassava Biotechnology Network (CBN) is addressing the major socioeconomic and agronomic challenges of this orphan crop by bundling the scarce resources available and uniting the major stakeholders involved in cassava breeding, production, marketing, and consumption worldwide. Based on a small expert survey, this article investigates the importance of the problems in cassava agriculture and the approaches considered to be most effective in addressing them. The author concludes that the CBN represents an innovative, demand-oriented and multistakeholder-driven crop research network that is able to effectively address the challenges in cassava agriculture that were perceived to be most important in the survey. Its innovations could be of particular benefit to Central Africa—a region that is highly vulnerable to starvation and malnutrition and relies mostly on cassava as the main staple food. However, in order to make it happen, some major institutional bottlenecks need to be addressed in the international agricultural research system.


School climate has been a subject of interest to educators and researchers for over a century. As early as 1908, Perry was the first to explore the impact of school climate on student learning (Cohen & Geier, 2010).The purpose of the study is to investigate the relationship between school climate and teachers' commitment. The study also examined to investigate the assumption and predictability of key dimensions of school climate in relation to Achievement Press, Teacher Professionalism, Collegial Leadership, and Institutional Vulnerability towards teacher commitment. This study also explored the relationships of school climate and the organizational commitment of teachers from primary school in the district of Sri Aman in Sarawak. The population of this study involved of teachers from five National Primary Schools in the Sri Aman district with 131 respondents has been selected as a sample. Data was collected by using the quantitative method. Two instruments was used; (1) Organisational Climate Index (OCI) by Hoy, Smith and Sweetland (2003) and (2) Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ)
by Cevat Celep (2000). The dependent variable was teacher commitment was measured by the 12 items and independent variable was measured by the 30 items of the organizational climate. The quantitative data was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 21.0. Descriptive statistics and inferential statistic was used to address the objective of the study. The result showed that the level of school climate and teachers' commitment of the selected five National Primary Schools is in the moderate level. As a result for the correlation between school climate dimensions, it was determined that they were positively correlated with the teachers' commitment. The
regression analysis was shows that only Achievement Press made a significant contribution to teachers' commitment.


Cutaneous lymphocyte antigen (CLA) is expressed on a subpopulation of human memory T cells and is involved in the primary step of their skin homing. T cells and some B cells in the peripheral blood express CLA, but the pathophysiologic roles of CLA(+) B cells have not yet been clarified. We examined the relationships among CLA expression in B cells and immunoglobulin heavy chain subtype, the localization of CLA(+) B cells in the peripheral lymphoid tissues, and their functional binding to E-selectin. CLA was expressed on class-switched, memory B cells in the peripheral blood and tonsils as revealed by flow cytometry. Immunohistochemical staining of the lymph nodes with various types of inflammation or reactive hyperplasia showed CLA on the monocytoid B cells, which correspond to memory cells. The functional study revealed that CLA on B cells bound to E-selectin transfectants. E-selectin was detected on some of the high endothelial venules in the monocytoid B-cell-rich lymph nodes. These findings suggest that CLA is also expressed on a subset of memory/effector B cells, in addition to a subset of memory T cells. Such B cells were located in the lymph nodes or tonsils and rarely in chronic dermatitis. Therefore, CLA seems to be related to memory/effector B-cell trafficking to the lymph nodes or tonsils. According to the multistep theory, mechanisms involved in the second or third step might be different between CLA(+) B and T cells.


Troops to teachers (T2T) is a UK government funded initiative through which recently retired ex-military personnel after being demobbed are retrained for careers in the teaching profession The University of Brighton has a key role in arranging and facilitating this curriculum and a particular responsibility for the organisation and delivery of the physical education dimension of the T2T programme. The University of Brighton is also home to the world renowned Football 4 Peace International (F4P) programme, a multi-dimensional sport-based community engagement project that places a particular emphasis on peace building in divided and otherwise fragmented and fractured societies. A number of former service personnel who have enrolled on the PE T2T route have also chosen to engage with F4P, in so doing volunteering to be trained in the distinctively pacifist values-based teaching and coaching methodologies associated with this programme before being deployed to take part in peace-building and related development projects in various troubled regions of the world. In this short article I have chosen to focus critically on the overlap between T2T and F4P, seeking to answer the question, why and how are former military personnel turned into peace makers?


If you are in middle management, you live with daily ambiguity, lack of control, and even chaos. To get anything done, you must present your ideas to decision makers, and those presentations can be brutal. Careers and projects can come unwound in a matter of minutes if a presenter at the top level doesn't know the rules.

 Fear in the middle creates fog at the top, and bad decisions are made. The stakes are high—one presentation can make or break a career—but the rules are utterly unclear. Or at least they used to be.

 Speaking Up is an indispensable resource for anyone who needs to know how to present to those higher up the chain. It offers revelatory insights into the minds of the men and women at the top—information that is crucial to understanding what they're looking for from presenters. Tactics and techniques that work well with peers, subordinates, and immediate supervisors may actually work against you when presenting up the chain.

 Psychologist and coach Frederick Gilbert shows why these high-level presentations are about one thing: delivering information to help extremely talented, highly stressed people make good decisions—fast.

 Gilbert focuses on three simple rules for "speaking up": (1) know the people, (2) get to the point, and (3) improvise. Based on ten years of research and hundreds of interviews, Gilbert's book is unique in featuring extensive comments from executives explaining exactly what they want and don't want in a presentation, as well as midlevel managers' stories of triumphs and tragedies and what they learned as a result. This a must-read book for surviving high-stakes meetings.


The effects on serum ionized calcium (ICa) and pH of different storage conditions of blood or serum, and of physiological influences such as over-ventilation, food intake and dietary sodium intake have been investigated. Temperature and time-related changes in ICa occurred with storage and were minimized by immediate separation of serum and storage at 4°C, (6 h or less). Elevation of serum ICa and a fall in pH accompanied increased salt intake; over-ventilation induced an elevation of serum pH and a reduction in ICa. Day-to-day intra-individual variation of ICa was 0.93%. We proceeded to examine a group of age-, sex- and race-matched hypertensive and normotensive subjects under standardized conditions designed to minimize such technical and physiological artefacts. ICa was not significantly different in the two groups; however, serum pH was significantly elevated in the hypertensive group. In the combined group of normotensive and hypertensive subjects, serum pH was significantly correlated with blood pressure. Exclusion of the black subjects from the analysis did not alter the findings.


Photodynamic therapy (PDT) has become a promising treatment approach against cancer due to low side effects and high therapeutic efficacy. However, the limitations of photosensitizers such as poor water solubility and lack of targeting ability hindered the clinical application of PDT. Here, we synthesized a phosphorescent conjugated polymer brush (PPF-Ir-g-(POEGMA-b-PGal)) in which a small photosensitizer iridium(III) complex was covalently attached to the conjugated backbone. A further hydrophilic polymer (POEGMA) and glycopolymer polygalactose (PGal), which has a specific binding ability with Hep G2 tumors, were grafted from the conjugated backbone via atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) and click reaction. The brush structure rendered PPF-Ir-g-(POEGMA-b-PGal) exhibited excellent water solubility. Meanwhile, PPF-Ir-g-(POEGMA-b-PGal) showed efficient properties of producing singlet oxygen. The photodynamic effect of the PPF-Ir-g-(POEGMA-b-PGal) photosensitizer was evaluated in Hep G2 cells via the MTT assay and flow cytometry and the results indicated that this photosensitizer can efficiently cause the death of cancer cells. Additionally, an antitumor study of PPF-Ir-g-(POEGMA-b-PGal) was conducted in vivo with Hep G2 tumor bearing nude mice, and the results show that the xenograft tumors were significantly inhibited. In summary, PPF-Ir-g-(POEGMA-b-PGal) exhibited fine water solubility and high PDT efficiency both in vitro and in vivo. Our study may further encourage the applications of conjugated polymer brush based photosensitizers for PDT in tumor treatment.


Schizophrenia has a heterogeneous and complex etiology that includes multiple candidate genes affected by a variety of mutational mechanisms including epigenetics, functional pathways, and environmental factors. This chapter mainly focuses on reviewing two sets of studies. The first one is whole‐genome next‐generation sequenc‐ ing datasets involving monozygotic twins discordant for schizophrenia. The findings suggest that de novo sequence variations may underlie the discordance of monozygotic twins for schizophrenia. Second, whole‐genome DNA methylation study suggesting the role of DNA methylation in the mechanisms of actions of antipsychotic drugs in treating the disorder as well as the manifestation of side effects such as metabolic disorders. Furthermore, we are reporting original research results using next‐generation mitochondrial DNA sequence analysis of a pair of monozygotic twins discordant for schizophrenia as well as their mother. The chapter sheds light on the interplay between sequence variations and epigenetic signatures, including DNA methylation changes, in the etiology and pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Given the dynamic nature of methylation, it may be possible to develop a new treatment strategy for schizophrenia that is based on reversion of genomic methylation. This may involve environmental, dietary, and/or pharmaceutical approaches.


The frequency dependence (13.56–70 MHz) of the ion energy distribution at the ground electrode was measured by mass spectrometry in a symmetrical capacitive argon discharge. Reduced sheath impedance at very high frequency allows high levels of plasma power and substrate ion flux while maintaining low levels of ion energy and electrode voltage. The lower limit of ion bombardment energy is fixed by the sheath floating potential at high frequency, in contrast to low frequencies where only the radio frequency voltage amplitude is a determinant. The capacitive sheaths are thinner at high frequencies which accentuates the high frequency reduction in sheath impedance. It is argued that the frequency dependence of sheath impedance is responsible for the principal characteristics of very high frequency plasmas. The measurements are summarized by simple physical descriptions and compared with a particle‐in‐cell simulation.


This thesis studies the relationship between subsets and specified minors in a 3-connected matroid. For positive integers k and m, a set S of k-connected matroids is (k,m)-rounded if it satisfies the following condition. Whenever M is a k-connected matroid having an S-minor and X is a subset of E(M) with at most m elements, then M has an S-minor using X. Oxley characterized the (3,2)-rounded sets that contain a single matroid. In Chapter 2, we obtain an analog of this result for binary matroids. In Chapter 3, we use this result to characterize the pairs of matroids which form (3,2 )-rounded sets. The methods of Chapter 3 are generalized to 4-connected matroids in Chapter 4 to determine the (4,2)-rounded sets that contain a single matroid. This extends results of Coullard and Kahn. For a 3-connected minor N of a 3-connected matroid M, the following question arises from roundedness theory. Let X be a subset of E(M). How small a 3-connected minor of M can we find which both uses X and has an N-minor? Seymour answered this question for |x| = 1 and 2. We answer this question for |x| > 3 in Chapter 5. Finally, in Chapter 6 , results from roundedness theory are applied to the study of 3-element circuits in 3-connected matroids. An extension of a result of Asano, Nishizeki, and Seymour is obtained for binary matroids which are non-regular.


The uncertainties in measurement make the estimation accuracy of traditional methods difficult to meet the dispatching requirements of distribution systems. At the same time, the measurement system often has bad data during the acquisition and transmission process, which seriously affects the accuracy of state estimation. The method in this paper is used to improve the influence of the state estimation on measurement uncertainty and bad data, and improve the robustness and accuracy of estimation. Interval analysis method is used to describe the measurement problem with uncertainties, the interval constraint model of state variables in distribution network is established, and the feasible region of state variables is obtained using linear programming method. Based on the measurement uncertainty theory, a robust state estimation optimization model with the highest measurement point accuracy as the objective function is established. The precise value of the state estimation is solved by the interior point method. With the feasible region of state variables as constraints and the median value of the interval as the initial value, it is unnecessary to take the calculation results of power flow as the initial value, thus reducing the scope of solving state variables and reducing the amount of calculation. Compared with the traditional weighted least square, this method has a significant improvement in accuracy and resistance. The feasibility and effectiveness of this method are verified by IEEE30 and IEEE118 systems.


This article posits that Canadian trademark law is sufficiently circumscribed to regulate the realm of Internet domain names. The overarching purpose of its thesis aims to identify an inherent compatibility between Canadian trademark law and the Internet, while also clearly delineating the Canadian legal framework vis-a-vis domain names. In shedding light on this legal symbiosis, the article ventures upon a comparative study of Canadian, US, and UK jurisprudence, while also taking stock of certain arbitral structures such as ICANN, in order to highlight horizontal legal transplants that will have direct incidence on Canadian online business. Among the themes canvassed, particular emphasis is placed on the ever-increasing extraterritoriality of US law in this field, along with the acknowledgment that US judicial precedents wield considerable influence over Canadian intellectual property policy. As a corollary to this proposition, deference to transboundary domain name litigation and transnational law-derived considerations also pervade the discussion. The merging of Canadian trademark law and Internet domain name regulation is ultimately actuated through the extension of foundational trademark concepts, such as confusion and passing off, to the Internet, along with judicial pronouncements emanating from cognate common law jurisdictions, which are conflated into a single, overriding approach.


Many typical robotics problems involve search in high-dimensional spaces, where realtime execution is hard to be achieved. This thesis presents two case studies of parallel computation in such robotics problems. More specifically, two problems of motion planning – the Inverse Kinematics of robotic manipulators and Path Planning for mobile robots – are investigated and the contributions of parallel algorithms are highlighted. For the Inverse Kinematics problem, a novel and fast solution is proposed for general serial manipulators. This new approach relies on the computation of multiple (parallel) numerical estimations of the inverse Jacobian while it selects the current best path to the desire configuration of the end-effector. Unlike other iterative methods, our method converges very quickly, achieving sub-millimeter accuracy in 20.48ms in average. We demonstrate such high accuracy and the real-time performance of our method by testing it with six different robots, at both non-singular and singular configurations, including a 7-DoF redundant robot. The algorithm is implemented in C/C++ using a configurable number of POSIX threads, and it can be easily expanded to use many-core GPUs. For the Path Planning problem, a solution to the problem of smooth path planning for mobile robots in dynamic and unknown environments is presented. A novel concept of Time-Warped Grids is introduced to predict the pose of obstacles on a grid-based map and avoid collisions. The algorithm is implemented using C/C++ and the CUDA programming environment, and combines stochastic estimation (Kalman filter), Harmonic Potential Fields and a Rubber Band model, and it translates naturally into the parallel paradigm of GPU programing. The proposed method was tested using several simulation scenarios for the Pioneer P3DX robot, which demonstrated the robustness of the algorithm by finding the optimum path in terms of smoothness, distance, and collision-free either in static or dynamic environments, even with a very large number of obstacles.


Following the contraction in demand for law firms' services during the Great Recession, "Big Law" was widely diagnosed as suffering from several maladies that would spell its ultimate demise, including excessive fees, excessive size, increased competition from in-house counsel, the commoditization of legal work, and the decline in demand for "relationship firms." While each of these market pressures is only too real for certain segments of the law-firm population, their threat to the most elite U.S. law firms has been largely misunderstood. Even as many firms reduce their fees and contract in size, we should expect certain firms to continue to charge more and grow bigger. The current prescriptions for fixing Big Law fail to recognize that the top-tier firms within the group serve a unique market function. Focusing on a particular type of legal work – major corporate transactions – this Article proposes a novel theory of the value created by elite law firms: their private information about "market" deal terms, acquired through repeated exposure to the same types of transactions, provides clients with a significant bargaining advantage in deal negotiations. By aggregating expertise in the ever-changing and ever-increasing set of deal terms for certain transactions, law firms help their clients price such terms more accurately and thereby maximize their surplus from the deal. This pricing function – traditionally thought to be limited to investment banks – is one that cannot be replicated or subsumed by in-house counsel, other service providers, or commoditized contracts.


When data analysis applicationsare employed in a multiclient environment, a data server must service multiple simultaneous queries, each of which may employ complex user-defined data structures and operations on the data. It is then necessary to harness interand intra-query commonalitiesand system resources to improve the performance of the data server. We have developed a framework and customizable middleware to enable reuse of intermediate and final results among queries, through an in-memory active semantic cache and user-defined transformation functions. Since resources such as processing power and memory space are limited on the machine hosting the server, effective scheduling of incoming queries and efficient cache replacement policies are challenging issues that must be addressed. We have worked on the scheduling problem in earlier work, and in this paper we describe and evaluate several cache replacement policies. We present experimental evaluation of the policies on a shared-memory parallel system using two applications from different application domains.


How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared these horrors. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer.


We document a novel role of heterogeneity in price rigidity: It strongly amplifies the capacity of idiosyncratic shocks to drive aggregate fluctuations. Heterogeneity in price rigidity also completely changes the identity of sectors from which fluctuations originate. We show these results both theoretically and empirically through the lens of a multi-sector model featuring heterogeneous GDP shares, input-output linkages, and idiosyncratic productivity shocks. Quantitatively, we calibrate our model to 341 sectors and find sectoral productivity shocks can give rise to aggregate fluctuations that are half as large as those arising from an aggregate productivity shock. Heterogeneous price rigidity amplifies the aggregate fluctuations by a factor of more than 2 relative to a flexible-price or homogeneous sticky price economy. Hence, idiosyncratic shocks and heterogeneous price rigidity can account for large parts of aggregate uctuations and there is hope we will not "forever remain ignorant of the fundamental causes of economic fluctuations" (Cochrane (1994)).


Objective In a scenario of new expensive cancer therapies entering the market, strategies of optimisation and cost containment are crucial in oncology care. Better management of drug waste and centralization of drug preparation can be effective strategies to achieve these goals. The aim of this work is to describe the economic management of a high cost anticancer drug (ipilimumab) in some Italian reference centres. Methods This was an observational, multicentred study in which economical and clinical data of 21 cancer centres (418 patients) were collected during the enrollment period from February 2013 to August 2014. The follow-up period ended in July 2015. Results Participants purchased 10.7% more vials of ipilimumab than necessary for compounding. The results were variable among centres, and only five centres had a deviation lower than 5% between the drug purchased and the drug prescribed. Hospitals applying the drug day reached a statistically significant residual of drug effectively used compared to the amount prescribed (P = 0.018). Consequently, the price for treating a model patient was significantly lower in those hospitals (median spare of 7456 euro per patient). Conclusions This study demonstrated that the careful management of drug waste and the application of drug-day, through a proper selection of vial and the ability to use the leftover drug, can generate economic savings. However, tailoring the drug stock to clinical need is still an open issue which deserves further analysis.


Lactose may affect the immune response mediated from the gut and interact with gastrointestinal microbiota; however no effects of milk-yeast on growth performance were detected. Summary An experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of dietary lactose alone or in combination with dried milk-yeast product on growth performance , gastrointestinal microbiota, and immune parameters in weanling pigs. Pigs fed lactose and lactose with milk-yeast tended (P = 0.07) to have greater BW compared to control pigs (19.56 and 19.60 vs. 18.55 lb) at the end of phase 1 (week 1 to 2); however, no differences in BW were observed during phase 2 (week 3 to 4), phase 3 (week 5), or overall (week 1 to 5). With respect to growth performance, pigs fed lactose and lactose plus milk-yeast had greater (P = 0.05) ADG, and tended (P = 0.07) to have greater ADFI compared to control pigs during phase 1. There were no differences observed for ADG or ADFI during phase 2, 3, or the overall experimental period. With respect to immune parameters, a main effect of treatment was observed for circulating immunoglobulin (Ig)A where control pigs had greater (P < 0.01) concentrations of IgA compared to pigs fed lactose with or without milk-yeast; however, no effects of dietary treatment were observed for circulating IgG or tumor necrosis factor alpha. Lastly, fecal microbiota of control pigs had a greater microbial diversity index (Shannon's , P = 0.03) compared to pigs fed lactose plus milk-yeast on day 0; however, no differences in microbial diversity indices were observed on days 7 or 14 among dietary treatments. In addition , a shift in microbial composition, limited to a small number of microbial groups, was observed on day 7 with lactose fed pigs having greater (P = 0.05) putative L. jonhsonii staining intensity compared to control pigs and pigs fed lactose plus milk-yeast. On day 14, L. reuteri tended (P = 0.15) to be enhanced , and L. delbrueckii was virtually eliminated (P = 0.04) by feeding lactose with or without milk-yeast. This research indicates that growth performance, immune parameters, and composition of the fecal microbiota may be affected by dietary inclusion of lactose alone or in combination with milk-yeast.


In doing his job as human resources must have the ability and optimize all their potential for making excellent and qualified individuals that can provide meaningful contributions to the organization. The basic characteristic of a person who influences the way of thinking and acting to make
generalizations to any situation they faced, and survived long enough in human beings is competence. Components of competence Motif (Motives) is something that is consistently a person thinks or desired, which in turn will lead, guide, and choose a specific behavior of a number of actions or goals. Personal character (traits) are the physical characteristics and reactions or responses are carried out consistently against a situation or information. The concept of self (self concept) is the attitude or value system of one's own self-image. How does one look at him this is also related to personal experiences in the life of each individual as an employee. Knowledge (knowledge) is the information held by a person against a certain specific areas. In the implementation of knowledge becomes the main capital before the employee acting in the exercise activities. Skills (skills) is the ability to do a series of specific physical or mental tasks. The study was a descriptive qualitative research in the form of interviews (interview) with early identification, based on the company's problems on PG. Kebon Agung Malang. This study aims to determine how the competence of employees PG. Kebon Agung Malang in parts manufacturing. Subjects were employees who had been in the lift to become permanent employees who worked on the manufacturing production process in the office of overseer. Based on research results that have been implemented, it can be concluded that (1) Competence in employee PG. Kebon Agung Malang parts manufacturing foreman-level positions are dominated by aspects of the motives and skills. (2) Competence is not made by the company's basic guidelines in determining the company's policies, especially on employee recruitment and selection process. (3) Competence is not used as the basis of employee performance appraisal and is unable to measure the actual quality of employment. (4) Competence of employees increased through training (coaching) carried out each milling season arrives in order to improve the quality of the employee.


A 5 watt wideband power amplifier using a SiC MESFET has been designed. The frequency range covers 10 MHz to 2.4 GHz with small-signal gain of 8 dB. A broadband choke structure with a new technique was developed to obtain good isolation and low loss over the desired bandwidth. Input and output matching networks and shunt feedback topology were introduced to increase the bandwidth. At VDS = 30 V and IDS = 500 mA, power performance measurements with PAE of almost 35%, an output power of ≥ 37 dBm and 8 dB power gain over the operating bandwidth were achieved. Two-tone measurements at frequency spacing of 200 kHz were also done and OIP2 and OIP3 of 76 dBm and 49 dBm, respectively, were obtained. Finally, AM/AM and AM/PM distortions were measured and the results are discussed.


Work over Welfare tells the inside story of the legislation that ended "welfare as we know it." As a key staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee, author Ron Haskins was one of the architects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. In this landmark book, he vividly portrays the political battles that produced the most dramatic overhaul of the welfare system since its creation as part of the New Deal. Haskins starts his story in the early 1990s, as a small group of Republicans lays the groundwork for welfare reform by developing innovative policies to encourage work and fight illegitimacy. These ideas, which included such controversial provisions as mandatory work requirements and time limits for welfare recipients, later became part of the Republicans' Contract with America and were ultimately passed into law. But their success was hardly foreordained. Haskins brings to life the often bitter House and Senate debates the Republican proposals provoked, as well as the backroom negotiations that kept welfare reform alive through two presidential vetoes. In the process, he illuminates both the personalities and the processes that were crucial to the ultimate passage of the 1996 bill. He also analyzes the changes it has wrought on the social and political landscape over the past decade. In Work over Welfare , Haskins has provided the most authoritative account of welfare reform to date. Anyone with an interest in social welfare or politics in general will learn a great deal from this insightful and revealing book.


Shipwrecked on a remote island in the Dutch East Indies, Captain Aubrey, surgeon and secret intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, and the crew of the Diane fashion a schooner from the wreck. A vicious attack by Malay pirates is repulsed, but the makeshift vessel burns, and they are truly marooned. Their escape from this predicament is one that only the whimsy and ingenuity of Patrick O'Brian-or Stephen Maturin-could devise. In command now of a new ship, the Nutmeg, Aubrey pursues his interrupted mission. The dreadful penal colony in New South Wales, harrowingly described, is the backdrop to a diplomatic crisis provoked by Maturin's Irish temper, and to a near-fatal encounter with the wildlife of the Australian outback.


Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are increasingly being used in surveillance and traffic monitoring thanks to their high mobility and ability to cover areas at different altitudes and locations. One of the major challenges is to use aerial images to accurately detect cars and count-them in real-time for traffic monitoring purposes. Several deep learning techniques were recently proposed based on convolution neural network (CNN) for real-time classification and recognition in computer vision. However, their performance depends on the scenarios where they are used. In this paper, we investigate the performance of two state-of-the art CNN algorithms, namely Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3, in the context of car detection from aerial images. We trained and tested these two models on a large car dataset taken from UAVs. We demonstrated in this paper that YOLOv3 outperforms Faster R-CNN in sensitivity and processing time, although they are comparable in the precision metric.


In 1977 we published an article in this Review that discussed the legal aspects of the installment land contract. The installment contract was then, and continues to be, widely used as a device for seller financing of real estate. In our judgment, and increasingly in the judgment of the courts, that is a mistake. Few situations, if any, would lead an informed lawyer to advise his client to use an installment land contract rather than its financing cousin, the note secured by a mortgage or deed of trust.Since the prior article was published, the courts have continued to place impediments in the path of the vendor who must realize on the security of the contract. The law has grown increasingly complex and disadvantageous to vendors. The installment contract device persists only because of a lack of understanding by buyers, sellers, and brokers, and because most such transactions occur without a lawyer's involvement. Unfortunately, the role of counsel is typically to "pick up the pieces" after the contract has been executed and default has occurred.In the present article we give renewed attention to the familiar problems covered in our prior work and focus on several new issues. In particular, we focus on issues relating to the parties' use of their contract rights as security for further financing, the rights of creditors of the parties, and recent developments in bankruptcy and federal income tax law. More than half of the material is new, but readers acquainted with the previous article will find that much of its structure and analysis survives.


The rotation of the Earth around its own axis creates a fundamental challenge for life on this planet, related to the need of all living organisms to modify their physiology in accordance with daily variations in multiple geophysical properties, including light, temperature, and availability of nutrients. As a consequence, all domains of life have developed intrinsic timing systems ("biological clocks") in order to efficiently adapt organismal activity to the fluctuating environmental conditions [1]. The mechanisms by which different organisms have solved this challenge are manifold. In mammals, the molecular clock is classically understood as a network of transcription factors that are rhythmically operational in virtually all cells of the body [2]. Specifically, the core circadian clock is constituted by the transcription factors Period/Cryptochrome and BMAL1/CLOCK, which not only control each other's circadian expression pattern but also drive rhythmic oscillations in a large number of target genes, thereby orchestrating the daily activity profile of a cell [3]. Interestingly, mammalian molecular clocks are autonomous and self-sustained but can be entrained by external stimuli, such as light and nutrient availability, in order to adapt organism-intrinsic rhythmicity to fluctuating environmental conditions.