With the increasing penetration of wind power, the effective inertia of the power system reduces. Besides, a series of interactive instability issues including sub-synchronous oscillations and harmonic oscillations were reported due to the weak grid effects. Broadly speaking, those issues are closely related to the PLL and its tuning. Therefore, recent literature make efforts to avoid using the PLL for converter control, e.g., the virtual synchronous generator (VSG) control. However, the VSG control usually employs multiple loops, where a fast switching frequency of the converter is required to decouple each loop's dynamic. This prerequisite is usually not met for wind power converters with high capacity and low switching frequency. To address these issues but also inherit the merits of a VSG on the grid-integration, this paper employs a new concept of PLL-less control and applies it to the Type-IV wind turbine, in which the grid-synchronization is realized by the dynamics of dc capacitor voltage. The virtual capacitor control is designed and added to the machine-side converter to eventually deliver adequate inertia to the grid. To justify the effectiveness of the proposed control, both the soft start-up validation and the thorough analysis of the overall small-signal stability are presented. Several concerns of vital importance regarding the virtual capacitor design and stabilization control are discussed, where the mechanism of stability is revealed through the complex-power coefficient-based analysis. On this basis, a stabilization control method is proposed, which can enlarge the stable range of virtual capacitor coefficient and enhance the inertial response effect. Finally, the performance of the proposed method on the inertial response and the weak grid operation is evaluated by time domain simulations in PSCAD/EMTDC, which is proven effective overall.


Background and Aim: Spinal anesthesia has advantages when compared to general anesthesia but it has some disadvantages also such as bradycardia and hypotension. We aimed to evaluate hypotension during spinal anesthesia and associated factors in elderly. Materials and Methods: One hundred and nineteen elderly operated under spinal anesthesia in Adnan Menderes University hospital between May and December 2004 were evaluated retrospectively. Chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, ASA (American Society of Anesthesiologists) classification, body-mass index, operation type (urology, orthopedics and general surgery) and sensory block level due to hypotension after spinal anesthesia were evaluated in all patients. Results: Sensory block level (OR=15.3, p=0.001) and presence of chronic disease (OR=16.47, p=0.0001) were influencing factors on hypotension during spinal anesthesia, but not age. Conclusion: Chronic conditions such as hypertension and high sensory block levels were influencing factors on hypotension in elderly patients.


OBJECTIVE Although gestational diabetes affects as many as 3% of all pregnant women, specific aspects of glucose and protein metabolism in this population have not been clearly delineated. We tested the hypothesis that gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) results in increased glucose production and proteolysis during fasting. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Using tracer isotope infusions, the rate of appearance (Ra) of glucose, leucine, phenylalanine and tyrosine, phenylalanine hydroxylation, leucine oxidation, and urea nitrogen excretion were determined after an overnight fast in 10 GDM subjects, within 2 weeks of diagnosis and before initiation of treatment, and in a matched control group of nine healthy nondiabetic pregnant women. RESULTS Fasting glucose Ra was similar in GDM patients and control subjects (GDM, 12.8 ± 1.1 vs. control subjects, 12.8 ± 0.9 μumol · kg−1 . min−1). Leucine and phenylalanine Ra (reflecting proteolysis) also were not different between GDM patients and control subjects (GDM leucine Ra, 128 ± 14 vs. control subjects, 124 ± 5; phenylalanine Ra GDM, 35 ± 4 vs. control subjects, 40 ± 2 μumol · kg−1 · h−1). Furthermore, leucine oxidation and phenylalanine hydroxylation were not increased in GDM subjects, urea nitrogen excretion was actually lower in GDM patients. However, fasting insulin concentrations were significantly elevated in GDM subjects (GDM, 165 ± 35 vs. control subjects, 30 ± 5 pmol/l; P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS Hepatic glucose release and whole-body proteolysis in GDM patients were remarkably similar to matched pregnant control subjects. This was achieved with insulin concentrations three- to fivefold higher than normal, suggesting significant insulin resistance for both glucose and protein metabolism in GDM.


The main objective of this thesis is to investigate takeover gains for UK bidding firms and offer a behavioural approach to empirical analysis. The main issues and key findings of the three empirical chapters are summarised as follows. Chapter 3 empirically investigates the hubris hypothesis for corporate takeovers (Roll (1986)). This thesis examines whether overconfident managers destroy shareholder value (in public deals) or whether their actions generally lead to lower wealth effects (in private deals) relative to rational bidders. Bidders' short and long-term performance is also examined by employing, for the first time in a UK study, three different measures of overconfidence namely Stock Options, Multiple Acquirers and Business Press proxies. The results indicate that managers infected by hubris fail to generate superior returns than those generated by rational bidders, for all three proxies of overconfidence after controlling for various bidder and deal characteristics. We therefore argue that the well-documented destructive effect upon shareholder wealth of managerial overconfidence is not sensitive to the measure used for this behavioural bias (i.e. overconfidence). The Hubris hypothesis assumes a rational market-irrational manager framework while Shleifer and Vishny (2003) offer rational manager-irrational market framework and suggest that takeovers are driven by overvalued markets. Chapter 4 empirically investigates the proposal of Baker et al. (2007) who claims that 'the irrational manager and irrational investor stories can certainly coexist'. Findings show that rational managers who announce takeovers in high valuation periods enjoy the highest abnormal returns while overconfident managers who announce takeover bids in low valuation periods cannot hide the poor quality or possible overpayment of their deals ending up suffering the highest losses. Lastly, Chapter 5 offers a behavioural approach to explain short –run bidder gains. Neoclassical theories suggest that the market reaction following the announcement of a takeover bid reflects either synergy or revaluation gains. Chapter 5 suggests that acquirers' abnormal returns reflect a market overreaction. Results suggest that under conditions of low information uncertainty when investors do not possess private information, the market reaction is complete (zero abnormal returns) for any type of acquisition. On the other hand, under conditions of high information uncertainty, investors overweight their private information and overreact to takeover announcements. Therefore, they generate highly positive and significant gains following the announcement of private stock and public cash deals (considered to be 'good' news), positive gains following private cash acquisitions (also defined as 'good' news) while investors heavily punish public stock deals (classified as 'bad' news)


The Arab-Israeli struggle is not only a struggle over land, but a struggle over language representations. Arab reporters as well as politicians believe that their political discourses about the Middle East conflict are objective, accurate, and credible. Arab News and Conflict critically examines the role of language in the representations of events and ideologies found in news media. Drawing on socio-political-linguistic approaches combined with real-case studies, the author offers a unique discourse analysis model for analysing politically sensitive language in the media. The focus in this study is on the Arab media discourse in times of conflict with Israel and the US, spanning the years 2001 to 2009. Using rich examples from outspoken Arab media outlets, the study explores ideological and language facts about the Arab-Israeli conflict. This book is compelling reading for students and researchers of media and cultural studies, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, and translation. It is of equal interest to political analysts, political speakers, journalists, and news editors who need to understand more about the ideological function of the language they use or the political-journalistic-linguistic nexus of power.


This paper discusses the accession of Myanmar to ASEAN and its effects on the emergence of fundamental political norms in ASEAN. The article first advances the theoretical idea of how accession demands towards Regional Organizations (ROs) open windows of opportunity for norm entrepreneurs to act for norm change in a Regional Organization. Secondly, these ideas are empirically illustrated by a case study on ASEAN's enlargement to include Myanmar. The tentative conclusion is that, being confronted with the accession of the highly stigmatised state of Myanmar, ASEAN was forced to position itself vis-à-vis this outcome, and to open itself up to discussions about fundamental norms and regional identity. This critical phase of transition mobilised norm entrepreneurs to push for norm change, and opened avenues for these entrepreneurs to contribute ideas regarding ASEAN's regional identity. By subsequently framing the discourse on human rights and democracy in Southeast Asia, and by successfully gaining access to the official ASEAN agenda, these entrepreneurs pressured ASEAN to be more precise about its norms. The discussion about stigmatised Myanmar thus introduced new ideas into the regional forum, and in the longer term may have contributed to ASEAN's identity-building and the concession of greater attention to democracy and human rights issues.


The optical effect upon insertion of hydrogen into Pd-coated magnesium lanthanide switchable mirrors is investigated in terms of the changes of their complex refractive indices. A significant change in the optical constants of LnMg layers is seen between the as-deposited state and the dehydrided state after one cycle. Furthermore, the optical effect of switching the Pd cap layer to a PdH cap layer was determined. It is shown that the Pd layer mainly limits the visible transmittance of the hydrided stack to about 35%–40%. Whereas the extinction coefficient of dehydrided LnMg layers at 550 nm is between 2.2 and 3.1, it is as low as 10−4 in the transparent state. This is of great promise to applications requiring large optical contrast (e.g., optical switches).


International transfers in climate policy channeled from the industrialized to the developing world either support the mitigation of climate change or the adaptation to global warming. From an allocative efficiency point of view, transfers supporting mitigation tend to be Pareto-improving whereas this is not very likely in the case of adaptation support. We illustrate this by regarding transfer schemes currently applied under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto framework. However, if we enrich the analysis by integrating distributional aspects, we find that international adaptation funding may help both developing and developed world. Interestingly this is not due to altruistic incentives, but due to follow-up effects on international negotiations on climate change mitigation. We argue that the lack of fairness perceived by developing countries in the international climate policy arena can be reduced by the support of adaptation in these countries. As we show AƒÂ¢A'€A'" taking into account different fairness concepts AƒÂ¢A'€A'" this might raise the prospects of success in international negotiations on climate change. Yet, we find that the influence of transfers may induce different fairness effects on climate change mitigation negotiations to run counter. We discuss whether current transfer schemes under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto framework adequately serve the distributive and allocative objectives pursued in international climate policy.


This article examines the development of social media as a communication tool for courts, judicial agencies, and tribunals. It presents the findings of a study into a small, but vibrant network of public information officers from this sector who shared knowledge and worked creatively in developing their social media practice at a time when these platforms were emerging as a serious consideration for government stakeholder communication. The article achieves two outcomes. First, it advances the limited scholarly literature into how courts, judicial agencies, and tribunals have transitioned to social media. Second, it develops a theoretical framework based on a community of practice model, which has application across any sector or industry in which practitioners work in siloed communication roles or are required to incorporate information and communication technologies at a rapid pace.


One of the most vexing problems in privacy policy is identifying consumer harm from unwanted observation; because it is highly subjective and is likely to vary greatly throughout the population, it doesn't lend itself to easy measurement. Yet, these types of situations increasingly are the focal point of privacy policy discussions. The primary approach to attempt to quantify subjective harms has been to measure consumers' willingness to exchange personal data for money in an experimental setting. This study takes a different tack, using field data to measure actual consumer response to a real-world reduction in the anonymity of online search. In March 2012, Google began to combine user information across platforms. To the extent that Google's policy change reduced the anonymity associated with Google search, it may have reduced incentives to search sensitive or topics. Using a difference-in-difference estimator with top non-sensitive search terms as the control group, the results suggest that there was a small and short-term reduction in the Google Trends scores for sensitive search. There is no measured difference in reaction between high- and low-privacy demand states. Overall, the results indicate that any consumer welfare loss from Google's policy change was small, and likely swamped by the demand-increasing impact of customization made possible from the cross-platform data sharing. That there is no measurable long-term substitution out of sensitive search may reflect the privacy advantages of searching for sensitive information on Google versus seeking the same information in an interpersonal setting. These findings suggest that privacy policy changes that are publicized should be treated like ordinary price changes — causing marginal consumers to exit and reducing consumer surplus for those who remain — not opportunities for regulatory intervention.


There are numerous examples illustrating the application of human shape in everyday products. Usage of anthropomorphic form has long been a basic design strategy, particularly in the design of intelligent service robots. As such, it is desirable to use anthropomorphic form not only in aesthetic design but also in interaction design. Proceeding from how anthropomorphism in various domains has taken effect on human perception, we assumed that anthropomorphic form used in appearance and interaction design of robots enriches the explanation of its function and creates familiarity with robots. From many cases we have found, misused anthropomorphic form lead to user disappointment or negative impressions on the robot. In order to effectively use anthropomorphic form, it is necessary to measure the similarity of an artifact to the human form (humanness), and then evaluate whether the usage of anthropomorphic form fits the artifact. The goal of this study is to propose a general evaluation framework of anthropomorphic form for robot design. We suggest three major steps for framing the evaluation: 'measuring anthropomorphic form in appearance', 'measuring anthropomorphic form in Human-Robot Interaction', and 'evaluation of accordance of two former measurements'. This evaluation process will endow a robot an amount of humanness in their appearance equivalent to an amount of humanness in interaction ability, and then ultimately facilitate user satisfaction.

Keywords:
Anthropomorphic Form; Anthropomorphism; Human-Robot Interaction; Humanness; Robot Design


RFC 5586 generalized the applicability of the pseudowire Associated
Channel Header (PW-ACH) into the Generic Associated Channel G-ACh.
However, registries and allocations of G-ACh parameters had been
distributed throughout different, sometimes unrelated, registries.
This document coalesces these into a new "Generic Associated Channel
(G-ACh) Parameters" registry under the "Multiprotocol Label Switching
Architecture (MPLS)" heading. This document updates RFC 5586. This
document also updates RFCs 6374, 6378, 6427, and 6428.


We show experimental validation of a novel technique to measure optical path length distributions and path length resolved Doppler broadening in turbid media for different reduced scattering coefficients and anisotropies. The technique involves a phase modulated low coherence Mach-Zehnder interferometer, with separate fibers for illumination and detection. Water suspensions of Polystyrene microspheres with high scattering and low absorption levels are used as calibrated scattering phantoms. The path length dependent diffusion broadening or Doppler broadening of scattered light is shown to agree with Diffusive Wave Spectroscopy within 5%. The optical path lengths are determined experimentally from the zero order moment of the phase modulation peak around the modulation frequency in the power spectrum and the results are validated with Monte Carlo simulations.


We report on the design and implementation of Naiad, a set of declarative data-parallel language extensions and an associated runtime supporting efficient and composable incremental and iterative computation. This combination is enabled by a new computational model we call differential dataflow, in which incremental computation can be performed using a partial, rather than total, order on time. Naiad extends standard batch data-parallel processing models like MapReduce, Hadoop, and Dryad/DryadLINQ, to support efficient incremental updates to the inputs in the manner of a stream processing system, while at the same time enabling arbitrarily nested fixed-point iteration. In this paper, we evaluate a prototype of Naiad that uses shared memory on a single multi-core computer. We apply Naiad to various computations, including several graph algorithms, and observe good scaling properties and efficient incremental recomputation.


Accounting is a key task in commercial networks. With the increasing number of IP-based services and mobility support, accounting needs to evolve towards an integrated, service-oriented accounting approach in a mobile environment. Therefore, this dissertation digest paper presents the Serviceoriented Tailored Accounting Configuration (STACO) architecture that enables a service-oriented accounting configuration management in a mobile, multi-domain networking environment. Additionally, it presents the Diameter flow accounting application as an extension to the Diameter protocol in order to integrate IP flow accounting into any Diameter-based infrastructure and to support an efficient transfer of IP flow records.


In recent years there has been an increase in number of transplantation surgeries, especially live donor liver transplantation in the western countries. So, anatomical variations of Hepatobiliary vessels gained special attention from anatomists, Gastroenterological surgeons and Interventional radiologists. We report a case of the accessory hepatic artery that arise from the left gastric artery, entered the liver at an independent site from the portahepatis to supply the left lobe of the liver. Transplantation of such livers with multi vascular pedicles may pose a challenge during anastomosis of these accessory hepatic arteries of the donor liver to the nearby arteries of the recipient.(Chudhari ML et al NJIRM 2013; 4(2) : 173-174)


Knowledge management is not new to construction companies, as they have been implementing and managing knowledge for as long as they have existed. However, there is the business need for organizations to continuously evaluate the effectiveness of their knowledge management enabling initiatives. With growing competition, companies must remain competitive through the deployment and use of various knowledge management enabling technologies. Equally important is the need to be aware of the factors that are related to the effectiveness of knowledge management enabling initiatives. As such, there is the need to know what those factors are, and the main purpose of this study is to identify the barriers and enablers of effective knowledge management enabling initiative in a construction organization. The research approach was a case study research design, and it captured in-depth experiences of a specific construction organization before and after the implementation of their knowledge management enabling initiative, and the major drivers of improvement. In general, the research found three key barriers and enablers to the knowledge management enabling initiative at the case study organization: awareness centered on the need and value of knowledge or lack of it, a knowledge sharing environment or lack of it, and web-enabled and integrated knowledge management systems or lack of it. It is hoped that from this study other construction organizations and other companies within other sectors would learn from the experience of the case study organization on barriers and enablers of effective knowledge management, as well as how to evaluate the effectiveness of their knowledge management initiatives.


»Der wissenssoziologische Ansatz der Diskursanalyse in der Innovationsforschung: Beurteilung der Innovationen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst«. The empirical question in this paper addresses problems of institutionalizing inventories of knowledge under conditions of uncertainty. As a focus, negotiations of discursive evaluation of the new or of inventions as innovations lead the empirical approach. This determines the empirical approach to understanding the process of legitimation, and makes patterns as well as variations intelligible. What characterizes this research project is an unconventional theoretically based setting by the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis (from now on SKAD) (Keller 2008) that will be discussed in this paper. An extended comprehension of social innovation is tied to the field of contemporary art where the assembly of novelty is conventional and actors are mainly engaged with the selection and valuation of novelty. In the first section of the article I introduce my methodological and theoretical framework and relate them to questions of how to conduct empirical research on innovations. The case study explores the question how contemporary art is legitimized with reference to Howard S. Becker's theory of art worlds. It builds a bridge between a semantic level of discourse and the level of discursive practices. Section two introduces the field and the case of the study, and how the study is arranged. Section three describes the methods used, discussing the relevant aspects of the study for innovation research, and leads into the conclusion.


Large-scale abrupt socioeconomic changes are often associated with unsustainable conditions in terms of populations' health. An epidemic increase in suicide death rates has been recorded in Russia during the turbulent period of the socioeconomic transition. The socioeconomic aetiology of suicide mortality has been analysed for a large set of Russian regions. Suicide rates were statistically accounted for by the 'transition-related stressors' - hyperinflation, severe economic depression, etc. Deficiency of coping resources - lacking economic activities of the regional populations - turned out to be the strongest explanatory variable. Heavy binge drinking was a significant, but not the leading mortality predictor. The study results support the idea that sustainable socioeconomic development is crucial for the prevention of stress-related mortality.


We study regulatory incentives and governance during the 1998–1999 electricity shortage in Chile. We argue that it was feasible to manage the shortage with no outages. The outages can be blamed on the rigid price system and deficiencies in regulatory governance, which led to a weak regulator unable to make the price system work. The shortage shows the limitations of a rigid price system requiring regulatory intervention. It suggests that countries where governance structures are weak should rely as much as possible on market rules that clearly allocate property rights and leave contract terms to be freely negotiated by private parties.


A subsea shuttle tanker (SST) concept for liquid carbon dioxide transportation was recently proposed to support studies evaluating the ultra-efficient underwater cargo submarine concept. One important topic is the position keeping ability of SST during the offloading process. In this process, the SST hovers above the well and connects with the wellhead using a flowline. This process takes around four hours. Ocean currents can cause tremendous drag forces on the subsea shuttle tanker during this period. The flow velocities over hydroplanes are low throughout this process, and the generated lift forces are generally insufficient to maintain the SST's depth. The ballast tanks cannot provide such fast actuation to cope with the fluctuation of the current. It is envisioned that tunnel thrusters that can provide higher frequency actuation are required. This paper develops a manoeuvring model and designs a linear quadratic regulator that facilitates the SST station-keeping problem in stochastic current. As case studies, the SST footprints at 0.5 m/s, 1.0 m/s, and 1.5 m/s mean current speeds are presented. Numerical results show that the designed hovering control system can ensure the SST's stationary during offloading. The required thrust from thrusters and the propeller are presented. The presented model can serve as a basis for obtaining a more efficient design of the SST and provide recommendations for the SST operation.


The importance of entrepreneurship to organisational health and national economic growth has been widely acknowledged. Concerned government agencies and economic development boards have tried to encourage entrepreneurship. Academics have spent endless effort looking into the variables associated with entrepreneurship. The Traditional Approaches to the Study of Entrepreneurship There have been two main approaches to the study of entrepreneurship. One focuses on psychological aspects, researching traits or behaviours, or both. The other focuses on sociocultural aspects, researching the social and cultural backgrounds of entrepreneurs. In the behavioral (sociocultural) approach to the study of entrepreneurship, an entrepreneur is seen as a set of activities involved in organization creation, while in the trait approach, an entrepreneur is represented by a set of traits and characteristics. Gartner (1989) has organized the literature on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, disclosing a startling number of traits and characteristics that can be attributed to the entrepreneur. It seems that these psychological profiles could fit anyone. Learning from the history of research on leadership, Gartner suggested that it would be more fruitful to focus on the behaviour of the entrepreneurs in order to determine what situational factors affect their behaviour. Carland, Hoy, and Carland (1988) stated that the problems with the trait approach point to the need for improving the methodology. In the infancy of entrepreneurial study, it is not wise to discard this approach entirely, but we should not rely solely on this approach. Entrepreneurship also can be studied as a function of entrepreneurs' social and cultural identities. This approach explains entrepreneurship as influenced by membership in certain ethnic, political, or occupational groups. Wong (1988) describes how immigrants from Shanghai, many of them with educational qualifications not recognized by the colonial government, formed their own business in Hong Kong. These two approaches have been very useful in providing information on different aspects of entrepreneurship. However, the trait approach overgeneralized about individual sources of entrepreneurship. The sociocultural approach stereotyped the ethnic, cultural, or religious group as being the source of the entrepreneurial impetus. Chu and Siu's (1993) study of Hong Kong female entrepreneurs and Tuan, Won, and Ye's (1986) study of Chinese entrepreneurship in Hong Kong and Guangzhou were based on traditional approaches to describe the entrepreneurs. They encountered the same problems as the research carried out by their Western counterparts in the U.K. and North America. The weaknesses of the traditional approaches also include the assumption that resources, one of the key factors contributing to business success, are freely available to those with the right psychological or sociocultural backgrounds. This limitation led researchers to develop a new framework for the study of entrepreneurship, focused on the mechanisms through which the entrepreneurs obtain resources. The Social Network Approach to the Study of Entrepreneurship A social network perspective has been suggested (Aldrich & Zimmer, 1985; Johannisson, 1986) to explain why some people are more successful in starting and maintaining businesses, discounting the personal and sociocultural factors. In the case of Chinese entrepreneurship, a social network approach was deemed most appropriate because one's social network is viewed as a factor crucial to business success in a Chinese society (Redding, 1991). The social network approach suggests that a person's behaviour is contingent on the nature and structure of his social relationships, which also provides the resources and support required for entrepreneurship. Sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and organizational theorists have used the social network approach to study the relationship between people and organizations. …


Background: The aims of this study were to assay the activity of adenosine deami nase (ADA) in estrogen receptor positive (MCF-7) and negative (MDA-MB468) breast cancer cell lines. Methods: MDA-MB468 and MCF-7 breast cancer cell lines were cultured in complete medium, striped serum with and without 0.0 111M diethylstilbestrol (DES), complete medium in the presence and absence of 111M tamoxifen for 20 hr. Adenosine deaminase activity was determined using the colorimetric method described by Guisti and Galanti. Results: It was found that the activity of enzyme in estrogen receptor positive (ER+) cell line (MCF-7) was significantly higher than that of estrogen receptor negative breast cancer cell line (MDA-MB468). ADA activity in MCF-7 cells cultured in the presence of tamoxifen or charcoal-striped serum was significantly lower than that of control. Furthermore addition of diethylstilbestrol (DES) to the striped serum increased the value of ADA activity to that of control. Unlike MCF-7 cells, the activity of ADA in MDA-MB468 cells remained un changed upon treatment with tamoxifen or striped serum. Conclusion: These findings suggest estrogen responsiveness of ADA expression in MCF-7 cells. MJIRI, Vol. 19, No.1, 53-56, 2005.


A ZigBee based wireless sensor network is implemented in this paper which is of low-cost solar-powered air quality monitoring system. The main objective of the proposed architecture is to interfacing various sensors to measure the sensor analog data and displayed in LabVIEW on the monitor using the graphical user interface (GUI).  The real time ambient air quality monitoring in smart cities is of greater significance for the health of people. The wireless network sensor nodes are placed at different traffic signals in the smart cities which collect and report real-time data on different gases which are present in the environment such as carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), methane (CH4) and humidity. The proposed system allows smart cities to monitor air quality conditions on a desktop/laptop computer through an application designed using graphical programming based LabVIEW software and provides an alert if the air quality characteristics exceed acceptable levels. The sensor network was successfully tested on the campus of the institute of aeronautical engineering, Hyderabad. The sensor data are indicated by different indicators on the front panel of LabVIEW and also different charts are plotted with respect to time and amplitude which explains the severity of polluted areas.


The debates on 'Islam and Modernity' clearly include in their analysis notions of the State. Abdelillah Belkeziz here charts the development of the concept of 'the state' (al-dawlah) in Islamic discourse over the last two centuries. The result is a tour de force survey of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the modern era, which encompasses three successive waves: the modernist trends of the early and later reformers like Sayyed Jamal Eddin Al-Afghani; the dogmatism of ideologues like Hasan Al-Bana; and, the rhetoric of revivalists like the Ayatollah Khomeini. Through this analysis, Belkeziz argues that modern Islamic political thought succeeded in producing ideologies, but ultimately failed to produce a unified theory of state. This work is an essential encyclopedic resource for all scholars and researchers of Political Islam and will become a standard work in the field.


Mediastinal mature cycstic teratomas are rare germ cell tumors most commonly found in the anterior mediastinum, and constitute about 3-12% of all mediastinal tumors. They grow slowly and are usually diagnosed incidentally. This is a rare presentation of a young lady with mediastinal mature cystic teratoma (dermoid cyst) presenting with chronic cough and haemoptysis.


This study was conducted to determine the incidence of E. coli 0157 in beef in Malaysia
and lamb in United Arab Emirates. A total of 113 samples of beef (n = 25) and lamb (n =
88) were examined for the presence of E. coli 0157 which yielded 130 positive isolates
for E. coli 01 57. All the isolates were found to be resistant to one or more of the fifteen
antimicrobial agents tested. The strains isolated from lamb samples showed a high
occurrence in multiple drug resistance. Plasmid analysis showed that most of the E. coli
strains isolated from beef samples in Malaysia contained plasmids with size ranging from
1.3 to 60 MDa. The commonest plasmids of 60 MDa were observed in 3 1.8% of the
strains. On the other hand, representative patterns for plasmid profiles among
Esclzerichia coli O157 isolates from lamb possessed plasmid with molecular size ranging
from 1.2 to 35.8 MDa. However, there did not appear to be a consistent relationship
between a particular plasmid and resistance 10 an antibiotic. Two types of specific primer
encoding the Shiga-like toxins gene, the SL7' I and SL7' 11 gene were utilized in the
multiplex PCR assay. Analysis carried out demonstrated that Escherichia coli 0157
strains were positive for the presence sf Shiga-like toxins (stx) genes. Thus, analysis of
all the /:: coli genome showed that mqst of isolates carried either both SIJT I and SI,T II
genes or only the SI,T II gene. RAPD-PCR was used to generate polymorphic genomic
fingerprints to discriminate the E. coli 0157 isolates. After a set of ten-mer
oligonucleotides of 50% G-tC contents were screened, primers Gen1-50-9
(5 'AGAAGCGATG 3 ') and Genl -50,l 0 (S'CCATTTAC~ 3 ') were chosen whereby
the primers generated reproducible and typeable results with bands ranging from 0.25 to
4.0 kilobase pairs. All the dendrogram were constructed utilizing the Gel Compar and
RAPDistance software package based on the data retrieved from the presence or absence
of banding pattern. Based on the dendrogram generated, there appears to be a genetic
similarity at 70% among the strains issolated from beef and lamb. Two main groups were
observed at 10% similarity level, group ane consists of E. coli 0157 isolates from
imported beef in Malaysia and a few gf isolates of E. coli 0 157 from imported lamb in
UAE. On the other hand, group two consists mainly of eight isolates of E. coli 01 57 from
imported lamb in UAE. In the present study, all the molecular typing techniques have
been used generally provided an additional value for assisting the molecular
characterization of isolates of Escheric(ziu coli 0 157 utilized.


We are studying two cohorts of kidney transplant recipients, with the goal of defining specific clinicopathologic entities that cause late graft dysfunction: (1) prevalent patients with new onset late graft dysfunction (cross‐sectional cohort); and (2) newly transplanted patients (prospective cohort). For the cross‐sectional cohort (n = 440), mean time from transplant to biopsy was 7.5 ± 6.1 years. Local pathology diagnoses included CAN (48%), CNI toxicity (30%), and perhaps surprisingly, acute rejection (cellular‐ or Ab‐mediated) (23%). Actuarial rate of death‐censored graft loss at 1 year postbiopsy was 17.7%; at 2 years, 29.8%. There was no difference in postbiopsy graft survival for recipients with versus without CAN (p = 0.9). Prospective cohort patients (n = 2427) developing graft dysfunction >3 months posttransplant undergo 'index' biopsy. The rate of index biopsy was 8.8% between 3 and 12 months, and 18.2% by 2 years. Mean time from transplant to index biopsy was 1.0 ± 0.6 years. Local pathology diagnoses included CAN (27%), and acute rejection (39%). Intervention to halt late graft deterioration cannot be developed in the absence of meaningful diagnostic entities. We found CAN in late posttransplant biopsies to be of no prognostic value. The DeKAF study will provide broadly applicable diagnostic information to serve as the basis for future trials.


Ras, STAT3, and Transformation The STAT (signal transducer and activator of transcription) proteins are activated in response to receptor stimulation and act in the nucleus to regulate gene expression. Gough et al. (p. 1713) found that STAT3 functioned in transformation of cells by the oncogene Ras. However, this activity was maintained in mutants of STAT that fail to activate transcription. Instead, the active STAT3 appeared to be associated with mitochondria. Furthermore, modified STAT3 targeted to the mitochondria promoted transformation by Ras, and mitochondrial function was disrupted in Ras-transformed cells lacking STAT3. Such transformation-specific effects of STAT3 could be a useful target in developing anticancer therapies. A transcription factor promotes the transformation of cells by the Ras oncogene only when present in the mitochondrion. Signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) is a latent cytoplasmic transcription factor responsive to cytokine signaling and tyrosine kinase oncoproteins by nuclear translocation when it is tyrosine-phosphorylated. We report that malignant transformation by activated Ras is impaired without STAT3, in spite of the inability of Ras to drive STAT3 tyrosine phosphorylation or nuclear translocation. Moreover, STAT3 mutants that cannot be tyrosine-phosphorylated, that are retained in the cytoplasm, or that cannot bind DNA nonetheless supported Ras-mediated transformation. Unexpectedly, STAT3 was detected within mitochondria, and exclusive targeting of STAT3 to mitochondria without nuclear accumulation facilitated Ras transformation. Mitochondrial STAT3 sustained altered glycolytic and oxidative phosphorylation activities characteristic of cancer cells. Thus, in addition to its nuclear transcriptional role, STAT3 regulates a metabolic function in mitochondria, supporting Ras-dependent malignant transformation.


A series of experiments that examine the initial development of an axisymmetric gravity current have been carried out. The experiments highlight the growth of a ring vortex that dominates the dynamics of the gravity current's early time propagation. In particular, the experiments show three distinct stages of early time development that have previously been described as the "initial phase" of a gravity current. The first phase of the early time development is dependent on the fractional depth of the lock release, followed by a secondary phase wherein the frontal speed is approximately constant and a third phase of reducing speed. The second phase of the gravity current's propagation comes to an abrupt end with the breakdown of the ring vortex at a clearly defined position. All of the experimental results show the development of a complex flow field where the generation and collapse of a ring vortex dominate the gravity current's early time propagation. The complexity of the flow field and the dependence of the propagation speed on the presence of the ring vortex in the head of the gravity current highlights the unsuitability of shallow-water modeling for axisymmetric lock releases at early times.


Empirical evaluation of policies to mitigate climate change has been largely confined to the application of discounted utilitarianism (DU). DU is controversial, both due to the conditions through which it is justified and due to its consequences for climate policies, where the discounting of future utility gains from present abatement efforts makes it harder for such measures to justify their present costs. In this paper, we propose sustainable discounted utilitarianism (SDU) as an alternative principle for evaluation of climate policy. Unlike undiscounted utilitarianism, which always assigns zero relative weight to present utility, SDU is an axiomatically based criterion, which departs from DU by assigning zero weight to present utility if and only if the present is better off than the future. Using the DICE integrated assessment model to run risk analysis, we show that it is possible for the future to be worse off than the present along a 'business as usual' development path. Consequently SDU and DU differ, and willingness to pay for emissions reductions is (sometimes significantly) higher under SDU than under DU. Under SDU, stringent schedules of emissions reductions increase social welfare, even for a relatively high utility discount rate.

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/dietzs/Climate policy under sustainable discounted utilitarianism.pdf


Over the past two decades there has been a great deal of international, specialized research activity focused on risk factors and prevention strategies for falls in older people. This book provides health care workers with a detailed analysis of the most recent developments in the area and helps bridge the gap between scientific journal articles and general texts. The book is constructed in three parts: risk factors, prevention strategies, and future research directions. Coverage includes epidemiology, critical appraisal of the roles of exercise, environment, footwear, and medication, evidence-based risk assessment, and targeted and individually tailored falls-prevention strategies. Falls in Older People will be invaluable to medical practitioners, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nurses, researchers and all those working in community, hospital and residential aged care settings.


This work proposes a method of model-based speech enhancement that uses a network of
HMMs to first decode noisy speech and to then synthesise a set of features that enables
a speech production model to reconstruct clean speech. The motivation is to remove the
distortion and residual and musical noises that are associated with conventional filteringbased
methods of speech enhancement.
STRAIGHT forms the speech production model for speech reconstruction and requires
a time-frequency spectral surface, aperiodicity and a fundamental frequency contour.
The technique of HMM-based synthesis is used to create the estimate of the timefrequency
surface, and aperiodicity after the model and state sequence is obtained from
HMM decoding of the input noisy speech. Fundamental frequency were found to be best
estimated using the PEFAC method rather than synthesis from the HMMs.
For the robust HMM decoding in noisy conditions it is necessary for the HMMs
to model noisy speech and consequently noise adaptation is investigated to achieve this
and its resulting effect on the reconstructed speech measured. Even with such noise
adaptation to match the HMMs to the noisy conditions, decoding errors arise, both
in terms of incorrect decoding and time alignment errors. Confidence measures are
developed to identify such errors and then compensation methods developed to conceal
these errors in the enhanced speech signal.
Speech quality and intelligibility analysis is first applied in terms of PESQ and NCM
showing the superiority of the proposed method against conventional methods at low
SNRs. Three way subjective MOS listening test then discovers the performance of the
proposed method overwhelmingly surpass the conventional methods over all noise conditions
and then a subjective word recognition test shows an advantage of the proposed
method over speech intelligibility to the conventional methods at low SNRs.


This dissertation builds on the old debate regarding the role of smallholder farmers in society and links it to the integration of smallholders into modern global value chains. Since the peak in global agro-commodity prices in 2007/08, interest in agriculture has increased again among policymakers and in the private sector. Modern global value chains provide opportunities for smallholder farmers but also increasingly dictate conditions in terms of production practices, and thereby determine conditions for inclusion. The Indonesian oil palm sector provides an interesting case regarding smallholder inclusion in modern global value chains and the role they play in sustainable agro-commodity production. Palm oil production in Indonesia has thrived due to insertion in global value chains, experienced massive smallholder engagement, faces considerable sustainability challenges and illustrates the impacts sustainability initiatives can have on smallholders. It thus provides a promising case to further explore the nexus of sustainable and inclusive development, smallholder agriculture and policy. The primary aim of this dissertation is to advance the understanding of how the oil palm sector can be made more sustainable and inclusive. It does so by exploring independent and organized oil palm smallholders in Sumatra, explaining their emergence and performance, and discussing strategies to improve their performance. Whereas the smallholder oil palm sector clearly has its unique characteristics, this dissertation unpicks some stereotypical views on smallholders and highlights the dynamics impacting farmers' organizations over time, and thereby contributes to debates on the future of farming.


Matthew Hart. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing. Oxford UP, 2010.Matthew Hart's Nations of Nothing but Poetry contributes to the growing field of transnational criticism, joining such studies as Anita Patterson's Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Jahan Ramazani's Transnational Poetics (U of Chicago P, 2009). Although Hart derives his main concept of the synthetic vernacular from the poetics of Hugh MacDiarmid, he persuasively explains why the concept also applies to Basil Bunting, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Melvin Toison.Drawing on Edward Sapir's belief that "'provincial' language is a fundamental element of literary art," Hart zeroes in on the contradiction between the materiality of language, particularly in the form of dialects, and the universal appeal of successful literature (8). To explain what he means by "synthetic vernacular," he draws on Adorno's claim that "the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived." Hart equates Adorno's concept with "the idea of a language that articulates some collective sense of nationality," while he correlates the thing conceived with the "actual" poetic discourse of nationhood (8). From this perspective, the vernacular can only be synthetic because the sign is never wholly adequate to the concept. Focusing on this divide, Hart explores how different poets from both sides of the Atlantic forge distinctive idioms in relation to their specific dreams of nationhood. He relates his study to modernism's preoccupation with mimesis by examining the way his poets "strain the representational norms of vernacular language to the breaking point, thereby registering the contradictoriness - and uncanny durability - of the politics of locality in a transnational age" (16).Hart views MacDiarmid's "Synthetic Scots poetry as a creative solution to the problem of reconciling Scottish nationalism and socialist internationalism" (52). He argues that this solution is only partially effective because of Scotland's contradictory status as a partner in promoting the British Empire and as a victim of English linguistic domination. The characteristic gesture of a MacDiarmid poem is always double, as in the following example: "Noisy, inorganic, and dredged up from textbooks and dictionaries, the language of 'On a Raised Beach' . . . binds language to a place . . . and yet reveals it to be always out of place, forever rejoining and remaking the world" (67). To explain this dynamic, Hart contrasts MacDiarmid's method with Pound' s in Cathay: "Rather than comprising a systematic reflection on the contemporarneity of an ethnohistorical type, the 'nexus of personae' at work in MacDiarmid's Scots poems are part of a catch-as-catch-can program to 'represent an alternative Scot' in the present moment" (65). Hart sees this as laudable but also notices that it undercuts the political efficacy of MacDiarmid's thought. In the long run, for MacDiarmid, "poetry ... is the true test of politics, its forms and languages allowing for imaginative complexities far greater than those encompassed by mere theory." Unfortunately, however, "this aesthetic victory has little parallel at the level of activism or political theory" (77).In his chapter on Bunting, Hart tries to account for the paradox of what the poet "called 'a dialect written in the spelling of the capital' - a Northumbrian vernacular verse, that is, which looks like Standard English" (79). As with MacDiarmid, Hart detects a regional cosmopolitanism at workin Bunting's writing, a quality he connects to synthetic vernacularism. For Hart, the chief tension driving Bunting's poetry is the tension between the dialect of the spoken word and the potential durability of the written word. His poem Briggflatts "never engages with graphic forms of writing without also troubling their suitability for recording a life and defining a Northumbrian poetics" (88). …


The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) is responsible for protecting the Federal investment in over 300 water storage and conveyance facilities in the 17 Western States. Reclamation's Review of Operation and Maintenance (RO&M) Program was established in 1948, to provide periodic examinations of operation and maintenance (O&M) practices at Reclamation facilities. This paper describes the history, purpose, and structure of the RO&M Program. The paper also discusses examination procedures, team composition, and documentation requirements. Additionally, the paper will briefly describe case studies which exemplify the need for periodic examinations of hydraulic structures.


Software maintenance reportedly accounts for much of the total cost associated with developing software. These costs occur because modifying software is a highly error-prone task. Changing software to correct faults or add new functionality can cause existing functionality to regress, introducing new faults. To avoid such defects, one can re-test software after modifications, a task commonly known as regression testing. Regression testing typically involves the re-execution of test cases developed for previous versions. Re-running all existing test cases, however, is often costly and sometimes even infeasible due to time and resource constraints. Re-running test cases that do not exercise changed or change-impacted parts of the program carries extra cost and gives no benefit. The research community has thus sought ways to optimize regression testing by lowering the cost of test re-execution while preserving its effectiveness. To this end, researchers have proposed selecting a subset of test cases according to a variety of criteria (test case selection) and reordering test cases for execution to maximize a score function (test case prioritization). This dissertation presents a novel framework for optimizing regression testing activities, based on a probabilistic view of regression testing. The proposed framework is built around predicting the probability that each test case finds faults in the regression testing phase, and optimizing the test suites accordingly. To predict such probabilities, we model regression testing using a Bayesian Network (BN), a powerful probabilistic tool for modeling uncertainty in systems. We build this model using information measured directly from the software system. Our proposed framework builds upon the existing research in this area in many ways. First, our framework incorporates different information extracted from software into one model, which helps reduce uncertainty by using more of the available information, and enables better modeling of the system. Moreover, our framework provides flexibility by enabling a choice of which sources of information to use. Research in software measurement has proven that dealing with different systems requires different techniques and hence requires such flexibility. Using the proposed framework, engineers can customize their regression testing techniques to fit the characteristics of their systems using measurements most appropriate to their environment. We evaluate the performance of our proposed BN-based framework empirically. Although the framework can help both test case selection and prioritization, we propose using it primarily as a prioritization technique. We therefore compare our technique against other prioritization techniques from the literature. Our empirical evaluation examines a variety of objects and fault types. The results show that the proposed framework can outperform other techniques on some cases and performs comparably on the others. In sum, this thesis introduces a novel Bayesian framework for optimizing regression testing and shows that the proposed framework can help testers improve the cost effectiveness of their regression testing tasks.


Several authors reported that the absence of normal physical activity promotes a faster functional loss of several organs and systems, such as the cardiorespiratory system. It is known that scheduling physical activities and regular exercise for DMD patients, when performed based on a thorough functional evaluation, is fundamen-tal for maintaining the quality of life of these children, as well as other associated resources that should be used, whenever possible. Exercise can help DMD patients to maintain and improve muscular strength for performing activities of daily living (ADL) such as stair climbing, slow the rate of increased weakness or contracture development that can prolong ambulation, maintain enough respiratory capacity and strengthened postural muscles, which can slow the onset of scoliosis. There is a need to pass throughout the message to professionals, staff and families who are in this context or who have children with developmental disabilities that exercise and physical activity are an essential factor for maintaining health and well-being throughout the lifespan. That's what we wish and hope with this chapter.


Large effects of solar variability related to the 11-year sunspot cycle (SSC) are seen in the stratosphere, but only if the data are grouped according to the phase of the QBO (Quasi-Biennial Oscillation). New results based on an extended, 66-year long data set fully confirm earlier findings and suggest a significant effect of the SSC on the occurrence of the Major Midwinter Warmings (MMWs) over the Arctic as well as on the strength of the stratospheric polar vortex and on the mean meridional circulation. By means of teleconnections the dynamical interaction between the Arctic and the Tropics in the stratosphere and in the troposphere is shown for the whole data set and compared with the anomalies of single events. The results suggest strongly that during the northern winter the teleconnections between the Arctic and the Tropics were determined by the MMWs and the undisturbed, cold winters, respectively. These events in the stratosphere depend, however, on the 11-year SSC and on the QBO. The stratosphere is least disturbed during the northern summer when the interannual variability is small. And if the different phases of the QBO are introduced, a large solar signal is found in the eastphase of the QBO (more than two standard deviations). It is shown that the QBO not only modulates the solar signal on the decadal scale, but that the QBO is itself modulated by the solar variability.


The proposed topic concerns, in general, the decision-making process in urban planning in relation to its ideological implications, freedom of choice and the fight against urban poverty. In particular, this study focuses on ideal urban model design, and its subsequent export to different contexts, as a measure of development and reduction of economic and social inequality and marginalization of a certain part of the population. The case studies presented will be the following: the leisure city project "Tróia, garden-city" (1970) and the social housing project "Zona J" (1980). Even though they had different purposes (one was meant to be a middle class and touristic neighborhood, while the other was thought to be a neighborhood for poor people), both have the same formal project design. On one hand, Tróia continues representing a modern and quality touristic destination, "Zona J", on the other hand, has become the emblem of degradation. What was initially meant to be a requalification and urban integration project has eventually become a further element of stigmatization. Through comparison between original intentions, what was actually built and their effective use of spaces, we tried to answer the questions that underlie this work: are there universally valid solutions? What makes the same project a reference work in a given context and the emblem of environmental and social degradation in another? Who are the individuals who take these decisions?Keyword: Shape; Identity; Right to the City; Urban design


Background : Patients (pts) with advanced systemic mastocytosis (SM), including aggressive SM (ASM) and mast cell leukemia (MCL) ± associated clonal hematologic non–mast cell lineage disease (AHNMD), have a poor prognosis with few effective treatment options. More than 80% of pts express the activating KIT D816V mutation. The oral multikinase inhibitor midostaurin inhibits wild-type and D816-mutated KIT. In this global phase 2 trial ([NCT00782067][1]), the largest prospective trial in advanced SM, a planned interim analysis of stage 1 pts demonstrated a high overall response rate (ORR) with reductions in marrow mast cell (MC) burden and a favorable safety profile (Gotlib et al, Blood 2012). Updated stage 1 results showed improvements in symptoms and quality of life (QOL) (Gotlib et al, Blood 2013). Here, we report primary results for the fully accrued trial.

Methods : This single-arm trial consisted of an adapted Fleming 2-stage design. Midostaurin 100 mg twice daily was administered in continuous 28-day cycles until progression or unacceptable toxicity. Eligibility and responses (modified from Valent et al , Leuk Res 2003) were adjudicated by study steering committee (SSC). Histopathology was centrally assessed. Eligible pts had ≥ 1 measurable C-finding (CF) defined as SM-related organ damage. The primary endpoint was ORR (major response [MR] + partial response [PR]) occurring in the first 6 cycles and maintained for ≥ 8 weeks (wk).

Results : Of 116 enrolled pts, 89 (77%) were eligible for efficacy evaluation; pts were considered ineligible by the SSC due to absence of measurable CF (n = 14) or organ damage considered unrelated to SM (n = 13). Median age was 64 years (range 25-82). Overall, 73 pts (82%) had ASM, including 57 (78%) with an AHNMD (ASM-AHNMD); 16 (18%) had MCL, including 6 (38%) with an AHNMD (MCL-AHNMD). AHNMDs included chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (n = 25), myelodysplastic/myeloproliferative neoplasm unclassifiable (n = 22), hypereosinophilic syndrome/chronic eosinophilic leukemia (HES/CEL; n = 5), and 11 other subtypes. A total of 37 pts (42%) had received ≥ 1 prior therapy (median 1; range 1-4). Seventy-seven pts (87%) were positive and 10 pts (11%) were negative for KIT D816V/Y/L mutation; 2 pts were not evaluable. The ORR was 60% (53/89); most responses were MRs (40/53, 75%), subtyped as incomplete remission (IR) in 36%, pure clinical response in 28%, and unspecified in 11%. PRs included good PR (GPR) in 21% and minor PR in 4% of pts. Overall, 12%, 11%, and 17% of pts had stable disease, progressive disease, or were not evaluable for response, respectively. After a median follow-up of 26 months (mo; range 12-54), the median duration of response (DOR) and median overall survival (OS) were 24.1 and 28.7 mo, respectively (Figure). Median OS in responders was 44.4 mo. Of 16 MCL pts, 8 responded, including 7 MRs (44%); median DOR was not reached (NR), with 3 IRs ongoing (49+, 33+, and 19+ mo). Median OS was 9.4 mo among all pts with MCL and NR among responders. Median change in MC burden in 72 evaluable pts was -59% (range -96% to 160%); 41 pts (57%) had ≥ 50% reduction. Median best change in serum tryptase level in 89 evaluable pts was -58% (range -99% to 185%); 32 pts (36%) had ≥ 50% reduction lasting ≥ 8 wk. Four of 5 responding ASM/MCL-HES/CEL pts (1 IR, 3 GPR) also had complete resolution of eosinophilia (mean % and absolute eosinophils at baseline: 57% and 12.4 × 109/L). Improvements in symptoms and QOL were consistent with those reported previously (Gotlib et al, Blood 2013).

All 116 pts received ≥ 1 midostaurin dose and were evaluable for safety. Grade 3/4 drug-related hematologic adverse events (AEs) were neutropenia (5%), leukopenia (4%), febrile neutropenia (3%), anemia (3%), and thrombocytopenia (3%). Low-grade nausea was common but usually manageable with antiemetics. The most frequent grade 3/4 drug-related non-hematologic AEs included nausea (6%), vomiting (6%), fatigue (4%), and increased lipase/amylase (4%/3%). As of July 9, 2013, 65 pts had discontinued therapy, most commonly due to progression (n = 31) and AEs (n = 18; 11 were considered drug related [3 hematologic and 8 non-hematologic AEs]). Seven patients developed acute myeloid leukemia related to a prior AHNMD.

Conclusions : Midostaurin exhibits a high rate of durable responses in pts with advanced SM, particularly in MCL, which has a dismal prognosis. The reductions in MC burden suggest that midostaurin may impact the natural history of the disease.

![Figure 1][2]

Figure 1

![Figure 2][2]

Figure 2

Disclosures Gotlib: Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Travel Support Other. George: Novartis: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Akin: Novartis: Consultancy. Sotlar: Novartis Pharma: Laboratory Services, Laboratory Services Other; Nanostring Technologies: Consultancy. Hermine: Novartis: Research Funding. Awan: Boehringer Ingelheim: Consultancy; Lymphoma Research Foundation: Research Funding. Mauro: Ariad: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Bristol Myers Squibb: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Novartis Oncology: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Pfizer: Consultancy, Honoraria, Speakers Bureau. Sternberg: Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation: Employment, Equity Ownership. Villeneuve: Novartis Pharma AG: Employment. Emery-Salbert: Novartis: Employment. Stanek: Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation: Employment. Hartmann: Novartis: Consultancy. Horny: Novartis: Consultancy. Valent: Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding. Reiter: Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria.

 [1]: /lookup/external-ref?link_type=CLINTRIALGOV&access_num=NCT00782067&atom=%2Fbloodjournal%2F124%2F21%2F636.atom
 [2]: pending:yes


Digital communication systems utilizing wide-band carriers require a coherent reference for optimal data processing. This reference may be either locally generated or transmitted simultaneously with the data. The latter system completely avoids the synchronization problem of locally generated reference systems but is degraded by the fact that two receivers are required, excess system dimension must be used, and the transmitter power is diluted by having to transmit the reference. This report is a study of a general transmitted reference (TR) system, with the primary objective of finding bounds on these restrictions. It is based upon geometrical considerations using the fact that a transmitted reference system can be described by vectors in, and linear transformations upon, an N -dimensional Euclidean space. In this way it can be shown, for example, that the dimension of the transmitting channel must be greater than that of the space of carrier signals for unique operation. This increase in dimension need be only slight in the noiseless case, but an advantage is gained by increasing the dimension in noisy operation. An equivalent expression for output SNR is obtained in terms of norms of signal vectors and a comparison is made with that of a locally generated reference (LGR) system. It is shown that a TR system always operates with at least a 3-dB poorer SNR than that of an ideal LGR system, with the bound increasing to 6 dB if the transmitter is power limited, and gets progressively worse as the transmitter power to noisepower ratio decreases below 0 dB. Some curves are plotted to show these relationships quantitatively.


Photographs are characterized by different compositional attributes like the Rule of Thirds, depth of field, vanishing-lines etc. The presence or absence of one or more of these attributes contributes to the overall artistic value of an image. In this work, we analyze the ability of deep learning based methods to learn such photographic style attributes. We observe that although a standard CNN learns the texture and appearance based features reasonably well, its understanding of global and geometric features is limited by two factors. First, the data-augmentation strategies (cropping, warping, etc.) distort the composition of a photograph and affect the performance. Secondly, the CNN features, in principle, are translation-invariant and appearance-dependent. But some geometric properties important for aesthetics, e.g. the Rule of Thirds (RoT), are position-dependent and appearance-invariant. Therefore, we propose a novel input representation which is geometry-sensitive, position-cognizant and appearance-invariant. We further introduce a two-column CNN architecture that performs better than the state-of-the-art (SoA) in photographic style classification. From our results, we observe that the proposed network learns both the geometric and appearance-based attributes better than the SoA.


ABSTRACT The spatial organization of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus in chronic wounds was investigated in the present study. Wound biopsy specimens were obtained from patients diagnosed as having chronic venous leg ulcers, and bacterial aggregates in these wounds were detected and located by the use of peptide nucleic acid-based fluorescence in situ hybridization and confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM). We acquired CLSM images of multiple regions in multiple sections cut from five wounds containing P. aeruginosa and five wounds containing S. aureus and measured the distance of the bacterial aggregates to the wound surface. The distance of the P. aeruginosa aggregates to the wound surface was significantly greater than that of the S. aureus aggregates, suggesting that the distribution of the bacteria in the chronic wounds was nonrandom. The results are discussed in relation to our recent finding that swab culturing techniques may underestimate the presence of P. aeruginosa in chronic wounds and in relation to the hypothesis that P. aeruginosa bacteria located in the deeper regions of chronic wounds may play an important role in keeping the wounds arrested in a stage dominated by inflammatory processes.


The purpose of this thesis is to examine data mining and data censorship in the United States and China through the Occupy Wall Street social movement and labor protest activity at the Foxconn, Foshan, and Lock factories. The question posed relates to the level of investment the U.S. and Chinese governments have made in data mining and data censorship to create either a predictable situation with regard to social movement activity, or to impede communication between social movement organizers in the attempt to stop protest. For the U.S. example, I outline the legal history and interpretation of the 4th Amendment as pertaining to data mining policies enacted now to show the legality of governmental actions regarding data surveillance. The evidence of this is in the Occupy Wall Street example, as I use Freedom of Information Act requested documents to show governmental agencies infiltrating and surveilling activity of the OWS movement using data mining. For the Chinese example, I outline the legal history of data censorship as explained through Chinese legal code. Evidence of these practices is shown in communication issues found amongst protestors in Foshan, Lock, and Foxconn factories. I conclude my argument with an alternative to the U.S. and Chinese methods in German rasterfahndung, or data screening. I describe rasterfahndung as a less extreme example of data mining that has evolve over time to exhibit an open dialog for change in mining policies as opposed to blanket, legal mining in the U.S.


Spherical tokamaks (STs) have attractive features for fusion, and there is considerable interest in understanding their transport properties which depend on the underlying microinstabilities. STs are capable of operation with low magnetic fields and exhibit large inhomogeneity in the toroidal magnetic field. These factors strongly affect particle dynamics and the potency of magnetic perturbations, which correspondingly impact on the microstability properties of STs. This paper reviews previous microstability studies in ST plasma configurations and presents gyrokinetic microstability calculations for a range of ST equilibria, using the gyrokinetic code GS2. Microstability properties of L-mode and H-mode equilibria, from the MAST experiment at Culham, are compared. In MAST the shearing rates of equilibrium E × B flows usually exceed the growth rates of microinstabilities with k⊥ρi < 1 (including ion temperature gradient, ITG, driven drift waves) and are generally smaller than the growth rates of shorter wavelength modes with k⊥ρi > 1 (electron temperature gradient, ETG, driven drift waves). Electromagnetic effects are significant at mid-radius in these MAST equilibria, where the local β ⩾ 0.1. At k⊥ρi < 1, strongly electromagnetic modes dominate over ITG instabilities, and these modes are found to have tearing parity in the H-mode plasma and twisting parity in the L-mode plasma. Numerical experiments have been carried out to assess the properties of the tearing parity modes and to probe the underlying physical drive mechanism. At shorter wavelengths the electromagnetic effects can significantly stabilize the ETG instabilities. Nonlinear electron scale microturbulence calculations for two surfaces of a MAST H-mode plasma suggest that significant electron heat transport can be carried via this mechanism. In an extremely high β ST equilibrium, which has been proposed as the basis of a conceptual ST power plant, electrostatic instabilities are fully stabilized, but tearing parity modes are predicted to be unstable over-wide range of length scales.


This is the first book-length study of the status of composition in English studies and the uneasy relationship between composition and literature. Composition studies and institutional histories of English studies have long needed this kind of clarification of the historical and political contexts of composition teaching, research, and administration. Susan Miller argues that composition constitutes a major national industry, citing the four million freshman-level students enrolled in such courses each year, the $40 million annual expenditure for textbooks, and the more than $50 million in teacher salaries. But this concrete magnitude is not expressed in political power within departments. Miller calls on her associates in composition to engage in a persistent critique of the social practices and political agenda of the discipline that have been responsible for its institutional marginalization. Drawing on her own long experience as a composition administrator, teacher, and scholar, as well as on a national survey of composition professionals, Miller argues that composition teachers inadvertently continue to foster the negative myth about composition' s place in the English studies hierarchy by assuming an assigned, self-sacrificial cultural identity. Composition has been regarded as subcollegiate, practical, a "how-to," and has been denied intellectual rigor in order to preserve literature' s presentations of quasi-religious textual ideals. Winner of three major book awards: The Modern Language Association' s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize The Conference on College Composition and Communication' s Outstanding Book Award The Teachers of Advanced Composition' s W. Ross Winterowd Award


Strain gradient sensing offers an alternative avenue for in-situ monitoring of onset and growth of cracks in structural health monitoring, where the strain gradient is the most sensitive measurand. In this study, flexoelectric strain gradient sensing structures using Ba0.64Sr0.36TiO3 (BST) were attached on the proximity of an open hole in an aluminum plate, to monitor strain gradient variations of the specimen under a uniaxial dynamic load. Charge outputs of the BST micro-bars showed good linearity with the average strain gradients, with a sensitivity of 88 pC m, which is in good agreement with the theoretical estimation by assuming a 30 μm bonding thickness.


Owing to the need for inexpensive, remotely applicable, and distributed sensing methodologies, we have been working on a new approach to measure natural frequencies of structures and mechanical systems from digital videos. Our earlier proposed Eulerian-based virtual visual sensors (VVS) are different than block matching-based approaches such as digital image correlation (DIC) in that we measure the change in intensity of a fixed single pixel or a patch of pixels. For our measurements we have used, besides regular DSLR cameras, commercially-available technology such as the GoPro camera, which is a popular gadget used by the athletic and adventure communities. We also investigated the use of professional high-speed cameras, with which we have been able to detect frequencies as high as 740 Hz from an impulse response test of a steel beam. A comparison between the frequencies and the signal-to-noise ratios computed from the VVS and the baseline accelerometer data showed them to be comparable. In this paper, we introduce the fundamental concept of Eulerian-based VVS and present and discuss a series of laboratory experiments on scaled structures and field tests on bridges. Finally, we discuss our most recent attempt to measure frequencies with high SNR employing targets combined with simple noisereduction algorithms. doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/203


From the Publisher:
Python Standard Library is an essential guide for serious Python programmers. Python is a modular language that imports most useful operations from the standard library (basic support modules; operating system interfaces; network protocols; file formats; data conversions; threads and processes; and data storage). You can't really program in Python without using it. In this book, author Fredrik Lundh, creator of the Python Imaging Library (PIL), delivers tested, accurate documentation of all the modules in the Python Standard Library, along with over 300 annotated example scripts using the modules.
Python Standard Library renders this valuable information in a clean, easy-to-read format, yet doesn't talk down to readers. This accurate and complete reference documentation is for the Python programmer who wants the facts and little else.
The book is based on the author's work with the Python newsgroup: he reviewed more than 2500 questions and answers to that newsgroup in order to make sure the book covered what Python users really wanted to know. An earlier version of this book has been available electronically for over a year, so the material has been tested by Python programmers in real-life applications.
This version of Python Standard Library covers all the new modules and related information for Python 2.0, the first new major release of Python in four years.


Problem statement: Stroke or cerebral ischemia has been recognized as one important problem worldwide. To date, the effectiveness of protective and therapeutic strategies against stroke is still very limited. Therefore, the development of novel strategy is required. Porcine brain is traditional believed to improve brain functions. Recent studies showed that the extract of porcine brain could protect against brain damage related to the oxidative stress, therefore, we hypothesized that it could protect against brain damage in stroke. Approach: To test the potential of porcine brain extract as the novel protective supplement against stroke, various doses of porcine brain extract at doses of 0.5 and 2.5 mg kg-1 b.w. were orally given to male Wistar rats, weighing 300-350 g, at the period of 14 days before and 21 days after the occlusion of right middle cerebral artery. Then, all rats were determined the neurological score, motor performance, cognitive function and brain infarct volume. Moreover, the possible neuroprotective mechanisms of the extract were also determined via the alteration of Malondialdehyde (MDA) or lipid peroxidation product and via the activities of scavenger enzymes including Superoxide Dismutase (SOD), Catalase (CAT) and Glutathione Peroxides (GPx). Results: The results showed that the low dose of porcine extract decreased the infarct volume and improved brain functions including neurological score, motor performance and memory deficit. In addition, it also decreased MDA but increased the activities of SOD, CAT and GPx. Conclusion: Our results suggested the potential role of porcine brain extract as neuroprotectant. The possible underlying mechanism appeared to be related to the enhanced activities of SOD, CAT and GPx which in turn resulted in the decrease MDA. Moreover, our findings may shed light on the pharmacologic basis for the clinical application of traditional Chinese medicine to protect against stroke.


This issue brief describes the ways in which competition between firms can benefit consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, small businesses and the economy more generally, and also describes how these benefits can be lost when competition is impaired by firms' actions or government policies. Several indicators suggest that competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors, including the decades-long decline in new business formation and increases in industry-specific measures of concentration. Recent data also show that returns may have risen for the most profitable firms. To the extent that profit rates exceed firms' cost of capital— which may be suggested by the rising spread on the return to invested capital relative to Treasury bonds— they may reflect economic rents, which are returns to the factors of production in excess of what would be necessary to keep them in operation. Such rents may divert resources from consumers, distort investment and employment decisions, and encourage firms to engage in wasteful rent-seeking activities.


Ionospheric convection signatures observed over the polar regions are provided by the DMSP F8 satellite. We consider five passes over the southern summer hemisphere during a time when the z component of the interplanetary magnetic field was stable and positive and the y component changed slowly from positive to negative. Large-scale regions of sunward flow are observed at very high latitudes consistent with a strong z component. When By and Bz are positive, but By is greater than Bz, strong evidence exists for dayside merging in a manner similar to that expected when Bz is negative. This signature is diminished as By decreases and becomes smaller than Bz resulting in a four-cell convection pattern displaced toward the sunward side of the dawn-dusk meridian. In this case the sign of By affects the relative sizes of the two highest-latitude cells. In the southern hemisphere the duskside high-latitude cell is dominant for By positive and the dawnside high-latitude cell is dominant for By negative. The relative importance of possible electric field sources in the low-latitude boundary layer, the dayside cusp, and the lobe all need to be considered to adequately explain the observed evolution of the convection pattern.


The Romantic age was one of anger and its consequences: revolution and reaction, terror and war. Andrew M. Stauffer explores the changing place of anger in the literature and culture of the period, as English men and women rethought their relationship to the aggressive passions in the wake of the French Revolution. Drawing on diverse fields and discourses such as aesthetics, politics, medicine and the law and tracing the classical legacy the Romantics inherited, Stauffer charts the period's struggle to define the relationship of anger to justice and the creative self. In their poetry and prose, Romantic authors including Blake, Coleridge, Godwin, Shelley and Byron negotiate the meanings of indignation and rage amidst a clamourous debate over the place of anger in art and in civil society. This innovative book has much to contribute to the understanding of Romantic literature and the cultural history of the emotions.


The growing popularity of smartphones and continuous user demand for a rich web experience has resulted in an exponential surge in cellular bandwidth requirements. Cellular providers have struggled to keep pace with the new requirements while users often face a monetary cost associated with the data downloaded to their device. While many modern websites have adapted to the new mobile habitat, they often take shortcuts to transition from their desktop to mobile versions, many times carrying redundant content that is never utilized. Moreover, mobile users are effectively paying for certain undesirable content, such as advertisements, in the form of their bandwidth costs. In this paper, we study the composition and complexity of modern websites, from both a mobile and desktop perspective, to identify sources of wasted bandwidth. We developed a custom crawler-based framework to perform an in-depth analysis of the top 100,000 popular sites ranked by Alexa. Our results show that 23% or more of the content size on an average website is unnecessary, unused or redundant. Our results serve as a motivation for developing optimized websites and enhancing the web infrastructure to better suit the mobile environment with emphasis on reducing bandwidth costs, while also improving performance and efficiency.


Massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) are a method to probe the effects of short sequences on transcriptional regulation activity. In a MPRA, short sequences are extracted from suspected regulatory regions, inserted into reporter plasmids, transfected into cell-types of interest, and the transcriptional activity of each reporter is assayed. Recently, Ernst et al. presented MPRA data covering 15750 putative regulatory regions. We trained a multitask convolutional neural network architecture using these sequence expression readouts which predicts as output the expression level outputs across four combinations of cell types and promoters. The model allows for the assigning of importance scores to each base through in silico mutagenesis, and the resulting importance scores correlated well with regions enriched for conservation and transcription factor binding.


Abstract Multi-instance (MI) learning is a variant of inductive machine learning, where each learning example contains a bag of instances instead of a single feature vector. The term commonly refers to the supervised setting, where each bag is associated with a label. This type of representation is a natural fit for a number of real-world learning scenarios, including drug activity prediction and image classification, hence many MI learning algorithms have been proposed. Any MI learning method must relate instances to bag-level class labels, but many types of relationships between instances and class labels are possible. Although all early work in MI learning assumes a specific MI concept class known to be appropriate for a drug activity prediction domain; this 'standard MI assumption' is not guaranteed to hold in other domains. Much of the recent work in MI learning has concentrated on a relaxed view of the MI problem, where the standard MI assumption is dropped, and alternative assumptions are considered instead. However, often it is not clearly stated what particular assumption is used and how it relates to other assumptions that have been proposed. In this paper, we aim to clarify the use of alternative MI assumptions by reviewing the work done in this area.


Three-dimensional data merging is vital for full-field three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement. All 3D range data patches, acquired from either different sensors or the same sensor in different viewing angles, have to be merged into a single piece to facilitate future data analysis. A novel method for 3D data merging using Holoimage is proposed. Similar to the 3D shape measurement system using a phase-shifting method, Holoimage is a phase-shifting–based computer synthesized fringe image. The 3D information is retrieved from Holoimage using a phase-shifting method. If two patches of 3D data with overlapping areas are rendered by OpenGL, the overlapping areas are resolved by the graphics pipeline, that is, only the front geometry can be visualized. Therefore, the merging is performed if the front geometry information can be obtained. Holoimage is to obtain the front geometry by projecting the fringe patterns onto the rendered scene. We also demonstrated that each point of the geometry in the overlapping area can be obtained by averaging the corresponding point of the geometries reconstructed from Holoimage for each patch. Moreover, using Holoimage, the texture can also be obtained. Both simulation and experiments demonstrated the success of the proposed method.


This Article addresses how the international community governs the Arctic and whether that community, or parts of it, should be governing it differently. Its core is analysis of programs specifically created to protect and manage that regional sea. More broadly, this Article presents the great range of policy and regulatory activity that focuses on the environmental quality of the region. The aim is not only to describe and evaluate existing governance structures but also to indicate how governance can be improved. One approach emphasized, rather than or in addition to working on more international initiatives, is to focus on implementation of the myriad, almost paralyzing, existing international legal obligations. Implementation is addressed in the organizational studies context. Implementation in the legal sense of executing international law into domestic systems is the starting point for our focus on implementation. The research is based on a multidisciplinary literature analysis; field visits; and policymaker, scientific, and legal expert interviews. I argue that more fully applying knowledge from implementation studies can improve Arctic environmental governance, irrespective of decisions made about additional legal obligations.
"[H]e who controls the Arctic controls the world."


The assassination of a political leader is among the highest-profile acts of political violence, and conventional wisdom holds that such events often have substantial political, social, and economic effects on states. We investigate the extent to which the assassination of a head of state affects political stability through an analysis of all assassinations of heads of state between 1952 and 1997. We examine the political consequences of assassination by assessing the levels of political unrest, instability, and civil war in states that experience the assassination of their head of state. Our findings support the existence of an interactive relationship among assassination, leadership succession, and political turmoil: in particular, we find that assassinations' effects on political instability are greatest in systems in which the process of leadership succession is informal and unregulated.


Subsurface imaging is very critical to exploit subsurface resources, monitor the fluid movement in the reservoir, mapping tunnels etc. As science advances scientists and other researchers are constantly trying to develop new techniques and methods for subsurface imaging that are more effective, efficient, and are more robust under varying field conditions. The main focus of this research is one such effort to improve and increase the usability of the Multi-channel Analysis of Surface Wave method (MASW) method in determining regolith and rock properties by introducing a new type of receiver arrangement to extend its usage in places that are inaccessible for example, near embankments, military places, clandestine burials, etc. Advances in near-surface geophysical techniques, such as multi-channel analysis of surface waves (MASW), have greatly increased our ability to map subsurface variations in physical properties here on Earth. The MASW method involves deployment of multiple seismometers to acquire 1-D or 2-D shear wave velocity profiles that can be directly related to various engineering properties. The purpose of the research presented here is to demonstrate the usefulness and capabilities of MASW technique using a random receiver array 1) through controlled site experiments, 2) through Modeling experiments, and 3) And finally apply the technique at terrestrial site (the Black Point Lava Flow) with a different geologic setting. The results focus on near-surface MASW studies and interpretation of the subsurface geology using a random geophone array. The field techniques and methodologies discussed in this dissertation, although applicable on Earth, are also intended for surfaces and regolith in the future exploration of planetary bodies for possible human habitation. This would include Mars, its Moon-Phobus/Deimos, Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA's), even Earth's Moon. With each situation, the nature of the regolith and its formational processes will place certain restrictions and limitations upon the applications. This is expected with any change of terrains even on the Earth, let alone between planetary bodies.


This paper describes the development of an open source Learning Object Repository (LOR), named eNOSHA (eLearning Neutral Object Storage with a Holistic Approach.), at University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), Sri Lanka. The e-Learning Centre (eLC) at UCSC has been developing learning content for a nationwide e-Learning Bachelor of Information Technology degree (eBIT) and a preparatory programme for the eBIT program (The Foundation in Information Technology, FIT). Since eBIT started in 2002, a lot of learning content has been developed in-house and there was a need for a repository to support storing and reusing of learning content. The aim of the paper is to present the development of eNOSHA in regards to three key concepts, flexibility, reusability and user-friendliness. Based on a requirement analysis carried out in December 2008, a plan was drafted for the development and implementation of the system. A participatory approach was used where users have been involved in the design, evaluation and implementation. Based on the testing of the system we gained a positive response regarding the searchability and reuse of content. Tests have, however, shown that additional features are needed to be implemented to improve the usability of the system, Even though the system has been developed based on the needs of UCSC, one of the objectives has always been to make it context independent. Internal tests conclude that the system is flexible enough to work in different contexts but the design may need some minor changes once tested in other organizations or cultures.


The Anginosus group of the genus Streptococcus has been the subject of much taxonomic confusion, which has hampered the full appreciation of its clinical significance. The purpose of this study was to critically re-examine the taxonomy of the Anginosus group, with special attention to β-haemolytic, Lancefield group C strains, using multilocus sequence analysis (MLSA) combined with 16S rRNA gene sequence and phenotypic analyses. Phylogenetic analysis of concatenated sequences of seven housekeeping genes previously used for examination of viridans streptococci distinguished seven distinct and coherent clusters in the Anginosus group. Analyses of 16S rRNA gene sequences and phenotypic characters supported the MLSA clustering and currently recognized taxa of the Anginosus group. Single gene analyses showed considerable allele sharing between species, thereby invalidating identification based on single-locus sequencing. Two novel clusters of β-haemolytic, Lancefield group C strains within the Streptococcus constellatus and Streptococcus anginosus species and isolated from patients with sore throat showed sufficient phylogenetic distances from other clusters to warrant status as novel subspecies. The novel cluster within S. anginosus was identified as the previously recognized DNA homology cluster, DNA group 2. The names S. anginosus subsp. whileyi subsp. nov. (type strain CCUG 39159(T) = DSM 25818(T) = SK1267(T)) and S. constellatus subsp. viborgensis subsp. nov. (type strain SK1359(T) = CCUG 62387(T) = DSM 25819(T)) are proposed.


This volume examines the roots of pragmatist imagination and traces the influence of American pragmatism in diverse areas of politics, law, sociology, political science, and transitional studies. The work explores the interfaces between the Progressive movement in politics and American pragmatism. Shalin shows how early 20th century progressivism influenced pragmatism's philosophical agenda and how pragmatists helped articulate a theory of progressive reform. The work addresses pragmatism and interactionist sociology and illuminates the cross-fertilization between these two fields of studies. Special emphasis is placed on the interactionists' search for a logic of inquiry sensitive to the objective indeterminacy of the situation. The challenge that contemporary interactionist studies face is to illuminate the issues of power and inequality central to the political commitments of pragmatist philosophers. Shalin explores the vital link between democracy, civility, and affect. His central thesis is that democracy is an embodied process that binds affectively as well as rhetorically and that flourishes in places where civic discourse is an end in itself, a source of vitality and social creativity sustaining a democratic community. The author shows why civic discourse is hobbled by the civic body that has been misshapen by past abuses. Drawing on the studies of the civilizing process, Shalin speculates about the emotion, demeanor, and body language of democracy and explores from this angle the prospects for democratic transformation in countries struggling to shake their totalitarian past. View Table of Contents