THE TERRORIST ATTACKS AGAINST THE UNITED STATES in September 2001 led the Canadian government to pay renewed attention to the security of the country and its citizens. Whether to provide enhanced protection to Canadians or to assuage concerns in Washington, the government moved rapidly to improve security at airports and border crossings, to broaden the powers of police and intelligence agencies, to tighten laws governing immigration and refugee flows, and to stockpile antidotes to a variety of biological warfare agents. All of these measures were aimed at combating what were traditionally referred to as 'unconventional' security threats but are now often called 'asymmetrical' threats. They do not, however, significantly improve Canada's ability to confront enduring or emerging 'conventional' security challenges to its interests, rooted in political instability or interstate conflicts in many areas of the world.Throughout the years of the cold war, Canada's international security policy was reasonably well focused and had a fair degree of coherence, largely because there was an identified adversary, the Soviet Union, and a well understood threat, a global nuclear war resulting from a military confrontation between the two superpowers. With the end of the cold war and the demise of the Soviet Union, the adversary and the quasi-existential threat both disappeared.Like most Western countries, Canada experienced considerable difficulties in adjusting its international security policy to the new realities of the 1990s. By the middle of that decade, the government decided to adopt a security policy that gave pride of place to the so-called human security agenda on the grounds that 'serious long term challenges are posed by environmental, demographic, health and development issues around the globe' and that the best response to those challenges was to be found in 'the promotion of democracy and good governance, of human rights and the rule of law, and of prosperity through sustainable development.'(1) In pursuit of this new policy orientation, the Canadian government launched a variety of initiatives, which generally garnered strong domestic support and widespread international attention, positive and negative.Whatever the merits of the new emphasis in Canadian security policy, and they are debatable,(2) one of its by-products is a steadily diminishing attention by policy-makers to more traditional security challenges to Canada's political, security, economic, and social interests worldwide. This is not to suggest a lack of awareness of these issues within the Canadian government system (as the Department of National Defence's excellent annual Strategic Overview makes clear(3)), but rather that they have not been given the attention they deserve by Canada's political leadership. A good part of the evidence for this is to be found not only in the statements and actions of Canadian political leaders, but also in the steady erosion throughout the 1990s of the diplomatic, military, and financial resources Canada would need to address these issues seriously.(4)This article attempts to identify and examine a few of the major long-term international security challenges to Canadian national interests and suggests in general terms some of the capabilities Canada will need to address these challenges in co-operation with its allies and other like-minded countries.RUSSIA AND IS NEIGHBOURHOODIn the cold war era, Soviet strength was the primary concern of the West; in the post-cold war era, it should be Russia's weakness. The collapse of the Soviet system left in its wake a Russia beset with formidable problems, most of which have grown worse in the intervening years. The central government is corroded by cronyism, corruption, and organized crime and is daily faced with challenges to its authority from a variety of centrifugal forces. The economy is in a lamentable state: Russia's gross domestic product is smaller than that of Sweden, a country of only nine million people, and its per capita GDP is less than half that of Malaysia. …


Person re-identification (ReID) aims at finding the same person in different cameras. Training such systems usually requires a large amount of cross-camera pedestrians to be annotated from surveillance videos, which is labor-consuming especially when the number of cameras is large. Differently, this paper investigates ReID in an unexplored single-camera-training (SCT) setting, where each person in the training set appears in only one camera. To the best of our knowledge, this setting was never studied before. SCT enjoys the advantage of low-cost data collection and annotation, and thus eases ReID systems to be trained in a brand new environment. However, it raises major challenges due to the lack of cross-camera person occurrences, which conventional approaches heavily rely on to extract discriminative features. The key to dealing with the challenges in the SCT setting lies in designing an effective mechanism to complement cross-camera annotation. We start with a regular deep network for feature extraction, upon which we propose a novel loss function named multi-camera negative loss (MCNL). This is a metric learning loss motivated by probability, suggesting that in a multi-camera system, one image is more likely to be closer to the most similar negative sample in other cameras than to the most similar negative sample in the same camera. In experiments, MCNL significantly boosts ReID accuracy in the SCT setting, which paves the way of fast deployment of ReID systems with good performance on new target scenes.


The integration of a fuzzy system and automaton theory can form the concept of fuzzy automaton. This integration allows a discretely defined state-machine to act on continuous universes and handle uncertainty in applications like Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). The typical IDS detection mechanisms are targeted to detect and prevent single-stage attacks. These types of attacks can be detected using either a common convincing threshold or by pre-defined rules. However, attack techniques have changed in recent years. Currently, the largest proportion of attacks performed, are multi-step attacks. The goal of this paper is to introduce a novel detection mechanism for multi-step attacks built upon Fuzzy Rule Interpolation (FRI) based fuzzy automaton. In that respect, the FRI method instruments the fuzzy automaton to be able to act on a not fully defined state transition rule-base, by offering interpolated conclusion even for situations which are not explicitly defined. In the suggested model, the intrusion definition state transition rule-base is defined using an open source fuzzy declarative language. On the multi-step attack benchmark dataset introduced in this paper, the proposed detection mechanism was able to achieve 97.836% detection rate.  Furthermore, in the studied examples, the suggested method was able not only to detect but also early detect the multi-step attack in stages, where the planned attack is not fully elaborated and hence less harmful. According to these results, the IDS built upon the FRI based fuzzy automaton could be a useful device for detecting multi-step attacks, even in cases when the intrusion state transition rule-based is incomplete. The early detection of multi-step attacks also allows the administrator to take the necessary actions in time, to mitigate the potential threats.


Taking a view of literacy as a communicative practice, in which a learned skill is applied by individual people in their particular social contexts, this thesis examines the understandings of literacy of people in a village in northern Cameroon and explores how these are influenced by the circumstances of their lives. Many developments have taken place in local life in the last fifty years as the village has become progressively integrated into a wider world. Most people are small farmers; poverty and hunger are recurrent problems. Three different languages are spoken, in different domains of life. The majority of adults describe themselves as non-literate and several literacy programmes are in operation. Using a qualitative methodology, the researcher took part in local events and activities and noted the ways in which literacy was used in the community. He also conducted interviews with 59 literate and non-literate men and women, three of whom were interviewed in depth over several months. He found that many people thought that literacy offered advantage and status and that it facilitated personal correspondence. It gave some people a sense of autonomy. However, learning to read and write was not a high priority in relation to the immediate pressures of survival. Religion was a significant influence on local understandings of literacy with Christians being mostly positive towards literacy. Protestants viewed literacy as useful for reading the Bible, and Catholics associated it with development. Literacy in French was seen as relevant for education and employment, literacy in the local language for religious purposes. This study confirms the view that literacy has to be understood as situated in its local context and it reveals that people's conceptions of literacy, and not only their uses of reading and writing, need to be understood in the context of their lives.


The Indo-Burman Ranges in western Myanmar extend along the Sunda Arc subduction zone and may be divided into a western portion of Neogene sedimentary rocks and an eastern portion of Palaeogene sedimentary rocks, separated by the Kaladan Fault. Both Himalayan and Burman sources have been proposed for these sediments. Our thermochronological analyses on detrital grains, isotopic analyses on bulk rock, and petrographic and heavy mineral data indicate that the Palaeogene Indo-Burman Ranges contain a significant component of arc-derived material, interpreted as derived from the Burmese portion of the Mesozoic–Tertiary arc to the east. And older crustal component is also identifiable, which may have been sourced from the Himalaya or the Burmese margin. By contrast, the Neogene Indo-Burman Ranges show dominant derivation from the Himalaya. A minor arc-derived component may have been sourced from the Trans-Himalaya, or recycled from the arc-derived Paleogene Indo-Burman Ranges.


From the beginning, Darwin's dangerous idea has been a snake in the garden, denounced from pulpits then and now as incompatible with the central tenets of Christian faith. Recovered here is the less well-known but equally long history of thoughtful engagement and compromise on the part of liberal theologians. Peter J. Bowler doesn't minimize the hostility of many of the faithful toward evolution, but he reveals the existence of a long tradition within the churches that sought to reconcile Christian beliefs with evolution by finding reflections of the divine in scientific explanations for the origin of life. By tracing the historical forerunners of these rival Christian responses, Bowler provides a valuable alternative to accounts that stress only the escalating confrontation.Our polarized society, Bowler says, has all too often projected its rivalries onto the past, concealing the efforts by both scientists and theologians to find common ground. Our perception of past confrontations has been shaped by an oversimplified model of a "war" between science and religion. By uncovering the complexity of the debates sparked by Darwin's theory, we might discover ways to depolarize our own debates about where we came from and why we are here.


Males generally achieve higher levels of performance than females on mental rotation
tasks (Linn & Petersen, 1985, Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995); though the factors which
contribute to this sex difference are poorly understood. The present research aimed to
investigate the cognitive mechanisms that underlie sex differences in mental rotation
task performance using event-related potentials (ERPs). Specifically, the effects of
image type, task repetition and image familiarity on the cognitive processes used by
males and females in mental rotation were explored. This research also investigated
similarities and differences in the way that males and females performed specific
cognitive operations within the task (e.g., forming a mental representation of the
stimulus, accessing an existing representation from memory and mental rotation per se). In Experiment 1, 18 males and 18 females completed three mental rotation tasks.
The three tasks were the same, except that stimulus category was manipulated between
tasks (letters, familiar symbols or unfamiliar abstract figures). Males and females were
found to achieve similar performance levels. For both sexes, performance was highest
for the letters condition and lowest for the unfamiliar abstract figures condition. ERP
analysis revealed sex differences in the P2 and P3 components and for mental-rotation
related negativity (e.g., P2 was left-lateralised in females and symmetrical in males).
This indicates that males' strategic approach to the task was different to females', but
the ultimate performance outcome did not differ between the sexes.
In Experiment 2, the effects of image familiarity on sex differences in mental
rotation were further explored. Participants were trained to reach a determined level of
familiarity with initially unknown polygons which ensured that familiarity with the
images was reasonably similar for all participants. Nineteen males and 20 females
completed three mental rotation tasks, which were largely the same, except that image
familiarity was manipulated between tasks (trained, or initially unfamiliar/repeated
during the task, or unfamiliar/never repeated). Again, males and females demonstrated similar overall performance levels, except during the unfamiliar condition. In this
condition, there was a trend for males' accuracy to be higher than females'. ERP results
revealed the P2 component to be larger for females than for males. Females showed
differentiation in P2 amplitude between mirrored and normal images when presented
upright rotated by 45°, while males did not demonstrate any parity differentiation in this
component. P2 indexes early stimulus processing, including feature detection processes
(Crowley & Colrain, 2004; Luck & Hillyard, 1994). The P2 sex difference indicates that
early stimulus processing was undertaken differently by males and females. It was also
found that mean amplitude (300-600ms) was symmetrical for males and rightlateralised
for females. Interpreted within a resource allocation framework (Isreal,
Wickens, Chesney, & Donchin, 1980; Kok, 1997; 2001), this result indicates that
females probably allocated a high proportion of visuospatial resources to character
classification and the formation of an elaborate mental image while males did not
demonstrate this same visuospatial resource recruitment strategy. In both experiments, ERP rotation-related negativity was demonstrated
differently by males compared to females. Give that this negativity is regarded as a
direct index of mental rotation (Heil, 2002), this indicates that males and females used
different mental rotation strategies. Females showed strong left hemisphere rotationrelated
negativity and weak negativity in the right hemisphere. Males showed
symmetrical rotation-related negativity. These lateralisation patterns indicate that
females adopted a piecemeal strategy and males used a holistic strategy.
For females, performance generally improved as each mental rotation task
progressed (i.e., performance was higher in the second half than in the first half of most
tasks). Males' performance remained consistent within each mental rotation task. (These
effects were observed when data for each task was split into two equal halves and
compared.) Within-task performance enhancements were present for females when the
mental rotation task contained a set of four stimuli which were repeated throughout but not when the task contained a large set of stimuli which were never repeated. Thus
females' performance improved when stimuli became familiar, but did not improve
when there was no opportunity for stimuli to become familiar. Although females
showed marked performance changes, there were no similar, consistent ERP changes
over time. This indicates that performance changes were probably not caused by a
strategy shift in the way that repeated images were processed. It appears that both sexes
adopted relatively consistent strategies throughout the task which, for females, were
more successful when the images were repeated and became familiar.
In summary, males' and females' strategic approach to the mental rotation task
differed during early stimulus processing and mental rotation. Because sex differences
were not limited merely to mental rotation, it is recommended that future investigation
of the root(s) of sex differences on the task explores each stage of processing independently. Additionally, image familiarity was found to be an important influence
on females' processing, particularly when they were familiar with rotated and upright
versions of the stimuli. Females showed clear performance benefits when they had
mental representations of images at multiple orientations but these effects were not
present for males. These benefits for females were interpreted with reference to sex
difference frameworks which emphasise the underlying processes recruited to perform
cognitive tasks (Colom, Escorio, & Rebollo, 2004; Halpern, 1992; Halpern & Wright,
1996; Vecchi & Girelli, 1998). Females were thought to have excelled at mental
rotation of familiar images because of their high skill in retrieving previously stored
mental representations from memory. The present research provides a basis for
understanding, at least in part, why the magnitude of performance sex differences has
varied so widely between studies (Voyer & Hou, 2006; Voyer & Saunders, 2004; Voyer
et al., 1995): image familiarity has differed markedly between studies. Image familiarity
differences between studies subsequently alter the underlying cognitive requirements of
the mental rotation task and, ultimately, the likelihood that sex differences will occur.


We argue that political distribution risk is an important driver of aggregate fluctuations. To that end, we document significant changes in the capital share after large political events, such as political realignments, modifications in collective bargaining rules, or the end of dictatorships, in a sample of developed and emerging economies. These policy changes are associated with significant fluctuations in output and asset prices. Using a Bayesian proxy-VAR estimated with U.S. data, we show how distribution shocks cause movements in output, unemployment, and sectoral asset prices. To quantify the importance of these political shocks for the U.S. as a whole, we extend an otherwise standard neoclassical growth model. We model political shocks as exogenous changes in the bargaining power of workers in a labor market with search and matching. We calibrate the model to the U.S. corporate non-financial business sector and we back up the evolution of the bargaining power of workers over time using a new methodological approach, the partial filter. We show how the estimated shocks agree with the historical narrative evidence. We document that bargaining shocks account for 34% of aggregate fluctuations.


This paper offers a legal pluralist description of the transformation of Canadian labour arbitration over the second half of the twentieth century from an institution of the workplace to an institution of the state. Industrial employment and contractual relations are often described as creating a 'law of the shop', or as developing a 'web of rules' to govern interactions. These rules are a mix of state law, negotiated norms between employers and employee representatives, amongst workers themselves, and a host of other social and economic forces operating to organize relations at both the industrial and workplace level. Labour arbitrators, appointed and paid for by the parties to interpret collective bargaining agreements, historically expert in the dynamics of the workplace, and concerned with the long term relationships of the parties, have traditionally acted as translators of sorts. Labour arbitration sat at the intersection of the 'law of the shop' and the law of the state. Arbitrators acted to translate and mediate between the overarching principles of state law and the terms negotiated by the workplace parties, seeking to use the language and concepts of each so as to protect the system of private contracting from unwanted judicial interference. Towards the end of the 20th century, however, the increasing number of individual statutory rights regime (particularly human rights law) and the expanded scope of arbitral jurisdiction, has served to legalize this previously informal institution, and to effectively pull it into the service of the state's law.


Background: The prevalence of major depressive disorder (MDD) by DSM criteria among cancer patients is about 14%–15% in oncological, hematological, and palliative services and the number is risen up to 20%–25% when other depressive disorders are also included. Like MDD patients in general, patients with cancer are thought to be underdiagnosed and undertreated. Untreated depression in cancer patients may lead to having distressed symptoms and signs, decreased quality of life, higher suicide risk, greater psychological burden on the family, longer hospital stays, poorer anticancer treatment compliance, as well as even increased risk for mortality. Methods: In this review, the authors reviewed published articles on the use of antidepressant use for patients with cancer, to familiarize the readers with the use of antidepressants. Results: Antidepressants have been found to be more effective than placebo in relieving depressive symptoms in patients with cancer, and the efficacy is positively associated with length of treatment. Although the rate of antidepressant prescription is increasing, still about 75% of cancer patients with depression have not yet received antidepressant treatment. Besides the use in treating mood and anxiety symptoms, antidepressants have also been found to have versatile rôles as palliative treatment for cancer-related symptoms – pain, hot flushes, nausea, anorexia/cachexia, and fatigue. Furthermore, antidepressants have been studied for their anticancer potentials. They can inhibit tumor growth through either indirectly regulating immunity by enhancing cytotoxic activity and modulating cytokine production, or directly initiating cancer cell death and arresting cancer cell proliferation. We also found important drug-drug interaction between antidepressants and tamoxifen. Conclusion: Besides treating depressive and anxiety disorders, antidepressants are effective in treating cancer-related symptoms (pain, hot flushes, nausea, anorexia/cachexia, and fatigue). Cancer patients are eager to receive more effective treatment against their cancer as well as comorbid depression, and physicians should be more aggressive in providing every beneficial regimen – including an antidepressant.


We present a new technique, H3, for reproducing Heisenbugs in production runs on commercial hardware. H3 integrates the hardware control flow tracing capability provided in recent Intel processors with symbolic constraint analysis. Compared to a state-of-the-art solution, CLAP, this integration allows H3 to reproduce failures with much lower runtime overhead and much more compact trace. Moreover, it allows us to develop a highly effective core-based constraint reduction technique that significantly reduces the complexity of the generated symbolic constraints. H3 has been implemented for C/C++ and evaluated on both popular benchmarks and real-world applications. It reproduces realworld Heisenbugs with overhead ranging between 1.4%- 23.4%, up to 8X more efficient than CLAP, and incurs only 4.9% runtime overhead on PARSEC benchmarks.


BACKGROUND
multidisciplinary rehabilitation is of proven benefit in the management of older inpatients. However, the identification of patients who will do well with rehabilitation currently lacks a strong evidence base.

OBJECTIVES
the aims of this study were to compare the importance of chronological age, gender, co-morbidities and frailty in the prediction of adverse outcomes for patients admitted to an acute geriatric rehabilitation ward.

DESIGN
prospective observational cohort study.

SUBJECTS AND SETTING
two hundred and sixty-five patients admitted consecutively to an acute geriatric rehabilitation ward at a tertiary care teaching hospital.

METHODS
frailty status was measured by an index of accumulated deficits, giving a potential score from 0 (no deficits) to 1.0 (all 40 deficits present). Patients were stratified into three outcomes: good (discharged to original residence within 28 days), intermediate (discharged to original residence but longer hospital stay) and poor (newly institutionalised or died).

RESULTS
patients were old (82.6 ± 8.6 years) and frail (mean frailty index (FI) 0.34 ± 0.09). Frailty status correlated significantly with length of stay and was a predictor of poor functional gain. The odds ratio of intermediate and poor outcome relative to a good outcome was 4.95 (95% CI = 3.21, 7.59; P < 0.001) per unit increase in FI. Chronological age, gender and co-morbidity showed no significant association with outcomes.

CONCLUSION
frailty is associated with adverse rehabilitation outcomes. The FI may have clinical utility, augmenting clinical judgement in the management of older inpatients.


In recent years, text classification in sentiment analysis has mostly focused on two types of classification, the distinction between objective and subjective text, i.e. subjectivity detection, and the distinction between positive and negative subjective text, i.e. polarity classification. So far, there has been little work examining the distinction between definite polar subjectivity and indefinite polar subjectivity. While the former are utterances which can be categorized as either positive or negative, the latter cannot be categorized as either of these two categories. This paper presents a small set of domain independent features to detect indefinite polar sentences. The features reflect the linguistic structure underlying these types of utterances. We give evidence for the effectiveness of these features by incorporating them into an unsupervised rule-based classifier for sentence-level analysis and compare its performance with supervised machine learning classifiers, i.e. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Nearest Neighbor Classifier (kNN). The data used for the experiments are web-reviews collected from three different domains.


Olive mill wastewaters (OMWs) represent a major environmental concern due to their high organic load and phytotoxic activity. The selective recovery of phenolic compounds (PCs) from OMW represents a promising technology, thanks to the antioxidant and antimicrobial properties of PCs. The goal of this work was to optimize a process of PC adsorption / desorption on resin XAD16N, and to perform the life cycle assessment (LCA) and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of the process. Adsorption tests were conducted at different velocities in a 1.8-m column packed with resin XAD16N. The optimal superficial velocity and retention time (2.78 m/h and 0.56 h) allowed the attainment of satisfactory performances in terms of resin operating capacity, PC adsorption yield, PC mass fraction in the sorbed product and specific antioxidant activity of the final product. Six consecutive adsorption / desorption cycles, operated with the same resin load, resulted in stable process performances. The LCA indicated that the environmental impact of the process could be markedly decreased through the addition of an anaerobic digestion step for the production of irrigation-quality water and fertilizers from the dephenolized OMW. The PC market price required for the generation of a positive business case resulted reasonable. The results indicate that the proposed PC adsorption/desorption technology, if integrated with an anaerobic digestion step, represents a promising solution for the treatment and valorisation of OMW, a major agro-industrial waste in Mediterranean countries. This dataset contains the data underlying the following publication: Continuous flow adsorption of phenolic compounds from olive mill wastewater with resin XAD16N: process optimization, life cycle assessment and cost-benefit analysis.


Background: Acute kidney injury (AKI) can happen due to different factors such as anemia. Packed cell (PC) transfusion is an important cause of AKI occurrence. The aim of the study is to investigate whether appropriate blood component (BC) therapy can reduce blood transfusion and it would result in AKI decreasing. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cohort study of 1388 patients who underwent cardiac surgery in one university hospital. A serum creatinine higher than 2 mg/dl, renal disease history, renal replacement therapy (chronic dialysis) were our exclusion criteria. Results: From our 1088 samples, 701 (64.43%) patients had normal kidney function, 277 (25.45%) were in the AKI-1 group, 84 (7.72%) had an AKI-2 function, and the rest of patients were classified as end stage. A mean of more than three PC units were transfused for the second and third stage of AKI, which was significantly higher than other AKI groups (P = 0.009); this higher demand of blood product was also true about the fresh frozen plasma, platelet, and fibrinogen. However, there were no needs of fibrinogen in the patients with normal kidney function. The cardiopulmonary bypass time had an average of 142 ± 24.12, which obviously was higher than other groups (P = 0.032). Total mortality rate was 14 out of 1088 (1.28%), and expiration among the AKI stages 2 and 3 was meaningfully (P = 0.001) more than the other groups. Conclusion: A more occurrence of AKI reported for the patients who have taken more units of blood. However, BC indicated to be safer for compensating blood loss because of low AKI occurrence among our patients.


My aim in this article is to frame Brook more clearly against historical parameters that affected the understanding and practice of theatre from the 1960s and to reassess to what extent his multiculturalism looks different from a twenty-first-century perspective. Brook's work up to and beyond The Mahabharata occurs in the context of post-1960 developments and attitudes to science, spirituality, aesthetics and society. During the same period, there are major developments in stage languages and embodied practices. These dimensions manifest pragmatically as a specific set of adaptations of what performers do, of the nature of the relationship between performers and receivers, and of the understanding of the nature and function of theatre and performance. The article looks at Brook's focus on the reception of his work and on what he conceived as the role of theatre in providing 'extended' experience; and at aspects of the practice of Brook and Barba with actors, which work around reduction and interruption and aim to put them in contact with the initial phases of production. It suggests that this work specifically targets the zone 'beyond' acculturation and habitus, verbal and physical. The article also revisits concerns, largely articulated by Rustom Bharucha, about the sociopolitical and economic parameters of Brook's work in India.


The electrical conductivity of milk is an indirect method of mastitis diagnosis and can be used as selection criterion in breeding programs to obtain resistant animals to infection. For the present study data from 9,302 milk electrical conductivity measurements in the morning (ECM), from 1,129 Holstein cows in first lactation, calving between 2001 and 2011, belonging to eight herds in the Southeast of Brazil, obtained from automated milking equipment WESTFALIA® with system management "Dairyplan" was utilized. Classes of ECM were formed at weekly intervals, representing a total of 42 classes. The model included direct additive genetic, permanent environmental and residual effects as random and the fixed effects of contemporary group (herd - year and season of the control), age at calving as a covariate (linear and quadratic). Mean trends were modeled by an orthogonal Legendre polynomial with three coefficients of days in milk. The residual variance was considered homogeneous throughout lactation. Variance components were estimated by restricted maximum likelihood method (REML), using the statistical package Wombat (Meyer, 2006). The mean and standard deviation of the electrical conductivity of milk were 4.799 ± 0.543 ms/cm. The heritability for ECM were increased from the beginning to the middle of lactation (154 days), when it reached the maximum value (0.44), decreasing thereafter and reaching its minimum value at 300 days (0.17). Genetic correlations between the ECM at different periods of lactation were high and positive across the course of lactation, ranging from 0.73 to 0.99. It was observed that the correlation estimates were considerably lower when compared to the ECM 300 days with those of other periods. The data suggest that significant gains can be obtained via selection when using the ECM as selection criterion aimed at resistance to mastitis. It was verified also, that the selection for this trait in the early period of lactation, to increase resistance to mastitis would be more efficient than in other periods Moreover, the heritabilities were higher in this period. The estimates of genetic correlations were high throughout lactation.


Objectives: To determine the prevalence of overweight and obesity, as well as socio-demographic risk factors associated with childhood overweight and obesity in the Stellenbosch area, Western Cape province.

Design: A cross-sectional, comparison study was conducted.

Setting and subjects: A representative group of 638 children (aged 6-13 years) attending three randomly selected Stellenbosch primary schools. An additional school was selected for the pilot study. In the screening (first) phase, children were weighed and measured to calculate body mass index using international obesity task force guidelines to determine the prevalence of overweight and obesity. For the comparison (second) phase of the study, only 24 overweight and obese children and 21 children of normal weight (comparison group) (n = 45) were included.

Outcome measures: Socio-demographic and eating behaviour data were collected using a structured questionnaire and compared between the overweight and obese group and the comparison group (normal weight) to identify associated risk factors.

Results: The prevalence of overweight and obesity was 13%, of which 9% (n = 57) were overweight and 4% (n = 27) obese in the screening phase. In the comparison phase, socio-economic factors, such as maternal employment hours (p-value = 0.0462); family characteristics, such as the number of children in the household (p-value = 0.0231); and time spent participating in sport (p-value = 0.0450); were significantly associated with overweight or obesity.

Conclusion: Preventative initiatives should proactively promote healthy eating behaviour and physical activity in children at an early age, based on previous research, particularly in girls. Involving families and schools in these initiatives is recommended, as well as a national childhood obesity monitoring system to identify children at risk, and tracking childhood obesity trends to guide evidence-based interventions to tackle this growing public health issue.


This article gives a survey of the emblematic Estonian poet, theologian and scholar Uku Masing's (1909– 1985) known poetry translations. The object is not a poetics of translation or an analysis of language, but an overview of the texts of poetry Masing translated: the time of publication, political influences on publishing, and the public reception or the lack of it. The focus is on the choices and interests of Masing as a translator, as well as the influence of society on which texts he translated. Masing started translating in the 1920s; by the end of the 1930s, he was known both as a theologian and poet, as well as a translator. Just before the beginning of the Soviet regime, two very important translations by Masing were published: Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali and The Gardener, and a new translation of the Bible (Masing was one of three translators). In the Soviet era, Masing translated constantly from material that interested him and that was available to him (the poetry of Shanfara, Omar Khayyam, Matsuo Basho, Louise Labe, Tagore et al.). As might be expected, from the standpoint of publication, the Stalinist period was Masing's least productive period as a translator: in Estonia only one excerpt was published in a school textbook and without the name of the translator; a few new editions of Tagore's prose poems were published in exile. From the 1960s on, as controls on society relaxed, Masing's name as a translator returned little by little to the public eye. At that time, Masing was in greater favour as a translator than he was as a poet; this was the case for many other translators who were also poets. In the 1960s, many different poetry translations by Masing appeared along with commentary by the translator; reviews were also published. The mid–1970s was also an influential period, when the new editions of Tagore's prose poetry collections The Gardener and Gitanjali appeared; the impact of these books persisted long after publication. The real "(re)discovering" and (re)publishing of Masing's works (among them translations) began some years after his death, in 1988 with the political liberation of Estonia, and continues to the present day. We can distinguish between those translations that Masing carried out for his own interest (works by Tagore, Shanfara, Omar Khayyam, Matsuo Basho, Louise Labe et al.) and those that were commissioned, such as contributions to anthologies (Anthology of Greek Literature, Anthology of Roman Literature and Anthology of Renaissance Literature). Through his translations, Masing was also searching for something reflected in his own poetry and discussed in his essays. Masing translated poetry from English, German, French, Italian, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Sumerian, Syrian, Coptic and Tigre. The list can perhaps be expanded by a few more entries. The cultures and eras that are the source of the translated texts also form a variegated and extensive tapestry, including ancient Sumer, the Old Testament world, the classical culture of antiquity, the Italian and French Renaissance, and Japanese, Persian and Arabic poetry. In the case of a number of translations, Masing was a trailblazer, since traditions of translation from the given languages and cultures were lacking altogether in Estonia. As a translator, Masing represented the rare combination of scholar (theologian and linguist) and poet, which is the key to his meticulousness in translation, as well as his fluid and creative use of language.


We survey the theoretical literature on pollution-reducing and resource-saving technological progress, differentiating between microeconomic partial equilibrium models and endogenous growth models. The microeconomic models serve to investigate incentives to develop and adopt environmentally friendlier technologies under different policy tools, commitment strategies and market structures. Here price-based instruments usually outperform command and control policies. In most growth models a trade-off between growth rates and environmental quality occurs. Moreover, typically three market imperfections arise, market power for new products, R&D spillovers and pollution. These imperfections can be mitigated by subsidies on output and R&D effort, and taxes on emissions.


Many children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) suffer from gastrointestinal problems such as diarrhoea, constipation and abdominal pain. Such symptoms may be due to a disruption of the indigenous gut microbiota promoting the overgrowth of potentially pathogenic micro-organisms. These observations have stimulated investigations into possible abnormalities of intestinal microbiota in autistic patients. The purpose of the present study was to determine if a relationship exists between ASD severity (mild – severe) and GI microbial populations. The faecal microbiota of 22 male and 6 female participants with ASDs (aged 7 ± 6 years) were analyzed by standard microbial culture methods and compared within-group (based on ASD severity) and with a standard laboratory reference range. Comparisons between children with mild ASD and those with moderate to severe ASD, as well as comparisons to a neurotypical control group previously reported, revealed that no significant differences appear to exist in the composition of the gut microbiota. Nevertheless, examination of each individual's gut microbial composition showed 10 cases of unusual findings witch means 1out of 3 cases have unusual microbiota. Our data do not support consistent GI microbial abnormalities in ASD children, but the findings do suggest that aberrations may be found in a minority subset of ASD children. Further studies are required to determine the possible association between the microbiota and gastrointestinal dysfunctions in a subset of children with both ASD and gastro-intestinal problems.


Called "the queen of vegetables" by some gourmets because of its strong taste, onion is a highly consumed vegetable which is appreciated worldwide. Onion brings a significant contribution of vitamins and minerals when used in human food.Onions are perishable and cannot be long-term stored under normal conditions. Post-harvest losses are estimated from 18 to 25% depending on the storage system (refrigeration, mechanical ventilation, etc.).Onion dehydration is a solution to reduce losses and expenses for storage and transportation, ensuring and increasing shelf life.The use of the existing dehydration devices has created quality problems regarding color, texture and taste.Our research aimed to establish optimal dehydration conditions recommended for production use.To improve the drying process and to achieve a quality product, studies were performed on a laboratory dehydration device. The studies included the effect of drying temperature and air velocity, the thickness of onion slices and drying time regarding the sensorial qualities and rehydration characteristics.


Abnormal uterine bleeding is the common presenting complains in the Gynaecology outpatient department in all age groups. Histopathological evaluation of the endometrial samples plays a significant role in the diagnosis of abnormal uterine bleeding. The study is planned to evaluate the pathological conditions in endometrium of the patients having abnormal uterine bleeding and its correlation with clinical condition. The 50 women's having age from 20-60 history of abnormal uterine bleeding was studied. Endometrial tissue collected by sampling procedure such as Dilatation and Curettage (D&C),endometrial biopsies had been sent to the pathology lab for evaluation. The histopathological study of the endometrium showed Proliferative Endometrium as prominent histopathological pattern in 18 patients. Secretory Phase was seen in 12 womens, Endometrial Hyperplasia is seen in 8, Menstrual Phase observed in 3 patients. Atrophic Endometrium was followed in 7 patients followed by Endometrial Metaplasia in 2 patients.


Meteorological records recorded at the Observatory, Hobart Town. Includes theleafing, flowering and fruiting of a few standard plants in the Royal Society's Gardens during the month of December 1865-1866.
No December of the previous eight years had meteorological conditions so
favorable to health and life as the present mouth presents ln fact, for five
or six years past, the character of December weather has in many respects
altered for the better. The mean temperature has fallen lower, and the
extremes have not been so great. Rain, particularly, has been more abundant.
By the Royal-Observatory records for the 14 years, 1841 to 1854, the average
rainfall in December was less than an inch i.e., ·92 of an inch, and the
wettest year of the whole, 1848, haod only 2.36 inches. In the succeeding six
years the mean rose to l·73 inches, the maximum year, 1855, having a fall of
2·73 inches; while in the last five years, 1861 to 1865, the average has risen
to all but 4 inches; the maximum, 1863, being 7·60 inches, the minimum, 1862,
1.73 inches. The latter alone being close upon half an inch above the 20
years' mean of the adopted standard. The purity of the air, also, as indicated
by the ozouometer, has during the last four years, greatly exceeded the first
four years, 1857 to 1861 of the series of observations. By the mortuary table
it will he seen that the present December had a mortality considerably less than
any of the previous eight years, and one third less than the average of the
whole.


The purpose of this study is to learn more about the consumers' interaction with companies over different channels. It is conducted from a consumer's point of view, but the insights gained through this study will help companies to design and build better services. In this context, the concepts of User Experience, cross-channel and Customer Experience provide a theoretical framework. The new approach in this study is to combine the three concepts, their framing and their identified design elements. This conceptual framing contains a list of design elements with a positive influence on the service experience. However, the conceptual framing provides no answers on how to apply these design elements. In the methodology part, possible approaches are discussed. The heuristic evaluation used in the two case studies is a method that takes all three concepts from the theoretical framework into account. With the first heuristic, it is possible to analyze single touchpoints like User Experience demands. The following heuristics are used within a cross-channel context. Finally, the last heuristic is responsible for the holistic perspective from Customer Experience. The case studies are then conducted to verify the applicability of the design elements with the heuristic evaluation. The findings of the study were positive and suggest that the heuristic evaluation is a suitable method to analyze a company's service offerings. Additionally, the case studies lead to results which are useful for the two companies (Migros and Nestlé). The overall conclusion of this study is that the three concepts complement each other very well. User Experience is responsible for well designed touchpoints. Cross-channel expands the perspective on ecosystems and evaluates how the touchpoints operate together. Finally, Customer Experience analyzes the whole company and its touchpoints on a heuristic perspective.


Part of the Jones & Bartlett Learning Information Systems Security and Assurance Series Revised and updated to address the many changes in this evolving field, the Second Edition of Legal Issues in Information Security addresses the area where law and information security concerns intersect. Information systems security and legal compliance are now required to protect critical governmental and corporate infrastructure, intellectual property created by individuals and organizations alike, and information that individuals believe should be protected from unreasonable intrusion. Organizations must build numerous information security and privacy responses into their daily operations to protect the business itself, fully meet legal requirements, and to meet the expectations of employees and customers. Instructor Materials for Legal Issues in Information Security include: PowerPoint Lecture Slides Instructor's Guide Sample Course Syllabus Quiz & Exam Questions Case Scenarios/Handouts New to the Second Edition: Includes discussions of amendments in several relevant federal and state laws and regulations since 2011 Reviews relevant court decisions that have come to light since the publication of the first edition Includes numerous information security data breaches highlighting new vulnerabilities


This paper examines the relationship between the dynamics of parent-youth living arrangements and labor market outcomes for youths who do not go to college in the United States. The data come from a newly constructed panel data set based on retrospective monthly coresidence questions in the NLSY97. This is the first data set containing information on the labor market circumstances of youths at the time of movements in and out of the parental home. Based on estimates from duration models that allow for unobserved heterogeneity, I find that moving from employment to non-employment increases the hazard of moving back home in a given month by 64% for males and 71% for females. These results suggest that labor market factors play an important role in determining the dynamics of parent-youth living arrangements and that coresidence may be an important way in which insurance against labor market shocks takes place within the family.


Proteins are important targets in cancer research because malignancy is associated with defects in cell protein machinery. Protein profiling is an emerging independent subspecialty of proteomics that is rapidly expanding and providing unprecedented insight into biological events. Quantitative assessment of protein levels in hematologic malignancies seeks a comprehensive understanding of leukemiaassociated protein patterns for use in aiding diagnosis, follow-up treatment, and the prediction of clinical outcomes. Many recently developed high-throughput proteomic methods can be applied to protein profiling. Herein the importance of protein profiling, its exploitation in leukemia research, and its clinical usefulness in the treatment and diagnosis of various cancer types, and techniques for determining changes in protein profiling are reviewed. (Turk J Hematol 2011; 28: 1-14)


This study demonstrated the use of a pressurized mechanical refining system for the continuous steam explosion pretreatment of wheat straw. Wheat straw was first impregnated with either dilute acid (0.5% sulfuric acid) or water and then steam exploded in an Andritz pressurized refiner. The effect of a range of pretreatment conditions, including refining retention time and steam pressure/temperature on the resulting substrate composition and hydrolysability as well as overall sugars yield was investigated. For autohydrolysis, the optimum conditions, 198 oC/6 min gave an enzymatic hydrolysis yield of 93.3% and an overall glucose yield of 85.8%, while 198 oC/4 min gave an enzymatic hydrolysis yield of 88.7% and overall glucose yield of 88.4%. Longer retention time increased the enzymatic hydrolysability but reduced the overall glucose yield owing to the degradation reaction during pretreatment. For acid pretreatment, the most favourable condition for enzymatic hydrolysis and overall glucose yield coincided at 178 oC /6 min.


Squaramides are presented as modular, easy to optimize, and effective catalysts for the conversion of epoxides and carbon dioxide into cyclic organic carbonates (COCs). The catalytic potential of these squaramides, in combination with a suitable halide nucleophile, is particularly noted when internal epoxides are examined as substrates, and their transformation into disubstituted COCs marks a rare case of an effective organocatalyst for these challenging conversions. Control experiments support the mechanistic view that the squaramides are predominantly involved in the stabilization of intermediate oxo and carbonato anions which, after their formation, are able to displace a bromide nucleophile from an initially formed 1:1 assembly comprising the squaramide host.


Background: Rapid detection of carbapenem resistant bacteria, in particular, members of the Enterobacteriaceae family (CRE), is of utmost importance for the management of infected or colonized patients. Methods: Three carbapenems ; meropenem, imipenem and ertapenem, with two different concentrations (0.5 m g/ml and 1.0 m g/ml), were impregnated in MacConkey agar . The carbapenem impregnated MacConkey agar plates; ([Mac-Mem], [Mac-Imp] and [Mac-Ert]), were then evaluated for the detection of carbapenem resistant Gram-negative bacteria in particular the bla KPC producing Enterobacteriaceae . The Limit of Detection (LOD) of the plates was determined after counting the colonies that grew on the plates after serial logarithmic dilutions of ten. Carbapenem resistant Gram-negative bacteria were prepared in normal saline, inoculated on the different plates and incubated at 35 o C for 18-24 hours. The specificity and the shelf-life of the plates were determined by challenging the plates with six ESBL positive members of the Enterobacteriaceae family ( K. pneumoniae, Salmonella species, Shigella species, E. coli , Proteus species and Citrobacter species ) and one Enterobacter species with the bla AmpC phenotype . Finally, the MacConkey agar plates impregnated with 0.5 m g/ml meropenem were further challenged by incorporating them in the routine Caritas Baby Hospital active surveillance program for the detection of carbapenem resistant bacteria. Results: Of the three carbapenems impregnated plates, Mac-Ert plates gave the lowest number of colony forming units (CFU's) detected regardless of the concentration of the antibiotic used. This was followed by the Mac-Mem plates which showed an LOD of less than 200 CFU's for most of the bla KPC positive bacteria tested at both antibiotic concentrations. The worst performance was noted for the Mac-Imp plate regardless of the antibiotic concentration used as a number of carbapenem resistant bacterial strains failed to grow on the plate. The Mac-Mem plates showed the best specificity as none of the ESBL and bla AmpC positive isolates grew on the plates at either antibiotic concentration tested after 18-24hours incubation in ambient air at 35 o C. On the other hand, the Mac-Ert plates failed to inhibit the growth of the Citrobacter species tested at both antibiotic concentrations and the Proteus species tested at the 0.5µg/ml antibiotic concentration. The Mac-Imp plates showed poor specificity as both concentrations failed to inhibit the growth of the Proteus , Enterobacter and Citrobacter species evaluated after 18-24 hours incubation in ambient air at 35 o C. Of all the plates tested, the 0.5 µg/ml Mac-Mem agar had the best shelf-life of up to one month at 4-8 o C. Conclusions: The high specificity and the good selectivity, in addition to the long shelf-life allowed the 0.5µg/ml Mac-Mem agar to be used as a cost effective selective medium for the isolation of carbapenem resistant Gram-negative bacteria, in particular the bla KPC producing members of the Enterobacteriaceae family.


Surveys in user context modeling have shown that the semantic web is one of
the promising approach to represent and structure the contextual information captured
from user's surrounding environment in a context-aware application. A benefit of
using semantic web language is that it enables application to reason user contextual
information in order to get the knowledge of user's behavior. However, regarding its
notation format, semantic web is suitable for implementation level or to be consumed
by application run-time.
Context-aware application is a part of distributed computing system. In distributed
computing system, the language used for specification should be distinguished from
the implementation / run-time purpose. This is known as separation of modeling language.
Regarding the context-aware application, for those who are concerned with
specification of context modeling, the language that is used for specification should
also be distinguished from the implementation one.
This thesis aims at proposing the use of formal specification technique to develop
a generic context ontology model of user's behavior at the Computer and Information
Sciences Department, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS. Initially, the context ontology
was written in OWL semantic web language. The further process is mapping onto
a formal specification language, i.e. onto Z notation. As a result, specification of context
ontology and its consistency checking have been developed and verified beyond
the semantic web language environment. An inconsistency of context model has been
detected during the verification of Z model, which cannot be revealed by current OWL
DL reasoner.
The context-aware designers might benefit from the formal specification of context
ontology, where the designers could fully use formal verification technique to check
the correctness of context ontology. Thus, the modeling approach in this thesis has
shown that it could complement the context ontology development process, where the
checking and refinement are performed beyond the semantic web reasoner


The gender quota for supervisory boards is continuing to show its impact: the proportion of women on the supervisory boards of the 200 highest-performing companies in Germany increased by over two percentage points to 27 percent the past year. In the 100 largest companies, it increased by over three percentage points to 28 percent. However, there are now indications that the companies are only doing the bare minimum, as the proportion of women in the group of the 30 largest DAX companies—many of which have already reached the minimum of 30 percent women—has stagnated at one-third. Additionally, it is becoming more and more apparent that the gender quota does not have the impact hoped for on executive boards, at least not in the short term. Even though the ten percent mark was reached for the first time in the top 100 companies, most development is still taking place at a snail's pace. It is still up to companies to stymie demands for binding board member quotas. To do this, however, they must act as quickly as possible and consistently fill all hierarchical levels, especially beneath the board, with more women in order to increase the pool of potential female board members.


System performance of optical fiber transmission in the presence of polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) can be improved by various types of electronic equalizers, which will be discussed in this paper. After a brief review of equalization and detection theory, equalizer concepts are adapted to the nonlinear optical channel and the architecture is optimized for high bit rate applications. Simulation results accounting for implementation losses in state-of-the-art technologies and realistic transmission conditions indicate that these concepts provide adequate solutions for equalization in lightwave transmission systems.


The efficacy of fingerlings of black molly, Poecilia sphenops to four types of formulated feeds containing different proportions of animal protein (fish meal, prawn meal and plankton meal) was evaluated in comparison with a commercially available pellet feed. Diet I was prepared in combination with fish meal and prawn meal, Diet II was prepared in combination with fish meal and plankton meal. Diet III and diet IV were prepared only with fish meal and plankton meal respectively. In 35 days feeding experiment, length gain (cm) of P. sphenops with Diet I, Diet II, Diet III , Diet IV and commercial diet was 0.47, 0.58, 0.74, 0.4 and 0.75cm, respectively while weight gain (g) was 0.12, 0.24, 0.25, 0.18 and 0.35 g, respectively. Specific growth rate of experimental diets ranged between 0.34 and 1.0 while that of commercial diet was 0.51. Higher mortality was recorded in commercial pellet feed (66.67%) compared to experimental diets (0 to 46.67%). Growth and development of P. sphenops suggest all the diets supported normal growth, nevertheless variation in the growth performance with different diets might be due to the difference in the composition of the macro-nutrient of these diets. In view of higher cost and mortality rate of commercial pellet feed, experimental diets could be used in commercial production of molly fish.


Mobile telecommunications networks based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology promise faster throughput to their users. LTE networks are however susceptible to a phenomenon known as inter-cell interference which can greatly reduce the throughput of the network causing unacceptable degradation of performance for cell edge users. A number of approaches to mitigating or minimising inter-cell interference have been presented in the literature such as randomisation, cancellation and coordination. The possibility of coordination between network nodes in an LTE network is made possible through the introduction of the X2 network link. This thesis explores approaches to reducing the effect of inter-cell interference on the throughput of LTE networks by using the X2 link to coordinate the scheduling of radio resources. Three approaches to the reduction of inter-cell interference were developed. Localised organisation is a centralised scheme in which a scheduler is optimised by a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to reduce interference. Networked organisation makes use of the X2 communications link to enable the network nodes to exchange scheduling information in a way that lowers the level of interference across the whole network. Finally a more distributed and de-centralised approach is taken in which each of the network nodes optimises its own scheduling in coordination with its neighbours. An LTE network simulator was built to allow for experimental comparison between these techniques and a number of existing approaches and to serve as a test bed for future algorithm development. These approaches were found to significantly improve the throughput of the cell edge users who were most affected by intereference. In particular the networked aspect of these approaches yielded the best initial results showing clear improvement over the existing state of the art. The distributed approach shows significant promise given further development.


Abstract Context: Tobacco use has been identified as the primary preventable cause of premature deaths and disability, yet results of a previous survey show that undergraduate allopathic medical schools do not adequately address this topic. Objective: To assess the content and extent of tobacco education and intervention skills in osteopathic medical schools' curricula. Design: A mailed survey with 19 questions similar to one used for allopathic medical schools. Setting: Nineteen osteopathic medical schools. Participants: Responses were obtained from each associate dean for medical education or representative. Main Outcome Measures: Curriculum in seven basic science and six clinical science content areas (elective or required), hours of tobacco use intervention education, and resource materials used to design curricula. Results: Average number of total content areas covered was 10.2 (6 ± 1.6 basic science areas, 4.17 ± 1.54 clinical areas) with a range of 2 to 13. Nine (47%) schools reported covering all seven basic science areas, and one school reported covering none. Eleven (64.7%) of seventeen schools reported less than 3 hours of training in tobacco dependence treatment techniques during all 4 years. Sixty percent of schools do not require clinical training in smoking cessation techniques. Thirty-six percent require clinical training in an artificial setting without patients. None of the schools require clinical training with live patients. The schools founded after 1920 covered an average of almost twice as many content areas as those founded before 1920 (11.1 vs 6.6; P = .018). Conclusions: Most US osteopathic medical school graduates are not being adequately educated to treat nicotine dependence as recommended by the National Cancer Institute expert panel and the Public Health Service Clinical Practice Guideline. Specifically, osteopathic medical education is deficient in clinical nicotine dependence treatment during the third and fourth years.


This forum reflects upon the current state of research on post-conflict natural resource management. It identifies two dominant perspectives on environmental peacebuilding in the literature: one focused on environmental cooperation, the other on resource risk. Both perspectives share a concern for the sustainable management of natural resources in post-conflict settings and prescribe environmental cooperation at large as a means to foster peace and stability. Yet both perspectives also feature notable differences: The cooperation perspective is driven by a faith in the potential of environmental cooperation to contribute to long-term peace through spillover effects. The resource risk perspective, however, recognizes that resource-induced instability may arise after intrastate conflict; stressing the need to mitigate instability by implementing environmental cooperation initiatives. Despite the significant contributions of both perspectives, neither has provided any cohesive theoretical understanding of environmental peacebuilding. This article suggests a timely revision of the research agenda to address this gap.


The aim of this article is to argue that the evident exchange of information on performance (and its supply, demand and use) should be regarded as a symptom of a new governmental regime that installs less evident power relations. Educational policy in Flanders (Belgium), and in particular the need for feedback information from the Flemish government, will be used as a case to describe this regime. Based upon the analytical framework of 'governmentality' (Foucault), the article focuses on the 'governmentalization' of Europe and Flanders that accompanies the need for feedback information. The main result of the analysis of European and Flemish policy documents can be summarized as follows: government or the 'conduct of conduct' currently takes the form of 'feedback on performance'. This means that the strategy of the governmental regime is to secure an optimal performance for each and all (member states, schools), and acts upon the 'need for feedback' and 'will to learn' of the actors involved. On the basis of these findings, the article introduces in conclusion the notion 'synopticon' in order to grasp the exercise of power in 'feedback on performance'.


The newest work from one of the most pre-eminent voices writing in the legal/political arena today, this important book presents a new conception of the relationship between free markets and social justice. The work begins with foundations--the appropriate role of existing "preferences," the importance of social norms, the question whether human goods are commensurable, and issues of distributional equity. Continuing with rights, the work shows that markets have only a partial but instrumental role in the protection of rights. The book concludes with a discussion on regulation, developing approaches that would promote both economic and democratic goals, especially in the context of risks to life and health. Free Markets and Social Justice develops seven basic themes during its discussion: the myth of laissez-faire; preference formation and social norms; the contextual character of choice; the importance of fair distribution; the diversity of human goods; how law can shape preferences; and the puzzles of human rationality. As the latest word from an internationally-renowned writer, this work will raise a number of important questions about economic analysis of law in its conventional form.


This brief presents new modeling and identification strategies to address many difficulties in the identification of anesthesia dynamics. The most commonly used models for the effect of muscle relaxants during general anesthesia comprise a high number (greater than eight) of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic parameters. The main issue concerning the neuromuscular blockade system identification is that, in the clinical practice, the input signals (drug dose profiles to be administered to the patients) vary too little to provide a sufficient excitation of the system. The limited amount of measurement data also indicates a need for new identification strategies. A new single-input single-output Wiener model with two parameters is hence proposed to model the effect of atracurium. An extended Kalman filter approach is used to perform the online identification of the system parameters. This approach outperforms many conventional identification strategies, and shows good results regarding parameter identification and measured signal tracking, when evaluated on a large patient database. The new method proved to be adequate for the description of the system, even with the poor input signal excitation and the few measured data samples present in this application. It turns out that the method is of general validity for the identification of drug dynamics in the human body.


Numerical modelling of wave energy converters (WECs) can provide insights into device performance at an early stage and help de-risk projects before progressing to more advanced, costlier stages of development. Several software packages have been made available for this purpose in recent years. However, the lack of design convergence in the wave energy industry, with its wide range of working principles and mechanisms, means that many developers have been unable use these tools. Here we show that some limitations can be overcome by using an alternative multibody dynamics approach. A third party multibody dynamics code based on the Lagrange multiplier method, Hotint, has been coupled to Innosea's existing WEC modelling code, InWave, and verified using existing test cases. This has made the modelling of many new types of mechanisms possible – include closed mechanical loops. KeywordsInWave, Multibody Dynamics, WEC Simulation


As a dance artist, educator and Feldenkrais practitioner I am committed to facilitating somatically oriented teaching and learning environments in professional dance education. This article illuminates action research conducted in the form of a case study with Bachelor of Arts students in a conservatory-modelled program in Germany. Embedded in a socio-constructivist epistemology the study sought to make the synergetic relationship between the Feldenkrais Method and contemporary dance technique accessible for the students in ways to support the development of their physical competencies, personal agency, self-regulative and self-reflective processes. In addition, the study's methods investigated how a collective somatic sensibility might enable the dancers to navigate more effectively within the interplay of contextualization and shared responsibility in the learning environment. The inductive methodology of grounded theory was used for the collection, evaluation and interpretation of the data. Reviewing the data four categories emerged that bring different and interrelated perspectives to the complex processes of situational learning: Environment, Reflection; Personal Agency, and Transferability. This paper locates the research in the context of German vocational education, identifies its methodological and pedagogical underpinnings and outlines the setting, participant group, and the planning and operationalization of the study. Included is a description of the methods of data capture, its analysis and a critical reflection of the processes.


Purpose To report the ocular characteristics and the presence of viral RNA of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in conjunctival swab specimens in a patient with confirmed 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Participant and methods A 30-year-old man with confirmed COVID-19 and bilateral acute conjunctivitis which occurred 13 days after illness onset. Based on detailed ophthalmic examination, reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) was performed to detect SARS-CoV-2 virus in conjunctival swabs. The ocular characteristics, presence of viral RNA and viral dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 in the conjunctival specimens were evaluated. Results Slit lamp examination showed bilateral acute follicular conjunctivitis. RT-PCR assay demonstrated the presence of viral RNA in conjunctival specimen 13 days after onset (cycle threshold value: 31). The conjunctival swab specimens remained positive for SARS-CoV-2 on 14 and 17 days after onset. On day 19, RT-PCR result was negative for SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion SARS-CoV-2 is capable of causing ocular complications such as viral conjunctivitis in the middle phase of illness. Precautionary measures are recommended when examining infected patients throughout the clinical course of the infection. However, conjunctival sampling might not be useful for early diagnosis because the virus may not appear initially in the conjunctiva.


Claspin is a large, acidic, DNA binding protein required for the ATR mediated activation of Chk1 in response to DNA replication stress. Upon checkpoint activation Claspin is phosphorylated which allows binding to Chk1. This binding in turn promotes the phosphorylation and activation of Chk1 by ATR. Although these findings have led to the designation of Claspin as a mediator protein in the activation of Chk1, the broader biological functions of Claspin have not been extensively explored at the cellular level, in part due to the lack of a genetically tractable system in which to study Claspin function.

The purpose of this study was to use reverse genetics in order to generate a Claspin knock-out cell line with which study Claspin function at the cellular level. This was to be achieved by exploiting the recombinogenic vertebrate DT40 cell line, a pre B-cell line of chicken origin. The chicken homologue of Claspin was successfully isolated and characterised. The chicken Claspin orthologue shares 56% identity with human Claspin and the overall domain structure of Claspin appears to be conserved based on sequence comparison. This information facilitated the construction of gene targeting vectors to disrupt Claspin expression in the DT40 cell line. One allele of Claspin was successfully targeted. Despite multiple attempts at disrupting the remaining allele homozygous Claspin knock-out cells were not obtained. This strongly indicates that Claspin is essential for the viability of DT40 cells. In order to circumvent this lethality, efforts were made to conditionally express Claspin in the hemizygous background to facilitate the generation of a conditional knock-out cell line. These efforts proved unsuccessful.

Other studies using a polyclonal antibody raised against Claspin investigated phosphorylation of the protein under various stress conditions. Data is presented which shows that phosphorylation of Claspin in response to replication stress is dependent on Chk1 kinase activity. However results from an in vitro kinase assay suggest that Chk1 itself does not directly phosphorylate Claspin. In addition it is also shown that Claspin is phosphorylated following inhibition of protein synthesis. Using specific kinase inhibitors against p38, JNK and mTOR, protein kinases known to be activated during protein synthesis inhibition, the involvement of these kinases in mediating this response was ruled out. The significance of this observation is yet to be determined.

Overall the work presented here provides evidence that a conditional DT40 knock-out cell line will be a valuable tool in revealing novel functions of Claspin once a successful rescue of lethality is achieved.


We consider a combinatorial optimization problem in passive In-Building Distributed Antenna Systems (IB-DAS) deployment for indoor mobile broadband service. These systems have a tree topology, in which a central base station is connected to a number of antennas located at tree leaves via cables represented by the tree edges. Each inner node corresponds to a power equipment, of which the available types differ in the number of output ports and/or by power gain at the ports. This paper focuses on the equipment selection problem that amounts to, for a given passive DAS tree topology, selecting a power equipment type for each inner node and assigning the outgoing edges of the node to the equipment ports. The performance metric is the power deviation at the antennas from the target values. We consider as objective function the minimization of either the total or the largest power deviation over all antennas. Our contributions are the development of exact pseudo-polynomial time algorithms and (additive) fully-polynomial time approximation schemes for both objectives. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the algorithms. We also extend some results to account for equipment cost.


Background: This questionnaire study aims to assess the precise knowledge of dental radiography along with cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) in dental fraternity. Materials and Methods: The data in questionnaire were completely filled by 500 participants including Master of Dental Surgery and Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) working as faculty and/or general practitioners, interns, and postgraduates. It consisted of multiple choice questions on CBCT. Overall assessment of answers obtained for each part was analyzed category-wise, specialty-wise, and qualification-wise. Results: A definite gap in knowledge of CBCT applications exists between different categories of dental specialists. Dental students should be provided with appropriate CBCT education supported by practical experience and guidance of oral medicine and maxillofacial radiologists. It is also recommended that all the CBCT scans should be performed under the guidance of an oral radiologist and the interpretation of these scans should be done by a trained oral and maxillofacial radiologist only. Conclusion: From the study it is evident dental practices are positively affected by high-end quality practice. More efforts for spreading awareness about this imaging modality, through inclusion of CBCT in curriculum of BDS and through lectures/Continuing Dental Education CDEs, should be undertaken to ensure better knowledge among dentists.


Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most prevalent malignancy and the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. More effective cures for HCC patients are urgently needed, of which gene therapy is among those with the most potential. We previously developed a novel gene carrier by conjugating low molecular weight chitosan with TAT (transactivator of transcription) peptide and LHRH (luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone) analog, with the resultant TAT-LHRH-chitosan conjugate (TLC) demonstrating high selectivity for hepatoma cells in vitro. However, it remains unclear whether TLC can deliver the genes to the target organs and tissues in vivo, which is one of the critical features determining their medical application potential. The current study further investigated the in vivo distribution of TLC/DNA nanoparticles (TLCDNPs) in the nude mice with subcutaneous hepatoma xenografts. It was found that TLCDNPs delayed the renal clearance of DNA and prolonged its circulation time as compared with CS/DNA complexes (CDNPs) and naked DNA, but failed to demonstrate enhanced accumulation of DNA in the hepatoma xenografts. The mechanisms regarding the failure of TLCDNPs' tumor targeting in the mice bearing subcutaneous hepatoma xenografts remain unclear and need to be further addressed. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part A: 104A: 2394-2400, 2016.


The study reported here is a research project aimed to examine the relationship between alternative approaches towards design teaching (structural or functional), and the students' mental modelling of the design process and the quality of their design process. The structural approach emphasizes the need for an ordered learning of the stages of the design process, while the functional approach emphasizes the teaching and study of design functions (rather than stages). 80 seventh graders, divided in two groups, were taught a unit on technological problem solving by either approach for fourteen classes (21 hours). Before, during and after the design process of a technological solution the students had to generate representations of this process and make portfolios representing their problem solving process. The results were analysed looking for: (a) The differences between the groups in the mental models which were constructed during the instruction process. (b) The differences between the groups in the quality of the process and the design functions implemented. Significant differences between the groups observed for many of the variables studied indicate that the functional approach represents a promising methodology for teaching design.


We have developed a transportable prototype designed for the treatment of raw domestic wastewater, human urine, human feces, and synthetic human waste analogues. After several hours of PV-powered electrochemical treatment, the turbid, black-water influent can be clarified with the elimination of the suspended particles along with the reduction or total elimination of the chemical oxygen demand (COD), total enteric coliform disinfection via in situ reactive chlorine species generation, and the elimination of measurable protein after 3 to 4 hours of PV-powered treatment. Our advanced prototype incorporates additional features such as a residual sludge handling unit, a hydrogen purification and filter system, a closed water reuse We have packaged our second-generation prototypes into modified shipping containers are ready for field testing in remote locations that lack traditional urban infrastructure.


We show that the spatial coherence of a partially incoherent light beam can be greatly enhanced through an energy-conserving interaction with an incoherent or a coherent dark spatial soliton. Computer simulations show that during this process a portion of the incoherent beam is trapped within the dark notch of the dark soliton, thus forming a sharp intensity spike. In this region the correlation length dramatically increases by at least 2 orders of magnitude.


Gradient-based meta-learning and hyperparameter optimization have seen significant progress recently, enabling practical end-to-end training of neural networks together with many hyperparameters. Nevertheless, existing approaches are relatively expensive as they need to compute second-order derivatives and store a longer computational graph. This cost prevents scaling them to larger network architectures. We present EvoGrad, a new approach to meta-learning that draws upon evolutionary techniques to more efficiently compute hypergradients. EvoGrad estimates hypergradient with respect to hyperparameters without calculating second-order gradients, or storing a longer computational graph, leading to significant improvements in efficiency. We evaluate EvoGrad on three substantial recent meta-learning applications, namely cross-domain few-shot learning with feature-wise transformations, noisy label learning with Meta-Weight-Net and low-resource cross-lingual learning with meta representation transformation. The results show that EvoGrad significantly improves efficiency and enables scaling meta-learning to bigger architectures such as from ResNet10 to ResNet34.


Since its first systematic description, multiple sclerosis has been associated with cognitive and behavioral symptoms. Among psychiatric syndromes, mood disorders are highly common. Herein we report a case of a manic episode following a multiple sclerosis relapse in a young male subject without past history of psychiatric illness. The patient's psychiatric symptoms influenced negatively his adhesion to treatment, possibly impacting his prognosis. Multiple sclerosis may be considered in the differential diagnosis of young adults presenting major psychiatric syndromes, including mania.


The geologic map of the Neogene Cabo de Gata volcanic zone is presented together with a comprehensive volcanic stratigraphy and structure based on logging, correlation and mapping. Volcanic rocks are interbedded with sedimentary rocks throughout the Cabo de Gata volcanic zone. The volcano-sedimentary succession of Cabo de Gata has been divided into formations according to lithology, age, composition and stratigraphic position. The contacts between sedimentary units and volcanic units and between formations are unconformities. Sedimentary units were deposited during periods of volcanic repose. The depositional environment of volcanism in Cabo de Gata is characterized as shallow-water submarine to emergent based on lithofacies of volcanic rocks and on fossil content and sedimentary structures of sedimentary rocks. The eruptive style in Cabo de Gata is dominantly effusive, although small-volume explosive eruptions due to magma-water interaction processes and to explosions of lava flow and domes complexes occurred.


The nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) pathway is a highly conserved surveillance mechanism that is present in all eukaryotes. It prevents the synthesis of truncated proteins by selectively degrading mRNAs harbouring premature termination codons (PTCs). The core NMD effectors were originally identified in genetic screens in Saccharomyces cerevisae and in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and subsequently by homology searches in other metazoans. A genome-wide RNAi screen in C. elegans resulted in the identification of two novel NMD genes that are essential for proper embryonic development. Their human orthologues, DHX34 and NAG/NBAS, are required for NMD in human cells. Here, we find that the zebrafish genome encodes orthologues of DHX34 and NAG/NBAS. We show that the morpholino-induced depletion of zebrafish Dhx34 and Nbas proteins results in severe developmental defects and reduced embryonic viability. We also found that Dhx34 and Nbas are required for degradation of PTC-containing mRNAs in zebrafish embryos. The phenotypes observed in both Dhx34 and Nbas morphants are similar to defects in Upf1, Smg-5- or Smg-6- depleted embryos, suggesting that these factors affect the same pathway and confirming that zebrafish embryogenesis requires an active NMD pathway.


Philo T. Farnsworth (1906 1971) has been called the "forgotten father of television." He grew up in Utah and southern Idaho, and was described as a genius by those who knew and worked with him. With only a high school education, Farnsworth drew his first television schematic for his high school teacher in Rigby, Idaho. Subsequent claims and litigation notwithstanding, he was the first to transmit a television image.Farnsworth filed ten patents between 1927 and 1929 for camera tubes (transmitting), circuitry, and the cathode ray tube (viewing). After his early years as an inventor in San Francisco, he worked as an engineer, doing battle with RCA in the 1930s over patent rights, formed the Farnsworth Television Company in the 1940s, and worked for IT&T after their purchase of the Farnsworth enterprises. Every television set sold utilized at least six of his basic patents.Because of endless legal wrangling with RCA over patent rights, he received very little financial reward for his television patents. Donald Godfrey examines the genius and the failures in the life of Philo Farnsworth as he struggled to be both inventor and entrepreneur."


The ongoing NHS project for the development of a UK-wide electronic health records service, also known as the 'Spine', raises many controversial issues and technical challenges concerning the security and confidentiality of patient-identifiable clinical data. As the system will need to be constantly adapted to comply with evolving legal requirements and guidelines, the Spine's authorisation policy should not be hard-coded into the system but rather be specified in a high-level, general-purpose, machine-enforceable policy language. We describe a complete authorisation policy for the Spine and related services, written for the trust management system Cassandra, and comprising 375 formal rules. The policy is based on the NHS's Output-based Specification (OBS) document and deals with all requirements concerning access control of patient-identifiable data, including legitimate relationships, patients restricting access, authenticated express consent, third-party consent, and workgroup management.


Aluminium nitride is a promising coating material for many applications, due to its good physical and mechanical properties. Hard transparent Aluminium nitride thin films have been deposited by bipolar reactive pulsed magnetron sputtering (PMS). With its inherent advantages of energetic particle bombardment of the growing film and minimal arcing tendency even in dielectric layer deposition processes, the technology allows deposition of high quality films. Layers have been deposited with a rate of 53 nm/min on moving substrates in a batch coating device. Characterization of the process was performed in both a fixed flow mode and a current controlled mode at a working pressure of 0.2 Pa. Based on the characteristic curves obtained; different working points have been selected for the deposition of 1.5 μm thick AlN layers on Si-Wafers and floatglass. For film deposition, the reactive sputter process was operated with a closed-loop feedback control to maintain stable operating conditions during the coating process. The Influence of varying the working points on the mechanical and the physical properties of the layers have been studied. All films are stoichiometric and highly transparent. Mechanical properties have been determined on coated Si-Wafers. The films exhibit hardness up to 26 GPa and elastic modulus up to 336 GPa and these properties do not vary significantly with varying working point. In contrast, the residual stress can be tailored from +0.5 GPa tensile to –0.5 GPa compressive stress by appropriate choice of deposition conditions.


Mismatch repair (MMR) is one of the main systems maintaining fidelity of replication. Different effectiveness in correction of errors produced during replication of the leading and the lagging DNA strands was reported in yeast, but this effect is poorly studied in humans. Here, we use MMR-deficient (MSI) and MMR-proficient (MSS) cancer samples to investigate properties of the human MMR. MSI, but not MSS, cancers demonstrate unequal mutation rates between the leading and the lagging strands. The direction of strand asymmetry in MSI cancers matches that observed in cancers with mutated exonuclease domain of polymerase δ, indicating that polymerase δ contributes more mutations than its leading-strand counterpart, polymerase ε. As polymerase δ primarily synthesizes DNA during the lagging strand replication, this implies that mutations produced in wild type cells during lagging strand replication are repaired by the MMR ~3 times more effectively, compared to those produced on the leading strand.


Purpose: We investigate trends in prevalence and volume of CSR disclosure by the top 50 New Zealand listed companies from 2005 to 2010, i.e. from before until after the initial impact of the global financial crisis (GFC). Design/methodology/approach: We examine the annual reports of each of the companies between the years 2005 and 2010, as well as company websites for standalone CSR reports. We count the number of pages of any social and environmental disclosures in annual reports and in standalone reports for each year and use this data to assess whether overall trends can be discerned. We compare CSR disclosure trends with changes in business confidence. Findings: Our results reveal a general upward trend in CSR disclosures over the six-year period. The number of companies disclosing in their annual reports and standalone reports increased from 2005 to 2007. However, during the initial drop in business confidence in 2008 (brought on by the GFC), CSR disclosures in annual reports and standalone reports remained consistent overall with 2007. Companies operating within industries more prone to public scrutiny or those industries more sensitive to the social and environmental impacts of corporate operations actually increased their CSR disclosures, whereas other companies decreased their disclosure for an overall constant level. The upward trend resumed in 2009, but when business confidence again suffered in 2010, overall annual report CSR disclosures decreased, whereas overall standalone report disclosure continued the upward trend. In sum, during times of reduced business confidence, companies in non-environmentally-sensitive and non-socially-sensitive industries appear to buck the overall trend towards increased CSR disclosures. Originality: Many studies conclude that there is an upward trend in CSR disclosures over time. Other studies examine the impact of particular events on disclosure. However, we are not aware of any study that examines the impact of the initial phase of the GFC on the overall upward trend in CSR disclosures, i.e. whether companies subjugate CSR in favour of more pressing business priorities during times of reduced business confidence.


Increasing global interaction between economies over the last few decades has lead to growing interest on the implications of globalization. Of particular interest has been the distributional impact of globalization and whether this has been equity enhancing. Chotikapanich et al (2011) estimated global and regional inequalities for 1993 and 2000. The main objective of this paper is to update their results to be based on the purchasing power parity data in the latest 2005 ICP round. A related aim is to examine the sensitivity of the inequality results to the use of alternative sets of real incomes derived using different sets of purchasing power parity data to convert income data into a common currency unit. The main finding of the paper is that the populist view that globalisation has increased inequality does not hold when inequality is measured at the global level. Between 1993 and 2005, inequality has consistently declined as measured both by the Gini coefficient and the Theil index. This decline in global inequality was the result of declines in inequality between countries. Thus, claims that globalisation is increasing inequality at an international level also lack support. The estimates do suggest that there is an upward trend in inequality within countries overall, as measured by the contribution to global inequality by within country inequality, which does add support for protestors against globalisation as it may be worsening within country inequality. While the levels of global inequality vary greatly the downward trend in global inequality is evident with different choices of PPP's and real incomes.


Abstract An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this article we further explicate this definition and show that it escapes the standard objections to divine omnipotence.


Many studies about entrepreneurs have already been done from the perspecitve of the individual's characteristics or background, but not many studies have studied it from the marital relationship perspective. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of marital relations strategies to business efficacy through mediation of spousal involvement and emotional social support. The subjects were 61 married young male entrepreneurs in Surabaya, Indonesia. Data analysis was tested by using structural equation modeling. Based on the structural equation modeling, only conflict management and advice strategy have a positive impact on the business efficacy of young male entrepreneurs through mediation of their spousal emotional involvement and social support. The other four strategies, namely assurance, openness, positivity and social network have no positive impact toward spousal involvement and spousal emotional social support. Therefore, the four strategies cannot have an effective influence on business efficacy if they are not preceded by a good conflict management strategy.


In the Al-Salt area of Jordan, natural geological hazard events occur frequently because the area northeast of the Dead Sea is recognized as an active seismic zone. Therefore, using the cutting edge technology represented in this study by the geomatics techniques of remote sensing, GPS and GIS were become necessary and sufficient, that because there are many variables a several features to be mapped and store. This study was focused on faults and landslides because these are the dominant events in the study area. Satellite images, geological maps and topographic maps were used to produce GIS layers describing geological hazard elements. The mapped elements included faults, landslides and many other spatial features including lineaments, drainage patterns, road networks, vegetation, contour lines, slopes, aspects and residential areas. Faults, lineaments and landslide maps were extracted from the published geological map of the Al-Salt area (1:50 000 scale). Other features were extracted either from a topographic map or from satellite images of the study area. Digital image-processing techniques were performed on satellite images to enhance the required spatial features (i.e., faults and landslides). Several techniques were applied to the digital images, including false-color composite band ratio analysis, principal-component analysis and high-pass filtering. A Garmin hand-held GPS (model GPSMAP60CSx) was used to track and to map the city's recently constructed main ring road. The hand-held GPS was also used to locate positions of the faults and landslides in the study area. Finally, the produced GIS layers and their attributes were stored in a spatial GIS database using the Arc GIS software package. These layers could be used for retrieving data on the geological hazard elements and for producing a geological hazards map (or any other thematic map) for the Al-Salt area in Jordan.