Jane Austen is famed for her pervasive use of irony. There are many other things one could praise in Jane Austen's writing: Her perfectly crafted plots, her deep understanding of human nature, her true-to-life depictions of everyday society, but it is her use of irony that makes her a really great writer, and which also contributes to making these other aspects of her writing so praiseworthy.

It might be said that the characteristics that make her such a good writer also make her an attractive writer to adapt onto the screen. Film thrives on a good plot and memorable characters. And a well established name like Jane Austen's is also seen to influence the box office. 1995 and 1996 saw the event labelled by some as Austenmania. What seemed like an avalanche of Jane Austen adaptations hit cinema and television screens over a relatively short period of time. Ten years later time has been deemed right for new film versions of her stories.

But what happens to Jane Austen's irony when it is transferred from page to screen? And if it gets lost on the way are we then really left with a successful adaptation of Jane Austen? Is she then being done a disservice by being promoted through all these screen adaptations?

This thesis takes a look at adaptation theory and the literary theory concerning irony before moving on to an in-depth study of four adaptations of Jane Austen's Emma. This is considered to be her most accomplished novel with a complex ironic structure. How much of this is preserved in the adaptations? Seven adaptations of Pride & Prejudice are looked at in brief to asses the representation of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Bennet, two characters that seem to embody Jane Austen's philosophy regarding irony.

Unfortunately, most of the adaptations studied display little of Jane Austen's irony. One adaptation is reasonably successful at reproducing the ironic structure of Emma, and one manages to create a distinctly ironic tone. But the appeal of adapting Jane Austen's writing for the screen seems to mainly be her love stories.

The thesis hopes to show that, though an adaptation will probably never be able to reproduce the full complexity of the novel, irony certainly can travel from page to screen. The question is rather whether filmmakers have the imagination required, or even the inclination. It seems a shame that not more of the potential for filmic irony is put to good use in adaptations of Jane Austen's writing. Adaptations do become part of an author's legacy, and it is a concern that film adaptations can potentially replace the reading of the novel for some people, and also make them think they know something of Jane Austen as an author.

The investigations in the thesis do, however, seem to indicate that what is really at stake here is the issue of interpretation. Of this irony is perhaps the most important aspect with an author like Jane Austen, but there are other factors as well. Her galleries of intriguing characters that provide us with archetypes, social issues and timeless interpersonal relationships.…


Field development and economic evaluation of hydrocarbon demand for an accurate model for predicting horizontal well performance as horizontal and multilateral wells have become far more prominent in the industry than vertical wells. Several approaches for modelling horizontal well performance have been studied and reported in the literature. Analytical approach is the easiest with large inaccuracy in the prediction of the horizontal well performance because of inability to apply it in reservoir-wellbore coupling equation. Numerical approach is more reliable for field application than analytical approach. However, it involves iterative nature that requires longer computational times. Semi-analytical approach is simpler and sufficiently exact for field applications if the governing fundamental flow equation is accurately modelled. This study presents a new semi-analytical model for predicting horizontal and multilateral well performance, which includes friction, acceleration and accumulation induced pressure drop along horizontal well length into the governing fundamental flow equations. The outcomes of the proposed model have been validated by field data gotten from gauge rate of 5660stb/d at steady-state condition. The estimated steady flow rate of 5593.9 stb/day obtained from the new approach shows an error of 1.2% which is seen to be more accurate than steady flow rate values obtained by four previous models that exhibited higher percentage errors when compared to gauge reading.


Flow-mediated dilatation (FMD) is a strong predictor for the future cardiovascular event and plays a role in cardiovascular health. Brachial FMD is impaired after a chronic stroke. Aerobic exercise training improves the vascular health and FMD. We investigated the effect of kinetic dance training by using video game Xbox on brachial artery FMD in patient with chronic stroke. The aim of the study is 1) to investigate the effects of kinetic dance training for six weeks on brachial artery FMD in patients with chronic stroke, 2) To compare the effects of our training in patients with chronic stroke to healthy age-matched control. We hypothesized that 1) six weeks of kinetic dance training with the Xbox video game would improve brachial artery FMD in patients with chronic stroke in comparison to healthy age-matched control group. 2) six weeks of kinetic dance training would lower resting heart, resting blood pressure, and improve blood flow velocity in the brachial artery. Our primary outcome measure is FMD although we include heart rate, BP, and flow velocity. We recruited a total of 11(N=11) patients with chronic stroke who underwent six weeks of dance training compared to a healthy age-matched control group. The training protocol was a kinetic dance for six weeks. In the first two weeks the training was 5 sessions/week, 38.6 min/session., in week 2-3 the training was 5 sessions/week, 45.5 mins/session, and in week 5-6 the training was 2 Sessions/week, 52.42 minutes/ session. Our results showed that kinetic dance training improves brachial artery FMD after two weeks 14.9% and six weeks of training 32.88% in patients with chronic stroke. The brachial artery FMD in patients with chronic stroke was impaired and significantly lower before the training (5.81%±1.62) in comparison to healthy age-matched control (7.62%± 1.65) (P=0.01). However, this impairment was revised after six weeks of training to improve the brachial artery FMD (7.92±2.06) to be not significantly different from age-matched control (7.62±1.65) who did not receive training (P=0.81). Our finding suggests the effectiveness of the kinetic dance training to improve brachial artery FMD in patients with chronic stroke after six weeks of training.


Compared to other ethnic groups in the Netherlands, Chinese are less likely to use mental health care yet present more serious symptoms at the first consultation. However, the reason for these differences is unknown because of the scarcity of research. This doctoral research sets out to fill this gap in our knowledge and to shed light on mental health care utilisation among this group. It further examines the adequacy of Dutch mental health care services for them. The research embraces a range of disciplines in medical and social sciences such as psychiatry, clinical and health psychology, medical anthropology, social history and sociology. Both literature reviews and empirical studies were carried out. Literature was examined relating to the background of Chinese in the Netherlands, general issues concerning health care for migrants, health service delivery and utilisation, as well as studies of Chinese in the Netherlands and other Western countries. In the empirical research a mixed-method approach was applied to data collection and analysis. Quantitative data were collected by administering a structured questionnaire in street interviews to 102 Chinese in the Randstad (Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht). Qualitative data were collected using 23 in-depth interviews with Chinese who were willing to relate accounts of one or more Chinese persons in their social environment whom they regarded as having (had) mental health problems (精神問題). Results show that the Chinese studied regarded Dutch health care as their primary method of managing general and mental health problems. The beliefs they expressed about mental illness did not seem to differ from those current in the West in ways that would form a major barrier to seeking help from mainstream services. Although cultural differences were observed which might create barriers to mutual understanding between health professionals and Chinese care users, they were not such as to prevent Chinese from accepting and benefiting from Dutch health care. Despite the fact that health insurance in the Netherlands is compulsory but affordable, the expectation of high costs for mental health care sometimes affected the readiness of Chinese to use such services. The results of this research suggest that the main barriers have to do with more practical factors such as low Dutch proficiency, lack of knowledge of the health system, or language and communication problems. Other barriers include lack of cultural sensitivity among professionals and the failure of the health system to take steps to overcome these problems. Because Dutch mental health services are incorporated in both primary and secondary care, the barriers to mental and general health care utilisation often overlap. The study also showed that Chinese in the Netherlands form a heterogeneous group in terms of their origins, sub-cultures, migration patterns, socio-economic status and levels of integration. Different individuals have different needs. Service providers and policy makers should take the diversity of the Chinese group into account and pay more attention to issues such as communication barriers, knowledge of the health care system, attitudes of professionals and discrimination.


Key messagesFor forest communities, migration is an important livelihood strategy. The primary driver of migration in our research areas in Malinau has changed from employment to education. In Kapuas Hulu, migration for high-level education is also gradually increasing, but here, finding better employment is still the most important reason for migration.Young, educated migrants from Malinau, interviewed in the city where they are studying, are eager to return to their homeland. They reported that they hope to get a formal job, but would like to maintain agriculture/forestry as an additional activity.In Kapuas Hulu, particularly in areas where the main – or only – economic opportunity is swidden, men and young people move to find better employment outside their village. Women are left behind to take care of swidden and other activities in the village.Economic migrants are expected to send remittances back, while education migrants receive support from home. These different patterns of migration have implications for forest management and policies.Youth, especially those returning from education migration, can become agents of change in local communities; for example, in government programs, such as Forest Management Units and social forestry programs. Educated migrants who have not returned can market the social forestry outputs.Women, generally, are an important source of labor and knowledge for social forestry programs and need to be able to obtain benefits from such programs.Steps toward the long term sustainability of the social forestry program include: mapping the skills needed; introducing the program to the younger generation; offering special incentives within the existing scholarship schemes to encourage students to become involved in social forestry; and using information technology to develop capacity and monitor the social forestry progress.


The study examines the factors affecting Greek pre-service teachers' intention to use
computers when they become practicing teachers. Four variables (perceived usefulness,
perceived ease of use, self-efficacy, and attitude toward use) as well as behavioral intention
to use computers were used so as to build a research model that extended the Technology
Acceptance Model (TAM) and structural equation modeling was used for parameter
estimation and model testing. Self-reported data were gathered from 487 pre-service
teachers studying at the Departments of Primary School Education in Greece. Results
revealed a good model fit and of the nine hypotheses formulated, seven were supported.
Overall, the TAM, with the addition of computer self-efficacy beliefs, adequately
represented the relationships among the factors. It also possesses the explanatory power
to predict pre-service teachers' intention to use computers when they become practicing
teachers since a high percentage (68%) of the variance in behavioral intention to use
computers was explained, while the most influential factors were perceived usefulness and
attitude toward computers. Implications for practice are also discussed.


Many works on speech processing have dealt with auto-regressive (AR) models for spectral envelope and formant frequency estimation, mostly focusing on the estimation of the AR parameters. However, it is also interesting to be able to directly estimate the formant frequencies, or equivalently the poles of the AR filter. To tackle this issue, we propose in this paper to decompose the signal onto several bases, one for each formant, taking advantage of recent works on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) for the estimation stage, further refined by sparsity and smoothness penalties. The results are encouraging, and the proposed system provides formant tracks which seem robust enough to be used in different applications such as phonetic analysis, emotion detection or as visual cue for computer-aided pronunciation training applications. The model can also be extended to deal with multiple-speaker signals.


Semiconductor nanowires (NWs) represent a unique system for exploring phenomena at the nanoscale and are also expected to play a critical role in future electronic and optoelectronic devices. Here we review recent advances in growth, characterization, assembly and integration of chemically synthesized, atomic scale semiconductor NWs. We first introduce a general scheme based on a metal-cluster catalyzed vapour–liquid–solid growth mechanism for the synthesis of a broad range of NWs and nanowire heterostructures with precisely controlled chemical composition and physical dimension. Such controlled growth in turn results in controlled electrical and optical properties. Subsequently, we discuss novel properties associated with these one-dimensional (1D) structures such as discrete 1D subbands formation and Coulomb blockade effects as well as ballistic transport and many-body phenomena. Room-temperature high-performance electrical and optical devices will then be discussed at the single- or few-nanowire level. We will then explore methods to assemble and integrate NWs into large-scale functional circuits and real-world applications, examples including high-performance DC/RF circuits and flexible electronics. Prospects of a fundamentally different 'bottom-up' paradigm, in which functionalities are coded during growth and circuits are formed via self-assembly, will also be briefly discussed.


This paper addresses when and how to adjust bandwidth allocation on uplink and downlink in a multi-service mobile wireless network under dynamic traffic load conditions. Our design objective is to improve system bandwidth utilization while satisfying call level QoS requirements of various call classes. We first develop a new threshold-based multi-service admission control scheme (DMS-AC) as the study base for bandwidth re-allocation. When the traffic load brought by some specific classes under dynamic traffic conditions in a system exceeds the control range of DMS-AC, the QoS of some call classes may not be guaranteed. In such a situation, bandwidth re-allocation process is activated and the admission control scheme will try to meet the QoS requirements under the adjusted bandwidth allocation. We explore the relationship between admission thresholds and bandwidth allocation by identifying certain constraints for verifying the feasibility of the adjusted bandwidth allocation. We conduct extensive simulation experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed bandwidth re-allocation scheme. Numerical results show that when traffic pattern with certain bandwidth asymmetry between uplink and downlink changes, the system can re-allocate the bandwidth on uplink and downlink adaptively and at the same time improve the system performance significantly.


Background: Autoverification is a process of using computer-based rules to verify clinical laboratory test results without manual intervention. To date, there is little published data on the use of autoverification over the course of years in a clinical laboratory. We describe the evolution and application of autoverification in an academic medical center clinical chemistry core laboratory. Subjects and Methods: At the institution of the study, autoverification developed from rudimentary rules in the laboratory information system (LIS) to extensive and sophisticated rules mostly in middleware software. Rules incorporated decisions based on instrument error flags, interference indices, analytical measurement ranges (AMRs), delta checks, dilution protocols, results suggestive of compromised or contaminated specimens, and ′absurd′ (physiologically improbable) values. Results: The autoverification rate for tests performed in the core clinical chemistry laboratory has increased over the course of 13 years from 40% to the current overall rate of 99.5%. A high percentage of critical values now autoverify. The highest rates of autoverification occurred with the most frequently ordered tests such as the basic metabolic panel (sodium, potassium, chloride, carbon dioxide, creatinine, blood urea nitrogen, calcium, glucose; 99.6%), albumin (99.8%), and alanine aminotransferase (99.7%). The lowest rates of autoverification occurred with some therapeutic drug levels (gentamicin, lithium, and methotrexate) and with serum free light chains (kappa/lambda), mostly due to need for offline dilution and manual filing of results. Rules also caught very rare occurrences such as plasma albumin exceeding total protein (usually indicative of an error such as short sample or bubble that evaded detection) and marked discrepancy between total bilirubin and the spectrophotometric icteric index (usually due to interference of the bilirubin assay by immunoglobulin (Ig) M monoclonal gammopathy). Conclusions: Our results suggest that a high rate of autoverification is possible with modern clinical chemistry analyzers. The ability to autoverify a high percentage of results increases productivity and allows clinical laboratory staff to focus attention on the small number of specimens and results that require manual review and investigation.


The studies presented in this thesis investigated dietary strategies to reduce cardiovascular (CV) risk associated with atherogenic dyslipidaemia. The thesis also describes the development of a new method for the separation of the principal HDL subclasses. The 'RISCK' study five examined the effects of five diets, differing in the type and amount of dietary fat and carbohydrate, on plasma lipids in subjects at risk of developing metabolic syndrome. All diets showed a significant reduction in serum total, and LDL cholesterol. Whilst no diet was superior in its lipid-lowering effect, the two low fat diets reduced waist circumference and other CV risk factors, suggesting a link between a reduction in visceral adiposity and CV risk The 'EDWINA' study addressed the effects of energy restriction and increased dietary cholesterol in the form of eggs, on body weight and plasma lipids. Energy restriction and energy restriction +2 eggs/day for 12 weeks achieved significant weight loss (3- 4kg). Increased egg consumption had no significant effect on plasma LDL cholesterol, suggesting that weight loss negates the cholesterol raising potential of dietary cholesterol. The weight loss and lipid response in the 'EDWINA' study was highly variable between subjects. Apo E genotype and serum non-cholesterol sterols (markers of cholesterol homeostasis) were measured to investigate the origin of this variability. Carriage of the epsilon4 allele was significantly associated with higher serum sitosterol (marker of cholesterol absorption) at baseline, however, apoE genotype did not explain the heterogeneity in response to diet. There was some indication from reductions in serum lathosterol, that falls in plasma cholesterol were associated with reduced cholesterol biosynthesis. The overall findings provide further evidence to support the CV health benefits of losing weight and especially visceral adiposity. They also highlighted the importance of dietary composition of energy restricted diets in modifying lipid mediated CV risk.


Analysis of mitragynine in different species of mitragyna, indigenous plant of peninsular Malaysia is an important area of research due to the use of this compound as a drug of abuse. A fast, selective and reproducible ultrasonic assisted extraction (UAE) coupled with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) method was developed for the determination of mitragynine in different species of mitragyna (mitragynaspeciosa and mitragynarotundifolia). Three samples of mitragyna species, namely KM, KY1 and KY2 were collected from Kedah state of Malaysia and identified as a mitragynine-containing species which are authenticated by botanists. UAE was carried out with chloroform-methanol (1:4-v/v) as extracting solvent at 30°C and 1.0 h sonication time. The GC-MS analyses of extracted samples confirmed the presence of mitragynine in KM and KY1 samples, while mitragynine was not detected in KY2 samples. Under optimized conditions, the quantitative estimation of mitragynine in KM and KY1 samples were found to be 0.094% and 0.105%, respectively.


ABSTRACT This paper investigates the emergence of an engineering education research (EER) community in three Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland and Sweden. First, an overview of the current state of Nordic EER authorship is produced through statistics on international publication. Then, the history of EER and its precursor activities is described in three national narratives. These national storylines are tied together in a description of recent networking activities, aiming to strengthen the EER communities on the Nordic level. Taking these three perspectives together, and drawing on concepts from community of practice theory, network theory and learning network theory, we discuss factors behind the differences in the countries, and draw some conclusions about implications for networking activities in a heterogeneous community. Further, we discuss the role of networks for affording a joint identity.


In testing, engineers want to run the most useful tests early (prioritization). When tests are run hundreds or thousands of times, minimizing a test set can result in significant savings (minimization). This paper proposes a new analysis technique to address both the minimal test set and the test case prioritization problems. This paper precisely defines the concept of mutant stubbornness, which is the basis for our analysis technique. We empirically compare our technique with other test case minimization and prioritization techniques in terms of the size of the minimized test sets and how quickly mutants are killed. We used seven C language subjects from the Siemens Repository, specifically the test sets and the killing matrices from a previous study. We used 30 different orders for each set and ran every technique 100 times over each set. Results show that our analysis technique performed significantly better than prior techniques for creating minimal test sets and was able to establish new bounds for all cases. Also, our analysis technique killed mutants as fast or faster than prior techniques. These results indicate that our mutant stubbornness technique constructs test sets that are both minimal in size, and prioritized effectively, as well or better than other techniques.


In South Africa conservation is still largely framed in terms of Western scientific values, with a focus on material benefits to local communities, whilst little is known about the intangible values local people attach to nature and biodiversity. We explored the cultural, spiritual and emotional relationships with nature expressed by Xhosa people, within the Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany Hotspot, as well as the activities that mediate this relationship. A descriptive research approach was applied to document the emotions, meanings and values associated with landscape elements. This approach included group and individual interviews and 'walk-in-the-woods' interviews and participatory mapping exercises. Respondents portrayed a strong, although not always easily articulated, appreciation for nature, especially ihlathi lesiXhosa ('Xhosa forest', vegetation types within the Thicket Biome). Activities such as collecting fuelwood and other resources, hunting and time spent at initiation schools were described as key opportunities for spending time in nature. The benefits of being in nature were ascribed not only to the physical experience of the forest environment and its biota, but also to the presence of ancestral spirits. Being in nature thus contributes significantly to the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of local people, and is also integral to their sense of cultural identity. This study has made it clear that maintenance of biodiversity and natural vegetation is as much in the interest of the local community's well-being as it is in the interest of conservation planners. We recommend that cultural values be incorporated into local conservation plans.


Diseases associated with addiction to nicotine, the key reinforcing constituent of tobacco, remain the largest cause of preventable death worldwide. Although twin studies indicate a large genetic contribution to the variation in smoking-related behaviours, the polymorphisms underlying this heritability remain largely unidentified. Candidate gene studies have investigated several pathways, but thus far only those few genetic loci identified in unbiased genome-wide association studies have been consistently replicated; these are the direct targets of nicotine in the nervous system, the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit genes CHRNA5–CHRNA3–CHRNB4 and the primary nicotine metabolism gene CYP2A6. These variants may differ in their influences regarding different aspects of smoking behaviour, and their frequencies vary widely among different ethnic populations. Use of more-targeted phenotypes including biomarkers of smoke exposure such as cotinine, nicotine's major metabolite, and exhaled carbon monoxide, may provide the key to detecting further genetic correlates of nicotine dependence and related diseases.

Key Concepts:

Variation in nicotine addiction-related traits have large genetic components.

Genetic studies of nicotine addiction seek to identify drug targets for smoking cessation treatment and to improve treatments using genotype-based personalised medicine.

Candidate gene studies have focussed on the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and genes in the nicotine metabolism, dopaminergic, serotonergic, GABAergic, and opioid pathways, but few associations have been convincingly replicated.

Unbiased genome-wide studies have identified very few consistent genetic associations with smoking-related phenotypes.

A functional variant in the CHRNA5–CHRNA3–CHRNB4 gene cluster is robustly associated with multiple smoking behaviours and related disease risk.

Functional variation in the CYP2A6 nicotine metabolism gene is associated with cigarette consumption and related disease risk.

Genetic factors contributing to nicotine addiction vary by ethnic population.

Genotype–environment and genotype–treatment interactions are important factors determining smoking initiation, dependence and cessation outcomes.

Use of biomarkers and other endophenotypes may provide greater power to identify genetic correlates of nicotine dependence.

Keywords:

Nicotine;
addiction;
genetics;
polymorphism;
smoking;
tobacco;
CHRNA5;
CYP2A6


In South America, fascioliasis caused by the trematode Fasciola hepatica is an anthropozoonosis disease associated with significant economic losses and poor animal welfare. The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence of F. hepatica in the liver of buffaloes slaughtered from 2003 to 2017 in Brazil, and to perform a forecast analysis of the disease for the next five years using the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. Data analysis revealed an incidence of 7,187 cases out of 226,561 individuals. The disease presented a considerable interannual variation (p<0.005). Fasciola hepatica was more prevalent in the southern states of Brazil; Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina, presenting 11.9, 7.7, and 3.2% of infected livers, respectively. The high frequency of liver condemnation in Paraná was influenced by weather conditions. The ARIMA models calculated a constant trend of the disease, depicting an average of its future prevalence. The models also described a worse-case and a positive-case scenario, calculating the effects of intervention measurements. In reality, there is an urgent need for regular diagnostic in the animals (fecal and immune diagnose) and in the environment (intermediate host), in order to avoid the high rates of infection.


Abstract. Trees modify the physico-chemical and biological properties of the soil underneath. Here we present results for seven tree species planted at a site that was contaminated by a mine spill – after which soil was cleaned up and remediated – and later was afforested. We studied the chemical composition (24 elements) in five ecosystem compartments (leaves, forest floor, roots, topsoil and deep soil). The variation in chemical concentration was highest at the level of canopy leaves and lowest at deep soil. The identity of tree species significantly affected the composition of all elements in the canopies but none in the deep soil underneath. Although the observed tree effects on topsoil chemistry were weak, the footprint is expected to be reinforced with age of the plantation, contributing to the phytostabilization of contaminating elements and to the carbon sequestration.


Since late last year when physicians in Brazil warned that a wave of serious birth defects might be linked to a little-known virus called Zika, researchers have struggled to prove the connection. Some in the media have questioned whether the reported increase in birth defects is real; others, particularly environmental activists, have suggested the virus is an innocent bystander, unfairly blamed for defects caused by chemicals or other factors. With three studies published last week, chances that the virus has been wrongly accused are fading. Two independent groups showed that, at least in the lab, the virus eagerly infects developing brain cells, suggesting a mechanism by which it could cause the most striking of the observed birth defects: microcephaly, in which babies are born with abnormally small heads and brains. A third study, following several dozen pregnant women in Brazil who were infected with the virus, directly links the infection to an increase in brain defects. It also suggests that the virus can harm a developing fetus in other ways, possibly by attacking the placenta and slowing down the supply of nutrients. "These are the data we have been waiting for," says Daniel Lucey, an expert on global health at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.


Flooding is a major hazard to lives and infrastructure, but trends in flood hazard are poorly understood. The capacity of river channels to convey flood flows is typically assumed to be stationary, so changes in flood frequency are thought to be driven primarily by trends in streamflow. We have developed new methods for separately quantifying how trends in both streamflow and channel capacity have affected flood frequency at gauging sites across the United States Flood frequency was generally nonstationary, with increasing flood hazard at a statistically significant majority of sites. Changes in flood hazard driven by channel capacity were smaller, but more numerous, than those driven by streamflow. Our results demonstrate that accurately quantifying changes in flood hazard requires accounting separately for trends in both streamflow and channel capacity. They also show that channel capacity trends may have unforeseen consequences for flood management and for estimating flood insurance costs.


This paper focuses on correcting a camera image that has been improperly white-balanced. This situation occurs when a camera's auto white balance fails or when the wrong manual white-balance setting is used. Even after decades of computational color constancy research, there are no effective solutions to this problem. The challenge lies not in identifying what the correct white balance should have been, but in the fact that the in-camera white-balance procedure is followed by several camera-specific nonlinear color manipulations that make it challenging to correct the image's colors in post-processing. This paper introduces the first method to explicitly address this problem. Our method is enabled by a dataset of over 65,000 pairs of incorrectly white-balanced images and their corresponding correctly white-balanced images. Using this dataset, we introduce a k-nearest neighbor strategy that is able to compute a nonlinear color mapping function to correct the image's colors. We show our method is highly effective and generalizes well to camera models not in the training set.


Fumagillin, an angiogenic inhibitor, binds to methionine aminopeptidase 2, which is the same as eukaryotic initiation factor 2-associated glycoprotein, p67. p67 protects eIF2alpha from phosphorylation by its kinases. To understand the importance of fumagillin binding to p67, we measured the level of p67 in mouse C2C12 myoblasts treated with fumagillin. We show that fumagillin increases the stability of p67 by decreasing its turnover rate. The increased levels of p67 result in inhibition of phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinases 1 and 2 (ERKs 1 and 2). p67 binds to these ERKs, and the 108-480 amino acid segment is sufficient for this binding. p67's affinity to ERKs 1 and 2 also increases in fumagillin-treated myoblasts while its affinity for eIF2alpha remains unchanged. A mutant at the conserved amino acid residue D251A increases the phosphorylation of ERKs 1 and 2 without affecting the binding to p67, thus indicating the importance of this residue in the regulation of the phosphorylation of these ERKs. These results suggest that fumagillin increases the stability of p67 and its affinity to ERKs 1 and 2 and causes the inhibition of the phosphorylation of ERKs 1 and 2.


It has been demonstrated that larger, heavier cars generally provide more protection for their occupants, although they may be more likely to injure other road users. Smaller, lighter cars generally have better fuel economy.

Some government agencies have programs that encourage consumers to purchase safer cars as measured by crashworthiness ratings; while other government agencies encourage consumers to purchase cars with good fuel economy. Consumer may find these messages contradictory. This analysis compares the Used Car Ratings calculated by Monash University Accident Research Centre with the official fuel consumption figures published by the Australian Greenhouse Office. It demonstrates that while there is a general negative correlation between crashworthiness rating and fuel economy, there is considerable scatter about the line of best fit. Particular makes and models of cars were identified as performing well on both crashworthiness and fuel economy while other makes and models of cars were shown to perform relatively poorly. The limitations of the study relate to the use of official fuel economy figures rather than in-use values and the relative variability of the published fuel economy figures compared to crashworthiness ratings.

Nevertheless, further development of this type of approach of identifying cars that perform well on several dimensions may be useful.


What sets this title apart is the authors deep insight of how to leverage the Facebook API to create wildly successful applications. They even provide instructions of how to a/b test, track, and analyze metrics to increase the exposure and engagement of your applications. Their knowledge is practical and after putting their techniques to use, my applications have achieved better results. Joseph Annuzzi, Jr., App Architect, PeerDynamic.com With more than 250 million active users, Facebook is the worlds #1 social networking platform. But developing successful Facebook applications presents unique challenges, both technical and nontechnical. Now, two of the worlds most experienced Facebook developers show you exactly how to meet those challenges. Essential Facebook Development offers insider guidance and up-to-the-minute best practices for the entire application lifecycle: design, coding, testing, distribution, post-launch monitoring, metrics, and even application marketing. Using extensive real-world examples, John Maver and Cappy Popp reveal why some Facebook applications succeed brilliantly while others fail. Next, they walk through building a complete application using every major component of the Facebook platform. Maver and Popp thoroughly cover Facebooks most important new features, including Facebook Connect, and provide extensive information available nowhere elsefrom measuring application success to monetization. Coverage includes Thorough introductions to Facebooks current architecture, integration points, and development technologies Discussion of successful Facebook applicationsand what makes them successful What every developer must know about Facebooks Terms of Service Creating an effective application infrastructure Creating canvas pages with FBML and IFrames Adding support for profiles, application tabs, and messaging Incorporating JavaScript into Facebook applications with FBJS Integrating Facebook into external sites with Facebook Connect and the Facebook JavaScript Client Library Debugging techniques for Facebook applications Spreading, monitoring, and tuning applications


This paper describes a convolution with a systolic array structure for perspective projection in real-time volume graphics based on the shear-warp method. In the original method, the further the ray proceeds, the more voxels are required to calculate the convolution. The increase in required voxels makes it difficult to implement the method in a VLSI-oriented architecture. We implement a 3D convolution using three serial 1D convolutions along the X, Y, and Z axes, which reduces the number of calculation units from M3 to 3M, where the convolution is calculated for the M3 area. The number of pipelines for the rays is V2 for V3 voxel datasets. If the hardware of a single pipeline can calculate the V rays, then each of the implemented pipelines is assigned to V theoretical pipelines (for V2 rays). The number of hardware pipelines should be much smaller than V theoretical pipelines in actual implementation. We folded the theoretical pipelines and reduced them to a certain number of hardware pipelines. We examined the relation between the folding process and its necessary time delay. The architecture can generate an image of a 2563 voxel dataset (V=256) at 30 Hz with four pipelines. In addition, the architecture can be extended easily for 5123 (V=512) and 10243 (V=1024) datasets, with 32 pipelines and 256 pipelines. Our architecture has processing scalability.


We study the dynamics of N point vortices on a rotating sphere. The Hamilto-nian system becomes infinite dimensional due to the non-uniform background vorticity coming from the Coriolis force. We prove that a relative equilibrium formed of latitudinal rings of identical vortices for the non-rotating sphere persists to be a relative equilibrium when the sphere rotates. We study the nonlin-ear stability of a polygon of planar point vortices on a rotating plane in order to approximate the corresponding relative equilibrium on the rotating sphere when the ring is close to the pole. We then perform the same study for geostrophic vortices. To end, we compare our results to the observations on the southern hemisphere atmospheric circulation.


"In Lies Across America," James W. Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning "Lies My Teacher Told Me," of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. "Lies Across America" is a one-of-a-kind examination of sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. With one hundred entries, drawn from every state, Loewen reveals that: The USS Intrepid, the "feel-good" war museum, celebrates its glorious service in World War II but nowhere mentions the three tours it served in Vietnam. The Jefferson Memorial misquotes from the Declaration of Independence and skews Thomas Jefferson's writings to present this conflicted slaveowner as an outright abolitionist. Abraham Lincoln had been dead for thirty years when his birthplace cabin was built! "Lies Across America" is a reality check for anyone who has ever sought to learn about America through our public sites and markers. Entertaining and enlightening, it is destined to change the way we see our country.


The quest to solve the structure of adhesion molecules called integrins has been long and arduous. But, as
 Humphries and Mould
 emphasize in their Perspective, the crystal structure of aVb3 integrin has now been resolved to 3.1 A… (
 Xiong
 et al.), a triumph that will be of particular benefit for designing anti-adhesive drugs that block the interactions of integrins with their ligands.


Methylation reactions of naphthalenic species over the acidic microporous zeolite with chabazite topology have been investigated by means of two‐layered ab initio computations. Large cluster results combined with van der Waals contributions provide thermodynamic and kinetic results of successive methylation steps. The growth of fused bicyclic species is important as these can act as hydrocarbon pool species within the methanol‐to‐olefin (MTO) process, but ultimately leads to the deactivation of the catalyst. The influence of the confined space of the zeolite pore on the resulting transition state or product shape selectivity is investigated in detail.


Increased drilling activities in deep water since 1985, especially in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), have revealed numerous hazards in the shallow sediments below the seabed, such as fault scarps, gas vents, unstable slopes, and reefs and shallow subsurface geologic hazards such as faults, gas-charged sediments, buried channels, abnormally pressured sands, and gas hydrates. Drilling risks associated with shallow aquifer-pressured sands or shallow water flow (SWF) sands and gas hydrates have received the most attention. These are global problems. In the GOM alone, more than US$250 million has been lost due to SWF. While the industry has matured in handling these problems, it is estimated that the losses associated with SWF sands continue to be nearly $1.7 million per well in the GOM alone.


While the livelihood opportunities in the refugee camps in Northern Greece are not sufficient, the city center of Thessaloniki represents a huge potential for integration, benefiting both existing citizens and newcomers. There is a large potential in the vacant buildings, the empty ground floors and the unused spaces in the city. How can this be transformed architecturally into common structures for both current and potential citizens?The scalable system of the project is a potential strategy for rethinking the ground floor space, support the existing decaying building structures and utilize unused space. The aim of the project is to secure long term integration of displaced people while the implemented structures improve the livelihood opportunities in the existing neighborhood.


Widespread application of omic technologies is evolving our understanding of population health and holds promise in providing precise guidance for selection of therapeutic interventions based on patient biology. The opportunity to use hundreds of analytes for diagnostic assessment of human health compared to the current use of 10–20 analytes will provide greater accuracy in deconstructing the complexity of human biology in disease states. Conventional biochemical measurements like cholesterol, creatinine, and urea nitrogen are currently used to assess health status; however, metabolomics captures a comprehensive set of analytes characterizing the human phenotype and its complex metabolic processes in real-time. Unlike conventional clinical analytes, metabolomic profiles are dramatically influenced by demographic and environmental factors that affect the range of normal values and increase the risk of false biomarker discovery. This review addresses the challenges and opportunities created by the evolving field of clinical metabolomics and highlights features of study design and bioinformatics necessary to maximize the utility of metabolomics data across demographic groups.


This Article is dedicated to retiring the now-dominant "rational actor" model of human agency, together with its numerous "dispositionist" cohorts, and replacing them with a new conception of human agency that the authors call the "situational character." This is a key installment of a larger project recently introduced in an article titled The Situation: An Introduction to the Situational Character, Critical Realism, Power Economics, and Deep Capture, 152 U. Pa. L. Rev. 129 (2003). That introductory article adumbrated, often in broad stroke, the central premises and some basic conclusions of a new approach to legal theory and policy analysis. This Article provides a more complete version of one of those central premises by elucidating a more realistic conception of the human animal than is currently embraced in legal theory. The Article begins with a short introduction to the larger project, and describes the central place that a realist conception of the human actor plays in that project. It then explores several bodies of literature within the fields of social, cognitive, behavioral, and neural psychology in pursuit of a vision of the human actor that is grounded in social science. Having explicated that conception, the Article then outlines some of the basic implications of it for law, legal theory, and social policy. It then analyzes conventional legal scholars', particularly legal economists', arguments for ignoring the lessons of social science in their treatment of human agency. As part of that analysis, this Article describes why recent efforts to incorporate some psychological findings - the sort of work that is often labeled "behavioralist" - have been inadequate. Finally, the authors briefly look beyond the human actor itself to consider some of the fairly obvious - but generally ignored - realities of our present social situation, and some of their implications for common policy presumptions. As subsequent work will make clear, this new, situationist conception of the human animal is as important to a realist account of law and legal theory as the dispositionist conception has been to now-dominant accounts.


The growing trend of the use of robots in many areas of daily life makes it necessary to search for approaches to improve efficiency in tasks performed by robots. For that reason, we show, in this chapter, the application of the Kalman filter applied to the navigation of mobile robots, specifically the Time-to-contact (TTC) problem. We present a summary of approaches that have been taken to address the TTC problem. We use a monocular vision-based approach to detect potential obstacles and follow them over time through their apparent size change. Our approach collects information about obstacle data and models the behavior while the robot is approaching the obstacle, in order to predict collisions. We highlight some characteristics of the Kalman filter applied to our problem. Finally, we show of our results applied to sequences composed of 210 frames in different real scenarios. The results show a fast convergence of the model to the data and good fit even with noisy measures.


We extend a model for coalescence and breakage of liquid–liquid dispersions proposed by Fasano/Rosso. The main feature is that the experimentally observed fact of a maximal droplet mass is taken into account. Our model includes spontaneous breakage as well as collisional fragmentation. Existence and uniqueness of solutions is proved and the long‐time behaviour is investigated. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Disappearing faster around the edges The floating ice shelves around Antarctica, which buttress ice streams from the continent and slow their discharge into the sea, are thinning at faster rates. Paolo et al. present satellite data showing that ice shelves in many regions around the edge of the continent are losing mass. This result increases concern about how fast sea level might rise as climate continues to warm. If warming continues to cause ice shelves to thin, as they have for the past couple of decades, their disappearance may allow land-based ice to collapse and melt. Science, this issue p. 327 Ice shelves around much of Antarctica have been thinning over the past two decades. The floating ice shelves surrounding the Antarctic Ice Sheet restrain the grounded ice-sheet flow. Thinning of an ice shelf reduces this effect, leading to an increase in ice discharge to the ocean. Using 18 years of continuous satellite radar altimeter observations, we have computed decadal-scale changes in ice-shelf thickness around the Antarctic continent. Overall, average ice-shelf volume change accelerated from negligible loss at 25 ± 64 cubic kilometers per year for 1994–2003 to rapid loss of 310 ± 74 cubic kilometers per year for 2003–2012. West Antarctic losses increased by ~70% in the past decade, and earlier volume gain by East Antarctic ice shelves ceased. In the Amundsen and Bellingshausen regions, some ice shelves have lost up to 18% of their thickness in less than two decades.


This article originally appeared in the April 2012 Insurance and Reinsurance Committee Newsletter. On March 2, 2012, the National Football League ("NFL") issued an official statement confirming that its investigation disclosed that between 22 and 27 defensive players on the New Orleans Saints participated in a "bounty" program whereby players were rewarded with cash payments for inflicting injuries on opposing players. Specifically, players were paid $1,500 for a "knockout," meaning that the opposing player was notable to return to the game, and $1,000 for "cart-offs," meaning that the opposing player was carried or carted off the field. Perhaps the most surprising part of the recent news was the involvement of coaches and team personnel in these "bounty" programs. According to the NFL investigation, the bounty program was administered by the defensive coordinator of the Saints, Gregg Williams, while other defensive coaches and the head coach of the Saints, Sean Payton, had direct knowledge of the program. The NFL is also investigating whether Williams administered a similar program with other teams, including the Washington Redskins and Buffalo Bills. While the Saints may be the target of the NFL's current investigation, it is obvious that other teams and players have of had similar programs in place. Of course, nobody could forget what became known as the infamous "Bounty Bowl," a game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas Cowboys in 1989. During that game, Eagles coach Buddy Ryan allegedly instructed one of his linebackers, Jesse Small, to deliver a hard block on Cowboys kicker, Luis Zendejas, who happened to be a former Eagle player. Since any football fan knows that the kicker is not worth blocking, it raised some red flags when Small delivered the hit. In the postgame conference by Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson, he said that he believed the Eagles had a $200 "bounty" on Zendejas and a $500 "bounty" on Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman. Some critics have taken the position that these "bounty" programs ate traditional and commonplace, and that violence and injuries are a part of the NFL game. Others concede that football is a violent sport and injuries happen, but argue that paying players to intentionally try to injure another player brings the sport to another level. Regardless, there is no doubt that such "bounty" programs area clear violation of the NFL Rules. In fact, before the 2011-2012 season, the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, sent a memo to all teams explicitly stating, "[n]o bonuses or awards may be offered of paid for on field misconduct (for example, personal fouls to or injuries inflicted on opposing players)." Thus, violations have clearly been committed, and surely, the NFL will inflict what it feels are appropriate consequences to the teams and its players. However, one lingering question still remains: Can the teams and their players, as well as their insurers, be held liable for civil lawsuits which may be filed by victimized players? Although there is no clear answer, this is not the first time that courts have been faced with the question of whether a player or team could be held civilly liable for an injury to an opposing NFL player. In Hackbart v. Cincinnati Bengals, (1) a pro football player for the Denver Broncos, Dale Hackbart, initiated litigation against an opposing player, Charles Clark, and the opposing team, the Cincinnati Bengals, for an injury that occurred during an NFL game in 1973. Although Hackbart remained in the game, he claimed that he suffered a neck injury when Clark intentionally struck him in the back of his head with his right forearm after the play had ended. (2) Apparently, the officials did not observe the incident, so no penalty was called. (3) After a bench trial, and notwithstanding the Court's finding that Clark's act was intentional, the U.S. District Court for Colorado entered judgment for Clark and the Bengals, mainly on the basis that Hackbart assumed the risk of injury. …


An inverse relationship between cell-mediated and humoral immunity has been described for different forms of tuberculosis and is the essential discriminator between lepromatous and tuberculoid leprosy. Studies of mice in which the genes for gamma interferon or IL-12 and their receptors have been deleted have conformed the importance of these cytokines in resisting the development of tuberculosis after aerosol challenge. Historically, antigens specific for Mycobacterium tuberculosis have been identified by using pre-absorbed hyper-immune serum or monoclonal antibodies. A meta-analysis of studies, which included random allocation of subjects for BCG vaccination and measured the number of cases and/or deaths due to tuberculosis, also demonstrated significant benefit from BCG vaccination in preventing active tuberculosis. The overall relative risks for tuberculosis and for death due to tuberculosis were 0.49 and 0.29, respectively, in those who received BCG vaccination compared to non-vaccinated subjects. Four controlled trials have shown that BCG vaccination is effective against the development of leprosy, and in one trial in which both tuberculosis and leprosy were studied, benefit was confined to the prevention of leprosy. The WHO recommends BCG vaccination for children in areas where HIV infection and tuberculosis are common unless the children have symptoms of AIDS.


The complete osteology of the basal sauropod Tazoudasaurus naimi from the late Early Jurassic Toundoute continental series of Ouarzazate Province, Morocco, is presented. The described material belongs to juvenile to adult individuals. The skeleton of Tazoudasaurus is virtually complete except for the skull and presents a combination ofplesiomorphic and apomorphic sauropodomorph characters. Phylogenetic analysis indicates that Tazoudasaurus shares with Vulcanodon several derived features that include strongly transversely flattened tibial shaft and the marked dorsoventral flattening of the unguals of pedal digits II and III. Both taxa are placed within the Vulcanodontidae, at the base of a new clade named Gravisauria n. nom. Our analysis underscores the major morphological changes that occur among Gravisauria between the Vulcanodontidae and the Eusauropoda. The numerous remains of Tazoudasaurus were recovered from a bone-bed associated with a few remains of the basal abelisauroid Berberosaurus. A minimum of six individuals was buried at the site. Taphonomical data suggest that Tazoudasaurus had a gregarious behaviour. The different interpretations of the evolution of the configuration and posture of the manus in basal sauropods can be tested thanks to the discovery of a complete articulated manus of Tazoudasaurus. The latter is clearly digitigrade with a spreading configuration of the metacarpus. Early sauropod evolution is analyzed in a broad extinction/ radiation perspective. Prosauropoda and Coelophysoidea extinction around the Pliensbachian-Toarcian boundary, followed by the late Early Jurassic to Middle Jurassic radiation ofGravisauria, Neoceratosauria, Tetanurae and Euornithopoda are linked to the Pliensbachian-Toarcian mass extinction event.


To examine which considerations play a role when individuals make decisions to purchase sustainable product varieties or not, we have conducted a large scale field experiment with more than 600 participating households. Households can vote on whether the budgets they receive should only be spent on purchasing the sustainable product variety, or whether every household in a group is free to spend their budget on any product variety. By conducting several treatments, we tested whether people tend to view sustainable consumption as a social dilemma or as a moral dilemma. We find little support for the hypothesis that social dilemma considerations are the key drivers of sustainable consumption behaviour. Participants seem to be caught in a moral dilemma in which they not only weigh their individual financial costs with the sustainable benefits but they also consider the consequences of restricting other people's freedom of choice. Complementary survey results further substantiate this claim and show that many people are reluctant to impose restrictions on their peers, but, at the same time, our results also suggest substantial support for the government to regulate the availability of unsustainable product varieties.


Field trial on cotton (Vega cultivar) was carried out during 2007-2011 on leached vertisols under irrigation regime of sprinkling - 75 % of the field moisture capacity (FMC) for the soil layer of 0 - 40 cm. The trial included the following variants: factor A) Irrigation with lower rates:1). Single irrigation of 600 mm/ha at the interphase period blooming-boll formations; 2). Two irrigations of 450 mm/ha - the first one at the blooming stage and the second - in the boll formations period; 3).Two irrigations of 600 mm/ha - the first one at the blooming and the second - in the boll formations period; 4). Non-irrigated variant - for standard. Factor B) Width of inter-row space: 1). 60 cm. 2).80 cm. It was established that the best results were obtained for the variant where cotton cultivated at 80 cm of inter-row space and with second irrigation with 600 mm - 939 kg/ha more than the non-irrigated control and 11.9 % more than the variant with irrigated 3 norm 600 mm/ha. In reference of net profit of 1000 m irrigated water the best results were achieved after single irrigation norm of 600 mm/ha. In respect to width of inter-row space the yield from a unit of area with inter-row space 0.80 cm we receive 4.6 % more than sowing at 0.60 cm inter-row space.


This title digs into Shakespeare's darkest, most-important play. "The Tragedy of King Lear" precedes Cymbeline, King of Britain, as the earliest of Shakespeare's English history plays in the sense that it represents a primordial age when the 'sceptered isle' of 'England' was hardly yet even clearly differentiated from 'Britain'. The decay and fall of the world is visible, i.e., is originally conceivable as a subject, only from a vantage that is in some sense not itself limited to error or fault. This resolution cannot be a thesis that is merely proved from outside but a vantage that emerges in a careful reading of the 1623 folio from the beginning that is alert both to the whole of Shakespeare's corpus and its cultural context. The reading shows "The Tragedy of King Lear" to be a broadly Thomistic portrayal of the problem and reality of kingship, in which there emerges an increasingly explicit and profound - and entirely unsentimental - Christianity that seems as much Augustinian as Thomistic.


INTRODUCTION "We've reached the limits of suburban development: People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities." --Shaun Donavan (1) More and more people, especially young people, are choosing to live in central cities instead of the surrounding suburbs. In the largely free market system for housing within a metropolitan area, suburban localities have traditionally dominated the competition. But with a new generation and a recession times are changing. The question becomes, can local city governments finally compete with their suburban counterparts in the market battle for desirable, long-term residents, and if so, how? Local governments control three major policy areas: education, land use, and law enforcement. (2) Only in these areas can local governments affect the competition for residents. In the ideal world, all localities would produce a strong education system, affordable housing, and effective law enforcement to keep the residents of each locality well-educated, sheltered, and safe, at least at some satisfactory baseline level, but that is not reality. In reality, each government depends on its constituents for tax revenue and many residents, especially in the current economic crisis, cannot afford seemingly basic amenities. Acknowledging the dependency of residents for revenue as an issue, localities across the country have attempted many different reform programs in education, land use, and law enforcement. These reforms can be at the federal level, the state level, or the local level. (3) Academics and politicians alike hotly debate the effectiveness of reforms in each of these categories. Frequently absent from the discussions on urban reform are the motivations (or lack thereof) of the government actors actually implementing the reforms. For example, providing mixed-income housing may address economic and racial segregation most effectively in cities, but without additional incentives developers will not provide mixed-income housing (privately or publicly) because mixed-income developments are not as economically profitable. Effectiveness is only one half of the equation and an effective reform means nothing without the incentives required to motivate political and economic actors to implement it. Therefore, attempts at successful reform must not only consider effectiveness but also incentives. This Note considers the effectiveness of various education, land use, and law enforcement reforms and the political and economic incentives guiding government action, concluding that law enforcement reforms provide the best, and only tenable, strategy for cities looking to attract more "desirable" residents. Part I lays the foundation for a public choice analysis of local governance and inter-locality competition for residents. It discusses the predictive accuracy of the Tiebout hypothesis and outlines the inefficiencies and inequalities that currently result from a free-market localism approach. Next, Part II addresses some of the major societal trends currently occurring and explains why these trends are leading more people to live in cities. From changes in preference, to the availability of jobs, to the opportunity to buy cheap urban land, more and more residents choose city life over suburban life. Nevertheless, the long-term success of cities and the ability to achieve permanent and lasting urban reform will depend on keeping residents in the city. Part III addresses the three main areas where local governments govern: education, land use regulation, and law enforcement. For each area, I explain ways which local governments can make their locality more attractive to prospective residents. Part III details the many steps that have been taken to address concentrated poverty and crime in U.S. cities and why none have been truly successful. While many programs and policy decisions do provide benefits on some level, all fall short on three main fronts--integrating the urban poor with the affluent, improving city public services, and making the city a more attractive place to live. …


Abstract The essay discusses the liquid spatiality that characterizes the activities of the pirate, the juridical liquid space that is created in his or her wake, and reactions to pirate activity that in various ways attempt to territorialize the open sea. The essay also considers the ways in which the activities of modern pirates affect the relationship between the juridical and the political. The focus is on legal, cultural, and political relationships between activities and spatialities, and in particular on the relationship between solid and liquid states. Although the perspective is mainly that of intellectual history, the essay also discusses some recent historical events, in particular the legal processes against the Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.


Digit recognition is a special part of research in Optical Character Recognition. It is a common technique to recognize the numeric characters from printed images. A solution's design for the digit recognition problem on a case study of SPOJ Hard Image Recognition (HIR) has been proposed in this paper. The case study's problem has challenging constraints such as runtime limit and source code limit and it has many noisy images. An artificial neural network has been implemented to solve this problem in consideration of its simplicity yet powerful enough algorithm. The selection of best ANN architecture is commonly achieved through trial and error process, which is a very time-consuming process. This paper also provides the use of a Genetic Algorithm to determine the architecture of ANN automatically. The creation of the dataset also has an important role to improve the accuracy. The proposed architecture development successfully passed the challenging constraints and achieved a high score of 108 at SPOJ HIR. The score obtained by using GA is higher than our predetermined ANN architecture.


This study examines potential long-term impacts on the U.S. and Mexican beef industries of the reduction in trade barriers under NAFTA and likely associated international technology transfers (of beef cattle, feeding methods, and meat packing) and foreign capital investments. The beef industry is represented as four subsectors: cow-calf production, post-weaning beef production, meat packing, and leather production. The analysis is accomplished through a multi-sector model of the U.S. and Mexican beef industries, estimation of key parameters, and simulation of long-run outcomes under three alternative scenarios. Our results show that Mexico will dramatically expand the size of its cow herd. The expanded supply and lower post-slaughter processing cost in Mexico give it a comparative advantage in beef production, despite most of the feed grain requirement being met from U.S. exports. Mexico is able to expand its exports of feeder calves significantly when technology is transferred and to become a beef exporter. Beef prices in both countries decrease in real terms. We conclude that U.S. beef producers cannot be optimistic about the long-run potential for beef exports to Mexico but much better prospects exist for U.S. feed grain exports.


OBJECTIVE
To describe the prevalence of lipid abnormalities found in the Mexican National Health and Nutrition Survey 2006 (ENSANut 2006).

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Information was obtained from 4 040 subjects aged 20 to 69 years, studied after a 9- to 12-hour fast.

RESULTS
Median lipid concentrations were: cholesterol 198.5 mg/dl, triglycerides 139.6 mg/dl, HDL-cholesterol 39.0 mg/dl, non-HDL-cholesterol 159.5 mg/dl and LDL-cholesterol 131.5 mg/dl. The most frequent abnormality was HDL-cholesterol below 40 mg/dl with a prevalence of 60.5% (95%CI 58.2-62.8%). Hypercholesterolemia (> 200 mg/dl) had a frequency of abnormality of 43.6% (95%CI 41.4-46.0%). Only 8.6% of the hypercholesterolemic subjects knew their diagnosis. Hypertriglyceridemia (>or= 150 mg/dl) was observed in 31.5% (IC 95% 29.3-33.9%) of the population.

CONCLUSIONS
The ENSANUT 2006 data confirm that the prevalence of hypoalphalipoproteinemia and other forms of dyslipidemia in Mexican adults is very high.


Today, the planet Mars is in a phase of volcanic and tectonic quiescence. However, the 11.000 m high and 8000 km wide volcanic dome of the Tharsis region, transected by giant tectonic features, bears witness to past intense activity on the red planet. At the northernmost boundary of the Tharsis dome, the volcanic edifice of Alba Patera forms a widespread shield of 2700 km diameter and 7.000 m maximum elevation. The tectonics on Alba Patera has been the particular object of attention. The volcano and its environment are intensely breached by lineaments, which are interpreted as being fault-type structures. The orientation of those faults is in general north-south, radial to the Tharsis dome. On the flanks of Alba Patera, however, the faults curve around and are arranged in concentric pattern, encircling the summit of the edifice.

In this thesis, the structural information of Alba Patera was reviewed and newly analysed based on Viking Mosaic data. Due to the high resolution of 60 m pro pixel, details about the fault development on Alba Patera are observable. Based on cross-cutting relationships of the observed lineaments, it becomes obvious that concentric fracturing of Alba Patera formed progressively, after radial fracturing. The further focus of this thesis is to study the implications of observed structures for hidden subvolcanic processes and to infer coupled genetic mechanisms that generate tension within the crust and the volcanic edifice. It is demonstrated that the lineaments record the dynamic past of Alba Patera, enlightening that this region of the red planet suffered a multifaceted history of crustal and volcanic evolution.

Modelling the observed structures is used as a crucial key to understand their formation. Two modelling methods were used. Most of the analysis was performed by numerical models using the Finite Element code TEKTON. Semi-automatic Fortran subroutines were programmed to accelerate Finite Element data input and allow modelling with a large variety of unknown mechanical parameters. The numerically predicted surface deformation and fault arrangements are compared to the Viking Mosaic lineaments, and finally reproduced qualitatively by analogue experiments in a sand-box.

Variations of subsurface source characteristics have been investigated specifically their interplay with the volcanic loading, and their superposition with a regional extension representative of the Tharsis doming. This study shows that the observed radial structures, i.e. the Tantalus Fossae, that extend from the flanks of Alba Patera toward large northern distance, reflect the extensional surface effect of local uplift. This supports the idea that Alba Patera was an autonomous hotspot and structural dome. The following tectonic phase on Alba Patera is dominated by the formation of concentric grabens on the western and eastern mid and upper flanks of the volcano. The orientation and position of these grabens are found to be best reproduced by local crustal subsidence, superposed with a regional extensional stress field. Simulating these mechanisms in analogue sand-box models also produced surface-structures of arrangements that almost perfectly mimic the observed lineaments on Alba Patera. As seen from the mosaic image analysis, the formation of the circumferential grabens was incrementally and increasingly pronounced towards the final stages of volcanic shield construction. Since this spans a time period probably on the order of a billion years, this suggests long-term geodynamic processes to be responsible for subsidence of the central Alba Patera area. The progressive change toward higher concentricity likely resulted from an increase of density by cooling and accumulation of intrusive material during the construction of the volcano – and thus subsidence of the region above this volcanic root.

The reader will find within various parts of the thesis implications for the potential mechanical properties of Alba Patera and the Martian crust. Also the absence of lineaments can be used, to infer new information about the mechanical properties of the planet's upper lithosphere. For instance, the absence of bending signatures surrounding the Martian volcano provides information about the mechanical properties of the lithosphere. The methodical work presented in the second part of this thesis is devoted to the modelling of lithospheric flexure under the load of Alba Patera. It is shown that the lithospheric viscosity together with the load emplacement, the planet curvature and the crustal strength are primordial parameters to reduce the flexural stresses, and thus explaining the absence of flexural fractures surrounding the volcano.

Summary and perspective: Due to the minor crustal plate movement and erosion, a very long-term creation history of Alba Patera is reconstructable. The formation of lineaments, as analysed by Viking photo-mosaics, was simulated by numerical and analogue methods to elucidate the dynamic history of this volcanic edifice. The proposed vertical tectonic processes may have been not only of importance on Alba Patera, probably on Earth similar mechanisms exist on similar dimensions that are however obscured by plate tectonics.


The human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system is a gene family that encodes the human major histocompatibility complex (MHC). HLA-B is the most polymorphic gene in the MHC class I region, comprised of 4,765 HLA-B alleles (IPD-IMGT/HLA Database Release 3.28). Many HLA-B alleles have been associated with adverse drug reactions and disease risks, and we are interested in developing efficient methods for analysis of HLA alleles in this context. Here we describe an approach to HLA-B typing using multiplexed next generation sequencing on the MinION™ nanopore sequencer (Oxford Nanopore Technologies), combined with data analysis with the SeqNext-HLA software package (JSI Medical Systems GmbH, Ettenheim, Germany). The nanopore sequencer offers the advantages of long-read capability and single molecule reads, which can facilitate effective haplotyping. We developed this method using reference samples of known HLA-B type as well as individuals of New Zealand Māori or Pacific Island (Polynesian) descent, because HLA-B diversity in these populations is not well understood. We demonstrate here that nanopore sequencing of barcoded, pooled, 943 bp polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplicons of 49 DNA samples, on one R9.4 flowcell (Oxford Nanopore Technologies), generated ample read depth for all samples. Sequence analysis using SeqNext-HLA software assigned HLA-B alleles to all samples at high-resolution with very little ambiguity. Our PCR-based next generation sequencing method is a scaleable and efficient approach for genotyping HLA-B and potentially any other HLA locus. Finally, we report our findings on HLA-B genotypes of this cohort, which adds to our understanding of HLA-B allele frequencies among Māori and Polynesian people.


AIM
To investigate the effects of systemic application of Theranekron on peripheral nerve healing after compression type peripheral nerve injury.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Twenty-one female Wistar albino rats were randomly divided into 3 groups (n=7): Control (C), injury (I), and Theranekron (T). The right sciatic nerves of rats in the I and T groups were compressed via an aneurysm clip for 5 minutes and 0.3 ml Theranekron D6 was applied via subcutaneous administration once a week in the T group for a total period of four weeks. Nerve conduction velocity and proximal and distal latency of the rats were measured at the end of day 30. The right sciatic nerves of the rats were then removed and myelin damage grading, axon counting, fibrosis assessment, caspase-3, and NF-kB immunochemical staining were performed. The data were analysed and a p value of less than 0.05 was considered to be significant.

RESULTS
Axonal degeneration, vacuolization and myelin destruction were found to be markedly greater in group T. Fibrosis and caspase-3 immunoreactivity were less intense in group T. There was a statistically significant difference in the electrophysiological results of groups I and T. However, there were no statistically significant differences in axon number and NF-kB immunochemical evaluation of groups I and T.

CONCLUSION
The findings of this study show that Theranekron decreases axonal and myelin damage after sciatic nerve injury and that this neuroprotective effect of Theranekron can be attributed to its anti-inflammatory effect on pro-inflammatory cytokine levels.


Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, malicious inputs crafted to fool trained models. Adversarial examples often exhibit black-box transfer, meaning that adversarial examples for one model can fool another model. However, adversarial examples are typically overfit to exploit the particular architecture and feature representation of a source model, resulting in sub-optimal black-box transfer attacks to other target models. We introduce the Intermediate Level Attack (ILA), which attempts to fine-tune an existing adversarial example for greater black-box transferability by increasing its perturbation on a pre-specified layer of the source model, improving upon state-of-the-art methods. We show that we can select a layer of the source model to perturb without any knowledge of the target models while achieving high transferability. Additionally, we provide some explanatory insights regarding our method and the effect of optimizing for adversarial examples using intermediate feature maps.


The mechanisms hypothesized to drive spatial heterogeneity in reported influenza activity include: environmental factors, contact patterns, population age structure, and socioeconomic factors linked to healthcare access and quality of life. Harnessing the large volume and high specificity of diagnosis codes in medical claims data for influenza seasons from 2002-2009, we estimate the importance of socio-environmental determinants and measurement-related factors on observed variation in influenza-like illness (ILI) across United States counties. We found that South Atlantic states tended to have higher ILI seasonal intensity, and a combination of transmission, environmental, influenza subtype, socioeconomic and measurement factors explained the variation in seasonal intensity across our study period. Moreover, our models suggest that sentinel surveillance systems should have fixed report locations across years for the most robust inference and prediction, and high volumes of data can offset measurement biases in opportunistic data samples.


In this paper it is argued that lexical ambiguity (where a word can have two or more separate meanings) and structural ambiguity (where a phrase can have two or more separate meanings) have profoundly affected the development of the theory of the firm and the economics of organization. We focus particularly on Coase's agenda as to what constitutes the nature of the firm, and argue that intellectual resources have been misallocated in this field of inquiry because of endemic problems of lexical and structural ambiguity. We suggest how the agenda could be restated and redirected. It is concluded that resource-based economics, organizational decision theory and transaction cost analysis (in the broadest sense) should not be seen as potentially competing perspectives or frameworks in analysis of the nature of the firm, but instead as valuable and complementary tools for such analysis.


This paper presents the introduction of problem-based learning (PBL) in a power electronics course at the University of Oviedo, Gijón, Spain, by means of two practical projects: the design and construction of a switching-mode power supply (SMPS) prototype and the static study of a dc-dc converter topology. The goal of this innovation was for students to apply in practice the knowledge they had acquired in theory classes. PBL is known to be a motivating, problem-centered teaching method that brings the real professional world closer to the student. The instructors thus considered PBL to be the most suitable methodology to obtain the desired results. The underlying methodology, task planning, and assessment of these projects will be presented. Furthermore, the influence of the introduction of PBL in practical sessions versus the traditional teaching method will be discussed. Finally, the instructors' reflections and conclusions regarding the application of PBL in this course from 2007-2009 will be presented.


For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare [are] not fleshly but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. And they will be ready to punish all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.


Derivative securities and markets have experienced tremendous worldwide growth since 1970. But even so, they are not always well understood. To remedy this situation, the authors explain the link between options and futures and the underlying security or index from which they ultimately derive their value. Pricing and hedging relationships of futures contracts, option characteristics and strategies, and option pricing and hedging relationships are also addressed. To further assist the reader, the authors include exercises to reinforce the concepts as well as a glossary. The result is an updated look at options and futures that can benefit many of us.


Religious spaces are changing, recently most visibly through migration. This implies that migra-tion does not only have consequences on a material level, but also in terms of the religious tradi-tions and self-understandings of countries or societies as well as religious bodies and individuals. Religious change is not always welcome, but often connected to prejudice, rejection and aggres-sion. What should be the role of practical theology in this context? This article argues for a dual focus. First, it discusses new analytical tasks referring to religious change and reactions to it. Second, it identifies and evaluates strategies for accompanying the processes of religious change. In the past, this task was mainly connected to religious education. In the meantime, it has also become a topic in diaconal and liturgical contexts as well as of pastoral care. More far-reaching questions concerning the presuppositions of practical theology still need to be posed.


This research is on the behavioral intention on technology application.The form of tax e-filing technology introduced in Malaysia particularly on corporate taxation is however, not fully utilized, despite huge amount of budget allocated for this matter.The underpinning theories applied in conducting this research is an extension of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) that tested the direct relationship as well as moderating effects on behavioral intention as introduced in Technology Acceptance Model 3 (TAM3), i.e. incentive alignment.Even though this unified model is accepted and integrated in many studies of various fields, their results revealed some inconsistencies when applied in different areas or situations.For instance in this research, performance expectancy, effort expectancy and social influence are significantly influence the
behavioral intention.However, the incentive alignment failed to moderate those relationships, in fact it weaken the relationship toward the acceptance of tax e-filing among tax agents/preparers in Malaysia.In other words,
there is no universal UTAUT that can explain all situation of acceptance.As such, the present research is attempted to discover enrichment the model of acceptability in a situation where authority is involved in encouraging professionals (tax agents/preparers) to adopt the proposed system. Thus, the integration of The Operant Conditioning Theory (OCT) is expected to give a new outlook to the existing model. It is expected to reveal the non-compliance behavior towards corporate tax e-filing acceptability among tax agents/preparers in Malaysia.


The key problem in routing is to map from an O/R Address onto an MTA
(next hop). This shall be an MTA which in some sense is "nearer" to
the destination UA. This is done repeatedly until the message can be
directly delivered to the recipient UA. This memo defines an
Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.


At the heart of George Du Maurier9s Trilby are juxtaposed attempts to convert the novel9s heroine and namesake. On the one hand, there is Svengali, the Jewish musician and mesmerist, who tries to convert Trilby into a cosmopolitan diva. On the other hand, there is Little Billee9s effort to remake Trilby into a model of Englishness——an effort that has received little critical attention. These opposing conversion strategies raise important questions about if and how one can become English, emphasizing Englishness not as a juridical or geographic identity so much as one attainable through what Du Maurier calls "English training," particularly the consumption of English novels and English food. These dual
 conversion attempts also reveal Du Maurier9smarked ambivalence toward what I term "cultural Englishness," a combination of both everyday and artistic culture. Du Maurier is deeply invested in elements of
 English everyday culture. Yet he is highly critical of England9s Philistinism, suggesting that Englishness can benefit from an "infusion" of Jewish creativity and vitality. The novel ultimately insists,
 however, that such an infusion can be healthy only when taken in "diluted homoeopathic doses." This essay, then, argues for the importance of Englishness in Trilby and for the way that Jewishness
 functions vis-aa-vis Englishness in several of Du Maurier9s works, which, like a number of Victorian contemporaries, repeatedly turn to Jewishness as medicinal——"homoeopathic"——yet reflect
 a contrary desire to "dilute" it into safety.


The Human Rights Council of the United Nations was inaugurated in 2006 to much acclaim. Promising to defuse the tensions that had overwhelmed its maligned predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, the council is based on the belief that depoliticizing human-rights discussions would enhance the effectiveness of the United Nations in the realm of human-rights promotion. This article investigates just what type of compliance pressure the council, particularly through its Universal Periodic Review mechanism, has been able to develop over countries through comparing the genesis and workings of the council to existing accounts of how actors influence each other in international politics. It is argued that the reforms instigated by the council may have shifted the system away from the overt politicization previously experienced, but they have certainly not removed totally the role of state politics in rights promotion. As such, they represent conceptually a middle position, identified by Thomas Risse, known as "rhetorical action." Identifying this allows for an analysis of the potential success of the council, as existing accounts of this type of compliance pressure have developed "scope conditions" about what the precursors for successful compliance are. Using these conditions, the article concludes that the council's prospects may not live up to the acclaim that surrounded its creation.


This paper uses data on cigarette consumption in the Current Population Survey Tobacco Supplements to estimate cigarette demand models that incorporate the decision of whether to smuggle cigarettes across a lower-price border. I find demand elasticities with respect to the home state price are indistinguishable from zero on average and vary significantly with the distance individuals live to a lower-price border. However, when smuggling incentives are eradicated, the price elasticity is negative but still inelastic. I also estimate between 13 and 25 percent of consumers purchase cigarettes in border localities. The central implication of this study is cross-border smuggling confounds many of the potential health and revenue gains from cigarette taxation.


Cryopyrin-Associated Periodic Syndrome (CAPS) is combination of different autoinflammatory hereditary disorders with same genetic basis. CAPS caused mostly due to mutation of NLRP3 gene (nucleotide-binding domain, leucine-rich family (NLR), pyrin domain containing 3), which is an early onset in children. There are many anti-INF agents, anti-IL blockers have been reported in the literature, and continuous efforts are being made to find more effective and safe biological drugs. Canakinumab (ILARIS®) is a biological medicine approved to treat a group of rare, but severe, inherited autoimmune disorders associated with over-secretion of IL-1. It preclinical and clinical examinations, canakinumab has been reported as an effective IL-1β blocker in patients of all ages, but available clinical data in children below two years is limited. In this study, we presented four recently reported cases and reviewed available literature that demonstrated the efficacy and safety profiles of canakinumab in patients with CAPS and other autoimmune and inflammatory disorders.


An important property of production functions is the concept return to scale (RTS) as found in the literature. There are two common variations RTS in data envelopment analysis (DEA) used, constant return to scale (CRS) and variation return to scale (VRS). The envelopment surface in BCC model is VRS and this is the result of the presence of the convexity constraint in the dual model and, equivalently, the presence of new separate variable, usually called u0, is introduced in the primal model which makes it possible to determine whether operations were led in the areas of constant, increasing and decreasing. In conventional BCC model make an assumption that input-output data and u0 are exact. While accurate measurement in many real applications due to either non-availability of sophisticated measurement tools or qualitative nature of the phenomena may not be possible, consequently, this information can be represented as fuzzy numbers or linguistic terms. In this paper the RTS of efficient decision making units (DMUs) are investigated in BCC model where fuzziness is considered in both inputs and outputs and u0 variable. The proposed models provide the stability of fuzzy u0 as interval region, consequently analyst can easily examine the sensitivity of RTS of efficient DMUs. Using alpha-cut, an alternative approach is suggested to solve the obtained model. To illustrate the proposed method, a numerical example is solved.


ABSTRACT Violence against Somali shopkeepers is often cited as evidence of xenophobic attitudes and violence in South Africa. However, as argued in this article, it is not necessarily the case that such violence is driven by anti-foreigner sentiment. Instead, as illustrated in the case of Delft, a poor, mixed-race area in the City of Cape Town, violence against spaza shopkeepers may also be explained in terms of criminal activities and economic competition in the form of 'violent entrepreneurship'. This argument is made drawing on a survey of over 100 spaza shopkeepers, a household survey, police statistics, and interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders living in Delft. The key insight is that despite a recent history of intense economic competition in the spaza market in which foreign skopkeepers have come to dominate, levels of violent crime against foreign shopkeepers, 80 per cent of whom are Somali, are not significantly higher than against South African shopkeepers. In addition, while South African shopkeepers openly resent the Somali advent, most consumers remain indifferent to their presence and certainly prefer the lower prices. While our findings cannot be generalised beyond this case, they do alert us to the importance of locating arguments about xenophobia in the wider context of crime and violence in South Africa, as well as paying close attention to the local particularities that can turn general sentiment into xenophobic action.


The success of vertebrates was due in part to the acquisition and modification of jaws. Jaws are principally derived from the branchial arches, embryonic structures that exhibit proximodistal polarity. To investigate the mechanisms that specify the identity of skeletal elements within the arches, we examined mice lacking expression ofDlx5 and Dlx6, linked homeobox genes expressed distally but not proximally within the arches.Dlx5/6–/– mutants exhibit a homeotic transformation of lower jaws to upper jaws. We suggest that nestedDlx expression in the arches patterns their proximodistal axes. Evolutionary acquisition and subsequent refinement of jaws may have been dependent on modification of Dlx expression.


Aim: The aim of this present work was to isolate, characterized, and evaluate the natural plant-based polysaccharides from the seeds of Mimosa pudica plant which belongs to family Mimosaceae. In pharmaceutical industries large number of excipients is used which are obtained from natural sources, mucilage is one of them. Mucilage and their derivatives are a group of polymers extensively used in pharmaceutical dosage forms. Materials and Methods: The fresh M. pudica seeds were collected from Botanical Garden Greater Noida India. The plant was authenticated at the pharmacognosy department by a scientist at National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) Delhi. (Authentication voucher no. NISCAIR/RHMD/Consult/2019/3437-38) All other chemicals used were of analytical grade, and distilled water was used throughout the experiments. M. pudica (family Mimosaceae), commonly known as sensitive plant and widely used as herbal medicine in India, is widely available and has very low cost. It is diffuse under shrub found widely in the tropical and subtropical parts of India. Seeds of M. pudica yield mucilage, which is composed of d-xylose and d-glucuronic acid. Mimosa seeds mucilage hydrates and swells rapidly on coming in contact with water. The present investigation involved isolation of mucilage from M. pudica seeds commonly known as chhui mui followed by phytochemical and physicochemical evaluation. Results and Discussion: The mucilage isolated from the seed of M. pudica will be useful as an excipient for oral drug delivery systems as the results of phytochemical and physicochemical tests indicated the suitability of mucilage for tablet dosage form as well as a suspending agent for suspension due to its flowability, weakly acidic pH, swelling potential, and viscous in nature. The present study suggests that isolated mucilage from the seeds of M. pudica showed good flow properties which is suitable for a direct compression formulation and is non-irritating in nature to the mucosal membrane.


The rapidly growing parameter volume of deep neural networks (DNNs) hinders the artificial intelligence applications on resource constrained devices, such as mobile and wearable devices. Neural network pruning, as one of the mainstream model compression techniques, is under extensive study to reduce the model size and thus the amount of computation. And thereby, the state-of-the-art DNNs are able to be deployed on those devices with high runtime energy efficiency. In contrast to irregular pruning that incurs high index storage and decoding overhead, structured pruning techniques have been proposed as the promising solutions. However, prior studies on structured pruning tackle the problem mainly from the perspective of facilitating hardware implementation, without diving into the deep to analyze the characteristics of sparse neural networks. The neglect on the study of sparse neural networks causes inefficient trade-off between regularity and pruning ratio. Consequently, the potential of structurally pruning neural networks is not sufficiently mined.In this work, we examine the structural characteristics of the irregularly pruned weight matrices, such as the diverse redundancy of different rows, the sensitivity of different rows to pruning, and the position characteristics of retained weights. By leveraging the gained insights as a guidance, we first propose the novel block-max weight masking (BMWM) method, which can effectively retain the salient weights while imposing high regularity to the weight matrix. As a further optimization, we propose a density-adaptive regular-block (DARB) pruning that can effectively take advantage of the intrinsic characteristics of neural networks, and thereby outperform prior structured pruning work with high pruning ratio and decoding efficiency. Our experimental results show that DARB can achieve 13× to 25× pruning ratio, which are 2.8× to 4.3× improvements than the state-of-the-art counterparts on multiple neural network models and tasks. Moreover, DARB can achieve 14.3× decoding efficiency than block pruning with higher pruning ratio.