Signaling through Notch receptors in the skin has been implicated in the differentiation, proliferation, and survival of keratinocytes, as well as in the pathogenesis of basal cell carcinoma (BCC). To determine the composite function of Notch receptor-mediated signaling in the skin and overcome potential redundancies between receptors, conditional transgenic mice were generated that express the pan-Notch inhibitor, dominant-negative Mastermind Like 1 (DNMAML1), to repress all canonical [CBF-1/Suppressor of hairless/LAG-1 (CSL)-dependent] Notch signaling exclusively in the epidermis. Here, we report that DNMAML1 mice display hyperplastic epidermis and spontaneously develop cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) as well as dysplastic precursor lesions, actinic keratoses. Mice expressing epidermal DNMAML1 display enhanced accumulation of nuclear beta-catenin and cyclin D1 in suprabasilar keratinocytes and in lesional cells from SCCs, which was also observed in human cutaneous SCC. These results suggest a model wherein CSL-dependent Notch signaling confers protection against cutaneous SCC. The demonstration that inhibition of canonical Notch signaling in mice leads to spontaneous formation of SCC and recapitulates the disease in humans yields fundamental insights into the pathogenesis of SCC and provides a unique in vivo animal model to examine the pathobiology of cutaneous SCC and for evaluating novel therapies.


The Journal of Advances in Parasitology (ISSN: 2311-4096) publishes peer-reviewed original scientific articles and reports quarterly in four issues by Nexus Academic Publishers. The journal is devoted to rapid dissemination of the advancement of parasitology to the academic communities, as well as research findings and development works concerning on all parasitology fields after being evaluated by expert reviewers. The journal also takes a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach to the most current issues in both veterinary and human parasitology.


Rationality is commonly identified with axioms and rules, such as
consistency, which are defined without reference to context, but are imposed in
all contexts. In this chapter, I focus on the social context of rational
behavior. My thesis is that traditional axioms and rules are incomplete as
behavioral norms in the sense that their normative validity depends on the
social context of the behavior, such as social objectives, values, and
motivations. In the first part, I illustrate this thesis by showing that social
context can determine whether an axiom or rule is satisfied or not. In the
second part, I describe an alternative to context-independent rationality: a
domain-specific theory of rational behavior derived from the evolutionary theory
of cooperation.


Eight newborn piglets were randomly assigned to two groups. All of the piglets were fed with a milk replacer using an ``artificial sow''. Three limes daily for six days they received physiological saline (0.9% NaCl) (control group, n=5) or leptin at 10 mug/kg body weight dissolved in physiological saline (experimental group, n=3) administered intragastrically. The piglets were then anaethesized, the entire gastrointestinal tract removed, and fragments of the duodenum and mid-jejunum were harvested and their in vitro motility was measured. Despite lack of differences in body weight, the piglets treated with leptin showed differences in the weight of the stomach and pancreas and length of the ileum in comparison with the controls. Administration of leptin also significantly affected intestinal motility in a manner characteristic of the particular segments (P <0.05; P <0.01; P <0.001, respectively). The spontaneous contractions of the duodenum and its response to acetylcholine and isoproterenol were higher in the group of piglets treated with leptin than in controls, whereas segments of the jejunum behaved in the opposite manner. The experiments will be continued in order to confirm these results on a larger number of animals.


cuSTINGER, a new graph data structure targeting NVIDIA GPUs is designed for streaming graphs that evolve over time. cuSTINGER enables algorithm designers greater productivity and efficiency for implementing GPU-based analytics, relieving programmers of managing memory and data placement. In comparison with static graph data structures, which may require transferring the entire graph back and forth between the device and the host memories for each update or require reconstruction on the device, cuSTINGER only requires transferring the updates themselves; reducing the total amount of data transferred. cuSTINGER gives users the flexibility, based on application needs, to update the graph one edge at a time or through batch updates. cuSTINGER supports extremely high update rates, over 1 million updates per second for mid-size batched with 10k updates and 10 million updates per second for large batches with millions of updates.


This paper reviews theoretical and empirical literature on the household distribution of the costs and benefits of pollution control policies, and ways of integrating distributional issues into environmental cost/benefit analysis. Most studies find that policy costs fall disproportionately on poorer groups, though this is less pronounced when lifetime income is used, and policies affect prices of inputs used pervasively across the economy. The policy instrument itself is also critical; freely allocated emission permits may hurt the poor the most, as they transfer income to shareholders via scarcity rents created by higher prices, while emissions taxes offer opportunities for progressive revenue recycling. And although low-income households appear to bear a disproportionate share of environmental risks, policies that reduce risks are not always progressive, for example, they may alter property values in ways that benefit the wealthy. The review concludes by noting a number of areas where future research is badly needed.


OBJECTIVE
To analyze the challenges and accomplishments of the Mexican health system as it faced the HIV/AIDS epidemic over the 20 years since discovery of the virus.

METHODS
A review of the relevant literature was done. The topics revised were: HIV/AIDS epidemiology, the early response of the health system and civil society, prevention and risk behaviors, care and treatment, and financing and resources allocation.

DISCUSSION
In Mexico a rapid initial public response surely contributed to containing any early spread of the epidemic to select populations; whether that spread will continue to be contained is an open question. Sexual risk practices remain high not only among traditional risk populations but also among youth. Even though the epidemic remains concentrated in Mexico, principally among MSM and IDU, only 13% of public HIV prevention funds are directed to key populations at especially high risk of becoming infected or infecting others. In recent years antiretroviral coverage has increased rapidly with funding increasing from 30 to 367 million pesos from 2001 to 2003 and coverage now approaching 100%. Of all health spending on HIV/AIDS in the public sector, 82.4% is spent by the social security institutes and 17.6% by the Ministry of Health. The former provides medical care to about half of PLHA while the latter, in addition to caring for the other half, supports the large majority of prevention expenses. One of the challenges faced by the health system which has largely achieved universal antiretroviral coverage is how to provide quality care with appropriate monitoring, promotion of adherence and recognition and treatment of resistance and adverse effects--without dramatically increasing costs.


This dissertation is concerned with the future of the construction industry in South Africa and the ability to improve. Continuous growth is predicted through to the year 2015 and beyond, it is considered that to meet this challenge the South African construction industry must achieve substantial improvement and change. South Africa is a developing nation with ambitious objectives to improve social development and growth through delivery of infrastructure and other areas including, municipal development, hospitals, roads, water, electricity and government facilities. It is essential that South Africa has a construction industry that can develop capability and capacity to achieve sustainable growth. Current management thinking acknowledges that the best management and production principles are transferable. This is not a new concept or proposal, early management and production theorists and applicators such as Frederick Taylor, Frank B Gilbreth and Henry Ford all held the view that best practice techniques are transferable in application. By researching and presenting current successful management and production practices it intends to identify principles that can be adopted for change and improvement by the South African construction industry. A current general review of the South African construction industry has been undertaken to place it in context regarding the adoption of these best practice principles. The research will adopt a qualitative approach; it will be subjective and contain descriptions of techniques, people interactions, observations and assumptions. The principles addressed in this research are Benchmarking, Lean Production and Supply Chain Management; they have been selected as current best practice and as having significant use and proven continued success. They are presented in a format to allow understanding of the principles now developed and to illustrate via existing case studies, successes in application.


We introduce a purely electrical version of Maxwell's demon which does not involve mechanically moving parts such as trapdoors, etc. It consists of a capacitor, resistors, amplifiers, logic circuitry and electronically controlled switches and uses thermal noise in resistors (Johnson noise) to pump heat. The only types of energy of importance in this demon are electrical energy and heat. We also demonstrate an entirely electrical version of Szilard's engine, i.e., an information-controlled device that can produce work by employing thermal fluctuations. The only moving part is a piston that executes work, and the engine has purely electronic controls and it is free of the major weakness of the original Szilard engine in not requiring removal and repositioning the piston at the end of the cycle. For both devices, the energy dissipation in the memory and other binary informatics components are insignificant compared to the exponentially large energy dissipation in the analog part responsible for creating new information by measurement and decision. This result contradicts the view that the energy dissipation in the memory during erasure is the most essential dissipation process in a demon. Nevertheless the dissipation in the memory and information processing parts is sufficient to secure the Second Law of Thermodynamics.


It is considered to be very probable that the frequency and intensity of heat waves will increase and that heat waves, such as the one experienced in Europe in 2003, will not remain an exception. Everything goes to suggest that human beings have adapted to their local climate. Extreme events such as heat waves, for example, can, however, cause considerable stress to the thermoregulative processes in the human organism. Heat load warning systems provide a possibility for reducing heat-induced morbidity and mortality. We are presenting a method that, apart from a thermophysiologically relevant evaluation of the environment, also takes into account short-term adaptation processes of human beings to the thermal environment. The forecast method differs from previously used methods in that it is based on a combination of absolute and relative thresholds and thus includes the local adaptation to the thermal conditions of the previous weeks. This is an attempt to give a quantitative description of the mainly qualitative statements in literature on acclimatisation. A further advantage of this method is that, due to the inclusion of relative, i.e. local, conditions, it can, in principle, be applied to all climates.


Karl Schwarzschild Lecture: The Road to Earth Twins By Michel Mayor, Christophe Lovis, Francesco Pepe, Damien Segransan and Stephane Udry (With 4 Figures) 1 Ludwig Biermann Award Lecture: Stellar Forensics with the Supernova-GRB Connection ByMaryamModjaz (With 5 Figures) 11 Doctoral Thesis Award Lecture: Accretion, jets and winds: High-energy emission from young stellar objects By HansMoritz Gunther (With 8 Figures) 37 The physics and astrophysics of supernova explosions By Wolfgang Hillebrandt (With 7 Figures) 61 The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research. A new era for supernova dynamics and nucleosynthesis By Karlheinz Langanke (With 15 Figures) 83 The Bar and Spiral Structure Legacy (BeSSeL) survey: Mapping the MilkyWay with VLBI astrometry By Andreas Brunthaler, Mark J. Reid, Karl M. Menten, Xing-Wu Zheng, Anna Bartkiewicz, Yoon K. Choi, Tom Dame, Kazuya Hachisuka, Katharina Immer, George Moellenbrock, Luca Moscadelli, Kazi L.J. Rygl, Alberto Sanna, Mayumi Sato, Yuanwei Wu, Ye Xu, and Bo Zhang (With 2 Figures) 105 On the origin of gaseous galaxy halos Low-column density gas in the Milky Way halo By Nadya Ben Bekhti, Benjamin Winkel, Philipp Richter, Jurgen Kerp, and Ulrich Klein (With 6 Figures) 117 Radio studies of galaxy formation: Dense Gas History of the Universe By Chris L. Carilli, Fabian Walter, Dominik Riechers, Ran Wang, Emanuele Daddi, and Jeff Wagg, Frank Bertoldi, and KarlMenten (With 21 Figures) 131 Water in star-forming regions with Herschel By Lars E. Kristensen and Ewine F. van Dishoeck (With 6 Figures) 159 Light-element abundance variations in globular clusters By Sarah L.Martell 173 Massive black holes and the evolution of galaxies By Marta Volonteri and Jillian Bellovary (With 6 Figures) 189 High-energy astrophysics ByMartin Pohl (With 7 Figures) 207 Star formation at High Resolution, Zooming into the Carina nebula, the nearest laboratory of massive Star feedback By Thomas Preibisch (With 2 Figures) 223 Characteristic structures in circumstellar disks Potential indicators of embedded planets By Sebastian Wolf 237 Index of Contributors 243 General Table of Contents 245 General Index of Contributors 260


Low female labour force participation has been one of the main characteristics of the Saudi labour market over the last fifty years. This study is an attempt to analyse the factors affecting women's (non)employment through the perception and understanding of employed and unemployed Saudi women and Saudi policymakers. By using primary data assembled through questionnaire and interview methods, it identifies the major factors the employment and non-employment of women in Saudi Arabia. Since in order to promote women's participation in all sectors of the economy, accurate information regarding various types of historical, financial, social, familial, cultural, religious and demographic factors explaining the prevailing lack of women's participation in the formal production of the economy is needed and this study aims to provide such a comprehensive understanding of the issues involved. The questionnaire method was conducted to collect data from employed and unemployed women samples to investigate their perceptions related to factors affecting their (un)employment and also challenges related to diversification and expansion of women participation in economic activity. In addition, semi-structure interviews were conducted to collect data regarding the perception of policy makers. The questionnaire survey and interviews were conducted in three cities of Saudi Arabia (Riyadh, Dammam, and Al Hasa) during the period of February 2004-June 2004. Assembled data were qualitatively and quantitatively analysed to provide further meaning through statistical, textual and interpretative methods. The analysis of the data indicates that demographic, financial, socio-economic, attitudinal and cultural factors as well as government policies influence women's employment status in Saudi Arabia. The qualitative and quantitative factor analysis based on women's perception indicates that the following factors has important impact on women's participation in the labour market: distance difficulties, transportation, extended holidays, negative view towards working women, mixed working environment, labour legislations, child care facilities, par-time work and flexible working hours and promotion programs to change society attitude. Important recommendations include the need for a change in the attitudes of people towards women's employment as well as providing the facilitators which help women cope with employment.


Since the early 1990s, the prominent role of 'Octobrists' – former left wing student activists from the 1970s – has become increasingly evident in parliamentary and extra-parliamentary politics. Some Octobrists have played
leading or supporting roles in key moments of political transition, such as the 1992 urban middle-class movement for democracy, various social movements throughout the mid-1990s, the political reform process of the late 1990s, and the rise of the Thais Love Thais (Thai Rak Thai) government under Thaksin Shinawatra in 2001. But over the course of the past ten years, these former student activists have become increasingly divided, amidst the protracted conflict between 'Yellow shirt' (anti-Thaksin) and 'Red Shirt' (pro-Thaksin) forces in Thai politics. Octobrists have defended opposing political stances and severely
attacked one another across the political divide.
This thesis examines why the Octobrists have managed to remain a significant force in Thai politics, despite the collapse of left wing politics in the late 1970s, and why they have experienced deepening internal divisions and a crisis of legitimacy over the course of the past decade. This thesis argues that the Octobrists successfully exploited shifts in the structure of political opportunities
over the 1980s and 1990s which allowed them to overcome constraints on their involvement in politics. These former left wing student activists successfully made use of the political skills, social networks, and progressive language which they had developed and refined since the 1970s, in order to gain access to new channels of political influence and power. Above all, they managed to reframe their earlier history as leftist failures and to craft a new political identity as 'Octobrists', as heroic fighters for democracy and against authoritarian rule in the 1970s. In examining the rise and deepening of conflicts among the Octobrists,
moreover, this thesis traces the shifts in political environment which accompanied the ascendancy and entrenchment of the Thaksin government and the rise of antiThaksin mobilisation over the past decade, which undermined the loose unity among Octobrists and created new sources of tension and conflict in their midst. The thesis also shows how the notion of 'Octobrists' shifted from an effective rubric for forging a shared identity among former student activists to a rhetorical device for conflict and contestation among former comrades-in-arms.


This paper describes the applicability of optical imaging techniques to the analysis of the scratch resistance of automotive interior plastic materials. The evaluation of so-called "finger testing" has traditionally relied upon human vision for detection of the initial scratch position. Commonly performed under uniform and defined illumination conditions, the relative contrast difference signified by whitening on a surface as determined by unaided human vision is a highly variable subjective perception; thus individual inspectors may determine the "whitening" point differently. This paper compares test data obtained from both visual and instrumental evaluation methods and discusses the advantages of optical imaging techniques for surface defect analysis.


Rifts in the interior of continents that evolve to form large oceans typically last for 30 to 80 m.y. and longer before complete rupture of the continent and onset of sea-floor spreading. A distinct style of rifts form along the active tectonic margins of continents, and these rifts more commonly form marginal seas and terranes or continental blocks or slivers that are ruptured away from their home continent. The Gulf of California and the Baja California microplate make up one of the best examples of the latter setting and processes. In the southern Gulf of California, sea-floor spreading commenced only ~6–10 m.y. after the formation of the oblique-divergent plate boundary at ca. 12.5 Ma. Three main factors caused this rapid rupture: (1) an inherited long, narrow belt of hot, weak crust from a volcanic arc that was active immediately before formation of the oblique-divergent plate boundary and that lay between two strong batholith belts; (2) relatively rapid plate motion resulting in high strain rates; and (3) a dominant role of strike-slip faulting in the highly oblique-divergent setting that formed large pull-apart basins with rapid and focused crustal thinning in a linked en-echelon system. Accentuating factor 1 is that the formation of slab windows associated with microplate capture west of the Baja California peninsula may have further weakened the crust. These causes of rapid rupture of continental lithosphere are mostly linked to the fact that the Gulf of California developed along a long-lived tectonically active margin of a continent with a convergent or oblique-convergent setting since at least the Jurassic, but not a margin that was thickened in a major contractional orogen. This combination of causes and factors suggests that rifts that form at active margins are fundamentally different than continental interior rifts, and that these differences can produce vastly different rifting histories. The formation and northwestward motion of the Baja California microplate also show that "terranes" formed in an obliquedivergent setting can form and move long distances over relatively short geologic time intervals. INTRODUCTION The rupture of continental lithosphere is one of the most fundamental tectonic processes. Complete rupture of a continent requires the familiar progression from early rifting to extreme continental lithosphere thinning to continental breakup that forms oceanic spreading in a nascent ocean (e.g., Veevers, 1981). The development of a rift, and whether it progresses to breakup, is mainly dependent on the thermal structure, crustal thickness, and crustal strength of the lithosphere when rifting begins (e.g., Buck, 2007), as well as forces at the base of the lithosphere and far-field plate interactions (Ziegler and


AIDS and crime rates are often treated in isolation from each other. This study, the first to empirically test whether HIV prevalence could influence crime rates, employs an interdisciplinary model of crime to fit the complex socio-demographic context of South Africa. I construct a provincial Crime-AIDS panel dataset for the period 1994 to 2003 and use different econometric models (OLS, Fixed-Effects, Instrumental Variables and a combined I.V plus F.E specification) to test the short-run relationship between HIV prevalence and crime rates in South Africa. The fixed-effects specifications are found to best capture the relationship between crime and HIV prevalence in South Africa. I find strong evidence that HIV prevalence is positively correlated with some types of monetary/property-related crimes. This study also assesses some of the behavioral mechanisms that could drive this positive relationship between AIDS and crime. I find evidence that those infected with HIV are also more likely to engage in other risky behaviors such as illegal drug use. Those infected with HIV may be more likely to engage in risky behaviors such as drug use and crime because their reduced life expectancy leads them to discount the future. I find no evidence of HIV/AIDS crowding-out police/law enforcement expenditure in favor of other government agency spending for the study period. I find weak evidence of a negative correlation between HIV/AIDS and some types of crime that are of a violent nature, possibly because HIV positive people become too sick to commit these types of crime. This study has important policy implications with regard to the planning, coordination, budgeting and execution of programs aimed at reducing crime and AIDS in South Africa. For example, a direct implication of the results presented in this study is that policies that decrease the incidence of HIV/AIDS, or increase the life expectancy of those with HIV/AIDS, will also contribute to reducing some types of property-related crimes.


The Kyoto Protocol is often described as a good first step towards reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere. The Protocol endorses emissions trading, joint implementation including "bubbling" between Annex I Parties, an a clean development mechanism that allows Annex I and non-Annex I Parties to act together to reduce emissions. However, the anticipated permit market will not function if uncertainties are not rigorously assessed and considered in any compliance process. With no reliable verification tool, it is impossible to effectively assess the different mechanisms and activities mentioned under the Protocol. Thus, it is very important to study the uncertainties underlying the Kyoto relevant GHGs, here with reference to Poland, because without the consideration of uncertainty robust verification can not occur.

This paper presents information about the data used in the calculations as well as the methods favored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The so-called Tier 1 method of the IPCC for the evaluation of uncertainties is described in more detail.

This paper also provides a first quantitative overview on the Polish uncertainties of three Kyoto relevant GHGs, namely CO2, CH4, and N2O, for 1988, 1990 and 1999. The main goals of the paper are to present the analytical calculations as well as additional calculations that are carried out to improve the evaluation of uncertainties. Recommendations are presented to reach these goals.


The Journal of Palestine Studies presents an original translation of a 1981 article by Yugoslav anthropologist Nina Seferovic (1947–1991) on "Bushnaqs"—Palestinians whose ancestors hail from the territory of present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina. Seferovic describes the circumstances of the Bushnaqs9 departure in the late nineteenth century; the distinct community they founded in the village of Caesarea near Haifa; and their assimilation into the Palestinian nation. This study is a contribution to the social history of Palestine that raises productive questions about the legacies of the Non-Aligned Movement and about the role of race and temporality in framing such categories as settler and native in the broader examination of settler colonialism. Below, in order of appearance, are Darryl Li9s translator9s preface, "A Note on Settler Colonialism," illuminating and explicating the original study; Nina Seferovic9s article, "The Herzegovinian Muslim Colony in Caesarea, Palestine," and an appendix titled, "Balkan Migration to the Middle East." A substantial section of endnotes follows, divided into three corresponding parts.


The in-plane thermal conductivity of porous sintered bronze plates was studied both experimentally and numerically. We developed and validated an experimental setup, where the sample was placed in vacuum and heated while its time-dependent temperature field was measured with an infrared camera. The porosity and detailed three-dimensional structure of the samples were determined by X-ray microtomography. Lattice-Boltzmann simulations of thermal conductivity in the tomographic reconstructions of the samples were used to correct the contact area between bronze particles as determined by image analysis from the tomographic reconstructions. Small openings in the apparent contacts could not be detected with the imaging resolution used, and they caused an apparent thermal contact resistance between particles. With this correction included, the behavior of the measured thermal conductivity was successfully explained by an analytical expression, originally derived for regular structures, which involves three struc...


ABSTRACT: Using questionnaire and interview techniques, 167 children aged 11 to 18, and 213 adults were asked for information on their experiences of physical abuse, physical neglect, verbal abuse, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse. When neglect preceded abuse in children who experienced both, the negative impact on the child's outlook was magnified. Neglect increases a child's susceptibility and vulnerability to abuse. Our data indicates neglect has a greater impact than abuse on a child's selfperception and future outlook. Being mistreated as a child and being mistreated by a spouse correlate highly with a parent's tendency to mistreat, particularly with physical and emotional neglect. INTRODUCTION In the research on child abuse and neglect, the study of neglect is badly overlooked. Although both clinical and research evidence indicates that childhood neglect has severely damaging effects on child development and adult psychology, abuse is more dramatic and attracts more public and scientific attention. Our study, contrasting the effects of abuse and neglect, appears to demonstrate that neglect has a more pronounced and longer lasting effect on a child's self esteem and outlook on the future. It appears that neglect makes children both more susceptible and more vulnerable to abuse. Neglected children are more easily taken advantage of. When they are abused, because they are more psychologically fragile, they are more deeply and more extensively hurt. The combination of abuse and neglect creates a greater impact upon all mistreated children but those who are neglected first are more damaged. There is less emphasis in the literature on child neglect possibly because physical abuse and sexual abuse are more definable and measurable. Articles on mistreatment from developing countries might be expected to emphasize the effects of neglect, yet they also seem more interested in abuse. It is assumed that in North America neglect is less frequent and less traumatizing than abuse. However, there is evidence that with the declining value of children (Preston, 1984), more children live in poverty and are consequently more often physically neglected; with poor nourishment, housing, and medical care, etc. Emotional and intellectual neglect can take place anywhere and may be relatively more prevalent in wealthier countries. Though it is difficult to measure objectively, many patients and clients report the consequent damage to their lives. The early studies of Dennis (1973) and Bowlby (1969) have shown that neglect interferes with the normal development of children and creates problems with early and later attachment. This has been confirmed by recent research (Crittenden, 1992; Goldson, 1991; LyonsRuth, Connell, Grunebaum, & Botein, 1990). Our interest is on the effects of abuse and neglect on a child's self-esteem, hope about the future and psychiatric illness. Although only one-tenth (approx.) of the recent articles on child abuse and neglect emphasize neglect, there are some fascinating findings. Ohshima, Nakaya, Saito, Maeda, and Nagano (1991) report the autopsy findings of a neglected baby girl who died of septicaemia. They state that an immunodeficiency was secondary to thymic involution which was due to nutritional neglect. A later publication (Fukunaga, Mizoi, Yamashita, Yamada, et. al., 1992) describes the results of autopsies on forty-six children. They confirmed that there was marked involution of the thymus resulting in insufficiency of the immune system, all because of neglect. Galvin, Shekhar, Simon, Stilwell, et. al. (1991) found low levels of dopamine-beta-hydroxylase (DBH) in a high percentage of psychiatrically hospitalized boys who had a history of abuse or neglect. They feel that the low serum DBH may be a biological sequela of seriously disrupted attachment resulting from child neglect. Neglect appears to result in a variety of psychiatric conditions, particularly self-destructive behaviour. …


In volume graphics, objects are represented by arrays or clusters of sampled 3D data. A volumetric object representation is necessary in computer modeling whenever interior structure affects an object's behavior or appearance. However, existing volumetric representations are not sufficient for modeling the behaviors expected in applications such as surgical simulation, where interactions between both rigid and deformable objects and the cutting, tearing, and repairing of soft tissues must be modeled in real time. Three-dimensional voxel arrays lack the sense of connectivity needed for complex object deformation, while finite element models and mass-spring systems require substantially reduced geometric resolution for interactivity and they can not be easily cut or carved interactively. This paper discusses a linked volume representation that enables physically realistic modeling of object interactions such as: collision detection, collision response, 3D object deformation, and interactive object modification by carving, cutting, tearing, and joining. The paper presents a set of algorithms that allow interactive manipulation of linked volumes that have more than an order of magnitude more elements and considerably more flexibility than existing methods. Implementation details, results from timing tests, and measurements of material behavior are presented.


We characterize how the size distribution of plants, within narrowly defined industries, changed in Italy over a ten-year time span, and relate this to the stock of civic capital at the provincial level. Data on plant size come from the 1991 and 2001 Italian censuses. Civic capital turns out to have a positive effect on both the average and standard deviation of size. Looking at several precise points of the plant size distribution, we find that it shifts toward the right and becomes more dispersed where civic capital is high. The potential endogeneity of current civic capital is addressed by instrumenting it with historical variables. Our main conclusion is that the geographic variation in the stock of civic capital poses substantial constraints on plants' ability to expand. Understanding this is the key for the implementation of effective industrial policies.


Both Confucius and Gandhi were fervent political reformers and this paper argues that their views of human nature and the self-society-world relationship are instructively similar. Gandhi never accepted Shankara's doctrine of māyā and the Gandhian self never dissolves into the Ātman-Brahman. Gandhi's view has been best described as an organic holism in which, much like the Confucian view, individuals preserve their integrity within the interdependent web of society. Both of them also balance a belief in human dignity and integrity with a belief in divine providence. I will also demonstrate that both have their own method of experiments in truth. On the fundamental issue of the unity of truth, goodness and beauty they are in profound agreement. On the basis of this fusion of fact and value I will suggest that they both share an aesthetics of virtue that prizes inner moral beauty, which is manifest in elegant behaviour rather than a beautifully formed body.


Pilot-scale electron donor injection enhances hexavalent chromium, Cr(VI), biochemical reduction to trivalent chromium, Cr(III), in an overburden groundwater system impacted by Cr(VI) disposal in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India . The study area is located in the Indo-Gangetic alluvial plain, and is characterized by overburden stratigraphy consisting of up to about 50 meters of generally fine to medium sand interbedded with silty clay, which is underlain by about 100 meters of laterally continuous clay. The clay is underlain by interbedded fine to medium sand and clay to a depth of about 500 meters, which overlies granitic bedrock. Cr(VI) has been detected for about 20 years at concentration up to 16 milligrams per liter in groundwater samples collected from the shallower fine to medium sand unit. The source is believed to be indiscriminate dumping of wastes resulting from production of Basic Chrome Sulfate (Cr(OH)2SO4, BCS) and other reagents used by local leather tanneries. Approximately 540 kilograms of a carbohydrate-based remedial additive were injected into two wells screened in the fine to medium sand unit using about 40,000 liters of groundwater. Treatment solution make-up water was obtained from a downgradient extraction well located within the Cr(VI) plume, amended with remedial additive, and then injected into the upgradient wells to establish hydraulic control on the injection and minimize dilution. Performance monitoring included five rounds of groundwater sampling for Cr(VI), total chromium, and certain indicator parameters, including total organic carbon (TOC) as an electron donor surrogate. Pilot study results suggest that remedial additive amendment resulted in an up to 99.9% reduction in Cr(VI) concentration; an up to 97% reduction in total chromium; and up to an order of magnitude increase in TOC concentration over the four month study.


This volume is the result of the mutual respect and fruitful cooperation of several researchers. As interest in academic discourse has been growing in Slovenia, as well as in the wider region, and shared research paradigms that take into consideration cross-cultural encounters in academic contexts are emerging, it seems important to create opportunities for interaction among scholars juxtaposing different lingua-cultures. With this edited volume, we wished to provide such an opportunity by bringing together researchers examining different language combinations, including those contrasting English as an academic lingua franca and L1 discourse, as well as experts investigating other languages and cultures. A central and recurring theme of the volume is the focus on the dynamic evolution of academic discourse conventions through language contact predominantly in Slovene, but also, in the context of the region, in Croatian and Serbian.


The formation of sub-micron sized particulates has been studied in a low pressure (0.1 mbar) radio-frequency (13.56 MHz) capacitively coupled plasma discharge. Particles are studied in situ by infrared absorption spectroscopy, laser illumination and Cavity Ring Down Absorption Spectroscopy. Transmission Electron Microscopy was applied ex situ for particulates collected during the plasma. We propose that two principal mechanisms may be involved in the formation of these particulates: formation and trapping of negative ions in the gaseous phase, and the recycling of material deposited on the electrodes during the discharge, by film erosion or delamination. The relative importance of these two mechanisms was studied in silane, methane, ethylene and acetylene plasmas. The growth of the particulates in silane plasmas, monitored with Infrared and Cavity Ring Down Absorption Spectroscopy, allowed us to distinguish an increasing volume growth phase followed by an agglomeration phase at constant volume, in agreement with the literature. A slight powder and film recycling effect is detected as the experiments are repeated, as observed by an increasing particle size. The hydrogen content of powder formed in silane plasmas was estimated in situ by infrared absorption spectroscopy and changes in the infrared absorption spectrum could be observed for silane diluted with hydrogen and argon. In particular, the porous structure of the powder was observed from the high content of surface related vibration bonds relative to bulk related bonds. Photoluminescence was detected for the particles at 2.15eV that could possibly be attributed to the crystalline structure of the particles. Infrared Absorption Spectroscopy and mass spectrometry applied in situ showed that acetylenic compounds are preferentially produced in methane, ethylene and acetylene plasmas and that the hydrogen content of the other species produced in these plasmas depends on the initial gas hydrogen content. Negative ions were evidenced in these plasmas and a polymerization reaction is proposed between acetylene and C2nHx- negative ions to explain the formation of particle's precursors. The formation of aromatic structures is suggested for n>3. The different relative abundance of C2Hx- ions is proposed to explain the different powder production rates with different initial gases or different fluxes. Hydrogen may inhibit the formation of high-mass negative ions and particles. Fast growth of spherical amorphous carbon particles (∼100s) was observed for a low pressure (0.1 mbar) acetylene plasma. The sp3 structure was confirmed in situ by infrared absorption spectroscopy. Slow growth (∼1000s) of irregularly shaped particles is observed for methane plasmas at the same pressure and power. Particle heterogeneity was studied with Transmission Electron Microscopy and showed graphitic onions, multiwalled nanotubes, flakes and agglomerates attributed to the erosion or the delamination of the deposited carbon layer. The influence of the recycling of the deposited layer on the powder formation was observed in situ from enhanced particle formation as the experiments were repeated. A similar behavior was observed for discharges containing mixtures of hexamethyldisiloxane, oxygen and helium. Keeping in mind that the control of powder homogeneity implies a control over the reactor contamination and its history, we conclude that an important part of the particulates formed in the discharges studied depends on the gas phase reactions, determined by the plasma chemistry.


DEVELOPMENT, KINETIC ANALYSIS AND APPLICATIONS OF 2-D NANOSTRUCTURED LAYERED METAL HYDROXIDES Stephen Majoni, BSc. Marquette University, 2011 Nanodimensional layered metal hydroxides which include layered hydroxy salts (LHSs) and hydroxy double salts (HDSs) have the ability to accommodate species between the layers. The structural composition of these materials can be tuned so as to create materials with targeted physico-chemical properties for applications where it is advantageous to intercalate or release molecules. Some of the applications include ionexchange, fire retardation, catalysis, and controlled release delivery. Anion exchange reactions are among methods used to optimize these materials for targeted applications, making the characterization of exchange kinetics of practical interest. In addition, understanding fundamental factors that control retention and release of functional anions is important in designing hosts for storage and triggered release. Isomers of hydroxycinnamate were used as model compounds to systematically explore the effects of anion structure on controlled release delivery in layered metal hydroxides. Following intercalation and subsequent release of the isomers, it has been demonstrated that the nature and position of substituent groups on interlayer anions have considerable effects on the rate and extent of release. The extent of release was correlated to the magnitude of dipole moments of the anions while the reaction rate showed strong dependence on the level of hydrogen bond network within the layers. Anion exchange kinetic analyses of this class of compounds have traditionally been carried out using model fitting methods. Isoconversional (model-free) approach can be utilized to identify when fitting to a single model is not appropriate, particularly for characterizing the temperature dependence of the reaction kinetics. We established a systematic analysis for identifying cases when model based approaches are not appropriate in modeling anion exchange kinetics in these compounds. Results obtained demonstrate the utility of the isoconversional approach for identifying when fitting kinetic data to a single model is not appropriate. In another study, nanocomposites prepared by compounding poly (methyl methacrylate) with boron containing LHSs showed enhanced thermal stability and reduced flammability (up to 48 %) as evaluated by thermogravimetry analysis and cone calorimetry. Effective activation energies for the first step of the degradation process (evaluated using Flynn-Wall-Ozawa, Friedman, and Kissinger methods) were shown to be higher in the nanocomposites.


Much effort has been devoted to the development and empirical validation of object-oriented metrics. The empirical validations performed thus far would suggest that a core set of validated metrics is close to being identified. However, none of these studies allow for the potentially confounding effect of class size. We demonstrate a strong size confounding effect and question the results of previous object-oriented metrics validation studies. We first investigated whether there is a confounding effect of class size in validation studies of object-oriented metrics and show that, based on previous work, there is reason to believe that such an effect exists. We then describe a detailed empirical methodology for identifying those effects. Finally, we perform a study on a large C++ telecommunications framework to examine if size is really a confounder. This study considered the Chidamber and Kemerer metrics and a subset of the Lorenz and Kidd metrics. The dependent variable was the incidence of a fault attributable to a field failure (fault-proneness of a class). Our findings indicate that, before controlling for size, the results are very similar to previous studies. The metrics that are expected to be validated are indeed associated with fault-proneness.


PURPOSE
To analyze the roles of vitreal macrophages and circulating leukocytes in retinal vascular growth.

METHODS
Bone marrow (BM) cells from green fluorescent protein (GFP) transgenic mice were transplanted into postnatal day (P)1 mice after irradiation. The mice were exposed to 76% to 78% oxygen (P7-P12), to initiate oxygen-induced retinopathy (OIR). The eyes were collected at P8, P17, and P30, to analyze the engraftment of GFP-positive cells in the retina. GFP-positive peritoneal macrophages, clodronate liposomes, or control liposomes were injected into the eyes at P5 or P12 to examine the effects at P8 or P17. The number of Iba1-positive vitreal macrophages was quantified from histologic sections at P12 and P17.

RESULTS
Few transplanted GFP-positive cells were found in the retina at P8 in both wild-type and OIR mice. However, their number increased at P17 during retinal neovascularization in OIR. Most GFP-positive cells were Iba1-positive microglia, which comprised a minority of the total retinal microglia. Intravitreal injection of peritoneal macrophages showed only incidental migration of these cells into the wild-type retinas (P8), whereas the engraftment was more robust, typically around the neovascularization, in OIR mice (P17). Furthermore, native macrophages in the vitreous cavity became fewer (37.7% reduction) during neovascularization in OIR at P17. The selective depletion of vitreal macrophages by clodronate liposomes at P12 reduced retinal neovascularization in OIR mice by 59.0% at P17.

CONCLUSIONS
Vitreal macrophages are attracted to the site of pathologic angiogenesis triggered by retinal ischemia, where they actively participate in vascular development.


Summary: Agaricus bisporus was cultivated axenically on wheat straw compost. Analysis of this culture medium during growth and fruiting showed that the lignin fraction of straw was degraded preferentially during the vegetative growth phase, whereas cellulose was degraded after the emergence of the fruit bodies. A novel technique was developed, whereby natural or synthetic radiolabelled lignin was mixed intimately with axenic compost and the rate of mineralization to CO2 throughout the life-cycle of A. bisporus was monitored continuously without culture disturbance. Mineralization rates were maximal during the vegetative growth phase and the onset of fruiting brought a decrease of this activity. A mutant strain of A. bisporus, which was unable to develop fruiting bodies, was shown to mineralize radiolabelied lignin continuously.


Background The incidence of lumbar spine injury is high. Ergometer rowing and fatigue have been cited as risk factors for this injury. Objective Compare the kinematics of the lumbar spine in rowers on an ergometer and a sculling boat during a fatiguing protocol. Design Lumbar spine kinematics were assessed in the sagittal plane using a twin axis electrogoniometer. Setting A laboratory and field based study of elite level rowing. Participants 19 male rowers, mean age 24.2 (3.7) years, mean weight 82.5 (8.4) kg and height 1.88 (0.05) m. Assessment of risk factors Maximum range of lumbar flexion was measured before each test. Sagittal plane lumbar spine angular kinematics were measured during an ergometer rowing trial which comprised of an incremental 'step test' on a Concept 2 ergometer. The trial was repeated in a sculling boat on the water. Main outcome measurements Pre-test maximum flexion and maximum lumbar flexion during each test were compared. Mean sagittal flexion in the lumbar spine during the first and last stage of the step test was compared. The findings of ergometer and boat rowing were compared. Results Maximum sagittal flexion was 113% (15.2) of pre-test range during ergometer rowing and 104.1% (10.2) during boat rowing. Lumbar flexion increased over the course of testing. Increase in lumbar flexion was significantly greater on the ergometer (mean change+4.4°(0.85)) compared with the boat (mean change+1.3°(1.1)), (mean difference 3.1, 95% CI 0.3 to 5.9, t=2.28, p=0.035). Conclusion Rowers experience a very high level of lumbar spine flexion which increases over the course of a rowing trial. Ergometer rowing results in significantly greater increases in sagittal motion in the lumbar spine compared to boat rowing.


Iran is located in an arid and semi-arid region and will be joining the 'Thirsty States' by 2025. However, water use efficiency and water services seem to be low and inadequate, as they do not match the emerging conditions of water scarcity. As part of the research efforts required to address the problems in this area, this paper endeavors to use a simple, efficient, precise, and practical method for determining the income and price elasticity of the domestic drinking water demand. The household income in this method is replaced by a good, measurable substitute index which is the household land and building areas. Log-log functions are presented for different blocks for the statistical period 2001- 2004. Correlation coefficients obtained were above 40% in all the functions. The average income elasticity ranged from 0.704 to 0.411 for the first to the fifth blocks, respectively. This shows that water is a necessary and non-substitutable commodity in the household portfolio. The price demand elasticity was estimated using the modified Pollak-Wales method, price variations over two different time periods, and income elasticity over the statistical period. The price elasticity value varied from - 0.3 to -0.01 for the second to fourth blocks, respectively. This indicates the inelasticity or low elasticity of water for current prices.


If the twentieth century is distinguished by progress and technological advancement, the twenty-first century is becoming known for the widespread societal and environmental change following the industrial revolution. From increasing access to energy to genetic engineering, Homo sapiens have discovered multiple means of accelerating their own development. In the process, we have gained notoriety as the first species to affect the global environment. From resource depletion, pollution, population growth, globalised commerce to climate change, humans have created global change in many forms and interconnected ways. Degradation of ecosystems, biodiversity loss, a warming atmosphere and continued reliance on non-renewable energy raise the question: Does human society have the capacity to adapt to the environmental changes it has set in motion? The future may be uncertain, yet humans have coped with a changing world for tens of thousands of years. Human relationships with the environment have moved from survival, to exploitation, to management, to recognising the complex physical and sociological connections between humans and their natural and built environments. These interdependencies aside, the complexity of human society makes it difficult to coordinate will, ability and effort to adapt to new circumstances. Yet this is what the institutions underlying society do; guide social behaviour, facilitate interaction and enable collective action. Furthermore, as social constructs, institutions reflect society's assumptions, beliefs, needs, and aspirations, and so alter and adjust as the world around them transforms. This thesis posits that if institutions allow society to function, the features by which they change contain the capacity to proactively and collaboratively adapt to global changes. The research seeks to identify these institutional adaptive capacities in the context of managing water in cities; a morally, environmentally and economically pressing field in need of societal change due to the role water plays in these highly modified landscapes of concentrated human activity. The experience of the Australian cities of Perth and Adelaide, responding to unprecedented drought, was utilised to explore the phenomenon of system adaptation, using institutional adaptive capacity as the central focus. Significant water scarcity throughout the drought exposed areas of technological lock-in and institutional inertia in the water sectors of these cities. This prompted a major rethink of the socio-technical configuration of urban water systems, and how they delivered services to meet societal needs and expectations. Exploration of these empirical examples of societal systems in transition, revealed some of the institutional roots of system inertia and mechanisms for adaptation. The research found three forms of adaptive capacity were important ingredients of system change; learning, deciding and acting. The results reveal some of the ways these capacities can be created, using a mix of institutional mechanism, to enable system resilience or transformation. With further development, such knowledge of institutional configurations and the change dynamics they generate could yield the building blocks of sustainable societies.


In a double-blind, random-order, cross-over study the effects of placebo and 100 mg of caffeine on postprandial sitting and erect blood pressure and heart rate were studied in 20 frail elderly subjects (mean age 84, range 75-93 years) after a standardized 400 K-calorie glucose drink. Maximal postprandial reduction in sitting systolic blood pressure occurred, at 60 minutes post-placebo, of - 11 mmHg (95% confidence interval -5 to -17 mmHg, P less than 0.01), and was attenuated by caffeine (P less than 0.05) with changes in systolic blood pressure, at 60 minutes post-drink, of 1 mmHg (95% CI -6 to 7 mmHg, not significant). Four subjects developed symptomatic postprandial hypotension after placebo which was prevented by caffeine. There were no significant changes in erect systolic blood pressure, postural systolic blood pressure change, sitting and erect, diastolic blood pressure and heart rate between treatment phases. Caffeine attenuates the postprandial fall in sitting blood pressure in frail elderly subjects and in particular prevented symptomatic blood pressure reductions in subjects with postprandial hypotension.


Abstract Titanium alloys are one of the materials extensively used in the aerospace industry due to its excellent properties of high specific strength and corrosion resistance. On the other hand, they also present problems wherein titanium alloys are extremely difficult materials to machine. In addition, the cost associated with titanium machining is also high due to lower cutting velocities and shorter tool life. The main objective of this work is a comparison of different cooling techniques during cryogenic machining of titanium alloys. The analysis revealed that applied cooling technique has a significant influence on cutting force and surface roughness (Ra parameter) values. Furthermore, in all cases observed a positive influence of cryogenic machining on selected aspects after turning and milling of titanium alloys. This work can be also the starting point to the further research, related to the analysis of cutting forces and surface roughness during cryogenic machining of titanium alloys.


Abstract. Soils in Arctic and boreal ecosystems store twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, a portion of which may be released as high-latitude soils warm. Some of the uncertainty in the timing and magnitude of the permafrost–climate feedback stems from complex interactions between ecosystem properties and soil thermal dynamics. Terrestrial ecosystems fundamentally regulate the response of permafrost to climate change by influencing surface energy partitioning and the thermal properties of soil itself. Here we review how Arctic and boreal ecosystem processes influence thermal dynamics in permafrost soil and how these linkages may evolve in response to climate change. While many of the ecosystem characteristics and processes affecting soil thermal dynamics have been examined individually (e.g., vegetation, soil moisture, and soil structure), interactions among these processes are less understood. Changes in ecosystem type and vegetation characteristics will alter spatial patterns of interactions between climate and permafrost. In addition to shrub expansion, other vegetation responses to changes in climate and rapidly changing disturbance regimes will affect ecosystem surface energy partitioning in ways that are important for permafrost. Lastly, changes in vegetation and ecosystem distribution will lead to regional and global biophysical and biogeochemical climate feedbacks that may compound or offset local impacts on permafrost soils. Consequently, accurate prediction of the permafrost carbon climate feedback will require detailed understanding of changes in terrestrial ecosystem distribution and function, which depend on the net effects of multiple feedback processes operating across scales in space and time.


Received: September 22, 2019 Accepted: October 27, 2019 Published: November 30, 2019 Volume: 2 Issue: 6 DOI: 10.32996/ijllt.2019.2.6.46 Due to technological innovations, nowadays, reading tools are being changed drastically. This study reports on a small-scale research study conducted to investigate that a large number of readers are switching their reading tools from hard copies to soft copies. This study has been conducted upon the readers of different ages and professions mostly students. The respondents are mainly students of a private university and two colleges in Bangladesh. A pre-tested questionnaire was prepared to conduct the survey. The results show that nearly 60% people read Word File in computer or in other devices. There are people who read in printed documents and they are around 40%. It also shows that 34% people use computer for reading, most of the people access reading through their smart phones and the percentage of it is 56. Majority of our surveyed people read their academic texts that are in percent 60. In response to questions, whether has social media affected reading habit greatly or not, the majority of our participants responded "Strongly Agree" and its rate is nearly 70%. Among the young generation tendency of soft copy is higher KEYWORDS


Waste management has developed in many countries and will continue to do so. Changes towards increased recovery of resources in order to meet climate targets and for society to transition to a circular economy are important driving forces. Scenarios are important tools for planning and assessing possible future developments and policies. This paper presents a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) model for environmental assessments of scenarios and waste management policy instruments. It is unique by including almost all waste flows in a country and also allow for including waste prevention. The results show that the environmental impacts from future waste management scenarios in Sweden can differ a lot. Waste management will continue to contribute with environmental benefits, but less so in the more sustainable future scenarios, since the surrounding energy and transportation systems will be less polluting and also because less waste will be produced. Valuation results indicate that climate change, human toxicity and resource depletion are the most important environmental impact categories for the Swedish waste management system. Emissions of fossil CO2 from waste incineration will continue to be a major source of environmental impacts in these scenarios. The model is used for analyzing environmental impacts of several policy instruments including weight based collection fee, incineration tax, a resource tax and inclusion of waste in a green electricity certification system. The effect of the studied policy instruments in isolation are in most cases limited, suggesting that stronger policy instruments as well as combinations are necessary to reach policy goals as set out in for example the EU action plan on circular economy.


Importance
High-flow nasal oxygen is recommended as initial treatment for acute hypoxemic respiratory failure and is widely applied in patients with COVID-19.

Objective
To assess whether helmet noninvasive ventilation can increase the days free of respiratory support in patients with COVID-19 compared with high-flow nasal oxygen alone.

Design, Setting, and Participants
Multicenter randomized clinical trial in 4 intensive care units (ICUs) in Italy between October and December 2020, end of follow-up February 11, 2021, including 109 patients with COVID-19 and moderate to severe hypoxemic respiratory failure (ratio of partial pressure of arterial oxygen to fraction of inspired oxygen ≤200).

Interventions
Participants were randomly assigned to receive continuous treatment with helmet noninvasive ventilation (positive end-expiratory pressure, 10-12 cm H2O; pressure support, 10-12 cm H2O) for at least 48 hours eventually followed by high-flow nasal oxygen (n = 54) or high-flow oxygen alone (60 L/min) (n = 55).

Main Outcomes and Measures
The primary outcome was the number of days free of respiratory support within 28 days after enrollment. Secondary outcomes included the proportion of patients who required endotracheal intubation within 28 days from study enrollment, the number of days free of invasive mechanical ventilation at day 28, the number of days free of invasive mechanical ventilation at day 60, in-ICU mortality, in-hospital mortality, 28-day mortality, 60-day mortality, ICU length of stay, and hospital length of stay.

Results
Among 110 patients who were randomized, 109 (99%) completed the trial (median age, 65 years [interquartile range {IQR}, 55-70]; 21 women [19%]). The median days free of respiratory support within 28 days after randomization were 20 (IQR, 0-25) in the helmet group and 18 (IQR, 0-22) in the high-flow nasal oxygen group, a difference that was not statistically significant (mean difference, 2 days [95% CI, -2 to 6]; P = .26). Of 9 prespecified secondary outcomes reported, 7 showed no significant difference. The rate of endotracheal intubation was significantly lower in the helmet group than in the high-flow nasal oxygen group (30% vs 51%; difference, -21% [95% CI, -38% to -3%]; P = .03). The median number of days free of invasive mechanical ventilation within 28 days was significantly higher in the helmet group than in the high-flow nasal oxygen group (28 [IQR, 13-28] vs 25 [IQR 4-28]; mean difference, 3 days [95% CI, 0-7]; P = .04). The rate of in-hospital mortality was 24% in the helmet group and 25% in the high-flow nasal oxygen group (absolute difference, -1% [95% CI, -17% to 15%]; P > .99).

Conclusions and Relevance
Among patients with COVID-19 and moderate to severe hypoxemia, treatment with helmet noninvasive ventilation, compared with high-flow nasal oxygen, resulted in no significant difference in the number of days free of respiratory support within 28 days. Further research is warranted to determine effects on other outcomes, including the need for endotracheal intubation.

Trial Registration
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04502576.


This paper examines premises and data underlying the assertion that some financial institutions in the U.S. economy were "too big to fail" and hence warranted government bailout. It traces the merger histories enhancing the dominance of six leading firms in the U. S. banking industry and he sharp increases in the concentration of financial institution assets accompanying that merger wave. Financial institution profits are found to have soared in tandem with rising concentration. The paper advances hypotheses why these phenomena might be related and surveys relevant empirical literature on the relationships between market concentration, interest rates received and charged by banks, and economies of scale in banking.


Specular neutron reflectometry has become an established probe of the nanometer scale structure of materials in thin film and multilayered form. It has contributed especially to our understanding of soft condensed matter of interest in polymer science, organic chemistry, and biology and of magnetic hard condensed matter systems. In this paper we examine a number of key factors which have emerged that can limit the sensitivity of neutron reflection as such a probe. Among these is loss of phase information, and we discuss how knowledge about material surrounding a film of interest can be applied to help resolve the problem. In this context we also consider what role the quantum phenomenon of interaction-free measurement might play in enhancing the statistical efficiency for obtaining reflectivity or transmission data.


Determinantal point processes (DPPs) offer an elegant tool for encoding probabilities over subsets of a ground set. Discrete DPPs are parametrized by a positive semidefinite matrix (called the DPP kernel), and estimating this kernel is key to learning DPPs from observed data. We consider the task of learning the DPP kernel, and develop for it a surprisingly simple yet effective new algorithm. Our algorithm offers the following benefits over previous approaches: (a) it is much simpler; (b) it yields equally good and sometimes even better local maxima; and (c) it runs an order of magnitude faster on large problems. We present experimental results on both real and simulated data to illustrate the numerical performance of our technique.


The online multi-armed bandit problem and its generalizations are repeated decision making problems, where the goal is to select one of several possible decisions in every round, and incur a cost associated with the decision, in such a way that the total cost incurred over all iterations is close to the cost of the best fixed decision in hindsight. The difference in these costs is known as the regret of the algorithm. The term bandit refers to the setting where one only obtains the cost of the decision used in a given iteration and no other information.

Perhaps the most general form of this problem is the non-stochastic bandit linear optimization problem, where the set of decisions is a convex set in some Euclidean space, and the cost functions are linear. Only recently an efficient algorithm attaining O (√T) regret was discovered in this setting.

In this paper we propose a new algorithm for the bandit linear optimization problem which obtains a regret bound of O (√Q), where Q is the total variation in the cost functions. This regret bound, previously conjectured to hold in the full information case, shows that it is possible to incur much less regret in a slowly changing environment even in the bandit setting. Our algorithm is efficient and applies several new ideas to bandit optimization such as reservoir sampling.


The study of the long-term history of what has been known since 1960 as the Islamic Republic of Mauritania is possible largely because of inhabitants' early embrace of Islam in the 8th century. While research on the early pre-Islamic history of the region is limited by the availability of sources to primarily the archaeological, the arrival of Islam through trade networks crossing the Sahara from North Africa meant that Arab merchants and explorers supplied and produced knowledge about the region's inhabitants, polities, and natural resources that was then written down in Arabic by Muslim chroniclers and historians. Early Muslims were largely Khajirite and Ibadi but the 11th-century Almoravid reformist and educational movement ensured that the region's Muslims would predominantly follow Sunni Islam as defined by the Maliki school of law and ʿAshari theology. By the time the Almohad empire succeeded the Almoravid in the 12th century, important centers of Islamic scholarship were emerging in major trading towns in the Sahara and along the Senegal River. The expansion of Sufi thought and practice, the arrival of the Arabic-speaking Banu Hassan, and the subsequent development of political entities known as emirates occurred in ensuing centuries and played a part in the genesis of a social structure that valorized the Arabic language, the study of Islam, and claims of descent from the Prophet Muhammad. The arrival of European merchants in the 15th century and the subsequent colonization of the region by the French led to rapid changes in the economic and cultural bases of political authority and social hierarchy, with colonial policy largely valorizing Sufi leaders as political interlocutors and community representatives. Independence from France in 1960 meant the establishment of an Islamic Republic whose laws are based on a mixed legal system of Maliki Islamic and French civil law. The basis of presidential rule is not religious in nature, though presidents have increasingly used a discourse of religion to legitimize their rule in the face of internal political opposition and external threats from extremist groups such as al-Qaʿeda.


Manufacturing industry is a crucial ingredient in national economic development.
This is because of the value which is added to natural resources and intermediate
products through industrial processing. Where this value is retained in an
economy, its circulation can sustain many more jobs than are created directly
in manufacturing itself. Even in so-called 'post-industrial economies', rising
industrial output continues to be a key source of wealth creation despite rapidly
contracting employment in manufacturing industry per se. The extraordinarily
high rate of economic growth which Ireland experienced in the 1990s was
largely driven by rapid expansion of its manufacturing sector, arising principally
from a surge of inward investment by transnational fi rms which began around
1993. This chapter outlines the historical background to this recent phase of
strong industrial growth, before examining in some depth the key dimensions
of this crucial feature of the so-called 'Celtic Tiger' economy. The chapter
concludes with an assessment of the long-term developmental implications
of the form recent industrial development has taken, particularly in the light
of certain weaknesses in the industrial structure which have become apparent
in the early 2000s. Case studies of the microcomputer and pharmaceutical
sectors are presented to illustrate key themes raised in the main text. The spatial
dimensions associated with successive industrial development phases are also
described and analysed.


A large organization can generate over ten billion network flow records per day, a high-velocity data source. Finding useful, security-related anomalies in this volume of data is challenging. Most large network flow tools sample the data to make the problem manageable, but sampling unacceptably reduces the fidelity of analytic conclusions. In this paper we discuss SiLK, a tool suite created to analyze this high-volume data source without sampling. SiLK implementation and architectural design are optimized to manage this Big Data problem. SiLK provides not just network flow capture and analysis, but also includes tools to analyze large sets and dictionaries that frequently relate to network flow data, incorporating higher-variety data sources. These tools integrate disparate data sources with SiLK analysis.


In order to process interval timestamped data, the sequenced semantics has been proposed. This paper presents a relational algebra solution that provides native support for the three properties of the sequenced semantics: snapshot reducibility, extended snapshot reducibility, and change preservation. We introduce two temporal primitives, temporal splitter and temporal aligner, and define rules that use these primitives to reduce the operators of a temporal algebra to their nontemporal counterparts. Our solution supports the three properties of the sequenced semantics through interval adjustment and timestamp propagation. We have implemented the temporal primitives and reduction rules in the kernel of PostgreSQL to get native database support for processing interval timestamped data. The support is comprehensive and includes outer joins, antijoins, and aggregations with predicates and functions over the time intervals of argument relations. The implementation and empirical evaluation confirms effectiveness and scalability of our solution that leverages existing database query optimization techniques.


A major economic concern is the ongoing sluggishness in the growth of output per worker hour, generally called labor productivity. In an arithmetic sense, the growth of the economy can be accounted for by the increase in hours worked plus that of labor productivity. With the unemployment rate now at a level widely regarded as near ?full employment,? growth in hours worked is likely to be limited by demographic forces, most importantly the very limited expansion of the working-age population. If productivity growth also remains low, the sustainable pace of increase of real GDP will be limited and remain noticeably lower than historic norms.


Natural images may lie on a union of disjoint manifolds rather than one globally connected manifold, and this can cause several difficulties for the training of common Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). In this work, we first show that single generator GANs are unable to correctly model a distribution supported on a disconnected manifold, and investigate how sample quality, mode dropping and local convergence are affected by this. Next, we show how using a collection of generators can address this problem, providing new insights into the success of such multi-generator GANs. Finally, we explain the serious issues caused by considering a fixed prior over the collection of generators and propose a novel approach for learning the prior and inferring the necessary number of generators without any supervision. Our proposed modifications can be applied on top of any other GAN model to enable learning of distributions supported on disconnected manifolds. We conduct several experiments to illustrate the aforementioned shortcoming of GANs, its consequences in practice, and the effectiveness of our proposed modifications in alleviating these issues.


The erosion of constitutional norms in the United States is at the center of an urgent national debate. Among the most crucial of these issues is the fragile and deteriorating relationship between the press and the government. While scholars have responded with sophisticated examinations of legislators' and the President's characterizations of the news media, one branch of government has received little scrutiny—the U.S. Supreme Court. This gap in the scholarship is remarkable in light of the Court's role as the very institution entrusted with safeguarding the rights of the press. This paper presents the findings of the first comprehensive empirical examination of the Court's depictions of the press. We tracked every reference to the press by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice in the Court's opinions since 1784. We coded these references to the press (broadly defined by the Justices themselves) for the presence of common frames and for whether the frame was conveyed with a positive, negative, or neutral tone. The results of our study reveal troubling trends at the Court, with widespread implications for any discussion of contemporary press freedom. We find that there has been a stark deterioration in both the quantity and quality of the Court's depictions of the press across a variety of measures. Our data show that the Justices are now less likely to talk about the press than they were in the past, and that, when they do, it is more often in a negative light. At this crucial moment, when we have seen the risks of executive and legislative branch attacks on the press, our study finds that the U.S. Supreme Court is not pushing back. The study also reveals a substantial correlation between ideology and the Justices' attitudes toward the press. It likewise illuminates the press-characterizing behaviors of the most and least press-friendly Justices of all time and of the currently sitting Justices, providing insights into patterns that might be expected in the years to come.


Correlation functions provide information on the properties of mesons in vacuum and of hot nuclear matter. In this Letter, we present a new method to derive a well-defined spectral representation for correlation functions. Combining this method with the quark gap equation and the inhomogeneous Bethe-Salpeter equation in the rainbow-ladder approximation, we calculate in-vacuum masses of light mesons and the electrical conductivity of the quark-gluon plasma. The analysis can be extended to other observables of strong-interaction systems.


Morality is often imagined to be at odds with capitalism and its focus on the bottom line, but in "The Moral Neoliberal" morality is shown as the opposite: an indispensable tool for capitalist transformation. Setting her investigation within the shifting landscape of neoliberal welfare reform in the Lombardy region of Italy, Andrea Muehlebach tracks the phenomenal rise of voluntarism in the wake of the state's withdrawal of social service programs. Using anthropological tools, she shows how socialist volunteers are interpreting their unwaged labor as an expression of social solidarity, with Catholic volunteers thinking of theirs as an expression of charity and love. Such interpretations pave the way for a mass mobilization of an ethical citizenry that is put to work by the state. Visiting several sites across the region, from Milanese high schools to the offices of state social workers to the homes of the needy, Muehlebach mounts a powerful argument that the neoliberal state nurtures selflessness in order to cement some of its most controversial reforms. At the same time, she also shows how the insertion of such an anticapitalist narrative into the heart of neoliberalization can have unintended consequences.


Names can act as daily reminders of a colonial presence. To unsettle Settler origin stories, we strive to reveal the legacy of (dis)possession rooted in naming. As case studies, we consider the attribution of the name Salish Sea, the naming of the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Georgia, and the delineation of national boundaries during the San Juan Water Boundary Dispute. We use these examples to demonstrate the unsettling potential of (re)naming practices. To conclude, we suggest further areas for praxis and research that are situated in a broader context of naming practices.


Critics of Jean Toomer's Cane disagree about the text's relation to the economic and social realities confronting rural and small-town Georgia blacks in the early 1920s. Some scholars read the novel as a nostalgic celebration of a vanishing peasant existence close to the earth. If the text acknowledges the harshness of racism and poverty, it subordinates social protest to lyricism, the representation of the here and now to the search for prophetic truths beyond the limits of history. Bonnie Barthold, for example, noting that the text eschews "linear development," argues that "the achievement of Cane" is its "mythic portrayal of a mythic truth on the verge of destruction" (159). Bowie Duncan, reading the text as an "oracular" articulation of post-Einsteinian notions of space and time, remarks that "the meaning of [Cane's] oracle is its multiplicity and uncertainty of meaning" (329). Alain Solard reads "Blood-Burning Moon" as only incidentally the story of a lynching: As the narrative unfolds, the "outline of reality gives way to the haunting presence of a visionary world" (552). Catherine Innes stresses the influence upon Toomer of P. D. Ouspensky's idealist view of "a living universe in which the hidden meaning of all things will be realized and felt, and the unity of all things understood" (155); in this context, Innes reads the Lewis of the text's "Kabnis" section as "a man capable of the cosmic vision, of penetrating the world of appearances, and of fusing together past and present, anguish and joy, 'soil and the overarching heavens'" (163). All the critics who read Cane as subsuming history under myth do not necessarily applaud the political implications of its idealism. Robert Jones notes that "Toomer's reification of thought is evident in the way he consistently proposed idealism as the solution to racism and social problems, yet without the praxis of social activism" (17). Maria Caldeira chides Toomer for his "belief that he would be able to transcend or solve his conflicts with reality through Art" and charges that he "substituted mysticism for his craving for equality and harmony among people" (548). Edward Margolies contends that Cane achieves a specious unity by "celebrating the passions and instincts of folk persons close to the soil, as opposed to the corruption of their spirit and vitality in the cities." Even the text's representations of violence reflect Toomer's "primitivism" and "neoromantic attitudes": "Is Toomer unconsciously saying that beauty resides in the pain and suffering of black men? . . . Are passivity and withdrawal from life ultimate fulfillment?" (Margolies 39-40). Donald Gibson argues that, by "locating historical causation outside of time and space," Cane offers not "a revelation of the essence of black life" but a "politics of denial" (163, 155). Susan Blake observes that "the central conflict in Cane is the struggle of the spectatorial artist to involve himself in his material"; never fully resolving this conflict, the text "advocate[s] . . . [al retreat into mysticism" (196, 211). To these critics, Toomer's mythic ahistoricity does not enable transcendence of historical tragedy, but instead constitutes an ideological accession and accommodation to that tragedy. While many Toomer scholars stress Cane's efforts - successful or unsuccessful - to transcend concrete historicity, a number read the book as an intense engagement with the actualities of 1920s Georgia life. Arthur P. Davis, in an early appreciation of Cane, observed that "[u]nderneath all of [the] elusive meanings, . . . one finds a profound knowledge of the Southern scene. . . . There is no overt protest here, but Toomer was always aware of the South's cruelty" (49). Nellie McKay remarks that Cane is about not only "the intrinsic worth of black culture" but also "the pain and struggle wrung from the soul of a people" and the author's own "confrontation with the meaning of that awful reality" (177). Discussing the role played by music in Cane, Nathaniel Mackey notes that Toomer "celebrates and incorporates song but not without looking at the grim conditions which give it birth, not without acknowledging its outcast, compensatory character" (36). …


A paradigm shift has occurred in the role and organization of laboratory diagnostics over the past decades, wherein consolidation or networking of small laboratories into larger factories and point-of-care testing have simultaneously evolved and now seem to favorably coexist. There is now evidence, however, that the growing implementation of continuous-flow automation, especially in closed systems, has not eased the identification of hemolyzed specimens since the integration of preanalytical and analytical workstations would hide them from visual scrutiny, with an inherent risk that unreliable test results may be released to the stakeholders. Along with other technical breakthroughs, the new generation of laboratory instrumentation is increasingly equipped with systems that can systematically and automatically be tested for a broad series of interferences, the so-called serum indices, which also include the hemolysis index. The routine implementation of these technical tools in clinical laboratories equipped with continuous-flow automation carries several advantages and some drawbacks that are discussed in this article.


— In today's world technology has made our lives easier and more enjoyable for the people. However, we all benefit from this emerging technology, certain groups of people need more help and support than others: elderly or disable people. For them, technology can make a way of having an almost normal life. So, we focused our attention on the concept of a personal assistant robot. This automaton is principally designed for this cluster of individuals as its main purpose is to supply help to Associate in Nursing aged or disabled persons. Personal robotic assistants help to reduce the manual efforts being put by humans in their day-to-day tasks. The purpose is to implement a voice-controlled system as an Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) that can perform numerous tasks or services for an individual. This golem is specially designed for this cluster of individuals as its main purpose is to supply help to associate senior or disabled person. The human voice command is given to the robotic assistant remotely, by using a voice module (it is like ears of the robot). The tasks are based on some features embedded in the Assistant. The automaton will perform different movements, turns, start/stop operations. The robot can also read and recognize characters like alphabets as well as numeric [5]. This enhances the capability of the robot to detect objects and relocate them from one place to another. The most important characteristic of the Assistant is to give the trending information that the user has asked for. The input query by the user can be news regarding weather, politics, etc .


Automated biomedical concept recognition is important for biomedical document retrieval and text mining research. In this paper, we describe a two-step concept extraction technique for documents in biomedical domain. Step one includes noun phrase extraction, which can automatically extract noun phrases from medical documents. Extracted noun phrases are used as concept term candidates which become inputs of next step. Step two includes keyphrase extraction, which can automatically identify important topical terms from candidate terms. Experiments were conducted to evaluate results of both steps. The experiment results show that our noun phrase extractor is effective in identifying noun phrases from medical documents, so is the keyphrase extractor in identifying document conceptual terms.


This article explores the lawfulness of servitudes on personal property in both common law and intellectual property regimes. The common law has from ancient times recognized the general right of owners of real property to burden land with restrictions on use - restrictions that "run with the land" - subject to various conditions and limitations. It has been more ambivalent about similar restrictions on personal property. Why? That was a question broached seventy-five years ago by Zechariah Chafee, though he never fully answered it. Today, the question has acquired a new importance because of the pervasive use of computer software licensing restrictions that, for all practical purposes, can be regarded as a form of property servitude. Software licensing restrictions implicate specialized rules of intellectual property, such as the first sale doctrine. However, those rules are basically derived from common law policies (most notably policies against restraints on alienation and restraints of trade) so the question about the legality of such restrictions is essentially no different for intellectual property than for common law property. In all events this article argues that the traditional hostility to use and resale restraints on personal property is misguided in both the common law and intellectual property contexts. While there may be legitimate reasons for limiting an owner's right to impose post-transfer restrictions on use and resale, those reasons are more exceptional than has been commonly assumed. Moreover, in the new digital world where servitude-type restrictions can be engineered into the architecture of the property right itself public policy restrictions on contractual "servitudes" may prove to be ineffectual, raising a new reason to take a fresh look at old conceptions of personal property servitudes.


At present the business processes have temporary requirements within their specifications. Logistics, e-commerce, are examples of these, among others. The time involved in business processes is important regarding the interaction of the actors. The sound of the technology involved in building these processes plays a key role in assessing the risk of implementation. The possibility of having technologies with elements for such specifications is vital to accurately model of reality. Workflow (Wf) is the technology of wide acceptance and recognition that can improve business processes. The Wf architecture has the Interface 1, which lets you define process through its processes definition language (PDL), but has no elements to express temporary restrictions of this kind. Our works present a theoretical framework in which there is an extension of the grammar of the WPDL to allow the specification of time variable. It also establishes a correspondence between the PD and its underlying Petri Net with Clocks (PNwC) preserving its semantic. The correspondence is specified by means of the RAISE Specification Language (RSL). The correlation between these formalisms lets you define business process with temporary restrictions validated.


Integrating production system and reservoir is used in several studies of offshore oilfield development and management for improved production forecasts through more realistic boundary conditions. This study evaluates the influence of the parameters in a production strategy of a reference model (carbonate oil reservoir) on financial and production performance. We first considered nonintegrated system (NI) with the reservoir and fixed boundary conditions for well and gathering system. We then considered integrated system (I) with the variable boundary conditions for the wells and gathering system. Finally, we compared both systems. Our analysis involved several steps to define the best production strategy for both systems based on net present value (NPV) and how integrated modeling helps define production strategy. For NI, three stages were considered: number of wells, placement of wells, and platform capacity. For I, five stages were evaluated (all NI parameters) with diameters and gas lift evaluation, and platform placement. The results are similar, but the simplifications (NI) may affect financial performance. The cross analysis indicated (in the hypothesis that the integrated system is closer to reality) that integrating the NI case resulted in considerable financial and production differences and may be useful in simplified systems. Since the main aspects of the object-function financial return were related to reservoir model behavior, one can first apply the nonintegrated optimization cycles, then add the integrated cycles, obtaining an intermediate time of the integrated model optimization in similar cases.


Globally, the exploitation of marine mammals has shifted from hunting to viewing over the last few decades. While refraining from actively killing animals may have a positive effect on marine mammal populations, whale and dolphin watching can induce changes such as displacement from preferred habitat and disruption of foraging that may also have severe fitness costs. Under some circumstances, this non-lethal disturbance may affect populations in a manner similar to directed mortality. Here, we focus on inshore dolphin populations that are known to show short-term behavioral responses to boat approaches. Long-term fitness effects have only been clearly identified in a small number of these populations, and all share certain characteristics, i.e., closed, small and food-limited. This raises the question of importance of context when considering the long-term effects of disturbance, since many dolphin populations may be open, large, and/or free from resource restriction. We explored the effect of disturbance based on the characteristics of populations using the population consequences of disturbance (PCoD) framework. PCoD was developed to link short-term changes in individual behavior and physiology to presumed long-term effects on population dynamics. To ensure our scenarios were biologically plausible, they reflected the ecological context of four well-studied populations of dolphins, Doubtful Sound, New Zealand, Sarasota Bay, United States, Durban Bay, South Africa, and Jervis Bay, Australia, in terms of their size, closure, and food resources. We found that the characteristics of the populations being disturbed are important with regards to the level of disturbance that could be tolerated. Closed populations were most sensitive, while large, open populations with no food limitation appeared to be able to withstand a higher probability of disturbance. This implies that population characteristics should be accounted for when determining the suitability of whale and dolphin watching operations in a given area.


Introduction: Antiangiogenic approaches are currently the dominating experimental therapeutic strategy in glioblastoma. First enthusiasm was provoked by promising radiological response rates and an apparent clinical benefit with some of these agents. Major limitations include the modest number of durable responses, the lack of cytotoxic antitumor activity, of synergy when combined with chemotherapy and of an overall survival benefit. Areas covered: We review the rationale as well as preclinical and clinical evidence for the future development of antiangiogenic agents in glioblastoma. The most prominent approach targets VEGF and includes agents such as the VEGF antibody bevacizumab, the VEGF receptor fusion protein aflibercept or the tyrosine kinase inhibitors cediranib and XL-184. Inhibition of angiogenic pathways by small molecules, for example, enzastaurin, or anti-integrin-based approaches, for example, cilengitide, represent alternative strategies. Expert opinion: Enzastaurin and cediranib failed in randomized Phase III trials in recurrent glioblastoma, aflibercept in Phase II. By contrast, bevacizumab was conditionally approved in many countries. Recently completed Phase III trials for bevacizumab and cilengitide in the first-line setting will define the future role of these agents. This intense clinical trial activity reflects the hope that antiangiogenic agents will become part of the limited therapeutic options for glioblastoma.


J.M. Henderson, Introduction to Real-World Scene Perception. G.A. Rousselet, O.R. Joubert, M. Fabre-Thorpe, How Long to get to the "Gist" of Real-world Natural Scenes? V. Goffaux, C. J.A. Mouraux, A. Oliva, P.G. Schyns, B. Rossion, Diagnostic Colors Contribute to the Early Stages of Scene Categorization: Behavioral and Neurophysiological Evidence. L. F.ei-Fei, R. VanRullen, C. Koch, P. Perona, Why does Natural Scene Categorization Require Little Attention? Exploring Attentional Requirements for Natural and Synthetic Stimulilus. E. Ozgen, P.T. Sowden, P.G. Schyns, C. Daoutis, Top-down Attentional Modulation of Spatial Frequency Processing in Scene Perception. M. McCotter, F. Gosselin, P. Sowden, P. Schyns, The Use of Visual Information in Natural Scenes. R.A. Epstein, The Cortical Basis of Visual Scene Processing. D.A. Gajewski, J.M. Henderson,Minimal Use of Working Memory in a Scene Comparison Task. A. Hollingworth , Memory for Object Position in Natural Scenes. M.S. Castelhano, J.M. Henderson, Incidental Visual Memory for Objects in Scenes. M.P. Munger, T. Ryan Owens, J.E. Conway, Are Boundary Extension and Representational Momentum Related? L.C. Loschky, G.W. McConkie, J. Yang, M.E. Miller, The Limits of Visual Resolution in Natural Scene Viewing. L. Itti, Quantifying the Contribution of Low-level Saliency to Human Eye Movements in Dynamic Scenes. E. Walter, P. Dassonville, Semantic Guidance of Attention within Natural Scenes. S. Forti, G.W. Humphreys, D.G. Watson, Eye Movements in Search in Visual Neglect. F.H. Hamker, A Computational Model of Visual Stability and Change Detection During Eye Movements in Real World Scenes. G.L. Dueker, A. Needham, Infants' Object Category Formation and Use: Real-world Context Effects on Category Use in Object Processing. B.C. Hansen, E.A. Essock, Influence of Scale and Orientation on the Visual Perception of Natural Scenes. R. Ni, M.L. Braunstein, G.J. Andersen, Distance Perception from Motion Parallax and Ground Contact.


Amplitude and phase in the diffraction near fields of small phase objects (bars with rectangular cross sections ≤λ2) are calculated according to the scalar Kirchhoff and Rayleigh–Sommerfeld diffraction theories. Results are compared with 3-cm microwave measurements. The agreement between calculation and measurement depends on the size of the phase objects because interference fields under certain circumstances will satisfy the Kirchhoff boundary conditions of the different diffraction theories.