Nuclear power plants rely on the Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) to cool down the reactor core in case of an accident. Occasionally, air is entrained into the suction piping of ECCS causing voids that decrease pumping efficiency, and consequently damage the pumps. In an attempt to minimize the amount of voids entering the suction side of the pump in ECCS, a Void Recirculation System (VRS) experiment was conducted for a proof of concept purpose. While many studies have been oriented in studying two-component flow behavior in ECCS, none of them propose a solution to minimize air entrainment. As a consequence, there are no simulation models that use computational fluid dynamics to address gas entrainment solutions in ECCS. The objectives of this thesis are to (1) simulate and investigate two-component air-water flow in a VRS that minimizes the amount of air in piping systems, using RELAP5/MOD3 as the computational tool, and (2) to validate the numerical results with respect to experimental results and observations. A one-dimensional model of the VRS was built in RELAP5, in which eight different scenarios (replicating those from the VRS experiment) were simulated for a period of 150 seconds. Four Froude numbers of 0.8, 1.0, 1.3 and 1.6 were evaluated in two different pipe configurations, and the experimental data obtained from the VRS experiment was used to validate the numerical results obtained from these simulations. It was concluded that air recirculation occurs indefinitely throughout the entire 150 seconds of the simulation for Froude numbers up to 1.3; while for a Froude number of 1.6, air recirculation occurs for approximately 100 seconds and ceases after 125 seconds of the simulation. An average air reduction effectiveness of 90% was found for all simulation scenarios. The VRS model was successfully validated and can be used to investigate the effects of air entrainment in suction piping.


Globalisation in the pharmaceuticals sector is entering a new phase. Many new drugs are marketed globally, and these revenues encourage further investment in research and development (R&D). The industry is undergoing substantial transition, with increased competition and downward pressure on prices. Moreover, there have also been widespread concerns that R&D productivity may be declining in recent years. This study examines how various linkages between trade and innovation work in the pharmaceuticals sector, focusing on the role of globalisation in the current innovation challenges of the pharmaceutical industry. It finds that emerging economies are increasingly important markets for pharmaceutical companies and more active participants in the R&D process. While this is an important part of an effort to reduce R&D costs and to improve R&D performance by established multinationals, this also contributes to upgrading the R&D capability of emerging economies. Various trade facilitating measures have been put in place at the international level, including tariff elimination under the World Trade Organization (WTO), plurilateral and bilateral regulatory harmonisation, mutual recognition and enforcement cooperation, and intellectual property protection. Given the growing participation of emerging economies in this sector, further involvement of emerging economies in these arrangements is likely to become more important to facilitate trade and globalisation of R&D.


The purpose of this study was to analyze the factors such as education level, family member, working days, age and loan which influence to household poverty in rural area of West Kalimantan. The study was conducted in Senujuh Village, Sejangkung Sub-district, Sambas Regency, West Kalimantan. There are 352 Households in Senujuh Village, with a sample of 80 poor households which find out based on the Simple Random Sampling from 105 household which listed as poor. The instrument of data collection used questionnaires and interviews. The study use Descriptive Statistics to describe the household poverty in rural area, furthermore Multiple Linear Regression was used to analyze the factors that influence household poverty in rural area of West Kalimantan. The results showed that 45% head of household were not educated, elementary school level 43.7%, junior high school 8.8% and only 2.5% have senior high school level. Based on the analysis of factors affecting the household poverty in rural area, it was found that the variables of working days and debt have positive significant impact on household poverty. Age of household head has negative significant impact on household poverty. While, education level and family size do not have significant impact on household poverty in this study area.


Project management approach is one of the crucial aspects of enhancing the operational efficiency of project-based organizations that makes optimum resources use possible. Risks management significantly affects operational effectiveness and performance efficiency in competitive organizations. These calls for a new management approach, such as the PMBOK project management standard that helps risks identification and methods of mitigating their adverse consequences. The aim is to focus on analysis of project-related processes in organizations using the PMBOK guideline risk management concept. The study is undertaken in the project-oriented Lorestan National Gas Company in Iran. The methodology involved using primary data using interviews of relevant stakeholders on project-management processes involving three major stages of data collection, process identification and process analysis based on the PMBOK. Results show the importance of risk management analysis in identifying major risk-generation areas required to take appropriate measures in averting or overcoming unexpected operational and performance challenges that affect organizational survival. Results further show the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving a more effective project control system that makes it possible for on-time project scheduling, enhanced performance effectiveness, economic justification and organizational survival.


A two stage model of the physicochemical processes at the electrolysis of pure water is
proposed. The presence of nascent hydrogen in the catholyte and nascent oxygen in the anolyte
during the first stage explains the antioxidant properties of the catholyte and the strong biocidal
action of the anolyte. In the second stage the nascent hydrogen and oxygen are combined into
hydrogen and oxygen molecules, respectively. The comparison between their average energies with
the average energy of the control sample of water shows an increase in the average energy of the
catholyte and decrease in the average energy of the anolyte. This indicates that some changes in the
structure of the activated water have occurred.
Keywords: Electrochemically activated water (ECAW), catholyte, anolyte, nascent
hydrogen, nascent oxygen, energetic spectrum, energy of hydrogen bonds.


Abstract. The retrieval of geophysical parameters is increasingly
dependent on synergistic use of satellite instruments. More
sophisticated parameters can be retrieved and the accuracy of retrievals
can be increased when more information is combined. In this paper,
a synergistic application of Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI), on the Aura platform, and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), on the Aqua platform, Level 1B reflectances is described, enabling the retrieval of the aerosol direct
radiative effect (DRE) over clouds using the differential aerosol
absorption (DAA) technique. This technique was first developed for
reflectances from the SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for
Atmospheric CHartographY (SCIAMACHY) on the Environmental Satellite (Envisat), which had the unique
capability of measuring contiguous radiances from the ultraviolet (UV)
at 240 to 1750 nm in the shortwave-infrared (SWIR), at a moderate
spectral resolution of 0.2 to 1.5 nm. However, the spatial resolution
and global coverage of SCIAMACHY was limited, and Envisat stopped
delivering data in 2012. In order to continue the DRE data retrieval,
reflectances from OMI and MODIS, flying in formation, were combined from
the UV to the SWIR. This resulted in reflectances at a limited but
sufficient spectral resolution, available at the OMI pixel grid, which
have a much higher spatial resolution and coverage than SCIAMACHY. The
combined reflectance spectra allow the retrieval of cloud microphysical
parameters in the SWIR, and the subsequent retrieval of aerosol DRE over
cloud scenes using the DAA technique. For liquid cloud scenes in the
south-east Atlantic region with cloud fraction (CF) >0.3, the area-averaged instantaneous aerosol DRE over clouds in June to August 2006 was 25 Wm−2 with a
standard deviation of 30 Wm−2. The maximum area-averaged
instantaneous DRE from OMI–MODIS in August 2006 was 75.6±13 Wm−2. The new aerosol DRE over-cloud dataset from OMI–MODIS is
compared to the SCIAMACHY dataset for the period 2006 to 2009, showing a
very high correlation. The OMI–MODIS DRE dataset over the Atlantic Ocean
is highly correlated to above-cloud AOT measurements from OMI and MODIS.
It is related to AOT measurements over Ascension Island in 2016, showing
the transport of smoke all the way from its source region in Africa over
the Atlantic to Ascension and beyond.


. Using new high-resolution 10 Be measurements in the NGRIP, EDML and Vostok ice cores, together with previously published data from EDC, we present an improved synchronization between Greenland and Antarctic ice cores during the Laschamp geomagnetic excursion ∼ 41 kyr ago. We estimate the precision of this synchronization to be ± 20 years, an order of magnitude better than previous work. We discuss the implications of this new synchronization for making improved estimates of the depth difference between ice and enclosed gas of the same age ( (cid:49) depth), difference between age of ice and enclosed gas at the same depth ( (cid:49) age) in the EDC and EDML ice cores, spectral properties of the 10 Be profiles and phasing between Dansgaard–Oeschger-10 (in NGRIP) and AIM-10 (in EDML and EDC).


This research is concentrated on the value that Internet of Things (IoT) can add to the education process, by using it in development of online virtual laboratories, which is a major requirement for any education system, in order to be qualitative and competitive. Practical experimentation is possible even with distance learning approach and today students may have access to a multitude of teaching resources, including IoT services used for various real world experiments. This is possible due to low costs and high performance of new electronic modules, on one hand, and the development of many high scalable web services, which permits data processing and communication over the Internet, on the other hand. The paper also presents an example of using IoT, by connecting an Arduino platform with the Xively web service, in order to read and display data received from a temperature sensor.


The walls of the prison are not solely physical. The doctrine of judicial deference to prison officials, which compels courts to defer to the discretion of those officials in almost all instances, obstructs the effective scrutiny of modern practices of punishment. Since its ratification, the Thirteenth Amendment - which prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude anywhere within the United States or its jurisdiction, except where imposed 'as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted' - has been seen by courts as one brick in this wall. This article makes the novel argument that, properly read, the amendment should instead function as a breach in this wall - one of sufficient size to allow some needed light to shine within.Although in some states inmates may still be sentenced to hard labor, in most systems today they labor under a more general requirement that, if they are able-bodied, they must work. Reading the word 'punishment' in the Thirteenth Amendment in a manner consistent with the way that same word is used in the Eighth Amendment, and is understood in the rest of the Constitution, reveals that only those inmates who are forced to work because they have been so sentenced - which is not the vast majority of inmates compelled to work in the present day - should be exempted from the general ban on involuntary servitude. In addition to examining the jurisprudence of the Eighth and Fifth Amendments as it relates to this question, this article also details the history of forced labor programs as punishment, and how courts' reading of the punishment exception is not supported by either the circumstances surrounding ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, or the ways that courts have construed it as a whole since that time. This article argues that the reason courts have broadened of the meaning of 'punishment' in the Thirteenth Amendment, while simultaneously narrowing it in the Eighth Amendment, is because these directly contradictory acts of constitutional interpretation both serve the same end of judicial deference to the actions of prison officials, which has resulted in the general abdication by courts of their constitutional obligations to oversee those officials' actions. This article also theorizes about the potential outcomes of interpreting the Thirteenth Amendment properly with respect to prison labor, and suggests that the resulting recognition of the punitive purposes that have always driven our prison labor programs may actually lead to an improvement in the overall well-being of prisoners, and perhaps of society as a whole.


Summary 1. Resource competition is an important process governing the impact of livestock on native wild mammalian herbivores, an issue acknowledged to be of global conservation concern. Resource competition occurs between species when their resources (habitat and diet) overlap and are limiting. Yet the evidence that livestock compete with wild herbivores has remained weak because resource limitation is often difficult to demonstrate in the field. 2. This 2-year field study at Bandipur National Park, India, examined livestock-mediated resource limitation among five wild herbivore species: wild pig Sus scrofa , chital Axis axis , sambar Cervus unicolor , gaur Bos gaurus and Asian elephant Elephas maximus , by comparing their distribution and densities in adjoining livestock-grazed and livestockfree areas before, and after, a 49% decline in livestock density. 3. During 2001, mean densities of wild grazers, gaur (0·11 ha − 1 ), chital (1·51 ha − 1 ) and elephant (0·61 ha − 1 ), were, respectively, 132, 11 and six times higher in the livestock-free area than in the adjacent livestock-grazed area. Densities of gaur, chital and elephant showed a sharp declining relationship with increasing livestock density, whereas no clear pattern was discernible with wild pig, a non-ruminant generalist, and the sambar, a forest browser. Preferred plant biomass also fell sharply with increasing livestock density. 4. Following the decline in livestock density in the livestock-grazed area in 2002, the densities of gaur, chital and elephant increased by a factor of 57, five and two in the same area, respectively, whereas no changes were seen in the densities of wild pig and sambar or in the preferred plant biomass. Except for a decline in elephant density, the livestock-free area did not show changes in wild herbivore densities. 5. Given the considerable overlap in habitat and dietary preference/requirements between livestock and wild herbivores in the study area, it is suggested that the recovery of gaur, chital and elephant densities following the livestock decline represents their release from livestock-mediated resource limitation. 6. Synthesis and applications . These results indicate that resource competition may be intense between wild herbivores and grazing livestock, and if left unchecked could trigger declines of wild herbivores, particularly grazing ruminants and bulk feeders. These results also suggest that, where possible, interventions to reduce livestock grazing may rapidly benefit wild herbivores that have been competitively suppressed. This has important implications for the management of livestock grazing in India's wildlife reserves.


The Lanham Act bars trademark infringement and false advertising in nearly identical and often overlapping language. In some circumstances, courts have interpreted the two provisions in the same way, but in other areas there has been significant doctrinal divergence, often to the detriment of the law. This Article argues that each branch of the Lanham Act offers important lessons for the other. Courts should rationalize their treatment of implied claims, whether of sponsorship or of other facts; they should impose a materiality requirement, such that the only unlawful trademark and false advertising claims are those that actually matter to consumers; and in false advertising cases, they should recognize that competitors have sufficient interests to confer standing when the advertisers' false statements are doing harm, rather than imposing increasingly elaborate barriers to suit. The present practice of interpreting the same language in substantially different ways lacks justification and has the effect of promoting the interests of the most powerful companies, whether they are asserting claims of trademark infringement against smaller entities or defending themselves against false advertising claims by competitors.


Modern systems use networks extensively, accessing both services and storage across local and remote networks. Latency is a key performance challenge, and packing multiple small operations into fewer large ones is an effective way to amortize that cost, especially after years of significant improvement in bandwidth but not latency. To this end, the NFSv4 protocol supports a compounding feature to combine multiple operations. Yet compounding has been underused since its conception because the synchronous POSIX file-system API issues only one (small) request at a time.

We propose vNFS, an NFSv4.1-compliant client that exposes a vectorized high-level API and leverages NFS compound procedures to maximize performance. We designed and implemented vNFS as a user-space RPC library that supports an assortment of bulk operations on multiple files and directories. We found it easy to modify several UNIX utilities, an HTTP/2 server, and Filebench to use vNFS. We evaluated vNFS under a wide range of workloads and network latency conditions, showing that vNFS improves performance even for low-latency networks. On high-latency networks, vNFS can improve performance by as much as two orders of magnitude.


Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large deformation due to their low elastic moduli; meanwhile, surface instabilities, including wrinkles, creases, folds, among others, are often observed. In particular, soft dielectrics subject to electrical stimuli can achieve significantly large deformations that are often accompanied by instabilities. While instabilities are often thought to cause failures in the engineering context and carry a negative connotation, they can also be harnessed for various applications such as surface patterning, giant actuation, and energy harvesting. In the biological world, instability and bifurcation phenomena often precede important events such as endocytosis, cell fusion, among others. Stability and bifurcation analysis (especially for soft materials) is challenging and often presents a formidable barrier to entry in this important field. A multidisciplinary audience may lack the background in one or more areas that are needed to carry out the requisite modeling or even understand papers in the literature. Furthermore, combining electrostatics together with large deformations brings its own challenges. In this article, we provide a tutorial on the basics of stability and bifurcation analysis in the context of soft electromechanical materials. The aim of the article is to use simple examples and "gently" lead a reader, unfamiliar with either stability analysis or electrostatics of deformable media, to develop the ability to understand the pertinent literature and position them to embark on research on this topic.


The direct reaction of N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)acetamide or paracetamol (C8H9NO2, PACET), a widely used Non Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug (NSAID), with diiodine forms an ionic salt with the formula {[(PACET)2H+]2·(I8)2−} (1) with the simultaneous reduction of iodine to iodide. The compound was characterized by X-ray diffraction analysis. Compound 1 contains the polyiodide (I8)2− counter dianions, in a z-shape conformation. By taking into account secondary I⋯I interaction the shape turns out to be rectangular. Moreover, N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)acetamide inhibits the catalytic activity of horse radish peroxidase (HRP) (a model of thyroid peroxidase (TPO)) on the oxidation of iodides to diiodine by hydrogen peroxide, as evidence of the kinetic and computational studies. The inhibition activity of PACET against the catalytic oxidation of iodides by H2O2 in the presence of FeTPPCl (a model of the active site of TPO) is measured as a result of the yield of I3−.


Abstract Background: Transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) is considered the reference surgical method of treating benign prostatic enlargement (BPE) causing obstruction. The procedure still carries a significant risk of perioperative morbidity according to previous reports. The aim of the present study was to disclose complications after TURP undertaken in routine clinical practice at a non-academic center. Methods: All patients with BPE submitted to TURP from January 2010 to December 2012 were evaluated for complications occurring during hospital stay, after discharge up to the end of the third post-operative month and finally for any late endourological re-interventions undertaken up to five years after TURP. All complications were graded according to the Clavien-Dindo system. Results: In total, 354 men underwent a TURP during the study period. In total, 47% had pre-operative urinary retention. Significant co-morbidity was seen in 17% of men (ASA III–IV). Spinal anaesthesia was applied to 312 men (88%). During hospital stay, major complications, graded as Clavien-Dindo ≥ III, was seen in only eight men (2.3%). Minor complications occurred in 91 men (26%). Between hospital discharge and follow-up visit major complications were noted in 12 men (3.4%). Minor complications occurred in 79 men (22%). The only factor that was associated with an increased risk of a major complication was general anaesthesia. Late complications, requiring an endourological re-intervention, occurred in 30 men (9.7%). Conclusion: TUR-P in routine clinical practice was associated with a low incidence of severe complications. TUR syndrome was very rare. Within five years a small proportion of men require the transurethral intervention to be redone.


A generalized water quality modeling program and a model verification analysis program have been developed that have application to a wide variety of water resource management problems. The Water Quality Analysis Simulation Program, WASP, is based on the flexible compartment approach. It may be applied to water bodies in a one, two, or three-dimensional configuration, and kinetic models may be structured to include linear and non-linear reactions. The user may choose, via input options, to employ constant or time-variable transport and kinetic processes, as well as point and nonpoint waste discharges. The Model Verification Program, MVP, may be used as an indicator of "goodness of fl't" or adequacy of the model as a representation of the real world. To date, WASP has been applied to over twenty water resource management problems. These applications have included one, two and three-dimensional configurations and a number of different physical, chemical and biological modeling frameworks, such as BOD-DO, eutrophication, and toxic substances. A user's manual and program listings have been prepared. manual was oriented towards the system analyst, whose responsibility it would be to design, develop and debug new kinetic models for end users, as well as the end user who must prepare the data input to the program. The user's


Abstract The objective was to investigate the genetic epidemiology of figural stimuli. Standard figural stimuli were available from 5,325 complete twin pairs: 1,751 (32.9%) were monozygotic females, 1,068 (20.1%) were dizygotic females, 752 (14.1%) were monozygotic males, 495 (9.3%) were dizygotic males, and 1,259 (23.6%) were dizygotic male-female pairs. Univariate twin analyses were used to examine the influences on the individual variation in current body size and ideal body size. These data were analysed separately for men and women in each of five age groups. A factorial analysis of variance, with polychoric correlations between twin pairs as the dependent variable, and age, sex, zygosity, and the three interaction terms (age x sex, age x zygosity, sex x zygosity) as independent variables, was used to examine trends across the whole data set. Results showed genetic influences had the largest impact on the individual variation in current body size measures, whereas non-shared environmental influences were associated with the majority of individual variation in ideal body size. There was a significant main effect of zygosity (heritability) in predicting polychoric correlations for current body size and body dissatisfaction. There was a significant main effect of gender and zygosity in predicting ideal body size, with a gender x zygosity interaction. In common with BMI, heritability is important in influencing the estimation of current body size. Selection of desired body size for both men and women is more strongly influenced by environmental factors.


Scholars in American literature as a rule have approached the study from a background in English and at times other European literatures. The earliest directors of graduate study in the national literature--not much over a generation ago--had received their training before American authors and works gained entrance into either graduate or undergraduate courses. This sequence was not new, of course; the earliest teachers of modern literature--whether in America or Europe--came to it from training and experience in the ancient literatures. In each instance the new field for scholarly study and writing gained acceptance only in slow steps and owed much of its progress to a few notable exemplars: George Ticknor and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow might be cited for the study of modern literature; William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville for the recognition of American literature; Fred Lewis Pattee and his academic heirs for the study of American as an independent literature. It goes without saying that academic opposition to recognizing American literature has been often narrowly based, and at times without any base at all. It may need to be said, however, that ultimate gains have accrued because much of the scholarly writing on American literary subjects has come from pens experienced with older and traditional literatures. Such writing can be expected to profit from perspectives, bases for comparison, bodies of literary theory, and acquaintance with major authors and works that lend assurance in the handling of the new literature and lessen the dangers of parochialism and absorption in the immediate. Southern literature is seen properly, I believe, as a segment or an extension of the national literature (though contemporaneous rather than subsequent). Important early describers and interpreters of Southern writing, such as William Peterfield Trent, William M. Baskervill, and C. Alphonso Smith, had their main scholarly interests in other areas, and indeed in remote areas. If the special insights of W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South seem to be owing to the author's emotional response to the distinctive elements in the history of the region and the relationships in his own time, it yet may be asked whether his insights would not hold up better if they had been formed within a sharper awareness of the full literary, cultural, intellectual, and social context in which the South existed. Perhaps this is to suggest only that literary scholars should have the same breadth, the same bases for judgment, that the creators of literature possess. Southern authors have shared in the universal literary heritage, and they have recognized from the beginnings to the present that their region would furnish only a lesser portion of their readers and only a negligible portion of the outlets for publication, in either books or periodicals. I would not want to imply that close study and thorough acquaintance are handicaps to literary interpretation. If the perceptions in D. H. Lawrence's essays on American authors are due in part to the distance of their origin, the perceptions are discounted on every page by evidence that Lawrence was writing about a realm that was foreign to him in literal fact and in sympathy. Nor would I want to seem impatient with literary study by regions or sections. The large scale possible to such study has obvious advantages. The background can be known in its fuller scope; lesser writers can be seen as influencing the major writers, or supporting or contradicting them, as the case may be. A large-scale picture may disclose among lesser writers trends, pressures, stimuli, and responses that were crucial but not conspicuous with the major authors. Such a picture may reveal that novelists or poets all but forgotten by a later generation so dominated the literary scene in their own time as to exert unsuspected influence on others who stand in historical perspective as their betters. …


Carotid artery intima media thickness estimation is a well-established way of cardio vascular disease evaluation. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to develop normal carotid intima media thickness percentile values for a Pakistani cohort. Data was collected at the Departments of Radiology and Family Medicine, The Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, from April 2014 to August 2015. High frequency ultrasound of carotid was done in 257 patients [97 male (38%), 160 female (62%)] without any known carotid artery disease. Reference ranges (90% range between 5th and 95th centiles) were constructed for each common carotid and internal carotid artery measurement and displayed in graph form. The mean difference was found in left common carotid artery (0.55 ±0.13) and left internal carotid artery thickness (0.50 ±0.10) significant at p=0.031 and p=0.014, respectively. The IMTpercentile graphs developed in this study for internal and common carotid arteries are exclusive for this population and can be used to assess vascular health from ultrasound measurements.


Researchers in the field of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) have been developing efficient mechanisms to coordinate the activities of multiple autonomous agents. The need for coordination arises because agents have to share resources and expertise required to achieve their goals. Previous work in the area includes using sophisticated information exchange protocols, investigating heuristics for negotiation, and developing formal models of possibilities of conflict and cooperation among agent interests. In order to handle the changing requirements of continuous and dynamic environments, we propose learning as a means to provide additional possibilities for effective coordination. We use reinforcement learning techniques on a block pushing problem to show that agents can learn complimentary policies to follow a desired path without any knowledge about each other. We theoretically analyze and experimentally verify the effects of learning rate on system convergence, and demonstrate benefits of using learned coordination knowledge on similar problems. Reinforcement learning based coordination can be achieved in both cooperative and non-cooperative domains, and in domains with noisy communication channels and other stochastic characteristics that present a formidable challenge to using other coordination schemes.


A critical computational step in large-scale process simulation using rigorous equationbased models is the solution of a sparse linear equation system. Traditional sparse solvers based on indirect addressing are not effective on supercomputers because they do not vectorize well. By relying on vectorized dense matrix kernels, the multifrontal and frontal methods provide much better performance, as demonstrated using several examples. On problems with good initial matrix orderings the frontal method is most effective, while without a good initial ordering the multifrontal method is attractive.


The Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics (JRM) is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary since its establishment in June 1989. As the founding Editorin-Chief, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the people and organizations that have helped in making JRM a success.
 Although founded in Japan, our primary objective was to provide a global platform for facilitating the publication of research work comprising outstanding results and novel information regarding robotics and mechatronics. Encouraged by the emphatic support received from several prominent researchers and engineers in numerous countries, including the United States of America and European countries, our team decided to launch JRM.
 It is now our aim to develop JRM into a highly ranked international journal. I sincerely hope that more academicians and engineers will participate in JRM's development process by contributing their valuable feedback, research results, and technical information.Kazuo Yamafuji


The mechanism of glucose isomerization to fructose catalyzed by Lewis acidic Sn sites in the framework of MOR, BEA, MFI and MWW zeolites was investigated by periodic DFT calculations. The main focus was on the influence of the nature of the active site and the zeolite topology on the rate-controlling hydride shift step. A general finding is that the Sn-catalyzed isomerization of glucose is strongly promoted by proximate hydroxyl groups. These hydroxyl groups can derive from co-adsorbed water molecules or internal silanols. The cooperative action of such proton donors with the Lewis acidic Sn sites results in more effective compensation of the negative charge developing on the O1 atom of glucose during the rate-controlling hydride shift reaction step. The variation in the shape of the micropores with a zeolite topology affects the mode and strength of carbohydrate adsorption, which is dominated by van der Waals forces. Their influence on the intrinsic reactivity of intrazeolite Sn sites is small. We propose that higher glucose adsorption energy in the narrower micropores of 10-membered ring zeolites (e.g., Sn-MFI and Sn-MWW) adversely affects the intrachannel diffusion compared to that in the zeolites with larger pores. The high catalytic performance of Sn-MWW towards glucose transformation is due to the lower barrier for the hydride shift step resulting from the presence of a relatively strong acidic bridging silanol group next to the Lewis acidic Sn site.


A novel series of metal complexes of 2-(thiazol-2-ylimino) thiazolidin-4-one ligand were prepared; the corresponding ligand was synthesized from reaction 2-Chloro-N-(thiazol-2-yl) acetamide with ammonium thiocyanate. The complexes are characterized by FTIR, UV-Vis, molar conductance and mass spectroscopy. The low molar conductance values indicate that the complexes are non-electrolytes.Spectroscopic studies confirmed that the ligand bonded to the metals through the sulphur atoms. Coordination number of copper and nickel complexes is four with square planar geometry, while the cobalt complex has octahedral geometry.In vitro antibacterial activity of ligand and its metal complexes was evaluated using well diffusion method and compared to the standard drug (tetracycline). The antibacterial activitywas examined against Escherichia coli, and pseudomonas aeruginosa, as gram negative bacteria and Staphylococcus aureus as gram positive bacteria. It was found that Nickel complex has the highest antibacterial activity among the synthesized compounds with Zone inhibition diameter in the range 25-29 mm.


When insects or pilots are flying forward, the image of the environment sweeps backward across their viewfield and forms an "optic flow" (OF) that depends on both the groundspeed and the distance to the ground (or to the lateral obstacles). We recently presented explicit control schemes which explain how insects may navigate on the sole basis of OF cues, without requiring any distance or speed sensors: how they take off and land, follow the terrain, avoid the lateral walls in a corridor and control their forward speed automatically. The optic flow regulator is a feedback control system controlling either the lift, the forward thrust or the lateral thrust. Three OF regulators account for various insect flight patterns observed over the ground and over still water, under calm and windy conditions and in straight and tapered corridors. We simulated and implemented these OF based autopilots on-board two kinds of aerial vehicles: a miniature helicopter for ground avoidance and a miniature hovercraft for lateral obstacle avoidance and cruise control in straight or tapered corridors. The OF sensors we are using are electronic sensors that we originally designed in 1986 and miniaturized using microcontrollers, LTCC or FPGA technology. They are based on a travel-time principle inspired by the housefly motion sensitive neurons that we had previously analyzed using single neuron recording combined with single photoreceptor stimulation. The simple and parsimonious control schemes described require no conventional avionic devices such as emissive range finders or groundspeed sensors based on Doppler Radars or GPS. They meet the low avionic payload requirements of autonomous micro-air and space vehicles, while being consistent with the neural repertory of flying insects.


Combining how-to information with voices of working artists, Poor Dancer's Almanac is an essential resource tool and source of inspiration for all independent artists-choreographers, performance artists, dancers producers, managers. Created in 1975 and revised again in 1984 this handbook has come to serve as one of the most crucial references for the arts community. In the most up-to-date and comprehensive edition yet, a broad range of issues affecting performers and producers is addressed, interwoven with newly added, more personal contributions from major figures in the performance world. Organized and compiled by Dance Theater Workshop in New York and authored by more than fifty leading professionals in the field, Poor Dancer's Almanac offers in-depth discussions of everything from personal livelihood to professional career development, from medical care, housing, and unemployment insurance to management, touring, and legal issues. Each chapter is followed by an appendix containing extensive and varied listings, giving names and addresses for finding internship programs, videotaping, flooring, grant-writing, and reference publications. Although centered on New York the Almanac includes lists of resources and contacts for many other states-California, Washington D.C, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and Ohio. An entirely new section has been added dealing with health issues and the crisis of AIDS. In personal anecdotes and essays various performers offer their own insights and stories-both of struggles and of successes-to bring to life the practical realities of working in the arts. We hear from Merce Cunningham, Eric Bogosian, Karen Finley, Paul Zaloom, and Bill T. Jones, among others. Illustrated with original drawings by Janie Geiser, this thoroughly revised and updated edition of the Poor Dancer's Almanac will continue to serve as one of the leading sources for those concerned with managing life and work in the performing arts.


Personality Disordered (herein referred to as PD) clients are challenging to statutory
mental healthcare programmes. They can be difficult to diagnose: their
disorders can be obscured by second-order problems such as anxiety and depression,
caused by PD cognitive processes. Treatment-as-usual (the predominant model of
psychiatric intervention) for PD clients in crisis tends to focus on these
second-order presentations, but provide no means of identifying underlying
PD. The purpose of this paper is to
describe how heuristic methods of diagnosis can be used to reframe the client's
distress in the context of personality disorders (according to DSM-IV criteria),
and how subsequent application of integrative therapies can break their cycle of recidivism. Method: Two
case studies of treatment-refractory individuals
with cyclical patterns of crisis-point service engagement for self-harm or psychotic depression
where heuristic/ integrative therapies were used. Results: The use of integrative therapies in the case studies presented
resulted in a marked change in recidivism and quality of life for each
client, as measured by a significant reduction in presentation of symptoms
and hypervigilance. Discussion: By understanding the maladaptive cognitive-behavioural
processes of PD clients, they can be modified to reduce the client's self-defeating
behavioural patterns, breaking the cycle of recidivism. However, a new
diagnostic strategy must first be formulated that looks at the clients past use of mental health services to detect underlying PD.


The synthesis and characterization of meso-to-meso PtII-bridged NiII-porphyrin dimers 5–7 are reported herein. A boron–platinum exchange reaction of meso-pinacolatoborylporphyrin 8 with Pt(cod)Cl2 afforded the cod-coordinated meso-to-meso PtII-linked cis-dimer 5, which was subsequently converted to the 1,3-bis(diphenylphosphino)propane (DPPP)-coordinated cis-dimer 6 and the PPh3-coordinated trans-dimer 7 upon treatment with DPPP and PPh3, respectively. On the other hand, a reaction of 5 with tri-tert-butylphosphine induced reductive elimination to give the meso–meso directly linked diporphyrin 9. Comparative studies of these PtII-bridged NiII-porphyrin dimers were conducted by UV/Vis absorption spectroscopy, electrochemical studies, and theoretical calculations. In the course of these studies, we found that cis-dimers 5 and 6 underwent an unprecedented reductive elimination to give the meso–meso linked dimer 9 upon chemical or electrochemical one-electron oxidation, while trans-dimer 7 was stable under such conditions.


The choice of a voting rule for the legislature is as important to public law as the choice between property and liability rules is to private law. This Article provides three models for choosing between majority and supermajority voting rules for the legislature. First, we examine a preference model, familiar from the economics literature, which permits us to explain how transactions costs, including agency costs, affect the choice between majority and supermajority rule. Second, we consider a spatial model used in political science. This model allows us to assess, among other things, the effects on that choice of the status quo as well as important elements of our political system, like agenda setting committees. Finally, we develop an accuracy model, which proceeds on the assumption that legislators genuinely seek to obtain the public interests. We examine under which circumstances majority or supermajority rule best aggregates the judgments of individual legislators. We come to several significant conclusions. First, supermajority rule works well when special interests use their influence to pass legislation, but works poorly when special interests use their influence to block legislation. Second, supermajority rule works well when the class of bills voted upon by the legislature consists of more socially harmful than socially beneficial legislation - a circumstance we argue is likely to be the norm rather than the exception. Third, we show that an accuracy model provides an insurance rational for supermajority rules. When legislators are more likely than not to discern the public interest less than fifty percent of the time, supermajority rules can provide an efficient form of insurance by reducing the risk of very bad results. These three different models can be used to select the best voting rule. In this article, we argue that strict supermajority rules are beneficial for entrenching constitutional provisions under both the preference and accuracy models. Supermajority rules are shown to provides a variety of benefits, including to prevent politically divisive entrenchments, to provide insurance against the possibility of bad entrenchments, and to create a veil of ignorance that helps generate constitutional provisions that take account of minority interests. Our analysis helps resolve a fundamental question that has never been satisfactorily answered: why supermajority rules should be used for generating the Constitution.


Terrestrial animals must have frequent contact with water to maintain their lives, implying that environmental DNA (eDNA) originating from terrestrial animals should be detectable from places containing water in terrestrial ecosystems. Aiming to detect the presence of terrestrial mammals using forest water samples, we applied a set of universal PCR primers (MiMammal, a modified version of fish universal primers) for metabarcoding mammalian eDNA. After verifying the primers' usefulness in silico and using water samples from zoo cages of animals with known species compositions, we collected five 500-ml water samples from ponds in two cool-temperate forests in Hokkaido, northern Japan. Using eDNA extracted from the water samples, we constructed amplicon libraries using MiMammal primers for Illumina MiSeq sequencing. MiMammal metabarcoding yielded a total of 75,214 reads, which we then subjected to data pre-processing and taxonomic assignment. We thereby detected species of mammals common to the sampling areas, including deer (Cervus nippon), mouse (Mus musculus), vole (Myodes rufocanus), raccoon (Procyon lotor), rat (Rattus norvegicus) and shrew (Sorex unguiculatus). Previous applications of the eDNA metabarcoding approach have mostly been limited to aquatic/semiaquatic systems, but the results presented here show that the approach is also promising even in forest mammal biodiversity surveys.


Citrus Mealybug Planococcus citri is an economically important pest species causing harm on citrus and some other plants. Biological control of the pest is gaining importance because of the problems caused by chemical control. In this study, effects of Beauveria bassiana, Paecilomyces fumosoroseus and Paecilomyces lilacinus against second instar larvae of mealybug were investigated. Healthy potato tubers were dipped into spore suspensions of the entomopathogens with 108 conidia/ml concentration and then infested with mealybugs. Potatoes were then kept in a climatic room with 25±1°C temperature and 60±5% humidity. Alive and dead mealybug individuals were determined 3, 5 and 7 days after applications and mortality rates were calculated. As a result, three entomopathogens caused different rates of mortality on the pest. B. bassiana isolate showed the highest effect and killed all pest individuals 5 days after the application. Mortality rates caused by P. fumosoroseus and P. lilacinus were lower in the first two observations, while they showed 96% and 82% mortality on the seventh day, respectively.


Most of the commentary written on the recent Bankruptcy Reform Act (The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005) has focused on provisions that will make bankruptcy less appealing for individuals. However, the Bankruptcy Act also contains important provisions that determine how financial market contracts are handled when a market participant goes into bankruptcy. These provisions, designed to update, clarify and strengthen the existing laws pertaining to financial contracts, will have far reaching implications for a wide variety of financial market participants, including banks and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) itself. The 2005 Bankruptcy Act promises to significantly improve the efficiency of the business bankruptcy process by harmonizing the treatment of financial contracts across the spectrum of bank and non-bank market participants and instruments. It does so by revising and amending a number of previous statutes (including the Bankruptcy Code, FIRREA (1989) and FDICIA (1991)) that currently govern these matters. The most important result of these changes is an improved ability of creditors under certain financial contracts to quickly resolve claims against bankrupt debtors by employing what is known as close-out netting. This ability to terminate financial contracts, determine a net amount due, and liquidate any pledged collateral is a valuable tool in minimizing losses in receivership and reducing the disruptions that result from the bankruptcy process. An equally important feature of the changes is that it clarifies and strengthens the FDIC's ability to resolve a failing bank involved in the financial markets. The past twenty-five years have been marked by a proliferation of new institutional players and ever-increasing complexity in financial instruments. These changes have led to a growing recognition that legal structures governing the disposition of financial market contracts in bankruptcy also needed to be updated. In the past, changes in how such contracts were handled were made in different statutes at different times creating inconsistencies, as well as persistent uncertainties as to how a given instrument might be handled in bankruptcy. By bringing more consistency and certainty to this process, the Bankruptcy Reform Act promises to reduce the risk that a bankruptcy will create systemic instability, which could affect individuals as well as financial institutions. To the extent that these changes allow financial market participants to more effectively manage market risks, they will also help to promote greater efficiency in the operation of U.S. financial markets.


There is a broad consensus that the communication capabilities of America's public safety agencies need to be improved. Public safety communications systems are not interoperable, making it difficult for agencies to communicate with one another. Moreover, these systems generally do not provide the broadband capabilities that are increasingly commonplace in commercial cell phones. In December 2006, the FCC proposed a "national, centralized approach to maximize public safety access to interoperable, broadband spectrum." The FCC plan aimed to ensure efficient and effective use of the spectrum provided to public safety, while promoting "the deployment of advanced broadband applications, related radio technologies, and modern, IP-based architectures." In 2007, a company called Cyren Call proposed allocating of an additional 30 MHz of spectrum to construct a nationwide broadband network which would be used for both commercial and public safety purposes. This paper presents our analysis of the Cyren Call proposal. We find that the plan suffers from serious flaws, and that its adoption would not result in more effective communications solutions for public safety. In addition, we find that sufficient spectrum has already been allocated for public safety use, and that more efficient spectrum management and the adoption of modern wireless technology can provide the interoperability and advanced capabilities public safety agencies need.


The complex reflection coefficient for the p polarization of a transparent film on an absorbing or transparent substrate can be made equal to the negative of that for the s polarization, and hence the film–substrate system acts as a half-wave retarder (HWR), by proper selection of film refractive index N1, film thickness d, and angle of incidence ϕ.This condition, which generally holds only at normal incidence, becomes possible at oblique incidence also if N1 is within a certain range, 1<N1<N1. For a given substrate and given N1, a procedure is described to determine ϕHWR and dHWR that achieve a HWR. As N1 is increased from 1 to the upper limit N1, ϕHWR decreases from 90° to 0 monotonically. dHWR approximately equals (exactly equals when the substrate is a perfect dielectric or a perfect conductor) an odd multiple of half of the film-thickness period evaluated at ϕHWR. Significantly, we find that the film–substrate HWR retains nearly the same characteristics of normal-incidence reflection over the range of angle from 0 up to (and beyond) ϕHWR. Detailed data are presented of HWR's that use transparent films on metallic (Al and Ag), semiconducting (Si), and dielectric (glass) substrates at two laser wavelengths (0.6328 and 10.6 μm). Film–substrate HWR's permit the realization of simple polarization-insensitive parallel-mirror beam displacers, 90° rooftop reflectors, and biconical axicons and waxicons.


In recent years, the concept of Regional Innovation Systems has evolved into a widely used analytical framework generating the empirical foundation for innovation policy making. Yet, the approaches utilizing this framework remain ambiguous on such key issues as the territorial dimension of innovation, e.g., the region, and the apparently important role played by "institutions" or the institutional context in the emergence and sustenance of regional innovation systems. This paper reviews and summarizes the most important ideas and arguments of the recent theorizing on regional innovation systems to provide the basis for a critical examination of such issues as (1) definition confusion and empirical validation; (2) the territorial dimension of regional innovation systems; and (3) the role of institutions. Far from having the last word on these issues, our intent in this paper is to draw attention to the definitional deficiencies of regional system of innovation theorizing and the need to address them. Key-words: Regional innovation systems, institutions, regions, research, policy


The aim of present study was to formulate and evaluate the loxoprofen loaded Sustained release microspheres by emulsion solvent evaporation technique. Ethylcellulose, a biocompatible polymer is used as the retardant material. The effects of process conditions such as drug loading, polymer type and solvent type on the characteristics of microspheres were investigated. The prepared microspheres were characterized for their particle size and drug loading and drug release. The in-vitro release studies were carried out in phosphate buffer at pH 7.4. The prepared microspheres were white, free flowing and spherical in shape. The drug-loaded microspheres showed 71.2% of entrapment and the in-vitro release studies showed that Loxoprofen microspheres of 1:3 ratios showed better sustained effect over a period of 8 hours


As challenging as meeting the 2030 climate and energy targets will be for the European Union (EU), it is the decision to extend the 2030 Framework to the contracting parties of the Energy Community (EnC) which will arguably require a truly Herculean effort In 2018, the contracting parties agreed to adapt the revised Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Directives, and the Energy Union Governance Regulation However, the EnC parties face significant obstacles, while the Energy Community has limited compliance mechanisms This article examines the Energy Community as a hybrid legal space in which the European Commission, EnC Secretariat and contracting parties co-create legal order It investigates major challenges to the extension of the 2030 Framework to the Energy Community, including the EnC?s structure and composition, weaknesses in national implementation and a limited dispute resolution regime The article also reflects on the role of law in the external dimension of EU climate policy


Abstract Most children with severe cerebral palsy experience daily pain that affects their school performance. School professionals need to assess pain in these children, who may also have communication difficulties, in order to pay attention to the pain and support the children's continued participation in school. In this study, South African school professionals' perceptions of how they observed pain in children with cerebral palsy, how they questioned them about it and how the children communicated their pain back to them were investigated. Thirty-eight school professionals participated in five focus groups. Their statements were categorized using qualitative content analysis. From the results it became clear that professionals observed children's pain communication through their bodily expressions, behavioral changes, and verbal and non-verbal messages. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) methods were rarely used. The necessity of considering pain-related vocabulary in a multilingual South African context, and of advocating for the use of AAC strategies to enable children with cerebral palsy to communicate their pain was highlighted in this study.


NOTE TO THE READER Independent experts have produced this report, applying an innovative methodology by a complex process to data that were voluntarily supplied by the responsible country authorities. Both, the methodology and the process are described in detail in the final opinion of the SSC on "the Geographical Risk of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (GBR)", 6 July 2000. This opinion is available at the following Internet address:


This article examines Heidegger's interpretation of Plato's Theaetetus, focusing on the problematic nature of opinion (doxa). Some commentators maintain that Plato's philosophy seeks an absolute conception of truth simply opposed to the arbitrary character of opinion, emphasizing an epistemological framework of the Platonic metaphysics. But a close reading of Heidegger's thoughts on the Theaetetus shows that Plato's original thinking does not attempt to simply posit a theoretical doctrine of pure knowledge contrary to opinion. For Plato, the possibility of knowing necessarily contains the ambiguous movements of opining (doxazein). Illuminating the lively disclosure of being inherent in the varying modes of opining, Heidegger's interpretive thinking suggests an open possibility of Plato's doctrine of untruth. In this light, I argue that a proper understanding of the Theaetetus must be based on the Platonic insight into the ambiguous power (dunamis) of opinion, which reveals the intermediate state of being between knowledge and ignorance.


Packet delay greatly influences the overall performance of network applications. It is therefore important to identify causes and locations of delay performance degradation within a network. Existing techniques, largely based on end-to-end delay measurements of unicast traffic, are well suited to monitor and characterize the behavior of particular end-to-end paths. Within these approaches, however, it is not clear how to apportion the variable component of end-to-end delay as queueing delay at each link along a path. Moreover, there are issues of scalability for large networks.In this paper, we show how end-to-end measurements of multicast traffic can be used to infer the packet delay distribution and utilization on each link of a logical multicast tree. The idea, recently introduced in [3] and [4], is to exploit the inherent correlation between multicast observations to infer performance of paths between branch points in a tree spanning a multicast source and its receivers. The method does not depend on cooperation from intervening network elements; because of the bandwidth efficiency of multicast traffic, it is suitable for large-scale measurements of both end-to-end and internal network dynamics. We establish desirable statistical properties of the estimator, namely consistency and asymptotic normality. We evaluate the estimator through simulation and observe that it is robust with respect to moderate violations of the underlying model.


With the NASDAQ having lost 70 percent of its value, the giddy, optimistic belief in perpetual growth that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s had fizzled by 2002. Yet the advances in information and communication technology, management and production techniques, and global integration that spurred the "New Economy" of the 1990s had triggered profound and lasting changes. Frontiers of Capital brings together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy. The contributors, most of whom are anthropologists, investigate changes in the practices and interactions of futures traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, residents of French housing projects, women working on Wall Street, cable television programmers, and others.

Some contributors highlight how expedited flows of information allow business professionals to develop new knowledge practices. They analyze dynamics ranging from the decision-making processes of the Federal Reserve Board to the legal maneuvering necessary to buttress a nascent Japanese market in over-the-counter derivatives. Others focus on the social consequences of globalization and new modes of communication, evaluating the introduction of new information technologies into African communities and the collaborative practices of open-source computer programmers. Together the essays suggest that social relations, rather than becoming less relevant in the high-tech age, have become more important than ever. This finding dovetails with the thinking of many corporations, which increasingly employ anthropologists to study and explain the "local" cultural practices of their own workers and consumers. Frontiers of Capital signals the wide-ranging role of anthropology in explaining the social and cultural contours of the New Economy.

Contributors. Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Greg Downey, Melissa S. Fisher, Douglas R. Holmes, George E. Marcus, Siobhan O'Mahony, Aihwa Ong, Annelise Riles, Saskia Sassen, Paul A. Silverstein, AbdouMaliq Simone, Neil Smith, Caitlin Zaloom


This article continues to examine the issue of 'escapees' raised by L. Siegelbaum and L. P. Moch in their work Escaping in Twentieth-Century Russia. In the author's opinion, during most of the 20th century the Russian state reacted most strongly to violations of the political regime, often preferring not to notice economic migration. This was due to the carefully concealed inability of the authorities to control the population totally. Violations of the regime of territorial movement by individual migrants were possible due to the uncoordinated actions of central and local authorities. With the gradual liberalisation of the Soviet system in the second half of the twentieth century, migrants were increasingly able to move legally. Refusing to coercively regulate migratory flows led to the displacement of the political factor in migrations by the economic one, which in turn caused a narrowing of 'autocratic' space.


Trees are in nature but also in our minds. Their shape have influenced how we communicate via diagrams, link ideas together and illustrate deeper human thoughts in art throughout history. Trees have been a recurrent metaphor for mapping information in numerous scientific domains, such as biology, genetics, sociology and linguistics and information visualisation is a growing area of interest amongst a variety of business practices. This book will expose our long-lasting obsession with trees, as metaphors for organising and representing hierarchical information, and provide a broad visual framework for the various types of executions, many dating back hundreds of years.


As witnessed in the 2004 elections, Americans feel the influence of interest groups today more than ever before. In races for the presidency, Congress, state legislatures, and even local school boards, interest groups help-in both major and minor ways-elect (or reelect) candidates who support their views. "Interest Groups in American Campaigns" is the only book to focus specifically on the role of interest groups in elections. Rozell, Wilcox, and Madland show that communication channels - from monetary donations to candidates and web pages for citizens - are the bedrock of interest group leverage on political parties, individual candidates, and voters. This second edition goes well beyond a straightforward update and spotlights the major changes in the way interest groups are now active in modern campaigns. Continuing the tradition of the first edition, the authors draw on interviews with interest group leaders, coverage of campaign finance filings, and election surveys in their extensive analysis. In addition to current data and updated examples and cases throughout the book, new coverage includes: the effects of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, the first finance reform package in a generation; the rise of 527s in campaign advertising in light of campaign finance reform restrictions; and, the successes and failures of George W. Bush and John Kerry to woo powerful interest groups.


The fundamental epistemic question that this paper seeks to examine is how the Hindutva discourse is increasingly getting mainstreamlined within India's socio-cultural milieu, buttressed by the economic transitions in the country. Due to the advent of globalisation, India has witnessed the twin phenomena of Hindutva and economic liberalisation, moving centre stage. In this connection, the paper seeks to argue that the place of Islam in the Indian ethos and the very identity of Muslims as citizens, has gained negative connotations in the current scenario which is propelled by the process of globalization. The central claim of the paper is that as left liberal policy in the economic sphere, the Nehruvian consensus in the political sphere and a sense of a composite tradition or shared heritage adored as the Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb began to crumble in front of the juggernaut of a mythical Hindu nation, the public imagination got increasingly reified into the sense of majoritarianism and 'hate- the- other' impulse. Media and films, benefited by the virtues of globalisation, appear to have emerged as crucial factors in nurturing this majoritarian logic, largely among the expanding Hindu middle class by projecting the minority Muslims as a distinct 'other' and as potential threats to the security of Hindus. In this regard, the paper aims at understanding the ways in which they have demonised Islamic culture and projected the identity of Muslims pejoratively. It thus contends that such an approach is primarily geared to validate the hegemonic designs embedded in Hindutva majoritarianism.


Periods of profound innovation and technological change invariably result in short run winners and losers. The rise of big box retailers like Wal-Mart, as well as the existence of large supermarket chains, has led competition authorities to focus anew on the issue of buyer power. Antitrust authorities in the United States have been investigating slotting fees and other retail practices, while UK and EU authorities have commenced a number of inquiries into the competitiveness of the supermarket grocery retail sector. Some in competition policy circles in the United States and Europe claim that there is something sufficiently special about market power on the buyer side of vertically related industries as to warrant special antitrust scrutiny or a separate analytical framework altogether. In this paper we outline both the relevant applicable law in the US and Europe, as well as the economics of buyer power. We conclude that while antitrust authorities must always be mindful of the facts and details of any potentially anticompetitive agreement, from an economic point of view, the case for treating buyer power differently from any other form of market power is unpersuasive. We compare U.S. and E.U. antitrust law, focusing our analysis on the adequacy of legal treatment of buyer power in the retail sector, and particularly, with respect to supermarkets.


We use a nested version of the GEOS-Chem global 3-D chemistry transport model to better understand the composition and variation of aerosol over Borneo and the broader Southeast Asian region in conjunction with aircraft and satellite observations. Our focus on Southeast Asia re- flects the importance of this region as a source of reactive or- ganic gases and aerosols from natural forests, biomass burn- ing, and food and fuel crops. We particularly focus on July 2008 when the UK BAe-146 research aircraft was deployed over northern Malaysian Borneo as part of the ACES/OP3 measurement campaign. During July 2008 we find using the model that Borneo (defined as Borneo Island and the sur- rounding Indonesian islands) was a net exporter of primary organic aerosol (42 kT) and black carbon aerosol (11 kT). We find only 13 % of volatile organic compound oxidation prod- ucts partition to secondary organic aerosol (SOA), with Bor- neo being a net exporter of SOA (15 kT). SOA represents ap- proximately 19 % of the total organic aerosol over the region. Sulphate is mainly from aqueous-phase oxidation (68 %), with smaller contributions from gas-phase oxidation (15 %) and advection into the regions (14 %). We find that there is a large source of sea salt, as expected, but this largely deposits within the region; we find that dust aerosol plays only a rel- atively small role in the aerosol burden. In contrast to coin- cident surface measurements over Northern Borneo that find a pristine environment with evidence for substantial biogenic SOA formation we find that the free troposphere is influenced by biomass burning aerosol transported from the northwest of the Island and further afield. We find several transport events during July 2008 over Borneo associated with ele- vated aerosol concentrations, none of which coincide with the aircraft flights. We use MODIS aerosol optical depths (AOD) data and the model to put the July campaign into a longer temporal perspective. We find that Borneo is where the model has the least skill at reproducing the data, where the model has a negative bias of 76 % and only captures 14 % of the observed variability. This model performance reflects the small-scale island-marine environment and the mix of aerosol species, with the model showing more skill at repro- ducing observed AOD over larger continental regions such as China where AOD is dominated by one aerosol type. The model shows that AOD over Borneo is approximately evenly split between organic and sulphate aerosol with sea salt rep- resenting 10-20 % during May-September; we find a similar breakdown over continental Southeast Asia but with less sea salt aerosol and more dust aerosol. In contrast, East China AOD is determined mainly by sulphate aerosol and a sea- sonal source of dust aerosol, as expected. Realistic sensitiv- ity runs, designed to test our underlying assumptions about emissions and chemistry over Borneo, show that model AOD is most sensitive to isoprene emissions and organic gas-phase partitioning but all fail to improve significantly upon the con- trol model calculation. This emphasises the multi-faceted dimension of the problem and the need for concurrent and coordinated development of BVOC emissions, and BVOC chemistry and organic aerosol formation mechanisms.


The Aswan High Dam Reservoir management system was developed to simulate dam operation under varying boundary conditions taking as example climate change and Millennium Dam construction, and analyze the optimal operation rules of the reservoir taking into account a large number of objectives, including hydropower production and water supply for irrigation purposes. The developed system runs on Windows platforms and comprises three basic modules: a user-friendly graphical interface managing all graphic features, a computational engine where all the algorithms are implemented, and a database and files module managing hydrological and operational data. The developed model was calibrated. The future hydrologic scenarios developed have been used to assess the expected impacts of potential climate change (baseline and three periods with two global emission scenarios) and the Millennium Dam. The new operation rules were used for scenarios analysis. It was concluded that overall applying the new operation rules will decrease the percentage of occurrence of minimum water levels. Also, the Millennium Dam will increase the percentage of occurrence of minimum water levels. Finally, the period III (2070–2099) for the two global emission scenarios is very critical for the dam operation.


Several lines of reclamation have been tested in the Palamoa/Vall-Llobrega (Girona, Spain) wastewater treatment plant. Each line consists of a filtration treatment (infiltration-percolation, sand filter, ring filter and physico-chemical treatment) plus a disinfection system (UV, peracetic acid, chlorine dioxide and ozonation). Every combination has been evaluated and compared with the other possibilities. This combination of filtration and disinfection allows the use of lower doses of disinfectants, thus minimising the negative impacts of the whole process and improving the reliability of the reclamation facilities.


In the context of debates about social work's knowledge base and its essential role this article focuses on how core social work activity might be identified and offers some preliminary suggestions as to what may constitute it. Drawing on a naturally occurring conversation between a social worker and two service users two claims are made. First, that despite concerns with uncertainty in late modernity, some features of interaction remain inherently certain. These include (1) Materiality, the setting and its participants are taken as real; (2) Identity, participants engage on the basis that they are who they say they are; (3) Taken for granted aspects of social organization; for example, that all participants can hold a conversation until shown otherwise; and, (4) Historicity, referring to a preexisting set of accounts, justifications, reasons and communicative orderings. Second, these 'background expectancies' provide the resource for topic seeking and non-routine practices that may be necessary to social work such as 'authorized breaching' of the domestic sphere and private life.


The aim of this paper is to give an overview of two aspects of modern-day Scots: its range of use (which is larger than sometimes assumed) and its standardisation (or lack thereof). Both aspects have come to be subsumed under the term ausbau, (1) following its introduction by the German philologist Heinz Kloss in 1967. The term itself has led to some degree of confusion, not least, perhaps, due to the difficulty of translating it into English. We will therefore start with a closer look at what ausbau is and how the term has been used. After that, the state of Scots ausbau in relation to domains and standardisation at the beginning of the twenty-first century will be investigated before, finally, we examine the significance of and motivation for the ausbau of Scots. This paper is not the first study of its kind. In 1979, A.J. Aitken gave an overview of the state of ausbau of Scots at that time, with a special focus on educational and academic contexts. McClure, in the same volume, looked at the 'range of uses' from a more literary perspective. This paper aims to be much broader in outlook, paying attention to as wide a range of domains (2) in which Scots is used at the beginning of the twenty-first century as possible. However, even for a vernacular whose range of uses is somewhat limited, any attempt at describing something as complex as the state of ausbau cannot claim to be comprehensive. Placing the emphasis on breadth rather than depth, but including individual cases that are considered particularly interesting or relevant, this paper operates within the following limitations: (i) It is restricted to the ausbau of Scots in Scotland. International varieties of Scots (as found in Ulster or Canada) are not considered. (ii) The paper is concerned only or mainly with the situation as it presents itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For historical overviews see Gorlach 1998 Ch. 5 and 2002. (iii) No consideration is given to works on Scots but not in Scots. Researching and writing on a variety does not, in my view, automatically contribute to its ausbau. This means that a large bulk of academic work on the Scots language is not reflected upon here. (iv) Finally, literature, one of the strongholds of Scots, can only be mentioned in passing and for the sake of completeness. There are a number of works on Scots literature that deal with the topic in a much more comprehensive way than can possibly be expected in the scope of the present paper. 1. WHAT IS AUSBAU? Stemming from the question of how language can be distinguished from dialect, Kloss distinguishes two qualities by virtue of which speech varieties can be assigned the label of 'language'. They could be structurally different from a (geographically) neighbouring variety, in which case they would be labelled as 'abstand languages', with 'abstand' being the German term for distance. This is the case for Gaelic as opposed to English in Scotland and Ireland or for French and Italian as opposed to German in Switzerland, and this is the traditionally and among non-linguists widely accepted criterion for the recognition of a variety as a language. Alternatively, and perhaps less palpable at first sight, Kloss labelled varieties that attain their language status 'by development' as 'ausbau languages' (Kloss 1967: 29): 'Languages belonging in this category are recognized as such because of having been shaped or reshaped, moulded or remoulded--as the case may be--in order to become a standardized tool of literary expression. We might say that an Ausbausprache is called a language by virtue of its having been reshaped, i.e. by virtue of its "reshapedness" if there were such a word.' By setting the (more or less) absolute criterion of 'standardized tool of literary expression', Kloss leaves little room for questions of degree: most varieties will either clearly pass or fail this criterion. (3) Kloss's terminology of abstand and ausbau languages has been variously taken up in linguistics throughout the Western world; his definition of the terms, however, has sometimes been altered or even confused. …


Dyslipidemia refers to a broad spectrum of various genetic and acquired disorders that affect blood lipid levels and largely contribute to global cardiovascular disease burden. Consistent evidence from epidemiological and clinical studies, supports the key role of the circulating LDL-cholesterol and other apoB containing lipoproteins in atherogenesis. All ApoB-containing lipoproteins with size less than 70 nm can cross the endothelial barrier, particularly in the presence of endothelial dysfunction. Uptake and accumulation of apoB-containing lipoproteins in the arterial wall is a critical initiating event in the development of atherosclerosis. Statin treatment, targeting LDL cholesterol reduction, remains the cornerstone of dyslipidemia management. There are abundant data supporting the concept of 'the lower LDL-C, the better' in the primary and secondary cardiovascular disease prevention. This chapter provides an overview of the key insights into the lipid abnormalities associated with an increased risk of CV events particulary in the context of dyslipidemia management in everyday clinical practice. Understanding the important role that metabolic derangements play in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis pave the way for stronger implementation of current guidelines for CVD risk assessment and prevention.


There is a rapid rise of multi-cores in recent hardware architectures. To exploit computational power of multi-core architectures, software should shift to be as concurrent as possible; and therefore should have concurrency control mechanisms. There are different concurrency programming paradigms such as locking and conditions, non-blocking algorithms, actors and software transactional memory (STM). There is a need to compare these approaches in terms of ease of use and performance. This work implements three fundamental cases of credit transfer, producer-consumer and token ring with different paradigms in Scala and the quantitative and qualitative results of the experiments are presented. Besides an STM implementation in Scala is presented.


This solo exhibtion presented a retrospective selection of works made between 1995 and 2004 that overall addressed the nature of perception and its cultural and psychological duality. The nature of perception, what is hidden and revealed, has long been a preoccupation of Boggon's, and this work was a manifestation of that cultural and psychological duality.

'Within', a Georgian grandfather clock, alluded to history, family and tradition, while a lower door and periscope allowed a view within that revealed an internal discord, as host to interior scenes that played with ideas of morality and deception, secrecy and make believe.

'The White House', an old 1970s dolls house, was renovated on the outside and animated internally; looking in through the windows, scenes are enacted by way of moving images, providing glimpses of ordinary occurrences.

The piece 'Drive In, Check Out', a wooden crate, contained a miniature drive in cinema, a barren, remote car park containing model cars. The small screen projected disjointed footage taken from films and newsreels, as set within a set. The process involved research into drive-in ciinemas, film, notions around escape through transportation (mentally and physically). Many components were needed and this resulted in research in terms of sourcing very particular items such as replica cars, LCD screen and also in learning new techinical skills in terms of editing and equipment.

Other works shown in the exhibition include 'Offshoot', 2004, DVD; 'Box', 1995, cardboard box, model window; 'If I could see through you', 2004, wardrobe, mixed media; and a series of 'Drawings', 2004, rotary pen on paper.


Objective: Accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF) is typically defined as a memory disorder in which information that is learned and retained normally over standard intervals (∼30 min) is forgotten at an abnormally rapid rate thereafter. ALF has been reported, in particular, among patients with transient epileptic amnesia (TEA). Previous work in TEA has revealed ALF 24 hr - 1 week after initial memory acquisition. It is unclear, however, if ALF observed 24 hr after acquisition reflects (a) an impairment of sleep consolidation processes taking place during the first night's sleep, or (b) an impairment of daytime consolidation processes taking place during the day of acquisition. Here we focus on the daytime-forgetting hypothesis of ALF in TEA by tracking in detail the time course of ALF over the day of acquisition, as well as over 24 hr and 1 week. Method: Eleven TEA patients who showed ALF at 1 week and 16 matched controls learned 4 categorical word lists on the morning of the day of acquisition. We subsequently probed word-list retention 30 min, 3 hr, and 8 hr postacquisition (i.e., over the day of acquisition), as well as 24-hr and 1-week post acquisition. Results: ALF became apparent in the TEA group over the course of the day of acquisition 3–8 hr after learning. No further forgetting was observed over the first night in either group. Conclusions: The results of this study show that ALF in TEA can result from a deficit in memory consolidation occurring within hours of learning without a requirement for intervening sleep.


Immunotherapy with nivolumab resulted in durable responses and promising overall survival (OS) in a dose-escalation and expansion trial of patients with advanced liver cancer. The 12-month OS rate exceeded 60% in patients in whom sorafenib had failed, and responses occurred in patients with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) or hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, reported Anthony B. El-Khoueiry, MD, Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, Los Angeles, at ASCO 2015. "Sorafenib remains the only standard-of-care systemic therapy for patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma, with median survival limited to <11 months," said Dr El-Khoueiry. "Patients who progress on sorafenib have no standard-of-care second-line therapy options. Based on recently completed phase 3 trials in the setting of sorafenib failure, the median survival with best supportive care is approximately 7 to 8 months." Hepatocellular carcinoma is typically an inflammation-associated cancer that can be immunogenic. Furthermore, HCV infection and HBV infection have been associated with the upregulation of PD-1. The upregulation of PD-1 and its ligand 1 (PD-L1) have been associated with worse prognosis in hepatocellular carcinoma, especially after resection or ablation. In the phase 1/2 study, nivolumab was evaluated in patients enrolled in dose escalation in 2 parallel cohorts—patients with HBV or HCV and uninfected patients. Dose escalation was followed by ongoing dose expansion. Patients were permitted ≥1 lines of previous systemic therapy, including sorafenib. Overall, 47 patients were evaluable for safety (43 from the dose-escalation phase and 4 from the dose-expansion phase) at the time of the interim analysis presented at ASCO 2015. A maximum tolerated dose was not defined, and drug-related adverse events occurred in 68% of patients, with 19% being grade 3 or 4. Currently, 17 patients remain in the study; a total of 30 patients discontinued treatment, with 26 discontinuations resulting from disease progression, 2 from drug-related adverse events, and 2 from achieving a complete response. Of 42 patients who were evaluable for response, 8 (19%) had an objective response (5% had a complete response and 14% had a partial response). In all, 48% of the patients had stable disease. Responses occurred across all the etiologic cohorts. "In addition to the confirmed responses,...40% of patients had some reduction in the size of their tumors," said Dr El-Khoueiry. Among the 8 responders, 7 had responses lasting >9 months, and responses are on going in 6 pa tients. Of the 8 patients who responded, 7 did so within 3 months of beginning treatment. The OS rate at 12 months is 62%. "To put this in context, the 12-month OS rate after sorafenib failure, based on recently completed phase 3 trials, is about 30%," Dr El-Khoueiry said. "The durable responses and prolonged stable diseases, along with the encouraging 12-month OS, lend strong support to the ongoing dose-expansion phase of the study to validate the promising signal and for continued exploration of nivolumab in hepatocellular carcinoma," Dr El-Khoueiry concluded. n Nivolumab Makes Headwinds into Liver Cancer


Al-Marri v. Wright (1) is the most recent case in the struggle to define who qualifies as an enemy combatant in the Global War on Terror. In Al-Marri, the Fourth Circuit, in contrast with its previous ruling in Padilla v. Hanft, (2) found that the President's authority to designate a person detained on U.S. soil an enemy combatant was greatly limited. In so doing, the court inappropriately usurped legislative and executive powers. Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a graduate student, was lawfully residing in Illinois when the FBI arrested him in December of 2001. (3) After criminal proceedings against al-Marri stalled, President Bush declared al-Marri an enemy combatant and ordered him transferred to the custody of the Secretary of Defense. (4) Since June 23, 2003, the military has held al-Marri as an enemy combatant at the Naval Consolidated Brig in South Carolina. (5) Al-Marri's attorney petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court in South Carolina. (6) The government responded to the petition with a declaration from the Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism that asserted, among other things, that al-Marri had trained with al Qaeda and was a "sleeper agent" for al Qaeda in America. (7) The district court dismissed al-Marri's habeas petition on the grounds that al-Marri had failed to rebut the accusations in the declaration. (8) Al-Marri appealed. (9) In an opinion written by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, the Fourth Circuit reversed the denial of the writ by the district court. (10) The court first addressed the question whether it had jurisdiction over the petition. The government argued that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) (11) removed from the court's jurisdiction habeas petitions from declared enemy combatants. (12) Section 7 of the MCA provides: No court ... shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien of the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant.... (13) The court held that the MCA did not strip it of jurisdiction over al-Marri's habeas petition because there had not been a review of his status as an enemy combatant after the President's initial decision to detain him. The court understood the statute to require two steps: a determination that a person is an enemy combatant, followed by a review of the appropriateness of that classification. (14) The panel found that al-Marri had not received the second step of the review necessary to remove his habeas petition from the court's jurisdiction. (15) Addressing the merits of the habeas appeal, the court found the government's two primary arguments unpersuasive. First, the government argued that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) (16) authorized the President to hold al-Marri as an enemy combatant. (17) Second, the government argued that the President had inherent constitutional authority under his Article II commander-in-chief authority to detain al-Marri as an enemy combatant. (18) The court first rejected a literal reading of the AUMF's "all necessary and appropriate force" language, because such a reading would lead to "absurd results," including allowing the President to detain anyone who was in any way related to the attacks on September 11, 2001. (19) The court then argued that the AUMF must be read in light of precedents such as Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (20) and Padilla v. Hanft, (21) and by references to attempts to define the scope of the Government's authority to detain and try enemy combatants in Ex parte Quirin (22) and Ex parte Milligan. (23) In Hamdi, the Supreme Court upheld the classification as an enemy combatant of an individual who fought with the Taliban, the de facto government of Afghanistan. (24) In Padilla, the Fourth Circuit allowed the detention as an enemy combatant of an individual who was armed and present in Afghanistan in opposition to American military action, even though the government captured that individual at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. …


This paper attempts to study the relationship between firm legal form and firm performance in the Middle East and North Africa Region (MENA) using the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) database. Our analysis shows that open shareholding, closed shareholding, partnership, and limited partnership companies demonstrate an advantage in terms of annual sales and annual productivity growth rates over sole proprietorship firms, and that medium-sized and large-sized firms also demonstrate an advantage over small ones. Our analysis also shows that foreign ownership, exporting activities, the usage of the web in communication with clients and suppliers, and the presence of full-time workers positively affect firm performance. These findings are robust when running the analysis for firms with female participation in ownership. This paper provides directions for strategists targeting at improving the performance of firms.


Optical recordings are ubiquitous in current scientific research. As recording and storing images and videos have become simpler and cheaper over the past years, new and more efficient tools are needed to analyse the growing amount of data. While current scientific image analysis tools focus on medical 3D data sets, a tool for efficiently handling large‐scale 2D time‐series recordings is still missing. We developed ClickPoints, an expandable, open‐source, Python‐based software to fill this gap. ClickPoints combines and streamlines the three main steps of image analysis – visualization, annotation and evaluation – in one program. ClickPoints enables the user to (i) efficiently review large data sets of images and videos, (ii) annotate interesting findings and (iii) facilitate manual and automatic evaluations. ClickPoints is highly versatile, ranging from clicking and selecting objects with simple markers, drawing masks and computing trajectories, up to (iv) custom‐written Python add‐ons for adapting or extending the available features. These add‐ons (v) reduce development time by utilizing ClickPoints' display, interface and storage solutions. In addition, ClickPoints provides an (vi) extensive data base application programming interface to facilitate efficient storage and retrieval of results. ClickPoints is designed to simplify repetitive and labour‐intensive scientific tasks, especially when dealing with large image and video time‐series recordings. ClickPoints offers cross‐platform support for Windows and Linux and is released under the GPLv3 license. Download, documentation and numerous examples are available at http://clickpoints.readthedocs.io.


Background: Children of parents with bipolar disorder are at increased risk of disturbance. Aims: This study examined relationships between parental mood, parenting, household organization and child emotional and behavioural adjustment in families with a parent with bipolar disorder to determine areas of specific need for parenting support. Method: 48 parents were recruited through advertisements via self-help organizations. The study was conducted online. Parental mood and activity was assessed by self-report questionnaires (CES-D, ISS, MDQ and SRM); parenting was assessed using the Parenting Scale (PS). The SDQ was used to assess the parent's view of their child's emotional and behavioural difficulties. The Confusion, Hubbub and Order Scale (CHAOS) assessed household organization. Results: Parents reported high levels of difficulties across all measures and scores were above clinical cut-offs on most scales. Children were reported as showing high levels of disturbance on the SDQ, including all sub-scales. Parenting and depression scores were significantly positively correlated, as were depression, parenting and CHAOS score. Regression analyses indicated that CHAOS was the strongest predictor of Total Difficulties and Emotional Symptoms on the SDQ. Conclusions: Families are likely to benefit from interventions tailored to meet their parenting needs.


We have studied gene activation via CArG boxes in the context of myogenesis. The proximal CArG box of the human cardiac actin gene (HCA1) stimulates transcription from the herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (TK) promoter in a tissue-specific fashion. Thus in transient transfection assays, when the expression of chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) from p(HCA1)4 TKCAT is compared to that derived from p(M1)4 TKCAT which contains an inactive mutated version (M1) of the HCA1 element, high levels of expression are seen in C2 mouse myoblasts and myotubes, and in the T4 myoblast cell line derived from the C3H10T1/2 cell line by 5-azacytidine treatment, whereas only low levels of expression are seen in the mouse L fibroblast cell line. The parental C3H10T1/2 cell line shows intermediate levels of expression. A similar situation is seen in stably transfected cell lines. Gene activation via CArG boxes was also analyzed in the course of myogenic conversion of C3H10T1/2 cells treated with 5-azacytidine. Our results indicate that activation of the CAT gene from the HCA1 element is slightly posterior to the appearance of the first MyoD1 and myogenin transcripts, concomitant with the appearance of cardiac alpha-actin transcripts, but clearly precedes the accumulation of myosin light-chain 1a transcripts and the appearance of troponin T-positive cells. These results further establish that CArG boxes can be seen as muscle-specific cis-acting regulatory element prior to terminal differentiation.