Adult stem cells represent only a minor proportion of a given tissue and are difficult to amplify in vitro without affecting their biological properties. To circumvent this problem, we used a transgenic/lentiviral based approach to isolate and characterize these cells by driving a fluorescent reporter protein under the control of Spi2a, H2Kb or MELK promoter/enhancer elements, which were previously shown to be active in various stem cells. The first chapter focuses on Spi2a, a serine protease inhibitor (Serpin), which is known to be preferentially expressed in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). Taking advantage of the previously characterized minimal Spi2a promoter, we were able to determine its activity profile in the hematopoietic system. For this purpose, we infected HSCs with a lentivirus driving d2eGFP expression under the control of the minimal Spi2a promoter. These cells were then injected into lethally irradiated recipient mice that were analyzed at different time points (≥2 months) after transplantation. Despite variable d2eGFP expression in the hematopoietic compartment, we found a population of bright d2eGFP-expressing bone marrow cells (Spi2a0.1%) that were mostly restricted to HSCs and early myeloid progenitors. Spi2a0.1% cells displayed multilineage colony forming potential in vitro and exhibited long-term multilineage repopulating capacity in vivo, when a restricted numbers of these cells (≥ 300 cells) were transplanted into secondary recipient mice. Furthermore, we generated transgenic mice using a similar construct as used for the lentiviral approach. These mice indicated that the Spi2a promoter may be activated in non-hematopoietic adult stem cells, such as in the brain, the testis or the pancreas. In the second chapter, we describe a transgenic mouse line that expresses a green fluorescent protein variant (zFP) under the control of H2Kb promoter/enhancer element. Despite the broad zFP expression, transgenic HSCs expressed exceptionally high levels of zFP, allowing prospective isolation of a population highly enriched in HSCs by sorting the 0.2% of the brightest green cells from the enriched bone marrow of H2Kb-zFP mice. Up to 90% of zFPbright cells were also c-kithigh, Sca-1high, Linneg, Flk-2neg, which is a bona fide phenotype for long-term HSCs. Double-sorted zFPbright HSCs were capable of long-term multilineage reconstitution at a limiting dilution dose of approximately 12 cells, which is comparable to that of highly purified HSCs obtained by conventional multicolor flow cytometry. Thus, the H2Kb-zFP transgenic mice provide a straightforward and easy setup for the simple and highly efficient enrichment for genetically labeled HSCs. The last chapter is dedicated to MELK. This kinase of the snf1/AMPK family was recently identified to regulate the proliferation of multipotent neural progenitor cells and was also found to be expressed in hematopoietic stem cells and in spermatogonia. Using a transgenic mouse approach by expressing eGFP under a 3.5kb MELK promoter/enhancer element, we demonstrated that eGFP-expressing cells were localized in the subventricular zone (SVZ) of the lateral ventricle and in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus, the two major regions of adult neurogenesis. Moreover, the eGFP expression level in SVZ-derived cells positively correlated with their ability to form neurospheres. We also observed strong and restricted expression of eGFP in spermatogonia cells, indicating that MELK may play an important role in early spermatogenesis. Additionally, activation of the MELK promoter in hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells suggested a widespread implication of MELK in various adult stem cells. To conclude, we have generated three different reporter strains and one lentiviral based approach that allow for in vivo identification of stem/progenitor cells in different compartment such as the brain, the bone marrow or the testis. With the raising interest of stem-cell-based therapies in the neurodegenerative or the cancer field, these mice should provide novel and alternative tools to study these phenomena in vivo.


Nanotechnology has progressed to the point where it can mimic natural systems such as porous membranes or the structure of leaves. Technological advances have resulted in a boom in the use of nanotechnology in different areas of engineering, including water purification systems. This book explores nanomaterials used for removing various textile dyes from water. It compiles 8 chapters that discuss the materials and nano systems used in these processes.

This reference is designed to provide answers to common questions for scholars, academicians and technologists about fundamentals of nanoscience and nanomaterial induced removal of textile dyes. College students (physics, chemistry and materials science, engineering) will be able to easily understand the subject matter.

Key Features:

Covers the basics of nano systems, from synthesis to applications

Explains the basics of nanomaterial behavior and characterization

Describes the classifications of dyes

Explains the interactions nanomaterials with different dyes

Explains the reaction mechanisms of photocatalysis and the kinetics behind adsorption two important methods for removing dyes from water

Discusses nano systems that are useful for textile dye removal from water. 3 types of nano systems are included: carbon based, oxide based, polymer based or nitride based systems

Includes references for further reading

Simple presentation for easy and quick understanding of the subject


Despite the considerable effort invested by industry and academia in modeling standards such as UML (Unified Modeling Language), software modeling has long played a subordinate role in commercial software development. Although modeling is generally perceived as state of the art and thus as something that ought to be done, its appreciation seems to pale along with the progression from the early, more conceptual phases of a software project to those where the actual handcrafting is done. As a matter of fact, while models have been found useful for documentation purposes and as rough sketches of implementations, their ultimate value has been severely limited by their ambiguity and tendency to get out of sync with the final code.
More recently, hopes that modeling might reach its deserved place in the software engineering process have been refueled by so-called MDD (model-driven development) initiatives, most prominently advanced by IBM and the OMG (Object Management Group). The underlying idea is to promote models to the primary artifacts of software development, making executable code a pure derivative. According to this development paradigm, software is generated—with the aid of suitable transformations—from a compact description (the model) that is more human readable and maintainable than any other form of software specification in use today. Using a metaphor from biology, such a model would be the construction plan—the DNA—of software, and the transformations the ribosomes of the construction process.
Today, increasing numbers of success stories accompany major releases of software development products that claim to have made MDD a reality, and market pressure will soon force even conservative CTOs to look into this emerging technology. As a colleague recently predicted: "In the future, there won't be any programming jobs in this country. Instead, we will make models and ship them offshore, where programmers will turn them into code." "False," another colleague responded, "we won't ship the models, but transform them ourselves. However, we will do it all automatically." Take your choice.
In the following Dr. Con, known as a harsh critic of today's modeling languages and a skeptic of the feasibility of MDD, and Dr. Pro, a believer in the MDD vision, discuss whether MDD is flawed from the beginning or represents the most promising new development paradigm today.


Rock and pop music in the USSR and eastern Europe has become an area of increasing interest to both the western mass media and cultural studies since glasnost, perestroika, the collapse of the Eastern bloc Communist regimes and the constitution of new western-styled democratic governments. This is largely because rock music has represented probably the most widespread vehicle of youth rebellion, resistance and independence behind the Iron Curtain, both in terms of providing an enhanced political context for the often banned sounds of British and American rock, and in the development of home-grown musics built on western foundations but resonating within their own highly charged political contexts. As the East German critic Peter Wicke has claimed, Because of the intrinsic characteristics of the circumstances within which rock music is produced and consumed, this cultural medium became, in the GDR, the most suitable vehicle for forms of cultural and political resistance that could not be controlled by the state. (Wicke 1991, p. 1)


Meroplankton was investigated at 11 Stations in the southern Kara Sea and the Yenisei Estuary in August 2000. Larvae of 31 benthic taxa representing 10 higher groups were identified. Meroplankton was present almost at all stations and depth levels. The two most abundant groups were Echinodermata (68%) and Polychaeta (26%). Echinoderms dominated total meroplankton locally due to mass occurrences of Ophiopluteus larvae. The relative group composition was highly variable and seemed to depend mainly on the local hydrographic pattern. Comparison of meroplanktonic data with the distribution of the adults revealed for Spionida and Bivalvia a downstream transport of the larvae while for other polychaete species and Ophiuroida upstream transport into the estuary occured. The transport mechanisms and concentration of the larvae within the estuary is explained by physical barriers established by hydrographic gradients, the prevailing mixing processes and the presence of near-bottom counter current.


Abstract. In recent decades, the development of vulnerability frameworks has enlarged the research in the natural hazards field. Despite progress in developing the vulnerability studies, there is more to investigate regarding the quantitative approach and clarification of the conceptual explanation of the social component. At the same time, some disaster-prone areas register limited attention. Among these, Romania's capital city, Bucharest, is the most earthquake-prone capital in Europe and the tenth in the world. The location is used to assess two multi-criteria methods for aggregating complex indicators: the social vulnerability index (SoVI model) and the spatial multi-criteria social vulnerability index (SEVI model). Using the data of the 2002 census we reduce the indicators through a factor analytical approach to create the indices and examine if they bear any resemblance to the known vulnerability of Bucharest city through an exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA). This is a critical issue that may provide better understanding of the social vulnerability in the city and appropriate information for authorities and stakeholders to consider in their decision making. The study emphasizes that social vulnerability is an urban process that increased in a post-communist Bucharest, raising the concern that the population at risk lacks the capacity to cope with disasters. The assessment of the indices indicates a significant and similar clustering pattern of the census administrative units, with an overlap between the clustering areas affected by high social vulnerability. Our proposed SEVI model suggests adjustment sensitivity, useful in the expert-opinion accuracy.


Author(s): Gerke, Brian; Gallo, Giulia; Smith, Sarah; Liu, Jingjing; Alstone, Peter; Raghavan, Shuba; Schwartz, Peter; Piette, Mary Ann; Yin, Rongxin; Stensson, Sofia | Abstract: In response to the imperative of the climate crisis, California is in the midst of deployment of low-carbon energy generation and electrified heating and transportation at a rapid pace. In 2018 the grid managed by the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) was already generating 26 percent of its power from non-hydro renewable sources, with an additional ten percent hydroelectric power; and with SB 100, California statute now sets a target of 100 percent carbon free electricity by 2045. Maintaining this fast pace of decarbonization requires action across multiple domains on the grid from generators to loads. This study describes new findings on the scale of the opportunity for enabling load shifting as a form of demand response (DR) in California, as part of this renewable energy transition. We use the shorthand term Shift to refer to this potential load-shifting DR resource. The operating principles for the electric power system mean that achieving California's renewable energy goals requires careful planning to build and operate the system in a way that maintains reliability at low cost. The most fundamental of these principles is that generation and demand need to be balanced at all times. Historically this has meant building adequate flexible and dispatchable generators that can be operated to match inflexible and uncontrolled loads. Meeting large fractions of demand with variable renewable energy (VRE) generation introduces a new paradigm, exemplified by the "duck curve" in California. In the times of year it occurs, the duck curve illustrates the net electricity demand that must be met by non-VRE generation; it has sharp peaks in morning and evening (the "tail" and "head" of the duck, respectively) and steep transitions to a deep midday trough (the duck's "belly") resulting from solar generation. Balancing the duck curve is a key priority for integrating increasing levels of VRE on the California grid. Shift DR is one of several renewables integration planning approaches that can work together to balance a high-VRE system. Others include "overbuilding" renewable energy with the intent to curtail during times of surplus generation, building and operating transmission lines to integrate regional systems, and building and operating energy storage to match generation with loads. Based on the 2019-2020 Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) model for California1—which did not consider Shift among its resource options—the least-cost pathway for achieving California GHG goals includes all of these other approaches. The Reference System Portfolio that is used to inform utility planning includes development of energy storage that is operated to serve about 10 GWh of consumption on the average day in 2020, 70 GWh in 2030, and 400 GWh by 2045. There is also significant curtailment of VRE in this least-cost portfolio, with 4 GWh on the average day in 2020, rising to 15 GWh by 2030 and 100 GWh by 2045. Throughout this report we compare the Shift resource to curtailment and storage as benchmarks, providing context for the results we report related to the quantity, cost, and performance of Shift. The timing of evening peak and curtailment defines times when load shifting is most valuable and would likely be used. The quantity of curtailment and use of storage to balance the system represent how much Shift could be valuable at the upper bound if Shift is inexpensive. The cost of energy storage is also a useful benchmark for the cost of Shift because it is the most comparable "competing" technology option; we therefore use the cost of storage to set a reference price level below which Shift will be most broadly cost competitive.


We investigated which variables, including environmental variables and food availabil- ity, could predict the spatial distribution and dynamics of benthic macrofauna on an intertidal flat. A time series of macrobenthos and sediment grain size samples was complemented by time series of microphytobenthos and saltmarsh vegetation biomass and sediment grain size from airborne hyper- spectral remote sensing, and elevation from laser altimetry. Response models were constructed to predict biomass and species richness of macrobenthos as a function of the environmental variables. Total biomass and species richness was best predicted by a combination of microphytobenthos biomass and sediment characteristics as explanatory variables. Deep deposit feeders and surface deposit feeders also responded best to a combination of variables, with deep deposit feeders responding more strongly to sediment grain size and surface deposit feeders responding more strongly to microphytobenthos biomass. The environmental conditions to reach maximum biomass differed for each macrobenthos species. Application of the response models to the remote sensing- derived maps of the environmental variables enabled significant predictions of the spatial distribu- tion of macrobenthos biomass, demonstrating the differences in distribution of the macrobenthos spe- cies. The models also revealed the sensitivity of the macrobenthic community to environmental change. In situ and remote sensing data demonstrated a significant fining of the sediment and a (tem- poral) increase in average microphytobenthos biomass. Field observations also showed a significant increase in species richness and changes in the relative abundance of species, with a decrease in Bathyporeia pilosa, and an increase in Nereis diversicolor, Pygospio elegans and Heteromastus filiformis. Such changes in macrobenthos biomass and species richness were indeed predicted from the response models. The study demonstrates that the synoptic remote sensing techniques combined with field sampling allow efficient ecological mapping and monitoring.


THE CONCEPTUAL PRIORITY OF THE PERFECT Matthew Zdon Marquette University, 2015 The doctrine of the conceptual priority of the perfect (CPP) is the claim that the concept of the perfect is prior to that of the imperfect insofar as possessing the latter presupposes a grasp of the former, but not vice versa. The goals of this study are to provide an account and defense of the Cartesian argument for CPP, to determine the consequences of this priority for the relationship between our concepts of human and divine properties, and to explore its implications for bottom-up accounts of theological concept formation. I argue that the predicates "perfect" or "infinite" in Descartes' version of CPP are equivalent to "true" or "genuine" and thus function in the same way they would in geometrical examples where the perfection at issue is definitive of the kind and where imperfection constitutes falling short of the kind. I can thus be said to have the idea of a "perfect" circle (of that which is "infinitely" circular, as it were) merely by virtue of having the idea of a circle, yet I cannot apprehend something as imperfect or finite insofar as it resembles but fails to be a circle unless I already possess a concept of the kind in question— a true or perfect circle. CPP thus implies a qualitative distinction between the perfect and imperfect that, when applied to God and creation, is consistent with a theory of analogy. Unlike traditional 'bottom-up' theories of analogy, however, CPP entails a 'top-down' order of derivation in which concepts of creaturely perfections are derived (via a sort of 'partial negation') from concepts of divine ones. The 'top-down' order of derivation yields epistemological advantages over the traditional approach, which had always struggled to explain how we can derive analogical concepts of God from creatures. Further, CPP enables its proponents to address the classic anthropomorphism critiques leveled at practitioners of Perfect Being Theology. Though I acknowledge that CPP is not without its own weaknesses, I present a largely sympathetic account of the argument and its relevance for contemporary philosophy of religion.


Tumors and tumorlike conditions of the anus and perianal region originate from the anal canal and anal margin or result from direct extension of tumors from adjacent organs. The anatomy of the anal canal is complex, and its different histologic characteristics can lead to diverse pathologic conditions. The anal canal extends from the anorectal junction to the anal verge. The World Health Organization classification of anal canal tumors includes (a) anal intraepithelial neoplasia, the precursor of squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), and (b) invasive tumors. Invasive tumors are further classified on the basis of cell type as epithelial tumors (SCC, adenocarcinoma, mucinous adenocarcinoma, small cell carcinoma, and undifferentiated carcinoma), nonepithelial tumors, carcinoid tumors, melanoma, and secondary tumors (direct spread from rectal, cervical, or prostate carcinoma). The anal margin, or perianal skin, lies outside the anal verge and encompasses a radius of 5 cm from the anal verge. Tumors in the anal margin are classified according to the World Health Organization classification of skin tumors. Anal margin tumors include SCC, anal intraepithelial neoplasia, also known as Bowen disease, adenocarcinoma and its precursor Paget disease, basal cell carcinoma, and verrucous carcinoma (Buschke-Löwenstein tumor), which is a rare variant of SCC. Imaging plays an important role in the evaluation, staging, and follow-up of patients with anal and perianal tumors. However, because of the overlap in imaging features among these diverse entities, a definitive diagnosis is best established at histopathologic examination. Nevertheless, familiarity with the pathogenesis, imaging features, and treatment of these tumors can aid radiologic diagnosis and guide appropriate patient treatment. (©)RSNA, 2016.


In this paper, we examine the methods by which candidates are selected for the Oxford Medical School in the light of the literature on assessment in general and candidate selection in particular. We review changes in the process that attempt to capture the best of evidence‐supported practice while preserving or enhancing the features identified as being peculiar strengths of the Oxford learning environment. These changes aim to improve fairness, reliability and validity, while permitting candidate‐specific approaches that allow for differences of prior experience and opportunity. Over the last three years, the outcome has been a marked convergence between the approaches to selection in Oxford with commonly accepted standards of assessment.


Real-world networks often need to be designed under uncertainty, with only partial information and predictions of demand available at the outset of the design process. The field of stochastic optimization deals with such problems where the forecasts are specified in terms of probability distributions of future data. In this paper, we broaden the set of models as well as the techniques being considered for approximating stochastic optimization problems. For example, we look at stochastic models where the cost of the elements is correlated to the set of realized demands, and risk-averse models where upper bounds are placed on the amount spent in each of the stages. These generalized models require new techniques, and our solutions are based on a novel combination of the primal-dual method truncated based on optimal LP relaxation values, followed by a tree-rounding stage. We use these to give constant-factor approximation algorithms for the stochastic Steiner tree and single sink network design problems in these generalized models.


Feedback on assessment tasks has an important part to play in underpinning student learning. Online assessment enables instantaneous feedback to be given so that the student can act on it immediately. However, concern has been expressed that e-assessment tasks (especially multiple-choice questions) can encourage surface-learning. Several projects at the UK Open University are investigating the use of rich interactive e-assessment. One of these projects is using a linguistically based authoring tool to enable sophisticated answer matching for free-text responses of up to a sentence in length. Immediate tailored feedback is provided on incorrect and incomplete responses, and students are able to use this feedback in reattempting the question. Students have been observed attempting the questions and were seen to answer them in different ways, with most students using short phrases but some using full and carefully constructed sentences and some using note form. There was evidence that some students assumed the system to be looking only for keywords. A human-computer marking comparison has demonstrated the computer-based answer matching to be of similar or greater accuracy than that of six course tutors.


The conformation of model [Arg(Ala)(4)X(Ala)(4)Lys+2H](2+) and [Arg(Gly)(4)X(Gly)(4)Lys+2H](2+) peptides has been systematically investigated as a function of the central amino acid X through a combined experimental and theoretical approach. Mass spectrometry-based ion mobility measurements have been performed together with conformational sampling using replica-exchange molecular dynamics to probe the influence of each amino acid on the stable peptide conformation. Satisfactory agreement is obtained between measured and calculated diffusion cross section distributions. The results confirm the propensity of alanine-based peptides to form alpha-helices in the gas phase, differences between peptides arising from the local arrangement of the central side chain with respect to the charged ends. More generally, we find that charge solvation plays a major role in secondary structure stabilization, especially in the case of glycine-based peptides. The rich variety of conformations exhibited by the latter is qualitatively captured by the simulations. This work illustrates the potentiality of such combined experimental/theoretical strategy to determine peptide secondary structures. The present polyalanine and polyglycine peptides also offer a series of benchmark systems for future conformation-resolved studies.


INTRODUCTION
In this work, we introduce the concept of semantic role labeling to the medical domain. We report first results of porting and adapting an existing resource, Propbank, to the medical field. Propbank is an adjunct to Penn Treebank that provides semantic annotation of predicates and the roles played by their arguments. The main aim of this work is the applicability of the Propbank frame files to predicates typically encountered in the medical literature.

METHODS
We analyzed a target corpus of 610,100 abstracts, which was selected by searching for publication type "case reports". From this target corpus, we randomly selected 10,000 sample abstracts to estimate the predicate distribution, and matched the predicates from this sample to the predicates in Propbank.

RESULTS
Of the 1998 unique verbs in our sample, 76% were represented in Propbank. This included the 40 most frequent verbs, which represented 49% of all predicate instances in our sample and which matched the Propbank usage in a study of representative sentences. We propose extensions to Propbank that handle medical predicates, which are not adequately covered by Propbank.

CONCLUSION
We believe that semantic role labeling using Propbank is a valid approach to capture predicate relations in the medical literature.


The thesis of this book is that neither laughter nor humor can be understood apart from the feeling that underlies them. This feeling is a mental state in which people exclude some situation from their knowledge of how the world really is, thereby inhibiting seriousness where seriousness would be counterproductive. Laughter is viewed as an expression of this feeling, and humor as a set of devices designed to trigger it because it is so pleasant and distracting. Beginning with phonetic analyses of laughter, the book examines ways in which the feeling behind the laughter is elicited by both humorous and nonhumorous situations. It discusses properties of this feeling that justify its inclusion in the repertoire of human emotions. Against this background it illustrates the creation of humor in several folklore genres and across several cultures. Finally, it reconciles this understanding with various already familiar ways of explaining humor and laughter.


Performance-based research funding systems have become popular over the last decades. One of the main reasons for these funding systems is to allow funding bodies to allocate public research funds more effectively based on the assessed quality. However, the performance-based research funding received by higher education institutes (HEIs) not only depends on the quality of research activity carried out but also on the funding formula used by funding bodies. This article examines the funding formula used by Research England (RE) and assesses the effect of this formula on quality-related research (QR) funding allocation using data of mainstream QR funding allocation for the 2017–18 period. RE's funding formula includes some value judgements by policymakers such as allocation of fourfold QR funding to 'world-leading' research compared to 'internationally-excellent' research, and the use of different subject cost weights. These value judgements play an important role in the allocation of QR funding beyond the assessed quality of research. This article finds that changes in some of these value judgments such as allocation of threefold (rather than fourfold) QR funding to world-leading research compared to internationally excellent research, or the use of alternative subject cost weights lead to major changes in the allocation of QR funding to different subject areas and HEIs. Results suggest that these value judgments are also important beyond the assessed quality of research, and that consultation of different subject areas and HEIs about these decisions and re-evaluation of some of these value judgements are needed for a more accountable distribution of QR funding.


It is anticipated that an uncoordinated operation of individual home energy management (HEM) systems in a neighborhood would have a rebound effect on the aggregate demand profile. To address this issue, this paper proposes a coordinated home energy management (CoHEM) architecture in which distributed HEM units collaborate with each other in order to keep the demand and supply balanced in their neighborhood. Assuming the energy requests by customers are random in time, we formulate the proposed CoHEM design as a multi-stage stochastic optimization problem. We propose novel models to describe the deferrable appliance load [e.g., plug-in (hybrid) electric vehicles (PHEV)], and apply approximation and decomposition techniques to handle the considered design problem in a decentralized fashion. The developed decentralized CoHEM algorithm allow the customers to locally compute their scheduling solutions using domestic user information and with message exchange between their neighbors only. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CoHEM architecture can effectively improve real-time power balancing. Extensions to joint power procurement and real-time CoHEM scheduling are also presented.


Public infrastructure investment may indirectly affect firm productivity and household welfare through its impact on the location of economic activity. Existing infrastructure policies encourage firms and households to move from dense urban environments to the surrounding suburbs. Nevertheless, several recent studies have suggested that the concentration of producers and consumers within cities results in agglomeration economies that are socially beneficial. In light of these findings, the author recommends the creation of infrastructure investment authorities that would have the power to select and finance projects that promote the overall well-being of a given region. Such authorities would most likely direct a larger share of infrastructure investment to the central cities.


For the superconducting magnet system of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, ITER, 60 current leads for a total current of more than 2500 kA are needed. To reduce the resultant large refrigerator load at 4.5 K, High Temperature Superconductor current leads (HTS-CL) could be used. Therefore, EFDA CSU Garching had launched a development program for a 70 kA HTS-CL demonstrator. The Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe and CRPP developed and built this CL optimized for 50 K Helium operation. In 2004, the CL was successfully tested in the TOSKA facility at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe. The very encouraging results lead to testing this CL with 80 K Helium because ITER provides a large 80 K Helium cooling capacity for the thermal shields. At the end of last year, the test could be successfully performed demonstrating that high current capacity current leads can be stably operated at about 80-85 K. Recently, the CL was retested using liquid nitrogen which would be an interesting alternative option. In this paper, the test results for the 80 K He cooling operation as well as for the operation with LN2 are presented and compared to the results obtained before for nominal conditions


Inconel 718 is a nickel-chromium-iron superalloy which presents excellent mechanical properties at high temperatures, as well as good corrosion resistance and weldability. These characteristics can be optimized with an appropriate control of microstructural features such as grain size and precipitation. Precipitates of different nature can form in these alloys, i.e. γ'' (a metastable metallic compound Ni3Nb), γ' (Ni3(Ti, Al), carbides and/or δ phase (intermetallic Ni3Nb). Aging treatments are usually designed to obtain the precipitation required in order to optimize mechanical properties. However, precipitation can also appear induced by deformation and therefore interfere with hot forming operations, such as forging. Under these conditions, precipitation may lead to an increase of the loads required to carry out the process. The aim of the work was the characterization of precipitation kinetics for Inconel 718. With this purpose, stress relaxation tests were carried out at temperatures ranging from 950°C to 800°C. Moreover, different amounts of deformation were applied to the samples, prior to stress relaxation, to evaluate the effect of this variable on inducing precipitation. Some samples were quenched at different relaxation times for metallographic evaluation. The results obtained through mechanical testing, together with a proper characterization of precipitation by Scanning Electron Microscopy, were the basis for obtaining precipitation-time-temperature (PTT) diagrams after different deformation conditions.


The current era is marked by an unparalleled level of human migration, the consequence of both recent and long-term political, economic, cultural, social, demographic and technological developments. Despite increased efforts to limit its size and consequences, migration has wide-ranging impacts upon social, environmental, economic, political, and cultural life in countries of origin and settlement. Such transformations impact not only those who are migrating, but those who are left behind, as well as those who live in the areas where migrants settle.

The Handbook of Migration Studies offers a conceptual approach to the study of international migration, exploring clearly the many modes of exit, reception and incorporation which involve varied populations in disparate political, economic, social and cultural contexts. How do these movements also facilitate the transmission of ideologies and identities, political and cultural practices and economic resources? Uniquely among texts in the subject area, the Handbook also provides a section devoted to exploring methods for studying international migration.

Featuring forty-seven essays written by leading international and multidisciplinary scholars, the Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies offers a contemporary, integrated and comprehensive resource for students and scholars of sociology, politics, human geography, law, history, urban planning, journalism, and health care.


We assess how tax-benefit policy developments in 2001-2011 affected the household income distribution in seven EU countries. We use the standard microsimulation-based decomposition method, separating further the effect of structural policy changes and the uprating of monetary parameters, which allows us to measure the extent of fiscal drag and benefit erosion in practice. The results show that despite different fiscal effects, policies overall mostly reduced poverty and inequality and both types of policy developments had sizeable effects on the income distribution. We also find that the uprating of monetary parameters not only had a positive effect on household incomes, meaning fiscal drag and benefit erosion were avoided, but generally also contributed more to poverty and inequality reduction than structural policy reforms.Â


This is undoubtedly an important new work in virology and one which should establish itself as a reference and text-book. In keeping with the known views of the author there is no attempt made to set out a formal classification of viruses. In essence, however, a sound basis for this is given which should lead, when more information becomes available on many of the viruses, to the establishment of such a classification. For ease of reference all the facts on each virus or virus group are given under twelve headings including chiefly chemical composition, morphology, physical characters, antigenic properties, multiplication, distribution, pathogenicity and control. Primary place is given to nucleic acid content when this is known for it is this substance which controls viral activities. The first two parts of the book consist of descriptions of the so-called ribonucleic acid (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) viruses, these being for the most part viruses with human associations, the author is at his best with them. In addition to a great deal of concentrated information there are many references to recent reviews and articles. Besides virologists, it should prove useful to other scientific workers and its moderate price is an important added attraction. A.D.M.


The crossing number is a popular tool in graph drawing and visualization, but there is not really just one crossing number; there is a large family of crossing number notions of which the crossing number is the best known. We survey the rich variety of crossing number variants that have been introduced in the literature for purposes that range from studying the theoretical underpinnings of the crossing number to crossing minimization for visualization problems.


Synopsis A large opencast gold mining company in Africa had just completed a feasibility study for an expansion of the operations. A traditional net present value project valuation methodology had been used that showed a very positive net present value (NPV). The project team had conducted a qualitative risk assessment that identified and logged all potential project risks and had subjectively incorporated 'risk' via the discount rate and other assumption contingencies around gold price expectations, operating parameters, etc. Management requested that an independent quantitative risk modelling approach be adopted to obtain a better understanding of the impact of risk on the overall project valuation and confidence level in the final valuation. A detailed project valuation model was configured in the Cyest Carbon Modelling Technology platform, and the stochastic modelling module used to perform the Monte Carlo simulations. Analysis of historical operational performance data relating to actual achievements versus planned and budget determined the historical variability of the underlying parameters as well as variance to budget. This was done at a detailed level for mining rates and costs, processing rate, costs and recovery, and other operational efficiency measures. External market assumptions relating to gold price, exchange rate, and inflation were modelled and the dependency between them modelled using a copula. This case study will demonstrate the approach taken to building and populating the quantitative risk model and the overall results of the Monte Carlo simulation. The final valuation demonstrated that the project had a 44 percent probability of an NPV less than zero i.e. a 44 percent chance of project finance loss.


The bleakest spot on the Islamic Republic's twenty one-year performance record, and a constant threat to its survival, has been the economy. Downgraded by the regime's founding father as unworthy of revolutionary pursuit, and described in the 1979 Constitution as "not an end in itself, but a means intended only to contribute to the attainment of the ultimate goal, namely, "a movement toward God," the post-revolution Iranian economy has remained the regime's Achilles heel. Striving in vain to find an "Islamic model" which could put an end to what the revolutionaries called "crass materialism" and "consumerism," the national economy has been managed in an ad hoc, improvised, and inconsistent manner. An unstable mixture of capitalism, populism and pragmatism with some ornamental Islamic topping has served as its anchor. As a result, the economy has moved from one crisis to another in an almost uninterrupted course.
Thus, the consensus among domestic and foreign observers remains that Iran's economy is now in worse shape than it was before the revolution. Judged by official statistics, all common indicators of economic health show negative signs. Per capita income is one-third less; income gaps among households has widened; economic growth is lower; inflation is higher; unemployment and underemployment are more extensive. Furthermore, the economy's slow growth, double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, and continued fiscal deficits, are accompanied by publicly acknowledged shortages of housing, classrooms, teachers, health clinics, and vital prescription drugs; significant air and water pollution; considerable soil erosion; and alarming deforestation.


Software-defined networking (SDN) decouples the control and data planes of traditional networks, logically centralizing the functional properties of the network in the SDN controller. While this centralization brought advantages such as a faster pace of innovation, it also disrupted some of the natural defenses of traditional architectures against different threats. The literature on SDN has mostly been concerned with the functional side, despite some specific works concerning non-functional properties such as security or dependability. Though addressing the latter in an ad-hoc, piecemeal way may work, it will most likely lead to efficiency and effectiveness problems. We claim that the enforcement of non-functional properties as a pillar of SDN robustness calls for a systemic approach. We further advocate, for its materialization, the reiteration of the successful formula behind SDN: 'logical centralization'. As a general concept, we propose anchor, a subsystem architecture that promotes the logical centralization of non-functional properties. To show the effectiveness of the concept, we focus on security in this article: we identify the current security gaps in SDNs and we populate the architecture middleware with the appropriate security mechanisms in a global and consistent manner. Essential security mechanisms provided by anchor include reliable entropy and resilient pseudo-random generators, and protocols for secure registration and association of SDN devices. We claim and justify in the article that centralizing such mechanisms is key for their effectiveness by allowing us to define and enforce global policies for those properties; reduce the complexity of controllers and forwarding devices; ensure higher levels of robustness for critical services; foster interoperability of the non-functional property enforcement mechanisms; and promote the security and resilience of the architecture itself. We discuss design and implementation aspects, and we prove and evaluate our algorithms and mechanisms, including the formalisation of the main protocols and the verification of their core security properties using the Tamarin prover.


Successful invasions are attributed to a combination of adaptations to biotic and abiotic conditions and many studies have highlighted the role of biological traits of invaders in their success. Among the most useful traits for successful establishment in a new ecosystem are the size of the invader and its diet and feeding habits. During the last twenty years, Dikerogammarus villosus has been one of the most successful invaders of large European rivers and lakes. However, regarding feeding habits, results were confusing and sometimes contradictory. In this study, we attempt to define the feeding strategy of D. villosus using their FA content according to sex and the seasonal and the spatial variation in its feeding habit. Our results indicated that D. villosus is rather unspecialized with plasticity in its feeding behaviour, switching between different functional feeding groups depending on seasons, habitats and available resources. The selection of high quality resources may hence provide a strong advantage during the invasion process by optimizing the growth and the reproduction of the invader.


Amphibian pathogens are of current interest as contributors to the global decline of amphibians. However, compared with chytrid fungi and ranaviruses, herpesviruses have received relatively little attention. Two ranid herpesviruses have been described: namely, Ranid herpesvirus 1 (RHV1) and Ranid herpesvirus 2 (RHV2). This article describes the discovery and partial characterization of a novel virus tentatively named Ranid herpesvirus 3 (RHV3), a candidate member of the genus Batrachovirus in the family Alloherpesviridae. RHV3 infection in wild common frogs (Rana temporaria) was associated with severe multifocal epidermal hyperplasia, dermal edema, a minor inflammatory response, and variable mucous gland degeneration. Intranuclear inclusions were numerous in the affected epidermis together with unique extracellular aggregates of herpesvirus-like particles. The RHV3-associated skin disease has features similar to those of a condition recognized in European frogs for the last 20 years and whose cause has remained elusive. The genome of RHV3 shares most of the features of the Alloherpesviruses. The characterization of this presumptive pathogen may be of value for amphibian conservation and for a better understanding of the biology of Alloherpesviruses.


Background To date, a variety of lasers have been used for treating vascular skin lesions. Intense pulsed light (IPL) is a proven technology for vascular lesion management, such as rosacea. Objectives The aim of this study was to test the effectiveness of IPL in treating vascular facial lesions in rosacea patients. Methods Sixty patients presenting with telangiectasia owing to facial rosacea were selected randomly from the patient population in the Department of Laser Therapy at the Medical Centre Maastricht, the Netherlands. Patients of various skin types (Fitzpatrick I–IV) were selected with an average age of 44.2 years. Five hundred eight sites were treated, with a mean of 4.1 treatments per site and an IPL spectrum ranging from 515 to 1,200 nm with different pulse durations between 4.3 and 6.5 milliseconds. The energy density varied from 25 to 35 J/cm2. Results Patients were assessed clinically and photographically. A mean clearance of 77.8% was achieved and was maintained for a follow-up period averaging 51.6 months (range 12–99 months). No correlation was found between the clearance of rosacea and patient-related or technical data. For approximately 3 years post-treatment, lesion recurrence was noted in 4 of the 508 treated facial sites. Discussion This study demonstrated that IPL treatment of facial rosacea is effective in obtaining clearance of 77.8%, with minimal side effects, and that treatment effects are maintained. Conclusion The IPL system, with its broad range of technical variables, is an effective tool in achieving meaningful and lasting rosacea clearance.


The electricity infrastructure is one of societys most critical infrastructures. The complexity of the electricity infrastructure system is increasing quickly, due to the increasing intensity of market-based power exchanges between electricity systems, the associated market restructuring and an increasing share of decentralized generation. As a consequence, the organizational complexity of power systems has exploded. At the same time, there is a shift in public and societal goals towards low-carbon and sustainable power generation. This will eventually require a drastic transformation of the industry. Increasingly, ICT is being depended upon for managing this infrastructure, for technical control and operation and for facilitating markets. A recent example is demand-side management, based on detailed metering of consumption and decentralized electricity generation. The mutual dependence of the electricity and the ICT infrastructures raises challenging questions in the areas of dependability, security and resilience. Examples include vulnerability to (cyber) attacks, avoiding and repairing technical failures and protecting data confidentiality, while guaranteeing accessibility. Therefore, better models and methods for protection against exploits of system vulnerabilities, whether accidental or intentional such as in cyber attacks, are called for. To address the above mentioned problems an advanced research workshop: "Electricity security in the cyber age: Managing the increasing dependence of the electricity infrastructure on ICT" was organized in the Netherlands in May 2009. The objective of the workshop was to contribute to the security of current and future electricity infrastructures by analyzing the risks that are caused by the increasing reliance upon ICT and investigating options for managing these risks. The book presents the contributions to the workshop by distinguished invited keynote speakers and participants from the international scientific and industrial community.


In the center of the article is the new regional ombudsman institution in Russia and its activities vis-a-vis the protection of women's rights. The article seeks to analyze how complaints filed by women are presented and how the status of women's rights within the context of human rights is described in the ombudsmen's annual reports. The analysis of the reports proves ambiguities of interpretations of human rights; it also shows that many of those filing complaints do it because of the violations of social and civil rights, and that the majority of those experiencing discrimination are women. However, in most of the cases the ombudspersons do not pay attention to the gender-specific dimensions of the discrimination nor have they identified this as an important problem in contemporary Russian society. This situation is connected with the absence of a legal or political mechanism for gender equality in Russia as well as a displacement of women's rights issues in favor of a focus on family issues and demography in the Russian public discourse of the late 2000s.


This article presents an explanatory analysis of an e- Youth City Council project held in the town of Sant Andreu de Llavaneres, Catalonia, during the year 2008. The main objectives of this programme were to increase citizen participation, improve good governance and through it, the possibility of consolidating and strengthening democracy by ICT use. This case study was based on a survey of 628 young people aged between 14 and 18. The aim was to motivate and enable them to play an active role in politics and to take up positions of genuine authority and responsibility, within local decision making, as pre-voting citizens. In this way, the young people engaged to develop all stages of the electoral process, participated in an e-voting system and were empowered in local government for 15 days. In this case polity was translated into practice and created a successful partnership between young citizens and the local political parties. The focus of this ICT research was, basically, which tools the youngsters used and the influence it had on electorate participation In this way, the ICT acquired a new perspective relating to this study group who are considered a generation raised in a computerised era and who are leaders in the fields of innovation and communication, used as a common tool in their social life and work. The analysis is described and evaluated by explanatory variables such as; population, age, ICT use and access, number of voters and abstentions, the ajuntamentjove.cat website , political party blogs, electoral campaign spots and meetings, the electronic voting system and finally the video " Youth Government Constitution" broadcast by internet into the school classroom. Electronic voting has been incorporated as a pilot test, consisting of a voting system of closed lists with a choice of up to two preferential candidates.


"Jeremy M. Devine shows off an encyclopedic knowledge of Vietnam War films in [this book]. The author, a motion picture industry executive, fills this excellent book with detailed summaries of Vietnam films, from the obscure to the best known. Devine tells his tale chronologically. In addition to his detailed plot summaries, he offers brief analyses, focusing on how the various films relate to historical events at the time they were released. He also connects these events to issues such as the draft, the antiwar movement, POWs, and veterans' readjustment problems. The two appendices, which list Vietnam films alphabetically and chronologically, are valuable resources...[A] wide-ranging, inclusive, and insightful book." VVA Veteran Originally issued in hardcover in 1995 by McFarland and Company, Inc., this book is now available in paperback for a wider public and classroom audience.


Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici explores Catherine de Medici's 'flying squadron', the legendary ladies-in-waiting of the sixteenth-century French queen mother who were alleged to have been ordered to seduce politically influential men for their mistress's own Machiavellian purposes. Branded a 'cabal of cuckoldry' by a contemporary critic, these women were involved in scandals that have encouraged a perception, which continues in much academic literature, of the late Valois court as debauched and corrupt.

Rather than trying to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, Una McIlvenna here focuses on representations of the scandals in popular culture and print, and on the collective portrayal of the women in the libelous and often pornographic literature that circulated information about the court. She traces the origins of this material to the all-male intellectual elite of the parlementaires: lawyers and magistrates who expressed their disapproval of Catherine's political and religious decisions through misogynist pamphlets and verse that targeted the women of her entourage.

Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de Medici reveals accusations of poisoning and incest to be literary tropes within a tradition of female defamation dating to classical times that encouraged a collective and universalizing notion of women as sexually voracious, duplicitous and, ultimately, dangerous. In its focus on manuscript and early print culture, and on the transition from a world of orality to one dominated by literacy and textuality, this study has relevance for scholars of literary history, particularly those interested in pamphlet and libel culture.


In recent years, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in translating from a language; source language, to another; target language. However, many of the proposed methods use word embedding techniques to represent a sentence in the source or target language. Character embedding techniques for this task has been suggested to represent the words in a sentence better. Moreover, recent NMT models use attention mechanism where the most relevant words in a source sentence are used to generate a target word. The problem with this approach is that while some words are translated multiple times, some other words are not translated. To address this problem, coverage model has been integrated into NMT to keep track of already-translated words and focus on the untranslated ones. In this research, we present a new architecture in which we use character embedding for representing the source and target languages, and also use coverage model to make certain that all words are translated. Experiments were performed to compare our model with coverage and character model and the results show that our model performs better than the other two models.


Open-text semantic parsers are designed to interpret any statement in natural language by inferring a corresponding meaning representation (MR – a formal representation of its sense). Unfortunately, large scale systems cannot be easily machine-learned due to a lack of directly supervised data. We propose a method that learns to assign MRs to a wide range of text (using a dictionary of more than 70,000 words mapped to more than 40,000 entities) thanks to a training scheme that combines learning from knowledge bases (e.g. WordNet) with learning from raw text. The model jointly learns representations of words, entities and MRs via a multi-task training process operating on these diverse sources of data. Hence, the system ends up providing methods for knowledge acquisition and wordsense disambiguation within the context of semantic parsing in a single elegant framework. Experiments on these various tasks indicate the promise of the approach.


A linear programming model has been formulated to suggest the optimal cropping pattern for maximizing net returns and ensuring significant savings of groundwater with the aim of sustaining groundwater use in the Punjab agriculture. The primary data obtained from the project, "Comprehensive scheme to study the cost of cultivation of principal crops in Punjab†for the year 2002-03 pertain to 170 farmers selected through three-stage stratified random sampling technique. As the period of transplantation of paddy has a significant bearing on the amount of groundwater used and its sustainability, the paddy crop has been further classified into Paddy 1 (transplanted before 10th June); Paddy 2 (transplanted during 11th June to 20th June) and Paddy 3 (transplanted after 20th June). At the existing level of water availability, the optimal crop plan has not revealed any significant changes in the production pattern. Restricting the availability of groundwater has resulted into a major shift in the cropping pattern. Such changes could ensure groundwater savings of almost 25 per cent, without any adverse impact on the net returns from crop production. Introduction of new crops in the production plan, such as Bt cotton, has further enhanced the returns from crop production by about 4 per cent along with groundwater savings of 26.55 per cent. The study has suggested that alternate wetting and drying, adoption of system of rice intensification (SRI), use of tensiometers and direct plantation of paddy are some of the other techniques which can save water.


This paper was an attempt to investigate to which extent participatory communication is adopted in communication interventions in Nigeria. Three selected developmental projects in Cross River State were studied. Four objectives and four research questions were raised to guide the study. Participatory Communication Theory (PCT) was adopted as the theoretical underpinning of the work. It also collected data through quantitative and qualitative research methods. The questionnaire was the main data gathering instrument. Data gathered was analysed using simple percentage. One of the findings in the research is that participatory communication should be adopted across every level of development projects as it has been considered as a veritable component that fast-tracks development/community projects. The researcher therefore, concludes that, participatory communication is a salient approach of communication that facilitates development projects. To achieve success, priority should be given to the component of participatory communication when carrying out community projects. Consequently, it has been recommended that, participatory communication should be adopted across every level of development projects as it helps development agents to engage the people to know their pressing needs and to avoid situations where projects that are worth millions of naira are not utilised by the beneficiaries.


The United States (US) and India are two populous democratic nations that are leading contributors to global climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. To address these problems, LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is one of the tools commonly utilized by the two nations to reduce negative environmental impacts of buildings. This research studied the ways in which LEED certified buildings offer social benefits to their surrounding communities in different socioeconomic contexts. For this study, two LEED Platinum Rated Buildings were purposively selected in the US and India, and technologies and strategies used to achieve the Platinum rating were identified. These technologies and strategies were classified based on social benefits offered to the surrounding community, and cases were compared to evaluate whether benefits varied between the two contexts. For the building located in the US, 26 out of 70, and for the building located in India, 18 out of 57 technologies and strategies were expected to offer social benefits to the surrounding community. For these cases, no significant difference was found in the proportion of potential societal benefits expected between case study projects in the developed vs. developing country. Future research should further explore and quantify the actual societal benefits achieved by certified buildings.


At what loss should a portfolio manager be stopped-out? What is an acceptable time under water? We demonstrate that, under standard portfolio theory assumptions, the answer to the latter question is strikingly unequivocal: On average, the recovery spans three times the period involved in accumulating the maximum quantile loss for a given confidence level. We denote this principle the "triple penance rule".We provide a theoretical justification to why investment firms typically set less strict stop-out rules to portfolio managers with higher Sharpe ratios, despite the fact that they should be expected to deliver superior performance. We generalize this framework to the case of first-order auto-correlated investment outcomes, and conclude that ignoring the effect of serial correlation leads to a gross underestimation of the downside potential of hedge fund strategies, by as much as 70%. We also estimate that some hedge funds may be firing more than three times the number of skillful portfolio managers, compared to the number that they were willing to accept, as a result of evaluating their performance through traditional metrics, such as the Sharpe ratio.We believe that our closed-form compact expression for the estimation of downside potential, without having to assume IID cashflows, will open new practical applications in risk management, portfolio optimization and capital allocation. The Python code included confirms the accuracy of our analytical solution.The appendices for this paper are available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2511599


Mevalonic acid can stimulate leukemic cells from some patients with B cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) to enter the cell cycle in vitro and to synthesize DNA. Unlike normal human peripheral blood lymphocytes, which require the presence of granulocytes for a maximal DNA synthetic response to mevalonic acid, CLL cells do not require a helper cell. Only the physiologically active R(-) enantiomer of mevalonic acid is active in initiating DNA synthesis, and no stimulatory effect is noted after addition of the precursors of mevalonic acid or of its known products. The mitogenic responses to mevalonic acid measured in CLL cells from 35 patients varied widely (range of stimulation indices, 1.2-18.6), but the DNA synthetic response of CLL cells from 9 patients to mevalonic acid exceeded those seen with such common lymphocyte mitogens as concanavalin A, phytohemagglutinin, poke-weed mitogen, or a phorbol ester. The mevalonate-responsive CLL cell was enriched in the E(-), M(+) rosette subpopulation. When CLL cells were incubated in lipoprotein-depleted serum-containing medium, the presence of low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol increased their sensitivity to mevalonic acid transformation, suggesting that a nonsterol product of mevalonic acid metabolism may be involved. Mevalonic acid, which is essential for the growth of cells programmed to divide or stimulated to divide by mitogens, can by itself initiate cell replication in relatively inert G0 phase normal and neoplastic lymphocyte populations.


Existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms typically assume class-balanced datasets, although the class distributions of many real-world datasets are imbalanced. In general, classifiers trained on a class-imbalanced dataset are biased toward the majority classes. This issue becomes more problematic for SSL algorithms because they utilize the biased prediction of unlabeled data for training. However, traditional class-imbalanced learning techniques, which are designed for labeled data, cannot be readily combined with SSL algorithms. We propose a scalable class-imbalanced SSL algorithm that can effectively use unlabeled data, while mitigating class imbalance by introducing an auxiliary balanced classifier (ABC) of a single layer, which is attached to a representation layer of an existing SSL algorithm. The ABC is trained with a class-balanced loss of a minibatch, while using high-quality representations learned from all data points in the minibatch using the backbone SSL algorithm to avoid overfitting and information loss.Moreover, we use consistency regularization, a recent SSL technique for utilizing unlabeled data in a modified way, to train the ABC to be balanced among the classes by selecting unlabeled data with the same probability for each class. The proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance in various class-imbalanced SSL experiments using four benchmark datasets.


Background/Aim: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the lifestyle and metabolic profiles in normal and obese. Material and Methods: A cross sectional study design was employed. Information on body weight, height, body fat, food choices, diet and physical activity behavior were collected by a questionnaire among 100 obese adults aged 18-35 years and compared with healthy individuals as controls. Blood samples were collected to analyze blood glucose, heamoglobin and total cholesterol. Result: Mean BMI for obese were 36.2±5 About 50% reported consuming no fruits or vegetables, while 80% preferred fried food over other forms of cooked food. The majority (60%) engaged in 13mg/dl. Blood glucose levels (>100) & total cholesterol levels (>200) significantly higher (p<0.05) in obese individuals compared to control. Conclusions: Dietary and physical activity behaviour of the participants were generally poor. High blood glucose and cholesterol levels found among obese compared to normal. Innovative ways to improve consumption of fruits and vegetables and increase physical activity among the obese are needed.


Lithuanian is one of the Baltic languages and has complex word relations in a sentence. GIVE is one of the verbs that illustrate the interrelatedness between morphological functions, syntactic restrictions and semantics. The analysis includes an overview of the verb's GIVE meanings, outlines morphological restrictions, presenting the morpho-semantic interface discussing word prefixation and suffixation, referring to Ambrazas (2006) and Holvoet and Semenienė (2004). Thereafter, the most common syntactic patterns are established revealing the complexity of the Lithuanian phrase and sentence formation. This study reviews the issues of cases, specifically genitive and accusative cases of the noun which appeared as a theme and the semantic meaning transfer using these cases in simple sentences. Role and Reference Grammar was adapted for the analysis of the examples with the simplified logical structure.


From Introduction] The workplace is an appropriate environment in which to educate and raise individuals' awareness about mental health problems. For example, encouragement to promote good mental health practices, provide tools for recognition and early identification of the symptoms of problems, and establish links with local mental health services for referral and treatment can be offered. The need to demystify the topic and lift the taboos about the presence of mental health problems in the workplace while educating the working population regarding early recognition and treatment will benefit employers in terms of higher productivity and reduction in direct and in-direct costs. However, it must be recognised that some mental health problems need specific clinical care and monitoring, as well as special considerations for the integration or re-integration of the individual into the workforce.


Most of the current anomaly detection methods for network traffic rely on the packet header for studying network traffic behavior. We believe that significant information lies in the payload of the packet and hence it is important to model the payload as well. Since many protocols exist and new protocols are frequently introduced, parsing the payload based on the protocol specification is time-consuming. Instead of relying on the specification, we propose four different characteristics of streams of bytes, which can help us develop algorithms for parsing the payload into tokens. We feed the extracted tokens from the payload to anomaly detection algorithm. Our empirical results indicated that our parsing techniques can extract tokens that can improve the detection rate.


We analyzed data obtained from the 2009 Southern Cotton Precision Farming Survey of farmers in twelve states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) to identify reasons for adoption/nonadoption of precision farming technologies. Farmers provided cost, time constraint, satisfaction with the current practice and other as reasons for not adopting precision farming technology. Profit, environmental benefit and to be at the forefront of agricultural technology are main reasons for adopting precision farming technology. Results from a nested logit model indicated that formal education, farm size, and number of precision farming meeting attend by farmers have positive effect on adoption of PF technologies. Moreover, spatial yield variability increases probability of adopting precision farming technologies for profit reasons.


We propose a novel approach for testing for rational speculative bubbles in segmented capital markets. The basic idea is that, under capital controls, heterogeneity of speculative expectations across international equity markets causes financial assets with identical cash flow promises to trade at different prices. Because these deviations from the law of one price inherit the properties of the speculative bubble process, they display periods of explosive dynamics and have predictive power for future movements in equity prices in sample. These two hypotheses can be examined empirically using sequential unit root tests and predictive regressions. An attractive feature of this approach for bubble detection is that it does not require the specification of a model for market fundamentals, thus mitigating the well-known joint hypothesis problem. The focus of the paper is on mainland Chinese companies that cross list shares in Hong Kong. China is an ideal setting for our analysis because of the significant restrictions on capital movements imposed by the authorities and the turbulent behaviour of its stock market over the last decades.


We use plasmon enhancement to achieve terahertz (THz) photoconductive switches that combine the benefits of low-temperature grown GaAs with mature 1.5 μm femtosecond lasers operating below the bandgap. These below bandgap plasmon-enhanced photoconductive receivers and sources significantly outperform commercial devices based on InGaAs, both in terms of bandwidth and power, even though they operate well below saturation. This paves the way for high-performance low-cost portable systems to enable emerging THz applications in spectroscopy, security, medical imaging, and communication.


The purpose of writing this review on floating drug delivery systems (FDDS) was to compile the recent literature with special focus on the principal mechanism of floatation to achieve gastric retention. It is known that differences in gastric physiology (such as, gastric pH, motility) exhibit both intra- as well as inter-subject variability demonstrating significant impact on gastric retention time and drug delivery behaviour. The recent developments of FDDS including the physiological and formulation variables affecting gastric retention, approaches to design single-unit and multiple-unit floating systems, and their classification and formulation aspects are covered in detail. This review also summarizes the studies to evaluate the performance and application of floating systems, and applications of these systems. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/icpj.v1i5.10283 International Current Pharmaceutical Journal 2012, 1(5): 110-118


Decoding is a strategy that allows us to assess the amount of information neurons can provide about certain aspects of the visual scene. In this study, we develop a method based on Bayesian sequential updating and the particle filtering algorithm to decode the activity of V1 neurons in awake monkeys. A distinction in our method is the use of Volterra kernels to filter the particles, which live in a high dimensional space. This parametric Bayesian decoding scheme is compared to the optimal linear decoder and is shown to work consistently better than the linear optimal decoder. Interestingly, our results suggest that for decoding in real time, spike trains of as few as 10 independent but similar neurons would be sufficient for decoding a critical scene variable in a particular class of visual stimuli. The reconstructed variable can predict the neural activity about as well as the actual signal with respect to the Volterra kernels.


Abstract Campylopus introflexus (Hedw.) Brid. is the most widespread invasive moss species in Europe. Originating from the Southern Hemisphere, it is nowadays causing serious changes in coastal sand habitats of Western Europe and invading various anthropogenic habitats in Central Europe. In South-Eastern Europe, the species was initially found in Croatia in 2013, in the Dinaric region in the karst plain Vrhovinsko polje, on leached bare soil and pine bark remnants. In 2015, another stand of similar size was found in the peri-Pannonian region, on Mt Papuk, on a gneiss cliff in an acidophilous sessile oak forest. These two localities are on the South-Eastern frontline of the species' invasion within Europe. The oldest individuals were three to four years old, and sporophytes were not found. At the moment, it seems that the invasive moss is not a threat to native flora in the Dinaric region. Nevertheless, special attention should be given to the peri-Pannonian and Eastern Balkan regions, since its expansion could threaten the habitats of native moss and lichen species growing in similar acidic forests. Since the bryoflora of South-Eastern Europe is still largely undersampled, directed surveys and monitoring programs should be promptly established.


This thesis investigates the work of a selected number of artists of Algerian origin who rose to prominence in France between 1989 and 2012 and analyses the
reception of their work in French institutions of art. The artists are Adel Abdessemed (b.1971), Kader Attia (b. 1970), Faycal Baghriche (b. 1972), Samta Benhyahia (b.1950), Zoulikha Bouabdellah (b. 1977), Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978), Katia Kameli (b.1973) and Zineb Sedira (b.1963).
This is the first in-depth study on these artists's work within a French exhibiting context and it also represents the first critical analysis of the impact that collective memory, French cultural policies and an emerging discourse ofa 'global' art world system has had on the reception of their work. Based upon extensive primary research on the exhibiting practices of French institutions and responses of the French press, alongside interviews with the artists, the thesis engages with art historical, sociological and cultural memory methods in order to examine the emergence and reception of these artist' work. The analysis also brings into focus the aesthetic preoccupations of the artists and their diverse contexts of production.
Chapter one presents a critical overview through a historiography of major . exhibitions of artists of Algerian origin in French institutions of art between 1989- 2012. The following four chapters are structured through themes that are recurrent in the artists's work: the urban, the home and the Arab woman and the global world. Chapter two focuses on Abdessemed and Attia's engagement with urban themes, and questions the impact of collective narratives of the 'banlieue' on their work. Chapter three analyses the representations of the self and the domestic in the early work of Benyahia, Bouabdellah, Kameli and Sedira, and proposes that their critical diasporic narratives problematize the dominant discourses of collective memory in France. An analysis of the work of Abdessemed, Attia and Sedira in chapter four foregrounds the discontinuities and continuities within a 'global' world-order with specific reference to Franco/Algerian crossings.
Overall, through a detailed analysis of the institutional contexts of France and the 'global' art world, the thesis offers an institutional critique arguing that diasporic experiences - evident in the work of artists of Algerian origin - are rarely acknowledged or debated in French institutions, while artistic nationality is over-determined. Informed by Isobel Armstrong's concept of a 'radical aesthetic' and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome, the thesis also argues that aesthetics and contexts of production need to be acknowledged in the analyses of the artist's work.


The conquest of Normandy by Philip Augustus of France effectively ended the 'Anglo-Norman' realm created in 1066, forcing cross-Channel landholders to choose between their English and their Norman estates. The best source for the resulting tenurial upheaval in England is the Rotulus de valore terrarum Normannorum, a list of seized properties and their former holders, and this article seeks to expand our understanding of the impact of the loss of Normandy through a detailed analysis of this document. First, it demonstrates that the compilation of the roll can be divided into two distinct stages, the first containing valuations taken before royal justices in June 1204 and enrolled before the end of July, and the second consisting of returns to orders for the valuation of particular properties issued during the summer and autumn, as part of the process by which these estates were committed to new holders. Second, study of the roll and other documentary sources permits a better understanding of the order for the seizure of the lands of those who had remained in Normandy, the text of which does not survive. This establishes that this royal order was issued in late May 1204 and, further, that it enjoined the temporary seizure rather than the permanent confiscation of these lands. Moreover, the seizure was not retrospective and covers a specific window of time in 1204. On the one hand, this means that the roll is far from a comprehensive record of terre Normannorum. On the other hand, it is possible to correlate the identities of those Anglo-Norman landholders whose English estates were seized with the military progress of the French king through the duchy in May and June and thus shed new light on the campaign of 1204. Third, the article considers the initial management of the seized estates and highlights the fact that, when making arrangements for the these lands, John was primarily concerned to maintain his freedom of manoeuvre, since he was not prepared to accept that Normandy had been lost for good.


A systematic procedure for the petrophysical identification and interpretation of low-resistivity and low-resistivity-contrast pay zones in intergranular reservoirs is founded upon an analysis of case histories for different reservoir types in diverse areas of the world. The approach acknowledges that a reservoir rock is a coupled physico-chemical system. The proposed method is generic and robust, it is conceptually simple, and it is structured in a manner that is easy to understand. The scheme is modular and it is arranged hierarchically to reflect maturing data scenarios: therefore, it can be progressively refined during the appraisal and development stages. The essence of the method is the definition and calibration of reliable interpretative procedures through quality-assured reference data from key wells by admitting only validated reservoir characteristics. Examples world-wide illustrate how failure to recognize low-resistivity pay can result in much loss of potential value. A principal thrust is to facilitate the re-evaluation of other wells within the same reservoir system without the need for excessive acquisition of additional data. However, the proposed interpretation framework does allow the incorporation of new logging technology as this becomes established. The end-product is a flexible petrophysical interpretation scheme for these unconventional reservoirs that benefits from cost-effectiveness, portability, a higher degree of exactness and consequently a much reduced uncertainty.


Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000). Routledge: London. 195 pages. ISBN 0-415-08633-7As understandings about the nature of knowledge and approaches to objects have changed, the notion of a museum has changed from the modernist museum, based on the transmission of knowledge, to what Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (2000) terms the "post-museum" (p. x), based on cultural approaches to objects. In Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, Hooper-Greenhill makes this assertion and investigates the ways museums display visual culture objects as related to their role as educational institutions. She builds her arguments on a well-developed theoretical basis that reflects postmodernism, feminism, educational theories, museum studies, and cultural studies. While concepts of visual culture and its implications for teaching and learning art are clearly articulated throughout contemporary art education literature (Ballengee-Morris & Stuhr, 2001; Barrett, 2003; Bolin & Blandy, 2003; Chapman, 2003; Duncum, 2001; Freedman, 2003; Krug, 2003; Smith-Shank, 2003; Tavin, 2003; Wilson, 2003), the role of visual culture in a museum setting is not often addressed in art education. This book consists of seven chapters that use case studies to investigate visual culture in museum settings. A unifying thread is the importance of looking at museum objects through multiple viewpoints and recognizing that their meanings shift with time, context, and in relation to other information. In the preface, Hooper-Greenhill explains the two main questions the book investigates: "How are objects and collections used by museums to construct knowledge?" and "How can the relationships of museum audiences to this knowledge be understood?" (p. x).In the first chapter, Hooper-Greenhill introduces a variety of terms and explains their usage throughout the text. One of the terms most crucial to this text is visual culture, which she explains as follows:'Visual culture' as a concept and a methodology refuses to accept the distinction between high and mass culture.... Visual culture as a field of study raises theoretical questions about the social practices of looking and seeing, which are related to processes of learning and knowing, (p. 14)She believes that the concept of looking is complex and involves the person who looks, the object that the person views, and the physical location of the object. She writes, "But to recognize something, it is necessary to have prior knowledge of it-thus observation depends on already knowing that for which one is searching. This contradictory and complex situation is at the heart of the museum experience" (p. 15). Many authors in art education consciously and consistently include examples of mass-produced objects, including advertisements, websites, clothing, CD covers, etc, when addressing visual culture. The examples that Hooper-Greenhill uses throughout the text are handmade objects (though not necessarily traditional art museum objects) including portraits, a Maori meetinghouse, and a Lakota-Sioux Ghost Dance shirt.One case Hooper-Greenhill investigates is the inception and initial decade of collecting by the National Portrait Gallery, London, in which she questions the collection and display of the portraits and complicates the narrative they create. Of the 225 portraits acquired during the museum's first decade, 203 were of men and 22 were of women. The men fit into a variety of categories including government officials, artists, clergy, scientists, philosophers, educators, or members of the royal family. The majority of the women (14) represented in the collection were members of the royal family. During the first decade of the National Portrait Gallery, more than 200 million people were under the rule of the British Empire; however, people of color and white women are largely invisible in this collection. Hooper-Greenhill explains that, "The public display of these collections makes a visual narrative which naturalises these underpinning assumptions and which gives them the character of inevitability and common sense" (p. …


Ozonation plays an essential role in water disinfection to inactivate viruses, bacteria and some parasites ( Giardia ). Ozone treatment rates to attain disinfection goals also result in oxidation reactions of emerging pollutants. Pharmaceuticals–except Ciprofloxacin–are very reactive to ozone: they are removed as early as the transfer compartment outlet even at an ozone treatment rate of less than 1 g/m 3 . Glyphosate, AMPA, Amitrole and Diuron–the four major pesticides in the Seine, Marne and Oise rivers–are reactive to ozone. Twenty-one pesticides are only partially reactive to ozone and an additional "GAC filtration" is needed to remove them. Further investigations have been planned to study the removal of Phthalates, Nonylphenols and Hormones by combining the "Ozone" and "GAC filtration" process units.


We dismiss wonder commonly with childhood. Much later we may return. Then the whole world becomes wonderful. But, greatest wonder, our wonder soon lapses. A rainbow every morning who would pause to look at? The wonderful which comes often is soon taken for granted. That is practical enough. It allows us to get on with life. But it may stultify if it cannot on occasion be thrown off.
Sir Charles Sherrington (1953:100)
Spirality is less conspicuous in animals than in plants… Nevertheless, there are numerous instances of spirality in animal bodies….The problem that is of interest here is why these structures [e.g. fibrils, wood cells, leaf attachments] should be arranged in a spiral at all.
Edmund W. Sinnott (1963:156, 163; italics in original)
[I]n his study of shells … [the mathematician] first noted that he could describe their general form…. Next, he saw that quite sudden — one might say unforeseen — changes occurred in the forms he was contemplating: the curves and surfaces that made it possible to represent their construction suddenly broke off or degenerated: whereas the cone, the helix, the spiral can well go on 'indefinitely', the shell suddenly wearies of following them. But why not one turn more?
Paul Valery (1964b:11; italics in original)
Why are there essents [i.e. existent things] rather than nothing?
Martin Heidegger (1961:1)


Transport is the sector with the highest final energy consumption and, without any significant policy changes, is forecast to remain so. In 2008, the IEA published 25 energy efficiency recommendations, among which four are for the transport sector. The recommendations focus on road transport and include policies on improving tyre energy efficiency, fuel economy standards for both light-duty vehicles and heavy-duty vehicles, and eco-driving. Implementation of the recommendations has been weaker in the transport sector than others. This paper updates the progress that has been made in implementing the transport energy efficiency recommendations in IEA countries since March 2009. Many countries have in the last year moved from "planning to implement" to "implementation underway", but none have fully implemented all transport energy efficiency recommendations. The IEA calls therefore for full and immediate implementation of the recommendations."


Unemployment Poverty and Inequality (UPI) are some of the key challenges facing youths in Africa. In response to this, African countries have made several efforts to help deal with challenges facing the youths. These efforts include the promotion of youth entrepreneurship development using various strategies and policies with particular emphasis on improving the business environment so as to make it easier for youths to start and run their own businesses. Entrepreneurship has been recognised as one of the main strategies to overcome these challenges. As such, in recent years a growing awareness of the importance of youth entrepreneurship for economic development has triggered research on the fundamentals of entrepreneurship in developing countries. This realisation has given rise to a number of entrepreneurship support interventions with many stakeholders coming on board to ensure that entrepreneurship succeeds. This paper explains the role of the family in youth entrepreneurship development in Africa. It explains how the family influences the development of youth entrepreneurship on the continent of Africa. The paper has found that although there were several efforts to improve youth entrepreneurship development on the continent, many approaches ignore the family as primary institution and as a key stakeholder in youth entrepreneurship. The review has also revealed that although the family remains ignored, there are opportunities that are found within the family that can help to steer youth entrepreneurship forward. This paper recommends that entrepreneurship support interventions should not just focus on the youths, but on family as well.


This paper reports the results on the agronomic performance of organic amendments in the EU 7th FP project "FERTIPLUS—reducing mineral fertilizers and agro-chemicals by recycling treated organic waste as compost and bio-char". Four case studies on field-scale application of biochar, compost and biochar-blended compost were established and studied for three consecutive years in four distinct cropping systems and under different agro-climatic conditions in Europe. These included the following sites: olive groves in Murcia (Spain), greenhouse grown tomatoes in Almeria (Spain), an arable crop rotation in Oost-Vlaanderen (Merelbeke, Belgium), and three vineyards in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy). A slow pyrolysis oak biochar was applied, either alone or in combination with organic residues: compost from olive wastes in Murcia (Spain), sheep manure in Almeria (Spain), and compost from biowaste and green waste in Belgium and Italy. The agronomical benefits were evaluated based on different aspects of soil fertility (soil total organic carbon (TOC), pH, nutrient cycling and microbial activity) and crop nutritional status and productivity. All amendments were effective in increasing soil organic C in all the field trials. On average, the increase with respect to the control was about 11% for compost, 20% for biochar-blended compost, and 36% for biochar. The amendments also raised the pH by 0.15–0.50 units in acidic soils. Only biochar had a negligible fertilization effect. On the contrary, compost and biochar-blended compost were effective in enhancing soil fertility by increasing nutrient cycling (25% mean increase in extractable organic C and 44% increase in extractable N), element availability (26% increase in available K), and soil microbial activity (26% increase in soil respiration and 2–4 fold enhancement of denitrifying activity). In general, the tested amendments did not show any negative effect on crop yield and quality. Furthermore, in vineyards and greenhouse grown tomatoes cropping systems, compost and biochar-blended compost were also effective in enhancing key crop quality parameters (9% increase in grape must acidity and 16% increase in weight, 9% increase in diameter and 8% increase in hardness of tomato fruits) Agronomy 2019, 9, 225; doi:10.3390/agronomy9050225 www.mdpi.com/journal/agronomy Agronomy 2019, 9, 225 2 of 19 important for the quality and marketability of the crops. The overall results of the project suggest that the application of a mixture of biochar and compost can benefit crops. Therefore, biochar-blended compost can support and maintain soil fertility.


Post-mineralization activities may cause difficulties in the process of ore modeling in porphyry deposits. Sungun, NW Iran, is one of the porphyry copper deposits, in which dyke intrusions have made ore modeling more complicated than expected. Among different kinds of dykes, two types were chosen and the consequent geostatistical analyses were applied on. In this study, simple directional variograms were used for extracting relevant information from dyke systems on which the Sequential Indicator Simulations were applied consequently. One hundred realizations were produced on the simulation grid considering the anisotropy characteristics and E-type map has been provided averaging all realizations. Moreover, a binary state between dyke and non-dyke environments was produced putting threshold on the E-type grid node values to discriminate the ore from barren dykes. Hole-effect models were fitted to the empirical variograms perpendicular to the dyke strike. Dimensional information was elicited from these models and the results were compared with the previously carried out geological investigations, and finally a good numerical match was found between these two sources of information.


DNA polymerases play a fundamental role in the transmission and maintenance of genetic information and have become an important in vitro diagnostic and analytical tool. The Loop-mediated isothermal DNA amplification (LAMP) method has major applications for disease and pathogen detection and utilises the unique strand-displacement activity of a small group of thermostable DNA polymerases. The Large (Klenow-like) Fragment of Geobacillus stearothermophilus DNA polymerase I (B.st LF Pol I) currently serves as the enzyme of choice for the majority of these isothermal reactions, with few alternatives commercially available. An increasing need for point-of-care nucleic acid diagnostics is now shifting detection methods away from traditional laboratory based chemistries, such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), in favour of faster, and often simpler, isothermal methods. It was recognised that in order to facilitate these rapid isothermal reactions there was a requirement for alternative thermostable, strand-displacing DNA polymerases and this was the basis of this thesis. This thesis reports the successful identification of polymerases from Family A, chosen for their inherent strand-displacement activity, which is essential for the removal of RNA primers of Okazaki fragments during lagging-strand DNA synthesis in vivo. Twelve thermophilic organisms, with growth temperature ranges between 50oC and 80oC, were identified and the genomic DNA extracted. Where DNA sequences were unavailable, a gene-walking technique revealed the polA sequences, enabling the Large Fragment Pol I to be cloned and the recombinant protein over-expressed in Escherichia coli. A three-stage column chromatography purification permitted the characterisation of ten newly identified Pol I enzymes suitable for use in LAMP. Thermodesulfatator indicus (T.in) Pol I proved to be the most interesting enzyme isolated. Demonstrating strong strand-displacement activity and thermostability to 98oC, T.in Pol I is uniquely suitable to a newly termed heat-denaturing LAMP (HD-LAMP) reaction offering many potential advantages over the existing LAMP protocol. The current understanding of strand-displacement activity of Pol I is poorly understood. This thesis recognised the need to identify the exact regions and motifs responsible for this activity of the enzyme, enabling potential enhancements to be made. Enzyme engineering using site-directed mutagenesis and the formation of chimeras confirmed the importance of specific subdomains in strand-separation activity. With this knowledge, a unique Thermus aquaticus (T.aq) Pol I mutant demonstrated sufficient strand-displacement activity to permit its use in LAMP for the first time. The fusion of Cren7, a double-stranded DNA binding protein, to Pol I for use in LAMP is also reported. Although the fusion construct was found to reduce amplification speed, enhancements were observed in the presence of increased salt concentrations and it is suggested here as a means for future enzyme development.