An observer, whose task is to monitor a large and complex system M̂ subject to malfunctions, may be interested in dealing with a simplified, abstracted model (M̂A of it, at the expense of some loss in fault-detection ability. Let M̂ be a finite- state machine whose inputs are modeled by stationary random variables. The abstraction A is effected by lumping M̂'s states, inputs, and outputs into classes, to obtain a smaller probabilistic machine M̂A. These ideas have been introduced in a previous paper, and the question of finding an optimal abstraction A* which minimizes the number of faults undetectable by the observer was posed. An algorithm for constructing the output component of the optimal abstraction A* is given in this paper. If there are no faults in the next-state map of M̂, this construction is sufficient to minimize the number of single faults in the output map that are undetectable by the observer because of the abstraction. Some experiments carried out using the algorithm provide general insight into the tradeoff between simplifying M̂ and making some faults in it undetectable. As a specific example, optimal output abstractions are found for a finite-state machine specification of the link level of the X.25 communication protocol.


This paper examines two pseudo-apologies in the news. Apologies have been defined as involving acceptance of responsibility for an offense and an acknowledgment of its wrongfulness. In contrast, pseudo-apologies index a stance lacking in remorse. This examination of a deviant type of apology reveals some of the limits that mediation imposes on more prototypical apologies: the more a speaker is viewed as attending to the interests of parties other than the offended party/ies, the greater the detriment to the apology. We propose that the polysemy of I'm sorry (and, via association, I apologize ), which can serve as both apology and expression of sympathy, provides the functional structure for the pseudo-apologies examined here.


Extracellular adenosine is a potent endogenous immunosuppressive mediator critical to the maintenance of homeostasis in various normal tissues including the lung. Adenosine is either released from stressed or injured cells or generated from extracellular adenine nucleotides by the concerted action of the ectoenzymes ectoapyrase (CD39) and 5′ ectonucleotidase (CD73) that catabolize ATP to adenosine. An acute CD73-dependent increase of adenosine in normal tissues mostly exerts tissue protective functions whereas chronically increased adenosine-levels in tissues exposed to DNA damaging chemotherapy or radiotherapy promote pathologic remodeling processes and fibrosis for example in the skin and the lung. Importantly, cancer cells also express CD73 and high CD73 expression in the tumor tissue has been linked to poor overall survival and recurrence free survival in patients suffering from breast and ovarian cancer. CD73 and adenosine support growth-promoting neovascularization, metastasis, and survival in cancer cells. In addition, adenosine can promote tumor intrinsic or therapy-induced immune escape by various mechanisms that dampen the immune system. Consequently, modulating CD73 or cancer-derived adenosine in the tumor microenvironment emerges as an attractive novel therapeutic strategy to limit tumor progression, improve antitumor immune responses, avoid therapy-induced immune deviation, and potentially limit normal tissue toxicity. However, the role of CD73/adenosine signaling in the tumor and normal tissue responses to radiotherapy and its use as therapeutic target to improve the outcome of radiotherapy approaches is less understood. The present review will highlight the dual role of CD73 and adenosine in tumor and tissue responses to radiotherapy with a special focus to the lung. It will also discuss the potential benefits and risks of pharmacologic modulation of the CD73/adenosine system to increase the therapeutic gain of radiotherapy or combined radioimmunotherapy in cancer treatment.


Rafael Popper - Research Fellow, Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, University of Manchester, UK. E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com: Booth Street West, Manchester, M15 6PB, UK.In recent decades Foresight and other forward-looking activities (FLA) gained ground as a tool of science, technology and innovation (STI) policy. The number of FLA studies is globally rising. To some extent, foresight is governed by context-depended issues; however there are also common features in the objectives, methodology, and recommendations made. Mapping allows codifying and analyzing a bulk of FLA experiences gained worldwide. This in turn will contribute to enhancing performance of such activities and therefore of STI policy as a whole. The paper provides rationales for Futures Studies mapping, considers related opportunities and challenges, reviews lessons learned from early mapping efforts. It focuses on the large-scale EU-funded mapping project "European Foresight Platform" (EFP). Using this project as illustration, the paper describes mapping routines, the selected indicators of mapped Foresight initiatives, including their objectives, participants, target groups, methodologies, outcomes and recommendations. It discusses the potential and the limitations of particular mapping tools as well as possible applications of gained knowledge. Basing on mapping results, policy-makers, for example, are able to identify gaps to be addressed with relevant policy tools, Mapping also allows Foresight practitioners to develop strategies for further research and shape expert networks for their implementation.


Problem. In order for the Seventh-day Adventist Church to continue to be effective in its mission to its communities, new leaders must be developed in the local church. While there are many ways to impart skills to potential leaders, developing them as spiritual leaders is a unique task. One program, designed and written by Dr. Dan Reiland seems to fulfill this task. Joshua's Men is a spiritual leadership curriculum which uses mentoring to develop leaders in the local church. The first edition was published in 1996. Reiland wrote a second edition which was released in 2006. Is this program effective? Does it develop spiritual leaders in the church? Can it be implemented in a small-sized church, where there is a restricted pool of potential leaders? This project evaluates Reiland's second edition of the Joshua's Men spiritual leadership curriculum to determine its effectiveness in developing spiritual leaders in the local church. Method. The method used to evaluate the effectiveness of the Joshua's Men spiritual leadership curriculum in implementing the second edition of the program was measuring the effect it had on the lives of the participants. Four men from the Williamsport Seventh-day Adventist Church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania participated in this project. Three tools were used to measure the results: interviews, a monthly survey and a Personal Leadership Assessment. Results. The results showed the effectiveness of the program in developing these four men as spiritual leaders. The monthly evaluations, interviews and the Personal Leadership Assessment revealed that the topics, monthly presentations and the reading material used, as a whole, were valuable. The participants also indicated they were applying in their everyday lives what they had learned. This was confirmed in the year end interviews with both the participants and their spouses, which noted that spiritual growth had occurred as a result of their involvement in the program. Conclusions. Joshua's Men is an effective spiritual leadership curriculum which helps facilitate the development of spiritual leaders in the local church. The success of this curriculum is found not only in its relevant topics and easy implementation but also in the fact that it uses mentoring as its basis. This combination of strengths makes Joshua's Men a very effective tool in developing spiritual leaders in the local church.


There is a growing recognition of the contribution that privately-owned land makes to conservation efforts, and governments are increasingly counting privately protected areas (PPAs) towards their international conservation commitments. The public availability of spatial data on countries' conservation estates is important for broad-scale conservation planning and monitoring and for evaluating progress towards targets. Yet there has been limited consideration of how PPA data is reported to national and international protected area databases, particularly whether such reporting is transparent and fair (i.e., equitable) to the landholders involved. Here we consider PPA reporting procedures from three countries with high numbers of PPAs—Australia, South Africa, and the United States—illustrating the diversity within and between countries regarding what data is reported and the transparency with which it is reported. Noting a potential tension between landholder preferences for privacy and security of their property information and the benefit of sharing this information for broader conservation efforts, we identify the need to consider equity in PPA reporting processes. Unpacking potential considerations and tensions into distributional, procedural, and recognitional dimensions of equity, we propose a series of broad principles to foster transparent and fair reporting. Our approach for navigating the complexity and context-dependency of equity considerations will help strengthen PPA reporting and facilitate the transparent integration of PPAs into broader conservation efforts.


Existing studies on using social media for deriving mental health status of users focus on the depression detection task. However, for case management and referral to psychiatrists, health-care workers require practical and scalable depressive disorder screening and triage system. This study aims to design and evaluate a decision support system (DSS) to reliably determine the depressive triage level by capturing fine-grained depressive symptoms expressed in user tweets through the emulation of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) that is routinely used in clinical practice. The reliable detection of depressive symptoms from tweets is challenging because the 280-character limit on tweets incentivizes the use of creative artifacts in the utterances and figurative usage contributes to effective expression. We propose a novel BERT based robust multi-task learning framework to accurately identify the depressive symptoms using the auxiliary task of figurative usage detection. Specifically, our proposed novel task sharing mechanism,co-task aware attention, enables automatic selection of optimal information across the BERT lay-ers and tasks by soft-sharing of parameters. Our results show that modeling figurative usage can demonstrably improve the model's robustness and reliability for distinguishing the depression symptoms.


Digitization and contemporary use of social media platforms is changing how we perceive and use IT, both in organizations and as citizens or consumers. These developments have also transformed and changed many industries, bringing both opportunities and challenges. One industry that was affected by digitization relatively early is the media industry, leading to studies on online journalism, gatekeeping, reader interaction and other changing practices enabled by IT. This study attempts to highlight the IT infrastructure behind the changing practice to understand the relationship between the IT and the use. Through an online ethnography, this paper investigates the use of social media platforms in the newspaper industry. The findings indicate that newspapers either use an integration strategy, where they relinquish control over the feature to the social media platform, or an appropriation strategy where they take the integration a step further, to have the social media platform work for them.


'Virtualized traffic' reconstructs and displays continuous traffic flows from discrete spatio-temporal traffic sensor data or procedurally generated control input to enhance a sense of immersion in a dynamic virtual environment. In this paper, we introduce a fast technique to reconstruct traffic flows from in-road sensor measurements or procedurally generated data for interactive 3D visual applications. Our algorithm estimates the full state of the traffic flow from sparse sensor measurements (or procedural input) using a statistical inference method and a continuum traffic model. This estimated state then drives an agent-based traffic simulator to produce a 3D animation of vehicle traffic that statistically matches the original traffic conditions. Unlike existing traffic simulation and animation techniques, our method produces a full 3D rendering of individual vehicles as part of continuous traffic flows given discrete spatio-temporal sensor measurements. Instead of using a color map to indicate traffic conditions, users could visualize and fly over the reconstructed traffic in real time over a large digital cityscape.


ABSTRACT Objective: In the present study, we used a multilevel approach to investigate the role of maternal country of birth (MCOB) in predicting adolescent use of psychotropic medication in Sweden. Design: Using the Swedish Medical Birth Register we identified all 428,314 adolescents born between 1987 and 1990 and who were residing in Sweden in the year they turned 18. We applied multilevel logistic regression analysis with adolescents (level 1) nested within MCOBs (level 2). Measures of association (odds ratio) and measures of variance (intra-class correlation (ICC)) were calculated, as well as the discriminatory accuracy by calculating the area under the Receiver Operator Characteristic (AU-ROC) curve. Results: In comparison with adolescents with Swedish-born mothers, adolescents with mothers born in upper-middle, lower-middle and low-income countries were less likely to use psychotropic medication. However, the variance between MCOBs was small (ICC = 2.5 in the final model) relative to the variation within MCOBs. This was confirmed by an AU-ROC value of 0.598. Conclusions: Even though we found associations between MCOB and adolescent use of psychotropic medication, the small ICC and AU-ROC indicate that MCOB appears to be an inaccurate context for discriminating adolescent use of psychotropic medication in Sweden.


Aliphatic nitriles, RCN (R = Me, Prn, CH2Cl, and CCl3), in the presence of trifluoromethanesulphonic acid have been found to react with a number of mono-, di-, and tri-substituted phenols and phenol ethers at room temperature to give ketones after hydrolysis of the reaction mixture. Moderate to good yields of acylation products are obtained in the majority of these reactions. The yield with malononitrile and succinonitrile, which are only slightly soluble in the reaction medium, are generally poor, and reaction involves only one of the available nitrile groups. Attempts to use diethyl ether and dichloromethane as solvents for some of these reactions were unsuccessful, but limited success was achieved with nitromethane.


This practice-based project considers what happens when projected video/film is placed in combination with drawing, and vice versa. The research conceives of the staging of video projection installations and related works in terms of their spatial and temporal dimensions. The main approach both in my practice (which focuses on drawing and video installation) and writing, aims to realign the layers of projected images in which bodily engagement performs as discontinuous transition. Since filmic media dematerialize the trope of bodily engagement, the drawing activity seeks its way of survival through performativity, promoting temporal continuity in a ritual manner. The text considers selected works by Pipilotti Rist, Dennis Oppenheim, VALIE EXPORT, Peter Campus, Joan Jonas, and Pablo Picasso in detail. Rist's work is examined and critically interrogated as an example of immersive illusionistic video installation. Dennis Oppenheim's Two Stage Transfer Drawing is considered as an example of kinetic transmission through the sensory body, which creates layers of images and screens (or interfaces). Using the physicality of projection, VALIE EXPORT's Auf+Ab+An+Zu expands its filmic images into the real space, in which participants are invited to mark the real space of the screen. The text asks how this work reconfigures the space-time of its multiple performative elements. Peter Campus's work is introduced as a productive example of the possibilities of closed-circuit installation. By manipulating the materiality of the screen, Joan Jonas's complex video performance installations take this possibility even further, generating the screens' own spatiality and temporality, as in the work Glass Puzzle, which is described in detail. Both of my text and practice focus on the materiality of the screen and consider how it can be rethought or restaged through bodily engagement.


OBJECTIVES
The efficacy of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in treating mood disorders (MDs) is hypothesized to be mediated by the induction of neurotrophic factors (denoted "angioneurins") that trigger neuronal plasticity. This study aimed to assess the effects of ECT on serum angioneurin levels in patients with MD.

METHODS
A total of 110 patients with MDs, including 30 with unipolar depression, 25 with bipolar depression (BD), 55 with bipolar mania (BM), and 50 healthy controls were included in the study. Patients were subdivided into two groups: those who received ECT+medication (12 ECT sessions) and those who received only medication (no-ECT). Depressive and manic symptom assessments and measurements of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), fibroblast growth factor-2, nerve growth factor (NGF), and insulin-like growth factor-1 levels in blood samples were performed at baseline and week 8.

RESULTS
Patients in the ECT group, specifically those with BD and BM, had significantly increased levels of VEGF compared to their baseline VEGF levels (p = 0.002). No significant changes in angioneurin levels were observed in the no-ECT group. Serum NGF levels were significantly associated with a reduction in depressive symptoms. Angioneurin levels were not associated with manic symptom reduction.

CONCLUSIONS
This study hints that ECT may increase VEGF levels with angiogenic mechanisms that amplify NGF signaling to promote neurogenesis. It may also contribute to changes in brain function and emotional regulation. However, further animal experiments and clinical validation are needed.


We introduce several new black-box reductions that significantly improve the design of adaptive and parameter-free online learning algorithms by simplifying analysis, improving regret guarantees, and sometimes even improving runtime. We reduce parameter-free online learning to online exp-concave optimization, we reduce optimization in a Banach space to one-dimensional optimization, and we reduce optimization over a constrained domain to unconstrained optimization. All of our reductions run as fast as online gradient descent. We use our new techniques to improve upon the previously best regret bounds for parameter-free learning, and do so for arbitrary norms.


The current global movement in the reform of education seems to focus on a number of issues that include standards, quality and teacher preparation. With regard to the latter, while teacher education curricula in most parts of the world attempt to strike a balance between content and professional training, the emerging scenario is that of training expert teachers. Three types of knowledge identified as necessary for expert teaching are content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. For Hong Kong to embark on a satisfactory and effective public education reform, it is essential that its most valuable human resource (i.e. teachers) must be comprehensively and adequately developed. Attention must be paid to both pre-service and in-service to raise an excellent quality-oriented teaching force. Teacher educators and researchers make important and well-informed decisions about what should be included in pre-service and in-service teacher development programmes. However, it is also important to take into account the teachers' own perceptions about the areas in which they feel confident and knowledgeable and those inwhich they do not. One practical avenue of sourcing such information is the teacher in training who is learning to acquire and display expertise. This paper reports on an investigation using a sample of 183 science and mathematics trainee teachers. A 60-item instrument, the Science and Mathematics Expert Teacher Preparation Survey (SMETPS),was developed to gather data on trainee teachers' perceptions of their current knowledge and what they think they need to know to become expert teachers. The data, analysed using both descriptive and inferential statistics, indicated some of the areas in which trainee teachers identified the need for future professional development that would contribute towards expert training. Several issues which emerged from the results are discussed, with reference to implications for current efforts in expert teacher training.


Pokemon Go was the first mobile Augmented Reality (AR) game that made it to the top of the download charts of mobile applications. However, very little is known about this new generation of mobile online Augmented Reality (AR) games. Existing media usage and technology acceptance theories provide limited applicability to the understanding of its users. Against this background, this research provides a comprehensive framework that incorporates findings from uses & gratification theory (U>), technology acceptance and risk research as well as flow theory. The proposed framework aims at explaining the drivers of attitudinal and intentional reactions, such as continuance in gaming or willingness to conduct in-app purchases. A survey among 642 Pokemon Go players provides insights into the psychological drivers of mobile AR games. Results show that hedonic, emotional and social benefits, and social norms drive, vice versa physical risks (but not privacy risks) hinder consumer reactions. However, the importance of these drivers differs between different forms of user behavior


Extension of the PLC application possibilities is closely related to increase of reliability and safety parameters. If the requirement of reliability and safety parameters will be suitable, the PLC could by implemented to specific applications such the safety-related processes control. The goal of this article is to show the way which producers are approaching to increase PLC`s reliability and safety parameters. The second goal is to analyze these parameters for range of present choice and describe the possibility how the reliability and safety parameters can be affected.


Nowadays, at Moto2 Championship there are mainly two kinds of frames talking about profiles ("square" the majority of them like Suter, FTR or Moriwaki and tubular some of theme MZ and Promoharris). At this work is going to be compared which are the mechanical differences between a tubular and square (no tubular) frame about stiffness, torsion and flexional resistance, weight, inertia,... and trying to take some
conclusions.
This project is composed by two parts:
- The first one is a bit of general information talking about the history of
motorcycles (particularly frames field), then there is a short introduction about
which kind of frames exists, a description on important points that define motorcycle's geometry and finally, the materials that frames are made of. (Chapters 3 to 5)
- Second part, it's the static and dynamic comparison between two frames. The first frame is made of steel and its tubular profile while the second one is a frame made of aluminium and its square profile. Both are drawn by SolidWorks and then analyzed by ANSYS with their belonging forces. To improve the results there is an optimization part. Some hypotheses are considered to do the analysis a bit less complex. An analysis on mechanical fatigue, modes on vibrations and own frequency are done too. Also there is a section about how frames could be manufactured, their weldings needed and a small study about cost. (Chapters 6 to 13).
Finally, there is a short chapter about environment (energy wasted to do the frame
(approximated) and to do this master thesis). It is an important thing to be considered for now, next future and future. (Chapter 14)


The prevalence of neck pain in musculoskeletal practice is second only to that of low back pain (Vernon et al., 2007). There is a growing interest in neck pain research due to the escalating disability burden and compensation costs associated with neck pain (Côte et al., 2003). Manual therapies are commonly used in the treatment of neck pain (Côte et al., 2003). After an extensive literature review by Haldeman et al. (2008) they found that manual therapy techniques have some benefit but no one technique was clearly superior to the next. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to compare three commonly used manual therapy techniques in the treatment of chronic mechanical neck pain. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to compare three different manual therapy techniques (SMT, MET and PNF) which are commonly used in the treatment of chronic MNP in terms of range of motion, pain and disability. METHOD Forty-five patients with chronic mechanical neck pain were obtained through non-probability convenience sampling and assigned into one of three treatment groups (15 per group) using a computer generated randomized table. The three different treatment groups were: Spinal Manipulative Therapy (SMT), Muscle Energy Technique (MET) and Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF). Each group received six treatments over a period of three weeks with a follow-up consultation. Measurements were taken at the first, third and sixth treatment and at the follow-up consultation. SPSS version 15.0 was used to analyse the data. A p value of <0.05 was considered as statistically significant. An intra-group analysis was done using repeated measures ANOVA testing to assess the time effect for each outcome separately. For inter-group analyses the time x group interaction effect was assessed using repeated measures ANOVA testing, and profile plots were used to assess the trend and direction of the effects. RESULTS Intra-group analysis of the results revealed that all three groups improved significantly between the first and the final consultation, for all measures. Inter-group analysis of the data did not show any difference between the three groups by the end of the final consultation. However, extension range of motion appeared to improve slightly faster in the PNF group iv but it was not significant when compared to the other two groups. Therefore, there was no statistical significance between the three groups. CONCLUSION It was concluded that all three treatment groups responded equally to the treatment, thus, suggesting that MET or PNF techniques can be used if SMT is contra-indicated.


Spinal stiffness and mobility assessments vary between clinical and research settings, potentially hindering the understanding and treatment of low back pain. A total of 71 healthy participants were evaluated using 2 clinical assessments (posteroanterior spring and passive intervertebral motion) and 2 quantitative measures: lumped mechanical stiffness of the lumbar spine and local tissue stiffness (lumbar erector spinae and supraspinous ligament) measured via myotonometry. The authors hypothesized that clinical, mechanical, and local tissue measures would be correlated, that clinical tests would not alter mechanical stiffness, and that males would demonstrate greater lumbar stiffness than females. Clinical, lumped mechanical, and tissue stiffness were not correlated; however, gradings from the posteroanterior spring and passive intervertebral motion tests were positively correlated with each other. Clinical assessments had no effect on lumped mechanical stiffness. The males had greater lumped mechanical and lumbar erector spinae stiffness compared with the females. The lack of correlation between clinical, tissue, and lumped mechanical measures of spinal stiffness indicates that the use of the term "stiffness" by clinicians may require reevaluation; clinicians should be confident that they are not altering mechanical stiffness of the spine through segmental mobility assessments; and greater resting lumbar erector stiffness in males suggests that sex should be considered in the assessment and treatment of the low back.


My granddaughter is 20 months old and I am amazed at herability to press the precise buttons on the iPhone to answerit. Of course, her language skills are crude, but the garbledwords are definitely aimed at the picture of her father ormother that appears with the ringtone. Why am I writingabout this in an editorial to my midwifery colleagues? Weneed to gear ourselves up and be ready to support the digitalnatives coming into our maternity services today and, moreimportantly, tomorrow. The new mothers preparing forbirth are from a unique generation of technologically savvycitizens – 'generation z', born after 1995 and referred to as'digital natives' (Howe and Strauss, 2000).Technology permeates every aspect of modern life for thez generation and as soon as the pregnancy is confirmed,tweets herald the announcement to the global e-community.Pictures of the 3D scan posted on Facebook follow.During pregnancy, mothers-to-be download apps forexercise monitoring and preparation for labour and birth.When labour begins, or if a caesarean birth is planned, thedate and time are posted on the network(s) and, duringlabour, tweets, emails and texts keep everyone informed.When the midwife or doctor pronounces a statementof progress on the labour, this becomes a social mediacommunication for global access.Midwives and doctors need to be conscious of this asnot only is there an opportunity for these conversations tobe recorded on smartphones, they can be tweeted, textedor emailed immediately to the eagerly-awaiting family andfollowers. As midwives, it is vital for us to be conscious ofthe layers of technology now surrounding every aspect ofour work and the social media technology that is there, butalmost invisible. I would predict it is only a matter of timebefore the legal eagles call for the data generated throughthe social media communication network to be availablefor medico-legal cases.Almost 30 years ago, I can remember the very firstbirthing video request by a doctor when I was assisting hiswife, who was in labour with their first child. This eventwas indeed novel and it was the talk of the tea room formany days. Professional opinion was polarised into twocamps: those who felt it was perfectly acceptable, and thosewho thought it was totally unacceptable; an intrusion intothe private world of the birthing space. I was not asked toconsent to being part of their everlasting memory of theevent and was never privy to viewing the footage.Today, I have the rights, and we have ethical andgovernance procedures, to ensure that consent is takenfor every person caught on camera. However, less obvioustechnologies are a natural part of everyday life and we seehow much mobile phone footage is used when disasters occurand people instantly switch on the camera that now comesas standard on nearly all mobile phones. Speed cameras,surveillance cameras and now birthing room cameras.Mobile phones are being increasingly used to access theinternet, and recent data from Fox and Duggan (2012)reports 85% of adults in the US own a mobile phone, morethan half of which are smartphones. Furthermore, 52% havesearched for health-related information online and one infive smartphone owners have downloaded health apps. Ourprevious research (Lagan et al, 2011) provided importantevidence to support perceptions of increased use of theinternet for seeking health information by pregnant women.Data from the UK Office for National Statistics (2011) showthat 46% of female internet users and 38% of males had usedthe internet in the three months prior to the survey in searchof online health information. While global data indicate thatalmost a quarter of all females who have been online havesearched for health information (Fox, 2011).The acceptability of social media has had an enormousimpact on our behaviour and you can switch on thetelevision to observe this in action as you watch mothersand midwives showcase birth to the global audience. Themodern woman does not seem to have any inhibitions aboutcameras recording her birth, as evidenced by the increasingnumber of programmes following birthing journeys.The mobile is switched on in our birthing worlds,regardless of whether the birth is taking place in the home,midwife-led unit, obstetric labour ward or theatre. Weneed to be ready for this becoming the 'social norm andthe professional status quo' and we need to train our newmidwives and doctors to expect 'big brother to be watching'.I believe that there is mounting evidence to support theglobal acceptance of social media platforms and onlinesupport systems. As such, maybe we need to look intostrategic planning and the formation of guidelines to addressthe effective use of information communication technologiesin practice, so that we can be ready for generation z?


The continuing growth of nontraditional families in the United States presents unique problems for family law courts. Concerns regarding the welfare of children in nontraditional families loom larger in light of considerable evidence demonstrating that a female child, after her parents' divorce, faces a significantly elevated risk of being sexually abused by either a parent, a parent's partner, or a person outside of the home. In this Article, Professor Robin Fretwell Wilson addresses whether the law can effectively mitigate the risk of child sexual abuse by considering it in custody determinations. After dispelling common misconceptions about the nature of sexual abuse, the Author marshals overwhelming empirical evidence-more than seventy social science studies-showing a connection between family disruption and child sexual abuse of girls. The Author argues that family law deals inadequately with this disturbing phenomenon because courts in custody proceedings generally neglect to address the increased statistical probability of sexual abuse after divorce. While acknowledging the various reasons why courts may resist considering the increased risk of child sexual abuse in custody proceedings, the Author contends that proactively addressing the problem is the proper solution. A bedrock strategy for curbing threats to public health, such as child sexual abuse, is to identify "high risk" groups and tailor prevention efforts accordingly. Building on this public health model, she maps out three possible routes to prevention through increased parental awareness. These routes include considering the willingness of a custodial parent to shield a daughter from abuse, mobilizing the noncustodial parent as a monitor, and conditioning custody awards upon the completion of actions designed to mitigate the increased risk of abuse, such as a parent participating in parenting classes or enrolling the child in school-based prevention programs. The Author contends that, while these methods are arguably invasive, they are consistent with the essential character of custody determinations, which fundamentally are exercises in predicting the future. To further institutionalize consideration of a girl's sexual vulnerability after divorce, the Author recommends that legislatures require courts to consider it as a criterion in custody hearings. The Author recognizes that acting in anticipation of risks-rather than after demonstrated conduct-is not without controversy. She examines, therefore, whether tailoring prevention efforts to children at divorce will stigmatize single parents, discourage remarriage or encourage non-custodial parents to later fabricate charges of abuse. She concludes that including consideration of the increased risk of child sexual abuse in custody proceedings is ultimately a common sense way to address a pervasive problem. More broadly, the Author contends that continuing to act as if nontraditional families function as nuclear families is unrealistic-especially in light of the overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. She concludes that judicial decisionmakers can intelligently address the challenges facing fractured families only if guided by substantial evidence of how these families function.


An algorithm is presented for underdetermined blind source separation, i.e., the number of observed signals is less than that of original sources. Traditional solutions based on minimizing the L1-norm have some disadvantages in searching the optimal sub-matrix for separation. In the proposed algorithm, first we use a potential function to estimate the mixing matrix by clustering method. Then we present an improved L1-norm algorithm by weighting the observed signals vectors at the different source clustering directions. This method makes good use of the super-Gaussian property of sources and overcomes the disadvantages of L1-norm-based solutions. Furthermore, the case of an arbitrary mixing matrix is discussed in this paper. Simulation results have shown that the proposed approach can give better separation results than traditional methods in terms of signal-to-noise ratio.


This paper considers the distribution of wealth in the period from 1989 to 1998 as an indicator of the economic condition of households. It examines changes in the distribution of wealth over that period, mostly using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Some of the SCF data used here have previously been studied by Weicher (1996), Wolff (1996), and Kennickell and Woodburn (1992 and 1999). As background, the paper also uses some estimates published by Forbes magazine on the 400 wealthiest people in the United States. The first section of the paper briefly discusses the data. The next section uses the Forbes data to characterize changes at the very top of the wealth distribution. The third section presents a variety of estimates of wealth changes for the population below the AForbes 400" level using SCF data. The fourth section examines the sensitivity of the SCF estimates to a variety of assumptions about systematic mismeasurement in the data. The final section summarizes the findings of the paper.


In this chapter we present an overview of some important concepts related to the processes and microstructural mechanisms that produce the deformation of hysteresis loops and the loss of their symmetry characteristics in ferroelectric, ferroelastic and ferromagnetic systems. The most discussed themes include: aging and fatigue as primary mechanisms of biased hysteresis loops in ferroelectric/ferroelastic materials, imprint phenomenon as an important biasing process in ferroelectric thin films, the development of an exchange bias field and of specific spin states, such as spin canting and spin-glass-like phases, as the main causes of biased hysteresis loops in different types of magnetic heterostructures. The present discussion leads to the identification of the main differences and possible analogies in the underlying mechanisms of possible biasing effects occurring in the different ferroic systems, which can benefit the theoretical description, modelling, and engineering of multifunctional devices based on ferroic systems experiencing the internal bias phenomena.


A case of plexiform neurofibroma of the penis is presented. It is a rare condition often found in association with congenital neurofibromatosis. This case is unique because of the accompanying lesion of the facial nerve above the right eye, an association not previously reported. The patient was managed effectively by adequate resection of the penile lesion.


Winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is the most extensive arable crop in the UK grown on about 2M ha p.a. There is a need to identify traits to ameliorate yield losses to drought which are on average about 15% per year. These losses will be exacerbated with predicted climate change. The overall objectives of the present study were to investigate the physiological and genetic bases of water-use efficiency (ratio of above-ground dry matter production to evapotranspiration; WUE) in winter wheat grown in UK conditions and to quantify relationships between WUE and yield performance under drought.

The present study used a doubled haploid (DH) population of 33 lines derived from a cross between Beaver and Soissons, known from previous work to contrast for WUE. Two glasshouse experiments (2002/3 and 2003/4) and two field experiments (one at ADAS Gleadthorpe, Nottinghamshire in 2002/3 and the other at Sutton Bonington, University of Nottingham in 2004/5) were conducted. In the glasshouse experiments, two irrigation treatments (with and without irrigation) were applied to four genotypes (two parents and two DH lines), and in the field two irrigation treatments (rainfed and fully irrigated) were applied to the two parents and the 33 DH lines. A range of physiological traits was measured, including developmental stages, carbon isotope discrimination (I"13C), leaf gas-exchange variables, green areas and biomass at sequential samplings, and these traits were related to grain yield. Transpiration efficiency (ratio of above-ground dry matter production to transpiration; TE) was assessed using the established inverse relationship between TE and I"13c.

In the glasshouse, WUE measured as the regression slope of dry matter on water use, did not differ amongst genotypes in 2003, but did in 2004. Soissons showed higher WUE than other genotypes under irrigation, and also higher WUE than Beaver under drought. For measurements of TE according to I"13. Soissons and line 134G showed lower I"13C values (higher TE) than line 134E and Beaver (P<0.05) in 2004 under both irrigation and drought. Soissons and line 134G showed consistently higher TE on account of lower stomatal conductance (gs ) and sub-stomatal C02 concentration (C) values. The early developing Soissons and line 134G exhibited greater flag-leaf green area persistence under drought than the late developing Beaver. Beaver tended to use more water than Soissons under both irrigation and drought, but reductions in water use under drought were similar amongst genotypes. Lower seasonal water use for Soissons than Beaver was associated with a smaller root system. There was a tendency for dry matter of Beaver to be more depressed under drought than Soissons in both the years. Overall, it was not possible to detect significant differences in biomass responses to drought amongst the genotypes, but there were consistent genetic differences in WUE and TE observed under both irrigated and droughted conditions.

In the field experiments, the onset of drought coincided broadly with anthesis. The average grain yield losses under drought were 0.5 t ha-1 in 2003 and L6 t ha-1 in 2005. Averaging across site/seasons, I"13C correlated positively with grain yield amongst the 35 genotypes under irrigation (r--0.35; P<0.05) and under drought (r--0.54; P<0.01), indicating a negative trade off between TE and yield. A 13C decreased under drought and a higher TE was associated with a reduction in average flag-leaf gs, measured from flag leaf emergence to anthesis + 4weeks. Stomatal conductance was measured for eight of the 33 DH lines including the parents, and there was a trend for lower I"13C (higher TE) to be associated with lower gs, The genetic differences in gs, were generally associated with corresponding decreases in Ci and net photosynthetic rate (A). Therefore results suggested that the negative relationship between TE, as indicated by I"13C and yield was associated with corresponding reductions in seasonal water use. There was a nonsignificant irrigation x genotype interaction at Gleadthorpe in 2003 and Sutton Bonington in 2005 for I"13C indicating that this trait was of high heritability. There was an irrigation x genotype interaction for grain yield (P<0.05). A small number of genotypes showed higher yield associated with low I"13C and these outlier lines could potentially be identified for breaking the negative linkage between yield and delta. In summary, WUE was negatively correlated with yield under drought in this population; and season-long water use appeared to be the most important component affecting yield levels under drought. It is suggested that selecting genotypes indirectly for high I"13C (low WUE) may be a strategy to improve grain yield under drought.

In the quantitative genetic analysis, the putative QTLs identified for target physiological traits were generally different at Gleadthorpe in 2003 and Sutton Bonington in 2005. The most confident putative QTLs for I"13C were mapped on chromosomes 3B (LOD=2.32) and 2D (LOD=1.43). The identification of QTLs as potential candidate genes on these chromosomes may be associated directly with WUE in the Beaver x Soissons DH mapping population. The I"13C QTL on chromosome 3B was detected commonly in both the irrigation environments and the direction of allelic effects was consistent with the parental differences in I"13C. This QTL may therefore represent a novel gene for optimising WUE. It is suggested that breeders could optimise TE by selection according to a marker for this gene involving further fine-mapping to identify a marker tightly linked to the gene. Such a marker would also provide a target for gene discovery in future work.

The results suggest that water use is the most important component of Passioura's yield model for yield improvement under UK conditions. Nevertheless, WUE and harvest index and their responses under drought will also likely play a role in yield improvement through breeding in the UK targeted at drought-prone environments in future years.


How do food and agribusiness firms capture more profit in
their value chain? How do innovative managers identify attractive adjacency and
disintermediation opportunities? What options are available to a manager facing
these questions and what economic incentives might motivate their strategic
behavior? This study sought to address these timely questions, more effectively
understand the strategic decisions facing food and agribusiness managers
relative to value chain profit pools, and uncover some of the hidden dynamics
between chain participants. Specifically, this study defines and quantifies the
U.S. animal protein industry value chain across three species – hogs, cattle,
and broiler chickens. The study found evidence to suggest that governance
structure has strong ties to value generation and that intra-value chain
dynamics impact price transmission between chain nodes. Further, this study creates
a foundation for other researchers to continue examining agri-food value chain
dynamics and its link to firm-level profitability, value capture, and long-term
sustainability.


Heterologous expression of HIV-1 Gag in a variety of host cells results in its packaging into virus-like particles (VLPs) that are subsequently released into the extracellular milieu. This phenomenon represents a useful tool for probing cellular factors required for viral budding and has contributed to the discovery of roles for ubiquitin ligases and the endosomal sorting complexes required for transport (ESCRTs) in viral budding. These factors are highly conserved throughout eukaryotes and have been studied extensively in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a model eukaryote previously utilized as a host for the production of VLPs. We used heterologous expression of HIV Gag in yeast spheroplasts to examine the role of ESCRTs and associated factors (Rsp5, a HECT ubiquitin ligase of the Nedd4 family; Bro1, a homolog of Alix; and Vps4, the AAA-ATPase required for ESCRT function in all contexts/organisms investigated) in the generation of VLPs. Our data reveal: 1) characterized Gag-ESCRT interaction motifs (late domains) are not required for VLP budding, 2) loss of function alleles of the essential HECT ubiquitin ligase Rsp5 do not display defects in VLP formation, and 3) ESCRT function is not required for VLP formation from spheroplasts. These results suggest that the egress of HIV Gag from yeast cells is distinct from the most commonly described mode of exit from mammalian cells, instead mimicking ESCRT-independent VLP formation observed in a subset of mammalian cells. As such, budding of Gag from yeast cells appears to represent ESCRT-independent budding relevant to viral replication in at least some situations. Thus the myriad of genetic and biochemical tools available in the yeast system may be of utility in the study of this aspect of viral budding.


The public procurement sector plays a vital role in the economic development in developing countries such as Vietnam. However, public procurement activities usually perform poorly. This situation can be attributed to ineffective procedures and system ("hardware") and human resource management ("software"), which occurs at every stage in project purchasing. The poor performance has reduced the effectiveness and efficiency of project delivery in the construction industry, causing delays, cost overruns, and defects in construction projects. This paper, through working experience and observation by the first author, problems of public procurement were obtained as hypotheses and then validated based on questionnaire surveys and CIS (Construction Industry Structure) model analysis. The survey results indicated a relative correlation with CIS model in description of current construction industry. The study aims to identify issues of public procurement at all stages: pre bid, bid information, evaluation, and award. Based on identified major problems and determined risks, the results are expected to provide a valuable perspective, and thus, to propose necessary strategies to deliver high performance, competition and transparency for the public procurement. In further studies, it is relevant to propose a new model for sustainable public procurement based on the best value approach.


Measurements of the zeta potential of solid heterogeneous supports are important for preparation of metal supported catalysts and for shaping zeolites into extrudates. In the current work, different types of heterogeneous support materials such as SiO2, Al2O3, and a range of beta zeolites of different silica- to-alumina ratio were analysed. It was observed that parameters such as temperature, pH and acidity significantly affect the zeta potential. In several instances, depending on the materials' acidity and microstructure, maxima in zeta potential were observed. The solid materials were thoroughly characterized using XRD, SEM, EDX, TEM, nitrogen physisorption, Al-NMR and FTIR with pyridine before zeta potential measurements.


The article investigates the role of the victim in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. It argues that the genre of forensic science drama to which the series belongs gives greater emphasis on the victim than the perpetrator in the investigation of and in its narratives about crime. However, this does not mean that the victim is more empowered to tell his or her story of what happened. Rather, the investigators appear as the powerful agents who can "read" the body of victims and uncover the truth. Focusing on the male victims of the first four seasons of the original series, the article highlights how most of the time victims are presented as powerless -- as silent, passive and penetrate-able -- even though the series continues to draw attention to the idea that the holder of the truth is the victim. This polysemic construction which occurs on two different levels of the text allows for the text to be read as conservative, as underlining the power of the investigators to solve the problem of crime rather than a text that is essentially about victims.


In 2011, China emerged as the largest consumer of energy globally, and is projected to be a main driver of global energy demand increases for the foreseeable future. Under the IEA's most recent long-term scenarios, over the next quarter century, China would account for about half of the rise in global demand for oil, coal and nuclear power, more than a quarter of new natural gas use, and a significant share of renewables expansion. This raises the significant question of energy security, not just for China itself, but also for all participants in global energy markets. In seeking to ensure its energy security. China will need to take strong action in a variety of energy sectors--including investment at home and abroad--to expand the energy supplies needed to meet its contribution to global demand growth. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Ensuring that such investments, and other steps China may take, are coordinated with the needs and interests of other nations will require greater participation by China in mechanisms for international energy governance. China is already beginning to play a more active part in existing international institutions for energy governance, and it is crucial that other nations now encourage further constructive contributions by China to the evolution of an international energy governance system that equally serves the needs of all energy market participants. Diversifying Energy Sources Energy security has long been a preoccupation of China, going back to the earliest days of the People's Republic. Expanding supplies of coal for industrial development was a major focus of energy policy in the 1980s, and led to significant liberalization of coal markets. Moderating demand growth through energy efficiency also became a permanent feature of energy policy in the 1980s as well. But until the early 1990s, when China became a net importer of oil, the nation's energy self-sufficiency was considered a given. Now, key to China's energy strategy is a push to boost security by limiting the growth of energy imports, largely by developing the country's considerable domestic resources. Its first comprehensive Five-Year Plan for the energy sector, approved in January 2013, serves this strategy. That drive will contribute to China's ranking among global leaders in deployment of renewable energy and unconventional gas production--and reinforce its position as the world's largest miner of coal. As a leader in these sectors, China will become more exposed to disagreement over trade and other disputes, as recent spats concerning renewable energy equipment have shown. This is normal for any country that is taking a role as large as China's, and for one that is so integral to the global economy. The country will be challenged to handle a brighter political spotlight than it has previously, and to treat relatively minor quarrels as such. The sheer magnitude of demand growth, however, means that imports are broadly set to rise, rendering complete energy self-sufficiency an unlikely prospect. China's increasing reliance on international markets means that it is now facing similar challenges as industrialized countries, and pressure is growing for it to take a role in international energy governance commensurate with its market presence. There is, of course, concern in some quarters that certain mechanisms and actions to stabilize global energy markets may be less effective without the participation of large emerging nations. But there is an argument to be made from the point of view of emerging nations as well: as they become more exposed to the vagaries of international markets, it is in their interest to have seats at the table of the major institutions that are engaged in looking after those markets. Moreover, as many of the countries that emerging nations will need to cooperate with already existing institutions, it would seem to be much more feasible to seek evolution of existing frameworks, rather than to ask current participants to abandon existing institutions and to create new ones. …


While authentication within organizations is a well-understood problem, traditional solutions are often inadequate at the scale of the Internet, where the lack of a central authority, the open nature of the systems, and issues such as privacy and anonymity create new challenges. For example, users typically establish dozens of web accounts with independently administered services under a single password, which increases the likelihood of exposure of their credentials; users wish to receive email from anyone who is not a spammer, but the openness of the email infrastructure makes it hard to authenticate legitimate senders; users may have a rightful expectation of privacy when viewing widely-accessed protected resources such as premium website content, yet they are commonly required to present identifying login credentials, which permits tracking of their access patterns.
This dissertation describes enhanced authentication mechanisms to tackle the challenges of each of the above settings. Specifically, the dissertation develops: (1) a remote authentication architecture that lets users recover easily in case of password compromise; (2) a social network-based email system in which users can authenticate themselves as trusted senders without disclosing all their social contacts; and (3) a group access-control scheme where requests can be monitored while affording a degree of anonymity to the group member performing the request. The proposed constructions combine system designs and novel cryptographic techniques to address their respective security and privacy requirements both effectively and efficiently.


The discovery of novel materials with very low thermal conductivity is paramount to improving the efficiency of thermoelectric devices. Here we present a series of quaternary semiconducting tellurides AXXTe12 (A = Rb, Cs; XII = Mn, Zn, Cd; XIII = Ga, In) with three-dimensional (3D) diamond-like frameworks (DLFs) and they exhibit a very low thermal conductivity (ca. 0.26-0.42 W m-1 K-1) around 800 K.


We present a motion-adaptive duty-cycling approach to estimate orientation using inertial sensors. In particular, we deploy a proportional forward-controller to adjust the duty-cycle of inertial sensing units (IMU) and the orientation estimation update rate of an extended Kalman filter (EKF). In sample data recordings and a simulated daily life dataset from a wrist-worn IMU, we show that our motion-adaptive approach incurs substantially lower errors that a static duty-cycling approach. During phases with low or no rotation motion, as it is often occurring in daily activities, our approach can dynamically reduce the IMU operation to 20% of the regular rate. Results show that duty-cycles of 50% are common during low-wrist rotation activities, such as reading and typing, while orientation error is below 1°. We further show the power saving benefits of our approach in a case study of the ETHOS IMU device.


We present the first three-frequency South Pole Telescope (SPT) cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectra. The band powers presented here cover angular scales 2000 < ℓ < 9400 in frequency bands centered at 95, 150, and 220 GHz. At these frequencies and angular scales, a combination of the primary CMB anisotropy, thermal and kinetic Sunyaev–Zel'dovich (SZ) effects, radio galaxies, and cosmic infrared background (CIB) contributes to the signal. We combine Planck/HFI and SPT data at 220 GHz to constrain the amplitude and shape of the CIB power spectrum and find strong evidence for nonlinear clustering. We explore the SZ results using a variety of cosmological models for the CMB and CIB anisotropies and find them to be robust with one exception: allowing for spatial correlations between the thermal SZ effect and CIB significantly degrades the SZ constraints. Neglecting this potential correlation, we find the thermal SZ power at 150 GHz and ℓ = 3000 to be 3.65 ± 0.69 μK2, and set an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power to be less than 2.8 μK2 at 95% confidence. When a correlation between the thermal SZ and CIB is allowed, we constrain a linear combination of thermal and kinetic SZ power: D tSZ 3000 + 0.5D 3000 kSZ = 4.60 ± 0.63 μK2, consistent with earlier measurements. We use the measured thermal SZ power and an analytic, thermal SZ model calibrated with simulations to determine σ8 = 0.807 ± 0.016. Modeling uncertainties involving the astrophysics of the intracluster medium rather than the statistical uncertainty in the measured band powers are the dominant source of uncertainty on σ8. We also place an upper limit on the kinetic SZ power produced by patchy reionization; a companion paper uses these limits to constrain the reionization history of the universe.


In the present work, we investigated the effect of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) on the monophenolase and diphenolase activity of mushroom tyrosinase. The results showed that diflunisal and indomethacin inhibited both monophenolase and diphenolase activity. For monophenolase activity, the lag time was extended in the presence of diflunisal. In the presence of indomethacin, the lag time did not change. IC50 values of monophenolase activity were estimated to be 0.112 mM (diflunisal) and 1.78 mM (indomethacin). Kinetic studies of monophenolase activity revealed that both diflunisal and indomethacin were non-competitive inhibitors. For diphenolase activity, IC50 values were estimated to be 0.197 mM (diflunisal) and 0.509 mM (indomethacin). Diflunisal and indomethacin were also found to be non-competitive diphenolase inhibitors.


PURPOSE
Understanding the long-term outcomes of developmental language difficulties is key to knowing what significance to attach to them. To date, most prognostic studies have tended to be clinical rather than population-based, which necessarily affects the interpretation. This study sought to address this issue using data from a U.K. birth cohort of 17,196 children, following them from school entry to adulthood, examining literacy, mental health, and employment at 34 years of age. The study compared groups with specific language impairment (SLI), nonspecific language impairment (N-SLI), and typically developing language (TL).

METHOD
Secondary data analysis of the imputed 5-year and 34-year data was carried using multivariate logistic regressions.

RESULTS
The results show strong associations for demographic and biological risk for both impairment groups. The associations are consistent for the N-SLI group but rather more mixed for the SLI group.

CONCLUSIONS
The data indicate that both SLI and N-SLI represent significant risk factors for all the outcomes identified. There is a strong case for the identification of these children and the development of appropriate interventions. The results are discussed in terms of the measures used and the implications for practice.


This paper investigates the implementation and use of an internal organisational blog by several departments in the HR division in a large public sector financial organisation in the UK. This qualitative study adopts a case study approach and examines the experiences of staff using the blog to explore whether it can facilitate organisational learning. The thinking and decisions that informed the pilot study are also investigated. Initial findings indicate that implementing an internal organisational blog does not revolve around the technology itself, but the work required to inform and educate staff about the idea of using a blog for working purposes. This paper has practical implications for the practitioner community with reference to organisational management informing them of issues to consider prior to implementing new technology in team environments. The paper also examines approaches towards maintaining technology initiatives in this case blogs once they are up and running. The unique focus of this paper is that it explores blog use from the perspective of individuals who have never used them before as opposed to a department that is already familiar with the technology.


Dyadic contests for possession of resources occur across a wide range of animal taxa, with contest outcome often being heavily influenced by the energetic reserves of the competitors. The majority of studied parasitoid wasps lack de novo lipogenesis, with adult lipid reserves being limited to those acquired throughout larval development. Carbohydrate- and lipid-rich adult diets can increase adult parasitoid lifespan and fecundity by potentially acting as a maintenance energy store. However, the effects of such diets on fat reserve compositions and some aspects of parasitoid behaviour contest outcome dynamics have not been examined. This study assesses the effect of a carbohydrate rich diet (honey) on the longevity, metabolic state and contest performance of Goniozus legneri, a bethylid wasp. The longevity of honey-fed diet adults was typically more than twice that of starved wasps. Compared to similarly-aged starved wasps, honey feeding increased concentrations of common haemolymph sugars and amino acids in a 3-day old and 7-day old wasps, and higher concentrations of stored lipid in7-day old wasps. However, nutritional status did not affect the outcome of dyadic contests over host possession when both contestants were either 3 days or 7 days old. While contest dynamics outcome may be unaffected by diet, it remains possible that an enhancing effect of feeding on contest ability is matched by an effect of higher value being placed on winning by starved wasps.


Background Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are used in the treatment of conditions such as dyspepsia, gastro-oesophageal reflux disease and Zollinger-Ellison syndrome. They are also used in the prevention of peptic ulcer disease (stomach ulcers) or haemorrhage induced by non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or antiplatelet agents, in patients with additional criteria. The literature refers to an overuse of PPI in patients who do not match these indications. Purpose To evaluate PPI prescriptions at discharge from our hospital (a tertiary hospital). Materials and methods The authors carried out a cross-sectional observational study in a tertiary care hospital located in Barcelona. The study included patients older than 18 years discharged during the months of July and August 2011. The authors excluded patients whose PPI treatment was justified. The authors included patients with preventive prescriptions for PPIs, patients without any PPI prescription at discharge and patients with another antacid at discharge. The authors calculated the percentage of patients who met the criteria for preventive PPI prescription but for whom it was not prescribed at discharge, and likewise the percentage of patients with an appropriate preventive prescription of PPI at discharge. Results The authors included 96 patients, seven were excluded because the PPI prescription fitted the indication for PPI treatment. The 89 patients included had a mean age of 77.48 years (SD 13.57). 59.6% of these had a PPI prescribed at discharge (average age of 79.92 years (SD 11.45) and 50.9% were women). 37.1% of patients did not have a PPI prescription at discharge and 3.4% were prescribed other antacids. These two groups made a total of 36 patients, five of whom met criteria for PPI preventive prescription (13.9%). Of the patients who were prescribed a PPI at discharge, only 17 (32.1%) met criteria for preventive PPI prescription. Conclusions The prescription of PPI at discharge for patients who do not meet the criteria for prevention of stomach disorders is a noticeable problem in our hospital.


Assessing the food texture via mastication is important for advancing knowledge of food properties so as to develop favorable and healthy food products. Oral processing of food by robots can enable an in vitro assessment of food texture by simulating human mastication objectively. In this study, a chewing robot is developed to mimic the rhythmic motion of the molars to enable controllable chewing kinematics and a biomimetic oral environment. The robotic chewing is realized using a 3 degree-of-freedom (DOF) linkage mechanism, which recreates the molar grinding movement based on molar trajectories and chewing cycle durations previously reported in the literature. Moreover, a soft pneumatically actuated cavity is developed to provide a space to contain and reposition the food between occlusions. To regulate the robotic chewing having variable molar trajectories and chewing durations, the mathematical relationship of the linkage's actuators and molar movements is investigated for the purpose of motion analysis and control. Accordingly, the design of the robot in terms of linkage, oral cavity, and mechatronics system is performed. The built robot is validated by tracing a planned variable molar trajectory while chewing peanuts. The performance of robot chewing is validated by demonstrating the ability of the robot to chew the peanuts similar to that by human through comparison of peanut particle size distributions (PSDs) and particle median size diameters.


Author bios  Geoffrey C. Bowker is Chancellor's Professor and Donald Bren Chair at the School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California at Irvine, where he directs the Evoke Laboratory, which explores new forms of knowledge expression. Recent positions include Professor of and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool and Executive Director, Center for Science, Technology and Society, Santa Clara. Together with Leigh Star he wrote Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences; his most recent books are Memory Practices in the Sciences and (with Stefan Timmermans, Adele Clarke and Ellen Balka) the edited collection: Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star. He is currently working on big data policy and on scientific cyberinfrastructure; as well as completing a book on social readings of data and databases. He is a founding member of the Council for Big Data, Ethics and Society.


This paper evaluates the effects of two subsidies targeted at schools with large proportions of disadvantaged pupils. The first scheme gives primary schools with at least 70 disadvantaged minority pupils extra funding for personnel. The second scheme gives primary schools with at least 70 pupils from any disadvantaged group extra funding for computers and software. The cutoffs provide a regression discontinuity design that we exploit in a local difference-in-differences framework. For both subsidies we find negative point estimates, which are for some outcomes significantly different from 0. Extra funding for computers and software seems especially detrimental for girls' achievement. The negative effects of extra funding for computers and software are consistent with results from other recent studies casting doubt on the efficacy of computers in schools.


Marks' Essentials of Medical Biochemistry takes a patient-oriented approach that links biochemistry to physiology and pathophysiology, allowing students to apply fundamental concepts to the practice of medicine. Based on the established text, Marks' Basic Medical Biochemistry, Marks' Essentials is streamlined to focus only on the most essential biochemical concepts, while maintaining intuitively organized chapters centered on hypothetical patient vignettes and helpful icons for smooth navigation. It includes full-color illustrations of chemical structures and biochemical pathways elucidate core concepts and enhance understanding of the text. It offers hypothetical patient vignettes that ensure clinical relevance and help connect biochemistry to human health and disease. Helpful icons guide you through each chapter and identify key concepts such as signs and symptoms, clinical pearls, treatment options and outcomes, and more. Chapter outlines and key points allow readers to preview and review chapter content. End-of-Chapter: review questions and summary; disease tables highlight the take-home messages and reinforce knowledge.


This public policy brief presents a proposal, originally posted on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in January of this year, designed to help homeowners who are unable to afford mortgage payments on their principal residence because they have suffered a significant income disruption and because the balance owed on their mortgage exceeds the value of their home. These homeowners represent a subset of the population of distressed homeowners, but according to our research they face an elevated risk of default and are unlikely to be helped by current foreclosure-reduction programs. The plan is a government payment-sharing arrangement that works with the homeowner's existing mortgage and provides a significant reduction in the homeowner's monthly mortgage payment. The plan does not involve principal reduction. Two options are presented; both are designed to help people with negative equity and a significant income disruption, such as job loss. In one version, the assistance comes in the form of a government loan, which must be repaid when the borrower returns to financial health. The second version features government grants that do not have to be repaid. In either case, the homeowner must provide evidence of negative equity in the home and of job loss or other significant income disruption. The costs of the plan are moderate, and the benefits should help not only the participating homeowners but also the housing industry, the financial markets, and the economy more broadly.


This study describes the results of a survey of the practices of National Hockey League strength and conditioning (NHL S&C) coaches. The response rate was 76.6% (23 of 30). This survey examines (a) background information, (b) physical testing, (c) flexibility development, (d) speed development, (e) plyometrics, (f) strength/power development, (g) unique aspects, and (h) comments. Results indicate, in part, that coaches assess an average of 7.2 parameters of fitness, with tests of strength and power being the most common. All coaches used a variety of flexibility-development strategies. Results reveal that 21 of 23 (91.3%) of NHL S&C coaches follow a periodization model (PM). Of the coaches who follow a PM, 21 of 21 (100%) indicated that their athletes used Olympic-style lifts, and 21 of 21 coaches (100%) trained athletes with plyometric exercises. For those who used plyometrics with their athletes, 17 of 21 (80.1%) reported no plyometric-related injuries in the past year. Coaches who report they did not follow a PM also did not use Olympic-style lifts, plyometrics, or speed development strategies, such as assisted, resisted, or interval training, with their athletes. Finally, coaches reported that the squat and their variations, as well at the Olympic-style lifts and its variations, were most frequently used with their athletes. The survey serves as a review, as well as a source of applied information and new ideas.


Background Since 2002, the Integrated Medicines Management Service (IMM) has strategically re-engineered clinical pharmacy services in the five acute Health and Social Care Trusts (HSCTs) in Northern Ireland. The Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS) supported the initial development of the IMM informed by evidence which demonstrated improvements in patient care and efficiencies [1, 2]. These included reduced length of stay, readmission rates and drug costs with improved medicines appropriateness and communication with primary care. Against a background of the review of public administration, focus on efficiencies and future models for integrated health and social care, IMM remains a key policy initiative. Purpose Within this context, a review of IMM service provision is being undertaken to assess the current application of the IMM model and its strategic alignment with plans for integrated health and social care. Materials and Methods The first stage of the review involved a quantitative assessment of IMM practise within HSCTs to measure the application of the IMM model against a range of good practise indicators, relating to: use of funding for a dedicated IMM workforce; relevant staff roles and professional focus; workforce deployment across HSCT sites; availability and level of IMM service provision. Results During 2011/12 66% of the total funding identified for IMM services in all HSCTs in Northern Ireland was used to employ pharmacists and 34% for pharmacy technicians. Within this workforce 96% of pharmacists and 98% of technicians had IMM roles included in their job descriptions with pharmacists spending 80% of their working time on clinical or IMM duties and pharmacy technicians 65%. The IMM workforce was deployed at 74% of HSCT sites (n = 17) with IMM services available for a range of bed types from Monday to Friday between 8am and 6pm. 40% of the total number of beds identified as suitable for IMM service provision across all HSCTs were reported as having active service provision during 2011/12 with activity levels ranging from 20% to 95% between HSCTs. Conclusions IMM is regarded as a cornerstone of medicines policy in Northern Ireland and results indicate that the funding allocated for this service is being used to support the deployment of a cohort of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians with roles that are focused on clinical practise and medicines management. Results show the provision of IMM services within defined periods across HSCT sites in a range of bed types but with some variation in the active application of the IMM model between HSCTs. References Burnett KM, Scott MG, Fleming GF, Clark CM, McElnay JC (2009), Effects of an integrated medicines management programme on medication appropriateness in hospitalised patients. Scullin C. Scott MG, Hogg A, McElnay JC, (2007), An innovative approach to integrated medicines management. No conflict of interest.


Following the Ml 5.9 earthquake that struck the Emilia area in northern Italy on May 20, 2012, at 02:03:53 UTC, and in co-operation with the personnel of the Municipality of Ferrara and the University of Ferrara, a team of seismologists of the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS; National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics) deployed a temporary seismographic network. This consisted of eight portable seismological stations, to record the local earthquakes that occurred during the seismic sequence. The OGS intervention was integrated into the broader action of the emergency response to the earthquake sequence, which was promoted by the National Department of Civil Protection and the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV; National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology) [Moretti et al. 2012, this volume]. The aim of the OGS intervention was on the one hand to extend the seismic monitoring area towards the East, to include Ferrara and its surroundings, to be ready in case of migration of the seismicity in that direction, and on the other hand to evaluate the seismic response at the instrumented sites. Some days later, another team of researchers coordinated by the University of Potenza carried out some investigations at a number of sites, and in particular at three of the sites instrumented by the OGS temporary network. […]


Abstract Predictions from the applied model of imagery use (Martin, Moritz, & Hall, 1999) were tested by examining the perceived effectiveness of five imagery types in serving specific functions. Potential moderation effects of this relationship by imagery ability and perspective were also investigated. Participants were 155 athletes from 32 sports, and materials included a chart for rating imagery effectiveness constructed specifically for the study as well as a modified version of the Sport Imagery Questionnaire (SIQ; Hall, Mack, Paivio, & Hausenblas, 1998). Results supported the predictions for cognitive but not motivational imagery types, and MG‐M imagery was perceived to be the most effective imagery type for motivational functions. Significant differences existed between imagery types regarding frequency and ease of imaging. The relationship between frequency and effectiveness was not moderated by imagery ability or perspective, and athletes who imaged more frequently found imagery more effective and easier to do.


It is suggested that the space industry is an ideal case for Additive Manufacturing (AM), with a low production volume and need for complex geometries. However, few engineers have experience of AM design. One way to support design engineers with limited experience of AM is the use of design heuristics, to enhance variety, quality and creativity of potential designs. This paper is based on literature studies and observations of creative workshops with companies from the space industry. Results showed that heuristics assisted designers and 8/10 heuristics was utilised during the ideation phase.


Cities are critical to transitions to low carbon futures, not only because of the large and growing global urban population but also because global resource consumption is concentrated in cities (Gossop, 2011:208; Hodson, Marvin, Robinson, & Swilling, 2012; Monstadt, 2007). Ensuring that new urban spaces, such as new housing or new city precincts, are low or zero carbon is central to these transitions (Hodson & Marvin, 2010). Yet, equally important to reducing urban carbon consumption is the retrofitting of existing urban planning frameworks and imaginaries, infrastructure, built form and patterns of daily life (Eames et.al., 2013; Pincetl, 2012). Retrofitting involves the modification of what already exists in cities: altering the ways in which existing buildings are heated and cooled, diverting households, businesses and organisations toward renewable sources of energy rather than fossil fuels, encouraging the take up of energy efficient appliances, altering urban infrastructures of energy and transport provision toward renewable sources. Retrofitting is both a social and a technological challenge. Technologically, it involves the installation of a diverse range of new or upgraded zero or low carbon technologies in the existing urban fabric. These include, often in combination, new forms of building insulation to minimise heat transfer between the inside and outside of buildings, more efficient lighting and heating (e.g. heat pump rather than electric hot water systems) and micro-generation of energy supply. Retrofitting technologies can be applied at a number of scales. These include individual buildings, clusters of buildings, precincts, entire local authority areas, or supra-urban systems of energy infrastructure. In the Australian case, for example, where 60% of carbon emissions are generated by energy use and 75% of electricity generation is coal-fired (Australian Australian Government, 2011), micro (ie individual building) installation of solar PV is the most common retrofitting technology. Retrofitting is also a social process in which technologies are adopted, accommodated and altered by urban actors. The behaviours and choices of individuals have a potentially profound impact on the effectiveness of technologies. For example, a recent Cambridge study suggested that attention to behaviour change can double the energy savings of retrofitting (Markusson, Ishii, & Stephens, 2011). Surprisingly, given the importance of retrofitting to the achievement of low carbon cities, and the voluminous literature on urban carbon governance (Bulkeley & Castan Broto, 2013; Rice, 2010; While, Jonas, & Gibbs, 2010), explicit focus on enabling retrofitting through governance is rare. There is some analysis of programs that encourage retrofitting at household or building scales (see Deakin, Campbell, & Reid, 2012; Ghosh & Head, 2009; Kelly, 2009; Sunikka-Blank, Chen, Britnell, & Dantsiou, 2012; Willand et al 2012), but little consideration of what institutions and mechanisms might best enhance cities' capacities to adopt retrofitting technologies and behaviours. This chapter hence provides a theoretical framework for understanding the governance of urban retrofitting as well as empirical answers to the question of the character of retrofitting governance. Specifically, we develop and implement a framework for understanding the governance of urban retrofitting that considers the assemblage of institutions, materials, agencies and mechanisms that might enable the transformation of cities. This framework is outlined in the first section. The second section presents a more detailed examination of retrofit governance at the 'sub' urban scale, using an audit of local scale retrofitting initiatives in Australia's largest city – Sydney – to develop a typology of means or techniques through which retrofitting is governed. Developing our argument that an understanding of governing retrofit requires attention to the mechanisms and techniques through which conduct is 'conducted', in the final empirical section we outline two cases in which retrofitting is pursued through demonstration. We ask how and by whom they are enabled (and simultaneously, what are the constraints they negotiate), what are the mechanisms through which they become productive, and what is their relationship to the existing carbon This book chapter is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/sspapers/2338 governance regime. We also focus on the 'demonstration' or 'showcase' elements of these projects to critically interrogate the multifaceted learning processes embedded within them. We conclude with an analysis of the limitations of retrofitting governance as currently practised and reflections on the purchase of demonstration as a governmental technique at citywide scales.


Composting is a solid state fermentation process that employs the use of complex relationships in microbial communities for the degradation of organic matter. By studying the process of composting, solid state fermentation, as a process may be better understood and characterized for the development of models in predicting scale up behavior. In addition, the study of compost microbial community provides essential information about the microbial community evolution and how this evolution drives changes in physical variables such as temperature, pH and oxygen concentration. In this study, 3 reactors were designed and built to a working volume of 50L. Each reactor was equipped with 7 axial sampling ports up to a height of 0.7m above a perforated plate used to hold the substrate bed, with a 10cm interval between ports. The reactors were loaded with a mixed substrate of dog food and switchgrass with a C/N ratio of 15/1, with each reactor being started off at different moisture contents: 70%, 65% and 60% moisture content wet basis. This is accomplished by keeping a constant dry weight for the substrates and varying the volume of water added. The reactors were then allowed to run for at least 96 hours. Temperature and effluent gas concentrations were monitored online for the duration of the process and at predefined times, samples were collected and analyzed for pH using a pH meter, moisture content using oven drying and yeast, bacteria and fungi content using probe hybridization. The results showed that moisture content is a key factor in determining the microbial community evolution, with the highest moisture content reactor generally producing the largest amount of detectable microbial DNA initially and at most points throughout the process. The temperature, effluent gas and pH profiles were also consistent with the trends observed for the microbial community data. Furthermore, it was observed that fungi were detected at all sampled points during the process, suggesting that fungi play an important role in the composting process.


Brain and retinal infarctions during sleep have been attributed to focal hypoperfusion caused by systemic hypotension combined with underlying arterial stenosis, rather than to embolism. Because some retinal emboli may be visualized on ophthalmoscopy, we studied 24 consecutive patients (18 men and six women) aged 26-78 (mean 58) years with recent retinal infarction and determined whether the infarction had occurred during sleep or wakefulness. All patients underwent dilated ophthalmoscopy and a carotid artery study (arteriography in 20, duplex ultrasound in the remaining four), and 12 had echocardiography. Retinal infarction occurred during sleep at an unexpectedly rate (14 of 24 observed compared with eight of 24 expected, p = 0.02). Retinal cholesterol emboli were seen in one half of the patients regardless of whether the retinal infarction had occurred during sleep or wakefulness. Carotid artery disease was found in seven of the 14 patients in whom infarction had occurred during sleep and in eight of the 10 patients in whom infarction had occurred during wakefulness (p = 0.21). Cerebrovascular occlusive disease was not found in the five patients aged less than 50 years. Our findings suggest that embolism is a common mechanism of retinal infarction during sleep or wakefulness, that in patients aged greater than 50 years extracranial carotid artery disease is a common source of retinal emboli, and that the retina may be especially susceptible to infarction during sleep.


Severe weather reduces sight distance and increases stopping distance of traveling vehicles. Traffic collisions are likely to occur when vehicles encounter traffic congestions on freeways under severe weathers. The primary objective of this study is to develop a control strategy of variable speed limit (VSL) to improve freeway safety in different types of weather conditions. The control strategy aims to reduce vehicle speeds gradually prior to congestions. A car-following model was used to simulate the behaviors of drivers in different visibility and road adhesion conditions. The time-to-collision was calculated to evaluate the collision potentials on freeway mainlines. Five typical severe weathers were tested. The simulation results showed that the VSL control strategy proposed in this study effectively reduced collision potentials under various types of severe weathers. The collision potential was reduced by 53.98% in heavy fog weather to 91.69% in heavy rain weather. The VSL strategy was compared to a previous VSL algorithm. The results showed that the strategy in this study outperformed the previous one in reducing collision potentials in most of cases.


Unchecked activity of a cell signaling pathway crucial in embryonic development and the liver's response to injury leads to liver cancer, researchers from Duke University Medical Center and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have found. Because the pathway, called Hedgehog, is present only in immature, stem-like liver cells, the discovery offers hope for targeted treatment of liver cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer-related death in the world. Laboratory experiments show that blocking the Hedgehog pathway kills cancer cells but leaves mature healthy liver cells intact, the researchers report. Treating patients with medications to interrupt the pathway would likely eliminate the cancer cells while sparing healthy liver tissue, said Jason Sicklick, M.D., a postdoctoral fellow at Duke and lead author of the study. "Currently, there are no good chemotherapies for liver cancer, and many people with advanced liver disease are too ill for surgery to remove tumors," Sicklick said. "There is a desperate need for effective anticancer treatments that are safe for patients with liver disease." The results will be published in the April 4, 2006, issue of Carcinogenesis . The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Finding the overactivated Hedgehog pathway in liver cancer, but not in mature liver cells, opens the door for development of new diagnostic tests for the disease, Sicklick said. "Signs of excessive Hedgehog activity in cirrhotic patients could alert us to early stages of liver cancer, as well as provide valuable prognostic information for patients," he said. Sicklick and colleagues also discovered a new Hedgehog pathway mutation in a patient with liver cancer that may lead to overactivation of Hedgehog and trigger abnormal cell growth, promoting cancer development. In test tube and cell culture experiments, blocking the Hedgehog pathway reduced growth of cancer cells by over 90 percent. Liver cancer, or hepatocellular carcinoma, often develops in people with cirrhotic livers damaged by chronic infections, such as hepatitis, by alcohol abuse or other causes. It is rare in people with healthy livers. The cancer's incidence is rising in the United States, with an estimated 17,550 new cases diagnosed in 2005 and 15,420 deaths. One reason for the rising rates is the increasing prevalence of obesity, which raises the risk of liver cancer five- to six-fold, said Anna Mae Diehl, M.D., chief of Duke's gastroenterology division and senior author on the study. The liver's attempts to repair itself and regenerate new tissue after injury can trigger the Hedgehog pathway. During embryonic development, Hedgehog tells cells where and when to grow. In adult tissue, it signals the body to grow new tissue. "If the liver is injured badly, it uses some of the same mechanisms to repair itself as a fetus uses in growing a liver," Diehl said. The Hedgehog pathway is linked to certain brain, skin and muscle cancers and has recently been implicated in cancers of the pancreas, esophagus, lungs and prostate. The work by the Duke and Johns Hopkins team now adds liver cancer to the growing body of evidence suggesting these cancerous tumors are generated by stem-like cells. Stem-like cells in the liver require the Hedgehog pathway for survival, the researchers discovered. These primitive cells are similar to stem cells, but differ in basic ways involving cell reproduction. Hedgehog may lead to liver and other cancers because of over-activation of Hedgehog pathway's components or genetic mutations that accumulate in these components during tissue repair. "Ordinarily, the process is very tightly regulated, but apparently something goes wrong in these cells and the pathway is not turned off. That's what conveys malignancy," Sicklick said. Study co-authors include Yin-Xiong Li, Yi Qi, Kouros Owzar and Wei Chen of Duke University Medical Center; Aruna Jayaraman, Rajesh Kannangai, Perumal Vivekanandan and Michael Torbenson of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and John Ludlow of Vesta Therapeutics. For more information, contact: Becky Oskin; Tel.: 919.684.4966 or 919.684.4148; Email: firstname.lastname@example.com


The 'Managing Climate Risk' module developed in this project aims to improve sustainable and profitable grains production in the Northern Grains Region through a needs-based education program. It is a significant addition to the Grains 'Best Management Practice' (BMP) program developed in Central Queensland that empowers grain growers with the capacity to assess their current management practices against a set of minimum industry standards for BMP, and to then identify a suite of actions to improve farm production practices. A suite of 24 minimum BMP standards for managing the variability of seasonal conditions and longer-term changes in climate are considered in the module's 4 areas: (i) linking climate and crop production, (ii) risk management principles, framework and process, (iii) farming tactics and strategies for managing climate risks, and (iv) managerial skills. These minimum BMP standards were ratified by industry reference panels in southern and central Queensland, and were considered by 87 grain growers attending 14 workshops from Narrabri in NSW to Clermont in Central Queensland, and 27 grain industry consultants, researchers and extension officers at three professional development workshops.
The most important climate risks to manage as perceived by grain farmers were found to be low and variable rainfall, and catastrophic events such as drought, intense storms, flood and unseasonal severe frost. Managing opportunities such as the 'perfect' weather for grain production and other risks such as heat waves, windy conditions wet weather impacts on pests and pathogens were also rated as important. Developing skills to address strategic and tactical operations at paddock, whole-farm and off-farm levels were identified as central to effective management of climate risk. Most growers considered their current agronomic practices for managing climate risk were either 'level with' or 'above' the industry minimum BMP standard (19% and 75% of growers respectively), and very few growers assessed their current practices as 'below' the minimum BMP standard. Making best use of continuously updated historical weather records and skills to assess current weather patterns, seasonal forecasts and long-range climate change forecasts were seen as priorities. Further priorities for management included the use of a robust risk management framework and process as defined by the Australian Standards for Risk Management. However, a significant proportion of growers considered their existing practices were 'below' the minimum industry BMP standard for risk management (48%), risk assessment (31%), record keeping (39%) and business planning (12%). Risk assessment and evaluation of options was identified as priorities by 73% and 95% of growers respectively. Off-farm investments, off-farm employment activities and a healthy lifestyle to mitigate climate induced stresses were also considered to be important.

The project successfully met objectives of the FarmReady Program concerning promotion, uptake, best practice and integration with industry. BMP standards developed in the 'Managing Climate Risk' module now provide useful benchmarks for extension programs that can be transferable nationally, and thus should be promoted to agencies such as the Grains Research and Development Corporation, training organisations for vocational education, and State Departments of Agriculture. RD&E programs should promote the uptake of robust, flexible management systems for managing the variability of seasonal conditions as the key approach for adaptation to climate change.