Rugby has always been a sport with as much drama off the field as on it. For every thrilling last-minute Jonny Wilkinson drop-goal to win the World Cup or Jonah Lomu rampage down the touchline for a try there has been a split, a feud, or a controversy. The Oval World is the first full-length history of rugby on a world scale-from its origins in the village-based football games of medieval times to the globalized sport of the twenty-first century, now played over a hundred countries. It tells the story of how a game played in an obscure English public school became the winter sport of the British Empire, spreading to France, Argentina, Japan, and the rest of the world, and commanding a global television audience of over four billion for the last World Cup final. It also explores how American football-and other games, such as Australian, Canadian, and Gaelic football-emerged from their English cousin. Featuring the great moments in the game's history and its legendary names-David Duckham, Serge Blanco, Billy Boston, and David Campese, alongside Rupert Brooke, King George V, Boris Karloff, Charles de Gaulle, and Nelson Mandela-The Oval World investigates just what it is about rugby that enables it to thrive in countries with very different traditions and cultures. This is the definitive world history of a truly global rugby.


BACKGROUND
Personality factors have shown to be related to mortality, morbidity, and psychological aspects in chronic disorders. Little is known about the effect of personality on disease severity in sarcoidosis and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of Type D personality and its relation with relevant clinical characteristics in sarcoidosis and IPF patients.

METHODS
The study included 441 sarcoidosis and 49 IPF patients from the outpatient clinic of the ild care team of the MUMC, the Netherlands. They completed the DS14 (Type D questionnaire), the fatigue assessment scale (FAS), the WHO quality of life-BREF (WHOQOL-BREF) and the Centre for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D). Moreover, relevant clinical data were collected. The control group consisted of 3678 subjects from a general population.

RESULTS
Type D personality was found in 25.6% of the sarcoidosis patients compared to 21% in the controls, but only in 18.8% of the IPF patients. No relation with disease severity was found in either of these disorders. Fatigue was a substantial problem in both populations. Depressive symptoms but not Type D personality predicted fatigue and poorer QOL in sarcoidosis and IPF.

CONCLUSION
Prevalence of Type D personality is not higher in sarcoidosis and IPF patients than in the general population and does not explain QOL impairment. Depressive symptoms explain QOL impairment and fatigue substantially. Therefore, in the multidisciplinary management of sarcoidosis and IPF psychological screening and psychological counselling concerning adequate coping strategies should be incorporated.


Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and aggregate app usage by about a third. Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation.


The aim of this essay was to recover 'the lost' or 'hidden' history of the ISKRA company that, at the height of its significance, employed 35,000, had its own design department with high standards of design that were recognised through winning more than 130 international design awards. Between its foundation in 1946 and its break up in the political turmoil of the early 1990s, ISKRA also played a highly significant part in the post war economic development of Yugoslavia, one of the most 'progressive,' although non-aligned, of European communist countries. An important aspect of 're-aligning' ISKRA and Slovenian design was to test the validity of the claims of the organizers of the ISKRA: 1946-90, Non-Aligned Design exhibition (Architecture Museum Ljubljana, 2009) that, as a high profile manufacturer and successful design networker and exporter, historians of design in Europe and beyond have ignored it. In fact, in support of this assertion, there is a considerable amount of primary material outside Yugoslavia in the University of Brighton's Design Archives holdings, most notably the Design Council Archive and the Archives of the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (ICOGRADA) and International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ISCID), all of which contain useful material relating to Yugoslavian and Slovenian design between 1945 and the early 1990s, particularly in respect of the "Golden Age" of Slovenian design between 1960 and 1985. This essay addresses the relative absence of Yugoslavian, and in this particular case Slovenian, design from the world map of design history. The difficulties of accessing and interpreting primary documentation were considerable as there are less than 2.5 million Slovenian speakers in the world, less than 60 years since the country's relatively small design community became a cohesive body and design education is still emerging in terms of its economic, social and cultural influence; design history as an academic discipline is still in its infancy. Issues of language accessibility may partly explain which Slovenian design has received a lesser profile than the communist aligned countries, particularly the former German Democratic Republic which has been the subject of rigorous and revealing research and publication over more recent years.


Addition of alcohols to particulate or cellular preparations of the monkey corpus luteum unmasks gonadotropin-binding sites via a temperature-sensitive process. Since alcohols and temperature are known modulators of membrane fluidity, we measured the fluidity of luteal membranes and determined whether the effects of ethanol and temperature on gonadotropin binding correlated with changes in the fluid state of the membrane. The fluidity of membranes from the macaque and rat corpus luteum was estimated from the fluorescence polarization of the lipophilic membrane probe 1,6-diphenyl-1,3,5-hexatriene (DPH). The absorption and emission spectra of DPH incorporated into luteal membranes were typical of those in other systems. Fluorescence intensity increased rapidly during the first 60 min of incubation and reached steady state conditions within 3 h. In contrast, polarization was constant within minutes and was insensitive to pH, ionic strength, tissue concentration, or DPH levels over the ranges tested. Fluorescence polarization was acutely sensitive to the temperature of the assay medium; polarization decreased as temperature increased from 4-50 C, and no phase transitions were observed. Addition of 4-20% and 8-20% ethanol to monkey and rat membranes, respectively, decreased (P less than 0.05) polarization relative to control values. However, ethanol was less effective on rat membranes, such that 20% ethanol was required to elicit a similar change in polarization as 8% ethanol in macaque membranes. The decrease in polarization was reversed to control levels when ethanol was removed from the incubation medium. Changes in fluorescence polarization of DPH-labeled macaque membranes elicited by ethanol and temperature correlated significantly (r = -0.97) with changes in specific [125I]iodohuman LH binding. In contrast, pretreatment of luteal membranes from the monkey and rat with neuraminidase, which unmasks another population of LH-binding sites in both species, did not alter polarization. We conclude that the fluorescence polarization of DPH is a useful tool for estimating membrane fluidity in the corpus luteum. Furthermore, changes in membrane fluidity may play an important role in the masking/unmasking of alcohol-sensitive (but not neuraminidase-sensitive) gonadotropin-binding sites in the macaque corpus luteum. Finally, the lesser effects of ethanol in the rat suggest important species differences in the receptor milieu and composition of luteal membranes.


Before the break-up of the Soviet Union, veterinary and livestock services for the dairy industry had been provided by the state. Dairy farmers, no longer employed by the state, had few resources to pay for veterinary services, and their herds suffered. This paper identifies how external facilitation activities can contribute to the development of the private sector supply of veterinary, artificial insemination and other livestock-related services to address the critical constraints of a fast-growing dairy farming industry in rural areas of Azerbaijan. It discusses the role that an international NGO can play in bringing service providers and clients together without injecting subsidies into the system, thus rendering the relationships sustainable and market-driven.


New genetic technologies and their applications in biomedicine have important implications for social identities in contemporary societies. In medicine, new genetics is increasingly important for the identification of health and disease, the imputation of personal and familial risk, and the moral status of those identified as having genetic susceptibility for inherited conditions. There are also consequent transformations in national and ethnic collective identity, and the body and its investigation is potentially transformed by the possibilities of genetic investigations and modifications (including the highly controversial terrains of reproductive technologies and the use of human embryos in biomedical research). The papers in this volume, drawn from an international array of authors, address these issues from a variety of national, disciplinary and empirical standpoints. An informative read for postgraduates and professionals in the fields of sociology, social anthropology, science and technologystudies, and environmental studies, the chapters comprise empirically based and theoretically informed discussions of key sociological, anthropological, political and ethical issues. Using the resources of a wide range of social science disciplines to provide a comparative approach to complex issues, this superb collection explores the local and global consequences of the new genetics, and analyzes the social implications of these advances for identity formation in a period of rapid social change.


Title of Document: MODELING AND SIMULATION OF MIXING LAYER FLOWS FOR ROCKET ENGINE FILM COOLING Kiran Hamilton Jeffrey Dellimore, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Directed By: Associate Professor, Christopher P. Cadou, Department of Aerospace Engineering Film cooling has been selected for the thermal protection of the composite nozzle extension of the J-2X engine which is currently being developed for the second stage of NASA's next generation launch vehicle, the Ares I rocket. However, several challenges remain in order to achieve effective film cooling of the nozzle extension and to ensure its safe operation. The extreme complexity of the flow (threedimensional wakes, lateral flows, vorticity, and flow separation) makes predicting film cooling performance difficult. There is also a dearth of useful supersonic film cooling data available for engineers to use in engine design and a lack of maturity of CFD tools to quantitatively match supersonic film cooling data. This dissertation advances the state of the art in film cooling by presenting semi-empirical analytical models which improve the basic physical understanding and prediction of the effects of pressure gradients, compressibility and density gradients on film cooling effectiveness. These models are shown to correlate most experimental data well and to resolve several conflicts in the open literature. The core-to-coolant stream velocity ratio, R, and the Kays acceleration parameter, KP, are identified as the critical parameters needed to understand how pressure gradients influence film cooling performance. The convective Mach number, Mc, the total temperature ratio, θ0, and the Mach number of the high speed stream, MHS, are shown to be important when explaining the effects of compressibility and density gradient on film cooling effectiveness. An advance in the simulation of film cooling flows is also presented through the development of a computationally inexpensive RANS methodology capable of correctly predicting film cooling performance under turbulent, subsonic conditions. The subsonic simulation results suggest that it in order to obtain accurate predictions using RANS it is essential to thoroughly characterize the turbulent states at the inlet of the coolant and core streams of the film cooling flow. The limitations of this approach are established using a Grid Convergence Index (GCI) Test and a demonstration of the extension of this RANS methodology to supersonic conditions is presented. Modeling and Simulation of Mixing Layer Flows For Rocket Engine Film Cooling


One of the first projects chosen by the Corps of Engineers for computer control was the John Day Project on the Columbia River. John Day powerhouse was completed in 1971 and has 16 generators with a total capacity of 2,485 MW. Computer control of the generators was an integral part of the original design. For many reasons replacement of such computer control systems has become the best alternative in many cases. The original equipment at John Day (like many other projects) was designed without special consideration being given for easy replacement. As a result, significant disruption of control was required in order to replace the computer equipment. Extra operators were required to maintain control functions during the outage. Experience gained at the John Day powerhouse will be valuable during the replacment of computer systems at several other powerhouses. Moreover, future designs will pay attention to the need to replace only the obsolete items while minimizing the disruption to the remainder of the powerhouse control system.


Integration in the East African Community offers significant opportunities not only to expand trade among member states, but more importantly to scale up regional production to take advantage of much larger global market opportunities. Special economic zones are a potentially valuable instrument to facilitate the integration of regional value chains in support of this scaling up. They also have the potential to deliver powerful demonstration effects on the benefits of integration and to help entrench the integration process. This paper discusses the proposal for developing an"economic integration zone"in the East African Community. The benefits of such a zone could be substantial, as would be the practical challenges to implementation -- in particular the political economy challenges. However, a number of institutional and commercial solutions exist to address these challenges.


With the proliferation of wireless networks and the declining cost of wireless devices there is increasing interest in the development of location aware applications. These applications include robotics, context aware systems to collect or disseminate information, duress alarms in institutions such as hospitals and prisons and security of the wireless network.

There are many technologies that may be used to sense the location of mobile devices or personnel, including those based on infrared, ultrasonic, radio frequency tags and magnetic sensing. Most of these technologies require the deployment of devices specifically placed to support the location system. This paper focuses on a location system based on the RSSI of packets on the IEEE 802.11b wireless network. This technique has the great advantage that it may be implemented using off the shelf hardware that is generally already deployed to support the data network.

A simple wireless network was deployed in the School of Computing Building at the Newnham Campus of the University of Tasmania and used to test the location performance of a location system based on Bayesian filtering of detected signal strengths.


Developing accurate dynamical system models from physical insight or data can be impeded when only partial observations of the system state are available. Here, we combine conservation laws used in physics and engineering with artificial neural networks to construct "grey-box" system models that make accurate predictions even with limited information. These models use a time delay embedding (c.f., Takens embedding theorem) to reconstruct effect of the intrinsic states, and can be used for multiscale systems where macroscopic balance equations depend on unmeasured micro/meso scale phenomena. By incorporating physics knowledge into the neural network architecture, we regularize variables and may train the model more accurately on smaller data sets than black-box neural network models. We present numerical examples from biotechnology, including a continuous bioreactor actuated using light through optogenetics (an emerging technology in synthetic biology) where the effect of unmeasured intracellular information is recovered from the histories of the measured macroscopic variables.


The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today. De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it - first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden, working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy. Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.


Understanding the spatial distribution of soil lead has been a focus of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study since its inception in 1997. Through multiple research projects that span spatial scales and use different methodologies, three overarching patterns have been identified: (1) soil lead concentrations often exceed state and federal regulatory limits; (2) the variability of soil lead concentrations is high; and (3) despite multiple sources and the highly heterogeneous and patchy nature of soil lead, discernable patterns do exist. Specifically, housing age, the distance to built structures, and the distance to a major roadway are strong predictors of soil lead concentrations. Understanding what drives the spatial distribution of soil lead can inform the transition of underutilized urban space into gardens and other desirable land uses while protecting human health. A framework for management is proposed that considers three factors: (1) the level of contamination; (2) the desired land use; and (3) the community's preference in implementing the desired land use. The goal of the framework is to promote dialogue and resultant policy changes that support consistent and clear regulatory guidelines for soil lead, without which urban communities will continue to be subject to the potential for lead exposure.


There has been controversy brewing among accounting professionals regarding the impact of switching to International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on United States corporations as deemed to converge in the near future (Deming, 2005). The viewpoint presented in this paper is that the United States should conform to the international standards primarily because a single set of standards creates uniformity and comparability for stakeholders regardless of their geographic location. This paper addresses the potential advantages and disadvantages of moving to a global set of standards as well as how the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) will need to work with the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) to align the current United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) with the newly proposed international accounting standards. If adopted, a wide range of issues relating to the operations within a business will need consideration in the future. One of these issues include effects of taxes as businesses will need to become keenly aware of how a country's tax law and auditing practices affect their operations. The paper presents the repercussions United States corporations will face as a result of the convergence and how future accounting professionals, investors, financial institutions and students of accountancy. They will need to continue to stay abreast of changes in this area as these changes can ultimately change the way accounting standards are practiced, credentialed and taught over the next decade.


Abstract. We describe a method to calculate regional snow line elevations and annual equilibrium line altitudes (ELAs) from daily MODIS imagery (MOD02QKM) on large glaciers and icefields in western North America. An automated cluster analysis of the cloud-masked visible and near-infrared bands at 250 m resolution is used to delineate glacier facies (snow and ice) for ten glacierized regions between 2000–2011. For each region and season, the maximum observed value of the 20th percentile of snow-covered pixels (ZS(20)) is used to define a regional ELA proxy (ELAest). Our results indicate significant increases in the regional ELA proxy at two continental sites (Peyto Glacier and Gulkana Glacier) over the period of observation, though no statistically significant trends are identified at other sites. To evaluate the utility of regional ELA proxies derived from MOD02QKM imagery, we compare standard geodetic estimates of glacier mass change with estimates derived from historical mass balance gradients and observations of ZS(20) at three large icefields. Our approach yields estimates of mass change that more negative than traditional geodetic approaches, though MODIS-derived estimates are within the margins of error at all three sites. Both estimates of glacier mass change corroborate the continued mass loss of glaciers in western North America. Between 2000 and 2009, the geodetic change approach yields mean annual rates of surface elevation change for the Columbia, Lillooet, and Sittakanay icefields of −0.29 ± 0.05, −0.26 ± 0.05, and −0.63 ± 0.17 m a−1, respectively. This study provides a new technique for glacier facies detection at daily timescales, and contributes to the development of regional estimates of glacier mass change, both of which are critical for studies of glacier contributions to streamflow and global sea level rise.


How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the "pandemic." In Visual Plague, Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twelve million deaths. Unlike medical photography, epidemic photography was not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with exposing the patient's body or medical examinations and operations. Instead, it played a key role in reconceptualizing infectious diseases by visualizing the "pandemic" as a new concept and structure of experience—one that frames and responds to the smallest local outbreak of an infectious disease as an event of global importance and consequence.
 As the third plague pandemic struck more and more countries, the international circulation of plague photographs in the press generated an unprecedented spectacle of imminent global threat. Nothing contributed to this sense of global interconnectedness, anticipation, and fear more than photography. Exploring the impact of epidemic photography at the time of its emergence, Lynteris highlights its entanglement with colonial politics, epistemologies, and aesthetics, as well as with major shifts in epidemiological thinking and public health practice. He explores the characteristics, uses, and impact of epidemic photography and how it differs from the general corpus of medical photography. The new photography was used not simply to visualize or illustrate a pandemic, but to articulate, respond to, and unsettle key questions of epidemiology and epidemic control, as well as to foster the notion of the "pandemic," which continues to affect our lives today.


Intensive research in the earth sciences over the past decades has created a tremendous wealth of literature, data, and material collections. So far, literature, data and sample collections have been separated. Information technology and the internet, in particular the new cyberinfrastructures for the earth sciences, offer ways to interlink literature, data and samples, creating the potential for new interpretations of the data and materials beyond the interpretation already published in the literature. To achieve this, technical, editorial and custodial issues need to be resolved. A key to this is the use of persistent identifiers for literature, data and sample collection objects. Past experience has shown that URLs are transient, but systems of persistent identifiers (e.g. handle.net, DOI, URN) already exist and can be used to reference these objects. The project "Publication and citation of scientific primary data" (STD-DOI) shows prototypically how these criteria can be met and implements a system for the publication of scientific data, which is open to the scientific community in any scientific field. This project uses persistent identifiers (DOI, handle.net and URN) to identify datasets available in a digital format. In addition, the data publications may be included into the catalogue of the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). Data at finer granularity are only identified by generic handle.net IDs, not by DOIs. Ideally, literature should already reference the materials used and the data derived from these. Since this is not yet done, repositories publishing data and tracking sample material record the literature based on these data and samples in their databases. In the case of the STD-DOI project, its metadata profile includes identifiers of related material, e.g. literature interpreting the data, related datasets, or samples from which the data were derived. These metadata can then be used to create ontologies interlinking literature, data and samples. The challenging task ahead is that of interlinking literature, data and samples with as little editorial work as possible. Keeping the amount of work small is essential to allow the indexing of the back catalogue of already existing works. A key technology to solve this task is the automatic creation of ontologies, which can be generated automatically by text mining applications. These ontologies can be combined with ontologies generated from reference lists and from metadata. This presentation will look at existing systems for data publication (STD-DOI project, http://www.std-doi.de), sample identification (SESAR project, http://www.geosamples.org) and for the management of interconnected literature, data publications and sample collections (TaxonConcept, http://taxonconcept.stratigraphy.net), and how these systems can be used to enable new discoveries in the earth sciences.


This paper introduces a novel method to perform transfer learning across domains and tasks, formulating it as a problem of learning to cluster. The key insight is that, in addition to features, we can transfer similarity information and this is sufficient to learn a similarity function and clustering network to perform both domain adaptation and cross-task transfer learning. We begin by reducing categorical information to pairwise constraints, which only considers whether two instances belong to the same class or not. This similarity is category-agnostic and can be learned from data in the source domain using a similarity network. We then present two novel approaches for performing transfer learning using this similarity function. First, for unsupervised domain adaptation, we design a new loss function to regularize classification with a constrained clustering loss, hence learning a clustering network with the transferred similarity metric generating the training inputs. Second, for cross-task learning (i.e., unsupervised clustering with unseen categories), we propose a framework to reconstruct and estimate the number of semantic clusters, again using the clustering network. Since the similarity network is noisy, the key is to use a robust clustering algorithm, and we show that our formulation is more robust than the alternative constrained and unconstrained clustering approaches. Using this method, we first show state of the art results for the challenging cross-task problem, applied on Omniglot and ImageNet. Our results show that we can reconstruct semantic clusters with high accuracy. We then evaluate the performance of cross-domain transfer using images from the Office-31 and SVHN-MNIST tasks and present top accuracy on both datasets. Our approach doesn't explicitly deal with domain discrepancy. If we combine with a domain adaptation loss, it shows further improvement.


Abstract This article explores relationships between religious and economic practices in Kozhikode, a medium-sized city in Kerala. We examine debates concerning the apparent decline of the "bazaar economy" in the face of the onslaught of globalization and the consequent emergence of a "new economy." The latter is felt locally to be overdetermined by capital and entrepreneurial practices connected, either directly or indirectly, to the combined effects of migration to the Gulf countries of West Asia and to the post-1991 liberalization of the Indian economy. We argue that these public debates are not simply reflections on the harsh reality of economic rationalization, but underscore the production and articulation of specific economies of morality and affect. We also perceive a drawing together of seemingly divergent orientations, sensibilities, and practices—namely, those commonly associated with reformist Islam and what in recent literature has been described as "neoliberal global capitalism."


Integrated Agriculture-Aquaculture (IAA) is essentially diversification of agriculture, leading to synergisms among sub-systems resulting in a higher productivity from land/water area under the farmers' control. One method of achieving this is adding a pond culture component to a farm system, basically to receive and utilize the nutrient inputs from the latter. The second method is physically integrating aquaculture into the other systems by modifying the farm design and operations. More than 30% of the total geographical area in 40 countries covering 9.2 million km2 in Sub-Saharan Mrica is suitable for some form of integrated aquaculture. Ba,~ed on the present production level, it has been projected that 35% of the Mrica's increased requirement of fish in 2010 could be met by small scale fish farmers using IAA in just 0.5 % of the total potentially available area. The main motivations t;hat enable farmers in adopting IAA are to i) reduce risk from cropping, ii) accumulate capital iii) provide draught animal power and manure for fertilizer/fuel (in case of livestock), iv) satisfy cultural needs, v) enhance prestige/status vi) provide food, and vii) generate income. An opportunity for further increased production in the flood-prone ecosystem is the integration of capture fisheries and fish culture with rice farming on a community management basis. However, a key requirement for win-win situation is the development and operation of a good governance system based on community approach in managing the IAA operations. This helps to ensure equity, minimize conflicts among stakeholders and ensure easy resolution of conflicts, should they arise. This has been shown to work very well in a floodplain rice-fish culture system, where in spite of individual ownership of rice plots, fish culture is done on a community basis. Rice-fish systems foster ecological conservation through a number of means such as use of natural organic inputs, least alteration in the physical habitat, safeguarding agro-biodiversity (both rice and fish), allowing free movement of wild stock (in flooded systems), efficient recycling of farm wastes, utilizing -all possible synergisms in various farm sub-systems, encouraging community and participatory approach in managing the resources, which can facilitate mass awareness on conservation.


This account of the last third of Britain's long war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France begins in 1807, when all of continental Europe was under Napoleon's sway. It traces the course of the war through the Spanish uprising of 1808, the campaigns of Wellington and Moore in Portugal and Spain, to the crossing of the Pyrenees by the British army, the invasion of southern France, and the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. The overthrow of Napoleon was achieved not by a single general, a single army, or a single nation. Muir sets Britain's military operations on the Iberian Peninsula within the context of the wider European conflict, and examines how diplomatic, financial, military and political considerations combined to shape policy and priorities. The focus is on the politicians who controlled Britain's grand strategy as well as on the soldiers who led its armies in the field, while the book also examines the personalities of Canning and Castlereagh, Perceval and Lord Wellesley, Wellington and the Prince Regent. The book is based on investigation of primary and secondary sources, and on examination of the papers of the Duke of Wellington. It includes coverage of the financial background of Britain's campaign. Muir places the war, and the manner in which it was fought, in a wholly modern perspective, based not only on military might but on the effectiveness of the British economy and the coherence of the nation that sustained it.


During the last decades, motion planning for autonomous systems has become an important area of research. The high interest is not the least due to the development of systems such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles and robotic manipulators. The objective in optimal motion planning problems is to find feasible motion plans that also optimize a performance measure. From a control perspective, the problem is an instance of an optimal control problem. This thesis addresses optimal motion planning problems for complex dynamical systems that operate in unstructured environments, where no prior reference such as roadlane information is available. Some example scenarios are autonomous docking of vessels in harbors and autonomous parking of self-driving tractor-trailer vehicles at loading sites. The focus is to develop optimal motion planning algorithms that can reliably be applied to these types of problems. This is achieved by combining recent ideas from automatic control, numerical optimization and robotics. The first contribution is a systematic approach for computing local solutions to motion planning problems in challenging unstructured environments. The solutions are computed by combining homotopy methods and direct optimal control techniques. The general principle is to define a homotopy that transforms, or preferably relaxes, the original problem to an easily solved problem. The approach is demonstrated in motion planning problems in 2D and 3D environments, where the presented method outperforms a state-of-the-art asymptotically optimal motion planner based on random sampling. The second contribution is an optimization-based framework for automatic generation of motion primitives for lattice-based motion planners. Given a family of systems, the user only needs to specify which principle types of motions that are relevant for the considered system family. Based on the selected principle motions and a selected system instance, the framework computes a library of motion primitives by simultaneously optimizing the motions and the terminal states. The final contribution of this thesis is a motion planning framework that combines the strengths of sampling-based planners with direct optimal control in a novel way. The sampling-based planner is applied to the problem in a first step using a discretized search space, where the system dynamics and objective function are chosen to coincide with those used in a second step based on optimal control. This combination ensures that the sampling-based motion planner provides a feasible motion plan which is highly suitable as warm-start to the optimal control step. Furthermore, the second step is modified such that it also can be applied in a receding-horizon fashion, where the proposed combination of methods is used to provide theoretical guarantees in terms of recursive feasibility, worst-case objective function value and convergence to the terminal state. The proposed motion planning framework is successfully applied to several problems in challenging unstructured environments for tractor-trailer vehicles. The framework is also applied and tailored for maritime navigation for vessels in archipelagos and harbors, where it is able to compute energy-efficient trajectories which complies with the international regulations for preventing collisions at sea.


M. Casanova, B. Ticona, O. Salazar, E. Gratacós, M. Pfeiffer, G. Ávila, Y. Tapia, O. Seguel, and C. Sabaini. 2020. Physical assessment of a Mollisol under agroecological management in the Quillota Valley, Mediterranean Central Chile. Int. J. Agric. Nat. Resour. 261-279. A number of agroecological practices have been proposed for assessing soil quality. Several physical soil properties have been shown to be important for determining soil quality by using the sustainability index (SI) and the cumulative rating approach. The main aim of the study was to determine the effects of different agroecological managements on the physical properties of a Mollisol in the Mediterranean central Chile. In addition, some physical properties were selected to compare the soil quality among different agroecological management practices and highly mechanized intensive systems by using the SI and cumulative rating approaches. An experimental field was defined in an area of 3.5 ha in 2014. Four sites with different agroecological practices were selected in 2019 to assess soil physical properties: rainfed Mediterranean annual prairie no tillage (1-S), irrigated perennial prairie with deep-root species no tillage (2-N), irrigated annual and perennial prairie conventional tillage (4-S), irrigated vegetables and flowers minimum tillage (4-N); an avocado orchard with traditional management was used as the control. Soil organic carbon and the following soil physical properties were selected to assess SI and CR: bulk density, total porosity, void ratio, air capacity, fast-drainage pores, relative field capacity, hydraulic conductivity, structural stability index and unavailable water pores. The applicability of the selected physical indicators to the SIs of agroecological management practices compared with the control was demonstrated. The cumulative rating index (CR) for each land use showed that all agroecological practices constituted sustainable soil management (25≤CR<30), whereas the avocado orchard showed the least sustainable management (30≤CR<40), and a change in soil use is recommended.


Purpose: To determine how innovation and corporate entrepreneurship can be fostered in Development Finance Institutions (DFI) by means of an innovation and corporate entrepreneurship training programme.
Problem investigated : Development finance institutions are regarded as catalysts for development that needs to address both the market and public failure that results from underdevelopment. There is a need for an improved understanding of what the current state of entrepreneurial orientation is within the DFI's as catalyst of development. An investigation into how innovation and corporate entrepreneurship in development finance institutions can be fostered needs to be investigated.
Design / methodology / approach : This research is designed as a formal case study. To demonstrate that innovation and corporate entrepreneurship can be fostered in development finance institutions the study employed a pre-test-post-test control group true experimental design in which the innovation and corporate entrepreneurship climate was diagnosed. A comprehensive ICEAI (Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument, based on the Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument of Kuratko, Hornsby & Montagno 1999) was developed to measure the level of innovation and corporate entrepreneurship in a development finance institution.
Findings: The results of the experiment indicate that the ICEAI can be a useful tool in diagnosing the innovation and corporate entrepreneurship environment in development finance institutions; that after the training intervention of the leadership group in the experimental development finance institution, there was a notable increase in developed and approved new venture plans, indicating the organisational leaders can be change agents in innovation and corporate entrepreneurship.
Value of research: The study offers empirically tested ideas on how to foster corporate entrepreneurship, innovation and new venture creation within DFIs in order to find new solutions for the challenges of underdevelopment.


Natural history has always been the foundation of conservation biology. For centuries, botanists collected specimens in the field to understand plant diversity; now that many habitats are threatened, botanists have turned their focus to conservation, and, increasingly, they look to the collections of museums, herbaria, and botanical gardens for insight on developing informed management programs. Plant Conservation explores the value of these collections in light of contemporary biodiversity studies. Plant Conservation opens with a broad view of plant biodiversity and then considers evolutionary and taxonomic threats and consequences of habitat alteration; specific threats to plant diversity, such as invasive species and global climate change; consequences of plant population decline at the ecological, evolutionary, and taxonomic levels; and, finally, management strategies that protect plant biodiversity from further decline. With a unique perspective on biodiversity and scientific collections, Plant Conservation ultimately emphasizes the role museums and botanical gardens will play in future conservation.


We use the Kirchhoff prestack depth migration to calculate migrated sections in simple anisotropic velocity models in order to demonstrate the impact of anisotropy and simple inhomogeneity on migrated images. The recorded wave field is generated in velocity models composed of two layers separated by a non-inclined curved interface. The upper layer has triclinic anisotropy and a velocity gradient. The bottom layer is isotropic and homogeneous. We apply the Kirchhoff prestack depth migration to both heterogeneous and homogeneous single-layer velocity models with different types of anisotropy: a triclinic anisotropic medium, the transversely isotropic media with a horizontal symmetry axis and a vertical symmetry axis. We show the errors of the migrated interface caused by inaccurate velocity models used for migration. The study is limited to P-waves.


The transient and steady-state kinetic parameters for the ATPase cycle of the complex of skeletal muscle actin with smooth or skeletal muscle subfragment 1 (S-1) were determined over a wide range of actin concentrations from measurements of protein tryptophan fluorescence, the transient hydrolysis step, and the steady-state rate. The properties of the completely associated system were determined by using S-1 covalently cross-linking to actin. A four-state model was found to provide a good approximation to the kinetic and steady-state behavior: (sequence; see text) where T, D, and Pi refer to ATP, ADP, and inorganic phosphate, respectively. The formation of AM1T and M1T occurs by a rapid equilibrium binding of T followed by a very fast step. Actin is in rapid equilibrium with M1T and M2.DPi, with association constants K2 and K4. The three rate constants k1, k-1, and k5 were obtained by fitting observed rate constants from transient state measurements and VM to the model using values of k3 and k-3 determined for S-1 alone. To fit the data for skeletal or smooth muscle acto-S-1, the calculated rate constant of the hydrolysis step k1 and the equilibrium constant K1 had to be 2-3 times smaller than the corresponding parameters (k3, K3) for S-1. The calculated effective rate constant for product release must be large for striated muscle (85 s-1 at 20 degrees C, low ionic strength) and relatively small for smooth muscle (3 s-1). The difference in the actin-concentration dependence of association and of steady-state ATPase activity was predicted correctly from the rate constants fitted to the transient evidence. While the proposed mechanism does not exclude the possibility of additional ATP or product intermediate states, the properties of such states cannot be deduced from the kinetic evidence.


For many thousands of years, there are many medicinal plants which have been used to cure diseases throughout the world. One such plant is Tulsi (Ocimum sanctum) which have several medicinal properties .Tulsi plant is used not only in Ayurveda and Siddha but also in Greek, Roman and Unani systems of medicine. Tulsi is used as anti-asthmatic and anti-kaphic drugs. It is also used in treatment of fever, bronchitis, arthritis, convulsions and in periodontitis it influences cytokine production and has an immune modulatory effect .Tulsi extracts are used as oral rinses. This article outline the present knowledge of pharmacological and other studies of this plant and its various possible applications in medicine and to pave the way for future studies in its applications in medicine.


Early in the development of a robust system of products liability law, American courts delegated most of the responsibility for assuring the safety of product designs to the market. Except for designs that failed to perform their intended functions and thus should be said to be dangerously self-defeating, most courts rejected claims that products were legally defective because they could have been designed more safely. As long as the relevant risks were obvious or product sellers supplied adequate warnings of hidden risks, product purchasers, not courts, determined how much design safety was appropriate. And then came the products liability revolution. Spurred by the adoption of strict liability under § 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, courts began in the 1970s to question, and then to reject, the idea that adequately-informed consumers always make sensible decisions regarding product design safety. Thus arrived a new era in American products liability in which courts began independently to review the reasonableness of manufacturers' product design choices, thereby second-guessing decisions reached in the market. In fairly short order courts abolished the patent danger rule and opened their doors to a broad range of fault-based design defect claims.Perhaps the most significant exception to the general pattern of courts overriding markets by engaging in broad product design review — a controversial subject upon which this essay focuses — concerns optional safety devices with respect to which purchasers, not courts, often make controlling decisions. The issue of when courts should delegate responsibility for product design safety is complex. What has been lacking to date is a structured approach to this issue. This essay, for the first time, pulls together the various strands of rationale offered by the courts into a coherent approach, concluding with a proposed Restatement section with comments. Work remains to be done in applying the suggested approach to future cases. The authors believe that this essay provides an important starting point for further development.


This study aims at assessing the prospects for a more liberal air passenger transport regime in the Asia Pacific region under the auspices of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). The decades-old bilateral air services regime has been under pressure to reform for several years. Notwithstanding the critical role that international air transport plays in the ongoing integration of Asia Pacific economies, the airline industry remains one of the region's most heavily regulated. Estimates from the gravity equation employing the Air Liberalization Index (ALI) developed by the World Trade Organization (WTO) Secretariat find a positive and statistically significant relationship between relaxing bilateral air services restrictions and air passenger traffic. The results hold for a wide range of specifications controlling for fixed effects, different sample sizes, and for all variants of the ALI. The preferred specification, the Anderson and Van Wincoop (2003) equation, provides the most conservative estimates. Prior to taking account of general equilibrium effects, the results imply that if APEC economies eased air transport restrictions to double the ALI scores with their aviation partners, both within and outside the APEC region, traffic would increase by 4.5%.


BACKGROUND:Clinicians and researchers use brief instruments, such as the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (TICS), to measure cognitive functioning in patients with cerebral aneurysms. MMSE and TICS scores are often dichotomized to classify patients as cognitively impaired or not. Frequently, after an initial MMSE face-to-face evaluation, the TICS is used for follow-up assessments by telephone. METHODS:A cross-sectional cohort of patients with cerebral aneurysms completed the MMSE at baseline and the MMSE or TICS at the 12-month follow-up examination. Multivariate logistic regression adjusting for demographics was used to model cognitive impairment. MMSE and TICS results were compared using the MMSE as the "gold standard." RESULTS:Eleven out of 171 (6%) patients had baseline MMSE scores less than 24, indicating cognitive impairment. Multivariate analysis showed that a history of subarachnoid hemorrhage was associated with cognitive impairment measured with the MMSE (odds ratio, 13.9; P = 0.021; C statistic = 0.87); there was no relationship between subarachnoid hemorrhage or treatment and TICS cognitive impairment (i.e., score < 27). In patients without recent or interim invasive interventions that might affect cognition (n = 65), raw baseline MMSE and 12-month TICS scores had fair correlations (r = 0.30, P = 0.015); however, dichotomized scores had poor agreement, and TICS sensitivity and positive predictive value was 0% compared with the MMSE. CONCLUSION:The MMSE may be more sensitive than the TICS to the effects of subarachnoid hemorrhage on cognitive functioning. Raw MMSE and TICS scores are well correlated, but dichotomized MMSE and TICS scores are probably not interchangeable in this patient population.


The relationship between cellular architecture and cellular state and function is apparent, but not yet completely understood. Precise characterization of cellular state is important in many fields, from pathology to synthetic biology. High-content high-throughput microscopy is now more than ever accessible to researchers. This allows for collection of large amount of cellular images. Naturally, the analysis of this data cannot be left to manual investigation and needs to resort to the use of efficient computing algorithms for cellular detection, segmentation, and tracking. Annotation is required for building high quality algorithms. Medical professionals and researchers spend a lot of effort and time in annotating cells. This task has proved to be very repetitive and time consuming. The experts' time is valuable and should be used effectively. Our hypothesis is that active deep learning will help to share some of the burden that researchers face in their everyday work. In this paper, we focus specifically on the problem of cellular segmentation. We approach the segmentation task using a classification framework. Each pixel in the image is classified based on whether the patch around it resides on the interior, boundary or exterior of the cell. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) are used to perform the classification task. Active learning is the method used to reduce the annotation burden. Uncertainty sampling, a popular active learning framework is used in conjunction with CNN to segment the cells in the image. Three datasets of mammalian nuclei and cytoplasm are used for this work. We show that active deep learning significantly reduces the number of training samples required and also improves the quality of segmentation.


Understanding demand in the new plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) market is critical to designing more effective adoption policies. We use stated preference data from an innovative choice experiment to estimate demand for PHEVs relative to battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and to explore heterogeneity in demand for these vehicle technologies. We find that the gap between willingness to pay for PHEVs and their price premium over conventional vehicles is on the order of current subsidies, while that of BEVs is an order of magnitude larger. We also find evidence that consumers with access to HOV lanes are more likely to purchase PHEVs and that the characteristics of the home charging environment are more important for BEV purchase decisions. Finally, we use a latent class model to show that PHEVs draw an entirely new consumer segment into the electric vehicle market that would not consider purchasing a BEV. ∗email@example.com †email@example.com ‡firstname.lastname@example.com


Increasing attention has been paid to the relationship between country reputation and corporate reputation by both public and private sectors. This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship by investigating the factors that influence and are influenced by country reputation. In particular, this study examines (a) the impact of country reputation on foreign consumers' attitudes toward brand and product purchase intentions, (b) the relationship between corporate reputation on country reputation, and (c) the mediating role of product image. Key findings of the study include the positive impact of corporate reputation on country reputation, and the mediating effects of product image between corporate reputation and country reputation.


Twin peak quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) appear in the X-ray power-density spectra of several accreting low-mass neutron star (NS) binaries. Observations of the peculiar Z-source Circinus X-1 display unusually low QPO frequencies. Using these observations, we have previously considered the relativistic precession (RP) twin peak QPO model to estimate the mass of the central NS in Circinus X-1. We have shown that such an estimate results in a specific mass–angular-momentum (M – j) relation rather than a single preferred combination of M and j. Here we confront our previous results with another binary, the atoll source 4U 1636−53 that displays the twin peak QPOs at very high frequencies, and extend the consideration to various twin peak QPO models. In analogy to the RP model, we find that these imply their own specific M – j relations. We explore these relations for both sources and note differences in the χ2 behavior that represent a dichotomy between high- and low-frequency sources. Based on the RP model, we demonstrate that this dichotomy is related to a strong variability of the model predictive power across the frequency plane. This variability naturally comes from the radial dependence of characteristic frequencies of orbital motion. As a consequence, the restrictions on the models resulting from observations of low-frequency sources are weaker than those in the case of high-frequency sources. Finally we also discuss the need for a correction to the RP model and consider the removing of M – j degeneracies, based on the twin peak QPO-independent angular momentum estimates.


Purpose

Open access (OA) electronic journals have been identified as potentially at risk of loss without more coordinated preservation efforts. The purpose of this paper is to test the current availability of OA electronic journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Design/methodology/approach

Using publicly available journal metadata downloaded from DOAJ, individual journal URLs were tested for validity and accessibility using a Microsoft Excel Visual Basic for Applications macro.

Findings

Initial results showed 69.51 per cent of the URLs tested returned a successful HTTP status code. The remainder of the URLs returned codes that indicated redirection or errors.

Originality/value

Unlike past studies of link decay, this is not limited to cited references or a specific discipline. This study uses the full DOAJ metadata to analyze the persistence of OA electronic journals.


The kinase IRAK1 senses the cytokine load to prevent overstimulation of the immune system. Keeping a check on the infection response The innate immune system responds to various cytokines and other "danger signals" that occur during infection. These must be properly identified and responded to; however, too much stimulation of the immune system can have debilitating consequences and cause autoimmune disease. Using live-cell biosensors and optogenetics, DeFelice et al. identified a regulatory feedback loop in one such immune signaling system mediated by cytokine receptors through the protein NF-κB. They found that the protein IRAK1 acted as a sensor of the amount of cytokine stimulation such that a high amount of stimulus elicited IRAK1-dependent inhibition of NF-κB activity, whereas low amounts of stimuli elicited oscillatory patterns of activity. The findings place IRAK1 at the central controls of the overall immune response to infection and may explain why mutations in IRAK1 are associated with rheumatoid arthritis. Over the last decade, multiple studies have shown that signaling proteins activated in different temporal patterns, such as oscillatory, transient, and sustained, can result in distinct gene expression patterns or cell fates. However, the molecular events that ensure appropriate stimulus- and dose-dependent dynamics are not often understood and are difficult to investigate. Here, we used single-cell analysis to dissect the mechanisms underlying the stimulus- and dose-encoding patterns in the innate immune signaling network. We found that Toll-like receptor (TLR) and interleukin-1 receptor (IL-1R) signaling dynamics relied on a dose-dependent, autoinhibitory loop that rendered cells refractory to further stimulation. Using inducible gene expression and optogenetics to perturb the network at different levels, we identified IL-1R–associated kinase 1 (IRAK1) as the dose-sensing node responsible for limiting signal flow during the innate immune response. Although the kinase activity of IRAK1 was not required for signal propagation, it played a critical role in inhibiting the nucleocytoplasmic oscillations of the transcription factor NF-κB. Thus, protein activities that may be "dispensable" from a topological perspective can nevertheless be essential in shaping the dynamic response to the external environment.


SHEAR DEFORMATION IN POLYMER GELS AND DENSE COLLOIDAL SUSPENSIONS Anindita Basu Arjun G. Yodh This thesis investigates two soft-matter systems, viz., bio-polymer gels and colloidal dispersions under mechanical deformation, to study non-affinity and jamming. Most materials are assumed to deform affinely, i.e., macroscopic applied deformations are assumed to translate uniformly to the microscopic level. This thesis explores the validity of the affine assumption in model polymer networks under shear. Displacements of micron-sized fluorescent polystyrene tracer beads embedded in polyacrylamide (PA) gels are quantified when the sample is sheared. The experiments confirm that the macroscopic elasticity of PA gels behaves in accordance with traditional flexible polymer network elasticity theory. Microscopically, non-affine deformation is detected, and the observations are in qualitative agreement with many aspects of current theories of polymer network non-affinity. The measured non-affinity in PA gels suggests the presence of structural inhomogeneities resulting from the reaction kinetics, which likely predominates over the effects of thermal fluctuations. Compared to flexible polymer gels, filamentous biopolymer networks generally have higher shear moduli, exhibit a striking increase in elastic modulus with increasing strain, and show pronounced negative normal stress when deformed under shear. Affine deformation is an essential iv assumption in the theories of these materials. The validity of this assumption is experimentally tested in fibrin and collagen gels. Measurements demonstrate that non-affine deformation is small for networks of thinner, relatively flexible filaments and decreases even further as strain increases into the non-linear regime. Many observations are consistent with the entropic nonlinear elasticity model for semiflexible polymer networks. However, when filament stiffness and mesh-size increase, then deformations become more non-affine and the observations appear to be consistent with enthalpic bending and stretching models. A qualitatively different set of studies explores the rheology of monodisperse and bidisperse colloidal suspensions near the jamming transition as a function of packing fraction, steady-state strain rate, and oscillatory shear frequency. The experiments employ soft, temperature-sensitive polymer micro-spheres for easy tuning of sample packing fraction and a rheometer in order to explore scaling behaviors of shear stress versus strain rate, and storage/loss shear moduli versus frequency. Under steady shear, rheometer measurements exhibit predicted scaling behavior for volume fractions above and below the jamming transition [113, 141] that agree with scaling observed in monodisperse particle suspensions by microfluidic rheology [107]; importantly, similar scaling behavior is observed for the first time in bidisperse particle suspensions. At finite frequency, new measurements were performed across the jamming transition for both monodisperse and bidisperse suspensions. The storage and loss moduli of the jammed systems, measured as a function of frequency and volume fraction, could be scaled onto two distinct master curves in agreement with simulation predictions [142]. For unjammed systems, stress-relaxation timescale is found to scale with volume fraction.


The objective in the present thesis was to evaluate possible improvements when using training as a treatment for peripheral arterial disease (PAD) patients and to study possible mechanisms behind the adaptations to training. During exercise patients with PAD are limited by muscle pain in the lower extremities, distal to the atherosclerotic lesions, due to lack of oxygen. In the first experiment high aerobic intensity whole body treadmill endurance training was found to be superior to previous recommendations using moderate aerobic intensity. During the 8 weeks of training whole body peak oxygen consumption (VO2peak) and time to exhaustion when walking improved, whereas no changes in blood flow were observed. Since the high aerobic intensity treadmill walking showed muscular, but not cardiac output or stroke volume responses, it was hypothesized in paper II that specific calf muscle individual leg training could result in even better effect on the distal limitations from the PAD. The calf muscle improved its VO2peak by 24%, which resulted in a 12% improvement in treadmill walking VO2peak in line with the hypothesis, and thus demonstrating the muscular limitation to whole body working capacity. The calf muscle endurance training did not improve walking economy and it was hypothesized that maximal strength training could act as a time efficient training intervention to improve walking economy. Paper III documented that leg press maximal strength training effectively increased 1 repetition maximum (1RM), rate of force development (RFD) and peak force (PF). Further, the increased strength led to an increased aerobic endurance performance, measured as improved walking economy. The ~10% improved walking economy resulted in a 14% increase in time to exhaustion when walking, using a ramp protocol. Realizing that the 8 weeks of treadmill training, the calf muscle training as well as the strength training primarily have an effect on the PAD symptoms, and that the underlying atherosclerotic disease is a risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease, the hypothesis in paper IV was that the individual leg calf muscle training can prime PAD patients for improvements in cardiac function in a following whole body training intervention. The 16 weeks training intervention showed an improvement of 27% in VO2peak and a 40% improvement in time to exhaustion using a ramp protocol. Cardiac output and stroke volume improved by 33% and 25% respectively, showing that the primed small muscles' adaptations do not any longer limit the possibility to address the cardiovascular system efficiently through the treadmill walking training. The structural adaptations in the cardiovascular system represent a substantial risk reduction for other atherosclerotic events. The experiments through this thesis show that the future guidelines for training used as treatment for PAD should imply high aerobic intensity interval training of the calf muscle followed by high aerobic intensity interval training walking on a treadmill. Both interventions should be supported by maximal strength training for the legs. This training regime is designed to treat the disease most efficiently, and to reduce the risk for further cardiovascular disease.


A recent meta-analysis by Cheng et al. (1) estimated increased risk of sudden cardiac death/ventricular arrhythmia and cardiovascular death in current users of macrolides. We have read with interest this timely paper, and we take the opportunity to bring to your attention a methodological issue. We note that Cheng et al. (1) erroneously considered our previous work (2) a case-control study, whereas it was a case/ non-case study performed in a spontaneous reporting system (SRS) database that used the reporting odds ratio (ROR) to investigate disproportion in reporting torsade de pointe in patients treated with macrolides. It is important to emphasize the fact that, although odds ratio (OR) and ROR share the same statistical formula, ROR is not a risk measurement but a simple indicator of risk, reflecting imbalance in reporting frequency of a drug-related event in comparison with other drug-related events; thus, "non-exposed" patients are not available, although they are crucial for measuring risk. In other words, ROR cannot estimate risk but only allows identification of potential safety issues, which necessarily requires further investigation (3). For these reasons and for a more reliable pooled risk estimate of macrolide-related proarrhythmia, we believe that our study is not eligible for the present meta-analysis. Although misclassification of our study and its inclusion in the meta-analysis has no influence on conclusions made by Cheng et al. (1), we would like to express our concern for the incorrect use of studies in SRS (the so-called pharmacovigilance syndrome [4]), which may result in their erroneous inclusion in safety meta-analyses of observational studies. It is time for a thorough discussion and, hopefully, consensus on the role of disproportionality analyses in measuring drug-related risks. In the meantime, we propose to include disproportionality studies in (qualitative) systematic reviews but keep results separated from pooled risk estimates of (quantitative) meta-analyses.


Over the last two decades, there has been an upsurge in research in social psychology on the relationships among gender, cognition, and social behavior. Over the same period, studies of gender in negotiation have declined, and the field has largely abandoned the gender variable as an inconsistent predictor of negotiator behavior or performance. In this paper, we argue that the dominant methodological approach to gender has overlooked the very situations in which gender is likely to be most consequential. More specifically, we argue that gender effects are likely to be greatly attenuated in strong situations - those situations that are clearly defined as "negotiations" with explicit issues and the expectation that bargaining will occur - yet will be greatly enhanced in weak situations - those situations in which people must recognize the opportunity to negotiate, and initiate such interactions with others. We then introduce a new construct - the propensity to initiate negotiations - that we argue is highly relevant to many everyday interactions. We then discuss the gendered nature of this construct, and provide empirical evidence that illustrates gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations. We explore the psychological processes that mediate such differences, and consistent with a contextual view of gender, close with a discussion of possible moderators of such effects.


Princess Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo may seem the luckiest girl ever. She's a princess, for starters. She also lives in New York City. And while she's no supermodel, mirrors do not crack at her reflection. Best of all, she finally has a boyfriend. The truth is, however, that Mia spends all her time doing one of three things: preparing for her nerve-racking entree into Genovian society under the slave-driving but elegant Grandmere, slogging through congestion unique to Manhattan in December, and avoiding further smooches from her hapless boyfriend, Kenny. All she wants is a little peace and quiet...and a certain someone else to be her boyfriend. For Mia, being a princess in love is not the fairy tale it's supposed to be...or is it?


In this study we aimed to determine the antioxidant effects of Cocoa ( Theobroma cacao L.), which is commonly used in both chocolate and cocoa drinks all over the world , on lipid peroxidation, alanine transaminase (ALT), aspartate transaminase (AST), glutathione (GSH) and protein oxidation levels in carbon tetrachloride (CCl4 ) treated for male Wistar rats. Two control groups and one treatment group of rats were formed. The control groups were nourished with a standard diet, while the Cocoa group was nourished with standard diet which was enriched with % 6 by weight dried Cocoa powder. After three months, a single dose of carbon tetrachloride (CCl4 ) was performed in Control II (CCl4 ) and Cocoa groups (1ml/kg, as 20% in olive oil) intraperitoneally and single dose of olive oil was administered (1ml/kg,i.p.) in the same way as rats in Control I group. They were sacrificed two hours later. Lipid peroxide levels in liver, protein oxidation in liver, glutathione levels in liver, ALT and AST in plasma were measured. Cocoa decreased liver lipid peroxide, liver glutathione levels and plasma ALT and AST activities previously increased by CCl4 treatment, to the Control I levels The protein oxidation levels in the rats in the Cocoa group compared with the rats in CCl4 treated control group were found to have significantly lessened. These fi ndings suggest that cocoa has strong antioxidant activity because of the fact that cocoa inhibits liver injury.


In this paper, we show how statistical decision theory can be used to solve real life product problems. Global Positioning System (GPS) Performance in a mobile handset is degraded whenever it is simultaneously used with a 3G data or voice call. This degradation is due to the 3G transmitter interference. Mitigation methods to interference in GPS have been pro-posed. However, most of these methods depend on hardware and signal processing or just hardware solutions. In some cases, it maybe difficult to implement these hardware methods, especially, in mobile handsets due to the small size of the handset, printed circuit board (PCB) layout issues and the added cost. In this paper, a novel signal processing statistical algorithm approach is proposed to mitigate the 3G interference to GPS. This statistical approach utilizes the knowledge of the statistical characteristics and distributions of both, the GPS signal and noise. Then the method utilizes the probabilities to make a statistical decision to remove the effect of noise. This method does not require room on the PCB of the mobile handset and therefore no layout challenges arise. In addition, cost is minimized and the product turn in cycle is shortened. This paper offers theoretical as well as practical insight to the GPS operation during 3G call inside the mobile phone.


PURPOSE
The aim of this study was to evaluate the oxygen uptake in patients with cardiovascular disease during the low-impact dance program and to compare the findings with the values at peak oxygen uptake (VO2) and aerobic threshold (AT).

METHODS
The study included 19 patients with cardiovascular disease [age, 68.3±8.7 years; left-ventricular ejection fraction, 60.3%±8.7%; peak VO2, 6.6±1.1 metabolic equivalents (METs)] who were receiving optimal medical treatment. Their heart rate and VO2 were monitored during cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) and during the low impact dance. The dance involved low-impact dynamic sequences. The patients completed two patterns of low-impact dance, and metabolic gas exchange measurements were obtained using a portable ergospirometry carried in a backpack during the dance sessions.

RESULTS
The mean values of VO2 (4.0±0.2 METs and 3.9±0.3 METs) and those of heart rate (105.2±2.9 bpm and 96.8±2.6 bpm) during the dance program were not significantly differ from the AT value (4.5±0.2 METs) obtained in CPET. The median (and interquartile range) RPE reported after the dance exercise trials was 11 (9-13). No signs of overexertion were observed in any of the patients during either dance exercise trial.

CONCLUSIONS
The results suggest that it is reasonable to consider the low-impact dance program as an aerobic exercise program in cardiac rehabilitation. Our findings have important implications for exercise training programs in the cardiac rehabilitation setting and for future studies.


The chemical composition of coexisting illites and chlorites was investigated in Al-saturated metapelites of very-low- to low-metamorphic grade (temperature 160-350 degrees C; pressure: 2-7 kbar). The main chemical characteristics of illites consist of a deficiency in interlayer cations, an important celadonitic substitution and a slight deviation of the octahedral sheet from dioctahedral to trioctahedral character. Interlayer cation deficiency appears to be controlled by K XII +Al IV --> SiIV+[] XII substitution and by the entry of some (Mg+Fe) VI into the octahedral layer in excess of a full dioctahedral occupancy. The first substitution represents the main mechanism of interlayer cation deficiency control: it appears to be mostly dependent on metamorphic temperature. The small amounts of (Mg+Fe) VI producing deviation from a perfect dioctahedral occupancy only balance about 0.2 vacancies in the interlayer sites: this mechanism appears more dependent on bulk rock chemistry than on metamorphic conditions. Most of the Mg and Fe cations present in the octahedral layer result from celadonitic substitution, which is essentially related to the metamorphic pressure. Use of Sigma (Mg+Fe) as a measure of the celadonite content is shown to be much more reliable than Sigma Si, which is also influenced by interlayer occupancy. The main chemical characteristics of chlorites are: a) an ubiquitous octahedral cation deficiency, which appears to decrease systematically with increasing metamorphic grade; this trend is coupled with an increase of (Mg+Fe) VI and a decrease of Al VI ; b) a conspicuous substitution of Al IV for Si, which is seen to increase systematically with increasing metamorphic grade; c) a largely constant value of Fe/(Mg+Fe) ratio, which seems to be independent of the metamorphic grade. The octahedral cation deficiency is dependent on rock composition, as well as on temperature and pressure conditions. Thus it can not be proposed as a reliable geothermometer. On the contrary, the Si IV content can provide a reliable geothermometer at constant host-rock composition.


Catching fish in proportion to their productivity, termed balanced harvesting, has been suggested as a basis for the ecosystem approach to fishing. Balanced harvesting has been criticized as uneconomical and unachievable because of the level of micromanagement it would require. Here, we investigate the consequences of allowing a fixed number of fishers in a small-scale fishery to choose what size fish to attempt to catch. We examine this from a game-theoretic perspective and test our predictions using an agent-based model for fishers' decisions coupled with a size-spectrum model for the dynamics of a single fish species. We show that small-scale gillnet fishers, operating without size-based regulations, would end up catching small and large fish in proportion to their productivity, in other words balanced harvesting. This is significant because it shows that, far from being unachievable, balanced harvesting can emerge without external intervention under some circumstances. Controls are needed to prevent overfishing, but minimum size regulations alone are not sufficient to achieve this, and actually reduce the sustainable yield by confining fishing to a relatively unproductive part of the size-spectrum. Our findings are particularly relevant for small-scale fisheries in areas where there is poverty and malnutrition because here provision of biomass for food is more important than the market value of the catch.


In order to understand the all-chemical-solution-deposition (CSD) processes for manufacturing coated conductors, we investigated the phase evolution of YBa2Cu3O7 (YBCO) films deposited by a low-fluorine metal-organic solution deposition (LF-MOD) method on CSD derived Ce0.9La0.1O2/Gd2Zr2O7/NiW. It is shown that the phase transition from the pyrolyzed film to fully converted YBCO film in the LF-MOD process is similar to that in typical trifluoroacetates-metal organic deposition (TFA-MOD) processes even though the amount of TFA in the solution is reduced by almost one half compared with typical TFA-MOD cases. Moreover, we found that the formation of impurities (mainly BaCeO3, NiWO4 and NiO) is strongly related to the annealing temperature, i.e., the diffusion controlled reactions become intensive from 760 oC, which might be connected with the poor structural and superconducting properties of the films deposited at high sintering temperatures. Based on these results, the optimized growth conditions of YBCO films were established, and a high critical current density (Jc) of about 2 MA/cm2 (77 K, self field) is achieved in a 200 nm thick YBCO film in the architecture made by our all CSD route.


OBJECTIVE
Experimental evidence suggests that inadequate sleep disrupts next-day affective processing and evokes greater stress reactivity. However, less research has focused on whether sleep predicts next-day affective reactivity to naturally occurring stressors and positive events in daily life, as well as the reversed direction of association (i.e., affective reactivity to daily events as predictors of subsequent sleep). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the within-person, bidirectional associations between nightly sleep duration and day-to-day fluctuations in affect related to stressors and positive events.

METHOD
Adults ages 33-84 (N = 1,982, 57% female) in the U.S. National Study of Daily Experiences II reported sociodemographics and chronic conditions at baseline, then completed telephone interviews for 8 consecutive days about their sleep duration, daily stressors, positive events, and affect.

RESULTS
Prior-night sleep duration moderated the link between current-day events and positive affect, but not negative affect. Specifically, nights of shorter-than-usual sleep duration predicted more pronounced decreases in positive affect in response to daily stressors, as well as smaller increases in positive affect in response to daily positive events. Results for the reversed direction of association showed no evidence for affective reactivity to daily events as predictors of subsequent sleep duration. People with more chronic conditions were more reactive to positive events, particularly after nights of longer sleep.

CONCLUSION
Affective reactivity to daily stressors and positive events vary based upon sleep duration, such that sleep loss may amplify loss of positive affect on days with stressors, as well as reduce positive affective responsiveness to positive events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).


Applying a historical-materialist framework, this exploratory venture to critique Eurocentric cultural studies deploys certain oppositional events/discourses to point out the limitations of the hegemonic discipline. Deconstructing elite bourgeois culture via institutionalizing popular tastes and demystifying idealist rhetoric simply reinforce alienation with a postmodernist hubris. The resurgence of "third-world" resistance with its focus on racial/gender negativity (as in certain democratizing initiatives in the Philippines and among people of color in the metropole) may signal a return to the radical vision of cultural studies. Key to this renewal is the rediscovery of the dialectics of local/ethnic practice and the concrete universal of an anti-capitalist liberation project of subalterns everywhere defying imperialism and the terrorist neoliberal global order. Keywords:  Cultural studies, ethnic writing, neocolonialism, imperialism, racism, hegemony


This article focuses on the year that Michelangelo spent in Bologna when he was very young and on the quantity, weight, and depth of his response to the artistic world he discovered there in 1494 and 1495. It contends that the commission for figures for the Arca di San Domenico was of greater significance for the artist than is usually acknowledged and that he was strongly affected by the art and culture of the city. The impact of the sculpture of Jacopo della Quercia and of painters of the Ferrarese school is shown to be more profound than previously acknowledged. In addition, Michelangelo's interest in Emilian terracotta Lamentation groups, particularly that of Niccolo dell'Arca, is discussed. The continuing importance of Bolognese sources is seen in the Madonna of the Steps, for which a later date is proposed than that traditionally ascribed to it. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Bolognese sources are presented as more logical sources for the St Peter's Pieta than the Northern Andachtsbild groups that are usually cited. Re-capturing Michelangelo's youthful receptivity to a new city changes our understanding of his early career.


BACKGROUND
Indomethacin is a member of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) commonly used for treatment of gout, arthritis, and other inflammatory conditions. It has been shown to inhibit ovarian prostaglandins synthesis in mammals, birds, fish and reptiles. However, the effects of its chronic administration on male reproductive functions remain largely unknown. Using rat as a model, we studied the effect of chronic treatment with indomethacin on the male reproductive system.

METHODS
Testosterone was measured in the serum, testicular tissue, and testicular interstitial fluid by radioimmunoassay. Moreover, we also studied the direct effect of indomethacin in vitro on luteinizing hormone stimulated testosterone secretion from the Leydig cells isolated from various treatment groups.

RESULTS
Indomethacin treatment for 50 days caused a significant but reversible decrease in prostate weight, epididymal sperm reserves and sperm motility score compared with control rats (p < 0.05). In vitro stimulation of Leydig cells isolated from treated rat's testes with luteinizing hormone (250 microIU) produced significantly reduced testosterone compared with cells from control groups (p < 0.05). Furthermore, stimulatory effect of luteinizing hormone on the control Leydig cells was significantly reduced when these cells were challenged with luteinizing hormone in the presence of indomethacin, (p < 0.05). Testosterone concentration in the testicular tissue and testicular interstitial fluid reduced after indomethacin treatment (p < 0.05).

CONCLUSION
Due to its significant inhibition of key reproductive hormones, indomethacin effectively inhibits reproductive functions if used on a long-term basis. In his study, we have identified potential risks in the long-term use ofcyclooxygenase inhibitors.


The Diocese of Linkoping has been in existence for more than 900 years. The churches, built at various periods of history, outstanding personalities and fascinating events, stand not only as reminders of an invaluable tradition of enormous proportions in the history of Sweden, but also of early and continuous international influences and modern day societal and ecclesiastical realities.The Swedish history of Christianity is irrefutably essential to understanding not only a specific ecclesiastical heritage, but also the general cultural, social, judicial,economic and political history as well, since the Christian Church remained a driving force in Swedish society for so many centuries.This volume is the first introduction of the diocesan history in English and is only a brief presentation of the eventful, critical and remarkable diocesan history.Nevertheless, it is also a valuable introduction to the history of the province of Ostergotland and, to a certain extent, to the ecclesiastical history of Sweden.


This research project was carried out to establish the determinants that influence the quality of working life among fresh produce exporter in Indu-farm limited which is based in the export processing zone (EPZ) of Nairobi. The objectives include to establish the effects of the human resource management practices on the quality of work life, to determine how economic liberalization affect the quality of work life, to determine how labor legislation influences the quality of work life and to determine the influence of social responsibilities on the quality of work life. A review of literature was carried out on factors of human resource management including job design, reward, training, participation on decision making and other environment related factors of economic liberalization, labor legislation, and social responsibilities. The study design was descriptive case study with a sample size of 118 which is 40% of the employees of Indu-farm. The findings indicate that human resource management practices are significant determinants of the quality of work life. The cost of living and the rate of pay were rated very high as influencing the quality of work life. Social responsibilities are increasingly part of determinants of the quality of work life. The quality of work life in indu farm was rated as a little satisfying. This study has recommended more consultation with employees in determining the job design, the cost of living to be considered when setting the pay rates. More awareness of labor legislation is recommended and a work balance strategy, required to enable employees to function well in their social roles. This study suggests further research on psychology as a determinant influencing the quality of work life.


To understand fully the mechanism of laser electrochemical etching of metal, it is necessary to describe the temperature field induced by the laser heating within an appropriate liquid medium. For solving the complex problem of the laser heating a metal immersed in a liquid, the thermal phenomena adjacent to the metal-liquid interface were numerically investigated by means of irradiating a stainless steel sample with an 808 nm semiconductor laser (high power diode laser (HPDL)) beam immersed in distilled water and an electrolyte solution. A commercial finite element analysis (FEA) code (ABAQUS) was used to directly solve and model the temperature distribution on the surface of the stainless steel during semiconductor laser heating in distilled water. The experimental results confirmed the simulation trend. It was found from both the experimental work and the FEA simulation that the rise in temperature over the entire surface of the stainless steel affected by interaction with the HPDL laser beam was low; however, large temperature gradients in the HPDL-irradiated micro-zone were observed.


Given a Boolean formula φ, the problem of model counting, also referred to as #SAT is to compute the number of solutions of φ. Model counting is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence with a wide range of applications including probabilistic reasoning, decision making under uncertainty, quantified information flow, and the like. Motivated by the success of SAT solvers, there has been surge of interest in the design of hashing-based techniques for approximate model counting for the past decade. We profiled the state of the art approximate model counter ApproxMC2 and observed that over 99.99% of time is consumed by the underlying SAT solver, CryptoMiniSat. This observation motivated us to ask: Can we design an efficient underlying CNF-XOR SAT solver that can take advantage of the structure of hashing-based algorithms and would this lead to an efficient approximate model counter?
The primary contribution of this paper is an affirmative answer to the above question. We present a novel architecture, called BIRD, to handle CNF-XOR formulas arising from hashingbased techniques. The resulting hashing-based approximate model counter, called ApproxMC3, employs the BIRD framework in its underlying SAT solver, CryptoMiniSat. To the best of our knowledge, we conducted the most comprehensive study of evaluation performance of counting algorithms involving 1896 benchmarks with computational effort totaling 86400 computational hours. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates significant runtime performance improvement for ApproxMC3 over ApproxMC2. In particular, we solve 648 benchmarks more than ApproxMC2, the state of the art approximate model counter and for all the formulas where both ApproxMC2 and ApproxMC3 did not timeout and took more than 1 seconds, the mean speedup is 284.40 – more than two orders of magnitude.


As the pre-school initiative in the USA continues to grow in the public school sector, the need to understand and be prepared to address the needs of this population of students is vital. This paper provides an exploratory analysis of language and behavioral skills in children aged three to five years old served in inclusive public preschools. Preschool children documented with language impairments (LI), or emotional and behavioral disorders (ED) were compared to a typically developing group using the Test of Early Language Development-3 and the Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scales. Results suggest that preschoolers with identified language delays or behavior disorders were significantly different in both language development and behavior ratings when compared to typical developing peers. Second, no significant differences were found between students with language delays and socio-emotional disabilities. Implications regarding the need for comprehensive screening, continuous assessment, targeted intervention, and professional development for teachers across both developmental areas in the early childhood education settings are presented.


Outside‐of‐school time (OST; i.e. before/after‐school hours, summer time), theory‐based interventions are potential strategies for addressing increased obesity among African American youth. This review assessed interventions across multiple settings that took place during OST among African American youth aged 5–18 years old. Seven databases were searched for studies published prior to October 2013; 28 prevention and treatment interventions that assessed weight or related behaviours as a primary or secondary outcome were identified. Overall, these studies reported heterogeneous intervention length, theoretical frameworks, methodological quality, outcomes, cultural adaption and community engagement; the latter two attributes have been identified as potentially important intervention strategies when working with African Americans. Although not always significant, generally, outcomes were in the desired direction. When examining programmes by time of intervention (i.e. after‐school, summer time, time not specified or multiple time periods), much of the variability remained, but some similarities emerged. After‐school studies generally had a positive impact on physical activity, fruit/vegetable consumption and caloric intake, or body composition. The single summer time intervention showed a trend towards reduced body mass index. Overall findings suggest that after‐school and summer programmes, alone or perhaps in combination, offer potential benefits for African American youth and could favourably influence diet and physical activity behaviour.


ABSTRACT Fermentation properties of oligosaccharides derived from orange peel pectin were assessed in mixed fecal bacterial culture. The orange peel oligosaccharide fraction contained glucose in addition to rhamnogalacturonan and xylogalacturonan pectic oligosaccharides. Twenty-four-hour, temperature- and pH-controlled, stirred anaerobic fecal batch cultures were used to determine the effects that oligosaccharides derived from orange products had on the composition of the fecal microbiota. The effects were measured through fluorescent in situ hybridization to determine changes in bacterial populations, fermentation end products were analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography to assess short-chain fatty acid concentrations, and subsequently, a prebiotic index (PI) was determined. Pectic oligosaccharides (POS) were able to increase the bifidobacterial and Eubacterium rectale numbers, albeit resulting in a lower prebiotic index than that from fructo-oligosaccharide metabolism. Orange albedo maintained the growth of most bacterial populations and gave a PI similar to that of soluble starch. Fermentation of POS resulted in an increase in the Eubacterium rectale numbers and concomitantly increased butyrate production. In conclusion, this study has shown that POS can have a beneficial effect on the fecal microflora; however, a classical prebiotic effect was not found. An increase in the Eubacterium rectale population was found, and butyrate levels increased, which is of potential benefit to the host.


A new method for total surface measurement based on reflection ellipsometry is presented. By scanning the surface of the target under test with a focused laser beam, one can measure the surface topography and its material distribution simultaneously with high lateral resolution. Target topography is determined by ellipsometric measurement of local gradient angles gamma(x) and gamma(y) of the target's scanned surface elements. To identify the material, one measures the local complex refractive index n, too. The influence of beam focusing on the measurement results is discussed. We describe successful tests with various dielectric and metallic surfaces by use of He-Ne (632-nm) and He-Cd (442-nm) lasers.


Association rules, a class of important regularities in databases, have proven very useful in practical applications, but association-rule-mining algorithms tend to produce huge numbers of rules, most of which are of no interest. Users have considerable difficulty manually analyzing so many rules to identify the truly interesting ones. To solve that problem, we have developed a new approach to help them find interesting rules (in particular, unexpected rules) from a set of discovered association rules. This interestingness analysis system (IAS) leverages the user's existing domain knowledge to analyze discovered associations and then rank discovered rules according to various interestingness criteria, such as conformity and various types of unexpectedness. This article describes how we have implemented this technique and used it successfully in a number of applications.


The purpose of this study was to determine the role of the aortic and carotid baroreceptors in regulating blood volume in the conscious non-human primate. Eighteen control animals were surgically instrumented to permit the recording of blood pressure, pulse rate, and left atrial pressure. After a urethral catheter was inserted into the bladder, the animals were given an intravenous infusion equal to 20% of the estimated blood volume. Renal function was determined before and after the volume expansion. Nine monkeys received the same infusion after undergoing chronic sinoaortic denervation. The denervated animals responded with a potentiated diuresis and natriuresis. The control animals excreted 24% of the infused volume and 4% of the infused salt while the sinoaortic-denervated animals excreted a volume equal to 113% of that infused and an amount of sodium equal to 46% of that infused. We conclude that high-pressure receptors exert an inhibitory influence on whatever mechanisms are involved in the renal response to acute volume expansion.