Background: Giant cell tumors of bone are aggressive, potentially malignant lesions. Juxtaarticular giant cell tumours of lower end radius are common and present a special problem of reconstruction after tumor excision. Out of the various reconstructive procedures described, use of nonvascularised fibular autograft has been widely used with satisfactory functional results. Methods: Sixteen patients with a mean age of 20.2 years, with either Campanacci grade II or III histologically proven giant cell tumours of lower end radius were treated with wide excision and reconstruction with ipsilateral nonvascularised proximal fibular autograft. Host graft junction was fixed with intramedullary nail in 12 cases and DCP in last 4 cases. Wrist ligament reconstruction and fixation of the head of fibula with carpal bones using K-wires and primary cancellous iliac crest grafting at graft host junction with DCP was done in last 2 cases. Results: The follow up ranges from 2 - 5 years (mean 3.5 years). At last follow up, the average combined range of motion was 110° with range varying from 60-125°. The average grip strength was 39% in comparison to the contralateral side (range 21-88%). The average union time was 8 months (range 4-12 months). Sound union occurred in 5 months, where DCPs were used. There were 5 nonunions, one resorption of graft, 10 wrist subluxations (2 painful), one recurrence, 3 superficial infections, one wound dehiscence and one amputation. There was no case of graft fracture, metastasis, death or significant donor site morbidity. A total of 10 secondary procedures were required. Conclusions: Enbloc resection of giant cell tumours of lower end radius is a widely accepted method. Reconstruction with nonvascularised fibular graft, internal fixation with DCP with primary corticocancellous bone grafting with transfixation of the fibular head and wrist ligament reconstruction minimizes the problem and gives satisfactory functional results.


This thesis is a sociological account of the controversy that surrounds New Religious Movements with special emphasis on the role of the print media in sustaining the controversy. The research that is reported here was conducted primarily by means of content analysis of articles appearing in four leading British publications between 1975 and 1985. Results are compared with on going research in the U.S. and Belgium in an effort to gain some cross-cultural insight into the phenomenon. This thesis is not, however, confined to a presentation of statistical data for it attempts to make sense of the findings within an interpretative framework. The thesis begins with a discussion of certain key concepts and then reviews the authoritative works on New Religious Movements, showing that the dominant theories do not pay enough attention to the role of the mass media in the development and maintenance of crucial moral boundaries. The sociological literature on the topic of deviance in the mass media and the social construction of moral panics is reviewed in Chapter Two, with special attention being given to the relevance of this topic to the treatment of New Religious Movements. The methodology of content analysis is outlined and assessed for its usefulness in the social sciences in Chapter Three. The findings from the British study are presented in Chapter Four and compared with those from studies in both the U.S. and Belgium. Wide variations were found in the treatment of individual NRMs. The predominantly negative tenor of print media items about them was largely a function of the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of one particular movement; the tenor of items changed over time; but endorsement of anti-cultism was weaker than expected. The image of a control group of older minority religious movements was found to be significantly different from that of the NRMs. Finally, conclusions are drawn concerning the present study, with potentially productive areas for future research being highlighted.


The acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic is the greatest challenge to human kind in the 21st century. In 2009, around 400,000 children under 15yrs became infected with HIV. Almost all of these infections occured in Sub Saharan countries, and more than 90% are a result of mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) during pregnancy, labour and delivery, or breastfeeding. Transmission during pregnancy is 5 – 10%, during labor and delivery is 10 – 20% and during breastfeeding is 10 – 15%. Without interventions, there is a 20-45% chance that a baby born to an HIV infected mother will become infected. However the risk of MTCT can be reduced up to 2% if comprehensive approach of PMTCT will be put in place. MTCT of HIV has a dramatic deleterious impact on child survival and therefore PMTCT is of crucial importance. To assess knowledge and attitude on PMTCT of HIV among pregnant women attending Reproductive and Child Health clinic at Temeke District Hospital, Dar Es Salaam. A cross sectional study was conducted from October 2010 to January 2011 at Temeke District Hospital RCH Clinic in Dar-Es –Salaam. Structured questionnaires were administered to all pregnant women at the clinic who have had the opportunity to be counseled and tested for HIV in their antenatal clinics in different primary health centers in Temeke District. The information was then summarized into SPSS version 17.0, for windows and analyzed. Frequency distribution and two way tables were used to summarize the data. Results: A total of 351 pregnant women fulfilling the inclusion criteria were included in the study. Out of these, 237(67.5%) were HIV negative and 114 (32.5%) were HIV positive. The mean age was 27.2 and SD 6.3. Married participants formed 68.9% and 86.9% had primary education. Sixty nine respondents, 19.7% had good, 61.8% moderate and 18.5% had poor basic HIV/AIDS knowledge. Only 15.7% had good, 49.9% had moderate and 34.5% had poor knowledge on mother to child transmission of HIV and its prevention. The attitude towards the PMTCT of HIV was generally positive which comprised 318 (90.6%) of the respondents. Though the level of basic knowledge of HIV/AIDS was shown to be moderate to good in pregnant women, almost half of pregnant women even after counseling attained only moderate knowledge on PMTCT. Since there are still knowledge gaps on different but important aspects of PMTCT, there is a need for adequate counseling including more sessions during pregnancy, more public campaigns to encourage early ANC attendances.


Objective To compare overnight oxygen saturation, heart rate and the thermal environment of infants sleeping in an indigenous sleep device (wahakura) or bassinet to identify potential risks and benefits. Design Randomised controlled trial. Setting Family homes in low socio-economic areas in New Zealand. Patients 200 mainly Māori mothers and their infants. Interventions Participants received a wahakura or bassinet from birth. Main outcome measures Overnight oximetry, heart rate and temperature at 1 month. Results Intention-to-treat analysis for 83 bassinet and 84 wahakura infants showed no significant differences between groups for the mean time oxygen saturation (SpO2) was less than 94% (0.54 min, 95% CI -1.36 to 2.45) or less than 90% (0.22 min, 95% CI -0.56 to 1.00), the mean number of SpO2 dips per hour >5% (-0.19, 95% CI -3.07 to 2.69) or >10% (-0.41, 95% CI -1.63 to 0.81), mean heart rate (1.99 beats/min, 95% CI -1.02 to 4.99), or time shin temperature >36°C (risk ratio (RR): 0.63, 95% CI 0.13 to 2.99) or <34°C (RR: 0.89, 95% CI 0.61 to 1.30). A per-protocol analysis of 45 bassinet and 26 wahakura infants and an as-used analysis of 104 infants in a bassinet and 48 in a wahakura found no significant differences between groups for all outcome measures. Conclusions This indigenous sleep device is at least as safe as the currently recommended bassinet, which supports its use as a sleep environment that offers an alternative way of bed-sharing. Trial registration number Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN12610000993099.


The Baure language (Arawakan) can be described as polysynthetic, agglutinating, head-marking, and classifying. Verbs are the most complex parts of speech, with various levels of derivational and inflectional morphology. Baure nouns are involved in fewer morphological processes, such as number and locative case marking. However, productive compounding leads to additional morphological complexity of nouns.Our broad understanding of 'compounding' includes bound lexical morphemes, such as classifiers and locative stems. We argue that we are actually dealing with one structure in Baure, based on a right head that is modified by any component to its left, be it that the elements in the compounds are bound or free forms. The construction is structurally also similar to noun or classifier incorporation to verbs.


Incidents by suspected Russian submarines spying in Swedish and Finnish waters in 2014 and 2015, and the ample history of such incidents over the past sixty-five years involving Chinese, British, North Korean, American, and Soviet (and Russian) submarines, suggest undersea spying occurs with some regularity, yet the political and legal consequences are uncertain. While submarine intrusions into the territorial sea are not uncommon, the legal standards that govern such operations and the rights and duties of affected coastal states are murky.First, although it is apparent that submarine espionage violates the sovereignty of the coastal state in the territorial sea, it is unclear whether the operations are inconsistent with the law of the sea, or even international law more generally. Certainly undersea operations and spying in territorial waters without coastal state consent are not compatible with the regime of innocent passage in the law of the sea, but it is unclear whether they are lawful as "non-innocent" passage. Second, even if the affected coastal state has suffered a violation of its sovereignty, there is disagreement over lawful coastal state responses or countermeasures. Although the law of the sea recognizes coastal state prescriptive jurisdiction over vessels not in innocent passage in order to "require" them to leave the territorial sea, the authority to enforce such measures — especially against warships with sovereign immune status — is unresolved. Third, it is doubtful whether states may take recourse to forceful action or invoke the doctrine of self-defense against submarine intrusions, even though several states appear to have done so.These issues have particular salience in the Asia-Pacific region, where regional states are invested in development and expansion of submarine fleets. Sophisticated undersea technologies are entering service in states situated along an arc that stretches from the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean in the west to Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia in the east. Many of these states, such as those surrounding the South China Sea, are engaged in fierce maritime disputes. The lack of consensus concerning the legal standards of submarine espionage, combined with a lack of operational naval acumen and simmering maritime rivalries, raises the risks of conflict.The Article presents a roadmap of legal issues associated with submarine espionage in the territorial sea, and the conclusions will tend to generate greater confidence, predictability, and stability at sea. While submarine espionage does not appear to be inconsistent with the law of the sea, espionage in the territorial sea is injurious to the sovereignty of the coastal state. In response to such incursions, coastal states may, without impinging on their sovereign immune status, require submarines to leave the territorial sea. The use of force in self-defense, however, may not be invoked by the coastal state to compel compliance.


Abstract Mineralogical changes in a set of phyllosilicates, differing in their layer nature, chemical composition, octahedral character, and Al content of the tetrahedral sheet, were analyzed after hydrothermal reaction in an alkaline solution. The composition of the alkaline solution was selected to simulate the first stage of cement degradation [NaOH-KOH-Ca(OH)2]. The reaction products have been analyzed by XRD, 29Si and 27Al MAS NMR spectroscopy, SEM/EDX, and TEM. The results indicate that the main factor influencing the stability of the clays is the occupation of the octahedral sheet such that all trioctahedral members withstand the alkaline attack, whereas most of the dioctahedral clays suffer a complete dissolution and crystallization of new phases. Second, clays with Al in the tetrahedral sheet of their layers are shown to be less stable than those with a pure Si tetrahedral sheet.


This theoretical essay applies active audience theory, convergence theory, and contemporary understandings of Web logs to an analysis of knowledge production in the antidoping movement. Using the Floyd Landis doping case as an example it examines how cycling fans and other interested parties used Internet sites such as wikis and blogs to mount a challenge to the hegemony of institutional knowledge produced by organizations such as the World Anti Doping Agency and Union Cycliste Internationale. The essay concludes that Landis's so-called wiki defense—based as it was on popular challenges to received knowledge—was a successful contestation of normative procedures and institutional authority in the prosecution of doping allegations in international sport.


This article advances a critique of the 'neighbourhood effects' genre in urban studies, by arguing that an acceptance of the 'where you live affects your life chances' thesis, however well-intentioned, misses the key structural question of why people live where they do in cities. By examining the structural factors that give rise to differential life chances and the inequalities they produce, and by inverting the neighbourhood effects thesis to: your life chances affect where you live, the problem becomes one of understanding life chances via a theory of capital accumulation and class struggle in cities. Such a theory provides an understanding of the injustices inherent in letting the market (buttressed by the state) be the force that determines the cost of housing and therefore being the major determinant of where people live. The article draws on Marxist urban theory to contend that the residential mobility programs advocated by neighbourhood effects proponents stand on shaky ground, for if it is true that 'neighbourhood effects' exceed what would be predicted by poverty alone, moving the poor to a richer place would only eliminate that incremental difference, without addressing the capitalist institutional arrangements that create poverty.


[1] To provide quality-improved and consistent real-time global green vegetation fraction (GVF) data products that are suitable for use in operational numerical weather, climate, and hydrological models, necessary processing steps are applied to the output data stream from the advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR)-based NOAA operational global vegetation index (GVI) system. This paper reviewed the NOAA GVI data and described the algorithm to derive weekly updated real-time GVF from the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The methodology description focuses on algorithm justification in an operational production context. The described algorithm was implemented in the global vegetation processing system (GVPS). The new global GVF data sets include the multiyear GVF weekly climatology and the real-time weekly GVF. Compared to the old 5 year GVF monthly climatology currently used in the operational National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)/Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) weather and climate models, the new data sets provide an overall higher vegetation value, real-time surface vegetation information, and numerous other improvements. The new GVF data set quality was partially assured by validation against Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) NDVI at a few EOS land validation core sites and comparison with another independently processed NDVI data set. Impact of the new GVF data sets in numerical weather prediction (NWP) model was investigated using EMC mesoscale model simulations and concluded overall positive.


The purpose of this study was to better understand how teachers in Wales differ from their counterparts in England in regard to their engagement with educational research. In 2010, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) conducted a study of over 4,000 teachers in England. Many of the questions referred to their engagement in forms of educational research. In 2013, the same questions were posed to 216 teachers in Wales. A comparison of the findings indicate teachers in Wales were more likely to have recently undertaken action research than the England teachers. They also found others' research findings more useful in their teaching. Additionally, the teachers in Wales were more likely than England teachers to agree that they know where to find relevant research to inform their teaching and that they are able to understand and use the research. With recent concerns over educational research and initial teacher education (ITE) in Wales, these findings provide insight into how teachers in Wales perceive and engage with education research and may help to inform policies enabling teachers to produce and implement evidence based practices into their pedagogy.


We provide a uniform solution to the problem of synthesizing a finite-state distributed system. An instance of the synthesis problem consists of a system architecture and a temporal specification. The architecture is given as a directed graph, where the nodes represent processes (including the environment as a special process) that communicate synchronously through shared variables attached to the edges. The same variable may occur on multiple outgoing edges of a single node, allowing for the broadcast of data. A solution to the synthesis problem is a collection of finite-state programs for the processes in the architecture, such that the joint behavior of the programs satisfies the specification in an unrestricted environment. We define information forks, a comprehensive criterion that characterizes all architectures with an undecidable synthesis problem. The criterion is effective: for a given architecture with n processes and v variables, it can be determined in O(n/sup 2//spl middot/v) time whether the synthesis problem is decidable. We give a uniform synthesis algorithm for all decidable cases. Our algorithm works for all /spl omega/-regular tree specification languages, including the /spl mu/-calculus. The undecidability proof, on the other hand, uses only LTL or, alternatively, CTL as the specification language. Our results therefore hold for the entire range of specification languages from LTL/CTL to the /spl mu/-calculus.


In this article, an alternative scheme is proposed for the SLAM problem, where the state vector holds only the robot pose and the map is feature-based in the form of line segments. It is a lighter representation in comparison to occupancy grids and point maps, something necessary as large scale environments are addressed. The basic idea is to obtain one estimate of the robot's pose from an innovative dead-reckoning scheme and one from a laser scan matching algorithm. The fusion is done through a covariance intersection filter, avoiding the assumption that holds in Kalman filter that the cross correlations are zero. In this way, the uncertainty of pose estimate while the cross correlations are unknown and non zero are minimized. In the following section, the general framework of the SLAM algorithm is described. Then a short description of the dead-reckoning scheme, feature extraction scheme and the map matching algorithm are discussed. The loop with the covariance intersection fusion of the robot pose estimates are concluded. The description of the global map update algorithm and the results from representative experiments in real world experimental conditions are presented


The study was performed on bulk milk samples obtained monthly during the milking period from the Srednostaroplaninska and Teteven sheep breeds, reared on pasture in the region of Central Balkan mountains. The technological part of yogurt production was carried out at the laboratory. Extraction of fat from the milk samples was done per the Rose-Gottlieb method. The fatty acid content was established on a gas chromatograph with a flame-ionisation detector and a capillary column. Saturated fatty acids in the milk of Srednostaroplaninska and Teteven sheep had a relatively high content during the milking period – 71.793% and 70.698%, respectively, with myristic acid content of 10.778% and 10.873%, respectively. The total amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids in the examined milk was relatively low and with similar concentrations (4.145-4.437%) during the months of the grazing period. Monounsaturated acids were mostly represented by oleic acid (С18:1), and its values in the milk of Srednostaroplaninska and Teteven sheep was, respectively, 23.545% and 25.271%. No significant change in the content of fatty acids could be observed over the course of yogurt production, in comparison with raw sheep milk.


One of the main challenges in addressing Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) in designing systems is to take into account their interdependencies and mutual impacts. For this reason, they cannot be considered in isolation and a careful balance and tradeoff among them should be established. This makes it a difficult task to select design decisions and features that lead to the satisfaction of all different NFRs in the system, which becomes even more difficult when the complexity of a system grows. In this paper, we introduce an approach based on fuzzy logic and decision support systems that helps to identify different design alternatives that lead to higher overall satisfaction of NFRs in the system. This is achieved by constructing a model of the NFRs and then performing analysis on the model. To build the model, we use a modified version of the NFR UML profile which we have introduced in our previous works, and using model transformation techniques we automate the analysis of the model.


Quantum mechanics arose to explain 'wobbles' in predicted effects of Newtonian physics, such as the stability of electron orbitals. Similarly, scientifically verified phenomena in the field of neuroscience which contradict known theories of brain function, could give weight and credibility to neuroquantology, stimulating new research and discovery. The existence of consciousness outside the physical brain, often recounted anecdotally in various forms, if verified, could be such a phenomenon. Accounts of 'Out of Body Experiences' (OBEs), often incorporating 'Near Death Experiences' (NDEs) have accumulated over many years, with believers in the empirical actuality of the OBE/NDE, and sceptics entrenched. After an overview of explanations and theories on both sides, with counter-arguments, we make the case for a new approach, for identifying verifiable cases, if any. This would allow critical appraisal of evidence, according to scientific methodology, though with certain inescapable limitations. Using a specific, much-cited case, we show how distorted accounts of NDEs may be used to support supposedly 'scientific' arguments. We propose an algorithm, to discount unsuitable cases, identify verifiable features, and allow further reputable scientific study, and an online cache, of suitable cases. Verifying out-of-brain consciousness would stimulate new technology, for medical science, and even communication between brains – and new science to explain it, conceivably using quantum models, as it's impossible according to current neuroscience. It would advance arguments about defining death, even survival after death. However slim the chance of verifying OBEs, the potential benefits and advances in scientific and biomedical knowledge make the attempt worthwhile.


Abstract
 Decline of biodiversity, especially in tropical areas and rainforests, due to human activity is a serious global issue. Recovery programs, including reintroductions, are one means of active species protection and biodiversity preservation. The Sumatran Laughingthrush Garrulax bicolor (SL), a little known passerine endemic to Sumatra Island, is currently suffering from serious population decline due to the intensity of the illegal wildlife trade and habitat loss in the region. Most local subpopulations have been extirpated and those remaining have been reduced, thus, urgent need for conservation has arisen. In this study, we carried out the soft-release of rehabilitated SLs, originating from the wild and kept in captivity. We released four SL pairs (N=8 individuals) in total and, by using radio-telemetry (VHF; <2 g tail-mounted tags); we assessed their survival rate and movement patterns. During the post-release period only one bird was monitored for the full, predetermined criterion period of three weeks for survival rate and site fidelity assessment and one death was confirmed directly. Affinity to the release site, defined by a 2 km radius around the release aviary, was lower for females, which left the release site within the first week after release leaving their fates unknown, compared with males which remained at the release site for up to three times longer. Therefore, only the males' home range sizes were calculated. As a standardised measure, only the first six days following release were included and 6-day home ranges were estimated as follows: 35.18±8.5 ha (mean±SE) with range 17.25–50.95 ha (N=4 males). We did not find significant differences in the distances of males from the release aviary with increasing days following release. As far as we know, this is the first field study providing novel knowledge of the recovery ability of the Sumatran Laughingthrush and of its post-release behaviour, which are crucial for species protection management.


Stuart Murray, Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. isbn 978-1-84631-092-8 pbk 236pp £16.95 Stuart Murray's Representing Autism is less about autism than it is about the culture that creates the idea of autism. It is less about the experiences of people with autism than it is about how celebrities, journalists, parents of people with autism, and experts create narratives about autism and thus construct its meaning. It is less about trying to discover answers to autism than it is about critically examining the kinds of questions posed in relation to autism. In this sense autism becomes alens through which to examine dominant culture or, as many autistic activists often put it, the NTs (neurotypicals). This is abook about normals, and about autism as normals construct it. It is about the multiple and shifting faces of autism the idea. Perhaps the best way to explain the contribution of Representing Autism is to share some of its findings: - Autism is typically characterized as adifference from the norm, and is experienced by the dominant culture as a "worry and afear" (3). - Autism is a "current concern" and also an "alien phenomenon, something that seems to have come from nowhere" (2). - Autism is popular; it appears frequently in news accounts, magazine articles, television and radio talk shows, theatre productions, and film. - Autism is often characterized as having atragic impact on the family; it is even said to ruin families (15). - Autism, like other developmental disabilities, has received relatively little attention from the field of Disability Studies where physical impairment dominates scholarly discussions. - Autism serves the purpose of helping to define normalcy; "fascination with the subject must always be in the terms of the majority audience" (13). - "That which is known about autism-by anyone, in any field-is probably in its infancy." While there may be agreement that there are neurological bases for autism and that there could be agenetic aspect to it, "there are countless unknowns" (21). - Autism invites akind of voyeurism, where "the person is viewed as the complex host of the condition" and is "open to study" (31). - Popular culture accounts of autism paint it as an assault on children and primarily as acondition of children. - Autism is popularly framed as aunitary condition to be found and eradicated, to be discovered and cured. These are just ahandful of the dozens of critical, interpretive findings that Murray puts forward in Representing Autism. As Ihave written in my own work on the sociology of autism, metaphor is ubiquitous, beginning with the very term autism, which implies that the person is an island to him or herself. More recently, news accounts characterize autism as an epidemic. And in professional circles, it is often said that the person labeled autistic is "mind blind" (i.e. unable to imagine that others may have different perspectives from their own). These are some of autism's metaphors and it is worth noting that science is nearly as guilty as popular culture of generating and perpetuating metaphors, and simultaneously of ignoring or minimizing the importance of the autistic perspective. As Murray explains, the one consistent feature of films and other creative representations about autism is that in nearly all of them, the person with autism and the perspective of the person with autism are nowhere to be found. Raymond, in the film Rain Man, displays remarkable skills of calculation, for example-this reaches an absurd level when Raymond is shown naming the number of toothpicks that fall on the floor at adiner-yet viewers never learn what Raymond feels when sent off on atrain back to institutional exile. …


Abstract Context. Wildlife detection dogs have been used globally in environmental monitoring. However, their effectiveness in the Australian context has been only minimally researched. Increased understanding of detection dog accuracy and efficacy is required for their inclusion in survey guidelines used by proponents of referred actions potentially impacting Australia's threatened mammals. Evaluation of new methods is also important for advancing population monitoring, particularly for threatened species. Aims. To determine the efficacy of wildlife detection dogs as a survey tool for low-density, cryptic species, using northern (Dasyurus hallucatus) and spotted-tailed (D. maculatus) quolls as subjects. We compared detection dogs, human search effort and camera trapping results, in simulated accuracy and efficacy trials, and field surveys. Methods. Two wildlife detection dogs' scores for sensitivity (ability to identify a target species scat) and specificity (ability to distinguish target from non-target species scats) were calculated during accuracy trials. The dogs were tested using 288 samples, of which 32 were targets, where northern and spotted-tailed quoll scat were the targets in separate trials. Survey efficacy was determined following completing 12 simulated surveys (6 per target species) involving a single, randomly placed scat sample in a 1–1.5 ha search area. During the northern quoll simulated surveys the dogs' survey efficacy was compared with that of a human surveyor. The dogs also undertook field surveys for both northern and spotted-tailed quolls, in conjunction with camera trapping for comparison. Key results. During accuracy trials the dogs had an average sensitivity and specificity respectively of 100% and 98.4% for northern quoll, and 100% and 98% for spotted-tailed quoll. Their average search time in efficacy trials for northern quoll was 11.07 min (significantly faster than the human surveyor), and 2.98 min for spotted-tailed quoll in the 1–1.5 ha search areas. During field surveys, northern quoll scats were detected at sites where camera trapping failed to determine their presence. No spotted-tailed quoll scat was detected by the dogs during field surveys. Conclusions. Trained and experienced detection dogs can work very accurately and efficiently, which is vital to their field success. Detection dogs are therefore capable of detecting evidence of species presence where alternative methods may be unsuccessful. Implications. Our study supports the future use of highly trained detection dogs for wildlife surveys and monitoring in Australia. Our results demonstrate that detection dogs can be highly accurate and are a beneficial stand-alone or complimentary method.


Functional size measurement is considered a complicated, tedious and time-consuming task when performed manually. Automating FSM is one solution to help in applying it and using it. Another solution is designing simple and easy-to-apply FSM procedures. The Synchronous Languages (SL) are built on solid mathematical foundations and used for correctly designing safety-critical reactive real-time systems. They are known for their strong semantic soundness, allowing the design of explicit safely-constructed formal models where the interpretation of a model is unique and reader-independent. These properties are very useful in the context of FSM because they help create simple FSM procedures and hence speed up the measurement process. In this paper, we propose a fast functional size measurement (FSM) procedure, based on the COSMIC method-ISO 19761, for safety-critical real-time systems described with the synchronous language LUSTRE.


We present a new video projection technique to defeat camcorder piracy in movie theaters using the newly emerged display paradigm of temporal psychovisual modulation. The technique exploits the difference in image formation mechanisms between human eyes and digital cameras: in the human visual system, images are formed via continuous integration of the light field, whereas digital video acquisition is based on discrete sampling of light sensors. A movie frame is decomposed into multiple so-called shale frames such that, when these shale frames are displayed at a frame rate higher than 60 Hz, the human viewers will experience normal movie presentation without any noticeable artifacts, but the video frames captured by camcorders will contain severe, highly objectionable artifacts, depriving the pirated video contents of any commercial values.


The purpose of the thesis was to investigate if integrity promoting care improves functions in demented patients over time. The Erikson (1982) theory of "eight stages of man" was used as a basis for training of staff in a three-month intervention study (I-VI) at a nursing home ward. A collective living unit where staff had had support in the performance of the delivery of care was also evaluated and compared with a nursing home in a long-term study (VII). Patients, relatives, staff, and the environments were investigated. Cerebrospinal fluid concentrations of somatostatin increased, and reduction of distractability, anxiety and confusion was seen in the intervention group (I) in contrast to controls. In the collective living group (VII) EEG activities indicated a reduction of supposed dementia induced changes. Better motor and social ability, some improved intellectual ability, more alertness and reduced signs of depression were seen (I, II, VII). Patients expressed more autonomy (IV, VII) and initiatives (II-VII) and showed a lot of competence (V) in conversations. Five patients (V) showed patterns of behaviour which seemed to reflect life-long characteristics in spite of their severe dementia. The improvement in the patients' functions can be attributed to the physical environment and the integrity promoting care, since the medical treatment of the patients remained unchanged. In the thesis medical, psychological, and nursing sciences were connected in a complementary process. The results were congruent, and indicate that patients in the care of staff who had had training and support, declined less than controls.


A novel optimistic concurrency control (OCC) protocol for distributed high-performance transaction systems is presented. Unlike other proposals for OCC in distributed systems, this scheme limits the number of restarts by acquiring locks to guarantee a failed transaction a successful second execution. Lock acquisition and validation are imbedded in the commit protocol in order to avoid any extra messages. Deadlocks are avoided by requesting all locks at once before performing validation. The protocol is fully distributed and employs parallel validation and lock acquisition. A main advantage compared with distributed locking schemes is that locks are held only during commit processing in general, thus considerably reducing the degree of lock contention. As first simulation results have confirmed, this is of particular benefit for high-performance transaction-processing complexes with fast processors.<<ETX>>


A new technological epoch is underway – the so-called Machine Age –reflecting advances in artificial intelligence, digitalisation and Big Data. Some commentators have claimed that this epoch is different from previous ones in that it will produce large-scale technological unemployment, while others argue the contrary. Only time will judge who is right on this crucial debate. But the Machine Age will lead to major shifts in the demand and supplies of skills, especially digital skills. In this paper, I review the available crosscountry evidence on the distribution of such digital skills across the adult populations within and across a large sample of OECD countries. I also review the evidence on participation rates in adult learning. Finally, I outline how education, training and labour market policies could help expand the supply of digital skills.


The success of adversarial formulations in machine learning has brought renewed motivation for smooth games. In this work, we focus on the class of stochastic Hamiltonian methods and provide the first convergence guarantees for certain classes of stochastic smooth games. We propose a novel unbiased estimator for the stochastic Hamiltonian gradient descent (SHGD) and highlight its benefits. Using tools from the optimization literature we show that SHGD converges linearly to the neighbourhood of a stationary point. To guarantee convergence to the exact solution, we analyze SHGD with a decreasing step-size and we also present the first stochastic variance reduced Hamiltonian method. Our results provide the first global non-asymptotic last-iterate convergence guarantees for the class of stochastic unconstrained bilinear games and for the more general class of stochastic games that satisfy a "sufficiently bilinear" condition, notably including some non-convex non-concave problems. We supplement our analysis with experiments on stochastic bilinear and sufficiently bilinear games, where our theory is shown to be tight, and on simple adversarial machine learning formulations.


The British National Health Service (NHS) has been involved in profound transformation to keep pace with, and shape, changes in our society. Innovation has been driven by the necessity to transform old hierarchical and paternalistic models into a modern health system, moving care closer to home, mobilizing and tailoring services to individual patients' and their carers' needs through the introduction of radically new services. This paper explores a particular element of ongoing NHS reform: Practice Based Commissioning (PBC). Based on first findings of a research project called "Design in Practice. Change and Flexibility within Health Providers" funded by the EPSRC research centre HACIRIC, the authors argue that PBC formally recognizes important forms of grassroots service design, but also introduces additional challenges. The project is based on case studies within the North West Strategic Health Area (UK), and the study of PBC frameworks and everyday PBC practices in this specific context is explored and contrasted with concurrent efforts to bring service design into the public sector, which are focusing on co-design and experience-based design methodologies. It is suggested that these have the potential to help NHS providers address NHS policy demands to use patient feedback in transforming services (DH, 2009), and the authors reflect on possibilities for potentiation through the application of Service Design methods in this context.


Although scientists have warned of possible social perils resulting from climate change, the impacts of long-term climate change on social unrest and population collapse have not been quantitatively investigated. In this study, high-resolution paleo-climatic data have been used to explore at a macroscale the effects of climate change on the outbreak of war and population decline in the preindustrial era. We show that long-term fluctuations of war frequency and population changes followed the cycles of temperature change. Further analyses show that cooling impeded agricultural production, which brought about a series of serious social problems, including price inflation, then successively war outbreak, famine, and population decline successively. The findings suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war–peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change. The findings also imply that social mechanisms that might mitigate the impact of climate change were not significantly effective during the study period. Climate change may thus have played a more important role and imposed a wider ranging effect on human civilization than has so far been suggested. Findings of this research may lend an additional dimension to the classic concepts of Malthusianism and Darwinism.


A galvanostatic method was used to study the influence of hydrostatic pressure on the cathodic protection of carbon steel in seawater. The polarization and electrochemical behavior of Q235 carbon steel was studied after being covered with calcareous deposits. Surface analysis was performed to investigate the growth mechanism of the calcareous deposits under various hydrostatic pressures. Although there was no obvious effect of the hydrostatic pressure on the polarization potential decay, the protectiveness of calcareous deposits showed significant variation under the different pressures. The results of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and linear polarization resistance (LPR) indicate that the electrochemical reaction resistance Rct on the polarized metal surface initially increased with the increasing pressure and then decreased, with a maximum value at 2 MPa. The protection factor Fp of the deposits decreased when the pressure was higher than 2 MPa. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses illustrated that parts of the calcium lattice positions were substituted by magnesium ions in the initial crystallization of calcium carbonate under 5 MPa pressure or even higher, which resulted in a crystal structure transformation from aragonite to dolomite. The order degree d of dolomite decreased under high pressure due to the low free energy of the lattice.


This study of the boundaries of personal property has an inward and an outward perspective, with the intellectual emphasis on the latter. The inward-looking inquiry considers shares as items of personal property. Nowadays those who think of themselves as shareholders often stand one step removed from the share itself. They hold what this book christens a sub-share. This part of the book asks in what sense shares and sub-shares can be conceived to be things, how those things are alienated, and how they are protected in litigation. The outward-looking inquiry then asks whether personal property can be contemplated as a sub-category of the law of things and, more particularly, as the law of all things locatable in space, alienable, or vindicable in court. The outward inquiry considers three boundaries. Within the law of property the line between realty and personalty proves relatively uncontroversial; the second boundary lies between property and obligations; the third between wealth and non-wealth. The second boundary is the main concern. Respect for it necessitates a differentiation between the law of property in the strict sense and the all-encompassing law of wealth, even where the consequence might be to exclude shares and sub-shares from the law of property. In maintaining the value of careful proprietary taxonomy and in reviving the underlying concepts on which it depends, this book opposes modern scepticism as to the possibility and desirability of precision in legal classification. In these commitments it could fairly be styled a post-modern study of personal property. Winner of the SLS Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2006 - Second Prize.


We use large-scale cosmological simulations to estimate the mass-to-light ratio of galaxy systems as a function of scale, and compare the results with observations of galaxies, groups, clusters, and superclusters of galaxies. We find remarkably good agreement between observations and simulations. Specifically, we find that the simulated mass-to-light ratio increases with scale on small scales and flattens to a constant value on large scales, as suggested by observations. We find that while mass typically follows light on large scales, high-overdensity regions, such as rich clusters and superclusters of galaxies, exhibit higher M/LB values than average, while low-density regions exhibit lower M/LB values; high-density regions are thus antibiased in M/LB, with mass more strongly concentrated than blue light. This is true despite the fact that the galaxy mass density is unbiased or positively biased relative to the total mass density in these regions. The M/LB antibias is likely due to the relatively old age of the high-density regions, where light has declined significantly since their early formation time, especially in the blue band, which traces recent star formation. Comparing the simulated results with observations, we place a powerful constraint on the mass density of the universe; using, for the first time, the entire observed mass-to-light function from galaxies to superclusters, we find Ω = 0.16 ± 0.05.


This paper proposes a client warehouse application over Microsoft Dynamics Navision 5.0 enterprise resource planning system. The application has been created to meet criteria and constraints stated by real world company, or in terms of application itself, the future user. By means of effectiveness, created application shortens or eliminates some warehouse activities. Employees can easily roam in warehouse and create physical inventory, transfer, intake or expend goods using PDAs with WiFi connection to database server. Furthermore, if WiFi signal is not strong enough to cover the whole working area of the warehouse, there is a possibility to synchronize essential data between source server database and local device compact database. Usage of barcode scanner makes every operation even more effective in terms of activity time consumption.


Prediction of high magnitude flows is of interest in many hydrological applications such as operation of flood control reservoirs, flood forecasting and gated spillways. Of the various types of existing streamflow prediction approaches, data driven models (such as ANN) are increasingly being preferred over the traditional conceptual models due to their simplicity, fast speed and ease of use. For models that consider only historical streamflow data, an attempt has been made to design a robust model over a wide range of streamflow magnitudes. The model inputs are the immediate past streamflow data which generally do not predict the typically high flows well, particularly for large lead times. In this study, the flow range is divided into three regions (low, medium and high flow regions) and the attributes are decided based on the underlying hydrological process of the flow region. A flow forecasting model is applied for each flow region, using only the historical streamflow data as input. The proposed approach is implemented in Tryggevaelde Catchment (Denmark) for 1- and 3-lead days, using the Support Vector Machine (SVM), which yields promising results, particularly for high flows in a 3-lead day model.


Sustainable water management in a river basin requires knowledge of the water availability and water requirements of the basin in the present and future for various purposes. The complexity of the water system in the region can be understood by calculating the regional water balance in a distributed scale considering the factors that affect it.  Water balance is defined as the net change in water, taking into account all the inflows to and outflows from a hydrologic system. Spatial variation due to distributed landuse, soil  texture,  topography,  groundwater  level,  and hydrometeorological conditions should be accounted for in the water balance estimation. However, conventional spatially and temporally lumped estimates of water balance do not help much  in  the planning and development of water  resources in the  water  shed.  This  is  an  important  and  current  issue  in  the  socially  and  economically  valuable Amaravathi  River  Basin  of  Tamil  Nadu.    In  this  study,  a  spatially  semidistributed  water  balance model was  developed  to  simulate mean monthly  hydrological  processes  using  landuse,  soil  texture, topography,  and  hydrometeorological  data  as  input  parameters  in  the  Amaravathi  River  Basin,  a semiarid  region  of Tamil Nadu  in  India.  It  is  a  physically  based methodology  for  estimation  of  the average  spatial  distribution  of water balance components. This model  can  be  applicable  in  a  public domain which can facilitate decision making. The water balance model is developed using SCS – CN (Soil  Conservation  Service  –  Curve  Number)  model  to  derive  the  runoff  component  and  FAOPM (Food  and  Agriculture  Organization  –  Penman  Monteith)  model  to  derive  the  evapotranspiration component spatially with the help of remote sensing and GIS techniques.


The international trading system, embodied in the World Trade Organization (WTO), is rightly celebrated as one of the great successes of international cooperation. The success of that system, however, has not been matched in other important areas of international policymaking, including environmental, labor, human rights, and competition policy. In recent years, the trading system has come under stress because the impact of its success has been felt in these "non-trade" areas. The liberalization of trade and the establishment of multilateral trading rules, for example, have made it more difficult for nation-states to impose trade sanctions on states that fail to undertake certain environmental measures. Governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and individuals concerned about the impact of the trading system on these non-trade issues have challenged the WTO to address this concern. As of yet no consensus has emerged on the question of how to balance existing trade interests against these other interests. This Article proposes a strategy that would allow states to discuss trade and non-trade interests in a single forum. With a single place for the negotiation of a range of issues, states will be able to negotiate rules to govern the balance between trade and non-trade concerns. No such forum exists today. The best starting point for this effort is the WTO. The WTO has the advantage of being an established and successful organization that has proven itself capable of managing complex negotiations and administering the resulting agreements. It also has the advantage of a well functioning dispute resolution system. The primary problem with the WTO as the single home for these diverse issues is the fact that it is a trade organization, staffed by trade specialists, and prone to favoring trade interests over others. If it is to be an effective and accepted forum for non-trade issues, this trade bias must be eliminated. To overcome the trade bias of the institution, this Article advances a novel proposal to create autonomous, topical departments within the WTO. Each department would represent a single area, such as trade, environment, human rights, and so on. The departments would organize rounds of negotiation within their issue areas, leading to WTO obligations. In addition, to permit negotiation across issue areas, periodic "Mega-Rounds" would be convened in which trade concerns could be balanced against, for example, environmental concerns. The resulting agreements from the Mega-Rounds would also represent WTO obligations. The departmental structure would avoid the problems of a trade bias within the organization and retain the advantages of specialization. At the same time, the organization would have a mechanism to undertake the difficult but critical tasks of determining how trade and non-trade interests will interact.


Abstract Objectives: The ternary complex is composed of insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-I, IGF binding protein (IGFBP)-3 and acid labile subunit (ALS). Growth hormone (GH) promotes IGFBP-3 proteolysis to release free IGF-I, ALS, and IGFBP-3 fragments. Our aim was to determine whether elevated GH levels during GH stimulation testing would trigger IGFBP-3 proteolysis. Design: This prospective study of 10 short prepubertal children (height standard deviation score –2.37±0.31) used arginine and GH releasing hormone stimulation to study dynamic changes in the ternary complex moieties. IGFBP-3 was measured in two assays: a radioimmunoassay (RIA) that detects both cleaved and intact IGFBP-3; and an immunochemiluminescence assay (ICMA) that detects only intact IGFBP-3. Results: IGFBP-3 measured by RIA increased by 19% (p<0.05), while IGFBP-3 measured by ICMA did not significantly increase (6.1%). Conclusion: The significant increase in IGFBP-3 measured by RIA, but not ICMA, provides evidence of IGFBP-3 proteolysis during acute GH stimulation.


Background: One of the essential issues in doctor-patient relationship is the matter of telling the truth of cancer diagnosis to patients. This is not only important from an ethical standpoint, but also can have legal implications. Thus, truth-telling and its associated factors are of great importance especially in cancer patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate factors effective in doctors' telling the truth to their patients. Methods: The statistical population included specialists and subspecialists working in the field of cancer treatment in Tehran. Overall, 161 questionnaires, designed for our study, were gathered and evaluated. Results: According to our study, 87.6% of the responders would tell the truth to their patients, while 12.4% wouldn't do so. They believed that the best person to tell the truth to the patient is the physician or the psychiatrist specialized in this field. Ninety-two percent of physicians felt the need for developing a guideline on educating patients. There was a significant difference between oncologists and non-oncologists in terms of tendency to tell the truth, with non-oncologists showing more tendency. Most of the doctors preferred to tell the truth to their middle-aged (51–70 years) patients rather than to their younger or older patients. Conclusion: Only 25.5% of physicians in our study had the policy to tell the truth to the majority of their patients, and almost all of them felt the need for having a formal guideline regarding informing and educating cancer patients. This highlights the significance of cultural-religious context of our country and the importance of having a practical guideline to educate our physicians.


Taxation through its impact on entrepreneurial activity, the attraction of Foreign Direct Investments, as well as disposable income and savings can be a crucial factor for economic growth. In this context, the paper examines the role of taxation as a determinant of macroeconomic stabilization in the geopolitical area of South-Eastern Europe, thus the area of Europe, which was affected in a great extent by the global financial crisis with a time lag (3rd Quarter 2008). The analysis will be based on the presentation of the current institutional tax framework prevailing in South-Eastern European Countries and focusing on the countries of the last and upcoming European Enlargement (Bulgaria, Croatia). The conceptual analysis will be accompanied by an econometric model that will test empirically the statistical significance of tax revenues on GDP of these countries.


As wealth inequality increases, the importance of parental financial transfers for socioeconomic attainment may also rise. Using data from the 2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics Rosters and Transfers Module, this study investigates two questions: how parental financial transfers for education have changed over time, and what the relationship is between these transfers and adult socioeconomic outcomes. Results suggest that transfers for education have increased, have become more commonplace, and have become more dependent on parental wealth over time. Holding constant several individual and parental measures, the relationship between parental transfers for school and adult socioeconomic attainment is positive. This relationship holds when using three-stage least squares models to account for potential endogeneity of financial transfers for school. Overall, results support arguments that parental financial transfers for education facilitate the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic standing.


We present an exploratory study of science communication via online video through various UK-based YouTube science content providers. We interviewed five people responsible for eight of the most viewed and subscribed professionally generated content channels. The study reveals that the immense potential of online video as a science communication tool is widely acknowledged, especially regarding the possibility of establishing a dialogue with the audience and of experimenting with different formats. It also shows that some online video channels fully exploit this potential whilst others focus on providing a supplementary platform for other kinds of science communication, such as print or TV.


Objective To understand arrangements for healthcare organisations' declarations of staff interest in Scotland and England in the context of current recommendations. Design Cross-sectional study of a random selection of National Health Service (NHS) hospital registers of interest by two independent observers in England, all NHS Boards in Scotland and a random selection of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in England. Setting NHS Trusts in England (NHSE), NHS Boards in Scotland, CCGs in England, and private healthcare organisations. Participants Registers of declarations of interest published in a random sample of 67 of 217 NHS Trusts, a random sample of 15 CCGs of in England, registers held by all 14 NHS Scotland Boards and a purposeful selection of private hospitals/clinics in the UK. Main outcome measures Adherence to NHSE guidelines on declarations of interests, and comparison in Scotland. Results 76% of registers published by Trusts did not routinely include all declaration of interest categories recommended by NHS England. In NHS Scotland only 14% of Boards published staff registers of interest. Of these employee registers (most obtained under Freedom of Information), 27% contained substantial retractions. In England, 96% of CCGs published a Gifts and Hospitality register, with 67% of CCG staff declaration templates and 53% of governor registers containing full standard NHS England declaration categories. Single organisations often held multiple registers lacking enough information to interpret them. Only 35% of NHS Trust registers were organised to enable searching. None of the private sector organisations studied published a comparable declarations of interest register. Conclusion Despite efforts, the current system of declarations frequently lacks ability to meaningfully obtain complete healthcare professionals' declaration of interests.


We use femtosecond mid-infrared pump-probe spectroscopy to investigate the effects of the osmolyte trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) on the structural dynamics of water. As a comparison, we also investigate the effects of other amphiphilic molecules: tetramethylurea (TMU), urea, proline, and N-methylacetamide (NMA). Our measurements show that TMAO has the unique property of increasing the orientational mobility of part of the water molecules in the solution, indicating that TMAO reorganizes the hydrogen-bond network of water in a special way. We also investigate the influence of the simultaneous presence in a solution of TMAO and urea, and of TMAO and NMA. It turns out that the effects of TMAO and urea are additive, whereas those of TMAO and NMA are nonadditive.


The purpose of this study was to use fast geophysical measurements of soil magnetic susceptibility (κ) as supplementary data for chemical measurements of selected light rare earth elements (REEs) in soil. In order to ensure diversity in soil conditions, anthropogenic conditions and types of land use, seven areas were selected, all located in regions subjected to past or present industrial pollution. Magnetometric parameters were measured using a selected magnetic sensor that was specially designed for measurements of soil cores and were used to classify collected soil cores into six distinctive types. The analysis of REEs concentrations in soil was carried out taking into account the grouping of collected soil samples based on the type of study area (open, forested and mountain), and additionally on the measured magnetometric parameters of collected soil cores. A use of magnetometric measurements provided different, but complementary to chemical measurements information, which allowed to obtain deeper insight on REEs concentrations in soils in studied areas.


Generative policies have recently been researched to provide a method for next generation security policies. They are created using either traditional machine learning techniques or, more recently, inductive learning of answer set programs. The latter method is targeted to the learning of Answer Set Grammars (ASG), a new notion of generative policy model for security policies that has the benefit of transparent explainability of the learned outcomes. This paper proposes a military scenario based on logistical resupply from a military base to coalition forces located in a nearby urban area or city. We describe the scenario and accompanying policy such that the context of the resupply missions (and therefore the policy) changes over time. The set of policies and related changes over time have been manually defined using a set of human created rules to replicate how security policies would currently be created by humans in such scenarios. We show how inductive learning of answer set programs can successfully learn ASG generative policy models that capture the human-driven rules from just example traces and decisions made at different time points and with respect to different contextual situations that can arise during the resupply mission. These results demonstrate the utility of ASG generative policy as a method for modelling human-driven policy rules.


Characterizing the architecture of bipartite networks is increasingly used as a framework to study biotic interactions within their ecological context and to assess the extent to which evolutionary constraint shape them. Orchid mycorrhizal symbioses are particularly interesting as they are viewed as more beneficial for plants than for fungi, a situation expected to result in an asymmetry of biological constraint. This study addressed the architecture and phylogenetic constraint in these associations in tropical context. We identified a bipartite network including 73 orchid species and 95 taxonomic units of mycorrhizal fungi across the natural habitats of Reunion Island. Unlike some recent evidence for nestedness in mycorrhizal symbioses, we found a highly modular architecture that largely reflected an ecological barrier between epiphytic and terrestrial subnetworks. By testing for phylogenetic signal, the overall signal was stronger for both partners in the epiphytic subnetwork. Moreover, in the subnetwork of epiphytic angraecoid orchids, the signal in orchid phylogeny was stronger than the signal in fungal phylogeny. Epiphytic associations are therefore more conservative and may co‐evolve more than terrestrial ones. We suggest that such tighter phylogenetic specialization may have been driven by stressful life conditions in the epiphytic niches. In addition to paralleling recent insights into mycorrhizal networks, this study furthermore provides support for epiphytism as a major factor affecting ecological assemblage and evolutionary constraint in tropical mycorrhizal symbioses.


Most data involving organizations are hierarchical in nature and often contain variables measured at multiple levels of analysis. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) is a relatively new and innovative statistical method that organizational scientists have used to alleviate some common problems associated with multilevel data, thus advancing our understanding of organizations. This article presents a broad overview of HLM's logic through an empirical analysis and outlines how its use can strengthen sport management research. For illustration purposes, we use both HLM and the traditional linear regression model to analyze how organizational and individual factors in Major League Baseball impact individual players' salaries. A key implication is that, depending on the method, parameter estimates differ because of the multilevel data structure and, thus, findings differ. We explain these differences and conclude by presenting theoretical discussions from strategic management and consumer behavior to provide a ...


Margin policy is used by regulators for the purpose of inhibiting exceSSIve volatility and stabilizing the stock market in the long run. The effect of this policy on the stock market is widely tested empirically. However, most prior studies are limited in the sense that they investigate the margin requirement for the overall stock market rather than for individual stocks, and the time periods examined are confined to the pre-1974 period as no change in the margin requirement occurred post-1974 in the U.S. This thesis intends to address the above limitations by providing a direct examination of the effect of margin requirement on return, volume, and volatility of individual companies and by using more recent data in the Canadian stock market. Using the methodologies of variance ratio test and event study with conditional volatility (EGARCH) model, we find no convincing evidence that change in margin requirement affects subsequent stock return volatility. We also find similar results for returns and trading volume. These empirical findings lead us to conclude that the use of margin policy by regulators fails to achieve the goal of inhibiting speculating activities and stabilizing volatility.


We have applied Mueller matrix ellipsometry to assess the change in the state of polarization of a light beam that has double passed the ocular media and is scattered at the fundus of the human eye in vivo. At several positions in the pupil plane, which together cover the area of the dilated pupil, Mueller matrices are assessed. From them the magnitude of the retardation and the orientation of the eigenvector are calculated. The properties of the retardation process are surveyed by measuring the retardation along a horizontal meridian as a function of wavelength, density of visual pigment, and location of retinal fixation. Furthermore, photographs are taken from the polarization patterns on the iris with circularly polarized light. We posit that the cornea behaves as a biaxial crystal with its fastest principal axis normal to its surface and its slowest nasally downward. The retardation of light by a model eye with such a cornea is calculated, and the results are compared with the data.


The role of the Arab diasporas in the political processes of their home countries has changed significantly since the 2011 uprisings. The article aims to analyse these changes and assess the impact that diasporas have had on the democratisation processes of the post-2011 transitions. It does so by looking at examples of both direct and indirect diasporas' participation in the politics of their home countries during and after the uprisings through mechanisms such as lobbying, campaigning, national dialogue initiatives, and voting in the parliamentary elections. The background to the social, economic and political contributions of the Arab diasporas before 2011 highlights the multiple identities of the diaspora communities abroad as well as the changes to their inclusion from disputed members of the regimes' opposition to a more active civil society. With the shifting social and political environment of the last decade, the examples demonstrate the important political role that diasporas could play in cooperation and bridge building, both locally and internationally. However, they also demonstrate the obstacles and severe limitations they face in their inclusion in the governments' transition to democratic governance. Transnational repression and a negative reception context are limiting factors affecting the ability of diasporas to fully participate as active citizens in both their host and home countries. As an important index for democratisation in the region, the conclusions drawn in the article could offer new perspectives on shaping and constructing regional politics and local regimes. These constitute pressing issues for the future and the evolution of democracy in the region, especially within the post-war reconstruction of countries such as Syria, Libya and Yemen, and the democratic transitions in Tunisia and Egypt.


This article assesses how the Freirean pedagogy can be used to combat the problems of poverty, unemployment, lack of political voice, economic deprivation and illiteracy besetting rural South Africans. The basic assumption is that the Freirean method can be used by underprivileged sections of any society to enhance their consciousness and transform their lives. This is more so in South Africa where people have been entrapped by apartheid for several decades. However, this will also depend to some extent on the commitment of the political leadership, non-governmental organisations and the private sector to transform rural South Africa. It is concluded that the South African context may be viewed as conducive because there are both governmental and non-governmental organisations that can facilitate the process of change and transformation among the rural people if they adopt this approach.


The interaction between oral-facial structural growth and muscle activity starts early in development and continues through childhood. Chronic oral breathing is an important clinical marker of orofacial muscle dysfunction, which may be associated with palatal growth restriction, nasal obstruction, and/ or a primary disorder of muscular or connective tissue dysfunction. It is easily documented objectively during sleep. Treatment of pediatric obstructive-sleep-apnea (OSA) and sleep-disordered-breathing (SBD) means restoration of continuous nasal breathing during wakefulness and sleep; if nasal breathing is not restored, despite short-term improvements after adenotonsillectomy (T&A), continued use of the oral breathing route may be associated with abnormal impacts on airway growth and possibly blunted neuromuscular responsiveness of airway tissues. Elimination of oral breathing, i.e., restoration of nasal breathing during wake and sleep, may be the only valid end point when treating OSA. Preventive measures in at-risk groups, such as premature infants, and usage of myofunctional therapy as part of the treatment of OSA are proposed to be important approaches to treat appropriately SDB and its multiple co-morbidities.


The authors use a new statistical method to attribute daily changes in U.S. Treasury yields and inflation compensation to changes in investor beliefs about domestic and foreign growth, inflation, and monetary policy. They find that while foreign developments have been important drivers of U.S. yields and expected inflation over the last decade, the recent divergence between U.S. and European monetary policy has had little effect. Instead, the behavior of asset prices seems consistent with positive "aggregate supply shocks." One candidate for such shocks is the large decline in energy prices experienced since June 2014.


Traditional low-temperature H2 production from methane needs high operating temperatures (above 500 °C), generates CO2 emissions, and shows poor stability. This study focused on more low-temperature stable H2 production from methane using a carbon-supported Ru catalyst (BS-Ru/C). This catalyst could stably generate H2 without COx at 200 °C over 15 days. The temperature for clean H2 production in conjunction with carbon fixation was found to be 200–250 °C, far lower than around 550 °C for the conventional low-temperature methane catalytic decomposition (MCD). The BS-Ru/C catalyst enabled the occurrence of steam reforming of methane (SRM) at 260 °C, which far exceeded other previous low-temperature catalysts reported at around 500 °C. Although CO2 was produced during the SRM process from 260 to 500 °C, no CO was produced. This lower-temperature stable H2 production technology using the BS-Ru/C catalyst with outstanding ability and stability will provide a helping hand to build a H2 society in near future.


Hepatitis C virus was discovered nearly 30 years ago, and for the first two decades, treatment was limited to agents with low response rates and substantial side effects. Since the introduction of direct-acting antivirals, there have been rapid advances made toward even higher sustained virologic responses (SVRs) and fewer side effects. This chapter provides a review of the newer agents for treatment of hepatitis C and highlights special populations, including those coinfected with HIV or hepatitis B, previously treated patients, and post-liver transplant patients.


Tomographic studies of the mantle of southern California (USA) commonly found evidence for seismically high speed material, known as the Isabella anomaly, extending from near the base of the crust of the southwestern Sierra Nevada foothills into the asthenosphere. This anomaly has been interpreted to mark downwelling lithospheric material that had been removed from the southern Sierra Nevada. Using data from the Sierra Nevada EarthScope Project (SNEP) array, we investigate the lithosphere of the Sierra Nevada and surrounding region to better understand the process by which batholiths form dense lithospheric roots that become unstable and founder. Inverting phase velocities of fundamental mode Rayleigh waves for shear wave speeds provides observations of the distribution of high and low wave-speed anomalies, which correspond to portions of the batholith that formed an intact lithospheric root, and where seismically slower shallow asthenosphere marks areas where lithosphere has been removed. Our results corroborate previous observations that the southern Sierra Nevada has thin crust underlain by shallow asthenosphere. High shear wave velocity (Vs) material in the mantle beneath the southwestern foothills marks the location of the Isabella anomaly, to the east of which is a region of low Vs mantle where asthenosphere has risen to replace the delaminating root. Farther north, near the latitude of Long Valley, low velocities at shallow depths beneath the high elevations of the eastern Sierra indicate the presence of asthenosphere close to the base of the crust. Thicker high-speed material, however, underlies the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada at this latitude and dips to the east where it extends to depths of ∼100 km or more, giving it the appearance of a portion of lithosphere that has detached from the east but remains attached to the west as it is currently peeling off. The structure of the Sierra Nevada changes near the latitude of Lake Tahoe, where thinner lithosphere extends between depths of 40 and 80 km, but does not reach greater depths. It appears that the lithospheric material of the Sierra Nevada from latitudes close to Lake Tahoe, and continuing to the north, is not being removed, indicating a change between the structure and evolution of the southern and northern Sierra Nevada.


Many different signaling pathways share common components but nevertheless invoke distinct physiological responses. In yeast, the adaptor protein Ste50 functions in multiple mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase pathways, each with unique dynamical and developmental properties. Although Kss1 activity is sustained and promotes invasive growth, Hog1 activity is transient and promotes cell adaptation to osmotic stress. Here we show that osmotic stress activates Kss1 as well as Hog1. We show further that Hog1 phosphorylates Ste50 and that phosphorylation of Ste50 limits the duration of Kss1 activation and prevents invasive growth under high osmolarity growth conditions. Thus feedback regulation of a shared component can restrict the activity of a competing MAP kinase to ensure signal fidelity.


One of the most important challenges in conservation biology is to predict the viability of populations of vulnerable and threatened species. This requires that the demographic stochasticity strongly affecting the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of especially small populations is correctly estimated and modelled. Here, we summarize theoretical evidence showing that the demographic variance in population dynamics is a key parameter determining the probability of extinction and also is directly linked to the magnitude of the genetic drift in the population. The demographic variance is dependent on the mating system, being larger in a polygynous than in monogamous populations. Understanding factors affecting intersexual differences in mating success is therefore essential in explaining variation in the demographic variance. We hypothesize that the strength of sexual selection, for example, quantified by the Bateman gradient, may be a useful predictor of the magnitude of the demographic stochasticity and hence the genetic drift in the population. We provide results from a field study of moose that support this claim. Thus, including central principles from behavioural ecology may increase the reliability of population viability analyses through an improvement of our understanding of factors affecting stochastic influences on population dynamics and evolutionary processes. This article is part of the theme issue 'Linking behaviour to dynamics of populations and communities: application of novel approaches in behavioural ecology to conservation'.


Human epidemiological and laboratory animal model studies have suggested that nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs reduce the risk of development of colon cancer and that the inhibition of colon carcinogenesis is mediated through the alteration in cyclooxygenase metabolism of arachidonic acid. Curcumin, which is a naturally occurring compound, is present in turmeric, possesses both antiinflammatory and antioxidant properties, and has been tested for its chemopreventive properties in skin and forestomach carcinogenesis. The present study was designed to investigate the chemopreventive action of dietary curcumin on azoxymethane-induced colon carcinogenesis and also the modulating effect of this agent on the colonic mucosal and tumor phospholipase A2, phospholipase C gamma 1, lipoxygenase, and cyclooxygenase activities in male F344 rats. At 5 weeks of age, groups of animals were fed the control (modified AIN-76A) diet or a diet containing 2000 ppm of curcumin. At 7 weeks of age, all animals, except those in the vehicle (normal saline)-treated groups, were given two weekly s.c. injections of azoxymethane at a dose rate of 15 mg/kg body weight. All groups were continued on their respective dietary regimen until the termination of the experiment at 52 weeks after the carcinogen treatment. Colonic tumors were evaluated histopathologically. Colonic mucosa and tumors were analyzed for phospholipase A2, phospholipase C gamma 1, ex vivo prostaglandin (PG) E2, cyclooxygenase, and lipoxygenase activities. The results indicate that dietary administration of curcumin significantly inhibited incidence of colon adenocarcinomas (P < 0.004) and the multiplicity of invasive (P < 0.015), noninvasive (P < 0.01), and total (invasive plus noninvasive) adenocarcinomas (P < 0.001). Dietary curcumin also significantly suppressed the colon tumor volume by > 57% compared to the control diet. Animals fed the curcumin diet showed decreased activities of colonic mucosal and tumor phospholipase A2 (50%) and phospholipase C gamma 1 (40%) and levels of PGE2 (> 38%). The formation of prostaglandins such as PGE2, PGF2 alpha, PGD2, 6-keto PGF1 alpha, and thromboxane B2 through the cyclooxygenase system and production of 5(S)-, 8(S)-, 12(S)-, and 15(S)-hydroxyeicosatetraenoic acids via the lipoxygenase pathway from arachidonic acid were reduced in colonic mucosa and tumors of animals fed the curcumin diet as compared to control diet. Although the precise mechanism by which curcumin inhibits colon tumorigenesis remains to be elucidated, it is likely that the chemopreventive action, at least in part, may be related to the modulation of arachidonic acid metabolism.


Pyrite (FeS2) is the most abundant sulfide mineral on Earth and represents a significant reservoir of reduced iron and sulfur both today and in the geologic past. In modern environments, oxidative transformations of pyrite and other metal sulfides play a key role in terrestrial element partitioning with broad impacts to contaminant mobility and the formation of acid mine drainage systems. Although the role of aerobic micro‐organisms in pyrite oxidation under acidic‐pH conditions is well known, to date there is very little known about the capacity for aerobic micro‐organisms to oxidize pyrite at circumneutral pH. Here, we describe two enrichment cultures, obtained from pyrite‐bearing subsurface sediments, that were capable of sustained cell growth linked to pyrite oxidation and sulfate generation at neutral pH. The cultures were dominated by two Rhizobiales species (Bradyrhizobium sp. and Mesorhizobium sp.) and a Ralstonia species. Shotgun metagenomic sequencing and genome reconstruction indicated the presence of Fe and S oxidation pathways in these organisms, and the presence of a complete Calvin–Benson–Bassham CO2 fixation system in the Bradyrhizobium sp. Oxidation of pyrite resulted in thin (30–50 nm) coatings of amorphous Fe(III) oxide on the pyrite surface, with no other secondary Fe or S phases detected by electron microscopy or X‐ray absorption spectroscopy. Rates of microbial pyrite oxidation were approximately one order of magnitude higher than abiotic rates. These results demonstrate the ability of aerobic microbial activity to accelerate pyrite oxidation and expand the potential contribution of micro‐organisms to continental sulfide mineral weathering around the time of the Great Oxidation Event to include neutral‐pH environments. In addition, our findings have direct implications for the geochemistry of modern sedimentary environments, including stimulation of the early stages of acid mine drainage formation and mobilization of pyrite‐associated metals.


The average computer user needs to remember a large number of text username and password combinations for different applications, which places a large cognitive load on the user. Consequently users tend to write down passwords, use easy to remember (and guess) passwords, or use the same password for multiple applications, leading to security risks. This paper describes the use of personalized hand-drawn "doodles" for recall and management of password information. Since doodles can be easier to remember than text passwords, the cognitive load on the user is reduced. Our method involves recognizing doodles by matching them against stored prototypes using handwritten shape matching techniques. We have built a system which manages passwords for web applications through a web browser. In this system, the user logs into a web application by drawing a doodle using a touchpad or digitizing tablet attached to the computer. The user is automatically logged into the web application if the doodle matches the doodle drawn during enrollment. We also report accuracy results for our doodle recognition system, and conclude with a summary of next steps.


Abstract. Nightly averaged mesospheric temperature derived from the hydroxyl nightglow at Rothera station (67°34' S, 68°08' W) and nightly midnight measurements of ozone mixing ratio obtained from Troll station (72°01' S, 2°32' E) in Antarctica have been used to investigate the presence and vertical profile of the quasi-16-day planetary wave in the stratosphere and mesosphere during the Antarctic winter of 2009. The variations caused by planetary waves on the ozone mixing ratio and temperature are discussed, and spectral and cross-correlation analyses are performed to extract the wave amplitudes and to examine the vertical structure of the wave from 34 to 80 km. The results show that while planetary-wave signatures with periods 3–12 days are strong below the stratopause, the oscillations associated with the 16-day wave are the strongest and present in both the mesosphere and stratosphere. The period of the wave is found to increase below 42 km due to the Doppler shifting by the strong eastward zonal wind. The 16-day oscillation in the temperature is found to be correlated and phase coherent with the corresponding oscillation observed in O3 volume mixing ratio at all levels, and the wave is found to have vertical phase fronts consistent with a normal mode structure.


In this paper, we describe several findings from a multi-year, multi-method study of how information and communication technologies have been adopted and adapted in Central Asia. We have found that mobile phone usage is outpacing the rate of Internet adoption, that access to the Internet is primarily through public access sites carrying with it issues regarding privacy and surveillance, that people rely on their social networks as information sources, that public institutions tend to be fairly weak as citizen resources, and that information seeking and communication are conflated in people's usage patterns with different technologies. In addition, in the developed world social networking software has grown rapidly and shown itself to have significant potential for mobilizing a population. Based on the collection of findings from Central Asia and observing patterns of technology usage in other parts of the world, our research leads to the conclusion that exploring mobile social software holds significant potential as an ICT that meshes well with preexisting patterns of communication and information seeking and also leverages the most predominant pattern of technology adoption. Many of the findings from this research echo results from studies in other geographic areas, and so we anticipate that much of this research will be relevant to developing regions generally.


Interferometric Radar Altimeters (IRA's) use dual receive antennas to overcome one of the spatial limitations of pulse‐limited altimeters. In a conventional IRA measurement, the range and across‐track direction of a scatterer are determined using the phase difference between the antennas. We demonstrate a method of determining multiple elevation points across a swath orthogonal to the instrument ground track in regions of steep terrain, such as ice‐sheet margins. We use data from an airborne IRA (a prototype of the CryoSat‐2 instrument), and compare the results to simultaneous Airborne Laser Scanner (ALS) observations. This application results in a 75‐fold increase in measurement density compared to conventional radar altimetry. Along a ∼2.5 km ground track, the RMS departure between the IRA‐ and ALS‐derived measurements was 1.67 m. Based on our result, although our approach is limited to areas of relatively steep slope, a 25‐ to 75‐fold increase in elevation measurements could be achieved in coastal regions of Antarctica and Greenland with similar processing of CryoSat‐2 data.


We report a wave-optical analysis of light propagation along leaky waveguides using a symmetric hollow dielectric slab as a model. The field deformation due to leakage into the surrounding regions for a guided wave that penetrated into the hollow structure is studied by using the eigenmode expansion method, where the propagation is described by an integral over the modes of the continuum. The numerical evaluation of the integral expansion enables us to estimate the radiation loss for the incident wave. Results are compared with those based on the simplified zigzag ray-optics approach and complex leaky waves.


Objective The aim of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of the comfort theory for the clinical nursing care of new mothers. Methods This is a reflexive-theoretical study conducted in November and December 2014, based on the usefulness criterion proposed in the critical analysis of the Barnum nursing theory. Results The comfort theory in nursing care for new mothers applied to study analysis revealed that this theory meets the criteria of usefulness because it provides applicable concepts that facilitated the clinical nursing care of women in the postpartum period and helped increase their comfort level. The verification of these concepts showed that the theory can be applied in different settings of clinical care for new mothers. Conclusion The theory can be used to support and improve clinical nursing care for postpartum women, and help improve puerperal comfort.


In 2010, President Obama signed legislation that significantly altered the healthcare and health insurance markets in the United States. An integral part of that reform is the individual mandate, a provision that requires individuals to purchase and maintain healthcare insurance. Failure to maintain such coverage subjects an individual to a tax penalty. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that provision under Congress's taxing power. Despite the Supreme Court upholding the individual mandate, fundamental questions remain. This Article addresses the question of whether the use of a tax penalty to encourage taxpayers to do something that the government desires is normatively a bad policy. Many commentators have contended that a tax penalty is economically equivalent to the current tax system's use of deductions and credits to encourage behavior. This Article argues that despite some similarity, there are major differences between the two that should lead Congress to reconsider the desirability of using a tax penalty approach in the future. This Article also considers whether the use of the Internal Revenue Service to administer and enforce a penalty that has little to do with the correct baseline of income will have an adverse effect on general tax compliance. This Article explores the individual mandate tax penalty in detail. It explains the mechanics of the tax penalty provision and points out several ambiguities in the provision that will likely require clarification. It also explores whether the extent of some of the problems in the healthcare system at which the mandate is aimed have been exaggerated. The Article concludes that Congress should reexamine the pros and cons and unintended consequences of using a tax penalty to induce behavior before going down a similar road.


[Excerpt] "Consider this scenario: an attorney represents a client in litigation against a corporation. The attorney gets a call from an employee of that corporation and the employee says, "Everything in your complaint is absolutely correct." However excited the attorney is to speak with this person, the Rules of Professional Conduct constrain whom the attorney can talk to if a corporation is involved in the pending litigation. In New Hampshire, any attorney can quickly find that Rule 4.2 prohibits contact with a represented party.1 But is this corporate employee a represented party? Even after reading the comment to the rule and the sparse interpretive case law available in New Hampshire, the attorney would be unable to discern whether it is proper to speak with this person, who could possibly make or break his or her case. [...] This article clarifies New Hampshire's Rule 4.2 in relation to corporate litigants and establishes a few basic concepts gleaned by reviewing different jurisdictional interpretations of the rule. This article begins with background information regarding Rule 4.2 followed by a brief explanation of both the 2001 version of the ABA Model Rule 4.2 and the New Hampshire Rule 4.2.4 In particular, this article focuses on the difference between the comments of each rule. Next, this article surveys tests other jurisdictions have formulated to interpret the scope of Rule 4.2 as applied to corporate litigants and analyzes the likelihood of the New Hampshire Supreme Court adopting each test. This article then examines the 2003 version of the ABA Model Rule 4.2 and explains the origin of the rule and the scope of this rule when applied to a corporate litigant. The author then proposes a rule for New Hampshire that is easy to apply and narrowly tailored to fulfill its purpose. This article concludes that New Hampshire should adopt this modified version of the 2003 Model ABA Rule, which clarifies who is covered under the ambit of the rule when applied to corporate litigants."


Translation of children's literature is a special challenge. The translator has to take into consideration specific guidelines, reader's expectations and aesthetic measures which are appropriate for the specific age, and at the same time has to face the numerous language barriers that typify children's poetry. Poetry in a wider sense as well as children's poetry contains many elements that could represent a difficulty for the translator. Such elements are rhyme, rhythm, meter and sound figures; the latter are especially frequent in children's literature and children's poetry. One additional challenge for the translator is translation of puns in children's literature which are often culturally determined. Translators, like authors, play an important role in the development of children's literature. Owing to them, young readers across the world know the classic characters of children's literature, such as Pippi Longstocking, Winnie-the-Pooh and others.
The purpose of this diploma paper is to investigate whether the Slovene translation of Revolting Rhymes has the same effect among Slovenian readers as the original. By analysing Roald Dahl's work Revolting Rhymes and its Slovene translation, I want to establish the difficulties that a translator encounters when translating children's poetry. Throughout my diploma paper, I do not take sides with any translation school; my goal is to analyse the original and the translation, compare similarities and differences and to provide my own conclusions and solutions. I took into consideration various aspects: meaning, imagery and idiom, tone, translation shifts, elements of poetic language (figures of speech, especially sound figures), lexical categories, fairytale characteristics, meaning of original illustrations etc.


INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: In an effort to reduce PCNL related morbidity, some urologists have progressively introduced the mini-perc technique in paediatric endourology. There was initial skepticism about its potential owing to the lack of a dedicated armamentarium. But the development of miniaturised nephroscopes, the understanding of the physics behind the vacuum cleaner effect together with the increased efficacy of modern holmium laser generators and the skill of surgeons led to widespread dissemination of the technique. The aim of this video is to describe the outcomes of our series of patients who underwent mini-nephrolithotomy (MINIPERC) and to show step by step the details of the technique. METHODS: A prospective analysis of 157 consecutive patients who underwent MINIPERC at our institution between September 2016 and September 2018, was performed. Intraoperative and postoperative outcomes were assessed. Abdominal noncontrast computerized tomography (NCCT) scan was performed in all cases preoperatively and 1-month postoperatively. Patients were reported to be stone free if there were no residual fragments. Peri/postoperative complications were reported according Clavien-Dindo classification system. The primary endpoint of the study was stone free rate (SFR) and the secondary endpoints were Clavien-Dindo complications grade 1 or higher. RESULTS: The outcomes are reported in the Table 1. CONCLUSIONS: MINIPERC is an effective and safe technique for treating medium-size renal stones that represents a reasonable a middle ground between standard perc and flexible ureteroscopy. Dedicated modern highly technological armamentarium is the key to succeed. Table. No title available. Source of Funding: None


A range of parameters are known to shape the methanogenic communities of biogas-producing digesters and to strongly influence the amount of biogas produced. In this work, liquid and solid fractions of grass biomass were used separately for semicontinuous batch methanation using sewage sludge as seed sludge. During 6 months of incubation, the amount of input COD was increased gradually, and the underlying methanogenic microbiome was assessed by means of microscopy-based automated cell counting and full-length 16S rRNA high-throughput sequencing. In this sense, we prove for the first time the suitability of the ONT™MinION platform as a monitoring tool for anaerobic digestion systems. According to our results, solid-fed batches were highly unstable at higher COD input concentrations, and kept Methanosaeta spp. typically associated to sewage sludge-as the majoritary methanogenic archaea. In contrast, liquid-fed batches developed a more stable microbiome, proved enriched in Methanosarcina spp, and resulted in higher methanogenic yield. This work demonstrates the high repowering potential of microbiomes from sewage sludge digesters, and highlight the effectiveness of liquefied substrates for increasing biogas productivity in anaerobic digestions.