Polar regions are free from major anthropogenic impact due to their remoteness. However, certain pollutants can be transported there via atmospheric and/or oceanic circulations. Here we present an overview of current research on organophosphorus esters (OPEs) in polar regions by reviewing the literature on distribution, source and transport of OPEs. Current research on OPEs reveals significant anthropogenic influences in both polar regions. As well as the expected occurrence in the Arctic, OPEs were found on the Antarctic Ice Sheet up to 650 km from the coast, and the OPE concentrations were higher at high elevation due to cold climate retention. The immediate source of OPEs for inland Antarctica might be the Southern Ocean surrounding the continent, where OPEs in aerosols and seawater showed comparable concentrations to remote areas in the European Arctic. A positive correlation between aerosol OPEs in the open water and the surface vortex of ocean currents indicates that these compounds may be transported and accumulated in the ocean currents. The Antarctica Circumpolar Current accumulates them in the marginal seas of Antarctica. Citation: Cheng W H, Blais J M, Xie Z Q, et al. Response of polar regions to emerging organic pollutant organophosphorus esters (OPEs), a review. Adv Polar Sci, 2017, 28(1): 13-22, doi: 10.13679/j.advps.2017.1.00013


15N tracer techniques were used to measure rates of NH4+ and NO3− uptake, dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) release resulting from both ammonium (NH4+) and nitrate (NO3−) uptake, and NH4+ regeneration at discrete depths throughout the euphotic zone in Monterey Bay, California, at a site, H3, outside the plume of direct upwelling influence. In March 1993, 94% of the inorganic nitrogen taken up was NH4+, and the primary fate of nitrogen uptake was particle production. In September 1993, NH4+ and NO3− uptake were more in balance, and the primary fate of nitrogen uptake was DON. We suggest that grazing was an important mechanism resulting in DON release in March and that a combination of grazing and a more physiologically stressed phytoplankton population produced the higher observed rates of DON release in September. During both cruises, the percentage of nitrogen released as DON increased with depth, suggesting that deeper in the water column, a smaller percentage of the nitrogen taken up is incorporated into sinking particles. Based on these data, we suggest that the DON pool acts as an intermediate between DIN assimilation and the net formation of particles for export and will thus affect carbon flow in Monterey Bay.


This volume contains the first Italian critical edition with introduction, translation and commentary of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis. The tragedy, exhibited posthumously in 405 BCE, stages the first mythical segment of the Trojan War, namely the sacrifice of Iphigenia, daughter of king Agamemnon, head of the Greek army, in order to propitiate the winds that should lead the navy to Troy. A tragedy of intrigue and unveiling, in which all the characters try to oppose the sacrifice, judged to be an impiety despite its sacred essence. It is therefore a tragedy without gods, in which characters of modest moral stature move, unstable, ready to sudden changes of mind, and among whom the protagonist stands out: the girl who, having overcome the dismay for the destiny awaiting her, voluntarily moves towards death on the altar, for a flimsy patriotic ideal and with the illusion of achieving immortal glory. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the text of this tragedy, handed over to us by the manuscript tradition, has been exposed more than others to a rigorous philological criticism that has broken its unity, through considerable expunctions of entire sections and sequences of verses. The volume traces the phases of this critical work, showing its methods – and sometimes its excesses – and choosing a balance line in the constitution of the text. The overall exegesis of the tragedy, which I propose in this study, consists in the belief that, despite the exodus being spurious, the finale, in view of which the entire dramaturgy was composed, still had to contemplate Iphigenia's salvation. In fact, if the Panhellenic ideal of defence against the barbarians is now meaningless, and if a war of destruction, to begin with, needs the death of an innocent person, then this death must be transcended and the horror of human sacrifice must dissolve. It therefore seems that, once political current events become opaque, the poet's research tends to create situations of great patheticism in an aesthetic setting of refined beauty.


The debate leading up to the ban on hunting with dogs in England and Wales in 2005 focused on the practical aspects such as the possible economic and social affect and issues of animal welfare. The relationship between hunting and the landscape was not prioritized, nor was it acknowledged that hunting contributed to regional and social identities. This article explores the relationship between hunting and landscape in the "shires" of the East Midlands, where modern hunting developed as part of the radical landscape changes experienced from the late eighteenth century. It examines why hunting is not recognized within national initiatives to map historic landscape character and suggests that the lacunae is the result of established academic agendas, which focus on long-term processes of change, to facilitate the creation of a common European landscape heritage. As a result distinctive regional identities and landscape character are ignored and the modern landscape is depoliticized.


This paper focuses on optimal and receding horizon control of a class of hybrid dynamical systems, called Discrete Hybrid Stochastic Automata (DHSA), whose discrete-state tran- sitions depend on both deterministic and stochastic events. A finite-time optimal control approach "optimistically" determines the trajectory that provides the best tradeoff between tracking performance and the probability of the trajectory to actually execute, under possible chance constraints. The approach is also robustified, less optimistically, to ensure that the system satisfies a set of constraints for all possible realizations of the stochastic events, or alternatively for those having enough probability to realize. Sufficient conditions for asymptotic convergence in probability are given for the receding-horizon implementation of the optimal control solution. The effectiveness of the suggested stochastic hybrid control techniques is shown on a case study in supply chain management.


Hand gesture interpretation is an open research problem in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), which involves locating gesture boundaries (Gesture Spotting) in a continuous video sequence and recognizing the gesture. Existing techniques model each gesture as a temporal sequence of visual features extracted from individual frames which is not efficient due to the large variability of frames at different timestamps. In this paper, we propose a new sub-gesture modeling approach which represents each gesture as a sequence of fixed sub-gestures (a group of consecutive frames with locally coherent context) and provides a robust modeling of the visual features. We further extend this approach to the task of gesture spotting where the gesture boundaries are identified using a filler model and gesture completion model. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art Hidden Conditional Random Fields (HCRF) based methods and baseline gesture spotting techniques.


Abstract Previous methods of network anomaly detection have focused on defining a temporal model of what is "normal," and flagging the "abnormal" activity that does not fit into this pre-trained construct. When monitoring traffic to and from IP addresses on a large network, this problem can become computationally complex, and potentially intractable, as a state model must be maintained for each address. In this paper, we present a method of detecting anomalous network activity without providing any historical context. By exploiting the size of the network along with the minimal overhead of NetFlow data, we are able to model groups of hosts performing similar functions to discover anomalous behavior. As a collection, these anomalies can be further described with a few high-level characterizations and we provide a means for creating and labeling these categories. We demonstrate our method on a very large-scale network consisting of 30 million unique addresses, focusing specifically on traffic related to web servers.


The purpose of this study is to acquire: (1) empirical data on career maturity of vocational school (SMKs) students; (2) empirical data on actual career guidance and counseling (BK) services at SMKs and the need of students and guidance and counseling teachers/counsellors (BK/K) against model online career counseling (OCC); and (3) model OCC to boost career maturity of SMKs students. The research using the method of research and development (R & D) to develop the OCC. Research population includes all the students of 10th grade at state SMKs in Jakarta province for educational year 2013/2014. Research sample amounts to 292 students and 10 BK/K teachers in Jakarta province. The sample is selected by using multistage cluster random sampling technique. Data collection applies inventory of career maturity and actualization as well expectation. Quantitative data is analyzed by using descriptive statistics with percentage technique with the aid of SPSS version 18.0 for Windows software. The research result covers: First, career maturity of SMKs students based on personal evaluation generally stands at the mature category. However, test result of detail is generally not mature yet which is signaled by inexistence of detailed career planning and information, no comprehension yet on information of liked work group and how to set up career decision. Second, BK/K teachers and SMKs students commonly need model OCC. Information required entails self-potential assessment and career information. Third, OCC ACIS-Q is obtained by utilizing green education media in the form of website in a bid to bolsters career maturity of SMKs students. Research recommendation is addressed to students, BK/K teachers and coming researchers for use and to complete the model OCC ACIS-Q.


BACKGROUND
Multicenter long-term studies of predictors for the effectiveness of continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII) in clinical practice are lacking. We hypothesized that there are substantially greater reductions in hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) in patients with poor glycemic control and that other predictors may also exist.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS
We used data from 10 outpatient diabetic clinics in Sweden and studied CSII treatment over 5 years. Patients with HbA1c values available ≤ 6 months before starting CSII and at 5 years were included (n = 272, 82% of CSII patients) along with 2,437 contemporaneous controls on multiple daily insulin injections (MDI). Baseline variables evaluated were age, sex, diabetes duration, insulin dose, body mass index (BMI), HbA1c at baseline, and outpatient clinical care unit.

RESULTS
At 5 years, significantly greater reductions in HbA1c by CSII compared with MDI were found for patients with higher baseline HbA1c (P = 0.032) and lower baseline BMI (P = 0.013). For baseline HbA1c levels of 7.0%, 8.0%, and 9.0% and a BMI of 25 kg/m(2), the reduction in HbA1c level by CSII was 0.08% (difference not significant), 0.16% (95% confidence interval, 0.03-0.29%), and 0.25% (95% confidence interval, 0.11-0.39%), respectively. Corresponding analyses for the change in HbA1c level from start to 1 and 2 years revealed a significant interaction of insulin pump therapy only with baseline HbA1c levels (P < 0.001 and P = 0.030, respectively). The interaction term between outpatient clinical care unit and CSII treatment was statistically significant for some care units, with some care units demonstrating a benefit from CSII and others demonstrating a detriment.

CONCLUSIONS
Patients with high HbA1c levels have a greater probability of improved HbA1c after initiating pump therapy, but effects remain relatively modest even for patients with poor control. Factors predicting successful insulin pump use need further study.


The budget proposals of the Deficit Commission, Congressman Ryan, and President Obama do not effectively address the long-term problem with the funding of Social Security and Medicare. As a tool for limiting the costs of these two entitlements and thereby helping to put these programs on a sustainable basis without reducing the effectiveness of their "safety net" function, Congress should phase-out the benefits under these programs for high income retirees. Under the phase-outs I propose in this article, (1) the Social Security benefit would be phased out as individuals move from $75,000 of annual Broadly Measured Income to $175,000 (Social Security Phase-Out Requirement), and (2) to participate in Medicare, retired persons would be required to pay an increasing portion of the premium covering the economic costs of Medicare benefits as they move from $75,000 of annual Broadly Measured Income to $175,000 (Medicare Premium Payment Requirement). Similar to the effective date of the Ryan Proposal, these provisions in general would only apply to people who are 55 years old or younger. The Social Security Phase-Out Requirement is similar to the phase-out for such payments under Canadian law, and the Medicare Premium Payment Requirement is structured so that even a high income person who elected to be self-insured would not see all of his or her assets completely depleted as a result of the cost of health care. Thus, the Medicare structure proposed here addresses President Kennedy's argument, also advanced in the Ryan Proposal, that Medicare should be adopted because it would prevent "people who had worked for years [from] suddenly [finding] all their savings gone because of a costly health problem." The phase-out proposal advanced here significantly cuts benefits, but only for those future retirees who will not suffer a material financial hardship as a result of a reduction or elimination of their Social Security and Medicare benefits. As a practical matter, adoption of the proposal here will, in most cases, simply mean that the heirs of the affected high income retirees will get smaller inheritances, because under the current system, the Social Security and Medicare benefits received by these high income retirees do not generally result in higher spending. Rather, in many instances, the benefits merely increase the assets passed on to their heirs. Politicians of all political persuasions should have the courage to bring his government funding of inheritances to an end, thereby reducing the adverse impact these programs have on long-term debt.


My research project consisted of examining 200 bills sponsored by six African American members of Congress during the Ninety-third Congress (1973-1975). These six members of Congress represented Chicago, Illinois; Detroit, Michigan; or New York, New York- three metropolitan cities with significant African American populations. This research emphasizes the importance of Black members of Congress to African Americans nationwide by highlighting the Congressional Black Caucus' formation and mission, examining the bills' key terms and public policy issues for racial implications, and consulting a variety of secondary source material that underscores the need for descriptive representation in the Black community. The primary goal of this research is to use the concept ofrace representation (a term coined specifically for this research describing African Americans who are expected to advocate on behalf of the African American community because of their common descriptive characteristics - a combination of both descriptive and substantive representation in a representative democracy) to better understand the legislative behavior of Black members of Congress and to suggest that descriptive representation allows for Black inclusion in the political arena.


As part of a multiscale hydrogeophysical and modeling study, a pseudo three-dimensional (3-D) seismic survey was conducted over a contaminant plume at P area, Savannah River site (South Carolina), to enhance the existing geologic model by resolving uncertainties in the lithostratigraphic sequence. The geometry of the dissolved phase trichloroethylene plume, based on initial site characterization, appears to be confined to a narrow corridor within the Eocene sand overlying a clay unit approximately 25 m (82 ft) below land surface. Processing the seismic data as a 3-D data volume instead of a series of closely spaced two-dimensional lines allowed for better interpretation of the target horizons, the lower clay, and the sand above the clay. Calibrating the seismic data with existing borehole geophysical logs, core data as well as vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data allowed the seismic data to be inverted from two-way traveltime to depth, thereby facilitating full integration of the seismic data into a solid earth model that is the basic part of a site conceptual model. The outcome was the production of realistic horizon surface maps that show that two channel complexes are located on the section, which are not present in the conceptual model, and that the upper and middle clays are not laterally continuous as previously thought. The geometry of the primary channel has been transposed over the map view of the plume to investigate potential relationships between the shape of the plume and the presence of the channel.


Importance Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the most common cause of death among adults in the United States. Treatment to prevent CVD events by modifying risk factors is currently informed by the Framingham Risk Score, the Pooled Cohort Equations, or similar CVD risk assessment models. If current CVD risk assessment models could be improved by adding more risk factors, treatment might be better targeted, thereby maximizing the benefits and minimizing the harms. Objective To update the 2009 US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendation on using nontraditional risk factors in coronary heart disease risk assessment. Evidence Review The USPSTF reviewed the evidence on using nontraditional risk factors in CVD risk assessment, focusing on the ankle-brachial index (ABI), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) level, and coronary artery calcium (CAC) score; the health benefits and harms of CVD risk assessment and treatment guided by nontraditional risk factors combined with the Framingham Risk Score or Pooled Cohort Equations compared with using either risk assessment model alone; and whether adding nontraditional risk factors to existing CVD risk assessment models improves measures of calibration, discrimination, and risk reclassification. Findings The USPSTF found adequate evidence that adding the ABI, hsCRP level, and CAC score to existing CVD risk assessment models results in small improvements in discrimination and risk reclassification; however, the clinical meaning of these changes is largely unknown. Evidence on adding the ABI, hsCRP level, and CAC score to the Pooled Cohort Equations is limited. The USPSTF found inadequate evidence to assess whether treatment decisions guided by the ABI, hsCRP level, or CAC score, in addition to risk factors in existing CVD risk assessment models, leads to reduced incidence of CVD events or mortality. The USPSTF found adequate evidence to conceptually bound the harms of early detection and interventions as small. The USPSTF concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of using the ABI, hsCRP level, or CAC score in risk assessment for CVD in asymptomatic adults to prevent CVD events. Conclusions and Recommendation The USPSTF concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of adding the ABI, hsCRP level, or CAC score to traditional risk assessment for CVD in asymptomatic adults to prevent CVD events. (I statement)


In all Mediterranean countries youth unemployment has reached alarming record levels. This paper analyses the current situation in France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. In all countries school dropout rates are high, returns to education are low and the transition from education to work is problematic and difficult. This is due to a poor working vocational training system, the dualization of the labor market and minimum wages that are set too high. The Great Recession deteriorated the situation of young people, but youth unemployment is mostly structural. To overcome this crisis the overall performance of the labor market has to be improved.


Received:5 Nov 2014 Accepted: 10 Jan 2015 Abstract Introdouction: It is important for the clinician to be aware regarding the necessary thickness of materials used as intra-orifice coronal barriers to prevent microleakage. The purpose of this in vitro study was to compare coronal microleakage of three different thicknesses of white and gray Angelus mineral trioxide aggregate (WAMTA, GAMTA). Materials and methods: A total of 66 canals of extracted maxillary central incisors were instrumented and obturated with gutta percha and AH26 sealer using cold lateral compaction technique. The teeth were randomly divided into two experimental groups of 30 teeth each according to the material tested (WAMTA and GAMTA) and two negative and positive control groups of three teeth each. The experimental groups were then subdivided into three groups of 10 teeth each according to the coronal plug thickness (2, 3, and 4 mm). The obturation material was removed upto the experimental depths and was sealed with tested materials. Sealing ability was evaluated by the dye penetration method using Pelikan ink and a stereomicroscope at ×10 magnification and 0.01 mm accuracy. Data were analyzed by analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-test. Results: t-test analysis revealed that there was no significant difference between coronal microleakage of GAMTA and WAMTA at depths of 2, 3, and 4 mm (P < 0.88, P < 0.285, P < 0.62). ANOVA test revealed that there was no significant difference between leakage of different thicknesses of WAMTA (P < 0.365) and GAMTA (P < 0.217). Conclusion: Coronal microleakage of 2-mm thickness of WAMTA and GAMTA had no statistically significant difference with 3-mm and 4-mm thicknesses of the materials.


This paper presents a dynamic multi-equation model based on a balance sheet identity, where technical aspects of capital structure are highlighted through separately observing debt and equity and their relationship to investment. Additionally, leverage dynamics are interpreted in their role for liquidity management. Interactions of leverage with lines of credit (LOC) and cash are considered in the light of financial flexibility. The major findings obtained by observing US REITs and REOCs from 1995 to 2010 are as follows. In accordance with the existing literature, cash and LOC reveal a substitute relationship. However, the calculus of financial flexibility and our findings suggest that leverage positively drives cash, which is consistent with Gamba and Triantis (2008), and also with the accepted perspective of debt minus cash being net debt (Spotlight A). Consequently, the very robust results indicate that leverage eliminates a significant amount of information. Further mechanical relationships, especially for market leverage, are suggested (Spotlight B).


BACKGROUND
Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive breast cancer subtype that disproportionately affects women who are African American, younger, or carriers of the BRCA1 gene. No targeted treatments exist for the disease, which has distinct features and presents unique challenges to patients who have been diagnosed with it.

OBJECTIVES
TNBC is reviewed in this article according to incidence, tumor grade, stage of diagnosis, biologic and social risk factors, mortality, and treatment.

METHODS
Published articles pertaining to TNBC and located through online database searches were reviewed. Articles were selected either because they offered the most current information about TNBC or contributed to the understanding of TNBC.

FINDINGS
Biologic, demographic, and social factors present unique challenges in the treatment of women with TNBC. Knowing about the characteristics of TNBC and the populations who are most at risk for the disease might help healthcare providers better respond to their patients. It may also facilitate responsiveness to patients' needs and enhance their quality of life.


Many facets of Bayesian Modelling are firmly established in Machine Learning and give rise to state-of-the-art solutions to application problems. The sheer number of techniques, ideas and models which have been proposed, and the terminology, can be bewildering. With this tutorial review, we aim to give a wide high-level overview over this important field, concentrating on central ideas and methods, and on their interconnections. The reader will gain a basic understanding of the topics and their relationships, armed with which she can branch to details of her interest using the references to more specialized textbooks and reviews we provide here.


Semaphorins, which have important roles in development, signal through their receptors, the plexins. Plexin-A1 is a promiscuous molecule that is known to interact with neuropilins to mediate axon guidance signaling and with receptor tyrosine kinases to mediate endocardial cell migration. Now Takegahara et al. show that plexin-A1 also interacts with Trem-2, which is coupled to DAP-12, a protein with an ITAM (immunoreceptor tyrosine-based activation motif) that activates nonreceptor tyrosine kinases. Plexin-A1 knockout mice showed increased bone mass, due to decreased osteoclast activity, and defective activation of T cells by dendritic cells. Sema6D is a semaphorin expressed by T cells, and Takegahara et al. show that it is also expressed by osteoclasts. Application of soluble Sema6D stimulated osteoclast differentiation, and exposure of dendritic cells to soluble Sema6D stimulated production of interleukin 12 and the abundance of major histocompatibility complex II--responses that were lacking in the plexin-A1-deficient cells. Trem-2 was identified in a screen for proteins that interacted with plexin-A1 and were common to both dendritic cells and osteoclasts. Trem-2 also interacts with the ITAM protein DAP-12, and all three proteins coimmunoprecipitated in samples from dendritic cells or from Cos7 cells transfected to coexpress the proteins. DAP12–/– mice exhibit similar deficiencies in dendritic cell function and osteoclast differentiation as do the plexinA1–/– mice. Thus, the pathways by which plexin-A1 can mediate signaling now extend to coupling to ITAM-based mechanisms. N. Takegahara, H. Takamatsu, T. Toyofuku, T. Tsujimura, T. Okuno, K. Yukawa, M. Mizui, M. Yamamoto, D. V. R. Prasad, K. Suzuki, M. Ishii, K. Terai, M. Moriya, Y. Nakatsuji, S. Sakoda, S. Sato, S. Akira, K. Takeda, M. Inui, T. Takai, M. Ikawa, M. Okabe, A. Kumanogoh, H. Kikutani, Plexin-A1 and its interaction with DAP12 in immune responses and bone homeostasis. Nat. Cell Biol. 8, 615-622 (2006). [PubMed]


This is the complete illustrated guide to expert head, face, body, legs and feet massage techniques. It is the ultimate expert step-by-step manual of massage techniques suitable for beginners to advanced levels. It includes routines both for self-massage and to enjoy with a friend or partner. It features specially devised step-by-step massage for people at all stages of life, from babies to the elderly. It also features over 800 specially-taken colour photographs designed to illustrate every technique in simple-to-follow detail. We all experience some degree of stress and anxiety in our day-to-day lives, and this book provides a wide range of treatments and techniques to soothe, tone and relax the body. Special routines for tackling specific problems are included, from headaches to indigestion, as well as a host of pampering treats. The book includes the latest techniques from East and West, including deep tissue massage, aromatherapy, shiatsu, reflexology and Indian head massage. 800 step-by-step photographs and illustrations make this book the ultimate guide to therapeutic body treatments, healing and pampering.


The increased recognition of the multiplicity of roles played by women in, and their crucial contributions to, the fisheries sector exists in stark contrast with the low presence of women in fisherfolk organizations around the globe, and the lack of access to decision-making positions in many formal fisheries-related organizations. This paper summarizes analyses of a global literature review on women in fisherfolk organizations. The aim of the study was to identify positive examples and lessons learned by pointing to the drivers – as well as the enablers and entities identified in the literature – that have a key role in fostering increased women's participation and leadership in collective action in fisheries. State institutions, social movements and civil society organizations, development and conservation projects, religious movements, academia, endogenous mobilization, charismatic individuals and coincidences have been identified as the key enablers of women's participation in collective action. Dwindling resources and the need to secure management roles, modernization, the allocation of fishing rights, economic changes, family welfare and women's rights, are the main drivers identified by the authors as catalysers of women's engagement in collective action. Finally, the paper identifies some of the barriers faced by women to gain equal access to organizations and decision-making. Although more research on the topic is required, there seems to be consensus on the positive effects for women arising from their engagement in modes of collective action.


The watchmaking crisis of the nineteen-seventies in effect marked an interruption of scientific research into the working of mechanical watches. For the past few years, a revival of interest in these timepieces has given industrialists the financial resources needed to improve the performance of existing systems and create new mechanisms. The escapement is the only subsystem of a watch movement which combines an energy transfer function with a direct mechanical action on the oscillating weight : its role here is therefore fundamental. This thesis describes a design approach leading up to the development of an escapement mechanism which satisfies the requirements of the movement suppliers as effectively as possible ; this procedure is based on four phases : formulation, synthesis, analysis and evaluation. Analysis is divided into a quantitative part and a qualitative part. While the state of the art essentially centres on calculation of the performance of a particular escapement, this thesis highlights on the one hand a synthesis-based method which systematically presents the different solutions that may be adopted to make a free escapement ; and on the other, the development of qualitative analysis tools enabling a choice of interesting solutions to be made among the numerous variants which emerge from the synthesis. With regard to the state of the art, the main contributions of this thesis are: an in-depth study of the different sources of interference with the precision of a mechanical watch movement, as well as the potential for improvement of the escapement, the definition of a functional specification for free escapements, the notion of the geometrical function condition and a clear demonstration of the importance of analysis of tolerances, a method of quantitative energy analysis for free escapements, a qualitative analysis of energy transfer in an escapement, the latter being demonstrated by two interacting masses moving on an axis ; the relationship between the efficiency of an escapement and its inertia as well as the quality factor of the oscillator is established, a synthesis approach based on the breakdown of functions, enabling original escapements to be proposed, the systematic search for new escapements with tangential pulses, a nomenclature of free escapements, energy and chronometric study of alternative methods for the transfer of energy to the oscillator.


The USDA's National Animal Health Monitoring System (NAHMS) collected data on management practices and cow-calf herds as a source of family income from a representative sample of cow-calf producers from 23 of the leading cow-calf states. Overall, 2,713 producers with one or more beef cows participated in the NAHMS Beef '97 Study, representing 85.7 percent of the beef cows and 77.6 percent of the beef cow operations in the United States as of January 1997. Producers whose cow-calf herds were the primary source of family income were more productive than those whose herds were a supplemental source of income. Cow-calf herds were the primary source of income for 14 percent of the producers and provided supplemental income for 69 percent of the producers. While average herd size was larger for primary income herds, nearly half of the herds with 100 or more cows were non-primary income herds. Producers whose herds were a primary source of income were more likely to dehorn cattle, castrate bull calves, and practice artificial insemination and semen testing than producers whose herds were not a primary source of income. Primary income producers were also more likely to vaccinate preweaned calves. Due to greater weaning rates and a higher weaning percentage, primary income producers produced more pounds of weaned calf per exposed cow than did non-primary income producers (440 vs. 400 pounds). Contact for this paper: Stephen Ott


Real world exposures to physiologically and/or psychologically stressful environments are often multifactorial. For example, high-altitude typically combines exposure to hypobaric hypoxia, solar radiation and cold ambient temperatures, while sea level thermal stress is often combined with supplementary or transient stressors such as rain, solar radiation and wind. In such complex environments, the effect of one stressor on performance may be subject to change, simply due to the presence of another independent stressor. Such differential influences can occur in three basic forms; additive, antagonistic and synergistic, each term defining a fundamental concept of inter-parameter interactions. As well as the natural occurrence of stressors in combination, understanding interactions is fundamental to experimentally modelling how multiple physiological strains integrate in their influence on or regulation of - exercise intensity.

In this thesis the current literature on neuromuscular fatigue and the influence of thermal and hypoxic stress is reviewed (Chapter 1). This is followed by an outline of the methodological developments used in the subsequent experiments (Chapter 2). In the first experimental study (Chapter 3) a novel approach was adopted to investigate the combined effect of muscle cooling and hypoxia on neuromuscular fatigue in humans. The results showed that the neuromuscular system s maximal force generating capacity declined by 8.1 and 13.9% during independent cold and hypoxic stress compared to control. Force generation decreased by 21.4% during combined hypoxic-cold compared to control, closely matching the additive value of hypoxia and cold individually (22%). This was also reflected in the measurement of mechanical fatigue (electromechanical ratio), demonstrating an additive response during combined hypoxic-cold. From this study, it was concluded that when moderate hypoxia and cold environmental temperatures are combined during low intensity exercise, the level of fatigue increases additively with no interaction between these stressors.

Before conducting a more complex investigation on combined stressors, a better understanding of the role of muscle temperature on central fatigue - i.e. voluntary muscle activation via the afferent signalling pathways was sought. The focus of Chapter 4 was to quantify the relationship between muscle temperature and voluntary muscle activation (central fatigue) across a wide range of temperatures. The primary finding was that different muscle temperatures can induce significant changes in voluntary activation (0.5% reduction per-degree-centigrade increase in muscle temperature) when neural drive is sustained for a prolonged effort (e.g. 120-s); however this effect is not exhibited during efforts that are brief in duration (e.g. 3-s).

To further explore this finding, Chapter 5 investigated the effect of metaboreceptive feedback at two different muscle temperatures, using post-exercise muscle ischemia, on voluntary activation of a remote muscle group. The results showed that at the same perceived mental effort, peripheral limb discomfort was significantly higher with increasing muscle temperature (2% increase per-degree-centigrade increase). However any influence of increased muscle temperature on leg muscle metaboreceptive feedback did not appear to inhibit voluntary muscle activation - i.e. central control - of a remote muscle group, as represented by an equal force output and voluntary activation in the thermoneutral, contralateral leg.

In Chapter 6, the psycho-sensory effects of changes in muscle temperature on central fatigue during dynamic exercise were investigated. During sustained dynamic exercise, fatigue development appeared to occur at a faster rate in hot muscle (4% increase per-degree-centigrade increase) leading to a nullification of the beneficial effects of increased muscle temperature on peak power output after a period of ~60-s maximal exercise. In support of previous studies using isometric exercise (Chapter 4 and 6), participants reported significantly higher muscular pain and discomfort in hot muscle compared to cooler muscle during dynamic exercise (2 and 1% increase per-degree-centigrade increase respectively), however this did not result in a lower power output.
From Chapters 4, 5 and 6 it was concluded that in addition to faster rates of metabolite accumulation due to cardiovascular strain, it is possible that a direct sensitisation of the metaboreceptive group III and IV muscle afferents occurs in warmer muscle. This likely contributes to the reduction in voluntary muscle activation during exercise in the heat, while it may attenuate central fatigue in the cold. It was also interpreted that muscle afferents may have a similar signalling role to cutaneous sensory afferents; the latter of which are recognised for their role in providing thermal feedback to the cognitive-behavioural centres of the brain and aiding exercise regulation under thermal stress. The impact of body core and active muscle temperature on voluntary muscle activation represented a similar ratio (5 to 1 respectively) to the temperature manipulated (single leg) to non-temperature manipulated mass (rest of body) in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. This indicates that voluntary muscle activation may also be regulated based on a central meta-representation of total body heat content i.e. the summed firing rates of all activated thermoreceptors in the brain, skin, muscle, viscera and spine.

Building on the initial findings of Chapter 3, Chapter 7 investigated the causative factors behind the expression of different interaction types during exposure to multi-stressor environments. This was achieved by studying the interaction between thermal stress and hypoxia on the rate of peripheral and central fatigue development during a high intensity bout of knee extension exercise to exhaustion. The results showed that during combined exposure to moderate hypoxia and mild cold, the reductions in time to exhaustion were additive of the relative effects of hypoxia and cold independently. This differs from the findings in Chapter 3, in which fatigue was additive of the absolute effects of cold and hypoxia. In contrast, combining moderate hypoxia with severe heat stress resulted in a significant antagonistic interaction on both the absolute and relative reductions in time to exhaustion i.e. the combined effect being significantly less than the sum of the individual effects. Based on the results in Chapter 7, a quantitative paradigm for understanding of systematic integration of multifactorial stressors was proposed. This is, that the interaction type between stressors is influenced by the impact magnitude of the individual stressors effect on exercise capacity, whereby the greater the stressors impact, the greater the probability that one stressor will be cancelled out by the other. This is the first study to experimentally model the overarching principles characterising the presence of simultaneous physiological strains, suggesting multifactorial integration be subject to the worst strain takes precedence when the individual strains are severe.


Manuel Machado is known as one of the most innovative Spanish modernist poets of the twentieth century. Despite his recognition as a literary figure in Spain, the mimetic descriptions in Machado's poetics are interpreted as mere innovations in Spanish poetry. Those mimetic descriptions are examples of ekphrasis in Spanish literature. Ekphrasis is both a literary and representational art. The mimetic dimension in Machado's poetry is ignored or misinterpreted by the critics of his poetics. This study written in Spanish investigates the use of ekphrasis in terms of Machado's poetic style. An analysis of Manuel Machado's ekphrastic poems will determine: ekphrastic poetry is a representational art; how visual and acoustic aspects of Machado's poems create enargeia; and the manifestation of ekphrasis in Spanish verse. In using Machado's poems, this project will contribute to future explorations of ekphrasis in Spanish literature.


Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's colitis (CC), affects nearly 2 million Americans, and the incidence is increasing worldwide. It has been established that UC and CC are distinct forms of IBD and require different medical care, however the distinction made between UC and CC is based upon inexact clinical, radiological, endoscopic, and pathologic features. A diagnosis of indeterminate colitis occurs in up to 15% of patients when UC and CC features overlap and cannot be differentiated; in these patients, diagnosis relies on long term followup, success or failure of existing treatment, and recurrence of the disease. Thus, there is need for a tool that can improve the sensitivity and specificity for fast, accurate and automated diagnosis of IBD. Here we present colonoscopy-coupled fiber probe-based Raman spectroscopy as a novel in vivo diagnostic tool for IBD. This in vivo study of both healthy control (NC, N=10) and diagnosed IBD patients with UC (N=15) and CC (N=26) aims to characterize spectral signatures of NC, UC, and CC. Samples are correlated with tissue pathology markers and endoscopic evaluation. Optimal collection parameters for detection have been identified based upon the new, application specific instrument design. The collected spectra are processed and analyzed using multivariate statistical techniques to identify spectral markers and discriminate NC, UC, and CC. Development of spectral markers to discriminate disease type is a necessary first step in the development of real-time, accurate and automated in vivo detection of IBD during colonoscopy procedures.


Conventional electronics requires the use of numerous deposition techniques (e.g. chemi- cal vapor deposition, physical vapor deposition, and photolithography) with demanding conditions like ultra-high vacuum, elevated temperature and clean room facilities. In the last decades, printed electronics (PE) has proved the use of standard printing techniques to develop electronic devices with new features such as, large area fabrication, mechani- cal flexibility, environmental friendliness and—potentially—cost effectiveness. This kind of devices is especially interesting for the popular concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which the number of employed electronic devices increases massively. Because of this trend, the cost and environmental impact are gradually becoming a substantial issue. One of the main technological barriers to overcome for PE to be a real competitor in this context, however, is the integration of these non-conventional techniques between each other and the embedding of these devices in standard electronics. This chapter summa rizes the advances made in this direction, focusing on the use of different techniques in one process flow and the integration of printed electronics with conventional systems.


In her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), Virginia Woolf used the occasion of a "pageant" given at a country house to present, in compressed form, the long march of history. As Mr. Page, a reporter, watches the final tableau, "The Present Time," he makes notes for himself: "Miss La Trobe conveyed to the audience Civilization (the wall) in ruins; rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort; witness also woman handling bricks. [...] Now issued black man in fuzzy wig; coffee-coloured ditto in silver turban; they signify presumably the League of...." (1) The word that Mr. Page does not write down is--presumably--"Nations," the League of Nations being the international organization founded in 1919 after World War One, which, at the time Woolf was writing Between the Acts, was conspicuously failing to stop the war it was designed to prevent. Woolf's connection to the League was not only as an interested observer of international politics, but also at a more personal level; her husband, Leonard, had long championed the League, and his 1916 book, International Government, was instrumental in drafting the very charter for the League. (2) The fact that Mr. Page is only able to get "League of ..." down in his notes suggests that Virginia saw the incompleteness of the international project that the League represented. When a member of the audience, Mr. Streatfield, offers his thoughts on the meaning of Miss La Trobe's historical pageant, he says, "To me at least it was indicated that we are members one of another. Each is part of the whole. [...] We act different parts; but are the same." He concludes, "Scraps, orts and fragments! Surely, we should unite?" (3) But moments later, the appearance of warplanes in the sky over Pointz Hall destroys any hope for unity. It was through this devastating and despairing juxtaposition at the end of Between the Acts that Woolf concluded a writing career that, in ways subtle and overt, fully engaged the political questions of the time. In particular, I argue that the internationalist convictions that were held by Leonard Woolf were also held and indeed shaped the modernist style of Virginia. In the aftermath of the first World War, one of the most pressing questions was how to prevent another such conflagration from ever happening again. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, talk of extracting reparations from Germany stood in contrast to equally earnest negotiations regarding an international organization that would, in some way or another, keep the peace. Woodrow Wilson often receives the credit for the founding of the League of Nations, and no doubt it was through his advocacy that the Conference linked the question of the immediate post-war settlement to the larger, if more nebulous, question of international law. But the idea for an organization that would collectively ensure peace and facilitate political and economic relations did not originate with Wilson or any other single person. Immediately after the outbreak of war in 1914, the League of Nations Society had been founded in Britain, and, along with its American counterpart, the League to Enforce Peace, it began to argue for a more permanent form of relations between states. (4) After the war, such arguments were taken up with renewed force, but there was considerable confusion and hesitation among even the victorious powers; questions arose without definitive answers. How should the decisions of the League be enforced? Should there be an international court with binding power? When would economic sanctions be used, and when would military force be applied? Would the defeated states be allowed into the League? Would the colonies of imperial powers be given representation? Although the desire for a League was strong enough to make it a top priority at the Conference, and strong enough, indeed, to bring it into being, there were doubts at its inception as to its precise nature, and those doubts, in the nearly two-decade history of the League, were never entirely put to rest. …


Industrial Engineering What you need to know to engineer the global service economy. As customers and service providers create new value through globally interconnected service enterprises, service engineers are finding new opportunities to innovate, design, and manage the service operations and processes of the new service-based economy. Introduction to Service Engineering provides the tools and information a service engineer needs to fulfill this critical new role. The book introduces engineers as well as students to the fundamentals of the theory and practice of service engineering, covering the characteristics of service enterprises, service design and operations, customer service and service quality, web-based services, and innovations in service systems. Readers explore such key aspects of service engineering as: The role of service science in developing a smarter planet Service enterprises, including: enterprise value creation, architecture of service organizations, service enterprise modeling, and the application of methods of systems engineering to services Service design, including collaborative e-service systems and the new service development process Service operations and management, including service call centers Service quality, from design operations to customer relations Web-based services and technology in the global e-organization Innovation in service systems from service engineering to integrative solutions, service-oriented architecture solutions, and technology transfer streams With chapters written by fifty-seven specialists and edited by bestselling authors Gavriel Salvendy and Waldemar Karwowski, Introduction to Service Engineering uses numerous examples, problems, and real-world case studies to help readers master the knowledge and the skills required to succeed in service engineering.


Salter's innominate osteotomy predisposes the hip to acetabular retroversion as it hinges upon the symphysis pubis. Retroversion is a recognised cause of osteoarthritis, hip pain and clinical signs of impingement, but there is uncertainty as to whether this over cover persists with growth and development. We reviewed the long-term follow up of twenty patients that had undergone a Salter's osteotomy between 1985 to 1993 at The Royal Orthopaedic Hospital Birmingham or New Cross Hospital Wolverhampton. Sixteen skeletally mature patients were available for review that had previously had the pelvic osteotomy performed at a mean five years of age with a contralateral normal hip. Salter's osteotomy had been performed for developmental dysplasia of the hip in 13 patients and for Perthes' disease in three patients. Follow up was performed at an average age of 20 years. Outcome was assessed using the Harris Hip Score and a clinical examination for signs of impingement and by a measurement of acetabular version, on well centered pelvic radiograph. Acetabular version was evaluated by the relationship between anterior and posterior walls of both the normal and Salter acetabulum, using radiographic templates as described by Hefti. Mean acetabular version averaged 16.9 degrees (95% CI 7.6 to 26.1) of anteversion on the Salter side and 17.6 degrees (95% CI 10.4 to 24.8) anteversion on the contralateral normal hip. There was no statistical difference between the version on operated and normal hips, paired t test (p = 0.83). Harris Hip Score averaged 85, indicating a good outcome at long-term follow up. Two patients (12%) demonstrated retroversion, however neither of these had signs of impingement on clinical examination. After a Salter innominate osteotomy in childhood, we believe there is remodelling of acetabular version by skeletal maturity.


Glomerular matrix accumulation is a hallmark of diabetic nephropathy. Recent studies showed that overexpression of the transcription factor SREBP-1 induces glomerulosclerosis. TGFβ1 is a key profibrotic mediator of glomerulosclerosis, but whether SREBP-1 regulates its effects is unknown. In kidney mesangial cells and in vivo, TGFβ1 activates SREBP-1. This requires SCAP, S1P, and PI3K/Akt signaling, but is independent of Smad3. Activation of the TGFβ1-responsive reporter plasmid p3TP-lux requires SREBP-1a, but not SREBP-1c, binding to an E-box adjacent to a Smad-binding element. SREBP-1a overexpression alone activates p3TP-lux. Smad3 is required for SREBP-1a transcriptional activation and TGFβ1 induces association between the two transcription factors. SREBP-1a K333 acetylation by the acetyltransferase CBP is required for Smad3 association and SREBP-1 transcriptional activity, and is also required for Smad3 transcriptional activity. Thus, both Smad3 and SREBP-1a activation cooperatively regulate TGFβ transcriptional responses. SREBP-1 inhibition provides a novel therapeutic strategy for diabetic kidney disease.


Although machine learning models trained on massive data have led to break-throughs in several areas, their deployment in privacy-sensitive domains remains limited due to restricted access to data. Generative models trained with privacy constraints on private data can sidestep this challenge, providing indirect access to private data instead. We propose DP-Sinkhorn, a novel optimal transport-based generative method for learning data distributions from private data with differential privacy. DP-Sinkhorn minimizes the Sinkhorn divergence, a computationally efficient approximation to the exact optimal transport distance, between the model and data in a differentially private manner and uses a novel technique for control-ling the bias-variance trade-off of gradient estimates. Unlike existing approaches for training differentially private generative models, which are mostly based on generative adversarial networks, we do not rely on adversarial objectives, which are notoriously difficult to optimize, especially in the presence of noise imposed by privacy constraints. Hence, DP-Sinkhorn is easy to train and deploy. Experimentally, we improve upon the state-of-the-art on multiple image modeling benchmarks and show differentially private synthesis of informative RGB images. Project page:https://nv-tlabs.github.io/DP-Sinkhorn.


In 1959 the New Zealand obstetrician Graham (Mont) Liggins began investigating mechanisms that triggered premature labour. Supported by the Wellcome Trust, he examined the effects of hormones on labour in sheep, and demonstrated co-incidentally that in utero corticosteroids accelerated fetal lung maturation. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) of prenatal corticosteroids in humans by Liggins and pediatrician Ross Howie, showed a reduction of respiratory distress syndrome in preterm babies. This Witness Seminar, chaired by Dr Edmund Hey, discussed the influence of Liggins' and Howie's 1972 paper announcing these results, and subsequent work by Avery and Kotas on induction of pulmonary surfactant in lambs. Other subjects included Crowley's 1981 systematic review of four RCTs; the low uptake of corticosteroids in practice until the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists issued usage guidelines in 1992; trials to determine optimum drug, dose and number of courses; potential adverse effects; and cost-benefit analysis. Participants included Dr Mel Avery, Sir Iain Chalmers, Dr Patricia Crowley, the late Professor Harold Gamsu, Professor Jane Harding, Professor Richard Lilford, Professor Miranda Mugford, Professor Ann Oakley, Professor Dafydd Walters and Mr John Williams. Appendices from Liggins and Howie; Liggins' Wellcome Trust grant; and the protocol of the 1975 UK trial of betamethasone, complete the volume.


In 1945 a committee of the American Medical Association (AMA) published a report [1] deploring the condition of the coroner service throughout the United States. The AMA report stated that "medicine participates less effectively in the administration of justice in the United States than it does in any comparable country in the world." Although the medical profession throughout the country was aware of the situation already, there was apparently no follow-up nor any change instituted as a result of that report. Presumably the obstacles to reforming the situation seemed invulnerable, for the offices of coroners in most states were imbedded in the state's constitution as were those of county boards, sheriffs, county clerks, prosecutors, and various others. These minor offices, along with the other dull and minor posts that appeared periodically on local ballots, failed almost completely to attract the attention or scrutiny of typical voters. Voters, in the course of marking a paper ballot or pulling little levers on a voting machine, came to such minor offices and voted for all the Democrats or all the Republicans without being able, as they left the polls, to tell you the names of the candidates. The sovereign people have their own royal notion of what is interesting or relatively important in their daily lives, and have taken this attitude toward the great lists of minor offices ever since the era of Andrew Jackson. They are not to be sneered at for being so sensible as to bestow their attention on nearer and dearer matters of private concern; however, this condition left the selection of minor offices to the ticket makers of the two major political parties in each county, a group trivial in numbers and concerned with self interest and party interest in distributing these minor jobs to loyal party members. In perhaps half the 3000-odd counties of the United States, a single party has held, and still holds, consecutive control for generations on end. The situation excluded selection of professionals, since the coronership, like the other county offices, was sure to be awarded to a local aspirant.


Most countries provide asylum through domestic legislation, such as a statute incorporating the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. France, Italy, and Germany stand out as three of very few European countries specifically to guarantee a right of asylum in their national Constitutions. The origin, wording, and scope of these constitutional provisions vary, depending on historical factors specific to each country. This article examines the right of asylum guaranteed in the Constitutions of France, Italy, and Germany from a historical perspective. It discusses how this right has evolved in all three countries, especially in light of the Refugee Convention and recent European Asylum Legislation. It concludes that however unique and individual constitutional asylum has traditionally been regarded as in France, Italy, and Germany, international obligations and recent European commitments have absorbed its distinctiveness, making it a redundant, almost obsolete, concept.


Objectives: Bifurcation percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs) remain a challenging subset with tussle between provisional versus dedicated (i.e. two-stent) stenting. Besides technical issues, many other factors such as cost, operator skill, and availability of surgery affect the practice which is followed in a particular region. Because of paucity of data in Indian settings, as also information with later generation stents; this study was planned. Methodology: Patients with bifurcation lesion undergoing elective PCI during 1-year period were prospectively enrolled. Decision of strategy (provisional or dedicated two-stent) and drug-eluting stent type (second or third generation) were operator's choice. Patients were followed telephonically and/or clinically (on routine visits) for 1-year postprocedure for any major adverse cardiac event. Results: One hundred and seven cases (28 in dedicated and 79 in provisional group) with a mean age of 56.2 ± 10.2 years were enrolled. All cases of dedicated arm were true bifurcation compared to 63.2% in provisional group (P < 0.001). In dedicated arm, 75% of patients had stenosis ≥5 mm in side branch (SB), in provisional group, 74.7% had <5 mm stenosis in SB (P < 0.001). T-TAP was most common strategy followed by DK crush and final kissing inflation was done in 96.4% cases of dedicated arm. Nearly 84.1% of patients could be followed up till the end of year. In hospital, events were few in either arm, one patient in the dedicated arm developed acute stent thrombosis and three patients in provisional arm developed in-hospital myocardial infarction. One-year major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE) was not significantly different (9.5% provisional vs. 7.4% dedicated; P = 0.65). Conclusions: One-year MACE did not differ in either 1 or 2-stent strategy in suitable patients with bifurcation lesions.


The meaningful contribution of terminal rising pitch has received a fair amount of scholarly attention, discussed for its ability to create questioning force on declarative syntax (Gunlogson, 2008), as part of listing intonation (Ladd, 2008), as well as indicating discourse relationships ( Jasinskaja, 2010; Nilsenova, 2006; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). A common interpretation of the meaning of rising pitch is that it conveys incompleteness, more-to-come, continuation or is 'forward-looking' (Bolinger, 1989; Hirschberg, 2008; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990). Recent experimental results contribute to this discussion, showing a rise can bias towards the coordinating interpretation of a coordination/subordination discourse ambiguity (Tyler, 2012). Because both interpretations of the ambiguity involve continuation, the rise is signaling not just that you continue but how you continue. In this paper, I will briefly present these results and then integrate them into a unified account of the contribution of rising pitch, which I see as a signal of incompleteness with respect to the current hierarchical level of the discourse. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/


Objective The 5As framework (ask, advise, assess, assist, arrange) is a recommended strategy for smoking cessation counseling in primary care. This study compares patient report with direct observation to assess the degree of recall bias for each of the 5As. Methods Primary care visits by 107 adult smokers and 16 physicians were audio-recorded. Within 48 hours after the visit, patients completed a survey assessing whether or not smoking was discussed and items specific to each of the 5As. The audio recordings were evaluated to assess the presence of each A. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of patient report versus direct observation were computed. Results The frequency of the 5As based on evaluation of the audio recording ranged from 13% (arrange) to 98% (ask). The sensitivity and specificity of patient report were 92% and not applicable for ask, 90% and 50% for assess, 94% and 33% for advise, 90% and 50% for assist, and 85% and 67% for arrange follow-up. Positive predictive values ranged from 28% to 98%; negative predictive values ranged from 0% to 97%. Conclusion Compared with the gold standard of direct observation, patient report of each of the 5As is reasonably sensitive but not specific. Patients overreport the occurrence of each of the 5As.


Changes in glycosaminoglycan abundance and function are associated with altered growth factor signaling in aged heart muscle. Changes in extracellular matrix (ECM) composition occur with injury, disease, or aging and may result in altered tissue homeostasis and integrity. Heparan sulfates (HS), chondroitin sulfates, and hyaluronans are subfamilies of long polysaccharides collectively known as glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) that can affect cellular signaling pathways by interacting with cytokines and growth factors or by acting as ligands for cell-surface receptors. Huynh et al. found that the overall abundance of sulfated GAGs in the left ventricular myocardium of rats increased with age (comparing 4-, 12-, 18-, and 24-month-old animals). Further analysis indicated that an increase in HS accounted for this increase in total GAGs. GAGs from young (4-month-old) and aged (24-month-old) rats also differed qualitatively, because GAGs extracted from aged myocardium exhibited increased affinity for a heparin-binding isoform of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF165) and decreased affinity for fibroblast growth factors 1 and 2 (FGF1 and FGF2), and HS derived from aged hearts showed decreased affinity for FGF2. To determine the effects of GAGs derived from young and aged hearts on cellular responses to these ligands, the authors used the BaF32 lymphoblastoid cell line, which lacks cell-surface HS, expresses transgenically encoded FGF receptor 1 (FGFR1), and proliferates in response to FGF2 only in the presence of exogenously supplied GAGs or heparin. In this assay, aged heart–derived GAGs potentiated FGF2-induced proliferation less than did GAGs derived from young hearts. In contrast, GAGs derived from aged hearts were better at promoting VEGF165-induced proliferation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) than were GAGs from young hearts. HS show great variety in the sulfation of their disaccharide building blocks, and the authors noted that the sulfation patterns differed between young and aged HS, suggesting that the biosynthesis of HS changed as the animals aged. It is therefore possible that age-related changes in ECM composition could affect the ability of tissues like the myocardium to maintain integrity, regenerate, or recover from stress, potentially contributing to the impairment of heart function in elderly humans. M. B. Huynh, C. Morin, G. Carpentier, S. Garcia-Filipe, S. Talhas-Perret, V. Barbier-Chassefière, T. H. van Kuppevelt, I. Martelly, P. Albanese, D. Papy-Garcia, Age-related changes in rat myocardium involve altered capacities of glycosaminoglycans to potentiate growth factor functions and heparan sulfate-altered sulfation. J. Biol. Chem. 287, 11363–11373 (2012). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The European Commission has proposed the target of achieving an interconnection capacity of at least 10% of the installed electricity production capacity for each Member State by 2020 in the context of the envisaged Energy Union. The underlying objectives are to increase the security of supply at affordable prices via market integration and to contribute to decarbonization by accommodating an increasing level of renewable generation. In this article we have assessed whether this target could effectively fulfil these two objectives. Our main focus is on the assessment of the impacts of compliance with the 10% interconnection target on the carbon emission of the European electricity system. Our main research question concerns the impact of interconnection capacity increases on EU carbon emission due to the better market integration, disregarding the RES-E integration aspects. In order to arrive at workable scenarios for the future cross-border capacity extension, the security of supply and market integration impacts are also assessed. We concluded on the basis of our European dispatch model that full compliance would slightly increase carbon emission in the EU, ceteris paribus. This impact is due to increased coal- and lignite-based electricity production, mainly in Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. By increasing the interconnections of these countries with their neighbours at the present low carbon price under the EU emissions trading scheme, these carbon-intensive electricity systems run on higher utilization rates and consequently increase carbon emission. It has to be emphasized that the increase is found for the current situation, and changes in other factors, such as increases in carbon prices or renewable generation, could modify this result. Policy relevance Our results demonstrate that EU network development and climate policies are highly interconnected. Changing patterns in the interconnections of the EU electricity systems connect diverse generation portfolios and in a low carbon price environment could increase carbon emission at the community level. Policy makers should be aware of the interactions between these areas and design policy tools that also consider negative synergies.


This honors thesis describes the development of the codebase for the 2018 University of Connecticut ECE Senior Design project titled "Smartwatch Device and App for Continuous Glucose Monitoring". The goal for the senior design project is to remove the dependencies imposed by a previously-designed prototype of a glucose-monitoring smartwatch, by creating a new custom device without those dependencies. Development of the new codebase involves splitting the tasks of an Arduino codebase into a number of logical components that are then implemented in C. This new codebase makes substantial improvements to the overall program structure and organization, as well as numerous functional additions. An API for writing graphics to a given display is written and implemented for two LCD controllers as well as for the standard output stream. This graphics API uses a buffering strategy and partial screen rendering to achieve faster display writing. Functions that plot incoming data on an auto-scaling bar graph are implemented as well. The resulting codebase realizes the firmware for a custom smartwatch controlled by an ATSAMD21G18A microcontroller. This smartwatch is designed to periodically read the frequency of an incoming signal to determine and display the current glucose level of a user. The program supports Bluetooth communication with a smartphone app and a deep sleep mode to save battery during inactivity. Current time and date are kept and displayed to the user, as well as battery and Bluetooth connection information. A user interacts with the smartwatch using two buttons.


Background:The widespread use of highly active retroviral therapy (HAART) has indicated a dramatic reduction in impairment due to immunodeficiency. Several studies have shown that an adverse event of HAART on dyslipidemia and insulin resistance. This study aimed to assess changes in lipid profiles after HAART. Methods:A prospective cohort study with a consecutive sampling method consists of 59 HIV-infected patientsreceiving HAART at Dr. Wahidin Sudirohusodo Hospital, Makassar, Indonesia, from March-September 2020. Lipid profiles were measured at the initial time and after three months of HAART. The drug regimen was divided into two groups: Regimen European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine ISSN 2515-8260 Volume 07, Issue 08, 2020 954 group 1 (tenofovir, lamivudine, efavirenz), and another regimen group (consist of 4 regimen group combination: zidovudine, lamivudine, efavirenz; tenofovir, emtricitabine, lopinavir/ritonavir; tenofovir, lamivudine, nevirapine, and tenofovir, lamivudine, rilpivirine). ANOVA paired t-test and chi-square test were used for statistical analysis(it is significant if p is<0.05). Results:The mean age of the subjects was 32.1 ± 6.6 years old. About 76.3% of subjects were male. Regimen 1 was used by 88.1% of the subjects and another regimen only 11.9% of the subjects. There were 27 subjects (45.8%) were underweight. The proportion of subjects with lipid abnormalities after 3 months of HAART significantly higher in LDL-c and TG level (P= 0.002 and 0.021). Regimen group1 showed increased levels of total cholesterol (TC), LDL-c, and TG (P = 0.037, 0.041, and 0.001) after HAART. Conclusion:Highly active retroviral therapy is associated with lipid profile changes in HIV patients after 3 months of therapy.


Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are energy and resource constrained. Energy limitations make it advantageous to balance radio transmissions across multiple sensor nodes. Thus, load balanced routing is highly desirable and has motivated a significant volume of research. Multihop sensor network architecture can also provide greater coverage, but requires a highly reliable and adaptive routing scheme to accommodate frequent topology changes. Current reliability-oriented protocols degrade energy efficiency and increase network latency. This thesis develops and evaluates a novel solution to provide energy-efficient routing while enhancing packet delivery reliability. This solution, a reliable load-balancing routing (RLBR), makes four contributions in the area of reliability, resiliency and load balancing in support of the primary objective of network lifetime maximisation. The results are captured using real world testbeds as well as simulations. The first contribution uses sensor node emulation, at the instruction cycle level, to characterise the additional processing and computation overhead required by the routing scheme. The second contribution is based on real world testbeds which comprises two different TinyOS-enabled senor platforms under different scenarios. The third contribution extends and evaluates RLBR using large-scale simulations. It is shown that RLBR consumes less energy while reducing topology repair latency and supports various aggregation weights by redistributing packet relaying loads. It also shows a balanced energy usage and a significant lifetime gain. Finally, the forth contribution is a novel variable transmission power control scheme which is created based on the experience gained from prior practical and simulated studies. This power control scheme operates at the data link layer to dynamically reduce unnecessarily high transmission power while maintaining acceptable link reliability.


Contemporary tourism is a social and especially a cultural process; it is a way o life of today's man. Up to modern times, the basic social relations represented a function of social proximity. The local communities, with a local cultural environment, sharing fundamental values, have eased the definitions of identity by the individuals and have given a meaning to the social groups, which are generally stable. All the values are combined within the "mass culture" society, which leads to the isolation of an individual among the "many loners".The process is unfolded in various parts of the Globe. This aims mainly at the developed countries and regions, but it gradually expands to the whole world. Tourism is, before all, a form of the human behaviour. Man is the essential subject of tourism. This can be explained if we understand man, as a human being with its social, cultural needs This article will look at the big picture of tourism development impacts and approaches to deliver low impact development. It will teach a holistic approach to planning and tourism development that reviews governments' and international donors' role in rural land development, stressing bioregional planning as a key tool for governments and their donors to move rural areas into a more thorough process for sustainable regional development.


The agro-ecosystem is under enormous pressure due to rapid population growth, increasing global food demand, increasing fresh water withdrawals and energy consumption, excessive food waste, inefficient use of agrochemicals, environmental degradation and climate change. Nanotechnology offers opportunities to make food production more sustainable by providing better sensors for monitoring physical, chemical, or biological properties and processes; technologies for controlling pathogens to increase food safety and minimize food waste; improved membranes and sorbents for distributed water treatment and resource recovery; novel materials for timed and targeted delivery of agrochemicals; and, new materials for monitoring and improving animal health. This tutorial review provides an overview of the nanotechnology opportunities of greatest potential determined through an NSF-funded interdisciplinary workshop of ∼50 experts from the U.S. and the EU in the areas of nanotechnology, energy, water, agriculture, systems engineering, data integration and analysis, and social science. This paper also presents examples of selected specific opportunities and the remaining scientific and engineering challenges that must be overcome to realize the benefits of nanotechnology across the farm to fork continuum.


Eighteen consecutive patients satisfying predefined clinical criteria for embolic strokes were prospectively studied by sequential computerized tomography (CT). Their findings were compared to CT scans obtained from patients presumed to have suffered thrombotic strokes. Our data reveal that the CT appearance of hemorrhagic infarction is likely to occur twice as frequently (22%) in CT scans of strokes presumed embolic than in those presumed thrombotic, where hemorrhagic infarction appeared at some time in 10% of the patients. No patient deteriorated with anticoagulation regardless of the CT appearance. In patients showing hemorrhagic infarction before anticoagulants, follow-up scans obtained after the administration of anticoagulants revealed resolution of the hemorrhagic aspect.


The House Judiciary Committee released a large number of business documents on July 29, 2020 alongside the Antitrust Subcommittee's hearing on "Online Platforms and Market Power." The hearing featured the chief executive officers of four large U.S. technology companies. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sudhar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Tim Cook of Apple gave testimony and answered questions on a range of topics over five and a half hours. The business documents are a subset of the documents collected from an ongoing antitrust investigation by the House Committee. We read the files and analyze them below. In my assessment, these "hot docs," particularly combined with market evidence, reveal episodes of rapid growth and innovation in digital markets, as opposed to obvious instances of anticompetitive conduct.


A prerequisite of participating in an enterprise system is the ability to cope with the rigorous demands experienced within the system. In order to cope with these demands, a number of infrastructure support services are available to assist developers in their creation. A key obstacle to the widespread deployment of agent technology is the relative immaturity of agent technology with regard to its infrastructure. This paper presents a solution to the problem by offering enterprise-level infrastructure services to agent platforms in an agent friendly manner. The proposed solution uses ServiceAgent Gateways (SAG) to offer these services within an agent environment. This paper describes the SAG design pattern and presents an implementation of the pattern that offers the functionality of Enterprise Message Services (EMS) to an agent environment. The Java Message Service (JMS)-Agent Gateway enhances the acceptability of agent platforms within business environments, moving them a step closer to full-scale participation in the digital enterprise.


I. INTRODUCTION In February of 1964, the Civil Rights Act was on the cusp of passing in the House of Representatives.1 Representative Howard Smith, a staunch opponent of the bill, was losing ground, and it looked as though equal employment opportunity would become a reality.2 "But Howard Smith had one last arrow in his quiver - perhaps 'bombshell' would be a better term."3 In what is dubbed "Ladies Day," Representative Smith, in "a mocking and jocular tone," moved to add "sex" to Title VII.4 Representative Smith's addition to Title VII was "to prevent discrimination against another minority group, the women."5 As explained by commentators, "[c]ertainly Smith hoped that such a divisive issue would torpedo the civil rights bill, if not in the House, then in the Senate."6 This last minute attempt to defeat the civil rights legislation by adding the term "sex" failed and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate.7 As noted by Justice William Rehnquist, the "prohibition against discrimination based on sex was added to Title VII at the last minute on the floor of the House of Representatives."8 Due to the last minute addition, "we are left with little legislative history to guide us in interpreting the Act's prohibition against discrimination based on 'sex.'"9 When Congress enacted Title VII, it was well-accepted that the term "sex" as it is used in the Act referred to a female and a male. There also seems to be little doubt that the reference to sex was primarily meant to provide equal employment opportunity protection to women in the workforce. However, without a clear guideline within the statute regarding the term "sex" and what protections are covered by the term, the courts and employers have been forced to participate in a virtual guessing game as to just how far they should go in order to assure their compliance with the Act. For instance, it was not until the late seventies, some ten years after the passage of Title VII, that sexual harassment as a form of prohibited sex discrimination was recognized.10 Sexual harassment claims are only one of the many expansions of Title VII coverage since the inception of the Act. The purpose of this article is to trace the trajectory of state and federal law regarding the possible expansion of equal employment protections for transgender employees and applicants and the issues that will arise with such an expansion. The authors would like to note in the opening that for the purposes of this article we will interchange the usage of the terms transsexual and transgender. While we recognize that the terms have different meanings, it is difficult to imagine any scenario in which one would be covered by Title VII and not the other; therefore, the terms are used interchangeably. Further, the authors are not discussing "sexual orientation," which is not correctly classified as a gender "disorder."11 "Although transgenderism is often conflated with homosexuality, the characteristic, which defines transgenderism, is not sexual orientation, but sexual identity. Transgenderism describefs] people who experience a separation between their gender and their biological/anatomical sex."12 Section II of this article addresses the case for exclusion and inclusion of transsexuals as a protected class under Title VII. The purpose of Section II is not to advocate for inclusion or exclusion, but rather to explore the current state of the law regarding transsexual rights. Section III of this article briefly addresses transsexual rights in the state court arena. Section IV addresses some practical implications for inclusion, whether it comes by legislative amendment or recognition by the courts. The scope of this article is to identify and elaborate on potential legal issues and lay the foundation for providing a workable solution. II. ARE TRANSGENDERED PERSONS COVERED UNDER TITLE VII? The first step for both proponents and opponents of inclusion begins by analyzing what falls within "sex" under Title VII. …


Excavation to the immediate west of the castle revealed considerable evidence of occupation (probably not continuous) dating from c. 1200 to at least the mid-sixteenth century. Most of the structures uncovered were associated with the medieval burgh not the castle. The first timber buildings gave way to a fourteenth-century tannery, probably when the castle was in ruins and unoccupied. The tannery gave way to two phases of residential buildings, either of masonry or set in stone foundations. The latest of these structures were set against a new boundary wall, all probably dating to the mid-sixteenth century when the adjacent road, the Scores, was realigned. From an earlier period, Beaker sherds indicate prehistoric settlement, although no associated features could be identified. There are specialist reports on: `Coins' by Nicholas M McQ Holmes (635); `Small finds' by D Caldwell (635--45); `The inscribed stone' by John Higgitt (646--7); `Prehistoric pottery' by Helen Smith (647--8); `Medieval pottery' by George Haggerty & Robert Will (648--69); `Mammal bones' by Finbar McCormick (669--71); `Bird and fish bones' by Sheila Hamilton-Dyer (671--2); `The micromorphology of a buried soil' by Stephen Carter (672--4); `Palaeobotanical analysis of samples from period 3 pits A, B & C' by Coralie Mills (675).


This qualitative study explores the experiences of female adolescents in relation to physical activity. The study investigates the experience of being adolescent and the meaning of a female adolescent's experience of physical activity. A qualitative description with a phenomenological hue was the methodology used. Their perceptions of their lived experiences in relation to physical activity were revealed through stories. The participants were six adolescent females. The study data was gathered through open-ended questions and in-depth conversations, to seek meaning of the adolescent's experience of physical activity. The interviews were transcribed and stories extracted from the data. Results from the findings of the study indicate that physical activity needs to be enjoyable for the female adolescent for her to be motivated to participate. What specifically constitutes enjoyment for the adolescent differs for each individual. The data also suggested that other persons of influence or the female adolescent's environment may also have an impact on their participation. Peers, parents, their gender, body issues, competition, running, and certain restrictions were revealed as making a difference. For the female adolescent participating in physical activity, it would be advantageous to find an approach that allows a girl to experience physical activity in the way that works for her. Some participants, already good at sports, are likely to be very competitive, want to train hard, and will build friendships among their like-minded peers. These viii female adolescents are not so problematic. They already love physical activity and participate in it. The challenge is to target those female adolescents who do not participate on a regular basis, and to design successful interventions which promote and encourage them into physical activity. This change may prevent a further decline in the levels of physical activity for the adolescent who is at a stage when physical activity may be so advantageous.


The essays in this issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge have received awards in The Kingston-Mann Student Achievement Awards for Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion Scholarship. Written by undergraduate students who address deeply urgent and important issues, each essay possesses a clear, distinctive voice. The authors do not turn away from difficult questions and do not waffle, even when they are dealing with questions and data that are ambiguous or contradictory. Although faculty may be accustomed to academic articles rife with qualifiers, indirect points, jargon, and a limited concern for relevance, the essays included here are the works of engaged researchers. They frequently include a call to action, sometimes persuasive for its subtle, measured tone. In this issue, students invite us to consider some traditional merits of scholarly work that have been lost, such as clear and jargon-free writing. They also point the way to new kinds of merit, such as using previously neglected information sources, paying attention to silenced or marginalized voices and questions, and raising issues of social justice. This introduction has three parts. First, we introduce the process by which we solicited and judged these award winning articles by undergraduate scholars. Second, we provide an overview of the essays' themes and some of the 'aha' moments that occurred when we recognized how much we were learning from the students. Third, we discuss how the students' research achievements might affect their role as engaged members of academia and the influence they might exert upon a much wider audience in an increasingly diverse civic sphere. I. The Kingston-Mann Student Achievement Awards for excellence in diversity and Inclusion Scholarship This competition for undergraduate students recognizes and honors student achievements in scholarship that focuses on questions of diversity and inclusion. (1) The awards committee seeks submissions of work that (1) applies a gender, race, culture/ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic class, age, disability, or sexual orientation analysis to research in any discipline, or (2) focuses on the contributions of women and men of diverse backgrounds to society, history, culture, or thought in any area of study. Interdisciplinary approaches, and analyses that consider the intersection of multiple dimensions of diversity, are particularly encouraged. The awards committee is composed of faculty members from eight colleges and universities (2) in the New England region whose student population includes many non-traditional, not highly privileged, first generation college students. Before the awards program was created, there was an abundance of awards that recognized students for leadership, involvement in campus or community life, athleticism, or high grades across their classes. But few reward students for their original research and acknowledge them as emerging practitioners of the kind of work that faculty do. This award was created to celebrate student scholars, and specifically to recognize how the diversity of our students helps them contribute perceptive scholarship on diversity and inclusion. In addition, the regional character of this project permits student achievement to be recognized in a cross-institution process, and introduces their work to students and faculty beyond their classroom, their field, and their campus. The Kingston-Mann awards explicitly celebrate students as scholars, and welcome them into a process of generating and disseminating the new ideas that nourish higher education. In this process, students who may have experienced a sense of marginality within the university community can begin to see that their work may contribute to the university's core commitment to scholarship. The award focuses specifically on diversity/inclusion scholarship. Our call for submissions explicitly defines some elements of inclusive scholarship, and include an appendix and a bibliography. …


Abstract The current literature reports divergent conclusions on the patterns of body size change in island snakes. I reviewed body size data in the published literature and tested the effects of island biogeographic variables on such changes. I found that none of the physiographic variables (island area, island age, distance to mainland, and latitude) was important in determining changes in size of island snakes. Additionally, a current hypothesis of phylogenetic history had no effect on changes in body size. Rather, the proportional change in body size of island snakes was bimodal, consistent with a diet alteration hypothesis that suggests that snake body size is principally influenced by prey size and that island snakes encounter prey that are larger or smaller in size compared with those on the mainland. Also, snakes that became small on islands did so to a relatively greater degree than those that became large. Ontogenetic changes in foraging strategies appeared to explain this pattern. The distribution of gigantic and dwarf snake populations on islands differed significantly between the families Viperidae and Colubridae. The foraging style of colubrids, specifically nest-robbing behavior, may predispose these species to become larger on islands. Numerous colubrid (and one elapid) species attain their largest sizes on islands that also support nesting seabirds, whereas dwarfed populations consume mainly squamates.


In order to assess the positive effect and validity of personalization on the basis of users' cognitive and emotional characteristics, this study presents three subsequent experiments. The first experiment explores the relationship of cognitive style and users' eye gaze behavior as to validate this specific psychological construct in the context of educational hypermedia. The second and third experiments present the effect of a set of human factors (cognitive style, visual working memory span, control/speed of processing, and anxiety) in an adaptive educational system. The eye tracking experiment demonstrated that eye gaze patterns are robustly related to cognitive style (n = 21), while matching the instructional style to users' characteristics was revealed to be statistically significant in optimizing users' performance ( n = 219), with the exception of control/speed of processing. Based on this empirical assessment, this paper argues that individual differences at this intrinsic level are important and adaptation on these parameters through personalization technologies may have a positive effect on learning performance.


Regarding the contingency theory, the purpose of this research is to identify factors affecting the development of accounting and financial [management] procedures (AFP) for joint operating agreements in Iran's oil and gas industry. To this end, at first, some partial factors were identified through a deep study of theoretical foundations. Subsequently, in order to identify environmental factors, a semi-structured interview was conducted with accounting and finance experts in oil and gas exploration and production companies whose competences were approved by the Ministry of Petroleum. Using the theoretical framework and the interview results, a questionnaire was set up and distributed in a wider range in order to add potentials and eliminate, modify, and finally rank the raised factors. The results showed that changes in laws and regulations, use of services in Iran's oil and gas industry, changes in business practices, information technologies, the structure of the principal contract,  and conflicts among operational parties are the most important factors that should be taken into account in the formulation and development of AFP's for these contracts in Iran's oil and gas industry, and, in this regard, some suggestions are provided.


Numerous enhanced oil recovery techniques including miscible gas injection, chemical, thermal and other methods are applied at the third phase of production after both primary and secondary recovery have been exhausted. Polymer flooding is one of the chemical methods that recover more oil by decreasing the mobility of the system; by increasing the viscosity of the injected water that results in an improvement in the volumetric sweep efficiency. The objective of this work is to asses and select the development options using polymer process that maximize oil recovery for a synthetic reservoir model where technical parameters are optimized thoroughly. Reservoir simulation study using ECLIPSE 100 was used to simulate the synthetic model to investigate the different development options of polymer flooding applied and compare them to waterflooding. The development options include continuous polymer injection, water alternating polymer, and polymer slug injection. Through the study, the effect of injection rate, polymer concentration, slug size, and well completion were investigated by setting up a range of sensitivities. According to the sensitivity analysis performed on injection rate when waterflooding is applied; 1500 STB/D was considered the most suitable operating injection rate for the study. Results of the study reveal a general trend of improved oil recovery with the implementation of polymer flooding over waterflooding in the range of 3 8%. In the continuous polymer injection, the highest field oil efficiency of more than 50% was obtained using polymer concentration of 200 ppm where all the layers were completed. On the other hand employing the water alternating polymer technique, a


The process design of chemical processes may be divided into
two broad phases: one, a synthesis phase, is all activities
associated with the selection of the process route or configuration
together with the selection of the type of process units required for
a given processing function; the other is an analysis phase
in which the design and optimisation of each unit within a given
configuration or process scheme is established.
Historically, the discipline of chemical engineering has
been concerned primarily with the analysis phase of process design;
in that it pioneered the concept of breaking down processes into
unique processing steps or 'unit operations'. Most of these unit
operations have now been developed to a very high degree of
sophistication. However, the synthesis phase has not received the
same degree of attention. For example, the selection of the optimal
process route for a given process function from among a number of
possible process routes has been made to a certain extent upon the
process designer's experience and/or intuition, there being no
formal techniques available to assist in the selection.
Process synthesis has been regarded more or less as an art
and consequently it has received very little attention in chemical
engineering research. [Continues.]


A multidisciplinary approach on mainly continental carbonate deposits outcropping in the southern part of the Valdelsa Basin has allowed the recognition of two units, the Strove Synthem (STR) and the Campiglia dei Foci Synthem (CDF), both previously attributed altogether to a single indistinct sequence. The presence of a mammalian fauna suggests that the STR Synthem belongs to the Early-Middle Pleistocene, whereas the CDF Synthem is assigned to Middle Pleistocene because of its stratigraphic position. Lateral correlation with continental deposits cropping out in the adjacent Lower Valdarno Basin suggests an age not younger of the Stage 11 of the isotope scale. A paleopedological study of the soils on the synthems has distinguished two pedogenetic typologies: a Cutanic Alisol (Manganiferric) on Gleyic Vertisol for STR Synthem and a Haplic Cambisol on Rhodic Luvisol on Rhodic Nitisol for CDF Synthem. The different pedogenetic development corroborated the hypothesis of two distinct synthems. The attitude of the STR Synthem (tilted deposits) in comparison with the CDF Synthem (sub-horizontal bedding) shows that the former was affected by a tectonic phase which ended before the deposition of the latter synthem. The chronostratigraphic attribution of the two synthems allow us to tentatively relate this tectonic phase with the regional Middle Pleistocene tectonic uplift, which caused the present Northern Apennine mountain chain.