ABSTRACTWith rapid economic development in China, the concentration of particulate matters emitted into the atmosphere has become increasingly higher. As an important city in the Yangtze River delta, Nanjing City in China has a high PM2.5 concentration level, due partly to the long-range transport of PM2.5 from elsewhere. It is important to study the transport pathways and PM2.5 source areas as the results can serve as scientific evidence for prevention of regional air pollution. In this study, we analyzed the 2013–2016 PM2.5 concentration data at Xianlin in Nanjing City, China. After being clustered to determine the transport pathways, backward trajectory data underwent potential source contribution function (PSCF) and trajectory sector analysis so as to identify potential PM2.5 source areas. A new index called pollution source strength was proposed to indicate the level of pollution in an administrative region. Our results indicate that the concentration of PM2.5 at Xianlin in the city and externally sourced PM2.5 are high in winter, but much lower in summer. The external source areas also show some spatiotemporal regularities. External PM2.5 source areas lie chiefly to the south and southwest of Xianlin, Nanjing City in spring, but mostly to the southeast in summer, to the southeast and northwest in autumn, and to the northwest and northeast with a broader distribution in winter.


A computational approach to evaluate the bit-error ratio (BER) in silicon photonic systems employing high-order phase-shift keying (PSK) modulation formats is presented. Specifically, the investigated systems contain a silicon based optical interconnect, namely a strip silicon photonic waveguide or a silicon photonic crystal waveguide, and direct-detection receivers suitable to detect PSK and amplitude-shaped PSK signals. The superposition of a PSK signal and complex additive white Gaussian noise passes through the optical interconnect and subsequently through two detection-branch receivers. To model the signal propagation in the silicon optical interconnects we used a modified nonlinear Schrödinger equation, which incorporates all relevant linear and nonlinear optical effects and the mutual interaction between free-carriers and the optical field. Finally, the BER is calculated by applying a frequency-domain approach based on the Karhunen-Loève series expansion method. Our computational studies of the BER reveal that the optical power, type of PSK modulation, waveguide length, and group-velocity are key factors characterizing the system BER, their influence on BER being more significant in a photonic system with larger nonlinearity. In particular, our analysis shows that the system performance is affected to a much larger extent when the signal propagates in the slow-light regime, despite the fact that this regime allows for a significantly reduced length of optical interconnects.


This is the third report of a TRL study of urban rapid transit systems in other countries. In this report, the actual capital costs, operating costs and patronage levels of a number of existing rapid transit systems are compared with forecasts made when the systems were planned and grants were being sought. The report draws on information obtained during a TRL study tour of rapid transit systems and on other published material. It summarises a study of ten US rapid transit systems, and also includes 3 case studies (Grenoble, San Diego and Tyne and Wear). The report concludes that on the whole, the rapid transit systems studied cost more than forecast and carry fewer passengers. Of the systems studied only one system was constructed for less than its forecast cost and only two carried the forecast number of passengers or more. The report discusses some possible reasons for these discrepancies and how forecasts might be improved. (A)


The stage is set for disaster -- and Nancy's in the spotlight! Bess has landed a small part in a promising new Chicago play, and she's seeing stars for the hot young featured actor, Jordan McCabe. Nancy, however, sees only trouble. The play is a mystery, the theme is murder, and it soon becomes apparent that Nancy and Bess may both have starring roles in a deadly real-life drama. A mysterious fire backstage, a prop gun loaded with real bullets, and an anonymous threat on Bess's life put Nancy on notice that danger is waiting in the wings. Nancy's investigation turns up a whole cast of suspects... one of whom is determined to turn the final act into a major tragedy!


In his first book of the series "50 Years of Foreign Relations", Ambassador Dashnor Dervishi covers his experience encompassing the period 1972-1992. The events and observations depicted in the book highlight the fact that despite the social system and the interests of the political class in power, the strategic interests of the country remain the fundamentals of its foreign policy. The relations of the Party-State with the leftist movements in Latin America during 1970-80 were driven by the power that had its influence in Albania at that period. Aware of its actions, the political leadership followed the conjunctures for the preservation of power, thus ensuring vital aid for the finances and economy of the country, as well as the international support of conjectural alliances. Most of the book comprises the memoirs of the Ambassador in Italy, in the period 1988-1992. It was a time, when right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demarcation line between the two blocs during the Cold War, was displaced from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea and Albania became part of the social system it belonged to. Under the new circumstances, the political rapport between Italy and Albania assumed a more "geographic dimension" and Rome became the main point of reference for all the relations with the West. Italy became the "promised land" of the Albanians, making a reality of the expression "All roads lead to Rome". The departure of Popa family to Italy, after a 5-year long refuge in the Italian embassy (1985-1990), was followed by mass inundation of the embassies in Tirana, a biblical departure of more than 25 thousand Albanians towards the Italian shores, on 13 July of the same year. The first "secret" meetings with religious and lay representatives, enabled the visit of Saint Tereza of Calcutta in Albania and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Holy See. This period in Italy was characterized by the intensification of unprecedented relations between Albania and Italy in all fields. After 22 March1992, the democratic system was established in Albania. Under the new conditions, the role and the position of Albania in the European and Regional arena did not change and the non-productive idea of the country's leadership that the West and the US need us, fueled the old mentality: "We govern and the world helps us".


Geometry provides a whole range of views on the universe, serving as the inspiration, technical toolkit and ultimate goal for many branches of mathematics and physics. This book introduces the ideas of geometry, and includes a generous supply of simple explanations and examples. The treatment emphasises coordinate systems and the coordinate changes that generate symmetries. The discussion moves from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometries, including spherical and hyperbolic geometry, and then on to affine and projective linear geometries. Group theory is introduced to treat geometric symmetries, leading to the unification of geometry and group theory in the Erlangen program. An introduction to basic topology follows, with the Mobius strip, the Klein bottle and the surface with g handles exemplifying quotient topologies and the homeomorphism problem. Topology combines with group theory to yield the geometry of transformation groups,having applications to relativity theory and quantum mechanics. A final chapter features historical discussions and indications for further reading. With minimal prerequisites, the book provides a first glimpse of many research topics in modern algebra, geometry and theoretical physics. The book is based on many years' teaching experience, and is thoroughly class-tested. There are copious illustrations, and each chapter ends with a wide supply of exercises. Further teaching material is available for teachers via the web, including assignable problem sheets with solutions.


We describe a robust method by which the spatial coherence from all pairs of points along a line may be simultaneously acquired from an image formed by diffraction from a phase discontinuity. In contrast to other methods, this approach can accurately reveal weak correlations in the tails of a coherence function.


Leptin is a 16-kDa protein that is primarily secreted by adipose tissue. It affects body mass regulation by constituting part of the adipostat, that acts to alert the brain of the body's stored energy levels. Additional roles in immune function, reproduction and inflammation are known.Genetic studies of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), that exist in the extracellular domain of the leptin receptor gene, were undertaken in a population of European Caucasian postmenopausal women to investigate associations with indicators of adiposity. Homozygosity of the G allele of the LYS109ARG SNP was associated with lower mean fat mass levels and BMI. Furthermore, linkage disequilibrium was detected between this SNP and GLN223ARG, which in previous studies was also associated with indicators of adiposity. No associations were found between the LYS656ASN SNP and the tested phenotypes.To complement genetic studies of the leptin receptor, cDNA constructs representing different combinations of the alleles for SNPs in the leptin receptor were generated and subsequent expression of protein variants was conducted in COS-7 cells. Using a radioactive ligand-binding assay, labelled leptin was shown to specifically bind to the LYS109ARG223 and GLN223ARG protein variants, thereby testing the effect of the GLN223ARG mutation on LBA Preliminary data, suggest that the ARG allele appeared to bind less leptin than the GLN.Genetic studies were carried out on polymorphisms in related candidate genes. A promoter polymorphism (G-2548 A) in the leptin gene was associated with lower mean BMI and leptin levels in a cohort of European Caucasian postmenopausal womenIndividuals who lacked the 2 repeat allele of the variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphism present in intron two of the interleukin 1 receptor antagonist gene had an association with lower leptin levels but not BMI or fat mass. This suggests a potential feedback and / or cross-talk mechanism between leptin and members of the IL-1 family of cytokines in processes other than adiposity. Immunity and inflammation are processes where the interleukin one receptor antagonist protein has a prominent role and in which the function of leptin is increasingly being investigated, therefore an interaction between the two cytokines may be specific for these conditions.The TNF alpha (G-308 A) SNP was also investigated but no associations were observed between this SNP and the phenotypes in the postmenopausal cohort. To investigate the influence of the leptin receptor gene in conditions at the opposite end of the body weight spectrum to obesity, a case-control association study was undertaken to compare allele frequencies of the LYS109 ARG, GLN223ARG and LYS656ASN leptin receptor SNPs between anorexic women and controls. No significant differences were observed in allele or haplotype frequencies.


This interview with Dr. Craig Guyer was conducted by Robert Gitzen and Patricia Hartman on May 31, 2016, as part of the Cultural History of Alabama Wildlife Project. The interview consists of an audio file and transcript. In the interview, Dr. Guyer recounts his career as a herpetologist and professor of Biological Sciences at Auburn University. Subjects include his research in Conecuh National Forest, including the 2010 Eastern indigo snake reintroduction; observed changes in local wildlife populations since his arrival in 1987; longleaf pine ecology and conservation; and local attitudes toward wildlife.


We have modeled various soft-matter systems with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations.
The first topic concerns liquid crystal (LC) biaxial nematic (Nb) phases, that can be possibly used in fast displays. We have investigated the phase organization of biaxial Gay-Berne (GB) mesogens, considering the effects of the orientation, strength and position of a molecular dipole. We have observed that for systems with a central dipole, nematic biaxial phases disappear when increasing dipole strength, while for systems characterized by an offset dipole, the Nb phase is stabilized at very low temperatures.
In a second project, in view of their increasing importance as nanomaterials in LC phases, we are developing a DNA coarse-grained (CG) model, in which sugar and phosphate groups are represented with Lennard-Jones spheres, while bases with GB ellipsoids. We have obtained shape, position and orientation parameters for each bead, to best reproduce the atomistic structure of a B-DNA helix. Starting from
atomistic simulations results, we have completed a first parametrization of the force field terms, accounting for bonded (bonds, angles and dihedrals) and non-bonded interactions (H-bond and stacking). We are currently validating the model, by investigating stability and melting temperature of various sequences.
Finally, in a third project, we aim to explain the mechanism of enantiomeric discrimination due to the presence of a chiral helix of poly(gamma-benzyl L-glutamate) (PBLG), in solution of dimethylformamide (DMF), interacting with chiral or pro-chiral molecules (in our case heptyl butyrate, HEP), after tuning properly an atomistic force field (AMBER). We have observed that DMF and HEP molecules solvate uniformly the PBLG helix, but the pro-chiral solute is on average found closer to the helix with respect to the DMF. The solvent presents a faster isotropic diffusion, twice as HEP, also indicating a stronger interaction of the solute with the helix.


This study investigated the organisational climate of 26 preschools in England using a multi stage mixed methods design. Data collection included an initial questionnaire administered to all preschools, followed by a second questionnaire and interview process focusing upon preschools at the opposite ends of the climate continuum (high climate n= 6, low climate n = 5). Using data from the Early Childhood Work Environment Survey, ECWES, (Bloom, 2010), preschool and staff variables showed no statistically significant association with the overall assessment of organisational climate. However, the data did reveal a significant statistical difference between staff from the high and low climate groups across each of the separate ECWES ten climate dimensions. In addition, there was a significant statistical difference between the perception of support staff and teachers in the low climate group across several climate dimensions. Questionnaire and interview data revealed low pay as a variable, which was perceived negatively by many staff. However, the processes which differentiated to the greatest extent between the high and low climate groups, on a day to day basis, were social and operational in nature. The high climate preschools had transparent and effective organisational processes in place, which created a strong social system, where subsystems within the school were connected. In this positive environment staff felt supported, and there was an atmosphere where all staff worked harmoniously together with a collective drive to address problems and adapt to change. Preschools with smaller staff numbers, and where there was a discrete educational focus upon early years, appeared best suited to achieving these ends. Future implications of this study appear twofold. The first suggests a need for greater communication across preschool subsystems for high levels of climate to be established. The second is a broader strategy and involves policy makers addressing the low levels of remuneration, and the heavy workload, which the constant drive for change has created for many staff. While the effective management and operational systems within high climate preschools were found to mitigate against such external challenges, where these systems were not in place organisational climate was negatively impacted upon.Thesis completed in 2018.


This paper presents an interactive GPU-based system for cinematic relighting with multiple-bounce indirect illumination from a fixed view-point. We use a deep frame-buffer containing a set of view samples, whose indirect illumination is recomputed from the direct illumination on a large set of gather samples, distributed around the scene. This direct-to-indirect transfer is a linear transform which is particularly large, given the size of the view and gather sets. This makes it hard to precompute, store and multiply with. We address this problem by representing the transform as a set of sparse matrices encoded in wavelet space. A hierarchical construction is used to impose a wavelet basis on the unstructured gather cloud, and an image-based approach is used to map the sparse matrix computations to the GPU. We precompute the transfer matrices using a hierarchical algorithm and a variation of photon mapping in less than three hours on one processor. We achieve high-quality indirect illumination at 10-20 frames per second for complex scenes with over 2 million polygons, with diffuse and glossy materials, and arbitrary direct lighting models (expressed using shaders). We compute per-pixel indirect illumination without the need of irradiance caching or other subsampling techniques.


Backgrounds: Infection with Neisseria meningitides can produce a variety of clinical manifestations. Mortality and long-term morbidity can be very high in patients with invasive meningococcal disease if the infection is not treated appropriately. Our main objective was to evaluate mortality of all children admitted with acute meningococcal septicaemia (AMS). Methods: We conducted a retrospective study of all paediatric-cases of acute meningococcal septicaemia admitted to Al-Nasser Paediatric Hospital, the largest paediatric hospital in Gaza Strip, between January-2009 and September-2015. All AMS cases were diagnosed based on the clinical presentation, skin smear and blood culture. Outcome measures were predicted mortality using Paediatric Risk of Mortality score III (PRISM III), actual mortality and standardised mortality ratio. Results: A total of 240-children were admitted with proven AMS. Aged range from 1-month to 12-years, and 113 of them (47%) were male. The number of admitted children with AMS was decreased from 47–59 cases/year in the 2009–2011 period to 21–22 cases/year in the 2012-201. The total mortality predicted by PRISM III was 25.56%, however the actual overall mortality was 49 children (20.8%): 16(48.5%) aged less than-a-year, 17(22.1%) 1–3 year-old, 9(18.8%) 3–5 year-old and 7(8.5%) 5–12 year-old (p value = 0.00299). Standardised mortality ratio was 0.814. Forty-one children (82%) were died within the first 24-hours of admission. Sixty-nine (28.8%) children received corticosteroid, 85(35.4%) received inotropic medications and 46(19.2%) required mechanical ventilation for a median of 24-hours. In 75(31.3%) children, AMS was associated with meningitis. Multi-organ failure (n = 22, 9.2%) was the most common complication, followed by skin necrosis (n = 13, 5.4%), convulsions (n = 13, 5.4%), and disseminated intravascular coagulopathy (n = 10, 4.2%). Interpretation: The mortality rate of the disease still high, however, this can be explained by the high predicted score of mortality, which reflect the severity of admitted cases. The mortality was significantly associated with younger age-group. New model of treatment (e.g. plasmapheresis) may be useful in decreasing mortality.


In this paper, we study cost-sensitive semi-supervised learning where many of the training examples are unlabeled and different misclassification errors are associated with unequal costs. This scenario occurs in many real-world applications. For example, in some disease diagnosis, the cost of erroneously diagnosing a patient as healthy is much higher than that of diagnosing a healthy person as a patient. Also, the acquisition of labeled data requires medical diagnosis which is expensive, while the collection of unlabeled data such as basic health information is much cheaper. We propose the CS4VM (Cost-Sensitive Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machine) to address this problem. We show that the CS4VM, when given the label means of the unlabeled data, closely approximates the supervised cost-sensitive SVM that has access to the ground-truth labels of all the unlabeled data. This observation leads to an efficient algorithm which first estimates the label means and then trains the CS4VM with the plug-in label means by an efficient SVM solver. Experiments on a broad range of data sets show that the proposed method is capable of reducing the total cost and is computationally efficient.


This paper shows how job search success, measured as search duration and entry salary, is affected directly or indirectly by personal and process as well as structural characteristics. A specific focus is on the relevance of practical experience which is claimed to be a key feature of employability. While self-assessed practical and namely international experience is positively related to salary, but not to search duration, the number and duration of internships does not affect job search success. Results are relevant for higher education institutions to develop their curricula, for students to prepare for job search, and for employers to understand the genesis of employability and their potential means to impact it.


Abstract. Rivers act as a natural source of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that can be released from the metabolisms of aquatic organisms. Anthropogenic activities can largely alter the chemical composition and microbial communities of rivers, consequently affecting their GHG emissions. To investigate these impacts, we assessed the emissions of CO2, CH4, and N2O from Cuenca urban river system (Ecuador). High variation of the emissions was found among river tributaries that mainly depended on water quality and neighboring landscapes. By using Prati and Oregon Indexes, a clear pattern was observed between water quality and GHG emissions in which the more polluted the sites were, the higher were their emissions. When river water quality deteriorated from acceptable to very heavily polluted, their global warming potential (GWP) increased by ten times. Compared to the average estimated emissions from global streams, rivers with polluted water released almost double the estimated GWP while the proportion increased to ten times for very heavily polluted rivers. Conversely, the GWP of good-water-quality rivers was half of the estimated GWP. Furthermore, surrounding land-use types, i.e. urban, roads, and agriculture, significantly affected the river emissions. The GWP of the sites close to urban areas was four time higher than the GWP of the nature sites while this proportion for the sites close to roads or agricultural areas was triple and double, respectively. Lastly, by applying random forests, we identified dissolved oxygen, ammonium, and flow characteristics as the main important factors to the emissions. Conversely, low impact of organic matter and nitrate concentration suggested a higher role of nitrification than denitrification in producing N2O. These results highlighted the impacts of land-use types on the river emissions via water contamination by sewage discharges and surface runoff. Hence, to estimate of the emissions from global streams, both their quantity and water quality should be included.


This study investigates a type of online language play popularized on the Taiwan-based Internet, including the rendering in Chinese characters of the sounds of Taiwanese and Taiwan Guoyu (Taiwanese-accented Mandarin), which are defined as Stylized Taiwanese and Stylized Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, respectively. The playfulness inherent in these stylized practices has multiple sources. First, they manipulate the Chinese writing system and create an incongruity between sound and meaning. Second, they call attention simultaneously to a number of functions of language (Jakobson, 1960). Third, the two stylized practices bring into play the respective social meanings and stereotypes associated with their spoken counterparts. Thus the superficially similar forms of language play may be interpreted differently and further serve subtly different interactional functions in face-threatening situations. Two cases of stylized practices are examined in detail to illustrate how stylized language play is used to mitigate potential tension, to show positive affect, and to regulate appropriate group behaviors simultaneously.


Ensemble forecasts are used to quantify the uncertatinty that is associated with a single weather forecast. In the ensemble prediction system of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts different perturbation methods are applied to account for uncertainties associated with the initial conditions and the forecast model. In this study, the impact of the different methods on tropical cyclone forecasts is analysed and the growth mechanisms of the perturbations are identified.


Mouse embryos containing only maternal chromosomes (parthenotes) develop abnormally in vivo, usually failing at the peri-implantation stage. We have analyzed the development of parthenote embryos by using an inner cell mass (ICM) outgrowth assay that mimics peri-implantation development. ICMs from normal embryos maintained undifferentiated stem cells positive for stage-specific embryonic antigen-1 and Rex-1 while differentiating into a variety of cell types, including visceral endoderm-like cells and parietal endoderm cells. In contrast, ICMs from parthenotes failed to maintain undifferentiated stem cells and differentiated almost exclusively into parietal endoderm. This suggests that parthenote ICMs have a defect that leads to differentiation, rather than maintenance, of the stem cells, and a defect that leads to a parietal endoderm fate for the stem cells. To test the hypothesis that the ICM population is not maintained owing to a lack of proliferation of the stem cells, we investigated whether mitogenic agents were able to maintain the ICM population in parthenotes. When parthenote blastocysts were supplied with the insulin-like growth factor-1 receptor (Igf-1r) and insulin-like growth factor-2 (Igf-2), two genes not detectable in parthenote blastocysts by in situ hybridization, the ICM population was maintained. Similarly, culture of parthenote blastocysts in medium conditioned by embryonic fibroblasts and supplemented with the maternal factor leukemia inhibitory factor maintained the ICM population. However, once this growth factor-rich medium was removed, the parthenote ICM cells still differentiated predominantly into parietal endoderm.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


Surface plasmon resonance modes in a two-dimensional gold nanodisk array incorporated with super-lattice defects are investigated in this paper. Both transmission and absorption spectra of the super-lattice metal nanodisk array are calculated. The transmission spectrum exhibits an asymmetric Fano resonance lineshape and a narrow linewidth peak between two transmission dips. The electric field and polarization charge distributions at the transmission peak and dip wavelengths are also calculated. It is explained that the surface plasmon resonance modes associated with the large period nanodisks and small period nanodisks give rise to the Fano resonance lineshape and the anomalous transmission peak. We also retrieve the effective optical constants of the metal nanodisk array film. The effective optical constants exhibit strong chromatic dispersion and a small attenuation at the peak transmission wavelength. The strong dispersion and small attenuation can potentially be used for slow light.


Study Design. A qualitative study in south-west England primary care. Objective. To clarify the decision-making processes that result in the delivery of particular treatments to patients with low back pain (LBP) in primary care and to examine clinicians' perspectives on the English National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) clinical guidelines for managing LBP in primary care. Summary of Background Data. Merely publishing clinical guidelines is known to be insufficient to ensure their implementation. Gaining an in-depth understanding of clinicians' perspectives on specific clinical guidelines can suggest ways to improve the relevance of guidelines for clinical practice. Methods. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 53 purposively sampled clinicians. Participants were 16 general practitioners (GPs), 10 chiropractors, 8 acupuncturists, 8 physiotherapists, 7 osteopaths, and 4 nurses, from the public sector (20), private sector (21), or both (12). We used thematic analysis. Results. Official guidelines comprised just 1 of many inputs to clinical decision-making. Clinicians drew on personal experience and inter-professional networks and were constrained by organizational factors when deciding which treatment to prescribe, refer for, or deliver to an individual patient with LBP. Some found the guideline terminology—"non-specific LBP"—unfamiliar and of limited relevance to practice. They were frustrated by disparities between recommendations in the guidelines and the real-world situation of short consultation times, difficult-to-access specialist services, and sparse commissioning of guideline-recommended treatments. Conclusion. The NICE guidelines for managing LBP in primary care are one, relatively peripheral, influence on clinical decision-making among GPs, chiropractors, acupuncturists, physiotherapists, osteopaths, and nurses. When revised, these guidelines could be made more clinically relevant by: ensuring that guideline terminology reflects clinical practice terminology; dispelling the image of guidelines as rigid and prohibiting patient-centered care; providing opportunities for clinicians to engage in experiential learning about guideline-recommended complementary therapies; and commissioning guideline-recommended treatments for public sector patients. Level of Evidence: N/A.


The replacement of forestland with impervious surfaces during urbanization can have significant effects on watershed hydrology and the quality of stormwater runoff. One component of water quality, total suspended solids (TSS), is both a significant part of physical and aesthetic degradation and a good indicator of other pollutants, particularly nutrients and metals that are carried on the surfaces of sediment in suspension. We investigated whether turbidity could produce a satisfactory estimate of TSS in urbanizing streams of the Puget Lowlands. A log-linear model showed strong positive correlation between TSS and turbidity (R = 0.96) with a regression equation of ln(TSS) = 1.32 ln(NTU) + C, with C not significantly different than 0 for 8 of the 9 sampled streams. These results strongly suggest that turbidity is a suitable monitoring parameter where water-quality conditions must be evaluated, however logistical and/or financial constraints make an intensive program of TSS sampling impractical.


Little is known about whether the timing of marriage is used as a strategy to avoid HIV infection among young people in sub-Saharan Africa. Analyzing five rounds of longitudinal data from the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Survey, we do not find support for the hypothesis that young women's perceived chances of future HIV infection are associated with the transition to marriage, but we do find evidence that young married women who see themselves as at risk of future infection have a greater likelihood of divorcing than do women who perceive no chance of future infection. We also use individual-level fixed-effects regressions to examine how the transition to marriage affects respondents' expectations of future HIV infection. Respondents are consistently more likely to perceive any chance of future HIV infection in the years following marriage than in the years preceding it. Our findings suggest that young women revise their risk perceptions based on their marital experiences and that divorce may serve as a protective strategy for young married women concerned about their chance of future HIV infection.


Persistent economic, food security and civic engagement problems impact the lives of rural, low-income families. A longitudinal study of 524 mothers from 30 counties in 17 states revealed specific problems and possible interventions that can benefit individuals, families and communities. This article shares key findings from the Rural Families Speak study and offers three interventions with rationales for each. It also suggests an organizing framework that enables both individuals and groups within a community to analyze problems and issues and derive any imperative for action.


This paper introduces the notion of location-based intelligence by tracking the spatial properties and behavior of a single civilian participant over a two-week study period using a global positioning system (GPS) receiver, and displaying them on a geographic information system (GIS). The paper clearly shows the power of combining speed (S), distance (D), time (T) and elevation (E) data with the exact longitude and latitude position of the user. The issues drawn from the observation and the civilian's personal diary are useful in understanding the social implications of tracking and monitoring objects and subjects using GPS. The findings show that while GPS has been used in some very innovative ways, there are a plethora of ethical dilemmas associated with its use on civilians, even if they are requesting a given service and paying for its utilization. From the information recorded during the field observation, a number of inherent technical limitations in GPS were identified which add to the complexity of such related areas as law and commerce. In conclusion, while the benefits of GPS for specific applications is apparent, safeguards need to be put in place to ensure that information gathered by the GPS is not misused or abused. One can envisage that if the wrong hands obtain location information records for individual subscribers that the potential exposure and risk might be even greater than that of stolen credit cards.


The intensities of short-duration rainfall events are fundamental inputs to the design of stormwater management infrastructure. However, since stormwater infrastructure must function as designed for many decades, if there are long-term trends in rainfall intensities, design storms need to be modified. Evidence demonstrates, using data from 13 rain gauges in Ontario, that storm intensities relevant to urban stormwater (5 year) appear to have changed over the last 30 years. The results show, for example, statistical significance at 80% confidence that the 5-year storm has increased, and 85% that the 2-year storm has increased, for the 1 h storm in Waterloo, using partial duration series (PDS) data. The PDS data indicate intensities are increasing at a rate of 1–3% per year. Results show, for example, that a 5-year recurrence storm for PDS for the period 1970–1984 is now very close in magnitude to a 2-year recurrence storm for the period 1985–2003 for Waterloo, Ontario. The implications for a case study demonstrate that 5 out of 12 storm sewer pipes in a subdivision would need to be increased in diameter to obtain the same level of stormwater performance.


A model of lending is presented where loans are established in matches between banks (lenders) and entrepreneurs (borrowers) who meet in a search process. Projects turn out randomly a quick payoff or a long-term payoff that requires a rollover of the loan. The model generates, under proper parameter conditions, two steady states without or with rollover, and rollover is socially inefficient. Under imperfect information, the standard debt contract is privately efficient. However, it extends the domains of equilibria with socially inefficient rollover. The global dynamics displays a continuum of equilibrium paths that each exhibits sudden discontinuities--crises--in which the mass of outstanding loans is reduced by a quantum amount of terminations. Crises have a cleansing effect.


Consider a two-player game between players Builder and Painter. Painter begins the game by picking a coloring of the edges of $K_n$, which is hidden from Builder. In each round, Builder points to an edge and Painter reveals its color. Builder's goal is to locate a particular monochromatic structure in Painter's coloring by revealing the color of as few edges as possible. The fewest number of turns required for Builder to win this game is known as the restricted online Ramsey number. In this paper, we consider the situation where this "particular monochromatic structure" is a large matching or a large tree. We show that in any $t$-coloring of $E(K_n)$, Builder can locate a monochromatic matching on at least $\frac{n-t+1}{t+1}$ edges by revealing at most $O(n\log t)$ edges. We show also that in any $3$-coloring of $E(K_n)$, Builder can locate a monochromatic tree on at least $n/2$ vertices by revealing at most $5n$ edges.


The top-k error is a common measure of performance in machine learning and computer vision. In practice, top-k classification is typically performed with deep neural networks trained with the cross-entropy loss. Theoretical results indeed suggest that cross-entropy is an optimal learning objective for such a task in the limit of infinite data. In the context of limited and noisy data however, the use of a loss function that is specifically designed for top-k classification can bring significant improvements. Our empirical evidence suggests that the loss function must be smooth and have non-sparse gradients in order to work well with deep neural networks. Consequently, we introduce a family of smoothed loss functions that are suited to top-k optimization via deep learning. The widely used cross-entropy is a special case of our family. Evaluating our smooth loss functions is computationally challenging: a na\"ive algorithm would require $\mathcal{O}(\binom{n}{k})$ operations, where n is the number of classes. Thanks to a connection to polynomial algebra and a divide-and-conquer approach, we provide an algorithm with a time complexity of $\mathcal{O}(k n)$. Furthermore, we present a novel approximation to obtain fast and stable algorithms on GPUs with single floating point precision. We compare the performance of the cross-entropy loss and our margin-based losses in various regimes of noise and data size, for the predominant use case of k=5. Our investigation reveals that our loss is more robust to noise and overfitting than cross-entropy.


For years, the cries of Cincinnati's Public Works Department and its civil engineers for infrastructure repair fell on deaf ears. In 1986, Mayor Charles Luken tried a new approach by forming the Cincinnati Infrastructure Commission—a volunteer group of community leaders given the task of making recommendations for infrastructure rehabilitation. Many civil engineers served on this 200-member commission as team leaders on various subcommittees. The commission leaders needed the civil engineers for their technical expertise, and the engineers needed the non-partisan clout of these respected citizens to help legitimize their recommendations. About a year after it was formed, the commission submitted its report to the City Council. The biggest accomplishment of the commission and the report was to highlight the importance of the maintaining the infrastructure to the people. The commission was so successful that voters passed a 0.1% city income tax hike with proceeds going for repairs.


PAGE 'Learning How To Listen': Analyzing Style and Meaning in the Music of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson examines the similarities of singing styles and core narrative traits in the original songs of three African American women vocalist-composers celebrated within the jazz idiom. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, including over 150 hours of personal interviews with musicians, attendance of jazz concerts and festivals both domestic and abroad, and a three-year listening journal (based on live performances and recordings), 'Learning How to Listen' is an Africana cultural studies product informed by vibrant multidisciplinary scholarship that bridges Jazz studies, Linguistics and African American history and literary studies. The latter especially extends the project's close relationship to twentieth-century black literary traditions found in poetry, prose, and as witnessed here, also song lyrics. The introduction highlights the significance of Lincoln (1930-201 0), Simone (1933-2003) and Wilson (b. 1955) to the American music canon, and articulates the dissertation's distinctive contribution to the field of black music studies, addressing the work's methodology and the scope of primary chapters which provide an analysis of the: a) singing voice; b) philosophical authorial voice and c) performance style specifically in relation to 'Re-memory' songs which bear witness to an African heritage. Chapter Two engages two distinct modes of discourse generated on Lincoln, Simone and Wilson by jazz critics and jazz musicians. Chapter Three proves the applicability and efficacy of linguistics to the music of Lincoln, Simone and Wilson by examining the collective approach to melorhythm and tonal semantics and the phonological style markers employed by each: Lincoln's phonosemantics; Simone's microtonality; and Wilson's polytonality. Since a significant portion of the original songs by these artists engage a plethora of black women's socio-political issues, Chapter Four analyzes lyrics that demonstrate a gendered philosophical outlook I refer to as womanist autoethno-graphy. Chapters Five and Six examines the creative impulse shared by these artists to bear witness to their African heritage in 'Re-memory' (a term coined by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison) songs that both invoke and re-imagine an African past and celebrate an African present and future. It is my contention that the cultural study of black music is uniquely positioned to delineate the principles and mechanisms by which African diasporic music is connected by similar aesthetic philosophies. Thus, in the seventh and final chapter my project ultimately suggests a model for expanding discourses about black women's music. My termAfrodiasporic 'Voicing,' introduced in the conclusion, is shorthand for the aural and authorial cultural elements that uniquely characterize black women's music across genres and nations. It implies that black American women singer-songwriters and their musical sisters in the African diaspora share conceptual approaches to music-making processes in spite of geographic or linguistic differences.


Evidence of bioalteration of natural basaltic rocks, presently receiving much attention, has so far been restricted to in situ oceanic crust and ophiolites in which fresh glass is still present. Here we present evidence of preserved bio-signatures in the chilled margin of pillow lavas of an old (443 Ma) ophiolite that has suffered pervasive lower greenschist facies metamorphism and deformation. X-ray mapping of initial alteration zones shows the remains of organic carbon associated with highly-concentrated Fe and S. Bioproduction of CO2 is further reflected in the low δ13C values of calcite extracted from pillow rims, compatible with microbe-induced fractionation during oxidation of organic matter. We attribute these effects to growth of sulphate-reducing bacteria at the early stage of ophiolite formation. During energy metabolism these bacteria reduce sulphate to H2S and oxidize organic matter to CO2 . Hydrogen sulphide will eventually react with iron and form pyrite, and carbon dioxide is precipitated as calcium carbonate. The results of this study may thus trigger the search for bio-signatures in glassy volcanic rocks of any age.


Fifteen years in the making, a landmark reinterpretation of the life of a pivotal figure in British and European history. In this magisterial addition to the Yale English Monarchs series, David Bates combines biography and a multidisciplinary approach to examine the life of a major figure in British and European history. Using a framework derived from studies of early medieval kingship, he assesses each phase of William's life to establish why so many trusted William to invade England in 1066 and the consequences of this on the history of the so-called Norman Conquest after the Battle of Hastings and for generations to come. A leading historian of the period, Bates is notable for having worked extensively in the archives of northern France and discovered many eleventh- and twelfth-century charters largely unnoticed by English-language scholars. Taking an innovative approach, he argues for a move away from old perceptions and controversies associated with William's life and the Norman Conquest. This deeply researched volume is the scholarly biography for our generation.


Deep neural networks paved the way for significant improvements in image visual categorization during the last years. However, even though the tasks are highly varying, differing in complexity and difficulty, existing solutions mostly build on the same architectural decisions. This also applies to the selection of activation functions (AFs), where most approaches build on Rectified Linear Units (Re- LUs). In this paper, however, we show that the choice of a proper AF has a significant impact on the classification accuracy, in particular, if fine, subtle details are of relevance. Therefore, we propose to model the degree of absence and the degree presence of features via the AF by using piecewise linear functions, which we refer to as L*ReLU. In this way, we can ensure the required properties, while still inheriting the benefits in terms of computational efficiency from ReLUs. We demonstrate our approach for the task of Fine-grained Visual Categorization (FGVC), running experiments on seven different benchmark datasets. The results do not only demonstrate superior results but also that for different tasks, having different characteristics, different AFs are selected.


Your all-in-one kit for the skills measured by the core exams for Microsoft Certified IT Professional: Enterprise Administrator certification and on the job. Covering Exams 70-640, 70-642, 70-643, and 70-647, these four official Microsoft study guides provide in-depth exam prep plus practice tests to help maximize your performance. This kit comes packed with the tools and features that exam candidates want most including self-paced training based on final exam content; rigorous, objective-by-objective review; exam tips from expert, exam-certified authors; and customizable testing options. It also provides labs and exercises for skills and expertise you can apply to the job. Focusing on Windows Server 2008 enterprise administration, topics include configuring, managing, and supporting user accounts, computer accounts, groups, Domain Name System (DNS) zones and client settings, group policy objects, Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service, and Active Directory Rights Management Service; configuring remote access, Network Access Protection, Network Authentication, IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, and DNS Replication; working with Terminal Services, Web services infrastructure and security, Media Server, Windows SharePoint Services server options, File Server, Print Services, network maintenance, and Simple Network Management Protocol; planning networks and application services; designing core identity and access management components; implementing PKI; and designing virtualization strategy. You ll work at your own pace through the lessons and hands-on exercises. Then assess yourself by using more than 1200 practice and review questions on the CD, which features multiple, customizable testing options. Choose timed or untimed testing mode, generate random tests, or focus on discrete objectives or chapters. You get detailed explanations for right and wrong answers including pointers back to the book for further study. You also get an evaluation version of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition and an exam discount voucher making this kit an exceptional value and a great career investment.Key Book Benefits Excellent value: Four official Microsoft study guides covering the core requirements for MCITP: Enterprise Administrator certification all in one box In-depth coverage of exam objectives and sub-objectives plus instructive case studies and troubleshooting scenarios to enhance your performance on the job 1200+ practice and review questions Test engine that enables customized testing, pre-assessment and post-assessment, and automated scoring and feedback Handy exam-mapping grid Evaluation version of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition 15 percent exam discount voucher from Microsoft (limited-time offer) All four study guides in searchable eBook format


Judicial legitimacy rests on the perception of judicial impartiality. As a partisan gulf widens among the American public, however, there is a growing skepticism of the judiciary's neutrality on politically sensitive topics. Hardening partisan identities mean that there is less middle ground on political issues and less cooperation among those with differing political views. As a result, the public increasingly scrutinizes judges and judicial candidates for signs of political agreement, distrusting those perceived to support the opposing political party.
Judges themselves are not immune to these political forces. In spite of a strong judicial identity that demands impartiality and judicial conduct rules that require judges to avoid even the appearance of bias, judges have the same unconscious biases and preconceptions as anyone else. Moreover, judges must generally have strong political affiliations to reach the bench at all, regardless of whether they are elected or appointed. Drawing the line between mere political affiliation and an inappropriate appearance of partisan bias can therefore be difficult.
This Article analyzes the mechanisms available to safeguard judicial impartiality. Although recusal motions are the most common weapon against partisan bias, this Article argues that recusal motions cannot effectively guard against the appearance of bias arising from a judge's political views. When recusal rules rely on an undefined "appearance" standard, they are susceptible to an interpretive bias that undermines their purpose. Nonetheless, the Article concludes that the appearance of partisan bias in the judicial branch is not so different from other types of unconscious bias. As a result, ordinary procedural tools — including the right to a jury trial and our system of appellate review — may provide a stronger safeguard against judicial bias than recusal motions.


Studies of the genetics of gene expression have served as a key tool for linking genetic variants to phenotypes. Large-scale eQTL mapping studies have identified a large number of local eQTLs, but the molecular mechanism of how genetic variants regulate expression is still unclear, particularly for distal eQTLs, which these studies are not well-powered to detect. In this study, we use a heritability partitioning approach to dissect the functional components of gene regulation. We make use of an existing method, stratified LD score regression, that leverages all variants (not just those that pass stringent significance thresholds) to partition heritability across functional categories, and we extend this method to partition local and distal gene expression heritability in 15 human tissues. The top enriched functional categories in local regulation of peripheral blood gene expression included super enhancers (5.18x), coding regions (3.73x), conserved regions (2.33x) and four histone marks (p<3x10-7 for all enrichments); local enrichments were similar across the 15 tissues. We also observed substantial enrichments for distal regulation of peripheral blood gene expression: super enhancers (1.91x), coding regions (4.47x), conserved regions (4.51x) and two histone marks (p<3x10-7 for all enrichments). Analyses of the genetic correlation of gene expression across tissues showed that local gene expression regulation is largely shared across tissues, but distal gene expression regulation is highly tissue-specific. Our results elucidate the functional components of the genetic architecture of local and distal gene expression regulation.


Background: The outcome of patients with spontaneous supratentorial intracerebral hemorrhage (SSICH) is unsatisfactory. Inflammatory response secondary to brain injury as well as those resulted from surgical procedure were considered responsible of this outcome. This study was intended to elucidate the anti-inflammatory activity of tigecycline by measuring TNF-α level and its neuroprotective effect as represented by inhospital mortality rate. Methods: Patients with SSICH who were prepared for hematoma evacuation were randomized to receive either tigecycline (n=35) or fosfomycine (n=37) as prophylactic antibiotic. TNF-α level was measured in all subjects before surgery and postoperatively on day-1 and day-7. A repeated brain CT Scan was performed on postoperative day-7. The Glasgow outcome scale (GOS) and length of stay (LOS) were recorded at the time of hospital discharge. Data were analyzed using Mann-Whitney and Chi square test. Relative clinical effectiveness was measured by calculating the number needed to treat (NNT). Results: There was a significant difference regarding the proportion of subject who had  reduced TNF-α level on postoperative day-7 between the groups receiving tigecycline and fosfomycine (62% vs 29%, p=0.022). Decrease brain edema on CT control (86% vs 80%, p=0.580). Tigecycline administration showed a tendency of better clinical effectiveness in lowering inhospital mortality (17% vs 35%; p=0.083; OR=0.49; NNT=5) and worse clinical outcome / GOS ≤ 2 (20% vs 38% ; p=0.096; OR=0.41; NNT=6). LOS ≥ 15 hari ( 40% vs 27%; p=0.243; OR=1.81; NNT=8). Conclusion: Tigecycline showed anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective activities. These activities were associated with improved clinical outcome in patients with SSICH after hematoma evacuation.


We report the progress of the ongoing project "Digitizing the Dualism Debate: a case study in the computational analysis of historical music theory sources". First, we give a brief introduction to the dualism debate, a central discussion in 19th-century German music theory. We then describe the transcription pipeline with which we process the digitized sources in order to arrive at a corpus of computationally feasible representations, and discuss a number of encountered challenges, e.g. the assignment of structural types and idiosyncratic symbols. Employing text similarity measures and topic modeling, we present some preliminary analyses. Future steps include text annotation, music encoding, and the presentation of the corpus with an online interface.


As the Baby Boomer generation begins to age along with the advances made in modern medicine, the number of elderly people is expected to increase significantly over the course of the next several decades. As the elderly population increases, the number of elderly drivers on our roads increases as well. Driving is both a physically and cognitively intensive task, and it is a well known fact that as people age, both their physical, and cognitive abilities decrease. As a result, elderly drivers are at an increased risk of being involved in a collision. Currently, the methods to determine driver fitness are limited, and as a result, doctors are placed in a difficult situation where they must choose between protecting their client, the public, and their own reputation; or allowing their client to maintain their accustomed level of independence. While there are elderly drivers who are obviously no longer fit to drive, the problem is making a decision regarding elderly drivers whose ability has not completely deteriorated, and fit in a sort of "gray area". The following research presents the ground work for the development of an objective driver risk assessment tool. The assessment tool makes use of artificial neural networks to both model, and evaluate driver behaviour. Presented herein is the current state of driver modeling, the theory behind neural networking and vehicle dynamics, the process used to develop the model, the performance results, and finally the conclusions that were obtained from the research.


The self-other asymmetry is a prominent and important feature of common-sense morality. It is also a feature that does not find a home in standard versions of act-utilitarianism. Theodore Sider has attempted to make a place for it by constructing a novel version of utilitarianism that incorporates the asymmetry into its framework. So far as I know, it is the best attempt to bring the two together. I argue, however, that Sider's ingenious attempt fails. I also offer a diagnosis that explains why no theory that remains recognizably act-utilitarian can successfully incorporate the asymmetry.


With the rise of the Chinese market, more MNCs begin to take China as the main market. In order to take up more market share in China, choosing a feasible business strategy is vital for MNCs. Localization strategy is now considered as one of the most suitable strategies in China. However, the motivations and impacts of localization strategy and its enlightenments for western catering multinationals in China are rarely researched. Therefore, I set Starbucks as a case study to do an in-depth analysis of localization strategy in China on the basis of overseas direct investment theory and strategic management theory. The finding shows that Starbucks take localization as the main strategy is because of both internal (company) and external (host country) factors. Correspondingly, the impacts of localization reflect in Starbucks performance and China's transformation. Still, there is the limitation in this research. For instance, Starbucks has its own distinctive characteristics which are difficult to imitate. Thus, setting Starbucks as a single case study is not comprehensive and the research findings cannot be applied to all catering multinationals. Also, it is hard to say that localization strategy is suitable for all MNCs in China.


The increasing ubiquity of PowerPoint in the university classroom raises complex questions about pedagogy and the creation of dynamic and effective learning environments. Though much of the sociological teaching literature has focused on engagement and active learning, very little of this work has addressed the presence of PowerPoint in sociology classrooms. Teaching sociology requires discussion, critical thinking, and debate—characteristics many critics argue are at odds with PowerPoint's unique presentation style. Utilizing survey data from faculty and students at a private university, this research explores PowerPoint usage and the many ways it influences the learning environment of the sociology classroom.


IMPORTANCE
Societal stigma gravely impedes occupational justice for transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) people, producing vast health disparities for this population.

OBJECTIVE
To test the feasibility of an intervention to reduce stigma and improve the well-being of TGNC people.

DESIGN
A parallel, mixed-methods design was used to test feasibility in the areas of acceptability, demand, and limited efficacy.

SETTING
Community.

PARTICIPANTS
Forty-two audience members and 5 TGNC interviewees.

INTERVENTION
Virtual, narrative-informed play reading and moderated discussion about gender diversity and affirmative care. Outcomes and Measures: The valid and reliable Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-Stigma was used to assess stigma beliefs. An open-ended, qualitative question assessed TGNC interviewees' experiences.

RESULTS
Recruitment and participant responses to the intervention indicated feasibility in the areas of acceptability, demand, and limited efficacy. However, future efforts at obtaining a diverse TGNC sample are needed.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE
The intervention decreased stigma beliefs in audience members and offered a positive experience for TGNC participants. Feasibility outcomes warrant future efficacy testing. What This Article Adds: This article adds an innovative intervention for promoting occupational justice to support the health and well-being of TGNC people. The community-based intervention facilitates change in societal attitudes and stigmatizing beliefs.


Network phenomena are of key importance in the majority of scientific disciplines. They motivate the desire to better understand the implications of interactions between connected entities. In the focus of this thesis are two of the most prominent tasks in the research of such phenomena: the modelling and the inference of connections within networks. In particular, I provide a systematic framework for using the topology and unifying characteristics of networks from fields as diverse as biology, sociology, and economics to predict and validate connections. I build on existing random graph models and node similarity measures, which I then employ in both unsupervised and supervised machine learning approaches. Furthermore, I present novel
methods for identifying the statistically significant connections in network settings that involve multiple types of entities and connections — a crucial element of modelling, which most available methods fail to address.

To demonstrate the potential of these new tools, I use them to filter networks that were constructed from large-scale noisy data generated by biological experiments as well as records of online social activity. Subsequently, I predict previously unobserved connections within these networks and evaluate the performance of the developed tools based on ground truth data. In further data sets without direct evidence for the connections in the network, a second, bipartite network serves as proxy for the analysis. Specifically, in an e-commerce setting I use connections between products and customers to deduce similarities between the products based on customer behaviour. In an
analysis of high-throughput screening data on the other hand, I utilize relations between proteins and experimental conditions to identify potential functional affinities among the proteins.

The findings presented here show that the computational prediction of connections can both help researchers gain a better understanding of costly large-scale data and guide further experimental design. The thesis demonstrates the potential of a network analytic approach to modelling and inference on multiple applications, such as the uncovering of possible privacy issues in the context of online social networking platforms and the optimization of drug development in cancer treatment.


Language identification (LID) is a crucial precursor for NLP, especially for mining web data. Problematically, most of the world's 7000+ languages today are not covered by LID technologies. We address this pressing issue for Africa by introducing AfroLID, a neural LID toolkit for 517 African languages and varieties. AfroLID exploits a multi-domain web dataset manually curated from across 14 language families utilizing five orthographic systems. When evaluated on our blind Test set, AfroLID achieves 95.89 F_1-score. We also compare AfroLID to five existing LID tools that each cover a small number of African languages, finding it to outperform them on most languages. We further show the utility of AfroLID in the wild by testing it on the acutely under-served Twitter domain. Finally, we offer a number of controlled case studies and perform a linguistically-motivated error analysis that allow us to both showcase AfroLID's powerful capabilities and limitations


The purpose of the present work was to prepare buccal adhesive tablets of miconazole nitrate. The simplex centroid experimental design was used to arrive at optimum ratio of carbopol 934P, hydroxypropylmethylcellulose K4M and polyvinylpyrollidone, which will provide desired drug release and mucoadhesion. Swelling index, mucoadhesive strength and in vitro drug release of the prepared tablet was determined. The drug release and bioadhesion was dependent on type and relative amounts of the polymers. The optimized combination was subjected to in vitro antifungal activity, transmucosal permeation, drug deposition in mucosa, residence time and bioadhesion studies. IR spectroscopy was used to investigate any interaction between drug and excipients. Dissolution of miconazole from tablets was sustained for 6 h. based on the results obtained, it can be concluded that the prepared slow release buccoadhesive tablets of miconazole would markedly prolong the duration of antifungal activity. Comparison of in vitro antifungal activity of tablet with marketed gel showed that drug concentrations above the minimum inhibitory concentration were achieved immediately from both formulations but release from tablet was sustained up to 6 h, while the gel showed initially fast drug release, which did not sustain later. Drug permeation across buccal mucosa was minimum from the tablet as well as marketed gel; the deposition of drug in mucosa was higher in case of tablet. In vitro residence time and bioadhesive strength of tablet was higher than gel. Thus the buccoadhesive tablet of miconazole nitrate may offer better control of antifungal activity as compared to the gel formulation.


This article reconsiders the financial and economic crisis of 2007-2009 and the present debate about the regulation of finance in the light of a vision of how finance can better serve the American economy and American democracy. The central claim is that regulation as conventionally understood cannot adequately redress the problems, and seize the opportunities, revealed by the crisis. We should approach financial regulation as the first step in a series of institutional innovations designed to put finance more effectively at the service of the real economy (financial deepening) while broadening economic opportunity in the country (financial democratization). I develop and defend this thesis by arguing for four subsidiary claims. A first subsidiary claim is that a major part of the causal background to the crisis was an inconclusive hollowing out of the New Deal regime for the governance of finance. That regime failed to be replaced by an alternative coherent scheme. Instead, it gave way to a ramshackle compromise -- powerful, opaque, recalcitrant, and damaging. Such a situation -- I argue -- represents the rule rather than the exception in the history of law and institutions. The outcome of the hollowing out in the United States was a weakening of the links of finance to the real economy, paradoxically accompanied by the hypertrophy of the financial sector. A second subsidiary claim is that the New Deal critics and reformers of finance, such as Louis Brandeis and William Douglas, were right in their intuition that a strong link exists between the legal and institutional requirements of financial deepening and of financial democratization. A third subsidiary claim is that to make good on this intuition in today's circumstances we need a new agenda of reform with an explicit and ambitious institutional content. Such an agenda includes the transfer of sophisticated financial capabilities to the country's remarkable network of local banks as well as a vast expansion and popularization of financial services, channeling long-term saving into long-term productive investment. A fourth subsidiary claim is that law and legal thought provide the chief storehouse of the ideas and methods needed to conceive and to implement such innovations. Prevailing styles of economic theory, including those underlying the dominant practice of "law and economics," remain largely bereft of institutional imagination. This article illustrates how a revised practice of legal and institutional analysis can help fill this lacuna. In so doing, this piece takes "law and economics" in another direction.


The evolution of flight energetics requires that phenotypes be variable, repeatable and heritable. We studied intraspecific variation in flight energetics in order to assess the repeatability of flight metabolic rate and wingbeat frequency, as well as the functional basis of phenotypic variation in workers and drones of the bumblebee species Bombus impatiens. We showed that flight metabolic rate and wingbeat frequency were highly repeatable in workers, even when controlling for body mass variation using residual analysis. We did not detect significant repeatability in drones, but a smaller range of variation might have prevented us from finding significant values in our sample. Based on our results and previous findings, we associated the high repeatability of flight phenotypes in workers to the functional links between body mass, thorax mass, wing size, wingbeat frequency and metabolic rate. Moreover, differences between workers and drones were as predicted from these functional associations, where drones had larger wings for their size, lower wingbeat frequency and lower flight metabolic rate. We also investigated thoracic muscle metabolic phenotypes by measuring the activity of carbohydrate metabolism enzymes, and we found positive correlations between mass-independent metabolic rate and the activity of all enzymes measured, but in workers only. When comparing workers and drones that differ in flight metabolic rate, only the activity of the enzymes hexokinase and trehalase showed the predicted differences. Overall, our study indicates that there should be correlated evolution among physiological phenotypes at multiple levels of organization and morphological traits associated with flight.


By highlighting the many ways that constitutions vary, comparative constitutional law raises interesting and important causal questions: What explains cross-national constitutional variation, and what are the real-world consequences of different constitutional arrangements? But comparative constitutional law scholarship so far has done relatively little to address these issues of constitutional causes and consequences in a rigorous manner. In this paper, I argue that scholars have much to gain from taking causality seriously in comparative constitutional law, and I suggest that scholarship on comparative politics and comparative political economy provides useful insights about how this might be done. First, I provide an overview of recent comparative constitutional law scholarship to highlight the pervasive issues of causality that it raises. Second, I introduce some of the interesting work that political scientists and economists have done on comparative constitutional law. They are asking questions about the origins and consequences of constitutions that are similar to those raised in comparative constitutional law scholarship - but they are framing them in explicitly causal terms, developing positive theories about cause-and-effect relationships, and testing them empirically using social science methods of inference. Third, I illustrate one such method that can be used to address causal claims and causal questions in comparative constitutional law. Using regression analysis of cross-national data on constitutions, government spending, and other institutional, demographic and economic factors in 80 democracies, I test a series of hypotheses about the effects of different constitutional arrangements on government spending. I also show how multiplicative interaction terms can be used to model and empirically test for conditional relationships between constitutions and various political, social or economic outcomes. I conclude with a proposed agenda for empirical comparative constitutional law, outlining its theoretical, methodological and pedagogical implications.


Discovering the causal structure among a set of variables is a fundamental problem in many areas of science. In this paper, we propose Kernel Conditional Deviance for Causal Inference (KCDC) a fully nonparametric causal discovery method based on purely observational data. From a novel interpretation of the notion of asymmetry between cause and effect, we derive a corresponding asymmetry measure using the framework of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Based on this, we propose three decision rules for causal discovery. We demonstrate the wide applicability of our method across a range of diverse synthetic datasets. Furthermore, we test our method on real-world time series data and the real-world benchmark dataset Tubingen Cause-Effect Pairs where we outperform existing state-of-the-art methods.


The comprehension of animal behavior, especially human behavior, is one of the most ancient and studied problems since the beginning of civilization, The big list of factors that interact to determine a person action require the collaboration of different disciplines, such as psichology, biology, or sociology. In the last years the analysis of human behavior has received great attention also from the computer vision community, given the latest advances in the acquisition of human motion data from image sequences.

Despite the increasing availability of that data, there still exists a gap towards obtaining a conceptual representation of the obtained observations. Human behavior analysis is based on a qualitative interpretation of the results, and therefore the assignment of concepts to quantitative data is linked to a certain ambiguity.

This Thesis tackles the problem of obtaining a proper representation of human behavior in the contexts of computer vision and animation. On the one hand, a good behavior model should permit the recognition and explanation the observed activity in image sequences. On the other hand, such a model must allow the generation of new synthetic instances, which model the behavior of virtual agents.

First, we propose methods to automatically learn the models from observations. Given a set of quantitative results output by a vision system, a normal behavior model is learnt. This results provides a tool to determine the normality or abnormality of future observations. However, machine learning methods are unable to provide a richer description of the observations. We confront this problem by means of a new method that incorporates prior knowledge about the enviornment and about the expected behaviors. This framework, formed by the reasoning engine FMTL and the modeling tool SGT allows the generation of conceptual descriptions of activity in new image sequences. Finally, we demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework to simulate behavior of virtual agents, which are introduced into real image sequences and interact with observed real agents, thereby easing the generation of augmented reality sequences.

The set of approaches presented in this Thesis have a growing set of potential applications. The analysis and description of behavior in image sequences has its principal application in the domain of smart video--surveillance, in order to detect suspicious or dangerours behaviors. Other applications include automatic sport commentaries, elderly monitoring, road traffic analysis, and the development of semantic video search engines. Alternatively, behavioral virtual agents allow to simulate accurate real situations, such as fires or crowds. Moreover, the inclusion of virtual agents into real image sequences has been widely deployed in the games and cinema industries.


A three-dimensional numerical wave tank (NWT) is established with Open Source Field Operation and Manipulation (OpenFOAM) software and waves2foam to investigate wave interaction with payloads with different postures in the process of offshore lifting or lowering. Numerical results of regular wave interaction with a vertically suspending cylinder are presented first for validation by comparison with the published data. A series of simulation experiments are carried out, and the forces and the moments exerted by the regular waves on a fixed suspending cylinder payload and a fixed suspending cuboid payload with different postures are presented. It can be concluded from the results that the rotating rectangular payload (cuboid and cylinder) suffers a drastically changed moment when it is initially vertically placed, and the projection area of payload vertical to the force affects the corresponding force. The simulation results also show how the forces and the moments change with different posture angles. With some certain posture, the suspending payload suffers minimum forces and moments. Parametric study for the cuboid payload is done in the case of normal incidence. The influence of the payload's size and wave parameters on forces and moments are analyzed. All of the numerical simulation results and conclusions provide the fundamentals for further research and safe control of offshore lifting or lowering.


Preterm labor is defined as birth before 37th week of pregnancy. Despite of progressive improvement in gynecological care, the prevalence of preterm labor is growing. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of 17α-Hydroxyprogestrone Caproate on prevention of preterm labor in high-risk pregnant women. This doubleblinded clinical trial study was conducted on 100 pregnant women who admitted to Besat hospital, Sananadj, Iran during 2013-2014. Women were block randomized and divided in two intervention (n=50) and control (n=50) groups. The intervention group was injected 250 mg 17α-Hydroxyprogestrone Caproate intramuscularly during 24th until 34th week on a weekly basis and placebo was given to control group. The results showed that 11 women (22%) with preterm labor on less than 37 week and 39 (78%) on more than 37 week, however, in placebo group these figures were 29 (58%) and 21 (42%), respectively. This finding showed that 17α-Hydroxyprogestrone Caproate had preventive effect on preterm labor in intervention group. The logistic regression also showed that there was a significant difference between two intervention and control groups (p=0.001). It seems that 17α- Hydroxyprogestrone Caproate had preventive effect on preterm labor.


Evolutionary computation (EC) has been recently recognized as a research field, which studies a new type of algorithms: Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). These algorithms process populations of solutions as opposed to most traditional approaches which improve a single solution. All these algorithms share common features: reproduction, random variation, competition and selection of individuals. During our research it was evident that some components of EAs should be re-examined. Hence, specific topics such as multiple crossovers per couple and its enhancements, multiplicity of parents and crossovers and their application to single and multiple criteria optimization problems, adaptability, and parallel genetic algorithms, were proposed and investigated carefully. This paper show the most relevant and recent enhancements on recombination for a genetic-algorithm-based EA and migration control strategies for parallel genetic algorithms. Details of implementation and results are discussed.


Although G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) have been shown to assemble into functional homo or heteromers, the role of each protomer in G-protein activation is not known. Among the GPCRs, the γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) type B receptor (GABABR) is the only one known so far that needs two subunits, GB1 and GB2, to function. The GB1 subunit contains the GABA binding site but is unable to activate G-proteins alone. In contrast the GB2 subunit, which does not bind GABA, has an heptahelical domain able to activate G-proteins when assembled into homodimers (Galvez, T., Duthey, B., Kniazeff, J., Blahos, J., Rovelli, G., Bettler, B., Prézeau, L., and Pin, J.-P. (2001) EMBO J. 20, 2152–2159). In the present study, we have examined the role of each subunit within the GB1-GB2 heteromer, in G-protein coupling. To that end, point mutations in the highly conserved third intracellular loop known to prevent G-protein activation of the related Ca-sensing or metabotropic glutamate receptors were introduced into GB1 and GB2. One mutation, L686P introduced in GB2 prevents the formation of a functional receptor, even though the heteromer reaches the cell surface, and even though the mutated subunit still associates with GB1 and increases GABA affinity on GB1. This was observed either in HEK293 cells where the activation of the G-protein was assessed by measurement of inositol phosphate accumulation, or in cultured neurons where the inhibition of the Ca2+ channel current was measured. In contrast, the same mutation when introduced into GB1 does not modify the G-protein coupling properties of the heteromeric GABABreceptor either in HEK293 cells or in neurons. Accordingly, whereas in all GPCRs the same protein is responsible for both agonist binding and G-protein activation, these two functions are assumed by two distinct subunits in the GABAB heteromer: one subunit, GB1, binds the agonists whereas the other, GB2, activates the G-protein. This illustrates the importance of a single subunit for G-protein activation within a dimeric receptor.


This book discusses some of the most critical ethical issues in mental health care today, including the moral dimensions of addiction, patient autonomy and compulsory treatment, privacy and confidentiality, and the definition of mental illness itself. Although debates over these issues are ongoing, there are few comprehensive resources for addressing such dilemmas in the practice of psychology, psychiatry, social work, and other behavioral and mental health care professions. This book meets that need, providing foundational background for undergraduate, graduate, and professional courses. Topics include central questions such as evolving views of the morality and pathology of deviant behavior; patient competence and the decision to refuse treatment; recognizing and treating people who have suffered trauma; addiction as illness; the therapist's responsibility to report dangerousness despite patient confidentiality; and boundaries for the therapist's interaction with patients outside of therapy, whether in the form of tennis games, gift-giving, or social media contact. For the most part the selections address contemporary issues in contemporary terms, but the book also offers a few historic or classic essays, including Thomas S. Szasz's controversial 1971 article "The Ethics of Addiction." Contributors include Laura Weiss Roberts, Frederic G. Reamer, Charles P. O'Brien, and Thomas McLellan.


We start by describing the major changes that occurred in the quotes of market rates after the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. We comment on their lost analogies and consistencies, and hint on a possible, simple way to formally reconcile them. We then show how to price interest rate swaps under the new market practice of using different curves for generating future LIBOR rates and for discounting cash flows. Straightforward modifications of the market formulas for caps and swaptions will also be derived. Finally, we will introduce a new LIBOR market model, which will be based on modeling the joint evolution of FRA rates and forward rates belonging to the discount curve. We will start by analyzing the basic lognormal case and then add stochastic volatility. The dynamics of FRA rates under different measures will be obtained and closed form formulas for caplets and swaptions derived in the lognormal and Heston (1993) cases. Alternative, and more recent, formulations of multi-curve LIBOR market models can be downloaded at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1563685 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1583081


Power budgeting is a critical consideration in designing a wearable pulse oximeter for long-term telemedicine application. This paper investigates the potential power saving in a ring-shaped sensor configuration comprising multiple photodetector elements positioned in transmission, transflection and reflection modes. Preliminary in vivo experiments revealed that battery longevity could be extended considerably by employing reflection rather than transflection or transmission mode measurements. KEY WORDS– wearable sensors, pulse oximeter,


Many people argue that government cannot, or should not, try to dictate morality. (1) But the judiciary, particularly the United States Supreme Court, has dictated immorality through First Amendment jurisprudence. What has achieved greater First Amendment free speech rights than political campaign speech, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, and the Boy Scout Oath combined? The answer is pornography. Since a series of Warren Court decisions in the 1960s, perhaps no single side of any issue has won in the Supreme Court as often as pornography. In the early twentieth century, the American people, without resort to government or litigation, maintained a society of decency. Pornography did not appear in neighborhood movie theaters or in popular music. Americans did not need or want government action because Hollywood regulated itself. The Hollywood Production Code, known as the Hays Code, reviewed movie scripts and banned sex, nudity, and profanity. (2) Their efforts contributed to the success of the business; more people went to the movies in the 1940s than go today. (3) In a 1957 case, Roth v. United States, (4) the Supreme Court declared that "obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press." (5) Calling Roth "the first time the question has been squarely presented to this Court," the majority stated that "expressions found in numerous opinions indicate that this Court has always assumed that obscenity is not protected by the freedoms of speech and press." (6) The cases cited in support of this declaration dated back as far as 1877. (7) Another way of reaching the Roth Court's conclusion would be to hold that obscene performances do not qualify as "speech" and obscene publications do not qualify as "press" as those terms are used in the First Amendment. (8) The supporters of pornography sought to overturn this decision. Charles Rembar, an advocate of constitutional protections for pornography, described their legal strategy in a book entitled The End of Obscenity, and constructed a clever legal argument to persuade Roth author Justice William Brennan to change his position on the issue. (9) Rembar took Justice Brennan's Roth definition of "obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance" (10) and persuaded him to make "utterly" a constitutional requirement. (11) The new legal test became that pornography cannot be banned "unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value." (12) Justice Brennan adopted this new legal test in the Court's next obscenity case, Memoirs v. Massachusetts, (13) also known as the Fanny Hill case. (14) "Social value" became a key phrase used in winning the Supreme Court's approval of pornography. (15) Justice Brennan was joined in his opinion supporting pornography by Chief Justice Earl Warren and by Justice Abe Fortas, (16) whom President Lyndon Johnson had just appointed to the Supreme Court. Justice Fortas had connections inside Lyndon Johnson's White House, (17) served as an attorney for pornographers, (18) and signed an amicus brief on behalf of pornographers in Roth. (19) After Memoirs, pornographers dramatically increased their production of movies and invested a significant amount of time and money to bring dozens of cases to the Supreme Court. By the fall term in October 1966, the Supreme Court was flooded with appeals from lower court convictions. This showed the great financial resources of the pornography industry, its determination to change a longstanding culture, and its optimism that it could accomplish this with the assistance of the Warren Court, including the activist liberal Justices Warren, Fortas, Brennan, Black, and Douglas. In the short space of thirteen months, May 1967 to June 1968, the Warren Court handed down a series of twenty-six decisions that changed dramatically the law of obscenity. (20) These decisions elevated pornography and other assaults on decency to the level of a First Amendment right. …


Bragg soliton is a solution of the nonlinear coupled mode equations (NLCMEs) that are a non-integrable system. Nevertheless, we show that for a broad region of soliton parameters the interaction between two Bragg solitons in a uniform fiber Bragg grating can be accurately described by using a trial function based on the known solution for two-soliton interaction in the massive Thirring model (MTM). In this region the similar behavior of Bragg solitons and solitons of the Thirring model enables one to calculate explicitly the approximate asymptotic properties of the interaction between two Bragg solitons such as the shifts in locations and phases of the solitons as a result of the interaction. We have validated that the similar behavior of Bragg solitons and solitons of the MTM is obtained for a broad range of parameters of the interacting solitons that can also be realized experimentally. Since the NLCMEs are not an integrable system, there is a parameter regime in which the interaction between Bragg solitons does not resemble the elastic interaction between MTM solitons. We describe an interaction between two co-propagating Bragg solitons that causes the inversion of the propagation direction of one of the solitons.


Learn how to develop MVC, Struts and JavaServer Faces portlet applications Learn about IBM Portlet API and the JSR 168 standard API Access Web Services and secure Web applications This IBM Redbook provides an overview and hands-on scenarios to help you design, develop and implement portlet applications using Rational Application Developer V6.0 and the provided Portal Tools. The sample scenarios included in this redbook target Business-to-Employee (B2E) enterprise applications, but most of the scenarios presented will also apply to Business-to-Consumer (B2C) applications. You will find step-by-step examples and scenarios showing ways to integrate your enterprise applications into an IBM WebSphere Portal environment using the WebSphere Portal APIs provided by the Portal Tools to develop portlets. You will also learn how to extend your portlet capabilities to use advanced functions such as cooperative portlets, internationalization, action events, using the Credential Vault to enable Single Sign-On, Web Services, remote portlets, portal design and portlet debugging capabilities. Elements of the Portlet API and the standard JSR168 API are described and sample code is provided. The scenarios included in this redbook can be used to learn about portlet programming and as a basis for your own portlet applications. You will also find scenarios describing recommended ways to develop portlets and portlet applications that follow the MVC design pattern, the Struts framework and JavaServer Faces technology. Basic knowledge of Java technologies such as servlets, JavaBeans, EJBs, JavaServer Pages (JSPs), as well as of XML applications and the terminology used in Web publishing, is assumed.


Green Bank of the Philippines was known for its product innovation and its ability to bring new products to market. In 2002, Green Bank designed an untested commitment savings product that both gave individuals access to formal savings and helped them commit to reaching their savings goals. Omar Andaya, the Green Bank president, must decide how to evaluate the success of this product. The management team at Green Bank discusses various evaluation methods, including a formal quantitative impact evaluation using a randomized control trial (RCT), and the value an impact assessment brings to the Bank. In particular, they grapple with the question of how success is measured for a product both for the bank and for its clients. The case highlights the issues an organization must consider before deciding to do an impact assessment as well as common design challenges.


Context. The southern hemisphere of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) became observable by the Rosetta mission in March 2015, a few months before cometary southern vernal equinox. The Anhur region in the southern part of the comet's larger lobe was found to be highly eroded, enriched in volatiles, and highly active.
Aims. We analyze high-resolution images of the Anhur region pre- and post-perihelion acquired by the OSIRIS imaging system on board the Rosetta mission. The Narrow Angle Camera is particularly useful for studying the evolution in Anhur in terms of morphological changes and color variations.
Methods. Radiance factor images processed by the OSIRIS pipeline were coregistered, reprojected onto the 3D shape model of the comet, and corrected for the illumination conditions.
Results. We find a number of morphological changes in the Anhur region that are related to formation of new scarps; removal of dust coatings; localized resurfacing in some areas, including boulders displacements; and vanishing structures, which implies localized mass loss that we estimate to be higher than 50 million kg. The strongest changes took place in and nearby the Anhur canyon-like structure, where significant dust cover was removed, an entire structure vanished, and many boulders were rearranged. All such changes are potentially associated with one of the most intense outbursts registered by Rosetta during its observations, which occurred one day before perihelion passage. Moreover, in the niche at the foot of a new observed scarp, we also see evidence of water ice exposure that persisted for at least six months. The abundance of water ice, evaluated from a linear mixing model, is relatively high (>20%). Our results confirm that the Anhur region is volatile-rich and probably is the area on 67P with the most pristine exposures near perihelion.


The numbers and the politics of the death penalty in India tell very different stories, presenting complicated narratives for its future. The public reaction to instances of sexual violence and other offences over the last decade and the consequent political response has significantly strengthened the retention and expansion of the death penalty. This is reflected from the fact that that of all the death sentences that district courts impose, only about 5 per cent get confirmed in India's appellate system. However, does this mean there is growing scepticism about the death penalty in the Supreme Court of India? Unfortunately, the answer is far from simple. An assessment of the death penalty in India's appellate courts during the last decade will demonstrate that a crime-centric approach has hindered any principled discomfort with the death penalty or the manner of its administration. In particular, the Supreme Court has faltered in high-profile death sentence cases (i.e., offences against the state and sexual violence cases), and its track record of commutations has very little to do with principled considerations on sentencing. This paper argues that the political and judicial imagination of the death penalty, as a necessary part of the response to crime, creates significant and unique challenges for the path towards abolition.


Abnormal vaginal discharge is a common problem which can usually be managed syndromically in non-specialist services.1 Common pathological causes include bacterial vaginosis (BV), candidiasis and Trichomoniasis (TV). Some women fail to improve with syndromic treatment, or present with additional symptoms such as severe dyspareunia or purulent discharge. This article focuses on a practical approach to investigating and managing such a presentation in a specialist setting where near-patient microscopy is available. It needs to be read in conjunction with guidelines, such as the 2011 European (IUSTI/WHO) Guideline on Management of Vaginal Discharge.2

### Overgrowth conditions of the vagina

Normal vaginal health in adult women is maintained by acid-secreting lactobacilli. In overgrowth conditions such as BV these healthy lactobacilli are disrupted, although the underlying cause for this remains unclear. In all these conditions vaginal pH rises and there is usually an increased discharge.

BV presents with a painless but unpleasant, odorous discharge. There is overgrowth of anaerobic organisms, such as Gardnerella vaginalis , Mobiluncus spp., BV-associated bacteria 1–3 and Atopobium spp. causing a rise in vaginal pH, discharge, and smell, but little inflammation. Once BV is established, biofilm formation may explain the high recurrence rate.3

Aerobic vaginitis (AV) presents with a more purulent discharge with significant inflammation and epithelial disruption. Patients may also report burning, stinging and dyspareunia. There is predominance of aerobic flora such as Escherichia coli , group B streptococci, Staphylococcus aureus and evidence of local cytokine-mediated inflammation.4

Desquamative inflammatory vaginitis (DIV), is a chronic condition of unknown aetiology with vaginal rash and purulent discharge. Patients present with profuse discharge, vestibulovaginal irritation, dyspareunia and vaginal inflammation or erythema. Many patients have long-standing symptoms for 12 months or …


A novel prototype thermoelectric domestic-ventilator with air-conditioning heat recovery of exhaust had been made and tested in this paper. A thermoelectric heat exchanger is integrated with a flat-fin cross-flow heat exchanger in this ventilator. This ventilator is investigated and its cooling (or heating) performance evaluated in terms of the Coefficient of Performance (COP), cooling and heating power, and being handled temperature difference of fresh air. The COP of this ventilator is found to be over 2.5 in the whole test. The optimal working parameters of this ventilator are found in the study. The potential improvement in the cooling and heating performance is also discussed in this work.