Introduction The emergence of computers has revolutionized modern society. One wonders how life was conducted prior to computers and their peripherals. Like other fields of human endeavor, there is no aspect of library activities that digital processing is not applicable. Digital technology is of particular importance when information is to be gathered, store, retrieved and evaluated (Kennedy and Davis, 2006). The importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Nigerian libraries is no longer an issue in contention. The issue in contention is how Nigerian libraries can ensure their continuous derivation of the benefits from new opportunities afforded by ICT. In order to bridge the gap that exists between traditional and modern methods of information storage, retrieval and provision in the digital age, the use of ICT in library operations must be seriously emphasized. Ideally, ICT is expected to have a major impact on the management, structure, and work activities of Nigerian libraries. As first step to bridging the gap, Nigerian librarians must accept one basic fact which is, ICTs are enablers of innovation in the managerial and operational processes in libraries. That is, the use of the technologies of modern computer-based information systems is a major force that has the capabilities of transforming the traditional methods used in cataloguing and classification, indexing, abstracting etc. It is expected that all technologies that process, store and communicate data and information in libraries should be managed as integrated systems and be used as access tools for the libraries resources. Nigerian libraries with access and those without access to information technology is actually narrowing, as the "Information Age" continues to expand the horizon through which information services are provided in libraries. This is one of the many challenges confronting Nigerian libraries and librarians as Information Technology sweeps the world. Many Nigerian libraries are now converting the contents of their print resources into electronic databases thus, increasing their dependence on technology. Unlike in the past, today, technology has provided opportunity for librarians in Nigeria to know how they can combine computer and communication technologies in the performance of library tasks. This confirms Williams and Sawyer (2003), assertion that, in the era of information technology, "we will have everything connected to everything", which are internet-based remote control devices to regulate our libraries. Technology has brought about a completely different way of providing library services resulting to the development of new services (Gbaje, 2007). The Internet is now the dominant mode of information exchange in libraries in the digital age, then, it is no longer a luxury but, a necessity which Nigerian libraries must accept and adopt to close the digital gap. Conceptual Considerations The concept of digital divide refers to the widening imbalances of access to ICTs in Nigerian libraries and, is perceived in the light of the following postulations: * There is a gap that exists between traditional and modern methods of processing, storing, analyzing, retrieving, providing and using information in Nigerian libraries. * There is inequitable access to ICTs and other Internet-related technologies associated with the provision and use of information services in Nigerian libraries. * There are imbalances of access to ICT among Nigerian libraries. And, these imbalances have implications for equitable access to quality information service delivering in Nigerian libraries. * Digital divide is a phenomenon that limits the numerous uses, benefits and advantages that ICT brings to Nigerian libraries that are ICT compliant, this shows clearly the distinction between libraries without walls and those with walls, and the degree of effectiveness and efficiency, when ICT is used in the provision of information services and performance of library tasks. …


Abstract Multimodal learning materials are frequently met in education assuming enhanced learning outcomes. This study examined whether contrasts in such materials are likely to support reading comprehension for all readers. Young adults (n=46) met either text-only or text+picture material. Participants (19 with low phonological awareness [PA] and 27 controls with high PA) thereafter answered open interview questions to check for reading comprehension. Learning materials were designed to focus readers on aspects critical to understanding the content by the use of contrasts; eye-tracking was used as method. Well-known pictures aided information recall, but contrasts described in the text were most effective for learning.


Writing is considered as an important skill in learning process which is needed to be mastered by the students. However, in teaching learning process at schools or universities, the assessment of writing skill is not becoming the focus of learning process and the assessment is administered inappropriately. In this present study, the researcher undertook the study which dealt with assessing descriptive paragraph writing ability of the students through picture description by employing an ex post facto as the research design. The present study was intended to answer the research problem dealing with the extent of the students' achievement of descriptive paragraph writing ability which is assessed through picture description. The samples under the study were 40 students determined by means of random sampling technique with lottery system. The data were collected through administering picture description as the research instrument. The obtained data were analyzed by using norm-reference measure of five standard values. The results of the data analysis showed that there were 67.50% samples of the study were successful in writing descriptive paragraph, while there were 32.50% samples were unsuccessful in writing descriptive paragraph which was assessed by administering picture description test


Classification of potential energy minima—mechanically stable molecular packings—offers a unifying principle for understanding condensed phase properties. This approach permits identification of an inherent structure in liquids that is normally obscured by thermal motions. Melting and freezing occur through characteristic sequences of molecular packings, and a defect-softening phenomenon underlies the fact that they are thermodynamically first order. The topological distribution of feasible transitions between contiguous potential minima explains glass transitions and associated relaxation behavior.


Case studies in engineering ethics were integrated into a first course in electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Worcester, MA, with the primary objective of increasing students' awareness of ethical issues in the workplace. During a three-hour "laboratory" period, students read and discussed three short case studies in engineering ethics, focusing on understanding the differing viewpoints of individuals within a case and identifying multiple courses of action for resolving the issue. The effects of the laboratory were assessed via student focus groups and surveys. All focus group participants agreed that their awareness of ethical issues in engineering was enhanced by the laboratory. In contrast, the survey results were equivocal, showing improvement in the students' awareness of ethical issues; however, the particular questions found to differ statistically pre-intervention versus post-intervention were not consistent between course offerings.


In the current study, a non-invasive technique for blood pressure (BP) measurement based on the detection of Photoplethysmographic (PPG) pulses during pressure-cuff deflation was compared to sphygmomanometry—the Korotkoff sounds technique. The PPG Senor used to measure blood pressure using the technique of correlation of volume and pressure. The performance of portable and wearable biosensorsis highly influenced by motion artifact, artery stiffness, measurement sites, light wavelength, sensor pressure, A novel real time system is proposed for accurate motion-tolerant extraction of heart rate (HR) and pulse oximeter oxygen saturation (SpO2) from wearable Photoplethysmographic (PPG) biosensors. Recently, monitoring of blood pressure fluctuation in the daily life is focused on in the hypertension care area to predict the risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease events. The main problem is using with digital BP monitoring machine is Doctors are not believe on digital machines they believe with only sphygmomanometer. In this paper, in order to propose an alternative system to the existed ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) sphygmomanometer, to sort out the problems using small wearable device consisting of photoplethysmograph (PPG) sensors. Recent advances in optical technology have facilitated the use of high-intensity green LEDs for PPG, increasing the adoption of this measurement technique. In this paper, we briefly present the problems of PPG sensor and recent developments in wearable pulse rate sensors with green LEDs.


Introduction The UK palliative care funding review is examining use and costs of palliative care services (PCS) including provision of end of life (EoL) care for children and young people (CYP) with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions (LL/LTC). Current provision is funded through a range of statutory and voluntary organisations. Place of care (POC) towards EoL may be influenced by several factors including service availability, attitudes of health and social care professionals, and patient and family-centred issues. Aims and Methods We sought to review the current evidence on POC in CYP with LL/LTC towards the EoL. An initial search was conducted in January 2011 (currently being updated) of databases MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL. We included empirical peer reviewed papers published between 2004–2011 with data on POC for CYP towards the EoL. Results To date 28 papers meet review inclusion criteria. Study quality is variable. We found evidence that CYP with Leukaemia, Lymphoma, and Cystic Fibrosis, those from ethnic minorities and those aged less than 1 year were more likely to die in hospital. CYP with solid tumours, those aged more than 1 year and those of male gender were more likely to die at home. Explanations for POC were poorly evidenced; most studies cited availability/access of services but few explored issues underlying preferences for POC. Conclusions Knowledge and understanding of factors affecting POC for CYP towards EoL is limited. Robust data are required to inform PCS provision and ensure that funding is available for care in appropriate locations to meet CYP clinical needs and family preferences.


After focusing on the Euro crisis, European leaders are now struggling with the biggest migrant crisis since Second World War. Up to now, over 1.1 million migrants have requested protection in Europe, and their number is growing every day. The functioning of the Schengen area is in danger due to control deficiencies at external borders. As it's facing this challenge, the EU is constantly seeking solutions designed to restore the proper functioning of the system and prevent its collapse.


Objective: This prospective observational study investigates the role of CSF biomarkers in predicting progression of dopa-resistant gait impairments in Parkinson disease (PD) in the first 36 months from diagnosis. Methods: Quantitative gait analysis was carried out longitudinally using an instrumented walkway (GAITRite) in 108 people with PD and 130 age-matched controls. A subgroup of 44 people with PD underwent lumbar puncture from which a battery of CSF biomarkers was measured: b -amyloid 1 – 42 and 1 – 40 (A b 42 and A b 40), total and phosphorylated tau protein (t-tau/p-tau 181 ), and a -synuclein ( a Syn). Linear mixed models examined the association between CSF and dopa-resistant gait characteristics (defined as substantial progression despite optimal medication). Results: Low baseline CSF A b 42, and to a lesser extend A b 40, predicted decline in gait characteristics in the first 3 years following diagnosis, independently explaining up to 12% of progression of step time variability (single task) and step length variability (dual-task). Interestingly, these findings were independent of age and cognition. Conclusions: These findings implicate underlying amyloid pathology in neural networks involved in locomotor control. Results suggest that disturbed A b metabolism may be a biomarker for dopa-resistant gait impairments in early PD. Our findings raise interesting questions regarding therapeutic interventions such as compounds or molecules aimed at reducing amyloid burden to mitigate gait disturbance in early PD and potentially falls risk. Finally, progression of discrete gait characteristics suggests they may have potential as clinical biomarkers of pathology and disease progression. Neurology ® 2017;


In this essay, I set out to prove that some of the medical experiments undertaken by Nazi doctors during World War II have scientific relevance in today's scientific community. In the first section, the experiments connected with Dr. Karl Brandt will be examined in some detail allowing the reader to develop a basic knowledge of the experiments that will be discussed. This will also set the foundation for the discussion on scientific validity due to the nature in which they are described. In the second section, the results relevant to today's scientific community will be discussed, proving that these horrific experiments do have useful applications. In the third section, the debates surrounding the issues of euthanasia and the use of the results from the experiments will be examined. Although some of the results do have scientific validity, these, and similar, experiments should not be replicated due to their horrendous nature.


Challenging the public dichotomy characterizing fathers as "involved" or "absentee," we investigate racial variation in college men's perceptions of their paternal relationships and the gendered constructions these promote. The analysis draws on intensive interviews (n = 76) with Asian American, Black, and white sons from one university and survey data (n = 1,576) from 24 institutions. In both data sets, Asian Americans and Blacks describe greater paternal distance than do whites. This conceals variations in sons' understanding of fathers. Asian Americans often criticize their fathers' distance, disidentifying with the near-exclusive focus on breadwinning they describe among fathers. In contrast, Blacks and whites normalize and identify with their dads. Blacks emphasize the "laid-back," "cool" masculinity their dads impart, while whites often emphasize the independent masculinity based on mentorship and friendship their dads offer. Recasting sociological theories, we argue these differences emanate from divergent structural contexts, but more importantly, cultural conceptions of fatherhood, race, and gender as well as public discussions that valorize white models of fatherhood.


The nutritional management of glycogen storage disease has often been called "the intensive regimen". The intensive regimen may not be without consequence. This thesis aims to characterise the intensive regimen and implement changes.
Chapter 1 discusses concepts of glucose homeostasis in humans and introduces the glycogen storage diseases as a group of disorders. The metabolic physiology of those glycogen storage disorders associated with hypoglycaemia are
reviewed and traditional methods used to ameliorate these metabolic disturbances are discussed. Methods used in the study include cornstarch loads, breath enrichment of 13CO2, hydrogen breath tests and dietary assessment as well as participant characteristics are discussed in chapter 2.
Chapter 3 examines nutritional management as a cross-sectional dietary survey of children and adults with GSD, comparing the patient group to expert-panel recommendations as well as age and sex matched controls. Chapter 4 looks
at the short-term effect a new carbohydrate therapy has on biochemical indices of metabolic control focusing on glucose, lactate and insulin profiles. These studies are double-blind cross-over studies, comparing the novel starch to uncooked
cornstarch. Similarly Chapter 5 studies further short-term metabolic effects of the novel starch compared to cornstarch by examining hydrogen breath test data and enrichment of 13C02 in breath in an attempt to gauge the mechanism of action
of the novel carbohydrate therapy. Chapter 6 examines the implementation of the new dietary starch into subjects' long-term dietary regimen in the form of a randomised cross-over trial. The primary endpoints are quantity of treatment starch
use but safety, efficacy and patient acceptance of therapy are also considered.
Chapter 7 brings together these various studies drawing conclusions and suggestions for further study. This chapter highlights the difficulties in performing investigations in rare disorders, when subjects are vulnerable to metabolic
decompensation and recommends further study in healthy volunteers.


In Chapter 1, Fluorescent enhancements have been achieved using a simple layered structure: fluorophore, polymer/metal ion, glass substrate. The polymer/metal ion layer apparently has a strong influence on the emission response of the fluorophore by removing the dye aggregation. This data supports that the addition of higher concentration of hydrated transition metal salt increases the production of β-phase in the Polyvinylidene Difluoride (PVDF). The absorption spectra intensity increased as the amount of Zn is increased in the substrate while the Rhodamine 6G (Rh6G) thickness is kept constant. Investigation into the means of β-phase production and the influence of the interfacial region effect on the fluorescence enhancement was completed and reported in this work. The goal of this study is to understand the interfacial properties that control the nature of the fluorescent emission and determine the structure of the fluorophore on different substrates. Chapter 2 of this dissertation shows an investigation of the role of the polymer substrate, the solvent and the reaction between Rh6G and Zn. Studying the reaction between Rh6G and Zn was done on glass slides in the absence of polymer. In order to study the role of the solvent, films of PVDF doped with Zn were cast from pure acetone. PVDF polymer was replaced by PMMA to evaluate the role of the polymer in the films. The response of emission signal of TNT, as a function of Rhodamine 6G concentration and mol % of Zn has been studied in Chapter 3. Using a different concentration of Rhodamine 6G and mol % of metal ion, the signal is quenched by a notably large amount. Different analytes can be applied and emission signals can be collected to find a pattern that could be used to identify the explosives.


This paper introduces Schumpeter's views on the relationship between business and politics and argues that we can discern a distinct Schumpeterian perspective of business-politics relations. Schumpeter's views about the pivotal role of entrepreneurs in economic development attracted substantial interest in economic sociology and in political economy. His views about the role of entrepreneurs in politics have so far however hardly been studied. The paper identifies the following four aspects as central to Schumpeter's perspective of business-politics relations: (a) entrepreneurs and corporations drive economic change, (b) entrepreneurs and corporations are ineffective in defending their political interests and vulnerable to hostile movements, (c) the resulting divergence of the economic and the political impact of entrepreneurs and corporations makes capitalism socio-politically instable, and (d) the relationship of entrepreneurs and corporations to political institutions and public policies is primarily adaptive, rather than causative. The paper proposes a two-dimensional typology of business-politics relations that combines the Schumpeterian focus on adaptation with the Marxian focus on influence. These two dimensions - adaptation and influence - result in four ideal types: business-dominated social compromise, imposed social compromise, business dominance, and political confrontation. Examples from German welfare state history illustrate these four types. The paper suggests that the Schumpeterian and the Marxian perspective, while in contrast to each other, may be complementary and each perspective valid under different socio-political conditions.


This paper looks at the rhetoric utilized in the debate surrounding the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing—a process for removing oil and natural gas from deep within the ground. In order to study the rhetoric surrounding hydraulic fracturing, the websites of three lobbyist groups from both sides of the debate, six in total, were selected and analyzed using Kenneth Burke's cluster analysis method. This method consists of discovering "what goes with what" or looking at both the frequency and intensity of, as well as the relationships between, the words utilized by a speaker in order to better understand their views. Following Carol Berthold who argues cluster-analysis can be used upon multiple subjects in order to compare them and that cluster analysis can be used in order to better understand the rhetoric behind a social movement, in this paper, I have combined the rhetoric of each of the three lobbying groups in favor of hydraulic fracturing, as well as the three lobbying groups in opposition to hydraulic fracturing, so that they can be compared as if there is only two speakers, each of them representative of the arguments of their side.


My contribution to this tribute places Bill Nelson's scholarship about Judge Edward Weinfeld and Justice Byron White within several contexts. It is a personal history of Nelson the law student, law clerk, and young scholar; an intellectual history of legal theory since the 1960s; an examination of the influence of legal theory on Nelson's scholarship based on his writings about Weinfeld and White; and an example of how legal historians contend with the subject of judicial reputation. Nelson was one of many former Warren Court and Burger Court clerks who joined the professoriate and rejected the legal process theory that they had learned as law students. Instead of process theory, Nelson and this upstart generation of scholars gravitated to one of five competing theories: (1) Rights protectors; (2) Post-realism; (3) Law and economics; (4) Originalism; and (5) Judicial restraint holdouts. Nelson's scholarship about Weinfeld and White represents a case study about a scholar struggling to fit two judges whom he clerked for and greatly admired into one of these five schools of thought. Nelson tries hard to turn them into rights protectors, to draw similarities between their jurisprudence and Justice Brennan's jurisprudence that Nelson so obviously admires. Nelson also reframes Weinfeld's and White's judicial restraint so that it looks nothing like the pretentious process theory that Nelson had rejected at N.Y.U. Law School and at Harvard.


In a previous article Labuschagne (2000:23-30) reviewed the criminological relevance of serial murder as well as some traditional viewpoints on crime. An interactional perspective on the phenomenon of serial murder, in which the contextual aspects based on an interview situation between researchers and the individuals in question, was also provided. This perspective represented a move away from traditional methods of focusing on the murders and the individuals in isolation with the inclusion of broader factors, such as the influence of other people. In this review the author follows through on his previous article and reports on empirically evaluated results of an interactional analysis of serial murder.


MIMO-OFDM receivers with horizontal encoding are considered in this paper. The successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm is compared to the K-best list sphere detector (LSD). A modification to the K-best LSD algorithm is introduced. The SIC and K-best LSD receivers are designed for a 2 times 2 antenna system with 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). The ASIC implementation results for both architectures are presented. The K-best LSD outperforms the SIC receiver in bad channel conditions but the SIC receiver performs better in channels with less correlated MIMO streams. The latency of the K-best LSD is large due to the high modulation order and list size. The throughput of the SIC receiver is more than 6 times higher than that of the K-best LSD.


At the Indonesian House of Representatives (DPR), there is an absence of public involvement in the deliberation of the State Budget Bill (RUU APBN) and Government Ministry/ Agency Work Plan and Budget (RKA-KL) eventhough the existing official regulation allows such situation. This became the background issue of this research. This research is aimed to explore, present issues and provide inputs to members of the DPR in considering policy choices to improve public information accessibility during the deliberation process of the RUU APBN in the DPR. To focus on the issue, this research takes a case study concerning the border issues with the consideration that this issue is often subjected to instant, partial, and unsustainable treatment by the policy makers.

In general, this research is based on the premise that the DPR as people's representatives should uphold their representation functions in conducting other functions. The existing DPR working system and mechanism should also put the principle of good governance, including transparency, accountability, and public participation into practice. The findings of this research showed that access to public information and public participation in the deliberation process of RUU APBN conducted by the government and DPR are still very limited. The attention of the government and DPR regarding border areas, especially in women and other marginalized groups is limited. Information about the State Budget itself is difficult to obtain.

DPR very rarely conducted a Public Hearing with the public or elements of the public in connection with the deliberation of the State Budget Bill. Up to the present, DPR only discussed the Proposed State Budget (RAPBN) that has been formulated by the Government, which had received inputs from the public through the Meetings for Development Planning (Musrenbang). This process within DPR is conducted with the assumption that inputs from the community have been completed in the Musrenbang forum.

Considering the limitations of this research, initial recommendations to reduce the problems on the deliberation process of the State Budget Bill in the DPR are as follows: (i) Increase public access to participate in the process of RUU APBN Deliberation at the DPR; (ii) Increase human resources capacity at the DPR forpublic information services and for supporting the functions ofDPR; (iii) Review the laws and regulations concerning the DPR's budgeting function; and (iv) Increase the awareness of the DPR concerning the interest of women and other marginalized groups in border territories.


In this paper, we evaluate the translation of negation both automatically and manually, in English–German (EN–DE) and English– Chinese (EN–ZH). We show that the ability of neural machine translation (NMT) models to translate negation has improved with deeper and more advanced networks, although the performance varies between language pairs and translation directions. The accuracy of manual evaluation in EN→DE, DE→EN, EN→ZH, and ZH→EN is 95.7%, 94.8%, 93.4%, and 91.7%, respectively. In addition, we show that under-translation is the most significant error type in NMT, which contrasts with the more diverse error profile previously observed for statistical machine translation. To better understand the root of the under-translation of negation, we study the model's information flow and training data. While our information flow analysis does not reveal any deficiencies that could be used to detect or fix the under-translation of negation, we find that negation is often rephrased during training, which could make it more difficult for the model to learn a reliable link between source and target negation. We finally conduct intrinsic analysis and extrinsic probing tasks on negation, showing that NMT models can distinguish negation and non-negation tokens very well and encode a lot of information about negation in hidden states but nevertheless leave room for improvement.


Unprecedented wet conditions are reported in the 2014 summer (December–March) in South-western Amazon, with rainfall about 100% above normal. Discharge in the Madeira River (the main southern Amazon tributary) has been 74% higher than normal (58 000 m3 s−1) at Porto Velho and 380% (25 000 m3 s−1) at Rurrenabaque, at the exit of the Andes in summer, while levels of the Rio Negro at Manaus were 29.47 m in June 2014, corresponding to the fifth highest record during the 113 years record of the Rio Negro. While previous floods in Amazonia have been related to La Niña and/or warmer than normal tropical South Atlantic, the 2014 rainfall and flood anomalies are associated with warm condition in the western Pacific-Indian Ocean and with an exceptionally warm Subtropical South Atlantic. Our results suggest that the tropical and subtropical South Atlantic SST gradient is a main driver for moisture transport from the Atlantic toward south-western Amazon, and this became exceptionally intense during summer of 2014.


Historians and sociologists have explored past and present processes of urban segregation, development, and displacement of minority and low income communities, and policy questions surrounding barriers to housing and the ways residents interact with community institutions. As communication scholars, we have a unique opportunity to add critical insights regarding the cultural meaning making of urban planning discourses. This article asks: How do cultural assumptions embedded in the myth of American opportunity shape urban planning processes? I examine two city planning documents—Detroit Future City and Connecting Cleveland 2020 Citywide Plan—for the ways references to opportunity construct an optimistic understanding of urban potential while ignoring the complicated and controversial ways race is woven into urban planning and the arrangement of city spaces. Specifically, I explore how references to the term "opportunity" appeal to cultural commonsense through associations with promise and possibility. These appeals gain persuasive traction through the term's tendency toward over-simplification, which acts conservatively to universalize the white male experience, beg questions of race and racism, and, at times, completely elide the relevance of race in urban arrangements.


We consider a decentralized learning problem, where a set of computing nodes aim at solving a non-convex optimization problem collaboratively. It is well-known that decentralized optimization schemes face two major system bottlenecks: stragglers' delay and communication overhead. In this paper, we tackle these bottlenecks by proposing a novel decentralized and gradient-based optimization algorithm named as QuanTimed-DSGD. Our algorithm stands on two main ideas: (i) we impose a deadline on the local gradient computations of each node at each iteration of the algorithm, and (ii) the nodes exchange quantized versions of their local models. The first idea robustifies to straggling nodes and the second alleviates communication efficiency. The key technical contribution of our work is to prove that with non-vanishing noises for quantization and stochastic gradients, the proposed method exactly converges to the global optimal for convex loss functions, and finds a first-order stationary point in non-convex scenarios. Our numerical evaluations of the QuanTimed-DSGD on training benchmark datasets, MNIST and CIFAR-10, demonstrate speedups of up to 3x in run-time, compared to state-of-the-art decentralized optimization methods.


Romanticism and Time is a remarkable affirmation of border-crossings and international exchanges in many ways. This major collection of essays represents the work of eminent scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as they in turn represent the Romanticisms that emerged not only from the "four nations" of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland but also from Continental Europe and America. With their commitment to diversity, to change, and to exchange, and because of their awareness of the romanticism of periodization itself, the authors in this volume produce, as Wordsworth might say, a "timely utterance."


Rooftop rainwater harvesting has received an increased attention as a potential alternative water supply source both in the coastal and arsenic affected rural areas in Bangladesh. Several programs in installing rainwater harvesting systems have been implemented to mitigate the drinking water problem in the coastal and arsenic affected areas in the country. This study was conducted with a view to assess sanitary integrity, microbial contamination and the associated health risk of the currently practiced rooftop rainwater harvesting mainly used for drinking water supply. Sanitary inspection of the rainwater harvesting systems and an extensive sampling of harvested rainwater from the storage reservoirs and laboratory analysis were conducted. The study findings reveal that harvested rainwater was found to microbiologically contaminated to some extend. The disease burden estimated using QHRA model showed a significant microbial health burden associated with drinking untreated rainwater and both viral and bacterial pathogens dominate the microbial disease burden. In context of arsenic mitigation, rainwater harvesting reduces the health risk from arsenic; however it may increase the microbial disease burden much higher than the level of arsenic health risk at 50 microg/L of Bangladesh standard. Microbial risk needs proper attention through the implementation of a water safety plan for safe and sustainable rainwater harvesting in Bangladesh.


1. The concentration of water, cerebroside (glycosphingoside), free and total cholesterol, total phospholipin, monoaminophospholipin (phosphoglyceride) and lecithin (phosphatidyl choUne) was determined in the brains of a series of vertebrates, including representatives of the cartilaginous and bony fishes, amphibians, reptiles birds and mammals. From these figures was calculated the concentration of ester cholesterol, sphingomyelin (phosphosphingoside) and kephalin. 2. The brains of each of the species contained a negligibly small concentration of cholesterol ester and, unlike the nervous system of certain invertebrates, the brains of all the species contained some cerebroside. 3. The concentration of each lipid in the brain was very similar for different individuals of the same species, but for various species within one class the mean concentration of many of the lipids differed greatly. 4. The mean concentration of total myelin lipid and that of each of the individual myelin lipids, i.e. cerebroside, cholesterol and sphingomyelin, was greater in the brains of the mammals than in the brains of the lower vertebrates.


Hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection is increasingly recognized as a cause of acute hepatitis in the industrialized world. We aimed to determine the frequency of acute HEV infection in cases of suspected drug-induced liver injury (DILI), mainly a diagnosis of exclusion. To this aim, formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) liver tissues of all cases routinely processed in our institute during a 2 1/2 years period in which DILI was among the differential diagnoses (157 liver biopsies, 1 liver explant) were subjected to semi-nested RT-PCR for the detection of HEV RNA. Histopathology was re-evaluated on all cases tested positive. HEV RNA was detectable in 3 of 158 cases (2%) tested, comprising autochthonic as well as travel-related infections with genotypes 1, 3, and 4 each found once, respectively. Histopathologic findings comprised one case with subtotal hepatic necrosis and two cases of acute (cholestatic) hepatitis not distinguishable from acute hepatitis of other etiology. Thus, the overall frequency of acute HEV infection as determined by detection of HEV RNA in liver tissue is substantially increased in patients with suspected DILI compared to the healthy population, emphasizing the need to actively look for HEV infection in cases of suspected DILI. Molecular testing for HEV RNA in routinely processed FFPE liver tissues can be applied to cases with undetermined HEV status.


This paper stresses the main results of a study on the modalities and benefits of collaboration between universities and local governments. It has been prepared in the context of the Erasmus + CityLab project: Engaging Students with Sustainable Cities in Latin America which aims to stimulate the development of active pedagogies in undergraduate and postgraduate courses promoting collaborative work of students with representatives of local governments, based on a problem-based teaching methodologies. But, the object of this study goes beyond the pedagogical task of the universities. It aims to understand the conditions in which this collaboration is developed and its impact. A questionnaire was applied to 80 institutions in Latin America (most of them) and Europe. The most interesting responses were selected to develop 20 in-depth interviews with university representatives. Then, a comparative analysis was carried out to better understand the main dimensions of the collaboration. The small size of the sample does not allow it to be representative. However, it allows to stress some aspects that foster successful collaborations, since there is a common pattern in several of the analyzed cases. At the same time, the heterogeneity of cases and their contexts help to understand the factors of success and the obstacles of collaboration. It is not intended, in any way, to offer a model, but to present some hypotheses and points of reflection that might help city and university leaders to improve their current collaboration. This reflection is based mainly on the perception of the universities and the perspectives from the academy, derived from the surveys and interviews developed with a group of them and will serve as the basis for a later work with local governments. This aims to present the main results of the study on the modalities and benefits of collaboration between universities and local governments. It was born in the context of the Erasmus + CityLab project: Engaging Students with Sustainable Cities in Latin America 1 which aims to stimulate the development of active pedagogies in undergraduate and postgraduate courses promoting collaborative work of students with representatives of local governments, based on a problem-based teaching methodology. But, the object of this study goes beyond the pedagogical task of the universities. It aims to understand the conditions in which this collaboration is developed and its impact.


This article joins calls for literary scholarship to move beyond the limitations of binary oppositions between 'close' and 'distant' reading and towards the development of approaches that exploit the macroanalytic potential of digital methods alongside the nuanced analysis that characterises literary scholarship. Drawing on a customised corpus of writing about the English Lake District, we model the application of a multiscalar approach known as geographical text analysis (GTA), which combines aspects of close reading and distant reading, and, in doing so, introduces a new method for literary research. Here, we focus on historical descriptions of the Lake District's soundscape to demonstrate both how perceptions of sound changed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how multi-scalar methods can uniquely uncover such historical-literary shifts. Sound, we argue, offers a particularly useful focus since it allows us to draw fruitful parallels between our methods and those applied by the writers we study. In this way, this article advocates for digital humanities scholarship that advances our disciplines in conversation with appropriate historical modes.


One of the most important issues in electricity power systems, regulated or deregulated, is reactive power management. Voltage stability, voltage profile and losses optimization are some of objectives in reactive power management and control. Under Load Tap Changer (ULTC) transformers and generator units are two common instruments which have been used in this regard. In this paper, simultaneous optimization of voltage stability, voltage profile and active losses as a multi objective function is considered. A new method for ULTC and generator candidate selection as well as implementation method in a large scale power system is demonstrated in this paper. In this paper, we introduce a new method for adjusting regulating voltage for selected ULTCs and generators, as well as tap position of ULTCs to achieve optimum voltage stability, voltage profile and losses in the system. After fully explained formulation, we will implement our method on an IEEE standard test system, and then we will apply our method on Iranian large scale power system and will demonstrate the results.


Staphylokinase (SAK) is abacterial kinase produced by certain strains of Staphylococcus spp. It is a 14.5 kDa, consisting of 136 amino acids single polypeptidechain protein, which activates plasminogen to form plasmin and digest fibrin clots. SAK is a promising thrombolytic agent for the treatment of myocardial infarction. The present research was carried out to produce SAK from locally isolated lysogenic Staphylococcus aureus. The main focus of this work was to isolate and characterize lysogenic S. aureus from various environmental samples involving non-pathogenic Staphylococcus spp., while the earlier isolation was done using pathogenic samples.


In the past three years, developments in social networking and internet applications have begun providing internet users with more opportunities for sharing short updates about themselves, their lives, and their whereabouts online. Users may post messages about their status, their moods, their location and other tidbits on social networks and blogging sites, or on applications for sending out short messages to networks of friends like Twitter, Yammer and others. As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others. Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults. Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter. The use of Twitter is highly intertwined with the use of other social media; both blogging and social network use increase the likelihood than an individual also uses Twitter. Twitter users and status updaters are also a mobile bunch; as a group they are much more likely to be using wireless technologies ? laptops, handhelds and cell phones ? for internet access, or cell phones for text messaging. Overall, Twitter users engage with news and own technology at the same rates as other internet users, but the ways in which they use the technology -- to communicate, gather and share information -- reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered and social opportunities for interaction. Moreover, Twitter as an application allows for and enhances these opportunities, so it is not so surprising that users would engage in these kinds of activities and also be drawn to an online application that expands those opportunities.


Redundancy of word and sub-word occurrences in large documents can be effectively utilized in an OCR system to improve recognition results. Most OCR systems employ language modeling techniques as a post-processing step; however these techniques do not use important pictorial information that exist in the text image. In case of large-scale recognition of degraded documents, this information is even more valuable. In our previous work, we proposed a subword image clustering method for the applications dealing with large printed documents. In our clustering method, the ideal case is when all equivalent sub-word images lie in one cluster. To overcome the issues of low print quality, the clustering method uses an image matching algorithm for measuring the distance between two sub-word images. The measured distance with a set of simple shape features were used to cluster all sub-word images. In this paper, we analyze the effects of adding more shape features on processing time, purity of clustering, and the final recognition rate. Previously published experiments have shown the efficiency of our method on a book. Here we present extended experimental results and evaluate our method on another book with totally different font face. Also we show that the number of the new created clusters in a page can be used as a criteria for assessing the quality of print and evaluating preprocessing phases.


This paper examines the use of judicial doctrines in federal tax trial controversies. Despite a taxpayer's strict compliance with the terms of a statute, a judge may still justify deciding for the government by applying a judicial doctrine. The common wisdom, derived from traditional tax scholarship about these doctrines, is that the doctrines are raised only by the government or the court and can only favor decisions in behalf of the government. A taxpayer may argue that the form of a transaction be set aside in limited circumstances such as fraud, so negating form is a one way street, available only to the government. The literature does not contain any empirical research. The five most common judicial doctrines, which were analyzed, are: business purpose, economic substance, sham transaction, step transaction, and substance over form. The hypothesis of this article is that the common wisdom is incorrect. A database was created for this article and consists of those federal trial decisions rendered by the district court, the Tax Court, and the Court of Federal Claims between 1993 and 2006 in which one or more of the doctrines were raised. Data was culled from on-line sources for these cases and for the accompanying briefs, if they were available. The evidence sustains the hypothesis. Judicial doctrines were raised in a much richer manner than the common wisdom would suggest. Among the results gleaned from the data are: -All three parties raised doctrines, the court more than the government or the taxpayer. The taxpayer raised doctrines half as much as the government, suggesting the taxpayer's active interest in judicial doctrines. The court's predominant role in raising doctrines appears to have occurred because litigants made more focused arguments, depending upon more specific authorities in their briefs, such as cases or legislative history. -All three parties raised doctrines, expecting that they would be applied, but the taxpayer argued much more frequently than the court or government that a doctrine it had raised should not be applied. -Three doctrines could be raised by the taxpayer to its advantage - economic substance, step transaction and substance over form - but the other two could be raised only to benefit the government - business purpose and sham transaction. The litigants, however, did not raise doctrine in a manner resonant with this model. -The areas of tax law in which doctrines were raised were inconsistent with traditional observations about the areas in which they should have been raised. -Despite the absolute nature of the one way rule, it was largely ignored when the taxpayer raised a doctrine. -Doctrines' use in the database could be associated with specific causes. More generally, a party's argument that the doctrine that it had raised be applied in behalf of a specific litigant was predictive of the doctrine being applied in that litigant's behalf. More specifically, and quite robustly, the taxpayer's prevailing in a doctrine's application was associated with use of substance over form and the government's prevailing was associated with the use of the business purpose doctrine. In addition to the paper's presentation of its result, it underscores the gap between traditional legal scholarship and empirical research. As this paper illustrates, more quantitative analysis can and needs to be done, in law and especially in tax.


Palaeoproterozoic volcanic formations having different geochemical features are described in the Katiola-Marabadiassa area (Central Ivory Coast). They consist of (i) metamorphic mafic rocks belonging to the greenstone belts, (ii) rhyodacites intruded into the greenstone belts and interpreted as sub-volcanic apophyses of TTG plutons, and (iii) calc-alkaline andesitic lava interbedded in the lower sedimentary pile of the Bandama Basin. The greenstone belt rocks have a magmatic signature of ocean floor tholeiites. They were generated from moderate partial melting of a fairly depleted spinel lherzolite source. The rhyodacites show the same compositions as the TTG granitoids of the belt. These TTGs generated from melting of garnet-bearing amphibolite, derived from subducted oceanic crust, but also from peridotite melting of the fertilized mantle wedge. The andesites show a common composition of active continental margin potassic calc-alkaline lavas. However, they do not constitute a volcanic belt, but belong to an intracontinental basin settled in a wrench tectonic system. They probably generated from remelting of sub-crustal metasomatised mantle.

The tectono-magmatism story of the Katiola-Marabadiassa area comprises four stages. A similar evolution is found in other belt-and-basin areas in Ivory Coast. A review of lithostratigraphic and chronological data of the Birimian terrains leads us to compare the four-stage model of the Central Ivory Coast to the West-African Palaeoproterozoic evolution. The first stage corresponds to ocean crust formation, by mid-ocean ridge accretion and volcanic arc building. The second stage, partly overlapping the previous one, is convergent and lasted from oceanic crust stacking to TTG and associated greenstone belt formation. It led to a protocontinental crust accretion by docking of granitized blocks, from ca 2200 Ma to 2110 Ma. The third stage corresponds to the formation of intracontinental basins by reorganization of the granitoid-greenstone shields and of the remnant oceanic basins, between 2118 Ma and 2093 Ma. It was associated with calc-alkaline magma production. The fourth stage is characterized by transtensional stress, with the closure of the basins by left-lateral wrenching along N-S faults, and by emplacement of new potassic granitoids until 2072 Ma.


This article utilizes critical race theory counterstorytelling to tell a story about ¡Poder Xicanx!, a Mexican-based student organization at a private, predominantly white university in the Northeast of the United States. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observations, pláticas, and document analysis, I document the educational experiences of 20 Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) undergraduate students who participated in ¡Poder Xicanx!. Specifically, I argue that ¡Poder Xicanx! functions as a counter-space, which is a site or space where MMAX students can challenge stereotypes, deal with racism, and empower one another. Moreover, I also highlight the fact that ¡Poder Xicanx! allows for members to create a home away from home, sustain and practice their cultural ties, and collectively build critical consciousness.


A Question of Character: Life of John F. Kennedy. By Thomas C. Reeves. (New York: The Free Press. 1991. Pp. xvi, 510. $24.95.) Thomas Reeves's biography of Kennedy should be read twice--first, as expose, and second, as a legitimate scholastic exercise--but retain a high degree of skepticism. The foundation upon which Reeves grounds his work, and title, is the identity of character with "a strong moral sense of right and wrong ... derived from our Western heritage and deeply embedded in our culture" (p. 16). It is as well a reaction to the Camelot school of Kennedy studies exemplified by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who, moreover, defined character as a "... combination of toughness of fiber and courage" (p. 5). Since Schlesinger chose to present Kennedy in this guise, and since we as an electorate have made character a basis of selecting our leaders at other times and places, and finally, since most people, according to Reeves, can still tell the difference between right and wrong, a study of the character of Kennedy and its effect upon his policies and actions is valid. The difficulty, however, is that Reeves is willing to accept the worst accounts of Kennedy's personal conduct when assessing his character. The sources used are extensive, relevant to the purpose and scholarly for the most part; there a also popular accounts and truly suspect ones and there is far too much reliance on such sources as Judith Exner's My Story and Anthony Summers' Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. The Kennedy Library Oral History portions a cited although some were still closed at the time Reeves was writing. Rarely, however, does Reeves distinguish relative values for these sources. Fundamentally, Kennedy is presented as a political animal, yet within that context, he is further portrayed as evolving, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The overall evaluation is that of a flawed character: The standard presentation--family background, war service, Congressional career, and presidency--are the natural parameters. In the city chapters the treatment necessarily is the more highly personal. Reeves maintains that Joseph Kennedy established the moral atmosphere--really amoral--in which John matured and that the son deviated little from the dictum of "win at all costs." Nevertheless, Reeves gives credit where due. The sinking of PT 109 is a case in point. Kennedy's handling of the vessel was incompetent, and yet his subsequent actions were heroic. He acknowledges, clearly with approval, that Kennedy's Senatorial votes were Liberal (although Kennedy disavowed the term for himself), and quotes Kennedy to the effect that the national interest and his conscience directed his vote, only to conclude that "there was little indication of any abiding moral vision directing his conscience, much less his vote" (p. …


The goal of our work is to characterize the current state of Cuba's access to the wider Internet. This work is motivated by recent improvements in connectivity to the island and the growing commercial interest following the ease of restrictions on travel and trade with the US. In this paper, we profile Cuba's networks, their connections to the rest of the world, and the routes of international traffic going to and from the island. Despite the addition of the ALBA-1 submarine cable, we find that round trip times to websites hosted off the island remain very high; pings to popular websites frequently took over 300 ms. We also find a high degree of path asymmetry in traffic to/from Cuba. Specifically, in our analysis we find that traffic going out of Cuba typically travels through the ALBA-1 cable, but, surprisingly, traffic on the reverse path often traverses high-latency satellite links, adding over 200 ms to round trip times. Last, we analyze queries to public DNS servers and SSL certificate requests to characterize the availability of network services in Cuba.


The presence of evaporitic formations in sedimentary basins, often dominated by the salt mineral halite, is of great influence on the structural style developed during tectonic events. On a somewhat smaller scale, salt rocks often host a variety of deep solution mined caverns, which are increasingly finding use for strategic storage of energy resources in the form of gaseous or liquid fuels and as vessels for off-peak energy storage in compressed gas. This is in addition to the use of conventionally mined galleries for the long term storage of hazardous waste materials. The low permeability of most salt rocks, with weak rheological behaviour and tendency to self-seal, has attracted engineers to use salt formations to host such projects. The Zechstein salt deposits in the Netherlands exist in the form of original beds and as migrated salt domes/pillows that may reach the kilometre scale. Some contain magnesium rich salts which are solution mined as an economic resource. Caverns constructed within these more soluble and weaker materials pose additional challenges for long term storage management. Careful management of fluid filled caverns requires a full knowledge of the rheological and transport properties of the host salt formations for a safe operation into the future. This thesis addresses a number of deficiencies in the current knowledge of salt mechanical behaviour regarding the creep of halite and its mixtures with magnesium salts. (1) The pressure sensitivity of creep was investigated, using dry synthetic halite rock. The rate controlling mechanism in the temperature range 22-350 oC was found to change from dislocation glide to dislocation climb. The experimental results allow quantification of the activation volume for creep. (2) The transition from creep governed by grain size sensitive (GSI) dislocation mechanisms to creep controlled by grain size sensitive (GSS) solution-precipitation mechanisms was studied on the basis of multi-step deformation experiments with constant strain rate parts and stress relaxation. Stress exponents n of conventional creep laws changed from ~10 at relatively high stress and strain rate to ~1 at the end of the relaxation steps. (3) The rheology of the magnesium bearing salts carnallite and bischofite was also investigated by means of multistep experiments including relaxation. Special attention was given to the mechanical behaviour of mixtures of these salts with halite. Both bischofite and carnallite, tested at real in situ conditions of temperature 70 oC and pressure 40 MPa, showed a change from GSI creep to GSS creep comparable to what was found for wet halite. n-values changed from ~5 to ~1. Composite GSI-GSS flow laws for bischofite and carnallite were established. (4) The effects of compositional layering on permeable transport in the excavation damage zones around mined cavities were investigated by argon gas permeability, using natural layered material from mines in China, to better understand effects of bedding orientation relative to deformational stresses expected in cavity and gallery walls at depth. Microstructural investigation revealed that local dilatancy occurred at interfaces, which must have given rice to a local increase in permeability.


This paper deals with the translation of the English-language Common Law legislation of the Republic of Cyprus into Greek. The legislation introduced to Cyprus in 1935 was common law codified by the British for use in the colonies. The aim of the paper is threefold: (a) to research the historical background and highlight the communicative implications for a community where the language of the law is not the mother tongue of the people, (b) to reconstruct the methods the translators applied when they translated the Law of Civil Wrongs from English into Greek within the common law framework of the Republic of Cyprus, and (c) to establish how the actual process of translation affected the target LSP.


How do the perpetrators of mass killing legitimise their behaviour? This article examines the legitimation of some of the worst cases of mass killing in the past two centuries. It finds that the colonial experience helped establish a moral framework that facilitated arguments designed to place whole groups beyond normal legal and moral protection on account of some assigned traits. This moral framework was evident in different colonial settings and rested on claims negating the right of the victim group to protection and claims valourising their violent extermination. It also underpinned the moral justifications offered by perpetrators of some of the twentieth century's worst episodes of mass killing. This article examines the "family resemblances" between the arguments used by perpetrators in different settings, indentifies their common structure, and examines the factors that influenced their capacity to secure legitimacy for mass killing.


A class of interior point methods using inexact directions is analysed. The linear system arising in interior point methods for linear programming is reformulated such that the solution is less sensitive to perturbations in the right-hand side. For the new system an implementable condition is formulated that controls the relative error in the solution. Based on this condition, a feasible and an infeasible potential reduction method are described which retain the convergence and complexity bounds known for exact directions.


Coherent beam combining (CBC) technology holds the promise of enabling laser systems with very high power and near-ideal beam quality. We propose and demonstrate a novel servo system composed of multilevel optical phase lock loops. This servo system is based on entirely electronic components and consequently can be considerably more compact and less expensive compared to servo systems made of optical phase/frequency shifters. We have also characterized the noise of a 1064 nm Yb-doped fiber amplifier to determine its effect on the CBC and studied theoretically the efficiency of combining a large array of beams with the filled-aperture implementation. In a proof-of-concept experiment we have combined two 100 mW 1064 nm semiconductor lasers with an efficiency of 94%.


In the design of structures to resist the effects of air blast loading or other severe dynamic loads it is vital to have large energy absorbing capabilities, and structural elements with large plastic deformation capacities are therefore desirable. Structures need to be designed for ductile response in order to prevent partial or total collapse due to locally failed elements. The research in this thesis considers experimental and theoretical studies on concrete beams of varying concrete strength. The nominal concrete compressive strength varied between 30 MPa and 200 MPa. A total of 89 beams were tested of which 49 beams were reinforced with varying amounts of tensile reinforcement. These beams were also reinforced with stirrups and steel fibres were added to a few beams. The remaining 40 beams were only reinforced with steel fibres with a fibre content of 1.0 percent by volume. Two different fibre lengths having constant length-to-diameter ratio were employed. The tests consisted of both static and air blast tests on simply supported beams. The blast tests were performed within a shock tube with a detonating explosive charge. All experimental research focused on deflection events, failure modes and loads transferred to the supports. The dynamic analyses involve single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) modelling of the beam response and the use of iso-damage curves. Also, the dynamic support reactions were calculated and compared with test results. For beams with tensile reinforcement, the failure mode of some beam types was observed to change from a flexural failure in the static tests to a flexural shear failure in the dynamic tests. Beams with a high ratio of reinforcement and not containing steel fibres failed in shear, whereas beams with a lower ratio of reinforcement failed in flexure. The introduction of steel fibres prevented shear cracks to develop, thus increasing the shear strength of the beams. The presence of steel fibres also increased the ductility and the residual load capacity of the beams. Beams subjected to air blast loading obtained an increased load capacity when compared to the corresponding beams subjected to static loading. The SDOF analyses showed good agreement with the experimental results regardless of concrete strength and reinforcement amount. The results of using iso-damage curves indicate conservative results with larger load capacities of the beams than expected. The theoretical evaluations of the dynamic reactions were in agreement with the measured average reactions, both in amplitudes and in general shape. The experimental results with steel fibre reinforced concrete beams indicate that the dynamic strength was higher than the corresponding static strength and that the toughness was reduced when increasing the compressive strength. Beams of normal strength concrete failed by fibre pull-out while a few beams of high strength concrete partly failed by fibre ruptures. It may be favourable to use shorter fibres with smaller aspect ratios in structural elements of high strength concrete and subjected to large dynamic loads. Further research should involve studies on the size effect, on different boundary conditions, on different types of structural elements and on the combination of blast and fragment loads. The theoretical work should involve analyses both with the use of SDOF modelling and finite element analysis.


Deference - the substitution by a decision maker of someone else's judgment for its own - is a pervasive tool of constitutional doctrine. But although it has been studied at more abstract levels of jurisprudence and at very specific doctrinal levels, it has received surprisingly little general attention in constitutional scholarship. This Article aims to fill that gap. This Article makes three primary contributions to the literature. First, it provides a careful examination of deference as a doctrinal tool in constitutional law, and offers a taxonomy of deference. In particular, it suggests that deference can best be understood as relying on two separate but overlapping grounds: deference on the basis of the legal authority of the deferee, and deference on the basis of the deferee's epistemic, or knowledge-based, authority. Importantly, this Article suggests that deference cannot be examined from the standpoint of the deferring institution - usually, the courts - alone. Rather, we must also consider the obligations of deferees, which should invoke deference only for those decisions reached in the full and fair exercise of their legal or epistemic authority. Second, the Article demonstrates the practical benefits of this richer understanding of deference by applying it to a recent case in which the Supreme Court confronted competing claims of deference: Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights ("FAIR"), in which the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Solomon Amendment, which requires law schools to provide access to campus for military recruiters. In FAIR, the Court faced claims of deference from Congress, acting pursuant to its military powers, and from the law schools, which invoked deference both as expressive associations and as universities. The Court's treatment of these competing claims to deference was unsatisfactory. The Court gave too much deference to Congress, and too little to the law schools. In particular, it failed to accord them the deference they deserved as universities, which serve as vital "First Amendment institutions" in the universe of public discourse. The Court's failure to soundly address these competing claims of deference bespeaks a larger failure to theorize the nature of deference and the occasions on which courts should defer. Thus underequipped, the Court was left at sea when confronting multiple institutions competing for deference in the same case. At the same time, the law schools themselves may have fallen short in meeting their own obligations as deferees. Finally, the Article shows that its examination of deference, and of universities as First Amendment institutions, lies at the intersection of two developing areas of constitutional scholarship: the study of constitutional decision rules, and the study of institutionally oriented approaches to the First Amendment. It argues that these two emerging fields are linked by the concept of deference, and might learn a good deal from each other.


On the basis of 16‐yr satellite time series (1987–2003) of sea surface temperature (SST) and using univariate and multivariate statistical techniques, we quantified patterns of fluctuation in oceanographic conditions, as well as their spatial structure along the coasts of South Africa and Chile between 29.0° and 34.5°S. Since variations in environmental conditions over multiple timescales are driven by oceanographic‐atmospheric processes modulated by coastal morphology, all of which affect in different ways coastal organisms, we hypothesized that dynamic properties of the environment contribute to characteristic patterns on rocky intertidal biomass structure across upwelling ecosystems. Although long‐term mean temperatures were similar between coasts, the relative importance of annual, semiannual, intraseasonal, and high‐frequency SST fluctuations differed; South Africa is more strongly pulsed over shorter timescales. Similar spatial discontinuities in thermal regimes were observed, with changes at about 32°S. Multivariate summaries of benthic community structure derived from functional group biomasses revealed striking differences between South Africa and Chile, as well as between regions north and south of 32°S within each ecosystem. Between‐continent and regional‐scale differences in community structure were largely unrelated to mean SST, but correlated with the different measures of temporal variance in SST. For all functional groups, as well as aggregate measures of benthic community composition, the weekly to annual SST fluctuations explained large fractions (>35%) of biological variability. Results highlight the importance of quantifying the temporal variance of regimes of hydrographic conditions since multispecies assemblages are expected to respond in different ways to the driving oceanographic processes behind these fluctuations.


Low level of seaport reliability is one of the crucial problems amidst the increasing trend of seaborne trade in Indonesia. Main seaports in Indonesia are suffering because of longer dwelling time relative to other international seaports in South East Asian countries partly due to poor administrative process. This paper examines the Indonesian sea transport market focusing on measuring the benefit of seaport service reliability improvement in terms of handling the seaborne trade documents. Using open-ended question of contingent valuation method, our estimates show a moderate benefit, a cost reduction of the administrative process ranging from US$10.8–90.3 per TEU for each day. The cost reduction is even higher for the subsample of importing firms, indicating that the improvement of document-handling plays a more crucial role in accelerating the import activities in Indonesia.


Hybrid constitutional courts are associated with deeply divided and post-conflict contexts where the impartiality of the domestic judiciary is suspect. Such courts enlist international (i.e., foreign) judges to create an ostensibly neutral counterbalance to the presumed political biases of local judges. This mixed-methods case study of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina questions the value of these hybrid courts. Contrary to what might be expected, the results of multidimensional scaling indicate that Bosnia's foreign judges have not provided a reliable counterbalance to apparent ethno-national divisions on the Court. Furthermore, qualitative analysis suggests that the foreign judges have contributed to several strategic mistakes that have probably harmed the Court's tenuous authority. It is also suggested that the presence of international judges on constitutional courts may actually discourage the kind of strategic behavior that is needed to build and sustain judicial power, particularly in deeply divided and post-conflict contexts.


Are environmental policies affected by the political cycle? This paper investigates if environmental spending is used as pork barrel with signaling purposes. It develops a two-period model of electoral competition where politicians use current policies to signal their preferences to rational, forward-looking voters. There exists an equilibrium where incumbents use pork barrel spending for signaling in majoritarian systems. Results show that it is directed towards ideologically homogeneous groups, and is mitigated if the incumbent is a 'lame duck' or has a high discount rate. The predictions of the model are tested using data on US state level environmental expenditures. The empirical results show support for the signaling motive as a central mechanism in generating pork barrel towards the environment.


Surveys of corporate risk management document that selective hedging, where managers incorporate their market views into firms' hedging programs, is widespread in the U.S. and other countries. Stulz (1996) argues that selective hedging could enhance the value of firms that possess an information advantage relative to the market and have the financial strength to withstand the additional risk from market timing. We study the practice of selective hedging in a 10-year sample of North American gold mining firms and find that selective hedging is most prevalent among firms that are least likely to meet these value- maximizing criteria -- (a) smaller firms, i.e., firms that are least likely to have private information about future gold prices; and (b) firms that are closest to financial distress. The latter finding provides support for the alternative possibility suggested by Stulz that selective hedging may also be driven by asset substitution motives. We detect weak relationships between selective hedging and some corporate governance measures, especially board size, but find no evidence of a link between selective hedging and managerial compensation.


The PCL (Weathers et al., 1993) is a useful and widely used measure to assess PTSD symptoms in clinical and research contexts, exhibiting adequate psychometric properties across its several versions and translations (e. g. Carvalho et al., 2015; Wilkins et al., 2011). The current study analyzed the psychometric properties (latent structure, internal consistency, temporal reliability, and convergent validity) of the Portuguese version of the PCL for the DSM-5 (PCL-5, Weathers et al., 2013) in a sample of firefighters. This study also aimed to contribute with empirical data to clarify the best latent structure of DSM-5 PTSD symptoms. Specifically, the DSM-5 four-factor model and other competing models for PTSD symptoms (four-factor Dysphoria model, five-factor Dysphoric Arousal model, six-factor Anhedonia model, six-factor Externalizing Behavior model, and seven-factor Hybrid model) applied to PCL-5 were analyzed and compared in this paper.


Advertising supported content sampling is ubiquitous in online markets for digital information goods. Yet, little is known about the profit impact of sampling when it serves the dual purpose of disclosing content quality and generating advertising revenue. This paper proposes an analytical framework to study the optimal content strategy for online publishers and shows how it is determined by characteristics of both the content market and the advertising market. The strategy choice is among a paid content strategy, a sampling strategy, and a free content strategy, which follow from the publisher's decisions concerning the size of the sample and the price of the paid content. We show that a key driver of the strategy choice is how sampling affects the prior expectations of consumers, who learn about content quality from the inspection of the free samples. Surprisingly, we find that it can be optimal for the publisher to generate advertising revenue by offering free samples even when sampling reduces both prior quality expectations and content demand. In addition, we show that it can be optimal for the publisher to refrain from revealing quality through free samples when advertising effectiveness is low and content quality is high. To illustrate, we relate our framework to the newspaper industry, where the sampling strategy is known as the "metered model."


FROM 1971 TO 1982 THE U.S. current account balance as a share of U.S. GNP averaged roughly zero.(1) Starting in 1983, however, the United States experienced increasingly large current account deficits, which reached 3.3 percent and 3.4 percent of GNP in 1986 and 1987, respectively. This tendency toward larger deficits was reversed gradually during the rest of the decade, and by 1991 the current account was near zero again. But starting in 1993 the current account again began to record increasingly large deficits, which grew to 3.6 percent of GNP in 1999 and 4.4 percent in 2000. This history of the current account prompts several questions: What is the source of the large current account deficits of the 1990s? Are they likely to remain with us indefinitely? If not, should we expect them to fade away slowly as they did in the 1980s? Or should we expect instead a sharp reversal in the near future? In this essay I interpret these trends in the U.S. current account from a perspective that focuses on the behavior of the country portfolio. The country portfolio is defined as the sum of all productive assets located in the United States, plus the U.S. net foreign asset position (that is, the sum of all claims on foreign assets held by U.S. residents minus the sum of all claims on U.S. assets owned by foreign residents). By the composition of the U.S. portfolio I mean the share of the net foreign asset position in it.(2) According to the portfolio view, it is useful to separate changes in the current account into two components: changes in the size of the country portfolio, which I call portfolio growth effects, and changes in the composition of the country portfolio, or portfolio rebalancing effects. A simple application of this approach reveals a clear picture: the recent current account deficits are mostly the manifestation of the spectacular increase in U.S. wealth experienced in the 1990s. Contrary to a widely held belief, these deficits do not reflect a rebalancing of portfolios toward U.S. assets and away from foreign assets. A natural question follows: Why did U.S. wealth increase so much in the 1990s? I explore two alternative hypotheses. The first views the increase in wealth as reflecting a rapid accumulation of an intangible form of capital. The second is based on the notion that the 1990s were characterized by the appearance and growth of a bubble in the U.S. stock market. Although both explanations exhibit interesting elements, neither is fully satisfactory. Our inability to account for the growth in wealth makes the task of predicting the future direction of the U.S. current account quite difficult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, each of these stories has a different ending, and I discuss them below.(3) A Portfolio View of the Current Account The point of departure for a portfolio view of the current account is the celebrated mean-variance theory of Harry Markowitz and James Tobin.(4) According to this theory, investors choose their portfolios by optimally trading off risk and return. The optimal or mean-variance-efficient portfolio contains the risk-free asset and an optimal combination of risky assets (OCRA). A strong result of the theory is that the OCRA is the same for all investors with access to the same menu of assets, regardless of their attitudes toward risk and their level of wealth. That is, the share of each asset in the OCRA depends only on the distribution of asset returns. Another strong result of the theory is that the weights that mean-variance investors assign to the risk-free asset and the OCRA depend only on their risk aversion and the distribution of asset returns. They do not depend on the investors' wealth.(5) Moving from the optimal investor portfolio to the average or country portfolio requires an additional assumption, namely, that the average risk aversion and the distribution of asset returns are both independent of wealth. This is a strong assumption, and its validity is an empirical issue that is far from settled. …


The signal recognition particle (SRP) and its receptor are the main components of the co-translational protein targeting pathway by which membrane proteins are targeted to the membrane. The co-translational targeting pathway is conserved in all organisms. For targeting to the membrane, the membrane proteins contain short hydrophobic patches (about 20 amino acids) at the N-terminus, so called a signal-anchor sequence (SAS). In the bacterial SRP pathway, SRP recognizes a ribosome-nascent chain (RNC) complex by binding to an SAS and forms a targeting complex with its receptor, FtsY. FtsY interacts with SRP and associates with the translocon at the membrane. Thus, from the targeting complex, nascent membrane proteins are transferred to the translocon at the membrane. The targeting complex is formed with high affinity. However, mechanistic details of targeting complex formation and RNC transfer to the translocon are not understood. In this work, the dynamic interactions between SRP and FtsY were analyzed by equilibrium titrations and pre-steady-state kinetics, monitoring FRET between labels introduced in the components of the targeting complex.

We present a mechanism of how the formation of the targeting complex is regulated by the nature of the nascent chain presented on RNCs and how diassembly of the targeting complex and RNC transfer to the translocon is influenced by the nascent chain. The rapid kinetic analysis of targeting complex formation reveals that it takes place in two steps, a bimolecular binding step followed by a conformational change. The conformational change is accelerated on RNCs presenting SAS-containing nascent chains which are about to emerge from the ribosome or already exposed outside the ribosome. Equilibrium studies show that the interaction with the translocon influences binding of FtsY to SRP. In the absence of the RNC, the translocon stabilizes the SRP-FtsY complex. In the presence of ribosomes, the effect is not seen. Instead, the translocon interacts with the ribosome and destabilizes the targeting complex, when the SAS-containing nascent chain reaches a critical length. These observations indicate that the formation and the stability of the targeting complex is regulated by the length of the nascent chain and interaction of the nascent chain containing an SAS with the translocon.


A study has been undertaken into the mine ventilation systems currently in use within Australian modern longwall extraction mines. The paper reviews current systems and discusses evolving changes being adopted to address the more complex problems. To remain viable mines are constantly emphasising cost reduction resulting in longer panels, wider faces, greater extraction heights, increased production rates and decreased personnel. In addition mine workings are moving deeper. Exacting ventilation control issues such as increased total and respirable dust, greater seam gas content at lower insitu permeabilities, spontaneous combustion and heat management become critically important. This review forms the basis for understanding these current ventilation issues. It analyses a comprehensive database of Australian longwall ventilation practice. This understanding is important so existing knowledge can be built on to assist with future operations. The review was completed by visiting and surveying 16 large longwall mining operations in Australia. The selection of longwall mines was based on encompassing most pits with pronounced ventilation challenges while focusing on larger operations facing issues related to higher production. Details are given of ventilation techniques used including number of gateroads developed, longwall ventilation patterns, use of monitoring systems, methods for sealing goafs, seal and stopping practices, pressure balancing of goafs and ventilation structures.


E-governance is the public sector's use of information and communication technologies for communication. Thus the usability of public organizations websites' is a critical factor for this interaction. While the conceptual framework, technological innovation, services measurement, and management of e-governance have been studied extensively, its' driving factors have not been well understood. The aim of the article is to identify the external factors that influence development of Lithuanian municipal websites. There were investigated correlations between 25 external economic, social, geographic, cultural and political factors and development indexes of municipalities' websites in this study. Disparities of the external factors were analysed and compared in the groups of urban, rural and all municipalities. Results of the study showed that the wide-ranging complex of external economic, social and geographic factors had significant impact on the development level of websites in the groups of urban and all municipalities. One cultural factor – the number of colleges and universities – also had impact on the development of websites in these municipalities. The smaller complex of economic, social and geographic factors had significant but weak and negative impact on the development of rural municipal websites. Other cultural factors and voter turnout to local councils (political factor) did not significantly determine the development of municipal websites. The major challenge in Lithuanian municipalities remains not only to increase the overall level of e-service usage but go for e-communication. The internal factors analysis is required for comprehensive driving factors impact evaluation. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ppaa.12.1.3854


Abstract. A novel analysis technique is presented to estimate the current sheet thickness unambiguously and directly, without associating time series data with spatial structure. The technique is a combination of eigenvalue analysis and minimum variance estimator adapted to Harris current sheet geometry, and needs one-time, four-point magnetic field data as provided by the Cluster spacecraft. Two current sheet parameters, thickness and distance to the spacecraft, can be determined at each time step of the magnetic field measurements. An example is shown from a Cluster magnetotail crossing under quiet magnetospheric conditions, yielding the result that the current sheet thickness is on the scale of the proton gyroradius. The analysis technique can also be used to track the dynamical evolution of the current sheet structure in three dimensions.


Major pseudotachylyte zones constitute a spectacular component of the renowned c. 2.023 Ga Vredefort impact structure, South Africa, but it has always been difficult to explain how they were formed. In his original account, in 1916, Shand interpreted the pseudotachylyte as due to cataclasis and frictional heating but pointed out two enigmas that have remained since: there were no associated major faults, and the pseudotachylyte volumes he observed were far greater than in similar rocks located within faults elsewhere on Earth. New observations show that the Vredefort pseudotachylyte zones were indeed formed by cataclasis and frictional heating, not by faulting but owing to impact-induced seismic shaking initiated around temporarily loosened blocks in dendritic fracture systems. Progressive cataclasis of such loose blocks by intense, high-frequency oscillations of the country rock at the beginning of the cratering process led to size reduction, rounding and comminution, and frictional melting of feldspars and biotite in the comminuted parts. Most pseudotachylyte was thus not injected from anywhere but produced in situ. The process of seismic shaking is well known from impacts on the Moon and asteroids, terrestrial earthquakes and nuclear tests but has largely been overlooked in terrestrial cratering, except in the theoretical concept of acoustic fluidization.


This communication examines nutritional status and its impact on infant mortality rate (IMR) in Saiha district, Mizoram, India. We conducted a case study of 17 villages and 1650 mothers were surveyed, using random sampling method. The district has very high IMR (219.6), significantly higher than Mizoram (35). Meanwhile, per day per capita calorie intake is 1703, which is less than the recommended dietary intake (2400 kcal). All food items which people consume daily were collected and nutritional status was assessed. Our result shows that high IMR in the district is due to food insecurity and malnutrition.


Purpose: Substance use is linked with poor outcomes among people living with HIV (PLWH) and is associated with mental health disorders. This analysis examines the impact of decreasing substance use, even without abstinence, on depressive symptoms among PLWH. Methods: Data are from PLWH enrolled in the Centers for AIDS Research Network of Integrated Clinical Sites cohort. Participants completed longitudinal assessments of substance use (modified ASSIST) and depressive symptoms (PHQ-9). Changes in substance use frequency were categorized as abstinence, reduced use, and nondecreasing use. Adjusted linear mixed models with time-updated change in substance use frequency and depressive symptom scores were used to examine associations between changes in the use of individual substances and depressive symptoms. Analyses were repeated using joint longitudinal survival models to examine associations with a high (PHQ-9 ≥10) score. Results: Among 9905 PLWH, 728 used cocaine/crack, 1016 used amphetamine-type substances (ATS), 290 used illicit opiates, and 3277 used marijuana at baseline. Changes in ATS use were associated with the greatest improvements in depressive symptoms: stopping ATS led to a mean decrease of PHQ-9 by 2.2 points (95% CI: 1.8 to 2.7) and a 61% lower odds of PHQ-9 score ≥10 (95% CI: 0.30 to 0.52), and decreasing ATS use led to a mean decrease of 1.7 points (95% CI: 1.2 to 2.3) and a 62% lower odds of PHQ-9 score ≥10 (95% CI: 0.25 to 0.56). Stopping and reducing marijuana and stopping cocaine/crack use were also associated with improvement in depressive symptoms. Conclusions: We demonstrated that both substance use reduction and abstinence are associated with improvements in depressive symptoms over time.


Certain basic demands from visualization code are common to all atomistic or spin systems; some are also relevant to more general visualization needs. Many commercial and homegrown visualization codes could meet these demands, but obviously the specific code used is less important than the fact that a visualization is made. The author describes in detail one specific public-domain code that meets these basic demands: the AViz package developed at the Technion.


Background: The authors of recent studies have reported newly devised implant-specific blood metal ion thresholds to predict adverse reactions to metal debris (ARMD) in patients who have undergone unilateral or bilateral metal-on-metal (MoM) hip arthroplasty. These thresholds were most effective for identifying patients at low risk of ARMD. We investigated whether these newly devised blood metal ion thresholds could effectively identify patients at risk of ARMD after MoM hip arthroplasty in an external cohort of patients. Methods: We performed a validation study involving 803 MoM hip arthroplasties (323 unilateral Birmingham Hip Resurfacing [BHR], 93 bilateral BHR, and 294 unilateral Corail-Pinnacle implants) performed in 710 patients at 3 European centers. All patients underwent whole-blood metal ion sampling, and were divided into 2 groups: those with ARMD (leading to revision or identified on imaging; n = 75) and those without ARMD (n = 635). Previously devised implant-specific blood metal ion thresholds (2.15 &mgr;g/L of cobalt for unilateral BHR; 5.5 &mgr;g/L for the maximum of either cobalt or chromium for bilateral BHR; and 3.57 &mgr;g/L of cobalt for unilateral Corail-Pinnacle implants) were applied to the validation cohort, and receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was used to establish the discriminatory characteristics of each threshold. Results: The area under the curve, sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values for the ability of each implant-specific threshold to distinguish between patients with and without ARMD were, respectively, 89.4% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 82.8% to 96.0%), 78.9%, 86.7%, 44.1%, and 96.9% for unilateral BHR; 89.2% (CI = 81.3% to 97.1%), 70.6%, 86.8%, 54.5%, and 93.0% for bilateral BHR; and 76.9% (CI = 63.9% to 90.0%), 65.0%, 85.4%, 24.5%, and 97.1% for unilateral Corail-Pinnacle implants. Using the implant-specific thresholds, we missed 20 patients with ARMD (2.8% of the patients in this series). We missed more patients with ARMD when we used the fixed thresholds proposed by regulatory authorities: 35 (4.9%) when we used the U.K. threshold of 7 &mgr;g/L for both cobalt and chromium (p = 0.0003), 21 (3.0%) when we used the U.S. threshold of 3 &mgr;g/L for both cobalt and chromium (p = 1.0), and 46 (6.5%) when we used the U.S. threshold of 10 &mgr;g/L for both cobalt and chromium (p < 0.0001). Conclusions: This external multicenter validation study confirmed that patients with blood metal ion levels below new implant-specific thresholds have a low risk of ARMD after MoM hip arthroplasty. Using these implant-specific thresholds, we missed fewer patients with ARMD compared with when the thresholds currently proposed by regulatory authorities were used. We therefore recommend using implant-specific blood metal ion thresholds when managing patients who have undergone MoM hip arthroplasty. Level of Evidence: Diagnostic Level III. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.


: [ Objective ] This research aims to examine the information seeking behavior patterns and contextual factors of online shoppers' multi-sessional activities. [ Methods ] First, we analyzed 1,409,160 logs of an online shopping Web site (generated by 4,285 users) to discover their information seeking behaviors. Second, we used in-depth interviews to explore the users' motivations. [ Results ] We found that multi-session shoppers were more likely to check detailed introduction to the products than simply browsing. The average interval between each session was 3 to 4 days. Personal preferences, needs, financial ability and time might lead the users to restore their previous sessions. Searching, shopping carts, bookmarks, browsing and personalized recommendation services were the major channels for users to restore previous sessions. [ Limitations ] Because of the limited number of participants, results from the interviews might not be generalizable to the whole population. [ Conclusions ] This research helps us understand the complex online shopping behaviors as well as improve services and user experience of E-commence Web sites.


ABSTRACT Religiously inspired violence is a global phenomenon and connects to transnational narratives, necessitating comparative analysis of socio-historical context and patterns of ideological mobilization. Northeast Africa hosts several radical-extremist and terrorist groups, mostly of Muslim persuasion, tuned in to these global narratives while connecting to local interests. Christian radicalism and violence also occur but are less ideologically consistent and less widespread. I examine key aspects of the current role and ideological self-positioning of Islamist radicalism in state contexts, comparing Somalia, affected by Islamist violence since the late 1990s, and Ethiopia, where Islam's mobilization followed a different path and where the state so far contained politicization and open radicalism of Muslim groups. A brief contrastive case from Nigeria is also provided. It is observed that Islam, while of course not 'equaling' violence, easily provides a militant political theology, frequently instrumentalized in conflicts and situations of (perceived) grievance, and via mimetic rivalry then becomes radically ideological. Securitized response patterns of state authorities toward militancy play a role in furthering violent radicalization. I follow a sociological-anthropological approach but also refer to key aspects of national-legal frameworks regarding state and religion, next to societal and political bases of Muslim militant mobilization for collective aims and self-presentation.


PURPOSE
This study was conducted to evaluate the microtensile bond strength of composite resin to dentin with experimental rigid rod polymer (RRP) modified primers. RRP fillers are based on long stiff molecules specifically designed to create long polymers with restricted chain movement.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Experimental primers were fabricated by dissolving RRP into dichloromethane (DCM) and further mixing it with monomers: ethylene glycol methacrylate phosphate (EGMP), bis[2-(methacryloyloxy)-ethyl]phosphate (BMEP) and 3(methacryloyloxy)propyltrimethoxysilane (MPS). Eight experimental primers were prepared with different proportions for each dentin substrate. A commercial etch-and-rinse adhesive was used as a control. Surfaces of human molar teeth were wet ground occlusally. The experimental primers were applied onto dentin prior to light polymerization of the incremental composite resin build-up. After 48 hours of water storage, teeth were sectioned and tested with the microtensile tester. Fracture surface analysis and contact angle measurements of adhesive resin were performed. Scanning electron micrographs were taken.

RESULTS
3-way ANOVA revealed that all factors, monomer type, solvent-monomer ratio and RRP, had a significant effect (p < 0.05) on bond strength. Primer with a combination of MPS and dimethacrylate BMEP revealed higher bond values than a mixture of MPS and monomethacrylate EGMP. Increase of the solvent-monomer ratio and addition of RRP into primers increased the microTBS.

CONCLUSION
The contact angle measurements showed that RRP containing primers enhanced adhesive resin penetration into dentin similar to that of the control primer. Within the limitations of this study, it was concluded that an experimental type of modified RRP-silane-phosphate-acrylate primer was developed with comparable bonding properties to a commercial control.