Biomass can serve as a sustainable template for the synthesis of carbon materials but is limited by the intrinsic properties of the precursor organism. In this study we demonstrate that the properties of a fungal biotemplate can be tuned during cultivation, establishing a new electrode manufacturing process and ultimately improving the electrochemical performance of the biomass-derived electrode. More specifically, the carbon/nitrogen ratio of Neurospora crassa mycelia mats was shifted by 5-fold while generating cobalt nanoparticles into the hyphal structure originating from macroconidia spores. This shift was achieved through nitrate limitation and equal molar concentrations of Mg2+ and Co2+ in the growth media. The resulting mycelia mat was converted via a high-temperature pyrolysis process (800 °C) to produce a freestanding cobalt and nitrogen codoped electrode material with no postmodification. Ultimately, nitrogen doping resulted in one of the highest recorded specific reversible capacity for a freestanding biomass-derived lithium-ion anode (400 mAh g-1 at C/10). We observed an additional improvement in capacity to 425 mAh g-1 with the incorporation of 3 wt % Co. Our results show how shaping the chemical characteristics of an electrode during the growth of the biotemplate allows for sustainable carbon-based material manufacturing from a living (self-assembled) material.


Studies have shown that a dominant class of questions asked by visually impaired users on images of their surroundings involves reading text in the image. But today's VQA models can not read! Our paper takes a first step towards addressing this problem. First, we introduce a new "TextVQA" dataset to facilitate progress on this important problem. Existing datasets either have a small proportion of questions about text (e.g., the VQA dataset) or are too small (e.g., the VizWiz dataset). TextVQA contains 45,336 questions on 28,408 images that require reasoning about text to answer. Second, we introduce a novel model architecture that reads text in the image, reasons about it in the context of the image and the question, and predicts an answer which might be a deduction based on the text and the image or composed of the strings found in the image. Consequently, we call our approach Look, Read, Reason & Answer (LoRRA). We show that LoRRA outperforms existing state-of-the-art VQA models on our TextVQA dataset. We find that the gap between human performance and machine performance is significantly larger on TextVQA than on VQA 2.0, suggesting that TextVQA is well-suited to benchmark progress along directions complementary to VQA 2.0.


This text is designed as a resource for all practitioners, students, managers and trainers who work in the child protection field. It explores the detailed working arrangements of the child protection system and examines the roles and perspectives of the agencies and practitioners who make up that system. It suggests that multi-disciplinary child protection work is both complex and difficult, claiming that a series of structural blockages exist to effective joint working, in particular that we all harbour an ignorance of the perspective and reality of the other agencies and practitioners within the system. The work goes on to propose a number of measures to be taken by practitioner, agency and government departments that will promote multi-disciplinary working at all levels, suggesting that good multi-disciplinary communication, co-operation and action is synonymous with good child protection work. The child protection system in England and Wales is used as a case study, but comparisons are drawn with child protection systems in other parts of the world. It is argued that the key concepts and conventions of effective multi-disciplinary child protection work are constant and go beyond the boundaries of single systems.


Investment in start-up biotech. companies outside the USA has essentially disappeared. VC investment in biotechnology and healthcare as a whole has nearly returned to pre-2008 levels, but almost all is in later stage opportunities. But companies continue to be founded, and continue to flourish. We examine the VC investment patterns for the past 7 years, and show that a start-up today can expect little VC support. We show from companies' financial records that companies are adopting financial models based on angel investment, grants and revenue, and moving away from business models that need substantial investment. There is a time lag, but government and research council policy is beginning to recognize and align with the new investment realities. We believe this trend will accelerate as internet-mediated angel investing, such as crowd-funding schemes seen in other sectors, become a developing force in the next decade.


The pesticide policy arena is filled with discussion of probabilistic approaches to assess ecological risk, however, similar discussions about implementing formal probabilistic methods in pesticide risk decision making are less common. An influence diagram approach is proposed for ecological risk‐based decisions about pesticide usage. Aside from technical data, pesticide risk management relies on diverse sources, such as stakeholder opinions, to make decisions about what, how, where, and when to spray. Bayesian influence diagrams allow multiple lines of evidence, including process related information from existing data and expert judgment, in 1 inclusive decision model. In ecological risk assessments, data informally incorporated for pesticide usage decisions, such as field and laboratory effect studies along with chemical monitoring and modeling data, can be formally incorporated and expressed in linked causal diagrams. A case study is presented from the perspective of an environmental manager wishing to efficiently control pests while minimizing risk to local aquatic receptors. Exposure modeling results and toxicity studies were incorporated, and an ecological risk assessment was carried out but combined with hypothetical information on spraying efficacy and valuation of outcomes that would be necessary for making risk management decisions. The variables and their links in the influence diagram are ones that are important to a manager and can be manipulated to optimally control pests while protecting nontarget resources. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2012; 8: 339–350. © 2011 SETAC


For over a century, evidence has been gathered to indicate that the two cerebral hemispheres of the human brain each tend to have their own behavioral specializations. An issue that has long been of interest to parapsychologists is whether the ostensibly anomalous behavioral phenomenon of "extrasensory perception" (ESP), in which a person seems to obtain veridical information about other people, objects, places, or events beyond the range of the body's sensory-motor system, may be a specialized function of either of the brain hemispheres. To address this issue, a review of parapsychological experiments designed to explore the potential relevance of cerebral lateralization to ESP performance was initially conducted by Broughton in 1983. He generally concluded that, although there was some possible indication of a contribution to ESP by the right hemisphere, the results were mixed and possibly confounded by issues of interpretation. In a more concise review conducted in 2002, Alexander found that a limited number of experiments continued to indicate a right hemispheric tendency, although certain others separately indicated left hemispheric involvement. Thus, the issue is still clearly unresolved. This paper seeks to build upon these two previous reviews by providing an updated and broader review of the various findings obtained in the experiments that have been conducted up to the present time. Although several experiments continue to offer modest support for a right hemispheric contribution, general interpretation of the current database remains hindered by a wide degree of variability in experimental methods and outcomes, potentially confounding factors, and the scarcity of additional clarifying data. Thus, while the issue remains unresolved, there appear to be at least some potential avenues for progress in future experiments.

NeuroQuantology | September 2012 | Volume 10 | Issue 3 | Page 350-373


International Journal of Exercise Science 9(3): 368-375, 2016. The aim of this study was to evaluate the physiological characteristics of competitive, collegiate female cyclists (CFC) to data of elite female cyclists (EFC) obtained from a meta-analytic review. Eleven (n=11) CFC volunteered as subjects. Subjects signed a university approved informed consent. Means and standard deviation (+ SD) were obtained from the following measurements: age (y), 22.5± 5.1; height (cm) 167.22 ± 6.2; body mass (kg) 63.78 ± 9.71; body fat (%) 22.9 ± 3.6. Subjects performed a maximal cycling ergometer test to volitional fatigue. Maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max, mL*kg1*min.-1) was analyzed using a gas analyzer. VO2 max, maximal blood lactate (mM), maximal power (W), lactate threshold (mM), ventilatory threshold (VT, % of maximal) and heart rate threshold (HRT, % of maximal) were used to compare the performance of CFC to the data of EFC. An independent samples t-Test compared measures of the CFC vs. EFC. Alpha was set a priori at p ≤ 0.05. Results indicate comparisons between CFC vs. EFC, respectively: body fat %, 22.9 (3.6)* vs 15.2( 3.3); VO2 max (mL/kg/min), 58.07(6.94)* vs 52.5 ( 5.5); max power (W) 275.0( 42.5 ) vs 450.7( 256)* ;lactate threshold (mM) 3.74(0.79)* vs 2.8 ( 0.28); VT (%) 87.0( 4.1)* vs 73.2 ( 9.8) and HRT (% max) 93.1( 2.2)* vs 79.7. There were significant differences *(p < 0.05) in the aforementioned measures. Results indicate differences between CFC vs. EFC. These differences were favorable in relation to performance with both CFC and EFC.


Abstract. The first photographs of Co-seismic Luminescence, commonly known as Earthquake lights (EQLs), were reported in 1968 in Japan. However, there have been documented reports of luminescence associated with earthquakes since ancient times in different parts of the world. Besides this, there is modern scientific work dealing with evidence of and models for the production of such lights. During the Peru 15 August 2007 Mw=8.0 earthquake which occurred at 06:40 p.m. LT, hence dark in the southern wintertime, several EQLs were observed along the Peruvian coast and extensively reported in the capital city of Lima, about 150 km northwest of the epicenter. These lights were video-recorded by a security camera installed at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP) campus and time-correlated with seismic ground accelerations registered at the seismological station on campus, analyzed and related to highly qualified eyewitness observations of the phenomena from other parts of the city and to other video recordings. We believe the evidence presented here contributes significantly to sustain the hypothesis that electromagnetic phenomena related to seismic activity can occur, at least during an earthquake. It is highly probable that continued research in luminescence and the use of magnetometers in studying electromagnetic activity and radon gas emanation detectors will contribute even more towards determining their occurrence during and probably prior to seismic activity.


Background: Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a group of genetic blood disorders characterized by a single point mutation in the sixth codon of the β-globin gene. Under low oxygen tension, the resultant abnormal hemoglobin S polymerizes and causes rigid and sickle-shaped red blood cells. Objectives: This study aimed to assess the effect of omega-3 supplementation in patients with sickle cell anemia. Subjects and methods: Seventy-eight SCD patients, who were undergoing regular follow-up at the outpatients SCD clinic in Ibn-Aoaf Pediatrics and Khartoum hospitals, were the main study group and 35 individuals were selected as control group. Patients recruited randomly were assigned to receive omega-3 fatty acid supplementation for at least two years. 5 ml of venous blood was collected from every individual into EDTA test tubes and used to determine complete blood count (CBC), electrophoresis and reticulocyte count. Results: A significant difference in the Hb (g/dl) mean between the omega-3 group and the group free of omega-3 (P. value < 0.0001) was recorded. Also in total red blood cells count X 103C/M l, hematocrit and mean cell hemoglobin pg (P.value < 0.05) .No difference in levels between the study groups at mean cell volume / f l and mean cell hemoglobin concentration % (P. value < 0.05). Retics count and reticulocyte production index significant decrease in omega-3 group compared to control group (P.value < 0.0001). Conclusions: These findings suggest that omega-3 fatty acids can be an effective, safe, and affordable therapy for sickle cell anemia.


Rationale The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between metabolic syndrome and the extent of coronary artery disease (CAD) in young adults presenting with acute coronary syndrome. Background Metabolic syndrome is associated with subsequent development of type II diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease. Individuals with metabolic syndrome are at a higher risk of developing myocardial infarction and CAD. Patients and methods This study was carried out at Kasr Al Ainy Hospital at Cairo University and the Sohag Specialized Cardiac and Digestive System Center. One hundred and twenty-two patients presented with acute coronary syndrome during the period of the study from January 2011 to January 2012. Eighty-five were men (69.7%) and 37 were women (30.3%). Patients were classified into two groups according to the presence or absence of metabolic syndrome to determine the effect of metabolic syndrome on severity of coronary lesions in comparison with nonmetabolic patients. Correlation was assessed between the number of metabolic risk components and coronary lesion severity using the SYNTAX score. Results The metabolic risk score was determined; patients with a significant metabolic score of at least 3 risk score constituted 66.4% of the total cohort (n = 81 patients). Patients were subjected to coronary angiography. Totally occluded vessels were found in 33.3% of metabolic syndrome patients and in 26.8% of non metabolic syndrome patients (P < 0.05). The SYNTAX score was used to assess the severity of CAD; it was found to be statistically significantly higher in patients with metabolic syndrome than those without (P = 0.001). Conclusion Patients with metabolic syndrome have more severe CADs. Preventive measures against metabolic syndrome and its components are very important and could help avoid the large economic burden of secondary prevention.


We presents an interactive design interface for three-dimensional free-form musical wind instruments [1]. The sound of a wind instrument is governed by the acoustic resonance as a result of complicated interactions of sound waves and internal geometries of the instrument. Thus, creating an original free-form wind instrument by manual methods is a challenging problem. Our interface provides interactive sound simulation feedback as the user edits, allowing exploration of original wind instrument designs. Sound simulation of a three dimensional wind musical instrument is known to be computationally expensive. To overcome this problem, we present a novel fast resonance frequency prediction method based on the boundary element method. Specifically, we formulate the resonance problem as an minimum eigenvalue problem of a nonlinear matrix. Furthermore, we can efficiently compute an approximate resonance frequency using a new technique based on a generalized eigenvalue problem. The designs can be fabricated using a 3D printer, thus we call the results "print-wind instruments" in association with woodwind instruments. We demonstrate our approach with examples of unconventional shapes performing familiar songs.


We study the process of dispersion of low-regularity solutions to the Schr\"odinger equation using fractional weights (observables). We give another proof of the uncertainty principle for fractional weights and use it to get a lower bound for the concentration of mass. We consider also the evolution when the initial datum is the Dirac comb in $\mathbb{R}$. In this case we find fluctuations that concentrate at rational times and that resemble a realization of a L\'evy process. Furthermore, the evolution exhibits multifractality.


The safe and economic operation of nuclear power plants (NPPs) requires that the behaviour and performance of the fuel can be calculated reliably over its expected lifetime. This requires highly developed codes that treat the nuclear fuel in a general manner and which take into account the large number of influences on fuel behaviour, e.g. thermal, mechanical, chemical, etc. Although many mature fuel performance codes are in active use, there are still significant incentives to improve their predictive capability. One particular aspect is related to the strong trend of NPP operators to try and extend discharge burnups beyond current licensing limits. With increasing burnup, more and more fission events impact the material characteristics of the fuel, as well as the cladding, and significant restructuring can be observed in the fuel. At local burnups in excess of 60-75MWd/kgU, the microstructure of nuclear fuel pellets differs markedly from the as fabricated structure. This "high burnup structure" (HBS) is characterised by three principal features: (1) low matrix xenon concentration, (2) sub-micron grains and (3) a high volume fraction of micrometer sized pores. The peculiar features of the HBS have resulted in a significant effort to understand the consequences for fuel performance and safety. In particular there is the concern that the large retention of fission gas within the HBS could lead to significant gas release at high burnups, either through the degradation of thermal conductivity or through direct release. While for the normal fuel microstructure numerous models, investigations and codes exist, only a few models for simulating ssion gas behaviour in the HBS have been developed. Consequently, in this context, it is fair to say that reliable mechanistic models are largely missing today. In line with this situation the present doctoral work has focussed on the development and evaluation of HBS fission gas transport models, with a view to improve upon the current gap in fuel performance modelling. In particular two features of the HBS have been focussed on, viz. the equilibrium xenon concentration in the matrix of the HBS in UO2 fuel pellets, and the growth of the HBS porosity and its effect on fission gas release. In a first step a steady state fission gas model has been developed to examine the importance of grain boundary diffusion for the gas dynamics in the HBS. With this model it was possible to simulate the ≈0.2 wt% experimentally observed xenon concentration under certain conditions, viz. fast grain boundary di usion and a reduced grain di usion coeficient. A sensitivity study has been conducted for the principal parameters of the model and it has been shown that the value of the grain boundary diffusion coeficient is not important for diffusion coeficient ratios in excess of  104. Within this grain boundary diffusion saturation regime the model exhibits a high sensitivity to principally three other parameters: the grain diffusion coeficient, the bubble number density and the re-solution rate coeficient. In spite of such sensitivity it has been shown that the model can reproduce the observed HBS xenon depletion with the assumption that grain boundary diffusion of fission gas is significantly faster than lattice diffusion. In particular the results from this study have demonstrated that the release of produced gas from the grains to the HBS porosity corresponds to a dynamic equilibrium, providing a justification for the typical modelling approach used in HBS modelling, viz. fast transport to the porosity, which from a fuel performance modelling point of view largely simplifies the calculations. In a second step, a model describing the evolution of the HBS porosity under annealing conditions has been developed. The model was applied to a high burnup fuel annealing experiment to assess its predictions against measurements. Reasonable agreement was found with respect to the experimental release in the temperature range where the release mechanism was originally interpreted to be due to volume diffusion of the gaseous fission products. In contrast to the original analysis, the developed model interprets the release mechanism as being due to pore growth, coalescence and, ultimately, venting. The model results for annealing conditions have been compared with available PIE data and this comparison has indicated that, for burnups examined to date, most of the fission gas is expected to be retained within the HBS porosity. The model of porosity growth and venting developed for annealing conditions has then been extended to take into account the effect of irradiation on the defect population and accumulation of fission gas in the HBS porosity. The power history of a high burnup fuel rod from a Swiss NPP was used to model the local behaviour of the HBS and good agreement was found between the calculation of porosity growth and results from open literature. A comparison between the calculated local gas release was found to be consistent with both the observations from the annealing calculations and measurements performed on the same fuel rod using Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). To provide a more comprehensive analysis of the model predictions, a gas release correlation for calculating the release due to pore venting has been developed from the stand-alone in-pile modelling of porosity growth and this was implemented into the fuel performance code TRANSURANUS. The examined high burnup rod was modelled using the thus extended TRANSURANUS code so that the integral behaviour (rather than just the local HBS behaviour) could be calculated. The subsequent fuel performance analysis has revealed that venting from the HBS has a small effect on the integral fission gas release with the release increasing towards the pellet periphery. The principal effect of the HBS for the considered high-burnup irradiation is the presence of the high porosity, which increases the fuel centre temperatures and therefore the fission gas release from the centre of the rod. For the base case analysis 22% of the integral fission gas was found to be released. However, this is less than the quantity measured by rod puncturing. To address this discrepancy several sensitivity studies have been performed to investigate as to where the additional fission gas release originates, specifically the fuel centre and/or the HBS zones in the pellet periphery. It has been shown from this sensitivity analysis that extra release from just one of these regions is unlikely to account for the discrepancy between measured and calculated fission gas release. It is more likely that the uncertainties for each of the individual regions, when considered together, could account for the observed integral release. In particular the presence of an athermal gas release from within the HBS has been explored in detail and it has been shown that, while significant release could occur, there is still significant retention. Previous examinations of fuel behaviour have assumed little to no release in the HBS; however it is clear from this work that at burnups as high as considered currently, the gas release does have a signi cant component coming from the pellet periphery.


After the Second World War, both Greece and Italy experienced a Left-Right political polarization and a reproduction of earlier patterns of political patronage. Both Italy and Greece received international aid, including emergency relief, interim loans, and Marshall Plan funds. By the beginning of the 1950s, the Italian economy had recovered better from war destruction and had achieved industrial growth faster than Greece. Italy progressed quite rapidly from stabilization to reconstruction, and then on to development, while Greece progressed with reconstruction, but did not achieve stabilization until after the end of the Marshall Plan.


Abstract The goal of this paper is to identify and compare the most important changes in the structure of the Czech economy, as a small open economy with independent monetary policy, the Slovak economy, as a small open economy that entered monetary union, and the economy of the euro area, which has a common monetary policy, during the turbulent period of the Great Recession, the subsequent anaemic recovery and recent disinflationary period. Structural changes are identified with the help of nonlinear dynamic stochastic models of general equilibrium with time-varying parameters. The model parameters are estimated using Bayesian methods and a nonlinear particle filter. The results confirm the similarity of the Czech and Slovak economies and show that in certain respects the structure of the Czech economy might be closer to that of the euro area than that of Slovakia. The time-varying estimates reveal many similarities between the parameter changes in the Czech economy and those in the euro area. In Slovakia, the situation during the Great Recession was dominated by the country's adoption of the euro, which caused large deviations in its Calvo parameters.


Effective management of fisheries depends on the selectivity of different fishing methods, control of fishing effort and the life history and mating system of the target species. For sex-changing species, it is unclear how the truncation of age-structure or selection of specific size or age classes (by fishing for specific markets) affects population dynamics. We specifically address the consequences of plate-sized selectivity, whereby submature, "plate-sized" fish are preferred in the live reef food fish trade. We use an age-structured model to investigate the decline and recovery of populations fished with three different selectivity scenarios (asymptotic, dome-shaped and plate-sized) applied to two sexual systems (female-first hermaphroditism and gonochorism). We parameterized our model with life-history data from Brown-marbled grouper (Epinephelus fuscoguttatus) and Napoleon fish (Cheilinus undulatus). "Plate-sized" selectivity had the greatest negative effect on population trajectories, assuming accumulated fishing effort across ages was equal, while the relative effect of fishing on biomass was greatest with low natural mortality. Fishing such sex-changing species before maturation decreased egg production (and the spawning potential ratio) in two ways: average individual size decreased and, assuming plasticity, females became males at a smaller size. Somatic growth rate affected biomass if selectivity was based on size at age because in slow growers, a smaller proportion of total biomass was vulnerable to fishing. We recommend fisheries avoid taking individuals near their maturation age, regardless of mating system, unless catch is tightly controlled. We also discuss the implications of fishing post-settlement individuals on population dynamics and offer practical management recommendations.


As political attitudes have diverged ideologically in the United States, political speech has diverged lingusitically. The ever-widening polarization between the US political parties is accelerated by an erosion of mutual understanding between them. We aim to make these communities more comprehensible to each other with a framework that probes community-specific responses to the same survey questions using community language models CommunityLM. In our framework we identify committed partisan members for each community on Twitter and fine-tune LMs on the tweets authored by them. We then assess the worldviews of the two groups using prompt-based probing of their corresponding LMs, with prompts that elicit opinions about public figures and groups surveyed by the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2020 Exploratory Testing Survey. We compare the responses generated by the LMs to the ANES survey results, and find a level of alignment that greatly exceeds several baseline methods. Our work aims to show that we can use community LMs to query the worldview of any group of people given a sufficiently large sample of their social media discussions or media diet.


It is a common wisdom that servers should better store the one-way hash of their clients' passwords, rather than storing the password in the clear. This paper introduces Catena, a new one-way function for that purpose. Catena is memory-hard, which can hinder massively parallel attacks on cheap memory-constrained hardware, such as recent "graphical processing units", GPUs. Furthermore, Catena has been designed to resist cache-timing attacks. This distinguishes Catena from scrypt, which may be sequentially memory-hard, but which we show to be vulnerable to cachetiming attacks. Additionally, Catena supports (1) client-independent updates (the server can increase the security parameters and update the password hash without user interaction or knowing the password), (2) a server relief protocol (saving the server's resources at the cost of the client), and (3) a variant Catena-KG for secure key derivation (to securely generate many cryptographic keys of arbitrary lengths such that compromising some keys does not help to break others).


At the recent AAAI conference at Stanford, it became apparent that many new AI research centers are being established around the country in industrial and governmental settings and in universities that have not paid much attention to AI in the past. At the same time, many of the established AI centers are in the process of converting from older facilities, primarily based on Decsystem-10 and Decsystem-20 machines, to a variety of newer options. At present, unfortunately, there is no simple answer to the question of what machines, operating systems, and languages a new or upgrading AI facility should use, and this situation has led to a great deal of confusion and anxiety on the part of those researchers and administrators who are faced with making this choice. In this article I will survey the major alternatives available at present and those that are clearly visible on the horizon, and I will try to indicate the advantages and disadvantages of each for AI work. This is mostly information that we have gathered at CMU in the course of planning for our own future computing needs, but the opinions expressed are my own.


In light of recent observational results indicating an apparent lack of correlation between the anomalous microwave emission (AME) and mid-infrared emission from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, we assess whether rotational emission from spinning silicate and/or iron nanoparticles could account for the observed AME without violating observational constraints on interstellar abundances, ultraviolet extinction, and infrared emission. By modifying the SpDust code to compute the rotational emission from these grains, we find that nanosilicate grains could account for the entirety of the observed AME, whereas iron grains could be responsible for only a fraction, even for extreme assumptions on the amount of interstellar iron concentrated in ultrasmall iron nanoparticles. Given the added complexity of contributions from multiple grain populations to the total spinning dust emission, as well as existing uncertainties due to the poorly constrained grain size, charge, and dipole moment distributions, we discuss generic, carrier-independent predictions of spinning dust theory and observational tests that could help identify the AME carrier(s).


Background Monitoring of patients may decrease treatment costs and improve quality of care. Pain is the most common health problem that people seek help for in hospitals. Therefore, monitoring patients with pain may have significant impact in improving treatment. Several studies have studied factors affecting pain; however, no previous study has reviewed the contextual information that a monitoring system may capture to characterize a patient's situation. Objective The objective of this study was to conduct a systematic review to (1) determine what types of technologies have been used to monitor adults with pain, and (2) construct a model of the context information that may be used to implement apps and devices aimed at monitoring adults with pain. Methods A literature search (2005-2015) was conducted in electronic databases pertaining to medical and computer science literature (PubMed, Science Direct, ACM Digital Library, and IEEE Xplore) using a defined search string. Article selection was done through a process of removing duplicates, analyzing title and abstract, and then reviewing the full text of the article. Results In the final analysis, 87 articles were included and 53 of them (61%) used technologies to collect contextual information. A total of 49 types of context information were found and a five-dimension (activity, identity, wellness, environment, physiological) model of context information to monitor adults with pain was proposed, expanding on a previous model. Most technological interfaces for pain monitoring were wearable, possibly because they can be used in more realistic contexts. Few studies focused on older adults, creating a relevant avenue of research on how to create devices for users that may have impaired cognitive skills or low digital literacy. Conclusions The design of monitoring devices and interfaces for adults with pain must deal with the challenge of selecting relevant contextual information to understand the user's situation, and not overburdening or inconveniencing users with information requests. A model of contextual information may be used by researchers to choose possible contextual information that may be monitored during studies on adults with pain.


Two years of CALIPSO level 2 version 2 data were analyzed to obtain regional distributions of vertical profiles of the aerosol extinction coefficient (AEC) across China. 10 typical geographical regions were selected for comparison, which cover various aerosol pollution levels, climate zones, and underlying surfaces. The whole troposphere was split into two-layers: the Lower- and the Upper-layer—separated by the maximum boundary layer height—which represent the boundary layer and the upper tropospheric layer, respectively. The annual average of the column-average AEC in the 10 regions ranged from 0.066 to 0.243 km–1 in the Lower-layer and from 0.022 to 0.059 km–1 in the Upper-layer. The regional AEC in the Lower-layer was the highest in central and eastern China, followed by that in the Sichuan Basin, the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, the capital economic circle, the Pearl River Delta, the desert region, the Tibetan Plateau, northeast China, the northwest semi-arid plateau, and, finally, the East China Sea. The seasonal AEC in the Lower-layer was the highest during spring in the desert and marine regions, during the summer on the Tibetan Plateau, and during autumn or winter in the other regions. The regional and seasonal patterns of AEC in the Lower-layer agreed to a large extent with known regional distributions of surface-layer PM2.5 distributions and dominant seasonal emission sources in their respective regions. Regional and seasonal patterns in the Upper-layer were slightly different from those in the Lower-layer due to different transport pathways of aerosol pollution in different regions. The proportion of occurrence under different pollution conditions and the number of polluted days were also estimated separately for the Lower- and the Upper-layer, based on AEC vertical profiles for each region.


For some time it has been argued that cities all over the world have become more entrepreneurial and increasingly competitive. Most research has focused on spectacular events in well-known metropolises, but far less is known about how smaller cities engage in competitive activities. This paper focuses on how, why and what Swedish cities hope to achieve by engaging themselves in hosting the tryouts to the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), which provides an opportunity for a critical case study of place marketing and city competition in Sweden. The empirical material is based on interviews with stakeholders in the tryouts. Our findings show that the local authorities do not compete in the same way as suggested by the literature, but instead collaborate to a great deal. While there are various motives behind arranging a tryouts tryout, it is noted that whereas the ESC presents an opportunity for a host city to 'place itself on the map', hosting a tryout is often mainly seen as an opportunity to show the organisers of the event the city's potential for hosting other events in the future. Our findings suggest that the main outcome of hosting a tryout, an outcome that the local authorities seem content with, is having arranged a glamorous party for the local inhabitants. The paper concludes by discussing why competition was found to be less outspoken than the literature suggests. Copyright (c) 2009 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.


Background: Childhood obesity is one of the most serious health challenges of the 21st century. The problem is global and the prevalence is increasing at an alarming rate. Objectives: To determine the prevalence and risk factors of overweight and obesity among Saudi primary school students in AlAbnaa primary schools in Tabuk. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among primary schools students in AlAbnaa Schools in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Sampling frame included all genders. In the first stage, a sample of four primary schools had been selected using simple random technique-two primary school for boys and two for girls. In the second stage, stratified sampling technique had been used. The data was collected through a self-administered validated questionnaire. Height and weight of the subjects were measured and body mass index (BMI) was calculated. Recently published 2007 World Health Organization (WHO) growth charts which depended on data from widely different ethnic backgrounds and cultural settings were used for defining overweight and obesity among students. Results: A total of 331 out of the target study subjects of 350 responded to the survey giving a response rate of 94.6%. Age of the respondents ranged from 6-13 years old and the mean age was 9.7 ± 2.1 years. The prevalence of overweight and obesity among male primary school students were 7.3% and 17.4%, respectively while the prevalence among female students were 12.4% and 20.9%, respectively. Overweight and obesity were more prevalent among student living with both parents (P = 0.031), with highly educated parents (P = 0.008), with history of maternal obesity (P = 0.001), with working mothers (P = 0.024), and with smaller family size (P = 0.004). Conclusion: The results of the current study provide alarming evidence-based data on the considerable prevalence of childhood overweight and obesity among Saudi primary school children in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.


This paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method I k that extends traditional approaches, and a class of poverty measures Ma that satisfies several desirable properties including decomposability. Our identification step employs two forms of cutoff: one within each dimension and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by counting their deprivations. We aggregate using Foster-Greer-Thorbecke measures adjusted for multidimensionality. Our adjusted headcount ratio is well suited for use with ordinal data. Examples from Indonesia and the US illustrate our methodology.


BACKGROUND--Allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis is a serious complication of cystic fibrosis and may be difficult to diagnose. The aim of this study was to define the usefulness of measuring total IgE compared with other major criteria in the diagnosis of allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis in children with cystic fibrosis. METHODS--A retrospective analysis was carried out of the case records of 160 children attending a tertiary referral paediatric cystic fibrosis clinic. RESULTS--Sixteen children had a total IgE level above 500 IU/ml. Eleven children had six or more other major criteria and were considered to have allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis. These 11 children had a fourfold rise in IgE in association with clinical deterioration. A further child had a fourfold rise in IgE to 341 IU/l, and was also thought to have allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis. Eleven had a fall in IgE with successful treatment; one patient died with uncontrolled disease. Only one of these 12 children had negative precipitins to Aspergillus fumigatus. The five children with a raised IgE not thought to have bronchopulmonary aspergillosis had four or fewer major criteria and were not treated; none had positive precipitins. CONCLUSIONS--A fourfold rise in total IgE, particularly to above 500 IU/ml, is strongly suggestive of the diagnosis of allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis in children with cystic fibrosis. The measurement of total IgE has the merit of being simple to perform and objective. Positive aspergillus precipitins provide useful confirmatory evidence. These two criteria, taken in conjunction with clinical deterioration and new radiological shadowing, allow simplification of the diagnosis of allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis in cystic fibrosis.


Abstract It is widely assumed that there is a natural, prelinguistic conceptual domain of time whose linguistic organization is universally structured via metaphoric mapping from the lexicon and grammar of space and motion. We challenge this assumption on the basis of our research on the Amondawa (Tupi Kawahib) language and culture of Amazonia. Using both observational data and structured field linguistic tasks, we show that linguistic space-time mapping at the constructional level is not a feature of the Amondawa language, and is not employed by Amondawa speakers (when speaking Amondawa). Amondawa does not recruit its extensive inventory of terms and constructions for spatial motion and location to express temporal relations. Amondawa also lacks a numerically based calendric system. To account for these data, and in opposition to a Universal Space-Time Mapping Hypothesis, we propose a Mediated Mapping Hypothesis, which accords causal importance to the numerical and artefact-based construction of time-based (as opposed to event-based) time interval systems.


This article measures gender pay gaps in Ontario's public post-secondary education sector from 1996 to 2016 using the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Data. We find gaps widening among all faculty ranks. Men were paid on average 2.06%, 2.14%, and 5.26% more than their women colleagues for all employees, university teaching staff, and deans, respectively. We also conduct a Blinder- Oaxaca decomposition to measure the source of gendered salary differentials. Pay gaps persist during this time period despite controlling for the literature's most common explanations, including the "pipeline effect." Our results additionally imply that women's years of experience in academia do not mitigate the observed pay gaps. Suggestions for future research include increasing the scope of our study to factor in finer details such as labour productivity.


Spatial computing aims at providing a scalable framework where computation is distributed on a uniform computing medium and communication happen locally between nearest neighbors. We study the particular framework of cellular automata, using a regular grid and synchronous update. We propose to develop primitives allowing to structure the medium around a set of particles. We consider three problems of geometrical nature: moving the particles on the grid in order to uniformize the density, constructing their convex hull, constructing a connected proximity graph establishing connection between nearest particles. The last two problems are considered for multidimensional grid while uniformization is solved specifically for the one dimensional grid. The work approach is to consider the metric space underlying the cellular automata topology and construct generic mathematical object based solely on this metric. As a result, the algorithms derived from the properties of those objects, generalize over arbitrary regular grid. We implemented the usual ones, including hexagonal, 4 neighbors, and 8 neighbors square grid. All the solutions are based on the same basic component: the distance field, which associates to each site of the space its distance to the nearest particle. While the distance values are not bounded, it is shown that the difference between the values of neighboring sites is bounded, enabling encoding of the gradient into a finite state field. Our algorithms are expressed in terms of movements according to such gradient, and also detecting patterns in the gradient, and can thus be encoded in finite state of automata, using only a dozen of state.


This study addresses the question: How do the structural conditions of university organisation modulate subject position, social relations and discourse and therefore shape individual consciousness and activity? The response is informed by an empirical pedagogical problem located at the tertiary level in Japan: What makes acquirers attain higher levels of language mastery in foreign language (Spanish) settings informed by communicative language teaching? The attempted answer is framed within cultural-historical activity theory, the cultural theory of Holland et al. (2001), and Basil Bernstein's code theory. These theories have been combined using Marxian-Hegelian notions of culture and subject, which allow language development and mastery to be treated as the acquisition by an individual of a cultural tool (semiotic mediation) subject to both individual agency and historical forces. The organisational and pedagogical contexts of three institutions engaged in Spanish language education have been analysed using motive-action/educational task as the unit of analysis that situates the observation in between micro and macro levels of analysis, in combination with the methodologies for ascertaining subject position provided by Bernstein's code theory and the cultural theory of Holland et al. This procedure made it possible to determine acquirers' coding orientations (orientations to meaning) and to establish comparisons between organisation and learning settings. The findings indicate that acquirers who have a formal trajectory of language learning and who are able to recognise grammar instructional discourse – i.e., who possess a representational gaze – attain better levels of language mastery (active realisation) than those with informal trajectories (e.g. learning languages overseas in a conversational fashion without following a formal programme) and who do not recognise grammar instructional discourse. Evidence is provided to indicate that there is no way to avoid representational-function programmes. The bottom-up move within Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is suggested as a feasible intervention without a drastic reshaping of the programmes.


No other instrument can lay claim to quite such a large and diverse family as the clarinet (Fig. 3.1), and even the player's basic equipment of a pair of instruments serves to distinguish him from other instrumentalists. The B♭ clarinet has reigned supreme for some 200 years, even though Mozart, Brahms and a host of other writers of orchestral and chamber music have ensured that the A clarinet also remains absolutely indispensable. Almost as familiar within the orchestra are the E♭ and bass, whilst the basset horn has a further specialist role, notably in the works of Mozart and Richard Strauss. The scope of even this select group of closely related instruments is unmatched by any other woodwind category, though in fact the clarinet family extends a great deal further – to as many as twenty-five different instruments. The tiniest is the scarcely known clarinet in high C, more than an octave higher than the normal clarinet; in increasing order of size there are then piccolo, sopranino, soprano, alto and bass clarinets ranging down to the B♭ contrabass. Least familiar are perhaps those clarinets smaller in size than the E♭, though there are also some shadowy larger representatives, such as the clarinettes d'amour in A♭ and G (pitched just below the normal A clarinet) from the latter half of the eighteenth century. An especially significant member of the family is the soprano C clarinet, the only one sounding at written pitch, whose prominent role within the repertoire positively demands its widespread revival.


Instability of a current sheet in the Earth's magnetotail has been investigated by two-dimensional fully kinetic simulations. Two types of magnetic configuration have been studied; those with uniform normal magnetic field along the current sheet and those in which the normal magnetic field has a spatial hump. The latter configuration has been proposed by Sitnov and Schindler [Geophys. Res. Lett. 37, L08102 (2010)] as one in which ion tearing modes might grow. The first type of configuration exhibits electron tearing modes when the normal magnetic field is small. The second type of configuration exhibits an instability which does not tear or change the topology of magnetic field lines. The hump in the initial configuration can propagate Earthward in the nonlinear regime, leading to the formation of a dipolarization front. Secondary magnetic islands can form in regions where the normal magnetic field is very weak. Under no conditions do we find the ion tearing instability.


Background: To analyze the diagnosis and the surgical treatment of intrabiliary ruptured hydatid disease of the liver. Methods: Between 1990 and 1995, 263 patients with hydatid cysts of the liver underwent surgery in a university hospital. Twenty-five (9.43%) patients with intrabiliary rupture of hepatic hydatid cyst were retrospectively reviewed. Results: Diagnosis was principally made using ultrasonography and computed tomography scanning and was confirmed by the findings of other tests. In 12 patients (48%) partial cystectomy with primary closure; 5 patients (20%) partial cystectomy with drainage; 5 patients (20%) cystotomy with drainage; 3 patients (12%) left hepatic resection (atypic, segmentary or lobar) was performed. Omentoplasty was performed in 6 patients. The common bile duct was explored in all patients and it was drained by a T-tube in 22 patients, and by a choledochoduodenostomy in 3 others. The average postoperative hospitalization time was 8.3 and 22.5 days in patients treated with choledochoduodenostomy and T-tube drainage respectively. Cholecystectomy was performed in 18 patients. Complications were seen in 4 patients (16%) with 1 pleural effusion and 3 wound infections. There was only 1 death (4%) due to duodenal peptic ulcus perforation with intrabiliary ruptured hydatid cyst. Conclusion: This study indicates that T-tube drainage and choledochoduodenostomy in intrabiliary ruptured hydatid cysts are effective procedures with low morbidity and mortality rates.


Independent national fiscal institutions can play a major role in fiscal policy and in maintaining and restoring sustainability of a country's public finance. This paper describes the role of CPB in Dutch fiscal policy and discusses its merits and risks. And to what extent can it provide lessons for improving decision-making on fiscal policy in other countries? In the second part, the Dutch fiscal targets and rules are discussed in view of the rising costs of ageing, the depletion of natural gas resources and the financial crisis. In the Netherlands, for already 65 years, CPB serves as the official expert institute for fiscal and economic policy. It does not only serve the government, but meets also requests from opposition parties, trade unions and employers' organizations. The reputation of quality and independence had to be earned and defended again and again. Its eminent founder and first director, Jan Tinbergen, was responsible for a very good start. CPB has a more comprehensive role than comparable institutions in other countries. This includes e.g. providing the official estimates on economic growth and purchasing power, analysis of the sustainability of Dutch public finance, costs-benefit analysis of major infrastructure projects, analysis of the economic effects of the election plans of Dutch political parties and all kinds of analyses on the Dutch economy and the role of the government.


Car use is engrained in our culture. Changing behaviour towards using more sustainable travel modes such as public transport is notoriously difficult, despite the increasing awareness of environmental problems caused by car use. Integrated ticketing is a policy measure more recently used in strategies towards achieving integrated and sustainable transport systems. It allows a passenger to travel with one public transport ticket throughout a region. This research uses a mixed method approach to assess how integrated ticketing may affect public transport use in Greater Wellington. The psychological constructs determining decisions to use public transport are tested using an integrated environmental behaviour model proposed by Bamberg and Möser (2007). The results support the integrated modelling approach. Intentions to use public transport are indirectly affected by awareness of environmental problems caused by car use mediated through social norms, guilt, perceived behavioural control and attitude. The intention to use public transport explains 56% of the variance in public transport behaviour. Integrated ticketing presents an opportunity to increase the ease and convenience of travel, shown to be important in the model. The majority of survey respondents perceived that they would use integrated ticketing in Greater Wellington and that it was important both on a regional and national scale. Achieving an effective integrated ticketing system in Greater Wellington will be conditional on firstly improving public transport service reliability and stakeholder communication. Integrating fares across the region and across modes will also be crucial to the success of the system.


Objective To estimate the effect of the 2005 Victorian mandatory personal flotation device (PFD) wearing regulations on PFD use by occupants of small (hull length ≤4.8 m) power recreational vessels. Design Before-after observational study investigating the probability of PFD use among occupants of small vessels before and after the regulations were introduced compared with the probability of use by their counterparts on large power vessels (hull length >4.8–12 m) who were not required to wear PFDs before or after the regulations were introduced in the low-risk conditions in which observations occurred. Methods Statewide observation surveys of boaters were conducted in peak boating periods between January and March 2005 (prelegislation) and 2007 (postlegislation). Data collection included size of vessel, age and sex of boaters, life jacket use, boat type, activity of boaters, type of waterway and weather and water conditions. Logistic regression modelling tested whether there were statistically significant differences in the change in the relative odds of occupants wearing PFDs from the preintervention to the postintervention period in small compared with large power recreational vessels. Results The probability of PFD use increased from 22% to 63% on small power vessels compared with 12% to 13% on large vessels. Regression analysis showed a high statistically significant increase in the odds of PFD use on small vessels relative to large vessels (OR 6.2, 95% CI 4.2 to 9.3, p<0.001). No statistically significant effect on use on large vessels was associated with the regulation (OR 1.27, 95% CI 0.94 to 1.70, p=0.15). Relative to large vessels, on small vessels the odds of PFD use increased significantly in both sexes, all age groups, all vessel types and activity groupings except for towed water sports where the increase was only marginally statistically significant. Conclusions The legislative intervention was successful in increasing PFD wearing in small vessels. However, visible enforcement and tougher penalties are needed to optimise compliance.


The rising threat of antibiotic resistance in Europe and beyond is of increasing concern and is prompting renewed effort to better understand and mitigate their impact. Escherichia Coli blood stream infections are a more major concern in Europe given their incidence and severe associated outcomes. Additionally the level of 3rd generation cephalosporins and carbapenems resistance among those bacteraemia has significantly increased, limiting available treatment options. We estimated the current burden associated with E. coli blood stream infections in Europe at 17,000 (95%CI [8,000; 30,000]) excess deaths and 960,000 (95%CI [600,000; 1,450,000]) extra hospital bed days. From those, the contribution due to 3rd generation cephalosporins and carbapenems resistant strains reached 6,000 (95%CI [2,000; 12,000]) excess deaths, and 200,000 (95%CI [76,000; 420,000]) extra hospital bed stay. In the worst case scenario, we estimated the burden of E. coli blood stream infection in 2026 could increase over 4-fold, mostly resulting from an increase in the level of resistance rather than an increase in the incidence of blood stream infections. Finally, we estimated that the impact of combined novel diagnostics and treatments could substantially reduce the excess mortality by 18.5% to 55.5%, and length of stay by 13.2% to 75.6%.


Deposition of the vanadium pentoxide on a KRS-5 ATR crystal by dip-coating has led to the formation of a thallium bronze. ATR spectroscopy is used to study the changes in the spectral pattern induced by the heat treatment of the films. The results show that both the spectrum of the xerogel and its evolution depend on the precursors and the method of preparation. The spectra of the heated thin films suggest an irreversible structural change taking place at a temperature around 220°C.


PAGE Malicious software (i.e., malware) has become a severe threat to interconnected computer systems for decades and has caused billions of dollars damages each year. A large volume of new malware samples are discovered daily. Even worse, malware is rapidly evolving to be more sophisticated and evasive to strike against current malware analysis and defense systems. This dissertation takes a root-cause oriented approach to the problem of automatic malware detection and analysis. In this approach, we aim to capture the intrinsic natures of malicious behaviors, rather than the external symptoms of existing attacks. We propose a new architecture for binary code analysis, which is called whole-system out-of-the-box fine-grained dynamic binary analysis, to address the common challenges in malware detection and analysis. To realize this architecture, we build a unified and extensible analysis platform, codenamed TEMU. We propose a core technique for finegrained dynamic binary analysis, called layered annotative execution, and implement this technique in TEMU. Then on the basis of TEMU, we have proposed and built a series of novel techniques for automatic malware detection and analysis. For postmortem malware analysis, we have developed Renovo, Panorama, HookFinder, and MineSweeper, for detecting and analyzing various aspects of malware. For proactive malware detection, we have built HookScout as a proactive hook detection system. These techniques capture intrinsic characteristics of malware and thus are well suited for dealing with new malware samples and attack mechanisms.


For almost 20 years, Open Educational Resources (OER) are an integral part of the debate about the digitisation of education. However, the empirical landscape of OER research is vivid and largely obscure. This article reviews the state of international empirical research on OER to reveal trends and gaps and, in this manner, identify possible desiderata for further research. We use a systematic mapping approach to examine the empirical English-speaking research landscape from 2015 to 2019. The results reveal that research primarily concentrates on the higher education sector while only a few studies are available for the school and other educational sectors. In terms of research methodologies, quantitative approaches are prevalent, with most of them being survey-based. The main research interests of the empirical studies lie in the perception of OER and the barriers to their use in educational practices. Open textbooks as a form of OER and their comparative cost advantages or qualitative comparability with traditional educational material constitute an emerging research field that is almost exclusively located in the U.S. Research gaps exist regarding the usability and user-friendliness of OER repositories. Addressing these gaps could support the numerous initiatives in different countries to establish and equip repositories. Additional gaps for empirical research were identified regarding the effects of the use of OER on pedagogical approaches and established educational practices.


In this paper, we study the application of Test-time domain adaptation in semantic segmentation (TTDA-Seg) where both efficiency and effectiveness are crucial. Existing methods either have low efficiency (e.g., backward optimization) or ignore semantic adaptation (e.g., distribution alignment). Besides, they would suffer from the accumulated errors caused by unstable optimization and abnormal distributions. To solve these problems, we propose a novel backward-free approach for TTDA-Seg, called Dynamically Instance-Guided Adaptation (DIGA). Our principle is utilizing each instance to dynamically guide its own adaptation in a non-parametric way, which avoids the error accumulation issue and expensive optimizing cost. Specifically, DIGA is composed of a distribution adaptation module (DAM) and a semantic adaptation module (SAM), enabling us to jointly adapt the model in two indispensable aspects. DAM mixes the instance and source BN statistics to encourage the model to capture robust representation. SAM combines the historical prototypes with instance-level prototypes to adjust semantic predictions, which can be associated with the parametric classifier to mutually benefit the final results. Extensive experiments evaluated on five target domains demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Our DIGA establishes new state-of-the-art performance in TTDA-Seg. Source code is available at: https://github.com/Waybaba/DIGA.


BACKGROUND
Atrial tachyarrhythmias are a complication of Fontan surgery. Conventional electrophysiological mapping and ablation techniques are limited by the complex anatomic and surgical substrate and a high arrhythmia recurrence rate. This study investigates the use of noncontact mapping to identify arrhythmia circuits and guide ablation in Fontan patients.

METHODS AND RESULTS
Eleven arrhythmias were recorded in 6 patients. Noncontact mapping improved recognition of the anatomic and surgical substrate and identified exit sites from zones of slow conduction in all clinical arrhythmias. Radiofrequency linear lesions were targeted across these critical zones in 5 patients. One patient underwent surgical cryotherapy. Although immediate success was achieved in 3 of 5 patients with radiofrequency ablation, 2 patients had a recurrence after a mean of 6.4 months of follow-up. The patient who underwent cryoablation remains free of arrhythmias.

CONCLUSIONS
Noncontact mapping can identify arrhythmia circuits in the Fontan atrium and guide placement of ablation lesions. Arrhythmia recurrence is high, possibly because of inadequate lesion creation rather than inaccurate mapping and lesion targeting.


With the transition from a one-party state to a multiparty democracy in the early 1990s, Zambia was initially considered a poster child for Africa's development. However, during the two legislative periods of Frederick Chilub's presidency, a culture of authoritarian rule and neopatrimonial governance was established. Since the constitution prohibited him to serve a third term in office, Chiluba handpicked a successor, Levy Mwanawasa, who went on to win the 2001 presidential elections. Shortly after Mwanawasa came to power, he turned against his mentor, for some time effectively dividing the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) into a Chiluba and a Mwanawasa faction.


This study investigated the challenges facing female learners at various levels of education, with a view to generating strategies and recommendations that would assist in promoting their full participation in the education sector in the country. In addition, the study investigated the challenges faced by female employees in the participating institutions. The participants were drawn from four institutions, purposively selected to represent middle level colleges, public as well as private universities. The study established that females faced challenges throughout the various education cycles as learners. The challenges seemed to increase as the female students went up the education ladder. Although identified challenges ranged from social-economic to policy and institutional based, sexual harassment was identified as a serious one cutting across all levels of education. This and other challenges call for urgent redress at institutional and government levels if gender equality and women empowerment is to be realized. The study concludes by discussing strategies that can be adapted to enhance participation of females at various levels of education in Kenya. Some of the strategies had implications for policies while others demanded social transformation in terms of change of people's culture and attitudes. Others challenged institutional policies and practices. Specific strategies included the need to promote access to education; provision of safe, friendly and secure learning and teaching environment; establishment and upgrading of single sex schools in the learning of science, mathematics and information technology (SMIT); teaching of life-skills and retooling of teachers for gender sensitive pedagogy.


In an age when scientists say they can no longer specify the exact difference between human and animal, living and dead, many contemporary artists have chosen to use animals in their work -- as the ultimate "other," as metaphor, as reflection. The attempt to discover what is animal, not surprisingly, leads to a greater understanding of what it means to be human. In Becoming Animal, 12 internationally known artists investigate the shifting boundaries between animal and human. Their explorations may be a barometer of things to come.The works included in Becoming Animal -- which accompanies an exhibit at MASS MoCA -- range from the aviary and cabinet of curiosities of Mark Dion to the gun-toting bird collages of Michael Oatman. Nicolas Lampert's machine-animal collages and Jane Alexander's corpse-like humanoids suggest a new landscape of alienation. Rachel Berwick's investigation of the last Galapagos tortoise from the island of Pinto and Brian Conley's humanized mating call of the Tungara frog question the divide between human and animal communication. Patricia Piccinini imagines a bodyguard for a bird on the edge of extinction and Ann-Sofi Siden recreates the bedroom -- and paranoia -- of psychologist Alice Fabian. Natalie Jeremijenko presents another installment in her ongoing Ooz, reverse-engineering the zoo, and Kathy High's installation of "trans-animals" remembers lab rats who have given their lives for science. Sam Easterson's videos allow us to see from the viewpoint of an aardvark, a tarantula, a tumbleweed; Motohiko Odani's films show a surrealistic genetically modified bestiary. Becoming Animal documents these works with eye-popping full-color images, taking us on a visual journey through an unknown world.


Theoretical literatures on procedural utility and the psychological benefits of political participation suggest that people who participate in political activities will be more satisfied with their lives because of the resulting feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Individual-level data from Latin America showin one dataset under study but not in anothera positive and statistically significant relationship between voting and life satisfaction. Variation in desire to vote as measured in Costa Rica, however, suggests that the causal arrow may run from happiness to voting. The use of multilevel models further reveals a consistentbut untheorizedcross-country negative relationship between enforced compulsory voting and happiness. Only preliminary results are found regarding the relationship between some other forms of political participation and life satisfaction.


ABSTRACT
The objective of this research was to study the quantity and quality of daily food menu consumed by families. Research was conducted at Pacitan District in East Java Province. The sample size ware 118 families that have children under five year old randomly selected from 4 sub district among 12 sub district in Pacitan. The observed variables were 1) Nutrient intake, including energy and protein as well as micronutrient intake. It's observed using 24 hours dietetic recall method. 2) Food consumption pattern, observed by food frequency method, 3) Food quality, analyzed using two parameters i.e well balance diet and score of Desirable Dietary Pattern. The result indicates that quantity of food consumed
by families represented by nutrients intake were low if compared with the standard of Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA). The average
of energy intake was 73% of RDA, and protein intake was 76.45% of RDA. The quality of food consumption was categorized unbalance diet, because it was low protein and high carbohydrate. Score of Desirable Dietary Pattern was very good (89.19). The score was closed to national score, and it was categorized in golden triangle. Despite of good quality in score, but it's still necessary to increase animal protein production
in order to improve score of animal food.


The most important information obtained by thermographic tests is not the absolute value of the temperature itself, but rather its distribution on space or time variables. Here, the authors propose an effective imaging method for infrared thermographic systems. Especially, it is applied to the change of blood flow detection in the infrared images. This purpose is achieved by using an image-subtraction technique and a spatio-temporal filter for motion enhancement. Through simulation results, it is shown that the change of blood flow is detected clearly.


Since the recent crisis, the resilience of worker cooperatives has not gone unnoticed in Europe (Cecop, 2012). In France this renewed interest in worker cooperatives has led to a new law in 2013 promoting this model of enterprise based on democratic governance. The legal status of worker cooperatives implies that such organizational forms are characterised by a double mission: to be profitable in order to maintain their activity and to be responsible vis-a-vis employees and towards their community. Such hybrid mission implies that such firms may be viewed as social enterprises. In this context, we use Austin & al.'s (2006) framework in order to assess how leaders of French and Spanish worker cooperatives make sense of who they are in terms of social or commercial entrepreneurship. Our study is based on a series of twenty semistructured interviews conducted with founders and / or leaders of worker cooperatives, from the Western region of France and the Basque country in Spain. Both regions are known for the large number of employee-owned cooperatives in their own country. Findings show that French and Spanish leaders of worker cooperatives have very different ways of making sense of what a worker cooperative stands for. In Spain, managers' worldview is pragmatic and instrumental as the benefits mentioned are lower taxes, work flexibility, higher empowerment of workers and a great emphasis placed on of the role of the client. In France, managers' worldview is more normative and ideological and less commercial/instrumental as they frame the worker cooperative as an alternative model to the classical capitalist enterprise, stressing the importance of workers, labor compensation and democratic governance.


A new decision making model is developed based on the use of a unified approach between the probability, the weighted average and the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator in an uncertain environment that can be assessed with fuzzy numbers (FNs). We present the fuzzy probabilistic ordered weighted averaging - weighted averaging (FPOWAWA) operator. It is an aggregation operator that integrates the OWA, the probability and the weighted average in the same formulation. Some of its main properties are studied and a wide range of particular cases such as the fuzzy probabilistic OWA, the fuzzy OWAWA, the fuzzy probabilistic weighted averaging operator and the fuzzy OWA operator. An application of the new approach in a fuzzy group decision making model regarding financial management is also developed.


Wound healing is very important after surgery and undisturbed closure of wounds is sometimes a major problem. Intensive efforts are made to improve wound healing using numerous approaches. In recent years, the oral application of specific bioactive collagen peptides has demonstrated positive effects on matrix synthesis and skin physiology. In this observational trial, their impact on wound healing was investigated in a group of 22 (12 verum/10 placebo) patients with postsurgical wounds and a second group of 20 (10 verum/10 placebo) patients with badly healing wounds. In both groups, the patients treated with bioactive collagen peptides had a clearly better outcome regarding wound healing compared to the placebo groups who showed suboptimal or bad results in the majority of cases. No side effects or intolerance to the product were reported. The results of this investigation confirm the positive impact of collagen peptides on wound healing. These data suggest this product can be used to improve wound healing, even in cases where normal wound healing is expected, and to achieve a better aesthetic outcome.


the pathway out of poverty is not through consumption but through saving and accumulation. That idea has led to a number of interesting and innovative experiments by state and local governments and by private charitable organizations and has helped fuel the drive for personal accounts as part of Social Security reform. It has also, however, spawned a movement for some form of "children's allowance," or federally funded grant to children, known generally as KidSave accounts, that would be saved for education and retirement. Such proposals have drawn support from liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. These schemes are well intentioned and address a very real problem: the failure of Americans, especially low-income Americans, to save for their own and their children's futures. The push for KidSave accounts is also motivated by a perception that low-income Americans have access to fewer tax-favored savings plans than do other Americans. There is ample reason to be skeptical of KidSave as an approach for increased saving, however. The proposal would create a massive new entitlement program, costing as much as $266 billion over the next 75 years (in presentvalue terms). If the program were to be expanded, as some observers have advocated, to all children instead of only newborns, the present-value cost would rise to $414 billion. And the cost to taxpayers would be even higher if the government were to adopt proposals to match future contributions made to KidSave accounts by lowand middle-income parents. With entitlement spending expected to skyrocket in the future, this is a burden we cannot afford. We should make every effort to expand savings opportunities and wealth accumulation for lowincome Americans. The proponents of KidSave have been asking the right questions. However, they have arrived at the wrong answer. KidSave Real Problem, Wrong Solution


The power of the trapped modes on a semi-infinite optical fiber illuminated by an incoherent source is determined. All possible modes are excited, each with approximately the same power when V → ∞, V=2πρ{n12−n22}1/2/λ, where ρ is the fiber radius, λ the wavelength of light in vacuum, and n1, n2 are the refractive indices of the fiber and its surround, respectively. A ray-optical interpretation is given for the summed power of the modes. For V = ∞, the power corresponds to that found from classical geometric optics, treating all rays as if they are meridional. This result is independent of the degree of coherence of the source. The per cent error of meridional ray optics is 100/V when V is large. The total power within the fiber is the combined power of the trapped modes and the radiation field. In the limit V = ∞, the total power within the fiber at any position z along its axis is that given by classical geometric optics, i.e., that found by tracing all rays, skew and meridional. At the point z = ∞ for arbitrary V, the total power is that due to the trapped modes only.


Small molecules that trigger potassium leakage from bacteria lead to biofilm formation. Bacteria are single-celled organisms, but under certain conditions they form multicellular communities. One such community, the biofilm, forms on surfaces when the density of bacteria becomes high enough that the bacteria detect each other's presence. Bacillus subtilis forms a biofilm when cultured on a minimal medium, but not when cultured on rich medium. López et al. tested several structurally unrelated, but natural, bacterial products, such as nystatin, amphotericin, gramicidin, and surfactin, for the ability to trigger biofilm formation of B. subtilis in rich medium. The common property of the molecules that did so was their ability to elicit cation leakage. Surfactin is a natural product of wild B. subtilis, and bacteria lacking the ability to produce this molecule do not form biofilms. Surfactin has surfactant properties, but these do not appear to be required for induction of the biofilm, because nystatin, which lacks surfactant properties, stimulated biofilm formation in strains of surfactin-deficient B. subtilis. Induction of biofilm formation by surfactin was prevented if the bacteria were cultured in high concentrations of potassium, but not sodium or lithium, which is consistent with cation leakage, specifically potassium leakage, as the signal for biofilm formation. Reporter assays demonstrated that surfactin and nystatin stimulated the expression of the operons involved in the production of extracellular matrix components required for biofilm formation. B. subtilis deficient in the histidine-sensor kinase KinC failed to form biofilms in response to surfactin. Introduction of KinC, the transcription factor and putative kinase target Spo0A, and Spo0A reporter gene into Listeria monocytogenes resulted in induction of the reporter gene in response to surfactin, which was inhibited by culturing the cells in high concentrations of potassium. Thus, bacteria appear to have evolved a mechanism to sense each other's presence that does not require a specific ligand-receptor interaction but instead triggers a change in cellular state (reduced potassium concentration) that activates a kinase to initiate a change in gene expression. D. López, M. A. Fischbach, F. Chu, R. Losick, R. Kolter, Structurally diverse natural products that cause potassium leakage trigger multicellularity in Bacillus subtilis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 280–285 (2009). [Abstract] [Full Text]


The occurrence of moderate and severe sustained droughts in the interior Pacific Northwest (PNW) from 1733 to 1980 was mapped using 18 western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis var. occidentalis Hook.) tree-ring chronologies. The frequency and duration of both moderate and severe sustained droughts are substantially greater in the northwest region of the interior PNW. Thus, this area is identified as a drought core region. These droughts are chiefly attributed to the presence of a Pacific blocking high off the NW coast that is associated with significant reductions in cool season precipitation. Specifically, the impacted northwest region lies within a transition zone between the fluxes of marine airflow during the cool season months and interior air during the warm season months. The waxing and waning of the boundaries of this transition zone particularly affect western juniper trees growing in this region. During years in which a blocking high is present, marine airflow is substantially reduced, exposing the trees in the transition zone to substantially drier springtime conditions that limit soil moisture and reduce radial growth. Although the most severe and persistent droughts were concentrated in the northwest region, four large-scale droughts also impacted the entire interior PNW during the study period. These droughts occurred principally during PDO warm phases, suggesting a regional-scale linkage to this climatic oscillation.


Abstract. Persistent contrails and natural cirrus clouds often coexist in the upper troposphere and contrails can be embedded within cirrus clouds. The present paper deals with some questions regarding the interaction of cirrus clouds and embedded contrails. I have selected only questions that can be answered by analytical means. I find that (1) the emission index for water vapour is only slightly changed when an aircraft crosses a cirrus cloud, (2) that contrail formation is not affected by an ambient cirrus, (3) that cirrus ice crystals entrained into the trailing wing tip vortex do not efficiently retard the sublimation of contrail ice crystals, and (4) that cirrus can start to dissolve an embedded contrail after a couple of hours by aggregation.


Abstract Mapping changes in glacier extent from repeat optical satellite data has revealed widespread glacier decline in nearly all regions of the world over the past few decades. While numerous studies have documented the changes of the outlet glaciers of the Northern and Southern Patagonia Icefields (NPI/SPI), information about glacier changes in the Patagonian Andes (to the north of the NPI) is much scarcer. Here we present an assessment of area changes for glaciers mainly located in the Palena district of Chile based on glacier inventories for 1985, 2000 and 2011 that were derived from two consecutive Landsat scenes and a digital elevation model. The analysis revealed a dramatic area decline for the largest glaciers and total area loss of 25% from 1985 to 2011. The lower parts of several larger glaciers (>10 km2) melted completely. Area loss below 1000 m elevation was 50–100% in both periods, and 374 glaciers out of 1664 disappeared. The number of proglacial lakes increased from 223 to 327 and their area expanded by 11.6 km2 (59%) between 1985 and 2011. Seasonal snow persisting at high elevations in the 2011 scene was a major obstacle to glacier delineation, so the obtained area change rate of ~1% a–1 over the entire period is a lower-bound estimate. The observed climate trends (e.g. cooling in Puerto Montt) are in contrast to the observed shrinkage.


BACKGROUND: Increasing numbers of procedures are being used to treat elderly ex-obese patients after bariatric therapies. However, reliable data regarding the evolution and complications of this population are scarce in the literature. In this study, we aimed to analyze the evolution and complications of abdominoplasty performed in patients with advanced age after massive weight loss and compare them to the corresponding data from younger patients. METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed patients who experienced massive weight loss and underwent surgery for abdominal contouring between July 2005 and July 2011 in the State Hospital Sapopemba (HESAP). An age of ≥ 60 years was used as a criterion for advanced age, in order to divide patients into groups to analyze the postoperative period and complications of abdominoplasty performed after massive weight loss. RESULTS: We analyzed 264 patients, 19 of whom were 60-75 years of age (Group I) and 245 of whom were 22-59 years of age (Group J). Group I had a major complication rate of 10.5% (P > 0.999) and a minor complication rate of 41.1% (P = 0.280), whereas Group J had a major complication rate of 10.6% (P > 0.999) and a minor complication rate of 30.2% (P = 0.280). CONCLUSIONS: Patients ≥ 60 years of age do not have a higher rate of complications than younger patients after abdominoplasty.


Two dimensional nanoparticle lattices can exhibit unique optical, electrical, and chemical properties giving rise to emerging applications for photovoltaic conversion, electronics and optical devices. In many applications, it is useful to be able to control the particle spacing, the crystal lattice formed, and the local composition of the lattice by co-locating nanoparticles of varying chemistry. However, control over all of these variables requires exquisite control over the interparticle interactions, and a large number of degrees of freedom affect the interactions. Achieving a particular structure by design requires solving the inverse-design problem, where one must optimize the chemistry to meet the structure or property that is desired. In recent years, a variety of examples have shown that one can finely control the interactions between nanoparticles through the use of polymers grafted onto the nanoparticle surface and by controlling the grafting density and the distribution of molecular weights on the nanoparticle surface. In this work, we take the first steps on solving the inverse design problem using an approach that explicitly accounts for the chemistry on the surfaces of the particles. Using two-dimensional hybrid particle/field theory calculations and an evolutionary design strategy, we design polymer grafted nanoparticles that self-assemble into targeted square, honeycomb, and kagome lattices. We optimize both the length and grafting density of the polymers grafted to the nanoparticles, and we show that our design strategies are stable over a range of nanoparticle concentrations. Finally, we show that three-body interactions are critical for stabilizing targeted structures.


RDF Schema (RDFS) and RDF are evolving as the de facto languages for the Semantic Web. Whereas RDFS can be used to define concepts in a domain ontology, RDF can be used to define instances of that ontology. In an attempt to make these modeling languages evolvable and extensible, the current languages lack a clear semantic support. While RDF and RDFS are easy to use, they are hard to understand and difficult to validate and extend as a result of their ambiguous semantics. In this paper, we use UML modeling and meta modeling concepts to resolve some of semantic ambiguities and provide support for validation and extension. We describe a UML meta modeling approach that defines five modeling layers and identify how RDFS and RDF as Semantic Web languages fit into the architecture. The approach also defines the meta languages required to create RDFS and RDF and to support extensions to both languages and their constructs. The meta modeling approach is based on concepts inspired by the UML meta modeling architecture. Moreover, we use UML to bootstrap the modeling hierarchy and we use the UML extension mechanisms to describe the models developed at each layer including the RDFS and RDF language constructs.


Abstract:Originally prepared for oral delivery at a conference session on the author's study of Baudelaire as a city poet, the paper explores related academic genres involving academic judgment before giving an autobiographical account of the author's reading of Baudelaire, which was mediated by the experience of the AIDS epidemic in Ronald Reagan's United States as Baudelaire's Parisian experience had been mediated by the Second Empire. Thus is suggested a theory of the ongoing readability of literary texts as that readability is mediated by the successive events of changing human history. (RC)The following essay attempts to tease out the implications of what it means to read in dialogue with others, to think of reading (and teaching) as a kind of conversational act, one involving exposure to modes, instances, and situations of difficulty, incomprehension, and "failure" that are often not only the surest sign of a text's constitutive open-ended interpretability, but also, and more importantly, of its (potential) meaningfulness for readers. Taking Rimbaud as a case study of sorts, the piece draws especially on a corpus of theoretical insights advanced by Ross Chambers—on the pragmatics of interpretation, on irony, reference and situationality, on the gap between meaning and meaningfulness—and thinks of reading a collective practice of meaning-making with, one hopes, important political and ethical implications for our times. (RSC)


A new algorithm is proposed for a) unsupervised learning of sparse representations from subsampled measurements and b) estimating the parameters required for linearly reconstructing signals from the sparse codes. We verify that the new algorithm performs efficient data compression on par with the recent method of compressive sampling. Further, we demonstrate that the algorithm performs robustly when stacked in several stages or when applied in undercomplete or over-complete situations. The new algorithm can explain how neural populations in the brain that receive subsampled input through fiber bottlenecks are able to form coherent response properties.


After the political change in Nepal of 1951, leapfrog land policy improvements have been recorded, however, the land reform initiatives have been short of full success. Despite a land administration system based on cadaster and land registries in place, 25% of the arable land with an estimated 10 million spatial units on the ground are informally occupied and are off-register. Recently, a strong political will has emerged to ensure land rights for all. Providing tenure security to all these occupants using the conventional surveying and land administration approach demands a large amount of skilled human resources, a long timeframe and a huge budget. To assess the suitability of the fit-for-purpose land administration (FFPLA) approach for nationwide mapping and registration of informality in the Nepalese context, the identification, verification and recordation (IVR) of the people-to-land relationship was conducted through two pilot studies using a participatory approach covering around 1500 and 3400 parcels, respectively, in an urban and a rural setting. The pilot studies were based on the FFPLA National Strategy and utilized satellite imageries and smartphones for identification and verification of land boundaries. Data collection to verification tasks were completed within seven months in the urban settlements and for an average cost of 7.5 USD per parcel; within the rural setting, the pilot study was also completed within 7 months and for an average cost of just over 3 USD per parcel. The studies also informed the discussions on building the legislative and institutional frameworks, which are now in place. With locally trained 'grassroots surveyors', the studies have provided a promising alternative to the conventional surveying technologies by providing a fast, inexpensive and acceptable solution. The tested approach may fulfill the commitment to resolve the countrywide mapping of informality. The use of consistent data model and mapping standards are recommended.


Receiver cooperation is an effective technique to improve the performance of multi-antenna Gaussian broadcast channels. In practical systems, the transmitter usually has partial channel state information (CSI) via the finite-rate feedback channel. How could receiver cooperation benefit the system performance in this case? In this letter, we propose a low complexity and effective cooperation scheme based on the principle of decode-and-forward (DF) relaying and successive interference cancelation (SIC) to mitigate the residual multiuser interference. Compared to non-cooperative systems, the proposed scheme brings a twofold benefit: improved chosen space of beamforming vectors and reduced multiuser interference terms. As a result, both degrees-of-freedom gain and power gain can be observed. The degrees-of-freedom gain leads to unbounded throughput with finite feedback rate. The power gain is significant such that the proposed scheme with partial CSI even outperforms the non-cooperative system with perfect CSI in low and moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region.


Newcache is a secure cache that can thwart cache side-channel attacks to prevent the leakage of secret information. All caches today are susceptible to cache side-channel attacks, despite software isolation of memory pages in virtual address spaces or virtual machines. These cache attacks can leak secret encryption keys or private identity keys, nullifying any protection provided by strong cryptography. Newcache uses a novel dynamic, randomized memory-to-cache mapping to thwart contention-based side-channel attacks, rather than the static mapping used by conventional set-associative caches. In this article, the authors present an improved design of Newcache, in terms of security, circuit design and simplicity. They show Newcache's security against a suite of cache side-channel attacks. They evaluate Newcache's system performance for cloud computing, smartphone, and SPEC benchmarks and find that Newcache performs as well as conventional set-associative caches, and sometimes better. They also designed a VLSI test chip with a 32-Kbyte Newcache and a 32-Kbyte, eight-way, set-associative cache and verified that the access latency, power, and area of the two caches are comparable. These results show that Newcache can be used as L1 data and instruction caches to improve security without impacting performance.


In this work, human serum albumin (HSA) stabilized gold nanoclusters (HSA-AuNCs) with reddish photoluminescence were used as sensing probes for pathogenic bacteria including Enterobacter cloacae, Escherichia coli J96, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, pandrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (PDRAB), Staphylococcus aureus, methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), Streptococcus pyogenes, and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecalis (VRE). We discovered that HSA-AuNCs have unique affinity with S. aureus and MRSA. In addition to demonstrating the selective sensing ability of HSA-AuNCs toward S. aureus and MRSA, the binding peptide motifs identified from HSA-AuNCs were characterized by mass spectrometry. The identified binding peptides were further used as the reducing and stabilizing agents for generation of peptide-bound AuNCs (Pep-AuNCs). The generated Pep-AuNCs were demonstrated to have the binding affinities with S. aureus and MRSA.