Nitrotoluenes are high production volume chemicals used in the synthesis of agricultural and rubber chemicals and in various dyes. Because of differences in the metabolism of the 3 isomers and their capability to bind to DNA, comparative toxicity studies of o-, m-, or p-nitrotoluene were conducted in F344 rats and B6C3F1 mice. Animals were evaluated for histopathology, clinical pathology, and toxicity to the reproductive system. The nitrotoluenes were also studied in several in vitro and in vivo assays for genetic toxicity. In 14-day studies, o-nitrotoluene, m-nitrotoluene, or p-nitrotoluene was administered in the feed to male and female rats and mice at concentrations ranging from 388 to 20000 ppm (5 animals/chemical/species/sex/dose). There were no effects on survival or clinical signs of toxicity in these studies, although animals at the higher doses showed decreases in body weight gains relative to controls. In the 13-week studies, o-, m-, or p-nitrotoluene was given to male and female rats and mice (10 animals/chemical/species/ sex/dose) in the feed at concentrations between 625 and 10000 ppm. The estimated daily doses based on measures of feed consumption were 40 to 900 mg nitrotoluene/kg body weight/day for rats and 100 to 2000 mg/kg/day for mice and were similar for each of the 3 isomers when compared for each dietary level/sex/species. There were no effects on survival in any of the studies, and clinical signs of toxicity were limited to decreases in feed consumption. Decreased body weight gains occurred in dosed rats and mice in all studies at the higher dose levels and were most pronounced in rats receiving o-nitrotoluene. In rats, histopathologic analyses after 13 weeks of dosing showed toxicity to kidney, spleen, and testis in animals receiving any of the 3 isomers, and toxicity to the liver and mesothelium in male rats given o-nitrotoluene. Kidney toxicity observed in male rats was characterized by the presence of hyaline droplets in tubular epithelial cells, attributed to an increase in the level of alpha-2μ-globulin. Pigment, possibly lipofuscin, and karyomegaly in the p-nitrotoluene study were present in the renal tubular epithelium of dosed male and female rats. In the spleen of treated male and female rats, there was a mild increase in hematopoiesis, hemosiderin deposition, and/or congestion; this effect was most severe with the para-isomer, followed by the ortho- and then the meta-isomer. Administration of o-, m-, or p-nitrotoluene impaired testicular function of the rat, shown by degeneration of the testis and reduction in sperm concentration, motility, and spermatid number. All 3 isomers increased the length of the estrous cycle in rats. Hepatic toxicity was characterized by cytoplasmic vacuolization and oval cell hyperplasia and by an increase in the level of serum bile acids, SDH, and ALT activities in male rats given o-nitrotoluene. There was no histopathologic evidence for liver toxicity in male or female rats with the m- or p-isomers, or in female rats with the o-isomer; but evidence of liver injury was observed in these groups, indicated by increases in relative liver weights and elevations in bile acids and liver enzymes in serum. Mesotheliomas of the tunica vaginalis were observed in 3/10 male rats receiving o-nitrotoluene at 5000 ppm, and mesothelial cell hyperplasia was observed in 2/10 male rats receiving o-nitrotoluene at 10000 ppm. The only histopathologic evidence for toxicity in mice in the 13- week studies occurred in the olfactory epithelium in mice receiving o-nitrotoluene, where the chemical caused degeneration and metaplasia. No liver lesions were noted in mice, but the 3 isomers caused increases in relative liver weights. There was no toxicity to the reproductive system in male or female mice treated with any of the nitrotoluene isomers. The 3 nitrotoluene isomers were not mutagenic in Salmonella typhimurium strains TA100, TA1535, TA1537, and TA98. Only p-nitrotoluene induced chromosomal aberrations in cultured Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells, and this required metabolic activation. Sister-chromatid exchanges were increased in CHO cells following exposure to each isomer; the requirement for metabolic activation varied. Only p-nitrotoluene was studied in the mouse lymphoma L5178Y test; it caused mutations with metabolic activation. Unscheduled DNA synthesis (UDS) was increased in in vitro incubations of hepatocytes isolated from both sexes of rats and mice after receiving a single in vivo oral dose of o-nitrotoluene. UDS was not increased in a similar study with male rats given m- or p-nitrotoluene. o-Nitrotoluene also induced s-phase DNA synthesis in hepatocytes of rats but not in those of mice. In summary, the 3 nitrotoluene isomers were toxic to the kidney, spleen and/or reproductive system in rats; o-nitrotoluene also caused lesions in the liver of male rats. No treatment-related lesions were noted in mice except with o-nitrotoluene where olfactory epithelium degeneration occurred. The increase in relative liver weights and the increase in UDS in liver indicate that all 3 isomers affected the liver of female rats and of male and female mice, even though histopathologic lesions were not observed. In general, the extent of the toxicity was most severe with the o-isomer in both rats and mice. o-Nitrotoluene was carcinogenic in male rats in 13-week studies, based on the occurrence of mesothelioma and mesothelial cell hyperplasia in dosed groups. Synonyms: o-NT, 2NT, 2-nitrotoluene, 2-methylnitrobenzene, 2-nitrotoluol; m-NT, 3NT, 3-nitrotoluene, 3-methylnitrobenzene, 3-nitrotoluol; p-NT, 4NT, 4-nitrotoluene, 4-methylnitrobenzene, 4-nitrotoluol.


Abstract. Understanding the mechanistic links between environmental drivers, human disturbance, plant functional traits, and ecosystem properties is a fundamental aspect of biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research. Recent studies have focused mostly on leaf-level traits or community-level weighted traits to predict species responses to grazing and the consequent change in ecosystem functioning. However, studies of leaf-level traits or community-level weighted traits seldom identify the mechanisms linking grazing impact on leaf traits to ecosystem functioning. Here, using a multi-organization-level approach, we examined the effects of grazing on leaf traits (i.e., leaf area, leaf dry mass and specific leaf area) and ecosystem functioning across six communities of three vegetation types along a soil moisture gradient in the Xilin River Basin of Inner Mongolia grassland, China. Our results showed that the effects of grazing on leaf traits differed substantially when scaling up from leaf-level to species, functional group (i.e., life forms and water ecotype types), and community levels; and they also varied with vegetation type or site conditions. The effects of grazing on leaf traits diminished progressively along the hierarchy of organizational levels in the meadow, whereas the impacts were predominantly negative and the magnitude of the effects increased considerably at higher organizational levels in the typical steppe. Soil water and nutrient availability, functional trade-offs between leaf size and number of leaves per individual, and differentiation in avoidance and tolerance strategies among coexisting species are likely to be responsible for the observed responses of leaf traits to grazing at different levels of organization and among vegetation types. Our findings also demonstrate that, at both the functional group and community levels, standing aboveground biomass increased with leaf area and specific leaf area. Compared with the large changes in leaf traits and standing aboveground biomass, the soil properties were relatively unaffected by grazing. Our study indicates that a multi-organization-level approach provides more robust and comprehensive predictions of the effects of grazing on leaf traits and ecosystem functioning.


Tra ffi c congestion has become inescapable across the United States, especially in urban areas. Yet, support is lacking for taxes to fund expansion of the existing network. Thus, it is imperative to find novel ways to improve e ffi ciency of the existing infrastructure. A major obstacle is the inability to enforce socially optimal routes among the commuters. We propose to improve routing e ffi ciency by leveraging heterogeneity in commuter preferences. We learn individual driver preferences over the route characteristics and use these preferences to recommend socially optimal routes that they will likely follow. The combined e ff ects of socially optimal routing and personalization help bridge the gap between utopic and user optimal solutions. We take the view of a recommendation system with a large user base but no ability to enforce routes in a highly congested network. We (a) develop a framework for learning individual driver preferences over time, and (b) devise a mathematical model for computing personalized socially optimal routes given (potentially partial) information on driver preferences. We evaluated our approach on data collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk and compared with Logistic Regression and our model improves prediction accuracy by over 12%.


Encoder layer fusion (EncoderFusion) is a technique to fuse all the encoder layers (instead of the uppermost layer) for sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models, which has proven effective on various NLP tasks. However, it is still not entirely clear why and when EncoderFusion should work. In this paper, our main contribution is to take a step further in understanding EncoderFusion. Many of previous studies believe that the success of EncoderFusion comes from exploiting surface and syntactic information embedded in lower encoder layers. Unlike them, we find that the encoder embedding layer is more important than other intermediate encoder layers. In addition, the uppermost decoder layer consistently pays more attention to the encoder embedding layer across NLP tasks. Based on this observation, we propose a simple fusion method, SurfaceFusion, by fusing only the encoder embedding layer for the softmax layer. Experimental results show that SurfaceFusion outperforms EncoderFusion on several NLP benchmarks, including machine translation, text summarization, and grammatical error correction. It obtains the state-of-the-art performance on WMT16 Romanian-English and WMT14 English-French translation tasks. Extensive analyses reveal that SurfaceFusion learns more expressive bilingual word embeddings by building a closer relationship between relevant source and target embeddings. The source code will be released.


Obesity and diabetes are major public health concerns that contribute to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and stroke. It is now widely accepted that chronic inflammation is an important element of pathogenic mechanisms linking obesity to diabetes. Moreover, clinical and experimental evidence has established the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathway as a pivotal mediator during inflammatory stress in coupling obesity to insulin resistance (IR). While numerous studies have examined the upstream kinase activation of MAPKs, few have examined mechanisms that dephosphorylate, and thus, deactivate these pathways, potentially affording protection against adipose tissue (AT) inflammation and obesity-induced IR. Data presented in this dissertation demonstrate that several MAPK-specific dual-specificity phosphatases (DUSPs) are induced in AT under conditions of genetic and diet-induced obesity that is associated with increased inflammation and IR. While AT is composed of multiple cell types, evidence suggests an essential role for preadipocytes (PAs) and adipocytes (ADs) in the development of AT inflammation and IR. Therefore, we further report phenotypic differences in DUSP expression where four of the ten MAPK-specific DUSPs are more abundant in PAs compared to ADs while two of the ten DUSPs are more abundant in ADs compared to PAs, suggesting a regulatory role for these phosphatases that is cell type specific. Moreover, phenotypic differences were observed regarding MAPK signaling and DUSP expression in PAs and ADs exposed to TNFalpha-mediated inflammatory stress, where ERK, JNK, and p38 phosphorylation was markedly elevated and transient in PAs while ERK and JNK phosphorylation was prolonged in ADs concomitant with the phenotypic differences in inducible DUSPs. As induction of DUSPs in PAs kinetically mirrored MAPK dephosphorylation, we further show that de novo mRNA synthesis was essential for MAPK dephosphorylation, suggesting a role for inducible DUSPs in the modulation of MAPK signaling. Based on these data, we present empirical evidence that DUSP knockdown markedly increased the magnitude and duration of ERK, JNK, and p38 phosphorylation in response to inflammatory stress, subsequently elevating MAPK-dependent pro-inflammatory cytokine and chemokine gene expression. Collectively, these findings demonstrate an essential role for DUSPs in the timely modulation of MAPK signaling, highlighting prospective therapeutic targets linking obesity with metabolic inflammatory diseases.


Dr. Soji Adelaja is appointed in the tenure stream in AFRE and in 2004 was named the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor in Land Policy. Until April 2011, he served as director of the Land Policy Institute, which he founded in 2006. In that capacity, he also served as the director of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, funded Michigan Higher Education Land Policy Consortium (MiHELP), and the People and Land Initiative (PAL). Dr. Adelaja's work in public policy is highly respected and he has served as advisor to several key local, state, and national policy makers.Prior to coming to MSU in 2004, Dr. Adelaja was at Rutgers University for 18 years, during which period he served as Executive Dean of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Dean of Cook College, Executive Director of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, Director of Rutgers Cooperative Extension, Professor and Ch air of Agricultural Food and Resource Economics, Director of the Food Policy Institute, Director of the Food Innovation Center, and Director of the Eco-Policy Center. Soji has received numerous awards for excellence in research, outreach and policy leadership, including being named ARER Fellow in 2012 by the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association, the 2011 Distinguished Faculty Award from Michigan State, 2010 tribute from the Governor of Michigan for his contribution to public policy and the State's economic development, a 2011 Outstanding article of the year award from Emerald Publishers, the 2010 Outstanding article of the year award from the Agricultural and Resource Economic Review, the 2003 Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Policy through Economics from NAREA, the Rutgers Presidential Award for Distinguished Public Service from Rutgers University, the 1999 Person of the Year Award from the National Prepared Foods Association, the 2002 Outstanding Alumnus Award from the Pennsylvania State University, and the New Jersey Governor's Recognition for Outstanding Contributions to the Garden State. November 10, 2017 2212 Dunbar 3:00pm – 4:30pm


Background The β3-adrenergic receptor (β3-AR) is mainly expressed in adipose tissue and plays an important role in lipid metabolism and metabolic rate by mediating lipolysis and thermogenesis. It has been suggested that the Trp64Arg (T→C) polymorphism in the β3-AR gene affects fat accumulation and/or impairment of lipid and carbohydrate metabolism. Objective The aim of this study was to investigate whether common polymorphism (Trp64Arg) of β3-AR gene has a role in the apparent susceptibility to type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) and its related disorders in the Egyptian population. Patients and methods One hundred and thirty five healthy controls and 123 individuals with type 2 DM were enrolled in the study. The β3-AR Trp64Arg polymorphism was identified using restriction fragment length polymorphism PCR of peripheral blood DNA samples. Analysis of data was performed using SPSS program 11. Results Allele frequency for C was 23.2% in the diabetic group compared with 12.2% in the control group. The carriers of XC genotype (TC and CC) were at high risk of developing type 2 DM (odds ratio=2.8; 95% confidence interval=1.6–4.9) when compared with the carrier of TT genotype. Furthermore, they were at much higher risk of developing its related disorders such as central obesity, dyslipidemia, and hypertension (odds ratio=2.8; 1.8, 1.5, 2.2, and 2.7 for BMI, waist–hip ratio, triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein, and hypertension, respectively). Conclusion The prevalence of Arg64 allele of the Trp64Arg polymorphism in the β3-AR gene is a risk factor for type 2 DM and its related disorders in the Egyptian population.


Certain factors of climate are favorable to streptococcus respiratory diseases. In those tropical environments where hemolytic streptococcus is unusual in the throat flora, scarlet fever is unknown and rheumatic fever rare. In New York City, however, following epidemic waves of pharyngitis with hemolytic streptococcus the incidence of rheumatic fever rises precipitously. The correlation between the geographical distribution of hemolytic streptococcus and rheumatic fever is a definite one. Furthermore, in New York City during the seasons of the year in which hemolytic streptococcus is seldom recovered from the pharynx, acute attacks of rheumatism are unusual. Corresponding to the seasonal rise in hemolytic streptococcus infections, the curve of incidence of acute rheumatism shows a similar form. Among the children of wealthy patients, enjoying great protection, hemolytic streptococcus has been recovered infrequently from the throat, and rheumatism has not been encountered during this study. Among the poor under observation in New York City, however, the organism is found frequently in the pharyngeal flora, and rheumatic fever is common. The findings suggest that poverty and unhygienic living conditions favor both the activity of hemolytic streptococcus in the throat and the incidence of rheumatic fever. Moreover, localized outbreaks of rheumatism have been observed frequently following epidemics of "sore throat". Bacteriological studies of these upper respiratory infections demonstrate a close relationship between the advent of hemolytic streptococcus in the throat flora and the outbreak of rheumatic fever in susceptible individuals. In addition to these studies of streptococcus infections and their relationship to the development of rheumatic fever, observations of the rheumatic patient add further emphasis to this association. First, among a group of rheumatic children in an isolated environment, reactivation of the rheumatic process has been recognized only following the advent of hemolytic streptococcus in the throat flora. Also, an investigation of families in which several members have rheumatic heart disease has led to the same conclusion. Recrudescences of the disease have been observed under a variety of conditions among these individuals. However, the one constant factor in the outbreaks of recrudescences in rheumatic homes is their association with family epidemics of hemolytic streptococcus infection. Moreover, by studying rheumatic patients before, during and after transplantation to a tropical environment, it has been possible to demonstrate a close relationship between activity of the disease process and infection with hemolytic streptococcus. While the rheumatic patients remained in the tropics this organism was not recovered from the pharyngeal flora, and the disease process seemed quiescent. On return to New York City, those individuals who have escaped respiratory infection have remained symptom-free. However, of those who have contracted hemolytic streptococcus pharyngitis, each has developed a rheumatic attack within 3 weeks after infection. Finally, extensive bacteriological studies made in ambulatory rheumatic subjects over a period of 4 years have demonstrated that the individuals who escape respiratory disease remain free of rheumatic manifestations. On the other hand, the majority of rheumatic patients who contract hemolytic streptococcus pharyngitis experience shortly afterward a definite recrudescence of their disease. In conclusion, there is a close relationship between respiratory infection with hemolytic streptococcus and activity of the rheumatic process in susceptible individuals.


Background: Formula-fed infants have growth and plasma amino acid patterns different from those of breastfed infants. Objective: -Lactalbumin is a major protein in human milk, and the addition of bovine -lactalbumin to infant formula has been proposed to modify the plasma amino acid pattern of the recipient infant, possibly allowing a reduction in the protein content of the formula, which may affect growth. Design: We compared breastfed infants and infants fed standard formula or -lactalbumin–enriched formulas (25% of protein) with glycomacropeptide accounting for 15% or 10% of the protein. The protein content of each formula was 13.1 g/L. Ninety-six infants aged 6 2 wk were recruited. Anthropometric measures were recorded, and interviews were conducted at enrollment and monthly until 6 mo of age. Blood samples were collected at enrollment and at 4 and 6 mo. Results: Formula intake did not differ between groups, and weight gain in the -lactalbumin–enriched formula groups were similar to that of the breastfed infants. The standard formula group gained significantly more weight than did the breastfed infants. All formulafed infants had significantly higher plasma concentrations of most essential amino acids at 4 and 6 mo than did the breastfed infants, and serum urea nitrogen was also higher in the formula-fed infants. Insulin and leptin concentrations did not differ between groups. Conclusions: Compared with standard formula-fed infants, infants fed formula with a modified protein composition had growth patterns more similar to those of breastfed infants. All formula-fed groups had plasma amino acid concentrations similar to or higher than those of breastfed infants. This indicates that the protein content of -lactalbumin–enriched formula can be further reduced, which should be evaluated. Am J Clin Nutr 2008;87:921–8.


The retinoblastoma tumor suppressor RB is well known for its capacity to restrict cell cycle progression at the G1/S transition of the cell cycle by controlling the transcription of cell cycle genes. In this issue of Genes & Development, Hilgendorf and colleagues (pp. 1003-1015) have identified a novel tumor suppressor function for RB independent of its role as a transcriptional regulator, in which RB directly activates the apoptosis regulator Bax at the mitochondria to promote cell death.


X-ray diffraction data from monoclinic crystals of yeast tRNAPhe soaked in dilute lead(II) acetate solutions at pH 5.0 and at pH 7.4 have been collected to a resolution of 3 A, and the Pb(II) binding sites have been obtained by difference Fourier analyses. The same three Pb(II) binding sites are observed at both of these pH values. At pH 7.4 an extra peak of negative electron density appears on the difference map close to one of the Pb(II) binding sites and at the position of phosphate-18, indicating cleavage of the sugar-phosphate-chain between residues D-17 and G-18 of the tRNAPhe molecule in this derivative. Chain scission does not occur to any observable extent in the structure at pH 5.0, and we have, therefore, a picture of the reactants (at pH 5.0) and products (at pH 7.4) of this cleavage reaction. Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis as well as sequencing experiments confirms the cleavage of the tRNAPhe molecule into one-fourth and three-fourth fragments, with the shorter fragment consisting essentially of residues G-1 through D-17 while the larger fragment contains residues G-18 through A-76. End-group analyses suggest a ribose cyclic 2',3'-phosphate at D-17 of the one-fourth fragment with a 5'-OH at G-18 of the three-fourth fragment. Cleavage of the tRNAPhe molecule does not occur in the absence of Pb(II), and the proximity of one of these metal ions to the cleavage site strongly implicates this metal ion in the cleavage reaction. Consideration of several possible mechanisms for the reaction, taking into account the biochemical and crystallographic facts presented above, suggests that the cleavage involves removal of the proton from the 2'-OH of ribose-17 by a Pb(II)-bound hydroxyl group. Subsequent nucleophilic attack of the resulting 2'-O- on the phosphorus atom of phosphate-18, presumably through a pentacoordinate phosphorus cyclic intermediate (as in the action of pancreatic ribonuclease A), results in chain scission. It cannot be decided whether the displacement, within the pentacoordinate intermediate, proceeds via an in-line or adjacent pathway, but an exploration of the likelihood of either pathway is presented. Strand cleavage at the particular site occurs fortuitously because the aquo Pb(II) ion binds at the correct distance and presumably in such a manner as to present a hydroxyl group in the correct orientation to effect the proton abstraction.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


Navigation and robotics in pediatric spine surgery have evolved due to the desire for improved safety and efficiency of pedicle screw placement. Computer guided navigation for pedicle screw placement is based on instrument registration to three-dimensional imaging of the spine and relies on a surgeon's ability to coordinate hand and instrument movements with a computerized screen representing the patient's anatomy. Navigation has been shown to be associated with higher accuracy for pedicle screw placement than other modern techniques such as free hand or fluoroscopic screw guidance. The use of robotics in surgery emerged as a potential way to diminish human error and with navigation has evolved to become a potential state of the art technique for spine surgery. Robotic-assisted pedicle screw placement with real time navigation afford the surgeon efficient means of rigid trajectory guidance based on anatomical registration of the patient's anatomy. Navigation, when coupled with robotics, aids the surgeon in confirmatory imaging on the screen in real time. While associated with significant set-up costs, a steep learning curve, and initial longer operating room times this technology promises to enhance accuracy and lead to a reduction in complications. Intraoperative pitfalls exist such as registration difficulties, intraoperative spine movement affecting accuracy, and instrument skiving. However, the benefits including improved surgical ergonomics and screw accuracy will undeniably continue to foster technological innovation to overcome the pitfalls, which will make robotics a standard part of pediatric spinal deformity surgery in the future.


The recently released Highway Safety Manual (HSM) published by AASHTO provides a comprehensive set of tools for evaluating and identifying opportunities to improve safety for highway facilities. Included in the HSM is a quantitative method for predicting crashes on the basis of recently developed scientific approaches. These predictive methods currently exist for three facility types: rural two-lane roads; rural multilane highways; and urban and suburban arterial highways. To enhance precision, each HSM predictive method should be calibrated for location conditions. This paper demonstrates the HSM calibration procedure for total crashes in Oregon. The research identified three critical data collection limitations on information about pedestrian volumes, minor road traffic volumes at rural locations, and minimum sample size for underrepresented crash locations. Most of the calibration factors for Oregon were determined to be considerably lower than the expected value of approximately 1, and this observation was attributed to Oregon crash reporting thresholds and procedures. The paper includes an evaluation of crash severity distribution methods and an assessment of the significance of collision type distributions on the overall predicted crashes.


Carbonate platform evolution around the island of Rodrigues, southwestern Indian Ocean, is reconstructed from cores recovered across the platform9s windward margin. In contrast to the classic "bucket-fill" model of carbonate platform evolution, whereby platform filling occurs predominantly as a function of the lagoonward transport of sediment from the reef rim, data from Rodrigues demonstrate that the primary mode of platform filling was through reef progradation from the platform interior seaward. Indeed, radiocarbon dates indicate that much of the platform interior had filled by ∼2000 cal. (calibrated) yr B.P. Data also indicate that the reef rim probably caught up with sea level only in the past ∼1000 yr, and subsequent export of sediment from those areas into the lagoon has probably only become important during the final stages of the platform9s evolution. We interpret this as a function of the platform margin reef9s catch-up growth mode. This would have allowed significant marine circulation within the platform interior, thus promoting active reef growth prior to sea level being attained. Given that such catch-up growth modes are widely recognized on many reef/platform margins, we suggest that this novel platform evolutionary model may have widespread applicability.sounder (resolution ±10 cm) were made at each core site, and water depths were normalized to the tide curves and corrected to mean sea level (MSL is 1.872 m above chart datum). All core depth measurements were uncompacted and were normalized to MSL.


Senior level IT managers are responsible for a wide variety of development projects. For the most part, these individual projects are handled by project managers. However, IT managers must be conversant in the field of project management. Additionally, they must understand the dynamics of managing the project manager and be familiar with the skill sets. Leading IT Projects: The IT Managers Guide provides a detailed roadmap for project success. The book provides information on the technical aspects of project management and also focuses on the human side of project managementleadership skills, team building, and promoting creativity. Overall, it facilitates an extensive understanding of the planning, monitoring, and control of the people, process, and events that occur as a computer system evolves from preliminary concept to operational implementation. Using ready-to-use forms and templates, this valuable resource enables you to increase productivity and ensures thatprojects come in on time and within budget.


The authors report the clinical case of a 29-year-old Caucasian woman who presented with clinicopathological findings and a previous outbreak all suggestive of actinic superficial folliculitis, a rarely reported and probably misdiagnosed phototoxic sun-induced dermatosis first described by Nieboer in 1985. Despite the exuberance of this cutaneous eruption, it is usually auto-limited, reinforcing the importance of its knowledge, for eviction of unnecessary diagnostic tests and therapies. Mechanisms of pathogenesis postulated include ultraviolet A radiation and local heat. This photodermatosis presents as monomorphic, superficial, pustular, and non-pruritic folliculitis affecting the upper body but not the face, usually arising on neck, back, shoulders and upper trunk. The follicular pustules emerge 24 - 72 h after intense exposure to heat and/or sunlight and fade spontaneously in 5 - 10 days, without scarring. This patient showed a 48-hour latency period; the number of pustules and area of the body affected were proportional to the duration of the sunlight exposure; the eruption lasted approximately 10 days. Actinic superficial folliculitis has a specific histology with follicular subcorneal sterile pustules and a mixed inflammatory infiltrate around hair follicles, probably secondary to keratinocytes and Langerhans cells involvement in the immunomodulatory actions of ultraviolet radiation. Recurrence under identical conditions may occur, after a latency period of at least 4 weeks, but usually about 1 year. Actinic superficial folliculitis and related follicular conditions are probably underdiagnosed and subsequently there is insufficient scientific information available to clinicians. Being familiar with these entities is of the utmost importance, since it can be crucial for their management.


This paper is a brief discussion of the early history of industrial democracy in one Scandinavian country: Sweden. Specific attention is paid to the evolving labor laws and the impact they had in creating this truly unique nation-wide approach to cooperative management-labor relations. It is interesting to note that although the three Scandinavian countries developed along similar lines, each maintained individual characteristics and philosophies towards the democratization of the workplace. It is also clear that industrial democracy in Scandinavia meant much more than employee representation on the board of directors. It encompassed all employee participation in the decision making process from the individual worker on the shop floor, through various cooperation committees or works councils, to the board of directors, and even outside of one's organization. Without question the early Scandinavian experimentation with employee participation and workplace democracy has long been held as the shining prototype that other nations (or at least by their academics) could only emulate. While recent history has indicated that there are a few flaws in Utopia, there is little doubt that the Scandinavian quality of work life and cooperative management-labor relations provide significant lessons for the rest of the world. This paper will not critique the merits of Scandinavia's workplace democracy. This paper attempts to provide an understanding of how one of these three countries, faced with the same pressures and issues as everyone else coming out of the industrial revolution, evolved such a unique approach to labor relations. This history lesson is also purposefully incomplete. It takes the reader from the Industrial Revolution to 1980. This stopping point is by no means arbitrary, for it was in the economic downswing of the late 1970's and early 1980's that some of the Scandinavian practices were found to be unrealistically excessive. The reader is encouraged to make comparisons between the Swedish experience and other nations' of which he/she is familiar with in order to develop a true appreciation for how this nation evolved such an unique approach to management. Sweden History of Swedish Labor Relations Industrialization began to expand in Sweden during the later part of the 19th Century. Manufacturing was centered in many small industrial towns. This differed from the British and U.S. experiences that saw manufacturing centered in larger industrial regions. With the growth of industrialization came the desire of workers to have greater control over their destinies in this new, strange environment in which they labored. Originally, there was legislation restricting the formation of trade unions, but these laws were gradually abolished during the middle decades of the 19th Century. By the 1880's and 90's, many labor unions had been formed, primarily by craft. In 1889 a central trade union confederation, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, (LO) was formed to improve the rights of its members. It was closely aligned with the Social Democratic Labor Party and strongly supported the Party's political beliefs (Forseback, 1980; Martin, 1979). Although the Swedish government has generally had a tradition of favoring labor unions, there were periods when labor legislation was designed to inhibit union growth and power. In 1889 a law was passed that made it illegal to prevent strike breaking which remained a viable anti-union law until it was repealed in 1938. This, and other laws, helped the labor organizations to see that relations with employers should be determined through negotiation rather than legislation. Therefore, collective bargaining was seen as the way for the labor movement to control its own destiny. In 1902 a general strike was called by various labor organizations in support of the Social Democratic and Liberal parties' demands for universal suffrage. Not expected by labor was the reaction caused by the strike. …


Lesion biopsies of 60 fingers from 30 patients with vibration-induced white finger (VWF) and control observations from seven fingers of five referents demonstrated three main characteristic pathological changes. First, in each case, the muscular layers of the arteries revealed intense thickening with strong hypertrophy of individual muscle cells without intimal fibrosis. Periarterial fibrosis was also noted. Arteriosclerosis with foamy cells, lipid deposition, and fibrous sclerosis was occasionally observed. The second main change was demyelinating neuropathy in the peripheral nerves in which a marked loss of nerve fibers had occurred. There was also an increase in the number of Schwann cells and fibroblasts with strong collagen formation. Severe loss of myelin sheath frequently occurred, and relatively smaller axons without myelin which appeared to have regenerated were observed. Perineural fibrosis was also noted. In the third main pathological change connective tissues with collagen were increased not only in the perivascular and perineural lesions, but also abundantly in the corium of the skin. The elastic fibers there had been destroyed. These three principal pathological changes are very useful for the histopathological diagnosis of VWF.


Most enterprises today run their applications on virtual machines (VMs). VM mobility - both live and offline, can provide enormous flexibility and also bring down OPEX (Operational Expenditure) costs. However, both live and offline migration of VMs is still limited to within a local network because of the complexities associated with cross subnet live and offline migration. These complexities mainly arise from the hierarchical addressing used by various layer 3 routing protocols. For cross data center VM mobility, virtualization vendors require that the network configuration of the new data center where a VM migrates must be similar to that of the old data center. This severely restricts wide spread use of VM migration across data center networks. For offline migration, the above limitations can be overcome by reconfiguring IP addresses for the migrated VMs. However, even this effort is non-trivial and time consuming as these IP addresses are embedded in various configuration files inside these VMs. As enterprises grow and new data centers emerge in different geographic locations, there is a need to interconnect these data centers in a way that allows seamless VM mobility. In this context, we present CrossRoads - a network fabric that provides layer agnostic and seamless live and offline VM mobility across multiple data centers. We leverage software defined networking and implement an OpenFlow based prototype of CrossRoads. CrossRoads extends the idea of location independence based on pseudo addresses proposed in recent research to work with a control plane overlay of OpenFlow network controllers in various data centers. We evaluate CrossRoads on an innovative testbed that leverages nested virtualization to emulate two data centers. Our results confirm that CrossRoads has negligible performance overhead as compared to a Default layer 2 network - its average performance was no worse than 2.3% as compared to Default fabric across all experiments. In some experiments, it even outperformed the Default by up to 30%.


Charging full requirements customers for distribution network services using the traditional cents per kilowatt-hour (KWh) price creates economic incentives for consumers to invest in distributed generation technologies, such as rooftop solar photovoltaics, despite the fact that marginal cost of grid-supplied electricity is lower. This paper first assesses the economic efficiency properties of this approach to transmission and distribution network pricing and whether current approach to distribution network pricing implies that full-requirement customers cross-subsidize distributed solar customers. Using data on quarterly residential distribution network prices and distributed solar installations from California's three largest investor-owned utilities I find that larger amounts of distributed solar capacity and more geographically concentrated solar capacity predict higher distribution network prices and average distribution network costs. This result continues to hold even after controlling for average distribution network costs for the utility, Using these econometric model estimates, I find that 2/3 of the increase in residential distribution network prices for each of the three utilities between 2003 and 2016 can attributed to the growth distributed solar capacity. The paper then investigates the extent of the legal obligation that distributed solar generation customers have to pay for sunk costs of investments in the transmission and distribution networks. The paper closes with a description of an alternative approach to distribution network pricing that is likely to increase the economic signals for efficient electricity consumption and the incentive for cost effective installation of distributed solar generation capacity.


Suffering is not something merely to be coped with; it holds important transformative power. Yet, it is important that suffering is not idealized or viewed as something that is, in itself, good. While suffering is not something to be sought, through embracing suffering that cannot be avoided, the suffering often can be transformed. Meaning is one of the most important constructs in working with suffering from an existential perspective. As Viktor Frankl (1946/1984) stated, "suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning" (p. 117). Meaning does not necessarily take the suffering away, but it changes the way that individuals experience suffering. Not all forms of suffering are the same, nor are all forms of meaning the same. From a clinical perspective, the therapist works with clients to help them to explore the various realms and aspects of their suffering. However, without a good therapeutic relationship and a competent guide, the journey into suffering can cause harm instead of healing. Not all forms of meaning are able to help a client sustain through and transform the experience of suffering. Superficial or imposed meaning even by well-intentioned others often are not sustaining meanings. Therapists working with the client's suffering need to be able to recognize the varieties of types of suffering as well as the varieties of types of meanings to help clients transform their experience of suffering.


In The Yale Manuscript Arnold singles out Homer, the Old Testament, and Shakespeare for their distinction in both matter and manner that enabled them to achieve a rare wholeness. As examples of one-sided, incomplete achievements, he points to "the Greek philosophers (Epicurus, Empedocles)" who have only "the great way of thinking, coextensive with nature" and, on the other hand, Tennyson, who "has the thinking and feeling that is in nature ..." (180; c. 1850). This assessment of Tennyson as a mere stylist epitomizes Arnold's attitude that remained unaffected even by the publication of In Memoriam. About June, 1850, Arnold purchased a copy as a present for his sister Jane, whose birthday was August 1st. She dated the volume "July, 1850." (1) Arnold must have read the poem before giving it to her. Yet he continued to think of Tennyson exclusively in terms of language and imagery, and, in fact, never regarded him as more than a poet with considerable verbal gifts and "poetic sentiment." On December 2, 1866, he inscribed a poem on the verso of the half-title of a Selection from the Works of Alfred Tennyson (1865), which he gave at her request to his niece Mary (later Mrs. Humphry Ward). The poem, a Tennysonian pastiche, incorporates some brief quotations from Tennyson and uses the In Memoriam stanza. The poem emphasizes the lyric qualities of Tennyson's poetry (five references in twenty lines). There is, however, also a reference to the volume as "a treasure-house of priceless thought...." Kenneth Allott noted that this "should not be taken too seriously.... Clearly he could not use the same language in making a gift of Tennyson's poems to an enthusiastic schoolgirl as he used soberly to his friends and contemporaries...." "Treasure-house" may also have had special connotations for Arnold. In his Preface to Poems (1853), he denigrated Keats's "Isabella," despite the fact that it is "a perfect treasure-house of graceful and felicitous words and images" (CPW 1: 10). Arnold regularly put Tennyson in the misguided tradition that emphasized the beauty of the part rather than of the whole, the tradition of Keats "and those d--d Elizabethan poets generally" (CL 97). In 1860, Arnold described poems like In Memoriam as "holding forth in verse which for anything in the nature of the composition itself, may perfectly well go on forever." (2) His usually uncomplimentary comments on Tennyson (not, as a rule, intended for publication) need to be put in context. When Arnold was beginning to write poetry seriously, his Oxford contemporaries assumed that Tennyson was the major poet of the coming age (the generation after Wordsworth). In the early 1840s, while Arnold was still an undergraduate, the Decade at Oxford thought it worth debating whether Wordsworth or Tennyson was the greater poet. Arnold knew Tennyson's early poetry so well that he had to be on his guard against Tennysonian echoes in his own work. (3) By 1847, he was attacking Tennyson for "dawdling with [the Universe's] painted shell" (CL 163). The fact that by 1850 Tennyson had come to be widely recognized as "our only living great poet," as Charles Kingsley expressed it in his anonymous review of In Memoriam for Fraser's Magazine (Jump 173) made Arnold all the more determined to focus on the limitations of Tennyson when compared with writers who really deserved to be called great. Even roughly contemporary Continental poets like Heine and de Musset seemed to him Tennyson's superiors (CL 154). Yet Tennyson was inescapably the living poet against whom English poets had to measure themselves. (4) The fact that a poet of Tennyson's limited endowments (as Arnold assessed them) was considered great must have reinforced his view of the "unpoetrylessness" of the age (CL 126). The reference to the naivete of Tennyson's language and imagery seems mistaken now, but it was a commonplace early in Tennyson's career. It also needs to be recalled that in the 1830s and 1840s Tennyson was frequently compared with his romantic predecessors. …


CASE DESCRIPTION The primary subject matter of this case concerns the individual-level application of elements of the strategic management process. This process includes the scanning of the environment, analysis of alternative courses of action based on information gained from the scanning process and the formulation and implementation of individual career strategies based on that process. Secondary issues examined include an examination of the career effects of following both sound and flawed decision-making processes relating to career decisions. The case has a difficulty level appropriate for junior or senior level business students. The case is designed to be taught in 1-3 class hours and is expected to require 1-2 hours of outside preparation by students. CASE SYNOPSIS This case contrasts the career decision-making processes of three very good friends that attended university together - Kitty, Nancy and Teresa. They first met when they were all enrolled in the same strategic management class and worked together as a group. After graduation, they were all hired by the same company. Kitty and Teresa are still with the same company and are doing very well. Nancy has recently lost her job with the company as a consequence of restructuring and has accepted a position with a company that will take her to a different part of the country. The case takes place at a farewell dinner for Nancy hosted by Teresa and Kitty. The case describes the two very different paths taken by the three friends to manage their careers to this point. All three began work in the same division with their employer - selling consumer electronics to medium and small retailers. Nancy transferred from the consumer products division to the automotive products division without considering the strategic position of that division. In contrast, Teresa & Kitty carefully considered the strategic position of the various divisions of the company before transferring to the division with best prospects for growth. While her friends continued to do well in their division, Nancy is paying a heavy price for not paying attention to some very important changes that were taking place in the company. Kitty and Teresa used logic-based principles of the strategic management process in their own personal career development decisions - with significant positive results. Nancy, on the other hand, utilized career decision-making criteria that were based on personal convenience and intuitive appeal. The case provides a clear description of how the strategic management process has tremendous utility for the individual-level career decision-making process as well as management of the organization. CASE It might be an enjoyable Friday after work "happy hour" for most patrons of the La Aguila Vuela Cantina, an upscale urban Mexican restaurant. However, for one patron it was not very happy at all. Three long time friends and coworkers had gathered one last time to say goodbye. One of them had recently lost her job in a corporate reorganization and had taken a lesser paying position in a small company that was located in a different part of the country. Teresa, Kitty and Nancy were classmates and graduated from an undergraduate business administration program offered by a prestigious public University. Once they arrived and were seated by the hostess, the conversation started by reminiscing about the many happy times they shared as undergraduates. They met as a result of being assigned to the same student group in their capstone strategic management class. The student groups in this class were each required to prepare an industry analysis. The group held weekly meetings at a local coffee shop to prepare for their presentation at the end of the semester. The group members really got to know each other during these meetings which resulted in the three classmates forming a close friendship that continued after graduation. After graduation, all three were hired by the same consumer electronics division of a foreign manufacturing company as salespersons based at the company's U. …


Maximal oxygen consumption (VO2max) is lower in females compared to males during traditional whole body, systemic exercise. These differences in VO2max between men and women are still present even after correcting for differences in fat and muscle mass and are due, in part, to central limitations in oxygen delivery in females. Many of these limitations can be avoided by evaluating exercise in an isolated muscle groups.   At rest and maximum in the forearm, both men and women have the same relative oxygen consumption and blood flow. There are some differences in the calf at rest; both males and females have the same relative oxygen consumption, however females receive a higher relative blood flow. To investigate if inherent skeletal muscle differences exist between men and women, we measured VO2 and power output during graded treadmill and calf plantar flexion exercise to maximum. It was hypothesized that the relative aerobic and work capacity of the calf would be lower in women compared to men. During treadmill exercise, men had greater absolute VO2 and power output at maximum and when expressed relative to fat free mass (FFM), there was no difference in power output between genders, but differences in VO2max persisted with men still being higher. During plantar flexion exercise, men again demonstrated greater absolute VO2 and power output at maximum and when expressed relative to calf FFM there was no difference in either VO2 or power output between genders. It is concluded that there are no inherent muscle differences in aerobic or work capacity between men and women suggesting that differences in absolute aerobic and work capacity are not due to gender, but rather differences in muscle mass


This paper presents the initial findings of the OPAL project. OPAL aims to move beyond a focus on the development of open educational resources (OER) to articulation of the associated open educational practices (OEP) around the creation, use and management of OER. In this paper we provide a definition of Open educational practices, along with an associated set of dimensions. We describe how these were derived based on an extensive survey and analysis of OER case studies. The article focuses on three aspects: First it provides a working definition of open educational practices and articulates how better understanding of OEP might lead to enhancements in both quality and innovation in education. Secondly it is discusses the ways in which adopting more 'open' approaches to educational practices might impact on the quality of education. Thirdly, the case study findings are presented and the ways in which the different stakeholders involved influence open educational practices are discussed.


This document is conceived for architects and intended to be as clear and practical as possible. It summarizes the knowledge needed to integrate active solar technologies (solar thermal and photovoltaics) into buildings, handling at the same time architectural integration issues and energy production requirements. Solar thermal and photovoltaics are treated separately, but the information is given following the same structure: 1- Main technical information; 2- Constructive/functional integration possibilities in the envelope layers; 3- System sizing and positioning criteria; 4- Good integration examples; 5- Formal flexibility offered by standard products; 6 - Innovative market products. To complete the information the manual ends with a short section dedicated to the differences and similarities between solar thermal and photovoltaic systems, with the purpose to help architects make an energetic and architecturally optimized use of the sun exposed surfaces of their buildings.


Introduction: Since the initial approval of imatinib much has been learned about its resistance mechanisms, and efforts have continued to improve upon BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase inhibitor therapy. Targeted therapy with TKIs has continued to be an area of active research and development in the care of acute and chronic leukemia patients. Areas covered: This article reviews current approved and investigational TKI treatments for chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), Philadelphia-chromosome positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia (Ph + ALL) and acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Expert opinion: There are now more potent BCR-ABL TKIs approved, which allow for additional options when determining front-line and second-line CML and Ph + ALL treatments. The T315I mutation is an ever-present challenge. Ponatinib, a pan BCR-ABL TKI, while still under investigation, is very hopeful with its ability to overcome T315I mutations in resistant CML and Ph + ALL patients. Because nilotinib and dasatinib have not been directly compared, at present we recommend selecting one or the other based on the side-effect profile, drug interactions, patient comorbidities, and mutational status. FLT-3 inhibition is of particular interest in AML patients with FLT-3 internal tandem duplication mutations; this type of targeted therapy continues to be studied.


This paper focuses on political change in Venezuela from a critical discourse analysis perspective that emphasizes the roles of the participants in the interaction to show how, with their actions, they are affected and affect others. An interactional approach based on Firth's categories of context (Firth, 1951) and conversational analysis is used (Bolivar, 1986, 1994a, 1994b). The interaction is studied at a global level first in order to identify the actors responsible for political change in the social dynamics, and then particular events are examined in more detail. The aim is to describe how, in ongoing interaction, the political dialogue after 1998 moved from a formal democratic one to a violent confrontation between two major groups. The article focuses on political events before and after April 11th 2002, which marked a turning point in Venezuelan history. The corpus includes national newspapers, presidential speeches, the program Alo Presidente, slogans, graffiti, and insults recalled by women and men. The results show how verbal aggression and physical violence affect and weaken democratic dialogue and, consequently, the possibility of cooperation and understanding. The discussion highlights the need to strengthen critical language awareness in order to promote peace language rather than hate language.


After briefly pointing out that different perceptions regarding TEE exist and referring to the purpose of TEE, this contribution lists ten weaknesses of the TEE programmes in Africa. Perceptions pertaining to its credibility, its lack of resources, tendency towards isolationism and exclusivism, underplayed ecumenical co-operation, threat of empire building, lack of sufficient church support, lack of tutor training, technological pressures, a redefining of its role in a new millennium and an attitude change are all aspects which are discussed as weak links which might affect the future of this movement. After discussing these weaknesses, some suggestions are offered on how each of them could be addressed.


Recent developments both in science and philosophy are tending to converge upon an outlook on things that constitutes or at least foreshadows a great new synthesis. The advances made more especially in astronomical and physical knowledge—the one concerning the indefinitely vast and the other the indefinitely minute—and the similarities disclosed in the two spheres, recalling Pascal's insistent relating of the two infinites (the infinitely great and the infinitely small), and also Bacon's contention that such similarities are not mere analogies but "the same footsteps of nature treading or printing upon several subjects or matters," 1 have both widened and unified our conceptions of reality. Along with this has gone the influence alike on philosophy and on the sciences generally of the development of mathematical and biological ideas. Under the combined influence, especially, of Bergson and Einstein a restatement of fundamental principles is proceeding apace.


Summary 1. Alien species can change the recipient environment in various ways, and some of them cause considerable damage. Understanding such impacts is crucial to direct management actions. This study addresses the following questions: Is it possible to quantify impact across higher taxa in a comparative manner? Do impacts differ between taxonomic groups? How are environmental and socio-economic impacts related? Can impacts be predicted based on those in other regions? 2. To address these questions, we reviewed literature describing the impacts of 300 species from five major taxonomic groups: mammals, birds, fish, terrestrial arthropods and plants. To make very diverse impact measures comparable, we used the semi-quantitative generic impact scoring system (GISS) which describes environmental and socio-economic impacts using twelve categories. In each category, scores range from zero (no impact known or detectable) to five (the highest possible impact). 3. Using the same scoring system for taxa as diverse as invertebrates, vertebrates and plants, we found that overall, alien mammals in Europe have the highest impact, while fish have the lowest. Terrestrial arthropods were found to have the lowest environmental impact, while fish had relatively low socio-economic impact. 4. Overall, the magnitude of environmental and socio-economic impacts of individual alien species is highly correlated. However, at the species level, major deviations are found. 5. For mammals and birds, the impacts in invaded ranges outside of Europe are broadly similar to those recorded for alien species within Europe, indicating that a consideration of the known impacts of a species in other regions can be generally useful when predicting the impacts of an alien species. However, it should be noted that this pattern is not consistent across all mammal and bird orders, and thus, such information should be considered with caution. 6. Synthesis and applications. Comparing the impacts of alien species across taxa is necessary for prioritizing management efforts and effective allocation of resources. By applying the generic impact scoring system (GISS) to five major taxonomic groups, we provide the basis for a semiquantitative cross-taxa listing process (e.g. 'black lists' or 100-worst-lists). If more data are collated from different geographical regions and habitats using standard GISS protocols, risk assessments for alien species based on rigorous measures of impact could be improved by taking into account local variation, and context dependence of impacts. This would also allow studies at lower taxonomic levels, and within-taxon analyses of functional groups and guilds.


Prevailing methods for graphs require abundant label and edge information for learning. When data for a new task are scarce, meta-learning can learn from prior experiences and form much-needed inductive biases for fast adaption to new tasks. Here, we introduce G-Meta, a novel meta-learning algorithm for graphs. G-Meta uses local subgraphs to transfer subgraph-specific information and learn transferable knowledge faster via meta gradients. G-Meta learns how to quickly adapt to a new task using only a handful of nodes or edges in the new task and does so by learning from data points in other graphs or related, albeit disjoint label sets. G-Meta is theoretically justified as we show that the evidence for a prediction can be found in the local subgraph surrounding the target node or edge. Experiments on seven datasets and nine baseline methods show that G-Meta outperforms existing methods by up to 16.3%. Unlike previous methods, G-Meta successfully learns in challenging, few-shot learning settings that require generalization to completely new graphs and never-before-seen labels. Finally, G-Meta scales to large graphs, which we demonstrate on a new Tree-of-Life dataset comprising of 1,840 graphs, a two-orders of magnitude increase in the number of graphs used in prior work.


While the internet has made it possible for the consumer to easily obtain images, audio, video, etc. in digital form, it has also made it easier to illegally obtain copyrighted material. Digital watermarking is a partial solution to this problem. Embedding a watermark in a legal version of material can help the copyright owner to identify who has an illegal copy. Because of the ever increasing enormity of the flow of information, it becomes necessary to watermark files in the least amount of time possible. For this reason it is natural to turn to parallel computing. In this work we compare the performance of three different implementations on a cluster of SMPs, in OpenMP, MPI, and CUDA, of a simple algorithm for watermarking digital images. Our experiments show that CUDA with one gpu is almost 300 times faster than the sequential version and many times faster than OpenMP and MPI using 1 up to 8 nodes.


In this paper I describe a method for analyzing mergers in industries in which it is more cost effective to close capacity than to idle it. The method can be used to define markets, to assess the likelihood of competitive effects and to evaluate divestitures. I also discuss the method's data requirements and how it can be modified to deal with the types of issues that often arise during an antitrust investigation.


This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account. Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, Spies resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. Spies also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted for American nuclear spies. Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.


We revise the Southeast Asian Pholcus bicornutus group in which males are characterized by a unique pair of horns on their ocular area, each of which carries at its tip a brush of hairs. In two species, the two hair brushes are 'glued' or 'waxed' together by an unidentified substance into a very consistently curved and pointed single median tip. In the other five species known, the hairs are unglued. We present a first revision of ocular modifications in Pholcidae and identify twenty supposedly independent origins. Most cases are in Pholcinae, and all but one case are limited to the male, suggesting sexual selection as the main driving force in the evolution of ocular modifications in Pholcidae. Previously, the Pholcus bicornutus group consisted of four species limited to the Philippines. We describe four new species, including three species from the Philippines ( P. olangapo Huber, sp. nov.; P. kawit Huber, sp. nov.; P. baguio Huber, sp. nov.) and the first representative from outside the Philippines ( P. mulu Huber, sp. nov. from Sarawak, NE Borneo) and provide new records and SEM data for three previously described species.


This thesis reports the development of a suite of FBG-based optical fibre sensors for non-destructive testing (NDT) and illustrating their potential for several specific industrial applications in the marine and railway sectors. These arose from work driven by the needs of project collaborators from these industries and are intended to be illustrative of the wider potential applications that optical fibre sensors have for measurements in different industrial sectors. The research has involved the development of new sensor system designs to meet these needs, building as they do upon a comprehensive review of NDT technologies and solutions, discussed in some detail.

In this research for the marine sector, a single FBG-based acoustic sensor was specifically developed and evaluated and compared with the performance of conventional sensors. To do so, a metal plate to which the sensors were fixed was excited with a sonotrode, at a resonant frequency of 19.5 kHz. The signal reflecting that acoustic excitation was captured by the FBG sensors designed and implemented and their performance has been shown to be comparable with that from conventional, industry-standard piezoelectric transducers (PZTs). Preliminary work undertaken for the sponsors then lead to the further development of an acoustic sensor array comprising of 3 FBGs, which was subsequently validated against co-located PZTs which all were installed on a glass plate and excited in an industry-standard way, through the acoustic signal from a 0.2 g steel ball dropped onto the plate. When signals were analysed and compared, the positive comparative performance outcomes from the sensors used enabled further the design and implementation of instrumentation for a marine lifting surface using a different array, designed comprising 4 FBG-based acoustic sensors. Extensive tests on the smart marine lifting surface created were undertaken under water with a sonotrode set at 26 kHz as an excitation source. Based on the arrival time of acoustic signals captured by each grating and the use of triangulation method, the location of the excitation source could thus be determined, to meet the needs of the industrial sponsor and show good agreement with the outputs of conventional sensor systems.

In parallel with the above, a further new industrial application of FBG-based sensor arrays was developed for a major player in the field, for the first time successfully instrumenting a railway current-collecting pantograph to allow reliable, remote in situ monitoring of key parameters: the contact force and contact location of the pantograph against the catenary. The optical fibre sensor approach has been shown to be an excellent means of measurement whose performance can be extrapolated to situations where the train is driven at high speeds up to 125 mph and powered from a high voltage line at 25 kV, in this design taking full advantages of the immunity of the optical fibre sensors to electromagnetic interference. In this research, key technical performance challenges were addressed and successfully overcome, including the temperature compensation needed for 'all-weather' performance, due to the intrinsic cross-sensitivity problems of using a FBG-based design being been fully addressed. This ensures the accurate measurement of the contact force/location between the pantograph and the catenary under all weathers.

The research concludes by considering future directions for the work in these and other industry sectors.


Trehalose is a nonreducing disaccharide of glucose that functions as a compatible solute in the stabilization of biological structures under abiotic stress in bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates. With the notable exception of the desiccation-tolerant "resurrection plants," trehalose is not thought to accumulate to detectable levels in most plants. We report here the regulated overexpression of Escherichia coli trehalose biosynthetic genes (otsA and otsB) as a fusion gene for manipulating abiotic stress tolerance in rice. The fusion gene has the advantages of necessitating only a single transformation event and a higher net catalytic efficiency for trehalose formation. The expression of the transgene was under the control of either tissue-specific or stress-dependent promoters. Compared with nontransgenic rice, several independent transgenic lines exhibited sustained plant growth, less photo-oxidative damage, and more favorable mineral balance under salt, drought, and low-temperature stress conditions. Depending on growth conditions, the transgenic rice plants accumulate trehalose at levels 3–10 times that of the nontransgenic controls. The observation that peak trehalose levels remain well below 1 mg/g fresh weight indicates that the primary effect of trehalose is not as a compatible solute. Rather, increased trehalose accumulation correlates with higher soluble carbohydrate levels and an elevated capacity for photosynthesis under both stress and nonstress conditions, consistent with a suggested role in modulating sugar sensing and carbohydrate metabolism. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of engineering rice for increased tolerance of abiotic stress and enhanced productivity through tissue-specific or stress-dependent overproduction of trehalose.


The fundamental problem of external validity is not to generalize from one experiment, so much as to experimentally test generalizable theories. That is, theories that explain the systematic variation of causal effects across contexts. Here we show how the graphical language of causal diagrams can be used in this endeavour. Specifically we show how generalization is a causal problem, how a causal approach is more robust than a purely predictive one, and how causal diagrams can be adapted to convey partial parametric information about interactions.


Performance and sensitivity of freely available equal resolution space borne digital elevation model derivatives in landslide susceptibility analysis were carried out in a selected part of the Western Ghats, India. ASTER and SRTM digital elevation models having 30m resolution were used to derive the terrain variables such as slope, aspect, relative relief, slope length and steepness, curvature, landform and stream networks. Most of the variables shown spatial variability in distribution pattern, which affects the results of geo-environmental processes analyzed. Sensitivity and performance of each variable derived from the digital elevation models were assessed by preparing a landslide susceptibility index (LSI) maps using the Information Value (InfoVal) technique and was validated through receiver operator characteristics (ROC) curve analysis. LSI maps generated point towards the capability of the SRTM digital elevation model, to correctly generate the terrain variables than the ASTER elevation surface, by giving the accuracy of LSI maps greater than those produced using the ASTER derived parameters (0.77 and 0.72 for SRTM; 0.67 and 0.65 for ASTER). The results of the present study suggest, the SRTM digital elevation data is more sensitive and suitable for terrain analysis and earth surface process modelling than the ASTER elevation data sets, though both possess equal resolutions .DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.erem.73.2.16385


Wildlife conservation schemes, which by design set out to protect endangered fauna and flora, have a relatively recent history in northern Arabia. Their philosophical underpinnings, though, stem from a long African colonial and post-independence tradition. In East Africa and elsewhere, pastoral populations were long ago forced off their grazing lands, in order to create parks and sanctuaries for wildlife and tourists (Howell 1987, McCabe et al. 1992, Turton 1987). The assumption then was that local populations overstocked and overgrazed the natural environment and were thereby obstacles to effective natural resource management. `Scientific' management of these areas required the removal of the indigenous population for the long-term benefit of these wildlife preserves. Over the past decade however, there appears to have been a change of heart, and some conservationist circles do now hold conceptual discussions of `conservation with a human face' (Bell 1987), and the need for community participation (Cernea 1991, IIED 1994). Studies based on a few promising examples of African conservation efforts are now emerging, where indigenous human populations appear to be effectively integrated into conservation and development projects (IIED 1994). When transposed to the Middle East, Africa's new-found conservation wisdom loses something in the translation (Figure 1). As I shall demonstrate, using a case study of an internationally-supported, wildlife reintroduction project in Oman, conservation schemes in Arabia have continued to regard local populations as obstacles to be overcome--either with monetary compensation or with special terms of local employment--instead of partners in sustainable conservation and development. Without partnership, these conservation efforts are doomed either to ultimate failure or, at the least, to costly programmes which `guard' the wildlife from the human element. Syria is now developing its own protected wildlife reintroduction area in a part of the desert that provides crucial winter and spring grazing for the herds of a number of Bedouin tribes. The current well-being and subsistence of these communities is at stake. If the Bedouin can be drawn into the planning and implementation of an efficient land-use and water management system, which incorporates them and their livestock into the equation, there is a chance that the wildlife reintroduction project will succeed. On the other hand, if the final design and implementation of the wildlife project ignore the human element then the outcome will be very costly and unsatisfactory. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Recent Historical Precursors to Current Conservation Paradigms Government organised parks and protected areas first made their appearance in America and Europe during the last century. Significant areas of land were set aside as wilderness, to be preserved `untouched by humans', for the good of man. In 1872 a tract of hot springs and geysers in northwestern Wyoming was set aside to establish Yellowstone National Park. The inhabitants of the area, mainly Crow and Shoshone native American Indians, were driven out by the army, which took over management of the area (Morrison 1993). In the United Kingdom, conservationists were mainly foresters whose philosophy stressed that the public good was best served through the protection of forests and water resources, even if this meant the displacement of local communities (McCracken 1987: 190). This expertise and philosophy was transferred abroad to all of Great Britain's colonial holdings. Now, a century later, most national parks in the developing world have been and, to a certain extent, continue to be, created on the model pioneered at Yellowstone and built upon by the early British colonial conservationists. The fundamental principal of operation remains to protect the park or reserve from the damage which the indigenous local communities inflict. In Africa problems like soil erosion, degradation of rangelands, desertification, and the destruction of wildlife have been viewed as principally due to local, indigenous misuse of resources. …


BACKGROUND
 Although elderly users comprise a major user group in the field of mobile health (mHealth) services, their adoption rate of such services is relatively low compared with their use of traditional health services. Increasing the adoption rate of mHealth services among elderly users is beneficial to the aging process.

 OBJECTIVE
 This study aimed to examine the determinants of mHealth service use intentions using a trust transfer model among elderly users facing declining physiological conditions and lacking support from hospitals.

 METHODS
 A survey comprising 395 users aged 60 years and above was conducted in China to validate our research model and hypotheses.

 RESULTS
 The results reveal that (1) trust in mHealth services positively influences use intentions, (2) trust in offline health services positively influences trust in mHealth services, (3) declining physiological conditions strengthen the effects of trust in offline health services regarding trust in mHealth services, (4) support from hospitals weakens the effects of trust in mHealth services on use intentions, and (5) the relationship between trust in offline health services and intention to use mHealth services is partially mediated by trust in mHealth services. The independent variables and moderators collectively explain a 48.3% variance in the use intention of mHealth services.

 CONCLUSIONS
 We conclude that the trust transfer theory is useful in explaining the development of initial trust in mHealth services. In addition, declining physiological conditions and support from hospitals are important factors for investigating the adoption of mHealth services among elderly users.


OBJECTIVE
To observe the underlying mechanism of acupuncture technique for ventilating the lung, invigorating the spleen and tonifying the kidney in the treatment of bronchial asthma (or asthma for short).

METHODS
According to the severity of the disease during the persistent stage and paracmasis, 71 outpatients and inpatients were randomized into treatment group (n = 40) and control group (n = 31). Patients of treatment group were treated with acupuncture of Quchi (LI 11), Lieque (LU 7), Yuji (LU 10), Neiguan (PC 6), Zusanli (ST 36), Sanyinjiao (SP 6), Taixi (KI 3), etc., once daily and those of control group treated with anti-asthma drugs as Cromolyn sodium, Albuterol, fenoterol, etc. Before and after 12 days of the treatment, heart rate variability (HRV) and pulmonary function were detected respectively.

RESULTS
In paracmasis and mild type asthma patients, self-comparison indicated that after the treatment, total power (TP), very low frequency (VLF), triangular index (TI) and the percentage of the adjacent R-R intervals (PNN50) of HRV, and forced expiratory volume in the first second (FEV1) (% PRED), forced expiratory flow (FEF) 0.2-1.2 (L/s), FEF(75%-85%) (L/s), peak expiratory flow (PEF) (% PRED), FEF(25%) (% PRED) in treatment group increased significantly (P < 0.05, 0.01), while no significant changes of various components of both HRV and pulmonary function were found in control group (P > 0.05). Comparison between two groups showed that after the treatment, the values of TP, VLF, TI and PNN50 of HRV, and FVC (% PRED), FEV1 (% PRED), FEV1/FVC (% PRED), FEF(0.2-1.2), FEF(25%-75%), PEF (% PRED) and FEF(25%) (% PRED) in treatment group were significantly higher than those in control group (P < 0.05). In moderate and severe type asthma patients, self-comparison showed that after the treatment, TP, LF, LFnorm, VLF, LF/HF, VLF/HF, (LF + VLF)/HF, TI and PNN50 of HRV, and FVC (% PRED), FEV1 (% PRED), FEV1/FVC (% PRED), FEF(0.2-1.2), FEF(25%-75%) (% PRED), FEF(75%-85%), PEF (% PRED), FEF25% (% PRED) , FEF(50%) (%PRED and FEF(75%) (% PRED) of the pulmonary function all increased remarkably (P < 0.05, 0.01, 0.001); while in comparison with control group, LF, LFnorm, VLF, (LF + VLF)/HF and TI of HRV, and all the parameters of the pulmonary function except FEV1/FVC were significantly higher than those in control group (P < 0.05, 0.01, 0.001). No significant changes of various components of both HRV and pulmonary function were found in control group (P > 0.05).

CONCLUSION
Acupuncture is significantly superior to medication in improving the pulmonary function of asthma patients with different state of disease, which is related to its function in regulating activities of the autonomic nervous system.


The rhodium(II)-catalyzed annulations of N-vinyl indole derivatives and N-tosyl-1,2,3-triazoles have been developed in this paper, providing a convenient, efficient and straightforward access to synthesize indoles containing a N-dihydropyrrole in moderate to good yields. Furthermore, the reaction of N-vinyl indoles with 2.5 equiv. of N-tosyl-1,2,3-triazoles gave C3-functionalized indoles containing a N-dihydropyrrole in moderate yields after reduction with NaBH3CN in a one-pot manner. This finding gives a new synthetic protocol for the preparation of indoles containing a N-dihydropyrrole under mild conditions.


Abstract In this paper, we aim to reconstruct the form of affirmative replies in the English spoken in England in the period 500–800. Examination of the extant texts shows that the two forms of the Old English word for 'yes', i.e. gea and gyse, are distinguished functionally, in that the former is used to reply to positive utterances and the latter to negative utterances. It is not clear, however, where the word gyse comes from. It has no cognates in other Germanic languages and the two main existing proposals for its etymology are problematic in several respects, and also fail to explain its functional patterning in the texts. We suggest a new, more plausible, etymology for gyse and use it to reconstruct the positive response system of proto-Old English. Apart from solving the puzzle ofgyse's origins, our proposal has two wider implications. The first is methodological, in that we demonstrate the value in historical reconstructive work of paying close attention not only to grammatical, phonological and semantic factors but also to the pragmatics of the forms being postulated. Secondly, the attested Old English data show a correlation that has been observed more widely through cross-linguistic comparison, i.e. the existence of a designated response item to negative utterances coupled with the existence of 'high' clausal negation. Drawing on our reconstruction of the emergence of gyse in proto-Old English, we suggest that one possible source of cross-linguistic correlations of this kind is diachronic development, in this case grounded in properties of day-to-day interaction in discourse.


Methods for studying the avian immune system have matured during the past two decades, with laboratory studies predominating in earlier years and field studies being conducted only in the past decade. One application has been to determine the potential for environmental contaminants to produce immune suppression, while another research direction is looking at the evolutionary significance of a robust immune system, and the relationship between immune competence and fitness parameters. Laboratory studies of immunosuppression following exposure of birds to environmental contaminants have adapted conventional mammalian methods to the avian immune system, and both lines of research have developed field-deployable measures of immune function. This review describes the avian immune system with emphasis on how it differs from the better known mammalian system, reviews the literature on contaminant-induced immunosuppression, and discusses the work on evolutionary biology of avian immunocompetence. Evidence indicates that the field of avian immunology is technically robust, even for nontraditional species such as passerines, seabirds, raptors, and other free-ranging species. It is now possible to screen chemicals for immunotoxicological properties following the same tiered approach that has been established for mammals. Despite the increased capacity and interest in avian field studies, there has not yet been a reported study of measured immune suppression associated with an avian epizootic. It is more likely that the immune suppression in adult birds resulting from low-level chronic stress (e.g., crowding onto poor quality habitat, food reductions, or climate stress) and (or) environmental contaminants causes slow but consistent morbidity and mortality associated with multiple pathogens, rather than an acute epizootic with a single pathogen. Increased fitness costs associated with such stress may significantly alter genetic diversity and species survival over time.


This work is dedicated to exploring the process of metaphor comprehension. There are a number of cognitive theories addressing this issue, including the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), the salience imbalance theory (Ortony, 1979), the structure mapping theory (Gentner, 1983), the domain-interaction theory (Tourangeau and Sternberg, 1982), the attributive categorization theory (Glucksberg and Keysar, 1990) and the conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998, 2002). A critical review of these theories and their supportive empirical studies have revealed that all of them are in a degree applicable to explaining the comprehension of certain metaphors but not capable of working with the processing of others. What are the major factors that drive different mappings to be involved in processing different metaphors and affect the metaphor comprehension? This is the major question to be investigated in this research.
Inspired by recent studies, a hypothesis is formulated: the cognitive processing mechanisms in comprehending a metaphor are largely influenced by the addressees' pre-existing conceptual knowledge as reflected in their estimation of the conventionality and the aptness of the metaphor and the communicative context in which the metaphor arises.
To test this hypothesis, a cross-cultural web-based experiment has been carried out to explore how three metaphors are comprehended under various role-play conditions by subjects whose pre-existing conceptual knowledge concerning these metaphors varies from each other. The metaphor The teacher is a candle was estimated by the Chinese subjects as the most conventional and apt teacher metaphor but the German subjects estimated it as a less conventional and less apt metaphor. The metaphor The teacher is a shepherd was estimated by the German subjects as the most conventional and apt, but by the Chinese subjects as less conventional and less apt. The metaphor The teacher is a captain was estimated by both Chinese and German subjects as a less conventional but apt metaphor. Under various role-play conditions (no role play, after the role play scenario with the positive development or after the role play with the negative development), the Chinese and the German participants were first asked to rate their affective impressions of the teacher metaphors on dimensions of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) (Lang, 1980). Then they were required to rate how suitable thirty-three features selected from a pilot study are in describing the teacher metaphors.
Altogether 180 complete valid data sets were collected from the participants from two German universities and two Chinese universities. The multivariate analysis of the SAM ratings and the cluster analysis and the network analysis of the feature ratings are summarized as follows: First, a greater consensus in both the SAM ratings and the feature ratings was shared among the subjects who regarded the metaphor as conventional and apt than those who regarded it as unconventional and inapt. Second, significant positive correlations between the topic and the vehicle concept were found in subjects' SAM and feature ratings of the metaphor that they regarded as conventional and apt. In contrast, their SAM ratings and feature ratings of the metaphor, which they regarded as unconventional and inapt, shows no positive correlation between the topic and the vehicle of the metaphor. Instead, there was a tendency of high rating emergent features. Third, context exerted significant influence on subjects' SAM and feature ratings. When the metaphor was provided in the role play with the positive development, a greater consensus in rating the SAM and the features appeared among the subjects who took the metaphor as unconventional and inapt. When the metaphor was provided under the condition of the role play with negative development, even the subjects who originally regarded the metaphor as conventional and apt seemed to lose their consensus in rating the SAM and the features.
Such results largely confirm the hypothesis of the experiment and reveal that the comprehension of a metaphor is not a static process but rather a dynamic one that can be affected by both the pre-existing conceptual knowledge of the metaphor addressee and the context in which the metaphor arises.
Based on the empirical findings, a dynamic theoretical view is formulated to explain the comprehension of metaphor through the integration of Wilson and Sperber's (2004) relevance theory, Cowan's (2005) working memory theory and relevant cognitive mapping theories. According to this view, the comprehension of metaphors can be segmented into various situations with the emphasis on the interplay of the addressee's conceptual knowledge and the communicative context in which the metaphor appears. Depending on people's conceptual knowledge preexisting in their long-term memory and the communicative context in which a metaphor appears, the comprehension of the metaphor involves testing the contextual metaphoric assumption that is formulated through the ad-hoc interplay of the topic space, the vehicle space, and the contextual space generated in people's working memory. The more conventional and apt the metaphor appears to them, the less complicated are the mappings involved in drawing the contextual metaphoric assumption needed for comprehending the metaphor.
This dynamic view of metaphor comprehension can explain why the German subjects had more difficulty than the Chinese subjects in comprehending the metaphor The teacher is a candle in this experiment. It can also provide a good solution to solve the debate among the current metaphor mapping theories and synthesize them in a plausible way. Furthermore, this cognitive metaphor research also suggests follow-up studies should be done in order to develop further the present dynamic view into a well-structured model of metaphor comprehension.


Awarded first prize in the Internal Medicine category of the British Medical Association Book of the Year Awards, 2012. Following a Tradition of Excellence. from reviews of previous editions: "the best source of synthesized clinical wisdom" -Gastroenterology "a tour de force in terms of knowledge and effort" -TheNew England Journal of Medicine "the foremost liver book in the world" -The Journal of the American Medical Association. "beautifully produced" -Hepatology Over the past 56 years, thousands of physicians have depended on Diseases of the Liver and Biliary System. Its didactic and reliable clinical guidance was - and still is - beyond comparison. This brand-new edition, now named Sherlock's Diseases of the Liver and Biliary System, after the late Professor Dame Sheila Sherlock, continues to provide concise clinical guidance for all those treating patients with hepato-biliary disease. Enabling clinicians to formulate incisive diagnoses and appropriate treatment strategies, this book has been updated to reflect the advances that have been made in the last 10 years, providing didactic and reliable clinical guidance in hepatology from the world's leading experts. A consistent chapter structure allows readers to access the information immediately, with summary boxes and key learning points throughout, and special emphasis on the latest in evidence-based clinical guidance. And for the first time, this edition now offers a free companion website providing the 680 full-color illustrations and figures in the book, for use in scientific presentations. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.


Majority of Malaysians do not meet the recommendation of adequate and regular physical activity, with about 61.4 % (aged 15 and above) considered inactive. This study examined the differences of psychosocial determinants of physical activity in undergraduates according to gender and physical activity index category. Self-efficacy Assessment, Social Support for Exercise, Motivation and Physical Activity Enjoyment Scales were used to measure the psychosocial determinants of physical activity. The Physical Activity Index (PAI) was determined by multiplying exercise intensity, duration and frequency. The total PAI score was categorized as 'Needs improvement' [NI], 'Fair' [F], 'Average' [A], 'Good' [G] and 'Excellent' [E]. A total of 359 undergraduates (male = 74.4%, female = 25.6%) were conveniently surveyed. Result in physical index category revealed that 25% of the undergraduates each was in the 'fair' and 'average' category. About 15% of the undergraduates needs improvement and 34.8% was in the 'good' and 'excellent' category. Inferential statistics analyses showed psychosocial determinants of 'self-efficacy', 'exercise enjoyment', 'motivation' and 'support from family' were significant according to gender. Males involved in physical activity due to 'self-efficacy', 'motivation' and 'enjoyment' while females were more influenced by family support. Significant results on PAI category and psychosocial determinants were shown in self-efficacy, social support from friends, motivation, and exercise enjoyment. For 'self-efficacy' and 'social support from friend' factors, the 'Need Improvement' group had low self-efficacy and low social support from friends. However, for the 'motivation' and 'exercise enjoyment' factors, the 'Needs Improvement' was more motivated and enjoyed exercise more than other groups.


Agricultural extension services are critical to the development of crops, livestock and fish farming in order to bring about social change. Fish farming, though introduced over 50 years ago through research and extension, remains at a slow pace of growth. There is a consensus in academic and policy literature about the potential benefits of fish farming, particularly nutrition and income generation. So why has extension not been more successful in improving the status of fish farming? Most explanations focus on supply side issues highlighting lack of inputs, particularly fingerlings and feeds with little consideration given to how the extension services themselves are organized in view of fish farming under general agriculture. Equally absent in the discourse are the perspectives on the motivations and experiences of individual fish farmers. Drawing from the Actor Oriented Perspective, this paper examines the organization and current status of extension service provision in aquaculture based on perspectives of policy makers, extension workers and fish farmers. Interviews were conducted with 246 fish farmers, eight extension workers and 11 key informants from government institutions. Secondary sources of information included various government documents on agriculture. Results revealed slow growth of aquaculture due to institutional and social factors regarding alignment of extension service provision to the needs of fish farmers. Reforms instituted over the past decades in search of better ways to avail farmers with improved farming knowledge have had minimal success. Less than 50% of fish farmers received extension visits from district extension staff with moderate difference (p<0.05) between frequency of extension visits in central and northern regions. Bias of extension service provision towards production related technical and information aspects above building and strengthening social capital of fish farmers was noted. Extension interventions should be socially negotiated and adapted in view of aspirations and limitations of fish farmers. DOI: 10.29011/2577-1493. 100037