The most precise map of galaxies has confirmed that much of the cosmos is in the dark. The map, which covers 6 percent of the sky and includes 200,000 galaxies recorded by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, supports previous evidence that most of the universe's matter is invisible. Without the gravity provided by this unseen material, dubbed dark matter, galaxies wouldn't have clustered as tightly as the Sloan map indicates they do.


This Article examines and documents the increase in NFL players' criminal conduct and concludes that the explanation for this behavior is not only a reflection of a larger societal trend in professional sports but is also caused by contractual incentives created by a new collective bargaining agreement. In the decade preceding the changes to the NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement in March 2006, the NFL Management Council won a series of arbitration grievances against the National Football League Players Association that rendered a player's bonuses forfeitable if he committed an act that was illegal or detrimental to the team and his contract called for a bonus forfeiture under those circumstances. However, these arbitration decisions, and particularly the Terrell Owens grievance with the Philadelphia Eagles in 2005, galvanized the NFLPA to successfully seek changes to the CBA that have created a moral hazard, disconnecting players' bonuses from the type of conduct for which Michael Vick, Pacman Jones, and Tank Johnson were arrested. This disconnect between behavior and guaranteed salary has not surprisingly led to an increase in arrests among NFL players who no longer face as severe contractual penalties as they did before the 2006 amendments to the CBA. The Article acknowledges that Michael Vick's recovery of a significant portion of his bonuses strongly favors the NFLPA. It also argues that despite Commissioner Roger Goodell's commendable efforts, it is unclear whether the NFL's new Personal Conduct Policy, a response to the increase in arrests, will prove effective in reducing player misconduct, and may do little besides transfer power that teams historically held to the Commissioner's office, unless Commissioner Goodell raises conduct penalties to the level for which contractual forfeiture provisions provided before the 2006 amendments to the CBA.


Heat No Service (HNS) is an increasing managerial decision made in commercial piglet producing herds. Performance of gilts has been shown to be influenced by initial decisions made on them at their introduction in the breeding herds. Lifetime Reproductive performance comprising of parity total born piglets and lifetime total born piglets of gilts initially bred on first observed estrus (0HNS) was compared with that of gilts bred on second observed estrus (1HNS). Stored data from Porcitec database consisted of 2.072 gilts bred on first observed estrus (0HNS) and 2.453 gilts bred on second observed estrus (1HNS) totaling to 4.525 gilts. Data was statistically analyzed using the GLM procedure of IBM SPSS version 25. The results showed a significance difference (p<0.001) in lifetime total born performance of gilts bred at 0HNS (mean 93.9) and 1HNS (mean 95.7). There was also a significant difference (p<0.001) of total born piglets in parity 1, 5 and 6 in the 2 groups. There was an observed increased parity total born and lifetime total born when first time insemination of gilts was delayed to second estrus. The findings in this study favor the 1HNS breeding with an overall increased lifetime total born. Gilts inseminated at 1HNS produce 1.57 more pigs for lifetime as compared with those inseminated at 0HNS when observation is made up to P6. Producers in piglet producing herds could re examine their decisions for increased productivity by promoting many gilts into 1HNS but still maintaining the balance between breed targets and production schedules to remain competitive and profitable in the current global swine industry.


Abstract This paper presents our preliminary research into the autonomous control of an alpine skiing robot. Based on our previous experience with active balancing on difficult terrain and developing an ice-skating robot, we have implemented a simple control system that allows the humanoid robot Jennifer to steer around a simple alpine skiing course, brake, and actively control the pitch and roll of the skis in order to maintain stability on hills with variable inclination. The robot steers and brakes by using the edges of the skis to dig into the snow, by inclining both skis to one side the robot can turn in an arc. By rolling the skis outward and pointing the toes together the robot creates a snowplough shape that rapidly reduces its forward velocity. To keep the skis in constant contact with the hill we use two independent proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers to continually adjust the robot's inclination in the frontal and sagittal planes. Our experiments show that these techniques are sufficient to allow a small humanoid robot to alpine ski autonomously down hills of different inclination with variable snow conditions.


The effective mass one-dimensional Schrödinger equation for the generalized Morse potential is solved by using Nikiforov—Uvarov method. Energy eigenvalues and corresponding eigenfunctions are computed analytically. The results are also reduced to the constant mass case. Energy eigenvalues are computed numerically for some diatomic molecules. They are in agreement with the ones obtained before.


Allele frequencies at seven polymorphic loci controlling the synthesis of enzymes were analyzed in six populations of Culex pipiens L. and Cx. quinquefasciatus Say. Sampling sites were situated along a north-south line of about 2,000 km in Argentina. The predominant alleles at Mdh, Idh, Gpdh and Gpi loci presented similar frequencies in all the samples. Frequencies at the Pgm locus were similar for populations pairs sharing the same geographic area. The loci Cat and Hk-1 presented significant geographic variation. The latter showed a marked latitudinal cline, with a frequency for allele b ranging from 0.99 in the northernmost point to 0.04 in the southernmost one, a pattern that may be explained by natural selection (FST = 0.46; p < 0.0001) on heat sensitive alleles. The average value of FST (0.088) and Nm (61.12) indicated a high gene flow between adjacent populations. A high correlation was found between genetic and geographic distance (r = 0.83; p < 0.001). The highest genetic identity (I(N) = 0.988) corresponded to the geographically closest samples from the central area. In one of these localities Cx. quinquefasciatus was predominant and hybrid individuals were detected, while in the other, almost all the specimens were identified as Cx. pipiens. To verify the fertility between Cx. pipiens and Cx. quinquefasciatus from the northern- and southernmost populations, experimental crosses were performed. Viable egg rafts were obtained from both reciprocal crosses. Hatching ranged from 76.5 to 100%. The hybrid progenies were fertile through two subsequent generations.


Anomaly detection algorithm complements human surveillance in that it is capable of handling both very fast and large volume of observations. In this report, it is instead used to evaluate and detect anomalous behavior in video-recorded extremely slow processes, which can be as challenging for human perception. Morphological image processing techniques are used to separate the slowly evolving foreground from the background in a time sequence of images. By defining the corresponding metrics of the extracted foreground features and applying an Bayesian estimator to the sequence within a finite time window, the probability of the upcoming observation being an anomaly can be evaluated. Single crystal growth process with optical floating zone method is used as an example for application.


Background: People with disability experience various problems to access to healthcare services. This study aimed to identify cultural barriers in access to healthcare services for people with disability in Iran. Methods: We conducted a qualitative study using content analysis to identify the cultural barriers. We used semi-structured interviews to collect data. Participants were selected through purposeful sampling with maximum variation. 50 individual interviews were conducted with three groups of people with disability, healthcare services providers and policy makers, September to May 2015, at different locations in Tehran, Iran. Results: We identified a number of different cultural barriers in access to health services for people with disability in Iran. These related to health service providers, namely reluctance to provide health services and disrespect; related to People with disability, namely denial of disability, disproportionate expectation, shame and insufficient sociocultural supports; and related to policy makers, namely lack of concern, little attention to the culture of disability and discrimination. We categorized misconception as a barrier that was observed at all levels of the society. Conclusion: Disability is a reality that some human being may experience and live with it. The negative attitude towards people with disability has a close relationship with the cultural norms of a society. The culture of disability in different dimensions should be a priority for all policy makers. Removing cultural barriers in access to healthcare for people with a disability needs collective efforts and collaborations among all stakeholders.


Between 1975 and 1979, thirty-one unidentified bodies bearing marks of torture appeared at various locations along Uruguay's coastline. These bodies were material proof of the death flights implemented in neighbouring Argentina after the military coup. In Uruguay, in a general context of political crisis, the appearance of these anonymous cadavers first generated local terror and was then rapidly transformed into a traumatic event at the national level. This article focuses on the various reports established by Uruguayan police and mortuary services. It aims to show how the administrative and funeral treatments given at that time to the dead bodies, buried anonymously (under the NN label) in local cemeteries, make visible some of the multiple complicities between the Uruguayan and Argentinean dictatorships in the broader framework of the Condor Plan. The repressive strategy implemented in Argentina through torture and forced disappearance was indeed echoed by the bureaucratic repressive strategy implemented in Uruguay through incomplete and false reports, aiming to make the NN disappear once again.


Seibal is a major ruin of the southern Maya lowlands, its vast ceremonial center covering several high hills on the banks of the Pasion River in the Guatemalan Department of Peten. In five volumes published over a 15-year period, the archaeological team headed by Gordon R. Willey presents a comprehensive review of their fieldwork from 1964 to 1968 and the results of many years of subsequent data analysis. The volumes also report on explorations in the peripheral settlements outside of the Seibal center and provide a regional view of the evolution of lowland Maya culture from the Middle and Late Preclassic through the Late Classic periods.


Perceiving rapidly approaching sounding objects can be critical for survival. In studies of "auditory looming" perception, listeners consistently perceive sound sources as closer than they actually are, resulting in an underestimation of arrival time (Neuhoff, Planisek, and Seifritz, 2009; Rosenblum, Carello, and Pastore, 1987). This effect has been argued to provide an evolutionary advantage by allowing more time to prepare for the source. However, critical to this argument is the timely engagement of motor behaviors. Here, we tested the hypothesis that listeners with lower levels of physical fitness would have a larger anticipatory bias in perceived auditory arrival time, and thus a larger margin of safety in response to looming sounds. Listeners judged the arrival time of a three‐dimensional looming sound. Physical fitness was measured using recovering heart rate after exercise and grip strength. Results show that the anticipatory bias in perceiving looming sounds is negatively correlated with physical fitness (r=−0.41). Those least prepared physically to interact with a looming sound source have a greater perceptual margin of safety. The findings are consistent with an evolutionary explanation of the anticipatory bias for looming sounds and provide evidence for fitness‐based perception‐action links between the auditory and motor systems.


Florek, M., P. Stanek, Z. litwiŃcZuk and P. ŻÒŁkiewSki, 2013. effect of concentrate supplement on slaughter value and meat quality of limousin suckler beef reared on pasture until the age of 8 months. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 19: 1112-1119 the objective of the present study was to evaluate the effect of concentrate (ground grain) served to limousine suckler beef in the period of rearing on pasture with mothers until the age of 8 months on slaughter value and quality of two skeletal muscles, i.e. musculus longissimus lumborum and musculus semitendinosus. the slaughter value parameters (e.g. dressing percentage, round dissection results, linear measurements) of calves' carcasses were determined and samples of m. longissimus lumborum – Mll and m. semitendinosus – MSt for basic chemical composition and intrinsic properties determinations were collected. the supplement of concentrate in a dose of calves reared on pasture with their mothers effected on higher slaughter output (by 2 percentage points), significantly (P<0.05) higher weight of round (more than 4 kg) and significantly (P<0.05) larger share of meat in the round (by 2.35 percentage points) and the lower share of bones (P<0.05) and fat with regard to calves not receiving the concentrate. Simultaneously, concentrate supplement did not affect the deterioration of limousin veal quality and in some cases, the quality was even improved in comparison with the control group. the results obtained in own study indicate that supplementing of nutritional dose of calves on pasture with a certain amount of concentrate is economically justified. the issue that needs a solution is elaborating of technique, quantity and quality of fodder according to a target slaughter weight (age) and nutritive value of the pasture without compromising the meat quality.


This paper presents the methods and preliminary results gained in geographic information systems (GIS)-based participatory activities designed to engage youth in urban planning. We describe our engagement framework that integrates such pervasive IT tools as GIS, online serious games, agent-based modeling, and mobile participatory GIS into engagement strategies that tap into what we see as the storytelling capabilities of these tools. We show how these methods help citizens, in our case youth, assume leadership roles and take positive, tangible actions in their communities. This paper summarizes the elements of our framework and the initial results of a program called "Community Growers" that we created between our Iowa State University research team and a chapter of the Boys & Girls Club of Central Iowa. Participants included middle school-age youth from three resource-vulnerable neighborhoods in Des Moines, the capital city of Iowa, USA. We conclude the paper with a discussion and further research directions.


Abstract. Bacterial population distribution in the Mediterranean Sea has been mainly studied by considering small geographical areas or specific phylogenetic groups. The present study is a molecular microbiology investigation aimed to identify the environmental factors driving total bacterioplankton community composition of seawater samples collected along a transect covering the whole Mediterranean Sea. We performed automated ribosomal intergenic sequence analysis (ARISA) and microscope evaluation of prokaryotic abundance of seawater sampled across both vertical profiles and longitudinal transects in the whole basin. Prokaryotic abundance decreased with depth at all the stations and presented similar values in epi-, meso- and bathypelagic layers across the whole Mediterranean Sea. However, peculiar bacterial assemblages were selected along a longitudinal transect in the epipelagic layers of the eastern and western sub-basins. Vertical differences of the bacterial communities were observed only when considering the epi- and bathypelagic waters, while the study of the structure of bacterial communities at a finer scale across the water column displayed higher variability at the intermediate layers. Nonetheless, different physico-chemical factors were significantly related to the distribution of bacterial populations, both according to geographic position and down the water column in the whole Mediterranean Sea. These results demonstrated that bacterial assemblages are putatively correlated to different water masses of the complex hydrographical systems of the eastern and western Mediterranean sub-basins.


The aim of this study was to determine the level of awareness of dental implant in Nigerian patients and their willingness to choose dental implant as a tooth replacement option A survey was conducted among patients presenting for dental treatment in 3 teaching hospitals and private dental clinics in 3 urban cities of Nigeria using a self-administered questionnaire. A total of 294 out of 325 questionnaires were returned completely filled. 39.8% of the respondents have knowledge of dental implants as tooth replacement option. 35% and 26.5% are willing to choose implant for replacement of missing anterior and posterior teeth respectively. Patients with high level of education are significantly better informed on implants as a method of tooth replacement. The major source of information is the dentist (41.5%) followed by friends (17.7%). The level of awareness of dental implants was low despite the high level of education of the respondents. Willingness to choose implant as tooth replacement option was low due to high cost of dental implants and the need for surgery. AWARENESS OF DENTAL IMPLANTS AMONG DENTAL PATIENTS IN NIGERIA 1,2 2 3 4 Ajayi Y. O. , Akinboboye B.O. , Dosumu O. O. , Akeredolu P. A.


Eosinophilic gastroenteritis (EG) is a rare disorder characterized by eosinophilic infiltration of the bowel wall with various gastrointestinal manifestations. Clinical presentation may vary depending on sites and depth of involvement of the gastrointestinal tract. Imaging has very little role in supporting the diagnosis, and therefore a high degree of clinical suspicion is required. In this article, we describe a 51-year-old male who presented with severe abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and constipation. CT scan of the abdomen showed ileitis and laproscopy revealed ileitis with stricture in the terminal ileum. The patient was treated with laproscopic right hemicolectomy with final diagnosis of EG . J Med Cases. 2014;5(8):463-465 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14740/jmc1869w Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE


This study analyses employers' support for the introduction of industry-specific minimum wages as a cost-raising strategy in order to deter market entry. Using a unique data set consisting of 800 firms in the German service sector, we find some evidence that high-productivity employers support minimum wages. We further show that minimum wage support is higher in industries and regions with low barriers to entry. This is particularly the case in East Germany, where the perceived threat of low-wage competition from Central and Eastern European countries is relatively high. In addition, firms paying collectively agreed wages are more strongly in favor of minimum wages if union coverage is low and the mark-up of union wage rates is high.


This paper presents a new approach for assembling graph neural networks based on framelet transforms. The latter provides a multi-scale representation for graph-structured data. We decompose an input graph into low-pass and high-pass frequencies coefficients for network training, which then defines a framelet-based graph convolution. The framelet decomposition naturally induces a graph pooling strategy by aggregating the graph feature into low-pass and high-pass spectra, which considers both the feature values and geometry of the graph data and conserves the total information. The graph neural networks with the proposed framelet convolution and pooling achieve state-of-the-art performance in many node and graph prediction tasks. Moreover, we propose shrinkage as a new activation for the framelet convolution, which thresholds high-frequency information at different scales. Compared to ReLU, shrinkage activation improves model performance on denoising and signal compression: noises in both node and structure can be significantly reduced by accurately cutting off the high-pass coefficients from framelet decomposition, and the signal can be compressed to less than half its original size with well-preserved prediction performance.


Marketing communication strategies are now imperative in the Higher Education arena. Understanding the prospective students' choice and determining the subgroups into which they fall, provides the basis for a well-planned strategy for marketing communications practitioners at Durban University of Technology (DUT). The purpose of this study is to review the effectiveness of the current marketing communication strategies of DUT, and to establish how first time enrolees make choices when selecting a Higher Education institution at which to study. This study uses quantitative descriptive methods of convenience sampling of the January 2009 intake of students. Although specific to DUT, the findings of this study may also be of interest to other Universities of Technology that are assessing their marketing communication strategies. Research implications in this study identify the most appropriate means of marketing communications for the DUT brand in the context of prospective student choice. At the close of this cross-sectional research, the study provides proposals for future marketing initiatives for DUT. The results of the study may be used in determining more appropriate marketing campaign strategies and initiatives to establish DUT as a first choice brand in our competitive arena. The value of this study is that it supports the opinion that the focus of marketing communication strategies must continually be modified in response to a changing market.


In this study, the suitability of fructose-6-phosphate phosphoketolase (F6PPK) from
Bifzdobacterium breve, and intact B. breve cells were examined as immunogens for the
production of polyclonal antibodies that could be used to detect the presence of the
organism. F6PPK is the enzyme that catalyzes the breakdown of fructose-6-phosphate to
yield erythrose-4-phosphate and acetyl phosphate through the bifid shunt. It represents
an interesting candidate as it is the key enzyme found restricted to bifidobacteria, and
there are differences in molecular masses of the enzyme among human and animal
sources. The study involved two stages. In the first stage, F6PPK extracted from B.
breve was partially purified by sequential acetone-fractionation, ion-exchange
chromatography and gel filtration chromatography, and then characterized. F6PPK was
eluted from the anion exchanger column at 0.48 mM NaCl. Following purification by
the gel filtration chromatography, the specific activity of F6PPK was found to be 11.05
fold but only 0.4% was recovered. The enzyme was not purified to homogeneity since 2
protein bands were observed on native polyacrylamide gel electrohphoresis. The
apparent molecular mass of the enzyme as determined by gel filtration chromatography
on Superose 12 was 200,000 Daltons. The enzyme was stable, at least for 10 minutes,
between 20-50°C. The optimum temperature was 37°C. It has a pH optimum of pH 6.0. F6PPK is not a metalloenzyme since EDT A did not reduce its activity. Cations like
magnesium and calcium affected the activity of the enzyme. The thioI inhibitors Lcysteine
and hydroxylamine HCl, were strongly inhibited activity of F6PPK by 19.8%
and 17.1% respectively. The affinity constant, Km, of F6PPK was 2xlO-1 mM and
maximal velocity, V max was 20 µmole/min with fructose-6-phosphate as the substrate. In
the second stage of this study, the production of polyclonal antibodies was achieved by
injecting F6PPK obtained after gel filtration and intact cells of B. breve intradermally
into 5 New Zealand White Rabbits, three of the rabbits were injected with F6PPK.
Booster doses made in Freund Incomplete Adjuvant were adminjstered every two weeks
for a total of three times. Blood was collected once before the first injection and twice
after third booster and labeled as Bleed 1, Bleed 2 and Bleed 3, respectively.
Assessments of the antisera were carried out by Noncompetitive Indirect ELISA. Bleed
2 contained the highest level of antibody. Extensive checkerboard htration was
performed; the optimum antiserum dilution for anti-F6PPK antiserum was 1:1600, while
the anti-B. breve antiserum dose-response was 1:800 and conjugate antibody was used at
a dilution of 114000. The best absorption for both antisera were obtained using
phosphate buffered saline pH 7.2 as the coating buffer. Crude extract was good enough
to bind to the anti-F6PPK antiserum. Both antisera were capable of detecting
bifidobacteria at the species level at 1 x 10⁵ CFU/ml or greater. Both antisera were found
to cross-react with the different strains of B. breve. A slight cross-reaction occurred with
other Bifidobacterium spp. whereas they showed no significant cross-reactivity towards
LactococCUs spp., Lactobacillus spp., probiotics, yogurt starter cultures and E. coli.
ELISA described herein should allow unequivocal identification of B. breve.


Keywords: gender, feminism, development, Dravidian Social MovementsPineapples and Oranges, the title of this paper, is the metaphor for caste difference that "Periyar feminists"(1) employed in a consciousness raising activity at the Periyar Polytechnic school for girls in Tamil Nadu, south India. The purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate the persistence of caste difference, and the shared experiences of women who followed Hindu practices. The activity was designed for the mostly lower, "Backward Caste"(2) teachers and staff who work at the school. Women were seated in a circle and arbitrarily designated in sequence as "pineapples, apples, bananas or oranges." These fruits correspond to Brahmins, Kshatryias, Vaiyshas and Shudras, the four Varna which hierarchically classify people within the Hindu caste system. The women were asked to stand up and move to distinguish whom they could marry and with whom they would normally socialize. In response, pineapples, representing Brahmins, congregated at one portion of the circle while oranges, representing Shudras, ended up opposite them. After many more questions, the women were encouraged to imagine a society where fruits mixed, by moving about the circle in free association.During the winter of 2000, I lived in the Periyar Polytechnic and participated in the events organized by Periyar feminists, including the activity described above. I sought to answer the call by Kamala Visweswaran for feminist anthropology to consider the "shape feminism takes in other parts of the world," (Visweswaran, 1995: 615) including the relationship between feminism and women's participation in related social movements. While women's social and political agency is well documented by feminist anthropology, only more recently is some attention paid to the diverse responses of women as actors in social movements and their deployment of feminism specifically in these forms of activism.(3) This is an important direction for feminist anthropology to take, in order to apprehend women's participation in modernity, and because "feminism" itself is now an "inescapable term of reference" (Abu-Lughod, 1998: 3) in the gender politics of postcolonial societies. Specifically, women's activism unfolds in specific social contexts and it articulates with pre-existing or emergent ideologies and practices, including nationalist, environmental, labour, and fundamentalist mobilizations. These movements impact on the way women interpret feminist practices and the way social issues, gendered experiences and utopian visions are imagined.In this paper I examine the way Periyar feminists in south India draw upon their attachment to a social movement in their interpretation of feminism. I explore the extent to which Periyar feminism provides a context for the emergence of critical practices that attend to inequalities of caste, gender and class and the extent to which it provides avenues for making changes in women's lives.Periyar feminists are teachers and staff who formed POWER, a women's organization and NGO, during an exchange with educators in Newfoundland, Canada. However, the structure of the organization and the analysis of women's "empowerment" and "inequality" which informs their activities is framed by their membership in a regional social movement, the Dravidiar Kazhagam. This movement emerged during the height of resistance to British colonial rule in the early 20th century and forms the basis for Dravidian nationalism in Tamil Nadu. Periyar feminism resonates with this ideology and the particular vision of its founder, E.V. Ramsamy Naicker, who is fondly and reverently known to his followers, as Periyar, meaning the "Great Leader."(4) Hence, women's oppression is officially understood as an effect of Brahmin and Hindu dominance, and religious, caste and linguistic difference within India. At the same time, POWER is an organization that explicitly draws upon feminist practices. It deploys consciousness-raising strategies and conveys a gender analysis that its organizers perceive to be connected to feminism, transnationally, and within India. …


We study the loss surface of a feed-forward neural network with ReLU non-linearities, regularized with weight decay. We show that the regularized loss function is piecewise strongly convex on an important open set which contains, under some conditions, all of its global minimizers. This is used to prove that local minima of the regularized loss function in this set are isolated, and that every differentiable critical point in this set is a local minimum, partially addressing an open problem given at the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2015; our result is also applied to linear neural networks to show that with weight decay regularization, there are no non-zero critical points in a norm ball obtaining training error below a given threshold. We also include an experimental section where we validate our theoretical work and show that the regularized loss function is almost always piecewise strongly convex when restricted to stochastic gradient descent trajectories for three standard image classification problems.


This work is a numerical study of microfluidic cooling of integrated circuits (ICs), using embedded micropin-fins on a silicon chip. The study considers non-uniform chip heat fluxes (250–500 W/cm2) and variable pin fin density using DI water as coolant. A parametric analysis was performed, using the theory of design of experiments (DoE) in order to find the best performing configurations. The proposed factorial design considers six geometrical parameters resulting in 64 microfluidic cooling configurations. The pressure drop and average chip temperatures were obtained for each model to determine the importance of input parameters utilizing a statistical approach. Results from this optimization point to different suitable configurations in which the maximum device temperature is below 60 °C, under moderate pressure drops below 80 kPa. This work takes advantage of numerical models and statistical approaches to seek optimal designs of microfluidic cooling systems and to identify key parameters that have influence on their global performance. In addition, alternative configurations are also assessed for cases in which thermal or hydraulic parameters could be traded-off depending on the application. The results from this study are helpful for the design of chip thermal management with nonuniform power distribution.


Youth who enter the juvenile justice system pose a challenge to all who work with and for them. The stakes are high. If the youth's behavior is not reformed as a result of the consequences of being in the juvenile justice system, the likelihood of continuous life-long involvement in adult correctional systems is high. Over their lives, if these individuals do not change, they can exact an enormous cost on their families, victims, and communities; on overburdened law enforcement and overcrowded court and correctional systems; and on the taxpaying public. Juvenile justice professionals have long been working to find a better answer. The public is demanding a better answer. The public's demands are clear. The juvenile justice system must achieve significant and measurable impact in preventing delinquency and reducing repeat offenders or recidivism. Imperatives to achieve these public goals include: * focusing consequences and treatment on the families, not just the juveniles; * engaging the community in supporting the juveniles and their families to bring about positive change and outcomes; * increasing consequences that are more clearly directed at helping youths understand the impact on their victims; * enlisting the assistance of schools, social services, and mental and physical health providers in supporting the youths and their families to achieve success in their communities through changed outcomes; * identifying and deploying resources (i.e., effort and money) for what is working; and * eliminating efforts, programs, and services that do not work. Although these goals are lofty, the way to meet those significant and measurable impacts on preventing delinquency and reducing recidivism is for juvenile justice professionals to have more quantifiable, relevant, and timely information. Why? Because each of the imperatives identified above requires enhanced knowledge of the youths, their families, the services they are currently receiving, and the consequences or treatment that will make a difference for them. Yet most juvenile justice programs lack the technical system capabilities to accomplish these goals. Clark County, Nevada, and a few other jurisdictions, however, are stepping up to these demands and challenges by improving their information technology systems. They are using technology as a starting point to support knowledge transfer across the juvenile justice continuum and its intersection with other human services information systems. THE CLARK COUNTY DIFFERENCE Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, has had the distinction, or plague, of being one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States for the past 10 years. Like so many human services systems, juvenile justice workers' caseloads have been increasing at such significant rates that all available financing has generally been invested in staff, programs, and, whenever possible, facilities. Clark County administrators recognized that by asking its staff and providers to carry these increased loads, many youths and their families served may have received only a fraction of the services their situations warranted. Unfortunately, this investment in only staff, programs, and facilities presented a case of double jeopardy. Youths and families were getting less service although their situations were more complicated. Also, Clark County administrators lacked the compelling, fact-based information to support their arguments for continued, or increased, financing of these services that could only be efficiently gathered through improved technology. With its inadequate information systems, it was not possible for county administrators to answer the most basic questions: * Who is this youth? * What are the issues or problems affecting the youth? * What other programs have served the youth or the youth's family? …


Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are zinc-dependent endopeptidases, which degrade all kinds of extracellular matrix proteins. MMPs play an important role in cell behaviors such as proliferation, migration, differentiation, apoptosis, and host defense. Polymorphisms in the promoter regions of multiple MMPs and overexpression of MMPs and tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) are associated with head and neck cancer risk and a worse prognosis. Serum and plasma levels of MMP and TIMP might be useful in diagnostics and follow-up. However, their use as therapeutic target should be further investigated, since the antitumor activity of matrix metalloproteinase inhibitors has been


The commercialization of nonfullerene organic solar cells (OSCs) critically relies on the response under typical operating conditions (for instance, temperature and humidity) and the ability of scale‐up. Despite the rapid increase in power conversion efficiency (PCE) of spin‐coated devices fabricated in a protective atmosphere, the efficiencies of printed nonfullerene OSC devices by blade coating are still lower than 6%. This slow progress significantly limits the practical printing of high‐performance nonfullerene OSCs. Here, a new and relatively stable nonfullerene combination is introduced by pairing the nonfluorinated acceptor IT‐M with the polymeric donor FTAZ. Over 12% efficiency can be achieved in spin‐coated FTAZ:IT‐M devices using a single halogen‐free solvent. More importantly, chlorine‐free, blade coating of FTAZ:IT‐M in air is able to yield a PCE of nearly 11% despite a humidity of ≈50%. X‐ray scattering results reveal that large π–π coherence length, high degree of face‐on orientation with respect to the substrate, and small domain spacing of ≈20 nm are closely correlated with such high device performance. The material system and approach yield the highest reported performance for nonfullerene OSC devices by a coating technique approximating scalable fabrication methods and hold great promise for the development of low‐cost, low‐toxicity, and high‐efficiency OSCs by high‐throughput production.


OBJECTIVE
To estimate the incremental effect of waist circumference (WC) on health-care costs among overweight and obese subjects after adjusting for body mass index (BMI).

METHODS
A prospective study. The subjects were members of Internet panels in the United States (US) and Germany. 10,816 individuals (United States: n = 5410; Germany: n = 5406) aged 30-70 years with BMI scores between 20 and 35 kg/m(2) were recruited and grouped by category: healthy weight (BMI 20-24.9 kg/m(2)), overweight (BMI 25-29.9 kg/m(2)), and obese (BMI 30-35 kg/m(2)). Within the overweight and obese categories, the individuals were stratified by sex and within those subgroups, characterized as above or below the median WC. The subjects self-reported weight, WC, and health-care resource use at baseline, 3 months, and 6 months using online questionnaires. Over 65% of the recruited subjects completed all surveys. Resource utilization was translated into health-care costs by multiplying unit costs from national sources in each country. Annualized health costs were summarized for subjects with low and high WC within the overweight and obese categories. A two-part model generated predicted annual costs because of the WC difference controlling for BMI, demographic, and lifestyle variables among the overweight and obese subjects.

RESULTS
When BMI and other characteristics are constant, annual health-care costs are 16% to 18% higher in Germany and 20% to 30% higher in the United States for the subjects with a high WC compared with subjects with a low WC.

CONCLUSIONS
Targeting people with a high waist circumference for weight management whether they are overweight or obese may maximize cost-efficacy.


Tell your doctor about any health problems, recent surgeries, or allergies and whether there's a possibility you are pregnant. The magnetic field is not harmful, but it may cause some medical devices to malfunction. Most orthopedic implants pose no risk, but you should always tell the technologist if you have any devices or metal in your body. Guidelines about eating and drinking before your exam vary between facilities. Unless you are told otherwise, take your regular medications as usual. Leave jewelry at home and wear loose, comfortable clothing. You may be asked to wear a gown. If you have claustrophobia or anxiety, you may want to ask your doctor for a mild sedative prior to the exam.


ABSTRACT The first Mesozoic fossil of the beetle family Ptilodactylidae Laporte, 1836 (Byrrhoidea) is formally described and figured from a male preserved in latest Albian amber from Myanmar. Aphebodactyla rhetine n. gen., n. sp., is distinguished from its modern relatives and is only the second fossil species yet formally described in the family. The fossil intermingles putatively derived features of various ptilodactylid subfamilies, suggesting that the current circumscription of these lineages is in dire need of revision.


Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine weight, diet, and physical activity (PA) changes in youth over summer vacation. Methods: Thirty healthy subjects (19 male, 11 female; mean age + SEM 10.0+0.1 yrs) were assessed before the end of the 2009/2010 school year (baseline), and prior to the start of the 2010/2011 school year (post-test).Results: Significant (p< 0.05) increases in height, weight, body mass index (BMI), and BMI percentile-for-age were observed. Percent time spent in light (p=0.002) and moderate (p=0.014) PA intensities both decreased, while time spent being sedentary significantly (p=0.006) increased. No significant diet changes were reported. Conclusion: This healthy youth population increased time spent being sedentary at the expense of light and moderate PA over summer vacation. The result was an increase in BMI and BMI percentile-for-age. Future studies are needed to examine ways to prevent this decline in PA in youth over summer vacation.


This Article addresses a series of situations in which the exercise of police discretion, while passing current constitutional thresholds, seems unfair and unforeseeable. We call this problem "inequitable enforcement." Current constitutional review of police action assesses all stops, searches, and arrests - regardless of how minor the offense - by focusing on the officer's level of suspicion and the officer's compliance with equal protection standards. In this Article, we argue that these existing constitutional mechanisms are flawed and fail to provide an appropriate remedy in cases of arbitrary and disproportionate enforcement for minor infractions. We begin by discussing the necessity of police discretion and the factors that guide officers in exercising it. After tracing the recent development of Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment law in the context of police discretion, we explain why these constitutional protections are inadequate for addressing the problem of inequitable enforcement. This inadequacy, we argue, is a result of the narrow and myopic lens through which the Supreme Court assesses reasonableness in its Fourth Amendment analysis, and discrimination in its Equal Protection analysis. We then suggest a set of considerations for assessing inequitability and present some ways in which those considerations can be integrated into constitutional doctrine. We conclude by discussing the promises and pitfalls of addressing inequitable enforcement through constitutional review.


As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, we have seen an increase in examples of AI systems reflecting or exacerbating societal bias, from racist facial recognition to sexist natural language processing. These biases threaten to overshadow AI's technological gains and potential benefits. While legal and computer science scholars have analyzed many sources of bias, including the unexamined assumptions of its often-homogenous creators, flawed algorithms, and incomplete datasets, the role of the law itself has been largely ignored. Yet just as code and culture play significant roles in how AI agents learn about and act in the world, so too do the laws that govern them. This Article is the first to examine perhaps the most powerful law impacting AI bias: copyright.
Artificial intelligence often learns to "think" by reading, viewing, and listening to copies of human works. This Article first explores the problem of bias through the lens of copyright doctrine, looking at how the law's exclusion of access to certain copyrighted source materials may create or promote biased AI systems. Copyright law limits bias mitigation techniques, such as testing AI through reverse engineering, algorithmic accountability processes, and competing to convert customers. The rules of copyright law also privilege access to certain works over others, encouraging AI creators to use easily available, legally low-risk sources of data for teaching AI, even when those data are demonstrably biased. Second, it examines how a different part of copyright law—the fair use doctrine—has traditionally been used to address similar concerns in other technological fields, and asks whether it is equally capable of addressing them in the field of AI bias. The Article ultimately concludes that it is, in large part because the normative values embedded within traditional fair use ultimately align with the goals of mitigating AI bias and, quite literally, creating fairer AI systems.


In this thesis we investigate the magnetism of a selection of crystalline mate- rials that display fascinating macroscopic properties, largely due to the complex behaviour of rare-earth ions. The technique of choice is diffraction; shown to pro- vide the most lucid of results in this field of research. Neutron powder diffraction, a well established tool for determining magnetic structures, has been employed in order to determine two magnetic structures of the intermetallic R2CoGa8 series. This was the first such study of these materials, which are of great interest as the magnetic exchange interactions of the rare-earth ions compete with the crystal elec- tric field, giving rise to a wealth of magnetic properties tuneable by the choice of rare-earth ion. We then move on to study two of the most extreme multiferroic mate- rials, TbMn2O5 and TmMn2O5. We have developed a new technique for determin- ing electronic state specific magnetic structures through resonant x-ray diffraction, which we have successfully employed in an investigation of the terbium magnetic sub-lattice in TbMn2O5. The outstanding question in many multiferroics regards the exact microscopic mechanisms at play. Due to the huge potential in technology, this has been the subject of intense debate over that past decade. We have shown, through ab-initio computation and the simultaneous measurement of electric polar- isation and magneto-striction, that the exchange-striction model is dominant in the main ferroelectric phase of TbMn2O5 and TmMn2O5. Through ion specific resonant x-ray diffraction measurements, we have clarified the behaviour of the terbium sub- lattice upon the magnetic field induced electric polarisation reversal in TbMn2O5. Furthermore, we have made the discovery of additional incommensurate magnetic diffraction signals, believed to be indicative of the response of magnetic domains to applied magnetic fields.


Background Sumo has long been a traditional sport in Japan, and recently is becoming a popular sport that is rapidly attracting enthusiasts abroad. With the aim of having the sport included in the Olympics, World Women's Sumo Championships as well as World Sumo Championship have also been held since 1999. Objectives The purpose of this study was to examine the radiological changes in the cervical spine in freshman collegiate and high school sumo wrestlers and the relationship between the radiological changes and the cervical spine symptoms. Design Epidemiology. Setting High school league and elite division. Participants We examined one hundred and sixteen freshman collegiate and 41 high school sumo wrestlers who belonged to the Japanese Sumo Federation. They were high level players. Interventions They underwent routine radiographic examination of their cervical spine and questionnaire of their cervical symptoms as a medical check. Results Their mean height was 175.1 cm, weight was 113.9 kg, body mass index was 37.1 kg/m2, and sumo career was 8.5 years in college. High school sumo wrestlers were significantly smaller than collegiate ones in weight, BMI and sumo career. 14 high school wrestlers (34.1%) and 46 collegiate ones (39.7%) had some cervical symptoms. The correlation between the deformity of cervical spine and cervical syndrome was significant. Seventy-three percent showed disappearance in lordosis, 39% showed osteophyte formation (mainly C3/4), 6% showed disc space narrowing (mainly C5/6) and 54% showed narrowing in the cervical nerve root foramen (mainly C3/4). Conclusion Comparing with our previous study, we concluded that the disappearance in lordosis and narrowing in the cervical nerve root foramen of C3/4 was due to the axial load they incurred in training during high school, and osteophyte formation and disc space narrowing of C5/6 occurred in training during collegiate and postgraduate in sumo wrestling.


There has been a long-held misconception among historians of philosophy and science that apart from brief comments in Aristotle and Averroes, the theory of minima naturalia had to await Latin Schoolmen for its full articulation. Recently scholars have shown that far from sporadic comments on minima naturalia, Averroes in fact had a fully developed and well-integrated theory of them. In this study, I complement these scholars' important work by considering Avicenna's place in the history and development of the doctrine of the minima naturalia. There is no study to date that mentions Avicenna in connection with this doctrine despite the fact that he dedicated an entire chapter to it in his Physics, yet Avicenna's account is at least as developed as and even better integrated than Averroes's presentation. The present study situates Avicenna's position within the more general history of atomism, and introduces Avicenna's "new argument" for natural minima. The argument is important not only for its novelty but also because it shows how Avicenna integrated Aristotle's account of minima naturalia into a theory of mixture as well.


The ability to compute shortest constrained Traffic Engineering Label
Switched Paths (TE LSPs) in Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and
Generalized MPLS (GMPLS) networks across multiple domains has been
identified as a key requirement. In this context, a domain is a
collection of network elements within a common sphere of address
management or path computational responsibility such as an Interior
Gateway Protocol (IGP) area or an Autonomous System (AS). This
document specifies a representation and encoding of a domain sequence,
which is defined as an ordered sequence of domains traversed to reach
the destination domain to be used by Path Computation Elements (PCEs)
to compute inter-domain constrained shortest paths across a
predetermined sequence of domains. This document also defines new
subobjects to be used to encode domain identifiers.


Abstract The purpose of this article is to examine the experiences of two generations among the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden: those who migrated as adults and those who were born and/or raised in Sweden. The focus will be on issues of identity, home(land) and politics of belonging with regard to generational and temporal aspects. We will argue that there are significant differences among the older and younger generations with regard to their experiences that demand different theoretical and analytical conceptualisations


Comic Literature and laughter in 12 th  century: The case of Constantine Manasses SUMMARY The intriguing literary production of the 12th century comprises among others satires, parodies and works that include comic elements. This is due to several reasons, such as the cultural continuum of the past two centuries, the vivid interest of the literati in Aristophanes and Lucian, and the social placing of authors within the highly competitive society of the era. Within this framework, learned men of the Capital often turn to the genres (Lucianic dialogues, ψόγοι and the techniques (offensive language, literary metaphors) of the ancient comic literature and the rhetoric, in order to attack, mock or degrade certain individuals (rival grammarians, oppressive patrons) or specific groups that represent the "Other" (rustics, "Latins"). Occasionally, the reaction of laughter escorts the intention of the authors to ridicule their targets. The present study takes into consideration the abovementioned frame and focuses on the comic elements that are to be traced in the work of orator and poet Constantine Manasses. Essentially, Manasses' employ of the comic doesn't deviate from the general practice of his contemporaries, as the author displays the same sense of superiority against other learned men, while showcasing a sentiment of aversion to people outside the capital. However, his attitude is considerably softer in comparison to other authors of this period, whereas his works are surprisingly devoid of any direct attack against learned competitors. In addition, laughter in Manasses, when it occurs, adds a lighthearted tone and doesn't seem to conceal an intention for rebuke or stinging criticism. The possible reasons for Manasses' stand are explored in this paper.


Laser filamentation is understood to be self-channeling of intense ultrashort laser pulses achieved when the self-focusing because of the Kerr nonlinearity is balanced by ionization-induced defocusing. Here, we show that, right behind the ionized region of a laser filament, ultrashort laser pulses can couple into a much longer light channel, where a stable self-guiding spatial mode is sustained by the saturable self-focusing nonlinearity. In the limiting regime of negligibly low ionization, this post-filamentation beam dynamics converges to a large-scale beam self-trapping scenario known since the pioneering work on saturable self-focusing nonlinearities.


Although sometimes difficult to detect, governmental power abuses can have detrimental impacts. Property tax assessments provide an effective lens to examine this phenomenon because, given the complexity of calculating property tax assessments, it is difficult for citizens to know when local government has exceeded its legitimate taxing authority and crossed into the realm of illegal extraction. Michigan is an ideal case study because it protects property owners by making assessment-related power abuses more visible through a unique state constitutional provision: property tax assessments cannot exceed 50 percent of a property's market value. Abuses have persisted nevertheless. Between 2011 and 2015, one in four properties in Detroit were subject to property tax foreclosure, and inflated property tax assessments that violate the Michigan Constitution are the unseen thread in this complex tapestry of foreclosure. Against this backdrop, this Article makes three primary contributions. First, no other article has argued and proven that property tax assessments in Detroit are illegal. Using assessment and sales data from 2009–2015 for the entire City of Detroit, we find that property tax assessments are substantially in excess of the state constitutional limit, and this illegality is most pronounced for lower-valued properties. Second, to remedy inflated assessments, in 2014 and 2015 Detroit's assessor implemented assessment decreases ranging from 5 percent to 20 percent for select districts, but we find that systemic assessment inequity persisted for lower valued properties despite these reductions. Third, this Article uses the case of illegal property tax assessments in Detroit to develop a new theoretical concept called "stategraft," which is when state agents transfer property from residents to the state in violation of the state's own laws and to the detriment of a vulnerable group. Although the concept was developed using the Detroit case, stategraft applies beyond Detroit to many other cases, including the discriminatory fines imposed and enforced by the police and courts in Ferguson, Missouri; broken treaties with Native Americans; and abuses of civil forfeiture laws.


Passive Resistance of Abutments with MSE Wingwalls Nathanael G. Bingham Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, BYU Master of Science Large scale static lateral load tests were performed on a pile cap under varying sand backfill configurations: no backfill, full-width dense sand backfill, dense sand slip plane confined backfill, and two configurations of dense sand MSE wall confined backfills. Efforts were made to maintain the relative compaction of the backfills for each of the tests near the same value. The MSE wall panel arrangement was varied to determine the effect of different reinforcement configurations on the passive resistance and wall panel displacement. Passive force-displacement curves were generated from each test. It was found that the MSE design manual provided reasonable estimates of pullout resistance of bar mats in dense sand, and that the passive resistance of a soil backfill confined by MSE walls can be calculated with an increased friction angle using a log-spiral approach. Also, the amount the triaxial friction angle can be increased depends on how much the MSE wall panels displace outward. Correlations were developed between the pressure on the pile cap and that on the MSE wall panels near the pile cap. Generally, the pressure on the wall panels was less than 10% of that which was on the adjacent pile cap, and decreased as the distance from the pile cap increased. Finally, it was found that while limiting the backfill width decreases the ultimate passive resistance of the backfill, if the backfill is confined in a plane strain configuration the passive resistance per unit width is higher than that for an unconfined backfill.


The ultra-thin precursor film surrounding droplets of liquid on a solid surface is used here as a confined reaction medium in order to drive a reaction that would not occur in bulk fluid. Sodium carbonate and calcium chloride mixed together in the presence of the organic thiol dithiothreitol (DTT) produced crystals of gypsum, or calcium sulfate, instead of the otherwise expected calcium carbonate. The possible sources of sulfate in the system are contaminants in the DTT or the oxidation product of the DTT sulfhydryl. The amount of gypsum produced implies that contaminants do not account for the total sulfate present in the system, suggesting that the DTT could be oxidized. The reaction quotient may be skewed in favor of this unexpected reaction by a combination of efficient removal of sulfate by precipitation, and the concentration of DTT at the leading edge of the precursor film through the coffee-ring effect during a brief drying step.


New diagnostic modalities for malaria must have high sensitivity and be affordable to the developing world. We report on a method to rapidly detect and quantify different stages of malaria parasites, including ring and gametocyte forms, using attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FT-IR) and partial least-squares regression (PLS). The absolute detection limit was found to be 0.00001% parasitemia (<1 parasite/μL of blood; p < 0.008) for cultured early ring stage parasites in a suspension of normal erythrocytes. Future development of universal and robust calibration models can significantly improve malaria diagnoses, leading to earlier detection and treatment of this devastating disease.


Rationale We have previously shown increased expression of the Frizzled-8 receptor of the Wingless/integrase-1 (WNT) signalling pathway in COPD. Here, we investigated if the Frizzled-8 receptor has a functional role in airway inflammation associated with chronic bronchitis. Methods Acute cigarette-smoke-induced airway inflammation was studied in wild-type and Frizzled-8-deficient mice. Genetic association studies and lung expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) analyses for Frizzled-8 were performed to evaluate polymorphisms in FZD8 and their relationship to tissue expression in chronic bronchitis. Primary human lung fibroblasts and primary human airway epithelial cells were used for in vitro studies. Results Cigarette-smoke-exposure induced airway inflammation in wild-type mice, which was prevented in Frizzled-8-deficient mice, suggesting a crucial role for Frizzled-8 in airway inflammation. Furthermore, we found a significant genetic association (p=0.009) between single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs663700 in the FZD8 region and chronic mucus hypersecretion, a characteristic of chronic bronchitis, in a large cohort of smoking individuals. We found SNP rs663700 to be a cis-eQTL regulating Frizzled-8 expression in lung tissue. Functional data link mesenchymal Frizzled-8 expression to inflammation as its expression in COPD-derived lung fibroblasts was regulated by pro-inflammatory cytokines in a genotype-dependent manner. Moreover, Frizzled-8 regulates inflammatory cytokine secretion from human lung fibroblasts, which in turn promoted MUC5AC expression by differentiated human airway epithelium. Conclusions These findings indicate an important pro-inflammatory role for Frizzled-8 and suggest that its expression is related to chronic bronchitis. Furthermore, our findings indicate an unexpected role for fibroblasts in regulating airway inflammation in COPD.


In this paper, we analyze the dynamic behavior of employment and hours worked per worker in a stochastic general equilibrium model with a matching mechanism between vacancies and unemployed workers. The model is estimated for the U.S. using the Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) estimation technique. An increase in government spending raises hours worked per worker, and crowds out private consumption due to a negative wealth effect. On the path converging towards the steady state, private consumption is below its long run average and increases, which implies that the interest rate is above its long run average and declines. The interest rate effect dominates the pure economic rent effect on the capital value of a hired worker to the firm, causing a reduction of job openings and consequently a decrease in employment. These results are contrasted with the predictions of a version of Burnside, Eichenbaum and Rebelo's (1993) labor hoarding model.


Noncoding deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which includes all sequences within the genome except exon sequences that encode the protein-reading frames, harbours a wide variety of regulatory genomic features and elements. The availability of increasingly complete and accurate genomic sequence data from evolutionarily separated species – as well as diverse strain and ethnic variants within species – is providing an unprecedented opportunity to identify potentially functional regions within the genomic noncoding DNA. A variety of computational approaches enable genome-wide detection, characterisation and visualisation of highly conserved sequences and the occurrence of potentially functional elements within both the conserved and evolved elements. As a result of the continued discovery of these functional elements, the nongenic genetic neighbourhoods are now considered as keys to identifying regulatory elements that are essential for gene and chromosomal function. In this article is given an overview of the various known components of the noncoding DNA landscape and present some of the bioinformatic-based approaches and resources to identify and analyse the potential regulatory regions in genomic sequences.

Key Concepts:

An indeterminate fraction of the noncoding proportion of the human genome has a decisive role in regulating gene expression.

Comparisons among genome sequences are keys to identifying the functional regions of noncoding DNA.

Identifying and analysing 'phylogenetic footprints' is a standard approach to examine for potential regulatory regions.

Two common features of long-range regulatory elements are that they are frequently conserved in other mammals and are unique within the human genome.

It is not only the conservation of the noncoding DNA but also the loss of the same that holds some of the clues to understand our phenotypic complexity and diversity.

Post-ENCODE, the genome is viewed as a network of collaborating RNA transcripts with many of the regulatory regions of proteins transcribed into RNA and serve as regulators (e.g., microRNAs and siRNAs).

Keywords:

phylogenetic footprint;
noncoding DNA ;
regulatory region;
cis elements;
repetitive elements;
promoter;
enhancer


The research undertaken for this project relates to the history of the 'Ladybird' imprint
together with the company that produced these popular children's books.
The period, from 1914 to present day, during which the books were produced, and
throughout which the company operated, was one of great technological change in the
print industry as well as one of great social change, and the company was shaped by
many outside factors. In turn, its books were widely read and, arguably, themselves
influenced generations of children.
The research covers the books and the company from the mid-nineteenth century to the
present day. Various factors that have influenced the company and its books, such as the
British education system, the First and Second World wars, changes in print and
communications technology, the British library system and bookselling practices,
evolving social and political attitudes, the impact of the media and the company's
competitors, have all been taken into account.
The ways in which the brand has emerged and evolved is discussed within the context of
commercial, social and political factors.


This paper empirically analyzes whether government size is conducive or detrimental to life satisfaction in a cross-section of 74 countries. We thus provide a test of the longstanding dispute between standard neoclassical economic theory and public choice theory. According to the neoclassical view, governments play unambiguously positive roles for individuals' quality of life, while the theory of public choice has been developed to understand why governments often choose excessive involvement in – and regulation of – the economy, thereby harming their citizens' quality of life. Our results show that life satisfaction decreases with higher government consumption. For low, middle income, and male people, this result is stronger when the government is leftwing, while government consumption appears to be less harmful for women when the government is perceived to be effective. Government capital formation and social spending have no significant impact on life satisfaction.


Previously, nine fecal isolates from wild birds and a domestic swine were identified as helicobacters by phenotypic characterization and reaction with a helicobacter genus-specific DNA probe. These isolates fell into three biotypes by analysis of phenotypic traits. To further characterize these isolates, full 16S rRNA sequences were determined for strains representing each biotype, and sequence comparison indicated that the strains represented three novel, phylogenetically defined Helicobacter species. Three 16S rRNA-based DNA probes were designed and used to identify the remaining strains. Probe reactivity divided the strains into the same three groups identified phenotypically. Six of the isolates represented a new species of the genus Helicobacter for which we propose the name Helicobacter pametensis sp. nov. The following phenotypic features distinguished H. pametensis from other Helicobacter and Campylobacter species: positive tests for oxidase, catalase, alkaline phosphatase, nitrate reduction, growth at 42 degrees C, and growth in the presence of 1% glycine; negative tests for urease, gamma glutamyl transpeptidase, indoxyl acetate hydrolysis, and hippurate hydrolysis; and susceptibility to nalidixic acid and cephalothin. H. pametensis cells were motile and possessed one subterminal sheathed flagellum at each end. The two additional Helicobacter species were similar to H. pametensis except that they were urease positive, hydrolyzed indoxyl acetate, and were resistant to cephalothin. Because these two additional species are phenotypically similar and are represented by only two isolates for one species and one isolate for the other, they are not formally named but are referred to as Helicobacter sp. "Bird-B" and Helicobacter sp. "Bird-C."(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


There are some indications from recent determinations of the strong coupling constant alpha_s and the gluon condensate that the Operator Product Expansion may not be accurate enough to describe non-perturbative effects in hadronic tau decays. This breakdown of the Operator Product Expansion is usually referred to as being due to Duality Violations. With the help of a physically motivated model, we investigate these duality violations. Based on this model, we argue how they may introduce a non-negligible systematic error in the current analysis, which employs finite-energy sum rules with pinched weights. In particular, this systematic effect might affect the precision determination of alpha_s from tau decays. With a view to a possible future application to real data, we present an alternative method for determining the OPE coefficients that might help estimating, and possibly even reducing, this systematic error.


BACKGROUND Tendon injuries are one of the most common injuries of the hand and challenging problems in trauma surgery. They usually require surgical repair and unlike the single tendon injuries, flexor tendon injuries have higher morbidities when accompanied with nerve injuries. In the present study, I aimed to report the clinical experiences and outcomes about tendon injuries. METHODS A total of 180 patients (149 males, 31 females) between 17 and 56 years old were operated in the clinic due to tendon injury. Seventy isolated extensor tendon injuries, 60 isolated flexor tendon injuries, 30 multiple flexor tendon and major nerve injuries, 18 combined extensor and flexor tendon injuries, and 2 combined extensor, flexor and major nerve injuries were treated. All patients were admitted to the clinic in acute phase and operated immediately. Physiotherapy was started in the third day of the operation. RESULTS Patients were followed up between 6 and 18 months (mean 12.4 months). There was not any major complications except one female patient (0.5%) who did not conform to the treatment protocol after flexor tendon injury. Fifteen patients (8.5%) had poor flexor range of motion. The other patients were healed uneventfully. CONCLUSION Tendon healing may cause some complications from mild to severe degrees. However, atraumatic surgery and a comprehensive postoperative early physiotherapy could decrease these complication rates.


Resistance to parenteral antimicrobials generally occurs within two years after introduction into general use. The site where de novo resistance develops has been acknowledged to be the gut. Overgrowth of abnormal flora, defined as 105 potential pathogens per g of faeces is a risk factor for resistance following increased spontaneous mutation leading to polyclonality and antimicrobial resistance. As parenteral antimicrobials generally fail to eradicate the abnormal carrier state in overgrowth concentrations due to sub-lethal concentrations in bile and mucus the enteral antimicrobials polymyxin/tobramycin aiming at converting the abnormal carrier state into normal carriage, are the essential component of selective decontamination of the digestive tract (SDD), because they eradicate carriage and overgrowth including resistant mutants, maintaining the usefulness of parenteral antimicrobials.


1. A convenient method is presented for calculating the reflectance of a stack of dielectric layers consisting of a series of identical repeats of any particular sequence of layers. The method is closely related to that published by Lord Rayleigh in 1917. 2. In this method, two quadratic equations are formed from the thicknesses and refractive indices of the layers composing a single repeat unit. The reflectance is obtained by substituting the solutions of these equations into an explicit formula. 3. Particularly simple formulae result for the case of a stack of p plates, optical thickness λo/2π, uniformly spaced in an infinite medium with spaces of the same optical thickness. If r is the amplitude reflexion coefficient at a single interface, the reflectance of the whole stack is as follows: ( a ) when cos 2 φ 2 , reflectance = 1/1+4m 2 (r 2 -cos 2 φ)/r 2 (1-m 2 ) 2 , where m=(1-√r 2 -cos 2 φ/sin 2 φ/1+√r 2 -cos 2 φ/sin 2 φ) p ; ( b ) when cos 2 φ > r 2 reflectance = 1/1+cos 2 φ-r 2 /r 2 sin 2 pθ, Where cosθ = cos2φ-r 2 /1-r 2 ; ( c )when the number of repeats in the stack is large ( p →∞), reflexion is complete so long as cos 2 φ 2 . Outside this range the reflections is 1-√(1-r 2 cos 2 φ). 4. These results are extended to cover: ( a ) unequal optical thicknesses in plates and spaces; ( b ) oblique incidence; ( c ) layers of materials of other refractive indices above and below the stack itself; and ( d ) stacks consisting of repeats of more complex units.


This paper considers the relationship between local economic conditions and health with a focus on different approaches to geographic aggregation. After reviewing the tradeoffs associated with more- and less-disaggregated analyses – including an investigation of the migratory response to changing economic conditions – I update earlier state-level analyses of mortality and infant health and then consider how the estimated effects vary when the analysis is conducted at differing levels of geographic aggregation. This analysis reveals that more-disaggregated analyses severely understate the extent to which downturns are associated with improved health. Further investigation reveals that county economic conditions have an independent effect on mortality but that state and regional economic conditions are stronger predictors. I also leverage county-level data to explore heterogeneity in the link between county economic conditions and health across states, demonstrating that local downturns lead to the greatest improvements in health in low-income states.


Input pipelines, which ingest and transform input data, are an essential part of training Machine Learning (ML) models. However, it is challenging to implement efficient input pipelines, as it requires reasoning about parallelism, asynchrony, and variability in fine-grained profiling information. Our analysis of over two million ML jobs in Google datacenters reveals that a significant fraction of model training jobs could benefit from faster input data pipelines. At the same time, our analysis indicates that most jobs do not saturate host hardware, pointing in the direction of software-based bottlenecks. Motivated by these findings, we propose Plumber, a tool for finding bottlenecks in ML input pipelines. Plumber uses an extensible and interpretable operational analysis analytical model to automatically tune parallelism, prefetching, and caching under host resource constraints. Across five representative ML pipelines, Plumber obtains speedups of up to 47x for misconfigured pipelines. By automating caching, Plumber obtains end-to-end speedups of over 50% compared to state-of-the-art tuners.


This is a third part of tripartite morphometric data of the pig coronary blood vessels, giving a complete quantitative description of the arterial tree [Kassab et al., Am. J. Physiol. 265 (Heart Circ. Physiol. 34): H350-H365, 1993], capillary network [Kassab and Fung, Am. J. Physiol. 267 (Heart Circ. Physiol. 36): H319-H325, 1994], and venous tree (this article). Together they provide the quantitative anatomic foundation for coronary hemodynamics. The coronary venules have a unique morphology. Unlike coronary arterioles, which have cylindrical cross sections and a fairly constant diameter in each segment, the venules have approximately elliptical cross sections, are usually wavy in the longitudinal direction, and often converge like fingers to a hand. Measurements were made with the silicone elastomer casting method on five pig hearts. Data on smaller vessels were obtained from histological specimens by optical sectioning. Data on larger vessels were obtained from vascular casts. Arcading veins and anastomoses on the epicardial surface have a unique topology. Data on the number of vessels in each order, the major and minor axes, length, connectivity matrix, and the fractions of the vessels of a given order connected in series in all orders of vessels of the sinusal and thebesian veins are presented. It is shown that of the blood in the coronary blood vessels of a pig heart 27.4% is in the arteries (> 200 microns), 37.1% is in veins (> 200 microns), and 35.5% is in microcirculation (< 200 microns), of which 89.4% is in the capillaries.


Lower absorption, lower refractive index and tunable resistance are three advantages of doped silicon oxide containing nanocrystalline silicon grains (nc-SiOx) compared to doped microcrystalline silicon, for the use as p- and n-type layers in thin-film silicon solar cells. In this study we show how optical, electrical and microstructural properties of nc-SiOx layers depend on precursor gas ratios and we propose a growth model to explain the phase separation in such films into Si-rich and O-rich regions as visualized by energy-filtered transmission electron microscopy.


The theory of networks is a very lively one, both in terms of developments in the theory itself and of the variety of its applications. This book, based on the 1981 AMS Short Course on the Mathematics of Networks, introduces most of the basic ideas of network theory and develops some of these ideas considerably. A number of more specialized topics are introduced, including areas of active research and a wide variety of applications. Frank Boesch gives the basic definitions in the mathematics of networks and in the closely-related topic of graph theory. He discusses two of the most fundamental network problems - the shortest path problem and the minimum spanning tree problem as well as some of their variants.Boesch also gives an interesting presentation in the area of network reliability. Frances Yao considers maximum flows in networks, the problem most often thought of in connection with the mathematics of networks. Richard Karp gives an account of the computational complexity of network problems. Using the case study method, Shen Lin demonstrates the effective use of heuristic algorithms in network design. Four applications of the mathematics of networks are presented by Daniel Kleitman. These include: the design of irrigation systems, the theory of electrical networks, the scheduling of delivery trucks, and the physics of ice. Finally, Nicholas Pippenger presents a chapter on telephone switching networks, an area of network theory that leads to difficult mathematics drawn from such apparently unrelated fields as harmonic analysis.


Abstract Studies of Internet censorship rely on an experimental technique called probing. From a client within each country under investigation, the experimenter attempts to access network resources that are suspected to be censored, and records what happens. The set of resources to be probed is a crucial, but often neglected, element of the experimental design. We analyze the content and longevity of 758,191 webpages drawn from 22 different probe lists, of which 15 are alleged to be actual blacklists of censored webpages in particular countries, three were compiled using a priori criteria for selecting pages with an elevated chance of being censored, and four are controls. We find that the lists have very little overlap in terms of specific pages. Mechanically assigning a topic to each page, however, reveals common themes, and suggests that handcurated probe lists may be neglecting certain frequently censored topics. We also find that pages on controversial topics tend to have much shorter lifetimes than pages on uncontroversial topics. Hence, probe lists need to be continuously updated to be useful. To carry out this analysis, we have developed automated infrastructure for collecting snapshots of webpages, weeding out irrelevant material (e.g. site "boilerplate" and parked domains), translating text, assigning topics, and detecting topic changes. The system scales to hundreds of thousands of pages collected.


High-dispersion observations of the Na i D λλ5890, 5896 and K i λλ7665, 7699 interstellar lines, and the diffuse interstellar band at 5780 Å in the spectra of 32 Type Ia supernovae are used as an independent means of probing dust extinction. We show that the dust extinction of the objects where the diffuse interstellar band at 5780 Å is detected is consistent with the visual extinction derived from the supernova colors. This strongly suggests that the dust producing the extinction is predominantly located in the interstellar medium of the host galaxies and not in circumstellar material associated with the progenitor system. One quarter of the supernovae display anomalously large Na i column densities in comparison to the amount of dust extinction derived from their colors. Remarkably, all of the cases of unusually strong Na i D absorption correspond to "Blueshifted" profiles in the classification scheme of Sternberg et al. This coincidence suggests that outflowing circumstellar gas is responsible for at least some of the cases of anomalously large Na i column densities. Two supernovae with unusually strong Na i D absorption showed essentially normal K i column densities for the dust extinction implied by their colors, but this does not appear to be a universal characteristic. Overall, we find the most accurate predictor of individual supernova extinction to be the equivalent width of the diffuse interstellar band at 5780 Å, and provide an empirical relation for its use. Finally, we identify ways of producing significant enhancements of the Na abundance of circumstellar material in both the single-degenerate and double-degenerate scenarios for the progenitor system.


The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints houses a large collection of information regarding the Mountain Meadows Massacre in its Church History Department. However, none of the sources are wholly reliable and must be analyzed carefully in order to piece together the complicated events of the massacre. Turley explains what possible errors exist in Major James Henry Carleton's report, the John D. Lee trial transcripts, and John D. Lee's autobiography, Mormonism Unveiled . Against most evidence, Carleton recorded that the wagon train massacred was the Perkins train, a fact that has been repeated without much scrutiny in other works on the topic. The John D. Lee trial notes, originally written in shorthand, are difficult to decipher, and written transcripts taken from the notes omit information as well as include details not originally mentioned in the notes. Finally, errors in Lee's autobiography suggest the possibility that his attorney, William W. Bishop, may have added sensational details after Lee's death. Turley concludes that historians must sift through myths, purposeful deceptions, and inaccurate memories in order to determine the facts about the Mountain Meadows Massacre.


Automatic adaptation of content for mobile devices is a challenging problem because optimal adaptation often depends on the usage semantics of content, as well as the context of users (e.g., screen size of device being used, network connectivity, location, etc.). Usage-awaRe Interactive Content Adaptation (URICA) is an automatic technique that adapts content for mobile devices based on usage semantics. URICA allows a user who is unsatisfied with the system's current adaptation prediction to take control of the adaptation process and make changes until the content is suitably adapted for her purposes. The adaptation system learns from the user's modifications and adjusts its prediction for future accesses by other users. This paper shows that it is possible to exploit user interaction to learn how to adapt content based on context. We introduce Feedback-driven Context Selection (FCS), an automatic technique that leverages user interaction to identify the context that has the most impact on adaptation requirements. We added context-awareness to URICA so that it makes adaptation predictions for a user based only on the history of the community of users that share the context identified by FCS. The result is an automatic adaptation system that provides fine grain adaptations that reflect both the user's context and the content's usage semantics. This level of fine grain adaptation was previously available only in content that was customized manually. Experiments with two context-aware URICA prototypes show that FCS correctly identifies the contextual characteristics that impact adaptation requirements, and that grouping users into communities based on context improves the performance of the adaptation system by up to 79%.


The article simultaneously explores three lines of reflection and analysis woven around the comparative reverberations (in space and time) between citi- zenship and the administration of populations (states of exception) in the Repub- lic of Ecuador during the nineteenth century and the Kingdom of Spain in the twenty century. The first thread tries to answer the question whether it is possible for concepts generated in a country of the Global South to be used usefully in an- alyzing a different Northern reality, inverting the usual direction in the flows of transfer and importation of "theory." The second theme of comparative reverber- ation explores a network of concepts concerning the citizenship of common sense and the administration of populations, that is the "back-patio" aspect of citizen- ship, particularly its historical formation in the domination of populations in the Republic of Ecuador during the nineteenth century. It is centered on the process of identification in the daily exchanges between interpares citizens and extrapares non-citizens. The last section involves testing concepts forged in the author's stud- ies of Ecuadorian history for their utility in analyzing the current situation of mod- ern sub-Saharan immigrants in Spain (using concrete examples), and their reclusion to the private sphere in spaces of exception and abandonment. Here, the article con- centrates on the difference between the public administration of populations and the private administration of citizens. The article uses documentary material relat- ing to nineteenth-century Ecuador and twentieth-century Spain and Senegal.


The Forkhead box M1 (FoxM1) oncogenic transcription factor is overexpressed in a majority of human tumors. p53 is a transcription factor and a major tumor suppressor that is mutated in 50% of human cancers. In this study, we compared the levels of FoxM1 in normal BJ human fibroblasts, BJ fibroblasts with p53 knockdown and corresponding BJ immortal/oncogenic cell lines with inactivated p53. We found that partial deletion or inactivation of p53 in these cells leads to upregulation of FoxM1 expression. Similarly p53 knockdown in several human cancer cell lines with wt-p53 led to upregulation of FoxM1 mRNA and protein expression, while induction of p53 by DNA-damage led to downregulation of FoxM1. These data suggest that p53 negatively regulates FoxM1 expression and therefore inactivation of p53 in tumors could partially explain the phenomenon of FoxM1 overexpression in human cancers.


In this paper, we develop a model of travel in tours that joins several locations by travel through a congested network. We develop a microscopic analysis in continuous time of individual benefits obtained by spending time at each of the locations and costs incurred through travel between them. This is combined with a continuous time macroscopic equilibrium model of travel during congested peak periods to show how individuals' travel choices are influenced by the congestion that result from corresponding choices made by others. We show how different travellers can achieve identical net utilities by making different combinations of choices within the equilibrium. The resulting model can be used to investigate the effect on travel behaviour and individual utility of various transport interventions, and we illustrate this by considering the effect of a peak-period charge that eliminates congestion.


We investigate the temporal record of magmatism in the Fiordland sector of the Median Batholith (New Zealand) with the goal of evaluating models for cyclic and episodic patterns of magmatism and deformation in continental arcs. We compare 20 U-Pb zircon ages from >2300 km2 of Mesozoic lower and middle crust of the Western Fiordland Orthogneiss to existing data from the Median Batholith to: (1) document the tempo of arc construction, (2) estimate rates of magmatic addition at various depths during arc construction, and (3) evaluate the role of cyclical feedbacks between magmatism and deformation during high and low magma addition rate events. Results from the Western Fiordland Orthogneiss indicate that the oldest dates are distributed in northern and southern extremities: the Worsley Pluton (123–121 Ma), eastern McKerr Intrusives (128–120 Ma), and Breaksea Orthogneiss (123 Ma). Dates within the interior of the Western Fiordland Orthogneiss (Misty and Malaspina Plutons, western McKerr Intrusives) primarily range from 118 to 115 Ma and signify a major flux of mafic to intermediate magmatism during which nearly 70% of the arc root was emplaced during a brief, ∼3 m.y., interval. The spatial distribution of dates reveals an inward-focusing, arc-parallel younging of magmatism within the Western Fiordland Orthogneiss during peak magmatic activity. Coupled with existing data from the wider Median Batholith, our data show that Mesozoic construction of the Median Batholith involved at least two high-flux magmatic events: a surge of low-Sr/Y plutonism in the Darran Suite from ca. 147 to 136 Ma, and a terminal surge of high-Sr/Y magmatism in the Separation Point Suite from 128 to 114 Ma, shortly before extensional collapse of the Zealandia Cordillera at 108–106 Ma. Separation Point Suite magmatism occurred at all structural levels, but was concentrated in the lower crust, where nearly 50% of the crust consists of Cretaceous arc-related plutonic rocks. Existing isotopic data suggest that the flare-up of high-Sr/Y magmatism was primarily sourced from the underlying mantle, indicating an externally triggered, dynamic mantle process for triggering the Zealandia high–magma addition rate event, with only limited contributions from upper plate materials.


Traffic on the Internet today is routed on the shortest path to the destination. This is considered as the quickest path but if traffic congestion occurs on the route, packets are dropped and the traffic slows down due to the retransmission of the missing packets. If the network resources could be more evenly utilised, some congestions could be avoided and the problem with retransmissions could be reduced. In order to balance the load evenly over a network, the load variation has to be known and predictable.
Other studies of IP traffic have shown that a small number of flows carry the main part of the network traffic, these flows are referred to as elephants. This property is studied in this report and the stability of these flows is examined. By aggregating with respect to the source and destination network of the traffic, individual flows are easily identified. This report also discusses how to identify the large flows during runtime in order to use their properties when calculating the stability for the future traffic demand. The traffic prediction is based on analysis of logged Internet traffic. The report concludes that the phenomenon with elephant and mice flows can be observed when aggregating traffic artificially by different lengths of their network prefixes. When calculating future stability of flows the network aggregation does not have a major impact.


This paper explores the extent to which government revenue is affected by external shocks, and whether these effects are different for resource-rich as compared with non-resource-rich countries. We are particularly interested in the fate of poorer countries, as we assume they will find it more difficult to implement the policies needed to offset the effect of shocks. Based on data from the International Centre for Taxation and Development Government Revenue Dataset for 1980–2010, we measure the elasticity of tax revenue with respect to terms-of-trade shocks. We find that revenue in resource-rich countries is more vulnerable to such shocks. Interestingly, it is above all the richer countries that appear to be adversely affected. Also, resource-rich countries became less vulnerable in the 2000s as compared with previous decades. When we look at the poorer resource-rich countries, we find that a country's general institutional characteristics may not always reflect the quality of its management of natural resources.


During the late 70's and early 80's the series of articles on nonlinear/multi-part tariffs explored the efficacy in the welfare effects of these prices. They found that multi-part prices could improve consumers' surplus or welfare. In particular, non-linear prices can benefit each and every individual consumer as well as consumers in the aggregate (Willig 1978).
During the same period, articles appeared on self-selecting tariffs where the consumer picks from a menu of prices to select a pricing plan. One of the principal finding of these studies on self-selecting or optional tariffs was that individual consumers generally purchased a plan which was more expensive than they needed. In other words, consumers paid for service above their needs, and paid more than they would have if they had knowledge of perfect information about their future usage. One critical assumption of neoclassical economics is that consumers have perfect information regarding prices and usage of products. Observation of consumers' behavior with self-selecting tariffs belies that assumption.
Today, more than ever in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector, we have a variety of self-selecting packages of plans from which to choose. One must select among the various plans of cellular phone packages, broadband services, and mobile wireless devices "hot spot." What broadband plans for DSL service, how many minutes for cellular service, what level of use for wireless data, etc. However, with the push for "competition" and deregulation, the ICT oligopolies have not been subject to price controls. Indeed, pricing regulation of these firms has been neglected (Alleman and Rappoport 2005).
This paper explores the relationship between these various areas and suggests how regulators should insert their influence in policy making. Specifically, regulators should require ICT firms to be more transparent regarding their optional pricing packages. Indeed we propose that ICT firms should be required to bill their consumers the "best" price structure for their usage ex post, and not require consumers to select a package ex ante. This pricing policy would allow the society to reap the saving and welfare benefits of nonlinear pricing.


Currently most link-related applications treat all links in the same web page to be identical. One link-related application usually requires one certain property of hyperlinks but actually not all links have this property or they have this property on different levels. Based on a study of how human users judge the links, the idea of the link function classification (LFC) is introduced in this paper. The link functions reflect the purpose that links are created by web page designers and the way they are used by viewers. Links in a certain function class imply one certain relationship between the adjacent pages, and thus they can be assumed to have similar properties. An algorithm is proposed to analyze the link functions based on both vision and structure features which simulates the reaction on the links of human users. Current applications can be enhanced by LFC with a more accurate modeling of the web graph. New mining methods can be also developed by making more and stronger assumptions on links within each function class due to the purer property set they share.


Resonant clock distributions have the potential to save power by recycling energy from cycle-to-cycle while at the same time improving performance by reducing the clock distribution latency and filtering out non-periodic noise. While these features have been successfully demonstrated in several small-scale experiments, there remained a number of concerns about whether these techniques would scale to a product application. By modifying the Cell broadband engine processor to incorporate a large resonant global clock network, power savings with full functionality is demonstrated over a 20% range in clock frequencies, and a 6-8 Watt power savings at 4 GHz. This was achieved by changing one wiring level and adding an additional thick copper level to create inductors and capacitors.


The hardware design and VLSI implementation of a byte-wise CRC generator is presented. The algorithm is based on the work presented by Perez, Wismer and Becker (1983) in which a software implementation was proposed. The byte-wise CRC algorithm is translated to hardware and pressed in APHL (VLSI design automation language). The method used calculates CRC 'on the fly' and is much faster then the look-up table method proposed by Lee (1981). The chip is 8 times faster than the serial implementation of Sait and Khan (see ibid., vol. 39, no.4, p.911-910, 1993) with smaller hardware requirements (occupies lesser area). The number of clock cycles required to generate and transmit any CRC (for an 8 byte message) is just two more than the time required to calculate it (in all 10 clock pulses). The CRC chip can be used in a number of applications. These include areas such as error detection and correction in data communications, signature analysis, and mass storage devices for parallel information transfers. >