Identification of critical life-stage habitats is key to successful conservation efforts. Juveniles of some species show great flexibility in habitat use while other species rely heavily on a restricted number of juvenile habitats for protection and food. Considering the rapid degradation of coastal marine habitats worldwide, it is important to evaluate which species are more susceptible to loss of juvenile nursery habitats and how this differs across large biogeographic regions. Here we used a meta-analysis approach to investigate habitat use by juvenile reef fish species in tropical coastal ecosystems across the globe. Densities of juvenile fish species were compared among mangrove, seagrass and coral reef habitats. In the Caribbean, the majority of species showed significantly higher juvenile densities in mangroves as compared to seagrass beds and coral reefs, while for the Indo-Pacific region seagrass beds harbored the highest overall densities. Further analysis indicated that differences in tidal amplitude, irrespective of biogeographic region, appeared to be the major driver for this phenomenon. In addition, juvenile reef fish use of mangroves increased with increasing water salinity. In the Caribbean, species of specific families (e.g. Lutjanidae, Haemulidae) showed a higher reliance on mangroves or seagrass beds as juvenile habitats than other species, whereas in the Indo-Pacific family-specific trends of juvenile habitat utilization were less apparent. The findings of this study highlight the importance of incorporating region-specific tidal inundation regimes into marine spatial conservation planning and ecosystem based management. Furthermore, the significant role of water salinity and tidal access as drivers of mangrove fish habitat use implies that changes in seawater level and rainfall due to climate change may have important effects on how juvenile reef fish use nearshore seascapes in the future.


Taking a generative perspective, we divide aspects of language into three broad categories: those that cannot be learned (are inherent in Universal Grammar), those that are derived from Universal Grammar, and those that must be learned from the input. Using this framework of language to clarify the "what" of learning, we take the acquisition of null (and overt) subjects in languages like Spanish as an example of how to apply the framework. We demonstrate what properties of a null-subject grammar cannot be learned explicitly, which properties can, but also argue that it is an open empirical question as to whether these latter properties are learned using explicit processes, showing how linguistic and psychological approaches may intersect to better understand acquisition.


Abstract How social protection programmes affect work choices is a question that has been at the centre of labour economics research for decades. More recently, a scant literature has focused on the effects of social protection on work choices and informal employment in the context of low and middle-income countries. This paper contributes to this scant literature by examining the effect of Bolivia's Renta Dignidad, a universal non-contributory old age pension that covers all Bolivians aged 60 years and older. We exploit the discontinuity introduced by the age eligibility criteria of the programme and the timing of the announcement of the programme, to implement a difference-in-differences approach. Overall, we find that Renta Dignidad has no detrimental effects on labour force participation and the intensity of labor of adult members of beneficiary households. Instead, we find that the pension reduces the intensity of work for girls aged 12–18 living with a pensioner, which indicates a positive effect on intra-household time allocation. In terms of work choices, Renta Dignidad reduces the probability of holding a salaried job in rural areas by about 8 percentage points, which denotes a shift from formal to informal employment.


The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled against required separation of the races in statesponsored institutions and ended apartheid in American education. That decision also led the way for ending segregation in public facilities and in private institutions not generally covered by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This decision did not end de facto racial segregation due to private choice of residential segregation. This special issue, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Brown, seeks to provide current readers of The Journal of Negro Education with an informed analysis of issues associated with race and education in America and a record for future readers with an interest in that period of America's past. We sought and achieved this task with the assistance of distinguished scholars on race and education in this country. The quest for quality integrated education in America began before the end of slavery. In 1849, a Black family sued the City of Boston (Roberts v. City of Boston, 1849) to allow its daughter to attend a neighborhood White school rather than travel a much longer distance to attend the city's all-Black elementary school. The state High Court ruled against the Black family, and that decision was supported by the U.S. Supreme Court. This action, seeking desegregation of public education, occurred before the enactment of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 14' Amendment applied the Bill of Rights (first 10 amendments to the Constitution) to the states and gave Blacks citizenship; moreover, Congress added an Equal Protection Clause to the 14th Amendment. The country, in general, obeyed the laws of the land until 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, held that states may satisfy the Equal Protection Clause of the 14* Amendment by providing the different races with "separate but equal" facilities. Plessy involved public transportation but was generally applied to most areas of public life involving race. Thereafter, all of the southern states and some border states enacted laws making it illegal for Black and White children to attend the same school. The first test of Plessy in education occurred in the State of Mississippi in 1927 (Gong Lum v. Rice) when a Chinese family sought relief from having its child attend Black schools and asked the Court to allow the child to attend White schools. The -Mississippi Court applied the Plessy decision to all non-Whites, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. However, beginning in the late 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began legal action to desegregate public graduate education in the southern states. Its first, efforts involved getting Black students admitted to White graduate and professional schools where none existed for Black students in Black colleges and universities. The NAACP won several cases, but the case with the most meaning for the future Brown decision was Sweatt v. Painter (1950). In this case, a Black student applied to the University of Texas Law School, and the state responded by establishing a Black Law School at all-Black Texas Southern University. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such a law school could not be the equal of the University of Texas Law School; therefore, the Court failed the "separate but equal" test and ordered the Black student admitted to the University of Texas Law School. Four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown, ruled that laws requiring racially separate schools were unconstitutional. The Brown decision of 1954 did not immediately end racially segregated schools. The desegregation of public education, en mass, occurred almost two decades later; and, in 2001, the U. …


When we talk about things like the 'lost art of letter-writing' or the 'digital communications revolution,' what do we mean? What do we lose and what do we gain as we move towards digital ways of being in the world? Critically engaging with many of the canonical writers in the philosophy of technology (Martin Heidegger, Albert Borgmann, Don Ihde, Bruno Latour, Hubert Dreyfus and Jurgen Habermas, for example), and following what has been termed the 'empirical turn' in that discipline, this thesis answers such questions by means of a philosophical, comparative study of epistolary technics and praxis in the early nineteenth and 21st centuries, making use of Romantic era archival letters and related materials to compare and contrast our own, Internet-enabled experience of communicating over distance. In so doing, it seeks to contribute towards our understanding of the ways in which information and communication technologies influence humanity by taking a long-view of many of the more radical claims (whether optimistic or pessimistic) for the ways in which the Internet effects change in culture, society and self. The thesis is structured thematically, with chapters examining the experience of distance and presence in these two periods, the potential for meaningful engagements by way of communicative media, the technological reconfiguration of social networks, and shifts in the public/private distinction. In its conclusions it is broadly sympathetic to the somewhat pessimistic positions of Heidegger and Borgmann, finding evidence and supplying argument to support the notion that the Internet does in some circumstances serve to diminish our meaningful involvements with the world and each other. It is, however, critical of many of the more extreme arguments for the substantive impact of the Internet, which very often lean too heavily towards naive technological determinism, neglect the social shaping of technology, overemphasise the radical novelty of the Internet, or simply deny or downplay many of its undoubted benefits.


This research is about the influence of link prediction on the evolution of communities on Twitter. We collected tweets from three technology micro-bloggers who led us through their followings and tweets to tens of thousands of unique users over several weeks. We analyzed conventional and alternative information streams for these micro-bloggers based on URLs embedded in their tweets and in tweets of followees and followees-of-followees. We model users based on the most recent URLs embedded on their tweets and the latest users they follow, from which we infer links and extract semantic entities that are indicative of their interests. Furthermore, we propose a pipeline of methods for user modeling and personalization of communities of interest on Twitter. We test the performance of different organizational principles in community design, including the principles of hierarchy, user interests and the baseline follower mechanism on Twitter, which is based on user intuitions. The goal of this thesis is to create a better notion of community by automatically calculating adaptive and personalized structures of followees that produce highly interesting content. Designing communities in this way is use- ful because it enables people to know in which community they are organized during a given period of time and because it enables community-based recommendations. Furthermore, designing communities based on organizational principles enables their automatic construction. Currently, communities are manually constructed by users through a tedious process of following and unfollowing which is based on disconnected user intuitions. We investigate whether it is possible to infer links between Twitter users who are not explicitly connected on Twitter and explore whether such automatically inferred social networks would allow for improving content recommendations on Twitter.


In this contribution we propose and study a multicarrier direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (MC DS-CDMA) scheme, which employs both time (T)-domain and frequency (F)-domain spreading. We investigate the achievable detection performance in the context of synchronous TF-domain spread MC DS-CDMA, when communicating over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The performance of three different detection schemes is investigated, which include the single-user correlation based detector, the joint TF-domain MMSE multiuser detector (MUD) and the separate TF-domain MMSE/decorrelating MUD. Our simulation results show that the separate TF-domain MMSE/decorrelating MUD scheme is capable of achieving a bit error rate (BER) performance that is similar to that of the significantly more complex joint TF-domain MMSE MUD schemes.


Graph contrastive learning (GCL), leveraging graph augmentations to convert graphs into different views and further train graph neural networks (GNNs), has achieved considerable success on graph benchmark datasets. Yet, there are still some gaps in directly applying existing GCL methods to real-world data. First, handcrafted graph augmentations require trials and errors, but still can not yield consistent performance on multiple tasks. Second, most real-world graph data present class-imbalanced distribution but existing GCL methods are not immune to data imbalance. Therefore, this work proposes to explicitly tackle these challenges, via a principled framework called C o- M odality G raph C ontrastive L earning ( CM-GCL ) to automatically generate contrastive pairs and further learn balanced representation over unlabeled data. Specifically, we design inter-modality GCL to automatically generate contrastive pairs (e.g., node-text) based on rich node content. Inspired by the fact that minority samples can be "forgotten" by pruning deep neural networks, we naturally extend network pruning to our GCL framework for mining minority nodes. Based on this, we co-train two pruned encoders (e.g., GNN and text encoder) in different modalities by pushing the corresponding node-text pairs together and the irrelevant node-text pairs away. Meanwhile, we propose intra-modality GCL by co-training non-pruned GNN and pruned GNN, to ensure node embeddings with similar attribute features stay closed. Last, we fine-tune the GNN encoder on downstream class-imbalanced node classification tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models and learns more balanced representations on real-world graphs. Our source code is available at https://github.com/graphprojects/CM-GCL.


The genetic manipulation of rodents through the generation of fully transgenic animals or via the modification of selective cells or organs is a procedure of paramount importance for biomedical research, either to address fundamental questions or to develop preclinical models of human diseases. Lentiviral vectors occupy the front stage in this scene, as they can mediate the integration and stable expression of transgenes both in vitro and in vivo. Widely used to modify a variety of cells, including re-implantable somatic and embryonic stem cells, lentiviral vectors can also be directly administered in vivo, for instance in the brain. However, perhaps their most spectacular research application is in the generation of transgenic animals. Compared with the three-decade-old DNA pronuclear injection technique, lentivector-mediated transgenesis is simple, cheap, and highly efficient. Furthermore, it can take full advantage of the great diversity of lentiviral vectors developed for other applications, and thus allows for ubiquitous or tissue-specific or constitutive or externally controllable transgene expression, as well as RNAi-mediated gene knockdown. Curr. Protoc. Mouse Biol. 1:169-184. © 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.


During the past two decades, many of the traditional conceptions about the configuration of the cultural landscape of precolonial Puerto Rico have been critically addressed from both political and disciplinary perspectives. Colonialist undercurrents embedded in the traditional models used to structure the indigenous history of the island have come into question and some of the fundamental ideas about the social and cultural makeup of the human collectivities that inhabited Puerto Rico have been drastically altered. The timing of the initial occupation of the island has been pushed back to more than five thousand years ago and the potential origin of some of these societies has also been reconsidered, including the possibility that some of groups moved across the Caribbean Sea from the Isthmo-Colombian region from where they brought phytocultural traditions that included the cultivation of a wide array of important economic plants. The cultural landscape of the island later expanded with the arrival of migrants from the surrounding continents who participated in long-distance interaction networks, as demonstrated by the trade of exotic goods mainly used for making personal adornments. The cultural plurality that existed on the island led to the development of distinct traditions that were not only forged by the diverse interactions that took place within Puerto Rico, but also by engagements that continued to take place with the inhabitants of other islands of the Antilles and surrounding continental regions. This all led to the articulation of a mosaic of cultural traditions that were diffusely united through the intersocietal negotiation of a set of codes that allowed the different collectivities to engage with one another while retaining their differences.


In this paper we study the process of technical change in the case of pollution abatement from large stationary sources that have been regulated by a very forceful refunded emission payment policy. Thanks to the high costs of emitting nitrogen oxides (NOx), considerable progress has been made in lowering aggregate emissions. This paper seeks to disaggregate average industry improvements to study how much of it is due to innovation (improvement of best practice through investments as well as learning by doing) and how much is due to the spread and adoption of technology. We find both factors very important. Innovation has been rapid: the best firms have cut emissions on the order of 70 percent. Nevertheless, reductions have been even more rapid for the majority of firms, such that the disparity in emission coefficients has also been reduced significantly as the median firms have caught up with best practice.


We study the general class of gravitational field theories constructed on the basis of scale invariance (and therefore absence of any mass parameters) and invariance under transverse diffeomorphisms, which are the 4-volume conserving coordinate transformations. We show that these theories are equivalent to a specific type of scalar-tensor theories of gravity (invariant under all diffeomorphisms) with a number of properties, making them phenomenologically interesting. They contain, in addition to the dimensionless coupling constants of the original theory, an arbitrary dimensionful parameter Lambda(0). This parameter is associated with an integration constant of the equations of motion, similar to the arbitrary cosmological constant appearing in unimodular gravity. We focus on the theories where Newton's constant and the electroweak scale emerge from the spontaneous breaking of scale invariance and are unrelated to Lambda(0). The massless particle spectrum of these theories contains the graviton and a new particle-dilaton. For Lambda(0) = 0, the massless dilaton has only derivative couplings to matter fields and the bounds on the existence of a 5th force are easily satisfied. As for the matter fields, we determine the conditions leading to a renormalizable low-energy theory. If Lambda(0) not equal 0, scale invariance is broken. The arbitrary constant Lambda(0) produces a "run-away" potential for the dilaton. As a consequence, the dilaton can act as a dynamical dark energy component. We elucidate the origin of the cosmological constant in the class of theories under consideration and formulate the condition leading to its absence. If this condition is satisfied, dark energy is purely dynamical and associated to the dilaton.


Background Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) represents the majority (85%) of lung cancers and is comprised mainly of adenocarcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs). The sequential pathogenesis of lung adenocarcinomas and SCCs occurs through dissimilar phases as the former tumors typically arise in the lung periphery whereas the latter normally arise near the central airway. Methodology/Principal Findings We assessed the expression of SOX2, an embryonic stem cell transcriptional factor that also plays important roles in the proliferation of basal tracheal cells and whose expression is restricted to the main and central airways and bronchioles of the developing and adult mouse lung, in NSCLC by various methodologies. Here, we found that SOX2 mRNA levels, from various published datasets, were significantly elevated in lung SCCs compared to adenocarcinomas (all p<0.001). Moreover, a previously characterized OCT4/SOX2/NANOG signature effectively separated lung SCCs from adenocarcinomas in two independent publicly available datasets which correlated with increased SOX2 mRNA in SCCs. Immunohistochemical analysis of various histological lung tissue specimens demonstrated marked nuclear SOX2 protein expression in all normal bronchial epithelia, alveolar bronchiolization structures and premalignant lesions in SCC development (hyperplasia, dysplasia and carcinoma in situ) and absence of expression in all normal alveoli and atypical adenomatous hyperplasias. Moreover, SOX2 protein expression was greatly higher in lung SCCs compared to adenocarcinomas following analyses in two independent large TMA sets (TMA set I, n = 287; TMA set II, n = 511 both p<0.001). Furthermore, amplification of SOX2 DNA was detected in 20% of lung SCCs tested (n = 40) and in none of the adenocarcinomas (n = 17). Conclusions/Significance Our findings highlight a cell-lineage gene expression pattern for the stem cell transcriptional factor SOX2 in the pathogenesis of lung SCCs and suggest a differential activation of stem cell-related pathways between squamous cell carcinomas and adenocarcinomas of the lung.


An increasing number of machine learning tasks require dealing with large graph datasets, which capture rich and complex relation- ship among potentially billions of elements. Graph Neural Network (GNN) becomes an effective way to address the graph learning problem by converting the graph data into a low dimensional space while keeping both the structural and property information to the maximum extent and constructing a neural network for training and referencing. However, it is challenging to provide an efficient graph storage and computation capabilities to facilitate GNN training and enable development of new GNN algorithms. In this paper, we present a comprehensive graph neural network system, namely AliGraph, which consists of distributed graph storage, optimized sampling operators and runtime to efficiently support not only existing popular GNNs but also a series of in-house developed ones for different scenarios. The system is currently deployed at Alibaba to support a variety of business scenarios, including product recommendation and personalized search at Alibaba's E-Commerce platform. By conducting extensive experiments on a real-world dataset with 492.90 million vertices, 6.82 billion edges and rich attributes, Ali- Graph performs an order of magnitude faster in terms of graph building (5 minutes vs hours reported from the state-of-the-art PowerGraph platform). At training, AliGraph runs 40%-50% faster with the novel caching strategy and demonstrates around 12 times speed up with the improved runtime. In addition, our in-house developed GNN models all showcase their statistically significant superiorities in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency (e.g., 4.12% 17.19% lift by F1 scores).


Background : : : Squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is a neoplastic disease of the squamous epithelial cells that has been rarely described in the literature. This neoplasm affects the eyelid, conjunctiva and third eyelid, as well as the cornea. Corneal SCC is a neoplastic lesion characterized by a pink, typically irregular mass protruding from the epithelial surface of the cornea. Canine corneal SCC has been associated with chronic keratoconjunctivitis sicca, or keratitis secondary to exophthalmia and is common in humans, horses and cows. The treatment is surgical with excision of the lesion of the ocular surface. This paper reported a study of a dog with corneal SCC, which was successfully treated with a superficial lamellar keratectomy excision combined with cryosurgery. Case : An 8-year-old male English bulldog was presented for the evaluation of a red mass on its left eye that had progressively grown over a 1-year period. The mass was approximately 6mm in diameter and it was elevated from 3 to 4 mm above the corneal surface with no expansion onto bulbar conjunctiva. At physical examination it was normal except for the ocular disease. A complete blood cell count and serum chemical profiles were unremarkable. The radiographic evaluation did not demonstrate any evidence of metastasis. The mass was excised by a superficial lamellar keratectomy and the surgical bed was frozen with nitrous oxide. The surgical procedures consisted in excising a rim of grossly normal conjunctiva with 2mm along the mass that was sent for histopathological examination. The postoperative measures included the administration of topical tobramycin at 0.3%, four times a day, and systemic carprofen 4 mg/kg, daily, for 5 days. A reexamination was performed after 14, 21, 30, 42, 70 and 180 days postoperatively. When the cornea was healed, topical dexamethasone at 1% was prescribed, twice a day for 2 weeks to control an excessive vascularization at the limbus. In 70 days, the postoperative result was very satisfactory and there was no evidence of ocular inflammation. Two years after the surgical procedure the dog had not developed metastasis or recorrence of the ocular neoplasm. Discussion : Ocular or adnexal SCC in animals and humans is suspected to be a result of the chronic effect of ultraviolet light on the epithelium. Also, in dogs the SCC has been associated with a chronic source of irritation. The dog observed in our study was brachycephalic, with natural exophthalmic eyes and oversized palpebral fissures that may have caused excessive and chronic corneal exposure to solar radiation. The treatment of choice was excision of the lesion with a wide surgical margin, because it is the standard treatment for SCC of the cornea and cryotherapy has been a common modality of treatment. A histological examination revealed islands and nests of pleomorphic epithelial cells and keratin pearls and the diagnosis of the corneal SCC was made. No evidence of metastasis or recurrence has been found since the surgical procedure. Although, recurrence rates following the excision of this neoplasm of the ocular surface ranged an average of 30%. The treatment of the neoplasm was successful in both procedures, once no visible evidence of regrowth presented two years after the keratectomy. Despite being a rare entity, squamous cell carcinoma of cornea should be considered as differential diagnosis in dogs with any corneal mass. :


Introduction The Minnesota Department of Transportation initiated a study focused on the effects of major traffic generators on local highway systems. Minnesota State University and SRF Consulting Group, Inc. will conduct a major research study on the topic. To assist in that research CTC & Associates was asked to conduct a preliminary investigation focused on large wind farm developments, an increasingly common type of major traffic generators in Minnesota. The development of large wind farms necessarily includes the movement of very large, oversize trucks carrying wind turbines over county roads. This construction raises several concerns, including pavement damage; indirect impact to the immediate area surrounding the roads; and related costs to local governments to repair and maintain the roads and to mitigate other effects. The preliminary investigation focused on gathering information related to the two main areas of inquiry in the research project: calculating pavement damage and secondary impacts due to large vehicle traffic; and policy options for local governments to recapture the costs of roadway maintenance caused by wind farm development.


An expanding global population not only increases the amounts of municipal solid waste and wastewater generated but also raises demand for a wide range of raw materials used to manufacture goods. Extraction of these raw materials and many subsequent manufacturing processes contribute significantly to the presence of a variety of metals in wastewaters and leachates. Metal-rich wastewaters not only result in short- and long-term environmental and associated health concerns but also have potential economic value if the metals can be recovered. In this chapter, we review the effectiveness of biochar, microbial and lignin biosorbents as well as constructed wetland systems to remove soluble metals from wastewaters. The wide variation in adsorptive capacity of these biosorbent materials reflects the heterogeneous nature of the source materials used for their production. Physical and chemical modifications of biochars and lignins generally improve their adsorptive capacities which remain highly variable. Constructed wetlands are attractive because of their passive nature with low-energy and low-maintenance requirements, although their long-term capacity to treat metal-rich wastewaters is as yet largely undetermined. Future perspectives focus on increasing the selectivity of adsorbents to remove complex matrices of metals from wastewaters and on increasing their adsorption/desorption capacities.


This paper addresses the troublesome question of feature selection and content prediction in definition writing. I present the basis of definition-authoring tools that can be used across a range of contexts, independently of the domain and language of the definitions. In addition to being domain- and language-independent, these tools should be easily tailorable to specific domains. Thus, my work seeks to contribute to developing generic definition-writing aids that can be tailored to a range of different contexts and domains. The objectives of this article are: (1) to show that it is possible to create implementable generic definition models; (2) to show how to constrain these models to produce definitions relevant to particular contexts; and (3) to propose an ontological analysis framework with a fixed and well-motivated descriptive vocabulary that can be used in further content analysis studies in terminology and to enhance integration of textual definitions in ontologies.


A single placenta normally supports a single fetus. When the situation arises in which two fetuses have to share a single placenta, complications may sometimes develop. Identical twins that share a single placenta are called monochorionic twins (MC). ?Chorion? is the Latin root that refers to the placenta, while the word ?amnion? refers to the sac, or ?membranes? that surround each fetus. While fraternal twins (2 eggs and 2 sperm) are always surrounded in their own sacs and have their own individual placentas, 70% of identical twins may end up sharing a single placenta. Only 1% of identical twins share both a single placenta and a single sac, and this poses significant risk.


BACKGROUND
Coagulopathy and hemorrhage are known contributors to trauma mortality; however, the actual relationship of prothrombin time (PT) and partial thromboplastin time (PTT) to mortality is unknown. Our objective was to measure the predictive value of the initial coagulopathy profile for trauma-related mortality.

METHODS
We reviewed prospectively collected data on trauma patients presenting to a Level I trauma center. A logistic regression analysis was performed of PT, PTT, platelet count, and confounders to determine whether coagulopathy is a predictor of all-cause mortality.

RESULTS
From a trauma registry cohort of 20103 patients, 14397 had complete disposition data for initial analysis and 7638 had complete data for all variables in the final analysis. The total cohort was 76.2% male, the mean age was 38 years (range, 1-108 years), and the median Injury Severity Score was 9. There were 1276 deaths (all-cause mortality, 8.9%). The prevalence of coagulopathy early in the postinjury period was substantial, with 28% of patients having an abnormal PT (2994 of 10790) and 8% of patients having an abnormal PTT (826 of 10453) on arrival at the trauma bay. In patients with disposition data and a normal PT, 489 of 7796 died, as compared with 579 of 2994 with an abnormal PT (6.3% vs. 19.3%; chi2 = 414.1, p < 0.001). Univariate analysis generated an odds ratio of 3.6 (95% confidence interval [CI], 3.15-4.08; p < 0.0001) for death with abnormal PT and 7.81 (95% CI, 6.65-9.17; p < 0.001) for deaths with an abnormal PTT. The PT and PTT remained independent predictors of mortality in a multiple regression model, whereas platelet count did not. The model also included the independent risk factors age, Injury Severity Score, scene and trauma-bay blood pressure, hematocrit, base deficit, and head injury. The model generated an adjusted odds ratio of 1.35 for PT (95% CI, 1.11-1.68; p < 0.001) and 4.26 for PTT (95% CI, 3.23-5.63; p < 0.001).

CONCLUSION
The incidence of coagulation abnormalities, early after trauma, is high and they are independent predictors of mortality even in the presence of other risk factors. An initial abnormal PT increases the adjusted odds of dying by 35% and an initial abnormal PTT increases the adjusted odds of dying by 326%.


Mathematical modelling of biological networks can help us understand the complex mechanisms that are behind cell proliferation, differentiation and other cellular processes. From these models, we are able to replicate and predict system behaviour that can help in the design of experiments in the systems biology context. Multiple formalisms capture the evolution or dynamics of a system as implied by the network. Ordinary differential equation (ODE) models provide a precise representation of the system, where the concentrations of network components evolve based on chemical kinetics, e.g. mass action kinetics. The kinetic parameters required to generate the dynamics accurately, however, are often lacking, which has led to the development of more qualitative or discrete modelling methods. Discrete formalisms, like the well known Thomas formalism, provide a very coarse but realistic representation of the systems dynamics, whilst still highlighting fundamental features of the network structure. When modelling a given system, it could occur that the different approaches yield contrary dynamics. From a modelling perspective, this is highly impractical as we expect the system to behave uniquely irrespective of the modelling approach used. By mathematically relating different formalisms, we can analyse the dynamics of the formalisms and determine conditions for which the dynamics of each formalism are common or contrary between formalisms. Hybrid modelling approaches, that is formalisms that combine discrete and continuous methods, help in relating the purely discrete Thomas formalism with the purely continuous ODE formalism. Approximating the ODEs, we obtain piecewise affine differential equations (PADEs), which have well defined dynamics that can be discretised to reflect features of the Thomas formalism. Incorporating the hybrid formalism of PADEs into our analysis, we can break up the otherwise rough transformation between ODE and Thomas formalisms. In doing so, we can specify with greater accuracy the conditions for contrary dynamics to occur between formalisms. Our main result compares the qualitative approach of PADEs with the Thomas formalism. In particular, we show that even though the qualitative parameter information of the PADEs is inherent in the Thomas formalism and vice versa, the dynamics in both models still yield contrary dynamics. However, with the well-defined correspondences of the transition systems implied by the two approaches, we can either provide proofs of paths and terminal strongly connected components that are common between both formalisms or present counterexamples that display contrary dynamics.


The cultural topography of two adjacent mountain tops in the northern Bighorn mountain range of the state of Wyoming, USA, is examined through several field and computer aided techniques. Socially constructed space, as reflected in cumulative architectural features through time, was initially revealed by high resolution aerial photography of the mountain tops. Features observed included clusters of stone circles, solitary rock structures commonly known as vision quests, and various sized rock cairns. Field mapping of all features with high resolution GPS allowed exploratory analysis of spatial relationships of stone circles using categorical data and tessellation models in GIS. The variation in placement of rock structures and directional alignments by vision seekers on Sheep Mountain vs. Hunt Mountain is explored through cumulative viewshed analysis also in GIS. Figure 1. Topography surrounding Sheep and Hunt mountains, Bighorn National Forest.


In this paper, teleoperation system using past image records (SPIR) considering moving objects is proposed. SPIR virtually generates the scene looked from backward-tracking viewpoint by overlaying the CG model of the robot at the corresponding position on the background image which is got from the camera mounted on the robot at past time. However, moving objects cannot display correct positions, because the existing SPIR uses past static images as a background. In this study, to reflect moving objects, we improve three methods in the system. The first method is detection of moving objects. We install the particle filter algorithm in the system. The second method is elimination of moving objects on the background image. The third is overlaying moving objects at the correct position on the background image. Furthermore we have a verification experiment for the proposed system.


With the popularity of location-based services and the abundant usage of smart phones and GPS-enabled devices, the necessity of outsourcing spatial data has grown rapidly over the past few years. Meanwhile, the fast arising trend of cloud storage and cloud computing services has provided a flexible and cost-effective platform for hosting data from businesses and individuals, further enabling many location-based applications. Nevertheless, in this database outsourcing paradigm, the authentication of the query results at the client remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we focus on the Outsourced Spatial Database (OSDB) model and propose an efficient scheme, called VN-Auth, which allows a client to verify the correctness and completeness of the result set. Our approach is based on neighborhood information derived from the Voronoi diagram of the underlying spatial data set and can handle fundamental spatial query types, such as k nearest neighbor and range queries, as well as more advanced query types like reverse k nearest neighbor, aggregate nearest neighbor, and spatial skyline. We evaluated VN-Auth based on real-world data sets using mobile devices (Google Droid smart phones with Android OS) as query clients. Compared to the current state-of-the-art approaches (i.e., methods based on Merkle Hash Trees), our experiments show that VN-Auth produces significantly smaller verification objects and is more computationally efficient, especially for queries with low selectivity.


During the last 20 years, a distance variable has sometimes been added to specifications of Logit utility functions that already included travel time and cost variables long assumed in theory and practice to embody the impeding effect of distance on transport demand. We briefly recall some milestones of this seemingly superfluous enrichment of modeling practice and propose to understand it as allowing for the expression of an Attitude to Distance (or DA) distinct from the Attitude to Time or Cost level of service outcomes. The framework adopted to document this split role of distance, a duality not entirely absent from common language, is the Multino- mial Box-Cox Logit model where, in the hope of improving estimates of Values of Travel Time Savings, distance raised to a simple power has recently often been introduced in interactions with the time and cost terms. Under the DA interpretation, the new power parameters of distance reveal an optimistic, pessimistic or neutral behavior towards distance distinct from any attitudes to the level of service variables themselves. In alternate specifications of utility functions based from the start on price, speed and distance variables, the self-standing distance term can also be re-interpreted as comprising a Distance Attitude component in addition to an impedance effect.


Drought-induced tree mortality has recently received considerable attention. Questions have arisen over the necessary intensity and duration thresholds of droughts that are sufficient to trigger rapid forest declines. The values of such tipping points leading to forest declines due to drought are presently unknown. In this study, we have evaluated the potential relationship between the level of tree growth and concurrent drought conditions with data of the tree growth-related ring width index (RWI) of the two dominant conifer species (Pinus edulis and Pinus ponderosa) in the Southwestern United States (SWUS) and the meteorological drought-related standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI). In this effort, we determined the binned averages of RWI and the 11 month SPEI within the month of July within each bin of 30 of RWI in the range of 0–3000. We found a significant correlation between the binned averages of RWI and SPEI at the regional-scale under dryer conditions. The tipping point of forest declines to drought is predicted by the regression model as SPEItp = −1.64 and RWItp = 0, that is, persistence of the water deficit (11 month) with intensity of −1.64 leading to negligible growth for the conifer species. When climate conditions are wetter, the correlation between the binned averages of RWI and SPEI is weaker which we believe is most likely due to soil water and atmospheric moisture levels no longer being the dominant factor limiting tree growth. We also illustrate a potential application of the derived tipping point (SPEItp = −1.64) through an examination of the 2002 extreme drought event in the SWUS conifer forest regions. Distinguished differences in remote-sensing based NDVI anomalies were found between the two regions partitioned by the derived tipping point.


Arid-land deserts comprise up to 30% of global land surface area and experience degradation by anthropogenic land use demands. Sixteen of the 19 climate models used by the International Panel on Climate Change predict increased temperature and prolonged periods of drought for much of the arid southwest US. Soil microfauna consume organic-bound nitrogen and excrete soluble inorganic and dissolved organic nitrogen that is available for plant uptake or as substrate for microbial saprotrophs. However, the growth and activity of nematodes and protozoa is restricted to periods of adequate temperature and moisture. The objective of this dissertation research project is to determine the possible effects of predicted climate changes on cool desert soil nematodes and protozoa and their role in nitrogen cycling. Climate changes are predicted to affect nematodes more adversely than protozoa. Nematodes are thought to contribute more to nitrogen cycling through dissolved organics while protozoa are thought to contribute relatively more to nitrogen cycling through inorganic nitrogen. A shift in community composition favoring amoebae over nematodes could shift the relative balance of organic and inorganic pools of soil nitrogen. Soil microfauna are not readily observed in their soil habitat, so extraction and enumeration techniques are adapted and tested for the desert microfaunal communitites. Desert soil nematodes and protozoa participate in energy channels deriving from vascular and non-vascular primary producers as well as bacterial and fungal saprotrophs. Environmental conditions influence the prey that are available to nematodes and protozoa and, thus, indirectly affect the relative composition of microfaunal feeding groups. Environmental conditions also directly affect microfauna. Not only are nematodes affected more negatively by adverse abiotic stress than amoebae, many species of bacterivorous nematodes appear to be susceptible to unique combination of the major abiotic stresses experienced in the desert. Findings from a two-year field experiment treated with elevated temperature and summer precipitation are consistent with lab and field mesocosm experiments, but highlight the uncertainly inherent in predicting long-term trends with brief experiments. In comparison with temperature and precipitation, long-term elevated carbon-dioxide enrichment was not shown to affect the abundance of desert soil microfauna directly but did affect the distribution of protozoa and the composition of nematodes indirectly through altered plant water use patterns. Continued work is needed to devise experimental systems that quantify the relative role of microfaunal functional groups in nutrient cycling.


In preparation for IODP Expedition 302, Arctic Coring Expedition (ACEX), a site survey database comprising geophysical and geological data from the Lomonosov Ridge was compiled. The accumulated database includes data collected from ice islands, icebreakers, and submarines from 1961 to 2001. In addition, seismic reflection profiles were collected during Expedition 302 that complement the existing seismic reflection data and facilitate integration between the acoustic stratigraphy and the Expedition 302 drill cores. An overview of these data is presented in this chapter. It is well recognized that collecting geophysical data in ice-covered seas, in particular the Arctic Ocean, is a challenging endeavor. This is because much of the Arctic Ocean is continuously covered with ice thicknesses that vary from 1 to 6 m. Over the continental shelves, sea ice can be absent during summer months, but it is present year-round in the central basins. This ice cover is the most dominant feature of the Arctic Ocean environment. It circulates in the ocean basin in two main circulation patterns: the Transpolar Drift and the Beaufort Gyre (see the "Expedition 302 summary" chapter; Rudels et al., 1996). Expedition 302 sites are located within the less severe of these two ice circulation systems, the Transpolar Drift, which primarily moves sea ice from the shelves where it is formed (the Laptev and East Siberian Seas) across the basin and exits through the Fram Strait. During late summer, concentrations of Arctic sea ice can be Early Arctic Ocean geophysical exploration was performed from ice-drift stations (Weber and Roots, 1990). However, the tracks from these drifting ice stations were controlled "by the whims of nature" (Jackson et al., 1990), preventing detailed, systematic surveys of predetermined target areas. These ice-drift stations were set up on stable icebergs that were trapped in sea ice and moved generally with the large drift patterns, but locally they were erratic, so preselected locations could not be surveyed. In the late 1980s, single icebreakers began to be used for oceanographic survey work in the Arctic Ocean. Between 1991 and 2001, four scientific icebreaker expeditions to the Lomonosov Ridge took place. These cruises all experienced local sea-ice conditions varying between 8/10 and 10/10. During these expeditions, towed geophysical equipment was occasionally damaged or lost, either because of a rapidly closing wake caused by local ice pressure or because ice had cut the air gun array. Conventionally powered icebreakers reached as far as the North Pole for the first time during the 1991 Expedition (Andersen and Carlsonn, 1992; Futterer, 1992). Geophysical results from this expedition collected two important reflection profiles, AWI-91090 and AWI-91091, that crossed the Lomonosov Ridge between 87° and 88°N. These profiles imaged a ~450 m thick, well-stratified and apparently undisturbed drape of sediments overlying a prominent acoustic unconformity (Jokat et al., 1992) that spawned the idea to conduct a paleoceanographic drilling expedition to this Ridge. The use of US Navy nuclear submarines for geophysical mapping was implemented through the Science Ice Exercise program (SCICEX) (Newton, 2000). The development of the Seafloor Characterization and Mapping Pods (SCAMP), which hold a Chirp subbottom profiler, swath bathymetric profiler, and side scan sonar, was an essential part of the SCICEX program (Chayes et al., 1996). In 1999, the Lomonosov Ridge geophysical database was augmented with acoustic data acquired during the SCICEX program using the SCAMP system mounted on the US nuclear submarine USS Hawkbill (Edwards and Coakley, 2003).


A rapid and simple on-line method is described for the determination of Au(III) in various samples. The method is based on the sorption of gold(III) on Lewatit MonoPlus TP207 chelating resin including the iminodiacetate group, which is used as sorbent material and packed in a minicolumn. The chemical variables such as the pH of the sample solution, eluent type, interfering ions and concentrations of reagents, and instrumental variables such as sample loading volume, reagents flow rates, and tubing length, which affect the efficiency of the method were studied and optimised. Au(III) was sorbed on the chelating resin, from which it could be eluted with 3 mol L−1 HCl, and then introduced directly to the nebuliser-burner system of FAAS. The limit of detection of the method was 0.2 µg L−1 while the relative standard deviation was <4.0% for 20 µg L−1 Au(III) concentration. The preconcentration factor was found to be 106 while the optimised sample volume was 15.3 mL. The accuracy of the method was verified by analysing the certified reference material. The developed method was applied successfully for the determination of gold in different samples with satisfactory results.


Spectra of broad-lined Type Ic supernovae (SNe Ic-BL), the only kind of SN observed at the locations of long-duration gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs), exhibit wide features indicative of high ejecta velocities (∼0.1c). We study the host galaxies of a sample of 245 low-redshift (z < 0.2) core-collapse SNe, including 17 SNe Ic-BL, discovered by galaxy-untargeted searches, and 15 optically luminous and dust-obscured z < 1.2 LGRBs. We show that, in comparison with Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies having similar stellar masses, the hosts of low-redshift SNe Ic-BL and z < 1.2 LGRBs have high stellar mass and star formation rate densities. Core-collapse SNe having typical ejecta velocities, in contrast, show no preference for such galaxies. Moreover, we find that the hosts of SNe Ic-BL, unlike those of SNe Ib/Ic and SNe II, exhibit high gas velocity dispersions for their stellar masses. The patterns likely reflect variations among star-forming environments and suggest that LGRBs can be used as probes of conditions in high-redshift galaxies. They may be caused by efficient formation of massive binary progenitor systems in densely star-forming regions, or, less probably, a higher fraction of stars created with the initial masses required for an SN Ic-BL or LGRB. Finally, we show that the preference of SNe Ic-BL and LGRBs for galaxies with high stellar mass and star formation rate densities cannot be attributed to a preference for low metal abundances but must reflect the influence of a separate environmental factor.


Dubowitz syndrome (DubS) is considered a recognizable syndrome characterized by a distinctive facial appearance and deficits in growth and development. There have been over 200 individuals reported with Dubowitz or a "Dubowitz‐like" condition, although no single gene has been implicated as responsible for its cause. We have performed exome (ES) or genome sequencing (GS) for 31 individuals clinically diagnosed with DubS. After genome‐wide sequencing, rare variant filtering and computational and Mendelian genomic analyses, a presumptive molecular diagnosis was made in 13/27 (48%) families. The molecular diagnoses included biallelic variants in SKIV2L, SLC35C1, BRCA1, NSUN2; de novo variants in ARID1B, ARID1A, CREBBP, POGZ, TAF1, HDAC8, and copy‐number variation at1p36.11(ARID1A), 8q22.2(VPS13B), Xp22, and Xq13(HDAC8). Variants of unknown significance in known disease genes, and also in genes of uncertain significance, were observed in 7/27 (26%) additional families. Only one gene, HDAC8, could explain the phenotype in more than one family (N = 2). All but two of the genomic diagnoses were for genes discovered, or for conditions recognized, since the introduction of next‐generation sequencing. Overall, the DubS‐like clinical phenotype is associated with extensive locus heterogeneity and the molecular diagnoses made are for emerging clinical conditions sharing characteristic features that overlap the DubS phenotype.


Background Many people with mental health problems do not seek professional help but their use of other sources of help is unclear. Aims To investigate patterns of lay and professional help-seeking in men and women aged 16–64 years in relation to severity of symptoms and sociodemographic variables. Method Postal questionnaire survey, including the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ–12), sent to a stratified random sample (n=15222) of the population of Somerset. Results The response rate was 76%. Only 28% of people with extremely high GHQ–12 scores (⩾8) had sought help from their general practitioner but most (78%) had sought some form of help. Males, young people and people living in affluent areas were the least likely to seek help. Conclusions Health promotion interventions to encourage appropriate help-seeking behaviour in young people, particularly in men, may lead to improvements in the mental health of this group of the population.


Analytic theology (AT) is a particular approach to theology and the study of religion that engages with the tools, categories, and methodological concerns of analytic philosophy. As a named-entity, AT arrived on the academic scene with the 2009 Oxford University Press publication, Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, edited by Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea. AT was arguably represented, prior to this publication, by the proto-analytic theologian Richard Swinburne in his noteworthy works on Christian doctrine (e.g. Providence and the Problem of Evil, Responsibility and Atonement, The Christian God, Faith and Reason, and The Resurrection of God Incarnate), as well as by other professional philosophers of religion such as Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Swinburne, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, Robert and Marilyn McCord Adams, Basil Mitchell, Keith Yandell, Paul Helm, and Stephen T. Davis, among others. These philosophers were addressing such topics as the coherence of theism, the rationality of religious belief, and the contributions of such philosophical theologians of the medieval past including Thomas Aquinas or William Ockham and those from modernity including Rene Descartes and Jonathan Edwards. Yet, the impetus for utilizing analytic philosophy to treat these topics emerged, not from the theological side of the conversation, but from the philosophical side. Anachronistically, then, the term "analytic theology" seems to aptly describe the work of these philosophers of religion.


We present a non-neutral stochastic model for the dynamics taking place in a meta-community ecosystems in the presence of migration. The model provides a framework for describing the emergence of multiple ecological scenarios and behaves in two extreme limits either as the unified neutral theory of biodiversity or as the Bak-Sneppen model. Interestingly, the model shows a condensation phase transition where one species becomes the dominant one, the diversity in the ecosystems is strongly reduced and the ecosystem is non-stationary. This phase transition extends the principle of competitive exclusion to open ecosystems and might be relevant for the study of the impact of invasive species in native ecologies.


We live in an "Information Age" of overabundant data and lightning-fast transmission. Yet although information and knowledge represent key factors in most economic decisions, we often forget that data, information, and knowledge are products created and traded within the knowledge economy. In Gurus and Oracles, Miklos Sarvary describes the information industry--the far-flung universe of companies whose core business is to sell information to decision makers. These companies include such long-established firms as Thomson Reuters (which began in 1850 with carrier pigeons relaying stock market news) as well as newer, dominant players like Google and Facebook. Sarvary highlights the special characteristics of information and knowledge and analyzes the unusual behaviors of the markets for them. He shows how technology contributes to the spectacular growth of this sector and how new markets for information change our economic environment. Research in economics, business strategy, and marketing has shown that information is different from other goods and services; this is especially true in competitive settings and may result in strange competitive market outcomes. For example, Sarvary points out, unreliable information may be more expensive than reliable information; information sellers may be better off inviting competitors into their market because this may allow them to increase their prices; and competition may lead to increased media bias--but this may benefit consumers who want to discover the truth. In Gurus and Oracles, Sarvary explores the implications of these and other peculiarities for information buyers and sellers.


Abstract This article reports a judgment sampling of microeconomics student scores. The material was presented in three distinctive, independent sets: (1) discussion, exclusively, (2) lecture, exclusively and (3) lecture with embedded discussion. The hypothesis was that the discussion method would produce superior examination scores. The education researcher believed the hypothesis would be supported. The business researcher believed the hypothesis would not be supported. In fact, the business researcher believed the discussion method would provide the least favorable results. The evidence supports the hypothesis. The specific implication, if confirmed by statistical sampling, means that the business professor will change his method of instruction. A more generic implication would be that the teachers of other adult students, from middle school upward, might consider doing the same. The virtual explosion of information, technology, communication and transportation makes the world increasingly complex. If a person is to remain economically competitive, there is a vast array of cognitive material that must be learned and affective material that must be mastered. The need for learning makes everyone a student and heightens the need for a clear understanding of the relationship between teaching and learning. Learning is a process that results in the assimilation of information by a student. Learning is facilitated by instruction. Fortunately, there are many teaching methods available to convey a message. There are advantages and disadvantages associated with each delivery package. This suggests that one method might be superior to another in some particular context. Elements determining the context include: (1) the type of material to be learned, (2) the magnitude of material to be learned, (3) the degree of mastery desired/required, (4) the level of student interest, (5) the level of student ability, (6) the amount of time the student can devote to independent study, (7) the type of benefits received upon mastery of the material, (8) the magnitude of rewards received upon mastery of the material, (9) the utility of the gains, from the student's perspective, (10) the type of sacrifices associated with failure to master the material, (11) the magnitude of penalties associated with failure to master the material, (12) the utility of the sanctions, from the student's perspective, (13) the type of instructional materials available, (14) the magnitude of instructional materials available, (15) access to an instructor, (16) the level of instructor knowledge of the material, (17) the degree of instructor willingness to teach the material, (18) the level of instructor knowledge of teaching techniques, (19) the ability of the instructor to apply the teaching techniques and (20) the time the instructor can devote to formal instruction. These and many more related variables lead the observer to ask whether one teaching method is better than another in the instruction of microeconomics. Colleges of education, throughout the country, argue that adult students tend to learn best via some interactive method. If that is true, then college professors should attempt to incorporate class discussions as often as possible. The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not the discussion method appears to be superior, as a teaching method for college level microeconomics. Three teaching methods are assessed in this research: (1) discussion, (2) lecture and (3) a combination of short lecture with an embedded discussion. The sample is the microeconomics class offered by the University of Montevallo (UM) to students attending the second summer term, 2001. UM is one of fewer than twenty state-supported liberal arts universities in the United States (U.S.). For over 10 years, UM's Michael E. Stephens College of Business has been the smallest American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business accredited state supported school of business in the country. …


Although still virtually unknown in the West, Ooka Shohei (1909-1988) is one of Japan's most important and influential writers and social critics. The Burdens of Survival is both a seminal English-language study of this preeminent literary figure and one of the first scholarly works to thoroughly examine the war literature of a major Japanese veteran-author. Drawing on Robert Jay Lifton's work on traumatic experience and survivor psychology, the book tells the illuminating story of Ooka's arduous journey that began with guilt-ridden survival as a prisoner of war in the Philippines and culminated some twenty-five years later in the fruitful completion of survivor mission. David C. Stahl examines Ooka's battlefield memoirs, including the established war classic Fires on the Plain (1952), in terms of extreme experience, survivor guilt, bearing witness, and the "inability to mourn." Writing enabled Ooka to give cathartic expression to his haunting battlefield experience and made it possible for him to move from blame-shifting to empathy and mourning. The lengthy, exhaustively researched historical work The Battle for Leyte Island (1967-1969) faithfully details the personal and collective experience of battle, depravation, and loss, and clarifies who and what was ultimately responsible for defeat. Toward the end of this work and Return to Mindoro Island (1969), Ooka draws attention to the outstanding obligations owed by his countrymen to the war dead and suggests how they can be fulfilled by public confrontation, learning the lessons of defeat, and using them to rectify lingering social and political evils.


Renowned scholar Alan Segal offers startlingly new insights into the origins of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. These twin descendants of Hebrew heritage shared the same social, cultural, and ideological context, as well as the same minority status, in the first century of the common era.Through skillful application of social science theories to ancient Western thought, including Judaism, Hellenism, early Christianity, and a host of other sectarian beliefs, Segal reinterprets some of the most important events of Jewish and Christian life in the Roman world. For example, he finds: --That the concept of myth, as it related to covenant, was a central force of Jewish life. The Torah was the embodiment of covenant both for Jews living in exile and for the Jewish community in Israel.--That the Torah legitimated all native institutions at the time of Jesus, even though the Temple, Sanhedrin, and Synagogue, as well as the concepts of messiah and resurrection, were profoundly affected by Hellenism. Both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity necessarily relied on the Torah to authenticate their claim on Jewish life.--That the unique cohesion of early Christianity, assuring its phenomenal success in the Hellenistic world, was assisted by the Jewish practices of apocalypticism, conversion, and rejection of civic ritual.--That the concept of acculturation clarifies the Maccabean revolt, the rise of Christianity, and the emergence of rabbinic Judaism.--That contemporary models of revolution point to the place of Jesus as a radical.--That early rabbinism grew out of the attempts of middle-class Pharisees to reach a higher sacred status in Judea while at the same time maintaining their cohesion through ritual purity. --That the dispute between Judaism and Christianity reflects a class conflict over the meaning of covenant. The rising turmoil between Jews and Christians affected the development of both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, as each tried to preserve the partly destroyed culture of Judea by becoming a religion. Both attempted to take the best of Judean and Hellenistic society without giving up the essential aspects of Israelite life. Both spiritualized old national symbols of the covenant and practices that consolidated power after the disastrous wars with Rome. The separation between Judaism and Christianity, sealed in magic, monotheism, law, and universalism, fractured what remained of the shared symbolic life of Judea, leaving Judaism and Christianity to fulfill the biblical demands of their god in entirely different ways.


This article provides background on the SMARTRISK Heroes Program, a mobile stage production that introduces young people to the prevalence of unintentional injury for their age group and presents them with a series of strategies that will reduce the likelihood that they will be unintentionally injured or killed. The program logic is consistent with theoretical work from the area of health promotion including the Protection Motivation Theory and the Transtheoretical Model of Stages of Change. The SMARTRISK Heroes Program has been the subject of a number of past evaluations that are briefly described. The program logic model was included in this article. Additional information on the program and its evaluations can be found at http://www.smartrisk.ca by selecting SMARTRISK Heroes, under the "Youth Tab."


Multiple studies have been conducted on mobile phone use and how, why, how much, and in what ways are individuals using them. However, this study discovers how mobile phones are changing the way an individual thinks, feels, relates, and then acts in regards to their cell phone. Cell phones were used with the intent to close the physical gap between people and improve long-distance relationships. Yet, this may not be the primary outcome for most mobile phone users. Instead, a relationship is being built between a user and their cell phone. The book Networked by Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman states 84% of mobile phone owners go to bed with the cell phone close by so as not to miss messages or calls and 10% "can't live" without it. By conducting my own one-on-one interviews I want to provide evidence that users feel a connection with their cell phone. When questioned about these feelings, what language and metaphors keep recurring? Then, using these findings I discuss the implications of this relationship. What does this serious relationship mean for an individual's actions?


This paper reports the results of a study of the costing procedures in a technology (or research centre) of a multinational UK company operating in the metalworking industry. Research contracts carried out within the company or in conjunction with other European engineering companies are priced at full cost, and contracts carried out for third parties are priced on a cost-plus basis. Budgets are prepared for all contracts and costs are reviewed for all contracts to ensure that they are within budget. The majority of the centre's costs are direct labour, hence satisfaction with the accuracy of research contract costs is dependent on ensuring that the labour cost of each contract is recorded correctly. Other than pricing contracts, cost information is rarely used in decision making. Decisions are based on research/technical information rather than cost information. This paper reports the results of a study of the costing procedures in a technology (or research) centre of Theta plc (the company's name has been changed to preserve confidentiality), a multinational UK company operating in the metalworking industry. The technology centres undertake research contracts for manufacturing units within Theta plc and for other external companies. Two of the technology centres are located in Northern England and the other in South Wales. In total, they employ 800 people, employing 365,235 and 200 in the three centres. The largest centre is the subject of the research and is divided into 25 knowledge groups (or departments) that are customer focused having names like construction applications, packaging applications and transport applications. The objective of the research is to describe the research contracts and costing procedures used in one of the company's three technology centres. The data for the study comes primarily from a questionnaire completed by and an interview with the management accountant at one of the technology centres. The remainder of the paper is organised in the following way the next section describes the types of research contracts undertaken by the technology centre, how they are priced and the use of profitability maps. This is followed by a description of the costing system and the final section concludes the paper. Research Contracts The objective of a research contract is to produce knowledge. This could be in the form of producing software, a report concerned with solving a problem or a computer program for managing a production process. There are three different types of research contract. (1) the Annual Operating Plan (AOP) contracts relate to work undertaken within Theta, (2) European Union (EU) contracts (the contracts name has been changed to preserve confidentiality) relate to work undertaken from a European perspective for the European Union and (3) contracts carried out for third parties. The EU contracts set out precise criteria relating to the research to be undertaken and the duration of the contract. They are invoiced annually and shown as an asset in the balance sheet with revenue from the contract being credited periodically to the profit and loss account. AOP contracts are invoiced quarterly and tend to be more open ended. This arises, for example, when there may be a request to carry out 20 research years of effort on a particular issue, but it is possible that the technology centre carries out 25 research years of effort to complete the contract and receives revenue for only 20 years worth of work. AOP and EU contracts are priced at full cost defined as materials, direct labour and some overheads incurred over the life of the contract. AOP contracts are priced at full cost because they are regarded as a service to Theta through helping to solve technical problems, provide a better product to the customer and improve the production process. EU contracts are priced at full cost, without any profit margin added to the cost, because their aim is to bring together European engineering companies to enhance their commercial viability rather than making a profit. …


Background: Mental practice with motor imagery entails an individual to symbolically rehearse a physical activity within working memory in the absence of overt body movement. It has been proven to be useful in sports training and other skills training. However, much is yet to be determined if the same promising results may be gained when this training method is used with persons with brain lesions, like stroke patients. Objectives: The aim of the study is to investigate evidence for the effectiveness of mental practice with motor imagery in the neurological rehabilitation of stroke patients in improving their impairments and functional limitations, and to identify variations in mental practice protocols (duration, type of imagery employed, etc) and characteristics of participants, (age of subjects, duration of stroke prior to intervention) that may have affected the results gathered. Methods: Literature search was accomplished with electronic databases such as Science Direct, Pub Med, Proquest, MEDLINE, CINAHL, Cochrane Library for Systematic Reviews and OVID. Criteria used in selecting articles included (1) Clinical controlled trials or RCTs, (2) adult stroke patients, except with cerebellar or basal ganglia pathology, (3) intervention given was mental practice with motor imagery without external aids. Two peer reviewers individually rated the quality of each study using checklists used by JBI. Results:. A total of 7 articles were included for this systematic review after quality appraisal. This included 5 randomized controlled trials and 2 CCTs. All studies reported improvement of UE function after the intervention. Conclusion Although researches done with this intervention have yielded equivocal results, a relatively small body of evidence for mental practice with motor imagery in rehabilitatio n of UE of stroke patients still exists. Future studies employing quality research endeavors with research designs at the upper levels of the hierarchy of evidence are recommended to strengthen the present evidence.


There is little question that we face substantial challenges in the 21st century: climate change, disease, poverty, natural resource depletion and degradation, war and terrorism — the list goes on. Emerging technologies will likely be integral in resolving or mitigating many of these challenges; prominent examples include renewable energy technologies, green chemistry, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and informatics. Government policies often play a significant or even central role in advancing the development and diffusion of such technologies. Yet, these policies typically fail to account for the unintended adverse health, environmental, social and other consequences that may flow from those technologies. This chapter starts with the premise that the United States' technology policy ought to integrate principles of protection and promotion so as to ensure the availability of truly beneficial technologies. It examines the extent to which this integration can be accomplished through technology assessment at the legislative stage of policy formulation. For these purposes, technology assessment refers to the systematic assessment and evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of an ostensibly beneficial technology. Technology assessment has a decades-long history, starting primarily in the United States and more recently establishing itself in Europe. It takes many forms, not all of which will be appropriate for use in legislative settings in the United States.After some definitional matters regarding the notion of technological change, the chapter turns to two specific aspects of government technology policy. Promotional policies actively support the development and use of emerging technologies through research funding, direct subsidies and other strategies. Regulatory policies create a demand for emerging technologies by removing market competitors, creating a need for the emerging technology, or even requiring its use. Next, the chapter examines the problem of unintended consequences by identifying potential causes and exploring the historical example of methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) and the Clean Air Act. The chapter then briefly surveys the field of technology assessment, and considers how it could mitigate the problem of unintended consequences in the legislative setting. It concludes that, given the institutional structure and dynamics of Congress, technology assessment can address some, but not all, causes of such unintended consequences.


We forecast quarterly US in‡ation based on the generalized Phillips curve using econometric methods which incorporate dynamic model averaging. These methods not only allow for coe¢ cients to change over time, but also allow for the entire forecasting model to change over time. We …nd that dynamic model averaging leads to substantial forecasting improvements over simple benchmark regressions and more sophisticated approaches such as those using time varying coe¢ cient models. We also provide evidence on which sets of predictors are relevant for forecasting in each period.


The time- and space scales of tropical deep convection are estimated via analysis of 3-hourly Global Cloud Imagery (GCI) data for 3 yr at 35‐70-km resolution. The emphasis is on estimating local time- and space scales rather than traditional zonal wavenumber‐frequency spectra. This is accomplished through estimation of local spatial lag autocorrelations, the conditional probability of convection at neighboring points, and the expected duration of convective events. The spatial autocorrelation scale is found to be approximately 130 km, and the mean duration of convective events approximately 5.5 h, in the convectively active areas of the Tropics. There is a tendency for the spatial autocorrelation scales to be shorter over the continents than oceans (95‐155 versus 110‐170 km). The expected duration of convective events likewise tends to be shorter (4‐6 versus 5‐7 h). In the far western Pacific, these differences are sharp enough to legitimize the notion of the Indonesian archipelago as an extended maritime continent with a distinctive shape. Consistent with many other studies, the diurnal variation of the convection is also found to be strikingly different over the continents and oceans. The diurnal amplitude over land is comparable to the long-term mean, raising the possibility of significant aliasing across timescales. The simple analysis of this paper should be useful in evaluating and perhaps even improving the representation of convective processes in general circulation models.


The improvement of industrial engineering performance is currently a key issue.Companies can achieve such an improvement in different ways. One way, especially for companies operating in a multi-project environment, is a successfully operating Project Management Office (PMO). Recent studies have revealed that a successful PMO is a key factor influencing organisational performance. The author of this study conducted world-wide research with a sample of over four hundred PMO cases to identify what determines the success of their operations. This study revealed that to achieve a successfully operating PMO, we should focus on the activities of the PMO during two periods: short term (up to one year) and long term (two or more years).Consequently, in each of these time frames, there are different issues that need to be addressed to run a successful PMO and, thus, improve industrial engineering performance. Moreover, the efficacy of operations in a multi-project environment is crucial for practitioners. Therefore, the findings of this research will help managers to improve organisational performance, which should result in the ability to manage more projects on time and within the budget and scope of the PMO. This paper advances the current state of knowledge on PMO success factors and explores new research areas. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.24.2.3087


A new experimental method is described, applicable to beam-foil spectroscopy or, more generally, to the spectroscopy of light emitted from excited ions moving with uniform velocity in a narrow beam. In the new method the ordinary entrance slit of the spectrometer is replaced by an arrangement comprised of a special coupling lens and an intermediate-image aperture. It is shown that the interplay between the parameters describing the point of emission (θ1), the angle of emission (θ2), and the Doppler shift of the light emitted from the beam can be made such that simultaneous first-order focusing in θ1 and θ2 is obtained at the exit slit. For a discrete atomic transition this implies an image brightness much greater than that of the object (i.e., the beam), and a considerable advantage in detector counting rate without loss in spectrometer resolution. Although the employed portion of the beam is not infinitesimal in length in the new method, the spatial resolution along the beam can be maintained to the degree generally required in beam-foil applications. In a practical test of the new method, employing He ions of 225 keV energy, an intensity gain by a factor of 70 has been observed on the 4686 A line in He ii, with a spatial resolution width along the beam of 0.2–0.3 mm. The resolution in wavelength in the test recording was 2.8–3.0 A. The relative merit of the new method improves with the resolution in wavelength required, but will ultimately be limited by beam divergence, spread in beam energy, and by imaging properties higher than the first order in the coupling lens and the spectrometer.


Self-calibration of camera intrinsics and radial distortion has a long history of research in the computer vision community. However, it remains rare to see real applications of such techniques to modern Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) systems, especially in driving scenarios. In this paper, we revisit the geometric approach to this problem, and provide a theoretical proof that explicitly shows the ambiguity between radial distortion and scene depth when two-view geometry is used to self-calibrate the radial distortion. In view of such geometric degeneracy, we propose a learning approach that trains a convolutional neural network (CNN) on a large amount of synthetic data. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed method by applying it as a checkerboard-free calibration tool for SLAM, achieving comparable or superior performance to previous learning and hand-crafted methods.


Excerpt] This report uses data from the European Quality of Life Survey (EQLS) to examine social inequalities in quality of life in the European Union. Four critical domains of life are examined: health, standard of living, productive and valued activities, and individual, family and social life. Variation in these four domains is measured by gender, age, disability status, employment status and citizenship status. The role of other important drivers of social inequalities such as educational status, occupational group, urbanisation, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, income, welfare regime and healthcare system is also discussed. The results of the third EQLS (2011) are compared with those of the second EQLS (2007) to assess the impact of the economic crisis on social inequalities and on the disadvantages experienced by population subgroups in Europe.


In general, fuzzy set theory (FST) is used in geotechnical engineering to handle uncertain data and subjective information. The techniques employed can be classified into four categories: basic fuzzy inference (fuzzy set/logic); advanced fuzzy inference (combining other soft computing techniques), fuzzy probability theory and Klisiński fuzzy plasticity methods. The principal objective of the present paper is to review the applications based on fuzzy inference techniques as they represent the most used FST approaches recently. First, it identifies and describes the different ways of application within topics such as slope stability, rock engineering, foundation and tunneling. It is observed that the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) has been in use over the past ten years, especially in rock engineering related topics. Finally it is suggested that further research need to be done in order to develop a rigorous methodology or criteria to identify the characteristics of the inference system (e.g. type of systems, defuzzification methods and assignment of membership functions to fuzzy variables) that solve best a given geotechnical problem. A proper use of FST as a research tool in geotechnical problems associated with uncertainties can help in improving the accuracy of the results.


Received: 2 Aug 2016 Accepted: 8 Dec 2016 Introduction: Sleep is an essential part of life and is of utmost importance in preserving human health and performance. The quantity and quality of sleep can affect blood pressure. The objective of this paper was to determine the relationship of sleep quantity and quality with high blood pressure. Methods: This profile study utilized the data of Health Study Program in Yazd. The population contained 6964 adults in the age range of 20 to 70 years, selected using cluster sampling method. The data were analyzed using chi-squared (X) and Logistic Regression tests via SPSS (ver. 18) software. Results: Generally, 50.3% of the participants were female, 28.6% of them had high blood pressure; 31.3% of men and 25.9% of women had high blood pressure. The lowest rate of blood pressure happened within participants with 20-29 years of age, i.e., 9.9%, while the highest rate was related to individuals of 60-69 years old, i.e., 49.6%. X test yielded significant results for sleep duration (p<0.001) and nightmare frequency (p=0.016). The adjusted chance of sleep duration, gender, age groups, educational levels, and body mass index (BMI) had significant effects on blood pressure (p<0.001). Half of the participants showed sleep dysfunctions in terms of quantity and quality, and one-third were likely to come down with high blood pressure. Conclusion: It can be concluded that the sleep quantity and quality of the studied people were not at a desirable level; it needs high attention. It can be maintained that the findings of the current study indicated the importance of paying attention to the quality and quantity of sleep in preventing the incidence of high blood pressure.


Chitosan is a deacetylated derivative of chitin, which is a naturally abundant mucopolysaccharide, supporting the matter of crustaceans, insects, and fungi. Because of its unique properties, such as non-toxicity, biodegradability, and biocompatibility, chitosan has a wide range of applications in various fields. Increasing interest on chitosan's usage has resulted in high consumption. Therefore, production of chitosan from essential sources with desired characteristics has become an important issue. Several methods, with different chemicals and reaction conditions, have been reported in the literature. This study aimed to shed light in several features of a very promising chitin isolation method described by Tolaimate et al. and its effect on the produced chitosan's phisico-chemical characteristics.


Motivation:
 An important step of "metagenomics" analysis is the assembly of multiple genomes from mixed sequence reads of multiple species in a microbial community. Most conventional pipelines employ a single-genome assembler with carefully optimized parameters and post-process the resulting scaffolds to correct assembly errors. Limitations of the use of a single-genome assembler for de novo metagenome assembly are that highly conserved sequences shared between different species often causes chimera contigs, and sequences of highly abundant species are likely mis-identified as repeats in a single genome, resulting in a number of small fragmented scaffolds. The metagenome assembly problem becomes harder when assembling from very short sequence reads.
 Method:
 We modified and extended a single-genome and de Bruijn-graph based assembler, known as "Velvet" [27], for short reads to metagenome assembly, called "MetaVelvet", for mixed short reads of multiple species. Our fundamental ideas are first decomposing de Bruijn graph constructed from mixed short reads into individual sub-graphs and second building scaffolds based on every decomposed de Bruijn sub-graph as isolate species genome. We make use of two features, graph connectivity and coverage (abundance) difference, for the decomposition of de Bruijn graph.
 Results:
 On simulated datasets, MetaVelvet succeeded to generate higher N50 scores and smaller chimeric scaffolds than any compared single-genome assemblers, produce high-quality scaffolds as well as the separate assembly using Velvet from isolated species sequence reads, and MetaVelvet reconstructed even relatively low-coverage genome sequences as scaffolds. On a real dataset of Human Gut microbial read data, MetaVelvet produced longer scaffolds, increased the number of predicted genes, and improved the assignments of a phylum-level taxonomy in the sense that the rate of predicted genes that cannot be assigned to any tanoxomy is reduced.
 Availability:
 The source code of MetaVelvet is freely available at http://metavelvet.dna.bio.keio.ac.jp under the GNU General Public License.


Simultaneous segmentation and detection of liver tumors (hemangioma and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)) by using multi-modality non-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (NCMRI) are crucial for the clinical diagnosis. However, it is still a challenging task due to: (1) the HCC information on NCMRI is invisible or insufficient makes extraction of liver tumors feature difficult; (2) diverse imaging characteristics in multi-modality NCMRI causes feature fusion and selection difficult; (3) no specific information between hemangioma and HCC on NCMRI cause liver tumors detection difficult. In this study, we propose a united adversarial learning framework (UAL) for simultaneous liver tumors segmentation and detection using multi-modality NCMRI. The UAL first utilizes a multi-view aware encoder to extract multi-modality NCMRI information for liver tumor segmentation and detection. In this encoder, a novel edge dissimilarity feature pyramid module is designed to facilitate the complementary multi-modality feature extraction. Second, the newly designed fusion and selection channel is used to fuse the multi-modality feature and make the decision of the feature selection. Then, the proposed mechanism of coordinate sharing with padding integrates the multi-task of segmentation and detection so that it enables multi-task to perform united adversarial learning in one discriminator. Lastly, an innovative multi-phase radiomics guided discriminator exploits the clear and specific tumor information to improve the multi-task performance via the adversarial learning strategy. The UAL is validated in corresponding multi-modality NCMRI (i.e. T1FS pre-contrast MRI, T2FS MRI, and DWI) and three phases contrast-enhanced MRI of 255 clinical subjects. The experiments show that UAL has great potential in the clinical diagnosis of liver tumors.


The exploitation of groundwater resources must always keep in account the geology and hydrogeological settings of the catchment basin for the sustainability of withdrawals, in order not to overexploit the aquifer. Especially, in the case of mineral water extraction, even more attention should be paid to understand what are the water-rock-gases interaction mechanisms, which allow obtaining a specific water chemistry. The case of Ferrarelle mineral water (western sector of Riardo Plain, Caserta) is particularly complex. Through the acquisition of a great amount of former geological and hydrogeological data and by new hydrogeological surveys, it has been possible to distinguish the aquifer levels, distinguishing four circulations over the Roccamonfina Volcano and in the Riardo Plain. The presence of volcanic and volcaniclastic deposits deriving from the Roccamonfina Volcano which cover a highlytectonized carbonate bedrock, allows the formation of two aquifers in hydraulic continuity. This mixing between the two aquifers allows, with the ascent of deep CO2 through faults in the carbonate bedrock, the formation of the typical chemical composition of the mineral water Ferrarelle. In the eastern sector of the plain, it is possible to distinguish the volcanic aquifer from the carbonate one, probably due to the presence of low permeability deposits.


In this paper I consider the impact of attending a selective high school in the UK. Students are assigned to these schools on the basis of a test taken in primary school and, using data on these assignment test scores for a particular district, I exploit this rule to estimate the causal effects of selective schools on test scores, high school course taking and university enrollment. Despite the huge peer advantage enjoyed by selective school students, I show that four years of selective school attendance generates at best small effects on test scores. Selective schools do however have positive effects on course-taking and university enrollment, evidence suggesting they may have important longer run impacts.


A worldwide battle over the future of the internet is under way. Telecommunications agencies around the world increasingly perceive the internet and the devices that connect to it as being under their regulatory control, and law enforcement authorities and the content industry are pushing them to exert this authority. I use two recent FCC case studies, the Broadcast Flag and the IP-Enabled Services rulemakings, to reveal the scope of the battle now playing out globally. Both of these proceedings present fascinating and troubling challenges to our shared online future, are being echoed around the world, and suggest that we are at a turning point in the brief history of the internet. Regulating information flows, usually the province of membranes created implicitly by individual attention and group decisions, is ordinarily an impossible task for governments. The US Congress has recognized this by (to date) acting with great restraint (with aberrational and expensive exceptions) when thinking about regulating the internet. The US should take the lead in recognizing that there is a fundamental mismatch between the scale of government actions online (large) and the complexity of the moves available to governments (low), on the one hand, and the scale of information flows online (fine) and their complexity (high), on the other. The only way to manipulate this online environment is to encourage the evolution of complex small-scale regulatory mechanisms that provide social order. We need to regulate the internet in a completely different way.


CONTEXT
Factors associated with the high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in China are not well described, especially among Chinese adolescents.

OBJECTIVES
The aim of the study was to examine important environmental or sociodemographic factors influencing 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] levels and estimate its heritability.

DESIGN
A sample of 226 male and female adolescent twins aged 13-20 yr from a large prospective twin cohort of rural Chinese children and adolescents that has been followed for 6 yr were evaluated.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S)
Blood level of 25(OH)D was measured using tandem mass spectrometry methodology.

RESULTS
The overall mean (SD) 25(OH)D level was 18.0 (9.4) ng/ml, with wide variation by gender and season. In males (47.4% of subjects), the mean (SD) 25(OH)D level was 12.1 (4.2) ng/ml in non-summer and 27.4 (8.8) ng/ml in summer; in females, it was 10.1 (4.1) ng/ml in non-summer and 19.5 (6.3) ng/ml in summer. A multivariate model that included gender, age, season, physical activity, and student status demonstrated that male gender, summer season, and high physical activity significantly increased 25(OH)D levels. Summer season and male gender also significantly decreased the risk of being in the lowest 25(OH)D tertile. Overall, 68.9% of the variability in 25(OH)D level was attributable to additive genetic influence. Stratification by gender found that in males, 85.9% of the variability in 25(OH)D level was attributable to such influence, but in females, it was only 17%.

CONCLUSION
In this sample of rural Chinese adolescents, 25(OH)D level was influenced by gender, season, and physical activity level. There was a strong genetic influence on 25(OH)D level in males only.


ABSTRACT DNA fingerprinting has been used extensively to characterize populations of Mycosphaerella graminicola, the Septoria tritici blotch pathogen of wheat. The highly polymorphic DNA fingerprints of Mycosphaerella graminicola were assumed to reflect the action of transposable elements. However, there was no direct evidence to support that conclusion. To test the transposable element hypothesis, the DNA fingerprint probe pSTL70 was sequenced, along with three other clones from a subgenomic library that hybridized with pSTL70. Analysis of these sequences revealed that pSTL70 contains the 3' end of a reverse transcriptase sequence plus 29- and 79-bp direct repeats. These are characteristics of transposable elements identified in other organisms. Southern analyses indicated that either the direct-repeat or reverse-transcriptase sequences by themselves essentially duplicated the original DNA fingerprint pattern, but other portions of pSTL70 contained single-copy DNA. Analysis of 60 progeny from a sexual cross between two Dutch isolates of Mycosphaerella graminicola identified several new bands that were not present in the parents. Thus, the putative transposable element probably is active during meiosis. Tests of single-spore isolates revealed gains or losses of one or more DNA fingerprint bands in 4 out of 10 asexual lines derived from isolate IPO94269. Therefore, DNA fingerprint patterns produced by the putative transposable element were capable of changes during asexual reproduction of this isolate. Probe pSTL70 did not hybridize at high stringency to genomic DNAs from other fungi related to Septoria and Mycosphaerella. These results indicate that the DNA fingerprint probe pSTL70 most likely identifies a transposable element in Mycosphaerella graminicola that may have been acquired recently, and appears to be active during both sexual and asexual reproduction.