Iron-cyanide complexes are present in soil and ground water because of anthropogenic inputs. We studied the sorption and the transport of the complexes ferrocyanide, [Fe(CN) 6 ] 4- , and ferricyanide, [Fe(CN) 6 ] 3- , in goethite-coated sand in column experiments under saturated conditions as influenced by flow velocity and flow interruption. Isotherm parameters obtained from batch experiments of Fe-cyanide complex sorption on goethite were used to simulate breakthrough curves in goethite-coated sand. The breakthrough curves of ferrocyanide were inversely modeled. The transport of both complexes was retarded and rate-limited. Only ferricyanide breakthrough curves revealed concentration drops after flow interruption. Simulations with batch parameters roughly reflected breakthrough curves of ferricyanide, but not of ferrocyanide. Ferricyanide sorption and desorption could not be described with the same isotherm indicating hysteresis. Since the sorption fronts of ferrocyanide breakthrough curves revealed the formation of a shoulder, it was concluded that ferrocyanide sorption in column experiments could not be described by a single isotherm, which is based on a singular sorption process. Therefore, sorption of ferrocyanide on goethite was assumed to be influenced by more than one sorption mechanism. Inverse modeling of ferrocyanide breakthrough data using the Laagmuir isotherm resulted in erroneous sorption maxima.


The raw compute performance of today's graphics processor is truly amazing. With peak performance of over 60 GFLOPS, the compute power of today's graphics processor (GPU) dwarfs that of the commodity CPU at a price of only a few hundred dollars. As the programmability and performance of modern graphics hardware continues to increase, many researchers are looking to graphics hardware to solve computationally intensive problems previously performed on general purpose CPUs. The challenge, however, is how to re-target these processors from game rendering to general computation, such as numerical modeling, scientific computing, or signal processing. Traditional graphics APIs abstract the GPU as a rendering device, involving textures, triangles, and pixels. Mapping an algorithm to use these primitives is not a straightforward operation, even for the most advanced graphics developers.
In this dissertation, we explore the concept of stream computing with GPUs. We describe the stream processor abstraction and how this abstraction and corresponding programming model can efficiently represent computation on the GPU. To formalize the model, we present Brook for GPUs, a programming system for general-purpose computation on programmable graphics hardware. Brook extends C to include simple data-parallel constructs, enabling the use of the GPU as a streaming co-processor. We present a compiler and runtime system that abstracts and virtualizes many aspects of graphics hardware. In addition, we present an analysis of the effectiveness of the GPU as a streaming processor and evaluate the performance of a collection of benchmark applications in comparison to their CPU implementations. For a variety of the applications explored in this dissertation, we demonstrate that our Brook implementations performs up to seven times faster than their CPU counterparts. We also discuss some of the algorithmic decisions which are critical for efficient execution when using the stream programming model for the GPU.


The effect of partial spatiotemporal coherence in photorefractive two-beam coupling is studied theoretically and experimentally. Coupled-wave equations and a beam-propagation method are used to study the influence of coupling on the statistical properties of the beams. The spatial coherence is found to improve for amplified and to deteriorate for deamplified beams. A two-beam coupling experiment with light of reduced spatial coherence was performed with photorefractive barium titanate. Qualitative agreement between theory and experiment was obtained.


A Nutrition Education Program for Advanced Practice Registered Nurses Caring for Obese Patients By Kathy L. Wilson MSN, Southeast Missouri State University, 2006 BSN, Southeast Missouri State University, 2009 Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Nursing Practice Walden University February 2018 Abstract Obesity is a major U.S. public health epidemic. A review of the current literature identified a lack of obesity counseling with individuals. The gap in practice was a lack of understanding of nutrition, nutrition labeling, and how foods affect health. The objective of this project was to identify the community assessment need related to obesity and then educate APRNs on ways to better communicate with obese patients. This project focused on an education program for advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) on using the 5 A's framework for obesity counseling to improve their knowledge and skill in counseling their overweight and obese patients in a rural primary care clinic. Knowles' adult learning theory was used to develop the education project. The education program was presented to and evaluated by 2 APRNs at a rural health clinic. The providers requested the information be placed online so they could give the presentation their undivided attention. The audio-based PowerPoint presentation and printed copies of the presentation content were e-mailed to each of the providers. The presenter went to the clinic 3 days after placing the presentation online to obtain the evaluations and answer any questions. An impact evaluation assessed the presenter, audience learningObesity is a major U.S. public health epidemic. A review of the current literature identified a lack of obesity counseling with individuals. The gap in practice was a lack of understanding of nutrition, nutrition labeling, and how foods affect health. The objective of this project was to identify the community assessment need related to obesity and then educate APRNs on ways to better communicate with obese patients. This project focused on an education program for advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) on using the 5 A's framework for obesity counseling to improve their knowledge and skill in counseling their overweight and obese patients in a rural primary care clinic. Knowles' adult learning theory was used to develop the education project. The education program was presented to and evaluated by 2 APRNs at a rural health clinic. The providers requested the information be placed online so they could give the presentation their undivided attention. The audio-based PowerPoint presentation and printed copies of the presentation content were e-mailed to each of the providers. The presenter went to the clinic 3 days after placing the presentation online to obtain the evaluations and answer any questions. An impact evaluation assessed the presenter, audience learning experience, and confidence and skill of the participant. The participants reported they had a better understanding of the reality of the obese population and how they could improve their communication by using the 5 A's method of assessment. Both participants reported the presentation was clear and easy to understand. A recommendation was made to conduct a future quality improvement project expanding the use of the educational program. This project has the potential to impact social change by improving health care education and ultimately reducing obesity. A Nutrition Education Program for Advanced Practice Registered Nurses Caring for Obese Patients By Kathy L. Wilson MSN, Southeast Missouri State University, 2006 BSN, Southeast Missouri State University, 2009 Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Nursing Practice


After 2 min of incubation of tobacco cell culture in a medium with [3H] -- thymidine the bulk of radioactivity of newly synthesized DNA is found in short (about 5S) fragments, whereas after a prolonged incubation of the cells, i. e. 5--60 min--in long replication fragments as well. Hence DNA replication in tobacco cells occurs discretely via formation and cross-linking of Okazaki fragments. At high cell concentrations in the medium the linking of 5S fragments is suppressed. It was shown that the Okazaki fragments and other fragments of DNA replication are subjected to methylation, the DNA methylation occurring immediately after the onset of replication. The level of methylation of the 4--6S fragments is two times less than that of the linked ones; therefore replicative methylation occurs in at least two steps: at first the Okazaki fragments undergo methylation and once they are linked, an additional methylation of DNA takes place. Auxin (2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) at concentration of 5 mg per 1 of medium does not affect the ratio of the replication fragments and methylation of the Okazaki fragments, but completely inhibits the second step of replicative methylation of DNA, i. e. methylation of the linked fragments. Phytohormones can probably control the transcription of newly synthesized DNA via regulation of methylation.


Fragmentation and convergence are two discoursal lenses that have been used to view changes that have taken place in the domains of legal services, the legal profession, regulation and legal education.  While they may appear orthogonal, the relationships between them are intimate, sophisticated, constantly shifting and require much more analysis. In this paper I shall argue that law schools need to engage with both processes for they are powerful actants upon the way we perceive our schools and our roles within them.  They are also powerful forces upon what and how we teach, and the nature of the knowledge that is the focus of our heuristics.  To exemplify this argument and to begin to examine its strength as a tool for analysis I shall focus on one area of legal education, namely the three fields of legal information literacies, legal informatics and legal writing.  I shall argue that the sum of the convergence of all three would significantly improve the educational effects of the parts in our curricula.  I shall explore how studies in New Media on media convergence give us models for such convergence, and can reveal the educational effects that the process may bring about.


This article identifies elements and connections that seem to be relevant to explain persistent aggregate behavioral patterns in educational systems when using complex dynamical systems modeling and simulation approaches. Several studies have shown what factors are at play in educational fields, but confusion still remains about the underlying mechanisms driving observed outcomes and therefore more guidance is needed. The framework suggested here throws some ideas in that direction stressing the relevance of nonlinear complex interactions via feedbacks between education systems' transition rates ─ intake, repetition, dropout, and promotion ─ and schooling outcomes. Schooling outcomes reciprocally influence transition rates in the system generating aggregate patterns that continuously change (and are changed by) the inputs that endogenously determine them. Furthermore, this paper underscores practical and theoretical limitations of traditional quantitative models that can be addressed with a complex systems analysis and suggests future lines of investigation. Specifically, this article advocates a complexity approach ruled by the laws of thermodynamics to help detect corrupt practices in education systems and improve accountability and governance in such systems.


The gold standard for studying natural selection is to quantify lifetime fitness in individuals from natural populations that have been grown together under different field conditions. This has been widely done in ecology to measure phenotypic selection in nature for a wide range of organisms — an evolutionary force that seems to be most determined by local precipitation patterns. Studies that include whole-genome data would enable the translation of coefficients of selection to the genetic level, but such studies are still scarce, even though this type of genetic knowledge will be critical to predict the effect of climate change in natural populations. Here we present such an experiment including rainfall-manipulation with the plant A rabidopsis thaliana. The experiment was carried out in a Mediterranean and a Central European field station with rainout shelters to simulate a high and low rainfall treatment within each location. For each treatment combination, we planted 7 pots with one individual and 5 pots with 30 counted seeds of 517 whole-genome sequenced natural accessions covering the global species distribution. Survival, germination, flowering time, and final seed output were measured for ca. 25,000 pots, which contained ca. 14,500 individual plants and over 310,00 plants growing in small populations. This high-throughput phenotyping was only possible thanks to image analysis techniques using custom-made scripts. To make the data and processing code available, we created an R package "dryAR" (http://github.com/MoisesExpositoAlonso/dryAR).


Metal Acetylacetonate–Bidentate Ligand Interaction (MABLI) is presented here as a new chemical mechanism for the highly efficient generation of free radicals for polymer synthesis. This MABLI process involves simultaneous ligand exchange and a change of the metal oxidation degree and is associated with the efficient release of free radicals. In conventional redox two-component radical generating systems, two criteria are required to be efficient: (1) oxidizing agents must exhibit a low bond dissociation energy (BDE) i.e. they are usually unstable (e.g. peroxides) and (2) a small difference must exist between the oxidation potential of the reducing agent and the reduction potential of the oxidation agent. In contrast, here, the criteria for efficient MABLI radical generation were energetic and geometric for both bidentate ligands and metal acetylacetonates. The strength of this approach is to use stable compounds in 2-components free radical initiating systems and to generate carbon centered radicals. Mechanistic investigations demonstrated the formation of new metal adducts by means of high-resolution mass spectroscopy (HR-ESI-MS) as well as UV-vis spectrometry. As a result of its high radical generating rate, the potential of MABLI was illustrated on the methacrylate free radical polymerization under mild conditions (room temperature, in air) and initiated with a small amount of metal acetylacetonate though it opens new perspectives for acac-like additions in organic chemistry.


Fully autonomous or "self-driving" vehicles represent a potentially transformative shift in personal mobility. Given the emerging nature of self-driving vehicle technologies, however, guidance for accessible implementation is limited. It has been suggested that the result is that much of this emerging technology is being designed in a manner that will render it largely inaccessible for persons with disabilities. Borrowing from object-oriented programming we identify common barriers to accessibility which we argue are de facto anti- patterns in the design of accessible self-driving vehicle technology. Drawing from the literature and our own studies we describe design commonalities (anti-patterns) which we argue may pose problems for persons with disabilities. We believe that this work may provide direction for designers regarding how to better support the needs of persons with a range of disabilities in the self-driving vehicle context.


Non‐frugivorous waterbirds disperse a wide variety of plants by endozoochory, providing longer‐dispersal distances than other mechanisms. Many waterbirds visit both agricultural and natural landscapes during their daily movements, but potential bird‐mediated dispersal of weed plants within and from agricultural landscapes to other habitats is commonly overlooked. Gulls (Laridae) are expanding in numbers and increasingly exploiting anthropogenic habitats worldwide, with possible growing implications for the spread of weeds. Yet, to date, there are no studies on the spatial distribution of weed dispersal by waterbirds. We developed a plant dispersal model based on movements of 19 Larus fuscus using ricefields, via GPS telemetry. We combined daily movements with two curves estimating the retention times of plant seeds in their guts: (a) an experimental curve based on retention time in captivity for four weeds with dry fruits known to be dispersed by gulls: Juncus bufonius, Cyperus difformis, Polypogon monspeliensis and the alien Amaranthus retroflexus; (b) a theoretical curve based on the interspecific scaling relationship between body mass and mean retention time. Median dispersal distances of weed plant seeds by gulls ranged between 690 and 940 m, but maximum distances exceeded 150 km. The theoretical retention time model showed higher median dispersal distances than the experimental retention time model. Spatial patterns of weed deposition were very similar between retention time methods, and most strongly depended on gull movements. Variation between individual gulls had little influence on seed shadows. About 92% of all seeds (>10,000 intact seeds per day) were dispersed within the ricefield area of 370 km2. The remaining 8% of seeds were deposited beyond ricefields into other habitats, 42% of which reached moist environments (other irrigated agriculture, rivers and natural wetlands) presumably suitable for weed establishment. Synthesis. Gulls can disperse weed plants over long distances across a mosaic of habitats. This implies exchange of weed plant species between human‐dominated and natural areas by waterbirds as dispersal vectors. This spatial study highlights the importance of non‐frugivorous birds for long‐distance plant dispersal, which is generally an overlooked mechanism in studies aiming to predict and manage expansion of weed plants.


This paper introduces the Adaptive Resonance Theory under Constraint (ART-C 2A) learning paradigm based on ART 2A, which is capable of generating a user-defined number of recognition nodes through online estimation of an appropriate vigilance threshold. Empirical experiments compare the cluster validity and the learning efficiency of ART-C 2A with those of ART 2A, as well as three closely related clustering methods, namely online K-Means, batch K-Means, and SOM, in a quantitative manner. Besides retaining the online cluster creation capability of ART 2A, ART-C 2A gives the alternative clustering solution, which allows a direct control on the number of output clusters generated by the self-organizing process.


This paper describes the effects of conditions, such as prebaking length, exposure energy, and postbaking temperature, on polybutadiene resist film formation, when obtaining high chemical resistance to hot phosphoric acid etchant. After alumina ceramic was etched at temperatures from 260°C to 320°C, we measured the change in resist thickness, resist film breakdown ratio, and etch factors. Polybutadiene molecules are cross-linked both photolytically and pyrolytically, so postbaking critically affects the enhancing of the resist's thermal and chemical stability. Prebaking at 80°C for 30min, exposure at 7-9mJ/cm2, and postbaking at 300°C for 30min yielded a highly chemically resistant, strongly adhesive, optimal resist film. The etch factor increased with increasing etching temperature, probably due to decreased acid viscosity, becoming about 2 at an etching temperature of 300°C. At higher etching temperatures, however, the etch factor decreased and the resist breakdown ratio increased, indicating that the applicable maximum etching temperature was 300°C for the polybutadiene resist.


Is the National Labor Relations Board (the NLRB or the Board), the agency that oversees federal labor law, still relevant? When this question is considered, as it frequently is by scholars, lawyers and officials of the NLRB itself, the focus typically is on whether changes in the workplace, the economy and society are diminishing the relevance of the Board. But there is a new and more immediate threat to the relevance of the Board that so far has been mostly ignored - that the Board is in danger of being rendered a superfluous legal institution in the scheme of American administrative law. In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Allentown Mack Sales and Service, Inc. v. NLRB created an opening for appellate courts to completely disregard the Board's rulings in labor law cases and decide these cases as they wish. And a number of appellate courts have already plunged through that opening to regularly decide labor law cases, and labor law issues, without any regard for the Board's views on them.The threat to the Board has come through courts' questioning of the Board's approach to fact-finding. In Allentown Mack, the Supreme Court declared that "(the Board) should not be able to impede judicial review, and indeed political oversight, by disguising its policymaking as fact-finding." The Board technique of "disguising" policymaking as fact-finding had been identified by many scholars, most notably Professor Joan Flynn, who showed that the Board commonly engaged in the practice of making policy determinations in the guise of (ostensibly policy-neutral) fact-finding, a practice that Professor Flynn and others dubbed "hiding the ball." These scholars argued that the Board hides the ball in order to make its policy determinations less visible and therefore less likely to be reversed by the federal courts of appeals or attacked by members of Congress.


Text generation tasks aim at generating human-readable text from different kinds of data. Normally, the generated text only contains the information included in the data and its application is thus restricted to some limited scenarios. In this paper, we extend the task to an open domain event text generation scenario with an entity chain as its skeleton. Specifically, given an entity chain containing several related event entities, the model should retrieve from a trustworthy repository (e.g. Wikipedia) the detailed information of these entities and generate a description text based on the retrieved sentences. We build a new dataset called WikiEvent1 that provides 34K pairs of entity chain and its corresponding description sentences. To solve the problem, we propose a wiki augmented generator framework that contains an encoder, a retriever, and a decoder. The encoder encodes the entity chain into a hidden space while the decoder decodes from the hidden space and generates description text. The retriever retrieves relevant text from a trustworthy repository which provides more information for generation. To alleviate the overfitting problem, we propose a novel random drop component that randomly deletes words from the retrieved sentences making our model more robust for handling long input sentences. We apply the proposed model on the WikiEvent dataset and compare it with a few baselines. The experimental results show that our carefully-designed architecture does help generate better event text, and extensive analysis further uncovers the characteristics of the proposed task.


The oral part of the pharynx affected by cancer is subject to radiation, surgical and combined treatment. In stage IIIb the author practices resection of the oral pharynx by means of posterolateral pharyngotomy. This provides an adequate approach to the lesion area (the root of the tongue, vallecules, posterior and lateral walls of the pharynx) to perform ablastic resection of the oral pharynx with radical dissection of cervical fat.


FANET (flying ad-hoc networks) is currently a trending research topic. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have two significant challenges: short flight times and inefficient routing due to low battery power and high mobility. Due to these topological restrictions, FANETS routing is considered more complicated than MANETs or VANETs. Clustering approaches based on artificial intelligence (AI) approaches can be used to solve complex routing issues when static and dynamic routings fail. Evolutionary algorithm-based clustering techniques, such as moth flame optimization, and ant colony optimization, can be used to solve these kinds of problems with routes. Moth flame optimization gives excellent coverage while consuming little energy and requiring a minimum number of cluster heads (CHs) for routing. This paper employs a moth flame optimization algorithm for network building and node deployment. Then, we employ a variation of the K-Means Density clustering approach to choosing the cluster head. Choosing the right cluster heads increases the cluster's lifespan and reduces routing traffic. Moreover, it lowers the number of routing overheads. This step is followed by MRCQ image-based compression techniques to reduce the amount of data that must be transmitted. Finally, the reference point group mobility model is used to send data by the most optimal path. Particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), and grey wolf optimization (GWO) were put to the test against our proposed EECP-MFO. Several metrics are used to gauge the efficiency of our proposed method, including the number of clusters, cluster construction time, cluster lifespan, consistency of cluster heads, and energy consumption. This paper demonstrates that our proposed algorithm performance is superior to the current state-of-the-art approaches using experimental results.


ABSTRACT This article aspires to make two original contributions to the vast literature on Hobbes's account of the nature and person of the commonwealth: (1) I provide the first systematic analysis of his changing conception of 'person'; and (2) use it to show that those who claim that the Hobbesian commonwealth is created by personation by fiction misconstrue his theory of the state. Whereas Elements/De Cive advance a metaphysics-based distinction between individuals ('natural persons') and corporations ('civil persons'), from Leviathan onwards Hobbes contrasts individuals acting in their own name ('natural persons') with representatives ('artificial persons'). These changes notwithstanding, Hobbes retains the same corporate conception of the state throughout. On the prevailing 'fictionalist' interpretation, the sovereign brings the commonwealth into existence by representing it. I argue, rather, that as an incorporation of natural persons, the commonwealth becomes one person through the authorized (i.e. non-fictitious) representation of each constituent member singly by one common representative ('the sovereign').


The development of a successful PET or SPECT molecular imaging probe is a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process that suffers from high attrition. To address this problem, we have developed a biomathematical modeling approach that aims to predict the in vivo performance of radioligands directly from in silico/in vitro data. Methods: The method estimates the in vivo nondisplaceable and total uptake of a ligand in a target tissue using a standard input function and a 1-tissue-compartment model with a parsimonious parameter set (influx rate constant K1, efflux rate constant k2, and binding potential BPND) whose values are predicted from in silico/in vitro data including lipophilicity, molecular volume, free fraction in plasma and tissue, target density, affinity, perfusion, capillary surface area, and apparent aqueous volume in plasma and tissue. The coefficient of variation of the BPND (%COV[BPND]) metric, derived from Monte Carlo simulations, is used to estimate the in vivo performance of candidate compounds. A total of 28 compounds for 10 targets was evaluated using our method to predict their in vivo performance and validated against measured in vivo PET data in the Yorkshire/Danish Landrace pig. Results: The predicted K1, k2, and BPND values were generally consistent with the values estimated from in vivo PET data. The model resulted in small %COV[BPND] values for widely accepted good ligands such as 11C-flumazenil (2.02%) and 11C-raclopride (2.55%), whereas higher values resulted from poor ligands such as 11C-(R)-PK11195 (13.34%). Of 4 candidates for the GlyT1 transporter, the model selected 11C-GSK931145 (2.11%) as the most promising ligand, which was consistent with historical decisions made on the in vivo PET data. Conclusion: A biomathematical modeling approach has the potential to predict the in vivo performance of ligands from in silico/in vitro data and aid in the development of molecular imaging probes.


This article describes a 90nm technology SRAM soft fail analysis. The bitmaps of affected wafers show a large number of wafer edge dies failing with single cell cluster fails at supply voltages below 1.0V. The fails appear in characteristic areas within a 256k dualport SRAM memory block. Nanoprobing was used for electrical localization at the cell level by means of a Multiprobe atomic force probe (AFP) system. Fail areas exhibit very weak PFET drain currents several orders of magnitude below the target values, while the drain currents of NFET cell transistors are in the expected range. For fail visualization a junction stain was applied to TEM samples to delineate areas with different doping levels. Due to differences in etch behavior between failed and reference areas, missing LDD extensions and a partially blocked source/drain (S/D) implantation were identified as the root cause of the fails.


Abstract. On 27 February 2010, a megathrust earthquake of Mw = 8.8 generated a destructive tsunami in Chile. It struck not only Chilean coast but propagated all the way to Japan. After the event occurred, the post-tsunami survey team was assembled, funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), to survey the area severely affected by the tsunami. The tsunami damaged and destroyed numerous houses, especially in the town of Dichato. In order to estimate the structural fragility against tsunami hazard in this area, tsunami fragility curves were developed. Surveyed data of inundation depth and visual inspection of satellite images of Dichato were used to classify the damage to housing. A practical method suitable when there are limitations on available data for numerical simulation or damage evaluation from surveys is presented here. This study is the first application of tsunami fragility curves on the South American Pacific coast and it might be of practical use for communities with similar characteristics along the west Pacific coast. The proposed curve suggests that structures in Dichato will be severely damaged – with a 68% probability – already at 2 m tsunami inundation depth.


We study the specification of access control policy in large-scale distributed systems. Our work on real-world policies has shown that standard policy idioms such as role hierarchy or role delegation occur in practice in many subtle variants. A policy specification language should therefore be able to express this variety of features smoothly, rather than add them as specific features in an ad hoc way, as is the case in many existing languages. We present Cassandra, a role-based trust management system with an elegant and readable policy specification language based on Datalog with constraints. The expressiveness (and computational complexity) of the language can be adjusted by choosing an appropriate constraint domain. With just five special predicates, we can easily express a wide range of policies including role hierarchy, role delegation, separation of duties, cascading revocation, automatic credential discovery and trust negotiation. Cassandra has a formal semantics for query evaluation and for the access control enforcement engine. We use a goal-oriented distributed policy evaluation algorithm that is efficient and guarantees termination. Initial performance results for our prototype implementation have been promising.


The rapid development in transport system monitoring provide planners and researchers with new opportunities to understand the trends of mobility patterns in urban areas, known as transformation of urban mobility. It brings businesses and cities together to implement system-level integrated initiatives to conducting urban mobility and transport system toward a more efficient future. As a result, identification of the trip patterns and spatio-temporal dependencies in urban areas requires a comprehensive understanding of high-dimensional human mobility dynamics. These emerging trends need a framework to identify urban mobility patterns from a spatio-temporal perspective that includes various visualized representation of mobility patterns and travel behaviour. The main purpose of this study is to investigate different data sources and methods used in the literature to obtain the proposed patterns in urban areas. The spatio-temporal models evaluated in this review can be used in a wide range of mobility studies suggesting trip patterns and related variables are significantly affected by spatial and non-spatial impacts.


The human society has been a rational effervescent of mankind. No more than ever, have we felt the desperate need to understand the basic filaments, which binds us all. Be it corporate or otherwise, a society is a repercussion and reflection of mankind's eclectic vision. The Earth is one big home for the whole mankind and it is our greatest obligation, to preserve the threads of humanity for keeping all of us together. Looking at the social aspects of corporates, the corporate social responsibility has come a long way. Even in the days of royal chartered companies, the fine line between the personal profits and the returns to the society at large was not completely absent. And despite all the alterations and adjustments of corporate laws around the globe, the ultimate accountability of board members of a company to its stakeholders is always cherished and underlined. This paper is a humble attempt to determine and analyse that, it is not only the shareholders or investors, who mandate a company's directors to be accountable and answerable to them, for the sheer objectives for which the company was created, but also to realise that eventually it is the society by and large which commands, governs and questions the motives and performances of a company. Keywords-Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Corporate Governance, Corporatism, Stakeholders, Economy, Symbiosis, Performance Parameters


Abstract The acute phase response is associated with metabolic derangements, including hyperglycaemia. Hyperglycaemia is associated with adverse clinical outcomes, including increased morbidity and mortality in various patient populations. The obvious question is: does tight blood glucose control improve morbidity and mortality in critically ill patients? Tight glycaemic control (TGC) or intensive insulin therapy (IIT) has become a major area of research, debate and controversies. The belief that hyperglycaemia is a physiological response and intervention is only warranted when the renal threshold is exceeded rapidly changed to aggressive control and, currently, clinical practice is moving to a mid-point between the two.


Book synopsis: Classical scholarship has traditionally neglected the prominence of the body in antiquity. Constructions of the Classical Body theorizes that the study of antiquity is necessarily a study of the body, and that attention to this fact can lead to a much-needed shift in the way in which classical studies are approached today. This volume aims to reestablish the relevance of the problem of the body at the perimeters of several different kinds of inquiry, and, in this way, to help open up a field of possibilities for future study.

The range covered by the essays in this volume is sweeping: from Corinthian vaseware to Athenian and Roman politics, poetry from Homer to Ovid, medical writers from the Hippocratic corpus to the diary of Aelius Aristides (second century c.e.), philosophy (Seneca, Porphyry), the Greek novel, Christian apocrypha, Ovid's medieval reception, and twentieth century film. This range is a consequence of the multidisciplinarity that any study of the body requires, and it attests to the particular richness of the body in classical antiquity and as an object for study today. The volume illustrates that body is located between traditional borders, not within them; the body dissolves traditional objects of study and joins areas usually kept apart. Retracing the fate of the body is thus a way of rendering antiquity truly strange again—it allows us to see the past afresh, with open eyes.


Rising prices of agricultural commodities have renewed concerns about constraints to agricultural productivity. To assess productivity trends, total factor productivity (TFP) is generally preferred to partial productivity indexes as an indicator of technical and efficiency changes because it is more closely related to the unit costs of production. But measuring TFP is demanding of data, and developing comprehensive and comparable indexes of international agricultural TFP has been challenging. This study proposes a growth accounting approach, using FAO data on quantity changes in inputs and outputs and aggregating input changes using cost shares derived from other sources, as a consistent way of constructing agricultural TFP indexes for world agriculture. This produces aggregate growth rates for agricultural output, input and TFP at the country, regional and global levels. Results suggest that the rate of agricultural TFP growth accelerated in recent decades, especially in developing countries. Most regions of the world now rely on productivity-based growth rather than resource-based growth to raise agricultural output.


This study assesses how child deprivation in Ontario compares to that of Ontario's population in general and that of children in eight European high-income countries (France, Germany, United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden). This research has been motivated by the publication of UNICEF's 10th Child Report Card. Due to lacking data the report card only compares child deprivation for Europe. For Ontario, however, deprivation information is available in the 2009 Ontario Material Deprivation Survey. Being a province that is close to Canada's average socio-economic performance, replicating the report card methodology allows exploring how child deprivation in Ontario, and possibly Canada, compares to Europe. This study finds that Children in Ontario have somewhat higher deprivation levels (11.7%) than the Ontario population as a whole (9.9%). In comparison to the eight European countries, Ontario also has higher child deprivation levels, ranking right after France which has the highest deprivation rates and 19th out of 30 countries. Just like their European peers, deprivation of Ontario children is associated with families consisting of lone parents and fewer employed household members as well as caretakers having low education and / or low income. Nevertheless, the relative disadvantage that such children in Ontario face seems smaller than in the European countries. As in Europe, there is considerable lack of overlap between income poor and materially deprived households: this study finds that about 6% of the children are both income poor and deprived; 6% are deprived only and 10% are income poor only (78% are neither income poor or deprived). In sum, rather than resembling the Nordic countries, child deprivation in Ontario resembles more to that in Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and especially France. As Canada's current focus on 'low income' measures excludes half of the materially deprived households, these findings suggest that using material deprivation measures would also contribute to a better and more nuanced understanding of poverty in Canada.


The last decade has witnessed enormous growth in the asymmetric synthetic applications of dirhodium(II) carbenes generated from diazo-precursors. Innovative construction of 'designer' catalysts has played an integral role in extending the breadth of the synthetic cascade of non-racemic products now available through a range of cyclopropanation, C-X insertion, aromatic cycloaddition-rearrangement, and ylide-based reaction types. This review, whilst mindful of importance of the catalytic system, focuses primarily on the latter feature of product diversity.
South African Journal of Chemistry Vol.54 2001: 1-40


Herbaria are potentially important repositories of living seeds that could be useful for recovery of rare plant species. To examine this capacity, we tested seed germination of rare milkweed (Asclepias) and milkvetch (Astragalus) species representing different collection dates and different herbaria. These groups have contrasting seed characteristics, with greater potential for longevity in the nonpermeable hard-coated milkvetch seeds. Twelve-year-old Asclepias lanuginosa seeds failed to germinate. However, we achieved 45% germination from three-year-old Asclepias meadii seeds, but germination dropped to 0% after ages of four to five years. Astragalus neglectus seeds germinated from 97-, 48-, and 28-year-old herbarium specimens, and Astragalus tennesseensis seeds germinated from a four-year-old collection. Seedlings produced from these experiments were incorporated into ex situ garden populations for recovery or restoration of rare species populations. Different herbarium pest control techniques may have significant bearing on the viability of seeds stored on herbarium specimens. Microwaving can cause precipitous loss of seed viability, while deep-freezing appears to allow some seeds to remain viable. Potentially live seeds of rare species should be stored under conditions that enhance their long-term viability.


This paper investigates the benefits of taking an ideological turn in translation studies after the linguistic turn and cultural turn in the previous decades. This ideological turn refers to a new/renewed focus on the ideological significance of the act of translation; more specifically, it refers to a changed perspective of seeing translation as a means of ideological resistance. Critical discourse analysis is equally engaged in exposing that discursive practices could have ideological effects. A translator, as a mediator between languages, cultures and ideologies, should make the readers aware of this feature of discourse. This has the advantage of allowing the readers to come to the ideology in their own terms, and not be forcefully interpreted for them by the translator.


The mental health of post-secondary students has dominated recent discourse surrounding higher education. Accordingly, many institutions have introduced a break in the fall term, designed to support student well-being. As part of an interdisciplinary, longitudinal study examining the effects of the fall break on student stress, we held focus groups with undergraduates. We observed mixed feedback surrounding this intervention. Students appreciated the fall break as an opportunity to reduce their stress, yet they frequently reported negative impacts of the break on the timing of academic assessments and their ability to effectively manage study time. Based on extensive dialogue with students, we provide recommendations for institutions which have implemented or are considering implementing a fall break as a way to support student mental health. We aim to address the paucity of qualitative research on student stress and develop a deeper understanding of the factors driving students' responses to stress intervention policies.


You don't have to know the work of the legal theorist, Pierre Legendre, to read Toni Morrison's new novel, Paradise (Morrison 1997) but it doesn't hurt. The novel is not ostensibly about law (as one might expect, in Paradise there is no crime). Nevertheless, law is central to the novel. It is what the paradisal community rests on, the foundation of the symbolic order. It lays down what would be taken to be the inalterable places of this society and culture. Law is constitutive, what constitutes, constitutional; which as we shall see is no fortuitous analogy. Paradise is a story of foundations, or foundational myths, at the center of which is law. With unusual uncanniness, these not-so-buried themes in Morrison's work overlap with Legendre's psychoanalytically based legal theories. If his work is an explication and explanation of the symbolic function of law -what rests in society's legal unconscious -Morrison's novel is an illustration of it. While the point of this paper is not to illustrate Legendre but to illuminate Morrison, awareness of Legendre makes corners and connections in Paradise brighter. This journal article is available in Law Text Culture: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol5/iss1/17 Law & The Sacred: Moving Beyond the Law of The Fathers Toni Morrison's Paradise


Adhesive bonding as an alternative method of joining materials together has many advantages over the more conventional joining methods such as fusion and spot welding, bolting and riveting. For example, adhesives can be used to bond dissimilar materials, adhesive joints have a high stiffness to weight ratio and the stress distribution within the joint is much improved. Stainless steels are commonly used in applications that would clearly benefit from adhesive bonding; architectural cladding, because of the large bond areas involved, and in the railway industry, due to improved acoustic insulation and greater fatigue resistance. The work presented in this thesis is concerned with adhesive bonding of stainless steels intended for structural applications.
As a starting point to the investigation, a review of the literature was conducted, covering the intrinsic mechanisms of adhesion, the significance of the chemical and physical nature of the adherend surface, the types of structural adhesives, the methods of testing adhesive joints and surface characterisation techniques. The first experimental stage, involved a screening programme to evaluate a number of candidate adhesive systems and adherend surface pre-treatments. Standard single overlap shear and floating roller peel tests conducted in ambient conditions were employed in the discrimination and the degree of compatibility between adhesive and adherend, as measured by the proportion of cohesive failure on the post-fracture face, was also considered. In the second stage of the experimental work, lap shear tests were used to evaluate the affects of surface contamination on joint strength. In addition, lap shear and peel tests were considered to assess the significance of the adhesive bondline and primer thickness. In order to assess the environmental durability of adhesive joints, lap shear and peel tests were conducted after ageing in ambient and high humidity environments. To compliment the data, Boeing wedge crack extension tests were also carried out on adhesive bonded joints incorporating adherends with different surface conditions, to investigate the contribution to joint strength in ambient and adverse environments afforded by surface pre-treatment. The next stage of the experimental work was designed to evaluate the significance of the adherend type and its thickness on initial lap shear strength. Several different commercial grades and gauges of stainless steel were used in the tests, which were conducted at room temperature. The final stage of the experimental work was concentrated on the room temperature creep and dynamic fatigue performance of adhesive joints. Throughout the course of study a number of different surface analytical techniques were employed to physically and chemically characterise the surfaces of pm-bonded adherends and to identify the locus of failure on post-fracture faces.
The single overlap shear and floating roller peel tests were able to differentiate between the candidate adhesives; epoxy systems, particularly the toughened variants, were considered the most suitable structural adhesives for bonding stainless steels in load bearing applications. However, these tests and subsequent tests using lap shear and peel, failed to discriminate conclusively between the different surface pre-treatments (except untreated or crudely prepared surfaces) and ageing environments. The Boeing wedge crack extension tests were found to be sensitive to the condition of the adherend surface and the environment in which the joint is located; roughening the surface of the adherend either chemically or physically was found to enhance joint durability in ambient, high humidity and sub-zero environments. The use of surface primers and coupling agents may protect the un-bonded surface and benefit joint durability, but excessively thick primer layers may reduce joint strength. The stiffness of the adherend material was found to significantly influence lap shear strength. Stiffer adherends, either thicker or inherently stronger, give higher joint strengths because they resist joint rotation and the peel stresses at the extremes of the overlap are minimised. Lap joints with low stiffness adherends will fail by peel-dominated, adherend-controlled failure and lap joints with high stiffness adherends will fail by shear-dominated, adhesive-controlled failure. Two elastic models were proposed for determining the elastic rotation and the line peel force as a function of the shear stress. The room temperature creep results showed an endurance limit of -40% mean static failure load (design load = 250 N.mni1 ). The dynamic fatigue results were favourable compared to those of spot welded and weldbonded joints and an endurance limit of 40% mean static failure load (design load = 250 N.mm-1 ) was observed. Finally, leaving the hard fillets of cured adhesive squeeze-out, intact at the extremes of the overlap, will reinforce the joint and minimise the rotation-induced peel stresses that will lead to premature failure when the adherend plastically deforms under static or dynamic loading.


The aim of the study is to determine and measure the blood volume as well as level of pain of the study volunteers after being punctured with different safety lancets (varying sizes) from 20 s to 2 m.  Blood sample can be used in a number of ways: for diagnosis, to determine health condition generally and for screening. 300 subjects were punctured 4 times with different safety lancets.  After each puncture their blood was collected into the capillary with the volume calculated.  After the lancing, the perceived pain was recorded on VAS scale. It was found that with increased thickness of the needle, the amount of blood sample increases too. Blood volumes obtained after puncturing with different types of safety lancets with the same needle diameter (Gauge) vary depending on the manufacturer. The level of pain in the VASt majority of cases was assessed as minimal or low. Based on the results obtained from a group of 300 volunteers (1200 punctures) it can be concluded that all types of safety lancets are efficient and safe for both patients and medical personnel.

 Key words: Blood, test, rapid, safety, lancet, capillary, diagnostic, volume, puncture, pain.


This work utilises archival methods to examine the processes of identification authorized by the colonial state to establish the certification routine for children employed in the textile mills of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Specifically, this project will investigate how colonial administrative and bureaucratic policies, along with the legal regulation of the Indian Factory Acts, naturalized 'age' as the category of identification for laboring children. This work argues that the colonial obsession with 'age' standardization is very much present in the contemporary law governing child labor in India, i.e. the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act. Therefore, the proposed research plans to center on 'age' as a historical category of analysis and its institutionalization with related processes of identification through the introduction of medico-legal procedures by the colonial state. The working hypothesis is that the 'industrial child' was produced as an age-based category through the interaction between these regulatory processes, a corrupt bureaucracy, and a superficial colonial concern for child protection.


Corsican pine (Pinus nigra) and beech (Fagus sylvatica) wood
specimens were modified with n-butyl isocyanate (n-Bu-NCO), phenyl isocyanate (Ph-NCO), 1,6-diisocyanatohexane (HDI) and tolylene 2,4-diisocyanate (TDI), using pyndine as the swelling agent and catalyst. Several levels of weight gain
were achieved by varying the reaction time. For each species the approximate general reaction rate order based on hydroxyl substitution was Ph-NCO> n-BuNCO>
HDI > TDI for Corsican pine, and HDI > Ph-NCO> n-Bu-NCO >
TDI for beech.
The effect of chemical modification in the sorption properties and in the associated dimensional stability of wood was investigated by determining sorption isotherms and measuring the respective volumetric swelling at each
relative humidity (RH) level. The treatment depressed the isotherms evenly over the entire range of RH for all levels of reaction, however, the difunctionally modified wood tended to show lower reduction in sorption at low RH's. The
reduction in sorption was closely accompanied by a reduction in swelling indicating that within the accuracy of the experiment no voids were formed within the cell walls due to the treatment.
The TDI treated specimens showed higher reduction in swelling under RH conditions than at saturation in liquid water. This was interpreted as to be caused by the formation of rigid TDI crosslinkages.
The mechanisms of reduction in wood hy~roscopicity were
investigated by fitting data to the Hailwood-Horrobin sorptIOn model. It was shown that the chemical modification treatment affects both monomolecular and polymolecular sorption. The accessibility of bonding sites was also reduced.
Regression analYSIS revealed that the reduction in monomolecular sorption is chiefly governed by the decrease in site accessibility and that the reduction in
polymolecular sorption is governed by the increase in the adduct volume in the cell wall.
Investigation of the causes of the reduction in site accessibility by analyzing the sorption isotherms for wood modified with n-Bu-NCO and with a bulkier monofunctional isocyanate (octadecyl isocyanate) suggest that the
accessibility of the internal wood surfaces is related to the weight gain and not to the fraction of hydroxyl groups (OH) reacted. This suggests that the reduction in
accessibility is caused by a "shieldin~ effect" where the adducts physically cover some of the adjacent unreacted sorptIon sites.
With difunctionally modified wood no evidence of crosslinking effectiveness was indicated at saturation in liquid water. However, when the samples were soaked in pyridine, the crosslinkages seemed to influence superswelling in comparison to that shown by mono functionally reacted wood.
Finally, tensile strength testes carried out on modified and
unmodified wood strips revealed that with the exception of n-Bu-NCO treated samples, the wood strength is slightly but significantly reduced by the treatments.


Recently, Miller et al. showed that a model's in-distribution (ID) accuracy has a strong linear correlation with its out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy on several OOD benchmarks -- a phenomenon they dubbed ''accuracy-on-the-line''. While a useful tool for model selection (i.e., the model most likely to perform the best OOD is the one with highest ID accuracy), this fact does not help estimate the actual OOD performance of models without access to a labeled OOD validation set. In this paper, we show a similar but surprising phenomenon also holds for the agreement between pairs of neural network classifiers: whenever accuracy-on-the-line holds, we observe that the OOD agreement between the predictions of any two pairs of neural networks (with potentially different architectures) also observes a strong linear correlation with their ID agreement. Furthermore, we observe that the slope and bias of OOD vs ID agreement closely matches that of OOD vs ID accuracy. This phenomenon, which we call agreement-on-the-line, has important practical applications: without any labeled data, we can predict the OOD accuracy of classifiers}, since OOD agreement can be estimated with just unlabeled data. Our prediction algorithm outperforms previous methods both in shifts where agreement-on-the-line holds and, surprisingly, when accuracy is not on the line. This phenomenon also provides new insights into deep neural networks: unlike accuracy-on-the-line, agreement-on-the-line appears to only hold for neural network classifiers.


From a clinical viewpoint, a greater number of ACL injuries have been observed involving the left knee than the right knee; however, the evidence is still limited. The purpose of the first study in this two-part investigation was to demonstrate whether laterality of ACL injury exists in various sports activities, including alpine skiing. We hypothesized that the incidence of left knee ACL injury would be higher than that of right knee injury. In the second study, a knee kinematic analysis during a trunk-turning test was conducted to demonstrate the laterality of knee kinematics in female alpine skiers. Subjects for the first study were ACL patients who visited Hiroshima University Hospital between 1994 and 2004. For the alpine skiers, the injury side, the mechanism of injury, and the turning side at the moment of injury were also determined. In the second study, the participants were female recreational skiers who had no history of an ACL injury. Kinematic analyses with a high-speed camera were conducted to measure the knee, hip, and trunk angles during the trunk-turning test. In alpine skiers, 194 (57 %) left ACL injuries and 146 (43 %) right ACL injures were observed. However, there were no significant differences in knee flexion angle during the trunk-turning test. Our findings showed that a left ACL injury occurred 33 % more frequently than a right knee ACL injury in alpine skiers. In addition, we found no differences in the knee flexion angle during the trunk-turning test; however, the height of left shoulder appeared to be higher than the right shoulder during the right turn.


This article addresses proof in both science and law. Both disciplines utilize proof of facts and proof of theories, but for different purposes and, consequently, in different ways. Some similarities exist, however, in how both disciplines use a series of premises followed by a conclusion to form an argument, and thus constitute a logic. This article analyzes the ways in which legal logic and scientific logic differ. Finding facts in law involves the same logic but quite different procedures than scientific fact-finding. Finding, or rather constructing, the law is also very different from scientific theorizing. But such differences do not indicate that one system of inquiry is deficient or the other superior. The fact-finding and law-constructing procedures that may seem odd or cumbersome to some scientists are rational responses to constraints that are simply not present in scientific inquiry. While these differences may seem obvious, their value lies in assisting us in describing the contrasting cultures of law and science.


When confronted with constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). the "generate & test" strategy of Prolog is particulary inefficient Also, control mechanisms defined for logic programming languages fall short in CSP because of their restricted use of constraints. Indeed. constraints are used passively for testing generated values and not for actively pruning the search space by eliminating combinations of values which cannot appear together in a solution. One remedy is to introduce the domain concept in logic programming language. This allows for an active use of constraints. This extension which does not impede the declarative (logic) reading of logic languages, consists in a modification of the unification, the redefinition of the procedural semantics of some built-in predicates (≠, ≤, ) and a new evaluable function and can be implemented efficiently. Without any change to the search procedure and without introducing a new control mechanism, look ahead strategies, more intelligent choices and consistency techniques can be implemented naturally in programs. Moreover, when combined with a delay mechanism, this leads directly to a strategy which applies active constraints as soon as possible.


The current research investigates L2 revision during text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and its relationships with the accuracy of text in chat logs and typing ability. Another main aim of this study is to explore how tasks can be implemented to facilitate learning in this medium. In particular, the effects of post-task anticipation (± post-task anticipation) and its type (anticipation of an individual vs a collaborative language correction post-task) on learners' main task performance in terms of revision, speed fluency and accuracy are examined. The study is primarily motivated by the methodological shortcomings of previous research exploring L2 changes during text-based SCMC, and the scarcity and limited scope of investigation of post-task anticipation studies. Various data collection methods were utilized to gain rich research data. Performance data were obtained from computer screen recordings, keystroke logs and chat logs by means of two text-based SCMC tasks involving picture description and decision-making. Stimulated recall interviews were carried out to gauge participants' thoughts during revision in order to ensure the reliability of the coding of revisions; and an exit questionnaire and a follow-up interview were administered to elicit their responses pertaining to different aspects of the research including their experience of post-task anticipation. This study manipulated both between- (± post-task anticipation) and within-participant (two types of post-task anticipation; anticipation of an individual and a collaborative language correction post-task) factors. Eighty-four Thai learners of English were randomly assigned to either a control (N = 28) or an experimental (N = 56) condition. While the control group carried out two main tasks without any post-task anticipation, the experimental group was informed about a post-task before each of the main tasks. Keystroke logs were examined for linguistic errors and evidence of revisions made during drafting or to the already-sent text. Revisions were coded based on criteria adapted from the revision taxonomies of previous writing research and aided by the data from computer screen recordings and stimulated recall interviews. The variables investigated included quantity, linguistic units, focus and triggers of revision, and rates of error revision success and error corrections. Accuracy was gauged in terms of both accuracy during writing and final text accuracy. Speed fluency was assessed by process-based measures, and typing ability was operationalized as typing speed adjusted for typing accuracy during a typing test. Qualitative data from the exit questionnaire and follow-up interviews were used in conjunction with quantitative data during the analysis. The results showed a high total revision frequency and a high rate of error revision success, suggesting that learners paid close attention to their L2 output and could successfully draw on their L2 knowledge to improve form-related errors in this medium. There was evidence that participants attended more to grammatical features than lexical ones, noticed and corrected more grammatical mistakes compared to lexical ones, and tended to correct grammatical errors more successfully than lexical ones. However, although students attended to grammatical items and revised frequently, the observed dominance of content revisions over form-related revisions indicated that their attention was primarily devoted to the meaning-related aspects of language, rather than to form. This finding does not support previous claims regarding the benefit of text-based SCMC, which argue that this medium is suitable for promoting learners' attention to form. In addition, local revisions occurred very frequently, suggesting that learners' attention might be restricted to short stretches of text at the letter, word or phrase level. Regarding the relationship between revision and final text accuracy, error correction rates were found to be the best predictors of final text accuracy out of all the revision measures. The results of follow-up analyses showed that proficiency potentially influenced final text accuracy and error correction rates; higher proficiency was significantly correlated with increased error correction rates and final text accuracy. Although the correlations between typing ability and most L2 revision measures were not significant, significant relationships were observed between typing ability and 1) error correction rates and 2) accuracy. These findings indicate that learners with better L2 typing ability may have more attentional resources available for attending to L2 output, resulting in increased detection and correction of their linguistic errors and increased internal L2 monitoring. As far as post-task anticipation is concerned, the findings do not support Skehan's (1998) hypothesis about the potential of post-task anticipation for enhancing attention to form and accuracy during the main task performance. No significant effect of post-task anticipation was detected on revision, accuracy or speed fluency. The non-significant effect found on fluency is consistent with the findings of previous post-task anticipation research which did not detect a clear influence of post-task anticipation on this performance aspect. In addition, no significant effect of type of post-task anticipation was observed.


Diabetes mellitus (DM) is an important risk factor for the development of cardiovascular disease. Extensive clinical, epidemiologic, and basic studies suggest that excessive tissue iron stores may contribute to the occurrence and complications of DM. Secondary diabetes occurs in inherited pathologic iron overload syndromes of European- and African-derived populations and is an established complication of transfusional iron overload. Epidemiologic studies have repeatedly shown positive correlation between levels of serum ferritin and those of fasting glucose, insulin, and glycosylated hemoglobin. Iron reduction therapy in hereditary hemochromatosis and transfusional iron overload is associated with improved glucose tolerance and reduced incidence of secondary diabetes. Trials of iron reduction therapy in diabetes mellitus, although limited and inconclusive, have shown clinical improvement in some patients. The current article reviews evidence suggesting that tissue iron contributes to DM and its complications and presents preliminary data that emphasize the potential importance of iron overload in DM of African Americans.


Objectives The study objective was to determine the feasibility of using a pharmacist-staffed, protocol-based structured approach to improving the management of chronic, recurrent gout. Setting The study was carried out in the outpatient clinic of a single Kaiser Permanente medical centre. This is a community-based clinic. Participants We report on 100 consecutive patients between the ages of 21 and 94 (75% men) with chronic or recurrent gout, referred by their primary physicians for the purpose of management of urate-lowering therapy. Patients with stage 5 chronic kidney disease or end-stage kidney disease were excluded. Interventions The programme consisted of a trained clinical pharmacist and a rheumatologist. The pharmacist contacted each patient by phone, provided educational and dietary materials, and used a protocol that employs standard gout medications to achieve and maintain a serum uric acid (sUA) level of 6 mg/dL or less. Incident gout flares or adverse reactions to medications were managed in consultation with the rheumatologist. Primary outcome measure The primary outcome measure was the achievement and maintenance of an sUA of 6 or less for a period of at least 3 months. Results In 95 evaluable patients enrolled in our pilot programme, an sUA of 6 mg/dL or less was achieved and maintained in 78 patients with 4 still in the programme to date. Five patients declined to participate after referral, and another 13 patients did not complete the programme. (The majority of these were due to non-adherence.) Conclusions A structured pharmacist-staffed programme can effectively and safely lower and maintain uric acid levels in a high percentage of patients with recurrent gout in a primary care setting. This care model is simple to implement, efficient and warrants further validation in a clinical trial.


Internet of Things (IoT) deployments are becoming increasingly automated and vastly more complex. Facilitated by programming abstractions such as trigger-action rules, end-users can now easily create new functionalities by interconnecting their devices and other online services. However, when multiple rules are simultaneously enabled, complex system behaviors arise that are difficult to understand or diagnose. While history tells us that such conditions are ripe for exploitation, at present the security states of trigger-action IoT deployments are largely unknown. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the interactions between trigger-action rules in order to identify their security risks. Using IFTTT as an exemplar platform, we first enumerate the space of inter-rule vulnerabilities that exist within trigger-action platforms. To aid users in the identification of these dangers, we go on to present iRuler, a system that performs Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solving and model checking to discover inter-rule vulnerabilities within IoT deployments. iRuler operates over an abstracted information flow model that represents the attack surface of an IoT deployment, but we discover in practice that such models are difficult to obtain given the closed nature of IoT platforms. To address this, we develop methods that assist in inferring trigger-action information flows based on Natural Language Processing. We develop a novel evaluative methodology for approximating plausible real-world IoT deployments based on the installation counts of 315,393 IFTTT applets, determining that 66% of the synthetic deployments in the IFTTT ecosystem exhibit the potential for inter-rule vulnerabilities. Combined, these efforts provide the insight into the real-world dangers of IoT deployment misconfigurations.


Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era: New Leaders, New Challenges, by Willy Wo-Lap Lam. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2006. xvi + 359 pp. US$82.95 (hardcover), US$29.95 (paperback). For the last 20 years, the China-watching community has been deeply indebted to Hong Kong-based journalist Willy Wo-Lap Lam for his detailed accounts of Chinese politics. Few other writers can offer such accessible and well-synthesised views of the totality of Chinese politics. Such grand narratives used to be found in the academy, but for various reasons they have migrated out of there, yet they remain essential not just for teaching but also for thinking about the politics of China. We cannot understand the parts without understanding the whole, and Chinese Politics in the Hu Jintao Era is Lam's latest installment of a holistic view of Chinese politics. As usual, we should be grateful for its appearance. Lam begs forgiveness in the front matter for feeling "somewhat put off by the sense oi plus ca change" (xv) that the era of Hu Jintao has evoked in him. So, too, readers who have read his earlier books should be forgiven for feeling the same about the book itself. Lam has a certain formulaic approach to Chinese politics that can be constantly refitted to the latest facts-the scourge of regionalism, the resurgence of Maoism, the persistence of factions, the intractability of political reform-all peppered with a steady array of Orientalist terms (perfectly translatable Chinese words rendered instead in their Romanized pinyin original) in order to give the sense of inscrutability. But this approach is perfectly suited, even welcome, for a fast-changing country like China, precisely because it points to persisting issues and modes of thought. There is something comforting about picking up a Willy Lam book, a little like curling up with the latest Harry Potter novel. So what happens in this one? Hu Jintao's Communist Youth League Faction comes to power by trouncing the Shanghai Faction associated with outgoing party leader Jiang Zemin. It quickly enacts policies to reverse what the regime sees as a slide to a crisis of legitimacy. Premier Wen Jiabao, though not a factionalist, signs up for many of these new changes, which reflect more generational than factional proclivities. Public policy-making is to be more "scientific" (for which read non-ideological) while growth is to be more "sustainable" (for which read regulated). The elitist provisions of Jiang's Three Represents ideology are downplayed in favor of something more populist. In particular, Hu and Wen want to reconcile the majority to party rule by making development serve their interests. Society is to become more "harmonious". However, the model is envisioned in terms of top-down controls, not bottom-up empowerment, so signs of its effectiveness are weak. Hu provides ample material for political reformers inside and outside the party to launch democratizing initiatives, but the Party center does not provide backing for such initiatives, so reformers continue to live in a risky no-man'sland of uncertainty about the center's true intentions. Hu may tinker with the political system but he is no Chiang Ching-kuo. …


Helical phase distributions used for optical information transfer increase its capacity by offering a characteristic spatial intensity arrangement for the diffracted beam. Here we propose the superposition between helical phase distribution with an axicon type. They form a composed object placed in the object arm to generate holographic masks. The diffracted patterns from these masks exhibit asymmetric shapes and peaks along the optical axis, with two kinds of spots, which contain independent or combined information from both phase distribution constructive parameters. To read these parameters based only on the diffraction patterns analysis, we generate the match reading masks (RMs) to be inserted in the optical path. In this proof-of-concept experiment, we demonstrate that one can sort constructive parameter values of each phase distribution, from both kinds of spots, using specific RMs.


English is classified as a satellite-framed language with manner-conflating verbs, but it also has a substantial number of (usually Romance) pathconflating verbs that are used transitively with a locative direct object. In this chapter, I address two aspects of these verbs. Using the case of enter, I show how they are initially used in the satellite-framed English motion construction, leading to a double encoding of the path, and are then integrated into the transitive pattern in order to avoid semantic conflicts within the motion construction. I also show how the use of enter in the motion construction and the transitive construction may lead to a semantic specialization in varieties where both variants exist, such that the double encoding of the path stresses the aspect of boundary crossing.


In this paper, we focus on the ontological concept extraction and evaluation process from HTML documents. In order to improve this process, we propose an unsupervised hierarchical clustering algorithm namely "Contextual Concept Discovery" (CCD) which is an incremental use of the partitioning algorithm Kmeans and is guided by a structural context. Our context exploits the html structure and the location of words to select the semantically closer cooccurrents for each word and to improve word weighting. Guided by this context definition, we perform an incremental clustering that refines the context of each word clusters to obtain semantically extracted concepts. The CCD algorithm offers the choice between either an automatic execution or a user's interaction. The last function of the CCD algorithm is to provide a complementary support for an easy evaluation task. This functionality is based on a large collection of web documents and several context definitions deduced from it by applying a linguistic and a documentary analysis. We experiment our algorithm on HTML documents related to the tourism domain. Our results show how the execution of our context-based improves the conceptual quality and the relevance of the extracted ontological concepts and how our credibility degree criterion assists the domain experts and facilitates the evaluation task.


Fuel cell technology is one of the promising systems for cleaner and competitive alternate power generation systems. When the high temperature fuel cells like solid oxide fuel cell and molten carbon fuel cell are integrated with the gas turbines, the total thermal efficiency of the combined cycle can be obtained greater than 60%. In the present work, thermodynamic analysis of SOFC-GT combined system (3MW) has been carried out for the fuel methane to evaluate the energy efficiency, exergy efficiency and exergy destruction of each component and compared with other fuels like coal gas and ethanol. The effect of compression ratio, turbine inlet temperature and ambient temperature of air on the performance of the system has been analysed. The outcome of the system modelling reveals that SOFC and combustion chamber are the main sources of exergy destruction. At the optimum compression ratio 9 and at the turbine inlet temperature 1,250 K, the total thermal efficiency and the exergy efficiency are found to be 63.3% and 60.85% respectively.


Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT) is an experimental
delay-based congestion control algorithm that seeks to utilize the
available bandwidth on an end-to-end path while limiting the
consequent increase in queueing delay on that path. LEDBAT uses
changes in one-way delay measurements to limit congestion that the
flow itself induces in the network. LEDBAT is designed for use by
background bulk-transfer applications to be no more aggressive than
standard TCP congestion control (as specified in RFC 5681) and to
yield in the presence of competing flows, thus limiting interference
with the network performance of competing flows. This document defines
an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.


Continuing medical education can help close the gaps between current and desired tobacco cessation practices. This paper reports a case of an innovative community-based continuing education approach implemented by a multi-organizational initiative aimed at increasing smoking cessation rates among adults in the USA. The approach involved collaborative partnerships with healthcare professionals and other stakeholders in 14 communities where smoking cessation was an established priority. The centralized evidence-based educational curriculum was delivered locally to more than 15,600 clinicians. Evaluation provided evidence of positive impact on clinicians, healthcare systems, and communities. A collaborative, community-based approach to continuing medical education has potential to increase tobacco cessation rates by leveraging efforts of multiple stakeholders operating at the community level into more effective and sustainable tobacco cessation projects. Future research is needed to study effectiveness of and appropriate evaluation frameworks for this approach.


Gains achieved by conservation interventions such as payments for environmental services (PES) may be lost upon termination of the program, a problem known as permanence. However, there have been few efforts to evaluate the permanence of conservation results. This article examines the permanence of land-use changes induced by a short-term PES program implemented between 2003 and 2008 in Matiguás-Río Blanco, Nicaragua. Under this program, PES had induced substantial adoption of silvopastoral practices. To assess the long-term permanence of these changes, participants were resurveyed in 2012, 4 years after the last payment was made. We find that the land-use changes that had been induced by PES were broadly sustained in intervening years, with minor differences across specific practices and subgroups of participants. The patterns of change in the period after the PES program were completed to help us understand the reasons for the program's success and rule out alternative explanations for the program's success. Our results suggest that, at least in the case of productive land uses such as silvopastoral practices, PES programs can be effective at encouraging land owners to adopt environmentally beneficial practices and that the benefits will persist after payments cease.


Introduction: There is a scarcity of information about the dietary intake and food selection of combat sport people. Optimizing nutritional status, body weight, and body composition are key factors for their performance.
Aim: The assessment of dietary intake, food habits, and body composition in elite combat sport people.
Subjects and Methods: 22 sportmen were recruited from the Spanish National Teams of Taekwondo, Judo, and Boxing. Food intake (FFQ), food habits and body composition (DXA and Bioimpedance) were analyzed.
Results and Discussion: Weight and body composition of the individuals assessed were similar to that previously described, although almost half of them were moderately over their desired competition weight. A lower than the recommended intake of vegetables (77% of individuals), cereals, bread, rice, potatoes, and pasta (73%), while red meat and derivatives intake exceeded the recommendations. Their main preferences were pasta, meat, and cereals. Legumes, vegetables, and fish were their main dislikes. A statistically significant relationship between food preferences and intakes was only observed for legumes, yogurt, and nuts. The athletes reported that reducing the intake of biscuits and confectionery (68% of individuals), high-fat foods (36%), and/or bread (27%) would be a good dietetic strategy for losing weight. None of them reported that voluntary dehydration would be a good strategy for this purpose.
Conclusions: food offer to which this sport people have access and their choices are adequate, although the intake of some food groups (vegetables, red meat and derivatives) does not follow the recommendations. Their body weight slightly exceeds their competition weight, what it is frequently found in these sports. Nevertheless, their knowledge about nutrition and dietetics applied to exercise are acceptable.


This ethnographic study concerns itself with the role that local rap performance plays in either reinforcing or challenging perceptions of 'race' amongst the participants of hip-hop culture in Durban, South Africa, and what this implies for the prospects of reconciliation. Using Cohen's (1989) theory of community and Grossberg's (1996) theory of affective alliances, I explore the ways in which music may create and maintain differences and commonalities between groups of people. It is my hypothesis that genre conventions and connotations, and the discourses that circulate about rap music (for example, rap music as a form of expression particular to the 'black Atlantic' diaspora and conditioned by a racially segregated society [Rose 1994 D, allow hip-hop to either reinforce or challenge participants' perceptions of 'race'. I examine how musical and lyrical utterances thrust into a semantic historical and socio-political context limit how rap performance can mean and how, as a dialogic speech genre, rap can uphold, subvert or negotiate its genre associations, including, through the use of double-voiced discourse, dominant ideas concerning 'race' and cultural identity. Acknowledging the idiom as of a form of black cultural expression (Rose 1994), interviewees mention narratives ofhip-hop's historical origins, rap artists' use of Five Percenter and Black Nationalist ideologies, and poverty, as factors that either reinforce or challenge notions of 'race'. The simultaneous transgression of and/or adherence to, racialized space and spatialized 'race' (Forman 2002) by different 'races', as well as the presence or absence of multilingualism, are viewed as indicators ofthe level of commitment to the notion of a democratic place for all 'race' and language groups in post-apartheid South Africa. It is the aim ofthis thesis to add to the body of knowledge concerning the nature of our post-apartheid identities, what influences them and in what way. And in a broader context, to explore the role of music in societies in transition and the role it might play in facilitating an ability to 'imagine culture beyond the colour line' (Gilroy 2000).


Based on extensive fieldwork at two well-known commercial publishers of scholarly books, Walter W. Powell details the different ways in which both internal politics and external networks influence decisions about what should be published. Powell focuses on the work of acquisitions editors: how they decide which few manuscripts, out of hundreds, to sponsor for publication; how editorial autonomy is shaped, but never fully curbed, by unobtrusive controls; and how the search process fits into the social structure of the American academy. Powell's observations and the many candid remarks of publishers and their staffs recreate the workaday world of publishing. Throughout, the sociology of organizations and of culture serves as Powell's interpretive framework. Powell shows how scholarly publishers help define what is "good" social science research and how the history and tradition of a publishing house contribute to the development of an organizational identity. Powell's review of actual correspondence, from outside letters proposing projects to internal "kill" letters of rejection, suggests that editors and authors at times form their own quasi-organization with external allegiances and bonds beyond those of the publishing house. "This is a welcome addition to the literature on the life of the organizations that produce our science and our culture. Powell's intimate look at two scholarly publishing companies has an insider's appreciation of the book business and an outsider's eye for questions the editors are not asking themselves." Michael Schudson, University of California at San Diego ""Getting Into Print" will long be "the" book about how academic editors choose the titles they sponsor. Even experienced editors and authors will find new insights here and revealing comparisons with decision-making in other kinds of organizations." Edward Tenner, "Los Angeles Times Book Review" ""Getting Into Print" is an unusually outstanding ethnographic study in that it reflects the evocative richness of detail associated with the ethnographic approach while simultaneously maintaining a clear-headed, analytical distance from the subject that allows for a meaningful theoretical contribution. Powell is an astute ethnographer who presents a vital and compelling 'insider's view' of the decision-making process in scholarly publishing, making this book fascinating reading for all those involved in the 'publish-or-perish' syndrome." Barbara Levitt, "American Journal of Sociology""


Research on the use of surface electromyography (sEMG) for analyzing the effects of Manual Therapy (MT) seems to have very dispersed intentions. The development of data collection protocols using sEMG might not be stable for conducting clinical studies. This study aimed to evaluate the current literature using surface sEMG in the context of MT and verify if it is a useful tool to verify its effectiveness. Also, to assess the methodologic quality and reporting standards and make a reflective analysis of how this technique has been used for this treatment modality. A computerized search was performed in May 2017 and repeated in June 2018, the search was performed in 8 electronic databases following PRISMA protocol. Thirty-one papers were included. More and better-designed studies are needed to create improved protocols. Further exploration and validation of these protocols may help to conduct more reliable clinically driven trials and it may inform policymakers of the role of MT in health care. The detection of clinically meaningful electrical alterations in muscles seems to be the main objective of most authors. Several sEMG items were not reported, and overall methodology quality was low.


High indium compositions InGaN films were grown on sapphires using low temperature pulse laser deposition (PLD) with a dual-compositing target. This target was used to overcome the obstacle in the InGaN growth by PLD due to the difficulty of target preparation, and provided a co-deposition reaction, where InGaN grains generated from the indium and GaN vapors deposit on sapphire surface and then act as nucleation seeds to promote further InGaN growth. The effects of co-deposition on growth mechanisms, surface morphology, and electrical properties of films were thoroughly investigated and the results clearly show promise for the development of high indium InGaN films using PLD technique with dual-compositing targets.


The paper explores the physically-based modeling of a blast wave impact on surrounding objects. We propose a connected voxel representation of objects to model explosions that result in realistic solid debris, rather than flat polygons. The paper also presents improved fracture algorithms capable of accounting for the damage of multiple explosions. The important implementation issues and the results of the simulation are discussed.


In undertaking the statistical analysis of the rhythm of Russian syllabic-accentual verse, one confronts a problem: how to accentuate words whose natural-language stress is weaker than that of fully-stressed words. Zhirmunsky called such words "ambiguous" and formulated a rule: they should be considered stressed in "strong" (ictic) positions and unstressed in "weak" (non-ictic) positions. Gasparov, who accepted and elaborated on Zhirmunsky's rule, pointed out that "this difference in the quality of stress in strong positions [...] has a significant impact on the rhythm of verse, especially that of ternary meters." The main point of the present paper is that this ambiguity equally impacts Russian binary meters. In the case of iambic tetrameter, for example, fully-stressed lines that contain rhythmically ambiguous words are often isomorphic with the predominating rhythmical form. In the present paper, this phenomenon is explored in connection with Jakobson's hypothesis that rhythmically ambiguous words gravitate toward "weak" (i.e. less frequently stressed) ictuses. Although Jakobson's view of accentual ambiguity was different from Zhirmunsky's, and Jakobson's calculation was, in fact, methodologically inaccurate, a cross-pollination of their approaches may prove fruitful.


This research brief quantifies how the United States military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) policy affects retention rates among lesbian, gay, and bisexual military personnel. If the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy had not been instituted, an estimated 4,000 lesbian, gay, and bisexual military personnel would have been retained each year since 1994. The military intends to add more than 18,000 new troops each year for the next five years. If patterns observed in 2004 were to continue for the next five years, the estimated retained LGB personnel would account for nearly one in six of the additional troops required.


The last 40 years have seen huge innovations in computing and in the availability of data. Data derived from millions of administrative records or by using (as we do) new methods of data generation such as text mining are now common. New data often requires new methods, which in turn can inspire new data collection. If history is any guide, some methods will stick and others will prove to be a flash in the pan. However, the larger trends toward demanding greater credibility and transparency from researchers in applied economics and a 'collage' approach to assembling evidence will likely continue.


Background Inadequately managed pain is a risk factor for chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP), a growing public health challenge. Multidisciplinary pain-management programs with psychological approaches, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness-based psychotherapy, have shown efficacy as treatments for chronic pain, and show promise as timely interventions in the pre/perioperative periods for the management of PSP. We reviewed the literature to identify randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of these psychotherapy approaches on pain-related surgical outcomes. Materials and methods We searched Medline, Medline-In-Process, Embase and Embase Classic, and PsycInfo to identify studies meeting our search criteria. After title and abstract review, selected articles were rated for risk of bias. Results Six papers based on five trials (four back surgery, one cardiac surgery) met our inclusion criteria. Four papers employed CBT and two CBT-physiotherapy variant; no ACT or mindfulness-based studies were identified. Considerable heterogeneity was observed in the timing and delivery of psychological interventions and length of follow-up (1 week to 2–3 years). Whereas pain-intensity reporting varied widely, pain disability was reported using consistent methods across papers. The majority of papers (four of six) reported reduced pain intensity, and all relevant papers (five of five) found improvements in pain disability. General limitations included lack of large-scale data and difficulties with blinding. Conclusion This systematic review provides preliminary evidence that CBT-based psychological interventions reduce PSP intensity and disability. Future research should further clarify the efficacy and optimal delivery of CBT and newer psychological approaches to PSP.


This paper uses panel data through 2011 to examine evidence of shifts in household balance sheet behavior following the financial crisis and Great Recession. The paper considers evidence of balance sheet repair through debt repayment as well as changes in the composition of households' balance sheets and/or saving decisions to determine whether households' desire for holding or investing in riskier versus safer assets has changed. The data show relatively small and limited balance sheet adjustment—especially for those households considered the most likely to have been impacted by the economic collapse. The adjustment that did occur typically raised households' liquid asset holdings and/or saving and reduced their risky asset positions (stocks). There is also some evidence of increased nonhousing debt repayment and slower takeup of new nonhousing debt. Overall, the findings are inconsistent with major adjustments occurring in households' balance sheet behavior—especially to the extent where these shifts would have contributed substantially to the sluggish economic recovery


Lessonia trabeculata is an important economic and ecological algal resource of Chile. Due to intense use in abalone and alginate industries, severe problems of over‐harvesting are emerging. We compared sporophyte‐initiation and ‐growth in two populations from northern and southern Chile (Bahía Inglesa and Maicolpué) under laboratory conditions. Irradiance and temperature were the most important factors affecting gametophyte development. Meiospores harvested in spring exhibited maximum reproductive and growth potential, while spores released during autumn were moribund, and died within a few days. In both study sites, we found evidence for acclimation: Meiospores collected in summer required higher levels of irradiance and temperature for maximum development than winter spores. Juvenile sporophytes from both localities responded similarly to temperature and/or irradiance. The best conditions for recruitment of sporophytes from both localities were 15°C and white fluorescent light of 40–70 μmol m−2 s−1. Although due to its low growth potential L. trabeculata is not a good candidate for mariculture, our results provide the necessary knowledge for laboratory‐based seedling production, which is needed for restoration and repopulation projects in damaged areas.


One of my favorite aphorisms is, "The mouth really is part of the body." The mouth gets limited exposure in medical education and has been delegated to dentistry, where emphasis is directed to 2 major clinical infections: caries and periodontitis. The article by Munro and Grap 1 in this issue of the American Journal of Critical Care masterfully identifies important complications to which immunocompromised patients are exposed. Pathogenic microflora of the mouth and pharynx play a major role in several systemic diseases: bacteremias, endocarditis, pneumonia, chronic lung diseases, and endotoxinrelated atherosclerosis, to name but a few. 2-4 A patient in the intensive care unit may be intubated, have a nasogastric tube in place, be heavily sedated, or be febrile—all of which lead to dehydration and breathing through the mouth. These, in turn, cause a change in flora and bacterial overgrowth, with the loss of salivary effectiveness. The administration of antihypertensive and anticholinergic medications also impairs salivary functions and promotes xerostomia. Oral hygiene performed by a nurse or aide is difficult, especially in patients who are semiconscious and noncooperating. To some caregivers, entering a patient's mouth is considered an invasion of privacy and even may have psychosexual undertones. Nevertheless, a soft, pediatric bristle brush properly used can be effective in removing microorganisms and debris. Partial removable dentures are best taken out and thoroughly cleaned to facilitate mouth care. The administration of ice chips is one way to reduce mouth dryness, make patients more comfortable, and keep down bacterial overgrowth. Use of oral chlorhexidine (0.12% solution) as an antimicrobial mouth rinse is encouraged, but the agent should be administered as a spray every 12 hours to reduce total volume. Use of low-intensity suctioning is also helpful and protective against aspiration during mouth care. Older patients, especially those who are in a supine position and sedated, tend to become mouth breathers and snorers. Their oxygen saturation decreases when the jaw and tongue fall backward and compromise the airway. Humidified nasal oxygen is indicated. The presence of a nasogastric tube interferes with cough and swallowing mechanisms and often leads to aspiration and ventilator-associated pneumonia. Although it may seem obvious, the presence of loose teeth, large deposits of calculus (tartar), and infected gingivae with easy bleeding require consultation with a dentist. A better designed procedural approach for oral care for patients in the intensive care unit is needed. 5