Three-dimensional finite element (FE) model for armchair, zigzag and chiral single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) is proposed. The model development is based on the assumption that carbon nanotubes, when subjected to loading, behave like space-frame structures. The bonds between carbon atoms are considered as connecting load-carrying members, while the carbon atoms as joints of the members.To create the FE models, nodes are placed at the locations of carbon atoms and the bonds between them are modeled using three-dimensional elastic beam elements. The elastic moduli of beam elements are determined by using a linkage between molecular and continuum mechanics. The investigation includes armchair and zigzag SWCNTs.
It is found that the choice of Vanderwall forces, the interaction significantly affects the calculation of Young's modulus. The obtained values of Young's modulus agree very well with the corresponding theoretical results and many experimental measurements. Dependence of elastic moduli to diameter and length of the nanotubes is also obtained. The presented results demonstrate that the proposed FE model may provide a valuable tool for studying the mechanical behavior of carbon nanotubes and their integration in nanocomposites.
So for we dealt with single walled carbon nanotube, in our case, we are going to consider into doubled walled carbon nanotube generally speaking multi-walled carbon nanotube. The therefore properties so obtained is completely different that of single walled. The DWCNT is then modeled in ANSYS-multiphysics then in is analysed for the mechanical properties using the same. The elements were considered as beam4, it is an uniaxial element with tension, compression, torsion, and bending capabilities. The element has six degrees of freedom at each node: translations in the nodal x, y, and z directions and rotations about the nodal x, y, and z axes. Stress stiffening and large deflection capabilities are included.
The interaction between the two layers of the MWCNT, the Vanderwalls interation, is considered in the calculation of mechanical parameter .The interation are also made of beam4 element, which researchers have not so far attempted to work on.


Many real-world problems can be reduced to combinatorial optimization on a graph, where the subset or ordering of vertices that maximize some objective function must be found. With such tasks often NP-hard and analytically intractable, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise as a framework with which efficient heuristic methods to tackle these problems can be learned. Previous works construct the solution subset incrementally, adding one element at a time, however, the irreversible nature of this approach prevents the agent from revising its earlier decisions, which may be necessary given the complexity of the optimization task. We instead propose that the agent should seek to continuously improve the solution by learning to explore at test time. Our approach of exploratory combinatorial optimization (ECO-DQN) is, in principle, applicable to any combinatorial problem that can be defined on a graph. Experimentally, we show our method to produce state-of-the-art RL performance on the Maximum Cut problem. Moreover, because ECO-DQN can start from any arbitrary configuration, it can be combined with other search methods to further improve performance, which we demonstrate using a simple random search.


While local processes (e.g., competition, predation, and disturbance) pre- sumably cause species exclusion and thus limit diversity in individual communities, regional processes (e.g., historical events, immigration, and speciation) are assumed to provide a source of species to colonize and thus enrich local communities. Ecologists have attempted to distinguish between these two sets of processes using graphical evidence for local as- semblage saturation. However, such efforts have been controversial and are antithetical to the fact that local diversity bears an imprint of both. We examine the local-regional species richness relationship from the perspective of the theory of island biogeography and develop a model that can produce the full range of observed local-regional richness relationships from linear to curvilinear. Importantly, unlike previous models, we do not require species interactions to produce the curvilinear pattern. Curvilinear relationships arise if per-species stochastic extinction rates are substantially higher than colonization rates, while linear relationships result if colonization rates are higher than extinction rates. Because we also show that merely changing the sampling scale can make local-regional relationships appear either saturated or unsaturated, an inference of ecological processes, derived solely from local-regional relationships, is unwarranted.


Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art demonstrates how silence as a form of indirect discourse provides us with access to hitherto inaccessible aspects of human experience.


Samples of Rhizobium bacteroids isolated from pea nodule symbiosomes reacted positively with a monoclonal antibody recognizing N-linked glycan epitopes on plant glycoproteins associated with the peribacteroid membrane and peribacteroid fluid. An antiserum recognizing the symbiosomal lectin-like glycoprotein PsNLEC-1 also reacted positively. Samples of isolated bacteroids also reacted with an antibody recognizing a glycolipid component of the peribacteroid membrane and plasma membrane. Bacterial cells derived from free-living cultures then were immobilized on nitrocellulose sheets and tested for their ability to associate with components of plant extracts derived from nodule fractionation. A positive antibody-staining reaction indicated that both PsNLEC-1 and membrane glycolipid had become associated with the bacterial surface. A range of rhizobial strains with mutants affecting cell surface polysaccharides all showed similar interactions with PsNLEC-1 and associated plant membranes, with the exception of strain B659 (a deep-rough lipopolysaccharide mutant of Rhizobium leguminosarum). However, the presence of a capsule of extracellular polysaccharide apparently prevented interactions between rhizobial cells and these plant components. The importance of a close association between peribacteroid membranes, PsNLEC-1, and the bacterial surface is discussed in the context of symbiosome development.


Polypeptides are becoming an important component of the antibiotic therapeutics. The production demand of therapeutic polypeptides is increasing and there is a significant interest in developing more efficient production processes. In pharmaceutical industries, polypeptides are produced as a crude mixture. Reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP HPLC) is used as a typical separation technique to purify the target polypeptide from other impurities. Currently organic modifier gradients are used to elute product peptides separately from impurities. In this work, we add a second, simultaneous counter-ion gradient, in the hope of increasing separation performance and call it double gradient reverse phase chromatography. A general procedure of the model-based optimization of a polypeptide crude mixture purification process was followed to evaluate the effects of the double gradients on industrial chromatographic process. The target polypeptide elution profile was modeled with a bi-Langmuir adsorption equilibrium isotherm. The isotherm parameters of the target polypeptide were estimated by the inverse method. The model parameters of the impurities were regressed from experimental data. The variations of the isotherm parameters with the modifier concentration and counter-ion concentration were taken into account of the adsorption model. After model calibration and validation by comparison with suitable experimental data, Pareto optimization of the process were carried out to analyze the differences between single gradient chromatography and double gradient chromatography. It was observed that the additional linear gradient of counter-ion concentration did not improve the separation process. Conclusively we were able to demonstrate the concept of double gradient reverse phase chromatography within limited time and possible least experimental efforts.


The present study is aimed to evaluate the extent of mismatch between different dimensions of students furniture and the respective anthropometric measures of students. For this purpose, 400 engineering students in the age group 18-24 years were randomly selected from engineering colleges in North Karnataka . The dimensions of the students desks available in the classrooms were taken. The class room furniture was evaluated with a defined match criterion given by various researchers. For the evaluation of classroom furniture a match criterion equation was defined. After considering the existing classroom furniture dimensions in each match criterion equation, the anthropometric characteristics of the considered population were compared in order to determine the mismatch between them. The results from the present study show that the college furniture is far from compatible with the anthropometric measurements of the students. there was a significant difference between the desk height and the sum of elbow rest height and popliteal height of the students, seat height and popliteal height, seat width and buttock popliteal length.. Incompatible furniture forced the students to adopt unnatural postures (lateral bend, forward bend, twisting, etc.) in the classroom for long periods, which imposes physical and mental strain on the students. It is recommended to develop an anthropometric database of students and on the basis of it, at the time of renewal of furniture, take into consideration this information either to gain adjustable furniture or possibly acquire, in size, three types of desks, large, medium and small so that students have the options and find the most suited to their anthropometry.


The task for business schools is to engage young leaders and give them a long-term vision of success that includes social responsibility. - William Clay Ford, Chairman, Ford Motor Company, 1999 I hope that all involved in the education of today's business students will develop and implement sustainable development educational strategies. - David Blunkett, UK Secretary of State for Education and Employment, 1999 INTRODUCTION In a survey of 481 environmental and other business people in North America and Europe, consultants Arthur D Little discovered that only 17 per cent of respondents thought their businesses were "well down the road" towards sustainable development (Arthur D Little, 2000). But 95 percent recognized that sustainable development was important to them. When asked "where will a company have to make the most changes in order to implement a sustainable development approach throughout its organization" 53 per cent cited aligning and motivating staff. In late 1998 opinion research company Environics International conducted a survey of 1158 sustainable development experts across mainly OECD countries embracing government, the corporate sector, voluntary organizations, institutions (including academia) and consultants. Among the 114 respondents "education and training" was cited more frequently (66 per cent) than any other factor as the element of corporate social responsibility most important in their organizations (Env ironics International, 1999). From these statistics we may conclude that there is a significant opportunity to connect business needs to educational offerings in the fields of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. It is not the purpose of this paper to reprise the literature on the concept of sustainability as it relates to business strategy and operations. Neither is it our intent to offer detailed prescriptions for courses aimed at delivering more sustainable practices by business. However, we will describe the current policy framework for sustainability in higher education and we will review briefly the current state of the art in graduate level business and sustainability programs, with particular emphasis on North American and European experience. We will also offer some observations on what we consider to be promising trends and opportunities for the future. In order to frame our analysis, we will offer three propositions based on our understanding of the current business context for sustainability. First, we would assert that the concept of sustainability, whilst still ambiguous in the definitional sense (Leal Filho, 2000), does offer a compelling strategic paradigm for guiding business in contributing to society's desire for balanced progress toward economic prosperity, social justice and environmental quality (Elkington, 1998). Indeed if we accept that the journey toward sustainability in the holistic sense requires exploration and innovation as much as prescription and planning, then definitional ambiguity is no bad thing. It frees the creative potential of the human mind and maximizes the potential for deeper learning, whether in the classroom or in the executive boardroom. Thus the challenge of sustainability fits well with contemporary theory on organizational development and personal learning (Morgan, 1986; Argyris, 1990; Senge 1990) as well as with the fields of chaos theory (Levy 1994; Stacey, 1996) and systems thinking (Clayton and Radcliffe, 1996; Capra, 1996). Second, we would assert that as an integrated part of business strategy, sustainability has the potential to help deliver superior business performance -- especially in a more complex and rapidly globalizing economy. In our view, the best future business leaders will be those who can handle the multi-dimensional challenge of sustainability and the inter-related expectations of a variety of stakeholders with legitimate interests and contributions to make. These future leaders will see complex expectations as sources of learning and competitive advantage (Freeman, 1984; Porter, 1990; Wheeler and Sillanpaa, 1998; Hart, 1997) rather than as threats to be overcome. …


This article describes a system for pattern recognition made up of electronic logic elements which has many of the characteristics of humans for recognizing patterns. In particular, the recognition is invariant for size and will tolerate a specified amount of tilt or figure rotation. The electronic components or organs which make up this system consist of delay lines, logical elements such as "and" circuits, and photoreceptors.


The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East, by Marc Lynch. New York: Public Affairs, 2012. 269 pages. $26.99. Reviewed by Curtis R. Ryan Five years before the events of the "Arab Spring," a term that many credit to author Marc Lynch, the same author had written a prescient book titled Voices of the New Arab Public. Lynch had argued that youth activists, social media, and satellite television such as Al Jazeera were changing the region. In the years that followed, his arguments have been proven correct several times over. Now, drawing on extensive field work and personal connections that range from journalists and revolutionary activists to Arab and US government officials, Lynch has written a comprehensive account of the Arab revolutions. The Arab Uprising is a superb book. If you are able to read only one account of the Arab Spring, this should be it. It is a highly readable narrative of the unfolding of these events, with appropriate historical background and context. Yet it is also a rich analysis that nonetheless manages to avoid social science jargon. It is written in an accessible way, of interest not only to scholars and policy-makers, but also to a much broader audience, including the general public. Lynch at times switches to writing in the first person, for good reason, since he is able to relate specific personal conversations with key figures from Tahrir Square to the White House. Lynch notes that the roots of the revolutions run deeper than any single event (such as the death of Tunisian vendor Muhammad Boazizi), and that political mobilization and social protests are not in any way new to the region. The revolutions were not caused by Facebook, Twitter, or Al Jazeera; yet these media forms did contribute to a broader awareness across the Arab world of otherwise distant regional events, and they have - for several years - created a new and more inter-connected Arab public sphere in which activists and regimes pay close attention to the tactics, strategies, and fates of their counterparts throughout the Arab world. In delving into the roots of the uprisings, Lynch examines the Arab Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s, an era associated largely with Nasser and the struggles between revolutionary pan-Arab regimes and conservative pro-Western monarchies. The years 2011 and 2012, in short, were not the first time that the region was embroiled in mass mobilizations, regime change, ideological conflict, and inter-Arab rivalries. Understanding this period is crucial, since modern Arab politics is in large part "based on the repressive, authoritarian state structures that developed in response to the turbulence of the Arab Cold War" (p. 30). Lynch then moves on to examine other rounds of activism over the years: bread riots and anti-austerity protests of the 1980s, defensive democratization efforts in the 1990s, and finally what he calls the "Kefaya wave" of protests in the early 2000s (p. 56). The latter wave centered on the efforts of Egyptian activists to prevent a dynastic succession from Husni Mubarak to his son, Gamal. …


Fuzzy inference system provides an effective means for representing and processing vagueness and imprecision. Conventional fuzzy modelling requires either complete experts' knowledge or given datasets to generate rule bases such that the input spaces can be fully covered. Although fuzzy interpolation enhances the power of conventional fuzzy inference approaches by addressing the problem of lack of knowledge represented in the rule bases, it is still difficult for real-world applications to obtain sufficient experts' knowledge and/or data to generate a sparse rule base to support fuzzy interpolation. Also, the generated rule bases are usually fixed and therefore cannot support dynamic situations. In addition, all existing fuzzy interpolation approaches were developed based on the Mamdani fuzzy model, which are not applicable for the TSK fuzzy model. It significantly restricts the applicability of the TSK fuzzy inference systems.

This PhD work, in the first part, presents a novel fuzzy inference approach, termed "TSK+ fuzzy inference", to address the issue of performing the TSK inference over sparse rule bases. The proposed TSK+ fuzzy inference approach extends the conventional TSK fuzzy inference by considering the degree of similarity between given inputs and corresponding rule antecedents instead of conventional overlapped match degree, which allows TSK inference to be performed over sparse rule bases, dense rule bases, and imbalanced rule bases. In order to support the proposed TSK+ inference approach, a data-driven rule base generation method is also presented in this work. In addition, the proposed TSK+ inference approach has been further extended to deal with interval type-2 fuzzy sets. The effectiveness of this system in enhancing the TSK fuzzy inference is demonstrated through two real-world applications: a network intrusion detection system, and a network quality of service management system.

In addition, in the second part of this work, a new rule base generation and adaptation method is developed in order to relax the requirement of rule base generation, which allows the fuzzy rule base to be generated with minimal or even without a priori knowledge. The proposed method mimics the pedagogic approach of experiential learning, which achieves automatic rule base generation and adaptation by transferring the proceeding performance experiences when performing inferences. The proposed rule base generation and adaptation method has been evaluated by not only a mathematical model but also a well-known control problem, inverted pendulum. The experimental results show that the control system can generate an applicable rule base to support the system running, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.


In this paper, we study asset prices in a dynamic, continuous-time, general-equilibrium endowment economy where agents have "catching up with the Joneses" utility functions and differ with respect to their beliefs (because of differences in priors) and their preference parameters for time discount, risk aversion, and sensitivity to habit. A key contribution of our paper is to demonstrate how one can obtain a closed-form solution to the consumption-sharing rule for agents who have both heterogeneous priors and heterogeneous preferences without restricting the risk aversion of the two agents to special values. We solve in closed form also for the the state-price density, the riskless interest rate and market price of risk; the stock price, equity risk premium, and volatility of stock returns; the term structure of interest rates; and the conditions necessary to obtain a stationary equilibrium in which both agents survive in the long run. The methodology we develop is sufficiently general that, as long as markets are complete, it can be used to obtain the sharing rule and state prices for models set in discrete or continuous time and for arbitrary endowment and belief updating processes.


Craniofacial sutures are a ubiquitous feature of the vertebrate skull. Previous experimental work has shown that bone strain magnitudes and orientations often vary when moving from one bone to another, across a craniofacial suture. This has led to the hypothesis that craniofacial sutures act to modify the strain environment of the skull, possibly as a mode of dissipating high stresses generated during feeding or impact. This study tests the hypothesis that the introduction of craniofacial sutures into finite element (FE) models of a modern domestic pig skull would improve model accuracy compared to a model without sutures. This allowed the mechanical effects of sutures to be assessed in isolation from other confounding variables. These models were also validated against strain gauge data collected from the same specimen ex vivo. The experimental strain data showed notable strain differences between adjacent bones, but this effect was generally not observed in either model. It was found that the inclusion of sutures in finite element models affected strain magnitudes, ratios, orientations and contour patterns, yet contrary to expectations, this did not improve the fit of the model to the experimental data, but resulted in a model that was less accurate. It is demonstrated that the presence or absence of sutures alone is not responsible for the inaccuracies in model strain, and is suggested that variations in local bone material properties, which were not accounted for by the FE models, could instead be responsible for the pattern of results.


France is a prominent player in international Antarctic affairs. As a claimant state, original signatory, and key player within all the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) institutions, with an extensive environmental legacy, France has consistently occupied an influential role in the international Antarctica political arena.
This thesis examines key instances of French cooperation in the ATS, and in doing so, addresses questions relating to the nature of a single state's cooperation within a multilateral treaty regime. It considers the factors that motivate French cooperation within the ATS, and the strategic focus setting for France's Antarctic agenda through examining two key questions: what are the drivers that have led to France undertaking increasing cooperative engagement within the ATS over the last decade? And, through what principal means is France pursuing cooperation within the ATS?
International regime theory, and in particular, the insights from the concept of complex interdependence, provides the analytical framework, and more widely assists in our understanding of international cooperation. This thesis also considers relevant aspects of international environmental law relating to France's engagement in the ATS. Three empirical case studies covering scientific and technical cooperation, marine living resource management, and environmental protection in the Antarctic and Southern Ocean region, provide evidence that assists in identifying the key characteristics, and patterns of interaction that encourage and facilitate France's multi-‐‑level cooperation within the ATS, and that enhance our understanding of the contemporary cooperative trends of France as a key player within the ATS.
France has maintained consistent engagement within the ATS following the entry into force of the Antarctic Treaty over fifty years ago, and has pursued a number of key policy objectives in order to achieve its Antarctic agenda. Several contributing factors are identified as influential in France's increasing cooperative behaviour within the ATS. France places significant emphasis on pursuing multilevel cooperative agreements within the ATS, particularly at the bilateral level.


New Zealand's road safety strategy Safer Journeys identifies young people driving on a restricted licence as having a high crash rate when driving solo for the first 6-12 months. A campaign was developed to reduce the incidence of crashes amongst restricted solo drivers. Parents were identified as key influencers. An advertising and public relations campaign was used to increase parents' awareness of the risk that teens face on their restricted licence, and to encourage parents of restricted drivers to "stay involved" at a time when the majority of parents would rather let go. The campaign directed parents to a website that provided advice and tools about how parents can stay involved. The advertising delivered high prompted recall, high takeout of intended key messages amongst the target audience and motivated them to visit the website www.safeteendriver.co.nz . Restricted drivers will continue to be a high crash risk group. Parental connectedness has been established as a protective factor against a range of health outcomes. Parents/ caregivers/ whanau will need to continue to monitor their restricted driver to reduce crash risk. Parents of adolescents are able to be targeted, as a means of influencing adolescent health risks, despite the majority of adolescent health campaigns excluding parental influence.


Background: Germline mutations in CHEK2 , a cell-cycle checkpoint kinase, are associated with increased susceptibility to breast, colon, and other cancers. The clinical characteristics and cancer risks of patients with CHEK2 mutations is under investigation. Methods: Patients identified with a pathogenic germline CHEK2 mutation between September 2013 and April 2017 were evaluated. Clinical multigene panel testing using next generation sequencing technologies was utilized. All patients received comprehensive pre- and post-test genetic counseling. Genetic testing results, demographics, tumor characteristics and outcomes were analyzed. Results: A total of 107 CHEK2 mutation carriers were identified, of whom 88 (82%) were females. The vast majority were Caucasian (99%), and of those, 17 (16%) had Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. The median age at time of genetic testing was 52 (range: 22-89). The most common mutations identified were: I157T (28%), c.1100delC (27%), p.S428F (15%) and c.1427C>T (9%). Seven of these patients (7%) were found to carry a second pathogenic cancer risk mutation: BRCA , ATM, NBN, NF1 , and MUTYH . One patient was found to carry 3 pathogenic mutations (1100delC, ATM , and BRCA ). Sixty-three (59%) patients had a prior diagnosis of malignancy, with a mean age of diagnosis of 53. Of the 88 females, the most common type of malignancy was breast cancer (55%), with a mean age of diagnosis of 52 (range: 35-79). Of the 19 males, breast cancer was seen in 4 patients. The most common known histopathology was invasive ductal carcinoma (72%), followed by DCIS (15%), invasive lobular carcinoma (9%), and papillary carcinoma (4%). Majority of the patients had breast tumors with low or moderate grade (62%), less than two centimeters (61%), node negative (70%), and estrogen/progesterone receptor positive/HER2neu negative (96%). Two patients had triple negative breast cancers. Of the 48 female mutation carriers with breast cancer, 38% underwent bilateral mastectomy. The 1- and 5-year survival was 100% with a median follow up of 57 months. Five of the 48 females developed a contralateral breast cancer, with a median time to contralateral recurrence of 6 years (range: 3-17). Two patients developed in-breast tumor recurrence at 9 and 19 years, respectively. Other cancers observed were papillary thyroid cancer (3 patients), melanoma (2 patients), and prostate (2 patients). One patient developed angiosarcoma of the chest wall two years after radiation therapy. Conclusion: Our study describes the unique clinical characteristics of CHEK2 mutation carriers in a US-based clinic at Beaumont Health. Majority of breast cancers were early stage, hormone receptor positive and demonstrated excellent outcomes. Despite the early stage, a significant proportion of patients underwent bilateral mastectomy. Additional pathogenic mutations were identified in 10% of patients; validating the importance of panel testing in assessing cancer risk. Future studies are needed to better define the clinical presentation, cancer risks, mutational spectrum, and outcomes of CHEK2 mutation carriers in order to provide tailored screening and management guidelines for this emerging population. Citation Format: Blankenship LM, Yadav S, Yumpo Cardenas P, Zakalik D. Characteristics of CHEK2 mutation carriers in a large academic health center in Michigan [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2017 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2017 Dec 5-9; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2018;78(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P4-06-03.


Most structure-building organisms in rocky benthic communities are surface-dependent because their energy inputs depend mainly on the surface they expose to water. Two photosynthetic strategies, divided into calcareous and non calcareous algae, strict suspension-feeders and photosynthetic suspension feeders (e.g. hermatypic corals) are the four main strategies evolutively acquired by benthic organisms. Competition between those strategies occur in relation to productivity of the different species, in such a way that, for given environmental conditions, species with a higher growth (P/B ratio) would dominate. At a worldwide scale, littoral marine benthos can he considered to fit into the four fields defined by two main axes: the first, relates to productivity and relies atrophic and oligotrophic waters and the second is defined by the degree of environmental variability or seasonality (from high to low). Coral reefs (marine ecosystems dominated by photosynthetic suspension feeders) develop in the space of oligotrophic areas with low variability, while kelp beds (marine ecosystem dominated by large, non calcareous algae) are to be found only in eutrophic places with a high variability. The space of eutrophic waters with a low variability do not has specially adapted, high structured, benthic marine ecosystems, and in these conditions opportunistic algae and animals predominate. Finally, photophilic mediterranean benthos -devoid of kelps and without hermatypic corals- typifies the field of oligotrophic areas with high variability; in its more genuine aspect, Mediterranean benthos is represented by small algae with a high percentage of calcareous thallii. In all cases strict suspension-feeders compete successfully with photosynthetic organisms only in situations of low irradiances or very high inputs of POM. In its turn, Mediterranean rocky benthos, in spite of its relative uniformity, is geographically organized along the same axes. The Gulf of Lions and the insular bottoms (Balearic Islands, for example) would correspond to the extremes of eutrophic-high variability areas and oligotrophic-low variability areas, respectively. Irradiance, nutrient and POM concentration, and hydrodynamism are the three variables which mainly affect the distribution of the different surface-dependent strategies, and thus, these parameters are of paramount interest for understanding the trophic structure of Mediterranean benthic communities. In environments non limited by light, nutrient availability, defined as the product between nutrient -POM concentration and hydrodynamism, states the dominance of calcareous versus non calcareous algae. Calcareous algae dominate in oligotrophic waters while non-calcareous algae dominate in moderately eutrophic waters. In light-limited environments, passive suspension feeders (octocorallaria, gorgonians) become dominant species if POM availability is enhanced by a high hydrodynamism (strong currents); in waters with a low charge of POM organisms of other groups, mainly active suspension feeders, predominate (sponges, bryozoans, scleractiniarians). In any case, there always exists a very variable bathymetric zone, depending on light attenuation and nutrient-POM availability, where encrusting calcareous algae strongly compete with suspension feeders (coralligenous).


Design research needs to explore and communicate the potential for design practice to be speculative and motivate discourse as and in design. This may be achieved via Discursive Design. Such a view comes out of practice-driven research on interaction and communication design within a sociocultural perspective. It is informed theoretically by Discourse Analysis in Applied Linguistics, with core concepts from social semiotics and studies of multimodality. Together these concepts form a fuller frame for design and design research at the level of mediated articulation and discourse through design. We link the discursive with developments in hybrid products that are medleys of physical form, technologies, interactions and services. We illustrate Discursive Design by referring to a span of artifacts and articulations from a large research project in interaction design. We close with a set of key concepts.


In the medieval era, the Royal families of Assam, India produced Muga silk fabrics. During the time of the Koch Dynasty (Historical Koch Country), Muga silk from ancient Pragjyotishpur and Koch Behar became an integral part of the trade with Bengal, Bhutan, Tibet, and the Mughals. Most households in Assam weave cloth and every girl child in the household acquires weaving skills at a very young age from her mother. In Sualkuchi, a town in Assam, there are approximately 6,872 female weavers. These weavers are very concerned about the preservation of traditional handloom weaving as they feel that over time the skills required for this could disappear. They feel that they are unable to work as efficiently in their old age as they had in their youth. The automated machine seems to be a sign of hope for them, but at the same time, they have a strong attachment to the traditional handlooms. Quite recently, the traders have started procuring traditional garments manufactured from cloth made by automated machines. This is a threat to the local weavers since these garments are sold at a lower price, and this poses a challenge to the traditional handloom fabrics of Assam. A sustainable model needs to be incorporated to improve the conditions of the local weavers. The introduction of modern techniques and business strategies will help to empower the weavers. Muga is a noninflammable, anti-bacterial, natural, lustrous gold fabric which absorbs UV rays from sunlight. Pat silk is hypoallergenic, and it contains sericin, which reduces allergic reactions in the skin. Eri is antifungal, and this makes it a unique fabric for face masks, baby clothes, undergarments, blankets, quilts, medical uses, mosquito nets or special attire to protect one from UV rays, fungus, bacteria, and insects. The full range of the unique qualities of the fabrics of Assam should be widely publicized to increase the consumer demand for these handlooms. The area also has the potential to make castor oil out of the castor plant (Ricinus Communis Linn), which is a fed to the Eri Silkworm.


The reload provision in an employee stock option entitles its holder to receive one new (reload) option from the employer for each share tendered as the payment of strike upon the exercise of the stock option. The number of reloads allowed can be finite or infinite. The shout feature in a call option allows its holder to reset the option's strike price to the prevailing stock price upon shouting. We explore a symmetry relationship between the price functions of the employee reload options and shout call options. When the dividend yield of the underlying stock is zero, the value of the employee reload option can be expressed in terms of the price functions of a shout call option and a forward contract. For an employee reload option with an infinite number of allowable reloads, the payoff of the employee reload option can be related to the lookback feature of the stock price process. We also examine the optimal exercise policies of the multi-reload employee stock options. The behavior of the critical stock price at which the holder should exercise optimally is shown to depend on the relative magnitude of the dividend yield, interest rate and volatility. Our analysis of the multi-reload and multi-shout options contributes to the literature on optimal stopping policies of contingent claims with multiple stopping rights.


We consider the diamond network where a source communicates with the destination through N non-interfering half-duplex relays. Using simple outer bounds on the capacity of the network, we show that simple relaying strategies having exactly two states and avoiding broadcast and multiple access communication can still achieve a significant constant fraction of the capacity of the 2 relay network, independent of the SNR values. The results are extended to the case of 3 relays for the special class of antisymmetric networks. We also study the structure of (approximately) optimal relaying strategies for such networks. Simulations show that optimal schedules have at most N + 1 states, which we conjecture to be true in general. We prove the conjecture for N = 2 and in special cases for N = 3.


Sedimentary rocks filling the Boltysh meteorite crater preserve an expanded record of post Cretaceous–Palaeogene (K/Pg) event vegetation destruction and subsequent floral recolonization. A post-destruction barren zone is succeeded by a fern spore spike recording the initial recovery vegetation. The Boltysh fern spore spike is divisible into two phases. Phase 1 is characterized by low abundances of fern spores, whereas the overlying Phase 2 has high fern spore abundances and contains common palm pollen. Comparison of the Boltysh Phase 2 fern spore spike with other palynological records shows strong similarities to the immediately post K/Pg boundary record of the Western Interior, North America. Variation in the composition of the Boltysh palynofloras has been used to define four moisture availability cycles between the K/Pg boundary and the Dan-C2 negative carbon isotope excursion, a period of some 300 kyr. Early post K/Pg event vegetation community recovery followed a common seral successional pathway at rates seen in large igneous provinces, although enhanced by high moisture availability. Continued succession to the first true swamp community was at a considerably slower tempo. The post K/Pg event vegetation recovery was therefore retarded by lack of moisture availability, extending the apparent period of recovery.


In 1989, the Soviet Union fractured into its constituent republics. In the space of a very short time, the existing maps of the world became obsolete, and a whole new political-geographical perspective had to be developed. Though monumental in its implications, such a radical change in the geography of world politics is not as rare as some would believe. An excursion into the boundary politics of any geographical area reveals that boundaries do not exist as separate and independent entities, but persist only to the extent that they are reinforced through social discourse and practice. From this perspective, boundaries constitute important inputs to, and outcomes of, relations of power regarding territory and resources (see Foucault 1982 for a discussion the dynamics of power relations; see Taylor 1994 and Thomas 1994 for discussions of nation-state boundaries as manifestations of power). Thus, as border scholars are well aware, far from being drawn in indelible ink, boundaries are dynamic in time and space and are, in the last analysis, one of the primary ways in which we construct and reinforce geographies of difference. Because they are intimately connected with the exercise of power - and resistance - boundaries not only reflect the outcome of political contests but by their very existence stand ready to serve as important inputs to subsequent contests over the location, size and configuration of the defined and bounded space.


Abstract The purpose of this paper was to re-evaluate the novel rheological method of Crosby et al. [J. Rheol. 46 (2002) 401] to characterise long chain branching (LCB) in polyethylenes (PE) using the rheology of concentrated solutions. The feasibility of this dilution method centred on knowing the class of branched material and the molecular tube theory-based technique for the determination of two topological parameters (n, bU), where n is the number of entanglements between branch points while bU is the probability of meeting a branch point when tracing along the molecule from a random monomer against the direction of polymerisation. This paper proposes new possible approaches to calculate the two topological parameters (n, bU) set for metallocene polyethylenes (mPE), and their ambiguity discussed, as the results are dependent on the approach taken, though the previous authors mentioned only one. In addition, their approach requires an input value of LCB/1000C obtained from the standard analytical solution (SEC-V or SEC-LALLS) methods, hence, until now, without proper demonstration of the potential advantage of the dilution rheology method for LCB characterisation, as the main premise of their published article was to characterise the degree of LCB via rheological measurements without recourse to other methods of LCB characterisation.


By degrading the dung of livestock that graze on pastures, coprophilous arthropods accelerate the cycling of nutrients to maintain pasture quality. Many veterinary medicinal products, such as ivermectin, are excreted unchanged in the dung of treated livestock. These residues can be insecticidal and may reduce the function (i.e., dung‐degradation) of the coprophilous community. In the present study, we used a standard method to monitor the degradation of dung from cattle treated with ivermectin. The present study was performed during a 1‐yr period on pastures in Canada, France, The Netherlands, and Switzerland. Large effects of residue were detected on the coprophilous community, but degradation of dung was not significantly hampered. The results emphasize that failure to detect an effect of veterinary medicinal product residues on dung‐degradation does not mean that the residues do not affect the coprophilous community. Rather, insect activity is only one of many factors that affect degradation, and these other factors may mask the nontarget effect of residues. Environ Toxicol Chem 2016;35:1953–1958. © 2015 SETAC


Annotation conflict resolution is crucial towards building machine learning models with acceptable performance. Past work on annotation conflict resolution had assumed that data is collected at once, with a fixed set of annotators and fixed annotation guidelines. Moreover, previous work dealt with atomic labeling tasks. In this paper, we address annotation conflict resolution for Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a structured prediction task, in a real-world setting of commercial voice-controlled personal assistants, where (1) regular data collections are needed to support new and existing functionalities, (2) annotation guidelines evolve over time, and (3) the pool of annotators change across data collections. We devise an approach combining information-theoretic measures and a supervised neural model to resolve conflicts in data annotation. We evaluate our approach both intrinsically and extrinsically on a real-world dataset with 3.5M utterances of a commercial dialog system in German. Our approach leads to dramatic improvements over a majority baseline especially in contentious cases. On the NLU task, our approach achieves 2.75% error reduction over a no-resolution baseline.


The aim of this work is to open up the structure of wood while retaining a large amount of hemicelluloses, in particular (galacto)glucomannans. The effects of pre-treatments on wood meal from spruce (Picea abies) with a reducing agent (NaBH4) combined with steam explosion at very mild conditions were investigated. The effects of steam explosion at 160 degrees C were studied for various residence times (5 to 35 min) on both water-impregnated wood meal and samples pre-treated with NaBH4. The findings showed that pre-treatment with sodium borohydride stabilized the reducing end-groups of glucomannans and that the treatment was effective both during mild steam explosion, for both long and short residence times, as well as during subsequent treatment in alkali. Extraction experiments at different pH and temperatures showed that the main part of the hemicelluloses still remained in the wood residue after treatment. The molecular weight distributions of the extracted material from the liquors indicated that there were broad molecular distributions and that the molecular weight averages were between 3 and 6 kDa.


"See if she is dark or fair, and if you can, notice if her hands be white; if not, see if they look as though she had ever done housework, or are milker's hands like mine." So Rhoda Brook, the abandoned mistress of Farmer Lodge, is jealous to discover details of his new bride in 'The Withered Arm', the title story in this selection of Hardy's finest short stories. Hardy's first story, 'Destiny and a Blue Cloak' was written fresh from the success of Far From the Madding Crowd. Beautiful in their own right, these stories are also testing-grounds for the novels in their controversial sexual politics, their refusal of romance structures, and their elegiac pursuit of past, lost loves. Several of the stories in The Withered Arm were collected to form the famous volume, Wessex Tales (1888), the first time Hardy denoted 'Wessex' to describe his fictional world. The Withered Arm is the first of a new two-volume selection of Hardy's short stories, edited with an introduction and notes by Kristin Brady.


Although prior research concerning Agnew's General Strain Theory (GST) has generated renewed support for the perspective, it remains limited in two critical ways. First, research tends to measure strain in terms of noxious stimuli while neglecting Agnew's conception of strain as the disjunction between expected and actual outcomes or as the disjunction between fair and actual outcomes. Second, studies rely exclusively on correlational designs that preclude causal assertions about the relationships among strain, anger, and crime. This study addresses both limitations by conducting the first experimental test of GST. Results indicate that (1) respondents assigned at random to experimental conditions involving strain as a disjunction between expected and actual outcomes or between fair and actual outcomes report significantly higher levels of situational anger, (2) high levels of situational anger are significantly associated with a higher self-reported likelihood of engaging in theft from an employer, and (3) these relationships are not significantly conditioned by perceived social support.


A range of powerful forces -- increasing demand for wood, uncertain and decreasing supply, increasing environmental pressures, and growing markets for environmentally certified wood -- are changing the way the forest products industry conducts business. Forward-thinking firms have recognized the significance of these forces and are developing a new business model, one that will not only sustain revenues, but can ensure the long-term health of the forests upon which the industry depends.The Business of Sustainable Forestry integrates and analyzes a series of 21 case studies of industry leaders carried out by the Sustainable Forestry Working Group. The motivations of the pioneering firms studied are as varied as their characteristics, yet each has made significant progress. The authors of this book argue that the operations that have been most succeessful are those that have integrated sustainable forestry principles and practices into their overall corporate strategy. The book: describes the forces that are pushing the industry toward sustainability presents an overview of the new techniques and technologies that are making sustainable forestry more feasible than ever presents in clear, engaging prose company profiles that demonstrate both the promise of and the obstacles to sustainable forest management gives a clear-eyed look at practices such as certification and their capacity to transform the forest products market provides conclusions drawn from the cases by Stuart Hart of the University of North Carolina and Matt Arnold of the Management Institute for Environment and Business offers a succinct set of lessons learned The Business of Sustainable Forestry is the first book topresent a composite snapshot of the business of sustainable forestry and the lessons learned by early adopters in form and language accessible to the general business reader. Forest and natural resource managers, forest products industry managers, and students and academics in schools of business and forestry will find the book a unique and valuable guide to an industry in transition.


This article presents an investigation that was funded by the Swedish Institute into the role of creative practice in architectural research as evidenced in Swedish doctoral theses. The sample was mapped and analysed in terms of clusters of interest, approaches, cultures of knowledge and uses of creative practice. This allowed the identification of the ontological, epistemological and methodological attitudes of the researchers, and hence a glimpse of their implicit worldview. The authors claim that the relationship between worldview and research actions in emerging areas of research such as architecture is often under-scrutinised, resulting in a disjunction between aims and strategies for action. Architectural research in which creative practices make an essential contribution to the aims, might represent something new in academic research. The investigators therefore focused on identifying cases in which creative practice was or was claimed to be integrated in an essential way into the research process. There were two principal conclusions. The first was that the mere presence of practice was not necessarily an indicator of so-called arts-based research. The second was that cases of arts-based research that could be regarded as a new paradigm as opposed to a variant of existing paradigms are less common than is claimed by the researchers themselves. As a result, this article makes a contribution to the debate on whether so-called practice-based research should be regarded as a distinct new paradigm.


We use the semiclassical limit of electromagnetic wave scattering theory to determine the properties of the exterior caustics of a diagonally incident plane wave scattered by an infinitely long homogeneous dielectric circular cylinder in both the near zone and the far zone. The transmission caustic has an exterior/interior cusp transition as the tilt angle of the incident beam is increased, and each of the rainbow caustics has a farzone rainbow/exterior cusp transition and an exterior/interior cusp transition as the incident beam tilt angle is increased. We experimentally observe and analyze both transitions of the first-order rainbow. We also compare the predictions of the semiclassical approximation with those of ray theory and exact electromagnetic wave scattering theory.


A group of piles in a specific geometric pattern may represent a part of a foundation supported by multiple pilings or a porous sea wall or other type of porous coastal structure. "Wave characteristics" of such a structure will include not only the wave transmission but also wave reflection characteristics. Most of the experiments in the past on pile groups were mainly concerned with wave transmission characteristics as a function of wave height and period. The main purpose of these previous studies was to evaluate the absorption characteristics of pile groups, and wave reflections were generally not measured, or evaluated. Variables in this study included wave characteristics such as wave height and length and three types of symmetric pile arrays, two providing clear spacing in the direction of the wave between pile rows and one with a staggered arrangement. The results presented in dimensionless form show the effect of pile geometry and wave steepness on the coefficient of reflection and transmissibility.


The levels of some heavy metals (Cu, Zn, Cd, and Pb) were determined in water, plankton, and fish (Liza aurata) collected from 5 sites in Lake Manzala. Metals in the water and fish exhibited a significant seasonal and regional variation, in which all metals attained their maximum value during summer, while the lowest levels were found during winter. The concentration of different metals in water, plankton, and fish tissues followed the same order: Zn > Cu > Pb > Cd. The mean concentrations of metals in the water were as follow: Cu, 0.055; Zn, 0.311; Cd, 0.020; and Pb, 0.022 mg/L. The Cd level in the water was found to be higher than the permissible limit recommended for drinking water. Metals in plankton were much higher than those of water and fish. Gills of the examined fish contained the highest concentration of all of the measured metals, while muscles retained the lowest. In spite of the contamination of Lake Manzala by heavy metals, the level of the metals in fish muscle (the edible part) did not exceed the recommended permissible limit and the fish is considered safe for human consumption.


Female makeup in the ancient Egyptian time period versus cosmetic use in Modern America was studied to determine whether cosmetics alter a women's perceived reproductive status in order to help the reader understand whether society seems to equate a woman's facial beauty with her fertility. To answer this question, journal articles that explored the types of cosmetics used by the ancient Egyptians, the cosmetics used by modern-day Americans, the relationship between the use of cosmetics in ancient Egypt and in modern-day America, the correlation between beauty and the beautiful individual's "halo-effect" in society, and how individuals tend to perceive women as more fertile (and valuable) due to their physical attractiveness were examined. A study was conducted at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in which photographs of five Caucasian women wearing no makeup, modern-day makeup (applied in accordance to researchers Nancy Etcoff, Lauren Haley, David House, Angela McKeegan, Richard Russell, Ian Stephen, Shannon Stock, and Sarah Vickery), and ancient Egyptian style makeup (applied in accordance to individuals' cosmetics portrayed by ancient Egyptian works of art), were shown to 11 VCU students (6 female, 5 male). The results were quite similar to those found by the aforementioned researchers, who found that attractive individuals are perceived as more socially competent and likeable, and receive better societal opportunities. Men, since the Neolithic time period, have sought to expand their bloodline, and tend to prefer beautiful women as the birth-givers, as men perceive beautiful women as more valuable and fertile than average-looking women 12 ; therefore, because cosmetics increase a woman's perceived beauty, cosmetics can therefore increase a woman's perceived fertility as well. Women who wear cosmetics tend to reap the societal benefits of feminine beauty (collectively known as the "Halo Effect"), which is relevant because it demonstrates the idea that women no longer have to be naturally beautiful in order to receive societal benefits.


Block copolymers (BCPs), through their self-assembly, provide an excellent guiding platform for precise controlled localization of maghemite nanoparticles (MNPs). Diblock copolymers (di/BCP) represent the most applied matrix to host filler components due to their morphological simplicity. A series of nanocomposites based on diblock copolymer or triblock terpolymer matrices and magnetic nanoparticles were prepared to study and compare the influence of an additional block into the BCP matrix. MNPs were grafted with low molecular weight polystyrene (PS) chains in order to be segregated in a specific phase of the matrix to induce selective localization. After the mixing of the BCPs with 10% w/v PS-g-MNPs, nanocomposite thin films were formed by spin coating. Solvent vapor annealing (SVA) enabled the PS-g-MNPs selective placement within the PS domains of the BCPs, as revealed by atomic force microscopy (AFM). The recorded images have proven that high amounts of functionalized MNPs can be controllably localized within the same block (PS), despite the architecture of the BCPs (AB vs. ABC). The adopted lamellar structure of the "neat" BCP thin films was maintained for MNPs loading approximately up to 10% w/v, while, for higher content, the BCP adopted lamellar morphology is partially disrupted, or even disappears for both AB and ABC architectures.


This study proposes a piecewise nonlinear model based on the segmentation of financial time series. The basic concept of proposed model is to obtain intervals divided by change points, to identify them as change-point groups, and to use them in the forecasting model. The proposed model consists of two stages. The first stage detects successive change points in time series dataset and forecasts change-point groups with backpropagation neural networks (BPNs). In this stage, the following three change-point detection methods are applied and compared: the parametric method, the nonparametric approach, and the model-based approach. The next stage forecasts the final output with BPN using the groups. This study applies the proposed model to interest rate forecasting and examines three different models based on various change point detection methods. The experimental result shows that the proposed models outperforms conventional neural network model.


Pain medicine in Israel and in the world has reached a crisis. The lack of available pain medicine services is resulting in the unsatisfactory treatment for chronic pain sufferers. The main causes of this crisis are: 1) the high prevalence of chronic pain, reaching levels of 17% in the adult population;2) the lack of appropriate training of primary care physicians in the field of chronic pain management; and 3) the paucity of consultation services in the field of chronic pain. In this journal article, we propose a possible model for the solution of the problem, based upon levels of treatment according to the severity of the disease and upon training of primary and secondary care physicians in the treatment of pain. According to the model, the vast majority of treatment and management will take place in the community after appropriate training of primary care physicians. More complex cases will be referred to secondary care community-based pain clinics manned by physicians with further in-depth training. Only the most complex of patients, or those needing specialized treatment such as invasive analgesic therapy, will be referred to tertiary pain centers manned by specialists in pain medicine. Implementation of this model will necessitate training of primary care physicians and the establishment of secondary care facilities and can, in our opinion, pose a pragmatic solution for the hundreds of thousands of patients suffering from chronic pain.


Higher education (HE) systems sustain and reproduce inequalities despite intentions to redress them. However, widening participation rooted in social justice practices increases participation in HE for marginalised under-represented groups through overt, shared and practised values in action and mobilization of HE interests and resources. Drawing on interviews with senior managers, teaching, research, academic/educational development staff and students at six South African universities (2012-16) and scrutiny of literature, our study contributes to cross-country learning by developing a taxonomy of social justice practices: epistemological access; values-oriented curriculum; critical pedagogies and professionalism; student engagement and belonging; critical enquiry and communities of practice; ethical leadership and strategic embedding of practice.


Abstract Presented publication presents a complex research model embracing a series of investigations related to assessment of driving forces affecting economic growth processes in Lithuania. New approach towards impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic development of transition country is emphasized. Speculations on FDI efficiency follow elaboration of factors initiating FDI. FDI and foreign trade are seen as specific factors affecting restructuring of transition country as it follows consistent patterns of development. Policy implications are formulated.


While many countries and regional authorities in the Caribbean have embraced the concept of integrated water resources management (IWRM) and recognized its guiding principles as beneficial, few have possessed the capacity to implement it since its enunciation in the Dublin Principles of 1992. The Caribbean Water Initiative (CARIWIN) endeavoured over a 6-year period, 2006–2012, to build capacity in a collaborative process with national governments and regional and international agencies. The result of this collaborative process was the selection of three Caribbean-specific tools to support the implementation of the key components of IWRM. These tools were National Water Information Systems, the Caribbean Drought and Precipitation Monitoring Network, and Community Water Strategies. This paper describes these three tools and the process promoted through CARIWIN for their successful adoption and implementation, i.e. a program including professional development, institutional partnerships, research, and dissemination of knowledge.


This chapter examines the system level changes and developments in education in the Middle East, focussing primarily on the relationship of education to its regional and international contexts where there is adequate information available (in some cases significant events have been happening so rapidly that scholarly information is not yet available). The argument made here is that given the political and economic instability throughout much of the Middle East (Aman & Aman, 2016; Korany, 2010) the social institution of education is a function of local and foreign contextual factors undergoing other forms of development than 'reform' (as it is generally understood in the West), unlike the 19th century during which many Middle East states experienced periods of educational reform (Hourani, 1991). The Middle East is is still affected by ongoing influence of World wars, colonisation, the Cold War, the Gulf Wars and disruptively high levels of modernisation and globalisation influences, perhaps more so in this region than many others globally. Barakat (1993) approaches this combination of internal and external factors as those that fall into a set of diversity and integration polarities that create the tension Middle Eastern states are coping with: unity vs fragmentation, tradition vs modernity, sacred vs secular, East vs West, and local vs national, all of which have a profound impact on educational systems and their curriculum, teaching and administration as well as the ends it is conceived to serve (e.g., Kaplan, 2006). The politics of education in the Middle East for many countries is not a matter of reform, but of other kinds of political processes in combination with international and regional forces that affect these political processes and the legacy of history that shaped their political structures, social norms and social institutions. There are five major country patterns, each of which has a corresponding structure and condition of educational system: 1) those countries undergoing rapid modernisation and multiculturation that are relatively stable states in which nation-building is well underway, characteristic of the Arabian Gulf states like Qatar (Tok, Al Khater & Pal, 2016) and the United Arab Emirates (Davidson, 2005); 2) postcolonial, revolutionary and/or post-war reconstruction characteristic of Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon (Najem, 2011; Shuayb, 2012) and Jordan (Alon, 2007); 3) destabilised states that are experiencing varying degrees of transformation and tension such as Turkey (Axiarlis, 2014) and many of those referred to as 'Arab Spring' states (Danahar, 2013; Lynch, 2014) like Egypt (Lacroix & Rougier, 2016) which has experienced a long history of student activism in national politics (Abdalla, 2008; 4) states that are in disintegration and human devastation like Syria, Iraq (Al-Ali, 2014; Isakhan, Mako & Dawood, 2015), and Yemen (Brehony, 2013; Heinze, 2016); and 5) the dispossessed like the Palestinians (Knudsen & Hanafi, 2011), Kurds (Allsopp, 2015; Aziz, 2011) and Syrians (Fisk, Cockburn & Sengupta, 2015; Yassin-Kassab & Al-Shami, 2016). The corresponding patterns of educational system, therefore, are the following: 1) those countries undergoing rapid modernisation and multiculturation that are stable states in which nation-building is well underway, characteristic of the Arabian Gulf states like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey (Abdel-Moneim, 2015; Abi-Mershed, 2011; Davidson & Smith, 2008); 2) postcolonial or post-war reconstruction characteristic of Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon and Jordan (Abi-Mershed, 2011; Fontana, 2016; Rohde, Dhouib & Alayan, 2012); 3) destabilised states that are experiencing varying degrees of transformation and tension including Turkey (Kaplan, 2006; Nohl, Akkoyunlu-Wigley & Wigley, 2008; Ozgur, 2012) and many of those referred to as 'Arab Spring' states like Egypt (Abdel-Moneim, 2015; Mohamed, Gerber & Aboulkacem, 2016); 4) education in disintegrating and devastating conditions like the identity politics of the Iraqi disputed territories (Shanks, 2015), destruction as in Syria (Glass, 2016), and Yemen (Mohamed, Gerber & Aboulkacem, 2016); and 5) the education of the dispossessed include schooling in refugee populations, as with many Syrian children in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan (Abi-Mershed, 2011; Culbertson & Constant, 2015; Demirdjian, 2011; Rhohde, Dhouib & Alayan, 2012). Understanding the developments and changes in educational systems also requires an historical perspective that extends in its most immediate effects to colonialism (Owen, 2004), the effects of late 19th century European imperialism and post-Ottoman Empire influences primarily from France and Britain (Fieldhouse, 2006) and Cold War activities (Halliday, 2005) that positively and negatively affected state and nation building. Current globalisation influences, therefore, can be seen as a continuity of foreign influences, currently mostly from the US, the UK and Russia, in combination with regional and local dynamics that create a complex regional and international assembly of factors that Jreisat (1997) refers to as 'converging obstacles' due to the inextricable interplay of internal and external factors. If one defines colonisation as not only the imposition of political and military power, but also the cultural shaping of ideas and imagination, as Said (1993) does, or Thiong'o's (1986) through his notion of colonising the mind and Spavik's (2010) 'subaltern' identity, then globalisation through education carries with it a recolonising effect. According to Sayigh (1991), education's role in colonising Middle East territories provided the intellectual framing of colonised and postcolonial states as dependent and underdeveloped, which colonised the mind by dispossessing people of their own (intellectual) history, providing a foreign ideology of development that was disadvantageous to them, and has continued to conflate a positivistic approach to growth with national development that effectively alienated Middle East people's from a societal development that preserved the integrity of indigenous social institutions. One example of this is the assumption that developing one's educational systems requires a knowledge transfer that only travels from 'West' to 'East'. Equally significant are security concerns that directly and indirectly have an impact on education, originating during the First World War, and continuing up to the present time related in part on an international level to parts of the Middle East like the Arabian Gulf which is an economic strategic location with vast oil reserves. Halliday (2005) identifies three main influences on Middle East societies that frame or shape an investigation into any aspect of society: 1) security issues internal and inter-nation; 2) overall economic decline with a rising population creating greater labour demands; and 3) an increasingly disruptive ideological atmosphere affecting internal and external relations. Complicating the development of education are also many waves of migration from Western ex-patriates moving into the Arabian Gulf for employment opportunities, Eastern European migration due to perceived life improvements, and Arab expatriates who have either moved for employment opportunities or as refugees. This produces a great cross-cultural complexity that can lead to conflicts and tensions over ideas and practices about how organisations should be structured and function. Another dimension of foreign influence relating particularly to education are schools and colleges operating on a foreign curriculum, usually American, British or Australian and many branches of Western universities throughout the region over the last several decades (Buzan & Gonzalez-Pelaez, 2009; Willoughby, 2008), affecting the development of many social institutions as well as the strong influence of Egyptian, Iranian and Iraqi teachers, faculty and administrators on many smaller countries (e.g., UAE, Bahrain). Despite the level of destabilization, etc., some educational developments in the region are quite literally astounding: in stable countries, especially in the Arabian Gulf, a rapid and extensive attendance and investment in schooling and higher education that began in the 1950s and has carried through to the present day, which however carries limitations in contributing to nation-building if modelled on an external source (Badry & Willoughby, 2016; Brown, 2000), and the heavy involvement of women, particularly in higher education in a number of countries (Kirdar, 2007). However, there are other problems such as those that are relatively minor like the 'borrowing' of what Donn and Al Manthri (2010) refer to as the 'off-loading' of failed educational experiments (or reforms) from the West to full-scale destruction and devastation in states where education has all but disintegrated.


This study examines the relationships between stock fundamental ratios and idiosyncratic volatility from 1993 to 2010 for Australian Securities Exchange listed companies. The portfolio analysis results show that high idiosyncratic volatility companies tend to be small (measured by size), highly leveraged (measured by interest cover ratio), low profitability (measured by return on equity and earnings per share), low valuation (measured by price to earnings ratio) companies. The regression analysis results show that dividend yield is positively related to the idiosyncratic volatility. Price to earnings ratio and return on equity are negatively related to the idiosyncratic volatility. The relationships between the idiosyncratic volatility and the stock fundamental ratios remain robustness in presence of size. JEL classification: G10


Imperialism is a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon; it occurs neither in limited areas nor at one specific moment. In cultures from across the world theatrical performance has long been a site for both the representation and support of imperialism, and resistance and rebellion against it. Imperialism and Theatre is a groundbreaking collection which explores the questions of why and how the theatre was selected within imperial cultures for the representation of the concerns of both the colonizers and the colonized. Gathering together fifteen noted scholars and theatre practitioners, this collection spans global and historical boundaries and presents a uniquely comprehensive study of post-colonial drama. The essays engage in current theoretical issues while shifting the focus from the printed text to theatre as a cultural formation and locus of political force. A compelling and extremely timely work, Imperialism and Theatre reveals fascinating new dimensions to the post-colonial debate. Contributors: Nora Alter; Sudipto Chatterjee; Mary Karen Dahl; Alan Filewood; Donald H. Frischmann; Rhonda Garelick; Helen Gilbert; Michael Hays; Loren Kruger; Josephine Lee; Robert Eric Livingston; Julie S. Peters; Michael Quinn; Edward Said; Elaine Savory.


The Allais Paradox is a well-known bias in which people's preferences result in contradictory choices between two normatively identical gamble pairs. Studies have shown that these preference reversals depend on how information is described and presented. In an experiment, we investigate the Allais gambles in several formats including an experiential paradigm, where participants make selections from two blank buttons and get an outcome as a result of a draw from distributions of outcomes in the selected gamble. Results indicate that a large proportion of Allais reversals are found in the traditional descriptive format, they are reduced when gambles are presented in a descriptive table format, and they disappear when choices are made from experience. Although a majority of participants made consistent choices from experience, the proportion of individual reversals is similar to that of descriptive choices. Detailed analyses of experiential choice suggest interesting behavioral differences between participants classified as consistent and those classified as reversals: consistent participants explore and maximize more than reversal participants. Furthermore, consistent participants demonstrate a different switching behavior after experiencing a rare outcome than do reversal participants. We find that, both, overweighting or underweighting of rare outcomes may occur within the course of an individual's experience; depending on the timing of those experiences, the magnitude of the outcomes observed, and the general accumulated value of the gambles


This paper addresses the legal consequences that surface when a consumer uses a product in a manner not specifically intended by that product's designer or manufacturer. If a product is used in a reasonably foreseeable manner, the fact that the use is at odds with a manufacturer's intention should not be a basis to deny tort liability or limit the regulatory options of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. If a product proves to be unsafe, defective, dangerous, or otherwise hazardous to users and consumers, use patterns should not be the primary determinant in assessing regulatory and common law sanctions or consequences. While producers may wish to limit tort liability or regulatory impact by characterizing as wrongful all uses not fully consistent with specified instructions, limiting tort liability or regulatory impact is indefensible, inhumane, and at odds with common law tort principles and the clear purposes of the Consumer Product Safety Act. Penalizing consumers for uses that are reasonable but not expressly intended is little more than victim blaming. A legal culture that scapegoats consumers is justly seen as pathological regulatory capture. Ramped up consumer misuse standards re-ward those who create risks and punish those who are harmed. That cannot possibly be the goal of the common law or the legacy anticipated when the Consumer Product Safety Commission was formed nearly a half-century ago.


PURPOSE
Junctional adhesion molecules (JAMs) are a family of adhesion proteins found in intercellular junctions. Evidence suggests that JAM-A is important for the regulation of tight junction assembly and epithelial barrier function. The authors recently reported that JAM-A is expressed in rabbit corneal endothelium and that antibody to JAM-A produces corneal swelling. In the present study, they investigate JAM-A expression in the human corneal endothelium and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) and examine the effect of a function-blocking antibody to JAM-A on the permeability of cultured RPE cell monolayers.

METHODS
Expression of JAM-A in human corneal endothelium, human RPE tissue, and cultured ARPE-19 monolayers was assessed by immunofluorescence confocal microscopy. Localization of JAM-A was compared with the tight junction-associated protein zonula occludens-1 (ZO-1). To investigate JAM-A function in ARPE-19 cells, ARPE-19 monolayers were subjected to a calcium switch protocol to disrupt cell junctions and treated with a function-blocking antibody to JAM-A or an isotype-matched control. Dextran flux assays were performed to assess the effect of JAM-A antibody on ARPE-19 monolayer permeability.

RESULTS
Expression of JAM-A was observed in human corneal endothelium, and its distribution correlated with the tight junction-associated protein ZO-1. In addition, expression of JAM-A was observed in human RPE and in intercellular junctions of ARPE-19 monolayers. The localization pattern of JAM-A in the RPE and ARPE-19 monolayers was similar to that of ZO-1. ARPE-19 monolayers treated with antibody to JAM-A demonstrated a 33% increase in permeability to 10,000 MWt dextran compared with monolayers treated with control antibody.

CONCLUSIONS
Results of this study provide new information about JAM-A expression in tight junctions of the human corneal endothelium and human RPE. The observation that antibodies to JAM-A increase ARPE-19 monolayer permeability is consistent with previous findings of JAM-A function in epithelial tight junctions and suggests JAM-A may have a role in the regulation of RPE barrier function.


Voice communications on IP networks use owner protocols as well as standards like SIP, MGCP and H323. In this paper we propose a new method for transparent traversal of NATed (Network Address Translated) networks for the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) protocol. Although SIP is an application layer protocol, its operation is affected by address translation. This is because SIP uses network layer information (source IP and source port) that is lost by the NAT operation. The suggested method adapts dynamically one of the three solutions: Connection-Oriented media STUN or TURN depending on the situation occurring during call initiation. Key-words: SIP, NAT, STUN, TURN, ICE, ConnectionOriented media, Voice over IP, IP Telephony.


Mashup is a hallmark of Web 2.0 and attracts both industry and academia. It refers to an ad hoc composition technology of Web applications that allows users to draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new services. Compared to traditional "developer-centric" composition technologies, e.g., BPEI and WSCI, mashup provides a flexible and easy-of-use way for service composition on Web. It makes the consumers free to compose services as they wish as well as simplifies the composition task. This paper makes two contributions. Firstly, we propose the mashup architecture, extend current SOA model with mashup and analyze how it facilitates service composition. Secondly, we propose a mashup component model to help developers leverage to create their own composite services. A case study is given to illustrate how to do service composition by mashup. This paper also discusses about some interesting topics about mashup.


In this paper, we present a simulation-based investigation of the potential benefit of route-guidance information in the context of risk-sensitive travelers. We set up a simple two-route scenario where travelers are repeatedly faced with risky route-choice decisions. The risk averseness of the travelers is implicitly controlled through a generic utility function. We vary both the travelers' sensitivity toward risk and the equipment fraction with route-guidance devices and show that the benefits of guided travelers increase with their sensitivity toward risk.


BACKGROUND
Pressure ulcers are defined as areas "of localized damage to the skin and underlying tissue caused by pressure, shear, friction and/or the combination of these". Electromagnetic therapy (EMT), in which electrodes produce an electromagnetic field across the wound, may improve healing of chronic wounds such as pressure ulcers.

OBJECTIVES
To assess the effects of EMT on the healing of pressure ulcers.

SEARCH STRATEGY
For this update we searched the Cochrane Wounds Group Specialised Register (2 June 2010); the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library 2010, Issue 2); Ovid MEDLINE (2007 to May Week 3 2010); Ovid EMBASE (2007 to Week 21 2010) and EBSCO CINAHL (2007 to 1 June 2010).

SELECTION CRITERIA
Randomised controlled trials comparing EMT with sham EMT or other (standard) treatment.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
For this update two review authors independently scrutinised the results of the search to identify relevant RCTs and obtained full reports of potentially eligible studies. We made attempts to obtain missing data by contacting study authors. A second review author checked data extraction and disagreements were resolved after discussion between review authors.

MAIN RESULTS
We identified no new trials for this update.Two randomised controlled trials (RCTs), involving 60 participants, at unclear risk of bias were included in the original review. Both trials compared the use of EMT with sham EMT, although one of the trials included a third arm in which only standard therapy was applied. Neither study found a statistically significant difference in complete healing in people treated with EMT compared with those in the control group. In one trial that assessed percentage reduction in wound surface area, the difference between the two groups was reported to be statistically significant in favour of EMT. However, this result should be interpreted with caution as this is a small study and this finding may be due to chance. Additionally, the outcome, percentage reduction in wound area, is less clinically meaningful than complete healing.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
The results provide no strong evidence of benefit in using EMT to treat pressure ulcers. However, the possibility of a beneficial or harmful effect cannot be ruled out because there were only two included trials, both with methodological limitations and small numbers of participants. Further research is recommended.


Introduction: Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the major public health and socio-economic issues in the 21st century globally. Assessment of TB treatment outcomes, and monitoring and evaluation of its risk factors in Directly Observed Treatment Short Course (DOTS) are among the major indicators of the performance of a national TB control program. Thus, the current study was carried to evaluate outcomes and to determine factors affecting outcome in TB patients with HIV. Materials and Methods: Between January 2010 to December 2014 all tuberculosis patients enrolled in DOTS clinic of the Lubumbashi's Health Zone were collected retrospectively from the TB registration book. We compared the data for TB patients of HIV positive and negative subjects. Medical records of the patients were reviewed for age, gender, type, category and treatment outcome. Results: A total of 3558 tuberculosis patients were registered in the Lubumbashi's Health Zone between January 2010-December 2014. Of these, 2063 (57.98%) were male, 1502 (42.02%) were smear positive pulmonary TB (PTB+), 125 (3.51%) were smear negative pulmonary TB (PTB-) and 1931(54.27%) were extra pulmonary TB (EPTB) patients. We evaluated 1653 registered patients (HIV screening rate: 46.46%), of these, 256(15.49%) were HIV positive patients. The overall treatment success rate was 83.3% and failure rate 16.7% of tuberculosis patients with and without HIV. Tuberculosis type, age, outcome and category of TB patients were significantly associated with TB-HIV co-infection. PTB+ patients and others category of patients were significantly adverse for outcome of patients with TB-HIV co-infection. Conclusion: It appears that DOTS have improved treatment success in the Lubumbashi's Health Zone for five years. However, this study shows clearly that TB-HIV coinfection have a negatively impacts on TB treatment outcome and TB screening should be encouraged in TB patients.


A new method is proposed which makes it possible to produce flattened irradiance distribution by incoherent combination of cosh Gaussian beams with different parameters. Based on the Collins integral formula, the resulting irradiance distribution is derived and the corresponding beam qualities in terms of M2 factor and kurtosis parameter are given. The numerical examples illustrate that a flattened intensity distribution of the resulting beam can be obtained in the near filed if appropriate parameters are chosen. Compared with the coherent combination of the Hermite-Gaussian (HG) beams, this new method leads to better beam quality and can be more easily realized experimentally resulting from in-phase-free requirement.


A 10-year-old domestic shorthair cat showed anorexia, lethargy and ptyalism with hyperammonaemia. Portosystemic shunts were not identified by computed tomography angiography. Biopsy results revealed mild interstinal nephritis and no lesion in the liver. Analysis of urine revealed the presence of a high methylmalonic acid (MMA) concentration. Serum cobalamin (vitamin B12) and serum feline trypsin-like immunoreactivity levels were also markedly low. The cat was diagnosed as having exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (EPI). After 5 weeks of parenteral cobalamin supplementation, serum cobalamin concentration had increased and urinary MMA concentration had decreased. This case suggests that hyperammonaemia may be caused by accumulation of MMA due to cobalamin malabsorption secondary to feline EPI.


Brought together here is the work of two Canadian masters of horror working in the divergent fields of sculpture and film. Dompierre discusses their preoccupations: the social phenomenon of horror and the human body as the site of horror, causes and representations of death and, respectively, the absence and presence of narrative structure. Biographical notes. Bibl. 6 p.


The Basin Focal Project for the Volta (BFP-Volta) is a research project funded by the Challenge Programme on Water and Food (CPWF). Its aim is to provide an in-depth analysis of the basin through three main thematic issues: water-poverty, water availability/use and water productivity. The overall objective of the BFP-Volta is to contribute to the main goal of the CPWF, that is, to alleviate poverty through better management of water in order to enhance agricultural productivity and environment conservation. In this context, the WorldFish Center has been commissioned to produce a series of two complementary reports focusing more specifically on the fisheries resources and the link that may exist between poverty and fisheries in the Volta basin. The present report is the first of these two documents. It should be seen as a preliminary analysis presenting a background of the fisheries resources in the Volta Basin essentially from a biological perspective. Its specific objective is to conduct a diagnostic analysis of the status of the Volta basinA†s inland fisheries, with a particular focus on the biological productivity of the various water bodies existing in the basin. Whenever possible, the diagnostic will be proposed in relation to the current exploitation rate of the fisheries resources. The analysis will include the Volta Lake, but also the other hydropower reservoirs, rivers, floodplains, and the numerous small-scale seasonal or permanent ponds that are scattered throughout the basin. Particular attention will be paid, however, to Lake Volta, reflecting the large number of fishery-dependent communities that live on its shores. The report will also concentrate on two countries within the basin: Ghana and Burkina Faso as together they cover more than 83% of the total basin surface.


An account of how one family of Polish Jews, with one son born at the close of World War II and the other son born in a "displaced persons" camp on the margins of Berlin, narrowly survived Hitler's atrocities and managed to emerge anew amid the bewildering landscape of Manhattan's Upper West Side and the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s. Joseph Berger recreates his parent's experiences in light of his own childhood among refugees in America. He illuminates the plight of 140,000 refugees who came to America between 1947 and 1953, through the eyes of a young boy. The book captures the poignant shading, the telling minutae and the stubborn intractability of displaced life.


Spectral analysis of device (instrument) operators, as an alternative approach to dynamic polarization phenomena, is presented by means of the example of a classical time-varying optical device: the rotating bi refringent plate. The mutual coherence matrices of right and left circularly polarized light are emphasized in the spectral structure of the rotating-plate matrix, and their physical significance is analyzed.


School climate is an aspect of school life that has been examined closely in recent literature as it related to student interactions, behavior, and student achievement. A number of factors that affect school climate have been identified; these include student/teacher relationships, school safety and student relations, clarity of a school's expectations, perceived fairness of school rules, and the presence of a strong, welldeveloped and widely-accepted behavior program in a school. Both Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS) programs and Responsive Classroom (RC) programs have been identified as having a positive impact on school climate at multiple grade levels and across demographics. The Delaware School Climate Survey (DSCS) is a tool that has been used across the state over multiple years to examine perceptions of school climate in multiple informant groups: teachers and staff members, parents and guardians, and students. This study evaluates the Delaware School Climate Survey results both in a PBIS elementary school and in a RC elementary school to examine the perceptions of school climate between informant groups and across the two school intervention programs. Results of the study found that perceptions of school climate were predominantly higher overall in the PBIS school, compared with the RC school. At the domain level, results showed that teachers, parents, and students in the PBIS school reported higher scores in the areas of Teacher/Student Relations, Student Relations and Safety, Fairness of Rules, and Clarity of Expectations domains. iv PERCEPTIONS OF SCHOOL CLIMATE Table of


The research for this thesis was mainly performed at the NATO Underwater Research Center, now named the Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE). The purpose of the research was to improve the detection of underwater targets in the littoral ocean when using active sonar. Currently these detections are being made by towed line arrays using a delay and sum beamformer for bearing measurements and noise suppression. This method of beamforming has can suffer from reverberation that commonly is present in the littoral environment. A proposed solution is to use an adaptive beamformer which can attenuate reverberation and increase the bearing resolution. The adaptive beamforming algorithms have existed for a long time and typically are not used in the active case due to limited amount of observable data that is needed for adaptation. This deficiency is caused by the conflicting requirements for high Doppler resolution for target detection and small time windows for building up full-rank covariance estimates. The algorithms also are sensitive to bearing estimate errors that commonly occur in active sonar systems. Recently it has been proposed to overcome these limitations through the use of reduced beamspace adaptive beamforming. The Subarray MVDR beamformer is analyzed, both against simulated data and against experimental data collected by CMRE during the GLINT/NGAS11 experiment in 2011. Simulation results indicate that the Subarray MVDR beamformer rejects interfering signals that are not effectively attenuated by conventional beamforming. The application of the Subarray MVDR beamformer to the experimental data shows that the Doppler spread of the reverberation ridge is reduced, and the bearing resolution improved. The signal to noise ratio is calculated at the target location and also shows improvement. These calculated and observed performance metrics indicate an improvement of detection in reverberation noise


Recent deep millimeter-wave surveys have attempted to measure the carbon monoxide (CO) luminosity function and mean molecular gas density through blind detections of CO emission lines. While the cosmic star formation rate density is now constrained in fields of hundreds of square arcminutes or more, molecular gas studies have been limited to ≤50 arcmin2. These small fields result in significant biases that have not been accounted for in published results. To quantify these biases, we assign CO luminosities to halos in cosmological simulations to produce mock observations for a range of field sizes. We find that fields of ≲10 arcmin2 alter the recovered shape of the luminosity function, causing underestimates of the number of bright objects. Our models suggest that current surveys are sensitive enough to detect sources responsible for approximately half of the cosmic molecular gas density at high redshift. However, uncertainties in the gas density measurement are large, and cosmic variance may double the uncertainty claimed in these surveys. As a result, the field size needed to detect redshift evolution in the molecular gas at high confidence may be more than one order of magnitude larger than what current surveys have achieved. Shot power intensity mapping measurements are particularly sensitive to Poisson variance and require yet larger areas to constrain the gas density or its evolution. We provide a simple prescription for approximating uncertainty in total CO emission as a function of survey area and redshift for both direct detection and intensity mapping surveys.


Unsupervised feature learning has been shown to be effective at learning representations that perform well on image, video and audio classification. However, many existing feature learning algorithms are hard to use and require extensive hyperparameter tuning. In this work, we present sparse filtering, a simple new algorithm which is efficient and only has one hyperparameter, the number of features to learn. In contrast to most other feature learning methods, sparse filtering does not explicitly attempt to construct a model of the data distribution. Instead, it optimizes a simple cost function – the sparsity of l2-normalized features – which can easily be implemented in a few lines of MATLAB code. Sparse filtering scales gracefully to handle high-dimensional inputs, and can also be used to learn meaningful features in additional layers with greedy layer-wise stacking. We evaluate sparse filtering on natural images, object classification (STL-10), and phone classification (TIMET), and show that our method works well on a range of different modalities.


An increasing amount of open source code is available on the Internet for quickly setting up and deploying bots on Twitter. This development of open-source Twitter bots signals the emergence of new political economies that redistribute agencies around technological actors, empowering both the writers of the bots and users who deploy a bot based on the shared code. However, we have no systematic knowledge about how these bots are produced or what role sharing and collaboration play in this process. This article examines the practice of writing and sharing bot codes on GitHub, currently the largest online code repository, by analyzing data about more than 4,000 public Twitter bot code repositories from 2008 to 2016. The data reveal an exponential growth in the number of Twitter bots and a strong dominance of U.S.-based bot developers. Based on data gathered from GitHub about the social aspect of programming on the platform, the article also discusses how developers collaborate and interact with one another on GitHub around bot codes.


Eighty-three cultivars and strains of annual lespedeza, Lespedeza stipulacea Maxim. and L. striata (Thunb.) H. & A., 77 of which were irradiated L. stipulacea strains, were evaluated for resistance to two of the most prevalent forms of root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne incognita "A" and M. incognita "B"). 'Climax,' 'Kobe,' 'Korean,' 'Summit,' and strain 29a were scored as susceptible, and 'Rowan' was scored as moderately resistant to each of these two forms of root-knot nematodes. Seventeen percent of the 77 irradiated strains originating from strain 29a were scored as highly resistant to M. incognita "A", 12% were scored as highly resistant to M. incognita "B", and 9% were scored as highly resistant to both of these forms of root-knot nematodes. In this study, 57% of the irradiated L. stipulacea strains had a significantly higher level of resistance to M. incognita "A" and 65% had a significantly higher level of resistance to M. incognita "B" than the check strain 29a. Approximately5 0% of the irradiated strains also were scored as either equal or superior in resistance to both M. incognita "A" and M. incognita "B" in comparison with the moderately resistant cultivar Rowan. Thus, through the use of irradiation, a new source of L. stipulacea germ plasm with a high level of resistance to these two forms of root-knot nematodes is now available for improvemenotf this species.