In biological research, diverse high-throughput techniques enable the investigation of whole systems at the molecular level. The development of new methods and algorithms is necessary to analyze and interpret measurements of gene and protein expression and of interactions between genes and proteins. One of the challenges is the integrated analysis of gene expression and the associated regulation mechanisms.
The two most important types of regulators, transcription factors (TFs) and microRNAs (miRNAs), often cooperate in complex networks at the transcriptional and post-transcriptional level and, thus, enable a combinatorial and highly complex regulation of cellular processes. For instance, TFs activate and inhibit the expression of other genes including other TFs whereas miRNAs can post-transcriptionally induce the degradation of transcribed RNA and impair the translation of mRNA into proteins.
The identification of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) is mandatory in order to understand the underlying control mechanisms. The expression of regulators is itself regulated, i.e. activating or inhibiting regulators in varying conditions and perturbations. Thus, measurements of gene expression following targeted perturbations (knockouts or overexpressions) of these regulators are of particular importance. The prediction of the activity states of the regulators and the prediction of the target genes are first important steps towards the construction of GRNs.
This thesis deals with these first bioinformatics steps to construct GRNs. Targets of TFs and miRNAs are determined as comprehensively and accurately as possible. The activity state of regulators is predicted for specific high-throughput data and specific contexts using appropriate statistical approaches. Moreover, (parts of) GRNs are inferred, which lead to explanations of given measurements. The thesis describes new approaches for these tasks together with accompanying evaluations and validations. This immediately defines the three main goals of the current thesis:

1. The development of a comprehensive database of regulator-target relation.

Regulators and targets are retrieved from public repositories, extracted from the literature via text mining and collected into the miRSel database. In addition, relations can be predicted using various published methods. In order to determine the activity states of regulators (see 2.) and to infer GRNs (3.) comprehensive and accurate regulator-target relations are required.
It could be shown that text mining enables the reliable extraction of miRNA, gene, and protein names as well as their relations from scientific free texts. Overall, the miRSel contains about three times more relations for the model organisms human, mouse, and rat as compared to state-of-the-art databases (e.g. TarBase, one of the currently most used resources for miRNA-target relations).

2. The prediction of activity states of regulators based on improved target sets.

In order to investigate mechanisms of gene regulation, the experimental contexts have to be determined in which the respective regulators become active. A regulator is predicted as active based on appropriate statistical tests applied to the expression values of its set of target genes. For this task various gene set enrichment (GSE) methods have been proposed. Unfortunately, before an actual experiment it is unknown which genes are affected. The missing standard-of-truth so far has prevented the systematic assessment and evaluation of GSE tests. In contrast, the trigger of gene expression changes is of course known for experiments where a particular regulator has been directly perturbed (i.e. by knockout, transfection, or overexpression). Based on such datasets, we have systematically evaluated 12 current GSE tests. In our analysis ANOVA and the Wilcoxon test performed best.

3. The prediction of regulation cascades.

Using gene expression measurements and given regulator-target relations (e.g. from the miRSel database) GRNs are derived. GSE tests are applied to determine TFs and miRNAs that change their activity as cellular response to an overexpressed miRNA. Gene regulatory networks can constructed iteratively. Our models show how miRNAs trigger gene expression changes: either directly or indirectly via cascades of miRNA-TF, miRNA-kinase-TF as well as TF-TF relations.

In this thesis we focus on measurements which have been obtained after overexpression of miRNAs. Surprisingly, a number of cancer relevant miRNAs influence a common core of TFs which are involved in processes such as proliferation and apoptosis.


In this paper we present some applications of A'Campo-L\^e's Theorem and we study some relations between Zariski's Questions A and B. It is presented some classes of homeomorphisms that preserve multiplicity and tangent cones of complex analytic sets. Moreover, we present a class of homeomorphisms that has the multiplicity as an invariant when we consider right equivalence and this class contains many known classes of homeomorphisms that preserve tangent cones. In particular, we present some effective approaches to Zariski's Question A. We show a version of these results looking at infinity. Additionally, we present some results related with Nash modification and Lipschitz Geometry.


Critics have long voiced concerns about the wisdom of living in cities and the effects of city life on physical and mental health. For a century, planners have tried to meet these issues. John Sewell traces changes in urban planning, from the pre-Depression garden cities to postwar modernism and a revival of interest in the streetscape grid. In this far-ranging review, Sewell recounts the arrival of modern city planning with its emphasis on lower densities, limited access streets, segregated uses, and considerable green space. He makes Toronto a case history, with its pioneering suburban development in Don Mills and its other planned communities, including Regent Park, St Jamestown, Thorncrest Village, and Bramalea. The heyday of the modern planning movement was in the 1940s to the 1960s, and the Don Mills concept was repeated in spirit and in style across Canada. Eventually, strong public reaction brought modern planning almost to a halt within the city of Toronto. The battles centred on saving the Old City Hall and stopping the Spadina Expressway. Sewell concludes that although the modernist approach remains ascendant in the suburbs, the City of Toronto has begun to replace it with alternatives that work. This is a reflective but vigorous statement by a committed urban reformer. Few Canadians are better suited to point the way towards city planning for the future.


Research article introductions (RAIs) play a significant role in gaining publication, and therefore have been studied by many applied linguists. Research into RAIs published in Indonesia has begun to be developed (Adnan, 2009; Mirahayuni, 2001; Safnil, 2000), and generally conclude that Indonesian Humanities RAIs were structured differently from English RAIs. However, as these are early studies, their findings still awaits scrutiny, and little information on Indonesian RAIs especially in Education has been published. Several models describing discourse structure of research article introductions have been proposed, but they have been problematic when applied to analyse RAIs. This paper reports an examination of the applicability of two important models, the CARS (Swales, 1990) and the PJP model claimed to be an Indonesian model of Humanities RAIs (Safnil, 2000), using a selection of 21 Indonesian research article Introductions (RAIs) written by Indonesian academics in Education. It concentrates on the following questions: To what extent do these models fit the data and why? The examination found that none of the RAIs fit the CARS, and only less than half fit the PJP model for various reasons. Therefore a new model is proposed. This model fits most of the data. The paper claims that apart from national concerns, discourse patterns of RAIs are also affected by writing guides provided by the discipline.


An outbreak of Salmonella typhimurium infection in a large general hospital is described. The outbreak was spread over some 20 weeks and gave rise to 102 cases of enteritis and there were at least 150 symptomless excreters of the organism. Evidence is presented to support the view that the method of spread was by cross-infection, not by contamination of food in bulk. Control measures, which ultimately brought the outbreak to an end, were instituted on this basis. We wish to thank Dr A. J. H. Tomlinson and his staff at the Public Health Laboratory, County HallS.E. 1 for the generous assistance they gave us in examining all the specimens from the hospital staff during the outbreak. The resources of the Department of Bacteriology of the Postgraduate Medical School were at that time largely devoted to teaching and adequate investigations could not have been made without this help. Dr Tomlinson also gave us much advice both during and after the outbreak for which we are most grateful. Dr E. S. Anderson, Director of the Central Enteric Reference Laboratory and Bureau, Colindale, London, N.W. 9, very kindly undertook the phage-typing of many of the strains of Salmonella typhimurium isolated and we wish to express our thanks to him for this and other help he gave us in the investigation of the outbreak. Our thanks are also due to Dr Joan Taylor, Director of the Salmonella Reference Laboratory, Colindale, for her help and interest. Discussions with Dr R. M. Fry and Dr Joan Boissard in Cambridge in connexion with their investigations of a similar outbreak were most interesting and valuable and it gives us pleasure to thank them. We also acknowledge gratefully the help and co-operation of our colleagues at Hammersmith Hospital, especially Dr C. E. Roberts, the Medical Superintendent, and of those at the Postgraduate Medical School.


Based on complete population data, with the exact same definitions of family class background and economic outcomes for a large number of birth cohorts, we examine post-war trends in intergenerational economic mobility in Norway. Despite only mild fluctuations in standard rank-based summary statistics, we show that men and women born into the lowest parts of the parental earnings rank distribution have fallen considerably behind in terms of several quality-of-life outcomes, such as earnings rank, earnings share, employment propensity, educational attainment, and the establishment of a family. In particular, the prime-age employment rates of lower class sons have declined spectacularly, both because their rank outcomes have deteriorated and because the lowest ranks to an increasing extent have become associated with non-employment rather than low-wage employment. We provide suggestive evidence that higher educational requirements in the labor market has increased the importance of parental encouragement and support and thus enlarged the handicap of being born into a less resourceful family. There is no evidence whatsoever of a relative decline in the lower classes' cognitive abilities.


Words communicate more than their ordinary dictionary meaning. Words tell us about individuals' and communities' conscious and subconscious perceptions. The words we use are evidence of how we think, which, in turn, ultimately determines what we do. In this paper, I examine and compare the usage of the words "immigrant," "alien," and "citizen" to make observations on the nature of membership and belonging in the United States. While it is perhaps intuitive that these words carry very different connotations, here I use corpus linguistics to explore those connotations. I rely on the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a database of natural spoken and written American English from a variety of sources, including newspapers, television programs, literary magazines, and movie scripts, to examine these terms' usage. By comparing the words most exclusively and closely associated with "immigrant," "alien," and "citizen," I highlight the connotations of these terms in modern American usage. Ultimately, I conclude that current usage of these terms suggests a hierarchical and status-based narrative of membership in which "aliens are criminals and outsiders," "immigrants are weak and vulnerable," and "citizens are noble and contributing." This narrative, I argue, contributes to a stratified notion of membership that engenders discriminatory perceptions of and facilitates the denial of rights to noncitizens.


This thesis demonstrates the possibility of manufacturing larger mirrors from nickel coated aluminium with a considerable cost and risk benefits compared to zero expansion glass ceramic or borosilicate. Constructing large mirrors from aluminium could cut the cost of production by one third. A new generation of very large telescopes is being designed, on the order of 100 meters diameter. The proposed designs are of mosaic type mirrors similar to the Keck Telescope primary. The enormous mass of glass required inhibits the construction, simply by its cost and production time. Very little research has been done on the processes involved in the production of large metal mirrors. However the thermal efficiency and potential improved mirror seeing benefits are documented. Space telescopes and optical telecommunications could also benefit with the application of metal mirrors. Presented here are the processes and results that culminated in the rebirth of the Birr Telescope. The main section concerns the material selection and processes in the construction of a 1.83 meter diameter 1.4 tonne aluminium primary mirror. The aluminium mirror technology developed was also applied to the construction of an aspheric thin meniscus deformable mirror. Methods employed in its production are described. Documented are the advanced computer controlled polishing methods employed in producing a one third scale model of the hyperbolic secondary mirror for the Gemini Telescopes. These were developed using an active polishing lap.


Contents: Introduction. Part I International Dimension: A balancing act: domestic pressure and international systemic constraints in the foreign policies of the great powers 1848-51, M. Schulze The 1848 revolutions and the British empire, M. Taylor. Part II National Experiences: Chartism in 1848: reflections on a non-revolution, H. Weisser Spain and the revolutions of 1848, D.R. Headrick The making of the Roman republic, H. Hearder Revolutionary organisation in the context of backwardness: Hungary's 1848, G. Handlery Liberal constitutionalism in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848: an inquiry based on roll-call analysis, D.J. Mattheisen. Part III Political Mobilisation: The insurrectionary tradition in France 1835-48, P. Pilbeam Peasants and revolutionaries in Venice and Veneto, 1848, P. Ginsborg Petitions and the social context of political mobilisation in the revolution of 1848/49, C. Lipp/L. Krempel Violence between civilian and state authorities in the Prussian Rhineland 1830-48, J.M. Brophy Festivals of national unity in the German revolution of 1848-49, J. Sperber German women and the revolution of 1848-49: Kathinka Zitz-Halein and the Humania Association, S. Zucker. Part IV Counter Revolution and the State: The role of state violence in the period of transition to industrial capitalism: the example of Prussia from 1815 to 1848, A. LA dtke Contention with civility: the state and social control on the German southwest 1760-1850, K. Wegert The failure of popular counter-revolution in Risorgimento Italy: the case of the centurions, 1831-47, A.J. Reinermann The techniques of repression. The control of popular protest in mid-19th-century France, R. Price An army divided: the loyalty crisis of the Habsburg officer corps in 1848-49, I. Deak. Part V Legacy: Garibaldi and the legacy of the revolution of 1848 in southern Spain, G. Thomson Commemorations of the revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic, T. Baycroft. Index.


How, if at all, can the worst-case scenario nuclear accident be represented artistically? Chernobyl' poses problems for writers, visual artists and film makers alike. For all the eventfulness of the first days and weeks following the accident, the area now seems devoid of life and activity. Nevertheless, the documentary prose writers Jurij Scerbak and Svetlana Aleksievich, the photographer Robert Polidori and the documentary film maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter have managed to capture in text and image the events of 26 April 1986 and their consequences. Above all, they convey the sense of shock and helplessness that reigned following the accident. They achieve this by working with monologues, underscoring the isolation of those affected, subverting supposedly apt comparisons (for example with the First World War) and revealing the emptiness of existence through a carefully calculated silence. Keywords: documentary (works of art), (inapt) comparisons, questions, perplexity, nothingness


This study examined effects of two response acquisition procedures on topography of responding using the revealed operant technique and compared results to previous experiments on this topic. Subjects emitted 100 repetitions each of 4 response patterns on a continuous schedule of reinforcement. A 30-min extinction condition followed acquisition. One group of subjects learned the first response through a series of shaping steps designed to reduce acquisition variability. Another group of subjects was instructed in the correct response topography and was told there was no penalty for attempting other sequences. The first group of subjects produced high variability during extinction despite reduced variability in acquisition. The second group of subjects responded with moderate to high variability during extinction and little variability during acquisition. Most extinction responses for the first group were variations of the last pattern reinforced. Most extinction responses for the second group were repetitions of the last pattern reinforced.


Keratinocyte-derived carcinomas represent the most common type of malignancy worldwide, and while surgical removal is a first-line therapy, surgery may be impractical for certain patients and does not completely eliminate risk of recurrence. Previous studies have demonstrated the advantages of biodegradable poly(lactic acid)-hyperbranched polyglycerol non-bioadhesive nanoparticles (NNPs) and bioadhesive nanoparticles (BNPs) as chemotherapeutic drug delivery vehicles for the treatment of internal solid tumors. We are now investigating the use of this delivery system for the treatment of cutaneous malignancies, with the goal of maximizing drug efficacy while minimizing systemic effects and treatment-associated morbidity. After topical application of fluorescent dye-loaded NNPs to the intact skin of mice, epidermal penetration of the NNPs to the dermal-epidermal junction and accumulation within hair follicles was observed at time points ranging from 4 to 72 hours. Using the PDV squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) murine model, both dyeloaded NNPs and BNPs exhibited a doseand timedependent association with PDV cells in vitro by flow cytometry, and BNPs had increased association with cells compared to NNPs. Confocal microscopy confirmed internalization of NPs by cells. Camptothecin (CPT)-loaded NNPs and BNPs were developed; these particles contained 5% by weight CPT. There was no significant difference in effect on PDV cell proliferation in vitro among CPT, CPT/NNP, and CPT/BNP treatment groups. A pilot study using subcutaneously transplanted PDV tumors showed effective and complete destruction of the tumor after intratumoral injection of CPT/BNP. A subsequent study using an increased frequency of treatment and lower concentration of CPT compared CPT/intralipid (CPT/IL), CPT/NNP and CPT/BNP injections and showed prolonged survival in all CPT groups compared to control, and a trend toward prolonged survival in NNP and BNP groups compared to CPT/IL. However, none of the three treatments fully eliminated tumor burden in treated mice, suggesting that a higher concentration of drug may be optimal. Overall, our results indicate that both NNPs and BNPs rapidly associate with PDV tumor cells, and in vitro drug delivery is not inhibited by NP encapsulation. Further studies are needed to optimize the method, concentration, and frequency of nanoparticle and drug delivery to effectively and consistently treat SCC tumors.


Propremiar or pro-president? On the distinction between parliamentarism, presitentialism and semi-presidentialism. From comparative research on the constitutional development in Central and Eastern Europe and also from the longstanding debate on whether parliamentarism or presidentialism best facilitates democracy, it is apparent that there has been and continues to be, a certain degree of confusion concerning the concepts of semi-presidentialism and presidentialism. Different scholars mean different things by the terms and therefore classify countries differently. In this article I argue that the conceptual dichotomy between pro-premiar (premier-presidentialism) and pro-president systems (presidentparliamentary systems) provide the best solution to several of the problems related to categorising constitutional types, most importantly perhaps to the presidential power dilemma. I, furthermore, employ these concepts on the post-communist constitutional systems and try to reveal patterns with regard to presidential power, geographical region and democratisation.


abstract Despite the recent increased interest in female entrepreneurs, attention has tended to focus on dynamic individuals and generic incentives without considering the roles of gender and place in entrepreneurship. In this article, we draw on the notion of mixed embeddedness to explore how time-and-place–specific institutional contexts influence women's entrepreneurship. Drawing on primary data collected in Ghana, where exceptionally more women engage in entrepreneurial activities than men, we examine the scale and characteristics of female entrepreneurial activity, exploring the factors that account for this strong participation of women, and examine whether this high entrepreneurial rate is also reflected in their performance and growth aspirations. The findings reveal a disjuncture between, on the one hand, the vibrant entrepreneurial endeavors of Ghanaian women and positive societal attitudes toward female entrepreneurship and, on the other hand, female business activities characterized by vulnerability and relatively low achievement. The article shows how regulatory, normative, and cultural–cognitive institutional forces, which have been transformed over time by local and global processes and their interaction, are concomitantly propelling and impeding women's entrepreneurial activities. We propose that the study of female entrepreneurs within economic geography could be advanced by analyzing the differing effects of the complex, multiple, and shifting layers of institutional contexts in which they are embedded.


Moral rights protection exists to recognize authorship autonomy by safeguarding the author's meaning and message. Despite the fact that all authors owe a debt to the past, the authorship construct as we know it today embodies the idea of crafting a work so that it embodies the author's personal stamp of autonomy. Notwithstanding the borrowing inherent in the authorship process, it is still the author who, on an individual or joint basis, composes the creative package. When a work of authorship manifests a meaning and message specific to the author, the moral right of attribution safeguards the author's original conceptions. Attribution is a vital, and perhaps the most widely endorsed, component of authorship dignity. An author's choice of attribution is very much part of a work's meaning and message and as such, it plays a central role in communicating the essence of an author's work to her audience. Even anonymous or pseudonymous works can be seen as reflecting a branding choice that is a fundamental part of the author's meaning and message. When the author's attribution of choice is omitted without permission of the author, the original work is somehow incomplete. Attribution thus functions as a significant, and widely acknowledged, means of safeguarding the integrity of an author's text. A large number of copyrighted works are produced outside the framework of an individual author whose identity is known to the public. Works created outside of the traditional authorship trope include those produced by authors who write anonymously or under a pseudonym, works for hire, and even collective works. The relationship between moral rights and works created by authors in disguise is problematic because if the primary objective of moral rights is to safeguard the meaning and message of an author's work, it would seem as though the true author's identity should be publicly known. Yet for the types of works discussed in this Article, this knowledge is not readily available. This Article explores these difficulties as a general matter, with particular focus on the failure of the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) to incorporate explicit protection for anonymous and pseudonymous works and its exclusion of works made for hire from the scope of its coverage. VARA is the primary federal codification of moral rights in the United States, and thus its provisions represent the most significant embodiment of the doctrine in this country. I argue that in light of the theoretical predicate for moral rights, VARA's exclusions are misguided.


In this Paper we argue that the objectives given to the European Central Bank in the Maastricht Treaty are not well represented by the widely used weighted sum of squared deviations of inflation and output from target (plus possibly terms in squared changes in interest rates to pick up interest rate smoothing). Instead the stated lexicographic ordering should be taken at face value and its implications explored fully. We set out a number of models that do this, and comment on their implications.


The study examines the relationship between performance and patterns of autonomy and the network relationships used by the foreign subsidiaries of transnational corporations (TNCs) in world cities compared to those subsidiaries outside these locations. This is done by exploring if these patterns differ in foreign subsidiaries in Greater Copenhagen compared to elsewhere in Demark. The findings reveal that there are important differences in the relationships between performance and the autonomy and network structures in foreign subsidiaries. These findings are discussed and policy implications distilled. The study finds that the scope of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) policy could be usefully extended to encompass urban development thereby helping cities develop assets, institutional support and infrastructure that can enhance agglomeration benefits and global connectivity. The findings indicate policies, aimed at helping subsidiaries embed in host location networks and incorporate these networks into other parts of the parent company, could be beneficial. The paper also discusses economic and social inequality that can stem from network patterns and the inclination of subsidiaries to operate autonomously in world cities. It proposes policy options that can lead subsidiaries to undertake high-value activities and innovation in world cities.


For understanding development of quantitative thinking, the distinction between nonsymbolic and symbolic thinking is fundamental. Nonsymbolic quantitative thinking is present in early infancy, culturally universal, and similar across species. These similarities include the ability to represent and compare numerosities, the representations being noisy and increasing logarithmically with actual quantity, and the neural correlates of number representation being distributed in homologous regions of frontoparietal cortex. Symbolic quantitative thinking, in contrast, emerged recently in human history, differs dramatically across cultural groups, and develops over many years. As young children gain experience with symbols in a given numeric range and associate them with nonverbal quantities in that range, they initially map them to a logarithmically-compressed mental number line and later to a linear form. This logarithmic-to-linear shift expands children's quantitative skills profoundly, including their ability to estimate positions of numbers on number lines, to estimate measurements of continuous and discrete quantities, to categorize numbers by size, to remember numbers, and to estimate and learn answers to arithmetic problems. Thus, while nonsymbolic quantitative thinking is important and foundational for symbolic numerical capabilities, the capacity to represent symbolic quantities offers crucial cognitive advantages.


The rapid development of video technology in the last decade has changed the ways in which people communicate, how they learn, and how research is done. Video technology offers rich potential in capturing complex social interactions over a prolonged period of time and in supporting teacher professional learning and development.

This book explores the ontological, epistemological, methodological, and ethical challenges associated with the different uses of video in research, ranging from video as a tool for investigating social interactions and for stimulating participants? reflection, to the use of video for engaging varied communities and social groups in the process of teaching, learning and research. Each chapter presents the authors? critical reflection on the ways in which video was employed, the research decisions made, the methodological challenges faced, and the consequences for how educational practices were understood. As such, it illustrates a wide range of philosophical and theoretical standpoints with respect to video-based research approaches.

This book will stimulate broad and rich discussion among education researchers who are interested in video research and contributes to: advancing knowledge of the field; developing approaches to dealing with emergent ethical, theoretical, and methodological issues; and generating new protocols and guidelines for conducting video-based research across a variety of disciplinary areas in education.


This work presents the formal and practical design of agents skilled to help a user in achieving personalized navigation, by recommending related documents according to the user's sensibility shown in similar-page searching mode. Our agent-based approach is based on the integration of different techniques and methodologies into a unique platform featuring: user profiling, fuzzy multi-sets, proximity-oriented fuzzy clustering, and knowledge based discovery technologies. Each of these approaches serves to solve one facet of the general problem (to carry out personalized web search by discovering documents relevant to the user) and is treated by specialized agents that achieve the final functionality through cooperation and task distribution.


PURPOSE
To provide a comprehensive investigation of electron beam reference dosimetry using Monte Carlo simulations of the response of 10 plane-parallel and 18 cylindrical ion chamber types. Specific emphasis is placed on the determination of the optimal shift of the chambers' effective point of measurement (EPOM) and beam quality conversion factors.

METHODS
The EGSnrc system is used for calculations of the absorbed dose to gas in ion chamber models and the absorbed dose to water as a function of depth in a water phantom on which cobalt-60 and several electron beam source models are incident. The optimal EPOM shifts of the ion chambers are determined by comparing calculations of R50 converted from I50 (calculated using ion chamber simulations in phantom) to R50 calculated using simulations of the absorbed dose to water vs depth in water. Beam quality conversion factors are determined as the calculated ratio of the absorbed dose to water to the absorbed dose to air in the ion chamber at the reference depth in a cobalt-60 beam to that in electron beams.

RESULTS
For most plane-parallel chambers, the optimal EPOM shift is inside of the active cavity but different from the shift determined with water-equivalent scaling of the front window of the chamber. These optimal shifts for plane-parallel chambers also reduce the scatter of beam quality conversion factors, kQ, as a function of R50. The optimal shift of cylindrical chambers is found to be less than the 0.5 rcav recommended by current dosimetry protocols. In most cases, the values of the optimal shift are close to 0.3 rcav. Values of kecal are calculated and compared to those from the TG-51 protocol and differences are explained using accurate individual correction factors for a subset of ion chambers investigated. High-precision fits to beam quality conversion factors normalized to unity in a beam with R50 = 7.5 cm (kQ (')) are provided. These factors avoid the use of gradient correction factors as used in the TG-51 protocol although a chamber dependent optimal shift in the EPOM is required when using plane-parallel chambers while no shift is needed with cylindrical chambers. The sensitivity of these results to parameters used to model the ion chambers is discussed and the uncertainty related to the practical use of these results is evaluated.

CONCLUSIONS
These results will prove useful as electron beam reference dosimetry protocols are being updated. The analysis of this work indicates that cylindrical ion chambers may be appropriate for use in low-energy electron beams but measurements are required to characterize their use in these beams.


Problem: The unnecessary or inappropriate use of prescription antibiotics is a public health problem. An estimated 40% to 75% of antibiotics prescribed in U.S. nursing homes may be unwarranted, and moreover, the most commonly treated infection in nursing homes is a urinary tract infection (UTI). Up to one-third to one-half of prescriptions used to treat suspected UTIs in nursing home residents are actually aimed at asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB). Consistent findings show the treatment of ASB is unnecessary and can be harmful, leading to increased rates of Clostridium difficile, multidrug resistant organisms, adverse drug events, hospital admissions, and higher health care costs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that all nursing homes take steps to improve antibiotic prescribing practices through the utilization of antibiotic stewardship activities. The CDC defines antibiotic stewardship as a set of commitments and actions designed optimize the treatment of infections while reducing adverse events associated with antibiotic use. Project Aim: The purpose of this quality improvement project was to assess if the implementation of an antibiotic stewardship program in the nursing home setting decreases the rate of antibiotics prescribed for ASB in older adults. Project Method: A retrospective chart review of data was utilized to record baseline rates of antibiotics prescribed for UTIs and ASB. The chart review included the analysis of nursing notes, progress notes, provider visits, and nursing home infection logs to determine if an antibiotic was prescribed for a symptomatic UTI versus ASB. An antibiotic stewardship program consisting of an educational session about antibiotic stewardship and a decision-making tool was implemented and utilized by nurses and providers. Recommendations regarding antibiotic prescribing practices for suspected UTIs and a toolkit for suspected UTIs developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality served as core elements of the antibiotic stewardship program. The rate of antibiotics prescribed for UTIs and ASB was evaluated and compared to baseline data at two months. Project Results: Baseline data revealed that 64% of antibiotic prescriptions written for suspected UTIs were aimed at ASB. Exposure to the antibiotic stewardship program decreased the rate of antibiotic prescriptions written for ASB by 18%, as the rate of antibiotics written for ASB in the post intervention period was 46%. Conclusion: The antibiotic stewardship program and decision-making tool decreased the rate of antibiotics prescribed for ASB in older adults in the long-term care setting.


More than a decade after becoming a topic of intense research there is no transactional memory hardware nor any examples of software transactional memory use outside the research community. Using software transactional memory in large pieces of software needs copious source code annotations and often means that standard compilers and debuggers can no longer be used. At the same time, overheads associated with software transactional memory fail to motivate programmers to expend the needed effort to use software transactional memory. The only way around the overheads in the case of general unmanaged code is the anticipated availability of hardware support. On the other hand, architects are unwilling to devote power and area budgets in mainstream microprocessors to hardware transactional memory, pointing to trans-actional memory being a " niche " programming construct. A deadlock has thus ensued that is blocking transactional memory use and experimentation in the mainstream. This dissertation covers the design and construction of a software transactional memory runtime system called SLE_x86 that can potentially break this deadlock by decoupling transactional memory from programs using it. Unlike most other STM designs, the core design principle is transparency rather than performance. SLE_x86 operates at the level of x86 machine code, thereby becoming immediately applicable to binaries for the popular x86 architecture. The only requirement is that the binary synchronise using known locking constructs or calls such as those in Pthreads or OpenMP libraries. SLE_x86 provides speculative lock elision (SLE) entirely in software, executing critical sections in the binary using transactional memory. Optionally, the critical sections can also be executed without using transactions by acquiring the protecting lock. The dissertation makes a careful analysis of the impact on performance due to the demands of the x86 memory consistency model and the need to transparently instrument x86 machine code. It shows that both of these problems can be overcome to reach a reasonable level of performance, where transparent software transactional memory can perform better than a lock. SLE_x86 can ensure that programs are ready for transactional memory in any form, without being explicitly written for it. 3 4 Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge my supervisor Steven Hand and adviser Tim Harris for all the advice, discussion and feedback they have provided throughout my time at Cambridge. In particular, I am thankful for all the drafts they have read through patiently. Their support has helped me gain considerable expertise and confidence. This thesis has …


Mutations in the ruv gene of Escherichia coli K-12 result in an increased sensitivity to agents that damage DNA. Studies presented in this thesis demonstrate that the ruv gene product is required for conjugational recombination in certain genetic backgrounds. From this it was inferred that the role of the ruv gene product was in the recombination repair of daughter strand gaps and double strand breaks in damaged DNA. In addition, the ruv gene product is shown to be required for the efficient recovery of F' transconjugants in certain genetic backgrounds, suggesting that recombination between transferred F' and the recipient chromosome may be an obligatory event in these strains.
Expression of ruv is regulated as part of the SOS response to DNA damage, by the lexA and recA gene products. The ruv gene product appears not to have any major role in its own regulation, however the basal level of expression of other SOS genes is increased in strains carrying ruv mutations.
The ruv gene has been cloned on a 10.4kb HindIII fragment into the low copy number vector pHSG4l5, to give plasmid pPVA101, which has been demonstrated to complement the UV sensitivity of strains carrying any of the 10 different ruv mutations tested. Analysis of the proteins synthesised by pPVA101, its deletion derivatives, and derivatives with Tnl1000 insertions inactivating the ruv gene, allowed the identification of the ruv coding region, and suggested that the ruv gene encoded a 4lkd protein. In addition, regions of the cloned DNA coding for two further proteins of approximately 24kd and 33kd were identified.
The sites of insertion of Mud(Ap)Rlac and Tn10 elements in the ruv gene were mapped, which allowed the direction of transcription to be determined, and suggested that the 4lkd protein may be cotranscribed with the 24kd protein from a promoter upstream of the smaller protein. This was substantiated by the demonstration that two of the ruv mutations studied were chromosomal inversions, one of which had its end point within the coding region for the 24kd protein, and by the isolation of an SOS inducible promoter derived from the region upstream of the 24kd protein.
The nucleotide sequence of the ruv region revealed two open reading frames, designated ruvA and ruvB, with coding potential for proteins of 22087 daltons and 37177 daltons respectively, corresponding to the proteins with molecular weights estimated as 24kd and 41kd from SOS-polyacrylamide gels. A possible promoter, and two sequences with homology to the LexA binding site consensus sequence were identified upstream of the coding region of the 22kd protein. An amino acid sequence within the proposed RuvB protein was identified with homology to ATP binding sites of other proteins 950involved in DNA metabolism.


The horticulture and propagation materials sector has been designated as one of the so-called top sectors in which the Netherlands excels globally and that are a government priority. The top sector approach for further innovation is based on public-private partnerships (PPPs) in which businesses, knowledge institutes and the (national) government are working closely together towards a common vision and action plans (the 'golden triangle'). This paper introduces the Digital Greenport Holland (Dutch: Tuinbouw Digitaal) and its research and innovation programme 'a Smarter Greenport'. Digital Greenport Holland is the PPP of the horticultural top sector that focuses on digital information management. The business involvement consists of the collaboration between three active industry associations for chain information, i.e. Frug I Com (fruit and vegetables), Floricode (flowers and plants) and EDIbulb (flower bulbs). The activities focus on four main themes: E-standards, E-information-integration, E-business-to-government and E-competence. The programme 'a Smarter Greenport' has currently conducted eight projects on these themes.


Mangrove forests are complex ecosystems that occur along intertidal accretive shores in the tropics. Mangroves play a significant role in both ecology and economy. In Sri Lanka many estuaries and lagoons are fringed with vastly diverse mangrove forests. The northwestern coastline represent all three major climatic zones in Sri Lanka. It also has the largest mangrove forest patch which is located in Puttlam – Kalpitiya lagoon. From the recent past the mangrove forest cover in Puttalam District is experiencing severe pressures from the adjoining settlements, the fishery industry, aquaculture and other activities in the catchment. An abrupt decline in the forest cover is evident due to being converted into industrial shrimp farms. An attempt was made in the present study to analyse the spatial pattern of mangrove destruction related to shrimp farm development and to analyse the distribution of mangrove species. For this purpose, shrimp farms of 2008 were mapped using IRS – LISS III image (2008) to identify the operational and abandoned shrimp farms. The results were verified by using Google Earth. In order to study the mangrove species distribution, a total of 40 sampling sites were selected to cover the whole study area. Data collection was done at each sampling point by a 10 m traverse established from the water level to the edge of the mangrove vegetation at the landside. Species and the number of individuals in each traverse were recorded during this survey. According to the findings of the study in 2008 there is a total of 5355 ha of land is used for shrimp farms but only 3872 ha is in operation and others are abandoned. These barren lands could be cultivated with mangroves if suitable restoration programme is implemented while natural regeneration is also evident in some areas. It was evident that Chilaw lagoon area is the richest when it comes to mangrove diversity. Rhizophore mucronata , Avicennia marina and Lumnitzera racemosa were the most dominant species in the study area. The most significant finding was the recording of Scyphiphora hydrophyllacea Gaertn. f. from Udappwa (854883.4 N 366900.8 E) which has now become very rare species in Sri Lanka. Only a few trees were previously recorded to be restricted to one locality on the Kalpitiya Peninsula in Puttalam lagoon.


Developers increasingly use streaming languages to write their data processing applications. While a variety of streaming languages exist, each targeting a particular application domain, they are all similar in that they represent a program as a graph of streams (i.e. sequences of data items) and operators (i.e. data transformers). They are also similar in that they must process large volumes of data with high throughput. To meet this requirement, compilers of streaming languages must provide a variety of streaming-specific optimizations, including automatic parallelization. Traditionally, when many languages share a set of optimizations, language implementors translate the source languages into a common representation called an intermediate language (IL). Because optimizations can modify the IL directly, they can be re-used by all of the source languages, reducing the overall engineering effort. However, traditional ILs and their associated optimizations target single-machine, single-process programs. In contrast, the kinds of optimizations that compilers must perform in the streaming domain are quite different, and often involve reasoning across multiple machines. Consequently, existing ILs are not suited to streaming languages.
This thesis addresses the problem of how to provide a reusable infrastructure for stream processing languages. Central to the approach is the design of an intermediate language specifically for streaming languages and optimizations. The hypothesis is that an intermediate language designed to meet the requirements of stream processing can assure implementation correctness; reduce overall implementation effort; and serve as a common substrate for critical optimizations. In evidence, this thesis provides the following contributions: (1) a catalog of common streaming optimizations that helps define the requirements of a streaming IL; (2) a calculus that enables reasoning about the correctness of source language translation and streaming optimizations; and (3) an intermediate language that preserves the semantics of the calculus, while addressing the implementation issues omitted from the calculus. This work significantly reduces the effort it takes to develop stream processing languages by making optimizations reusable across languages, and jump-starts innovation in language and optimization design.


Recently, a deep beamforming (BF) network was proposed to predict BF weights from phase-carrying features, such as generalized cross correlation (GCC). The BF network is trained jointly with the acoustic model to minimize automatic speech recognition (ASR) cost function. In this paper, we propose to replace GCC with features derived from input signals' spatial covariance matrices (SCM), which contain the phase information of individual frequency bands. Experimental results on the AMI meeting transcription task shows that the BF network using SCM features significantly reduces the word error rate to 44.1% from 47.9% obtained with the conventional ASR pipeline using delay-and-sum BF. Also compared with GCC features, we have observed small but steady gain by 0.6% absolutely. The use of SCM features also facilitate the implementation of more advanced BF methods within a deep learning framework, such as minimum variance distortionless response BF that requires the speech and noise SCM.


ABSTRACT In an age of accountability, it is critical to define and estimate the effects of teacher education and professional development programs on student learning in ways that allow stakeholders to explore potential reasons for what is observed and to enhance program quality and fidelity. Across the suite of statistical models used for program evaluation, researchers consistently measure program effectiveness using the coefficients of fixed program effects. We propose that program effects are best characterized not as a single effect to be estimated, but as a distribution of teacher-specific effects. In this article, we first discuss this approach and then describe one way it could be used to define and estimate program effects within a value-added modeling context. Using an example dataset, we demonstrate how program effect estimates can be obtained using the proposed methodology and explain how distributions of these estimates provide additional information and insights about programs that are not apparent when only looking at average effects. By examining distributions of teacher-specific effects as proposed, researchers have the opportunity to more deeply investigate and understand the effects of programs on student success.


This paper investigates the economic incentives of countries to cooperate on international adaptation financing. Adaptation is generally implicitly incorporated in the climate change damage functions as used in Integrated Assessment Models. We replace the implicit decision on adaptation with explicit adaptation in a multi-regional setting by using an adjusted RICE model. We show that making adaptation explicit will not affect the optimal mitigation path when adaptation is set at its optimal level. Sub-optimal adaptation will, however, change the optimal mitigation path. Furthermore this paper studies for different forms of cooperation what effects international adaptation transfers will have on (i) domestic adaptation and (ii) the optimal mitigation path. Adaptation transfers will fully crowd out domestic adaptation in a first best setting. Transfers will decrease overall mitigation in our numerical simulations. An analytical framework is used to analyse the most important mechanisms and a numerical model is used to assess the magnitude of effects.


Public and private payers have increasingly turned to "managed" care as a way to control expenditures and increase access to healthcare. And, while most managed care currently exists in the provision of acute and primary healthcare, interest is growing in applying managed care structures to longterm care alone and in combination with acute care. To date, little real experience and less evidence have been accumulated regarding managed care for the elderly with chronic conditions or limitations due to physical or cognitive impairments. But given the cost of care of this population, it is understandable that public payers are interested in managing their care. Given the importance of access to healthcare for this population, caution seems advisable. About 5.8 million people, or I7 percent of the elderly in 1995, had some limitation that would require the assistance of others to function and remain independent (Komisar, Lambrew, and Feder, 1996). The reasons for these limitations may or may not relate to medical conditions, but people who need assistance with these tasks tend to need medical care. In 1992, average Medicare expenditures were more than three times greater among beneficiaries with substantial functional limitations.' The vast majority of the elderly with long-term-care needs (71 percent) live in the community and receive a considerable amount of assistance from family, friends, and volunteers. But some people need the kind of care found in nursing homes; in I995, some 5 percent of the elderly population lived in such facilities. The term managed care encompasses a broad range of arrangements directed at eliminating unnecessary and inappropriate care and substituting lower-cost alternatives. By emphasizing appropriate care for the patient, managed care has the potential to improve the quality of care for elderly people with disabilities. Outside of a managed care plan, provision of acute care and of most long-term care is fragmented. Care is not systematically organized, either within each sector or across sectors, or across payers. Different financing sources compound the fragmentation in service delivery and often create additional barriers to care. At its best, managed care offers the potential to reduce fragmentation in delivery and in administration; to avoid inappropriate, ineffective, and redundant care; and to provide appropriate care in a more timely manner. Whether in practice managed care for any population lives up to its potential is unclear. Although relatively 'unmanaged" care may have inherent incentives to do more, the incentives inherent in managed care are to do less. Avoiding sick people or limiting needed tests, treatments, or specialists, for instance, are not examples of good managed care. Managing care should not simply mean providing less. Managing care should mean providing less to those who need less, providing more to those whose care needs are greater, and knowing who among plan enrollees fits into which category. As interest grows in bringing elderly people with disabilities and chronic conditions into managed care, it is important to realistically assess what we know about managed care from practical experience as well as from theory. For policy makers, the research on effectiveness substantially trails the latest market developments. Nevertheless, a review of experience to date highlights accomplishments and concerns to be recognized as we move forward. Experience of two kinds is relevant to the use of managed care for elderly people with chronic conditions and disabilities: (I) management of acute care and (2) management of acute care and long-term care in combination. Both approaches to managed care are being pursued in public programs. To a lesser degree, public programs are also exploring applying the concepts of managed care to long-term care by itself. MANAGED ACUTE CARE Although the vast majority of Medicare beneficiaries are in the traditional fee-for-service program for acute care needs, beneficiaries' participation in managed care is increasing rapidly and will continue to do so with implementation of the Balanced Budget Act of I997. …


This paper describes the European Commission (EC) Framework 7 funded project myCopter (2011-2014). The project is still at an early stage so the paper starts with a discussion of the current transportation issues faced, for example, by European countries and describes a means to solve them through the use of a personal aerial transportation system (PATS). The concept of personal air vehicles (PAVs) is briefly reviewed and how this project intends to tackle the problem described. It is argued that the key reason that many PAV concepts have failed is because the operational infrastructure and socio-economic issues have not been properly addressed; rather, the start point has been the design of the vehicle itself. Some of the key aspects that would make a PATS viable include the required infrastructure and associated technologies, the skill levels and machine interfaces needed by the occupant or pilot and the views of society as a whole on the acceptability of such a proposition. The myCopter project will use these areas to explore the viability of PAVs within a PATS. The paper reports upon the early progress made within the project. An initial reference set of PAV requirements has been collated. A conceptual flight simulation model capable of providing a wide range of handling qualities characteristics has been developed and its function has undergone limited verification. Results from this exercise show that the model behaves as intended and that it can deliver a predictable range of vehicle dynamics. The future direction of the project is then described.


The very first hour in a baby's life can have a significant—lifelong—impact on the health of the baby and on the bond between the mother and a baby. Keeping mothers and babies together is a safe and healthy birth practice. Childbirth and the first hour after birth is a time of many changes for both mother and child. Changes are also physiological, as well as psychological. Creating an optimal environment for birth boosts the right hormones for natural birth, which reduces the need for interventions that could cause early mother-baby separation. One of the major challenges in the birth hospital is how best to combine a midwifery care and those medical procedures that are not necessary, to right form the birth as a family intimate and privacy event, if, of course, the child and maternal health would allow this. The first hour after birth is a once-in-a-lifetime occasion for both the baby and the parents, a unique experience, and once lost, it can never be relived.


Information theoretic measures can be used to identify nonlinear interactions between source and target variables through reductions in uncertainty. In information partitioning, multivariate mutual information is decomposed into synergistic, unique, and redundant components. Synergy is information shared only when sources influence a target together, uniqueness is information only provided by one source, and redundancy is overlapping shared information from multiple sources. While this partitioning has been applied to provide insights into complex dependencies, several proposed partitioning methods overestimate redundant information and omit a component of unique information because they do not account for source dependencies. Additionally, information partitioning has only been applied to time‐series data in a limited context, using basic pdf estimation techniques or a Gaussian assumption. We develop a Rescaled Redundancy measure (Rs) to solve the source dependency issue, and present Gaussian, autoregressive, and chaotic test cases to demonstrate its advantages over existing techniques in the presence of noise, various source correlations, and different types of interactions. This study constitutes the first rigorous application of information partitioning to environmental time‐series data, and addresses how noise, pdf estimation technique, or source dependencies can influence detected measures. We illustrate how our techniques can unravel the complex nature of forcing and feedback within an ecohydrologic system with an application to 1 min environmental signals of air temperature, relative humidity, and windspeed. The methods presented here are applicable to the study of a broad range of complex systems composed of interacting variables.


Untreated wastewater being directly discharged into rivers is a very harmful environmental hazard that needs to be tackled urgently in many countries. In order to safeguard the river ecosystem and reduce water pollution, it is important to have an effluent charge policy that promotes the investment of wastewater treatment technology by domestic firms. This paper considers the strategic interaction between the government and the domestic firms regarding the investment in the wastewater treatment technology and the design of optimal effluent charge policy that should be implemented. In this model, the higher is the proportion of non-investing firms, the higher would be the probability of having to incur an effluent charge and the higher would be that charge. On one hand the government needs to impose a sufficiently strict policy to ensure that firms have strong incentive to invest. On the other hand, it cannot be too strict that it drives out firms which cannot afford to invest in such expensive technology. The paper analyses the factors that affect the probability of investment in this technology. It also explains the difficulty of imposing a strict environment policy in countries that have too many small firms which cannot afford to invest unless subsidised.


Abstract The effects of crop rotation and management system on annual variability in weed communities and crop yields were assessed in a 4-yr study in Michigan. Variability of the weed community and corn yields were assessed using the coefficient of variation (CV) and a multivariate dissimilarity index (Bray-Curtis) that accounted for changes in both weed species abundance and composition. The treatments included two rotations: continuous corn and a corn–corn–soybean–wheat rotation, and two management systems: conventional (CONV) and organic-based (ORG). Weed biomass was significantly higher in the ORG system; however, there was no effect of crop rotation on weed biomass or number of weed species in a treatment (species richness). Annual variability in weed community composition and structure was affected by both crop rotation and management system and was highest in the ORG rotation. In contrast to the weed community, variability in corn yield was highest in the least-diverse cropping system (CONV monoculture), despite that system having a more constant weed community. Corn yield in the ORG rotation was not significantly different from that in the CONV monoculture. Results of this study suggest that management aimed at increasing cropping system diversity may have additional effects on weed communities and crop yields beyond those commonly reported, and these may have important implications for the development of more efficient and sustainable weed and crop management practices. Nomenclature: Corn, Zea mays L.; soybean, Glycine max (L.) Merr.; wheat, Triticum aestivum L.


Habermas and Rawls are two heavyweights of social and political philosophy, and they are undoubtedly the two most written about (and widely read) authors in this field. However, there has not been much informed and interesting work on the points of intersection between their projects, partly because their work comes from different traditions: roughly the European tradition of social and political theory and the Anglo-American analytic tradition of political philosophy. In this volume, contributors re-examine the Habermas-Rawls dispute with an eye toward the ways in which the dispute can cast light on current controversies about political philosophy more broadly. Moreover, the volume will cover a number of other salient issues on which Habermas and Rawls have interesting and divergent views, such as the political role of religion and international justice.


The remedies section in the Israeli draft civil code attempts to create a unified law of remedies for the breach of any civil obligation, including originating in tort law and contract law. In his article, "The Risks of Codification: On Over-Coherence and Multiplicity of Remedies", Professor Dagan forcefully criticizes this attempt. The present article demonstrates that the two main criticisms raised by Dagan - against the unification of remedies and against the attempt to fortify the remedial response to breach of civil obligations - are unconvincing, from both a theoretical and a pragmatic point of view. The article commences with a summary of Dagan's critique. The second part examines Dagan's main argument against the unification of tort and contract remedies. Dagan claims that unifying the law of tort and contract remedies is problematic as it may obscure important normative differences between tort and contract law, thus representing an undesirable "over-unification". Contrary to Dagan, this article claims that neither the alleged distinction between the goals of the two branches nor the distinction concerning the separate interests protected within each of them, justifies the adoption of a separate set of remedial responses for torts and breaches of contract. The fundamental goal of both contract and tort law is the same: to create and maintain an appropriate equilibrium between the welfare and freedom of individuals in society. In the realm of remedies this goal is realized through the basic principle of restitutio in integrum, which requires the rectification of civil wrongs. In addition, as of today, a substantial overlap exists between the interests protected by the two branches. More importantly, as the article demonstrates, the type of interest protected is - and should be - only one of the relevant considerations for electing and shaping remedial responses. The third part of the article discusses Dagan's claim that the code's intention to add to the existing scheme of remedies new and more aggressive general remedies (such as coerced performance and punitive damages) is also misguided and problematic. Dagan bases most of his criticism on a few insights of American legal realism. While accepting the value of those insights, this article claims that they do not support - and in fact contradict - Dagan's objections to the draft's adoption of a general and more aggressive scheme of general remedies. Accompanied by appropriate statutory guidelines clarifying the special goals and main principles relevant to the administration of the various remedies, the remedies section of the proposed civil code may provide a solid infrastructure for a modern, effective and balanced law of remedies.


Writing in his encyclical Laudato Si': Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis asserts that there is a "solid scientific consensus" on the reality of climate change and on its origins in human activities ( # 23). Unfortunately, much of the detailed scientific understanding that underlies this claim has not been made readily accessible to scholars in fields outside of the sciences. This paper aims to correct that omission by examining the science of climate change in the context of integral ecology. In this light, it will be demonstrated how human activities cause climate change, climate change has devastating effects on human lives and livelihoods, and human actions are necessary in order to mitigate climate change. Mitigating climate change requires societal actions that bring together technological, cultural, sociological, economic, and political considerations. The question is, do we have the wisdom to see that we are the cause of climate change, that climate change is rapidly making our planet unlivable for large numbers of human beings, and that we have to take strong and immediate actions if we are to avoid ever worsening future disasters? Hopefully, attention to integral ecology—to the interplay of human activities with natural ecosystems—can encourage us to do so.


The function of a burgher family passed through changes depending upon historical conditions and power relations. Every family member had its social role within the family framework. Family members followed stabilisedpattem ofbehaviour influenced by personal motivation. In the era of the early modem period the original forms of social life of the burghers passed through weakening and a polarisation of the małe and female role was strengthening. That was the beginning of a gradual division process of home and public sphere leading to a formation of a burgher model of traditional roles of husband and wife. These changes were being reflected in gradual transferring of productive eaming activities from the home sphere to the public sphere. In the pre-industrial phase of early modem period the burgher women, particularly those that took part in productive and economic entrepreneurial activities with their husbands, were relatively more independent and free than the women in industrial period when the role of women was understood as a guardian of the family hearth. With the modemisation and democratisation of the society a burgher model of a good wife and a polarisation of both genders were gradually pushing ahead. The dependence of the wife on the husband was not economic only. The wife had to subordinate her life plans to the career of her husband in public sphere and concentrate to the home sphere.


A $1.1 trillion spending plan for 2014 that Congress is expected to approve this week is getting mixed reviews from research advocates. They are applauding budget increases awarded to many agencies that fund the physical sciences, including NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy. But biomedical lobbyists are less enthusiastic about a $1 billion increase for the National Institutes of Health, saying it goes only partway to undoing the damage caused by the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration made in 2013.


Roughly one in three individuals is highly susceptible to motion sickness and yet the underlying causes of this condition are not well understood. Despite high heritability, no associated genetic factors have been discovered. Here, we conducted the first genome-wide association study on motion sickness in 80 494 individuals from the 23andMe database who were surveyed about car sickness. Thirty-five single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were associated with motion sickness at a genome-wide-significant level (P < 5 × 10−8). Many of these SNPs are near genes involved in balance, and eye, ear and cranial development (e.g. PVRL3, TSHZ1, MUTED, HOXB3, HOXD3). Other SNPs may affect motion sickness through nearby genes with roles in the nervous system, glucose homeostasis or hypoxia. We show that several of these SNPs display sex-specific effects, with up to three times stronger effects in women. We searched for comorbid phenotypes with motion sickness, confirming associations with known comorbidities including migraines, postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV), vertigo and morning sickness and observing new associations with altitude sickness and many gastrointestinal conditions. We also show that two of these related phenotypes (PONV and migraines) share underlying genetic factors with motion sickness. These results point to the importance of the nervous system in motion sickness and suggest a role for glucose levels in motion-induced nausea and vomiting, a finding that may provide insight into other nausea-related phenotypes like PONV. They also highlight personal characteristics (e.g. being a poor sleeper) that correlate with motion sickness, findings that could help identify risk factors or treatments.


The contribution of seafood to global food security is being increasingly highlighted in policy. However, the extent to which such claims are supported in the current food security literature is unclear. This review assesses the extent to which seafood is represented in the recent food security literature, both individually and from a food systems perspective, in combination with terrestrially-based production systems. The results demonstrate that seafood remains under-researched compared to the role of terrestrial animal and plant production in food security. Furthermore, seafood and terrestrial production remain siloed, with very few papers addressing the combined contribution or relations between terrestrial and aquatic systems. We conclude that far more attention is needed to the specific and relative role of seafood in global food security and call for the integration of seafood in a wider interdisciplinary approach to global food system research.


By perianal electrical stimulation and EMG recording from the external anal sphincter three responses were found with latencies of 2-8, 13-18 and 30-60 ms, respectively. The two first responses were recorded in most cases. They were characterised by constant latency and uniform pattern, were not fatigued by repeated stimulation, were most dependent on placement of stimulating and recording electrodes, and always had a higher threshold than the third response. The third response was constantly present in normal subjects. It had the longest EMG response and the latency decreased with increasing stimulation to a minimum of 30-60 ms. This response represented the clinical observable spinal reflex, "the classical anal reflex". The latencies of the two first responses were so short that they probably do not represent spinal reflexes. This was further supported by the effect of epidural anaesthesia which left the first responses unaffected but abolished the classical anal reflex. The origin of the two first responses is discussed and models involving antidromal impulse propagation in the efferent fibre as the afferent limbs of the responses are proposed.


The study was funded by the Burdett Trust for Nursing and partly by Salford Primary Care Trust. A realistic evaluation design was used to collect data using a range of approaches, from before and after surveys of confidence in delivering end of life care, to participant observation and interviews. A total of 43 people were interviewed involving both staff, residents and relatives.
Key Messages
a) Significant resources are needed to engage staff, residents and relatives/carers with the idea of advance care planning b) Care home staff are optimistic about involving residents and relatives in planning care at the end of life and some relatives become very involved in care
c) Clearly registered nurses and other care home workers such as care assistants have different roles, but the overlap between these and the appropriate boundaries would benefit from further work d) Talking to residents and relatives about their feelings and wishes for care at the end of life remains especially difficult, but education and training in key skills and knowledge can engender both ability and motivation e) Care homes need strong and well-informed leadership in order to implement the Gold Standards Framework f) Placing a relative in a care home involves strain and an ability to compromise 'there's no perfect place' g) Advance care planning can reduce the distress and the number of inappropriate hospital admissions, but is challenging in the face of staff rotation and out of hours medical staff being unpredictable
h) The principles of the Gold Standards Framework are widely seen as sensible, but clinical challenges include diagnosing and predicting dying trajectories,
especially in heart failure, chronic pulmonary disease and dementia i) A particular concern of staff is how to approach nutrition and hydration as frailty and death approach j) Communicating about diagnosis and especially prognosis with residents who lack capacity is an increasing problem k) Natural justice suggests that resources should be allocated to the general standardisation of a good quality of care at the end of life in ALL care homes whatever their Care Quality Commission rating


This thesis deals with the emergence of the modern criminal process in England between 1780 and 1910 . It seeks to investigate this period from a standpoint which regards this development of the criminal process as intimately related to its internal structure and self-understanding. This is understood to occur through transformations in institutional structures produced by both the practices of the elements within it, and changes in the theoretical conceptualisation of the structure of the criminal process. The character of these developments, and the tendencies which they evince, are seen to be generally negative from the perspective of a theory of society which is intimately connected with an interest in emancipation. The relation between law, state and democracy is seen to be an essentially problematic one which does not conform to the ideas of progress, equality or liberty but to the maintenance of the survival of a social system which is seen as constantly at risk from a threatening environment of individuals whose obedience to the structure of the social order must be obtained continuously.

The thesis is the result of original research which draws upon both original and secondary sources. The methodology used in writing the thesis is a combination of historical analysis and theoretical perspectives. There is a focus upon modern developments and it is hoped that the thesis will inform current debate on the future of the criminal process.

The thesis is divided into four main chapters which concentrate upon particular parts of the criminal process in both their specificity and in their relation to the system and society as a whole. The first deals with the development of the institutional autonomy of the "New Police", during the nineteenth century, setting it in the context of the system of local governance. The second examines the system of prosecution describing the failure to institute a system of public prosecution and the predominance of the "New Police" as prosecutors in a system which remained private merely in form. The third deals with the position of the defendant during this process of transformation in the criminal process and presents its evolution as one which accorded with internal systemic considerations of the criminal process, and not as one which could be seen as the unfolding of the concept of freedom, equality or universality. The fourth deals with the creation of the Court of Appeal in 1907 which is seen, not as the institutional embodiment of justice, but as the product of the internal concerns of the Home Office Criminal Department with the systemic coherence and legitimacy of the criminal process.


This title offers a withering and clear-eyed critique about (but not for) intellectuals that explores their impact on public opinion, policy, and society at large. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. In "Intellectuals and Society", Thomas Sowell not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. Ultimately, he shows how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society.


In this commentary, we focus on invented corporate heritage, where organizations present falsified accounts of a corporate past. The extant corporate heritage literature has highlighted how the time frames of the past, present, and future (omni temporality) are merged in those organizations where there is trait constancy. Focusing on invented corporate heritage, we argue that this represents an extreme case of these dialectics, where present and future precede "the past," or more appropriately "invented past." Although lacking in authenticity, an invented corporate heritage may still be attractive to consumers since it can construct an aura of authenticity by delivering an enchanting experience to consumers, irrespective of its substantive genuineness. However, such inventions carry considerable risk since they represent a fabrication of the past.


This study is an ethnographic analysis of culture and meaning in a post-merger organisational context. It adopts the Geertzian notion of culture as the main conceptual framework which emphasises patterns of meaning and patterns of interaction (Geertz, 1973). In contrast to the dominant positivist epistemological approaches to mainstream organisational culture studies, this study takes an interpretivist approach. The focus is on less dominant perspectives (voices) in the post-merger organisation as a way to highlight and challenge assumptions about the nature and role of people within
mechanisms underlying expressions of culture. The research questions address the nature and sources of meaning systems in a culturally diverse post-merger community and investigate responses to observed
incongruences. Using an ethnographic case study methodology, post-merger cultural interactions are explored. A thematic approach is adopted for the analysis of data and main findings show the significance of the nature of creative knowledge work in the acquired population's culture. Findings reveal how incongruence in meanings emerges from interactions between the craft culture and imposed organisational values underpinning the bureaucratic post-merger context. In addition, the study uncovers nuanced connections between craft identity, practice and the person as salient elements
of the meaning system in the professionals' community, incompatible with the more dominant market-driven ethics in the organisation. Findings also show the ethical
challenges which emerge for the acquired team from the coexistence of incompatible meanings. The ethical challenges arise from the protective role played by the craft in preserving the acquired team's meaning system against assimilation by the acquirer's culture. These findings are relevant for studies on knowledge workers, cultural implications of strategic alliances and inform ethical concerns around incompatible values as described in Aristotelian virtue ethics theory. The cultural analysis is thus critically expanded and connected with concerns in the international business literature and relevant ethical debates.


Abstract What if our actions were imbued with the sacred? What if activism in organisations evokes better local society and responsible global community? What if sacred activism signals the performance of a deeper understanding and mindful actions for contextualising management and organisations in South Asia? These are some of the questions we pose to scholars and practitioners as we seek to present the multiplexities and singularities that epitomise South Asia. We address the braided realities and opportunities presented by religion, culture, ethnicity, gender and governance to contextualise organisations and management among the 1.67 billion people who constitute South Asia. We calligraph our interpretations and future possibilities based on historical traditions and extant data, mindful that some parts of this vast region are grappling with religious radicalisation, East–West tensions, underdevelopment, low literacy rates, violence against women, and international debts and handouts. This heterogeneous region also has a major BRICS country (i.e., India), provides CEOs to the world, scientists to NASA, outsourcing facilities to global corporations, has a young population, a huge middle class, and is actively participating in mergers and acquisitions in the global corridors of commerce. Our poignant hope is to inform and suggest possibilities for constructing enriching engagements and research in this region.


This paper presents a statistical correlation procedure to predict a master depletion curve by use of basin characteristics and the specific storage of water available for runoff at a particular recession discharge in small watersheds. Percentual lake area, drainage density and a weighted lake inflow area index are the most significant parameters to explain differences in specific storage among basins. The significance shows time-dependency. Percentual lake area has a decreasing contribution to a total explanation from high to low specific discharges, while drainage density increases its importance.


Traditional feedback control systems give little attention to issues associated with the flow of information through the feedback loop. Typically implemented with dedicated communication links that deliver nearly precise, reliable and non-delayed information, researchers have not needed to concern themselves with issues related to quantized, delayed and even lost information. With the advent of newer technologies and application areas that pass information through non-reliable networks, these issues can not be ignored. In recent years the field of Networked Control Systems (NCS) has emerged to describe situations where these issues are present. The research in this field focuses on quantifying performance degradations in the presence of network effects and proposing algorithms for managing the information flow to counter those negative effects. In this thesis I propose and analyze algorithms for managing information flow for several NCS scenarios; state estimation with lossy measurement signals, using input buffers to reduce the frequency of communication with a remote plant, and performing state estimation when control signals are transmitted to a remote plant via a lossy communication link with no acknowledgement signal at the estimator. Multi-agent coordinated control systems serve as a prime example of an emerging area of feedback control systems that utilize feedback loops with information passed through possibly imperfect communication networks. In these systems, agents use a communication network to exchange information in order to achieve a desired global objective. Hence managing the information flow has a direct impact on the performance of the system. I also explore this area by focusing on the problem of multi-agent average consensus. I propose an algorithm based on a hierarchical decomposition of the communication topology to speed up the time to convergence. For all these topics I focus on designing intuitive algorithms that intelligently manage the information flow and provide analysis and simulations to illustrate their effectiveness.


The Design of a Hysteroscopy Simulator G.V. Kruger Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering University of Stellenbosch South Africa Thesis: MScEng (Electronic Engineering with Computer Science) December 2007 This thesis documents the research, design and implementation of a virtual hysteroscopy simulator. A hysteroscopy is a medical procedure used in the field of obstetrics and gynaecology. The system consists of a mechanically modelled hysteroscope connecting to any personal computer using USB, and is plug and play compatible on any modern Windows operating system. The scope interfaces with custom-designed software, which simulates a patient's anatomy and thus creates a virtual operating environment. The software incorporates features like simulated soft tissue and an ablation algorithm. This system is developed with the aim to aid the young or inexperienced surgeon with hands-on training, developing his hand-eye coordination and visual and surgical skills used in this procedure.


BACKGROUND AND AIMS
Psoriasis and hidradenitis suppurativa [HS] co-occur more often with inflammatory bowel disease [IBD] than expected, due to shared pathogenic and genetic features. It is known that IBD patients harbour an altered intestinal microbiome characterised by a depletion of Faecalibacterium prausnitzii and increase of Escherichia coli. At present, it is unclear whether a similar intestinal microbiome trend can be identified in IBD-associated skin disorders. We therefore investigated the F. prausnitzii and E. coli abundance in psoriasis and HS, with and without concomitant IBD.

METHODS
Using quantitative polymerase chain reaction , we compared the F. prausnitzii and E. coli abundances in faecal samples from healthy controls [n = 33] with samples from patients with psoriasis [n = 29], IBD [n = 31], and concomitant IBD and psoriasis [n = 13]. Likewise, we analysed samples from patients with HS [n = 17], and concomitant IBD and HS [n = 17].

RESULTS
Psoriasis patients harboured a significantly lower abundance of F. prausnitzii in their stool than healthy controls [p < 0.001], which was similar to IBD patients. Together with the reduced F. prausnitzii levels, the psoriasis patients had a significantly higher abundance of E. coli [p < 0.001]. No significant difference in F. prausnitzii or E. coli abundance was found in HS. It was apparent that patients with concomitant IBD and associated skin disorder had the greatest decrease of F. prausnitzii and increase of E. coli.

CONCLUSIONS
The study demonstrates, for the first time, an IBD-like decrease of F. prausnitzii together with an increase of E.coli in psoriasis, supporting the presence of a gut-microbiome-skin axis in psoriasis and IBD.


This collection of essays examines Zambia's efforts to promote economic reform during the 1990s. Following the restoration of democratic rule, the government of Zambia adopted an ambitious programme designed to stabilise the economy and lay the foundation for sustained growth and development. These essays descrive the adjustment programme, highlighting the attempts to reform the budget, the tax system, the financial system, agriculture and mining, and to create the human capacity to sustain the reforms. Major improvements in economic performance occurred from 1992 to 1995. After that, however, economic performance deteriorated as a result of the government's selective abandonment of key elements of the reform programme and the emergence of major governance problems. In response to international pressure, by 2001 the government completed the sale of the copper mines and qualified for large-scale debt relief. The long delays involved seriously undermined economic performance. The volume concludes that for economic reform to succeed in Zambia, the government should scale back its development agenda to match its financial and human capacities, reduce dependence on foreign aid, adopt and maintain prudent macroeconomic policies and support the expansion of both mining and agriculture.


Using a spark source mass spectrograph, a search has been made for undiscovered naturally occurring isotopes of low abundance None was found, although the spark source instrument permitted examination of elements that have not been analyzed in this context for many years. The ability of the instrument to ionize all elements and the ease with which the rarer isotopes may be seen allowed upper limits of <0 000001 atom % to be placed on some isotopes. Be, P, Mn, Co, As, Rh, Au, and Bi were confirmed as monoisotopic.


The principal objective of this book is to provide a unified treatment of morphological case in Korean. Focussing on the nominative, accusative and dative suffixes, the author seeks to show that each of these morphemes consistently encodes a corresponding combinatorial relation in the 'surface' form of sentences.In support of his analysis, the author discusses a broad and representative range of Korean case marking patterns, providing one of the more complete treatments of case available for any language. This book should therefore be useful not only to Koreanists but also to researchers interested in the case systems of other languages.Written in a style that makes it accessible to readers from a variety of backgrounds in linguistics and other disciplines, Categories and Case also provides a good introduction to many important syntactic phenomena in the Korean language.


We report progress on an approach (Geometric Texton Theory - GTT) that like Marr's 'primal sketch' aims to describe image structure in a way that emphasises its qualitative aspects. In both approaches, image description is by labelling points using a vocabulary of feature types, though compared to Marr we aim for a much larger feature vocabulary. We base GTT on the Gaussian derivative (DtG) model of V1 measurement. Marr's primal sketch was based on DtG filters of derivative order up to 2nd, for GTT we plan to extend to the physiologically plausible limit of 4th. This is how we will achieve a larger feature vocabulary (we estimate 30-150) than Marr's 'edge', 'line' and 'blob'. The central requirement of GTT then is for a procedure for determining the feature vocabulary that will scale up to 4th order. We have previously published feature category systems for 1-D 1st order, 1-D 2nd order, 2-D 1st order and 2-D pure 2nd order. In this paper we will present results of GTT as applied to 2-D mixed 1st + 2nd order features. We will review various approaches to defining the feature vocabulary, including ones based on (i) purely geometrical considerations, and (ii) natural image statistics.


Reconstruction of target genomes from sequence data produced by instruments that are agnostic as to the species-of-origin may be confounded by contaminant DNA. Whether introduced during sample processing or through co-extraction alongside the target DNA, if insufficient care is taken during the assembly process, the final assembled genome may be a mixture of data from several species. Such assemblies can confound sequence-based biological inference and, when deposited in public databases, may be included in downstream analyses by users unaware of underlying problems. We present BlobToolKit, a software suite to aid researchers in identifying and isolating non-target data in draft and publicly available genome assemblies. BlobToolKit can be used to process assembly, read and analysis files for fully reproducible interactive exploration in the browser-based Viewer. BlobToolKit can be used during assembly to filter non-target DNA, helping researchers produce assemblies with high biological credibility. We have been running an automated BlobToolKit pipeline on eukaryotic assemblies publicly available in the International Nucleotide Sequence Data Collaboration and are making the results available through a public instance of the Viewer at https://blobtoolkit.genomehubs.org/view. We aim to complete analysis of all publicly available genomes and then maintain currency with the flow of new genomes. We have worked to embed these views into the presentation of genome assemblies at the European Nucleotide Archive, providing an indication of assembly quality alongside the public record with links out to allow full exploration in the Viewer.


Government policy in Sweden, as in other developed countries, pays increasing attention as to how best to support the family carers of older people. New and innovative means of support, such as information and communication technology, are emerging. This paper explores the perceived benefits of, and barriers to, information technology as a means of supporting family carers of older people. Following a brief overview of the care-giving literature, with particular reference to the Swedish context, interview and questionnaire data collected from 34 families who took part in the Swedish ACTION project are used to explore the role of user-friendly information and communication technology to inform and enable family carers of older people to exercise choice, to care more effectively and to work in partnership with professionals. Interview data from two groups of professionals that utilised ACTION are also examined to throw light on its potential benefits for both carers and professionals. Consideration is given to the barriers to using information technology, and to identifying those carers most likely to benefit. Areas for further development are the need for practitioners' education and a wider range of programmes to address carers' diverse needs. Clearly, lessons learned from the Swedish project have wider relevance, given that new forms of support are being developed in most technically advanced countries.


Visual working memory—holding past visual information in mind for upcoming behavior—is commonly studied following the abrupt removal of visual objects from static two-dimensional (2D) displays. In everyday life, visual objects do not typically vanish from the environment in front of us. Rather, visual objects tend to enter working memory following self or object motion: disappearing from view gradually and changing the spatial relation between memoranda and observer. Here, we used virtual reality (VR) to investigate whether two classic findings from visual working memory research—a capacity of around three objects and the reliance on space for object selection—generalize to more naturalistic modes of object disappearance. Our static reference condition mimicked traditional laboratory tasks whereby visual objects were held static in front of the participant and removed from view abruptly. In our critical flow condition, the same visual objects flowed by participants, disappearing from view gradually and behind the observer. We considered visual working memory performance and capacity, as well as space-based mnemonic selection, indexed by directional biases in gaze. Despite vastly distinct modes of object disappearance and altered spatial relations between memoranda and observer, we found comparable capacity and comparable gaze signatures of space-based mnemonic selection. This finding reveals how classic findings from visual working memory research generalize to immersive situations with more naturalistic modes of object disappearance and with dynamic spatial relations between memoranda and observer.


OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was to evaluate whether minute portal venous invasion in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) can be diagnosed radiologically.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
CT hepatic arteriography and CT with arterioportography (CTAP) of 15 patients with minute portal venous invasion (group 1) and 30 patients without it (group 0) were evaluated. An area showing low attenuation on CTAP and high attenuation on CT hepatic arteriography around the tumor was defined as an area of peritumoral hemodynamic change. The shape and size of the area were compared between the two groups. The ratio of the area of peritumoral hemodynamic change volume to tumor volume (area volume-tumor volume ratio) was used as an indicator of the size of the area of peritumoral hemodynamic change and was categorized as one of three grades: grade I, 10% or less; grade II, between 10% and 30%; and grade III, 30% or more. The detectability of minute portal invasion was assessed when grade III was considered as an indicator. Each comparison was also made independently when the tumor diameter either was limited to less than 3 cm or was 3 cm or more.

RESULTS
Three types of area of peritumoral hemodynamic change were identified: wedge-shaped, belt-shaped or irregular, and linear. No significant difference in the frequency of each type of area of peritumoral hemodynamic change was observed between the two groups. The area volume-tumor volume ratio in group 1 was larger than that in group 0, with statistical significance when the tumor diameter was less than 3 cm (p = 0.046). Positive and negative predictive values were 71.4% and 75.0%, respectively, when the tumor diameter was less than 3 cm.

CONCLUSION
The area of peritumoral hemodynamic change in HCC patients with minute portal invasion (group 1) may be larger than in those without it (group 0), especially when tumors are small.