This paper aims to investigate the impact of leverage on stock returns in three southern European countries, members of the Euro zone, Greece, Italy and Portugal from 2000 to 2010. The portfolio level analysis is performed both on a full sample basis and on an industry basis. The main contribution of our work is that we enhance the capital structure studies by broadening the limited work that has been accomplished on the base of leverage as an explanatory variable of returns. At the industry level analysis, a significant positive leverage effect is isolated only at Consumer Goods and Health Care industries in Italy and at Industrial sector in Portugal. In Greece, the industry effect of leverage is almost negligible.


The immunological processes behind sepsis are ill defined. Predicting or diagnosing sepsis, based on cellular immune parameters is a research priority. This study quantified differences in peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) and cytokine levels between septic patients with fecal peritonitis, matched surgical patients (no sepsis) and healthy controls. To assess function, PBMC were stimulated in vitro with anti-CD3±anti-CD28 antibodies. Four days later T and B cell proliferation were measured by CFSE and activation by expression of CD25 and CD69 on T cells and CD86 on B cells. Viability was assessed by flow cytometry. Concentrations of a range of cytokines were determined from plasma and supernatants (post-stimulation) by multiplex cytometric bead array. On day of phlebotomy there were reduced CD4+ and increased CD19+ cells in septic patients. Plasma IL-6 and IL-8 levels were higher in septic patients, IFN-γ and IL-13 were lower. There was reduced proliferation and activation of T cells from septic patients in response to anti-CD3+anti-CD28. Supernatant levels of IFN-γ, TNF-α and interleukins 1β, 5, 6, 13 and 17A were lower in septic patient samples. There were no initial differences in PBMC viability, but septic patient PBMC had reduced survival on incubation. In summary, we found reduced T cell numbers and a functional impairment of remaining T cells in septic patients.To our knowledge this is the first report of an immune function assay across these three groups.


Following the passage of the Nigerian sovereign investment authority Act 2011, by the National Assembly, the federal Government acting pursuant to the Act, set up the fund. It is customary for the government to distribute all revenue accruing to her in the Federation Account between the federal, state and local government councils according to a set formula. The establishment of the sovereign wealth fund received attacks and protest by the governors of the federating states, thus, raising the unsettled question of the concept of federalism in Nigeria. The view of many is that the concept of the Nigerian federalism is not determined by the judicious power and revenue sharing formula, rather by the result of the imposed federal system of government by the colonial master and the subsequent military regimes is the base for the frequent disputes and quarrels between the states and federal government in some national issues. The formation of the Governor's forum as an association of all the governors in Nigeria is to protect the states from the political and fiscal interference of the federal government. By virtue of the provision of the constitution, the concept of federalism was entrenched in that the sovereignty of the nation was divided between the federal, states and local governments. The exercise of the legislative and executive powers by the federal system, particularly, as these powers touch on the sharing of the country's revenue between the federating units. And at several occasions, attempts were made by the federal government through the National Assembly negating the principles of true federalism. This review has attempted to highlight on related concepts, legal base for Nigeria's fiscal federalism and its challenges. It also provides an analytical framework linking it to a suitable theory. The significant finding of the study is the fact that there is an imbalance in the federal system and structures of federating units in Nigeria. The implication of the finding is that there will continue to be a developmental lacuna and ethnic squabbles among the federating units if the imbalances are not corrected. Recommendations were also offered to ameliorate the imbalance system and establishment of the fund. Keywords : Sovereign Wealth Funds, Fiscal Federalism, Ethnic Squabbles, Federating unit, African Continent, Financial Management and Accounting.


Fuelled by successes in Computer Go, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) has achieved widespread adoption within the games community. Its links to traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been outlined in the past; however, the use of RL techniques within tree search has not been thoroughly studied yet. In this paper we re-examine in depth this close relation between the two fields; our goal is to improve the cross-awareness between the two communities. We show that a straightforward adaptation of RL semantics within tree search can lead to a wealth of new algorithms, for which the traditional MCTS is only one of the variants. We confirm that planning methods inspired by RL in conjunction with online search demonstrate encouraging results on several classic board games and in arcade video game competitions, where our algorithm recently ranked first. Our study promotes a unified view of learning, planning, and search.


The entrepreneurship dynamism of a country is the center of Schumpeter's creativedestruction process and virtuous circle, in which new and innovative companies enteringthe market drive the obsolete and less productive ones out of the market. As aconsequence of this process, the market is improved and it incentivizes the creation ofinnovative solutions to solve problems. The study focuses on the pivotal function of theentries in this process.To better understand the creation of new ventures process the study investigates how thecontextual factors impact the entrepreneur's decision of starting a new business, focusingon two business environments: Sweden and Brazil. Through interviews with Swedish andBrazilian entrepreneurs we analyze how entrepreneurs perceive the contextual factors andhow it impacted their new venture creation process.Through the literature we find that the business environment is composed by seven majorfactors that, with an extended framework based on literature review, we consider as:economic wealth, government policies and procedures, legal & administrative, society'sculture; network and knowledge; financial assistance; and non-financial assistance.Analyzing the empirical material about the business environments we find that Swedishand Brazilian entrepreneurs feel the influence of the different contextual factors inbusiness creation but do not always understand their causes. Our findings show that theseven contextual factors do not have the same level of influence in Sweden and Braziland often depend on the environment. However, for entrepreneurs in both two contextualfactors have a pivotal impact: network and financial assistance.This study contributes to the theory by providing a more detailed extended framework tostudy the influence of contextual factors on the process of starting a new business.Furthermore, this research also contributes by providing empirical evidence of Swedishand Brazilian entrepreneurs' perceptions of their business environment and the influenceof the contextual factors.


Recently, the interaction of copper with dislocations in p-type Si/SiGe/Si structures has been investigated experimentally and a new dislocation related DLTS-level at Ev +0.32 eV was detected after intentional contamination with copper. To determine the origin of this newly detected level, in this work we present first density functional calculations of substitutional copper at 90◦ and 30◦ partial dislocations in silicon. Defect–dislocation binding energies are determined and electrical gap levels are calculated and compared with the experimental data. As a result, the observed level at Ev + 0.32 eV is tentatively assigned to the single acceptor level of substitutional copper at the dislocation.


Background. The pressure to release high-quality, valuable software products at an increasingly faster rate is forcing software development organizations to adapt their development practices. Agile techniques began emerging in the mid-1990s in response to this pressure and to increased volatility of customer requirements and technical change. Theoretically, agile techniques seem to be the silver bullet for responding to these pressures on the software industry. Aims. This paper tracks the changing attitudes to agile adoption and techniques, within Microsoft, in one of the largest longitudinal surveys of its kind (2006-2012). Method. We collected the opinions of 1,969 agile and non-agile practitioners in five surveys over a six-year period. Results. The survey results reveal that despite intense market pressure, the growth of agile adoption at Microsoft is slower than would be expected. Additionally, no individual agile practice exhibited strong growth trends. We also found that while development practices of teams may be similar, some perceive and declare themselves to be following an agile methodology while others do not. Both agile and non-agile practitioners agree on the relative benefits and problem areas of agile techniques. Conclusions. We found no clear trends in practice adoption. Non-agile practitioners are less enamored of the benefits and more strongly in agreement with the problem areas. The ability for agile practices to be used by large-scale teams generally concerned all respondents, which may limit its future adoption.


Scott Prudham and Angela Morris analyze the complex politics surrounding the regulation of agricultural biotechnology. Governments are subject to conflicting pressures in this area: on the one hand, to support the biotechnology industry, seen as an innovative and potentially transformative sector, and on the other, to respond to consumer concerns about the ethical, social, and safety implications of the new biotech products. Prudham and Morris examine government's attempt to mediate this conflict by considering the case of the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee (CBAC) between 1999 and 2003. They argue that the CBAC GM foods project was, at best, a poorly conceived effort to engage with and respond to public concerns about GM foods, compromised by a prior commitment to commercialization.


We compare the likelihood of different socially relevant features to allow the evolutionary emergence and maintenance of cooperation in a generalized variant of the iterated Prisoners Dilemma game. Results show that the average costs/benefit balance of cooperation is the primary constraint for its establishment and maintenance. Behavior increasing inclusive fitness such as assortation, homophily, kin-selection and tagging of individuals, is second in importance. Networks characteristics were the least important in favoring the establishment and maintenance of cooperation, despite being the most popular in recent research on the subject. Results suggest that inclusive fitness theory with its expansions to include assortative and economic considerations is more general, powerful and relevant in analyzing social phenomena than kin selection theory with its emphasis on genetic relatedness. Merging economics with evolutionary theory will be necessary to reveal more about the nature of social dynamics.


Aim To better understand the phenomenon of dysphotopsia in patients implanted with multifocal intraocular lenses (IOLs). Methods Forty-five patients (aged 61.8±8.9 years) implanted bilaterally with Tecnis ZM900 (diffractive multifocal), Lentis Mplus MF30 (segmented refractive multifocal) or Softec-1 (monofocal) IOLs (each n=15) 4–6 months previously and who had achieved a good surgical outcome were examined. Each reported their dysphotopsia symptoms subjectively, identified its form (EyeVisPod illustrations), quantified retinal straylight (C-Quant) and halo perception (Aston halometer). Retinal straylight and halometry was repeated by a second masked clinician to determine interobserver repeatability. Results Subjective dysphotopsia ratings were able to differentiate Tecnis ZM900 from Lentis Mplus MF30 (p<0.001), but not Lentis Mplus MF30 from groups implanted with Softec-1 (p=0.290). Straylight was similar between the monofocal and multifocal IOL designs (p=0.664). ZM900 IOLs demonstrated a uniform increase in dysphotopsia in comparison with the monofocal IOL (p<0.001) as measured with the halometer, whereas sectorial refractive multifocal IOLs demonstrated a localised increase in dysphotopsia over the inferior visual field. Intraobserver repeatability was good for the straylight (intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC)=0.77) and halometry (ICC=0.89). There was no significant correlation between the subjective dysphotopsia severity and the straylight (p=0.503) or halometry (p>0.10) quantification or between straylight and the halo area (p>0.30). Conclusions Multifocal IOLs induce symptoms of dysphotopsia. Straylight did not differentiate between IOL designs, however halometry identified clear differences in light scatter due to the IOL optics. Whereas, subjective rating of overall dysphotopsia are not strongly associated with straylight or halo perception, the halometry polar diagram reflected the subjective descriptions of dysphotopsia.


Research in compulsory sectors of education indicates that curriculum negotiation (sometimes termed co-construction) between teacher and students is beneficial for both students and teachers. It would seem, therefore, that this approach would be equally valuable in the tertiary context of initial teacher education, as a model of a good teaching approach for student teachers to observe and experience. However, enacting this approach in the context of an academic tertiary programme is often perceived as problematic. This paper discusses theoretical underpinnings of curriculum negotiation, its foundations, implementation and benefits. It then describes actions taken by a university teaching team which endeavoured to create spaces for the negotiation of curriculum, and to intentionally model curriculum negotiation. The ways in which staff and students have been able to work together collaboratively, giving both parties shared influence, input and control of learning, are explored. I contend that curriculum negotiation is an essential element within teacher education programmes if we hope to maximise learning engagement and outcomes and model an effective pedagogy.


Conventional research in organizational theory highlights the role of board interlocks in facilitating business collective action. In this article, I propose that business collective action affects the evolutionary path of interlock networks. In particular, large market players' response after a collective action to the classic problem of the "exploitation" of the great by the small provides a mechanism for interlocks to evolve. Through studying the two types of collective action that banks organized during the Panic of 1907, I find that the experience of issuing currency substitutes, a course of collective action that needed to mobilize community support, made bankers more aware of their responsibility for community welfare. In the post-crisis period, bankers were thus more supportive of the market stabilization strategy of assisting small banks. In contrast, the experience of organizing mutual lending, a course of collective action that highlighted the power of businesses independent of the communities in which they were located, led bankers to focus more on their sectional interest and favor the market stabilization strategy of eliminating small banks. These different attitudes toward small banks affected the evolution of the interlock networks between large and small banks.


Deep generative models (dgms) seem a natural fit for detecting out-of-distribution (ood) inputs, but such models have been shown to assign higher probabilities or densities to ood images than images from the training distribution. In this work, we explain why this behavior should be attributed to model misestimation. We first prove that no method can guarantee performance beyond random chance without assumptions on which out-distributions are relevant. We then interrogate the typical set hypothesis, the claim that relevant out-distributions can lie in high likelihood regions of the data distribution, and that ood detection should be defined based on the data distribution's typical set. We highlight the consequences implied by assuming support overlap between in- and out-distributions, as well as the arbitrariness of the typical set for ood detection. Our results suggest that estimation error is a more plausible explanation than the misalignment between likelihood-based ood detection and out-distributions of interest, and we illustrate how even minimal estimation error can lead to ood detection failures, yielding implications for future work in deep generative modeling and ood detection.


The characterization of genotyes from a germplasm bank is the first step to define their use as sources of interesting genes. We evaluated 64 genotypes of mini tomatoes of the germplasm bank of the Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste, in Guarapuava, Parana state, Brazil. The experimental design consisted of randomized blocks with three replications and four plants per plot. Ten genotypes stood out for fruit production, all with yield equivalent to cv. Sweet Grape. Most genotypes presented fruits with 25-30 mm, oblong shape, similar to that observed in the sweet grape cultivar. Three genotypes stood out for the soluble solids content, with 7.13°Brix (6878-49), 7.17°Brix (RVTC-22) and 7.37°Brix (IAC1498-63). The genotypes RVTC-06, RVTC-08, RVTC-11, RVTC-12, RVTC-16, RVTC-20, 2318-43, 2091-44, 2298-45, IAC392-59 and IAC1622-64 exhibited brightness values between 38 and 40, considered appropriate. The red color (a*), was more intense in genotypes 1258-48, 6878-49, IAC392-59, 0224-53, RVTC-25 and RVTC-55. Three genotypes showed fruit with greater vivacity (chroma) (2091-44, 0489-54 and IAC1622-64). The genotypes RVTC-07, IAC392-59, IAC1622-64, RVTC-24 and RVTC-57 presented the lowest values of Hue, thus providing stronger red color. Based on these results, the genotypes of mini tomatoes showed promising agronomic and qualitative characteristics, besides good adaptation to soil and climatic conditions of the region. Although diverse market niches exist for this segment, no ideal standard of format has been defined. So, many characteristics may be used to improve the production, flavor and appearance, expanding the market.


Summary Biometric studies were carried out on Apis cerana indica (Fabr.) in the Nagapattinam district, Tamil Nadu, Southern India. A total of 24 colonies of A. c. indica from 13 different areas of the Nagapattinam district were sampled. Thirty two morphometric characters were statistically analysed by means of Principal Compound Analysis (PCA), Factor Analysis, Discriminant Analysis (DA) and Cluster Analysis. The morphometric features of the bees differed significantly (p < 0.05) in different areas of the district. Further the bee samples from the coastal regions of the Nagapattinam District were distinct morphologically when compared to other regions.


Early Miocene to Quaternary sedimentary strata drilled from the distal Bengal fan in the central Indian Ocean during Leg 116 of the Ocean Drilling Program are divided into six zones by modal proportions of detrital heavy minerals. We identified the provenance of sediments in each zone on the basis of the mineral assemblage and propose a two-phase uplift of the Higher Himalayas since 17 Ma. The oldest sedimentary strata, ranging from 17.1 to 15.2 Ma, were derived mostly from the sedimentary rocks of the Lower Himalayas and the Tethys Himalayas. The zone above these strata (15.2-10.9 Ma) contains minerals derived from the Higher Himalayas. The main provenance of the zone dated between 10.9 and 7.5 Ma also appears to be the Higher Himalayas. Calcic amphibole, which indicates contribution from the Higher Himalayas, appeared at 15.2 Ma and abruptly increased at 10.9 Ma. The acme of the uplift in the first phase was between 10.9 and 7.5 Ma. From 7.5 to 6.5 Ma, the amount of elements from the Higher Himalayas abruptly decreased. It is proposed that the Higher Himalayas were eroded, and their source area became smaller. Concurrently, pumpellyite disappeared. Because this mineral is currently found only in the limited area of the upper drainage basin of the Indus River, we presume that the drainage system of the Ganges and Indus rivers changed between 7.5 and 6.5 Ma, in association with tectonic movement. The zone dated between 6.5 and 0.9 Ma is composed of two types of sedimentary units, one from the Higher Himalayas and the other from the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka. The provenance of the zone younger than 0.9 Ma is thought to be the Higher Himalayas, where a large peridotite body was thrust up over the Tethys Himalayas. The second main phase of uplift of the Higher Himalayas occurred after 0.9 Ma.


This study assesses the extent to which welfare recipients engage in giving money and time to charitable causes. Using the 2003 Center on Philanthropy Panel Study data, this study examines the effects of public assistance—holding constant earned income and demographic traits—on two major types of charitable activities: charitable giving and volunteering. Using a Tobit specification, as appropriate for this type of data, the authors use a creative differencing strategy in an attempt to overcome sticky issues of selection bias. Evidence is found that public assistance receipt tends to suppress monetary donations but may increase volunteer time.


Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are an essential component of 5G-and-beyond ultra-dense Gbit/s wireless networks, but also pose significant challenges related to the communication environment. Especially beam-training and tracking, device association, and fast handovers for highly directional mmWave links may potentially incur a high overhead. At the same time, such mechanisms would benefit greatly from accurate knowledge about the environment and device locations that can be provided through simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms. In this paper we tackle the above issues by proposing CLAM, a distributed mmWave SLAM algorithm that works with no initial information about the network deployment or the environment, and achieves low computational complexity thanks to a fundamental reformulation of the angle-differences-of-arrival mm Wave anchor location estimation problem. All information required by CLAM is collected by a mmWave device thanks to beam training and tracking mechanisms inherent to mm Wave networks, at no additional overhead. Our results show that CLAM achieves submeter accuracy in the great majority of cases. These results are validated via an extensive experimental measurement campaign carried out with 60-GHz mmWave hardware.


Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare actual inheritances received during the period 1994 to 2004 with the amounts that, in 1994, households anticipated receiving within 10 years. We find little evidence of systematic forecasting errors. The factors affecting inheritance receipt also affect expectation formation. Although the distribution is highly skewed, inheritances are generally modest in amount and uncorrelated with lifetime income, and therefore have almost no effect on various measures of inequality. We find no evidence that households anticipating receipt of an inheritance save less than that of similar households, although this could reflect unobserved heterogeneity in tastes for saving.


Postmodernism in Biblical Studies is characterised by proliferation of methodological and ideological interpretive perspectives, emphasis upon the ethics of interpretation and awareness of the role of interpretive communities. Following Stephen E. Fowl, the underlying motives of interpreters can be understood when approaches are analysed in terms of interpretive interests. The work of David J. A. Clines, J. Cheryl Exum and Stephen D. Moore reveals a strong de-confessional motive and a desire to exclude confessional concerns from academic interpretation. This position is ideologically driven and, in terms of liberal academic values, self-contradictory. The difficulties posed for Christian interpretation by the postmodern context are evident in the narrative criticism of Mark Allan Powell and R. Alan Culpepper, where unresolved conflict of theological, methodological and political interests threatens the coherence of the approach. Recent work by Powell addresses postmodern concerns, but fails adequately to engage theoretical and theological issues.
A postmodern understanding of the Bible as Christian scripture which affirms both the validity and legitimacy of multiple interpretive perspectives and a pneumatological understanding of the Bible as the Word of God can be framed using the work of Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Stephen E. Fowl, Roman Jakobson and Daniel Patte. Socio-pragmatic objections to the legitimacy and validity of Christian interpretation beyond the faith community can be resisted by asserting a dialogical relationship between the Bible, the church and the wider academic community, and by following Francis Watson's argument that the church's discourse is derived from that of the wider society in which it exists. Christian interpretation will seek to engage constructively with other interpretive approaches. A Christian ethics of interpretation characterised by openness, humility, repentance and forgiveness offers a positive contribution to the culture of postmodern academic interpretation. Jesus' encounter with the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7 offers a paradigm for such interpretive practice.


ABSTRACT This study uses the Census 2001 and 2011 as well as Community Survey 2007 and 2016 data to derive a multidimensional poverty index in South Africa for each year, before assessing the changes in non-money-metric, multidimensional poverty over time. Both the incidence and intensity of multidimensional poverty decreased continuously, and these declines were more rapid than that of money-metric poverty. The decrease in multidimensional poverty between 2001 and 2016 was most rapid for female Africans residing in rural areas in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu–Natal provinces. Multidimensional poverty was most serious in numerous district councils in these two provinces, despite the fact that poverty decline was also most rapid in these district councils. The results of the multidimensional poverty index decomposition indicated that Africans contributed more than 95% to multidimensional poverty, while unemployment, years of schooling and disability were the three indicators contributing most to poverty.


AIM
To evaluate the effective dose and adverse effects of BCG doses.

METHODS
We searched published RCTs in Medline and Cochrane database before October 2013. Article using maintenance BCG after TUR in intermediate-high risk non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC) and followed for effectiveness, local and systemic side effect are included. Low risk patients, other dose and MIBC were excluded.

RESULTS
Meta-analysis of 6 clinical trials involving 2719 intermediate-high risk NMIBC patients showed recurrence rate in full dose (81 mg), low dose (27 mg) and very low dose (13.5 mg) were 33.3%, 34.7% and 30%, respectively. Meta-analysis of 2175 patients, 81 mg BCG was found to be superior to 27 mg in reducing tumour recurrences (RR 0.86; 95% CI 0.77-0.96, I2=0% and p=0.008). Meta-analysis of 544 patients, the effectiveness reducing tumour recurrences in 27 mg BCG was found to be superior to 13,5 BCG (RR 0.66; 95% CI 0.49-0.89, I2=8.8% and p=0.006). Systemic side effects were happened in 25%, 28.5%, and 15.5% in the doses 81.27 and 13.5 mg BCG, respectively. Low dose was superior to full dose in affecting systemic side effect (p=0,000) but no difference in affecting local side effect (p=0.137) in the meta-analysis of 1816 patients in 2 clinical trials.

CONCLUSION
Full dose BCG had superior outcome to reduce recurrences compared to low dose and very low dose. There were no significant differences between each dose in local side effect. However full dose regimen has higher systemic side effect compared to low and very low dose.


Logistics outsourcing has been applied in practices by enterprises for decades, but its efficiency is always restricted because logistics service providers (LSPs) often only have a single function such as delivery or warehousing. In the last few years, LSPs have upgraded their capabilities to support some other logistics services including value-added services, materials management, information-related services etc. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the differences between self-built logistics system and outsourcing logistics system by using the Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats (SWOT) strategic analysis; and figure out how to apply the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to make an appropriate selection among LSPs that based on the single-case study of Gevalia. Both quantitative and qualitative methods have been used in this study, authors expect to describe and explore the application of AHP approach regarding to the case company which implements outsourcing logistics system. Accordingly, it could be a good idea for case company to implement the mixed mode of self-built and outsourcing logistics system after using the SWOT strategic analysis. In addition, the production and logistics manager of case company emphasized that the five selection criteria including "compatibility", "delivery performance", "location", "management" and "cost" should be considered as a priority among other different criterion when he selected a LSP. As a result, it will be efficient and effective for us to simulate a best decision for those industrial manufacturing enterprises to achieve a path regarding to the selection of the best logistics partner that based on the significant AHP approach.


OBJECTIVE
Plasma interleukin-18 (IL-18) has been reported to be associated with homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR). It also has been described as one of the factors that, in addition to insulin resistance, may also contribute to atherosclerosis. Parameters of systemic inflammation are also significantly associated with circulating IL-18. Our objective was to investigate whether IL-18 is associated with insulin resistance and atherosclerosis in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in which accelerated atherogenesis develops.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Fifty-one female RA patients and 30 female controls were enrolled in the study; 31 of them were without disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) treatment and had a relatively short disease duration. Disease activity was assessed by Disease Activity Score (DAS) 28 index. HOMA-IR method was used to detect insulin resistance. Erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), C-reactive protein (CRP), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), insulin, tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), and IL-18 levels were evaluated. Also, carotid intima-media thickness (cIMT) was measured.

RESULTS
There were no differences between patients and the control group according to age, sex, and body mass index. ESR, CRP, insulin, FPG, HOMA-IR, TNF-α, IL-18 levels, and cIMT measurements were significantly high in the patient group. HOMA-IR and cIMT measurements were similar and high in both the DMARD and non-DMARD patient groups. HOMA-IR correlated with TNF-α (r=0.308, p=0.028), but no correlation was found between IL-18 and HOMA-IR. However, IL-18 was correlated positively with cIMT (r= 0.318, p=0.028) and negatively with BMI (r=-0.360, p=0.01).

CONCLUSION
IL-18 is associated with atherosclerosis in RA patients. However, no significant relation was found with insulin resistance. IL-18 may be a marker for early evaluation of atherosclerosis in RA patients.


The third workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR) took place on the 21th of July 2016 in conjunction with SIGIR 2016 in Pisa, Italy. It was the first GamifIR held in conjunction with the SIGIR, the first and second GamifIR workshops were both colocated with ECIR. The workshop program included one invited keynote presentation, seven paper presentations and a discussion session. The keynote presentation stated the necessity of proper theory for gamification design and resulting opportunities. The paper presentation covered studies on diverse areas and approaches for the application of gamification.


Human cord and placental blood provides a rich source of hematopoietic stem cells. On the basis of the finding, umbilical cord blood stem cells have been used to reconstitute hematopoiesis in children with malignant and non malignant diseases after treatment with myeloablative doses of chemoradiotherapy. Early results show, that a single cord blood provides enough hematopoietic stem cells to provide short and long term engraftment and, that the incidence and severity of graft versus host disease has been low even in HLA mismatched transplants. These results are encouraging enough to embark on large scale banking of cord blood for purposes of future allogeneic and autologous stem cell transplantation, to promote studies on the unique properties of fetal and neonatal hematopoiesis, to study the immunological properties of cord blood cells and, to initiate investigations on gene transfer into human cord blood cells for future gene therapy trials. This review will briefly summarize the current knowledge on cord blood transplantation as well as the future development of research on this unique source of hematopoietic stem cells.


Spruce mires are rare and endangered plant communities of central and western Europe. In the Czech Republic, they were intensively destroyed and drained during the 1970s. To start the regeneration of spruce mires, palisade dams sealed with peat were used to block draining ditches in the Giant Mountains. Four years after construction of the dams, there were significant differences in vegetation above and below the dams. Vegetation above the dams successfully developed towards plant communities characteristic to spruce mire forests. Below the dams, the colonization by forest floor species continued. These differences indicate that palisade dams effectively retain water and help the regeneration of spruce mire forests. Our results support construction of palisade dams in such habitats.


Metal additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, commonly referred to as 3D printing, provide a good prospect for medical applications because complex geometries and customized parts can be fabricated to meet individual patient needs. Orthopedic implants are a group of medical parts with high relevance for AM. This paper discusses relevant AM technologies, several orthopedic applications, materials and material properties, mechanical surface finishing techniques, and measurement techniques from the literature. Today, most metal 3D printed implants are manufactured through metal powder bed fusion technology which includes direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), selective laser melting (SLM), and electron beam melting (EBM). Common materials include titanium alloys, cobalt chromium (CoCr) and stainless steel, chosen because of their biocompatibility and mechanical properties. Surface finishing is most often required for 3D printed implants due to the relatively poor surface quality to meet the desired surface texture for the application. Typically, postprocessing is done mechanically, including manual and automated grinding, sandblasting, polishing, or chemically, including electrochemical polishing. This review also covers an overview of surface quality characterization of AM metal implants which includes surface texture and topography. The surface parameters used to characterize the surface of the implants: surface roughness (Ra), differences between the peak and valley (Rz), waviness, and micro-finish.


The strict tropism of many pathogens for man hampers the development of animal models that recapitulate important microbe–host interactions. We developed a rhesus macaque model for studying Neisseria–host interactions using Neisseria species indigenous to the animal. We report that Neisseria are common inhabitants of the rhesus macaque. Neisseria isolated from the rhesus macaque recolonize animals after laboratory passage, persist in the animals for at least 72 d, and are transmitted between animals. Neisseria are naturally competent and acquire genetic markers from each other in vivo, in the absence of selection, within 44 d after colonization. Neisseria macacae encodes orthologs of known or presumed virulence factors of human-adapted Neisseria, as well as current or candidate vaccine antigens. We conclude that the rhesus macaque model will allow studies of the molecular mechanisms of Neisseria colonization, transmission, persistence, and horizontal gene transfer. The model can potentially be developed further for preclinical testing of vaccine candidates.


Canonical Wnt signaling involves sequestration of glycogen synthase kinase 3. Signaling through the canonical Wnt/β-catenin pathway, which is crucial for normal development, depends on inhibition of β-catenin phosphorylation by glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3); this enables β-catenin to escape proteasomal destruction and activate the transcription of target genes. GSK3 inhibition follows a series of events initiated by Wnt binding to the co-receptors Frizzled and low-density lipoprotein receptor–related protein 6 (LRP6) and formation of a multiprotein signalosome (see Niehrs and Acebron). Noting that endocytosis of the Wnt-bound receptor complex is crucial for Wnt signaling, Taelman et al. hypothesized that GSK3 inhibition could depend on its sequestration in multivesicular endosomal bodies (MVBs, organelles containing internal vesicles formed by invagination of the endosomal membrane). Fluorescence microscopy of mouse 3T3 cells expressing GSK3-RFP (GSK3 with red fluorescent protein) cocultured with human 293T cells expressing xWnt8-Venus revealed a decrease in cytosolic GSK3-RFP and its colocalization in vesicles with xWnt8-Venus. Furthermore, expression of a constitutively active form of LRP6 or other mediators of Wnt signaling promoted translocation of endogenous GSK3 to vesicles with acidic pH (as is characteristic of MVBs and lysosomes), where it colocalized with late endosomal markers. Assays of L cells with permeabilized plasma membranes revealed that Wnt signaling elicited a reduction in cytosolic GSK3 activity, which was recovered after solubilization of internal membranes, and protected GSK3 from proteinase K digestion. Indeed, cryo–immunoelectron microscopy confirmed that Wnt signaling promoted translocation of GSK3 into MVBs. Experiments using small interfering RNA directed against mammalian hepatocyte receptor tyrosine kinase substrate (HRS, also known as Vps27) or a dominant-negative form of Vps4 revealed that these two components of the ESCORT (endosomal sorting complexes required for transport) machinery, which are necessary for formation of endosomal intralumenal vesicles, were also required for Wnt signaling. Bioinformatic analysis revealed that 20% of the human proteome contained three or more potential GSK3 phosphorylation sites, and, intriguingly, analyses of cells containing radioactively labeled proteins indicated that Wnt signaling (or GSK inhibition) prolonged the half-life of many cellular proteins. The authors thus propose that canonical Wnt signaling involves sequestration of GSK3 within MVBs and leads to stabilization of numerous substrates in addition to β-catenin. V. F. Taelman, R. Dobrowolski, J.-L. Plouhinec, L. C. Fuentealba, P. P. Vorwald, I. Gumper, D. D. Sabatini, E. M. De Robertis, Wnt signaling requires sequestration of glycogen synthase kinase 3 inside multivesicular endosomes. Cell 143, 1136–1148 (2010). [PubMed] C. Niehrs, S. P. Acebron, Wnt signaling: Multivesicular bodies hold GSK3 captive. Cell 143, 1044–1046 (2010). [PubMed]


Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate an effective way in prescribing exercise program in patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA). Materials and Methods: Sixty patients were included in the study. Group 1 received exercise program with both visual demonstration and written information materials. In addition, they have learned exercises under the supervision of a physiotherapist at the physiotherapy unit. Group 2 has got written materials describing exercises and they learned exercises under the supervision of a physiotherapist. Group 3 received only written materials about exercise program. Pain severity was assessed using a visual analogue scale (VAS) and the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC). Functional ability was evaluated with WOMAC functional score and WOMAC total score as well as 100-meter walk test, time required to ascend and descend, and chair rises. All assessments were performed before the treatment and one month and three months after the treatment. Results: At the end of three months of follow-up, there were statistically significant improvements in VAS, WOMAC scores, 100-meter walking test, time to ascend and descend stairs and sit-to-stand chair rises in both group 1 and 2 (p<0.05). In group 3, statistically significant improvements were detected in all parameters except for pain severity (p<0.05). After one month of follow-up, there were statistically significant differences between the groups in all parameters except for WOMAC pain scores (p<0.05), however, after three months of follow-up, statistically significant differences were observed in all parameters between the groups (p<0.05). Conclusion: Our results showed that an effective way for prescribing an exercise program seems to be giving both visual demonstration and written materials together. Besides, accompanying training lectures were found to be increasing the effectiveness of therapy in patients with OA. Turk J Phys Med Rehab 2013;59:1-6.


Stacking physical documents is one of the main forms of spatio-temporal organization of information. We present DisplayStacks, a system that enables physical stacking of digital documents via piles of flexible E Ink displays. With a conductive dot pattern sensor attached to the flexible display, we dynamically track the position and orientation of these displays in relation to one another. We introduce mechanisms for interacting with these physical stacks for access and manipulation of information using asymmetric bi-manual interactions, such as providing contextual overviews. Initial user experiences indicate a preference for linear overlaps as a stacking configuration.


Background Migraine headache significantly impacts the health of individuals and of society. The application of simple physical nonpharmacological techniques could greatly reduce the therapeutic costs and side effects in acute onset of such headaches. Methods Ten male patients (mean age was 32.0 ± 10.59 years) with acute onset of a migraine headache according to IHS-2004 diagnostic criteria were enrolled in the study. Neck and upper thoracic spine massage and manipulation technique was performed. Headache pain intensity was assessed before and after the intervention by means of a verbal analog scale. Results Following treatment, headache pain intensity was significantly reduced compared to the pretreatment values (1.85 ± 1.11 vs. 5.80 ± 2.25, p = .005). As a percentage, this represents a mean pain reduction of 68.77% ± 18.56. No side effects were observed, and all of the patients reported satisfaction with the intervention. Conclusion Our results show that the applied cervical and upper thoracic massage and manipulation technique could reduce the headache attack pain intensity in patients with migraine headaches, though further testing, including study designs that make use of control groups, is needed.


Biogas is a renewable resource that can be used in several applications, high sustainability and the wide availability of substrate makes it a technology with a promising future. The goal of this thesis project was to develop a concept that would integrate a biogas digester into a household environment. This was done by conducting a pre-study through customer visits, expert interviews and a survey to collect knowledge about the subject matter and to collect customer needs. The pre-study was followed by a concept development phase where new concepts were generated and then evaluated and lastly eliminated. Concepts were removed in two steps where the first one removed a number of them which were then evaluated more thoroughly. Then in the second elimination step a single most promising concept was chosen to be further developed. The final concept then had its architecture and industrial design finalized as well as materials selected. The result of the thesis is a biogas reactor system that can easily be integrated into a household environment to provide a sustainable way of recycling organic household waste.


This paper seeks to address the notion of authorship in publically procured projects of the post-war period. Regionality is a term used to try and capture the interplay between nationally instituted government policy and its interpretation through local actors and networks in the procurement and production of buildings and space. I will describe the extended narrative of the development of the National Computing Centre, 'designed' by a prominent Mancunian architectural practice of the period, Cruickshank & Seward. The study is based on extensive archival research and the triangulation of records held by MMU Special Collections (Cruickshank & Seward Archive), Manchester Archives+ and the National Archives. Projects in the public sector lend themselves to this mode of analysis due to the quality of ledgers, minutes and files maintained and held by the civil services. The aim of the presentation is to reveal the numerous exoteric forces acting upon the production of architecture and how policy, its definition and implementation affected siting, massing and materiality. The agency of the various policies, networks, organisations and individuals involved in the development of the scheme will be discussed in relation to their impact on the formal and material outcomes of the built object. I aim to reveal the manner in which each of these parameters affected notions of authorship and its attribution.This project was sponsored by central government in the 'White Heat' era of Harold Wilson's government but may also be described as a 'white elephant' in literal and metaphorical sense. Finally, I will describe how a model of regionality can be more widely applied and why it is particularly useful in a reading of the quotidian or, in this case, mainstream modernism of the nationalised era.


AIMS
To compare the effects of 2 and 5 min of passive static stretching (SS) on stiffness and blood flow in the rectus femoris in adolescent athletes using shear wave elastography (SWE) and superb microvascular imaging (SMI).Material and methods: This prospective study included 20 male athletes with median age of 14.5 (12.5-16.5) years. The subjects were divided into two groups based on the SS duration as follows: 2 min (n=10) and 5 min (n=10). At rest and after 2 and 5 min of SS, stiffness and blood flow values were compared in the rectus femoris for each group. Inter-operator reliability was also analysed.

RESULTS
There was no significant difference between resting and 2 min of SS in terms of stiffness. The stiffness values decreased significantly from resting to 5 min of SS. The blood flow increased significantly from resting to 2 and 5 min of SS. Inter-operator reliability was moderate to perfect for SWE and SMI measurements (ICC: 0.52-0.83).

CONCLUSIONS
 SWE and SMI can be used to acquire reliable quantitative data about muscle stiffness and blood flow in adolescents. While stiffness parameters significantly decreased from resting after only 5 min, blood flow significantly increased both after 2 and 5 min. For physical rehabilitation protocols, 5 min of SS may be chosen to reduce stiffness. For competitions, 2 min of SS may be sufficient for warm-up exercise because it increases the blood flow optimally. Five min of SS may be preferred for the cool-down exercise to enhance recovery.


Background: Obesity is one of the of the most pressing public health problems. Its prevalence has reached an epidemic proportion (>15%) in many countries. Obesity mainly results from a discrepancy between energy consumption and expenditure due to a complex interplay of behavioral and genetic factors.
Studies have shown a growing prevalence even amongst healthcare workers. In South Africa, there seem to be a dearth of information in this area, thus the motivation for this study.

Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted to determine the prevalence of overweight and obesity amongst 430 healthcare workers in Mafikeng Provincial Hospital. For each participant, weight was measured using a weight scale and height with a ruler. The Body Mass Index was the calculated using weight in kilogram divided by height in meter square. This was recorded in a questionnaire which was also used to obtain information on the knowledge, attitude and perception of the participants about overweight and obesity.

Results: The prevalence of overweight and obesity was found to be 29.7% and 41.0% respectively. Also this study showed a significant association between overweight and obesity prevalence and the following risk factors: lack of or inadequate exercise (P<0.05), eating between meals (P<0.05), black race (P<0.05), level of education with higher rates in those with tertiary education (P<0.009) and advancing age starting from participants aged 30 years and above (P<0.00).

Conclusion: This research shows a high prevalence of overweight and obesity amongst the participants which was higher than that of the general adult population of South Africa. Thus we recommend the development of programmes that promote healthy lifestyle amongst healthcare workers. There is need for further studies that will be more representative of the healthcare workers in South Africa to determine the extent of this problem.


Background Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) performed as an outpatient has become increasingly common for treating cervical spine pathology. Few reports have attempted to assess readmissions following outpatient ACDF. This study was performed to address this issue using population-based databases. Methods The State Ambulatory Services Database (SASD) for New Jersey (NJ) from 2003-2012 was used for analysis. Patients receiving ACDF (defined as anterior cervical fusion (ICD-0 code=81.02) + excision of intervertebral disc (80.51)) were extracted; those with three or more levels fused (ICD-9 codes 81.63-81.64), cancer (ICD-9 codes 140-239), or trauma (ICD-9 codes=805.0-806.9) were excluded. A series of perioperative complications including durotomy, red blood cell transfusion, acute posthemorrhagic anemia, paraplegia (weakness), and mortality were examined. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to adjust the analysis for patient age, race, sex, primary payer for care, and number of diagnoses. The NJ SASD defined readmission as admission to the same facility within seven days of initial discharge. Results Two thousand sixteen (2,016) patients were found, 1,528 of whom had readmission data. Of these 1,528 patients, 83 (5.4%) required readmission. PSM was performed prior to comparing readmission versus non-readmission. While there was no difference in perioperative complications between the two groups, the small sample size of the readmission cohort prevented this analysis from having sufficient power. No patient requiring readmission had an initial length of stay greater than one day. Conclusion Based on a 10-year outpatient analysis, fewer than 6% of outpatient 1-2 level ACDFs require readmission. Future studies involving outpatients from several states will be necessary to determine whether these results of outpatient ACDF are applicable nationwide. complications keywords: anterior cervical discectomy and fusion, outpatient, readmission, new jersey state ambulatory and services database volume 11 issue 1 doi: 10.14444/4003 pages 11 16


The surge of refugees worldwide is of fundamental concern to the United Nations (UN). There are millions of persons who have been displaced because of growing conflicts. The problem is serious in nations such as "Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Somalia, where the right to adequate food and protection might be insufficient or non-existent, and where the fundamental human rights are also not valued."1 There have been reports that, in numerous countries through the African continent women, as well as children are exposed to sexual violence because of these inadequacies among other reasons. Information is fundamental to humans in every environment and is perceived "as evidence, as things from which one becomes informed." This research study investigates refugees' information seeking in Nyarugusu Camp, Tanzania with the approval of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Tanzania Government. This research is centered on one-on-one interviews with refugees and with the UNHCR's staff (in Tanzania as well as in the United States of America (U.S.A), New York). Also, this research study carried out focus group discussions with refugees and an unobtrusive observation of the Nyarugusu Camp. There was a total of 70 refugees (22 women and 48 men), who participated in this research study. Five UNHCR staff, both in the field in Tanzania as well as in the USA, was interviewed. This research examined the subsequent research question: What role does information play for people in the refugee camp?1 This research question seeks to explore how refugees seek information in the camp. The research utilized content analysis, a qualitative method. Axial coding was utilized to construct taxonomic categories of the interview data, the focus group transcripts as well as the unobtrusive observation notes of refugees' information use in camp. Atlas.ti qualitative statistical software was utilized to code the text. Domain analytic techniques were utilized by empirically employing theories and model of information seeking and behavior of refugees. Previously established Information Seeking Behavior (ISB) models in the literature were used to pinpoint the information-seeking behavior patterns of refugees. There were three models utilized: (1) "The Information Seeking Model of Refugees in Nyarugusu Camp"1 (2) "A Depiction of External Factors Relating to Refugees' Use of Information"1 and (3) "A Model of Information Acquisition and Exchange"1 which depicts information acquisition and use of refugees in Nyarugusu Camp . The research found that a preponderance of refugees engage in information seeking while in Nyarugusu camps, but a majority of them did not find the information to be useful because it does not meet their needs.


This is Chapter Three of Law in American History: Volume One, From the Colonial Years Through the Civil War.The book's purpose is to explore the relationship of law to some central themes of American history from the initial colonial settlements through the conclusion of the Civil War. The themes singled out in the book include the displacement of Amerindian tribes from land they occupied on the North American continent; the emergence of agricultural householding as the principal form of family life in colonial British America; the detachment of the American colonies from the British Empire and the theories of sovereignty and grievance that accompanied that development; the evolution of American forms of government from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution; the emergence of the Supreme Court of the United States as a major institution of American grievance; the westward movement of enterprise and population in the decades between the 1830's and the 1850's; the central role of slavery and westward expansion and the gradual dissolution of the Union during these decades; and the role of the Civil War as a culmination of the central themes of early American history and as a force in transforming the subsequent course of that history.


From literature on this subject it is known that the process of cutting clay is different from that of water saturated sand. Sand is often modeled as a continuum with an internal friction angle and a sand/steel friction angle but without cohesion and adhesion. Clay is considered to be a continuum with cohesion and adhesion, but with an internal friction angle and a clay/steel friction angle equal to zero. In this paper clay will be considered this way. It has been noticed by many researchers that the cohesion and adhesion of clay increase with an increasing deformation rate. It has also been noticed that the failure mechanism of clay can be of the "flow type" or the "tear type", similar to the mechanisms that occur in steel cutting. Previous researchers, especially Mitchell (1976), have derived equations for the strain rate dependency of the cohesion based on the "rate process theory". However the resulting equations did not allow pure cohesion and adhesion. In many cases the equations derived resulted in a yield stress of zero or minus infinity for a material at rest. Also empirical equations have been derived giving the same problems. Based on the "rate process theory" with an adapted Boltzman probability distribution, the Mohr-Coulomb failure criteria will be derived in a form containing the influence of the deformation rate on the parameters involved.


The potential role of transnational organisations in fostering effective governance goes unexplored despite the increasing positive role that these organisations are playing today. In Senegal, a whole range of non-state actors have always played a substantial socio-economic role, even before the rise of the post-colonial state. The Murid brotherhood can be regarded as part of this category of customary non-state actors. In the 1980s, young Murids started to organize themselves in what can be viewed as self-help community-based organisations whose functions included the provision of social safety nets to their adherents. By the late 1980s, the scope of these youth organisations, or dahiras, expanded beyond the national boundaries. Mention of these dahiras in the vast development literature has so far been confined to the socio-economic importance of the money they remit.

This paper offers to transcend this focus on financial remittances, to explore the potential political role of international dahiras in their home country. By playing the role of alternative providers of social services, dahiras have propelled themselves to a position of legitimate non-state actors with political clout. Today, some of them are starting to hold government to account for their actions. Their political power is not only derived from their affiliation with customary centres of authority, but it is also the resultant of their increased financial autonomy.

Because transnational dahira interventions in Senegal are mostly associated with the role of remittances, their relations with the state are analysed through the lens of revenue generation and other processes of state formation such as internal bargaining between the state and societal forces. The paper is an examination of the potential role of transnational dahiras in demands for responsive governance. Its analytical orientation is placed within the theoretical premises of the "drivers of change" approach, fiscal sociology of state making and governance.


alternative approach in Cultural Studies, as compared to the hitherto dominant paradigm of 'difference'. The concepts of identity and otherness are becoming ever-more questionable, not least due to global political events of the last few decades. The assumption of distinct cultural identities in an era of postmodern migratory flows seems increasingly inadequate. Though the postcolonial critique of identity has emphasized alterity and hybridity, this has remained within the paradigm of difference as an overall perspective. For these reasons, it is important not only to discuss, but also to reflect upon whether a concept of similarity, which offers an alternative way of examining our complex cultural world, can be developed alongside a concept of difference. The essays presented in this volume come from literary and cultural studies, from philosophy, political science, sociology, ethnology and history. They are arranged according to their systematic perspectives: the first part of the book deals with conceptual attempts to establish the relevance of 'similarity' for Cultural Studies, while the second part is devoted to testing different areas and models of application. The essays explore the theoretical range of the concept of similarity in historical and systematic terms. Similarity is seen not only a heuristic concept, but also as an argument and an alternative option in cultural practice. That is why it was discredited by suggesting that it supported an assimilationist position leading to a forceful adjustment of cultures, gender or religion. In addition, similarity and thinking in similarity were supposedly part of a premodern way of thinking belonging to other times and places, part of the primitive stages of culture or a premodern epoch, and therefore of a different order of things (Foucault) that was distinct from a rationalist modern epoch in which only exact concepts are valid. Thinking in similarity does in fact oppose the desire to draw precise borders and exact definitions. But this supposed drawback can be an advantage when dealing with complex phenomena of culture where fluid transitions, multiple overlappings and broad spatial borders are given. The specific epistemological achievement of the category of similarity consists in offering new ways of seeing the diffuse dynamics and fuzzy relations characteristic of our contemporary complex and entangled world. Thinking about similarity should not be (mis-) understood as a false form of harmonization or as a levelling of differences. Rather, considerations of similarity contain a subversive potential to expose the claimed antagonisms and radical incompatibilities of opposition and differences as nothing more than ideology.


Up to the present time, there has existed no general method for obtaining the pole locations of minimum-phase constant time delay filters of desired selectivity. Since constant time delay filters are necessary for low distortion FM transmission, and minimum-phase filters are easy to construct and align, a general method for locating the poles of minimum-phase constant time delay filters would be of considerable importance. Presented in this paper is a procedure for locating the poles of minimum-phase constant time delay filters of desired selectivity, using a FORTRAN digital computer program. Two experimental FM receivers were built to test the new filter characteristic, and the performance of these receivers is discussed.


Revisiting the issue of return predictability, the authors show that there is substantial predictive power in combining forecasting variables. Applying correlation screening to combine 20 variables that have been proposed in the return predictability literature, the authors demonstrate forecasting power at a six-month horizon. They illustrate the economic significance of return predictability through a walk-forward simulation, which takes positions in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) proportional to the model forecasted equity risk premium. The simulated strategy yields annual returns more than twice that of the buy-and-hold strategy, with a Sharpe ratio four times as large. To eliminate look-ahead bias, the authors perform additional simulations, while including variables only as they are discovered in the literature. Results show similar annual returns and Sharpe ratios. Although a market-timing strategy outperforms the market, the authors maintain that it is difficult to implement.


In this paper, we use a non-parametric regression method to compare the transition process from high to low inflation with the implementation dates of central bank independence reforms. In most countries, price stability is achieved before more independence is given to the central bank. Moreover, for those countries which have implemented a central bank independence reform under a high inflation regime, no evidence is found that the reforms have actually led to price stability. This suggests that the credibility of a low inflation goal can be achieved without institutional reforms which grant the central bank more independence from the political policymakers. Copyright 2008 , Oxford University Press.


Federalism is important in the United States. It is also important that the United States be able to participate effectively in a global economy and that those charged with the conduct of the country's foreign affairs be able to make, and that the country abide by, international agreements that are designed to facilitate transnational commercial activity. The Hague Choice of Court Convention is one such agreement, the modest fruits of more than a decade of work in an international lawmaking effort that was initiated by the United States. However modest the fruits of the enterprise, the rest of the world is watching to see whether the United States ratifies, and how it implements, the Hague Convention. Effective dispute resolution processes are critical to a well-functioning global economy, and effectiveness for this purpose requires, just as it does for a national or regional economy, generous recognition and enforcement of judgments. Key to such generosity, in turn, are acceptable jurisdiction standards and, experience has demonstrated, reciprocity. Finally, mutual assurance that reciprocity will in fact be forthcoming requires very considerable uniformity and certainty in the governing legal rules. The Hague Convention leaves little room for variation or departure in standards for asserting jurisdiction or recognizing and enforcing judgments. Although there are good reasons to implement the treaty through legislation, the proposal that the uniform state law process be used for that purpose is not well considered. The history of domestic regulation does not provide strong normative support for state law to furnish the rules for jurisdiction and judgment recognition in international cases. Harmonization with abutting or intersecting state law norms, which is a legitimate concern in thinking about international private lawmaking on many subjects, is not generally a concern in connection with the law governing jurisdiction and judgment recognition. The Hague Convention appears to be an exception to that generalization with respect to jurisdiction, because choice of court clauses implicate contract law. Experience in the arbitration field suggests, however, that an attempt to harmonize would be a mistake, and the relevant state contract law is in any event underdeveloped and not uniform. Finally, federal implementation through legislation prescribing federal law that is mostly uniform, but a few provisions of which may borrow designated state law, would impose lower transaction and administrability costs, with no loss of accessibility, than would state implementation.


Within this analysis of Kate Braid's poetic discourse as a response to Emily Carr's paintings in the text To This Cedar Fountain, this essay demonstrates how painter and poet subvert the matter/spirit binary to articulate a fundamental connection among spirituality, creativity, and the material conditions of women's lives. ... the sould of painting [is] poetry... Samuel Richardson, Clarissa ********** Like that of Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, Emily Carr's personal mythology was deeply rooted in the spiritual (Udall 235). Carr's biographers, art historians, and scholars, such as Paula Blanchard, Doris Shadbolt, Sharon Rohlfsen Udall, and Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, agree that Carr's friendship with Lawren Harris, who was a practising theosophist as well as an artist, signalled a major transformation in her artistic practice. Harris believed that artistic work was a sacramental act, one that made the spirit in the universe visible (Blanchard 178). Carr's friendship with Harris was characterized by discussions about the sacred in art; indeed it was Harris who encouraged Carr to immerse herself in the natural world of British Columbia, believing as he did that "the whole visible universe was the living body of an inexpressibly beautiful and benevolent spiritual force" (172). In 1930, Carr was deeply moved when she saw the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), the abstract art pioneer who had publishe d a text in 1928 that was widely read in avant-garde circles (218-19). Concerning the Spiritual in Art argues that abstract art should be understood as "an attempt to discover a reality behind surface appearance" (or matter) and that the arts are leading the way to a spiritual revolution in the twentieth century (Macleod 205). Linking notions of the self to "wonders in a hidden realm" was the aim of many modernists who turned away from the constraints of Christian thought to embrace primitivism, the unconscious and the occult (Walker 113). The avant-garde placed spirit at the heart of creativity, a positioning that is central to understanding Carr's writing and painting. The purpose of her practice was to "rise above the external and temporary to the real of the eternal reality, to express the 'I am,' or God, in all life, in all growth, for there is nothing but God" (Carr 32). In To This Cedar Fountain, published in 1995, Kate Braid, a Vancouver poet, feminist, academic, and carpenter, engages unflinchingly with the spiritual dimension in Carr's paintings. Her collection of thirty-six poems responds to Carr's modernist achievement with earthy, concrete images that offer readers a visceral, experiential connection to Carr's spiritually rich oeuvre. Braid joins a long (predominantly male) tradition of poets whose encounters with paintings inspire and inform their work. The tradition, begun in modern times with Baudelaire, includes the contemporary Irish poet Paul Durcan, whose presence in the gallery, like Braid's, animates the paintings they love and admire. Braid moves her readers around art galleries and the vast forests of British Columbia where an intangible power awaits, such as a "patch on heaven" ("Totem By The Ghost Rock," Cedar 11) or "a hallelujah chorus of greens" ("Rushing Undergrowth" 51). In her poems, Braid subverts the dualistic categories of matter and spirit to emb race Simone de Beauvoir's definition of women's metaphysical wisdom as a double allegiance to both the carnal and poetic, and a combination of the immanent and transcendent (Thomas). Braid's poetic approach complements existing Carr scholarship that analyzes the artist's desire to paint a God that she experienced as "a great breathing among the trees" (Blanchard 105), an image that invokes the origin of spirit in the Latin word spiritus 'breath' (Ayto 494). Braid responds to Carr's instinctive animism with a poet's (in) sight into what Doris Shadbolt calls Carr's "primal spirit affinity with all the forms of creation" (142). …


The Fiene local fauna, located in north-central Kansas, is one of the few Pleistocene microfaunas in the state located outside the Meade Basin. The fauna includes a variety of vertebrate taxa, including a small but diverse assemblage of arvicoline rodents. Seven morphotypes of the first lower molar are recognizable among the specimens assignable to Arvicolini. These include a form with five closed triangles assigned to Microtus sp., three morphotypes with four closed triangles assigned to M. paroperarius, and three morphotypes with three closed triangles assigned to M. llanensis, M. meadensis, and Allophaiomys sp. The co-occurrence of these forms supports an Irvingtonian age for the site, and constitutes a relatively rare taxonomic assemblage for the Great Plains. The Fiene thus may prove important for testing future questions of provinciality in arvicoline biochronology and faunal dynamics. Recent phylogenetic hypotheses, based largely on molecular sequence data, have complicated the interpretation of isolated fossil teeth by proposing the extant species of North American Microtus are monophyletic and that taxa characterized by three closed triangles on the m1 evolved independently from five-triangled forms. The ability of fossil assemblages, such as Fiene, to meaningfully inform broad questions of arvicoline evolution requires that paleontologists improve their ability to place isolated teeth into this expanded phylogenetic context. Rather than depressing paleontological study, this requirement hopefully will be embraced as an opportunity to expand research on the arvicoline dentition. Richard J. Zakrzewski, Department of Geosciences and Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kansas 67601, USA. email@example.com Gabe S. Bever, Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th, New York, New York 10024, USA.


This study investigates consumers' behavioral response to ambient scent in a retail setting. An eye-tracking analysis was performed to observe the visual attention of 135 participants at Pack Expo International 2012, an international packaging trade show in Chicago, Illinois. A mock office supply store was erected and an essential oil nebulizer was used to covertly emit realistic scents of lemon or coffee within the store while the study took place. A Tobii® head mounted eye tracker was used to obtain the eye movements of the participants as they shopped for items on a pre-established shopping list. Analysis of the data attempted to determine if a correlation exists between ambient scent and the visual attention of participants to retail items that correspond to the ambient aroma. This study found no statistical significance between the ambient aromas of coffee and lemons and visual attention to coffee products or lemon scented cleaning supplies, however further explanation for this inconclusiveness is offered in the discussion.


Self-organizing logic is a recently-suggested framework that allows the solution of Boolean truth tables "in reverse," i.e., it is able to satisfy the logical proposition of gates regardless to which terminal(s) the truth value is assigned ("terminal-agnostic logic"). It can be realized if time non-locality (memory) is present. A practical realization of self-organizing logic gates (SOLGs) can be done by combining circuit elements with and without memory. By employing one such realization, we show, numerically, that SOLGs exploit elementary instantons to reach equilibrium points. Instantons are classical trajectories of the non-linear equations of motion describing SOLGs, and connect topologically distinct critical points in the phase space. By linear analysis at those points, we show that these instantons connect the initial critical point of the dynamics, with at least one unstable direction, directly to the final fixed point. We also show that the memory content of these gates only affects the relaxation time to reach the logically consistent solution. Finally, we demonstrate, by solving the corresponding stochastic differential equations, that since instantons connect critical points, noise and perturbations may change the instanton trajectory in the phase space, but not the initial and final critical points. Therefore, even for extremely large noise levels, the gates self-organize to the correct solution. Our work provides a physical understanding of, and can serve as an inspiration for, new models of bi-directional logic gates that are emerging as important tools in physics-inspired, unconventional computing.


Despite the fact that displacement-based methods are now frequently applied when assessing the seismic performance of unreinforced masonry (URM) structures, the displacement capacity of in-plane loaded URM piers is still estimated from empirical rather than mechanical relationships. One idea for estimating a pier's force-displacement curve including its displacement capacity that has been put forward in the past is based on the double integration of the curvature profile. The curvature is derived assuming a bilinear stress-strain relationship in the compression domain and neglecting the tensile strength of the masonry. We tested several identical URM piers under different constant axial load and shear span ratios while applying quasi-static horizontal cyclic in-plane loading. During testing, we tracked with a set of cameras the displacement of four LEDs on each full brick of the masonry piers. Therefore, we were able to determine the local deformations, e.g. average strains in the bricks and deformations of the joints. In this paper we will present experimentally determined local and global deformation quantities of one pier dominated by flexural deformations and compare these to the estimates from the analytical model. Differences between model and experiment will be discussed and first estimates of performance limits describing local deformations will be proposed.


Macro- and micromorphological features of achenes belonging to 59 taxa from Turkey were observed via light and scanning electron microscopy. The findings agree with the traditional subdivision of Scorzonera into S. subg. Scorzonera, S. subg. Podospermum and S. subg. Pseudopodospermum. Members of S. subg. Podospermum were distinguished by achenes with a distinct carpopodium and horizontally striped epidermal cell surface; members of S. subg. Pseudopodospermum were distinguished by achenes with a conspicuous carpopodium and often ruminate and sometimes rugose-granulate or smooth epidermal surface, and members of Scorzonera s.str were distinguished by achenes without a carpopodium and with various combinations of surface patterns . The results also showed that the length, pubescence and surface pattern of achenes, as well as the carpopodium and anticlinal and periclinal walls of the epidermal cells are valuable for delimiting the examined species within the genus.


Seq2Logo is a web-based sequence logo generator. Sequence logos are a graphical representation of the information content stored in a multiple sequence alignment (MSA) and provide a compact and highly intuitive representation of the position-specific amino acid composition of binding motifs, active sites, etc. in biological sequences. Accurate generation of sequence logos is often compromised by sequence redundancy and low number of observations. Moreover, most methods available for sequence logo generation focus on displaying the position-specific enrichment of amino acids, discarding the equally valuable information related to amino acid depletion. Seq2logo aims at resolving these issues allowing the user to include sequence weighting to correct for data redundancy, pseudo counts to correct for low number of observations and different logotype representations each capturing different aspects related to amino acid enrichment and depletion. Besides allowing input in the format of peptides and MSA, Seq2Logo accepts input as Blast sequence profiles, providing easy access for non-expert end-users to characterize and identify functionally conserved/variable amino acids in any given protein of interest. The output from the server is a sequence logo and a PSSM. Seq2Logo is available at http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/biotools/Seq2Logo (14 May 2012, date last accessed).


A field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based intelligent dynamic sliding-mode control (IDSMC) using recurrent wavelet neural network (RWNN) estimator is proposed to control the mover position of a linear ultrasonic motor (LUSM) in this study. First, the structure and operating principles of the LUSM are introduced briefly. Then, the dynamics of LUSM mechanism with the introduction of a lumped uncertainty, which include the friction force, is derived. Since the dynamic characteristics and motor parameters of the LUSM are non-linear and time-varying, an IDSMC using RWNN estimator is designed to achieve robust control performance of the LUSM drive system. The RWNN estimator is employed to estimate the non-linear functions including the system parameters and external disturbance. Moreover, the adaptive learning algorithm trained the parameters of the RWNN online is derived using the Lyapunov stability theorem. Furthermore, an FPGA chip is adopted to implement the developed control and on-line learning algorithms for possible low-cost and high-performance industrial applications. The experimental results show that excellent positioning and tracking performance are achieved. In addition, the robustness to parameter variations and friction force can be obtained as well using the proposed control system.


Consider a finite set of sources, each producing independent identically distributed observations that follow a unique probability distribution on a finite alphabet. We study the problem of matching a finite set of observed sequences to the set of sources under the constraint that the observed sequences are produced by distinct sources. In general, the number of sequences N may be different from the number of sources M, and only some K ≤ min {M, N} of the observed sequences may be produced by a source from the set of sources of interest. We consider two versions of the problem-one in which the probability laws of the sources are known and another in which the probability laws of the sources are unspecified but one training sequence from each of the sources is available. We show that both these problems can be solved using a sequence of tests that are allowed to produce no-match decisions. The tests ensure exponential decay of the probabilities of incorrect matching as the sequence lengths increase, and minimize the no-match decisions. Both the tests can be implemented using variants of the minimum weight-matching algorithm applied to a weighted bipartite graph. We also compare the performances obtained using these tests with those obtained using tests that do not consider the constraint that the sequences are produced by distinct sources. For the version of the problem in which the probability laws of the sources are known, we compute the rejection exponents and error exponents of the tests and show that the tests that make use of the constraint have better exponents than the tests that do not make use of this information.


"We must be prepared to find, therefore, that the patient yields to the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember...." Freud

Twenty Four Seven and Dead Man's Shoes share a temporal structure; both films span three distinct time frames: a distant past, that is symbolised by childhood memory and signified by degraded film stock, a more recent past that is often violent and shocking and a meaningful present that attempts to come to terms with the pain and the anguish of encysted trauma.

This paper argues that this temporality is both a structural and a thematic trope and that it feeds into, what are important elements in both works, trauma and loss. Using Freud's celebrated paper 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-through' (Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durchar- beiten ), I argue that both films can be seen as explorations of the compulsion to continually re-enact painful events born out of repressed or inaccessible memories. For Freud, trauma that can not be consciously remembered is doomed to be forever repeated until it is worked through in psychoanalysis or until it ceases at death. Such theory allows us not only to view Twenty Four Seven and Dead Man's Shoes as films primarily concerned with mourning and coming to terms with loss but offers us insights into the films' structure and the specific avenues of catharsis open to the director and the audience.

More than this however, as I shall assert, remembering, repeating and working-through stand as quilting points for many of the canonical tropes of Meadows' films: the search for a father (This is England, Somers Town), violent confrontation (A Room for Romeo Brass) and loss of innocence (This is England, A Room for Romeo Brass) can all be viewed as part of the same process; a process that seems to go right the very heart of the director's filmic and psychological interests.


Immersive visualization techniques are just starting to see limited adoption in medical applications. e Visualization Group at the University of Bergen wish to expand its research efforts into such immersive visualization techniques. A new immersive environment installed at the University is meant to be utilized for this purpose. is thesis presents a solution which enables the use of VolumeShop in the immersive environments for presentation of volumetric data and for combination of 2D and 3D medical imaging modalities. VolumeShop is a rapid prototyping environment for visualization techniques, which is oen used by our visualization group. For general use of the immersive environment, motion tracking support needs to be added to VolumeShop. is motion tracking support can then be utilized to realize the immersive visualization pipeline. is pipeline computes correct perspective projection based on the user's position. Additionally it implements intuitive gesture based interaction with the data using a handheld interaction device. A multimodal visualization pipeline is described and implemented, which enables the visualization of 2D+time ultrasound images combined with MRI volumes. To realize this pipeline, components for motion tracking of the ultrasound probe, for synchronization of the time offset between the motion tracking and the ultrasound series, picking landmarks in the ultrasound slice and MRI cross-section, and computation of the registration transformation which spatially unifies the two of the modalities. e result of this thesis is a general purpose motion tracking component as well as the two described pipelines.


Flexible displays is an emerging technology in which devices are mounted on flexible substrates, generally plastic substrates rather than glass ones. Flexible displays have a compliant structure, very-thin profile, low weight, and ultimately low cost. However, although this technology shows a great promise, it is still nascent and therefore faces many challenges. One of the main challenges that results in performance degradation is sensitivity to ambient conditions. Flexible displays are susceptible to many types of stresses during processing and usage including mechanical, thermal, and chemical stresses. Tension, compression, and bending are examples of mechanical stresses that might cause failures when applied repeatedly during processing. In this work, design of experiments (DOE) methods were used to study the factors affecting the high cyclic bending fatigue of uniform copper thin films forming the back planes of flexible displays on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates. A 2k-1 fractional factorial design was implemented to investigate the significant parameter effect. The parameters investigated were temperature, humidity, bending radius, film thickness, and frequency. Initial results showed a great effect of temperature and bending radius on the bending fatigue life of such structures.


The Asia crisis was originally expected to affect the U.S. economy adversely, mainly through reduced exports to, and increased imports from, the crisis countries. However, U.S. GDP growth in 1998, at 4.3 percent, was surprisingly strong. This article examines the effect of the crisis on the U.S. economy, using a quantitative approach that focuses on capital outflows from Asia. It finds that banks were the primary mechanism by which the funds left Asia, and that these funds did not flow directly to the United States. Rather, they went first to offshore banking centers and then to European banks. In addition, the article uses an equilibrium framework to calculate the Asian capital outflows' impact on U.S. GDP. It finds that the overall impact was positive but small.


Edmund Burke is both the greatest and the most underrated political thinker of the past three hundred years. A brilliant 18th-century Irish philosopher and statesman, Burke was a fierce champion of human rights and the Anglo-American constitutional tradition, and a lifelong campaigner against arbitrary power. Revered by great Americans including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Burke has been almost forgotten in recent years. But as politician and political philosopher Jesse Norman argues in this penetrating biography, we cannot understand modern politics without him. As Norman reveals, Burke was often ahead of his time, anticipating the abolition of slavery and arguing for free markets, equality for Catholics in Ireland, and responsible government in India, among many other things. He was not always popular in his own lifetime, but his ideas about power, community, and civic virtue have endured long past his death. Indeed, Burke engaged with many of the same issues politicians face today, including the rise of ideological extremism, the loss of social cohesion, the dangers of the corporate state, and the effects of revolution on societies. He offers us now a compelling critique of liberal individualism, and a vision of society based not on a self-interested agreement among individuals, but rather on an enduring covenant between generations. Burke won admirers in the American colonies for recognizing their fierce spirit of liberty and for speaking out against British oppression, but his greatest triumph was seeing through the utopian aura of the French Revolution. In repudiating that revolution, Burke laid the basis for much of the robust conservative ideology that remains with us to this day: one that is adaptable and forward-thinking, but also mindful of the debt we owe to past generations and our duty to preserve and uphold the institutions we have inherited. He is the first conservative. A rich, accessible, and provocative biography, Edmund Burke describes Burke's life and achievements alongside his momentous legacy, showing how Burke's analytical mind and deep capacity for empathy made him such a vital thinker--both for his own age, and for ours.


In 1988, Michelle Fine explored the ways in which damaging patriarchal discourses about sexuality affect adolescent girls, and hinder their development of sexual desire, subjectivities, and responsibility. In this article, I emphasize the durability and pliability of those discourses three decades later. While they have endured, they shift depending on context and the intersections of girls' race, class, and gender identities. Calling on ethnographic research, I analyze the intersectional nuances in these sexual lessons for Latina girls in one (New) Latinx Diaspora town.


A whale shark Rhincodon typus satellite tagged off the coast of Mozambique showed a highly directional movement across the Mozambique Channel and around the southern tip of Madagascar, a minimum distance of 1200 km in 87 days. Dives to depths well into the mesopelagic and bathypelagic zones (1286 m maximum depth) were recorded in a bathymetrically non-constraining habitat. The water temperature range recorded during the fish's movement was 3.4-29.9 degrees C.


P2ClAn/PVDF composite membranes were prepared utilizing cation-exchange groups in the PVDF (polyvinylidenefluoride) membrane matrix by casting method. The poly(2-chloroaniline) (P2ClAn) was chemically synthesized with different dopant anions such as o-aminobenzene sulfonic acid (ABS) and sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). P2ClAn/PVDF membranes were extensively characterized for their surface morphology, thickness, ion-exchange capacity, SEM, AFM, and FTIR-ATR measurements. The SEM, AFM and FTIR-ATR pictures, comparing the original PVDF membrane support sheet to P2ClAn/PVDF composite membranes, indicate that the morphologies of the membranes are different. The membrane potential measurements were performed in various electrolyte solutions in order to observe the selectivity and stability of these membranes at different pHs. The P2ClAn/PVDF cation-exchange membranes were then used for the removal of chromium(III) and copper(II) ions from aqueous solution with Donnan dialysis. The flux values (J) of chromium(III) and copper(II) were obtained. The flux value of copper(II) ion was higher than chromium(III) for all of composite membranes because of the hydration volume.


The goal of this dissertation is to understand how a eukaryotic cell makes decisions. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a biciliated unicellular green alga, is used as our model organism. This organism has the ability to track the light using its photoreceptor called rhodopsin, which overlays the eyespot. The organism makes decisions to swim toward, away from, perpendicular to or to ignore the light using its slender arm-like structures called cilia. It can integrate several external inputs such as ion concentration and light intensity, and then process this information to adjust the steering of its cilia corresponding to its environment. We investigated how red light (670 nm) influences cell behavior. Most studies were done with a single cell held on a micropipette making it possible to observe the cilia behavior over a long time. The cell is illuminated with near-infrared light (peak at 870 nm) to avoid photoreceptor excitation. Ciliary movement is monitored using a quadrant photodiode detector (Chapter 2). Interpreted ciliary behavior parameters are the beating frequency (BF) and the stroke velocity (SV). Pulse stimuli were used to stimulate the mutant strain 806 (agg1), a negatively phototactic cell, whose beating frequency is in the same range as wild type. The "step-up" red light from the dark increases the beating frequency as an exponential function, )] / exp( 1 [ ) ( b t a t y − − = , where y is a beating frequency, a is an amplitude and b is a time constant. On the other hand, the "step-down" red light drops the beating frequency transiently and recovers to its normal beating frequency of about 50 Hz in about 10 s. The 40 s duration pulse gave the maximum transient drop of the beating frequency. Using multi-sinusoidal red-light stimuli, I compared the behavior of the double mutant (cpc1-2) relative to the single mutant 806 (cpc1-2 was backcrossed to strain 806 so it is a single mutant with respect to 806). The mutant misses the part of the central-pair complex containing the enolase enzyme, one of the ciliary glycolytic enzymes that produces ATP in the cilia. Under a high constantintensity of red light, the BF fluctuation is less than 2%. In the dark, BF of cpc1-2 is about 30 Hz which is lower than 806 probably due to less ATP being available. However, BF can be increased to the 806 level of 50 Hz by exposure to red light. A simple hypothesis is that red-light photosynthesis of the chloroplast makes ATP more available in the cell. In any case, sinusoidal red-light response of cpc1-2 shows that part of the early signal processing is approximately linear. In this case, cells respond to a decrease in light intensity by differentiating the red light signal. Our hypothesis is that the cell creates this signal to avoid futile usage of ATP. The transfer function describing this step is, s e s a s G τ − ∗ ∗ = ) ( where τ = 0.40 sec. In addition to this linear part, both strains have non-linear or approximately full-wave rectified signal processing of another red light created signal with a simple delay in time described by the transfer function, s strain e a s G τ − ∗ = ) ( where τ806 = 1.18 sec and τcpc1-2= 0.37 sec. The longer delay time of 806 is likely due to the slow conversion of 3-phosphoglycerate (3PG) to adenosine triphosphate (ATP), in the glycolytic pathway, which is absent in the mutant. We hypothesize that the slow synthesis is due to the positive Gibbs free energy of two steps in the ciliary glycolytic pathway between 3PG and production of ATP and pyruvate. Furthermore, the beating frequency of red-light sinusoidal responses is stabilized by negative feedback. However, in the frequency range from 10 to 100 Hz in both strains that stabilizing negative feedback becomes positive and the BF jumps to a new state. In addition, I also studied how external ion concentration such as Ca, H, and K and red light affect phototaxis of positively and negatively-phototactic cells (1117 and 806 respectively). I have tracked a cell population using the cell-tracking system for 10 s after stimulating them with green light (Chapter 4). Increasing [Ca]ext with a red light background enhances the motion of cells in the same and the opposite direction respectively according to cells' phototactic behavior under normal condition (pCa4 and pH 6.8). Increasing the pH tends to induce cells to move away from the light while increasing the [K]ext gave the opposite results. Changing external ion concentration such as H and K affects the cell's membrane potential. Changing Ca concentration affects both membrane potential and likely triggers internal signaling proteins such as IP3 and cAMP. Therefore, we hypothesize that cells may integrate these and potentially other signals to decide its phototaxis. Finally, I developed a technique that can be used to measure changes of the electric field across the plasma membrane of the cell in response to rhodopsin excitation. Rhodopsin excitation is thought to cause transmembrane ion influxes resulting in changes in the electric field across the plasma membrane. These electric field signals are then sensed in the cilia to enable phototactic steering of the cell (Chapter 5). BIOENERGETICS AND DYNAMICS OF CILIARY RESPONSES AND SYSTEMS BIOLOGY OF PHOTOTAXIS IN CHLAMYDOMONAS REINHARDTII