Technology-focused literature on socio-technical transitions shares some of the complex systems sensibilities of social-ecological systems research. We contend that the sharing of lessons between these areas of study must attend particularly to the common governance challenges that confront both approaches. Here, we focus on critical experience arising from reactions to a transition management approach to governing sustainable socio-technical transformations. Questions over who governs, whose system framings count, and whose sustainability gets prioritized are all pertinent to social-ecological systems research. We conclude that future research in both areas should deal more centrally and explicitly with these inherently political dimensions of sustainability.


Evidence of a major cosmic event at the end of the Eocene is given by the finding of at least one, possibly two or more, impact horizons containing microtektites, microkrystites, shocked quartz, and unusually high iridium concentrations. We report here the discovery, in the global stratotype of the Eocene-Oligocene boundary at Massignano in Italy, of Ni-rich spinel, a mineral that forms by the interaction of meteoritic bodies with the Earth's atmosphere. A maximum concentration of ≈800 crystals mg−1, corresponding to a flux of 2 × 107 crystals cm−2, is observed in a well-dated layer (35.7 ± 0.4 Ma) that also contains shocked quartz and iridium. The crystals are found clustered in flattened spheroids, the probable relic of their host bodies. The chemical and physical characteristics of the spinel crystals indicate that the spheroids formed by interaction of dust particles in the upper part of the atmosphere rather than by ablation of large objects, as proposed for the spinel-bearing spheroids found at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The most likely explanation is that the dust particles were generated by a large cometary impact. Whether this impact is the one that produced microtektites and/or microkrystites, or another one that may have occurred shortly after or before, is still questionable. Additional searching for Ni-rich spinel at other upper Eocene sections may help to answer this question.


A key aspect of generating new ideas is drawing from different elements of preexisting knowledge and combining them into a new idea. In such a process, the diversity of ideas plays a central role. This paper examines the empirical question of how the internet affected the diversity of new research by making the existing literature accessible online. The internet marks a technological shock which affects how academic scientists search for and browse through published documents. Using article-level data from economics journals for the period 1991 to 2009, we document how online accessibility lead academic economists to draw from a more diverse set of literature, and to write articles which incorporated more diverse contents.


The potential for finding Quaternary tetrapod fossils on islands is governed by a combination of biodiversity, geology, fossil preservation, and time span of records. Islands with extensive limestone exposures are particularly well represented at low and middle latitudes, where biodiversity is potentially high, and the caves and karst fissures in these landscapes have proven to be rich reliquaries of the Quaternary fossil record. This is particularly apparent when we contrast limestone islands with volcanic islands in the Lesser Antilles; the latter present a serious deficiency in the fossil vertebrate record and an impediment to understanding the biogeography of the region. Caves and karst fissures are also ephemeral on geological time scales, and few tropical island sites are known that are older than the Last Interglacial. In Britain, important cave sites of Middle Pleistocene age are known, but are rare.


There is a lack of a unified statistical modeling framework for cerebral shape asymmetry analysis in the literature. Most previous approaches start with flipping the 3D magnetic resonance images (MRI). The anatomical correspondence across the hemispheres is then established by registering the original image to the flipped image. A difference of an anatomical index between these two images is used as a measure of cerebral asymmetry. We present a radically different asymmetry analysis that utilizes a novel weighted spherical harmonic representation of cortical surfaces. The weighted spherical harmonic representation is a surface smoothing technique given explicitly as a weighted linear combination of spherical harmonics. This new representation is used to parameterize cortical surfaces, establish the hemispheric correspondence, and normalize cortical surfaces in a unified mathematical framework. The methodology has been applied in characterizing the cortical asymmetry of a group of autistic subjects.


How DO STUDENTS react when they read this passage (see page 10)? [The immigrants] who come [to America] are generally of the most ignorant stupid sort of their own nation, ... Their own clergy have very little influence over the people ... Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it ... they are not esteemed men till they have shown their manhood by beating their mothers ... now they come in droves ... Few of their children in the country learn English ... The author is none other than Benjamin Franklin--inventor, diplomat, and founder-writing in 1753 about German immigrants to America. (1) Without knowing that, however, some readers might guess that the author was writing in the second half of the 1800s, during the great wave of Chinese immigration, or in the early 1900s, when immigrants from Eastern Europe crowded onto Ellis Island. Others might guess that it's a letter to the editor from a current newspaper. "Swarthy" Germans and the Peculiar Institution Franklin was clearly unhappy about the great number of Germans who were immigrating to his home town of Philadelphia, even though many supported him by patronizing his printing business. (2) Before the Revolutionary War, he grumbled about Philadelphia's bilingual (English and German) street signs and complained that the Pennsylvania parliament needed to use translators. After the war, people considered whether English or German should be the national language, and Franklin did not like the German option. For example, he wrote Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small.... (3) More telling than his negative comments about Germans' shortcomings, was Franklin's early attitude to slavery. In the 1730s, Franklin's newspaper, the Philadelphia Gazette, carried advertisements for black slaves, and he himself apparently participated in the slave trade, acting at the very least as the contact man for buyers and sellers. (4) After reading the passages above, it might be easy for readers to jump to the conclusion that Ben Franklin was simply a racist. Before becoming attached to that opinion, however, it is worth taking a moment to read about a couple of other things that Franklin did in his long life. Squelching a Race Riot, 1763 Benjamin Franklin's first diplomatic assignment was as Pennsylvania Indian Commissioner. He printed accounts of treaty councils conducted with Native American tribes. He studied Native American culture and politics, and discussed political ideas with the Indians, (5) but was not averse to calling in the militia to fight tribes that attacked settlers. In 1763, in the aftermath of the French and Indian wars, a gang of armed frontiersmen (from the town of Paxton, on the Susquehanna River) gathered, wishing to massacre communities of innocent Indians who were not involved in the fighting. Benjamin Franklin, at great political risk, lobbied to protect the Native Americans, writing If an Indian injures me, does it follow that I may revenge that injury on all Indians? ... If it be right to kill men for such a reason, then, should any man with a freckled face and red hair kill a wife or child of mine, it would be right for me to revenge it by killing all the freckled red-haired men, women and children I could afterwards anywhere meet with. (6) Franklin formed a well-equipped militia that encountered the unruly mob, and he negotiated with its leaders, persuading them to return home to their farms. …


We study the superfluid properties of attractively interacting fermions hopping in a family of 2D and 3D lattices in the presence of synthetic gauge fields having π-flux per plaquette. The reason for such a choice is that the π-flux cubic lattice displays Dirac points and that decreasing the hopping coefficient in a spatial direction (say, tz), these Dirac points are unaltered: it is then possible to study the 3D–2D interpolation towards the π-flux square lattice. We also consider the lattice configuration providing the continuous interpolation between the 2D π-flux square lattice and the honeycomb geometry. We investigate by a mean-field analysis the effects of interaction and dimensionality on the superfluid gap, chemical potential and critical temperature, showing that these quantities continuously vary along the patterns of interpolation. In the two-dimensional cases at zero temperature and half-filling, there is a quantum phase transition occurring at a critical (negative) interaction Uc presenting a linear critical exponent for the gap as a function of |U − Uc|. We show that in three dimensions, this quantum phase transition is again retrieved, pointing out that the critical exponent for the gap changes from 1 to 1/2 for each finite value of tz.


The time is appropriate for writing about asbestos use, with the 21st century in full sway and on the eve of the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, scheduled to discuss the planet's sustainability. The success of sustainability hinges on political guidelines to ban and/or reduce harmful chemical substances still in use, including pesticides, benzene, and asbestos. Asbestos is a mineral fiber used in roof tiles, water tanks, brake linings, and other products. Asbestos causes asbestosis (a form of pulmonary fibrosis), pleural plaques, altered lung function, lung cancer, and mesothelioma, a rare, difficult-to-treat cancer of the membrane surrounding the lungs, with poor prognosis. All types of asbestos are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in group 1, known to be "carcinogenic to humans"; according to the World Health Organization (WHO) criterion 203, there are no safe levels for exposure to asbestos fibers. Further according to the WHO, the risk must be zero in order to exclude the possibility of cancer in the exposed population, including non-occupational exposure. WHO estimates some 100,000 deaths/year caused by asbestos worldwide. According to the International Social Security Association (ISSA), 3,500 people in Great Britain die yearly from asbestos exposure. Australia has more than 45 thousand cancer deaths due to asbestos. In Brazil, morbidity and mortality data show an increase in cases of mesothelioma, and a wave of new patients is expected to use public health services. The ban on asbestos in industrial processes is now a reality in more than 50 countries. Asbestos victims have increasingly sued for their rights. A ruling by the French Supreme Court sentenced employers that exposed workers to asbestos to pay damages and acknowledge asbestos as the cause of the disease. In 2012, the Italian Supreme Court sentenced the owners of an asbestos tile factory to compensate victims and their families. Brazil is the world's third leading asbestos producer and consumes nearly 1kg of asbestos/inhabitant/year. All this asbestos is found in installations and equipment in different environments, extending outside the workplace and increasing the risk to the environmentally exposed population. Some States of Brazil such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have passed legislation to ban asbestos, but companies that insist on using asbestos have filed for court injunctions, thus hindering enforcement of the ban. Numerous Bills of Law have circulated in the National Congress since the late 1980s, but unfortunately none of them has met with success. Through a letter recently published in various news media, a group of Brazilian academic institutions reaffirm that there is no possibility of "safe use" or even "controlled use" of asbestos, and that such concepts are misleading and unfeasible. Thus, the Brazilian government, in its decision-making and civilizing role, has the duty to uphold the Constitution and protect the population's health by enforcing an immediate ban on asbestos.


Each new graduate student should plan to attend one of the Institute's orientation sessions. Information on these sessions will be posted on the Graduate Studies website at www.grad.gatech.edu (http:// www.grad.gatech.edu). In some cases, individual programs will also hold program orientations. New students should plan to attend both the Institute and the program orientation as the same information is not covered in these separate sessions.


Despite the recent success of face image generation with GANs, conditional hair editing remains challenging due to the under-explored complexity of its geometry and appearance. In this paper, we present MichiGAN (Multi-Input-Conditioned Hair Image GAN), a novel conditional image generation method for interactive portrait hair manipulation. To provide user control over every major hair visual factor, we explicitly disentangle hair into four orthogonal attributes, including shape, structure, appearance, and background. For each of them, we design a corresponding condition module to represent, process, and convert user inputs, and modulate the image generation pipeline in ways that respect the natures of different visual attributes. All these condition modules are integrated with the backbone generator to form the final end-to-end network, which allows fully-conditioned hair generation from multiple user inputs. Upon it, we also build an interactive portrait hair editing system that enables straightforward manipulation of hair by projecting intuitive and high-level user inputs such as painted masks, guiding strokes, or reference photos to well-defined condition representations. Through extensive experiments and evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of our method regarding both result quality and user controllability.


Summary Several shallow submarines areas are characterized by considerable releases of hydrocarbon gases, which, during earthquakes or volcanic activity, may suddenly and violently occur. In some instances, changes in chemical and physical properties of gas emissions, which are generated by geothermal systems connected to the volcanoes' plumbing system, are important precursors of volcanic activity and useful indices for the study of the geothermal field. Furthermore, some superficial structures such faults, landslide slopes or archaeological relics should be studied with such a high detail that geophysical and bathymetric surveys are unable to provide. In response to the needs increasingly felt of a completely customizable low cost tool for geological/geophysical/geochemical investigation of shallow submarine system, in the framework of the ROVER project, starting from an international project called OpenROV, is being implemented a micro-ROV for multidisciplinary environmental investigation. In this paper, we will describe the project progress, with particular reference to the first tests conducted in pool and in sea water, the geophysical/geochemical instrumentation of which will be equipped and the automatic control algorithms that are being developed for the semi-automatic navigation.


The American Civil War: A Military History. By John Keegan. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Pp. xvi, 396. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-307-26343-8.) With the approach of the American Civil War's sesquicentennial, major publishers are bound to flood bookstores with new histories of that off-studied conflict. John Keegan, the British military historian who has frequently graced best-seller lists since the release of his blockbuster, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976), has stolen a march on the competition by publishing The American Civil War: A Military History two years before anniversary observances commence. Keegan deliberately primes his readers to expect something special. His new book's dust jacket copy hails him as "the greatest military historian of our time." Unfortunately, Keegan's overview of the American Civil War falls far below the level of excellence that he established three decades ago. The most charitable description one can apply to Keegan's take on the Civil War is old-fashioned. The book reads like a relic from the 1960s. Keegan's sparse endnotes and bibliography reveal a fondness for works that may have represented the cutting edge during the Civil War centennial but have been long supplanted by subsequent research. Keegan also overlooks the decades of historiography that demonstrate how the social revolution ignited by the Civil War shaped its conduct and outcome. He stubbornly clings to the paradigm cherished by legions of buffs. "To an extraordinary degree," Keegan proclaims, "the Civil War was a war of battles" (p, 357). Such an approach lends itself to the kind of dramatic narrative that pleases mass audiences, but it distorts the nature of this complicated popular rebellion and that of modern warfare in general. The belief that wars are won mainly on the battlefield contributed to Britain's loss of the thirteen colonies between 1775 and 1783, America's disaster in Vietnam, and the near defeat of American and British forces during the second war in Iraq. Shackled to tradition, Keegan depicts the Civil War as essentially a succession of Napoleonic-style clashes. He transforms a people's contest into simply a chess match between generals. Consequently, he has little to say that would contribute to a new interpretation of how this war was fought and won. He stresses the importance of geography, arguing that the topography of the Confederacy provided a formidable challenge and greatly delayed the Union's ultimate victory. While there is no disputing this insight, it is not original to Keegan. Like contemporary European observers, Keegan disparages the fighting abilities of Union and Confederate armies, forgetting that the supposedly professional British, French, and Russian forces that fought in the Crimean War a decade earlier failed to establish a standard worthy of emulation. At the same time, he seems to pander to acolytes of American exceptionalism by labeling the Civil War as "the most important ideological war in history" (p. 357). That declaration may have been more telling had Keegan paid adequate attention to the role that ideology played in the struggle. He fails into the trap of ignoring the spontaneous eruptions of guerrilla violence that dogged Union forces almost everywhere they went in the Confederacy and how that moved generals in blue to inexorably embrace hard-war policies targeting the enemy populace. Keegan paints with a broad brush in this book, which is to be expected in a survey of any major conflict. Sadly, an uncertain grip on salient facts leads to a blurred picture. Keegan exhibits an imperfect mastery of the American way of war and the military system that emerged during the Civil War. He attributes the outcome of the U.S.-Mexican War to marksmanship, an absurdity since the vast majority of American soldiers carried inaccurate smoothbore muskets. …


With the rapid adoption of machine learning systems in sensitive applications, there is an increasing need to make black-box models explainable. Often we want to identify an influential group of training samples in a particular test prediction for a given machine learning model. Existing influence functions tackle this problem by using first-order approximations of the effect of removing a sample from the training set on model parameters. To compute the influence of a group of training samples (rather than an individual point) in model predictions, the change in optimal model parameters after removing that group from the training set can be large. Thus, in such cases, the first-order approximation can be loose. In this paper, we address this issue and propose second-order influence functions for identifying influential groups in test-time predictions. For linear models, across different sizes and types of groups, we show that using the proposed second-order influence function improves the correlation between the computed influence values and the ground truth ones. We also show that second-order influence functions could be used with optimization techniques to improve the selection of the most influential group for a test-sample.


During a survey of cultivated fields of Karachi, Thatta, Hyderabad, Pandora, Tharparker, Tando Qaiser, Islamabad, Naran, Shugran, Kalam, Khanspur and Madyan more than 600 plant specimens belonging to 36 plant species showing symptoms of wilting and root rot disease were collected, Fungi associated with roots were isolated and identified. Macro-phomina phaseolina, Rhizoctonia solani, Fusarium oxysporum and F. solani alone or mixed together were found predominantly associated with infected plants. In the present study Drechslera australiensis on Lens culinaris, Solanum tuberosum, Trifolium alexandrianum and Zea mays; D. halodes on Leas culinaris; F. oxysporum on Brassica napus;p Macrophomina phaseolina on lens culinaris and pisum sativum and verticillium alboatrum on vigna radiate are new host records from Pakistan.

Thirty rhizobial strains either isolated from root nodules of leguminous plants or obtained from NifTAL, USDA, NIAB, NAEC, ICARDA or ICRISAT were used to study their interaction with m. phaseolina, R. solani, F. oxysporum and F. solani. Rhizobium meliloti (KUMH 139 & KUMH 555) , Rhizobium sp., (KUMH 770) and Bradyrhizobium sp., (KUMH 560) produced zones of inhibition against all the 4 test fungi whereas R. meliloti (KUMH 653) ingibitedinhibited M. phaseolina, R. solani and F.phaseolina and R. solani.

In field experiments, R. meliloti (KUMH 139 & KUMH 555), B japonicum (KUMH 569) and R. leguminosarum (KUMH 551) used as seed dressing and or as soil drench significantly controlled the infection of M. phaseolina, R. solani and Fusarium spp., on leguminous plants like soybean and mungbean as will as non leguminous plants like sunflower and okra. Reduction in root rot disease resulted in increased plant height and fresh weight of shoots, of the three strains of B. japonicum used, TAL- 102 was found more effective in reducing the root rot disease of soybean, lentil, fenugreek and mustard as compared to TAL-379 and a local isolate.

Use of rhizobia with other biocontrol agents like Trichoderma spp., Paecilomyces lilacinus, Gliocladium virens and Stachybotrys atra were found more effective in reducing the root rot disease of lentil, mustard, okra, fenugreek, soybean and mungbean in 60 day old plants than their separate use, Greatr grain yield in soybean was recrded where B. japonicum was used with T. hamatum. Use of rhizobia with P. lilacinus significantly increased nodulation in mungbean.

Of the fungicides used, vitavax was found, vitavax was found inhibitory to B. japonicum with bavistin was found more effective in controlling the infection of M. phaseolina and Fusarium spp., on both sunflower and soybean and against R.solani in sunflower than their separate use. Highest number of nodules per plant was produced on soybean where B. japonicum was used with bavistin @ 2500 ppm a.i. Soil amendment with cotton or neem cake significantly controlled the infection of M. phaseolina, R. solani and Fusarium spp., on mungbean and okra, however, oil cakes were slightly inhibitory to root nodulation. Greater plant height was observed where cotton cake @ 3% was used with P. lilacinus followed by P. lilacinus mixed with Bradyrhizobia. Although use of potash, supper phosphate and urea controlled the infection of root infection fungi, use of potash was found to reduce the efficacy of P. lilacinus, B. japonicum and R. meliloti in disease control. Use of rhizobia with urea was found more effective in controlling infection of M. phaseolina and F. solani on okra than their separate use.

In studies on mass multiplication of rhizobia, wheat bran showed more rhizobial population per gm of substrate as compared to saw dust or rice husk. Soil amendment with wheat bran or rice husk inoculum of rhizobia also showed better control of M. phaseolina and Fusarium infection on okra under field condition than use of rhizobia as seed dressing. Multiplication of rhizobia on sugarcane filter mud amended with 1% sugar yielded upto 1011 cfu/gm of substrate where rhizobia were found viable upto one year with 109 cfu/gm. A six month old inoculum of R. leguminosarum and B. japonicum produced nodules respectively on pea and soybean while 1 year old inoculum of R. meliloti produced nodules on Lucerne. Use of rhizobial inoculum multiplied on sugarcane factory mud was effective for 1 year in controlling R. solani and Fusarium infection and upto 6 month M. phaseolina infecting on okra used as test plant. Rhizobia applied to soil were found ineffective in reducing the infection of root infection fungi on succeeding non leguminous crop like okra but were found effective on their original host like Lucerne and soybean.


Using trade-level data, we study whether brokers play a role in spreading order flow information. We focus on large portfolio liquidations, which result in temporary drops in stock prices, and identify the brokers that intermediate these trades. We show that these brokers' best clients tend to predate on the liquidating funds: at the beginning of the fire sale, they sell their holdings in the liquidated stocks, to then cover their positions once asset prices start recovering. The predatory trades generate at least 50 basis points over ten days and cause the liquidation costs for the distressed fund to almost double. These results suggest a role of brokers in fostering predatory behavior and raise a red flag for regulators. Moreover, our findings highlight the trade-off between slow execution and potential information leakage in the decision of optimal trading speed.


London has been an irresistible subject for generations of artists and draughtsmen, who have captured scenes of everyday life as well as the grand occasions in a variety of moods and weather. Their work has provided us with a rich legacy that is a record of London and its people, complementing the testimony of writers in portraying the splendour and the variety, the humour and sometimes the folly within the metropolis. The range of illustrations includes the atmospheric paintings of Claude de Jongh from the early seventeenth century, the Georgian elegance shown on Canaletto's cultured canvases, and Gustave Dore's disturbingly grim images of slum dwellers in Victorian London. The map-makers, too, captured the layout and character of the city and its many districts. But there are other illustrations, by little-known or anonymous draughtsmen, of particular corners or details of life within London's many worlds. A Dutch visitor, Johannes de Witt, was at the Swan Theatre on Bankside in 1596 and sent a sketch of the interior to an acquaintance, whose copy is the only contemporary illustration of the interior of a playhouse of Shakespeare's time. That is just one of the invaluable survivals which provide us with windows into London's past. This spectacular collection of images from medieval times to the present includes paintings, sketches and prints, and is accompanied by authoritative explanatory accounts of the places, people and subjects illustrated.


Functional foods are foods that provide positive health effects apart from the provision of essential nutrients. Along with nutraceuticals, they represent the top trends in the food industry. Fruit wines are considered functional foods. When assessing the fruit wine quality, a wide range of descriptors are taken into consideration, namely physicochemical and sensorial properties of fruit wine. Furthermore, within the context of the new food products development (e.g. functional products), functional properties of fruit wines are also taken into consideration. Functional properties are determined by the content of the biologically active components, such as polyphenols, vitamins and micro- and macrominerals. It is also important to consider the food-safety issues regarding the fruit wines consummation, that is, the presence of pesticides, mycotoxins and biogenic amines in different fruit wines. This chapter aims to give an overview of various factors used to evaluate the quality and the functional properties of fruit wines.


Lock & Dam  1 on the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Paul had deteriorated badly but the U.S. Corps of Engineers determined that replacement with a new structure was not feasible financially. Rehabilitation of one lock cost less than a quarter of estimated replacement costs, but keeping it open during normal shipping seasons meant that construction was done during the winters. Controlled blasting to remove portions of the old concrete, management and scheduling techniques, and use of precast concrete speeded construction to meet the time limitations.


Background We aimed to investigate associations between combinations of body mass index (BMI)-categories, levels of physical activity and long-term risk of cardiovascular disease. Method and results At age 50 years, cardiovascular risk factors were assessed in 2196 participating men of the ULSAM-study. This investigation was repeated at age 60, 70, 77 and 82 years. Being physically active (PA) was defined as three hours of recreational or hard physical training per week. The men were categorized according to BMI/PA-status, as PA/normal weight (n = 593 at baseline), non-PA/normal weight (BMI < 25 kg/m2, n = 580), PA/overweight (n = 418), non-PA/overweight (BMI 25–30 kg/m2, n = 462), PA/obese (n = 62), non-PA/obese (BMI >30 kg/m2, n = 81). We used updated data on BMI and physical activity obtained at all examinations. During follow-up (median 30 years) 850 individuals suffered a cardiovascular disease (myocardial infarction, stroke or heart failure). Using updated data on BMI/PA categories, an increased risk for cardiovascular disease was seen with increasing BMI, but a high physical activity was associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease within each BMI category: non-PA/normal weight (hazard ratio (HR) 1.31, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.04–1.66), PA/overweight (HR 1.52, 95% CI 1.20–1.94), non-PA/overweight (HR 1.65, 95% CI 1.31–2.07) PA/obese (HR 2.05, 95% CI 1.44–2.92) and non-PA/obese (HR 2.39, 95% CI 1.74–3.29), using PA/normal weight men as referent. Conclusions Although physical activity was beneficial at all levels of BMI regarding the risk of future cardiovascular disease, there was still a substantial increased risk associated with being overweight or obese during 30 years of follow-up.


The process of programmed cell death (PCD) is a prevalent area of scientific research and is characterized by a highly complex proteolytic cascade. PCD is involved in development, homeostasis and the immune response. Further, unregulated PCD has been implicated in various, often, devastating pathologies including cancer, autoimmune diseases and neurodegenerative disorders. The importance of PCD in human health and disease has led to the widespread utilization of genetically encoded reporters for the non-invasive imaging of PCD in vitro and in vivo; however, it is currently not well understood whether the reporters themselves are susceptible to inactivation and/or degradation during PCD. Molecular reporters that do exhibit an unexpected sensitivity to their environment could lead to ambiguous findings and/or inaccurate conclusions. Interestingly, we have found that the commonly used bioluminescent reporter protein, Firefly Luciferase (f Luc), exhibits a rapid loss in activity in cells undergoing PCD. In contrast, a variant of Renilla Luciferase, RLuc8, demonstrated quite stable activity under the same conditions. Following extensive inhibition analyses, it was determined that reactive oxygen species (ROS), particularly hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), play a large role in the disparity between f Luc and RLuc8 activity, in cells undergoing PCD. ROS are natural byproducts of oxygen metabolism that are normally regulated by antioxidants; if the balance between ROS and antioxidants becomes skewed, cells can enter a state of 'oxidative stress.' It has been reported that many cases of PCD are associated with elevated levels of ROS. Consistent with these reports, when f Luc and RLuc8 were intracellularly coexpressed, it was found that the bioluminescence ratio, RLuc8:f Luc, served as a useful metric to report on caspase-dependent and –independent PCD in vitro and in vivo in an ROS-mediated manner. It is envisioned that this ratiometric reporter could have widespread impact on research endeavors involving the aforementioned maladies, including therapeutic development and evaluation. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Bioengineering First Advisor Andrew Tsourkas


In general, the majority of vulnerability detection techniques depend on fairly simple injections of strings and subsequent blind pattern matching of the body of the induced HTTP response. These vulnerabilities include, but are not limited to, XSS, SQL Injection, File Inclusion which require no awareness of context but straightforward brute-force. However, there are types of vulnerabilities like Blind SQL Injection and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF) that do require a certain awareness of the context under which the audit and discovery occurs. In the case of CSRF even this is not enough as CSRF, due to its abstract nature, covers a great range of scenarios, most of them completely benign. Thus, automated CSRF detection traditionally creates a great deal of noise. This paper is aimed towards demonstrating a fairly simple technique, dubbed "4-pass rDiff CSRF detection", in order to diminish such noise by easing the process of context establishment, i.e. allow Web Application Security Scanners to determine which HTML Form elements are worthy of being reported as vulnerable to CSRF. Table of


Members of the MEF2 family of transcription factors bind a conserved A/T-rich sequence in the control regions of many skeletal and cardiac muscle genes. To begin to assess the roles of the different Mef2 genes in the control of muscle gene expression in vivo, we analyzed by in situ hybridization the expression patterns of the Mef2a, Mef2c and Mef2d genes during mouse embryogenesis. We first detected MEF2C expression at day 7.5 postcoitum (p.c.) in cells of the cardiac mesoderm that give rise to the primitive heart tube, making MEF2C one of the earliest markers for the cardiac muscle lineage yet described. By day 8.5, MEF2A, MEF2C and MEF2D mRNAs are all detected in the myocardium. By day 9.0, MEF2C is expressed in rostral myotomes, where its expression lags by about a day behind that of myf5 and several hours behind that of myogenin. MEF2A and MEF2D are expressed at a lower level than MEF2C in the myotome at day 9.5 and are detected in more embryonic tissues than MEF2C. Expression of each of the MEF2 transcripts is observed in muscle-forming regions within the limbs at day 11.5 p.c. and within muscle fibers throughout the embryo at later developmental stages. The expression of MEF2C in the somites and fetal muscle is distinct from that of MEF2A, MEF2D and the myogenic bHLH regulatory genes, suggesting that it may represent a distinct myogenic cell type. Neural crest cells also express high levels of MEF2 mRNAs between days 8.5 and 10.5 of gestation. After day 12.5 p.c., MEF2 transcripts are detected at high levels in specific regions of the brain and ultimately in a wide range of tissues. The distinct patterns of expression of the different Mef2 genes during mouse embryogenesis suggest that these genes respond to unique developmental cues and support the notion that their products play roles in the regulation of muscle-specific transcription during establishment of the cardiac and skeletal muscle lineages.


A new kind of polarization bandpass filters (P-BPFs), which fulfill the functions of high reflectivity for one polarization and high transmittance in the passband for the other, are proposed. The P-BPFs consist of a stack of two one-dimensional (1D) photonic crystals (PCs) that are referred to as 1D PC heterostructures. The essential function of P-BPFs is realized by making the first transmitted peak near the photonic bandgap edges of one PC coincide with that of the other PC. Based on this method, three kinds of filters have been designed and discussed in detail: an isotropic 1D PC single-polarization bandpass filter (SP-BPF) at oblique incidence with a narrow passband for TM polarization and a broadened stop band for TE polarization, an anisotropic 1D PC SP-BPF at normal incidence with a narrow passband for TE polarization and a broadened stop band for TM polarization, and an anisotropic 1D PC double-polarization bandpass filter (DP-BPF) at oblique incidence with a spectral separated narrow passband for both polarizations, respectively. The filters can be fabricated by a lot of coating methods and integrated easily with other photonic components.


Short range optical data links are experiencing bandwidth limitations making it very challenging to cope with the growing data transmission capacity demands. Parallel optics appears as a valid short-term solution. It is, however, not a viable solution in the long-term because of its complex optical packaging. Therefore, increasing effort is now put into the possibility of exploiting higher order modulation formats with increased spectral efficiency and reduced optical transceiver complexity. As these type of links are based on intensity modulation and direct detection, modulation formats relying on optical coherent detection can not be straight forwardly employed. As an alternative and more viable solution, this paper proposes the use of carrierless amplitude phase (CAP) in a novel multiband approach (MultiCAP) that achieves record spectral efficiency, increases tolerance towards dispersion and bandwidth limitations, and reduces the complexity of the transceiver. We report on numerical simulations and experimental demonstrations with capacity beyond 100 Gb/s transmission using a single externally modulated laser. In addition, an extensive comparison with conventional CAP is also provided. The reported experiment uses MultiCAP to achieve 102.4 Gb/s transmission, corresponding to a data payload of 95.2 Gb/s error free transmission by using a 7% forward error correction code. The signal is successfully recovered after 15 km of standard single mode fiber in a system limited by a 3 dB bandwidth of 14 GHz.


. This paper is concerned with the evaluation of the tensile properties of a tempered glass plate at the quasi-static state corresponding to the strain rate of 0.001 s -1 . A tempered glass is used in many electronic devices and components of vehicles. It is important to ensure the safety of the products because the tempered glass is a brittle material and it is broken into many fragments. Many studies have been conducted numerical simulations of glass impact to verify the safety of the glass. Tensile properties of a tempered glass plate are required to obtain accurate results of the numerical simulations. Specimens were obtained from the tempered glass plates for the cover glass of an electrical device. The Instron 5583 was utilized to acquire the tensile properties at the quasi-static state of 0.001 s -1 . The digital image correlation (DIC) method was used to measure the strains with a small order of the tempered glass specimens. The tensile properties such as Young's modulus and the fracture strength, were obtained from the experiments with the conventional tensile testing machine.


The following activity recognition problem is considered: a description of the action capabilities of an agent being observed is given. This includes the preconditions and effects of atomic actions and of the activities (sequences of actions) the agent may execute. Given this description and a set of propositions, called history, about action occurrences, intended actions and properties of the world all at various points in time, the problem is to complete the picture as much as possible and determine what has already happened, what the intentions of the agent are, and what may happen as a result of the agent acting on those intentions. We present a framework to solve these activity recognition problems based on a formal language for reasoning about actions that includes a notion of intended actions, and a corresponding formalization in answer set programming.


XLoader and FakeSpy, the two major smishing botnets targeting Japan, change their attack strategies over various timescales. Based on recent observations of the botnets and Twitter data, we present empirical facts about their strategies and activity patterns and applied some of these strategic and activity patterns to malware detection and malicious domain detection. All the proposed methods yielded small false positive and negative rates, and are expected to run on user devices owing to their small computational cost. Recent malware detection methods based on traffic analysis extract TCP/IP traffic features if the upper layers of TCP are encrypted. In this study, Frida's hooking capability was employed to decode the upper layers (WebSocket and JSON-RPC) to create a list of all commands flowing over the botnet channel. The command-level traffic analysis presents decisive attack features because commands are transmitted according to strategies developed by the attackers. The proposed malicious domain detection method, on the other hand, exploited the tendency of the attackers to create domains in batches. Previous researchers focused on how benign and malicious domains were registered and used on the name servers. The proposed method, on the other hand, focuses on the arrival rate of SMS messages with URL links. The error rates become significantly small when users do not receive such messages very often.


The authors present an overview of ongoing studies of the rich dynamical behavior of the uniform, deterministic Burridge-Knopoff model of an earthquake fault, discussing the model's behavior in the context of current seismology. The topics considered include: (1) basic properties of the model, such as the distinction between small and large events and the magnitude vs frequency distribution; (2) dynamics of individual events, including dynamical selection of rupture propagation speeds; (3) generalizations of the model to more realistic, higher-dimensional models; and (4) studies of predictability, in which artificial catalogs generated by the model are used to test and determine the limitations of pattern recognition algorithms used in seismology.


Pakistan's first military dictatorship launched the Basic Democracies scheme in 1960, after a bloodless coup that dissolved political parties and legislative institutions. Naqvi's essay considers how the architects of the "BD system" reconceived the Pakistani nation in response to the ends of martial rule, namely, the permanent empowerment of the postcolonial executive. Naqvi theorizes the BD scheme as an extraconstitutional system of governmentality that produced the Pakistani citizen ambivalently—as an authentic yet nontranscendent subject of the nation. He further shows how the Basic Democracies scheme rationalized the state's negation of wider channels of democratic participation by nationalizing the parochial as an expression of the true "genius" of the Pakistani people. Such attempts to fragment and reassign the experience of national solidarity, he contends, drew inspiration from the racial assumptions of the colonial state in a postcolonial context marked by uncertainty about the form of Muslim national solidarity. Moving between programmatic literature on Basic Democracies and nineteenth-century colonial debates on the reform of local self-government, the essay traces the genealogical and comparative significance of the following question: Can a nation in which democratic participation is confined exclusively to the local level continue to feel and act as a nation?


This study examined the effect of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on children and adolescents' disruptive behavior. Administrative data were obtained for 1 year of child and adolescent admissions at Austin State Hospital. Two measures of disruptive behavior were operationally defined as the use of mechanical restraints and emergency medication. Between-subjects analysis compared patients who did versus those who did not receive SSRIs. Within-subject analysis was conducted only for patients receiving SSRIs to examine their disruptive behavior during medication initiation. No differences were found between patients who did versus those who did not receive SSRIs. No differences were found among patients who received SSRIs during initial versus later phases of drug use. No significant relationship between SSRI use and increased agitation, hostility, or self-harm as manifested by the number of mechanical restraints or emergency medications at any time during hospitalization was found.


We use several US and euro-area surveys of professional forecasters to estimate a dynamic factor model of inflation featuring time-varying uncertainty. We obtain survey-consistent distributions of future inflation at any horizon, both in the US and the euro area. Equipped with this model, we propose a novel measure of the anchoring of inflation expectations that accounts for inflation uncertainty. Our results suggest that following the Great Recession, inflation anchoring improved in the US, while mild de-anchoring occurred in the euro-area. As of our sample end, both areas appear to be equally anchored.


Land use (LU) land cover (LC) information at a temporal scale illustrates the physical coverage of the Earth's terrestrial surface according to its use and provides the intricate information for effective planning and management activities. LULC changes are stated as local and location specific, collectively they act as drivers of global environmental changes. Understanding and predicting the impact of LULC change processes requires long term historical restorations and projecting into the future of land cover changes at regional to global scales. The present study aims at quantifying spatio temporal landscape dynamics along the gradient of varying terrains presented in the landscape by multi-data approach (MDA). MDA incorporates multi temporal satellite imagery with demographic data and other additional relevant data sets. The gradient covers three different types of topographic features, planes; hilly terrain and coastal region to account the significant role of elevation in land cover change. The seasonality is another aspect to be considered in the vegetation dominated landscapes; variations are accounted using multi seasonal data. Spatial patterns of the various patches are identified and analysed using landscape metrics to understand the forest fragmentation. The prediction of likely changes in 2020 through scenario analysis has been done to account for the changes, considering the present growth rates and due to the proposed developmental projects. This work summarizes recent estimates on changes in cropland, agricultural intensification, deforestation, pasture expansion, and urbanization as the causal factors for LULC change.


More widespread adoption requires swarms of robots to be more flexible for real-world applications. Multiple challenges remain in complex scenarios where a large amount of data needs to be processed in real-time and high degrees of situational awareness are required. The options in this direction are limited in existing robotic swarms, mostly homogeneous robots with limited operational and reconfiguration flexibility. We address this by bringing elastic computing techniques and dynamic resource management from the edge-cloud computing domain to the swarm robotics domain. This enables the dynamic provisioning of collective capabilities in the swarm for different applications. Therefore, we transform a swarm into a distributed sensing and computing platform capable of complex data processing tasks, which can then be offered as a service. In particular, we discuss how this can be applied to adaptive resource management in a heterogeneous swarm of drones, and how we are implementing the dynamic deployment of distributed data processing algorithms. With an elastic drone swarm built on reconfigurable hardware and containerized services, it will be possible to raise the self-awareness, degree of intelligence, and level of autonomy of heterogeneous swarms of robots. We describe novel directions for collaborative perception, and new ways of interacting with a robotic swarm.


Research indicates that administrative leadership is the most important factor in determining the climate of a school, and there are specific leadership attributes such as improving working conditions that promote retention. This study seeks to identify leadership behaviors that positively affect quality teacher retention among two particular groups (Beginning teachers with 1-3 years of experience and career teachers with 4+ years of experience) in the middle schools of North Carolina. A Fisher's Exact Test was performed on the data that were collected from the 22 leadership questions on the 2006 North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey. Ten of those questions were statistically significant at the .05 level. A Pearson Chi-Square was conducted to determine what working condition domain had the most impact on quality teacher retention for both beginning and career teachers. According to the findings of this study, there is a relationship between principal leadership and quality teacher retention, wherein different leadership attributes can be used as predictors for quality teacher retention.


Designers have difficulty visualizing the end results of the projects during the initial architectural conceptual design phase. This research introduces a computational tool—Social Network Analysis (SNA)—commonly used in the communications field to study relationships between people for solving this visualization problem. The research intent was to affirm whether or not SNA can be utilized as a spatial planning tool during conceptual building design. The author posits that since the nodes and structural relationships between the nodes may have similar architectural characteristics, the tool would enable architects to make changes by moving any spaces on a floor plan while safely maintaining their spatial relationships to other spaces. In this research, the author developed a proof-of-concept model using an available SNA tool to facilitate spatial diagramming visualization during conceptual design phase. This study, tested the use of the SNA tool at four levels. The first level determined whether spatial relationship between functional spaces could be developed (such as the living room must be adjacent to the front entry). The second level was on setting priority values for the different nodes and the linkages. The third level determined whether this study could develop grouping relationships between several functional spaces that have a common characteristic (such as public versus private spaces) on one horizontal plan. The final fourth level determined whether the author could develop multiple layers (such as multi floors) that are connected by one common connector (such as a staircase in a double-story house). The corresponding models are validated intellectually by visual comparison between the simulated model of this study and another diagramming by (Nooshin, 2001) that was developed manually. The author is most interested in the fourth level because complexity in the spatial diagramming exercises is caused by multi-layered spatial arrangements at the horizontal and vertical planes. This study provided guidelines in developing a prototype for a spatial diagramming tool, which architects can use to resolve visualization problems when conducting the architectural spatial diagramming.


Tidal marshes in equilibrium with rising sea level accrete material and gain elevation at a rate similar to sea level rise (SLR). Increased inundation, erosion, and marsh area loss occur where alterations to ecogeomorphic processes and feedbacks cause surface elevation gain to be less than SLR. Relationships between marsh platform elevation and surface elevation change have been observed in tidal salt marshes. In this study we expand this concept to tidal freshwater marshes by monitoring elevation change using surface elevation tables (SETs) and repeated surface elevation surveys. A novel method of survey differencing revealed elevation‐dependent rates of elevation change in our study site. Greater elevations were generally associated with decreased elevation gains. This relationship, however, was not monotonic but included a reversal to increasing gains from ∼ 0.2 m to 0.3 m elevation, leading to a local maximum elevation gain rate at ∼ 0.3 m elevation, about 0.3 half tide units above mean tide level. This localized accretion maximum could be caused by the elevation‐controlled distribution of marsh plant species, among other possibilities. Model projections of modern elevation change rates into the future suggested that high‐ and low‐marsh platforms would be maintained and even expanded for SLR rates between 2 and 4 mm yr−1. In our projections, rates of SLR < 2 mm yr−1 led to conversion of low marsh to high marsh, whereas rates from 4 to 6 mm yr−1 led to the reverse. SLR > 6 mm yr−1 led to conversion of marsh to open water. On average, surface elevations appear to be increasing at a rate similar to recent local SLR, although elevation change at some specific locations and within some elevation ranges may be less than SLR.


For business-to-consumer (B2C) electronic-commerce (ecommerce) transactions to work, website users must disclose sensitive information (such as credit card information). To establish a long-term customer relationship, organizations desire further information about current and potential customers (e.g., their name, user preferences, product preferences, physical address, and email address). Both ecommerce literature and interpersonal relationship research indicate that self-disclosure is a key dependent variable in burgeoning long-term relationships. In this study, I use a survey methodology (N = 281) and tests key antecedents that the ecommerce B2C relationship stage theory proposes as they relate to self-disclosure. This research model identifies the following antecedents of self-disclosure: attraction, perceived rewards, switching cost, involvement, and trust. Survey results show that trust and perceived rewards explain significant amounts of variance in self-disclosure intention in an online B2C context. I discuss implications for both practice and theory with the results.


This paper presents design and a characterisation of an active single-stage single-ended 30 to 60 GHz frequency doubler and a resistive down conversion mixer with differential buffer stage. These MMICs are realised using 90-nm CMOS process. The doubler exhibit 7.1 dB conversion loss and 10.8 dB fundamental frequency suppression with 0 dBm input power and 13.7 mW power consumption. Maximum output power of -4.2 dBm is achieved with 5 dBm input power. The mixer has 9.8 dB conversion gain with +5 dBm local oscillator level. The compression point P1dB is -2 dBm with 14 mW power consumption.


The study develops a rule operation model for gated spillways which improves the performance of the volumetric evaluation method (MEV). MEV was proposed by Giron (1988) and is largely used in common practice in Spain. The improvement was made by applying a corrective factor to the outflow discharge proposed by MEV method. The choice of the corrective factor was based on a multi-decision environment accounting for the number of improved cases and the amount of improvement. A Monte Carlo simulation environment was created to evaluate the method under a wide range of operating conditions. The environment includes the generation of storms and inflow hydrographs and their routing through the reservoir. The methodology was applied to the Talave basin, in the south-east of Spain. The improved method (called K method) was compared with other methods for the operation of gate-controlled spillways as the MEV and PLEM methods. The results showed that if the corrective factor K is higher than 1 the number of improved cases was significant, while if it is lower than 1 there was not improvement. The analysis of the relation between the return period and the devised method showed that by using the K method the percentage of improvement of both reducing maximum outflows and reducing maximum levels reached in the reservoir is greater for events with higher return periods than for the lower ones.


The aim of the study is to show emerging identity performances of Turkish Fulbright foreign teaching language assistants (FLTAs) in social and academic contexts during their sojourn experiences in the US. The grant program brings institutional roles of being a teacher and a learner and social duties of culture transmission in the host country. The dynamic triad of these roles yields negotiated identities manifested through reflections to the experiences of interaction, communication, and participation in the host community. In an attempt to reveal the interplay of these roles, 5 Turkish grantees were interviewed to elicit personal storylines. The narratives were analyzed adopting Davies and Harré's (1990) positioning theory rooted in discursive psychology relying on Bauman's (2013) postmodern conception of identity where identity is seen as fluid, multilayered, and negotiated. The participants' emerging identities formulated in the personal narratives are depicted through the negotiation of self-other positioning. The findings showed that affinity, racial, national, gender, cultural, second language, professional, and learner identities were revealed as emerging identity performances with an intersectional structure. This study provides a useful depiction of the FLTAs' sojourn experiences with a microanalytic eye and recommends covering different aspects with various focal points to better understand the educational and cultural aspects of such sojourn experiences. © 2021 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).


Nutrition is the basis of human physiological processes.
Inadequate nutrition can lead to dysfunction in the metabolic
chain links. One of the most important micronutrients
is zinc, as evidenced by its wide range of carriers in
the body. Zinc intake has a large margin in the current
world population, may be 7 mg/d in the UK, reaching 15
mg/d in the U.S., although of course, the RDA's are set
according to age, sex , physiological status (pregnancy,
lactation, etc..), or disease. It is known that zinc is essential
for the structure and function as well as DNA and
enzymes, coenzymes, hormones and so on. Life is short,
zinc, since the most rapidly absorbed and is transferred to
tanks where it is stored, so the amount available zinc in
the blood cannot be the amount "real". In this work we
have done a mini-review of the passage of zinc by the body
trying since their intake to their tour of the blood in both
healthy and sick people.


The present study examines the development of sight word reading in young children by examining changes in their self‐reported reading strategies over time. A sample of 65 five to seven year olds were asked to read 40 real word items, all carefully matched for letter length and word frequency, on three separate occasions. Changes in the children's word identifications were measured using immediately retrospective verbal self‐reports. Overall, the results showed some variability in the children's self‐reported reading strategies. Over time the children relied less on phonological strategies and moved towards reliance on directly retrieving words from memory. This change was most evident in the older children; while both year groups showed similar patterns of shifting reliance from explicit phonological strategies to retrieval, this shift was simply less frequent among the younger children. An analysis of word‐specific changes in reading strategies showed that the older children had a better sight vocabulary for more complex word items. These findings provide further support for Ehri's mediated phase theory in explaining children's development in learning to read.


Ras-MAPK signaling modulates innate immunity in the fly. Nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) plays an important role in innate immunity in many animals, where it regulates expression of genes involved in the response to pathogens. In Drosophila melanogaster, activation of the NF-κB homolog Relish (Rel) can be induced by signaling through either the Toll or IMD (immune deficiency) pathway. IMD is an adaptor protein that mediates the interaction of PGRP-LC, a receptor for bacterially derived peptidoglycans, with downstream components leading to Rel activation. Ragab et al. report that signaling through the Ras-MAPK (mitogen-activated protein kinase) cascade suppresses IMD signaling to fine-tune the immune response. In cultured Drosophila SL2 cells, decreasing Ras-MAPK signaling by RNA interference (RNAi) increased the IMD response to Gram-negative bacteria, whereas increasing MAPK signaling decreased the IMD response. In contrast, manipulating Ras-MAPK signaling had no effect on Toll signaling. RNAi of Ras-MAPK signaling components led to induction of IMD targets even in the absence of bacterial stimulation, implying that Ras-MAPK signaling was required for basal repression of IMD signaling. Similarly, increasing Ras-MAPK signaling in bacterially infected larvae repressed expression of an IMD-induced antimicrobial peptide (AMP) in the fat body, a liver-like metabolic and secretory organ, and in the macrophage-like hemocytes but had no effect on expression of a Toll-induced AMP. Adult flies with increased Ras-MAPK signaling exhibited decreased survival after septic injury but no change in survival after infection with a fungus that primarily elicits a Toll-dependent immune response. Ras-MAPK signaling also played a role in modulating IMD signaling in intestinal immunity in adults, where it was required for stem cell proliferation. Finally, the authors demonstrated that Ras-MAPK signaling likely inhibited IMD signaling by inducing the expression of Pirk, a protein that prevents IMD from binding to PGRP-LC. Ras-MAPK signaling thus limits IMD signaling during infection and prevents activation of IMD target genes in the absence of pathogen. Given that many Drosophila immune regulation pathways are conserved in mammalian innate immunity, these findings may be relevant to overactivation of the innate immune response in humans, which leads to chronic inflammation, a condition associated with obesity and cancer. A. Ragab, T. Buechling, V. Gesellchen, K. Spirohn, A.-L. Boettcher, M. Boutros, Drosophila Ras/MAPK signalling regulates innate immune responses in immune and intestinal stem cells. EMBO J. 30, 1123–1136 (2011). [PubMed] K.-Z. Lee, D. Ferrandon, Negative regulation of immune responses on the fly. EMBO J. 30, 988–990 (2011). [PubMed]


This paper presents a study regarding the quality of particular painting techniques - grisaille, black and white colors on thick paper, in case of an about 200 years old artwork, using exclusively two analytical laser techniques: Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS). The investigation aimed the identification of the type of white and black colors, and an other possible specific color (yellow or ochre) compounds (which were not allowed by this technique). The results proved again the known efficiency of each mentioned investigation technique, but also the conclusions that could be drawn from the correlated experimental data. The fast and efficient experiment took advantage of: i) double pulse LIBS technique that allows a more intense signal to be acquired,a reduced material consumption, the elimination of the matrix effect; ii) fast data mapping and characterization of critical points all over the painting using LIF scanning image.


Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) presents a major public health problem for which currently available treatments are modestly effective. We report the findings of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multi-site phase 3 clinical trial (NCT03537014) to test the efficacy and safety of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)-assisted therapy for the treatment of patients with severe PTSD, including those with common comorbidities such as dissociation, depression, a history of alcohol and substance use disorders, and childhood trauma. After psychiatric medication washout, participants (n = 90) were randomized 1:1 to receive manualized therapy with MDMA or with placebo, combined with three preparatory and nine integrative therapy sessions. PTSD symptoms, measured with the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 (CAPS-5, the primary endpoint), and functional impairment, measured with the Sheehan Disability Scale (SDS, the secondary endpoint) were assessed at baseline and at 2 months after the last experimental session. Adverse events and suicidality were tracked throughout the study. MDMA was found to induce significant and robust attenuation in CAPS-5 score compared with placebo (P < 0.0001, d = 0.91) and to significantly decrease the SDS total score (P = 0.0116, d = 0.43). The mean change in CAPS-5 scores in participants completing treatment was -24.4 (s.d. 11.6) in the MDMA group and -13.9 (s.d. 11.5) in the placebo group. MDMA did not induce adverse events of abuse potential, suicidality or QT prolongation. These data indicate that, compared with manualized therapy with inactive placebo, MDMA-assisted therapy is highly efficacious in individuals with severe PTSD, and treatment is safe and well-tolerated, even in those with comorbidities. We conclude that MDMA-assisted therapy represents a potential breakthrough treatment that merits expedited clinical evaluation. Appeared originally in Nat Med 2021; 27:1025-1033.


We estimated the level of risk to seismic hazards of the Cardiology Hospital of the National Medical Center "Siglo XXI", the Children's Hospital "Dr. Federico Gomez" and the "Hospital de Jesus" in Mexico City, Mexico. Vulnerability of these installations was measured using optimal theoretical vulnerability indicators. Our results indicate that the main elements that increase structural risk are the lack of enough separation among the hospital's buildings generating a pounding effect in case of a local earthquake. Another factor is the use of bridges to connect buildings. Also, the type and age of construction as well as heavy objects or architectural elements placed on the roofs of the buildings not considered in the original structural design. Regarding the non-structural risk, the main problems are the use of building materials not appropriated for hospitals such as heavy panels in ceilings and large windows without protection to prevent breaking. The main elements identified that increase the functional vulnerability are the lack of special rooms for care of patients in shock. Another factor is the lack of emergency exits and stairs. The high social-administrative risk is caused by the lack of a response and/or a mitigation plan. It is possible to reduce risk of these three hospitals with low cost mitigation measures such as development and implementation of an operational emergency plan, providing regular structural maintenance to buildings, removing heavy installations from the roofs of the structures, installing locks in the medical devices and equipment as well as adopting structural seismic-resistant measures.


This presentation discusses the effects of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) on foreign direct investment (FDI). In particular, the inflow of FDI from the United States and Canada towards Latin American countries is discussed along with an analysis of the role of regional integration variables (RIAs). This document was presented by the Trade and Integration Network of the Regional Policy Dialogue for the 5th Hemispheric Meeting celebrated on August 14th and 15th, 2003.


We have demonstrated binding of purified pili from a strain of Escherichia coli to Vero cell monolayers as a model of prokaryotic- eukaryotic cell adherence. Pili bound to the tissue culture in a rapid reaction that did not require enzymatic activation. Attachment occurred optimally at pH 4-5 and could be inhibited by analogues of D-mannose, anti-pili antibodies, or by preincubation of tissue cells with mannose- specific plant lectins. Binding remained after treatment of the monolayer with glycosidases, trypsin, or a protease mixture but was enhanced after neuraminidase treatment. These results indicate that bacterial binding can occur via pili which act like lectins and presumably bind to mannose-containing glycoproteins on mammalian cell surfaces.


The presence of large quantities of Chromium metal in soil and plants is of major concern due to its toxicity to humans. Total (USEPA 3050a) and bioavailable (USEPA 1311) levels of chromium were measured along a serpentinic Central Coast toposequence. Soil from the surface and subsurface, as well as the above ground plants of the toposequence were determined and compared to several soil chemical and physical properties using a least squares regression. The binding environments and oxidation states were found through XANES and EXAFS x-ray spectroscopies. The total and bioavailable chromium concentrations of the soil averaged 1457.1 and 1.6 mg Cr/kg respectively, and the average total plant chromium was 115.2 mg Cr/kg. The difference between chromium in the soil surface and subsurface was not statistically significant. The concentrations of total soil and plant chromium were highest in the backslope positions with a value of 2528.8 mg Cr/kg in the soil and 288.5 mg Cr/kg in the above ground plants. Though the backslope positions had slightly elevated levels of Cr, slope position did not have a large influence on soil and plant total chromium levels. The soil chemical and physical properties did not show a significant linear relationship with chromium levels. The dominant form of chromium found in both the bulk-soil and plant samples was Cr 3+, this agrees with the low amount of bioavailable chromium found at the site. Sepentinitic parent materials naturally lead to high chromium levels in soils and plants, so the ability to understand how chromium interacts with soil properties is crucial in the effective landscape management of areas rich in this metal.


Knet (pronounced "kay-net") is the Koç University machine learning framework implemented in Julia, a high-level, high-performance, dynamic programming language. Unlike gradient generating compilers like Theano and TensorFlow which restrict users into a modeling mini-language, Knet allows models to be defined by just describing their forward computation in plain Julia, allowing the use of loops, conditionals, recursion, closures, tuples, dictionaries, array indexing, concatenation and other high level language features. High performance is achieved by combining automatic differentiation of most of Julia with efficient GPU kernels and memory management. Several examples and benchmarks are provided to demonstrate that GPU support and automatic differentiation of a high level language are sufficient for concise definition and efficient training of sophisticated models.


Errata: The original article was published with an error of hyperinsulinemia improves fibrinolysis, instead hyperinsulinemia impairs fibrinolysis. The error has been corrected in this version. Globally, there is an increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases. The morbidity and mortality from these conditions confer a greater economic societal burden. Epidemiological research associates insulin resistance in the etiology of these diseases, but there is limited evidence for the mechanism of damage. Emerging research suggests that hyperinsulinemia, a symptom of insulin resistance, may cause these pathological changes, and therefore be an independent contributor to these diseases. This review shows that hyperinsulinemia, or excessive insulin secretion, should be considered independently to insulin resistance, defined as glucose uptake rate, even though the two conditions are intertwined and will co-exist under normal conditions. Hyperinsulinemia directly and indirectly contributes to a vast array of metabolic diseases including all inflammatory conditions, all vascular diseases, gestational and type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, obesity and certain cancers and dementias. The mechanisms include increased production of: insulin growth factor-1; reactive oxidative species and advanced glycation end-products; and triglyceride and fatty acids. Hyperinsulinemia also directly and indirectly affects many other hormones and cytokine mechanisms including leptin, adiponectin and estrogen. There is limited research standardizing the hyperinsulinemia diagnostic process. Methodological concerns and lack of standardized reference ranges preclude the use of fasting insulin. Most research has also focused on insulin resistance and it is unknown whether these methods translate to hyperinsulinemia.


A survey of three sites along the Northeast Cape Fear River, NC indicated that natural regeneration of Taxodium distichum (bald cypress) only occurred at the most oligohaline site along a salinity gradient. Floodwater salinity from 2000-2006 at this site was routinely < 0.1, while salinity at the other two downstream sites was <2 and 2-9, respectively. Germination and emergence of T. distichum seeds collected from the Northeast Cape Fear River were evaluated in a range of salinities (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12). Seeds germinated in all salinities, but at lower rates with increasing salinity. Salinity significantly impacted germination above 6 (p=0.001). Establishment, the ability to germinate, emerge and survive the duration of the study, occurred only in the lowest salinities, 0 and 2, suggesting that salinity is a major factor limiting T. distichum recruitment and establishment along the Northeast Cape Fear River. The results of this study indicate that as sea level rise increases, salt water intrusion will likely restrict T. distichum from tidal swamps along the lower Cape Fear River, where mature stands now occur.
A vegetation survey was conducted at three sites along the Northeast Cape Fear River, a natural salinity continuum, to assess the persistence of Taxodium distichum and associated vegetation when exposed to rising sea level. Three permanent plots measuring 20 x 50 m were established at each of the sites and surveyed using the NCVS protocol. A total of 89 species representing 54 families were identified. Live T. distichum were absent from the site furthest downstream, the most saline. Both NMS and DCA ordinations show that the vegetation assembles along a continuum of average tidal duration and soil sulfate concentrations (a proxy for salinity intrusion). Swamps dominated by T. distichum are being replaced by salt and brackish marsh species, such as Juncus roemerianus, due to sea level rise. A lack of allochthonous riverine input may accelerate the process of vegetation regression. These swamps will be limited to upstream areas of higher elevation and those exposed to freshwater flooding.


Most of the existing crypto drivers cannot operate effectively over the multi-core systems, resulting in high synchronization overheads. Moreover, the crypto drivers under utilize the full capacity of the hardware device underneath, resulting in low IPsec throughput. This paper discusses a design methodology that virtualizes the access to the common crypto accelerators across the multiple cores and leverages the existing feature of Linux to design a more balanced system. The new design can utilize the hardware capabilities in a better and efficient way to improve the overall crypto performance on multi-core systems.


A stock-market collapse such as the one after the 2008 Lehman Brothers default is followed by more pessimistic assessments of the likelihood of future collapses in surveys and by lower price-dividend ratios. This column argues this reaction of expectations and asset prices can be explained by Bayesian decision theory. The key is to appreciate that market participants know little about the drivers of such crashes. They revise their beliefs and learn over time.


This article' reconstructs the world of the rickshaw pullers of Singapore in the period from 1918 to 1939, examines the nature of their interaction and experience with the city, and the causes and effects of colonial policy and practice on their working and personal lives. There has been increasing recognition of the need to focus research on the urban work place, labor and the everyday problems of the coolie class under colonial rule in Southeast Asia. Such efforts, if they are to be meaningful, must be posed, theoretically and empirically, against a background of real life. This approach raises grave historiographical problems, for historians, I ike anthropologists, have tended "to graze in the fields," focusing their primary attention on rural societies of Southeast Asia. Considerable work has been done on peasant based movements and, opposition to colonial rule, but hardly any historical research has been conducted on the urban laboring class, of which the rickshaw coolies of Singapore formed a part.


We propose a spectral partitioning approach for large-scale optimization problems, specifically structure from motion. In structure from motion, partitioning methods reduce the problem into smaller and better conditioned subproblems which can be efficiently optimized. Our partitioning method uses only the Hessian of the reprojection error and its eigenvector. We show that partitioned systems that preserve the eigenvectors corresponding to small eigenvalues result in lower residual error when optimized. We create partitions by clustering the entries of the eigenvectors of the Hessian corresponding to small eigenvalues. This is a more general technique than relying on domain knowledge and heuristics such as bottom-up structure from motion approaches. Simultaneously, it takes advantage of more information than generic matrix partitioning algorithms.


This study investigated the effect of feedlot production on lamb growth characteristics of three common South African breeds: Merino, South African Mutton Merino (SAMM) and Dorper. Lambs were supplied with a balanced diet (16% crude protein, 9.41 MJ ME/kg feed) ad libitum and had free access to water. Lambs from each breed were divided into six groups. One group of each breed was slaughtered every three weeks until 105 days under feedlot production were reached. The weights of the lambs were recorded weekly, along with feed intake, to obtain the individual daily intake, average daily gain (ADG) and feed conversion ratio (FCR) for each lamb. The ADG for the SAMM 2007 and Dorper lambs increased throughout their production period, while that of the SAMM 2008 and Merino lambs tended to decrease with time, although the SAMM 2008 group achieved the highest ADG of 350.2 g/lamb/day of all the breeds. The Dorper and SAMM 2007 lambs had higher FCR (7.52 and 7.58, respectively). The average FCR achieved by the SAMM 2008 and Merino lambs was 5.54 and 5.14, respectively. However, the FCR of Merino and SAMM 2008 lambs increased throughout the production period. The Dorper lambs produced fatter carcasses and therefore exhibited the highest average dressing percentage of 49.7% compared with the SAMM 2007 (48.4%) and 2008 lambs (45.6%), followed by the Merino lambs (43.9%). The results confirm that the Merino is a late maturing breed that is recognised for its wool rather than meat production, and therefore exhibits weaker growth characteristics. The SAMM is a dual-purpose breed that has also been selected for growth and meat production, and therefore exhibits desirable production characteristics, while the Dorper is an early maturing breed that deposits localized fat at an earlier age as it grows, thereby producing fatter carcasses than SAMM and Merino lambs. Therefore, Dorper lambs should be slaughtered at lower live weights so that carcasses are not graded as over-fat.


The proposed hydroelectric site location has a low head potential making discharge the primary energy production component. A flow duration curve (FDC) study was commenced to generate annual and monthly flow and energy estimates. This FDC study involved setting up a recording stage sensor at the redevelopment site and monitoring stage. Then time series analysis was used to transform twenty-four years of up stream data to site streamflow data. Monthly and annual FDCs were generated and used to evaluate the site's full energy potential. The energy estimates computed using time series analysis were less than those computed using basin area ratios. This was expected because of the different physical hydrology of the gaged and ungaged portions of the basin.


First Nations communities in Canada have been drafting their own constitutions for many years, but these documents have not received significant attention from Canada's legal community. The constitutions written by First Nations communities raise many legal questions. This paper addresses three of those questions: (1) From what source do First Nations constitutions draw their legitimacy (Canadian legislation, the Canadian constitution, or an inherent Indigenous source)? (2) What aspects of Indigenous self-governance do they address? (3) How have Canadian courts treated them? This paper examines three Indigenous constitutions that are demonstrative of trends in Indigenous constitution-drafting to answer those three questions. The three example constitutions, judicial considerations of these documents, and jurisprudence about Indigenous self-governance reveal two conclusions. These constitutions are better tools than the Indian Act for governing relations between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian Crown. However, they run into many of the same issues that most attempts by First Nations communities have in their push for greater self-governance, since Canadian courts are only willing to show limited deference to these documents that purport to outline the fundamental principles of the communities who write them.


In this paper, a strategy for organisational knowledge evolution is presented. Organisational knowledge is defined as knowledge concerning the management of the artefacts provided by the organisation. The strategy is derived from a theoretical, action-oriented representation of knowledge and uses concrete instruments for iterating between reflection and action. The instruments for reflection are conceptual models and information flow diagrams. The instrument for action is an object oriented information management system, where the models are implemented and tried out in practise. By applying these instruments iteratively, organisational knowledge is generated, both as individual and shared knowledge among the actors, as well as objectified knowledge represented by the models and the implemented information management system. We describe how this strategy has been used at the Ericsson telecommunication company to handle the transition to a new software development model. The transition was complicated by the fact that Ericsson has many designers (more than 10 000) working at local design centres all over the world. Our experience shows that the proposed strategy is a powerful way to quickly acquire, deploy and manifest new organisational knowledge1.


: Amino acid precursors of dopamine and serotonin have been administered for decades to treat a variety of clinical conditions including depression, anxiety, insomnia, obesity, and a host of other illnesses. Dietary administration of these amino acids is designed to increase dopamine and serotonin levels within the body, particularly the brain. Convincing evidence exists that these precursors normally elevate dopamine and serotonin levels within critical brain tissues and other organs. However, their effects on urinary excretion of neurotransmitters are described in few studies and the results appear equivocal. The purpose of this study was to defi ne, as precisely as possible, the infl uence of both 5-hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP) and tyrosine on urinary excretion of serotonin and dopamine in a large human population consuming both 5-HTP and tyrosine. Curiously, only 5-HTP exhibited a marginal stimulatory infl uence on urinary serotonin excretion when 5-HTP doses were compared to urinary serotonin excretion; however, a robust relationship was observed when alterations in 5-HTP dose were compared to alterations in urinary serotonin excretion in individual patients. The data indicate three statistically discern-ible components to 5-HTP responses, including inverse, direct, and no relationships between urinary serotonin excretion and 5-HTP doses. The response to tyrosine was more consistent but primarily yielded an unexpected reduction in urinary dopamine excretion. These data indicate that the urinary excretion pattern of neurotransmitters after consumption of their precursors is far more complex than previously appreciated. These data on urinary neurotransmitter excretion might be relevant to understanding the effects of the precursors in other organs.


Abstract The perturbation of a transcription factor should affect the expression levels of its direct targets. However, not all genes showing changes in expression are direct targets. To increase the chance of detecting direct targets, we propose a modified two-group model where the null group corresponds to genes which are not direct targets, but can have small nonzero effects. We model the behavior of genes from the null set by a Gaussian distribution with unknown variance . To estimate , we focus on a simple estimation approach, the iterated empirical Bayes estimation. We conduct a detailed analysis of the properties of the iterated EB estimate and provide theoretical guarantee of its good performance under mild conditions. We provide simulations comparing the new modeling approach with existing methods, and the new approach shows more stable and better performance under different situations. We also apply it to a real dataset from gene knock-down experiments and obtained better results compared with the original two-group model testing for nonzero effects.


Rising fuel costs and growing
environmental concerns have forced gas turbine engine manufacturers to place
high value on reducing fuel burn. This
trend has pushed compressor technology into new design spaces that are not
represented by historical experience.
Specifically, centrifugal compressor diffusers are trending toward
higher pressure recovery and smaller diameters.
The internal fluid dynamics in these new flow regimes are not well
understood and additional study is necessary.
This work outlines detailed experimental and numerical observations of
the flow field through a vaned diffuser for aeroengine applications.

The experimental data consist
of extensive Laser Doppler velocimetry measurements of the unsteady velocity
field from the impeller trailing edge through the majority of the diffuser
passage. These data were obtained
non-intrusively and yielded all three components of the velocity vector field
at approximately 2,000 geometric points. The correlation between fluctuations
in the three velocity components were also observed at several key locations to
determine the components of the local Reynolds stress tensor.

These data indicated a jet/wake
profile at the impeller exit represented by a consistent velocity deficit
region from hub to shroud adjacent to the suction surface of the passage. This region was more prevalent adjacent to
the splitter blade. The unsteady
fluctuations due to the propagation of the jet and wake through the diffuser
passage persist to 40% downstream of the throat. A complex secondary flow field was also observed
with large axial velocities and a passage-spanning vortex developing through
the diffuser passage. The velocity data
and total-pressure data indicated a region of flow separation developing along
the pressure surface of the vane near the hub due to the unsteady propagation
of the jet and wake flow through the diffuser.
Although this region was stable in time, its development arose due to
unsteady aspects of the flow. Finally,
the strong interconnection between the jet and wake flow, unsteady
fluctuations, secondary velocities, incidence, and flow separation was demonstrated.

Computationally, a
"best-practice" methodology for the modelling of a centrifugal compressor was
developed by a systematic analysis of various turbulence models and many
modelling features. The SST and
BSL-EARSM turbulence models with the inclusion of fillets, surface roughness,
and non-adiabatic walls was determined to yield the best representation of the
detailed flow development through the diffuser in steady (mixing-plane)
simulations. The accurate modelling of
fillets was determined to significantly impact the prediction of flow
separation with the SST turbulence closure model. Additionally, the frozen rotor approach was
shown to not accurately approximate the influence of unsteady effects on the
flow development.

Unsteady simulations were also
compared to the detailed experimental data through the diffuser. The BSL-EARSM turbulence model best matched
the experimentally observed flow field due to the SST model's prediction of
flow separation in the shroud-pressure side corner of the passage. In general, lower levels of axial velocity
were predicted numerically that resulted in less spanwise mixing between the
endwall and freestream flows.
Additionally, the turbulent kinetic energy levels in the computational
results showed little streamwise variation through the vaneless and
semi-vaneless space. The large variation
observed experimentally indicated that the production and dissipation of
turbulent kinetic energy through this region was not accurately predicted in
the two turbulence models implemented for the unsteady simulations.


Writing in the workplace is among the understudied business topics in the field of HRD. Yet, the impacts of writing in today's workplace are significant, and organizations making it a priority benefit from it. Furthermore, writing is related to the issue of workplace literacy which is the umbrella term for basic communication skills. This literature review provides a general view on workplace writing and discusses implications to HRD within a model research proposal


The increasing use of nanomaterials in almost all sectors of society (e.g., health or energy to agriculture and transport) has generated a need for innovative detection methods for nanomaterials, to enable their continued development, environmental and toxicological monitoring, and risk assessment. In vivo nanoparticle visualization is needed to support applications in drug delivery to plant biology where real-time monitoring is essential. Techniques are sought that do not require the addition of molecular tags or nanotags to enhance detection, because these may modify the surface properties or behavior of the nanomaterials. Here two-photon excitation microscopy coupled with plant nanomaterial, or chemical autofluorescence is used to detect and visualize multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), titanium dioxide, and cerium dioxide in living wheat tissues. The potential of the technique to track chemical-nanomaterial interactions in living tissues is then demonstrated, using phenanthrene as a model compound. MWCNTs were observed to pierce wheat root cell walls and enhance the transport of phenanthrene into the living cells. The ability of this technique to monitor real-time in vivo nanomaterial behavior and its potential applications and limitations for use in various disciplines is highlighted.


The performance of error correction codes in conjunction with different diversity methods is investigated in a simulated multi-user indoor radio communications environment in the presence of a single interferer. Bit-error curves are presented for soft-decision convolution coding and for trellis coding with simple diversity methods. The degradation in bit error rate caused by CCI (co-channel interference) on uncoded QPSK (quadrature phase-shift keying), convolutionally coded QPSK, and trellis-coded 8-PSK is presented. The results indicate that the given trellis codes (without interleaving) have poor performance in a Rayleigh fading medium; their performance is even worse in the presence of both fading and CCI. The performance of soft-decision convolutional coding was much better than that of trellis, but at the expense of increasing the channel bandwidth.<<ETX>>


The Fifth International Conference on Hydroinformatics, Hydroinformatics 2002, was held from July 1st - 5th 2002 at City Hall, Cardiff, UK, and was opened by her Royal Highness, The Princess Royal. The conference was organised in association with the International Association of Hydraulic Engineering and Research (IAHR), the International Water Association (IWA) and the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS). Hydroinformatics is a relatively new discipline concerned with the application of computer and networking technology for the planning, management and protection of the water environment. Its aim is to allow environmental managers and engineers to make rapid and robust decisions as they address the increasing challenges of ensuring a sustainable water environment and adequate water resources for future generations. Hydroinformatics 2002 addressed these objectives with over 250 high quality presentations, by authors from over 50 countries, organised under the following themes: Decision support and management systems; Integration of technologies; GIS; Tools, Environments and Languages; Numerical engines; Data acquisition and management; Data mining; Neural networks in hydroinformatics; Internet, Intranets and Extranets; Inverse modelling and data assimilation; Uncertainty and risk; Ecology and water quality modelling; Experiences with modelling systems; Evolutionary algorithms; Policy and Strategy support systems. Hydroinformatics 2002 provided an excellent opportunity for engineers, environmental managers, scientists to meet and exchange ideas in this rapidly developing field. These proceedings will provide an invaluable reference to researchers, practitioners and all those interested in the field of Hydroinformatics.


The research reported here is concerned with the future of informal care over the next thirty years and the effect of changes in informal care on demand for formal services. The research draws on a PSSRU computer simulation model which has produced projections to 2031 for long-term care for England. The latest Government Actuary's Department (GAD) 1996-based marital status projections are used here. These projections yield unexpected results in that they indicate that more elderly people are likely to receive informal care than previously projected. The underlying reason is that the GAD figures project a fall in the number of widows and rise in the number of elderly women with partners. What this implies is that 'spouse carers' are likely to become increasingly important. This raises issues about the need for support by carers since spouse carers tend to be themselves elderly and are often in poor health. The article explores a number of 'scenarios' around informal care, including scenarios in which the supply of informal care is severely restricted and a scenario in which more support is given to carers by developing 'carer-blind' services. This last scenario has had particular relevance for the Royal Commission on Long Term Care.