This paper presents a rigorous phase noise analysis in the 1/f2 region for the differential CMOS LC-tank oscillator with both nMOS and pMOS switch pairs. A compact, closed-form phase noise equation is obtained, accounting for the noise contributions from both tank losses and transistors currents, which allows a robust comparison between LC oscillators built with either one or two switch pairs. The fabricated oscillator prototype is tunable between 2.15 and 2.35 GHz, and shows a phase noise of -144 dBc/Hz at 3 MHz offset from the 2.3 GHz carrier for a 4 mA bias current. The phase noise figure-of-merit is practically constant across the tuning range, with a minimum of 191.5 dBc/Hz. A reference single-switch-pair oscillator has been implemented and tested as well, and the difference between the phase noise levels displayed by the two oscillators is very nearly the one expected from theory


Seventeen brown bear dens were studied in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve (Russian Far East). The majority of dens were excavated in the ground. The dens were located mainly in the upper part of slopes with southwest aspects in birch forests, dwarf Siberian pine and alder patches. The structure of the dens was typical for brown bear ground dens. There are places in the basin of Shumnaya River in Kamchatka where brown bears prefer to set up their dens.


This article presents new experimental estimates of the impact of low-ability peers on own outcomes using nationally representative data from China. We exploit the random assignment of students to junior high school classrooms and find that the proportion of low-ability peers, defined as having been retained during primary school ("repeaters"), has negative effects on nonrepeaters' cognitive and noncognitive outcomes. An exploration of the mechanisms shows that a larger proportion of repeater peers is associated with reduced after-school study time. The negative effects are driven by male repeaters and are more pronounced among students with less strict parental monitoring at home.


Desiring Whiteness provides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often seen to be a social construction. Nevertheless, we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually. How do subjects become raced? Is it common sense to read bodies as racially marked? Employing Lacan's theories of the subject and sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks explores how the discourse of race parallels that of sexual difference in making racial identity a fundamental component of our thinking. Through close readings of literary and film texts, Seshardi-Crooks also investigates whether race is a system of difference equally determined by Whiteness. She argues that it is in relation to Whiteness that systems of racial classification are organized, endowing it with a power to shape human difference.


This paper provides the structural framework for the proposed modified version of Activated Sludge Model No. 3 (ASM3), where direct heterotrophic growth on readily biodegradable substrate is included as a new process and provision is made so that growth on internal storage compounds is started sequentially, after the depletion of the external primary substrate pool. The results have provided strong indication that there was a need for considering direct growth on primary substrate as a significant biological mechanism.


Many countries have made major commitments to carbon sequestration through reforestation under the Paris Climate Agreement, and recent studies have illustrated the potential for large amounts of carbon sequestration in tropical second-growth forests. However, carbon gains in second-growth forests are threatened by non-permanence, i.e. release of carbon into the atmosphere from clearing or disturbance. The benefits of second-growth forests require long-term persistence on the landscape, but estimates of carbon potential rarely consider the spatio-temporal landscape dynamics of second-growth forests. In this study, we used remotely sensed imagery from a landscape in the Peruvian Amazon to examine patterns of second-growth forest regrowth and permanence over 28 years (1985–2013). By 2013, 44% of all forest cover in the study area was second growth and more than 50% of second-growth forest pixels were less than 5 years old. We modeled probabilities of forest regrowth and clearing as a function of landscape factors. The amount of neighboring forest and variables related to pixel position (i.e. distance to edge) were important for predicting both clearing and regrowth. Forest age was the strongest predictor of clearing probability and suggests a threshold response of clearing probability to age. Finally, we simulated future trajectories of carbon sequestration using the parameters from our models. We compared this with the amount of biomass that would accumulate under the assumption of second-growth permanence. Estimates differed by 900 000 tonnes, equivalent to over 80% of Peru's commitment to carbon sequestration through 'community reforestation' under the Paris Agreement. Though the study area has more than 40 000 hectares of second-growth forest, only a small proportion is likely to accumulate significant carbon. Instead, cycles between forest and non-forest are common. Our results illustrate the importance of considering landscape dynamics when assessing the carbon sequestration potential of second-growth forests.


The recent demand for architectural transparency has drastically increased the use of glass material for structural purpose. However, connections between structural glass members represent one of the most critical aspects of glass engineering, due to the fragile behaviour of this material. In that regard, research activities on a novel type of metal-to-glass adhesive connections (called laminated connections) are currently on-going at EPFL. These joints make use of transparent thin polymer foils - i.e. an ionomer polymer (SentryGlas® from Dupont) and a structural silicon (TSSA from Dow Corning) – that are cured by an autoclave lamination process. The research activities involve both experimental and numerical studies with the aim to develop a design model and failure criterion for laminated connections. In this paper, the nonlinear numerical investigations on the behaviour of this type of adhesive joints are presented. In particular, the effects of mechanical and geometrical parameters on the response of the laminated connections are studied by non-linear modeling. The results are obtained performing several numerical simulations varying the parameters' values and monitoring the related effects. Strong non-linearity in both strain and stress field distributions are observed, even in case of simple load conditions. The results suggest that, with the purpose of performing numericalexperimental comparisons, precise measurements have to be performed since very small displacements are to be expected. Additionally, an appropriate modeling of both boundary conditions (realized by the test setup) and adherents' deformations (of both steel and glass adherent) is necessary.


In recent years, many studies and development of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) have been carried out to feed back analysis results to human users in a physical space by using machine learning, aiming to analyze a huge amount of information obtained from physical space in a cyber space. To apply CPS to sports, a lot of studies have been conducted on sensing and recognizing actions and movements of athletes using machine learning. In this study, we focus on fishing as a sport, and propose a fishing CPS that recognizes anglers' actions in real-time and provides information on the past useful actions that are linked to fishing results depending on time and place as a decision support when the anglers do not make catch. In addition, this paper reports on the development of an IoT (Internet of Things) device that acquires positional information, acceleration and gyroscope information, and a web system that displays results of real-time activity recognition along with the place and time by animation for realizing the fishing CPS. We have evaluated the developed IoT device and web system from the viewpoint of practical use. As a result, we have confirmed that the GPS and acceleration sensors, in the actual breakwater environment, were constantly transmitting data to a server via UDP communication for 4 hours and 40 minutes.


This study aims to assess the health information system (HIS) in Jordan, and to recommend future steps to support evidence based policies and actions. A rapid evidence assessment and qualitative meta synthesis for the health information system in Jordan. The HIS in Jordan does not secure prompt availability of data and timely publication of information. Also, HIS in Jordan is complex, with multiple data sources, various types of information, and many producers and managers of data. The HIS was shown to be missing key pieces of information. These features are explained by the fact that some of the key pieces of information for the identification of the health inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes of upstream forces do not lend themselves to population survey tools, as well as the absence of some relevant modules in population surveys, and also due to the ineffective capitalization on the potentials of the institutional HIS. Jordan's strategic commitment to improving health services and the existing solid foundation of its HIS are opportunities to be capitalized on. The recent package of indicators for HIS should be used as a foundation to support the realization of an effective health information system in Jordan.


The relative importance of genetic and environmental factors for explaining differences in trait distributions between populations is one of the major issues in evolutionary biology. In ectotherins, temperature can have a major impact on morphology, physiology, and life history strategies, and has often been inferred to explain differences between populations. In species with active thermoregulation, however, the ambient temperature may not be as important as the opportunity for thermoregulation. We studied growth in juvenile common lizards (Lucerta vivipara) originating from two environments differing in such thermal opportunity (i.e. day length). The populations differed significantly in their norms of reaction, with lizards experiencing long days in the wild showing a steeper increase in growth rate with increasing thermal opportunity. The environment with longer days also has a lower mean temperature in the wind, and in accordance with evolutionary predictions, lizards from this population had higher endurance at low temperatures. Both populations showed genetic variation in degree of phenotypic plasticity in growth rate as evident from the extensive crossing in norms of reaction.


Improved catalysis for more efficient chemical processing, biomass conversions and water oxidation-hydrogen production will be important for achieving new clean technologies. Our research work involves a novel approach to produce catalytic mechanistic properties in synthetic peptide nanoparticle structures that mimic the active sites of enzymes. A series of six peptides have now been designed and synthesized which contain a cysteine sulfhydryal group (nucleophile) and histidine imidazole group (general base) in close proximity. Upon acylation of the cysteine sulfhydryal group, some of the peptides with closely proximated imidazole groups, exhibit accelerated deacylation in the presence of a trapping reagent. Peptides with phenylalanine groups between the cysteine and histidine have deacylation rates more than 10 times higher than in the peptides without a histidine. This accelerated deacylation indicates that the histidine imidazole group is functioning much like it does in the catalytic sites of the natural cysteine and serine proteases. These peptides will ultimately be attached to derivatized nanoparticles which are designed to bind appropriate substrates (esters and amides) through hydrophobic and/or electrostatic interactions. The final goal being to use the peptide nanoparticle structures to accelerate both the acylation and deacylation rates and produce true substrate turnover.


A more demanding and evolving consumer is creating change in the market for pork and many working within the industry are predicting opportunities for leaner products. However, leaner pork enthusiasts also are frustrated by the established industry food chain that offers little incentive for modification. Modification would require change on the part of genetic suppliers, commercial producers, packers and processors, and retailers. However, many of these food chain participants traditionally have not collaborated with others in the sector. Yet the establishment of these new linkages may be key to the success of a leaner pork industry. This case study documents several of the activities currently occurring within the leaner pork industry and explores new linkages which may be critical in the future. Currently, genetic suppliers are struggling with short-term needs of producers, while attempting to look at the long-term demands of consumers. Hog producers have been profitable and lack incentives to alter practices which would produce leaner animals. Packers are interested in efficiently running large scale operations with large quantities of low cost meat. Retailers struggle with labeling inconsistencies and a low cost mentality that make it difficult to market leaner pork in the meatcase. Leaner pork enthusiasts are making strides to overcome the disadvantages found in the traditional system. Some genetic suppliers are now working with packers to determine animal quality beyond the producer's feedlot. Some packers are creating incentive programs that pay producers for leaner quality. These lean incentive programs may become more attractive for packers and producers if new technologies measuring lean become less prohibitive for larger operations. Many packers are moving into branded products, resulting in incentive programs for producers who supply animals with the desired quality. Overall, these efforts have remained a small portion of total pork industry activities.


Fifth century Greeks distinguished between hegemonia (legitimated leadership) and arkhe (control). Thucydides employed this distinction to track the changing nature of the Athenian Empire during the Peloponnesian War, and the ways in which a diminishing concern for balancing self-interest against justice corroded Athenian authority, made survival of the empire increasingly problematic and encouraged the disastrous expedition to Sicily. The Melian Dialogue—often cited by realists to justify a power-based approach to foreign policy—is intended to symbolize this decay. Building on our analysis of Thucydides, we examine the British, Soviet and American experiences with hegemony. A striking feature of the contemporary American situation is the extent to which American leaders claim hegemonia but deny any interest in arkhe. Rightly or wrongly, much of the rest of the world has the reverse perception. This seeming contradiction has important implications for US foreign policy and world politics more generally.


This thesis studies the role of the banking system in several aspects of the macroeconomy, including the likelihood of financial crises, volatility of asset prices and the transmission of monetary policy. In chapter 2, I analyze the accumulation of international reserves by central banks as insurance against financial crises. In the model, private banks borrow from foreign creditors to invest in domestic projects. By lending to banks in response to liquidity shocks, the central bank can reduce the liquidation of bank assets and lower the probability of bank runs. I show that the central bank will hold more reserves when private banks hold lower reserves. I also find that if the central bank can borrow additional loans from external sources, then domestic banks will hold fewer reserves by themselves. If the borrowing cost of external loan is very high, then the central bank may actually want to accumulate more reserves in order to avoid borrowing from external sources at high costs. In chapter 3, I show that the ability of banks to supply liquidity through money creation is important for financial stability. By supplying liquidity, banks can smooth the sale of assets and stabilize asset prices. I find that without elastic money, the attempt of non-bank mutual funds to raise cash by selling assets will only add more volatility into the market. Elastic money provided by banks can help mutual funds better smooth the consumption of their shareholders. In chapter 4, we consider the role of elastic money in an different environment where liquidity shocks affect agents asymmetrically. We show how money growth and interest rate policy can be used to adjust the consumption level of households. We find that the optimal policy is affected by the sensitivity of the supply price to the interest rate. When the supply price is more sensitive to the interest rate, it would be better to adopt a higher inflation rate, and to make the zero-bound of nominal interest rate less likely to be binding.


. Information Technology (IT) and business is one that we can use to get more profit from the system that is running. Information and business technology has also been utilized in education. Therefore, the authors aim to measure the maturity level of alignment of information technology and business that exist in Kartini University Surabaya to know the deeper conditions about the implementation of business alignment and information technology. The method used is Luftman method by conducting interviews with units and IT business Based on 6 criteria of maturity and alignment of IT and business. Based on the assessment of the completeness of alignment between IT with business Kartini University Surabaya is at level 2 of the Committed Process. It describes the commitment by organizations to achieve harmony between business and IT. Therefore, training needs to be improved so that the proposed strategy can be applied optimally so as to realize the harmony between top management's desire in achieving business objectives and understanding of business units and IT in order to realize business objectives


The cephalic and thoracic horns of various male lucanid and dynastid beetles have long been considered classical examples of allometric growth, the relation between size of horn and body size being expressed by the exponential equation Y = bXk, where Y horn size, X body size, band k being constants; k is usually referred to as the ""growth coefficient"" of the heterogonic organ. But, as pointed out by Huxley (1931, 1932) there is an important difference between holometabolous insects and other animals exhibiting allometric growth e.g. crabs.


In this article I aim to provide a better understanding of the concept `non-governmental organization' and its implications for the politics of international relations. As the prevailing confusion about the term stems largely from poor knowledge about the politics behind its introduction and function, the overarching question asks how NGOs have been socially constructed as actors on the margins of the international stage. To this end, a sound insight into the little-known conceptual history and background of the term `NGO' in what might be called a `Westphalian nomenclature' is given. I suggest that the still prevalent NGO terminology is an outcome of political games played by various actors, restricting and containing the signified organizations. The article provides a non-substantial, functional and politics-oriented definition of the term NGO, which differs significantly from previous attempts to attach meaning to it. It also suggests improved choices of terminology for general International Relations theorizing.


On the basis of a quantum microscopic approach we study the dynamics of the afterglow of a dilute Gaussian atomic ensemble excited by pulsed radiation. Taking into account the vector nature of the electromagnetic field we analyze in detail the angular and polarization distribution of single-photon superradiance of such an ensemble. The dependence of the angular distribution of superradiance on the length of the pulse and its carrier frequency as well as on the size and the shape of the atomic clouds is studied. We show that there is substantial dependence of the superradiant emission on the polarization and the direction of fluorescence. We observe essential peculiarities of superradiance in the region of the forward diffraction zone and in the area of the coherent backscattering cone. We demonstrate that there are directions for which the rate of fluorescence is several times more than the decay rate of the timed-Dicke state. We show also that single-photon superradiance can be excited by incoherent excitation when atomic polarization in the ensemble is absent. Besides a quantum microscopic approach, we analyze single-photon superradiance on the basis of the theory of incoherent multiple scattering in optically thick media (random walk theory). In the case of very short resonant and long nonresonant pulses we derive simple analytical expressions for the decay rate of single-photon superradiance for incoherent fluorescence in an arbitrary direction.


Social capital, from the collective social capital theory perspective, is constituted by trust, social network and participation. Social capital is agreed to be crucial for civil society and wellbeing, but there is no general consensus on how to define and measure it. Sense of belonging shares important meanings with social capital, but is more amenable to measurement. Social capital, primarily a metaphor, is elastic, implicative, and versatile, whereas belonging is a more concrete and tangible concept that is suitable for the measurement. This research explores how belonging is related to social capital, and examines whether belonging can be used as an indicator for social capital.
A mixed methods, qualitative and quantitative research design was developed to collect data on students' sense of belonging to Bangor University. A new instrument, the 10 Words Question, was developed to elicit participants' own thoughts and feelings, while a survey questionnaire was used in parallel, with questions about belonging, social capital, and demographic information.
The empirical analysis reveals that there are four main domains of belonging, academic and social engagement, surroundings, and personal spaces. This challenges previous research on the subject in the UK. The findings suggest that students' sense of belonging is strongly associated with social capital. Further conceptual and statistical analysis shows that there is significant overlap with each of the main components of social capital.
One implication of the study is that a one-dimensional approach to students' sense of belonging to an institution may result in poorly targeted and ineffective policies. The research highlights the complex characteristics of belonging, so if students' belonging is to be used to promote academic success and retention, more conceptually refined approaches and empirically detailed evidence will be required. This research also demonstrates that belonging data can be used as a simple alternative indicator for social capital.


We study two graph parameters, namely the number of spanning forests and the number of connected subgraphs, for self-similar graphs with exactly two boundary vertices. In both cases, we determine the general behavior for these and related auxiliary quantities by means of polynomial recurrences and a careful asymptotic analysis. It turns out that the so-called resistance scaling factor of a graph plays an essential role in both instances, a phenomenon that was previously observed for the number of spanning trees. Several explicit examples show that our findings are likely to hold in an even more general setting.


We introduce Picturebook, a large-scale lookup operation to ground language via 'snapshots' of our physical world accessed through image search. For each word in a vocabulary, we extract the top-k images from Google image search and feed the images through a convolutional network to extract a word embedding. We introduce a multimodal gating function to fuse our Picturebook embeddings with other word representations. We also introduce Inverse Picturebook, a mechanism to map a Picturebook embedding back into words. We experiment and report results across a wide range of tasks: word similarity, natural language inference, semantic relatedness, sentiment/topic classification, image-sentence ranking and machine translation. We also show that gate activations corresponding to Picturebook embeddings are highly correlated to human judgments of concreteness ratings.


This article starts from the assumption that patterns of media concentration and measures of regulating media pluralism are not the results of random media policy adjustments, but are rooted in trajectories of public sphere conceptions and shaped by a set of varying actor interests. In Germany, regulation of media plurality differs greatly between the print media and the broadcast sector. The print media market is shaped by commercial ownership and largely deregulated, except for special measures of fusion control. The broadcast sector is shaped by a dual system of public and commercial broadcasters that are regulated by non-governmental public institutions. This article focuses on two current developments regarding the regulation of pluralism in German media: The post-communist legacy of a concentrated print media market in former East Germany and the paradigmatic change in defining pluralism in the broadcast sector.


Reactive oxygen species (ROS) form a class of molecules with both positive and negative impacts on cellular health. Negatively, ROS may react with cellular constituents including proteins, lipids, and DNA to generate an array of oxidative lesions. These lesions may compromise genome stability which is critical for long-term cellular homeostasis and healthy progeny. Paradoxically, ROS also function as strong signalling molecules that mediate various growth-related responses, so their presence is also essential for cellular metabolism. While ROS are generated in an unregulated manner by physical stresses such as exposure to ionizing radiation and biochemical malfunctions such as mitochondrial leakage, cells also contain the NADPH oxidases NOXs and DUOXs, which specifically generate ROS in a wide variety of tissues. While the NOXs/DUOXs may be involved in maintaining optimal cellular redox levels, there is also accumulating evidence that NADPH oxidases-derived ROS may elevate the risk for genomic instability and cancer. Cancer cells may produce high levels of ROS, and in some cases, the source of these ROS has been linked to NOX/DUOX deregulation as reported for prostate cancer (NOX1 and NOX5), melanoma and glioblastoma (NOX4) among others. In addition, recent studies reveal that targeting NADPH oxidases with NOXs inhibitors may impair tumor growth in vivo; indicating that these proteins may be useful targets in future clinical strategies to fight cancer. This review provides an overview of the current knowledge concerning these enzymes, their roles in cancer, and their potential as targets in future cancer therapies.


This article is about the making of modern legal education in North America. It does so with a case study of the lives of two law schools, the University of Alberta, Faculty of Law and the University of Minnesota Law School, and their respective deans, Wilbur Bowker and Everett Fraser, in the decades surrounding the Second World War. The article follows Bowker's unorthodox route to Alberta's deanship via his graduate training under the experimental "Minnesota Plan" – Fraser's long forgotten effort to place public service at the centre of American legal education. In detailing an overlooked moment of transition and soul searching in North American legal education, this article underlines the personalities, ideologies, circumstances, and practices that combined to forge the still dominant model of university-based legal education across the continent. Highlighting the movement of people and ideas, this study corrects a tendency to understand the history of law schools as the story of single institutions and isolated visionaries. It also reveals the dynamic ways in which law schools absorbed and refracted the period's ideological and political concerns into teaching practices and institutional arrangements. In bold experiment and innate conservatism, personal ambition and institutional constraints, and, above all else, faith in the power of law and lawyers, the postwar law school was born.


1. Central and peripheral haemodynamics, circulating blood volume and plasma renin activity (PRA) were investigated under resting conditions in 97 patients with chronic nonuraemic renal parenchymatous disease and without anaemia. For comparison a group of 17 healthy subjects was used. 2. An initial abnormality appeared in 12 out of 32 normotensive renal patients. It consisted of a markedly increased circulating blood volume, raised cardiac output, low total peripheral and forearm vascular resistance, hyperfusion of the forearm and increased venous distensibility. PRA was slightly (but insignificantly) higher in these hyperkinetic subjects with relaxed peripheral vessels than in the other 20 normotensive renal patients who did not differ haemodynamically from the control subjects. 3. Fifteen out of 47 renal patients with a mild or moderate hypertension (stage I–II WHO) were hyperkinetic. However, in these there was no compensatory vasodilatation in response to the high cardiac output: forearm blood flow was normal and venous distensibility below that of the control subjects. Blood volume was normal. Plasma renin activity (PRA) was the same as in the normotensive renal patients. 4. The difference between stage I–II and stage III was due entirely to a rise in total peripheral vascular resistance. 5. A re-examination of these patients 2-8 years after they had been first studied revealed that 11 out of the 12 originally hyperkinetic normotensive renal patients were now hypertensive compared with only one-half of the originally normokinetic normotensive renal subjects. 6. It is concluded that an inability of the diseased kidney to control volume homoeostasis leads to hypervolaemia, which raises cardiac output in the renal patients whilst still normotensive. As long as the arterioles adjust to the high output and the capacitance system to the high volume, blood pressure remains normal. When this adaptation of the periphery ceases, blood pressure rises, normalizing (possibly through a pressure diuresis) blood volume. PRA does not correlate with any of these changes and only in advanced renal hypertension may its rise partly contribute to the maintenance of high blood pressure without being its cause.


Many consumers struggle to repay their credit card debt, in part because paying small portions of large bills often feels fruitless. We introduce a novel credit card payment option – repayment-by-purchase – and examine its influence on both the amount consumers' repay and their perception of progress toward reducing their debt. With typical repayment, consumers simply enter the amount they wish to pay toward their total balance – often the minimum required payment. With repayment-by-purchase, in contrast, consumers can select specific purchases (e.g., a coffee at Starbucks, a utility bill) that they wish to repay, and make payments specifically directed toward "eliminating" these purchases. Five studies reveal that repayment-by-purchase increases awareness of what is being repaid, which increases perceptions of progress toward reducing debt, which in turn encourages higher repayment. In a large field experiment, credit card customers who were given the opportunity to allocate their payment toward specific purchase categories paid 12.18% more toward their debt balance than a control group. These findings advance our practical understanding of how consumers can be encouraged to pay more toward credit card debt and offer conceptual insight into how both increased awareness and perceived goal progress enhance consumer motivation to get out of debt.


Team effectiveness has been studied greatly in organizational research, and many factors have been identified that contribute to team success. However, given that numerous work teams today are long-term, ongoing entities, performance alone may not be the most appropriate measure. Many teams need to be highly adaptive to meet environmental demands (Tannenbaum, Mathieu, Salas, & Cohen, 2012). These teams go through several performance episodes, often managing several tasks simultaneously (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001). Team viability as a construct may be useful in determining how well a team will perform on subsequent tasks. Viability assesses the team's potential for future success based on its current health and sustainability (Bell & Marentette, 2011). This thesis describes the development and initial validation of a measure of team viability that can be used for ongoing teams. There has been much construct confusion in the literature on team viability. The importance of team viability is discussed as well as how it is distinct from similar constructs such as satisfaction. An initial content validation of the measure was conducted using subject matter experts who provided feedback on scale items. Results indicated that several initial items used in the item pool are clearly representative of viability. The experts also recommended that the ideas of sustainability, development, and willingness to work with team members again are important aspects of viability that should be captured in both the definition and items used. Future research can further refine


BACKGROUND
The utility of contrast MRI for assessing myocardial viability in stable coronary artery disease (CAD) with left ventricular dysfunction is uncertain. We therefore performed cine and contrast MRI in 24 stable patients with CAD and regional contractile abnormalities and compared MRI findings with rest-redistribution 201Tl imaging and dobutamine echocardiography.

METHODS AND RESULTS
Delayed MRI contrast enhancement patterns were examined from 3 to 15 minutes after injection of 0.1 mmol/kg IV gadolinium diethylenetriamine pentaacetic acid (Gd-DTPA). Comparable MRI and 201Tl basal and midventricular short-axis images were subdivided into 6 segments. Segments judged nonviable by quantitative and qualitative assessment of 201Tl scans showed persistent, systematically greater MRI contrast signal intensity than segments judged viable (P</=0.002). Delayed contrast hyperenhancement also occurred in segments judged nonviable by dobutamine echocardiography (P</=0.03). The presence or absence of hyperenhancement correlated most closely with nonviability and viability, respectively, in segments that were akinetic or dyskinetic under resting conditions (83% concordance with 201Tl in both cases). In segments with resting hypokinesis, 58% of segments showing hyperenhancement were judged viable by 201Tl and may have represented an admixture of scar tissue and viable myocardium.

CONCLUSIONS
Delayed (by 3 to 15 minutes) hyperenhancement of Gd-DTPA contrast-enhanced MRI images occurs frequently in dysfunctional areas of the left ventricle in patients with stable CAD. Hyperenhancement is associated with nonviability by rest-redistribution 201Tl scintigraphy and dobutamine echocardiography, particularly in regions exhibiting resting akinesis/dyskinesis. The absence of hyperenhancement correlates with radionuclide and echocardiographic determinations of viability, regardless of resting contractile function.


Marginalised groups of workers in Slovenia are traditionally most affected by labour market uncertainty, but increasingly middle-class and upper-class workers are experiencing the same. Furthermore, new work forms have given rise to ethical, psychological and legal dilemmas. In this paper, we examine the concept of decent work and focus on job-related and organisational aspects of work in Slovenia. In the empirical part of the paper we therefore focus on working time, work organisation and co-operation within teams, work-life balance, health and stress, and overall satisfaction with working conditions. Our results evidence that new work forms increase insecurity and consequently diminish worker well-being; and this is most experienced by younger, agency and self-employed workers in Slovenia. This suggests that the development of multilevel and multifaceted measures which take into account socio-psychological and legislative factors to address labour market segmentation is necessary, especially when addressing the needs of those forced to work atypically.


The rise of mobile phones and social media may come to be historically coupled with a growing atmosphere of dissent that is enveloping much of the globe. The Arab Spring, UK Riots, Occupy and many other protests and so-called "flash-mobs" are all massive gatherings of digitally-connected individuals in physical space; and they have recently become the new normal. The primary role of technology in producing this atmosphere has, in part, been to effectively link the on and the offline. The trend to view these as separate spaces, what I call "digital dualism", is faulty. Instead, I argue that the digital and physical enmesh to form an "augmented reality". Linking the power of the digital–creating and disseminating networked information–with the power of the physical–occupying geographic space with flesh-and-blood bodies–is an important part of why we have this current flammable atmosphere of augmented revolution.


Sponsored by ASCE; the U.S.–Mexican Policy Studies Program, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin. This report describes the consequences of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as they affect water resources planning and management in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The NAFTA process may change the administration of state or federal water quality or other environmental regulations, and it creates three new organizations to resolve border and trade disputes related to the environment. These new institutions also will facilitate construction and rehabilitation of environmental infrastructure. The total volume of environmental infrastructure needs along the U.S.–Mexican border has been estimated to be in the billions of dollars, and the financial commitments appear to be in place. NAFTA will create new opportunities for engineering services in North America by requiring Canada, Mexico and the United States to treat professional service providers from the other two countries no less favorably than it treats its own service providers, and certainly on no less favorable terms granted to other nations. Negotiations over transnational engineer licensing under NAFTA are part of a rapidly evolving process which may conclude in 1995. Engineers who are licensed Professional Engineers (PE) in Canada, Mexico, or the United States may be eligible for a temporary license to practice in either of the neighboring countries, provided that education, experience, and other requirements are met.


This work introduces the Distributed Network Reachability (DNR) algorithm, a distributed system-level diagnosis algorithm that allows every node of a partitionable arbitrary topology network to determine which portions of the network are reachable and unreachable. DNR is the first distributed diagnosis algorithm that works in the presence of network partitions and healings caused by dynamic fault and repair events. Both crash and timing faults are assumed, and a faulty node is indistinguishable of a network partition. Every link is alternately tested by one of its adjacent nodes at subsequent testing intervals. Upon the detection of a new event, the new diagnostic information is disseminated to reachable nodes. New events can occur before the dissemination completes. Any time a new event is detected or informed, a working node may compute the network reachability using local diagnostic information. The bounded correctness of DNR is proved, including the bounded diagnostic latency, bounded startup and accuracy. Simulation results are presented for several random and regular topologies, showing the performance of the algorithm under highly dynamic fault situations.


The aim of encouraging 'arts, manufactures, and commerce' in Britain through drawing education was the focus for disagreement throughout the long nineteenth century and beyond. The production of technical representations (in print, exhibitions and the factory) by jobbing designers and factory draughtsmen presents one under-researched area where these cultural conflicts can be addressed in more detail. In this chapter, neither a celebration of the 'art of the engineer' nor an attack on the 'coercive' nature of worker education in drawing, I discuss the strategies of workers who aimed to exploit the 'machine dreams' of this period to claim professional and cultural status by acquiring and demonstrating drawing skills.

These technical representations are under-researched because they do not readily fit into established academic categories. We see that technical draughtsmen and engineers in Britain largely trained themselves through copying from a wide range of examples and conventions; their drawing strategies were ambiguous and multivalent and must be addressed in a cross-disciplinary way. Draughtsmen became invisible because their status was disputed and problematic, squeezed by issues about creative control and autonomy in the workplace. As 'visual technicians' both elite engineers and factory draughtsmen trained themselves to draw for the mechanical arts through copying from a wide range of artistic, artisanal and architectural precedents and were thus constantly negotiating how different kinds of visual display related to professional status.

But within the range of occupations inside engineering, draughtsmen became a further sub-group of even more compromised status. This chapter takes examples of working practice in the factory, and also from the work of illustrators for print, to consider how the process of making these drawings either aided or frustrated the working ambitions of the draughtsmen who produced them. Moving inside this artworld of technical drawing at a time of expanding visual economies gives a textured account of the ways in which practitioners sought to gain authority by visual means by appealing to both art and industry. The findings of this chapter are in sympathy with Patrick Joyce's account of autodidact workers and narratives of 'class' (1994), but more immediately, engage with histories and philosophies of art and design education in the shadow of John Ruskin. In a period when drawing was widely touted as a civic accomplishment like the ability to read or to reason, the development of art and design discourses cannot be understood without considering equally the development of these technical styles.


The hollowing of the state has added new challenges for administrators attending to the competing values of the administration. This article examines how the wisdom of the crowds can be used in a deliberative manner to extract new knowledge through crowdsourcing. We will specifically examine cases of intelligence and information gathering through the analysis of a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria and the use of the crowd in mapping unknown or rapidly changing environments. Through case analysis, this article seeks to understand if crowdsourcing can offer a potential opportunity for public managers to reduce transactions costs while engaging the crowd in a form of deliberative governance to understand and potentially solve public problems. Our approach involves applying the seven lessons of deliberative governance (Scott, Adams, & Wechsler, 2004) to our cases in order to produce five administrative concepts for creating mini-publics for deliberative crowdsourcing.


Seagrass meadows are an important wetland habitat that has been degraded globally but has an important carbon storage role. In order to expand the restoration of these productive and biodiverse habitats methods are required, that can be used for large scale habitat creation across a range of environmental conditions. The spreading of seagrass seeds has been proven to be a successful method for restoring seagrass around the world, however in places where the tidal range is large such methods become limited by resultant water movements. Here we describe and test a method for deploying seagrass seeds of the species Zostera marina over large scales using a new, simple method 'Bags of Seagrass Seeds Line (BoSSLine)'. This method involved planting seeds and sediment using natural fibre hessian bags deployed along strings anchored onto the seabed. When deployed in a suitable environment a 94% of bags developed mature seagrass shoots, unfortunately, one site subjected to a large storm event resulted in sediment burial of the bags and no seed germination. Bags were filled with 100 seeds with each leading to the development of 2.37 ± 2.41 mature shoots (206 ± 87 mm in length) 10 months after planting. The method was proven successful however the experiments illustrated the need to ensure habitat suitability prior to their use. The low seed success rate was comparable to other restoration studies however further trials are recommended to ensure ways to improve this rate. In conclusion, this study provides evidence for an effective, simple method 'Bags of Seagrass Seeds Line (BoSSLine)' for deploying seeds of the seagrass Zostera marina over large scales.


August Wilson granted me the following interview while he was in Washington, DC, for the November 1991 premiere of Two Trains Running at the Kennedy Center. Extremely personable and undeniably committed to his art, Wilson carefully outlined his answers to my questions about his growth from poet to playwright, about the cultural and political agendas underlying his plays, and about his role as a black writer. Shannon: Early in your career you made a gradual shift from writing poetry to writing plays. How has being a poet affected your success as a playwright? Wilson: It's the bedrock of my playwriting ... not so much in the language as in the approach and the thinking. Thinking as a poet, one thinks differently than one thinks as a playwright. The idea of metaphor is a very large idea in my plays and something that I find lacking in most contemporary plays. I think I write the kinds of plays that I do because I have twenty-six years of writing poetry underneath all of that. Shannon: I'm fascinated by the combination of memory, history, myth-making, and the blues in your work. Do you perceive your role as an historian, as a prophet, as a healer, or perhaps as something else? Wilson: Well, I just say playwright. Of course, I use history and the historical perspective. For instance, in The Piano Lesson, you can see the actor, the character going down a road, and given the benefit of a fifty-year historical perspective, we know how all this out. I try to keep all of the elements of the culture alive in my work, and myth is certainly a part of it. Mythology, history, social organizations, economics--all of these things are part of the culture. I make sure that each element is in some way represented--some elements more so than others--in the plays, which I think gives them a fullness and a completeness, creates the impression that this is an entire world. Shannon: What is your reasoning behind writing a 400-year-old autobiography in ten plays? At what point did you decide upon this strategy? Wilson: Well, actually, I didn't start out with a grand idea. I wrote a play called Jitney!, set in '71, and a play called Fullerton Street that I set in '41. Then I wrote Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which I set in '27, and it was after I did that that I thought, "I've written three plays in three different decades, so why don't I just continue to do that?" Also, everyone assumes that any writer's work--it's not just my work--is autobiographical, that you're writing about yourself. None of the events in the plays are events in my life--none of the characters are modeled after me--because I feel that, if you write your autobiography, you don't have anything else to tell. So I thought when people would ask me that, I'd say, "Well you know I've got a 400-year autobiography. That's what I'm writing from. There's a whole bunch of material. You never run out of stories." Shannon: But you're part of the story Wilson: Oh, absolutely. I'm definitely a part of the story. I claim all 400 years of it. And I claim the right to tell it in any way I choose because it's, in essence, my autobiography--only it's the story of myself and my ancestors. Shannon: As you know, I'm in the midst of writing a biocritical study of your work. During my research I've come across quite a few titles and have acquired the scripts of several never-before-published works. For example, you wrote several brief scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota. The plays that I have read include An Evening with Margaret Mead, How Coyote Got His Special Powers, and Eskimo Song Duel. Could you talk briefly about that experience? Wilson: Well, it was a good experience. If nothing else, it was the first time that I was paid for writing, and it was good money, as I recall. There wasn't, though, a whole lot of creativity necessary to document a northwest Indian tale for a group to act out on the anthropology floor. …


Well-known difficulties in applying sequence stratigraphic concepts to deposits that accumulated across slowly subsiding cratonic interior regions have limited our ability to interpret the history of continental-scale tectonism, oceanographic dynamics of epeiric seas, and eustasy. We used a multi-disciplinary approach to construct a high-resolution stratigraphic framework for lower Paleozoic strata in the cratonic interior of North America. Within this framework, these strata proved readily amenable to modern sequence stratigraphic techniques that were formulated based on successions along passive margins and in foreland basins, settings markedly different from the cratonic interior. Parasequences, parasequence stacking patterns, systems tracts, maximum flooding intervals, and sequence-bounding unconformities can be confidently recognized in the cratonic interior using mostly standard criteria for identification. The similarity of cratonic interior and foreland basin successions in size, geometry, constituent facies, and local stacking patterns of nearshore parasequences is especially striking. This similarity indicates that the fundamental processes that establish shoreface morphology and determine the stratal expression of retreat and progradation were likewise generally the same, despite marked differences in tectonism, physiography, and bathymetry between the two settings. Our results do not support the widespread perception that Paleozoic cratonic interior successions are so anomalous in stratal geometries, and constitute such a poor record of time, that they are poorly suited for modern sequence stratigraphic analyses. The particular arrangement of stratal elements in the cratonic interior succession we studied is no more anomalous or enigmatic than the variability in architecture that sets all sedimentary successions apart from one another. Thus, Paleozoic strata of the cratonic interior are most appropriately considered as a package that belongs in a continuum of variable stratigraphic packages reflecting variable controls such as subsidence and shelf physiography. Special conditions of exceptionally slow subsidence rate, shallow bathymetry, and nearly flat regional shelf gradient are manifest mostly by the presence of individual systems tracts of relatively long duration that extend for much greater distances across depositional strike than those that characterize successions deposited in more dynamic tectonic and physiographic settings. These results suggest that if other cratonic interior successions are as anomalous as reported, a low sediment supply may have played a primary role in development of their apparently condensed stratal architecture. The results also lead us to suggest that a nonvegetated lower Paleozoic landscape played a relatively insignificant role in the development of what are commonly perceived to be enigmatic stratigraphic features of sheet sandstones, particularly their widespread yet thin geometry, and a scarcity of shale and siltstone.


Epiphytes constitute it Major component of tropical forests. However, human caused disturbances can alter the structure and diversity of epiphyte community. We Surveyed and compared the diversity and distribution of epiphytic bryophytes on host free trunks within 0.2m above ground in two old-growth and three secondary forests in Xujiaba, Mt. Ailao, SW China, in order to see whether disturbed forests have lower diversity and to identify environmental variables that can influence epiphyte distribution. We recorded 176 species in total 38 families. Meteoriaceae was the dominant families ill terms of species richness (24 species). Species richness did not differ between old-growth and secondary forests, however, beta diversity indexes were severely reduced in secondary forests. The life forms differed ill preferences to some forest types: fail (moss) and rough mat (moss) preferred old-growth forests, while turf (moss) was, commoner in secondary forests. The degree Of abundance of CWD (Coarse Woody Debris), atmospheric relative humidity, the roughness and water-holding capacity of host bark were the four environmental variables found to be significantly influencing the distribution of life forms in epiphytic bryophytes in the study area. Although secondary forests were similar to old-growth forests in epiphytic diversity, the absence of particular bark features in trees in secondary forest limited the growth of certain life form groups. Besides retaining CWD ill old-growth forest, forest management should encourage the protection and rehabilitation of trees with special bark features to enhance the diversity of epiphytic bryophytes.


This thesis has been written in partial fulfillment of the requirements of a masters programme in intercultural communication. The study focuses on aspects of linguistic communication, specifically in media discourse, where "cultural boundaries" are determined by sexual difference and where much misunderstanding appears to be founded in different conceptions of homosexuality. I have investigated the theoretical frameworks within which discursive reflection on homosexuality can be studied from an interdisciplinary perspective. The research examines reports in a student newspaper that topicalise homosexuality; it also considers reports that are part of a discourse in which communication takes place between a heterosexual majority and a homosexual minority. Reports that were published across a period of five years were examined, in order to determine whether there has been any development in the discourse. This investigation of a particular kind of intercultural media discourse has been augmented by investigating attitudes towards the minority group by means of a questionnaire, designed by Kite and Deaux (1986: 137). This questionnaire was distributed among 240 students in an attempt to determine whether their reported attitudes coincide with those reported in the media. Despite the fact that homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) more than 30 years ago, reports of homophobic violence and attitudes in news media reveal that a significant percentage of the population still views homosexuality as an illness, a psychological disorder or as sin. The aim of this thesis was to examine the possible (re)enforcement of such homophobic ideologies in news media, as well as the possible (re)enforcement of increasingly tolerant ideologies, by making use of frameworks developed within Critical Discourse Analysis, by van Dijk (1998) and Gelber (2002). While the results of the media analysis indicate a growing acceptance of homosexuality, the survey results reveal that the majority of the heterosexual students surveyed still maintain homophobic attitudes. Furthermore, discrepancies in the survey results reveal the complex nature of such attitudes.


The emergence of location-based social networks provides an unprecedented chance to study the interaction between human mobility and social relations. This work is a step towards quantifying whether a location is suitable for conducting social activities, and the notion is named location sociality. Being able to quantify location sociality creates practical opportunities such as urban planning and location recommendation. To quantify a location's sociality, we propose a mixture model of HITS and PageRank on a heterogeneous network linking users and locations. By exploiting millions of check-in data generated by Instagram users in New York and Los Angeles, we investigate the relation between location sociality and several location properties, including location categories, rating and popularity. We further perform two case studies, i.e., friendship prediction and location recommendation, experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of our quantification.


Whether they are rich or poor, tall or short, liberal or conservative, most young American women have one thing in common--they want to be thin. And they are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get that way, even to the point of starving themselves. Why are America's women so preoccupied with weight? What has caused record numbers of young women--even before they reach their teenage years--to suffer from anorexia and bulimia? In Am I Thin Enough Yet?, Sharlene Hesse-Biber answers these questions and more, as she goes beyond traditional psychological explanations of eating disorders to level a powerful indictment against the social, political, and economic pressures women face in a weight-obsessed society. Packed with firsthand, intimate portraits of young women from a wide variety of backgrounds, and drawing on historical accounts and current material culled from both popular and scholarly sources, Am I Thin Enough Yet? offers a provocative new way of understanding why women feel the way they do about their minds and bodies. Specifically, Hesse-Biber highlights the various ways in which American families, schools, popular culture, and the health and fitness industry all undermine young women's self-confidence as they inculcate the notions that thinness is beauty and that a woman's body is more important than her mind. The author builds her case in part by letting her subjects tell their own story, revealing in their own words how current standards of femininity lead many women to engage in eating habits that are not only self-destructive, but often akin to the obsessions and ritualistic behaviors found among members of cults. For instance, we meet Delia, a bulimic college senior who makes the startling admission that "my final affirmation of myself is how many guys look at me when I go into a bar." We even learn of six-year-olds like Lauren, already preoccupied with her weight, who considers herself "a real clod" in ballet class because she is not as thin as her peers. We are introduced to women (and men) from different cultures who themselves have acquired eating disorders in pursuit of the American standard of physical perfection. And we learn of the often tragic consequences of this obsession with thinness, as in the case of Janet, who underwent surgery to reduce her weight only to suffer from chronic illness and pain as a result. The book concludes with Hesse-Biber's prescriptions on how women can overcome their low self-image through therapy, spiritualism, and grass-root efforts to empower themselves against a society obsessed with beauty and thinness. Am I Thin Enough Yet? brings into sharp focus the multitude of societal and psychological forces that compel American women to pursue the ideal of thinness at any cost. It will remain a benchmark work on the subject for many years to come.


This thesis examines the settlement of Gujaratis in Harrow, London, and the evolution of Gujarati organisations during the 1970s and the 1980s. Most Harrow Asians settled in the Borough after 1972, following their expulsion from Uganda. The Asian community, therefore, is predominantly East African and the majority of Asians originate from the Indian state of Gujarat. Gujaratis were not welcomed in Harrow, yet the Borough could not prevent Asian immigrants from settling in this part of London. The proximity of Harrow to large Asian settlements in north London made it attractive to the more established immigrants. The first years of settlement were mainly dedicated to building a firm economic base, and Gujaratis established, during the 1970s, various associations that complemented their economic activity during the 1970s. Some associations were founded on traditional lines. These were mainly caste and religious associations, which were also the most resourceful in financial and human terms. The affiliation of Gujaratis to different caste associations created serious rivalries with the consequence that the Gujarati community in Britain has remained divided. In Harrow, rivalries have emerged within the Asian community as a result of a growing competition for scarce resources. During the 1980s, Harrow Council declared itself an equal opportunities employer and, by this act, has raised the expectations of Asians that the Borough would be more responsive to their needs. Several pressure groups have emerged, and Gujaratis played a major role in exerting pressure on the Council. Though some Gujarati activists were equally active in traditional associations, the intensification of the relationships with the Council assisted in the emergence of a new type of leadership, comprised Gujaratis who identified themselves as black and who adopted the ideological framework of institutional racism. Although the thesis is about the settlement in Harrow of this community, the original interest of the researcher was focused on the food habits of this population as a method of measuring acculturation. Fieldwork on this subject was conducted both in Harrow and India. The thesis ends, therefore, with a description of the Gujarati diet both in Britain and India, with an analysis of the significance of the changes that have taken place in this area.


Vortex tube is a device which is used to separate the energy of a compressible flow of liquid into two streams viz. hot stream and cold stream. In this research paper Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and experimental studies are conducted towards the optimization of the Ranque–Hilsch vortex tubes on a macro scale. Simulations of more than 20 models of vortex tube were studied and performed; these models included change in length, change in inlet pressure, change in cold orifice diameter, change in cross section of nozzles, change in material of apparatus, number of inlets. Conclusions and inferences were drawn based on maximum cold end temperature difference in the studied models. The obtained computational results for optimum cold diameter (dc), l/d ratio, number of inlet, profile of inlet were validated through experiments.


Generative urban design is an emerging field which seeks to apply a procedural algorithm to grow urban forms parametrically. These tools are mainly used for cityscapes in the entertainment industry. Currently, there is active research to repurpose them as semantically meaningful tools for urban design. This paper reviews the two primary approaches to generative urban design: CityEngine and Urban Induction(UI).AfterconsiderationUIwaschosenasthepreferredapproach.Thispaper is a commentary on and assumes a background knowledge of UI. A novel synthesis of UI and Form-Based Codes is proposed as a lightweight method of generation. This method is then tested on a 3,040 acre site in San Francisco. Results indicate while the method works conceptually in simple cases it should be expanded into a comprehensive toolset before it can be considered an open-source replacement for CityEngine.


Canada has committed internationally to several agreements to limit climate change, most recently by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol in 2002. However, its domestic climate change policy is not reflective of these international commitments. In particular, federal government climate change policy over the last decade has emphasised noncompulsory policies such as voluntarism, information provision, and modest subsidies. These policies are designed primarily to engender minimal political resistance, and have been relatively ineffective in providing the incentives and regulatory structure for the dramatic technological and behavioural change required for significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Without a major change in direction towards more compulsory policies, it seems unlikely that Canada will achieve significant domestic greenhouse gas reductions over and beyond the Kyoto Protocol time frame. We suggest a more compulsory policy approach dominated by market-oriented regulations. When designed appropriately, this type of policy stimulates the development and commercialisation of new technologies without dramatically affecting prices of energy or goods.


The overall aim of this work described in this thesis was to apply MALDI-MS and imaging MALDI-MS (MALDI-MSI) to the analysis of compounds of interest in occupational hygiene monitoring.Isocyanates are highly reactive compounds with a wide variety of industrial uses. MALDI-MS and MS/MS were used to investigate diisocyanate stability and reactivity. A monoisocyanate intermediate product was observed from the hydrolysis of both an aromatic and also an aliphatic diisocyanate. The stability of this product was assessed over a 14 day experimental period. Ethanol was used to derivatise hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI) and the resulting urethane was observed to be stable over 14 days. This derivatisation method was incorporated into a surface swab technique for sampling of HDI from work surfaces.Industrial diisocyanates have been reported to penetrate through skin and to be excreted as diamine metabolites in urine. A LC-MS method for the determination of free toluene diamine (TDA) monomer formed by biotransformation of toluene diisocyanate (TDI) when applied to HaCaT cells was developed. In the two experiments performed, TDA was only observed at low levels after spiking with high concentrations of TDI. This appeared to be due to most of the isocyanate becoming conjugated to proteins within the cell and thus not being extracted during the extraction procedure.A novel ethanol-saturated cellulose membrane blotting technique was developed for the extraction and ethanol-derivatisation of HDI from the surface of skin. However, not all of the HDI present on the membrane reacted with the ethanol. Increasing the amount of ethanol on the membrane did increase the amount of derivatised HDI monomer observed although this occurred at the expense of spatial information. The technique was also applied for analysis of the insecticide chlorpyrifos, for both skin surface sampling and permeation studies. From the images obtained, chlorpyrifos was observed to readily penetrate through the stratum corneum and reach a depth of 1.7mm. The highest amount was located in the dermis after the 1 hour exposure time.The dermal absorption of HDI was monitored after 1 hour exposure by mapping HDI monoamine penetration through the skin via indirect blotting and novel direct skin analysis methods. Similar profiles were observed from both methods. Penetration depths of 2.3 and 2.6 mm were observed for the direct skin and indirect blotting methods respectively. The highest level of HDI monoamine was located in the dermis.


BACKGROUND
The effects of folic acid fortification on neural tube defects is well known. Other reports show a beneficial effect of the fortification on orofacial clefts, urinary malformations and defects caused by limb reduction.

AIM
To determine the changes in prevalence of congenital malformations after the start of flour folic acid fortification in Chile.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
The rates of 22 malformations occurring in the maternity of the University of Chile Clinical Hospital and other Chilean hospitals participating in the Latin American Collaborative Study of Congenital Malformations (ECLAMC) were compared before and after the start of flour folic acid fortification.

RESULTS
After the start of folic acid fortification a significant reduction in the rates of anencephalia, spina bifida and diaphragmatic hernia, was observed. The rates of all other malformations remained stable or increased. The rates of all malformations at the University of Chile Clinical Hospital had a steady increase until 2005 and were significantly higher than in the rest of hospitals participating in ECLAMC.

CONCLUSIONS
Folic acid fortification was associated with an expected reduction in rates of spina bifida and anencephalia and an unexpected reduction in the rates of diaphragmatic hernia.


Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term transmedia with transnational, they show that the movement beyond specific media or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. In two parts, the book stages debates across essays, creating dialogues that give different narrative accounts of what is historically and ideologically at stake in medium specificity and digital politics. Each part includes a substantive introduction by one of the editors. Part 1 examines precursors, contemporary theorists, and artists who are protagonists in this discursive drama, focusing on how the transmedia frictions and continuities between old and new forms can be read most productively: N. Katherine Hayles and Lev Manovich redefine medium specificity, Edward Branigan and Yuri Tsivian explore nondigital precursors, Steve Anderson and Stephen Mamber assess contemporary archival histories, and Grahame Weinbren and Caroline Bassett defend the open-ended mobility of newly emergent media. In part 2, trios of essays address various ideologies of the digital: John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Herman Gray, and David Wade Crane redraw contours of race, space, and the margins; Eric Gordon, Cristina Venegas, and John T. Caldwell unearth database cities, portable homelands, and virtual fieldwork; and Mark B.N. Hansen, Holly Willis, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gmez-Pea examine interactive bodies transformed by shock, gender, and color. An invaluable reference work in the field of visual media studies, Transmedia Frictions provides sound historical perspective on the social and political aspects of the interactive digital arts, demonstrating that they are never neutral or innocent.


The education of children with disabilities in the general education classroom has evolved over many years. The popularity of inclusive education became widespread in the 1980s (Friend, Cook, Hurley-Chamberlain, & Shamberger, 2010). It began as a civil rights movement, based on the rationale that all children–disabled and non-disabled–should have access to the same academic and social opportunities within the school (Sailor, 2002). In 2006, 95% of the special education students aged six to 21 years old were educated in regular classrooms for at least 50% or more of their school day (U.S. Department of Education, 2008). To serve special education students in the general education classroom, schools began implementing several different inclusion models. One of those models was cooperative teaching, also called co-teaching. Co-teaching is characterized as a general education teacher and a special education teacher or another specialist collaborating for the purpose of delivering instruction together to students, including students with disabilities, in the general education setting (Friend et al., 2010). Co-teaching was designed to address the needs of students in an inclusive classroom by having a general education and special education teacher in the same classroom to meet the needs of individual students (Murawski & Dieker, 2008). Co-teaching has become an increasingly common option for educating students with disabilities in order to comply with the federal mandates (Friend & Cook, 2014). In 1994, the National Center on Educational Restructuring and Inclusion reported that co-teaching was the most frequently employed special education service delivery model for inclusive classrooms. The European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education in 2003 stated that 3 co-teaching was one of the five educational approaches that appeared to be effective within the inclusive education model (Saloviita & Takala, 2010). Now, more than a decade after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the popularity of co-teachings has only increased (Kloo & Zigmond, 2008). Murawski and Swanson (2001) completed a meta-analysis of co-teaching studies to determine the impact of co-teaching on students. They reviewed six studies and found the overall mean impact of co-teaching to be 0.40, suggesting that it is a moderately effective procedure for influencing student outcomes. Quantitative and qualitative research over the past 20 years has consistently established that students in co-taught classrooms learn more and perform better on academic assessments than do special education students in more restrictive services delivery models (Walsh, 2012). In order for students and teachers to achieve maximum benefit from co-teaching, certain elements, including the components, methods, benefits, and barriers need to be addressed. The purpose of this study was to examine co-teaching in a select sample of school districts to determine the presence or absence of those elements in their co-teaching models that lead to successful co-teaching. This study employed a case study research methodology. Further, the study incorporates qualitative and quantitative research methods, creating a mixed-methods study. Three school districts in Minnesota were selected to participate in the study. The districts were required to have a co-teaching program district wide. Data were collected through an online survey and an interview of select co-teachers who responded to the survey. Analysis of the data was done using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). 4 The results of this study provide recommendation for further practice and research that may benefit the field of educational leadership. A number of limitations of the study were also presented.


Event cameras are bioinspired sensors with reaction times in the order of microseconds. This property makes them appealing for use in highly-dynamic computer vision applications. In this work,we explore the limits of this sensing technology and present an ultra-fast tracking algorithm able to estimate six-degree-of-freedom motion with dynamics over 25.8 g, at a throughput of 10 kHz,processing over a million events per second. Our method is capable of tracking either camera motion or the motion of an object in front of it, using an error-state Kalman filter formulated in a Lie-theoretic sense. The method includes a robust mechanism for the matching of events with projected line segments with very fast outlier rejection. Meticulous treatment of sparse matrices is applied to achieve real-time performance. Different motion models of varying complexity are considered for the sake of comparison and performance analysis


In this study we estimate the statistical properties of abyssal hill morphology adjacent to the Southeast Indian Ridge in a region where the axial morphology changes from axial high to axial valley without a corresponding change in spreading rate. We explore the influence of axial morphology on abyssal hills and place these results within the context of response to spreading rate. Two cruises aboard the R/V Melville collected Sea Beam 2000 multibeam data along the Southeast Indian Ridge, providing continuous multibeam coverage of the axis from ∼89°W to ∼118°W, and ∼100% coverage within four survey regions extending out to ∼45 km (∼1.2 Ma) from the axis [Sempere et al., 1997; Cochran et al., 1997]. We apply the statistical modeling method of Goff and Jordan [1988] to gridded data from the four survey areas, examining in particular estimates of abyssal hill rms height, characteristic width and length, aspect ratio, and skewness. Two analyses are performed: (1) comparison of the along-axis variation in abyssal hill characteristics to ridge segmentation, and (2) a calculation of population statistics within axial high, intermediate, and axial valley data populations of this study, and comparison of these results to population statistics derived from studies adjacent to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and East Pacific Rise. We find that abyssal hills generated along axial high mid-ocean ridges are very different from those generated along axial valley mid-ocean ridges, not only with respect to size and shape, but also in their response to such factors as spreading rate and segmentation.


A key theme underlying recent changes to youth justice in England and Wales has been responsibilising young offenders by holding them accountable for their offending. While this has led to a focus on offending behaviour and restorative justice programmes to address perceived deficits in young offenders' cognitive skills, it has also been recognised that their ability to desist from crime is frequently constrained by acute levels of socio-economic disadvantage. With this concern in mind, policy makers have introduced several initiatives to combat the risks associated with social exclusion, and facilitate reintegration. Yet research suggests that these initiatives have failed to alleviate the problem. It will be argued that this is because New Labour has constituted reintegration as the personal moral responsibility of young offenders, with scant regard to structural barriers and broader social justice ideals. The article concludes by suggesting that a solution may lie in the propagation of a transformative rights-based agenda.


Because pesticides may operate through different mechanisms, the authors studied the risk of prostate cancer associated with specific pesticides in the Agricultural Health Study (1993-2007). With 1,962 incident cases, including 919 aggressive prostate cancers among 54,412 applicators, this is the largest study to date. Rate ratios and 95% confidence intervals were calculated by using Poisson regression to evaluate lifetime use of 48 pesticides and prostate cancer incidence. Three organophosphate insecticides were significantly associated with aggressive prostate cancer: fonofos (rate ratio (RR) for the highest quartile of exposure (Q4) vs. nonexposed = 1.63, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.22, 2.17; P(trend) < 0.001); malathion (RR for Q4 vs. nonexposed = 1.43, 95% CI: 1.08, 1.88; P(trend) = 0.04); and terbufos (RR for Q4 vs. nonexposed = 1.29, 95% CI: 1.02, 1.64; P(trend) = 0.03). The organochlorine insecticide aldrin was also associated with increased risk of aggressive prostate cancer (RR for Q4 vs. nonexposed = 1.49, 95% CI: 1.03, 2.18; P(trend) = 0.02). This analysis has overcome several limitations of previous studies with the inclusion of a large number of cases with relevant exposure and detailed information on use of specific pesticides at 2 points in time. Furthermore, this is the first time specific pesticides are implicated as risk factors for aggressive prostate cancer.


Background: Tibial plateau fractures, Tibial plafond fractures, proximal 1/3 fractures of tibia are serious type of injuries which are found to be difficult to treat. The injury is caused by high velocity RTA which apart from causing fractures, cause extensive damage to soft tissue envelop. Aim: To study functional and radiological outcome of compound comminuted fractures of proximal and distal third tibia. Method: This is a descriptive longitudinal study carried out in 15 patients operated for hybrid external fixation for compound comminuted fractures of proximal and distal third tibia. Every patient was assessed for common fracture site, healing time and functional outcome. Results: Out of 15 patients 13 has good result 1 had varus deformity and average fracture healing time with full weight bearing walking was 20 to 24 weeks. Conclusion:-The comminuted fractures of the proximal third or the distal third fractures pose serious problems due the injury/ degloving of the soft tissue envelop. The risk of infection secondary to internal fixation is very high. Also it has been noted to have high incidence of post injury residual deformity, & knee joint stiffness. Hence less invasive method of hybrid fixator was tried which would minimize these problems and allow the biological healing of the fracture. This technique is simple, user friendly, & can allow adjustment even after frame application.


This article reviews the current state of English insurance law applied to the duty of utmost good faith, in particular the assured's duty of full and accurate disclosure, and to insurance warranties, and examines the adequacy of the proposals made by the Law Commission for the reform of the law in both instances. Whilst recognising that there is a case for some reform, the reform recommended by the Law Commission is considered to extend beyond the bounds of what is necessary for the just and rational alteration of the law. In summary, the duty of utmost good faith requires no substantive reform as to the existence or scope of the duty, but does require a change by which the Courts will have the power to exercise a discretion to achieve a flexible remedial response to any breach of the duty. The principal reform which would benefit the law of warranties should concentrate on the clarity of the language in which the warranty is expressed and to identify the circumstances in which a true promissory warranty may be said to exist.


The paper presents the results of studies in properties of ZnTPP and nanocomposite ZnTPP-C60 films prepared under quasi-equilibrium conditions. The films' composition, structure and surface morphology have been investigated. Inequality in the optical absorption and photoluminescence (PL) spectra of ZnTPP solution and ZnTPP film was testimony to the formation of a regulated phase with the 745 nm-phosphorescence at room temperature. The X-ray effect on the PL spectra of ZnTPP and ZnTPP-C60 films was considered. The former was rather stable to the used X-ray doses. The dose dependences of electronic and electron-vibrational contributions to the PL emission intensity were different for the latter. A decrease in the emission intensity due to the electronic transition in the composite was caused by a probability increase in an excitation transfer from the carrier to the fullerene C60 and, correspondingly, by PL suppression.


The Mgeni Estuary on the wave dominated east coast of South Africa occupies a narrow, bedrock confined, alluvial valley and is partially blocked at the coast by an elongate sandy barrier. Fluvial sediment extends to the barrier and marine deposition is restricted to a small flood tidal delta.

Sequential aerial photography, sediment sampling and topographical surveys reveal a cyclical pattern of sedimentation that is mediated by severe fluvial floods which exceed normal energy thresholds. During severe floods (up to 10x 103 m3 s−1), lateral channel confinement promotes vertical erosion ofbed material. Eroded material is deposited as an ephemeral delta in the sea. After floods the river gradient is restored within a few months through rapid fluvial deposition and formation of a shallow, braided channel. Over an extended period (approximately 70 years) the estuary banks and bars are stabilised by vegetation and mud deposition. Subsequent downcutting in marginal areas transforms the channel to an anastomosing pattern which represents a stable morphology which adjusts to the normal range of hydrodynamic conditions. This cyclical pattern of deposition produces multiple fill sequences in such estuaries under conditions of stable sea level.

The barrier and adjacent coastline prograde temporarily after major floods as the eroded barrier is reformed by wave action, but excess sediment is ultimately eroded as waves adjust the barrier to an equilibrium plan form morphology. Deltaic progradation is prevented by a steep nearshore slope, and rapid sediment dispersal by wave action and shelf currents.

During transgression, estuarine sedimentation patterns are controlled by the balance between sedimentation rates and receiving basin volume. If fluvial sedimentation keeps pace with the volume increase of a basin an estuary may remain shallow and river dominated throughout its evolution and excess fluvial sediments pass through the estuary into the sea. Only if the rate of volume increase of the drowned river valley exceeds the volume of sediment supply are deep water environments formed. Under such conditions an estuary becomes a sediment sink and infills by deltaic progradation and lateral accretion as predicted by evolutionary models for microtidal estuaries. Bedrock valley geometry may exert an important control on this rate of volume increase independently of variations in the rate of relative sea level change.

If estuarine morphology is viewed as a function of the balance of wave, tidal and fluvial processes, the Mgeni Estuary may be defined as a river dominated estuary in which deltaic progradation at the coast is limited by high wave energy. It is broadly representative of other river dominated estuaries along the Natal coast and a conceptual regional depositional model is proposed. Refinement of a globally applicable model will require further comparative studies of river dominated estuaries in this and other settings, but it is proposed that river dominated estuaries represent a distinct type of estuarine morphology.


Background The adverse health effects of Asian dust (AD) on the respiratory system of children are unclear. We hypothesized that AD events may lead to increased visits by children to emergency medical centers due to bronchial asthma and respiratory diseases, including bronchial asthma. Methods We used anonymized data on children receiving primary emergency treatment at Nagasaki Municipal Primary Emergency Medical Center, Japan between March 2010 and September 2013. We used Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data to assess AD exposure and performed time-stratified case-crossover analyses to examine the association between AD exposure and emergency department visits. The main analysis was done with data collected from March through May each year. Results The total number of emergency department visits during the study period was 756 for bronchial asthma and 5421 for respiratory diseases, and the number of "AD days" was 47. In school children, AD events at lag day 3 and lag day 4 were associated with increased emergency department visits due to bronchial asthma, with odds ratios of 1.837 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.212-2.786) and 1.829 (95% CI, 1.179-2.806), respectively. AD events were significantly associated with respiratory diseases among preschool children at lag day 0, lag day 1, and lag day 2, with odds ratios of 1.244 (95% CI, 1.128-1.373), 1.314 (95% CI, 1.189-1.452), and 1.273 (95% CI, 1.152-1.408), respectively. These associations were also significant when the results were adjusted for meteorological variables and other air pollutants. Conclusions The study findings suggested that AD exposure increases emergency department visits by children.


Fifty Key Texts in Art History is an anthology of critical commentaries selected from the classical period to the late modern. It explores some of the central and emerging themes, issues and debates within Art History as an increasingly expansive and globalised discipline. It features an international range of contributors , including art historians, artists, curators and gallerists.

Arranged chronologically, each entry includes a bibliography for further reading and a key word index for easy reference. Text selections range across issues including artistic value, cultural identity, modernism, gender, psychoanalysis, photographic theory, poststructuralism and postcolonialism.

•Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock Old Mistresses, Women, Art & Ideology (1981)

•Victor Burgin's The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (1986)

•Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture: Hybridity, Liminal Spaces and Borders (1994)

•Geeta Kapur When was Modernism in Indian Art? (1995)

•Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1999)

•Georges Didi Huberman Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (2004)


This study focuses on detecting vehicle crossings (events) with ground-based interferometric radar (GBR) time series data recorded at bridges in the course of critical infrastructure monitoring. To address the challenging event detection and time series classification task, we rely on a deep learning (DL) architecture. The GBR-displacement data originates from real-world measurements at two German bridges under normal traffic conditions. As preprocessing, we only apply a low-pass filter. We develop and evaluate a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) to achieve a solely data-driven event detection. As a baseline machine learning approach, we use a Random Forest (RF) with a selected feature-based input. Both models' performance is evaluated on two datasets by focusing on identifying events and pure bridge oscillations. Generally, the event classification results are promising, and the CNN outperforms the RF with an overall accuracy of 94.7 % on the test subset. By relying on an entirely unknown second dataset, we focus on the models' performances regarding the distinction between events and decays. On this dataset, the CNN meets this challenge successfully, while the feature-based RF classifies the majority of non-event decays as events. To sum up, the presented results reveal the potential of a data-driven DL approach concerning the detection of bridge crossing events in GBR-based displacement time series data. Based on such an event detection, a prospective assessment of bridge conditions seems feasible as an extension to previous structural health monitoring approaches.


Wettability of CO2/brine/clay is one of the most important parameters in assessing CO2 storage capacities and containment security. Despite its importance, the literature data in this context are very limited. We thus systematically measured montmorillonite, illite, and kaolinite wettability for CO2/brine, nitrogen/brine, and nitrogen/oil systems at various pressures (5, 10, 15, and 20 MPa) and temperatures (305 and 333 K). The zeta potential of each clay mineral was also measured to investigate its link to the macroscopic contact angle. The results show that both advancing and receding water contact angles for CO2/brine, nitrogen/brine, and nitrogen/oil systems increase with an increase in pressure. However, they are only slightly reduced by increasing temperature. It was also shown that montmorillonite has a higher water contact angle in the presence of CO2, followed by illite and kaolinite. The same trend was measured for nitrogen/brine and brine/oil systems. Consequently, montmorillonite is strongly oil-wet; kaolinite and illite, however, are strongly water-wet at typical storage conditions (high pressure and elevated temperature). This has important implications for CO2 geostorage in determining the flow of CO2 and its entrapment, fluid spreading, and dynamics in the reservoir.


In recent decades, the role of policy networks in public promotion of innovation has been highlighted in Western innovation policies and innovation theories. However, a knowledge gap still prevails concerning the paradox that while emphasizing decentralization and inclusion in theory, innovation theories and policies are characterized by a top-down approach in practice, ascribing superiority to certain actors and areas in advance while marginalizing others. This motivates the application of analytical approaches and empirical data that are more considerate towards a multitude of actors, areas and aspects in order to fully understand the dynamics of policy networks such as innovation systems and clusters. In this article, some of the marginalized actors and areas get to prove their importance empirically by means of existing tools of bottom-up policy analysis. A bottom-up approach has previously been applied in relation to innovation systems and clusters only in a few research studies. The paper portrays how four Swedish policy networks have challenged prevailing innovation policy and innovation research by highlighting the role of non-profit actors, services and creative industries and women's entrepreneurship and innovation. They have challenged the norms by expanding the range of relevant actors in such policy networks, resulting in entrepreneurial types of innovation systems. The bottom-up generated data contributes to the further development of existing innovation theories by exposing a causal relation between context, organization and outcomes – implying that experiences of marginalization evoke entrepreneurial types of innovation systems rather that institutional, engendering a wider range of innovations. The acknowledgement of such a causal relation increases the ability of innovation theories to correctly inform Western policies aiming to enhance innovation and evoke "smart, sustainable and inclusive growth", emphasized in the new


Prescribed fire is an important, ecology-driven tool for restoration of grassland systems. However, prescribed fire remains controversial for some grassland managers because of reported reductions in bird use of recently burned grasslands. Few studies have evaluated effects of fire on grassland bird populations in the northern mixed-grass prairie region. Fewer studies yet have examined the influence of fire on nest density or survival. In our review, we found no studies that simultaneously examined effects of fire on duck and passerine nesting. During 1998–2003, we examined effects of prescribed fire on the density of upland-nesting ducks and passerines nesting in north-central North Dakota, USA. Apparent nest densities of gadwall (Anas strepera), mallard (A. platyrhynchos), and all duck species combined, were influenced by fire history of study units, although the degree of influence was not compelling. Fire history was not related to nest densities of blue-winged teal (A. discors), northern shoveler (A. clypeata), or northern pintail (A. acuta); however, apparent nest densities in relation to the number of postfire growing seasons exhibited a strikingly similar pattern among all duck species. When compared to ducks, fire history strongly influenced apparent nest densities of clay-colored sparrow (Spizella pallida), Savannah sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensis), and bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus). For most species examined, apparent nest densities were lowest in recently burned units, increased during the second postfire growing season, and stabilized or, in some cases, decreased thereafter. Prescribed fire is critical for restoring the ecology of northern mixed-grass prairies and our findings indicate that reductions in nest densities are limited mostly to the first growing season after fire. Our results support the premise that upland-nesting ducks and several grassland passerine species are adapted to periodic fires occurring at a frequency similar to that of pre-Euro-American settlement of the region. © 2011 The Wildlife Society.


We hypothesized, on the basis of epidemiologic and animal toxicologic findings, that exposure to ozone (03) in air pollution can acutely impair cardiovascular function in susceptible human populations. We tested this hypothesis in 10 hypertensive and 6 healthy male volunteers aged 40-78 yr. Each subject, after catheterization of the right heart and a radial artery, was exposed in an environmentally controlled chamber to filtered air (FA) on one day and to 0.3 ppm o3 on the following day, for 3-hr periods with intermittent exercise. Relative to FA, 03 exposure induced little change in cardiac index, pressures and resistances in the central, pulmonary, or peripheral circulations, cardiac enzymes, homeostatic hormones (norepinephrine, epinephrine), or arterial oxygen saturation, as measured at rest after exposure. Stroke volume and central venous pressure showed small changes associated with 03 exposure, which were statistically but not clinically significant. During 03 exposure, heart rate increased relative to FA, even though ventilation rate did not increase. Post-O3-exposure resting heart rate also increased. Ozone exposure elicited statistically and clinically significant respiratory effects, i.e., increased the mean alveolar-arterial oxygen gradient by 10 mm Hg (P < 0.01 ), increased respiratory symptoms slightly but significantly (P < 0.05), and decreased mean forced vital capacity and FEV 1 by >5% (P < 0.01 ). These effects did not differ significantly between hypertensive and healthy subjects. This study, although limited by a non-ideal design and small sample, suggests that direct acute effects of moderate 03 exposure on cardiac function are unlikely in typical ambulatory healthy or hypertensive middle-aged and older men. However, 03 exposure can impair gas exchange, thereby indirectly increasing the hemodynamic load on the cardiovascular system. This, in turn, increases oxygen demands of a stressed myocardium, to a degree that may be clinically important in some patients with preexisting cardiopulmonary impairment. GONG ET AL. 03 & CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE 3