The results of an intensive monitoring study of main eutrophication parameters in relation to fish farming management, climate and hydrography in the Vassova coastal lagoon (Nestos Delta) are presented. The overall aim is to produce basic knowledge in order to contribute to the management of eutrophication of coastal lagoons at local and national levels. Due to extensive spatiotemporal variability of the measured parameters correlation and regression polynomial analysis was used to identify patterns (p<0.05). Freshwater was the main source of nitrate and phosphate in the lagoon. This finding has justified the reduction of freshwater inflow in the past, which, however, has increased mean salinity to 30 PSU and reduced spatial salinity gradients. Maximum nitrate values in winter coincided with adverse climatic and hydrographic conditions (high precipitation, strong NE to E winds and low tide) and fish farming management that hinder water circulation. Dissolved phosphorus variability indicated the combination of the external (freshwaters) and internal (sediment) P-sources. N/P water values indicated nitrogen being the most important nutrient for primary producers throughout the year, except in winter, when phosphorus was the most important nutrient. Practical measures for improving fish farming practices to decrease "eutrophication risk" during winter are suggested. Existing nutrient data from the Vassova and from other Greek lagoons in comparison were also presented and discussed.


ABSTRACT In Jefferson County, in the Illinois coal basin, southern Illinois, the Pennsylvanian column between the Shoal Creek and Stonefort Limestones, an interval of about 900 feet, was divided into seven intervals separated by widespread coals or limestones readily recognized on electric logs, namely the Shoal Creek Limestone, coal No. 8, West Franklin Limestone, coal No. 7, coal No. 5, coal No. 4, coal No. 2, and the Stonefort Limestone listed in descending order. These intervals were determined from 578 electric logs in the county, an average of about one per square mile. Sand-shale ratios were determined for each interval and it was found than a "channel" sandstone of one age occurs in each interval except between the Shoal Creek Limestone and coal No. 8. Two ages of channels occur in one interval. Sandstone percentage maps were made of each interval. Thicknesses of each interval were compared in the "channel" areas and nearby, outside the channel, to avoid regional variations in thickness. Assuming that the coals and limestones were laid down nearly parallel to each other, variations in interval result from greater compaction of the shales than of the sandstones. Results show the following percentages of differential compaction for the six intervals with channels listed in descending order: 21, 34, 29, 35, 42 and 54 percent.


The influence of socially responsible investing (SRI) on large and listed companies is limited. Private equity could be successful but methods have to be adapted to avoid the costs associated to SRI post-investment monitoring. Criteria have been applied in the investment screening process, notably in minority-related private equity investments. Despite its promising endeavour, minority-related investing is still not part of mainstream private equity, because the minorityrelated private equity risk–return profile is sub-optimal. The roots of the underperformance lie in the definition of intervention of private equity fund managers focusing on different opportunities. The author suggests that these private equity fund managers redefine the scope of their intervention from geographical or ethnical criteria to underprivileged people. Private equity fund managers will need to redefine the way they create value for their portfolio companies. The extra work would result in risk reduction and benefit usual private equity investors.


This study presents an experimental overview for the development of photocatalytic materials based on geopolymer binders as catalyst support matrices. Particularly, geopolymer matrices obtained from different solid precursors (fly ash and metakaolin), composite systems (siloxane-hybrid, foamed hybrid), and curing temperatures (room temperature and 60 °C) were investigated for the same photocatalyst content (i.e., 3% TiO2 by weight of paste). The geopolymer matrices were previously designed for different applications, ranging from insulating (foam) to structural materials. The photocatalytic activity was evaluated as NO degradation in air, and the results were compared with an ordinary Portland cement reference. The studied matrices demonstrated highly variable photocatalytic performance depending on both matrix constituents and the curing temperature, with promising activity revealed by the geopolymers based on fly ash and metakaolin. Furthermore, microstructural features and titania dispersion in the matrices were assessed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray (EDS) analyses. Particularly, EDS analyses of sample sections indicated segregation effects of titania in the surface layer, with consequent enhancement or depletion of the catalyst concentration in the active sample region, suggesting non-negligible transport phenomena during the curing process. The described results demonstrated that geopolymer binders can be interesting catalyst support matrices for the development of photocatalytic materials and indicated a large potential for the exploitation of their peculiar features.


The conventional aggregation tool in geographic information system (GIS) assumes that the aggregated grid resolution to be an integer multiple of the input grid resolution. This assumption is not always practicable, particularly in hydrologic applications, where the model resolution is decided based on number of other factors. A new tool in GIS (modified aggregation tool) is developed in the present study to generate the surface elevations and/or its derived parameters at any desired resolution. Applicability of the presented tool is tested for the Rincon Valley region in southern New Mexico, U.S.A. The 90 m digital elevation model (DEM) of the study area is aggregated and then smoothened to a uniform resolution of 402.3 m for use with the groundwater modelers and managers of the region. Surface elevations derived at model resolution using both conventional and modified aggregation tools are evaluated statistically. Results of the analysis conclude that the elevation data derived from the modified aggregation tool has resulted in minimal loss of spatial information content. The modified aggregation tool is developed such that the output dataset can be readily used by the hydrologists with no processing to the input DEM.


Recognising the possibility that Europe and America's economies may play a secondary role in the future compels us to enquire into the cultural changes our world will undergo as a result. What might a global media landscape - that can no longer be called 'western' - look like, and how might it affect cultural practice? Commissioned in 2008 by WGSN, a forecasting agency under pressure to supply global cultural trends, Potter launched a four-year project with Shanghai-based researcher Samantha Culp to investigate 'non-western' contemporary creative practice. Due to the unprecedented scope of the project - 12 reports including Global South Futurism, Afrofutures, Chinafrica Arts and JPEG politics, based on extensive research trips to China, India, Indonesia, Senegal, South Africa, Russia and Brazil - Potter and Culp were commissioned to co-curate the 2012 Impakt Arts Festival, titled 'No More Westerns in Utrecht'. This included the festival exhibition 'The Impossible Black Tulip'. Discussions on post-western futures occur on online platforms such as Africa is a Country and in disparate memes such as Futuristic Masjids, however these impulses have not been collected and displayed as artworks within a cohesive exhibition format. 18 young artists, most of whom had never exhibited in Europe, were invited to critically explore ideas of multi-directional cultural flows, hybrid languages and indigenous innovation along a south-south arts axis. The CBKU-Gallery was reconstructed into a mutated 'white cube', leading the audience through a utopian-whitewashed atrium into the semi-lit 'backstage', commenting on formal and informal channels of global culture. Funded by the Mondriaan Fund, a Dutch state-financed cultural organization, The Cultural Participation Fund and the Arts Collaboratory, supporters of knowledge sharing between Africa, Asia and Latin-America, the event aimed to generate new knowledge on post-western culture. Subsequent funding has been received from the Utrecht Peace Treaty to launch an online platform in November 2013 called 'PoW! – Charting the Post-Western'.


Wireless network on chip (WiNoC) is one of the promising on-chip interconnection networks for on-chip system architectures. In addition to wired links, these architectures also use wireless links. Using these wireless links makes packets reach destination nodes faster and with less power consumption. These wireless links are provided by wireless interfaces in wireless routers. The WiNoC architectures differ in the position of the wireless routers and how they interact with other routers. So, the placement of wireless interfaces is an important step in designing WiNoC architectures. In this paper, we propose a simulated annealing (SA) placement method which considers the routing algorithm as a factor in designing cost function. To evaluate the proposed method, the Noxim, which is a cycle-accurate network-on-chip simulator, is used. The simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce flit latency by up to 24.6% with about a 0.2% increase in power consumption.


In this paper, we consider the channel assignment problem in single radio multi-channel mobile ad-hoc networks. Specifically, we investigate the granularity of channel assignment decisions that gives the best trade-off in terms of performance and complexity. We present a new granularity for channel assignment that we refer to as component level channel assignment. The strategy is relatively simple, and is characterized by several impressive practical advantages. We also show that the theoretical performance of the component based channel assignment strategy does not lag significantly behind the optimal possible performance, and perhaps more importantly we show that when coupled with its several practical advantages, it significantly outperforms other strategies under most network conditions.


Economics is changing radically. This paradigm shift, the biggest in the field for over a century, will have profound implications for business, government and society for decades to come. In this groundbreaking book, economic thinker and writer Eric Beinhocker surveys the cutting-edge ideas of the leading economists, physicists, biologists and cognitive scientists who are fundamentally reshaping economics, and brings their work alive for a broad audience. These researchers argue that the economy is a 'complex adaptive system', more akin to the brain, the internet or an ecosystem than to the static picture of economic systems portrayed by traditional theory. They claim it is the evolutionary process of differentiation, selection and amplification, acting on designs for technologies, social institutions and businesses that drives growth in the economy over time. If Adam Smith provided the inspiration for economics in the twentieth century, it is Charles Darwin who is providing it in the twenty-first. If we can understand how evolution creates wealth, then we can better answer the question 'How can we create more wealth for the benefit of individuals, businesses and society?' Beinhocker shows how 'Complexity Economics' turns conventional wisdom on its head in areas such as business strategy, the design of organisations, the workings of stock markets and public policy. As sweeping in scope as its title, "The Origin of Wealth" is a landmark book that shatters orthodox economic theory, and will rewire our thinking about how we came to be here - and where we are going.


Executive Information Systems (EIS) are information systems designed for the direct use of the Executive to access business relevant information, including information about customers, competitors, key performance indicators, internal operations, stock prices and news. Classified as high-risk projects, just like any other IS projects, organizations have been cautious and critical in ensuring EIS successful implementation and continuous usage by their intended users, the Executives. Unilever South Africa is no exception, and would thus like to ensure a successful implementation and acceptance of its EIS. An EIS system that once implemented will be used, accepted and adopted by executives to drive the achievement of its strategic objectives. This research is intended to investigate and identify potential factors that are likely to affect user acceptance, usage and adoption of an EIS implemented by Unilever South Africa. The research investigation was based on a proposed model derived from Davis (1989) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) that explores the phenomena of 'perceived usefulness' and 'perceived ease of use', as drivers of user acceptance and illustrates the dynamics of the factors that affect the users' acceptance of the system. The research data was obtained via questionnaires and semi-structured interviews of users from the Unilever EIS user group. The feedback obtained was then analysed and tested against three hypotheses. All three hypotheses were accepted leading to the conclusions that: (a) Users' attitudes towards usage of the Unilever EIS are positively influenced by both their 'perceived usefulness' and 'perceived ease of use' of the system. (b) The Unilever EIS users' 'perceived usefulness' of the system positively influences their 'perceived ease of use' of the system. (c) The Unilever EIS users' 'perceived ease of use' of the system has a greater influence on their attitude towards the system usage than their 'perceived usefulness' of the system.


UNESCO since the 1970s has debated the best way to support and preserve cultural heritage forms. Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity were declared from 2001 until 2006, when the new Intangible Cultural Heritage convention replaced that program. Japan provided models and leadership for the masterpieces program. New thinking in museum practice, interest in finding ways to value performing arts as much as geographical or architectural monuments, and hopes for safeguarding and giving communities ownership of genres concerned were involved in the evolution from the masterpieces model to the Intangible Cultural Heritage model. The needs of Southeast Asian groups and their ownership of the process are queried.


Background: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is characterized by an intense desmoplastic stroma, due to the activation of pancreatic stellate cells (PSC). The activated PSC are characterized by a reduction of fat droplets, expression of α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA), and an increased synthesis and secretion of several connective tissue components such as fibronectin (FN) and collagen type I. Aberrant stromal-epithelial interactions contribute to pancreatic cancer spread and metastasis raising the possibility that targeting the stroma may represent viable strategy for treating pancreatic cancer. Our group has shown that pancreatic cancer progression can be restrained via modulation of the stellate cells in the stroma. Methods: Organotypic cultures (OT) were constructed to mimic human PDAC. Treatment of OT was performed to mimic human chemotherapy regimen cycles with all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA), targeting PSC, and the chemotherapeutic agent Gemcitabine (GEM), targeting pancreatic cancer cells (PCC). Furthermore, KPC mice (LSL-KrasG12D/+; LSL-Trp53R172H/+; Pdx-1-Cre) were treated with the combination of GEM and ATRA. Appropriate controls were used for both in vivo and in vitro assays using either drug alone or vehicle alone to dissect effect of individual drug. Both in vivo and in vitro assays were studied for various surrogate endpoints for chemotherapy efficacy. Results:In the organotypic model, ATRA alone or in combination with GEM reduced cancer cell and stellate cell invasion. The same treatment also reduced cancer cell proliferation. Stellate cell activation, as measured by fibronectin production per stellate cell, was significantly reduced upon combination treatment with GEM/ATRA, in comparison to cultures treated with GEM or ATRA only. In the KPC mice model, ATRA alone or in combination with GEM caused stromal collapse. The same regimen treatment led to an increase in vascular density in the tumor area and a significant impairment of the tumor growth, when compared with mice treated with ATRA or GEM alone. The number of necrotic areas was also higher in tumors from mice treated with the combination treatment of GEM/ATRA. Further assessments are being carried out. Conclusions:The combination treatment of all-trans retinoic acid and Gemcitabine may have a synergistic detrimental effect upon pancreatic cancer progression. Citation Format: Elisabete Florencio Carapuca, Emilios Gemenetzidis, Christine Feig, David Tuveson, Hemant Kocher. Developing drug combinations to co-target pancreatic cancer and its supporting stroma. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference on Pancreatic Cancer: Innovations in Research and Treatment; May 18-21, 2014; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2015;75(13 Suppl):Abstract nr B72.


Tenurial rights are critical for the Indigenous and forest-dwelling communities, and especially tribal groups of India. The discourse around the ownership, governance and management of forests in India underwent a significant change with the enactment of the Forest Rights Act, 2006. The livelihoods of people living close to and within forests are inextricably linked to the forest ecosystem. This paper demonstrates the learning that emerged through ground-level implementation of the Forest Rights Act, that recognition is only the beginning for building resilience. It also attempts to present the case of adaptation as the best mitigation and the most likely to be successful at the local level. A significant focus of the paper is to advocate that recognition of rights should provide a pathway to a process which is ecologically sustainable, socially just and economically beneficial for communities, and to suggest a way towards achieving convergence with government programmes.


As the need for well-prepared leaders in the nonprofit sector increases, so does the importance of identifying effective educational strategies to prepare emerging professionals. The case study method has been widely used in many disciplines to bring reality into the classroom. These cases are used to prepare emerging professionals to critically evaluate problems and issues and to develop action plans to address them. As more case studies become available in the nonprofit literature, instructors need to carefully consider how to help the students effectively prepare for case discussions, analysis, and reporting. This paper addresses practical instructor and student strategies that will increase the likelihood of a successful case study experience.


AIM
The concept of shared decision-making is poorly defined and often used interchangeably with related terms. The aim of this study was to delineate and clarify the concept of shared decision-making in the paediatric field.

METHOD
Rodgers and Knafl's evolutionary concept analysis was used to delineate and clarify the concept. Following a search of the CINAHL, PubMed and MEDLINE databases and online journals between 1995 and 2016, we included a total of 42 articles that referred to shared decision-making in the paediatric field.

RESULTS
The attributes included active participation of the three: parents, children and health professionals; collaborative partnership; reaching a compromise; and common goal for child's health. Antecedents were existing several options with different possible outcomes; substantial decisional conflict; recognising child's health situations that decision-making is needed; and willingness to participate in decision-making. Finally, the consequences included decreased decisional conflict; mutual empowerment; improved child health status; and improved quality of paediatric health care.

CONCLUSION
This study provides a theoretical understanding of the concept of shared decision-making in the paediatric field; furthermore, by integrating this concept into paediatric practice, it may help to reduce the gap between theory and practice. The analysis could also provide nursing researchers with insight into paediatric decision-making and establish a foundation to develop future interventions and situation-specific theory for promoting high-quality decision-making in the paediatric field.


ABSTRACT Models with intractable likelihood functions arise in areas including network analysis and spatial statistics, especially those involving Gibbs random fields. Posterior parameter estimation in these settings is termed a doubly intractable problem because both the likelihood function and the posterior distribution are intractable. The comparison of Bayesian models is often based on the statistical evidence, the integral of the un-normalized posterior distribution over the model parameters which is rarely available in closed form. For doubly intractable models, estimating the evidence adds another layer of difficulty. Consequently, the selection of the model that best describes an observed network among a collection of exponential random graph models for network analysis is a daunting task. Pseudolikelihoods offer a tractable approximation to the likelihood but should be treated with caution because they can lead to an unreasonable inference. This article specifies a method to adjust pseudolikelihoods to obtain a reasonable, yet tractable, approximation to the likelihood. This allows implementation of widely used computational methods for evidence estimation and pursuit of Bayesian model selection of exponential random graph models for the analysis of social networks. Empirical comparisons to existing methods show that our procedure yields similar evidence estimates, but at a lower computational cost. Supplementary material for this article is available online.


Qualitative methods of social research are to do with the interpretation and meaning of texts, words, images and actions. They are often defined, in contrast to quantitative methods, as methods that do not use numbers. However, recent years have seen two developments that are beginning to break down this simple distinction. One is the availability of software to assist the analysis of qualitative data – the text, images and video that researchers collect. Such software often has quantitative data mining functions built in which can be used to assist with the interpretation and analysis of qualitative data. The second development has been the growth in interest in mixed methods, that is, approaches to social research that combine the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Traditionally, there has been little reference to technology or number in the use of qualitative methods in social research and particularly in the teaching of qualitative methods at undergraduate level. The one exception to this is the discussion of the use of computer assisted qualitative data analysis programs in several textbooks aimed at undergraduate users. At the moment, although the use of such software is a standard part of most postgraduate training, it is not much used at undergraduate level. But there is clearly the potential to increase this level of usage, more in line with the almost ubiquitous use of software to support quantitative data analysis.

This project looked for examples of good practice in promoting STEM skills acquisition, "through the back door" so to speak, as part of teaching qualitative research methods. It identified what barriers there are both to the use of software at undergraduate level and to the use of numerical techniques to assist qualitative analysis. One barrier was the lack of good educational resources and data sets that can be used in such teaching.


For 20 years following the 1989–1990 democratic transition, Chilean politics was characterized by stable forms of party-based political representation, relatively low levels of social mobilization, and a technocratic consensus around a neoliberal development model that generated rapid and sustained, albeit highly unequal, patterns of economic growth. This sociopolitical matrix was challenged, however, when hundreds of thousands of students and their supporters took to the streets to protest against educational inequalities, while smaller numbers of protestors mobilized around a plethora of other labor, environmental, and indigenous rights claims. This wave of social protest occurred in a context of growing detachment of Chilean citizens from traditional parties and representative institutions, and it punctured the aura of inevitability and consensus that surrounded the country's economic model. The ground-swell of popular protest signified the end of a posttransition political era in Chile and the dawning of a new one defined by the repoliticization of social and economic inequalities, including vigorous debates about the social pillars of the neoliberal model and the reach of social citizenship rights. The Chilean case sheds new light on the processes by which inequalities come to be politicized or depoliticized in different structural, institutional, and ideational contexts.


Calling, Kingdom, and Cultural Engagement: Recovering Christian Spirituality for the Public Square Frank Boswell Doctor of Ministry School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary 2011 The purpose of this study was to examine how recovering an understanding of Christian calling could be key to de-compartmentalizing the lives of Christians and fostering a spirituality that connects faith with public life in today's postmodern environment. After examining the current cultural context, the paper considered how and why the evangelical church finds itself so marginalized and explored the consequences of that disengagement. It also looked closely at the way alternative spiritualities are penetrating the business world with alarming effectiveness and then demonstrated the superiority of the biblical theology of creation and calling, particularly as it applies to work. A significant concern that emerged was the importance of distinguishing between one's work and God's building of his kingdom. Although not directly building God's kingdom, people's work can still be an indirect vehicle by serving as a witness to the goodness and beauty of the new creation. Another theme was the critical importance of the doctrine of creation and how transforming it is for people's thinking and behavior in their work. The third discovery was how comprehensive and transformative the idea of calling can be for spiritual formation, particularly in surmounting the pervasive legalism plaguing dedicated Christians. It also provides a subtle but powerful way to interact meaningfully with non-believers. This approach allows conversations to begin with people's subjective awareness of, curiosity about, and hunger for a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives. The material in this study points the way to a fresh and timely approach to pastoral ministry by wedding ancient spirituality to the contemporary work environment and providing Christians with an increasingly urgent need for a voice in the public square. Content Reader: Richard J. Mouw, PhD


Although poets have written about warfare since at least the time of Homer, the Vietnam war has struck many observers as being immune to the interpretations of poetry and myth. "Lyric poetry of a traditional kind," writes one critic, "has proved inappropriate to communicate the character of the Vietnam war, its remoteness, its jargonized recapitulations, its seeming imperviousness to aesthetics." Nonetheless, the past two decades have seen an unprecedented outpouring of poetry that seeks to describe and come to terms with that bitterly divisive conflict. In "Radical Visions" Vince Gotera argues that poetry written by Vietnam veterans underlines the failure of traditional American myths to help Americans understand the war and its aftermath. The book blends sociohistorical commentary with close readings of individual works by such poets as Michael Casey, Walter McDonald, and W. D. Ehrhart. In the book's first section, "The 'Nam," Gotera examines several key mythic structures--the Wild West (a violent extension of the mythic virgin land), the machine in the garden, the city on the hill, regeneration through violence--all of which helped delude Americans about Vietnam and the war being fought there. In the second part, "The World," Gotera shows how another myth, the American Adam as an exemplar of ahistorical innocence, proved unusable for returning veterans attempting to readjust to American life. In addition to exposing these failed myths, Gotera argues, the poetry by Vietnam veterans reflects an effort to construct new myths--most notably that of the "warrior against war," an oxymoronic structure arising from the difficulties faced by returning veterans. In the book's final chapters, Gotera examines the work of Bruce Weigl and Yusef Komunyakaa, two poets whom the author considers most successful at portraying the moral absurdity of the Vietnam war without sacrificing lyrical aesthetics. The first comprehensive study devoted exclusively to poetry by Vietnam veterans, "Radical Visions" argues that this body of writing registers an important advance in the aesthetics and poetics of war literature and offers a cogent antiwar statement rooted in personal experience.


Abstract. In order to advance understanding of the role of seawater surfactants in the air–sea exchange of climatically active trace gases via suppression of the gas transfer velocity (kw), we constructed a fully automated, closed air–water gas exchange tank and coupled analytical system. The system allows water-side turbulence in the tank to be precisely controlled with an electronically operated baffle. Two coupled gas chromatographs and an integral equilibrator, connected to the tank in a continuous gas-tight system, allow temporal changes in the partial pressures of SF6, CH4 and N2O to be measured simultaneously in the tank water and headspace at multiple turbulence settings, during a typical experimental run of 3.25 h. PC software developed by the authors controls all operations and data acquisition, enabling the optimisation of experimental conditions with high reproducibility. The use of three gases allows three independent estimates of kw for each turbulence setting; these values are subsequently normalised to a constant Schmidt number for direct comparison. The normalised kw estimates show close agreement. Repeated experiments with Milli-Q water demonstrate a typical measurement accuracy of 4% for kw. Experiments with natural seawater show that the system clearly resolves the effects on kw of spatial and temporal trends in natural surfactant activity. The system is an effective tool with which to probe the relationships between kw, surfactant activity and biogeochemical indices of primary productivity, and should assist in providing valuable new insights into the air–sea gas exchange process.


The long-term durability of WAXFIX, a paraffin-based grout, was evaluated for in situ grouting of activated beryllium wastes in the subsurface disposal area (SDA), a radioactive landfill at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex, part of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The evaluation considered radiological and biological mechanisms that could degrade the grout using data from an extensive literature search and previous tests of in situ grouting at the INL. Conservative radioactive doses for WAXFIX were calculated from the "hottest" (i.e., highest-activity) Advanced Test Reactor beryllium block in the SDA. These results indicate that WAXFIX would not experience extensive radiation damage for many hundreds of years. Calculation of radiation-induced hydrogen generation in WAXFIX indicated that grout physical performance should not be reduced beyond the effects of radiation dose on the molecular structure. Degradation of a paraffin-based grout by microorganisms in the SDA is possible and perhaps likely, but the rate of degradation will be at a slower rate than found in the literature reviewed. The calculations showed the outer 0.46-m (18-in.) layer of each monolith, which represents the minimum expected distance to the beryllium block, was calculated to require 1000 to 3600 yr to be consumed. The existing data and estimations of biodegradation and radiolysis rates for WAXFIX/paraffin do not indicate any immediate problems with the use of WAXFIX for grouting beryllium or other wastes in the SDA.


House cricket is currently introduced for scaled-up production in farming systems in Kenya and other parts of the world, as an alternative source of animal proteins. The aim of this study was to assess the nutritional composition in farmed cricket as influenced by age in order to ascertain the optimal harvesting time for possible utilization of crickets in improving child nutrition in Kenya. Sampling was carried out between weeks 4 and 13. The moisture content was analysed by drying method, chitin by sodium hydroxide digestion, protein content by estimation of total nitrogen, crude fat by soxhlet extraction method, ash by muffle furnace incineration, available carbohydrates by subtraction, and energy by calculation method. The crude protein mean ranged from 36.00 to 60.00 g/100 g, chitin 2.20 to 12.40 g/100 g, total lipids 12.00 to 25.00 g/100 g, over the 13 weeks period. Minerals concentration was optimum at week 9, with magnesium 1.30 to 11.30 mg/100 g, calcium 1.40 to 19.70 mg/100 g, and zinc 0.20 to 16.60 mg/100 g. Findings from this study indicate that farmed cricket would be best harvested between weeks 9 and 11, when the protein and mineral content is optimum. Nutrients available in farmed crickets show that farmed crickets can be used in child food ingredients to improve child nutrition.

 Key words: Farmed crickets, proximate, protein, fatty acid, omega 3, omega 6, minerals, child nutrition.


The main function of negation is to deny or to disavow statement(s) of addressee or addresser considered wrong by the addresser. Experts state that although negation is universal and the universality of negation indicates that in any language its existence plays an important role, the application of negation theory in some languages in the world shows that there are differences in both the expression system of negation and the grammatical unit used to express the negation. In Arabic and in English, negation is also expressed differently not only in terms of negative devices used to express the negation but also their distribution in sentences. Besides, English and Arabic are among the foreign languages which are taught at schools in Indonesia. The Qur'an is believed to be the most authentic and the earliest surviving document of written Arabic. In this Holy Book, as in natural language, negation also plays a very important role and has relatively the same function. This is in accordance with the main function of this Holy Book for Muslims, that is as the guidance to distinguish the right and the wrong ways. However, among the studies on the language of the Holy Qur'an, none of them is analyzing the syntactic aspect.

Hence, this study is aimed at describing the syntactic characteristics of Arabic and English negation in the Qur'an and its translation in English by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall. It is directed to be able to find out the syntactic patterns of Arabic and English negation in the Qur'an and its English translation as well as to describe the semantic implication of each syntactic pattern. After employing Transformational Generative Grammar as an approach and being directed into standard negation, relation between negation and quantity, and negation and adverb as proposed by Payne (1985), this study finds that: (1) The Arabic negative devices used in the Qur'an are la, ma, lam, laysa (all of them mean 'non'), and the English negative devices are not, no, never, almost not, cease not and hardly. These words are expressed in not less than 18 different sentence patterns in standard negation, 3 in negation and quantity, and 9 in negation and adverb, besides three pairs of phrasal negation ma-min, ma-bi, and laysa-bi which work as single negative devices and are equivalent to not no. The Arabic negative devices occur in preverbal position, whereas the English negative devices occur in post-verbal position. In Arabic sentences the subject may be either free-standing or indicated in the verb, while in English the subject is always free-standing; (2) Semantically, the same negative device in different sentence pattern may negate different element in the sentence, although they commonly negate the whole proposition. This propositional negation frequently shows up syntactically in the Arabic sentences but not in the English translation. (3) There are three pairs of double negation in la illa and ma-min illa that only occurs in verbless construction and functions to express strong emphasis on a given proposition. In Pickthall's the Meaning of the Glorious Qur'an illa is equivalent to but, and both ma-min illa and la-illa are equivalent to no save or no hut. Such strong emphasis is also implied in the structure of the English translation.

Based on the above findings, the researcher recommends the following suggestions: (1) The future researches are suggested to analyze negation in complex or compound sentences, as negative devices found in this study should have different syntactical characteristics when they are in those longer sentences. (2) Considering that significant problem, translation of the Holy Qur'an into other languages should be attached with the original text. This is undoubtedly in line with what has been previously suggested by Islamic scholars; (3) For translation teachers, they can use Pickthall's translation of the Qur'an to demonstrate the translation procedures applied in an Arabic-English translation, but they should be sure not to present the parts translated incorrectly unless they explain the mistakes.


Destinations across the world are beginning to replace or supplement culture-led development strategies with creative development. This book critically analyzes the impact and effectiveness of creative strategies in tourism development and charts the emergence of 'creative tourism'. Why has 'creativity' become such an important aspect of development strategies and of tourism development in particular? Why is this happening now, apparently simultaneously, in so many destinations across the globe? What is the difference between cultural tourism and creative tourism? These are among the important questions this book answers. It critically examines the developing relationship between tourism and creativity, the articulation of the 'creative turn' in tourism, and the impact this has on theoretical perspectives and practical approaches to tourism development. A wide range of examples from Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and Africa explore the interface between tourism and creativity including: creative spaces and places such as cultural and creative clusters and ethnic precincts; the role of the creative industries and entrepreneurs in the creation of experiences; creativity and rural areas; the 'creative class' and tourism; lifestyle, creativity and tourism and marketing creative tourism destinations. The relationship between individual and collective forms of creativity and the widely differing forms of modern tourism are also discussed. In the concluding section of the book the contribution of creativity to tourism and to development strategies in general is assessed, and areas for future research are outlined. The diverse multidisciplinary contributions link theory and practice, and demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of creativity as a tourism development strategy and marketing tool. It is the first exploration of the relationship between tourism and creativity and its consequences for tourism development in different parts of the world.


The economic as well as efficient use of scarce resources is one of the challenges in developing countries. This paper aims at providing an investment methodology to infrastructure planning and development agencies. To achieve the goal, the paper specifically analyses the unbalanced growth concept in prioritizing investment in infrastructure development. It further examines in detail the investment policies in infrastructure development in Sri-Lanka. Based on that, this paper carried out an extensive survey of the literature pertaining to available social infrastructure and the social status of Nigerian Niger Delta (ND) region. In looking for broad correlations, this paper sets aside a crucial issue - given that investment capital is scarce and living standards are low, what should get priority in terms of investment between consumption and productive activities? The study employed. An adaptation of photovoice methodology is used to collect primary data on the status of infrastructure facilities in the ND. The methodology is adopted to identify scope not captured through quantitative measures. The methodology combines photography with grassroots social action through interviews. The sample size is based on purposive sampling technique because the methodology requires adults that can participate in interview survey and handle instruments to be used for data collection. Based on that, fifty seven participants were first selected and subdivided into eight groups. The findings establish that social overhead capital (SOC) investments are more beneficial than direct productive activities (DPA) during early phase of infrastructural development and thus be given priority because the provision of SOC is relevant to addressing the appalling state of living of the people of the Nigerian ND region and thus improve the region's human capacity. The paper concludes that the measure of self-reliance of poor people is a strong indicator of the long-term poverty reduction impact of infrastructure development. Policy recommendations and specific actionable targets are suggested.


Platostoma africanum P. Beauv. is a tropical plant species valued for its efficacy in traditional medicinal system in West Africa. Although studied for its chemical properties, no cytogenetic study has been reported on this plant species. Axillary buds obtained from the growing plants were used to conduct mitotic study. Results obtained in this study showed that P. africanum is a diploid species with chromosome number, 2n = 10. The mean chromosome length was 3.93 µm and chromosomes ranged from 3.08 to 5.39 µm, with a haploid set length of 19.64 µm. The karyotype showed assymetry with a formula, 1m+1sm+2a+1t and indicated good adaptation and advancement in evolution in this species. This is the first report of the chromosome number in this indigenous medicinal plant species.

 Key words: Cytology, mitosis, medicinal plants, Lamiaceae.


Adiabatic soliton compression is an attractive optical pulse compression scheme that relies on monotonic decreasing of the fiber dispersion along the soliton's propagation path. This scheme requires kilometers of specialty fiber, and only a few dispersion profiles are practically feasible. We propose adiabatic soliton compression in a nonuniform fiber Bragg grating. The Bragg soliton propagates in the passband of a grating, where one or more of its parameters (e.g., the grating pitch) varies along the propagation direction. The capability of manufacturing almost arbitrary grating profiles and hence engineering practically any dispersion profile makes this all-fiber pulse compressor, which is to our knowledge novel, a very versatile component. Additionally, the large dispersion in the spectral vicinity of the grating stop band leads to very short devices (tens of centimeters as opposed to kilometers).


Arabic dialects vary as to the presence of affricates in their phonemic inventory. Many dialects, such as San'ani Arabic, have only the voiced palato-alveolar affricate /dʒ/; others, like Baghdadi have two (/dʒ/ and /tʃ/), and still other dialects, such as Cairene, lack affricate phonemes altogether. Although dialects differ on the presence of underlying affricates, many have derived affricates. These arise when the alveolar stop /t/ and the fricative /ʃ/ come together over a morpheme boundary or as a result of vowel deletion. In this paper we explore the phonological patterning of the derived sequence [t+ʃ] as a single affricated segment or as a bisegmental sequence. We examine the evidence from three dialects. San'ani, Cairene, and Iksal (a Palestinian variety) and show that its patterning differs among the dialects.


Ubiquitous computing is still a maturing field of investigation. The vision of the seamless integration of computers to people's life has yet to happen, if it ever has to become a reality. Nowadays, most mobile, distributed systems and sensor technologies have their faults and limitations. Users of ubiquitous technologies often learn to avoid or rectify the systems failures. However, there is still a lack of quantitative information concerning how they impact the collaboration. Therefore, we propose to use a 'field of experiment' approach based on a pervasive game platform. Our aim is to rely on a mix of qualitative and quantitative evaluations to find out how uncertainties modified the collaborative processes.


Abstract Traditional fossil fuel production of electricity has serious externality issues that influence air quality, public health and viewscapes. In order to limit these influences, public policy aims at increasing the production of electricity using renewable fuels. For a variety of reasons, including market cost barriers, antiquated government policy and the overall lack of knowledge by energy consumers, renewable energy has had a tough time finding a niche in the energy marketplace. In this article we explain the theoretical question of treating air quality as a private externality or a public good, and propose various policy implements that will allow states to increase production of electricity from renewable sources. The set of policies currently developed for Arizona are used as a baseline for recommendations for more advanced policies. However, fossil-fueled electric generation contributes to regional haze and other environmental problems, the public cost of which is not reflected in electricity prices. States have generally rejected mechanisms such as taxation that would raise the price of fossil-fueled generation to reflect the cost of environmental "externalities." The alternative is to adopt policies that offset the cost differential of renewable generation and ensure that an appropriate fraction of states' electrical supplies are generated from environmentally-preferable renewable resources. (APS, 2002b)


Birth cohort studies can be used not only to generate population-level quantitative data, but also to recompose persons. The crux is how we understand data and persons. Recomposition entails scavenging for various (including unrecognised) data. It foregrounds the perspective and subjectivity of survey participants, but without forgetting the partiality and incompleteness of the accounts that it may generate. Although interested in the singularity of individuals, it attends to the historical and relational embeddedness of personhood. It examines the multiple and complex temporalities that suffuse people's lives, hence departing from linear notions of the life course. It implies involvement, as well as reflexivity, on the part of researchers. It embraces the heterogeneity and transformations over time of scientific archives and the interpretive possibilities, as well as incompleteness, of birth cohort studies data. Interested in the unfolding of lives over time, it also shines light on meaningful biographical moments.


When Justice Robert H. Jackson died, he left thirteen handwritten pages—this Essay—among his papers. It has been unknown for sixty-five years, until this publication. The essay addresses two topics: (1) Jackson's own religious beliefs and practices and those of his ancestors, who were 19th and early 20th century American farmers; and (2) some history of Spiritualist movements in their western Pennsylvania and western New York State region. Jackson and his people were shaped by religious currents and diversities. They believed that the proper way to live is to give people space and to tolerate what they are and what they choose to believe and to practice in their own spaces, so long as they do not intrude unduly on others'. Justice Jackson's essay is significant because it comes from him, a renowned writer and one of the most interesting, thoughtful, and significant United States Supreme Court justices ever—it is a late-life, deeply personal piece of Jackson. The essay also has significance because it is Jackson on religion, a topic of great import in life, constitutional law, public debates, and legal cases. As a Supreme Court justice, Jackson wrote many notable opinions addressing how the U.S. Constitution limits and empowers government in the realm of religion. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), for example, he wrote the Court's opinion holding that the Constitution prohibits public officials from compelling Jehovah's Witness schoolchildren to salute and pledge allegiance to the American flag. For Jackson, that limit on government power to compel professions of faith was of a piece with his view that government constitutionally may prohibit religious proselytizers from harassing others, especially in their homes—under the Constitution as he understood it, government may regulate religious actors when, but only when, their conduct imposes upon the freedom and peace of others. Jackson also believed that the Constitution bars government from ranking religion itself or any particular religion as more or less correct, or from evaluating the sincerity of professed adherents. In his view, to believe and practice any religion or none at all is, short of the point where it imposes on another, for the individual to determine, separate from government involvement. This Jackson essay reveals that his personal views on religion and his own religious practices very much fit with his judicial interpretations of the Constitution. Jackson did not really believe in God or practice religion, but he was tolerant of others who did and how they chose to do so. He respected and deferred to the sincerity of people whose belief systems were not his. In both his living and his constitutional judging, Jackson gave religion its private space. He objected, however, and he read the Constitution as the legal basis on which to object, when government sought to bring religion into public spaces, because they belong equally to people whose beliefs range from religious belief to non-belief.


The highly significant variances due to interaction, environments and genotypes were observed by AMMI analysis of salinity tolerant barley genotypes under multi location trials. The genotypes G6 and G13 with negative IPCA1 values showed positive IPCA2, IPCA3, IPCA4 values. Genotype G1 showed lowest value of D with smallest negative IPCA1 score (-0.013). Genotype G18 followed by G8, G1 and G5 were the stable performer based on ASV. Yield stability index advocated G8 followed by G5, G10, G4 and G12. The results of MASV indicated that genotypes G5, G1, G15, G17, G9 and G19 were stable, whereas genotypes G5, G9, G8 and G11 were the stable genotypes with relatively more average yield. Overall mean ranks of all of the AMMI estimates, genotypes G5, G1 and G8 were the most stable genotypes followed by genotypes G17 and G18.


The likelihood models used in probabilistic visual tracking applications are often complex non-linear and/or non-Gaussian functions, leading to analytically intractable inference. Solutions then require numerical approximation techniques, of which the particle filter is a popular choice. Particle filters, however, degrade in performance as the dimensionality of the state space increases and the support of the likelihood decreases. As an alternative to particle filters this paper introduces a variational approximation to the tracking recursion. The variational inference is intractable in itself, and is combined with an efficient importance sampling procedure to obtain the required estimates. The algorithm is shown to compare favorably with particle filtering techniques on a synthetic example and two real tracking problems. The first involves the tracking of a designated object in a video sequence based on its color properties, whereas the second involves contour extraction in a single image.


With widespread adoption of electronic health records, there is an increased emphasis for predictive models that can effectively deal with clinical time-series data. Powered by Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units, deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results in several clinical prediction tasks. Despite the success of RNN, its sequential nature prohibits parallelized computing, thus making it inefficient particularly when processing long sequences. Recently, architectures which are based solely on attention mechanisms have shown remarkable success in transduction tasks in NLP, while being computationally superior. In this paper, for the first time, we utilize attention models for clinical time-series modeling, thereby dispensing recurrence entirely. We develop the SAnD (Simply Attend and Diagnose) architecture, which employs a masked, self-attention mechanism, and uses positional encoding and dense interpolation strategies for incorporating temporal order. Furthermore, we develop a multi-task variant of SAnD to jointly infer models with multiple diagnosis tasks. Using the recent MIMIC-III benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in all tasks, outperforming LSTM models and classical baselines with hand-engineered features.


A novel experiment has been performed at the CERN HiRadMat test facility to study the impact of the 440 GeV proton beam generated by the Super Proton Synchrotron on extended solid copper cylindrical targets. Substantial hydrodynamic tunneling of the protons in the target material has been observed that leads to significant lengthening of the projectile range, which confirms our previous theoretical predictions [N. A. Tahir et al., Phys. Rev. Spec. Top.-Accel. Beams 15, 051003 (2012)]. Simulation results show very good agreement with the experimental measurements. These results have very important implications on the machine protection design for powerful machines like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the future High Luminosity LHC, and the proposed huge 80 km circumference Future Circular Collider, which is currently being discussed at CERN. Another very interesting outcome of this work is that one may also study the field of High Energy Density Physics at this test facility. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.


Where does meaning reside? Is it separate from the material? Is matter totally mute before being worked by man? The problem with matter (-mater) is that it is reduced to mere material when reason is understood as the only source of meaning. Classical thinking after Aristotle understands matter according to materials: things are formed matter and matter is a container for form. Matter is understood by classical philosophy as a receiving subject: it is undetermined and it has properties only potentially.Often matter appears as mute material until it is given meaning through form by the artist or architect. But, is really the artist the ultimate charger of meaning or just the awakener? Modern speculation defends that matter is not formally undetermined. The big departure from the Aristotelian philosophy is that the receiving subject is not passive but determinant: matter is active. This new perspective is clarifying. A second etymological meaning through the root –mater presents material as an agent of development. Instead of the idea of determination, we are elaborating now the idea of understanding.This workshop aims at exploring the second reading of matter as active determinant and architect as generator of meaningful situations.


Background Low therapeutic utility drugs (LTUDs) are those with controversial efficacy that provide little improvement for the disease or the symptoms. These drugs have recently been removed from the system financing Spanish healthcare, with the aim of controlling healthcare expenditure. Purpose To assess the use of these drugs in institutionalised older people and find out how the new law may be affecting it. Materials and Methods This was a retrospective transversal study. We choose one day at random and checked all treatments prescribed that day. The following data were collected: drugs, sex, age and LTUDs. The data were obtained from the SAVAC programme and processed in Excel. Results A total of 175 residents were included, mean age 89 years old. LTUDs were administered to 65 people (37%). There were 1812 different drugs, of which 88 (4.9%) were LTUDs, measured as number of dosage units. Drug consumption in primary care (PC) is measured by number of packs, not as number of dosage units. During the study, PC consumption of LTUD accounted for 6.86% of the total. The LTUDs prescribed were: 26 items (30.3%) acetylcysteine, 18 (21.5%) topical diclofenac, 12(14.4%) citicoline, 10 (12.0%) trimetazidine, 9 (10.8%) pentoxifylline, 4 (4.9%) piracetam, 2 (2.5%) ambroxol, 1 (1.2%) acetaminophen plus codeine, 1(1.2%) escine and 1(1.2%) inhaled mesna. Conclusions Institutionalized older people use fewer LTUDs than patients from PC. Mucolytic agents and topical NSAIDs are on top of the list, accounting for 50% of the LTUDs used. Nearly 40% of institutionalised people will have to pay for these 5% of their drugs, or these medicines will have to be removed from their treatments. Better designed studies should be done to clarify the real efficacy and efficiency of this large group of drugs. No conflict of interest.


Because they are immotile organisms, higher plants have developed efficient strategies for adaptation to temperature changes. During cold acclimation, plants accumulate specific types of solutes to enhance freezing tolerance. The vacuole is a major solute storage organelle, but until now the role of tonoplast proteins in cold acclimation has not been investigated. In a comparative tonoplast proteome analysis, we identified several membrane proteins with altered abundance upon cold acclimation. We found an increased protein abundance of the tonoplast pyrophosphatase and subunits of the vacuolar V-ATPase and a significantly increased V-ATPase activity. This was accompanied by increased vacuolar concentrations of dicarbonic acids and soluble sugars. Consistently, the abundance of the tonoplast dicarbonic acid transporter was also higher in cold-acclimatized plants. However, no change in the protein abundance of tonoplast monosaccharide transporters was detectable. However, a generally higher cold-induced phosphorylation of members of this sugar transporter sub-group was observed. Our results indicate that cold-induced solute accumulation in the vacuole is mediated by increased acidification of this organelle. Thus solute transport activity is either modulated by increased protein amounts or by modification of proteins via phosphorylation.


We derive the properties of a pump-resonant singly resonant optical parametric oscillator for which the pump and one of the parametrically generated waves share a common cavity. Wave-vector mismatch and focusing effects are taken into account. We calculate the oscillation threshold and its dependence on emission wavelengths as the result of mode shape changes. The conversion efficiencies for signal and idler waves are calculated. It is shown that one can maximize the conversion efficiencies by optimizing mirror transmissivities. The interference effects that occur in a standing-wave geometry and the mode content of the nonresonant wave are also analyzed.


An unparalleled collection of recommended guidelines for data warehousing and business intelligence pioneered by Ralph Kimball and his team of colleagues from the Kimball Group. Recognized and respected throughout the world as the most influential leaders in the data warehousing industry, Ralph Kimball and the Kimball Group have written articles covering more than 250 topics that define the field of data warehousing. For the first time, the Kimball Group's incomparable advice, design tips, and best practices have been gathered in this remarkable collection of articles, which spans a decade of data warehousing innovation. Each group of articles is introduced with original commentaries that explain their role in the overall lifecycle methodology developed by the Kimball Group. These practical, hands-on articles are fully updated to reflect current practices and terminology and cover the complete lifecycleincluding project planning, requirements gathering, dimensional modeling, ETL, and business intelligence and analytics. This easily referenced collection is nothing less than vital if you are involved with data warehousing or business intelligence in any capacity.


An antioxidant response in condensed polymeric environments is often ambiguous and may vary strongly depending on the nature of the polymer and the conditions of polymer storage, processing, and use. The impact of polymeric environments during melt processing on the intrinsic efficiency of a set of commercial antioxidants was studied. The antioxidative activity of primary antioxidants Lowinox CPL, Lowinox 22IB46, Naugard 445, hydroxylamine Genox EP, and secondary phosphite Weston TNPP were determined by using two versions of the model reaction of cumene initiated (2,2′‐azobisisobutyronitrile, AIBN, and cumyl hydroperoxide, ROOH) oxidation. The melt stabilizing efficiency of the antioxidants was also studied during multipass extrusion testing in HDPE (Phillipstype), metallocene LLDPE, and (Ziegler‐Natta) LLDPE. The kinetic measurements showed that each of the three functional hydroxyl groups of Lowinox CPL is consumed in the model reaction (version 1) with the same high inhibition rate constant (k7), whereas the two functional groups of Lowinox 22IB46 have different activity stipulated by hydrogen bonding between the hydroxyls. All the primary stabilizers involved afforded transformation products with additional antioxidative activity. For phenolic Lowinox CPL and amine Naugard 445, these products exhibited lower inhibition rate constants than that of the main functionality, but for Lowinox 22IB46, the discrepancy was not observed. Genox EP revealed three inhibition centers with different rate constants which, however, have low values of the inhibition coefficients (f). This effect is presumably due to the versatility of the inhibition pathways for the antioxidant and its intermediates, including the path of active interception of cumylalkyl (R•) radicals. The secondary stabilizer Weston TNPP, tested by means of the second version of the model system, along with the expected decomposition of hydroperoxide appeared to be an effective radical scavenger. Kinetic parameters of the antioxidizing activity of the stabilizers – inhibition rate constants, coefficients of the oxidation chain termination, and total antioxidative activity {A = ∑[k7(i) (fn[InH])(i)]} — were determined for each functional group and for the whole antioxidant molecule. The phenolic stabilizers manifested powerful antioxidative activity. Their strongest functional groups have very high inhibition rate constant values: (log k7) = 5.4 ± 0.15 (Lowinox 22IB46) and 5.2 ± 0.1 M−1s−1 (Lowinox CPL). In terms of the total inhibiting activity in the liquid system the antioxidants can be ordered as: Lowinox CPL > Lowinox 22IB46 > Naugard 445 > Genox EP > Weston TNPP. The effect of stabilizers during multipass extrusion experiments was assessed via melt flow rate and yellowness index measurements conducted as a function of the number of passes. Phenolic antioxidants and Genox EP significantly improved the melt stability of the polyethylenes in terms of melt viscosity retention and in partial compliance with the data from kinetic modeling measurements. According to the melt stabilizing efficiency data, the antioxidants can be arranged as: Lowinox 22IB46 > Lowinox CPL > Genox EP > Naugard 445 > Weston TNPP. The Lowinox 22IB46 with relatively lower molecular weight exhibited the best results among the primary stabilizers because of the unrestricted molecular dynamics in the viscous‐flow state of the polymer. Yellowness index measurements made after multiple extruder passes indicated that Weston TNPP effectively decreased the color development caused by the phenolic antioxidants. Genox EP displayed high efficiency as an antioxidant and melt‐processing stabilizer and additionally provided good color protection. Generally, we received a good correlation between the activity of the antioxidants in the model system and their melt stabilization performance in HDPE, metallocene LLDPE, and LLDPE. The model reaction of cumene‐initiated oxidation has demonstrated excellent applicability as an effective tool for preliminary quantitative assessment of antioxidant radical‐scavenging efficiency. J. VINYL ADDIT. TECHNOL., 2010. © 2009 Society of Plastics Engineers


This study is designed inspired by the fact that there is an interhemisphere asymmetry of the brain region. A lot of researches studied in demonstrating the differences between right and left hemispheres of the brain . The objective of this preliminary study is to observe scientifically the effect of delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol (∆ 9 -THC) on the hemispheric lateralization with behavioural changes. Two regions of brain are selected, prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. Behavioural tests , namely heat stress test and novel-object discrimination test (NOD), were done on day seven. The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex regions of the brain were preceded to Western Blot technique in detecting c-fos . As for behavioural tests , heat stress and NOD and c-fos on hippocampus did not show significant differences. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex shows significant difference with p < 0.01. With these findings, reasonable dosages of ∆ 9 -THC should be used to have statistically significant differences effects on behavioural tests.


Sialylated glycans serve as cell surface attachment factors for a broad range of pathogens. We report an atypical example, where desialylation increases cell surface binding and infectivity of adeno-associated virus (AAV) serotype 9, a human parvovirus isolate. Enzymatic removal of sialic acid, but not heparan sulfate or chondroitin sulfate, increased AAV9 transduction regardless of cell type. Viral binding and transduction assays on mutant Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell lines defective in various stages of glycan chain synthesis revealed a potential role for core glycan residues under sialic acid in AAV9 transduction. Treatment with chemical inhibitors of glycosylation and competitive inhibition studies with different lectins suggest that N-linked glycans with terminal galactosyl residues facilitate cell surface binding and transduction by AAV9. In corollary, resialylation of galactosylated glycans on the sialic acid-deficient CHO Lec2 cell line with different sialyltransferases partially blocked AAV9 transduction. Quantitative analysis of AAV9 binding to parental, sialidase-treated or sialic acid-deficient mutant CHO cells revealed a 3–15-fold increase in relative binding potential of AAV9 particles upon desialylation. Finally, pretreatment of well differentiated human airway epithelial cultures and intranasal instillation of recombinant sialidase in murine airways enhanced transduction efficiency of AAV9 by >1 order of magnitude. Taken together, the studies described herein provide a molecular basis for low infectivity of AAV9 in vitro and a biochemical strategy to enhance gene transfer by AAV9 vectors in general.


Light has important visual and non-visual effects on humans and high-quality light should therefore be supplied inside buildings in sufficient quantities. On the other hand, artificial lighting is responsible for a large part of an office building's electricity needs. It is thus important to take into account at the same time visual comfort, non-visual effects of light and energy-efficiency when designing lighting systems for office buildings. The general objective of this doctoral thesis was to combine knowledge from several scientific fields (e.g. daylighting technology, artificial lighting technology, lighting simulation and chronobiology) to discuss how sustainable lighting solutions (i.e. lighting solutions that are optimized in terms of energy-efficiency, visual comfort and performance as well as non-visual aspects of lighting) can be achieved in office rooms. A research strategy that used a test office room equipped with an Anidolic Daylighting System (ADS) as a starting point has been followed. This ADS was shown to be well-accepted by office occupants and to be able to supply sufficient daylight flux during large parts of most working days. Based on this ADS, a highly energy-efficient electric lighting system for complementary artificial lighting was developed and tested in a visual comfort and performance study with human subjects. In addition to that, the chronobiological properties of the test office room were assessed. It was shown that the ADS-equipped room performs extremely well under daylighting conditions in terms of non-visual aspects of office lighting. For the rare times when this is not the case, a back-up system for chronobiological lighting based on blue Light Emitting Diodes was developed. In order to get a deeper insight into chronobiological aspects of office lighting, a first applied chronobiological study at the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory was initiated. Furthermore, possibilities to apply the concepts developed during this doctoral thesis to other types of buildings and other geographic regions were discussed. In conclusion, this doctoral thesis successfully demonstrated that it is possible to achieve sustainable lighting scenarios that are optimized in terms of energy-efficiency, visual comfort and performance as well as non-visual aspects by combining day- and electric lighting technologies in an appropriate way.


Introduction: Urticaria is a vascular lesion of the skin characterized by the appearance of well demarcated wheels along with angioedema. In more than 75% of cases, a causative agent can't be established and thus is termed as chronic Idiopathic Urticaria. Treatment of this condition focuses on measures which provide symptomatic relief; 2nd and 3rd generation anti-histaminic drugs are the mainstays now for the treatment of chronic idiopathic urticaria.
Objectives: To determine the efficacy of rupatadine in the treatment of chronic idiopathic urticaria.
Materials and Methods: A clinical trial was conducted on 60 patients who were suffering from chronic idiopathic urticaria from March to August 2015 at Department of Dermatology and Venereology, Combined Military Hospital (CMH), Dhaka. Tab. Rupatadine 5 mg 1 tab daily was given for 6 weeks. Clinical response of treatment and adverse effect was assessed at every two weeks' interval by taking history and clinical examination. Ethical issue was addressed
Results: The patients reported a considerable improvement in overall chronic idiopathic urticaria due to the use of Rupatadine. The mean total symptom score (TSS) value reduced by 83% compared to the base line evaluation at the end of the therapy duration. Total disappearance of symptom was recorded in 25% patients. There were 79% decrease in the score for number of wheals, 81% reduction in the score for size of the wheals, 88% reduction in the pruritus severity score, and 83% reduction in the duration of pruritus score in relation to baseline evaluation.
Conclusion: 5mg of Rupatadine once daily is effective in patients with chronic idiopathic urticaria.
JAFMC Bangladesh. Vol 17, No 2 (December) 2021: 39-42


Multi-hop wireless network based on IEEE 802.11 WiFi technology has emerged as a cost effective solution for accessing cellular networks or the Internet from the remote rural areas of the developing countries. Such access networks, typically, have long distance links that span tens of kilometers. Because of the long distance nature of the links, bit error rate is significant. Hence, to make these networks a viable access technology, it is imperative to design schemes that combat noise and the fading effect and thereby improve the links' throughput. In this paper, we propose diversity combining along with packet size adaptation to maximize the throughput. We also show that the significant throughput improvement can be achieved by using Selective Repeat or Go-back-N ARQ instead of Stop-and-Wait ARQ, which is currently used in IEEE 802.11 WiFi.


Well-preserved low-Mg calcite tests of modern benthic foraminifera from a depth transect off SW Norway show decreasing Sr/Ca with increasing water depth (r = -0.84). The Mg/Ca ratios also decrease with increasing water depth, although in a curvilinear fashion. Moreover, the inter- and intra-species scatter is apparently larger than for Sr/Ca. A majority of the analysed specimens have Mn/Ca < 200 μmol/mol, and show Sr/Ca, Mg/Ca that fall within published ranges for benthic foraminiferal calcite, indicating that pristine biogenic calcite has been analysed. The uniform temperature and salinity of bottom waters below ~800 m moreover indicate that neither temperature nor salinity can explain the observed Me/Ca trends. The Sr/Ca and Mg/Ca depth trends cannot be explained by dissolution since bottom waters are generally supersaturated with respect to calcite, and dissolution is only observed in a few specimens. Moreover, a regular increase in sedimentary organic content with depth needed to invoke a decrease in porewater pH and concomittant calcite dissolution is not observed. We tentatively ascribe the decreasing Sr/Ca and Mg/Ca trends to depth- related physiological phenomena. The relatively small intra- and interspecies scatter at a given water depth, as well as the linear decrease in Sr/Ca ratios with increasing water depth observed in modern oceans, may render the Sr/Ca in calcitic benthic foraminifera a potential water-depth proxy for fossil deposits.


In this paper we propose the use of multi-longitudinal mode lasers, such as Fabry-Pérot (FP) lasers, for simultaneous distributed strain and temperature sensing based on hybrid Brillouin and Raman scattering. Fabry-Pérot lasers allow for high-power Raman intensity measurement and the simultaneous detection of the Brillouin frequency shift parameter for all FP longitudinal modes, by using a self-heterodyne detection scheme based on a multi-wavelength optical local oscillator. Experiments point out significant improvement in hybrid sensor performance, also suggesting further potential benefits when combining the use of FP lasers with optical coding techniques and/or optical amplification.


Hex is one of the homeobox genes suggested to be important for hematopoietic cell differentiation. However, its biological function and mechanism of transcriptional regulation in hematopoietic cells remain elusive. We have identified the regulatory region necessary for transcription of the mouse Hex gene in K562 leukemia cells through transient reporter assays involving various deletion mutants. This region, comprising +775 to +1177 in the first intron, had enhancer-like properties and showed high activity in other hematopoietic cell lines such as U937, HEL, and RAW264.7, but little activity in other Hex-expressing cell lines such as MH(1)C(1) and H4IIE hepatoma cells, suggesting that this region functions as a hematopoietic cell-specific enhancer-like element. Binding site mutation of hematopoietic transcription factors, such as GATAs and c-Myb present in the enhancer-like element, significantly decreased the luciferase reporter gene expression in K562 cells. Electrophoretic mobility shift assays showed that GATA-1, GATA-2, or c-Myb actually binds to three of these putative binding sites, and also suggested that several unidentified factors might interact with the enhancer-like element. Overexpression of GATA-1, GATA-2, or c-Myb stimulated the enhancer-like activity via these three binding sites. Thus, we conclude that Hex expression in hematopoietic cells is mainly regulated by GATA-1, GATA-2, and c-Myb via this intronic enhancer-like element.


Bats are a highly gregarious taxon suggesting that social information should be readily available for making decision. Social information transfer in maternity colonies might be a particularly efficient mechanism for naïve pups to acquire information on resources from informed adults. However, such behaviour is difficult to study in the wild, in particular in elusive and small-bodied animals such as bats. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of social information in acquiring access to two types of resources, which are crucial in the life of a juvenile bat: suitable roosting sites and fruitful feeding grounds. We hypothesized that fledging offspring will make use of social information by following informed members of the social groups to unknown roosts or foraging sites. In the present study we applied for the first time the newly developed miniaturized proximity sensor system 'BATS', a fully automated system for documenting associations among individual bats both while roosting and while on the wing. We quantified associations among juveniles and other group member while switching roosts and during foraging. We found clear evidence for information transfer while switching roosts, mainly among juveniles and their genetically identified mothers. Anecdotal observations suggest intentional guidance behaviour by mothers, indicated by repeated commuting flights among the pup and the target roost. Infrequent, short meetings with colony members other than the mother indicate local enhancement at foraging sites, but no intentional information transfer. Our study illustrates how advances in technology enable researchers to solve long-standing puzzles. Miniaturized proximity sensors facilitate the automated collection of continuous data sets and represent an ideal tool to gain novel insights into the sociobiology of elusive and small-bodied species.


We investigated the interaction of dissolved actinides Th, U, Np Zgpu, and Am, with a pure and a mixed culture of halophilic bactezia isolated from the Waste Isolation H.Iot Plant repository under anaerobic conditions to evaluate their potentiaI transport as biocolloids from the waste site. The sizes of the bacterial cells studied ranged from ().54 x 0.48 pm to 7.7 x 0.67pm Using sequential mimofiltration, we determined the ~~ation of actinides with fi-ee-living (mobile) bacterial cells suspended in a fluid medium containing. NaCl or M=W12 brine, at various phaes of their growth cycIes. The number of suspended kcteria rangy-d born 106 to 109 cells ml-*. Tine amount of actinide associatd with the wspend~ cell fraction (cakzdated & mol cell-*) was very Iow: Th, 10-*2; U, 10-1s - 10-lS; - ~ Np, 1o-15- 10-19; Pu, 10-ls -10-21 ; and h, 10-1* - 10-*9 ; and it varied with the bacteihl - CUIture studied. l%e differe&es in the asswiation are amibuted to the extent of bioamxmdation and biosorption by the bacteria pH, the compo&on of the brine, and the speziation and bioavaiIability of the actinides.


Objective: Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is a leading health problem worldwide. In this study, we aimed to identify the pathways significantly relevant to T2DM, and a brief review based on these pathways was made. Materials and methods: The genes associated with T2DM were extracted by text mining tool from literature database. Then we employed the Fisher's exact test based on the cumulative hypergeometric distribution to evaluate the pathways relevant to T2DM. Result: A total of 135 genes associated with T2DM were confirmed and 76 pathways significantly relevant to T2DM were identified from 880 cellular pathways. These 76 pathways could be classified mainly in five classes: adipocytokine, inflame, PPAR, insulin and T2DM pathway. Adipocytokine pathway from KEGG database was the most relevant pathway. Conclusion: Disregulation of adipocytokine and inflammatory pathway is the hallmark of T2DM originated from the organism in the status of excess energy over long time span.


Water conflicts in the western United States increasingly arise from competition between traditional economic uses (especially irrigation, municipal supply and hydropower) and public uses (especially environmental protection and water-based recreation). Western United States water law, based on the prior appropriation doctrine, has always promoted maximizing 'beneficial use' of the resource and has effectively protected water allocations for traditional purposes. Public water uses also enjoy some legal protection, but it exists mostly on paper; in practice, neither statutory public interest provisions nor the non-statutory public trust doctrine has been widely effective. This paper identifies the relevant legal principles and briefly explains how they have failed to protect public water uses in the western United States.


A method that can be used for for recognizing facial expressions of multiple persons is proposed. In this method, the condition of facial muscles is assigned to a hidden state of a HMM for each expression. Then, the probability of the state is updated according to a feature vector obtained from image processing. Image processing is performed in two steps. First, a velocity vector is estimated from every two successive frames by using an optical flow algorithm. Then, a two-dimensional Fourier transform is applied to a velocity vector field at the regions around an eye and the mouth. The coefficients for lower frequencies are selected to form a feature vector. A mixture density is used for approximating the output probability of the HMM so as to represent a variation in facial expressions among persons. To cope with the case when two expressions are displayed contiguously, the HMM computation is modified such that when the peak of a facial motion is detected, a new sequence of facial expressions is assumed to start from the previous frame with minimal facial motion. Experiments show that a mixture density is effective because recognition accuracy improves as the number of mixtures increases. In addition, the method correctly recognizes a facial expression that contiguously follows another one.


A survey of 261 libraries was undertaken to determine the level of use of and duties performed by student assistants in monographic cataloging operations. Ninety-five of 142 responding libraries (64.1 percent) indicate that they use student assistants for some type of monographic cataloging tasks. These tasks are downloading of bibliographic and authority records, monographic cataloging, classification, subject heading authority control, holdings, database maintenance, and editing of 246 or 505 MARC tags. Some respondents expressed reluctance to use student assistants for higher-level cataloging tasks. ********** Despite being surrounded by a steady labor supply of thousands of inexpensive and intelligent individuals, the use of student assistants at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY-Albany) traditionally has been limited to processing of materials (applying call number labels, security strips, property stamps) and other similar lower-level duties (retrieving of materials from the stacks, pulling loose periodicals to be bound). Since 1999, graduate students from the university's School of Information Science and Policy (SISP) have been used for special projects. Two SISP graduate students worked on language-specific projects due to their bilingual or polylingual skills. One project involved the upgrading of brief records for Chinese language materials and the other project involved the processing of gift books in Russian and other Slavic languages. For these two projects, the workflow was fairly simple and linear. A third graduate student worked on the cataloging of new acquisitions that were to become part of the Miriam Snow Mathes Historical Children's Literature collection. Due to the detailed and unique cataloging provided to these materials, the staff member responsible for cataloging these materials worked one on one with the graduate students. However, changes, both internal (reduction of staff) and external (fewer print materials being purchased, increased emphasis upon electronic resources) over the last several years have led the current administration to examine workflow and the level of staff required to complete the various duties in monographic cataloging. Cornel] University librarian Sarah E. Thomas stated, "the world's information resources are abundant, but time is a scare commodity" and that "there is a chronic imbalance between the amount of work to be done and the resources available to do it." (1) These two statements reflect what many academic libraries, both large and small, are encountering. These circumstances caused SUNY-Albany to consider the utilization of student assistants in monographic cataloging workflow. A survey was constructed in order to gather information about how other institutions were or were not employing students, with the idea that SUNY-Albany could then take advantage of the knowledge and experiences of other institutions. Literature Review Using student assistants in cataloging has been discussed in the current literature, but published papers primarily focus upon their use in projects rather than as part of the standard workflow. Gnidarelli and Cary discussed the use of art students to catalog a gift of approximately 12,000 art exhibition catalogs at Virginia Commonwealth University. (2) Over four years, six different student assistants (both graduate and undergraduate students all involved in the study of the arts) worked on cataloging this collection. Three of the students already had been trained in copy cataloging using Library of Congress records. Under the close supervision of librarians, these students were able to use their previous copy cataloging knowledge and subject knowledge to enhance less than-full records, including the assignment of call numbers and subject headings. Guidarelli and Cary made the significant points that using students: (1) cost less than half the cost of outsourcing when estimating the cost of copy cataloging per title; and (2) produced more complete records. …


By tying peptide fragments originally distant in parental proteins, the proteasome can generate spliced peptides that are recognized by CTL. This occurs by transpeptidation involving a peptide-acyl-enzyme intermediate and another peptide fragment present in the catalytic chamber. Four main subtypes of proteasomes exist: the standard proteasome (SP), the immunoproteasome, and intermediate proteasomes β1-β2-β5i (single intermediate proteasome) and β1i-β2-β5i (double intermediate proteasome). In this study, we use a tandem mass tag–quantification approach to study the production of six spliced human antigenic peptides by the four proteasome subtypes. Peptides fibroblast growth factor-5172-176/217-220, tyrosinase368-373/336-340, and gp10040-42/47-52 are better produced by the SP than the other proteasome subtypes. The peptides SP110296-301/286-289, gp100195-202/191or192, and gp10047-52/40-42 are better produced by the immunoproteasome and double intermediate proteasome. The current model of proteasome-catalyzed peptide splicing suggests that the production of a spliced peptide depends on the abundance of the peptide splicing partners. Surprisingly, we found that despite the fact that reciprocal peptides RTK_QLYPEW (gp10040-42/47-52) and QLYPEW_RTK (gp10047-52/40-42) are composed of identical splicing partners, their production varies differently according to the proteasome subtype. These differences were maintained after in vitro digestions involving identical amounts of the splicing fragments. Our results indicate that the amount of splicing partner is not the only factor driving peptide splicing and suggest that peptide splicing efficiency also relies on other factors, such as the affinity of the C-terminal splice reactant for the primed binding site of the catalytic subunit. Visual Abstract Key Points Splicing efficiency by the four proteasome subtypes depends on the peptide sequence. Availability of the splice reactants is a factor controlling splicing efficiency. Affinity of the C-terminal splice reactant for the primed binding site also seems key.


Federal, state and local governments have funded various efforts to support value added agriculture, often implicitly assuming that the enterprises would be profitable and that the transition from commodity producer to producer-processor-marketer-distributor would be relatively easy. Some analysts (e.g., Streeter and Bills; 2003a, 2003b) have questioned both of these assumptions, noting that available aggregate data do not allow assessment of the financial performance of value-added enterprises. Our study collected detailed financial information from 27 value-added dairy enterprises with cows, goats or sheep in three states. These businesses processed and marketed cheese, fluid milk products and yogurt; 17 had begun processing during the previous three years. The financial information was used to develop income statements and balance sheets for both the milk production and the dairy processing and marketing enterprises. Our results suggest that value-added dairy is not a panacea: despite much higher revenues per unit milk produced or processed, mean net income for the processing enterprise and for the combined milk production and processing business were modest at best and often negative. More than half of the on-farm processors had negative net incomes from processing, and seven processing enterprises had negative net worth. On average, returns per cwt milk processed were $90 per cwt and $209 per cwt (for cow and goat/sheep milk producers, respectively) lower than the full economic costs of production and processing.


Abstract Taking as a point of departure the question of whether Ibero-American music should have a more prominent presence in music history sequences currently taught at U.S. institutions of higher education this essay explores questions about diversity and tokenism in the reproduction of mainstream models of knowledge production. These issues are analyzed vis-a-vis the contemporary attack on the humanities in U.S. academia in order to propose alternative approaches to music education and scholarship that work as critical models to the colonialist perspective that has informed music academia for generations and to the neo-liberal project that has been slowly taking over academia in the last twenty years.


This article tackles celebrity culture as embodied in the person of one, who, ironically, must-not-be-named: Voldemort. Moving deep into the layers of celebrity cultures in the academy, the world, and the world of the novels, Bhattacharya takes an intriguing, timely, and surprising position: it is less an inherently evil nature of the individual and more the inherently social — perhaps panoptic — nature of the world into which Voldemort enters that result in the wizard's criminal notoriety.


Digital platforms are a primary means of communication in society. Public libraries play an empowering role in these processes, strengthening citizens' digital competences. This raises questions about what democratic processes the digital technology is made to enable. The study investigates how a Swedish Digital Library (DL) is envisioned and organised within a national digitalisation strategy. Qualitative methods are used, and a theoretical democracy framework is developed and used together with the concepts of education and Bildung in the analysis. Four empirical themes are identified. The analysis centres on tensions related to horizontality and hierarchy, and Bildung and sociality. The DL vision is dominated by a hierarchical and instrumental educational vision that connects to representative democracy. A subordinated social and pedagogical vision of inner motivational drives and partial forms of sharing, connected to deliberative and semi-participatory democracy forms, exists, mostly in the form of some cherry-picked Web 2.0 discourses.


Based on image sparse representation in the shearlet domain, we proposed a L1/2 sparsity regularized unconvex variation model for image super-resolution. The L1/2 regularizer term constrains the underlying image to have a sparse representation in shearlet domain. The fidelity term restricts the consistency with the measured imaged in terms of the data degradation model. Then, the variable splitting algorithm is used to break down the model into a series of constrained optimization problems which can be solved by alternating direction method of multipliers. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, both in its visual effects and in quantitative terms.


The Hungarian agricultural sector has undergone substantial changes between 1992 and 2003, which was a period of transformation from command economy to an EU-conform market economy. The question is whether the Hungarian agricultural sector was able to keep its competitiveness despite the extensive transformation. The aim of this paper is to measure the competitiveness of Hungarian agri-food product groups in relation to the ones of the EU-15 during the transformation period. Results indicate that the competitiveness, measured by revealed comparative advantage (RCA), of the studied agri-food product groups has not changed considerably. The strong position of the Hungarian agricultural sector could be maintained because its competitiveness is based on factor endowments, which are not affected by changes of economic policy. The observed moderate fluctuations of competitiveness can be derived to trade concession changes.


Blind image denoising is an important yet very challenging problem in computer vision due to the complicated acquisition process of real images. In this work we propose a new variational inference method, which integrates both noise estimation and image denoising into a unique Bayesian framework, for blind image denoising. Specifically, an approximate posterior, parameterized by deep neural networks, is presented by taking the intrinsic clean image and noise variances as latent variables conditioned on the input noisy image. This posterior provides explicit parametric forms for all its involved hyper-parameters, and thus can be easily implemented for blind image denoising with automatic noise estimation for the test noisy image. On one hand, as other data-driven deep learning methods, our method, namely variational denoising network (VDN), can perform denoising efficiently due to its explicit form of posterior expression. On the other hand, VDN inherits the advantages of traditional model-driven approaches, especially the good generalization capability of generative models. VDN has good interpretability and can be flexibly utilized to estimate and remove complicated non-i.i.d. noise collected in real scenarios. Comprehensive experiments are performed to substantiate the superiority of our method in blind image denoising.


Objective Adequate symptom control is a problem for many people with asthma. We asked whether weekly email reports on monitored use of inhaled, short-acting bronchodilators might improve scores on composite asthma-control measures. Methods Through an investigational electronic medication sensor attached to each participant's inhaler, we monitored 4 months' use of inhaled, short-acting bronchodilators. Participants completed surveys, including the Asthma Control TestTM (ACT), to assess asthma control at entry and monthly thereafter. After the first month, participants received weekly email reports for 3 months. The reports summarized inhaled bronchodilator use during the preceding week and provided suggestions derived from National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (NAEPP) guidelines. Paired t-tests and random-effects mixed models were implemented to assess changes in primary asthma endpoints. Results Thirty individuals participated in the 4-month study; 29 provided complete asthma control information. Mean age was 36.8 years (range: 19–74 years); 52% of respondents were female. Mean ACT scores were 17.6 (Standard Deviation [SD]  = 3.35) at entry and 18.4 (SD = 3.60) at completion of the first month. No significant difference appeared between ACT values at entry and completion of the first month (p = 0.66); however, after participants began receiving email reports and online information about their inhaler use, mean ACT scores increased 1.40 points (95% CI: 0.61, 2.18) for each subsequent study month. Significant decreases occurred in 2-week histories of daytime symptoms (β = −1.35, 95% CI: −2.65, −0.04) and nighttime symptoms (β = −0.84, 95% CI: −1.25, −0.44); no significant change in activity limitation (β = −0.21, 95% CI: −0.69, 0.26) was observed. Participants reported increased awareness and understanding of asthma patterns, level of control, bronchodilator use (timing, location) and triggers, and improved preventive practices. Conclusions Weekly email reports and access to online charts summarizing remote monitoring of inhaled bronchodilator frequency and location were associated with improved asthma control and a decline in day-to-day asthma symptoms.