The present study was conducted with the main purpose of identifying reading preferences of secondary school students and their related issues. The study was conducted on a total of 387 secondary school students of academic session 2010-12 in District Bahawalpur of Pakistan. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected through questionnaire and interview schedule respectively by adopting survey method. The study concluded that secondary school students preferred to read books, magazines, poetry and other reading materials to get pleasure through edutainment, kill their leisure time during holidays and/ or at weekends and for their emotional gratification. The respondents preferred to read books on religion, literature, novels, magazines and story & romantic books. They were keen on reading newspaper, traveling story and scientific books, autobiographies and literature –poetry and drama. They faced problems in reading and setting their reading preferences like high costs of the books, context and circumstances, availability of books, time and their time management ability, examinations & academic workload, lack of guidance, personal interest, and their study circles or groups.


A theoretical and experimental study of noise in Brillouin two-beam coupling is presented, which includes both the nondepleted and the depleted pump regimes. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is shown to be proportional to the weak signal input power as well as to the pump intensity in the nondepleted regime. Pump depletion causes both the SNR and the gain to degrade significantly, leading to an optimum working point of gBIpL ≃ 20. The minimum detectable signal power per mode of noise, predicted and measured to be approximately 5 μW at λ = 1.06 μm, is dependent on frequency and temperature, while the peak gain is also dependent on the Brillouin coupling coefficient gB, interaction length, and cross-sectional area of the amplifier.


What are the major determinants of green growth? What role can the government play to promote green growth? To address these questions, this paper develops a simple Green Solow model that sheds light on the role of finance and technology in the process of green growth. The empirical section of the article augments this canonical green growth model to include structural variables relating to finance, technological development, trade openness, natural resource exploitations, and areas where the government can play an important role. In addition, the use of the spatially-corrected generalized method moments approach affords us to explore the role of such factors as growth performance of the neighbouring countries, domestic learning or determination to achieve its national desired target, and political and economic shocks in the process of green growth. It is hoped that research reported in the paper will stimulate further research in the area.


Extracted from text ... South African Psychiatry Review ? May 2006 69
GUEST EDITORIAL S Afr Psychiatry Rev 2006;9:69-71
On 1 December 2005, the Constitutional Court made a
judgement legalising same-sex marriages, effectively making
South Africa one of just five countries worldwide that have
removed legal barriers to gay and lesbian unions. The ruling
includes the right to adopt children for gay and lesbian
couples. The only restriction recognised by the Court was that
marriage officers could refuse to marry homosexual couples if
it was against their conscience. South Africa is now the first
African nation to parallel heterosexual and homosexual
relationships in ..


The purpose of this study was to examine the history and analyze the influence of the women's track and field team at the historically black college, Tennessee State University located in Nashville, Tennessee. The study was divided into three major sections. The first part examined the founding, early development and growth of the
TSU women's track and field program beginning in 1944. The second section examined the social changes and transformations of the TSU track and field program and its athletes during the heart of the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The third section examined the decline in the TSU track and field program during
Coach Edward Temple's last years as head coach, particularly examining how and why the Tigerbelles program lost its athletic dominance during this time period. Additionally, this third part reflected on the historical legacy and influence of the Tigerbelles and the renewed efforts to return the TSU track and field program to its past glory under the last Temple-era Olympian, Chandra Cheeseborough.


Introduction Service-learning is an educational approach that allows for a structured learning experience for students, combining community service with preparation and reflection. Through service learning, students not only provide community service but also learn about the context in which the service is provided. Methods Shared Community–Based Practice (SCBP) is a pioneering service-learning initiative of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) for all health and welfare disciplines located within a community setting. It is unique in the sense that it affords students from discipline–specific domains, an opportunity to practice interdisciplinary in a structured and coordinated manner. SCBP was designed to meet discipline-specific, multidisciplinary and personal goals through the development and implementation of an intervention care plan. Four centres in Nyanga and Mitchelll's Plain were targeted for placement of students in the Community and Health Sciences Faculty at UWC. Focus group discussions were held with the centres personnel and the needs of the centres were identified. Interventions were designed based on these needs. Results The main themes identified included the need for training, awareness and lack of resources. Implementation of the projects had its challenges but students were able to overcome them. Conclusion Shared community based practice is an initiative that can be used effectively in communities in an interdisciplinary manner.


SUMMARY This paper proposed a new approach for the joint friction estimation of non-slipping walking biped robots. The proposed approach is based on the combination of a measurement-based strategy and a model-based method. The former is used to estimate the joint friction online when the foot is in contact with the ground, while the latter adopts a friction model to represent the joint friction when the leg is swinging. The measurement-based strategy utilizes the measured ground reaction forces (GRF) and the readings of an inertial measurement unit (IMU) located at the robot body. Based on these measurements, the joint angular accelerations and the body attitude and velocity are estimated. The aforementioned measurements and estimates are used in a reduced dynamical model of the biped. However, when the leg is swinging, this strategy is inapplicable. Therefore, a friction model is adopted. Its parameters are identified adaptively using the estimated online friction whenever the foot is in contact. The estimated joint friction is used in the feedback torque control signal. The proposed approach is validated using the full-dynamics of 12-DOF biped model. By using this approach, the robot center of mass (CoM) position error is reduced by 10% which demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach.


Scott Ross Baker is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Donald P. Jacobs Scholar at Northwestern University. His research is concentrated in empirical finance and macroeconomics. He is currently engaged in a variety of research projects regarding household leverage, the effects of policy uncertainty on financial markets and growth, as well as the effects of unemployment benefits on job search intensity. Recent work examines the impact of household leverage and credit constraints in driving sensitivity to both income and asset shocks during the Great Recession. Scott joined the Finance Department at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management in July 2014.


1. We have studied in vivo the intracellular responses of neurones in cat visual cortex to electrical pulse stimulation of the cortical afferents and have developed a microcircuit that simulates much of the experimental data. 2. Inhibition and excitation are not separable events, because individual neurones are embedded in microcircuits that contribute strong population effects. Synchronous electrical activation of the cortex inevitably set in motion a sequence of excitation and inhibition in every neurone we recorded. The temporal form of this response depends on the cortical layer in which the neurone is located. Superficial layer (layers 2+3) pyramidal neurones show a more marked polysynaptic excitatory phase than the pyramids of the deep layers (layers 5+6). 3. Excitatory effects on pyramidal neurones, particularly the superficial layer pyramids, are in general not due to monosynaptic input from thalamus, but polysynaptic input from cortical pyramids. Since the thalamic input is transient it does not provide the major, sustained excitation arriving at any cortical neurone. Instead the intracortical excitatory connections provide the major component of the excitation. 4. The polysynaptic excitatory response would be sustained well after the stimulus, were it not for the suppressive effect of intracortical inhibition induced by the pulse stimulation. 5. Intracellular recording combined with ionophoresis of gamma‐aminobutyric acid (GABA) agonists and antagonists showed that intracortical inhibition is mediated by GABAA and GABAB receptors. The GABAA component occurs in the early phase of the impulse response. It is reflected in the strong hyperpolarization that follows the excitatory response and lasts about 50 ms. The GABAB component occurs in the late phase of the response, and is reflected in a sustained hyperpolarization that lasts some 200‐300 ms. Both components are seen in all cortical pyramidal neurones. However, the GABAA component appears more powerful in deep layer pyramids than superficial layer pyramids. 6. The microcircuit simulates with good fidelity the above data from experiments in vivo and provides a novel explantation for the apparent lack of significant inhibition during visual stimulation. The basic circuit may be common to all cortical areas studied and thus the microcircuit may be a 'canonical' microcircuit for neocortex.


Ocean climate, environmental and biological conditions vary on several spatio-temporal scales. Besides climate change associated with anthropogenic activity, there is growing evidence of a natural global multi-decadal climate signal in the ocean–atmosphere–biosphere climate system. The spatio-temporal evolution of this signal is thus analyzed during the 20th century and compared to the variability of small-pelagic fish landings. It is argued that the low-frequency global ocean environment and plankton ecosystems must be modified such that small-pelagic populations vary accordingly. A small-pelagic global index or fishing 'regime indicator series' (RIS) (i.e. a small-pelagic abundance indicator) is used. RIS is derived from fish landings data in the four main fishing areas in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Global RIS changes phase (from positive to negative values) when SST multi-decadal anomalies are out-of-phase between the eastern Pacific and southern Atlantic. RIS also displays maxima during the mid-30s to early-40s and the late-70s to early-80s when the multi-decadal signal was approximately changing phases (Tourre and White 2006 Geophys. Res. Lett. 33 L06716). It is recognized that other factors may modulate fish stocks, including anthropogenic predation. Nevertheless it is proposed that variable climate and environment, and the low-frequency 'global synchrony' of small-pelagic landings (Schwartzlose et al 1999 S. Afr. J. Mar. Sci. 21 289–347), could be associated with the multi-decadal changes in global ocean climate conditions.


Problem Statement: The number of studies on the effect of educational leadership on several organizational outputs is increasing. The most popular topic to review within the framework of leadership is job satisfaction. In several studies, a positive correlation was found between leadership and job satisfaction. According to the two-factor theory of Herzberg (1966), the leadership approaches of leaders affect teachers' job satisfaction. This is due to the fact that the administrators are an important part of the work done at school; and they contribute to teachers' experiences in a positive or negative way. Purpose of the Study: The aim of this study is to test the effect of educational leadership on teachers' job satisfaction using the method of meta-analysis. Method: In order to define the type of research that needs to be included into the meta-analysis of this study, an in-depth search was made in the Council of Higher Education (YOK), the Turkish National Academic Network and Information Center (ULAKBIM), and Google Scholar databases. In this phase, the research process was reduced to only certain keywords, titles, and abstracts, based on the terms leadership, and only using job satisfaction, vocational satisfaction, and work satisfaction. The latest date of research included in this study is January 2016. In using meta-analysis, all doctoral and post-graduate dissertations, articles published in refereed and non-refereed journals, seminars, notices, and books on the  subject can be used. However, in this study, only doctoral and post-graduate dissertations and articles published in refereed and non-refereed journals were included in the analysis. The Pearson correlation coefficient (r) was determined to be the impact quantity in this study. A random effects model was applied in the meta-analysis processes in this study. Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software was used in these processes. Findings: The mean effect size of educational leadership on job satisfaction was found to be .53. This value indicates that educational leadership has a strong impact on job satisfaction. According to the results of the meta-analysis, transformational [r = .52], cultural [r = .59], visionary[r = .47], and educational [r = .60] leadership styles were found to have a strong effect on job satisfaction, and leadership style was found to have a moderate effect. Conclusion and Recommendations: According to the results of the meta-analysis, only the sampling region was determined to have a statistical significance among the determined moderator variables. The fact that only positive leadership styles and job satisfaction were covered by the study may have had an effect on the results obtained. So, future studies using meta-analysis can be designed to include negative leadership attitudes and outputs received from schools. In regard to organizational outputs, negative leadership approaches may occasionally offer better explanations than the positive leadership ones. Finally, this context should be considered, and studies designed to include leadership styles and other organizational outputs covering job satisfaction should be conducted with meta-analysis, as they would be likely to obtain more detailed information to explain related concepts. Keywords: Leadership, educational leadership, job satisfaction, meta-analysis


The publication of David Malouf's Remembering Babylon met with an
ambivalent reception.' The novel is a complex and often deeply moving
narrative that vividly evokes the displacement, dispossession, uncertainties
and anxieties of living in the border or contact zones in mid-nineteenth
century Australia. Yet it radically divided literary critics, their divergent
responses exacerhated by the socio-cultural context of its publication. This
was in 1993, the International Yearof Indigenous Peoples, and one year after
the momentous Mabo v. Queensland High Court ruling on native title. My own
position in the ongoing debate is along the lines of Peter Otto's assertion that
Malouf's text inscribes an "erasure of the political" through his literary
translation of the "political into the psychological, and matters of history and
politics into questions of creativity and aesthetics'? and in compliance with
Suvendrini Perera's postcolonial critique of Malouf's protagonist as being
centred within a "discourse of happy hyridisation".' However, rather than
simply re-engaging with this debate, I want to offer a reading of the
underlying theme of shame in Remembering Babylon, a subject that has so far
been neglected in critical discussions of this novel.


In this PhD thesis, we present our research in the domain of high performance software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD). With the increasing demand of high-resolution simulations, there is a need of numerical solvers that can fully take advantage of current manycore accelerated parallel architectures. In this thesis we focus more specifically on developing an efficient parallel solver for 3D incompressible Navier-Stokes (NS) equations on heterogeneous CPU/GPU architectures. We first present an overview of the CFD domain along with the NS equations for incompressible fluid flows and existing numerical methods. We describe the mathematical model and the numerical method that we chose, based on an incremental prediction-projection method.A balanced distribution of the computational workload is obtained by using a domain decomposition method. A two-level parallelization combined with SIMD vectorization is used in our implementation to take advantage of the current distributed multicore machines. Numerical experiments on various parallel architectures show that this solver provides satisfying performance and good scalability.In order to further improve the performance of the NS solver, we integrate GPU computing to accelerate the most time-consuming tasks. The resulting solver can be configured for running on various heterogeneous architectures by specifying explicitly the numbers of MPI processes, threads and GPUs. This thesis manuscript also includes simulation results for two benchmarks designed from real physical cases. The computed solutions are compared with existing reference results. The code developed in this work will be the base for a future CFD library for parallel CPU/GPU computations.


As one of the countries in the world emphasizing on speech levels in their language, Japan has a unique languge. In spite the fact that the usage of keigo is not as rigid as it was during pre-war era keigo, the highest speech levels in Japanese, is still practiced nowadays. Yet perfect keigo is often disturbed in everyday conversation. Therefore, in speaking, the Japanese speakers will normaly try to adjust their language with both the present hearer and absent hearer. This situation often causes misunderstanding with other people who do not understand Japanese's language character. Most foreign people assume that the Japanese speakers are reluctant to express directly what their inner wish and true intentino. In fact they actually try to avoid speech expression or words that they assume would have been causing impoliteness toward the hearer. Most expressions in language are influenced by people's ways of thinking, doing, and their habits. Keigo expressions therefore serve as reflections of Japanese people character.


Background: Major reviews of the health effects of passive smoking have been subjected to tobacco industry campaigns to refute the scientific evidence. Following the 1992 US Environmental Protection Agency review, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) initiated a review of the health effects of passive smoking. At the time of this review, evidence that environmental tobacco smoke causes disease was being increasingly accepted in courts of law and voluntary adoption of smoking restrictions was rapidly growing. Objective: To demonstrate how the tobacco industry attempted to delay and discredit the publication of a report on passive smoking that the tobacco industry anticipated to contain recommendations that would be unfavourable to their business. Methods: A search of tobacco industry documents on the Master Settlement Agreement websites was conducted using the terms and acronyms representative of the NHMRC review. Results: The tobacco industry sought to impede the progress of the NHMRC Working Party by launching an intensive campaign to delay and discredit the report. The main strategies used were attempts to criticise the science, extensive use of Freedom of Information provisions to monitor all activity of the group, legal challenges, ad hominem attacks on the credibility of the Working Party members, rallying support from industry allies, and influencing public opinion through the media. Conclusions: The Australian tobacco industry deliberately impeded the NHMRC Working Party's progress and successfully prevented the publication of the report's recommendations. The tobacco industry's motivation and capacity to disrupt the advancement of scientific knowledge and policy in tobacco control should be recognised and anticipated.


NASCAR, Sturgis, and the New Economy of Spectacle vividly illustrates how legendary spectacles, such as those in NASCAR racing and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, generate a triple-circuit of profit.


The PHP scripting language and MySQL open source database are quite effective independently, but together they make a simply unbeatable team. When working hand-in-hand, they serve as the standard for the rapid development of dynamic, database-driven websites. This combination is so popular, in fact, that it's attracting many programming newbies who come from a web or graphic design background and whose first language is HTML. If you fall into this ever-expanding category, then this book is for you.Learning PHP and MySQL starts with the very basics of the PHP language, including strings and arrays, pattern matching and a detailed discussion of the variances in different PHP versions. Next, it explains how to work with MySQL, covering information on SQL data access for language and data fundamentals like tables and statements. Finally, after it's sure that you've mastered these separate concepts, the book shows you how to put them together to generate dynamic content. In the process, you'll also learn about error handling, security, HTTP authentication, and more.If you're a hobbyist who is intimidated by thick, complex computer books, then this guide definitely belongs on your shelf. Learning PHP and MySQL explains everything--from basic concepts to the nuts and bolts of performing specific tasks--in plain English.Part of O'Reilly's bestselling Learning series, the book is an easy-to-use resource designed specifically for newcomers. It's also a launching pad for future learning, providing you with a solid foundation for more advanced development.


Thesis abstract
Marine ecosystems are changing rapidly in response to anthropogenic and environmental stresses, and seabird populations that depend on marine resources are in decline in many areas of the world. Iceland supports internationally important populations of many seabird species and, although fishing pressures in Icelandic waters are relatively low, the impacts of current climatic and oceanic changes are predicted to be particularly severe at high latitudes, including Iceland. However, little is known about the current status and demography of Icelandic seabird populations. In this thesis, I explore the breeding demography of Arctic Terns, Sterna paradisaea, at colonies throughout the W and NE of Iceland, between 2008 and 2011. Although Arctic Tern productivity varied among colonies, it was generally low in both regions, primarily because of very low chick survival rates. Low chick survival was primarily a consequence of low growth rates throughout the pre-fledging period, and the application of forensic ecology techniques showed that chick mortality occurred throughout each breeding season and at all ages. Prey composition and prey delivery rates varied regionally and among colonies. The main high quality marine prey are sandeels, Ammodytes spp., In W-Iceland and capelin, Mallotus villosus, in NE-Iceland, but non-marine prey of low nutritive value comprised a large proportion of chick diet in both regions. While productivity in W-Iceland increased with prey delivery rates, in NE-Iceland prey delivery was either inconsistent or low in quality, and productivity was always low. A suite of changes in marine prey communities appears to be impacting Icelandic Arctic Terns. These may include fishing impacts on capelin abundance and/or oceanic and climatic influences on the abundance and availability of sandeels, which are not fished in Iceland. These changes may also be impacting other seabird species in Iceland, for which there is also some evidence of recent low productivity.


Playa type, size, and setting; playa hydrology; and surfacesediment characteristics are important controls on the type and amount of atmospheric dust emitted from playas. Soft, evaporite-rich sediment develops on the surfaces of some Mojave Desert (USA) playas (wet playas), where the water table is shallow (< 4 m). These areas are sources of atmospheric dust because of continuous or episodic replenishment of wind-erodible salts and disruption of the ground surface during salt formation by evaporation of ground water. Dust emission at Franklin Lake playa was monitored between March 2005 and April 2008. The dust record, based on day-time remote digital camera images captured during high wind, and compared with a nearby precipitation record, shows that aridity suppresses dust emission. High frequency of dust generation appears to be associated with relatively wet periods, identified as either heavy precipitation events or sustained regional precipitation over a few months. Several factors may act separately or in combination to account for this relation. Dust emission may respond rapidly to heavy precipitation when the dissolution of hard, wind-resistant evaporitemineral crusts is followed by the development of soft surfaces with thin, newly formed crusts that are vulnerable to wind erosion and (or) the production of loose aggregates of evaporite minerals that are quickly removed by even moderate winds. Dust loading may also increase when relatively high regional precipitation leads to decreasing depth to the water table, thereby increasing rates of vapor discharge, development of evaporite minerals, and temporary softening of playa surfaces. The seasonality of wind strength was not a major factor in dust-storm frequency at the playa. The lack of major dust emissions related to flood-derived sediment at Franklin Lake playa contrasts with some dry-lake systems elsewhere that may produce large amounts of dust from flood sediments. Flood sediments do not commonly accumulate on the surface of Franklin Lake playa because through-going drainage prevents frequent inundation and deposition of widespread flood sediment.


Background As most obese adults were not overweight as children, the prediction of adult obesity from childhood body size alone is limited. We constructed a two-way, multifactor risk assessment framework for predicting adult obesity during childhood using the Foresight Obesity System Map and tested it against longitudinal data from the 1958 National Child Development Study. Methods The framework divided study participants according to two categories of risk: 'conditioning factors' (past/fixed events and conditions) and 'intervention factors' (present and modifiable). At the age of 11 years, conditioning factors were 'low/high birth weight' and 'absence of breastfeeding', and intervention factors were 'low childhood activity level' and 'having at least one obese parent'. From a composite score of all four variables, study participants were assigned to one of the four risk groups: low risk, past 'conditioning' risk only, present 'intervention' risk only and high combined risk. ORs and relative risks for the development of future overweight/obesity at ages 23, 33 and 42 years were calculated for each risk group. Results Those identified in the highest risk category at the age of 11 were around twice as likely to become overweight (body mass index (BMI)≥25 kg/m2) by the age of 23 years, and obese (BMI≥30 kg/m2) by ages 33 and 42 years, in comparison to their low-risk peers (total sample, N=11 752). Increased prevalence of future obesity was also observed for high-risk children who were not already overweight at the age of 11 (filtered sample, N=9549). Conclusions This framework identifies a greater proportion of the population that is at risk for future obesity than does childhood weight assessment alone.


Aims: To determine the distribution of subgingival occurrence of Candida species in chronic periodontitis and peri-implantitis. Materials and methods: A total of 20 patients with chronic periodontitis and 20 patients with peri-implantitis were evaluated. Periodontal parameters that include mean periodontal or peri-implant pocket depth, mean clinical attachment level or relative attachment level, mean gingival index, and mean plaque index were evaluated. Pooled subgingival sample from the deepest pockets using sterile paper points and sterile curettes was obtained from each patient and immediately streaked on to Sabouraud's dextrose agar. Species identification was done by colony color on Chrom agar medium and Dalmau plate culture technique on corn meal agar. Results: In periodontitis, the prevalence of Candida species in periodontal pockets was 26.8%, while in peri-implantitis, it is 27.2%. Comparing the prevalence of various sub-species of Candida between the two groups, we did not find any significant statistical differences. Also, there were no significant statistical differences between the two groups in terms of mean plaque index, mean gingival index, mean probing depth, and mean CAL (p > 0.05). Conclusion: Candida albicans was the most common Candida species isolated from both the groups. It is followed by Candida dubliniensis, Candida krusei, Candida tropicalis, Candida glabrata, and Candida parapsilosis. No significant statistical difference was detected in the Candida count between the two groups.


Break-junction measurements are typically aimed at characterizing electronic properties of single molecules bound between two metal electrodes. Although these measurements have provided structure-function relationships for such devices, there is little work that studies the impact of molecule-molecule interactions on junction characteristics. Here, we use a scanning tunneling microscope based break-junction technique to study pi-stacked dimer junctions formed with two amine-terminated conjugated molecules. We show that the conductance, force and flicker noise of such dimers differ dramatically when compared with the corresponding monomer junctions and discuss the implications of these results on intra- and inter-molecular charge transport.


This paper investigates the effect of differences in sex, age, ethnicity and residency on the willingness of individuals to share money with others in a solidarity game. The solidarity game that was used in this study consists of groups of four players and has similarities with the well-known 'dictator game'. The dictator role was either randomly assigned (random conditions) or earned by performing well on a quiz (performance conditions). In each group, two 'dictators' could distribute 20 credits (reflecting real money). Contrary to most experimental games, this experiment was carried out both with university students in a laboratory at the University of Amsterdam and with 'ordinary' people who visited the Dapper market in a multicultural Amsterdam neighbourhood as subjects. This working paper reports on the latter case. Since the players were informed about the age, the sex, the cultural background and the number of years of residency in the Dapper area of their co-players, we can examine the effect of a difference between two players and of heterogeneity of the group. Thus we test the thesis of Robert Putnam (2007) that ethnic diversity of a group harms both out-group and in-group solidarity. A difference in cultural background between two players appears to have a significantly negative impact on the gift they bestow each other. Natives discriminate against co-players with a Turkish, Moroccan or European background, but not against Surinamese co-players. Surinamese players and players with an 'other' cultural background also demonstrated a bias in favour of players of their own or each other's group compared to natives, Turks, Moroccan and European players. We also found an effect of the ethnic composition of groups on giving, but there is no straightforward relationship between ethnic diversity and the size of gifts. In general, gifts are largest in groups with either three natives or three non-natives, due to intra-ethnic favouritism within these groups. In case of an equal number of natives and non-natives within a group, however, there is little evidence for intra-ethnic favouritism or discrimination against the other ethnic group. Remarkably, we found a similar effect with respect to the diversity of residency within the group, i.e. the number of players who live in the Dapper neighbourhood. Regarding age, both the age of the players and the age difference between the players matters. Up till the age of 50, the size of gifts rises with the age of the player, and gifts are the largest when the players differ about 18.5 years in age, irrespective of who is older and who is younger. Consequently, solidarity seems to be stimulated by a substantial but not too large age difference. Finally, we also examine the relationship between media use and political party preferences on the one hand and gift giving on the other.


BACKGROUND
The efficacy of erlotinib is controversial in patients with unknown EGFR mutational status. The aim of this study was to identify the clinicopathological factors that are predictive of erlotinob treatment outcomes for NSCLC patients with unknown EGFR mutational status.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
A retrospective analysis of 109 patients with advanced NSCLC who had previously failed at least one line of chemotherapy and received subsequent treatment with erlotinib (150 mg/day orally) was performed. A Cox proportional hazard model for univariate and multivariate analyses was used to identify the baseline clinical parameters correlating with treatment outcome, expressed in terms of hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals.

RESULTS
The median treatment duration was 15 weeks (range, 4-184). The disease control rate was 55%, including disease stability for ≥ 3 months for 40% of the patients. Median progression-free survival and median overall survival (OS) were 4.2 and 8.5 months, respectively. The Cox model indicated that an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status (ECOG PS) ≥ 2 (HR 3.82; p<0.001), presence of intra-abdominal metastasis (HR 3.42; p=0.002), 2 or more prior chemotherapy regimens (HR 2.29; p=0.021), and weight loss >5% (HR 2.05; p=0.034) were independent adverse prognostic factors for OS in NSCLC patients treated with erlotinib.

CONCLUSIONS
This study suggests that NSCLC patients should be enrolled in erlotinib treatment after a first round of unsuccessful chemotherapy to improve treatment success, during which they should be monitored for intra-abdominal metastasis and weight loss.


Competitive mooting is very popular among Australian law schools and Australian law students perform very well in mooting competitions. This paper argues that competitive mooting, although it involves hypothetical scenarios and is often somewhat removed from what most legal practitioners will realistically be involved with in daily practice, nevertheless offers an invaluable educational experience at law school. Although competitive mooting does not fall within the narrow definition of clinical legal education (because of its lack of realism, and it being a simulation exercise), it nevertheless shares the benefits of experiential learning pedagogy with clinical legal education. In addition, the unique educational benefits produced by the intense and challenging experiences in competitive mooting accord well with the changing landscape of the legal profession, and the perceived shift in the role of a law degree, from a professional qualification to a valuable companion degree.


The overall aim of the thesis is to extract from a hitherto under-used data set a wide range of statistics that enable the calculation of annual average earnings for a geographically and occupationally diverse group of workers. The period covered is 1896 to 1913 and essentially attempts to draw economic and welfare inferences from spatial and time series analysis by occupational sector and between geographical location. The extent of the data may be exemplified by noting that the number of workers represented is 52,977 in 1896 and 178,674 in 1913. The thesis is divided into three sections as follows: 1. The introductory part discusses in general terms the measurement of economic and labour market conditions in the period, the relative importance of this issue, and difficulties that exist due to lack of representative data. The second part attempts to justify the use of data for annual average earnings of co-operative society workers as giving some representation of market wages. This is covered by two chapters, one qualitative and one quantative 2. The first part of this section draws upon statistics from productive societies in the Movement. The data is arranged by sector and comparisons are made with existing work by Bowley, Wood and Feinstein. Additional data is drawn from the Labour Gazette in the period and the results seem to suggest that, when actual earnings rather than wage rates are used, annual and periodic levels of income show greater variance. The possibility that these variances may be an indication of underlying economic and labour market conditions is discussed in detail. The second part of this section uses data from the largest section of the Movement, the distributive side. A database (Access) has been created and statistics on annual average earnings entered for all 1,167 distributive societies in 1906 (62,465 workers). A total of 890 have been mapped onto an outline of Great Britain. This data is also presented at metropolitan and regional levels of analysis for comparative purposes. 3. The final part of the thesis attempts to draw upon the preceding chapters to suggest that variance in annual average earnings may contribute to the debate concerning conditions within Britain for the period. Relative distress within the diverse economy that existed in the period has been an area of quite considerable discussion and authors have used a number of proxy measures - for example poor law returns, data for the recovery of small debts, marriage rates and trade union unemployment returns - to measure these variations. This section will investigate the possibility that one or more of these proxies may be indicative of relative conditions (by comparison with annual average wages) when tested at local levels.


The Mesozoic and Cenozoic structures of southern England form part of a system of disturbances which extends across the Channel into northern France. They are reviewed in the light of published data from south Dorset. Basin development started with Permo-Triassic rifting, and is believed to have continued through the Jurassic and early Cretaceous with intermittent growth on deep-seated listric normal faults, probably associated with roll-over anticlines. This regime had ceased by the Aptian and the basin passed through a period of relative stability in the late Cretaceous, followed by tectonic inversion and, in the Miocene, by northwards compressive movement along the former normal faults. This partially restored the earlier separative displacement at depth, and probably accentuated pre-existing roll-over anticlines: it was expressed in the surficial Upper Cretaceous-Palaeogene sequence as monoclinal flexuring. The early rifting and the change from overall N-S crustal stretching to compression may reflect plate tectonic events in the North Atlantic region.


Information and Communication Technologies facilitate the emergence of new contexts and practices of learning that educational institutions have to adapt to their pedagogical discourse. This paper presents an application of wikis for mediated collaborative learning of Spanish as a second language ("Spanish L2"). We employed the off-the-shelf wiki environment provided by wikispaces in this pilot project. Students were asked to create a set of pages in Spanish about topics of their interest, with the aim of creating a complete cross-linked wiki. At the end of the project, the students answered 25 open questions related with their experiences in improving their language skills, technical use, and collaborative writing with wikis; working collaboratively in small groups; and searching and reading available information in Spanish on the Internet. Our results indicate that students can quickly appropriate wikis as a tool for learning Spanish L2. Moreover, the wiki supported the shift from individual to collaborative writing effectively as indicated by a change from (a) personal to collective responsibility; (b) fragmentary and individual comprehension to general and collective knowledge; and (c) monocontextuality to polycontextuality. Notably, the wiki was a catalyst in language skill development and proved a good tool for cultural knowledge acquisition.


In general, to determinate applications of liquid crystal spatial light modulators (LCSLM), it is necessary to find the display operational modulation curves, considering the optical setup in which it will be used. This requires the use of a SLM physical model to characterize the Jones matrix of the device. From these, the modulator operation curve is obtained under any polarization configuration, and it is possible to predict the SLM behavior, to modulate in amplitude or phase modulation. The characterization procedure is usually performed with normal incidence. Nevertheless, if the illumination is off-axis, it could deteriorate the prediction of their behavior and consequently the expected modulation of polarized light. In this work we analyze experimentally the behavior of the transmissive LCDSLM when the incident beam impinging on it is off-axis. It is observed that the amplitude modulation is scarcely noticeable, when the incident light beam is non-perpendicular to LCD, different to configuration 0°, as it was characterized. The situation is different when we study the phase only modulation configuration. In this case, a variation in operation curve versus inclination of incident light beam is observed. This result can be important to optimize some experiments or to take advantage, in only one optical setup, to implement polarized beams with controlled slight phase differences between them. Likewise, the Jones matrix of the LCSLM dispositive is obtained, and it is possible to observe variations in any matrix components whereas the angle of the incident light beam is varying. Also, experimental curves for amplitude and phase modulations are presented.


In response to concerns about the standards of training for non-medically qualified homeopathic practitioners, between 1999 and 2009 a number of UK universities taught Bachelor of Science (BSc) degrees in homeopathy. All the courses were subsequently closed following media coverage of a vigorous campaign from scientists against the degree courses. A boundary-work analysis of 65 articles published in the UK print media reveals the use of metaphors from a number of different fields as rhetorical strategies to malign homeopathy education. As well as the commonly used contrasts of profit versus academic integrity, rationality versus faith and logic versus magic, media reports associated homeopathy with new universities and Mickey Mouse degrees, both of which had been denigrated in the press previously. In the press coverage, much attention was also drawn to the fact that the method of repeatedly diluting homeopathic medicines defies both logic and common sense, and the plausibility argument became a decisive blow in the debate over the legitimacy of teaching homeopathy as a science degree. It seems that the boundary work sought to protect the authority of both science and medicine by expelling homeopathy from higher education. These findings contrast with previous studies that suggest that orthodox medicine has occasionally expanded to incorporate desirable aspects of complementary and alternative therapies. Scientists carry out boundary work not just to demarcate the boundaries of science and directly defend their own interests, but also to protect the authority of other allied professions.


This article asks if and under what conditions ethnic diversity could become the foundation for a prosperous society. Recent studies on ethnic diversity and social cohesion suggest that diversity has a negative effect on social cohesion and therefore is detrimental to the social prosperity of individuals and communities. This article argues that although such a negative correlation may apply to contexts with well-consolidated ethnic groups, it does not necessarily apply to 'super-diverse' places with multiple small ethnic groups and multiple social, legal and cultural differences that cut across ethnicity. Drawing on ethnographic material from East London, the authors contend that, in super-diverse places, ethnic diversity could become a valuable aspect of community life, while inequalities in social, cultural and symbolic capital become central points of social antagonism to the detriment of prosperity.


Biochar is a solid material obtained from the carbonization of biomass. If properly produced, it is useful for soil application to enrich plant values. Rice husk (RH) waste, an abundant agricultural by-product, was gasified in a top-lit updraft Belonio rice husk gasifier with a biochar yield of 29.0% ± 1.9%. The equivalence ratio (ER) for optimum biochar production was identified and its effect on biochar properties such as pH, volatile matter (VM), fixed carbon (FC) and ash content (AC), electricity consumption, biochar yield, specific gasification rate (SGR) as well as reactor temperature investigated and statistically analyzed. As ER increased from 0.292 ± 0.005 to 0.442 ± 0.016, the SGR decreased from 85.4 ± 4.5 kg/(m2hr) to 51.6 ± 2.4 kg/(m2hr) whereas reactor temperature increased linearly with ER. The original VM content of RH was found to be 76.1% ± 1.2% and decreased with increasing ER from 14.1% ± 0.2% to 10.6% ± 0.3%. The original FC and AC of 5.49% ± 0.22% and 9.10% ± 1.23% increased with ER from 50.5% ± 0.7% to 51.3% ± 0.4% and 33.7% ± 0.4% to 36.7% ± 0.1% respectively. The biochar pH at low, medium and high ER was 9.36 ± 0.11, 9.64 ± 0.03 and 9.42 ± 0.01, respectively. Results revealed a significant change in biochar yield and proximate values as ER changes from low to high.


The 19th Century Concord Digital Archive implemented a scholarly map interface that draws on current open source technologies. The archive includes interlinked literary texts, maps, census materials, town reports, broadsides, and period newspaper clippings. These texts are technologically designed to reference and interact with each other. However, the archive does not seek merely to present a set of texts for study. Instead, it tests an initial map interface to the textual data. When we are able to view satellite photos of the topography and quickly find a physical description related to the topography in an essay, what new information might be revealed? When we explore a place visually and then link to the text, what new conclusions might scholars draw?


Ready to unleash the Droid 2? This entertaining guide helps you take full command of Motorolas sleek new device to get online, shop, find locations, keep in touch, and much more. Every page is packed with useful information you can put to work right away, from setup to troubleshooting, with lots of valuable tips and tricks along the way. Get organized. Sync your contacts, calendar, and email with your Google Calendar and Outlook accounts. Go online. Make your phone a portable hotspot or a modem to get your laptop online. Be productive. Use Google docs to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Play music. Purchase music from Amazon and sync your Droid 2 with Windows Media Player. Capture photos and video. Edit your photos and share everything you shootinstantly.


We identify form-stable coupled excitations of light and matter ("dark-state polaritons") associated with the propagation of quantum fields in electromagnetically induced transparency. The properties of dark-state polaritons such as the group velocity are determined by the mixing angle between light and matter components and can be controlled by an external coherent field as the pulse propagates. In particular, light pulses can be decelerated and "trapped" in which case their shape and quantum state are mapped onto metastable collective states of matter. Possible applications of this reversible coherent-control technique are discussed.


This is the reference guide to everyday expressions in American Sign Language, providing the quickest way to converse with people who are deaf or hearing impaired. Now updated and expanded, this bestselling manual is clearly illustrated with thousands of line drawings and is very easy to use. Organized by topic, its chapters focus on areas such as health, family, school, sports, travel, religion, time, money, food and drink, and even small talk. A detailed discussion of ASL grammar (very different from English grammar) and a compact dictionary of signs are also included. This edition reflect the evolution of the language--changes in its grammar as well as changes that are a result of the recent movement toward replacing stereotypical signs with their neutral counterparts. The only ASL phrase book available, this handy guide can function as both an instant reference tool and a long-term study guide.


Unlike social programs targeting individuals, few enterprise support programs have been rigorously evaluated, and existing evaluations have mostly been done in high-income countries such as the United States and Europe. Mexico spends a large share of government resources on small and medium enterprise programs each year. How effective these programs have been in achieving their objectives is unclear. In Mexico, impact evaluations of small and medium enterprise programs are rare, and most are qualitative in nature. This is the first paper evaluating these programs in Mexico using firm-level panel data. The continuous and ten-year panel data -- from the 1994-2005 period -- allow the authors to address selectivity bias and unobserved firm heterogeneity by applying a generalization of differences-in-differences models combined with propensity score matching methods. This study finds evidence that participation in small and medium enterprise programs is associated with improvements in key variables such as value added, gross production, and wages. Furthermore, the study finds evidence that some of the positive effects can take several years to realize. The results also call for streamlining and greater efficiency in Mexico's small and medium enterprise programs.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the tissue distribution of enrofloxacin after intramammary or simulated systemic administration in isolated perfused sheep udders by measuring its concentration at various sample collection sites.

SAMPLE
26 udders (obtained following euthanasia) from 26 healthy lactating sheep.

PROCEDURES
For each isolated udder, 1 mammary gland was perfused with warmed, gassed Tyrode solution. Enrofloxacin (1 g of enrofloxacin/5 g of ointment) was administered into the perfused gland via the intramammary route or systemically via the perfusion fluid (equivalent to a dose of 5 mg/kg). Samples of the perfusate were obtained every 30 minutes for 180 minutes; glandular tissue samples were obtained at 2, 4, 6, and 8 cm from the teat base after 180 minutes. The enrofloxacin content of the perfusate and tissue samples was analyzed via high-performance liquid chromatography with UV detection.

RESULTS
After intramammary administration, maximun perfusate enrofloxacin concentration was detected at 180 minutes and, at this time, mean tissue enrofloxacin concentration was detected and mean tissue enrofloxacin concentration was 123.80, 54.48, 36.72, and 26.42 μg/g of tissue at 2, 4, 6, and 8 cm from the teat base, respectively. Following systemic administration, perfusate enrofloxacin concentration decreased with time and, at 180 minutes, tissue enrofloxacin concentrations ranged from 40.38 to 35.58 μg/g of tissue.

CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE
By 180 minutes after administration via the intramammary or systemic route in isolated perfused sheep mammary glands, mean tissue concentration of enrofloxacin was greater than the minimum inhibitory concentration required to inhibit growth of 90% of many common mastitis pathogens in sheep. Use of either route of administration (or in combination) appears suitable for the treatment of acute mastitis in sheep.


Methods which implemented at class give great influence to graduates profile in the universities . Therefore, the learning material in a lecture at the university is very important to be directed in accordance with the vision and mission of the university. Ciputra University is a university with the vision and mission of "Creating a World Class Entrepreneur", which has 4 faculties and 10 departments. One of them is Business Information System, which aims to deliver an entrepreneur in the field of Information Systems, especially in the field of analysis and design of information systems. To support this, one of the usual course concepts taught during the Operation Management is implemented by using the concept and project-based-learning. This is done before the final exams the students are given the opportunity to look for small and medium business clients for a given application is Accurate Accounting software. The program aims to explore the creativity of the students apart from academic activities that followed the everyday, as well as giving them the establishment of the expected 5 things: 1. Interpersonal Skill 2. Personal Selling 3. Accounting 4. Introduction to Business Process. By looking at the results, we can get an evaluation of the system during the learning for teachers as well as feedback obtained by the students themselves when undergoing a small project for beginner.


This paper considers the implications of changing land use and transport patterns in cities in Central and Eastern Europe. It reviews experience elsewhere, primarily in Western Europe, where a spiral of increasing mobility and dispersal is widely acknowledged to be environmentally, socially and economically unsustainable. Policies being adopted at different scales in attempts to modify these trends are outlined, and some considerations for CEE cities are highlighted. It is argued that sustainable land use and transport systems are a matter of political choice.


ABSTRACT. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a free‐living and common environmental bacterium. It is an opportunistic and nosocomial pathogen causing serious human health problems. To overcome its predators, such as macrophages and environmental phagocytes, it utilises different survival strategies, such as the formation of microcolonies and the production of toxins mediated by a type III secretion system (TTSS). The aim of this study was to examine interaction of TTSS effector proteins of P. aeruginosa PA103 with Acanthamoeba castellanii by co‐cultivation, viable count, eosin staining, electron microscopy, apoptosis assay, and statistical analysis. The results showed that P. aeruginosa PA103 induced necrosis and apoptosis to kill A. castellanii by the effects of TTSS effector proteins ExoU, ExoS, ExoT, and ExoY. In comparison, Acanthamoeba cultured alone and co‐cultured with P. aeruginosa PA103 lacking the known four TTSS effector proteins were not killed. The results are consistent with P. aeruginosa being a strict extracellular bacterium that needs TTSS to survive in the environment, because the TTSS effector proteins are able to kill its eukaryotic predators, such as Acanthamoeba.


Sine-wave threshold characteristics of human color mechanisms inferred by superimposing red and green stimuli in opposite phases have roughly the same curve shapes as those measured under intense chromatic adaptation, but the latter technique yields considerably greater overall sensitivity for the green mechanism. The adaptive-artifact explanation for this discrepancy offered by Cavonius and Estevez is shown to be untenable.


ABSTRACT Unlike previous researchers who concentrated on carbonate strata in the Sacramento Mountains, New Mexico, we conducted facies analysis on sandstone units within the Upper Pennsylvanian Holder Formation (Virgilian). Detailed work on several exposures in Laborcita Canyon revealed that the sandstone bodies have flat bases and upward-coarsening grain size sequences and are composed of three main subfacies. The sandstone subfacies in ascending vertical order are 1) thin-bedded, fine-grained sandstone with parallel-laminae and hummocky stratification with graded "tempestite" sequences; 2) fine-grained sandstone similar to subfacies 1, but occurring within medium to thick-bedded, large-scale foresets up to 5 m high; and 3) medium-grained sandstone with multidirectional cross-stratification, ipples and abundant marine trace fossils. The sandstones were deposited in a storm-dominated, inner shelf environment, and the preserved depositional topography, lenticularity, distribution of sedimentary structures and paleocurrent relationships suggest that the Laborcita Canyon sandstones represent sand ridges. The sand ridges migrated and accreted seaward during storms that generated large waves (estimated wave heights = 1.25-6 m) and downwelling pressure gradient currents, which combined to transport sand efficiently offshore. Storm-flow paleocurrent indicators trend roughly normal to the regional paleoshoreline, suggesting that the ridges were deposited in a friction-dominated or transitional shelf dynamic zone rather than in a fully-developed geostrophic zone. Sand ridges on the U.S. Atlantic inner shelf are modern proc ss analogues to the Laborcita Canyon sandstones because of the similarities in scale, internal bounding surfaces, grain-size sequences and storm processes that control deposition.


Assessment of available water is the basis that allows for sustainable management of the water resource. Special need concerns the assessment of groundwater resources, about which, often little is known. The present study aims to explore the water resource, with a focus on groundwater, of a small catchment (3.5km2), situated in a semi-arid zone in Burkina Faso (West Africa). A 5-year data set of stable isotopes of water, groundwater level and other hydrologic data is used to gain insight into the water resources in this small catchment. The main effort is devoted to the analysis of isotope data, with the secondary goal to asses the potential of the use of stable isotopes of water as an innovative tool in hydrology. Analyzed are temporal and spacial variations of the isotopic signature in groundwater, surface water and rain. Isotope data is compared to groundwater level data. Isotope data allowed to distinguish two different categories of wells. First, wells where evaporation dominated compared to recharge at the end of the wet season through the dry season, and wells that have constant isotope ratios throughout the year. Evolution of the isotope signature of the former suggests that these wells get disconnected from the aquifer at some point of the year. Comparison of isotope ratios of different sampling sites (springs, wells, pumps, surface water and rain) revealed that the upstream springs diverge from the other sites in their isotopic signature, and thus either have a different origin or were subject to different processes. Negligible diurnal variations observed in isotopic signatures of wells prompt that diurnal fluctuations observed in groundwater levels are due to non isotope fractionation processes. Periods deduced from seasonal changes in isotopic signatures match periods of rising and decreasing groundwater levels. Though groundwater levels show inter-annual variability, especially in their peak levels, this was not reflected in the isotope data. Isotope data confirmed conclusions gained from other data (recharge periods), added additional information (diurnal fluctuations of wells are non isotope fractionation processes), and pointed out the fact that upstream spring water distinguishes in some form or another from other groundwater.


Context The relative contribution of genes vs environment in idiopathic Parkinson disease (PD) is controversial. Although genetic studies have identified 2 genes in which mutations cause rare single-gene variants of PD and observational studies have suggested a genetic component, twin studies have suggested that little genetic contribution exists in the common forms of PD.

Objective To identify genetic risk factors for idiopathic PD.

Design, Setting, and Participants Genetic linkage study conducted 1995-2000 in which a complete genomic screen (n = 344 markers) was performed in 174 families with multiple individuals diagnosed as having idiopathic PD, identified through probands in 13 clinic populations in the continental United States and Australia. A total of 870 family members were studied: 378 diagnosed as having PD, 379 unaffected by PD, and 113 with unclear status.

Main Outcome Measures Logarithm of odds (lod) scores generated from parametric and nonparametric genetic linkage analysis.

Results Two-point parametric maximum parametric lod score (MLOD) and multipoint nonparametric lod score (LOD) linkage analysis detected significant evidence for linkage to 5 distinct chromosomal regions: chromosome 6 in the parkin gene (MLOD = 5.07; LOD = 5.47) in families with at least 1 individual with PD onset at younger than 40 years, chromosomes 17q (MLOD = 2.28; LOD = 2.62), 8p (MLOD = 2.01; LOD = 2.22), and 5q (MLOD = 2.39; LOD = 1.50) overall and in families with late-onset PD, and chromosome 9q (MLOD = 1.52; LOD = 2.59) in families with both levodopa-responsive and levodopa-nonresponsive patients.

Conclusions Our data suggest that the parkin gene is important in early-onset PD and that multiple genetic factors may be important in the development of idiopathic late-onset PD.

Parkinson disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects more than a half-million people in the United States.1 The economic, social, and emotional burden of PD will increase as the population ages. Controversy has surrounded the etiology of PD, with evidence suggesting that both genetic and environmental factors influence disease risk. Familial aggregation of PD has been observed for decades.2 Data from family studies, including a recent large study from Iceland,3 have shown that the sibling recurrence risk ratio ranges from 2 to 10, suggesting that a genetic component to PD exists. However, twin studies4- 6 have produced conflicting results about the genetic contributions, suggesting that little if any genetic contribution exists in the development of PD.

Previous efforts to identify genetic risk factors for PD have focused primarily on rare, simple autosomal dominant and recessive forms of the disease. Mutations in the α-synuclein gene, located on chromosome 4q, have been shown to be rare causes of autosomal dominant, early-onset PD.7 Mutations in the parkin gene, located on chromosome 6q, have been reported in families with rare autosomal recessive juvenile parkinsonism and autosomal recessive early-onset PD.8,9 Linkage of several large families with autosomal dominant PD to chromosome 2 has been reported,10 but a disease-causing gene remains to be identified. Collectively, these studies have demonstrated genetic effects only for rare single-gene variants of PD. To examine the broader issue of genetic effects in idiopathic PD, we performed a complete genomic screen for linkage analysis in 174 families with PD containing at least 1 affected relative pair.


Abstract The choice of processing routes for parts is often strongly influenced by high tooling costs that can only be justified when large batches are required. This paper describes a novel system for producing inexpensive dies and moulds. The system exploits the recently developed 'incremental sheet forming' process to produce a die surface, which is then supported by a reinforcement and used as a conventional die or mould. A demonstrator die pair has been designed, constructed and tested, and the results show that even with a temporary reinforcement such as sand, the dies retain geometric accuracy. The use of this system allows more widespread application of incremental sheet forming than has been envisaged to date, as it expands the potential process applicability beyond prototypes and small batches by allowing manufacture, validation, and adjustment of dies and moulds for conventional mass production processes.


Abstract The Panel on Food Additives and Flavourings of the European Food Safety Authority was requested to deliver a scientific opinion on the implications for human health of the product Grill flavour concentrate (vegetable) [FL‐no: 21.002] in the Flavouring Group Evaluation 501 (FGE.501), according to Regulation (EC) No 1331/2008 and Regulation (EC) No 1334/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council. The product is derived from heat‐treated canola oil and intended to be used as a food flavouring with grilled aroma in a wide variety of food categories. Information on manufacturing and compositional data was considered adequate to show the reproducibility of the production process. The chronic dietary exposure to the substance estimated using the added portions exposure technique (APET) was calculated to be 0.402 and 0.252 mg/person per day for a 60‐kg adult and for a 15‐kg child, respectively. Based on exposure estimate and the results from the repeated‐dose toxicity studies, a sufficient margin of safety could be calculated. However, the Panel noted that for six constituents of the flavouring there is an indication for genotoxicity. Therefore, these six substances have to be further considered. Until these evaluations have been finalised the safety of Grill flavour concentrate (vegetable) cannot be fully assessed.


Spinoza is a key figure in modern philosophy. Ethics is his most studied and well known work. Being both up-to-date and clear, this Guidebook is designed to lead the reader through this complex seminal text. Spinoza's Ethics introduces and assess: * Spinoza'a life, and its connection with his thought * The text of the Ethics * Spinoza's continuing relevence to contemporary philosophy


ABSTRACT Patients with diabetes occasionally develop diabetic polyneuropathy (DPN), which is characterized by both positive symptoms such as pain and negative symptoms such as numbness/dysesthesia. However, these symptoms have always been collectively analyzed to determine their risk factors. This study aimed to independently analyze the risk factors for neuropathic pain and numbness/dysesthesia in DPN patients. In total, 298 patients with diabetes (age: 61.1 ± 10.4 years; 176 male) were included. The relationships among the incidence of DPN and its clinical parameters were determined using logistic regression models. Then, the statistical model was applied in two groups of DPN patients: those with pain only or both pain and the negative symptoms (pain group; n = 25) and those with the negative symptoms only or both pain and the negative symptoms (numbness/dysesthesia group; n = 60). All logistic regression models were adjusted for the duration of diabetes, glycosylated hemoglobin levels, and age. The depression score was higher for patients with DPN than for those without, although it did not reach an abnormal level. An abnormal Achilles tendon reflex (ATR) and insulin treatment, but not smoking, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetic retinopathy, were associated with DPN. Furthermore, female sex and an abnormal ATR and insulin treatment were significant clinical features in the pain and numbness/numbness groups, respectively. Overweight and obesity were the common clinical features in both groups. We conclude that the positive and negative symptoms of DPN possibly have independent risk factors, suggesting different underlying mechanisms and the need for separate diagnosis and treatment.


Cradled among the world's highest mountains - and sheltering one of its most devout religious communities - Tibet is, for many of us, an ultimate destination, a place that touches the heavens, a place only barely in our world, at its very end. In recent decades Western fascination with Tibet has soared, from the rise of Tibetan studies in academia to the rock concerts aimed at supporting its independence to the simple fact that most of us know - far from any base camp - exactly what a sherpa is. And yet any sustained look into Tibet as a place, any attempt to find one's way around its high plateaus and through its deep history, will yield this surprising fact: we have barely mapped it. With this atlas, Karl E. Ryavec rights that wrong, sweeping aside the image of Tibet as Shangri-La and putting in its place a comprehensive vision of the region as it really is, a civilization in its own right. And the results are absolutely stunning. The product of twelve years of research and eight more of mapmaking, A Historical Atlas of Tibet documents cultural and religious sites across the Tibetan Plateau and its bordering regions from the Paleolithic and Neolithic times all the way up to today. It ranges through the five main periods in Tibetan history, offering introductory maps of each followed by details of western, central, and eastern regions. It beautifully visualizes the history of Tibetan Buddhism, tracing its spread throughout Asia, with thousands of temples mapped, both within Tibet and across North China and Mongolia, all the way to Beijing. There are maps of major polities and their territorial administrations, as well as of the kingdoms of Guge and Purang in western Tibet, and of Derge and Nangchen in Kham. There are town plans of Lhasa and maps that focus on history and language, on population, natural resources, and contemporary politics. Extraordinarily comprehensive and absolutely gorgeous, this overdue volume will be a cornerstone in cartography, Asian studies, Buddhist studies, and in the libraries or on the coffee tables of anyone who has ever felt the draw of the landscapes, people, and cultures of the highest place on Earth.


Co-published by Bernan Press and the World Trade Organization, the 1998 Trade Policy Review series provides detailed trade information on every World Trade Organization member country. This volume describes the trade policies, policy-making institutions, practices, and macroeconomic situation of Hungary.


Massively parallel sequencing technologies continue to alter the study of human genetics. As the cost of sequencing declines, next-generation sequencing (NGS) instruments and datasets will become increasingly accessible to the wider research community. Investigators are understandably eager to harness the power of these new technologies. Sequencing human genomes on these platforms, however, presents numerous production and bioinformatics challenges. Production issues like sample contamination, library chimaeras and variable run quality have become increasingly problematic in the transition from technology development lab to production floor. Analysis of NGS data, too, remains challenging, particularly given the short-read lengths (35-250 bp) and sheer volume of data. The development of streamlined, highly automated pipelines for data analysis is critical for transition from technology adoption to accelerated research and publication. This review aims to describe the state of current NGS technologies, as well as the strategies that enable NGS users to characterize the full spectrum of DNA sequence variation in humans.


This study shows that dialectal [DO] is a candidate for fostering dialect resurgence (and countering moribundity) because some of its forms are salient (though to varying degrees); thus they may be retained by speakers even as highly phonetically variant items and other (sometimes infrequent items) recede. These lexical shibboleths are actively and consciously manipulated by speakers to assert dialect identity, in the face of stigma and ostensible levelling of some variants. Interesting for the resilience of these [DO] paradigmatic forms is their degree of fossilisation, which is in a mutual feeding relationship with salience; this is predicted to result in greater sociolinguistic resilience for shibboleths. We describe how the range of [DO] shibboleths achieve (or do not achieve) salience and resilience, and thereby, in some cases, elude moribundity trends evident in paradigmatically related items; in the process, we demonstrate the social stratification effects evident in the phenomenon.


In late 2013, the Japanese Supreme Court voided inheritance rules giving non-marital children half the shares of their marital half-siblings. To punish children for the sins of their parents, it explained, violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Like the stigma that most traditional societies attached to illegitimacy, the inheritance rules had reflected a simple selection bias: the societies that survive are those where more children live to reproductive age; in harsh environments (the norm until a few centuries ago) whether children survived turned on the level of investment adults made in them; men tend not to invest in children whose paternity they do not know; hence, non-marital children had been substantially less likely to survive; but the stigma attached to illegitimacy and the accompanying legal disabilities had helped minimize the number of such children by channeling sex into stable dyadic relationships. The pre-2013 inheritance rule had promoted that relational stability by helping women hold men to their promises. In order to induce women to marry them, men routinely promise to invest in the children they bear together. The earlier rule had assured women that if their husbands breached those promises in life, they could at least trust the law to favor their children in his death. After 2013, the courts could no longer offer even that assurance.


This research investigates what drives the euroization in Albania. By using survey data collected in one of the main Albanian cities, we find that factors like remittances, financial literacy, perception of high inflation and trust in financial system play an important role in the extent of euroization together with the experience of past events. Factors related to the future, such as the expectation on the exchange rate fluctuations, seem to not be correlated with the extent of euroization. As regards the current Eurozone crisis, its impact on euroization results to be mediated by the (mis)trust in EURO rather than local currency.


SUMMARY Case of a 7 years old female, with significant medical history of embrional type of RMS, diagnosed 2,5 years ago in left parapharingeal area. After surgical removal of the tumor, the area is radiated with 50Gy for 6 weeks and also has 3 courses of chemotherapy. By now the child is clinically healthy of RMS, but she has developed serious side effects of radiation therapy: erosive caries to all primary teeth, hyposalivation and total lost of function of the left parotid gland, delayed development of the teeth, facial asymmetry, caused by the arrested growth of left side mandibule. Acute and chronic complications of radiation therapy act to the dynamic changes of the oral environment in a phase of active growth, dental eruptions and incomplete mineralization. The potential risk of osteoradionecrosis and radiation caries, resulted in the sequel of xerostomia and a cariogenic shift in micro flora, requires a prophylactic and heeling program to modulate the oral environment and to prevent or at lease, minimize the side effects and should be integral part of the treatment. Frequent dental follow – up should be scheduled throughout the treatment period to reinforce the importance of continued oral hygiene and to deal with the complications for a lifelong period of time. Key word: Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) embryonic,


Mr. Donoso presents a case study base don Missio's experience in organizational development in the Northern area of the Metropolitan Area of Santiago. Missio is a Catholic Church organization acting at the lowest income levels of population in the city in two different ways: on the one hand, by backing up reivindicative actions of the population through assistance to pobladores organizations; on the other, by acting as their counselors in maximizing the output achieved with their own scarce resources. The conclusion attained is that in order to improve the habitat a set of different complementary actions are needed and, most important of all, the generation of income through productive employment.


The aim of the thesis is to consider the surrealist portrait and whether it has added to an understanding of portraiture as a genre. It uses Richard Brilliant's Portraiture (1991) and Shearer West's Portraiture (2004) as points of reference, using the limited examples of surrealist portraiture provided by both authors and their criteria for the consideration of portraiture in general. The thesis presents a number of other surrealist portraits, exploring whether Brilliant and West's criteria may have been modified had they analysed such images. It also seeks to identify any issues and new directions research may take in order to augment the study of portraiture. By focusing on surrealist portraiture, the thesis reflects on how a movement constructed and guided by human relationships, and informed by a number of principles of psychoanalytical theory has reflected such concerns in the portraiture they produced. An investigation of all surrealist portraits would have been impossible within the scope of this thesis; therefore, it has been necessary to select four key areas which most ably demonstrate issues relevant to portraiture: gender and self-exploration, photography, group portraiture and concealment. The thesis takes issue with Brilliant and West's view that likeness is an essential requirement of portraiture by providing a number of examples of surrealist portraiture which toy with expectations of likeness by the concealment of features, and
incorporation of an alter-ego. Brilliant's assertion that inanimate objects have no position in portraiture is also explored through specific examples of surrealist portraiture. By considering specific examples of surrealist portraiture the thesis questions such conventional definitions as those proposed by Brilliant and West.


ABSTRACT

Innovations in Policing regarding EU Membership in Turkey: Police Officers' Perceptions of Community Policing
 by
 Murat Aksoy

The Turkish National Police (TNP) has been undergoing continuous reform and reorganization for over a decade, with many new departments and training facilities being set up. As part of this continuous change, a number of innovative initiatives, including community policing, have been introduced in Turkey in the past decade in anticipation of European Union membership. The advent of Community Policing (COP) was announced to the Police Organization, in a circular, by the Turkish Interior Ministry in 2005. In support of this new policy style, studies were also undertaken to run an EU sponsored project titled 'Community Involvement in Suppression of Crimes'. It is expected that such policies and programmes will contribute to the approach to policing in Turkey.
Similar to any other innovative initiative, effective implementation of COP as an innovative style depends on the police officers' perceptions and acceptance in particular and the police organisation in general. However, to date, no empirical studies have been conducted to examine officers' perceptions of community policing nationwide.
The aim of this study, therefore, is to examine the perceived effectiveness of COP at the individual level through the expressed perceptions of participating police officers. In addition, this study also aims to identify the selected demographic and experiential variables, which determine the level of effectiveness of COP from the viewpoint of the police officers on the ground. In order to fulfil these aims, this study is constructed as an explorative case study for which primary data is collected through a questionnaire survey administered with 290 law enforcement community police officers from 16 cities across Turkey.
Statistical methods are employed to analyse the primary data. The findings from the OLS regression analysis demonstrate that COP has the potential to be implemented in Turkey. After creating dependent and one independent variable using factor analysis, the results reveals that COP officers strongly support the program and they have positive perceptions of it. In addition, the majority of the participating COP officers are in support of the EU process to help the changing environment in Turkey, particularly in the Police service. The OLS model I identifies six variables with a statistically significant relationship. These variables are: 'European Union', 'fear of crime', 'years of experience', 'volunteer or assigned', 'education' and 'proportion of COP to traditional policing'. The OLS model II reveals that there is a significant relationship in city size (population). In addition, the Black Sea, East Anatolia, and Aegean regions are statistically associated with the effectiveness of COP which means there are no differences according to region in Turkey. The findings of the study also rendered useful information for future developments.

It can be concluded that the findings of this study can be expected to help practitioners, policymakers, and researchers for the development of future policies in the field.


Based on a collection of written narratives gathered in the context of a broader longitudinal investigation of the bilingual acquisition of German Sign Language (DGS) and written German by bilingually educated deaf students, the study presented in this chapter explores the main milestones in the development of German in order to (a) identify the commonalities and differences between the deaf students' and other learners' development of German, and (b) determine the range of intra-individual variation (including language contact phenomena) and its relation to reorganisation phases in the learner grammars. The analysis of the data reveals the structure-building processes underlying the students' development of German sentence structure. Further, it is shown that the deviances in the written productions pattern with the errors produced by learners of German in other acquisition situations, which provides additional support for the assumption that deaf learners' acquisition of written German as an L2 is bound, too, to underlying language specific learning processes. Regarding language contact phenomena, the lexical and structural borrowings identified occur at specific developmental phases whereby structural borrowings decrease as learners progress in their development of the L2.


Internet of Things refers to interconnection of billions of things which include objects, services and living beings. The realization of IoT systems will fundamentally change how we interact with the world and a key technology in that direction is Middleware. Middleware is an intermediary software system between IoT devices and applications. This thesis proposes a lightweight Middleware solution which can be deployed both on the Cloud for intense analytics and on the Edge Network for local analytics to support near real time applications and support interoperability between heterogenous devices and applications by providing multiple protocol binding. The experiments are conducted on SDN managed IoT network testbed and the results show that the proposed Middleware is a lightweight solution, which is suitable for both Cloud which is resourceful and Edge devices like resource constrained IoT Gateway and provides interoperability between IoT devices and applications.


This paper considers a learnable approach for comparing and aligning videos. Our architecture builds upon and revisits temporal match kernels within neural networks: we propose a new temporal layer that finds temporal alignments by maximizing the scores between two sequences of vectors, according to a time-sensitive similarity metric parametrized in the Fourier domain. We learn this layer with a temporal proposal strategy, in which we minimize a triplet loss that takes into account both the localization accuracy and the recognition rate. We evaluate our approach on video alignment, copy detection and event retrieval. Our approach outperforms the state on the art on temporal video alignment and video copy detection datasets in comparable setups. It also attains the best reported results for particular event search, while precisely aligning videos.


Abstract An atypical asbestiform sepiolite occurrence with exceptionally long fibres wrapped by a sheath of aliphatic hydrocarbons was found in the Gressoney Valley (Italian Western Alps) while monitoring asbestos presence in outcrops of serpentinite rocks. Microscopic and Fourier transform infrared analyses proved that these fibres, apparently up to several cm long, are formed by bundles of thinner fibrils (average length: 150 μm) potentially dispersible in the environment. When observed using transmission electron microscopy these fibrils show a rhomboidal to parallelogram cross section (<1 μm), of which surfaces are covered mostly by an aliphatic hydrocarbon film - an association not reported in the literature. The sepiolite fibrils and their organic coating probably originated in sequential steps from precipitation of Si/Mg rich hydrothermal fluids, resulting from serpentinization of olivine and clinopyroxene and a Fischer-Tropsch-type reaction. The presence of hydrocarbons has serious implications for the sepiolite habit, as the organic wrap interacts with the fibril's surface reducing the amount of adsorbed water and favouring the fragmentation of thicker units into thinner ones, due to an 'opening' process implying separation along z and cleavage on (110). This defibrillation mechanism, coupled with the extraordinary length, further increases the aspect ratio of these fibrils (length/width >>3) thus amplifying their potential danger for human health when dispersed in air and inhaled.


The success of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as an online research platform has come at a price: MTurk exhibits slowing rates of population replenishment, and growing participants' non-naivety. Recently, a number of alternative platforms have emerged, offering capabilities similar to MTurk while providing access to new and more naive populations. We examined two such platforms, CrowdFlower (CF) and Prolific Academic (ProA). We found that both platforms' participants were more naive and less dishonest compared to MTurk. CF showed the best response rate, but CF participants failed more attention-check questions and did not reproduce known effects replicated on ProA and MTurk. Moreover, ProA participants produced data quality that was higher than CF's and comparable to MTurk's. We also found important demographic differences between the platforms. We discuss how researchers can use these findings to better plan online research, and their implications for the study of crowdsourcing research platforms.


In reinforcement learning from human feedback, it is common to optimize against a reward model trained to predict human preferences. Because the reward model is an imperfect proxy, optimizing its value too much can hinder ground truth performance, in accordance with Goodhart's law. This effect has been frequently observed, but not carefully measured due to the expense of collecting human preference data. In this work, we use a synthetic setup in which a fixed"gold-standard"reward model plays the role of humans, providing labels used to train a proxy reward model. We study how the gold reward model score changes as we optimize against the proxy reward model using either reinforcement learning or best-of-$n$ sampling. We find that this relationship follows a different functional form depending on the method of optimization, and that in both cases its coefficients scale smoothly with the number of reward model parameters. We also study the effect on this relationship of the size of the reward model dataset, the number of reward model and policy parameters, and the coefficient of the KL penalty added to the reward in the reinforcement learning setup. We explore the implications of these empirical results for theoretical considerations in AI alignment.


This work explores the feasibility of inducing lasing action in a single dye molecule using an optical microcavity. A single-molecule light source is proposed, in which a microcavity-coupled dye molecule is pumped by multiple energy donors via an intermolecular resonance energy transfer mechanism. A quantitative model based on realistic parameters for microcavities and for organic dyes shows that stimulated emission may become dominant over spontaneous fluorescence under optimal yet technically reachable conditions, suggesting the likelihood of achieving a single-molecule lasing photon source with the proposed device. Lasing of a single dye molecule generates signals much brighter than spontaneous fluorescence, and may find applications in a wide range of fields from physics and chemistry to biology.


For those who have puzzled over the mysteries of sleep, this panoramic view of modern sleep research by a pioneer in the field offers enlightening answers. Interweaving facts with fascinating case histories and anecdotes, Peretz Lavie discusses all that is known about sleep, dreaming, and sleep disorders, including landmark discoveries from his own sleep laboratory.


The TAC developed an eLearning module to assist all members of staff to understand and be able to describe the principles of the Safe System. As a leader in road safety, recognised internationally, the TAC is committed to developing road safety capacity throughout the organisation. The module was developed to support the actions of the Victorian Road Safety Strategy 2013-2022, which aims to reduce serious injuries and fatalities by more than 30 percent. The module was developed by an experienced online learning organisation through a defined program management framework and included consultation and stages of review by the Victorian road safety partners. The module was deployed to all staff from the beginning of April 2014 for a period of four weeks. The resource is now available on-line and accessible to any organisation or individual. For organisations with a learning management system, it can be downloaded and allocated to staff, as was the case for the TAC. This paper will describe the project development, deployment and evaluation by the TAC, along with providing outcomes for other organisations that have accessed the module.


Purpose: To evaluate CD4+ helper functions and antitumor effect of promiscuous universal cancer peptides (UCP) derived from telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT). Experimental Design: To evaluate the widespread immunogenicity of UCPs in humans, spontaneous T-cell responses against UCPs were measured in various types of cancers using T-cell proliferation and ELISPOT assays. The humanized HLA-DRB1*0101/HLA-A*0201 transgenic mice were used to study the CD4+ helper effects of UCPs on antitumor CTL responses. UCP-based antitumor therapeutic vaccine was evaluated using HLA-A*0201–positive B16 melanoma that express TERT. Results: The presence of a high number of UCP-specific CD4+ T cells was found in the blood of patients with various types of cancer. These UCP-specific T cells mainly produce IFN-γ and TNF-α. In HLA transgenic mice, UCP vaccinations induced high avidity CD4+ TH1 cells and activated dendritic cells that produced interleukin-12. UCP-based vaccination breaks self-tolerance against TERT and enhances primary and memory CTL responses. Furthermore, the use of UCP strongly improves the efficacy of therapeutic vaccination against established B16-HLA-A*0201 melanoma and promotes tumor infiltration by TERT-specific CD8+ T cells. Conclusions: Our results showed that UCP-based vaccinations strongly stimulate antitumor immune responses and could be used to design efficient immunotherapies in multiple types of cancers. Clin Cancer Res; 18(22); 6284–95. ©2012 AACR.


The current study investigated the effect of poling on physiological, kinematic and kinetic responses at different velocities by comparing the G4 skating technique with (G4-P) and without (G4-NP) poling. The G4 involves a "strong side" with poling action and a "weak side" with arm swing. 17 elite male cross-country skiers performed 4-min submaximal tests at 10, 15 and 20 km·h on a 2% inclined treadmill using G4-P and G4-NP. Physiological, kinematic and kinetic variables were assed with opencircuit indirect calorimetry, blood lactate analysis, Qualisys Pro Reflex system and roller skis integrated with two full bridged strain gauges. Gross efficiency (GE) was calculated by the external work rate against friction and gravity divided by the metabolic rate in aerobic steady state conditions. O2 consumption, ventilation and blood lactate concentration were lower with G4-P than G4-NP at all velocities and thus, GE was higher in the two examined velocities with G4-P compared to G4-NP (11,1% vs 9,9%; 12,5% vs 10,6%; all P < 0.05). Longer cycle lengths at lower cycle rates, as well as less ski angling and edging were demonstrated with G4-P compared to G4-NP from low to high velocities, with a 15% difference in cycle length at high velocity (all P < 0.05). Force impulse was lower with G4-P compared to G4-NP for the "strong side" at low and high velocity (both P < 0.05). Rate of force development and peak force were lower for both strong and weak sides with G4-P compared to G4-NP, and the ski velocity was on average higher on the strong side for G4-P at all velocities (all P < 0.05). Altogether, these results demonstrated lower physiological demands and higher gross efficiency at a given work rate when elite skiers added poling to the G4 skating technique. At the same time, skiers increased their cycle lengths and showed significant changes in the cycle characteristics by increasing the ski velocity and reducing the applied ski forces of both the strong and weak sides when poling.


This thesis examines the role of flavonoid compounds in determining the shelf life of
tomato fruit. Shelf life is one of the most important traits for tomato industry. Although
there are many approaches to enhance the post-harvest performance of tomato fruit,
most of them would have side effects such as reducing fruit quality.
My work showed that accumulation of anthocyanins in tomato fruit by over expressing
Delila and Rosea 1, two transcriptional factors from Antirrhinum majus, can extend
tomato shelf life significantly. Compared to WT tomato fruit, the anthocyanin-enriched
purple fruit have double the shelf life including delayed over-ripening and reduced
susceptibility to the fungal pathogen, Botrytis cinerea. My data indicate that the delayed
over-ripening is associated with the high antioxidant capacity of purple tomato and the
reduced susceptibility to B. cinerea is due to the high scavenging ability of
anthocyanins.
Using Aft/Aft atv/atv, a conventionally bred tomato variety which accumulates
anthoycanin predominantly in the skin, I showed that accumulation of anthocyanins in
tomato skin can be sufficient to extend fruit shelf life. The scientific findings from
transgenic crop studies can provide new strategies for conventional breeding improved
fruit quality.
My research also revealed that, as a general principle, flavonoids extend tomato shelf
life. For ripening and over-ripening, increasing total antioxidant capacity by
accumulating flavonoids of different types can delay these processes. To reduce
susceptibility to B. cinerea, however, the effects of different flavonoids depend on their
scavenging abilities, which are determined by their molecular structures. Taken together
these findings demonstrate that increasing total antioxidant capacity by accumulating
different flavonoid compounds offers a general strategy to delay over-ripening of
tomato fruit. However, to reduce susceptibility to B. cinerea, flavonoid compounds with
high scavenging activity should be used.