Beta-3 adrenergic receptors have important physiological implications, being expressed in many places in the body, including brown adipose tissue. Of the effects studied in preclinical research on lipid metabolism attributable to stimulation of these receptors, we can mention the increased thermogenesis and metabolic rate in the brown adipose tissue, reduction of body weight in obese diabetic rats, lowering of intra-abdominal and subepithelial fat in nonobese and nondiabetic rats, decrease of triglyceride, and increase of HDL cholesterol levels. Carbohydrate metabolism is also changed by beta-3 adrenergic agonists, the most prevalent effects being blood glucose lowering in diabetic rats, increasing insulin secretion of the pancreas, or increasing glucose tolerance. Metabolic effects of 13 newly synthesized compounds of beta-phenylethylamine structure and reference BRL 37344 were investigated in order to identify a potential affinity for beta-3 adrenergic receptors. The antidiabetic and hypolipemiant effects were investigated on a rat model of alloxan-induced diabetes. The results demonstrated that new beta-phenylethylamine derivatives produced marked biological activity over lipid profile. All compounds have markedly decreased the values of total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides and also have increased the values of antiatherogenic HDL cholesterol. The effects were significantly more intense than the reference substance BRL 37344.


Since the release of IR8 in 1966, 42 additional indica rice (Oryza sativa L.) cultivars developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) for the irrigated and favorable rainfed lowlands have been released in the Philippines. The maximum yield of IR8 has been reduced by about 2 Mg ha-1 during the past 30 yr. Empirical breeding for population improvement within the indica germplasm has resulted in the maintenance of rice yield potential in the tropics of about 10 Mg ha-1. To break the yield barrier, several approaches are being explored. These include development of a new plant type (NPT) with low tillering capacity and large panicles from tropical japonica germplasm and exploitation of heterosis through intervarietal and intersubspecific hybrids. Hybrid rice between indicas increased yield potential by about 9% under the tropical conditions. The higher yield potential of indica/indica hybrids compared with indica inbred cultivars was attributed to the greater biomass production rather than harvest index. New plant type breeding has not yet improved yield potential due to poor grain filling and low biomass production. Factors that cause poor grain filling and low biomass production of the NPT lines have been identified. Selecting parents with good grain filling traits, introduction of indica genes into NPT's tropical japonica background, and a refinement of the original NPT design are expected to improve the performance of the NPT lines. Further enhancement in yield potential may be possible from use of intersubspecific heterosis between indica and NPT lines.


On its official roster of current and former members, the Supreme Court does not list William Cushing as the third Chief Justice of the United States, between Chief Justices John Rutledge and Oliver Ellsworth. It should. The accepted view is that Cushing - an Associate Justice from 1790 to 1810 - was nominated, confirmed, appointed, and commissioned as Chief Justice in January 1796, but that he declined the job without ever taking the required oaths or taking office. The historical record supports a different conclusion. In the rough minutes of the Court for February 3 and 4, 1796, the Clerk of the Court records Cushing as Chief Justice - and, as the Documentary History of the United States shows, the Clerk never recorded a person's status as a member of the Court until that person had either taken his oaths in Court or provided proof that he had taken the oaths elsewhere. It is true that the fine minutes of the Court for those two days do not show Cushing as Chief Justice, but Joseph Story's qualifications to be an Associate Justice suffer from a similar problem: his oath-taking is recorded in the rough minutes but not in the fine minutes for February Term 1810. Moreover, there are several other recognized Associate Justices - John Blair, Bushrod Washington, John McKinley, Peter Daniel, John Campbell, and Cushing himself - for whom there is no record at all of the required oath-taking. What is sauce for Associate Justices Story, et al., should be sauce for Chief Justice Cushing. In addition, the language used by President Washington and the Senate during the appointment process for Cushing's successor, Oliver Ellsworth, reveals that the executive and legislative branches understood Cushing to have been Chief Justice. In particular, they used the word resigned to describe Cushing's departure from the Chief-Justiceship. In a remarkable display of consistency, from 1791 to 1801 the President and Senate invariably used the word resigned in the judicial appointments process when referring to individuals who had entered into and then departed from judicial offices, and the word declined to describe individuals who refused an office without ever entering into it. Finally, the correspondence of key players in the federal government in 1796 supports the existence of a Cushing Chief-Justiceship. The most striking evidence is a pair of letters sent by John Adams to his wife Abigail, in which his reports of Cushing's agonized deliberations over whether to be Chief Justice track neatly the rough minutes of February 3 and 4 described above. So Cushing was, briefly, Chief Justice. But there are other issues. First, in a letter to Washington dated February 2, Cushing seeks to avoid the job. But the letter was a draft that was almost certainly never sent, and even more certainly had no effect, as shown by the document itself, the correspondence of John Adams and others, and the absence of any version of the letter or mention of it in the federal government's otherwise rather complete record of appointments to the Court in the mid-1790s. Second, there is Cushing's return to his Associate-Justiceship - without renomination, reconfirmation, etc. - after being Chief Justice. The only way he could have lawfully returned to being an Associate Justice without running the appointments gantlet again was to retain his Associate-Justiceship while he served as Chief Justice, and it appears that he did just that. Today such a maneuver would be impossible, but the country and its federal government were different then, and in ways that would have made his briefly simultaneous Chief- and Associate-Justiceships constitutional, otherwise legal, and no more unorthodox than several other odd cases in the early republic. The abrogation in the Judiciary Act of 1789 of the doctrine of incompatible offices as it would have applied to members of the Court, and numerous instances of multiple office-holding by Justices and Chief Justices, would also have contributed to the acceptability of Cushing's dual service. Moreover, even if his return to an Associate-Justiceship was defective, it would have no consequences today because his acts as Associate Justice would be valid under the de facto officer doctrine. Lastly, there is the question of why the government has not noticed the existence of one of its own highest-ranking officeholders. The answer lies in the treatment of John Rutledge, whose Chief-Justiceship also was ignored until the 1850s, when two biographers gathered the evidence and made the case for his occupation of that office. It is only now, with the publication of the Documentary History of the Supreme Court and the development of a number of searchable databases of key documents, that it has become feasible to assemble and organize evidence of Cushing's Chief-Justiceship.


Nonviral gene therapy approaches face the challenge of achieving stable gene expression in target organs and tissues. We used fluorescence microscopy and in vivo imaging after rapid, high-volume delivery of plasmid DNA (pDNA) encoding DsRed and luciferase as products of the same mRNA to detect localized gene expression in liver. Plasmids encoding the luciferase gene transcriptionally regulated by cellular and viral promoters were injected under similar conditions to test for potency and stability of gene expression in the liver of adult mice. Animals were imaged at 3, 6, 12, 24, and 48 hr and followed up at 1- to 2-week intervals over 2 months to identify maximum and persistent luciferase expression after injection of equimolar amounts of each plasmid. Emitted light representing luciferase expression was detected as early as 3 hr after pDNA infusion, reaching maximum levels at 12 hr for promoters containing viral sequences and at 24 hr for elements from human genes. Viral elements displayed 10- to 20-fold higher peak levels of expression but also yielded the most dramatic decline in expression over 8 weeks. In contrast, only a moderate decrease was observed for the cellular ubiquitin C promoter during that same period of time. Both promoter-deleted and phosphoglycerate kinase (PGK)-containing plasmids failed to maintain luciferase expression at levels above the limit of detection. These results demonstrate fine temporal analyses of reporter gene activity using promoters of various strength, suggesting an effective and reproducible method for studying gene therapy vectors in vivo.


A bipolar framework is introduced for combining agents' beliefs so as to enable them to reach a common shared position or viewpoint. Our approach exploits the truth-gaps inherent to propositions involving vague concepts, by allowing agents to soften directly conflicting opinions. To this end we adopt a bipolar truth-model for propositional logic characterised by lower and upper valuations on the sentences of the language. According to this model sentences may be absolutely true, absolutely false or borderline (i.e. neither absolutely true nor absolutely false). The added flexibility of a possible truth-gap between absolutely true and absolutely false allows agents with inconsistent viewpoints, in which a proposition p is absolutely true according to one view and absolutely false according to the other, to reach a compromise position in which p is borderline. Within this framework four combination operators are proposed for combining different viewpoints as represented by different valuation pairs. Intuitively, these correspond to compromise positions with different levels of semantic precision (or vagueness). Kleene belief pairs are then introduced as lower and upper measures quantifying epistemic uncertainty about the sentences of the language when valuation pairs provide the underlying truth model. The combination operators on valuation pairs are then extended to belief pairs using a general schema incorporating a probabilistic model of the interaction between agents. The properties of the four operators are then investigated within this extended framework.


Identifying, developing and grading soft skills, i.e., transversal cross-curricular competencies, in higher education requires the recognition of key qualities, the capacity to discriminate between these qualities and a mechanism to validly and reliability grade soft skill acquisition. This research proposes a technological infrastructure that acknowledges the importance of self-assessment, peer observation and teacher evaluation when adjudicating on subjective and often personal data. The proposal has the capacity to balance, weight and triangulate the objective and subjective evidence of soft skill acquisition ensuring the validity and reliability of the resultant accreditation. Accreditation of soft skills was in the form of digital badges. Using the proposed technological approach, the identification, development and grading of soft skills can be reviewed, tracked and managed over time to demonstrate competencies with respect to both the context and situation. The technological approach empowers stakeholders as critical partners within the assessment process and supports the ecological validity of their judgements based on the evidence submitted for accreditation. Reliability is strengthened by the triangulation of these judgements. Though more significantly, the technological approach facilitates the capacity to weight stakeholders' decisions relative to the context and situation.


This Article attempts to discover the reasons behind the decision of Israeli corporations to go public in the U.S. To find the reasons behind this unique phenomenon, we use two hypotheses that we borrow from the current debate on the reasons for cross-listing of corporations in foreign countries. Under the first hypothesis, law does not matter for Israeli corporations that choose to go public in the U.S. and their decision was motivated by reasons such as liquidity of the U.S. markets, openness of markets to early stage corporations, and image concerns. The second hypothesis is that law does matter and the decision of Israeli corporations to migrate to the U.S. was motivated by their desire to opt into better investor protective laws. Therefore, under this hypothesis, Israeli corporations chose to go public in the U.S. to bond their insiders from expropriating the corporate assets. To decide which hypothesis represents the actual reasons behind the decision of Israeli corporations to migrate to the U.S., we compare the relevant Israeli and U.S. laws. If the U.S. laws provide a better protection for investors and therefore better bond insiders, then the second hypothesis, under which law does matter, is the correct hypothesis. However, if the differences between the two laws are insignificant and cannot justify incurring the high costs of going public in the U.S., then the first hypothesis under which law does not matter, is the more accurate hypothesis. The comparison between the Israeli and the U.S. securities law shows that there are insignificant differences between those laws. Those insignificant differences cannot justify incurring the high costs of going public in the U.S. To support this conclusion we use two sets of data. Both a quantitative data, on the number, industry and year of initial public offerings of Israeli corporations in the U.S., and a qualitative data that includes information collected from investors and attorneys who took part in conducting the initial public offerings of Israeli corporations in the U.S., supports the conclusion that law does not matter. According to this data, Israeli corporations chose to go public in the U.S. mostly in order to enjoy the liquidity of the U.S. markets and the openness of U.S. markets for early


This paper studies the throughput performance of a two-way energy harvesting relaying system. Network Coding and Energy Harvesting are promising techniques that can improve the transmission efficiency and the energy efficiency of wireless systems, respectively. In particular, we focus on the energy harvesting system with the power splitting-based relaying (PSR) protocol, and consider both the amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying and decode-and-forward (DF) relaying methods for the network coding. We successfully derive the expressions for both the outage probability and the system throughput for each case. It can be shown that DF relaying system outperforms AF relaying system in terms of both the outage probability and the throughput. Furthermore, simulations show that the throughput gain brought by network coding highly depends on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver. The throughput gain can be up to 33% in the high SNR region.


The normal biochemical reactions in our body, increased exposure to the environment, and higher levels of dietary xenobiotic's result in the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS). The ROS and RNS create oxidative stress in different pathophysiological conditions. The reported chemical evidence suggests that dietary antioxidants help in disease prevention. The antioxidant compounds react in one-electron reactions with free radicals in vivo/in vitro and prevent oxidative damage. Therefore, it is very important to understand the reaction mechanism of antioxidants with the free radicals. This review elaborates the mechanism of action of the natural antioxidant compounds and assays for the evaluation of their antioxidant activities. The reaction mechanisms of the antioxidant assays are briefly discussed (165 references). Practical applications: understanding the reaction mechanisms can help in evaluating the antioxidant activity of various antioxidant compounds as well as in the development of novel antioxidants.


Aim: To examine the relationship between multiple measures of financial hardship and glycemic control in older adults with diabetes. Methods: Using data from Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we investigated four measures of financial hardship: difficulty paying bills, ongoing financial strain, decreasing food intake due to money, and taking less medication due to cost. Using linear regression models, we investigated the relationship between each measure, and a cumulative score of hardships per person, on glycemic control (HbA1c). Results: After adjustment, a significant relationship existed with each increasing number of hardships associated with increasing HbA1c (0.09, [95%CI 0.04, 0.14]). Difficulty paying bills (0.25, [95%CI 0.14, 0.35]) and decreased medication usage due to cost (0.17, [95%CI 0.03, 0.31]) remained significantly associated with HbA1c. Conclusion: In older adults, difficulty paying bills and cost-related medication nonadherence is associated with glycemic control, and every additional financial hardship was associated with an increased HbA1c by nearly 0.1%.


Despite the growth and potential future market for water-based recreation activities such as canoeing, to date research on the sport and its participants is sparse. Little is known about who canoeists are and why they choose canoeing as an outdoor activity, particularly in light of the burgeoning popularity of eco- and nature-based tourism. This study therefore profiled participants in the Dusi Canoe Marathon according to their motives for participating. A total of 250 self-administered questionnaires were distributed at the KwaZulu-Natal Canoe Club in Pietermaritzburg on the day of registration (13 February 2013), of which 220 were returned completed (an 88% return rate) and included in the analysis. A factor analysis indicated that the canoeists' main motives for paddling were enjoyment and adventure followed by intrinsic achievement . Based on these motives, the cluster analysis revealed three distinct segments, labelled Recreational, Intermediate and Serious canoeists. The results further confirm that several factors contribute to the differences between canoeists over and above their socio-demographic and behavioural characteristics: the setting of the event, whether river, lake or ocean, the level of fitness required and the duration of the activity. It corroborates the argument that motives for participating differ according to the sporting event, and supports the view that marketers and sports event organizers should not treat participants as a homogeneous group. These findings will assist sports event organizers in making informed and cost-effective marketing and product development decisions. Keywords : Canoe tourism, sport tourism, canoeist, motives, segmentation.


In the scene of new technology for Smart Farming it is important to develop a low cost station that can be monitored remotely. This would make it easier for farmers to monitor different stations (within a radius of up to 15 km). In addition, the use of several wireless monitoring stations is considered advantageous because it generates a decrease in the amount of water used, avoiding waste due to the connection of the irrigation pivots without the real need. In addition, it also generates energy savings, saving resources in general. The main applications are in precision farming, for example, in control of irrigation pivots in large-scale crops, such as wheat and soybean plantations. This project developed a micro controlled system for radio frequency wireless communication (LoRa), since these plantations are generally not located in places with access to the electric and cellular networks. The main functions are to monitor temperature and humidity, soil and air, as well as to know the location (GPS) of each station, to feed microclimatic databases that allow the control of irrigation system and better planning of the use of pesticides.


OpenStreetMap has grown rapidly into an exemplary geowiki, where contributors collectively build an open map of the world. Official 'mapping party' events are organized on a regular basis to invite users to socialize, map and to engage new-comers locally. Here, we measure the direct and indirect impact of mapping parties on user contributions in both the short and long terms. We question whether this social mapping is a cause for users to become highly committed through a social bond, or is an effect of the mappers' need to find a common social ground. We show that mapping parties have distinct effects on different types of users, with a more profound direct impact on weaker contributors and a longer term effect on heavy contributors.


Systematic reviews and accompanying meta-analyses of high-quality studies are at the top of the evidence pyramid. By synthesising the totality of evidence they can address a variety of clinical and research questions. Although they were initially effectiveness and safety of health interventions, systematic reviews (with or without meta-analysis) are now also common in the evaluation of diagnostic test accuracy, prognostic factors, prediction models, prevalence of disease, cost-effectiveness and other areas. With increasing numbers of systematic reviews, clinicians, consumers, and policy makers usually need to refer to a large number of systematic reviews to inform clinical decision-making.


Cognitive load theory identifies three types of cognitive load present during learning: intrinsic, extrinsic, and germane. To optimize learning, cognitive load theory recommends optimizing germane load. The purpose of this study was to examine the interactions among intrinsic and germane cognitive loads when practicing a wind instrument. The study will determine which of two practice strategies is most effective for three levels of learners on a woodwind instrument. Forty-five participants were university music majors and minors with either (1) no experience playing a woodwind instrument, (2) limited experience, or (3) a woodwind major or minor. In a repeated-measures design, students practiced three technical tasks in a random order (high cognitive load) and three technical tasks in a repetitive order (low cognitive load). Participants practiced on a MIDI wind controller, which is similar to a saxophone. Twenty-four hours following practice, participants completed a second study session for retention measurement. Performances were scored for pitch accuracy and speed. Within-subjects comparisons examined which level of cognitive load was most effective for each level learner. Results will be situated in prior research on cognitive load theory, and implications will be drawn for practice.


Objective: A high correlation between lower limb explosive power and muscular strength, production of high power levels in the shortest time, and high level of agility are essential to achieve optimal performance in Parkour. It seems that polymetric exercises can make it possible to achieve the highest performance. In this regard, the aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of an 8-week plyometric exercise program on knee kinematic parameters, body composition, agility and horizontal jumping power of Parkour athletes. Methods: In this quasi-experimental study with pre-test and post-test design, 20 elite Parkour athletes aged 19-26 years were selected and randomly divided into two groups of exercise (n=10) and control (n=10). The exercise group carried out the program for eight weeks, three sessions per week, each for one hour. Before and after exercise, measurements of kinematic parameters of knee, agility, and horizontal jumping power, and body composition in subjects were performed. The collected data were analyzed using t-test considering a significant level of P≤0.05. Results: Plyometric exercise for eight weeks had a significant effect on knee kinematic parameters of Parkour athletes (P=0.003) and significantly improved their horizontal jump, agility and reduced body fat percentage (P≤0.05). Conclusion: Plyometric exercise can significantly improve kinematic parameters of the knee, increase the jumping power and agility, and reduce body fat percentage in Parkour athletes; however, since Parkour movements are very similar to plyometric exercises, more study is needed.


To combat the ease of online shopping in pajamas, offline mall owners focus increasingly on driving satisfaction and improving retention by identifying customers' preferences. However, most of these studies are based on customers' offline consuming history only. Benefiting from the internet, we can also get customers' online behaviors, such as the search logs, web browsing logs, online shopping logs, and so on. Might these seemingly irrelevant information from two different modalities (i.e. online and offline) be somehow interrelated? How can we make use of the online behaviors and offline actions jointly to promote recommendation for offline retailing? In this study, we formulate this task as a cross-modality recommendation problem, and present its solution via a proposed probabilistic graphical model, called Online-to-Offline Topic Modeling (O2OTM). Specifically, this method explicitly models the relationships between online and offline topics so that the likelihood of both online and offline behaviors is maximized. Then, the recommendation is made only based on the pairs of online and offline topics, denoted by (t,l), with high values of lift, such that the existence of the online topic $t$ greatly increases the response on the corresponding offline topic $l$ compared with the average response for the population without the online topic t. Furthermore, we evaluate this solution in both live and retrospect experiments. The real-world deployment of this model for the anniversary promotion campaign of a famous shopping mall in Beijing shows that our approach increases the occurred customer purchases per promotion message by 29.75\% compared with the baseline. Also, our model finds some interesting interpretable relationships between the online search topics and offline brand topics.


This Article seeks to expand the scope of the domestic violence discourse within the context of the theory and practice of legal strategies. The intent is to shift the analytical parameters beyond the criminal justice system to include the political economy of everyday experiences of households. Such a paradigm shift examines the conditions of the private sphere as a function of the circumstances of public realms. It considers domestic violence by linking it to the structural transformations of the U.S. economy during recent years. It assesses domestic violence from the perspective of the daily life of men and women who have experienced an erosion of a subjective sense of economic well-being in an environment of diminishing prospects. The Article identifies the gains to be had from a paradigm shift that examines the structural causes of domestic violence within a larger context of economic instabilities. It sets forth expanded analytical tools with which to understand the challenges facing battered women as well as new legal and programmatic strategies to ameliorate domestic violence. It suggests criminal justice policies must incorporate an understanding of the political economic determinants of crime and seek to mitigate the conditions that contribute to domestic violence in the first place. It concludes by noting the possibilities for developing new alliances as the shared agendas and common concerns between labor organizations, critical globalization activists and feminists are set in relief by this paradigm shift. The article suggests that patriarchy, as one system of power by which battered women are harmed, is often both mediated by and a function of economic forces. It also suggests that without a deeper understanding of the determinants of domestic violence, a criminal justice response can do little to end the cycle of violence.


The growing literature on Bitcoin can be divided in two groups. One performs an economic analysis of Bitcoin focusing on its monetary characteristics. The other one looks takes a financial look at the price of Bitcoin. Interestingly, both of these groups have not given much more than passing comments to the problem whether or not Bitcoin has the right monetary rule. This paper argues that Bitcoin in particular, and cryptocurrencies in general, do not have a good monetary rule, and that this shortcoming seriously limits its prospect of becoming a well-established currency.


Abstract. In this paper, the free vibration of axially-loaded, multi-cracked Timoshenko beams with differing boundary conditions, namely, hinged-hinged, fixed-fixed, fixed-hinged, and fixed-free is studied. The cracked beam system is represented as several beam segments connected by massless rotational springs with sectional flexibility. Each segment is assumed to obey the Timoshenko beam theory. A simple transfer matrix method is used to derive the characteristic equation of the axially-loaded, multi-cracked beam with differing boundary conditions. The characteristic equation and corresponding mode shapes are a function of natural frequency, crack size and location, and physical parameters of the beam. In this paper, the effects of crack depth, number of cracks, position of cracks, axial load, shear deformation and rotary inertia on the dynamic behavior of multi-cracked beams are studied in detail. It is found that there is good agreement between the results obtained in this study and results available in the literature. Additionally, interesting observations overlooked by other researchers are obtained.


Typical colour digital cameras have a single sensor with a colour filter array (CFA), each pixel capturing a single channel (red, green or blue). A full RGB colour output image is generated by demosaicing (DM), i.e. interpolating to infer the two unobserved channels for each pixel. The DM approach used can have a significant effect on the quality of the output image, particularly in the presence of common imaging artifacts such as chromatic aberration (CA). Small differences in the focal length for each channel (lateral CA) and the inability of the lens to bring all three channels simultaneously into focus (longitudinal CA) can cause objectionable colour fringing artifacts in edge regions. These artifacts can be particularly severe when using low-cost lenses. We propose to use a set of simple neural networks to learn to jointly perform DM and CA correction, producing high quality colour images subject to severe CA as well as image noise. The proposed neural network-based joint DM and CA correction produces a significant improvement in image quality metrics (PSNR and SSIM) compared the baseline edge-directed linear interpolation approach preserving image detail and reducing objectionable false colour and comb artifacts. The approach can be applied in the production of high quality images and video from machine vision cameras with low cost lenses, thus extending the viability of such hardware to visual media production.


Accounting for people is the first step of every manpower-based organization in today's world. Hence, it takes up a signification amount of energy and value in the form of money from respective organizations for both implementing a suitable system for manpower management as well as maintaining that same system. Although this amount of expenditure for big organizations is near to nothing, rather just a formality, it does not hold as much truth for small organizations such as schools, colleges, and even universities to a certain degree. This is the first point. The second point for discussion is that much work has been done to solve this issue. Various technologies like Biometrics, RFID, Bluetooth, GPS, QR Code, etc., have been used to tackle the issues of attendance collection. This study paves the path for researchers by reviewing practical methods and technologies used for existing attendance systems.


This study examines the relationships between the planning, development and representation of heritage for tourist consumption and the notions of modernity, identity and sustainable development in contemporary China.The study's approach involved developing a conceptual framework of issues related to heritage tourism and the notions of modernity, identity-building and sustainable development. It draws from theory and concepts of western literature and previous studies of China, and this was then applied to the case study. The study used a case study approach based on four heritage sites in Shandong Province in order to gain "deeper" insights and understandings of the phenomena being studied, including their basis in politics, governance, administration and socio-cultural issues. Qualitative methods were adopted and relevant primary data were collected through semi-structured interviews, document analysis and field observation. All these sources were analysed and interpreted through the use of a constant comparative approach, which meant that the interpretation was comparative, iterative and flexible.The research findings of this study demonstrate and explain the role of heritage tourism in mediating between modernity and tradition, development and sustainable development, and the local and the global. Actors from different social groups who had interests in heritage tourism development at the four sites sometimes shared certain views about modernity, identity and sustainability, but sometimes they held rather different opinions about these key organising ideas. The actors involved in policy-making and planning at the sites held some similar and some differentiated beliefs about the representation of heritage for tourist consumption, with this reflecting their varying interests in the past as a resource and in tourism development. The research findings revealed the tensions and even open contestation among the actors with interests in development of the sites. The agreement and contestation around heritage tourism could alter people's cognition and behaviour, including their overall notions of modernity, identity and sustainability.The study adds a new approach and new insights into the relationships between heritage tourism and notions of modernity, identity-building and sustainable development in China, which is shown to be an under-researched general topic. It demonstrates that the role of the state, political ideology, institutions, tradition, society and culture, and other external elements have considerable impacts on the presentation of heritage. It also indicates that the complex relationships between tourism and the notions of modernity, identity and sustainability are rarely stable; rather they often are mobile and dynamic.


Badly lit roads lead to vehicle accidents and encourage crime. Therefore, it is important to rapidly detect and report faulty streetlights (FSLs) to the relevant authorities to keep roads safe. Currently, communities primarily depend on electrical inspectors to check streetlights regularly, which may result in long and unnecessary delays prior to repair. Recent studies have focused on adding a networking capability (i.e., a wireless sensor network) into street light poles to enable real-time status reports. However, a smart system that would incorporate sensors and network modules into every streetlight would be expensive; therefore, it would be nearly impossible to realize this system quickly. In this paper, we propose a noninvasive method for detecting faulty lights that involves designing special equipment, called the Hitchhiker, which could be installed on vehicles and would collect information about streetlights' intensity. This system would not require the modification of conventional streetlights. The collected data would be used to create illumination maps (IMaps), the analysis of which could help identify changes in lighting intensity in specific regions. As far as we know, this is an unprecedented approach; no other approaches use IMaps to find FSLs and consider cost and invasiveness. The proposed system could be extended to a citywide scale with minimal cost, and could be used as a complementary system for electrical inspectors possibly identifying FSLs sooner and shortening the duration of poor lighting on streets.


This dissertation analyzes vowel systems in two dialects of Even, an endangered Northern Tungusic language spoken in Eastern Siberia. The data were collected during fieldwork in the Bystraia district of Central Kamchatka and in the village of Sebian-Kuol in Yakutia. The focus of the study is the Even system of vowel harmony, which in previous literature has been assumed to be robust. The central question concerns the number of vowel oppositions and the nature of the feature underlying the opposition between harmonic sets. The results of an acoustic study show a consistent pattern for only one acoustic parameter, namely F1, which can be phonologically interpreted as a feature [±height]. This acoustic study is supplemented by perception experiments. The results of the latter suggest that perceptually there is no harmonic opposition for high vowels, i.e., the harmonic pairs of high vowels have merged. Moreover, in the dialect of the Bystraia district certain consonants function as perceptual cues for the harmonic set of a word. In other words, the Bystraia Even harmony system, which was previously based on vowels, is being transformed into new oppositions among consonants.


Objective Myocardial infarction (MI) remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Exercise training could improve cardiac function following MI. However, the mechanisms are still not well-known. Neuregulin 1 (NRG1)plays an important role in heart development and regeneration.In this study, we investigated the effect of NRG1 on cardiac regeneration in a zebrafish model, detected whether exercise could improve cardiac function through regulating NRG1 expression in infarcted heart and explore the possible role of up-regulation of NRG1 in skeletal muscle play in the cardioprotective effects in rats with MI.
Methods Transgenic zebrafish line, cmlc2:CreERandβ-act2:BSNrg1,wereusedto study the effect of NRG1 on heart growth and regeneration after injury. PCNA was detected by immunofluorescence staining andmRNAexpression of gata4, nkx2.5, tbx5, smyd1b, hsp90α and murf were tested by RT-PCR.Sprague-Dawley rats were used to establish MI model and underwent fourweeks of exercise training (ET) or pAAV-{dMCK promoter}rNRG1-eGFP intervention.AG1478 was used asan inhibitor of NRG1/ErbBs signaling pathway. Cardiac function and structure,cardiomyocyte proliferation and NRG1 expression were detected in the heart or skeletal.
Results Cardiac-specific overexpression of NRG1 induced cardiac hypertrophy and cardiomyocyte proliferation, regulated the mRNA expression of gata4, nkx2.5, tbx5, smyd1b, hsp90α andmurf in uninjuriedzebrafish, and promote cardiac repair and regeneration after injury in the zebrafish.Exercise activated NRG1/ErbBs signaling pathway, improved cardiac remodeling and heart function, enhanced cardiomyocyte proliferation, reduced cardiomyocyte apoptosis, ROS level and MuRF1 protein expression in rats with MI. BlockingErbB signaling attenuated the ET-induced cardioprotection effects in rat with MI.up-regulation of NRG1 expression in skeletal muscle could increase the protein level of NRG1 in serum and infarcted heart, improve cardiomyocyte proliferation and reduce the level of cardiac fibrosis, finally promote cardiac function.
Conclusions Up-regulation of NRG1 expression in the heart or skeletal musclemay be one of the underlying mechanisms of thebeneficial effects of exercise training following MI.


Everyone from Madonna to Howard Stern to the cast of "Baywatch" is in "the Zone" -- and now "Zone"-favorable cuisine is tastier than ever! Dr. Barry Sears, author of the No.1 "New York Times" bestseller and health phenomenon, "The Zone" (more than 600,000 hardcover copies sold!), is back with an exciting new book teeming with tantalizing recipes and insightful information that will deepen readers' understanding of this revolutionary health and fitness program that has become the regimen of the '90s.Flying in the face of conventional dietary thinking, and after years of comprehensive scientific research, Dr. Sears discovered that "eating fat doesn't make you fat." His phenomenally successful first book, "The Zone, " introduced the world to to groundbreaking health plan that for hundreds of thousands of readers has become the magic key to maintaining a consistent level of physical and mental well-being -- a healthful state known as "The Zone." Now Dr. Sears takes his breakthrough scientific discoveries and stunning success a step further with "Mastering the Zone," which not only presents delicious, completely original Zone-favorable recipes that are easy to prepare and taste as good as they are good for you, but also offers a practical guide to fine-tuning your place in the Zone.From entrees to appetizers to desserts, there is something here for every taste and every occasion. Appearing throughout is Dr. Sears' enlightening new information for readers interested in educating themselves further about the Zone -- the health regimen that succeeds where millions of others have not.Enter The Zone Files -- the official Dr Barry Sears site.


Efficient and improved agripreneurship cannot be attained if measures are not put in place to curtail crop losses due to nematode damage. This research was conducted to look at the level of resistance and susceptibility of selected annual crops to guide agripreneurs on what crops to adopt for planting in meloidogyne infested soils and in crop rotation as a method of cultural control. Five crops namely were randomly selected from different crop families and soillorganic manure medium in a 3:1 ratio was used as the planting medium. Nematode inoculum containing about 1000 larvae of the root knot nematode Meloidogyne incognita in 30ml of nematode slurry was used to inoculate the test crops with the control left un-inoculated. Data were collected on plant height, fresh root weight, fresh top weight and number of galls/plant. The data were analyzed using genstat and the mean separation done using Fisher's least significant difference. The results showed that maize was resistant to the inoculum and a good control crop in nematode infested soils while the other four test crops (water-melon, green beans, tomato and green amaranthus) showed varying degrees of susceptibilities from the effect of the inoculum on all the parameters measured. Maize being immune to the inoculum can be used in rotation programmes as a cultural control crop in M. incognita infested plots to reduce the pest's population and boost the yield of the follow-up crop. Keywords : Infestation, Nematode inoculum, Meloidogyne incognita, Resistance and Susceptibility,


Abstract A combination of Kawai-type multianvil apparatus and highly brilliant X-rays at the third generation synchrotron radiation facility (SPring-8) in Japan has been successfully applied to various studies in high-pressure mineral sciences such as determinations of phase transition boundaries, P-V-T relations of high-pressure phases, kinetics of phase transitions, structure and viscosity of melts. These studies are now comfortably made at pressures of ~25 GPa and at temperatures to 2300°C, using the intense X-ray beam and the large capacity of the high-pressure apparatus at SPring-8. Moreover, efforts have been made to further extend the pressure limit using large sintered diamond anvils. Thus in situ X-ray observations are now possible at pressures to 50 GPa with the Kawai-type apparatus, which may be doubled in the near future when the potential of sintered diamond anvils is fully utilized. On the other hand, some problems, such as those related to pressure and temperature measurement, have been manifested in these studies. These should be overcome for further quantitative studies of the mineralogy of the Earth's deep interior based on these techniques.


Background
This report was commissioned by the Technologies and Components Task Group of the Construction Research and Innovation
Strategy Panel (CRISP). Its purpose is to identify, illustrate and where possible categorise recent and current initiatives on pre-assembly, particularly within UK construction. Pre-assembly literally means to 'assemble-before'. Pre-assembly covers the manufacture and assembly (usually off-site) of buildings or parts of buildings
or structures earlier than they would traditionally be
constructed on site, and their subsequent installation in
to their final position. Pre-assembly can be sub-
divided into four categories:
•
 Component manufacture and sub-assembly
•
 Non-volumetric pre-assembly
•
 Volumetric pre-assembly
•
 Modular building
Current Research
Almost £5 million has been invested by DETR and EPSRC
in research projects that include pre-assembly
in construction since 1997. Of this total figure, around £1.1 million covers general innovation which includes pre-assembly, with the remainder concentrating more specifically on pre-assembly. Because of the gearing of the funding, the actual overall value of the research is twice the funded value (ie ~£10 million), with the extra being funded, usually in kind, by the industry partners.
The main schemes that have funded pre-assembly re
search in the UK construction sector include the
EPSRC/DETR Innovative Manufacturing Initiative (M
eeting Clients' Needs through Standardisation) and
the DETR Partners in Innovation programme.
Pre-assembly has been well represented in the funding
 schemes over recent years although it is often
disguised as part of broader research projects
on innovation and frequently different terms are used
instead of pre-assembly. Many projects also combine pre-assembly with standardisation (for more information on this see CRISP report 00/20). Many of the projects reviewed are still in progress and so the outcomes are not yet fully understood. This work has focussed on various different technologies and materials, often led by industry bodies with obvious priorities set by their membership. The research projects reviewed are spread across the industry sectors and involve most of the industry bodies and
many universities. There may be an opportunity to
check for cross fertilisation between these groups and
between the findings of their respective projects. In addition to their input to government funded projects, industry is doing its own work, but the results are
often commercially sensitive and confidential. In
 particular there has been a recent increase in
developments in the residential sector. Many different university research teams are also involved, with a small number doing most of the work, however, there is little evidence of coordination between teams. This has resulted in a challenge for future work to ensure that it is organised in a holistic manner and takes best advantage of the other work that is already underway.
Furthermore, the deliverables from the funded projects
vary considerably, from CDs, videos, high-impact
publicity documents to word-processed reports and le
arned journal papers. Some deliverables have
been disseminated widely and others hardly at all.
 Websites have been used, but their quality and
accessibility again vary widely. Few of the projects
 have developed the deliverables to the level of
practical 'sharp-end' guidance and advice. The existing DETR and EPSRC websites have not been kept up to date and information on deliverables have often not been added to the data. There appears to be no one place where interested parties can go to obtain information about pre-assembly research.
There is a good opportunity to draw together these deliverables and make them more accessible providing the lead-researchers of the projects are co-operative.
Also, future projects could be encouraged to concentrate more strongly on effective dissemination. There are also challenges to take some of the existing work and apply it in a broader sphere, or in a more co-ordinated, strategic manner. The various research networks may be a good way of achieving this, but they have not been going for
long enough to evaluate their effectiveness. The deliver
ables from existing projects are varied in quality and format, with some focussed on dissemination to industrial end-users and others more suitable for academic audiences. Some of the more academic deliverables may be able to be developed into tool kits or other industry-focussed output.
Some international work has been related to the UK
 situation, but this study has not included a full
international review.
Motivators, facilitators, barriers and implications
Motivators, facilitators, barriers and implications include: clients and the project team; procurement methods and supply chain relationships; formal/contractual requirements; legislation; changing construction to a manufacturing process; whole life costing, sustainability
and waste reduction; people issues, skills and training; new materials and technologies; information and communications technology; pre-assembly; and the measurement of success. There are also some sector-specific issues. Benefits from pre-assembly are often realised else where in the construction process. Some leading repeat-order clients have started to acknowledge this and moved towards better consideration of pre-
assembly, but the one-off clients are harder to involve in this movement. Advisors to the 'one-off' client sector appear to be significant barriers to further implementation.
The principle of the important influence of procurem
ent routes and supply-chain relationships for pre-
assembly implementation appears to be accepted. But there are many other drivers for procurement routes and there has been much work already completed in this area. By contrast, there has been little work on the link between pre-assembly and formal or contractual requirements,
 nor on the effect of legislation.
Successful implementation of pre-assembly depends on the industry moving towards a manufacturing process approach and away from an on-site construction approach. Whilst this has been acknowledged, it does not seem to have been worked out in the projects completed to date.
Whole-life costing studies have not been completed for pre-assembly and, although they have been raised, issues of sustainability in pre-assembly have not really been resolved. People issues have not been covered in much of the existing work except for a project on health and
safety and one on skills, education & training. Further opportunities in these areas could be established
once these projects have delivered. There is little evidence of the study of new materials for pre-assembly, although this subject is covered in more detail in another CRISP report recently commissioned. Because of the way that much of the pre-assembly supply chain is organised, the current applications for ICT are somewhat limited. This should be an area of further opportunity, but only if the supply chain moves to embrace ICT more fully.
Existing methods of measuring project success are not developed sufficiently to adequately evaluate the
benefits of pre-assembly, but a number of existing
projects are currently working in this area. The research on pre-assembly is more or less evenly split between general (no specific sector) (36%), the residential sector (39%), and the remainder major building and civil engineering with a small amount covering maintenance, repair and refurbishment. There appears to be little work aiming to co-ordinate this work or apply lessons learnt in one sector to the challenges of another sector.
Conclusions
There is much existing research work looking at pre-assembly, although it is often combined with broader
subjects. Much of the work is not co-ordinated well
and benefits may be gained from further efforts in this
area. Further work should be encouraged especially
 where it effectively engages the whole supply chain
and is targeted on producing end-user guidance.


Machining is a tribological process which involves friction, lubrication and wear. It is important to understand the basic machining principles and link them to the actual machining of components. Powder metalallurgy (PM) components are commonly considered to be more difficult to machine compared to wrought steels due to their inherent porosity and differences in the material compositions required to achieve similar performance. Machinability enhancing additives are a commonly used solution to improve machining. However, to utilize the benefits provided by the additives for specific or multiple machining operations is a challenging subject due to the complexity of machining. Therefore, developing an effective laboratory testing procedure based on specific machining operations is critical to avoid failures in production trials when introducing a machining enhancer into the material. In this study, the basics of machining PM materials and the ways to improve machining are discussed. The effectiveness of recenttly developed machining enhancers is demonstrated for improving productivity and increasing tool life through application case studies.


Gross primary productivity (GPP) estimates derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) are converted to wheat yield and compared with observed yield for counties, climate districts and entire states for the 2001 and 2002 growing seasons in Montana and North Dakota. Analyses revealed that progressive levels of spatial aggregation generally improved the relations between estimated and observed wheat yield. However, only state level yield estimates were sufficiently accurate (⩽ 5% deviation from observed yield). The statewide yield results were encouraging because they were derived without the use of retrospective empirical analyses, which constitutes a new opportunity for timely wheat yield estimates for large regions. Additionally, this study identifies six practical limits to estimating wheat yield using MODIS GPP. As a result we describe three suggestions for improving wheat yield estimates for scientists willing to re‐compute MODIS‐derived GPP estimates using regionally specific inputs.


Oyster shells were planted on four successive months (May to August 1986) in contiguous plots at Jones Shore Bar in the Potomac River, Maryland, to study the effect of differences in time of cultch planting on settlement and survival of oyster spat. The plots were usually sampled at two-week intervals from time of planting through November, 1986, and once in June, 1987. A massive concentration of the tunicate Molgula manhattensis covered the bottom in all plots within four to six or eight weeks following shell planting. A commercially acceptable number of spat per shell, between 1.8 and 2.2 (approximately equivalent to 900-1200 spat per bu), was recorded at three of the plots on June 26, 1987, in spite of the heavy tunicate fouling of 1986. Recruitment of oyster spat was lower in the plot on which cultch was planted earliest, on May 13, than in the other three plots on which cultch was planted 1-3 months later. Number of spat was highest in the plot on which shells were planted on July 14; accidental planting of cultch into two elongated mounds on that plot may have contributed to the high recruitment of spat observed. Mean spat height was lowest in the plot on which cultch was planted on August 12 and highest in the plots on which shell was planted on May 13 and June 16. The lower number of spat found on shells planted on May 13 was probably associated with the early planting date. The data suggest that combined maximum recruitment and growth of oyster spat is most likely to occur at Jones Shore on cultch planted between late June and mid-July, although plantings as early as mid-June and as late as early August may also produce commercially-acceptable results.


The links between human rights and biodiversity and natural resource conservation are many and complex. The conservation community is being challenged to take stronger measures to respect human rights and is taking opportunities to further their realisation. 'Rights-based approaches' (RBAs) to conservation are a promising way forward, but also raise a myriad of new challenges and questions, including what such approaches are, when and how they can be put into practice, and what their implications are for conservation.This volume gives an overview of key issues and questions in RBA. Rights and social justice related policies of major international organisations are reviewed. Case studies and position papers describe RBAs in a variety of contexts - protected areas, natural resource management, access and benefit-sharing regimes, and proposed reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) mechanisms. No one blueprint for RBA emerges. However, there are common themes: supporting both procedural and substantive rights, linking rights and responsibilities, equalising power relations, providing capacity building for rights holders and duty bearers, and recognising and engaging with local leaders and local people. RBAs can support improved governance but are, in turn, shaped by the governance systems in which they operate, as well as by history, politics, socio-economics and culture. Experience and dialogue will add to a fuller understanding of the promises and challenges of RBAs to conservation. The aim of this volume is to contribute to that discussion.


Modern cities are dependent on vast infrastructure systems to deliver a constant supply of drinking water and sewerage systems for removing surface and waste water. This paper investigates urban water infrastructure as a complex system. It describes the emergence of existing systems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a response to public health crises. Existing systems are at a point of criticality as growth in demand for water outstrips local water resources. This represents a potential bifurcation point from which alternative structures and patterns of organisation could emerge over coming decades. One possible pathway for future urban water systems relies upon the development of new sources of water including desalination and recycling of waste water for potable supply. This pathway continues to expand the boundaries of urban water systems, increasing entropy outside the system while requiring higher energy input to maintain order within the system. An alternative pathway involves the emergence of distributed systems of water collection and reuse to meet non-potable demand, thereby relieving pressure on the existing potable water and sewerage systems. This could result in increasing complexity across the city as non-potable water systems emerge at household and neighbourhood scales. The paper concludes by outlining the potential for urban modelling techniques based on complexity to inform policy makers, planners, engineers and designers in steering urban water systems towards a more sustainable future.


Country safeguard systems are the first line of defense to mitigate the environmental and social impacts of projects that the Inter-American Development Bank finances in the Caribbean. The capacity of authorities to prescribe appropriate environmental and social requirements, and consistently enforce compliance with them, allows countries to control the way human activities impact natural resources, protect public welfare and sustain prosperity. The performance of licensing and compliance functions is increasingly critical in Caribbean countries, as the effects of climate change compound challenges already inherent to the economic growth of small, geographically unique states. Towards building knowledge and promoting shared thinking, this paper presents the IDB's current understanding of the diverse types of environmental licensing and compliance systems found throughout the Caribbean region. The analysis depicts three loosely-defined conceptual models and identifies commonalities and differences in the institutional frameworks and the administration of environmental and social impact assessments (ESIA). The paper briefly illustrates a country system as an example of each model.


Information security is concerned with maintaining the secrecy, reliability and accessibility of data. The main objective of information security is to protect information and information system from unauthorized access, revelation, disruption, alteration, annihilation and use. This paper uses spatial domain LSB substitution method for information embedding and Arnold's transform is applied twice in two different phases to ensure security. The system is tested and validated against a series of standard images and the results show that the method is highly secure and provides high data hiding capacity. General Terms Digital Image Processing, Steganography, Security


Despite the existence of well‐established international environmental and nature conservation policies (e.g., the Ramsar Convention and Convention on Biological Diversity) ponds are largely missing from national and international legislation and policy frameworks. Ponds are among the most biodiverse and ecologically important freshwater habitats, and their value lies not only in individual ponds, but more importantly, in networks of ponds (pondscapes). Ponds make an important contribution to society through the ecosystem services they provide, with effective conservation of pondscapes essential to ensuring that these services are maintained. Implementation of current pond conservation through individual site designations does not function at the landscape scale, where ponds contribute most to biodiversity. Conservation and management of pondscapes should complement current national and international nature conservation and water policy/legislation, as pondscapes can provide species protection in landscapes where large‐scale traditional conservation areas cannot be established (e.g., urban or agricultural landscapes). We propose practical steps for the effective incorporation or enhancement of ponds within five policy areas: through open water sustainable urban drainage systems in urban planning, increased incentives in agrienvironment schemes, curriculum inclusion in education, emphasis on ecological scale in mitigation measures following anthropogenic developments, and the inclusion of pondscapes in conservation policy.


A subset of JET ITER-like wall (ILW) discharges, combining electron density and temperature as well as divertor heat flux measurements, has been collected for the validation of non-linear magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of edge-localised-modes (ELMs). This permits a quantitative comparison of simulation results against experiments, which is required for the validation of predicted ELM energy losses and divertor heat fluxes in future tokamaks like ITER. This paper presents the first results of such a quantitative comparison, and gives a perspective of what will be necessary to achieve full validation of non-linear codes like JOREK. In particular, the present study highlights the importance of pre-ELM equilibria and parallel energy transport models in MHD simulations, which form the underlying basis of ELM physics.


Because of the very low level of 90Sr in the environmental soil samples and its determination by beta counting may take several weeks, we developed a procedure for ultratrace determination of 90Sr using collision reaction cell-inductively coupled plasma tandem mass spectrometry (CRC-ICP-MS/MS, Agilent 8800).Soil samples were dried at 105 °C and then heated in a furnace at 550 °C to remove any organics present. 500 g of each soil samples were aliquoted into 2000 ml glass beakers. Each Soils samples were soaked in 2 ppm Sr solution carrier to allow determination of chemical yield. The solid to liquid ratio was 1:1. Finally the soil samples were dried at 105 °C. Five hundred milliliters concentrated nitric acid and 250 ml hydrochloric acid volumes were added on 500 g soil samples. The samples were digested on hot plate at 80 °C to prevent spraying with continuous manual mixing. The leachate solution was separated. The solids were rinsed with 500 ml deionized water, warmed on a hot plate and the leachate plus previous leachate were filtered and the total volume was reduced to 500 ml by evaporation. Final leachate volume was transferred to a centrifuge tubes. The centrifuge tubes were centrifuged at 3,500 rpm for 10 min. The leachate was transferred to a 1 L beaker and heated on a hot plate to evaporate the leachate to dryness. The reside was re-dissolved in 100 ml of 2% HNO3 and reduced by evaporation to 10 mL. The solution was measured directly by CRC-ICP-MS/MS by setting the first quadruple analyzer to m/z 90 and introducing oxygen gas into the reaction cell for elimination isobar interference from zirconium-90. The method was validated by measurements of standard reference materials and applied on environmental soil samples. The overall time requirement for the measurement of strontium-90 by CRC-ICP-MS/MS is 2 days, significantly shorter than any radioanalytical protocol currently available.Copyright © 2013 by ASME


Informal care may substitute for formal long-term care that is often publicly funded or subsidized. The costs of informal caregiving are borne by the caregiver and may consist of worse health outcomes and, if the caregiver has not retired, worse labor market outcomes. We estimate the impact of providing informal care to one's partner on the caregiver's health using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). We exploit the panel structure of the data and use statistical matching to deal with selection bias and endogeneity. We find that in the short run caregiving has a substantial negative effect on the health of caregivers. These negative effects should be taken into account when comparing the costs and benefits of formal and informal care provision. These negative effects are potentially short-lived, however: we do not find any evidence that the health effects persist after 4 or 7 years. JEL codes: C21, I11, J14


OBJECTIVES
The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of remote ischemic precondition (RIPC) on the incidence of myocardial and renal injury in patients undergoing cardiovascular interventions as measured by biomarkers. Clinical data were pooled to evaluate the usefulness of RIPC to benefit clinical outcomes.

BACKGROUND
Debate exists regarding the merit of using RIPC for patients undergoing cardiovascular interventions.

METHODS
Systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective randomized clinical trials of patients undergoing cardiovascular interventions who received RIPC versus control were performed. Two independent reviewers selected articles from MEDLINE, EMBASE, SCOPUS, Cochrane, ISI Web of Science, and BIREME, and through hand search of relevant reviews and meeting abstracts upon agreement. Surrogate markers of myocardial (troponin T or I and CK-MB) and renal (serum creatinine) injury for primary outcomes were abstracted.

RESULTS
Final pooled analysis from 17 clinical trials showed significant heterogeneity of results and no relevant publication bias. Patients receiving RIPC had lower levels of markers of myocardial injury in the first few days after surgery (standardized mean difference [SMD], 0.54; 95% confidence interval [CI], -1.01 to -0.08; P=.01) with highly heterogeneous results (I2 = 93%). A lower incidence of perioperative myocardial infarction (7.9% RIPC vs 13.9% placebo; RR, 0.56; 95% CI, 0.37-0.84; P=.005; I2 = 0%) was also noted. In patients undergoing abdominal aortic aneurysm repair, RIPC when compared to control also decreased renal injury (SMD, 0.28; 95% CI, -0.49 to -0.08; P=.007; I2 = 51%).

CONCLUSIONS
RIPC appears to be associated with a favorable effect on serological markers of myocardial and renal injury during cardiovascular interventions. Larger trials should be conducted to substantiate this initial impression.


The problems of finding best facility locations require complete and accurate road network with the corresponding population data in a specific area. However the data obtained in road network databases usually do not fit in this usage. In this paper we propose our procedure of converting the road network database to a road graph which could be used in localization problems. The road network data come from the National road data base in Sweden. The graph derived is cleaned, and reduced to a suitable level for localization problems. The population points are also processed in ordered to match with that graph. The reduction of the graph is done maintaining most of the accuracy for distance measures in the network.


This is a book about Strindberg and about the nature of autobiographical writing. In this sensitive and discerning study, Michael Robinson has turned aside from the more traditional biographical approach to Strindberg. Instead he sets out to explore the highly idiosyncratic way in which Strindberg projected himself in language, looking at the problems which this brought in its trail, and laying bare the subterfuges it engendered. He has not limited himself to those works explicitly designated by Strindberg as autobiographical, but ranges widely over the dramas, the narratives and other prose works.


The Holocene sedimentary record in southeastern Australia is present in a range of landscape settings, such as upland swamps (dells), internally drained lake basins, alluvial fans, and mid-catchment and lowland floodplains. An assessment of the best-constrained basal radiocarbon dates in valley-fill locations between 30 and 42°S and upstream of last-glacial eustatic influences yields an intriguing pattern. The record for fluvial sites with catchment areas > 30 km2 exhibits a distinct gap in the alluvial record between 8 and 4 ka BP (10—4.5 ka). In contrast, data for eleven upland-swamp sites with catchment areas < 50 km2 exhibit a broader spectrum of basal ages, albeit with some reduction of activity during the alluvial gap. We suggest that the period 8—4 ka BP in the sedimentary record at the fluvial sites reflects the early to mid-Holocene climatic optimum independently recognized in proxy climate data in the region. It was a period of enhanced water discharges, stable well-vegetated catchments and low sediment yields, and therefore greatly limited sediment sequestration, and it has been termed the Nambucca Phase. In upland swamps, however, threshold-driven processes produce an episodic landscape responses during much of the Holocene. Contrasting results in upland compared with middle and lower basin locations demonstrate the nonuniform landscape response to climatic changes during the Holocene in southeastern Australia.


Network industries, such as electricity, railways and air transport, are very complex technical, economic, and political systems in which the alignment between technology and institutions has a significant impact on performance. This alignment has been studied based on the coherence framework which aims to measure the alignment between technology and institutions in the case of network industries. It can be stated that technology has to be supported by institutions aligned with them (and vice versa) in order to deliver a given performance. This leads to a co-evolution between institutions and technology in network industries. This paper reviews the literature on the coherence framework, identifies its weaknesses, and contributes to the further development of the framework. It concludes with challenges for further research.


The effect of combined application of poultry manure and sawdust on soil properties , growth and yield of okra ( Abelmoschus esculentus (L.) Moench) were investigated at the main campus of Tai solarin University of Education Ijagun, Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, Nigeria during 2010/2011 dry season. This size of the plot was 45 m by 5m; the seed was planted with three seed per hole at a spacing of 0.5 m. The total numbers of plots were 27 plots, for the avoidance of doubt; it comprises three treatments and each treatment was replicate three times. The treatments consisted of 0, 5, 10 ton/ha Broiler litter (Poultry manure) and 0, 2, 5 ton/ha (sawdust). The results indicated a significant increase in growth parameters in those plants planted in 0, 2, 5 ton/ha poultry manure plot than sawdust plot. However, treatments were laid out in a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications. Data were collected on growth and yield parameters (plant height, stem girth and number of leaves) were increased significantly (p<0.05) as manure rates increased. Poultry manure at 10 ton/ha has significant increase in fruit yield of okra increase. The combined application of poultry manure and sawdust does not have effect on yield and fruit number of okra but there is a slight effect on plant height. Based on the findings of the experiments it could be deduced that poultry manure seems to promote higher growth and yield of okra. Thus, it should be recommended for farmers growing okra in region.


It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the UK and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s,such luminaries as Labov (1969) and Trudgill (1975) were at pains to point out to educationalists, with some success, that this 'deficit 'view of working-class children's communicative competence is not a helpful one. However, a close reading of recent think-tank reports and policy papers on language and literacy teaching in schools reveals that the linguistic deficit hypothesis has resurfaced and is likely to influence present-day educational policy and practice. In this paper I examine in detail the findings, claims and recommendations of the reports and I argue that they are biased, poorly researched and reflect the vested interests of certain specialist groups, such as speech and language therapists and companies who sell literacy materials to schools. I further argue that we need to, once again, inject the debate with the social dimensions of educational failure, and we need to move away from the pathologisation of working-class children's language patterns.


The clothing industry employs 25 million people globally contributing to many livelihoods and the prosperity of communities, to women's independence, and the establishment of significant infrastructures in poorer countries. Yet the fashion industry is also a significant contributor to the degradation of natural systems, with the associated environmental footprint of clothing high in comparison with other products.

Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes, and paradigms and takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues of:

• Fashion in a post-growth society

• Fashion, diversity and equity

• Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systems

This handbook is a unique resource for a wide range of scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities interested in sustainability and fashion.


The escape rate of cosmic ray (CR) particles from radio galaxy cocoons is a problem of high astrophysical relevance: e.g. if CR electrons are stored for long times in the dilute relativistic medium filling the radio cocoons ( radio plasma in the following) they are protected against Coulomb losses and thus are able to produce a significant non-thermal Comptonisation signature on the CMB. On the other hand, CR protons and positrons which leak out of radio plasma can interact with the ambient medium, leading to characteristic gamma ray radiation by pion decay and pair annihilation. In order better understand such problems a model for the escape of CR particles from radio galaxy cocoons is presented here. It is assumed that the radio cocoon is poorly magnetically connected to the environment. An extreme case of this kind is an insulating boundary layer of magnetic fields, which can efficiently suppress particle escape. More likely, magnetic field lines are less organised and allow the transport of CR particles from the source interior to the surface region. For such a scenario two transport regimes are analysed: diffusion of particles along inter-phase magnetic flux tubes (leaving the cocoon) and cross field transport of particles in flux tubes touching the cocoon surface. The cross field diffusion is likely the dominate escape path, unless a significant fraction of the surface is magnetically connected to the environment. Major cluster merger should strongly enhance the particle escape by two complementary mechanisms. i) The merger shock waves shred radio cocoons into filamentary structures, allowing the CRs to easily reach the radio plasma boundary due to the changed morphology. ii) Also efficient particle losses can be expected for radio cocoons not compressed in shock waves. There, for a short period after the sudden injection of large scale turbulence, the (anomalous) cross field diffusion can be enhanced by several orders of magnitude. This lasts until the turbulent energy cascade has reached the microscopic scales, which determine the value of the microscopic diffusion coefficients.


We examine a set of supposedly "biclausal" constructions in natural conversations in English and German, and argue that: (1) these constructions are not biclausal, since the second "clause" is typically not a clause but an indeterminate stretch of discourse without a consistent syntactic structure; (2) the first "clause" functions to strongly project this upcoming discourse segment; (3) in certain of the allegedly biclausal constructions even the first part is not really a clause but is instead a fixed sequence with limited lexical choices. We suggest that these apparently "biclausal" constructions should be analyzed as single, partly formulaic clauses deployed by speakers in managing interactional discourse. This analysis accounts for a number of previously unnoticed restrictions on the grammatical and prosodic form the formulaic clauses take, as well as for their projective properties.


Internet privacy concerns (IPC) is an area of study that is receiving increased attention due to the huge amount of personal information being gathered, stored, transmitted, and published on the Internet. While there is an emerging literature on IPC, there is limited agreement about its conceptualization in terms of its key dimensions and its factor structure. Based on the multidimensional developmental theory and a review of the prior literature, we identify alternative conceptualizations of IPC. We examine the various conceptualizations of IPC with four online surveys involving nearly 4,000 Internet users. As a baseline, study 1 compares the integrated conceptualization of IPC to two existing conceptualizations in the literature. While the results provide support for the integrated conceptualization, the second-order factor model does not outperform the correlated first-order factor model. Study 2 replicates the study on a different sample and confirms the results of study 1. We also investigate whether the prior results are affected by the different perspectives adopted in the wording of items in the original instruments. In study 3, we find that focusing on one's concern for websites' behavior (rather than one's expectation of websites' behavior) and adopting a consistent perspective in the wording of the items help to improve the validity of the factor structure. We then examine the hypothesized third-order conceptualizations of IPC through a number of alternative higher-order models. The empirical results confirm that, in general, the third-order conceptualizations of IPC outperform their lower-order alternatives. In addition, the conceptualization of IPC that has the best fit with the data contains a third-order general IPC factor, two second-order factors of interaction management and information management, and six first-order factors (i.e., collection, secondary usage, errors, improper access, control, and awareness). Study 4 cross-validates the results with another dataset and examines IPC within the context of a nomological network. The results confirm that the third-order conceptualization of IPC has nomological validity, and it is a significant determinant of both trusting beliefs and risk beliefs. Our research helps to resolve inconsistencies in the key underlying dimensions of IPC, the factor structure of IPC, and the wording of the original items in prior instruments of IPC. Finally, we discuss the implications of this research.


This Article examines employee location tracking through either smart phone apps or GPS devices attached to or embedded within an employee's personal or company vehicle. For each form of tracking, this Article provides separate frameworks for employers to follow when conducting individual employee misconduct investigations and when tracking an entire group of employees for non-investigatory purposes. Beginning with GPS tracking for individual misconduct investigations, this Article contends that such tracking should be used only as a means to corroborate evidence that an employee has committed a terminable offense, that an employer may resort to this technique only after alternative investigative methods fail to generate enough evidence to warrant disciplinary action, and that the tracking must cease once the alleged wrongdoing has been corroborated. Turning to non-investigatory forms of GPS tracking, such as the monitoring of an employer's entire fleet of taxi-cab or rideshare drivers, this Article proposes that such tracking should be performed only for legitimate business purposes and only if employees consent to the tracking in advance. Whether performed for investigatory or non-investigatory purposes, this Article further proposes that employers should avoid collecting GPS tracking data while employees are off-duty. Finally, this Article addresses employee tracking through smart phone apps, including employer-owned apps and apps designed for time-keeping purposes. Because employees who use such apps typically consent to the monitoring of their phone's location, this Article concludes that employees tracked in this manner cannot reasonably expect privacy in such monitoring. As a result, this Article predicts that app-based employee tracking will not trigger Fourth Amendment protection, nor will it be sufficient to sustain a privacy-related tort claim, such that employers will typically not face civil liability for tracking employees through smart phone apps.


An all-optical AND gate based on optically induced nonlinear polarization rotation of a probe light in a bulk semiconductor optical amplifier is realized at a bit rate of 2.5Gbit/s. By operating the AND gate in an up and inverted wavelength conversion scheme, the extinction ratio is improved by 8dB compared with previously published work.


For most of the 20th century, American land use regulation sought to separate different types of land uses from each other and to reduce population density, while American parking and street design regulation sought to facilitate driving by mandating wide streets and forcing landlords and businesses to build parking lots for their tenants and customers. These policies have helped to create a pattern of land use often described as "sprawl": low-density, automobile-oriented development. Where offices and shops are in a different zone of a city from low-density housing, residents will often be unable to live within walking distances of such facilities. And where parking lots and wide streets surround those offices and shops, pedestrians must cross dangerously wide streets and then cross a sea of parking in order to reach those buildings. In recent decades, a group of architects generally known as the New Urbanist movement has sought to reform both conventional land use regulation and the sprawl that it generates. New Urbanists seek to build compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. Because existing zoning is hostile to New Urbanism, New Urbanists have begun to develop alternative zoning codes codifying New Urbanist principles. For example, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ), a leading New Urbanist architectural firm, has drafted a model code known as the SmartCode. The purpose of this article is to compare New Urbanist zoning to sprawl-oriented conventional zoning, using the SmartCode and two conventional zoning codes as case studies. The article concludes that the SmartCode is in many ways less restrictive than existing zoning, and shows how the SmartCode could be made even more libertarian yet at the same time even more pedestrian-friendly.


With the increasing importance of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), there have been substantial studies on this issue, both empirically and theoretically. However, most existing studies focus on either the impacts of FDI presence or the determinants of FDI inflows, ignoring the fact that inward FDI and economic development may simultaneously affect each other. This thesis sets out to examine the interactive effects between FDI and economic development. The whole thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One is an overall introduction to the thesis. Chapter Two presents a theoretical study and chapter Two and Three provide two empirical studies. Chapter Five concludes. Chapter Two presents a theoretical two-sector model that features the importance of human capital in attracting foreign investment. This model theoretically explains why FDI is more likely to occur among countries that are similar in terms of human capital and technology. On the other hand, MNCs must train local employees to work with firm-specific technology and hence improve the technological skills of local workers. In Chapter Two, an empirical model is constructed to detect whether the productivities of foreign and local firms impact each other. The model is tested on China's data at the industry level. The results indicate that productivity growth of local and foreign firms are jointly determined. Evidence also suggests that the extent to which spillovers occur varies with difference technology levels of local firms. Chapter Four investigates the relationship between FDI and economic grown based on a panel of data for 84 countries over the period 1970-1999. Both equations of FDI inflow and GDP growth are examined. The results indicate that FDI not only directly promotes economic growth by itself, but also indirectly does so via its interaction terms. There is a strong positive interaction effect of FDI with human capital and a strong negative interaction effect of FDI with technology gap on economic growth in developing countries.


It could be said that Acoustics forms a bridge between speech production and speech perception, and as such it lies at the intersection of several speech communication related fields. The field of Speech and Hearing Sciences, for example, deals with speech production and speech perception. Speech Pathology also relates crucially to Acoustics. In addition, the linguistic fields of Phonetics and Phonology have points of intersection in common with Acoustics, particularly Phonetics, which comprises three important subfields: Articulatory Phonetics, Acoustic Phonetics and Auditory Phonetics (related to Psycho-acoustics). Speech technology, including automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis and speech coding, is overlaid as an application of these fields. Because acoustics is related to so many fields, such classes are generally comprised of students from a wide variety of backgrounds. At Sophia University, the author is teaching acoustics not only to Engineering students but also to students majoring in fields such as Linguistics, Psychology, and Speech Pathology. We believe that an education in acoustics is important not only for college-level students, but also for high-school or potentially even elementary-school students. Therefore, we are motivated to develop intuitive and effective methods for educating students of different ages and from varied backgrounds. Toward this aim, we proposed using physical models of the human vocal tract as educational tools, and we verified their usefulness in the classroom. We have also started exhibiting our models at a science museum targeting for 10-12 year-old children. Furthermore, we identified other areas where the models were needed, for example, as educational tools for speech pathologists and patients with speech disorders and hearing impairment. Finally, we have developed new models for language learning, such as models for the consonants /r/ and /l/, so that second language learners appreciate them, as well.


Understanding the environmental factors that shape microbial communities is crucial, especially in extreme environments, like Antarctica. Two main forces were reported to influence Antarctic soil microbes: birds and plants. Both birds and plants are currently undergoing relatively large changes in their distribution and abundance due to global warming. However, we need to clearly understand the relationship between plants, birds and soil microorganisms. We therefore collected rhizosphere and bulk soils from six different sampling sites subjected to different levels of bird influence and colonized by Colobanthus quitensis and Deschampsia antarctica in Admiralty Bay, King George Island, Maritime Antarctic. Microarray and qPCR assays targeting 16S rRNA genes of specific taxa were used to assess microbial community structure, composition and abundance and analyzed with a range of soil physico-chemical parameters. The results indicated significant rhizosphere effects in four out of the six sites, including areas with different levels of bird influence. Acidobacteria were significantly more abundant in soils with little bird influence (low nitrogen) and in bulk soil. In contrast, Actinobacteria were significantly more abundant in the rhizosphere of both plant species. At two of the sampling sites under strong bird influence (penguin colonies), Firmicutes were significantly more abundant in D. antarctica rhizosphere but not in C. quitensis rhizosphere. The Firmicutes were also positively and significantly correlated to the nitrogen concentrations in the soil. We conclude that the microbial communities in Antarctic soils are driven both by bird and plants, and that the effect is taxa-specific.


We argue that in pharmaceutical markets, variation in the arrival time of consumer heterogeneity creates differences between a producer's ability to extract consumer surplus with preventives and treatments, potentially distorting R&D decisions. If consumers vary only in disease risk, revenue from treatments--sold after the disease is contracted, when disease risk is no longer a source of private information--always exceeds revenue from preventives. The revenue ratio can be arbitrarily high for sufficiently skewed distributions of disease risk. Under some circumstances, heterogeneity in harm from a disease, learned after a disease is contracted, can lead revenue from a treatment to exceed revenue from a preventative. Calibrations suggest that skewness in the U.S. distribution of HIV risk would lead firms to earn only half the revenue from a vaccine as from a drug. Empirical tests are consistent with the predictions of the model that vaccines are less likely to be developed for diseases with substantial disease-risk heterogeneity.


It is well appreciated that the description of overadiabatic convection affects the structure of the envelopes of luminous asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in the phase of "hot bottom burning" (HBB). We stress that this important uncertainty in the modeling plays a role which is much more dramatic than the role which can be ascribed, e.g., to the uncertainty in the nuclear cross-sections. Due to the role tentatively attributed today to the HBB nucleosynthesis as the site of self-enrichment of Globular Clusters stars, it is necessary to explore the difference in nucleosynthesis obtained by different prescriptions for convection. We present results of detailed evolutionary calculations of the evolution of stars of intermediate mass during the AGB phase for the metallicity typical of the Globular Clusters that show the largest spread in CNO abundances ($Z\sim 10^{-3}$). We follow carefully the nucleosynthesis at the base of the external convective region, showing that very different results can be obtained according to the presciption adopted to find out the temperature gradient within the instability regions. We discuss the uncertainties in the yields of the various chemical species and the role which these sources can play as polluters of the interstellar medium.


For social and economic reasons, national economies benefit from the inclusion of as many people as possible in financial services. In a cross country study, the present study shows that financial literacy for the general population promotes financial inclusion. This relationship goes beyond the effect of higher economic or financial development. And the effect of higher levels of financial literacy is greatest on the "use of financial products" in financial systems that are more developed. On the contrary, the educational effect on "access to finance" is greatest for countries that are financially less developed. Economic policy that targets financial inclusion should therefore not only concentrate on financial infrastructure, but also on improving financial literacy.


A once-thriving doctrine, today the common law right to information has been largely forgotten by U.S. courts at both the state and federal level. But courts have not paused to question whether the common law right still has a role to play in modern litigation. One reason may be the dearth of case law explaining the common law right's operation. Another may be that courts believe this doctrine has been eradicated by the advent of freedom of information laws. This article first brings together the disparate authority on the common law right in an attempt to pin down the precise contours of the doctrine. It then examines the operation of the various federal and state freedom of information statutes and compares them to the common law right. Then it considers whether these statutes preempt or displace the common law rights, ultimately concluding that the state common law right is unlikely to be displaced, while the federal common law right is more likely displaced. Finally, this article suggests several relatively narrow uses the common law may still serve today in the realm of public access to information.


In the first part of the thesis, we study the trade-off between the transmission reliability and data rate in high signal-to-noise ratio regime in ad-hoc wireless networks. Bandwidth allocation plays a significant role in this trade-off, since dividing bandwidth reduces the number of users on each band and consequently decreases the interference level, however it also decreases the data rate. Noting that the interference power is substantially influenced by the network density, this trade-off introduces a measure for appropriate bandwidth allocation among users considering the network density. The diversity-multiplexing trade-off is derived for a one-dimensional regular ad-hoc network. In the second part of the thesis, we study the performance of point-to-point and broadcast systems with partial channel state information at the transmitter in a time-varying environment. First, the capacity of time-varying channels with periodic feedback at the transmitter is evaluated. It is assumed that the channel state information is perfectly known at the receiver and is fed back to the transmitter at the regular time-intervals. The system capacity is investigated in two cases: i) finite state Markov channel, and ii) additive white Gaussian noise channel with time-correlated fading. In a multiuser scenario, we consider a downlink system in which a single-antenna base station communicates with single antenna users, over a time-correlated fading channel. It is assumed that channel state information is perfectly known at each receiver, while the rate of channel variations and the fading gain at the beginning of each frame are known to the transmitter. The asymptotic throughput of the scheduling that transmits to the user with the maximum signal to noise ratio is examined applying variable code rate and/or variable codeword length signaling. It is shown that by selecting a fixed codeword length for all users, the order of the maximum possible throughput (corresponding to quasi-static fading) is achieved.


The significance of this book, one of the essential works to examine the concept of "nationality" in international law, has been renewed by the emerging debate on the concept of citizenship in the context of the global human rights regime. Professor Donner starts from the basic rule that it is the right of each sovereign independent state to determine who are its nationals, as evidenced in their nationality legislation (the reserved domain) and in the practice of diplomatic protection. She proceeds with an analysis of any possible standards or rules set by public international law. This is a valuable study of one of the most fundamental issues in the law of nations.