A ship travelling in canals or narrow channels may encounter hydrodynamic forces and moments caused by a nearby side bank. Since most canals are shallow the effect of the bottom can also be considerable. Knowledge of these effects is crucial for safe navigation. The present paper introduces a study in the framework of a project applying Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in the prediction of confined water effects. Using a steady state Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes solver, this study investigates the shallow-water and bank effects on a tanker moving straight ahead at low speed in a canal characterized by surface piercing banks. The tanker is fitted with a rudder and a propeller at a zero propeller rate and at self-propulsion. In the systematic computations, a series of cases are considered with varying water depth and ship-to-bank distance, as well as different canal configurations. In the computations, the double model approximation is adopted to simulate the flat free surface. The non-rotating propeller is treated as an appendage composed of shaft and blades, while the operating propeller is approximated by body forces, simulated by a lifting line potential flow model. Validation of forces and moments against experimental data has been performed in previous studies. The emphasis of the present paper is placed on the effects on the flow field and the physical explanation of these effects. © 2013 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.


Abstract The private language argument in Wittgenstein has important implications for how self consciousness should be characterised. Some recent cognitivist theories claim that the self is really the sense of being a mental presence whilst the body is merely a container for these vital mental attributes. The cognitivist perspective emphasizes that mental states are internal to the mind thereby promoting the notion that the self is separate from the body. The private language argument is used to critique cognitivism through an examination of the notion of privacy which this conception of mental states depends upon. The assumption that the mental is essentially private leads to the supposition that it is intelligible to attribute self consciousness to either minds or bodies. On Wittgenstein's view new theories of the self are not required but a grammatical investigation into the employment of 'self consciousness' and its cognates (including their psychological and neuroscientific uses) is.


Access to the resources listed on this page is limited. Users may access most of these databases from a School of Law computer. Faculty, staff, and students have remote access with a University of South Carolina network username and password.


A study is presented on the optical damage and photovoltaic behaviour of proton-exchanged LiNbO3 waveguides in the ?-, ?1-phases as well as reverse-exchanged guides. The intensity threshold for optical damage has respectively been found 40, 1.5·103 and 2·104 W/cm2, as measured by the loss of linearity between the in- and out-coupled intensities in a single beam configuration. The photocurrent versus in-coupled intensity curve appears superlinear for ?-guides and linear for ?1 and reverse guides. The initial linear stage of the curve shows photocurrent values for reverse and ?1 guides respectively five times and an order of magnitude smaller than for ?-guides.


Aim: Increasing solubility of medicinal substances is a major problem in the pharmacy, since about 40% of produced pharmaceutical substances are poorly soluble, and of newly synthesized substances up to 60% have low solubility in water and aqueous solutions. For poorly soluble drugs, the limiting stage of the absorption process is usually the rate of its dissolution, and therefore, much attention is paid to the development of ways to increase it. To solve this problem, a number of methods are used which can be conditionally divided into physical and chemical. Materials and Methods: Objects of the study were chosen quercetin, quercetin solid dispersions (SDs) with polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP), polyethylene oxide (PEO)-6000, and β-cyclodextrin (β-CD). The solubility of the samples was studied spectrophotometrically. The particles'shape and size were studied using microscopic analysis. X-ray diffraction analysis was performed on a DRON-3 installation at monochromatic radiation Ka - Cu (λ = 1.54 Ǻ) by recording diffraction mappings on the diffractogram tape in the angular range 2θ = 5–500. Results and Discussions: In the article, the results of solubility study of quercetin and its SDs based on PVP, PEO, and β-CD obtained by melting with the removal of solvent are presented. The results obtained suggest the possibility of quercetin polymorphic transformations in the composition of SD. Polymer effect on increasing the solubility of quercetin in the composition of the SD has been shown. Conclusion: Using physicochemical methods of analysis, change in the crystal structure of quercetin under the influence of high-molecular substances has been proved.


Silver nanoparticles have been shown to inhibit viruses. However, very little is known about the mechanism of antiviral activity. This study tested the hypothesis that 25-nm silver nanoparticles inhibited Vaccinia virus replication by preventing viral entry. Plaque reduction, confocal microscopy, and beta-galactosidase reporter gene assays were used to examine viral attachment and entry in the presence and absence of silver nanoparticles. To explore the mechanism of inhibition, viral entry experiments were conducted with silver nanoparticles and small interfering RNAs designed to silence the gene coding for p21-activated kinase 1, a key mediator of macropinocytosis. The silver nanoparticles caused a 4- to 5-log reduction in viral titer at concentrations that were not toxic to cells. Virus was capable of adsorbing to cells but could not enter cells in the presence of silver nanoparticles. Virus particles that had adsorbed to cells in the presence of silver nanoparticles were found to be infectious upon removal from the cells, indicating lack of direct virucidal effect. The half maximal inhibitory concentration for viral entry in the presence of silver nanoparticles was 27.4+/-3.3 microg/ml. When macropinocytosis was blocked, this inhibition was significantly reduced. Thus, macropinocytosis was required for the full antiviral effect. For the first time, this study points to the novel result that a cellular process involved in viral entry is responsible for the antiviral effects of silver nanoparticles.


Schistosomiasis is the second most prevalent parasitic disease in the world. Currently, the treatment of this disease relies on a single drug, praziquantel, and due to the identification of resistant parasites, the development of new drugs is urged. The demand for the development of robust high‐throughput parasite screening techniques is increasing as drug discovery research in schistosomiasis gains significance. Here, we review the most common methods used for compound screening in the parasites life stages and also summarize some of the methods that have been recently developed. In addition, we reviewed the methods most commonly implemented to search for promising targets and how they have been used to validate new targets against the parasite Schistosoma mansoni. We also review some promising targets in this parasite and show the main approaches and the major advances that have been achieved by those studies. Moreover, we share our experiences in schistosomiasis drug discovery attained with our S. mansoni drug screening platform establishment.


Government procurement policy in the UK is an uneasy mixture of different policy legacies, where the dominant objectives of cost-efficiency and value for money compete with alternatives which emphasise public procurement as central to innovation policy and/or a critical demand-side instrument in local and regional economic development. Quantitative analysis of which types of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) benefit, and how, from different levels of government as a customer is, however, rare in the UK (and indeed more widely across the EU). Utilising data from the Federation of Small Businesses 2008 biannual survey, we address this important task. Results reveal different patterns of procurement depending on the territorial scale of government, in terms of both the innovativeness of SMEs supported through public procurement as well as demand-side contributions to local and regional economic development, allowing us to judge future possible policy directions with regard to the use of public procurement.


During the eleventh century the Aquitanian monastery of St. Yrieix, located forty kilometers south of Limoges, acquired a new gradual, a manuscript containing the liturgical Mass chants for the year. The Gradual of St. Yrieix, now at the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale (Pa903), includes both text and music, redacted with the musical notation typical of the region of Aquitaine.
The objective of this research is to analyze Pa903 as a document of liturgical musical practice and as a participant in the historical events of its region and time. While the Gregorian chant repertory dominates the gradual, this dissertation addresses the neo-Gregorian chants of Pa903, composed in the period following the dissemination of Gregorian chant throughout Europe. These neo-Gregorian chants were open to the influence of the contemporary regional musical style and cultural traditions surrounding St. Yrieix.
Chapter II reviews the backdrop of historical events surrounding Pa903, focusing on the reform and expansion at St. Yrieix and its transition from a monastery to a chapter of canons. The musical and liturgical characteristics of Pa903 (Chapter III) show that St.
vii
Yrieix favored its senior patron St. Martin of Tours and St. Aredius (its patron saint) above St. Martial of Limoges (a powerful neighbor) and presented in the gradual a community of saints with strong regional influence.
Chapters IV and V analyze the concordances of antiphons, tropes, prosulas, prosas, and neo-Gregorian Mass chants of Pa903 with those of the Aquitanian graduals and other sources throughout Europe. The tropes of the Proper and Ordinary, the complete repertory of prosulas and prosas, and the neo-Gregorian Mass chants of Pa903 are collected together here for the first time outside of Pa903. The neo-Gregorian chants are found in the sanctoral, temporal, and the ritual Masses and include a group of chants that reflects textual and musical elements of the prior Gallican tradition. The chant repertory of the gradual also presents a subgroup of forty-nine antiphons, prosas, prosulas, and neo-Gregorian Mass chants found only in Pa903, documented here with musical examples.


Super-resolution Ultrasound imaging (SRI) can visualize and quantify changes in the microvasculature. Metabolic syndrome is associated with hypertension and hyperlipidemia that affects different organs, including the kidneys. Ex vivo studies have shown glomerular injury in Obese Zucker rats (OZR) over time. If in vivo SRI can diagnose renal disease earlier than currently possible, treatment can be initiated in time to postpone the onset of renal complications in persons with metabolic syndrome. The overall aim of this study was to investigate whether SRI can detect early microvascular changes in the kidneys of rats with metabolic syndrome. The rats presented in this work were scanned at an early age to get a baseline scan prior to further studies. An 11-week-old OZR and a healthy age-matched Zucker rat were investigated. During open surgery, the left kidney was scanned for 10 min using a modified BK5000 scanner (BK Medical, Denmark) and a fixated X18L5s transducer. SonoVue (Bracco, Italy) was injected intravenously (1:10 dilution). Contrast images were obtained using a pulse amplitude modulation sequence and interleaved B-mode images were obtained for tissue motion correction (focused beam transmission, 6 MHz, 50 Hz, MI: 0.2). An in-house tool was used to track microbubble (MB) movements between frames to estimate the MB velocities measured in a large region of the cortex and the outer medulla. Both the cortex and the medulla were well-perfused with MBs, and no morphological differences in the microvasculature were found between the two rats. The thickness of the cortex and the medulla was almost identical; cortex 1.8 mm, medulla 8 mm, craniocaudal length 2.0 vs. 1.9 cm (healthy vs. OZR). The same was true regarding the MB velocities (median (IQR; difference between upper and lower quartiles = Q3 - Q1) in mm/s) for healthy vs. OZR; cortex 0.75 (3.51) vs. 0.65 (2.64) and medulla 0.75 (0.32) vs. 0.62 (0.30). This is the first time SRI has been used on the kidneys of rats with metabolic syndrome. The results will be used as the foundation for further investigations of the renal microvascular changes, which occur in the course of metabolic syndrome.


Aposematic insects conspicuously advertise their unprofitability to potential predators. However, when these prey initially evolved, they were likely to have been rare and presumably at a greater risk of being detected and killed by naive predators. Both kin and individual selection theories have been used in attempts to explain this apparent paradox, with much of the empirical research supporting kin selection--based theories. Here, we experimentally test how chemical defence levels in prey and avian color biases influence the probability of a rare conspicuous morph having an initial survival advantage. We used newly hatched domestic chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) foraging on green and purple prey, on a green or purple background, to model the evolutionary scenario of a rare conspicuous morph arising in a population of already defended cryptic prey. Defended prey were produced by spraying them with quinine solution, which the birds readily detect and can learn to avoid. Although attack rates were initially similar for both defended prey types, the chicks only learned to avoid defended prey when they were conspicuous, not when they were cryptic. In addition, defended conspicuous prey were more likely to be rejected on attack than defended cryptic prey, even when first encountered by a predator. These data suggest that there could be a selective advantage for a rare conspicuous morph to arise in a population of cryptic defended prey due to increased avoidance learning and taste-rejection in naive predators. Our findings also suggest that being a non-preferred color and/or highly defended will increase the probability of this evolutionary scenario. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.


David Ginsburg, who died at age 98 on May 23, 2010, was, to my knowledge, the last living official who served at senior levels in the early Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration.Ginsburg, after growing up in West Virginia and graduating from college, attended Harvard Law School and became a protege of Professor Felix Frankfurter. In 1935, he helped Ginsburg get a position at the new Securities & Exchange Commission, where his work included defending the constitutionality of the Public Utility Holding Company Act and, as borrowed personnel, researching speeches for President Roosevelt. In 1938, Ginsburg worked as newly appointed Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's first law clerk. In 1939, Ginsburg returned to the executive branch, working on various aspects of national defense, ultimately becoming general counsel of the Office of Price Administration. In 1943, Ginsburg joined the U.S. Army as a private. He served in Europe and, after the war, remained in Germany to work in the U.S. occupation government. In later decades, he headed one of Washington, D.C.'s great law firms (Ginsburg, Feldman & Bress), was a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action, and was appointed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to significant positions. In 1967, LBJ, responding to riots and racial unrest, created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known popularly as the Kerner Commission, and appointed Ginsburg its executive director. He in large part wrote its March 1968 final report.This eulogy, delivered at a memorial gathering in September 2010 and based in research in Ginsburg's newly available papers in the Library of Congress, describes his paths and his work in the New Deal and World War II periods.


This paper shows how monopolization of a given market through exclusive contracts can affect the profitability of monopolization of another market in a model with two incumbent firms, each producing a distinct substitute or complementary good and each facing a distinct potential entrant. Externalities between incumbents operate through a "scale effect" and a "profit extraction effect." With linear demand, when both potential entrants have intermediate levels of entry costs there exist multiple equilibria. In particular, when the goods are strong complements there exists an equilibrium with monopolization in both markets and an equilibrium with entry in both markets. When the goods are substitutes or weak complements there exist two asymmetric equilibria, each with a different incumbent monopolizing its market while the other does not. The equilibrium is instead unique when at least one of the two potential entrants has very high or very low entry costs. I discuss implications for antitrust enforcement in markets for complementary inputs and for national antitrust policy-making in the presence of international trade in substitute goods.


The IWA conference on water economics, statistics and finance involved multidiscipline participants from academia and industry and decision makers. A number of important issues were considered such as: how utilities are financed, the variety of water tariff structures, measurement of performance and benchmarking, national and regional water industry statistics, water facts, regulation, economic aspects, costs/benefits, feasibility analysis, as well as funding possibilities and practices. This is an overview paper that gives the state of the art on these issues, new directions, which were presented at the conference and the up-to-date literature.


Various crystalline phases of uric acid are frequently identified components of human kidney stones, including anhydrous uric acid (UA) and uric acid dihydrate (UAD). Herein we report a quantitative study of the solution-mediated phase transformation of metastable UAD to UA as a function of pH as well as in model urine solution. Using a combination of X-ray diffraction, thermal analysis, and optical microscopy techniques, the UAD to UA transformation was found to go to completion within 48 hours at 37 °C in buffered solutions with pH between 4.0–6.5 with no evidence for intermediate crystalline phases. In solutions with pH > 6.8, UAD transformation to a different monosodium urate monohydrate phase becomes dominant. In artificial urine solution, the transformation occurs on a slightly faster timescale and results in smaller UA crystals. Seeding and saturation experiments indicate that the rate-limiting step in the overall transformation is the dissolution of UAD. The kinetics of these transformation processes suggest that interconversions between various solid state forms of uric acid are relevant under the physiologic conditions which lead to stone formation.


Scatterometry is a common technique for the characterization of nanostructured surfaces. With shrinking dimensions, fewer and fewer propagating diffraction orders exist, and structure roughness becomes more important. Recent investigations suggest that roughness has to be taken into account for structure reconstruction. The short wavelength of the extreme UV (EUV) is advantageous, since it provides more propagating diffraction orders as compared to UV and visible radiation and increases the sensitivity to small structural features, particularly roughness. We present a method to numerically estimate changes in measured diffraction intensities in angular resolved EUV scatterometry induced by line roughness. The model can be used to include the estimation of the roughness into the structure reconstruction algorithm.


This paper is aimed at looking into the results of the U.S. and NATO apologies for the Chinese Embassy bombing, which occurred on May 7, 1999. Through the theoretical lens of Nick Smith's categorical apology with reference to the relevant works of Tavuchis and Lazare and via the rhetorical method of close textual analysis, this study has analyzed the transcripts of five selected rhetorical artifacts of the U.S. and NATO apologies. A close reading of the artifacts against the nine standards of the categorical apology reveals both positive and negative findings. Positively, the United States and NATO have fully met three standards of performance of apology, reform and reparations, and standing and partially satisfied the standard of categorical regret. Negatively, they have failed to meet five other standards completely in their apologies. At the time, the United States and NATO had the first priority to continue with their air strike campaign and the least motivation to present a full, categorical apology even though they were challenged with the humanitarian necessity and the intention to maintain their relationships with P.R. China.


Abstract This scientific opinion of the EFSA Panel on Food Contact Materials, Enzymes, Flavourings and Processing aids (CEF Panel) deals with the safety assessment of 1,2,3,4‐tetrahydronaphthalene‐2,6‐dicarboxylic acid, dimethyl ester (TDCM) for use as a co‐monomer to manufacture polyester layers. The polyester layer is not intended to be in direct contact with food. The finished multilayer articles are intended for packaging aqueous, acidic and low alcoholic foodstuffs. Contact conditions include sterilisation followed by long‐term storage at room temperature. No thermal degradation of TDCM is expected during the manufacture of the middle polyester layer and of the multilayer articles. Total mass transfer of the substance from a polyester monolayer was calculated to be up to 0.032 mg/kg food. Based on three in vitro genotoxicity tests, the CEF Panel considered that the substance does not raise concern for genotoxicity. When tested behind a polypropylene layer, migrating TDCM‐related oligomers, their oxidation products and other related reaction products were identified. The major components were TDCM dimers. When tested behind a cyclo‐olefin polymer layer, none of the TDCM‐related substances were found to migrate. Based on the lack of genotoxicity of the co‐monomer, the ester nature of the oligomers and on (quantitative) structure–activity relationship ((Q)SAR) analysis, the CEF Panel considered that there is no indication of genotoxicity for the oligomers, their oxidation products and other TDCM‐related reaction products. The CEF Panel concluded that the substance is not of safety concern for the consumer if used as a co‐monomer for the manufacture of a polyester layer intended to be used as an inner (non‐food contact) layer of a multilayer material for contact with foods simulated by simulants A, B, C, D1 (as set in Regulation (EU) 10/2011). The migration of the sum of the substance and the dimers (cyclic and open chain) should not exceed 0.05 mg/kg food.


Summary
1.
Hematologic studies on 20 cases of natural cutaneous leishmaniasis, and two cases of artificially induced cutaneous leishmaniasis showed no changes in the blood picture. The formol gel test of Napier and Sia precipitation test were negative.
2.
Four general paretics, who previously had cutaneous leishmaniasis, were injected intravenously with living leptomonas cultures of L. tropica in doses of 9,750,000 to 100,000,000. All four developed fever of about 40°C., lasting for three days. One general paretic, probably non-immune to L. tropica, was injected intravenously with 200,000,000 living leptomonas. He developed a chill, fever of 40.7°C., hepato- and splenomegaly, and obstructive jaundice. The symptoms subsided in about ten days.
3.
All these five patients showed amelioration and improvement of their mental symptoms.
4.
The writer was not able to produce kala azar in two patients who were presumably immune to cutaneous leishmaniasis.
5.
South American leishmaniasis could not be produced in a patient who was presumably immune to cutaneous leishmaniasis.
6.
A trial treatment with cultures of L. tropica may be given to general paretics, with the expectation of ameliorating the mental symptoms.


Predicting building damage as a function of hurricane hazards, building attributes, and the interaction between hazard and building attributes is a key to understanding how significant interaction reflects variation hazard intensity effect on damage based on building attribute levels. This paper develops multihazard hurricane fragility models for wood structure homes considering interaction between hazard and building attributes. Fragility models are developed for ordered categorical damage states (DS) and binary collapse/no collapse. Exterior physical damage and building attributes from rapid assessment in coastal Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina (2005), high-resolution numerical hindcast hazard intensities from the Simulating WAves Nearshore and ADvanced CIRCulation (SWAN+ADCIRC) models, and base flood elevation values are used as model input. Leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) is used to evaluate model prediction accuracy. Eleven and forty-nine combinations of global damage response variables and main explanatory variables, respectively, were investigated and evaluated. Of these models, one DS and one collapse model met the rejection criteria. These models were refitted considering interaction terms. Maximum 3-s gust wind speed and maximum significant wave height were found to be factors that significantly affect damage. The interaction between maximum significant wave height and number of stories was the significant interaction term for the DS and collapse models. For every 0.3 m (0.98 ft) increase in maximum significant wave height, the estimated odds of being in a higher rather than in a lower damage state for DS model were found to be 1.95 times greater for one- rather than for two-story buildings. For every 0.3 m (0.98 ft) increase in maximum significant wave height, the estimated odds of collapse were found to be 2.23 times greater for one- rather than for two-story buildings. Model prediction accuracy was 84% and 91% for DS and collapse models, respectively. This paper does not consider the full hazard intensity experienced in Hurricane Katrina; rather, it focuses on single-family homes in a defined study area subjected to wind, wave, and storm surge hazards. Thus, the findings of this paper are not applicable for events with hazards that exceed those experienced in the study area, from which the models were derived.


In this study, the contents of total phenolics, flavonoids, anthocyanins, β-carotene, and lutein as well as free, conjugated, and insoluble bound phenolic acids were determined in whole kernels of 10 different colored maize genotypes. In addition, the antioxidant activity was evaluated as radical scavenging activity with ABTS (2,2-azino-bis/3-ethil-benothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) and DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) reagents. Generally, considerable differences in phytochemical contents and antioxidant capacity were observed between the genotypes. The β-carotene and lutein contents ranged from 0 to 2.42 mg/kg d.m. and from 0 to 13.89 mg/kg d.m., respectively, whereas the total anthocyanin contents of anthocyanin-rich colored maize genotypes ranged from 2.50 to 696.07 mg CGE/kg d.m. (cyanidin 3-glucoside equivalent) with cyanidin 3-glucoside (Cy-3-Glu) as the most dominant form. The light blue ZPP-2 selfed maize genotype has a higher content of total phenolics, flavonoids, and ferulic acid as compared to other tested maize and the highest ABTS radical scavenging activity.


Physical activity of people plays increasingly more important
role in scientific interest regarding way of life of
contemporary society and it is very important factor in the
process of officiating of the level of healthy and active life
style, quality of life and health in general. We are living a
time when society, culture and science have become increasingly
aware of the great importance of sport not only as a part of
mass culture, but broadly understood, for individual and social
health and well-being. Indispensable role of physical activity
in the course of human life is permanently scientifically
confirmed also in context of prevention of obesity. The
development of a sedentary life style is the result of a
socialization process towards physical inactivity developed in
youth and continued into adulthood. At the present we face in
our cultural settings apparent tendency: People are more and
more individualized, loosing beneficial impacts of community
activities, involved in passive way of life lacking proper
level of physical activities and active sport. Some preliminary
data of the time of being in progress research of physical
activity of Czech population are presented to describe specific
relation of sport and sedentary society. The Czech Republic is
on the level of mass sport strongly influenced with the
existence of new development of the city structure, including
fitness centres, cyclo paths, roller skates stadiums, beach
volleyball playing fields, golf courses. Paper presented also
topical results regarding situationon physical activities in
Czech population. General conclusions of the paper is
concentrated on the question what Czech society expects from
sport in given context of existing tendencies in mutual
realtion of sport and society .


Classification of urls into topical categories is an important task of data minining and information filtering. In many applications the task needs to be performed with minimal information, which usually means just the url itself. While for some topics using the url information is surprisingly effective, there is still a substantial loss in accuracy when compared to basing the classification on full web page content. In this work we stipulate that the basic url-based approach can be significantly improved by taking the web-graph information into account, and in particular by precomputing the topical likelihood for the known hosts. While graph mining is computationally intensive, it is performed off-line and the url classification process simply consumes its results, which comes down to a simple table lookup operation. We demonstrate that the proposed approach not only greatly improves on using url-strings as sources of features but also outperforms techniques utilizing full html content. While the set of categories considered in our experiments is not exhaustive, the results are highly encouraging and the proposed approach could be potentially beneficial in a variety of different topic settings.


Activation of the sonic hedgehog (SHH) pathway has been implicated in basal cell carcinoma (BCC), and one mechanism to achieve aberrant SHH signaling is through loss of the function of Patched (Ptch, also sometimes abbreviated Ptc), a receptor that inhibits the pathway in the absence of SHH. Wakabayashi et al. now implicate aberrant Ptc function in susceptibility to squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) caused by H-Ras. They mapped the difference in susceptibility of two strains of mice to H-Ras-induced SCC: C57BL/6 mice are resistant to SCC, and FVB/N mice are susceptible to SCC compared with a control mouse strain. They found a polymorphism in the Ptch gene that resulted in the appearance of either a Thr (resistant mice PtchB6) or an Asn (susceptible mice PtchFVB) at position 1267 in the C-terminal region. Comparison with the human protein revealed that humans have an Asn in that position. This polymorphism affected the interaction of Ptch with Tid1, with the PtchB6 version interacting with the short form of this protein, which has been implicated in Ras-induced apoptosis and senescence. In contrast, PtchFVB did not interact with Tid1 by coimmunoprecipitation when expressed in transfected cells. When coexpressed in NIH 3T3 cells or C5N keratinocytes with H-Ras, only the PtcFVB inhibited apoptosis. In mice transgenic for PtcFVB in the skin, Ptc and Gli transcripts were present in normal skin, whereas these two transcripts were repressed in the SCC tumors. This implies that the altered Ptch function may be required at a very early stage in tumor initiation but is not required or is actively silenced in the tumors. This contrasts with the situation in BCC in which increased SHH signaling is present. The authors propose a mechanism for SHH in cell fate determination that may contribute to the two different forms of cancer, with Ptch activity contributing to SCC and Ptch loss contributing to BCC. Y. Wakabayashi, J.-H. Mao, K. Brown, M. Girardi, A. Balmain, Promotion of Hras-induced squamous carcinomas by a polymorphic variant of the Patched gene in FVB mice. Nature 445, 761-765 (2007). [PubMed]


Traditional tensor decompositions such as the CANDECOMP / PARAFAC (CP) and Tucker decompositions yield higher-order principal components that have been used to understand tensor data in areas such as neuroimaging, microscopy, chemometrics, and remote sensing. Sparsity in high-dimensional matrix factorizations and principal components has been well-studied exhibiting many benefits; less attention has been given to sparsity in tensor decompositions. We propose two novel tensor decompositions that incorporate sparsity: the Sparse Higher-Order SVD and the Sparse CP Decomposition. The latter solves an `1-norm penalized relaxation of the single-factor CP optimization problem, thereby automatically selecting relevant features for each tensor factor. Through experiments and a scientific data analysis example, we demonstrate the utility of our methods for dimension reduction, feature selection, signal recovery, and exploratory data analysis of high-dimensional tensors.


In the second century AD, when the Ninth Roman Legion marched into the mists of northern Britain, not one man came back. Four thousand men disappeared, and the Eagle, the symbol of the Legion's honour, was lost. Years later there is a story that the Eagle has been seen again. So Marcus Aquila, whose father disappeared with the Ninth, travels north, to find the Eagle and bring it back, and to learn how his father died. But the tribes of the north are wild and dangerous, and they hate the Romans ...


Abstract This paper aims to examine the relative impacts of three different models of learning (collaborative learning, traditional lecturing and process-oriented guided inquiry learning [POGIL]) on student performance and learning perceptions. In a controlled case study, we measured the learning outcomes of 57 undergraduates in a chemistry course taught by the different learning modules, using quizzes and exams as performance measures. In one academic quarter, the collaborative learning method was used exclusively whereas all three models were used subsequently in a second quarter by dividing up lectures into 4 different modules. Student quiz and exam outcomes indicated significant difference between collaborative learning and traditional lecturing (P = 0.01) but not within the active learning variants or POGIL versus traditional lecturing (P > 0.05), suggesting students performed best on content taught by collaborative learning. When prompted to pick a learning module, 67% of the students chose collaborative learning but not POGIL, indicative of student preference for one active learning variant over the other. However, student engagement and higher-order thinking appeared to be higher under the POGIL module though both skills were also evident during the collaborative learning period. Based on the outcome of the present study, it is recommended that purely inquiry-based lectures should employ short-burst intermittent lecturing to overcome student resistance and negative perceptions.


The vacant retirement house has become a central feature of many areas of the Global South. Over the years,  migrants' savings are invested in the building of conspicuous houses for retirement in their areas of origin. But  despite these substantial efforts, a number of migrants postpone their return or do not return at all. Their houses  remain empty, their purposes shifting as their owners reach old age. This stretching of time does not only affect  the migrants' livelihoods and ideas of home. Furthermore, kin-scripts as conceptualized by Stack and Burton  (1993) are being reconfigured substantially. This goes hand-in-hand with the reframing of culturally prescribed  responsibilities, meanings, and social roles attached to certain stages of the migrants' lives. Based on long-term  and multi-local ethnographic fieldwork in rural Mexico and urban Chicago since the 1990s, we analyze how  remittance houses are tied and untied with their owners' life courses in the later stages of life. Furthermore, we  examine how kin groups on both sides of the border deal with the new challenges this entails.


There have been conflicting reports which associate a low dietary intake or plasma concentration of betacarotene (BC) with decreased fertility in dairy cows. The bovine corpus luteum (CL), a transient endocrine gland formed subsequent to ovulation, produces the steroid hormone progesterone which sustains pregnancy and is associated with fertility. Because of its high concentrations of the antioxidant nutrient beta-carotene, the CL was examined to identify an in vivo function for BC, other than that as a precursor of retinol. Five nonlactating Jersey cows were fed a basal ration containing a low BC concentration. Each cow received either 0, 1.6, 8.0, 16.0, or 80.0 mg/day of supplemental BC in the form of water-soluble beadlets incorporated into grain. Changes in plasma BC were measured weekly. After each of four feeding periods (7 weeks each), a midcycle CL (9-11 days following estrus) and plasma were harvested from each cow. Plasma and CL betacarotene concentrations were directly related to the dietary BC level and, while on the BC deficient diet were similar to those seen in humans. Western immunoblotting was used to identify, the steroidogenic enzymes adrenodoxin (Adx, $\sim$14 kDa) and cholesterol side-chain cleavage cytochrome P-450 (P450scc, 49 kDa). The enzymes Adx and P-450scc catalyze the first and rate-limiting reaction in progesterone synthesis. Antisera specific for Adx or P450scc, in addition to recognizing their respective proteins, recognized a protein of higher molecular weight (63 kDa). The 63 kDa protein band, believed to be P450scc and Adx chemically cross-linked in a one to one ratio, was present consistently in the lanes where CL beta-carotene concentrations were below $\sim$11 nmol/g. On the other hand, the cross-linked protein was not apparent in lanes where the CL betacarotene concentrations were above $\sim$50 nmol/g. In lanes where the CL beta-carotene concentrations were between 11 and 50 nmol/g, the cross-linked protein was sometimes apparent, but not consistently. Thus, it appears that BC protects the mitochondrial enzymes Adx and P450scc against damage from free radicals produced during steroidogenesis. These observations may help explain studies which show that antioxidant vitamins enhance steroid production.


Chemoinformatics is the generic name for the techniques used to represent, store and process information about the two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) structures of chemical molecules [1, 2]. Chemoinformatics has attracted much recent prominence as a result of developments in the methods that are used to synthesize new molecules and then to test them for biological activity. These developments have resulted in a massive increase in the amounts of structural and biological information that is available to support discovery programmes in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries.Chemoinformatics may appear to be far removed from information retrieval (IR), and there are indeed many significant differences, most notably in the use of graph representations to encode chemical molecules, rather than the strings that are used to encode text; however, there are also many similarities between the two fields, and this paper will exemplify some of these relationships. The most obvious area of similarity is in the principal types of database search that are carried out, with both application domains making extensive use of exact match, partial match and best match searching procedures: in the IR context these are known-item searching, Boolean searching and ranked-output searching; in the chemical context, these are structure searching, substructure searching and similarity searching. In IR, there is a natural distinction between an initial ranked-output search and one in which relevance feedback can be employed, where the keywords in the query statement are assigned weights based on their differential occurrences in known-relevant and known-nonrelevant documents. In the chemoinformatics technique called substructural analysis, substructural fragments are assigned weights based on their occurrence in molecules that do possess, and molecules that do not possess, some desired biological activity [3]. The analogy between relevance and biological activity has also resulted in the development of measures to quantify the effectiveness of chemical searching procedures that are based on the standard IR concepts of recall and precision [4].Analogies such as these have provided the basis for some of the chemoinformatics research carried out in Sheffield. The starting point was the recognition that techniques applicable to documents represented by keywords might also be applicable to molecules represented by substructural fragments. This led directly to the introduction of similarity searching, something that is now a standard tool in chemoinformatics software systems; in particular, its use for virtual screening, i.e., the ranking of a database in order of decreasing probability of activity so as to maximize the cost-effectiveness of biological testing [5]. Measures of inter-molecular structural similarity also lie at the heart of systems for clustering chemical databases: just as IR has the Cluster Hypothesis (similar documents tend to be relevant to the same requests) as a basis for document clustering, so the Similar Property Principle (similar molecules tend to have similar properties) has led to clustering becoming a well-established tool for the organization of large chemical databases [6]. More recently, we have applied another IR technique, the use of data fusion to combine different rankings of a database, to chemoinformatics and again found that it is equally applicable in this new domain [7].The many similarities between IR and chemoinformatics that have already been identified suggest that chemoinformatics is a domain of which IR researchers should be aware when considering the applicability of new techniques that they have developed.


An improved hidden Markov model-based (HMM-based) speech enhancement system designed using the minimum mean square error principle is implemented and compared with a conventional spectral subtraction system. The improvements to the system are: (1) incorporation of mixture components in the HMM for noise in order to handle noise nonstationarity in a more flexible manner, (2) two efficient methods in the speech enhancement system design that make the system real-time implementable, and (3) an adaptation method to the noise type in order to accommodate a wide variety of noise expected under the enhancement system's operating environment. The results of the experiments designed to evaluate the performance of the HMM-based speech enhancement systems in comparison with spectral subtraction are reported. Three types of noise-white noise, simulated helicopter noise, and multitalker (cocktail party) noise-were used to corrupt the test speech signals. Both objective (global SNR) and subjective mean opinion score (MOS) evaluations demonstrate consistent superiority of the HMM-based enhancement systems that incorporate the innovations described in this paper over the conventional spectral subtraction method.


Community information sharing is crucial to a government's ability to respond to a disaster or a health emergency, such as a pandemic. In conflict zones, however, citizens and local leaders often lack trust in state institutions and are unwilling to cooperate, risking costly delays and information gaps. We report results from a randomized experiment in the Philippines regarding government efforts to provide services and build trust with rural communities in a conflict-affected region. We find that the outreach program increased the probability that village leaders provide time-sensitive pandemic risk information critical to the regional Covid-19 Task Force by 20%. The effect is largest for leaders who, at baseline, were skeptical about government capacity and fairness and had neutral or positive attitudes towards rebels. A test of mechanisms suggests that treated leaders updated their beliefs about government competence and shows that neither security improvement nor project capture by the rebels are primary drivers. These findings highlight the important role that government efforts to build connections with conflict-affected communities can play in determining public health outcomes during times of national emergencies.


Truth‐seeking efforts have gained an increasingly central position in the process of dealing with a legacy of mass abuse following political transition to democracy or the end of violent conflict. The place that 'truth' assumes within the transitional justice framework has often been subject to controversy. What seems to be commonly agreed upon is that creating the conditions for finding and revealing the truth is essential in any process of transition. We posit that restorative justice paradigm can be an attractive approach to inform future truth‐seeking mechanisms. We propose a framework for guiding such truth‐seeking mechanisms based on restorative justice principles that reverberate in current debates as well as in the official discourse laid down in the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Restorative Justice Programmes in Criminal Matters. The significance and application of these principles will be illustrated in the transitional justice processes of South Africa and Bosnia and Herzegovina.


This study is concerned with the New Acropolis Museum, which was opened in June 2009 in Athens. The New Acropolis Museum, out of all of the world's new museum structures of the past century, has dramatically intensified the issue of the relationship between parts and the whole, between the building and its integration into the setting, between the museum function and the historical city, which is a protected heritage site, one treated as a museum exhibit. With the New Acropolis Museum as an example, the study would like to highlight the complexity and the ambiguity of the present-day relationship between the heritage protection, the museumisation of art and the design of our environment. The particular attention is focused on the vivid debate about the building and the distinguishing the differences between traditionalist and modernist views of architecture manifested in this debate. These differences are deeper rooted than many people have been willing to admit.


Russia's food economy is undergoing a fundamental transition. Rapid changes and adjustments are still taking place in the market and pricing systems, in the subsidies to output and input markets and the credit market, and in the process of privatization and other structural reforms. These transformations have far-reaching effects on domestic supply and demand relationships. And, as part of the still greater economic changes taking place in the former planned economies of central and eastern Europe, these transformations may have extensive ramifications for international food markets. The authors describe agricultural policy before reform and then the state of reforms and agriculture today. They then turn to future food consumption and production trends. The authors conclude that Russian agriculture will remain in transition for a long time. Risky labor and food markets and the inaccessibility of financing are causing the expansion of small-scale farming and the home production of food. Managerial deficiencies and market imperfections are hindering a revitalization of large-scale farming. Certainly the potential for major production increases exists in Russia, as well as in some other countries of the former Soviet Union, especially Ukraine and Kazakhstan. One need not be overly optimistic to assume that efficiency will improve and this potential will be realized over the long term. During the period covered by the projections given here, however, institutional constraints, friction in finance, land, and labor markets, and limited infrastructure will probably prevent farmers and the food-processing sector from responding strongly to incentives and will continue to inhibit the efficiency and growth of the Russian food economy.


Standard approaches to meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) prevention have included hand hygiene and active surveillance. These approaches have shown mixed results. The addition of pulsed xenon ultraviolet (PX-UV) room disinfection for MRSA prevention is a novel approach. This new MRSA prevention method was implemented at an acute care hospital system in Greensboro, NC, USA. An MRSA screening programme was implemented over a six-month period from July 2011 to January 2012 to include all high-risk patients and the majority of surgical patients. A two-week hand hygiene education initiative was implemented in February 2011. The use of PX-UV for terminal cleaning of MRSA patient rooms was also implemented in February 2011. The rates of hospital associated MRSA (HA-MRSA) infections were monitored before and after implementation of all prevention efforts. The HA-MRSA rate decreased at the largest facility in the system by 57%, and for the entire healthcare system by 56% (p=0.001). The two smaller hospitals saw reductions of 51% and 66%, but the results were not statistically significant (p=0.1047 and p=0.2263). Implementing a PX-UV device in conjunction with active screening and hand hygiene was associated with a decrease in HA-MRSA rates. Studies on the individual effect of PX-UV on HA-MRSA rates are warranted.


In a rapidly changing environment of growing competition for limited resources and ever increasing operational costs, institutions of higher education must focus on all aspects of the organizational functions to insure institutional effectiveness and the maximization of student success. This study will use a Student Environment Model (SEM) to assess students' perception of their college environment outside of the formal classroom at a unique two year technical college. The information obtained is used by the administration of Texas State Technical College Waco (TSTCW) to make appropriate adjustments in programs, services, or policies when the student data indicates that change or improvement is needed. While the SEM provides an indication of the students' "image" of the college environment, it can also provide indicators of areas which need improvement or require change. Applying the SEM information to decision making, problem solving, and planning will allow the institution and its people to move toward higher productivity and continuous quality improvement.


We present the first polarimetric detection of the inner disk component around the pre-main-sequence B9.5 star HD 141569A. Gemini Planet Imager H-band (1.65 μm) polarimetric differential imaging reveals the highest signal-to-noise ratio detection of this ring yet attained and traces structure inward to 0.″25 (28 au at a distance of 111 pc). The radial polarized intensity image shows the east side of the disk, peaking in intensity at 0.″40 (44 au) and extending out to 0.″9 (100 au). There is a spiral arm–like enhancement to the south, reminiscent of the known spiral structures on the outer rings of the disk. The location of the spiral arm is coincident with 12CO J = 3–2 emission detected by ALMA and hints at a dynamically active inner circumstellar region. Our observations also show a portion of the middle dusty ring at ∼220 au known from previous observations of this system. We fit the polarized H-band emission with a continuum radiative transfer Mie model. Our best-fit model favors an optically thin disk with a minimum dust grain size close to the blowout size for this system, evidence of ongoing dust production in the inner reaches of the disk. The thermal emission from this model accounts for virtually all of the far-infrared and millimeter flux from the entire HD 141569A disk, in agreement with the lack of ALMA continuum and CO emission beyond ∼100 au. A remaining 8–30 μm thermal excess a factor of ∼2 above our model argues for an as-yet-unresolved warm innermost 5–15 au component of the disk.


Recently, researchers in answer set programming and constraint programming spent significant efforts in the development of hybrid languages and solving algorithms combining the strengths of these traditionally separate fields. These efforts resulted in a new research area: constraint answer set programming (CASP). CASP languages and systems proved to be largely successful at providing efficient solutions to problems involving hybrid reasoning tasks, such as scheduling problems with elements of planning. Yet, the development of CASP systems is difficult, requiring non-trivial expertise in multiple areas. This suggests a need for a study identifying general development principles of hybrid systems. Once these principles and their implications are well understood, the development of hybrid languages and systems may become a wellestablished and well-understood routine process. As a step in this direction, in this paper we conduct a case study aimed at evaluating various integration schemas of CASP methods.


The unique and outstanding electrical and optical properties of graphene make it a potential material to be used in the construction of high-performance photosensors. However, the fabrication process of a graphene photosensor is usually complicated and the size of the device also is restricted to micrometer scale. In this work, we report large-area photosensors based on reduced graphene oxide (rGO) implemented with Ag nanoparticles (AgNPs) via a simple and cost-effective method. To further optimize the performance of photosensors, the absorbance and distribution of the electrical field intensity of graphene with AgNPs was simulated using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method through use of the surface plasmon resonance effect. Based on the simulated results, we constructed photosensors using rGO with 60–80 nm AgNPs and analyzed the characteristics at room temperature under white-light illumination for outdoor environment applications. The on/off ratio of the photosensor with AgNPs was improved from 1.166 to 9.699 at the bias voltage of −1.5 V, which was compared as a sample without AgNPs. The proposed photosensor affords a new strategy to construct cost-effective and large-area graphene films which raises opportunities in the field of next-generation optoelectronic devices operated in an outdoor environment.


This study aims to investigate the speech act of complimenting in Zulu. It is divided into five chapters, which are arranged as follows: Chapter one provides special details regarding the aim of this study, the method that has been followed, and the organizational structure of the study. Chapter two focuses on both speech act and politeness theories. The central notion relates to (a) the acts of locution, (b) illocution and (c) perlocution. These elements of speech acts entail the notion that utterances that are produced by participants in a conversation comprises of (a) the actual sounds and words uttered, and those words and sounds (b) are intended towards the fulfillment of the force or intention behind them and (c) the effect of that force is intended to the hearer. Although there are other related elements, this notion is prominent in this chapter. Chapter three examines the speech acts of complimenting in Zulu along with their responses. This examination is informed by various ideas from the respective researchers. For an effective and successful investigation of speech acts, a guideline which serves as a base follows a method of ethnography of communication. Almost all these researchers are putting emphasis on this view. The elements of the responses, the principles, their nature, structure and appearance in general conversations with specific reference to complimenting, are other key properties examined in this chapter. Chapter four focuses on the functions of compliments. For example, almost all the researchers in the field are in agreement that compliments serve to revitalize, establish or create or encourage solidarity. Although there are other functions relating to this speech act, such as replacing other conversational formulas, e.g. greetings, softening criticism, the function of solidarity is perceived to be central. Another area which receives attention is the structural qualities of the compliment, along with syntactic and iii lexical features. This analysis explores the syntactic categories that relate to this work, together with the formulaic nature of this speech act. Chapter five is the last chapter of this study. It represents the conclusion in which the main findings in the study are summarized.


Multi-relational networks are used extensively to structure knowledge. Perhaps the most popular instance, due to the widespread adoption of the Semantic Web, is the Resource Description Framework (RDF). One of the primary purposes of a knowledge network is to reason; that is, to alter the topology of the network according to an algorithm that uses the existing topological structure as its input. There exist many such reasoning algorithms. With respect to the Semantic Web, the bivalent, axiomatic reasoners of the RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) are the most prevalent. However, nothing prevents other forms of reasoning from existing in the Semantic Web. This article presents a non-bivalent, non-axiomatic, evidential logic and reasoner that is an algebraic ring over a multi-relational network and two binary operations that can be composed to perform various forms of inference. Given its multi-relational grounding, it is possible to use the presented evidential framework as another method for structuring knowledge and reasoning in the Semantic Web. The benefits of this framework are that it works with arbitrary, partial, and contradictory knowledge while, at the same time, supporting a tractable approximate reasoning process.


In case of violence of Copyright of literary, scientific and artistic works, authors` interests do not end in an appropriate legal sanction or even criminal penalty sometimes set for violator for illegal activity done. It is very important for the author that profit and non-profit damage would be determined or compensation set in a short time period. Copyright regulation, its protection and defense including damage compensation have changed a lot since Lithuania's independence announcement. These changes are being analysed by the author of this paper while implementing the standard rules of law for regulation of copyright and related rights as well as changes in defense process and its development. In consideration of one of the most important international documents regulating protection and defense of copyright and related rights, some certain periods have been distinguished, namely a period before the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the one after. Whereas the author of this paper taking into account law rules regulating copyright and related rights defense divides the mentioned periods to the following stages: up to year 1994; from 1994 to 1999 06 09; from 1999 06 09 to 2003 03 21 and from 2003 03 21 up to now and analyses them separately.


Even in the twenty-first century, the undead walk among us...Before "Twilight" and "True Blood", vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's legendary 1897 novel, "Dracula". Acclaimed author and anthologist Michael Sims brings together the finest vampire stories of the Victorian era in a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Aleksei Tolstoy's tale of a vampire family to Fitz James O'Brien's invisible monster to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's rich and sinister widow, Good Lady Ducayne. Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and finishes the collection with Stoker's own Dracula's Guest - a chapter omitted from his landmark novel. Vampires captivated Victorian society, and these wonderful stories demonstrate how Romantic and Victorian writers refined the raw ore of peasant superstition into a whole vampire mythology of aristocratic decadence and innocence betrayed.


When realizing a programming language as VM, implementing behavior as part of the VM, as primitive, usually results in reduced execution times. But supporting and developing primitive functions requires more effort than maintaining and using code in the hosted language since debugging is harder, and the turn-around times for VM parts are higher. Furthermore, source artifacts of primitive functions are seldom reused in new implementations of the same language. And if they are reused, the existing API usually is emulated, reducing the performance gains. Because of recent results in tracing dynamic compilation, the trade-off between performance and ease of implementation, reuse, and changeability might now be decided adversely.

In this work, we investigate the trade-offs when creating primitives, and in particular how large a difference remains between primitive and hosted function run times in VMs with tracing just-in-time compiler. To that end, we implemented the algorithmic primitive BitBlt three times for RSqueak/VM. RSqueak/VM is a Smalltalk VM utilizing the PyPy RPython toolchain. We compare primitive implementations in C, RPython, and Smalltalk, showing that due to the tracing just-in-time compiler, the performance gap has lessened by one magnitude to one magnitude.


Radin Inten II airports managed by PT Angkasa Pura 2 is one example of a company that offers its services in the field of aviation. To face the competition in the business environment services, airports are required to always improve the quality of care services by considering what the needs and expectations of service users. Problems in this study is: Does Quality Service Passenger Satisfaction Influences on RadinInten II Airport South Lampung? The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of quality of service to the airport passenger satisfaction In Radennten II South Lampung. Methods of data analysis in this study using simple linear regression. Based on test results obtained R² value of 0.380, which means that 38% of passenger satisfaction (Y) aircraft flight services are located in airports Radin Inten II influenced by the variable quality of service. While the remaining 62% is influenced by other variables not examined in this study. Based on test results obtained statistics is positive constant value of 2.858 states that if there is no activity of the independent variables (quality of service) which affect passenger satisfaction, the satisfaction of passengers is positive. X marked positive regression coefficient of 0.895 states that if the variable quality of service increased by 1 point, then the passenger satisfaction will be increased by 0.895 points. So it is suggested should aerodrome RadinInten II continues to improve the quality of services to improve passenger satisfaction. Things can be done by airports RadinInten II is to further improve the quality of services that focus on aspects of the airport authorities friendliness and speed of flight information to the passengers, so the aircraft passenger satisfaction has increased. In addition to safety from crime to passengers carried by road adds to the officer - security officer at the airport location and access road exit - entry airports.


The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is the cornerstone of the European Union's climate policy and covers just under half of the EU's greenhouse gas emissions. More than ten years since the EU ETS was first introduced, there continues to be substantial research interest regarding its functioning and the behavior of participating companies. DIW Berlin conducted three econometric studies based on microdata at company and/or installation level. The findings suggest that, overall, there are only minor distortions in the behavior of companies regulated by the EU ETS. However, the studies also show that small companies exhibit distinctive behavior which could result in inefficiencies. For instance, during Trading Phase I, small companies participated less actively in trading allowances than companies with a higher turnover. Moreover, the emissions produced by small power plants depend, to a certain extent, on the allocation rules. Small companies also often fail to take full advantage of the cost reduction potential of international offset credits: for a total of 22 percent of all companies (predominantly small emitters), an average of 31,000 euros in cost reduction potential remained unused. The barriers causing this loss may be interpreted as fixed transaction costs. For further ex-post analyses, the timely provision of user-friendly emissions trading data at the installation level would be very beneficial.


The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are the new set of alternative futures of societal development that inform global and regional climate change research. They have the potential to foster the integration of socioeconomic scenarios within assessments of future climate-related health impacts. To date, such assessments have primarily superimposed climate scenarios on current socioeconomic conditions only. Until now, the few assessments of future health risks that employed the SSPs have focused on future human exposure—i.e., mainly future population patterns—, neglecting future human vulnerability. This paper first explores the research gaps—mainly linked to the paucity of available projections—that explain such a lack of consideration of human vulnerability under the SSPs. It then highlights the need for projections of socioeconomic variables covering the wide range of determinants of human vulnerability, available at relevant spatial and temporal scales, and accounting for local specificities through sectoral and regional extended versions of the global SSPs. Finally, this paper presents two innovative methods of obtaining and computing such socioeconomic projections under the SSPs—namely the scenario matching approach and an approach based on experts' elicitation and correlation analyses—and applies them to the case of Europe. They offer a variety of possibilities for practical application, producing projections at sub-national level of various drivers of human vulnerability such as demographic and social characteristics, urbanization, state of the environment, infrastructure, health status, and living arrangements. Both the innovative approaches presented in this paper and existing methods—such as the spatial disaggregation of existing projections and the use of sectoral models—show great potential to enhance the availability of relevant projections of determinants of human vulnerability. Assessments of future climate-related health impacts should thus rely on these methods to account for future human vulnerability—under varying levels of socioeconomic development—and to explore its influence on future health risks under different degrees of climate change.


This Essay explores the concept of attorney competence in a criminal justice system dominated by plea bargaining. It focuses, in particular, on the results of a widely-reported empirical study of Philadelphia murder cases that found "vast" differences in legal outcomes based on the type of defense attorney assigned to the case. The first part of the Essay explores the implications of these empirical findings, which appear to stem from a counter-intuitive form of professional competence, persistence in convincing one's client to plead guilty. The findings are particularly intriguing in light of the Supreme Court's recent expansion of ineffective assistance of counsel claims into America's untidy plea bargaining regime. The second part of the Essay highlights the extraordinary empirical methods employed to unearth the findings described in Part I. As empiricists apply increasingly sophisticated tools to the extraordinarily complex criminal justice system, gaining insight into the advantages and shortcomings of various methodological approaches can be just as important for those interested in criminal justice as any particular study's substantive contributions.


Microphthalmia (Mi) is a transcription factor essential for melanocyte development and function. Wu et al. demonstrate that Mi is activated and targeted for proteasome-mediated degradation by phosphorylation following stimulation of receptor tyrosine kinase c-Kit and activation of the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway. Mi was phosphorylated on two residues, serine 73 and serine 409, by MAPK and Rsk-1, respectively. Mutation of either serine individually did not prevent proteasome-mediated degradation, although functional activity was reduced. Mutation of both residues resulted in a stable protein that was functionally inactive, yet retained DNA binding capability. Thus, dual phosphorylation of Mi leads to both its activation and degradation following stimulation of the MAPK pathway. Wu, M., Hemesath, T.J., Takemoto, C.M., Horstmann, M.A., Wells, A.G., Price, E.R., Fisher, D.Z., and Fisher, D.E. (2000) c-Kit triggers dual phosphorylations, which couple activation and degradation of the essential melanaocyte factor Mi. Genes Dev. 14: 301-312. [Abstract] [Full Text]


Mid-Cretaceous igneous rocks of central Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica record a rapid change from subduction-related to rift-related magmatism. This correlates with the final stages of subduction of the Phoenix plate and the subsequent rifting of New Zealand from West Antarctica, prior to the opening of the Southern Ocean. Rift magmatism produced diverse A-type granitoids and mafic intrusive rocks of continental flood-basalt affinity that were derived ultimately from lithospheric mantle sources. Rifting was caused by changes in plate boundary forces; however, mantle plume activity may have begun in mid-Cretaceous time, triggering melting of the lithosphere and controlling the locus of rifting.


The Supreme Court began its 2009 Term by addressing the constitutional rights of corporations. It ended the Term by addressing the incorporated rights of the Constitution. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a five-member majority of the Court held that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend their own money on political advocacy. A corporation generally is no different than a natural person when it comes to the First Amendment - at least as it relates to political speech. In McDonald v. City of Chicago, a plurality of the Court held that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is incorporated through the Due Process Clause and applies to states and municipalities. Neither the federal government nor states may prevent persons from keeping and bearing arms in their homes for self-defense. Given this new world in both senses of incorporation, the time has come to explore the issue of Second Amendment rights and the corporate form. This Article will offer an analysis of the potential Second Amendment rights of the corporation. And it will, in the process, offer a more systematic critique of corporate constitutional rights in general.


Although most of the 5-axis NC milling machine tool producers declare that their machine poses the function of 5-axis simultaneous machining, and most of the commercialized CAD/CAM software was reported it can support the 5-axis simultaneous machining, but there are very few analyses about their machining efficiency. I hope that the reader would be interested to know how the new method is highly effective. The paper did a good job in motivating the problem mentioned here. The model of this paper is extremely efficient ant. This is a highly effective way of surface machining. There are also some areas that need improving. The mathematic presentation is not clear, but much more pages are needed, if the authors like to make it clearer. In the resent paper "The Extreme Efficiency of the New Model in Milling of Complicated Surfaces" we discussed the extreme efficiency of the new model in milling of complicated surfaces in 5-axis machining for 2-dimensional contact. While this time let's discuss the same problem but much complicated one, 5-axis machining for 3-dimensional contact. As the research activities conducted by Dr. Liu Huran opened a new field and wide horizons in 5-axis machining of sculptured complicated surfaces using mathematical theories, and according to the interesting results presented in paper, Dr. Liu Huran is strongly encouraged if he can submit a similar work but this time with a new title that corresponds to the purpose [1].


This thesis examines ethical questions in four plays written by Helene Cixous for the Theâtre du Soleil; L'Histoire terrible mais inachevee de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge (1985), L'Indiade ou L'Inde de leurs reves (1987), La Ville parjure ou le Reveil des Erinyes (1994), and Tambours sur la digue (1999). It begins by establishing a working definition of the remit of ethics and discussing some of Cixous's accounts of writing for the theatre. It goes on to compare the use of power by three different groups in Norodom, suggesting how power may be used ethically. There is an examination of how identity is created in Indiade, which leads to analyses of the ethical value of love and of innocence. Three conflicting models of justice are identified in Ville parjure, and there is an exploration of the question of what the basis of justice should be. The ethical implications of the manipulation of the dramatic form of tragedy in Tambours are then discussed. In the final chapter of the thesis, the responses to these apparently disparate questions are brought together. Drawing on the conclusions of the previous chapters, the final chapter suggests answers to the questions of 'where can ethical questions be asked?', 'what should the basis of ethics be?', and 'whom should I care about?'.


This paper attempts to describe the word formation process known as 'conversion' and a specific lexeme impact which is converted from noun to verb basically by American native speakers or news reports. But many people think that this process is to nouns and exploit them as verbs and many of such usages as impact are really disdainful. My purpose is to provide actual examples of impact taken from American newspapers and give reasons behind the functional shift of impact. As newspapers use the most standard language of time, this paper tries to show how the verb impact has established its transitive use in American Standard English, having gained more semantically emphatic force than its synonymous verb effect. Key words: word formation; American Standard English; news paper DOI: 10.3329/dujl.v2i4.6905 Dhaka University Journal of Linguistics Vol.2(4) August 2009 pp.161-172


Maddison's international panel data show that technically it was the faster growth rate of the US economy that led to its overtaking the UK as economic superpower. We explore the contributing factors. Identifying the land-grant colleges system triggered by the 1862/1890 Morrill Acts (MAs) as a major contributor, we develop this hypothesis theoretically and test it via difference-in-differences regression analyses viewing the MAs as the experiment, the US or US states as treatment groups, and the UK as chief control group in the country-level comparisons. Using national and state-level data, we estimate that the MAs produced sizeable educational and economic returns which catapulted the US into its leading status.


The paper charts the process through which employment has been transformed in China. Measures of employment quality captured by estimates of regular and non-regular employment and unemployment are used to form a view of the changing employment situation. The increase in the share of regular employment in total employment, from 40.1% in 1990 to 62.7% in 2011, is staggering for the most populous country in the world. This is what lies behind the improvement in employment in China. This paper argues that factors behind the improvement in employment in China can be traced to sequenced policy shifts in sector growth strategies on one hand, and the gradual removal of effective constraints on the physical movement of labour on the other. In other words China has managed its process of structural change.


Study on arterial coronary circulation was performed in 30 dog hearts, by using the dissection and clearing techniques. We observed that the heart is supplied by the right coronary artery (a. coronaria dextra) and three branches of the left coronary artery ( a. coronaria sinistra): paraconal interventricular ( ramus interventricularis paraconalis), septal ( ramus septales ) and circumflex arteries (ramus circumflexus). The left coronary artery arose from a trunk in the ventral aortic sinus and, when there was no trunk formation, it was found two different origins in the aorta, corresponding to the circumflex and paraconal interventricular arteries. The latter, after originating right anterior ventricular, left anterior ventricular and septal ventricular arteries, ended next to the heart apex. The circumflex artery presented its course to the left up to the atrial face, where it ended as subsinuous interventricular artery. Arising from the circumflex artery, it was found the auricular ( rami auricularis), ventricular ( rami ventricularis) and septal (rami septales) branches and branches to the atrio-ventricular node ( nodus atrio-ventricularis). The septal artery (ramus septales) was observed to be originated from the paraconal interventricular artery, with lower frequence of the left coronary artery and in two cases of the circumflex artery. The right coronary artery presented no arterial trunk. In that place, there were two separate origins in the aorta or 2-3 origins in a common sinus. This artery emitted auricular, ventricular branches and to the atrio-ventricular node.


How do political elites, such as the Members of the U.S. Congress, decide to use innovative forms of Information and Communication Technologies, such as social media applications? Communication between elected officials is guided by outdated rules and regulations that are focusing on paper mailings. The apparent lack of formal guidance and outdated rules are not reflecting the changing online landscape and the requirements on Members of Congress to interact with their constituents where they prefer to receive their information. New forms of highly interactive online communication tools, such as the microblogging service Twitter are challenging the existing information paradigm. First year of tweets posted by Members of Congress in combination with qualitative interviews with congressional offices show that the Members are mainly using Twitter to complement their existing push communication style and automatically distribute vetted content via Twitter, using the Microblogging service as an additional communication channel for their individual appearances and issues. The awareness network among tweeting Members specifically shows that the potential for interactive conversations are not harnessed. Finally, Twitter's potential as an innovative mode for future democratizing interactions is discussed.


Background. Intraventricular haemorrhage (IVH) is a serious complication in infants with a low birth weight (LBW).  Objective. To study the prevalence, severity and outcomes of IVH in LBW infants admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).  Methods. This was a retrospective cohort study of LBW infants admitted to the NICU at a quarternary hospital between January and December 2012. Neonates with recorded cranial ultrasound scans were included and followed up to between 18 and 24 months of age for neurological outcomes.  Results. An overall IVH prevalence of 44.3% (95% confidence interval 40 - 50) was observed in the study population ( N =210). The prevalence of IVH in infants with a very low birth weight (VLBW) was 67.0%. Multivariable logistic regression showed risk factors for IVH to be VLBW, extreme prematurity, exposure to HIV, outborn delivery and receipt of a blood transfusion. Moderate to severe IVH was more common in VLBW and extremely premature infants. Severe IVH was associated with high mortality. At follow-up, 18.8% of the subjects showed signs of neurodevelopmental delay, while 6.3% were diagnosed with epilepsy. The overall all-cause mortality rate was 15.7% at discharge. Mothers' antenatal clinic attendance and caesarean delivery were protective factors.  Conclusion. Improved perinatal care for women in preterm labour, especially in rural areas in South Africa, could lead to better outcomes in infants. A screening schedule could contribute to timeous detection of brain injury in at-risk babies to facilitate appropriate medical management and detection of lesions associated with adverse long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes.


Although Malaysia is well known as a host economy, there is little research on its investment abroad even though this has been steadily increasing over time. Using a case study approach based on Dunning's OLI framework, seven firms are studied in order to understand their motivations to invest abroad as well as home and host country policies that have facilitated or hindered their investments. The main motivations for these firms to invest abroad are quite varied, ranging from the low labor cost advantage in the host country, saturation of the domestic Malaysian market, as well as the need to enhance their export-competitiveness in third-country markets and to exploit the domestic market potential in other countries. The main home country policy that has benefited the companies in their overseas investment is the full tax exemption on income earned overseas. Host country policies such as tax incentives, while attractive, are not considered to be critical in their investment decisions. Equity constraints are also not considered as obstacles.


Efforts to conserve globally declining herbivorous green sea turtles have resulted in promising growth of some populations. These trends could significantly impact critical ecosystem services provided by seagrass meadows on which turtles feed. Expanding turtle populations could improve seagrass ecosystem health by removing seagrass biomass and preventing of the formation of sediment anoxia. However, overfishing of large sharks, the primary green turtle predators, could facilitate turtle populations growing beyond historical sizes and trigger detrimental ecosystem impacts mirroring those on land when top predators were extirpated. Experimental data from multiple ocean basins suggest that increasing turtle populations can negatively impact seagrasses, including triggering virtual ecosystem collapse. Impacts of large turtle populations on seagrasses are reduced in the presence of intact shark populations. Healthy populations of sharks and turtles, therefore, are likely vital to restoring or maintaining seagrass ecosystem structure, function, and their value in supporting fisheries and as a carbon sink.


Brillouin scattering is an interaction between light and sound in a material. This inelastic light scattering had been observed in the first optical fibres that were used in cross-continent communication. Via Brillouin scattering, the guided light wave in an optical fibre is backscattered by the thermally generated high frequency acoustic waves and undergo Doppler frequency shift. Owing to the sensitivity of acoustic velocity to the change of temperature and strain, Brillouin scattering has been widely used in distributed fibre sensors and its resolution, distance range and speed of measurements have been tremendously improved. However, all reported distributed Brillouin fibre sensors incorporate the axial propagating acoustic wave and thus limited to detecting physical parameters inside the fibre core. In this thesis, distinct classes of Brillouin scatterings in optical fibres are explored and analysed in distributed fashion. Apart from the axial propagating acoustic wave, optical fibre supports a huge variety of elastic vibrations. In the first part, surface and hybrid Brillouin scatterings are studied by using the tapered optical fibre. As the diameter of optical fibre approaches subwavelength range (diameter ≈ 1 μm), the material properties contrast at the boundary of microfibre (the central part of the tapered optical fibre) gives rise to Rayleigh wave which propagates on the surface. This type of Brillouin scattering as well as the other acoustic resonances along the transition region of the tapered fibre are measured using a distributed Brillouin analysis technique based on phase correlation. In the second part, forward stimulated Brillouin scattering (FSBS) in standard singlemode fibres (SMF) is explored as a new type of sensor that allows materials surrounding the optical fibre to affect the phase of the guided light. FSBS is an interaction between the guided light and the transverse acoustic waves which are stimulated through electrostriction and resonate within the fibre cross-section due to the acoustic reflection at its boundary. The variation of the acoustic impedance mismatch between the fibre bulk and the external material affects the boundary reflectivity and modify the acoustic decay rate. An experiment has been performed to demonstrate the feasibility to measure acoustic impedance of several liquids through FSBS. As the scattered light of FSBS is in forward direction, obtaining its distributed profile along a fibre is a challenge due to the absence of time-of-flight information. In order to overcome this problem, the local response of FSBS is recovered through measuring the sidebands progression of a light pulse using the backward Brillouin scattering.


In infected cells rotavirus (RV) replicates in viroplasms, cytosolic structures that require a stabilized microtubule (MT) network for their assembly, maintenance of the structure and perinuclear localization. Therefore, we hypothesized that RV could interfere with the MT-breakdown that takes place in mitosis during cell division. Using synchronized RV-permissive cells, we show that RV infection arrests the cell cycle in S/G2 phase, thus favoring replication by improving viroplasms formation, viral protein translation, and viral assembly. The arrest in S/G2 phase is independent of the host or viral strain and relies on active RV replication. RV infection causes cyclin B1 down-regulation, consistent with blocking entry into mitosis. With the aid of chemical inhibitors, the cytoskeleton network was linked to specific signaling pathways of the RV-induced cell cycle arrest. We found that upon RV infection Eg5 kinesin was delocalized from the pericentriolar region to the viroplasms. We used a MA104-Fucci system to identify three RV proteins (NSP3, NSP5, and VP2) involved in cell cycle arrest in the S-phase. Our data indicate that there is a strong correlation between the cell cycle arrest and RV replication.


This study examined vividness of visual mental imagery and color discrimination ability in synesthesia. It was hypothesized that participants with synesthesia would have higher overall scores on the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) and participants with colored synesthetic experiences would have lower Total Error Scores (TES) on the Farnsworth Munsell 100-Hue test (FM 100 test). Results revealed a significant difference between groups on the FM 100 test [F(2,28) = 2.67, p =.03], with participants with colored synesthetic perceptions having lower TES scores (M = 20.40) than synesthetes without colored concurrents (M = 34.00) and participants without synesthesia (M = 34.63). An independent samples t-test revealed no significant differences between synesthetes and nonsynesthetes and overall VVIQ scores [t(30) = -1.46, p=.16]. These results indicate that synesthetes with colored concurrents may have better color discrimination ability than non-synesthetes and synesthetes without colored concurrents.


This study employs the ARDL cointegrating approach to examine the impact of financial liberalization on the relationships between three Chinese main bilateral exchange rates and its share market performance. We discovered that a long-term equilibrium relationship measured by cointegration has emerged between the exchange rate of the RMB against the Japanese Yen and, to a lesser extent, the exchange rate against both the US dollar and Hong Kong dollar and the Shanghai Composite Index since 2005 when the Chinese exchange rate regime changed from a peg system to a more flexible managed floating system. We found that the exchange rate actually influenced stock price with a positive correlation instead of a negative one as suggested by the goods market theory for an export-oriented economy. We documented that after local currency appreciation, 'hot money' flowing from foreign funds into the local markets followed by local investors' speculations on markets pushed the market into a high level based on the expectation of the local currency's further appreciation.


Recently a new model class has emerged in the field of non-linear black-box modeling; the hinging hyperplane models. The hinging hyperplane model is closely related to the well known neural net models. In this contribution the parameterization of hinging hyperplane models is addressed. It is shown that the original setting is overparameterized and a new parameterization involving fewer parameters is suggested. Moreover, it is shown that there is nothing to loose in terms of negative effects in the numerical search when less parameters are used. The positive effects of a model class parameterized with less parameters is a decrease in computational complexity. In addition to the parameterization issues, another related question is discussed, namely if the estimation problem is ill-conditioned.


Early modern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented increase in the rate of economic growth, and governments entertained a wide range of proposals aimed at developing and harnessing foreign trade and emerging financial markets. In his magisterial survey of foreign trade doctrine titled Studies in the Theory of International Trade (1936), Jacob Viner pointed out that enlightened authors of that time were often nonbullionist mercantilists: they favored export promotion and import reduction not on the grounds that it would lead to an accumulation of gold, but on the grounds that it would increase trade and employment. My focus here is on how some key economists of this time period—William Petty, John Law, and Richard Cantillon—adumbrated disputes between supply-side and demand-side macroeconomics that have continued to the present day.


Nalenggele River is an inland river located in the arid, fragile ecological environment area in Northwestern China. Groundwater discharge to the river can significantly impact the ecologic environment in the Nalenggele River basin, but few hydrogeological studies have been conducted in the inland arid basin. In this paper, two sections were chosen to analyze the groundwater discharge in the downstream of Nalenggele River. Section I–I′ is located in the west of the downstream of this river, while section II–II′ is in the east. Two methods were used to calculate the discharge in section I–I′: Darcy9s law and Modflow simulation. In these two methods, the vertical hydraulic conductivity of the stream sediment is a key parameter, which was determined by a falling-head permeameter test in the river. The results show that the groundwater discharges by the above two methods are very close to the results of a previous study by the 222 Rn mass balance method. This is the first attempt to use a field test method to obtain the vertical hydraulic conductivity and the hydraulic gradient, and to illustrate the groundwater discharge in the downstream of Nalenggele River in Northwestern China by classic methods.


This article analyzes the social conservative attacks on women preceding the 2012 election cycle, known as the War on Women, and the ensuing feminist response. Combat was waged on many fronts, including abortion restrictions, access to contraception, funding for Planned Parenthood, welfare programs, and workplace fairness. The article discusses what this "war" means for the complex relationship between feminism and democracy. American democracy has had both liberating and oppressive effects for women, while feminism has sometimes struggled internally to appropriate the values of democracy and externally to harness its potential. Accordingly, the article explains the major political theories regarding feminism and democracy and reflects on how the War on Women and its after effects impact those theories. The Article concludes that the War on Women reconfigured the relationship between feminism and democracy by reinvigorating the feminist political movement, redefining the scope of women's issues, realigning women voters across interest groups, and spurring a surge of women into office. Still, the War on Women kept feminism on the defensive, thereby draining the movement of the ability to fashion a feminist offensive. Thus, the feminism movement needs to generate an agenda that will wage a war for women.


Ultraviolet radiation (UV-B = 280 to 320 nm; UV-A = 320 to 400 nm) is harmful to the planktonic early life stages of some marine organisms. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, measurements of the diffuse attenuation coefficients have indicated that the maximum depth to which 10% of the surface energy penetrates at 310 nm is 3 m. Thus, organisms residing in this surface layer are exposed to UV radiation. During the summer spawning season (May to September), the first zoeal larval stages of the American lobster Homarus americanus are present in the first 2 m of the water column during the day. Thus, H. americanus larvae are exposed to UV radiation. We incubated stage I larvae of H. americanus under an artificial light source that simulated the irradiance conditions measured at a depth of 1 m in the Gulf of St. Lawrence waters near solar noon. Three spectral exposure treatments were used: (1) UV-B+UV-A+PAR; (2) UV-A+PAR; (3) PAR only. Larvae were irradiated for 4 d (2 h d -1 ) and maintained thereafter under a natural photoperiod (fluorescent lamps) until first molt. Mortality was monitored daily throughout the experiment. There were no differences in mortality amongst the 3 spectral treatments. Larvae began dying at the same time and at the same rate independently of the spectral irradiation that they received. Thus, lobster larvae appear to be tolerant of short (2 h) exposures to UV radiation.


This book investigates how corporate governance is directing the internal audit function (IAF) adaptation as a response to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. To date, there is insufficient knowledge about the adaptations of the IAF, which are required if it is to maintain its essential role as a governance mechanism. This book extends the reader's knowledge by exploring and theorising the adaptation of the IAF after ERP introduction and points towards future trends. Adopting an institutional approach, it analyses how the IAF responds to the external governance pressures and the internal pressures of the control logic following the introduction of an ERP system. Featuring data from two listed companies in the food and beverage sector and two large banks operating in Egypt, this volume will be of interest to researchers and academics in the field of financing and ERP systems in particular.


In Escherichia coli, starvation (stationary-phase)-mediated differentiation involves 50 or more genes and is triggered by an increase in cellular sigma s levels. Western immunoblot analysis showed that in mutants lacking the protease ClpP or its cognate ATPase-containing subunit ClpX, sigma s levels of exponential-phase cells increased to those of stationary-phase wild-type cells. Lack of other potential partners of ClpP, i.e., ClpA or ClpB, or of Lon protease had no effect. In ClpXP-proficient cells, the stability of sigma s increased markedly in stationary-phase compared with exponential-phase cells, but in ClpP-deficient cells, sigma s became virtually completely stable in both phases. There was no decrease in ClpXP levels in stationary-phase wild-type cells. Thus, sigma s probably becomes more resistant to this protease in stationary phase. The reported sigma s-stabilizing effect of the hns mutation also was not due to decreased protease levels. Studies with translational fusions containing different lengths of sigma s coding region suggest that amino acid residues 173 to 188 of this sigma factor may directly or indirectly serve as at least part of the target for ClpXP protease.