Recent academic achievement gaps of public secondary students in Imo State, in WAEC, NECO, and JAMB examinations posed a threat to students' aspiration to college education. The poor academic achievement level was denting previously achieved high academic record in Imo State. This trend was disturbing to parents and educators. However, this trend could be remedied if appropriate educational policy was enacted and implemented in secondary schools. One educational policy initiative that seemed to have worked in some countries is parents' participation in their children's education, otherwise, called "parental involvement." Studies have shown that parental involvement in the education of their children help students to perform better both in their studies and in academic achievement. The aim of this study was, therefore, to explore parents' involvement in the education of their children in public schools in Imo State, against the backdrop of their socioeconomic status. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with 30 parent-participants of varying socioeconomic backgrounds; to examine their perception of parental involvement, their type of involvement, the expectation they held for their children's education, their motivations to get involved, and the challenges they faced. The results of this study revealed that irrespective of their social and economic status, parents believed that secondary education was necessary for college education. Influenced by sociocultural norms, the parents perceived "parental involvement" not as a planned, structured effort directed solely toward the success of children, instead, they viewed participation in their children's education as integral to their overall parental obligations. This opinion was true of the low-SES more than the middle and high SES parents. The middle(n=6) and high-SES parents planned for their children's education from childhood. All parents were knowledgeable about the importance ii of education. The ultimate motivation parents had in sending their children to school was to achieve an upward social and economic mobility for their families' overall well-being. This result challenged the common assumption that low-SES parents lacked understanding of the importance of education. The parents were involved with their children's education at home than in schools. Lack of consistent scheduling of PTA meetings, and poor communication channel contributed to parents' poor involvement in schools. Two factors: level of education and occupation, distinguished involvement capabilities of the middleand high-SES, and low-SES parents, while income factor limited the low-income parents' ability to provide school-related need for their children. Although, parents were eager to support their children to succeed in secondary school exit exams such as WAEC and NECO, and college entrance exam, JAMB; the inadequate carrying capacity of colleges, poverty, and high college-graduate employment opportunities challenged low-SES parents' college funding decisions. The results of this study could inform policy articulating the relevance of parents' involvement in their children's high school education. It could enlighten parents and school administrators on the need for collaboration and cooperation regarding finding parental involvement strategy that makes for student achievement.


A recent proposal by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) suggests a new risk capital buffer for globally operating systemically important financial institutions. The suggested metric, "Total Loss Absorbing Capacity" (TLAC), is composed of Tier-1 capital and loss absorbing debt. In a crisis situation, "bail-in-able" debt is to be written down or converted into equity. Jan Krahnen argues that the credibility of bail-in, in the case of systemically important financial institutions, hinges crucially on the design of TLAC and the requirements that will be placed on loss absorbing "bail-in-able" debt.The fear of direct systemic consequences through bail-in could be overcome, if a holding ban were placed on the "bail-in-bonds" of financial institutions. The holding ban would stipulate that these bonds cannot be held by other institutions within the banking sector.


Enhancer regions and transcription start sites of estrogen-target regulated genes are connected by means of Estrogen Receptor long-range chromatin interactions. Yet, the complete molecular mechanisms controlling the transcriptional output of engaged enhancers and subsequent activation of coding genes remain elusive. Here, we report that CTCF binding to enhancer RNAs is enriched when breast cancer cells are stimulated with estrogen. CTCF binding to enhancer regions results in modulation of estrogen-induced gene transcription by preventing Estrogen Receptor chromatin binding and by hindering the formation of additional enhancer-promoter ER looping. Furthermore, the depletion of CTCF facilitates the expression of target genes associated with cell division and increases the rate of breast cancer cell proliferation. We have also uncovered a genomic network connecting loci enriched in cell cycle regulator genes to nuclear lamina that mediates the CTCF function. The nuclear lamina and chromatin interactions are regulated by estrogen-ER. We have observed that the chromatin loops formed when cells are treated with estrogen establish contacts with the nuclear lamina. Once there, the portion of CTCF associated with the nuclear lamina interacts with enhancer regions, limiting the formation of ER loops and the induction of genes present in the loop. Collectively, our results reveal an important, unanticipated interplay between CTCF and nuclear lamina to control the transcription of ER target genes, which has great implications in the rate of growth of breast cancer cells.


A significant challenge in the design of an autonomous mobile robot is the reliable detection of targets, obstacles and targets tracking. Many types of sensor are used for that purposes such as infrared, sonar, vision sensor and laser. Monocular vision is one of the methods used due to simplicity and computational cost compared to stereo vision. Based on current trends the autonomous mobile robot development, vision sensor is used as different functions such as target recognition, obstacles avoidance, and navigation.

To fulfill such demands the mobile robot should be able to estimate the distance of the detected targets and their angles from its current location. From the extracted information, the motions of the mobile robot can be done efficiently for targets retrieval task. This thesis addresses issue on golf balls localization. The sensor used for localization is a single color webcam. The experiment involves stationary golf balls localization at indoor and outdoor scene.
The objective is to localize golf balls at various locations to be retrieved by the mobile robot. The distance towards the golf balls are estimated based on their diameter. This is based on the perspective view concept where the golf ball sizes are inversely proportional to their distance from webcam. Golf balls detection is done using color segmentation in RGB (red, green and blue) color space. A vector, a, that represents mean value of the target sample is calculated. Then the mean and standard deviation of each color component is calculated. The threshold value lies in the range μ ± σ which represents a square bounding box in RGB color space with a center at a. Every pixel in the test image is tested whether it lies within the bounding box which contributes to target pixel. The technique for segmentation can avoid high computation time for color image processing. The simple features such as diameter, x-y ratio and area are used as its inputs to the k-nearest neighbors (K-NN) classifier.

The software is developed in Visual Basic 6 with a laptop computer acts as a controller and for handling image acquisition and processing. The localization process takes less than one second to be completed. The technique has been tested at indoor and outdoor environment. The efficiency of the estimation is more than 90 percents with a condition that the targets are less than 50 percents occluded.


The field of biomedical optics is experiencing tremendous growth. Biomedical technologies contribute in the creation of devices used in healthcare of various specialties (ophthalmology, cardiology, anesthesiology, and immunology, etc.). Recent research in biomedical optics is discussed. Overviews of meetings held at the 2002 Optical Society of America Biomedical Topical Meetings are presented.


The concept of 'political culture' has become very fashionable in the last thirty years, but only recently has it been consciously taken up by practitioners of late-medieval English history, who have argued for the need to acknowledge the role of ideas in politics. While this work has focused on elite political culture, interest in the subject has been growing among historians of towns and villages, especially as they have begun to recognise the importance of both internal politics and national government in the affairs of townsmen and peasants. This volume, the product of a conference on political culture in the late middle ages, explores the subject from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of spheres. It is hoped that it will put the subject firmly on the map for the study of late-medieval England and lead to further exploration of political culture in this period. The contributors include Caroline Barron, Alan Cromartie, Christopher Dyer, Maurice Keen, Miri Rubin, Benjamin Thompson, John Watts, Jenny Wormald. Linda Clark is editor, History of Parliament; Christine Carpenter is Reader in History, University of Cambridge.


Aim: The main aim of the study is to investigate the phytochemical screening of C. decapetala along with the content determination of different species of genus Caesalpinia with respect to their antidiabetic activity and identification of most bioactive species belonging to different origins. Methods: To achieve our goal different species of genus Caesalpinia collected from China and Pakistan were subjected to open column chromatography, High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), antioxidant, and antidiabetic assays for evaluation. Results: From η-BuOH fraction of C. decapetala extract, eight compounds were isolated using open column chromatography and identified as apigenin-7-rhamnoside (1), 4-O-methylepisappanol (2), caesalpinol (3), daucosterol (4), astragalin (5), kaempferol (6), quercitrin (7), and naringin (8) using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. HPLC analysis of different species of genus Caesalpinia showed that the most active antidiabetic compound 'quercitrin' was present more in C. pulcherrima followed by decreasing order in C. sappan, C.decapetala, and C. bonduc. Conclusion: The results indicated that quercitrin is the most bioactive content and C. pulcherrima is most bioactive specie of China origin from genus Caesalpinia.


Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2010.; Includes bibliographical
 references.; Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. Uric acid, a component in human kidney
 stones, crystallizes in an anhydrous (UA), a metastable dihydrate (UAD), a rare monohydrate,
 and an ionized monosodium urate form in vivo. In the body, these crystals exhibit a variety of
 morphologies and colors which differ from laboratory grown uric acids. These observations
 provided the motivation to study the effect of several molecular dyes and physiologically
 relevant metal cations on the crystallization of UA and UAD. All cationic and neutral dopants
 investigated were included in UA and UAD crystals, while anionic dyes were excluded. At low
 concentrations, the dyes were preferentially incorporated into the {001} and {201} growth
 sectors of UA. In UAD, variable inclusion behaviors were encountered. Inclusions occurred on
 the {011} growth sector/hillock, on the {102} growth sector, and non-specific inclusions were
 also observed. Most of the dyes induced morphological changes in UA and UAD crystals at higher
 concentrations. The amount of dye/metal cation included and absorption spectra of the dyes in
 the single crystals of both UA and UAD were determined.; Unlike physiologically derived
 crystals, laboratory grown UAD crystals are less stable and spontaneously transform to UA
 under ambient conditions. Using a combination of techniques, the mechanism and kinetics of the
 phase transformation of pure and doped UAD crystals were investigated. Intrinsic sample
 parameters (e.g. crystal size and shape) and environmental conditions (e.g. temperature and
 humidity) were considered. The dehydration reaction was found to be irreversible and highly
 anisotropic. This was rationalized on the basis of crystal structure and morphology. Most of
 the included dyes exhibited a stabilizing effect on UAD crystals, which was explained in terms
 of host-guest interactions as a function of variability in the structure of the dyes.; To
 better understand the microscopic effects of the dye impurities, the (100) face of UA crystals
 was studied in the presence of Bismarck brown dyes by atomic force microscopy. From
 topographical imaging, growth inhibition along the c-direction was observed in the presence of
 the dyes. Incremental dye concentrations also pinned advancing steps and reduced the velocity
 of b-steps due to high impurity incorporation. These results complement what was observed in
 bulk UA crystal growth.


Sugar cane milling processes leave a waste solid residue, known as bagasse, which is subsequently combusted with the aim of covering the energy demands of the sugar plants. An alternative way to co-generate electricity and heat is via the integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) process. The main sections of this process are the gasification unit and the combined power generation cycle (Brayton-Rankine) and it is usually preferred to combustion in small scale applications due to enhanced electricity yields and lower emissions. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine whether or not the IGCC process is more feasible than combustion for the utilisation of bagasse (large scale application). Aspen plus process simulator was employed to simulate the investigated system and based on the simulations technical and economic analyses were carried out. Consequently, the cost of electricity was calculated and compared with that derived from combustion systems. So far, to the best of our knowledge, no comparative assessment between the basic biomass-to-electricity processes was attempted. Thus, the present study focuses on integrating exhaustive process simulations along with thorough energetic and financial calculations to evaluate the feasibility of the IGCC process. This methodology provides a robust mechanism and can be used as a reliable decision making tool


A process is a series of actions executed in a particular environment in order to achieve a goal. It is often the case that several concurrent processes coexist in an environment in order to achieve several goals simultaneously. However, executing multiple processes is not always a possibility in an environment due to the following reasons: (1) All processes might be needed to be executed by a single agent that is not capable of executing more than one process at a time; (2) Multiple processes may have interactions between them that hamper their concurrent executions by multiple agents. As an example, there might be conflicting actions between several processes that their concurrent execution will stop those processes from achieving their goals. The existing solution to address the abovementioned complications is to merge several processes into a unified conflict-free and improved process before execution. This unified merged process is then executed by a single agent in order to achieve goals of all processes. However, we believe this is not the optimal solution because (a) in some environments, it is unrealistic to assume execution of all processes merged into one single process can be delegated to a single agent; (b) since merging is performed before actual execution of the unified process, some of the assumptions made regarding execution flow in individual processes may not be true during actual execution which will render the merged process irrelevant. In this paper, we propose a semantic web based solution to merge multiple processes during their concurrent execution in several agents in order to address the above-mentioned limitations. Our semantic web Process Merging Framework features a Web Ontology Language (OWL) based ontology called Process Merging Ontology (PMO) capable of representing a wide range of workflow and institutional Process Merging Constraints, mutual exclusivity relations between those constraints and their conditions. Process Merging Constraints should be respected during concurrent execution of processes in several agents in order to achieve execution-time process merging. We use OWL axioms and Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules in the PMO to define the formal semantics of the merging constraints. A Process Merging Engine has also been developed to coordinate several agents, each executing a process pertaining to a goal, to perform process merging during execution. This engine runs the Process Merging Algorithm that utilizes Process Merging Execution Semantics and an OWL reasoner to infer the necessary modifications in actions of each of the processes so that Process Merging Constraints are respected. In order to evaluate our framework we have merged several clinical workflows each pertaining to a disease represented as processes so that they can be used for decision support for comorbid patients. Technical evaluations show efficiency of our framework and evaluations with the help of domain expert shows expressivity of PMO in representation of merging constraints and capability of Process Merging Engine in successful interpretation of the merging constraints. We plan to extend our work to solve problems in business process model merging and AI plan merging research areas.


Following the social and political turmoil in many countries after the recent economic crisis, many Albanian migrants regarded a return to their 'homeland' as the best solution during a time of uncertainty. Adding to the literature on return migration, this research investigates a group of migrants, not previously studied
extensively, whose return to their country of origin was triggered by the lingering economic crisis in Europe, particularly in Greece. The research explores the experiences of return migrants and their children in Albania by focusing on their (re)settlement issues, the ways they (re)construct a sense of belonging, and how their identity is impacted by these changes. Return migrants (aged 30-50 years) and their children (aged 7-18 years) participated in this research (n=51). Qualitative data were collected through in-depth interviews with respondents aged 13 years and above, augmented by focus groups and family case studies. This research was conducted in two waves and several participants were followed up to document changes. Findings show that the economic and socio-structural constraints in the origin country and uncertainties about the future experienced by adults create barriers to their overall ability to adjust and construct a sense of belonging in Albania. The research documents further that children of return migrants experience exclusion and nonbelonging, instigating feelings of being foreigners for a second time. While children showed improvement in their socio-spatial worlds overtime; in Wave 2 adults continued to grapple with employment instability and future uncertainties. Entangled in between these experiences and a simultaneous quest to belong, the research contributes to a better understanding of return migration in times of economic crisis.


Darwin originally pointed out that there is something about infants which prompts adults to respond to and care for them, in order to increase individual fitness, i.e. reproductive success, via increased survivorship of one's own offspring. Lorenz proposed that it is the specific structure of the infant face that serves to elicit these parental responses, but the biological basis for this remains elusive. Here, we investigated whether adults show specific brain responses to unfamiliar infant faces compared to adult faces, where the infant and adult faces had been carefully matched across the two groups for emotional valence and arousal, as well as size and luminosity. The faces also matched closely in terms of attractiveness. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in adults, we found that highly specific brain activity occurred within a seventh of a second in response to unfamiliar infant faces but not to adult faces. This activity occurred in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), an area implicated in reward behaviour, suggesting for the first time a neural basis for this vital evolutionary process. We found a peak in activity first in mOFC and then in the right fusiform face area (FFA). In mOFC the first significant peak (p<0.001) in differences in power between infant and adult faces was found at around 130 ms in the 10–15 Hz band. These early differences were not found in the FFA. In contrast, differences in power were found later, at around 165 ms, in a different band (20–25 Hz) in the right FFA, suggesting a feedback effect from mOFC. These findings provide evidence in humans of a potential brain basis for the "innate releasing mechanisms" described by Lorenz for affection and nurturing of young infants. This has potentially important clinical applications in relation to postnatal depression, and could provide opportunities for early identification of families at risk.


Abstract. Concomitant to massive use of interactive maps the actual research agenda in cartography use and user's issues address the need of evaluating interactivity for specific map uses and users (ROTH et al. 2017). There is established scientific discussion concerning spatial tools and cartographic representations effects on learning and on increasing user's spatial capabilities and thematic knowledge which lead science of maps to develop methods for evaluating map user and use. This in order to better comprehend and quantify relationships around the extensive universe of map interactivity and contributing to advance a comprehensive theory in how to design interactions when dealing with spatial-temporal representations. As an area of growing interest for the last decade, this research field is being susceptible to technologic advances such as ubiquitous mapping, and map usage became a state-of-the-art study case for nearly all new interactive devices and systems.There are several dimensions to comprehend interaction. This work presents a study case based on the concepts of map interface complexity model (Mendonça, Schmidt & Delazari, In Press) focusing on the interaction operators (Roth, 2013) and its effects on map reasoning (Olson, 1976; MacEachren and Ganter, 1990; Roth, 2012) and on cognitive workload (Hart & Staveland,1988) and SUS (System Usability Scale – Brooke, 1986), the later related to self-perception of usability, with both associated indicating better user experiences in the interaction with devices and interfaces (Longo and Dondio 2015; Borsci, Federici and Lauriola, 2009). Preliminary tests carried out with URUT usability remote evaluations showed more than 80% of usability issues can be assessed from workload and SUS forms (Mendonça, 2017)The experience of the 1st author working with public sector and spatial analysis upon conservation of environment in the Amazonas state can be used to estimate that thousands of maps are produced every year to depict present and past situations of the subject, and these are being used by at least three main user groups: environmental professionals, which includes geographers, geologists, environment, forest, agronomic and fishing engineers, both in the public and private – including NGO – sectors; education professionals and students, including high school, technical, graduation and post-graduation levels; society in general, considering the appeal of preserving natural ecosystem in one of the most diverse tropical forests in the world. These groups are used to define the study users sample.Since this study is focused in map use and user's interaction, it carried out series of tests to measure and evaluate the role of interactivity in different levels of map tools interactions. Performance on better decision making and better understanding of environmental reality was stated and related to user interactions in order to answer if the variable level of interactivity can be related to better results on pointing out solutions to common maps ultimate goals: to support local and state policies on small scale issues like solid waste residuals disposal in small cities or analyze deforestation patterns together with forest fire focus against conservation units and the mosaic of protected areas. The study is part of a larger project which seeks to make better use of interactive technologies and to increase map use by different actors involved in the subject of monitoring Amazonas State environmental issues. This implies in identifying potential insights on environmental map use at local levels.The research main goal was to answer if levels of interactivity will play direct role on increasing understanding upon environmental issues depicted in interactive maps. Secondary research questions include: 1) If environmental professionals consider using interactive mapping techniques when presenting results or studies related to the thematic, and if this can be perceived by means of their strategies of using their own maps or thematic interactive maps built for them. 2) What are current usability and acceptability gaps of proposed interactive map model considering the three evaluated user groups? 3) Will other continuum like the type of input device, user's personal characteristic plays a more decisive role in the user's performance? 4) Workload and Usability are related to task performance success when using interactive maps?


The evolution of cloud applications into loosely-coupled microservices opens new opportunities for hardware accelerators to improve workload performance. Existing accelerator techniques for cloud sacrifice the consolidation benefits of microservices. This paper presents CloudiFi, a framework to deploy and compare accelerators as a cloud service. We evaluate our framework in the context of a financial workload and present early results indicating up to 485 x gains in microservice response time.


London is the UK's undiscovered country and it is time we recognised it as the UK's fifth constituent part by granting it the devolved political powers it deserves. As Tim Oliver argues, London's size, unique population, economy, politics, identity, society, place in the UK, Europe and the world all add up to make it stand apart from any other part of the Union. A devolved government for London would more than any other constitutional change help to rebalance the UK towards a federal union. It would give the metropolis the freedom to develop as it needs and be a big step towards reforming an unsustainable and unhealthily centralised UK and English state.


The use of the USA dollar as international key currency and its benefits to the USA
The US dollar occupied a supreme position during the past sixty years and more amongst all other international currency units. At no stage could any other international currency of repute, not even the euro, closely match the prominence of the dollar. The dollar evolved into the common global exchange medium that facilitates international trade and investment in a relatively safe environment. The mutually beneficial interaction between its functions of medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value in both private and public capacity ensured its uncontested and almost monopolistic position. This was supported by the US's unsurpassable economic, strategic, diplomatic and political position and its acknowledgement by other countries as the world's economic locomotive and political leader. These were also confirmed by the fact that the dollar satisfied the required underlying determinants for acquiring key currency status better than any other currency.
Of particular importance are the US's global dominance in world gross domestic product (GDP); world trade; currency confidence and stability; foreign direct investment flows; global capital flows and its unmatched deep, broad, liquid and resilient financial markets. Moreover, the dollar's key monetary functions and the US's economic and political milieu roles were in a mutually beneficial interaction. Similar to its predecessor, Britain, the US's global dominance bestowed on it the power to apply its political power to enhance and broaden its economic reign, and vice versa. Its political dominance opened the way for US financial and industrial enterprises to follow the flag, which in turn procured the financial means with which to finance and expand its political presence.
The foregoing economic driving forces were and are still powerfully complemented by structural factors such as network externalities and inertia. The former stems from the lowering of transaction cost and the increase in liquidity caused by the increased use of the dollar as key currency, which subsequently draws in more and more users. This becomes a self-enhancing feature of the increase in its use. These network externalities sideline other contesting currencies aspiring for key currency status and in so doing introduce an almost monopolistic tendency in the key currency status of the dollar. The conservativeness of central banks in their management of international reserves together with the vested interests and tradition-bound attitudes of private and public key currency holders also contribute to a substantial inertia in key currency holdings. Becoming a key currency is therefore more difficult than remaining one. This perpetuates the dominance of the dollar.
The paper attests that the supreme position of the dollar in the global currency arena brings substantial benefits and privileges to the US. Dollar hegemony bestows on the US a much greater flexibility in managing its current account deficits. Countries that hold dollars and dollar-denominated assets as the main component of their international reserves do not withdraw their dollar-based investments, thus cheaply providing short-term funds to the US with which to finance its current account and budget deficits. This allows the US not only to borrow short and lend long, but also enables it to invest the low-cost foreign funds in high-yielding foreign assets. Empirical studies show that in so doing the US reaps a considerable net international gain despite its growing international indebtedness and deficits. The foregoing enables the US during various occasions to prevent a major deterioration in its net international investment position despite the fact that its foreign liabilities increasingly exceed its foreign assets. Moreover, the US is not seriously affected by a depreciation in the exchange rate of the dollar since the majority of its foreign liabilities are in its own currency and are thus not affected, whereas its foreign assets are largely in other currencies that yield a valuation gain when the exchange rate of the dollar depreciates.
This benevolent situation together with the seigniorage benefits generated from dollar notes circulating outside the US, allow the US to live significantly above its means. Despite the indebtedness of the US to Far Eastern countries and its reliance on them for its financing needs, the US still acquires a higher welfare level than it would otherwise have obtained. It also assists the US in funding its foreign diplomatic and military ventures. The latter in turn feeds back into promoting financial and economic ventures that benefit the US financial markets.


On February 28, 1993, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided a
communal church outside of Waco, Texas in an attempt to serve a search warrant for suspected
weapons violations. At the raid were several members of the local media, who had been contacted
by the BATF to gain publicity. Members of the church, however, knew of the raid beforehand, and
a gun fight broke between the two groups. Four agents lost their lives in the fight, which had been
taped and broadcast nationally. Those inside the church refused to exit the building.
Angry over the refusal to surrender and embarrassed that a federal agency was defeated in a
gun fight on national television, the Federal Bureau of Investigations took control of the situation,
cutting communication from the church, subjecting church members to psychological warfare,
demonizing those in the church through the media, and preparing for a final confrontation with the
church using military weapons and vehicles.
On April 19, 1993, Attorney General Janet Reno ordered that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation's plan to remove people from the church be executed. The FBI and members of the
Army's Special Forces, using tanks, mortars, and grenades, subjected those inside the church to a
six hour tear gas assault, and destroyed parts of the building. Finally, three fires destroyed the
church, killing nearly eighty men, women, and children, in what the FBI labeled a "mass suicide".
Whether or not this claim was true, a deep seeded desire for revenge led to poor decisionmaking
by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, and
Department of Justice, which, in turn, led to the deaths of the people inside the church on April 19,
1993. Because of the embarrassment of the initial raid, the government agencies' need to save face
and justify their dead meant a violent outcome was most likely


Seven years after the publication of Wake-Robin (1871), his first collection of nature essays, John Burroughs wrote in his journal, I really see very little of Thoreau in myself.... But my current is as strong in my own channel as Thoreau's is in his. Thoreau preaches and teaches always. I never preach or teach. I simply see and describe. (qtd. in Barrus 74-75) Burroughs's comments reflect his concern with what James Perrin Warren has identified, drawing from a phrase in the passage, as the "Thoreau charge," the perception of John Burroughs as a disciple in a genre pioneered by the original genius of Henry David Thoreau (Warren 33). During his own life, Burroughs mentioned the issue or underscored it with criticisms of Thoreau frequently enough that Lawrence Buell has diagnosed him with "a prickly, hypersensitive anxiety of influence" (147). Moreover, Burroughs's defense may have had the opposite effect than the one he intended by attracting critics to the comparison that he most wished to avoid. The result has been a place in literary history for John Burroughs as a writer who popularized and standardized the existing genre of the nature essay. In the words of Philip Marshall Hicks, "he did not create a new form of the natural history essay, but he established by constant use and sincere workmanship a form that previous writers had, in the main, employed only experimentally" (157). (1) Notwithstanding the importance of critical comparisons between Thoreau and Burroughs, there is merit to Burroughs's assertion of his literary independence from Thoreau. What makes the excerpt from the journal truly fascinating is how Burroughs distances his work from Thoreau's by assigning it to a different rhetorical mode. Thoreau, Burroughs tells us, is first and foremost concerned with persuasion, particularly of a moral nature, as the verb "preaches" evokes. As for himself, Burroughs adopts the position of a describer and continues the journal by amplifying this point: "I paint the bird for its own sake, and for the pleasure that it affords me, and am annoyed at any lesson or moral twist" (qtd. in Barrus 74-75). The emphasis of this sentence is on fidelity to nature and human emotional response contrasted to presenting nature as a vehicle to impart moral lessons. In the immediate context, Burroughs refers to transcendentalism, but his statement could just as well be applied to Thoreau's predecessors, most of whom mixed piety into natural history. Read this way, Burroughs's journal entry also becomes a statement about his relationship to the pre-Thoreauvian tradition of literary natural history. The critic Ralph Black has written, "During more than sixty years of writing nature essays, Burroughs codified and popularized a literary genre that Audubon and Thoreau, if not William Bartram and St. Jean de Crevecoeur, had inaugurated in America" (49). The literary genre that Black refers to is literary natural history, a tradition of writing that presents the subject matter of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century--biology, geology, meteorology, and even anthropology--aesthetically. Beyond this very broad description, literary natural history is difficult to define as a genre due to the different forms that writers have applied. We most often associate the essay with literary natural history, but variations on the scientific form of the life history, correspondence, and travel narratives have all been applied to the tradition. The rhetorical goals of literary naturalists have varied greatly as well. Some, like John James Audubon, presented original scientific research. Others, like Wilson Flagg, a contemporary of Thoreau's, wrote more for literary pleasure and entertainment. (2) Despite the diversity, it is possible to identify a distinct tradition of literary natural history through some common characteristics. First and foremost--and arguably the most defining characteristic of the genre--literary natural history focuses on the experience of the naturalist. …


From the Publisher:
Systems engineering is the design of a complex interconnection of many elements to maximize performance. As such, the science relates to all fields of engineering. While systems engineering has always played an important role in industrial and military applications, advances in communications and computer technology have made this discipline especially relevant. This book introduces design methods and models used by systems engineers in the real world. It offer a comprehensive, integrated treatment that includes modeling, underlying design principles, and the process of optimization for peak performance.


Abstract This paper discusses an application of polarimetric measurements at vertical incidence. In particular, the correlation coefficients between linear copular components are examined, and measurements obtained with the NSSL's and NCAR's polarimetric radars are presented. The data are from two well-defined bright bands. A sharp decrease of the correlation coefficient, confined to a height interval of a few hundred meters, marks the bottom of the bright band.


The chemical constituents of Cnicus benedictus showed that it contained sesquiterpene lactone glycosides, cnicin, polyacetylen, absinthin, salonitenolide and artemisiifolin. Triterpenoids such as a-amyrenone, a-amyrin acetate, a-amyrine, and multiflorenol acetate. Lignans such as trachelogenin, nortracheloside and arctigenin. Flavonoids, including apigenin-7-O-glucoside, luteolin and astragalin. Tannins contents reached (8%). essential and volatile oils (0.3%) including n-nonane, n-undecane, ntridecane, dodeca-l,ll-dien-3,5,7,9-tetrain (polyyne), pcymene, fenchon, citral, cinnamaldehyde, were also isolated from the plant. It was also contained many nutritional components, minirals and trace elemints. The previous pharmacological studies showed that Cnicus benedictus possessed antimicrobial, cytotoxic, anti-inflammatory, wound healing, enhancing digestion and increasing bile secretion. This review was designed to highlight the chemical constituents, pharmacological and toxicological effects of Cnicus benedictus.


This paper discusses the use of support vector machines (SVMs) to detect and predict the health of multivariate systems based on training data representative of healthy operating conditions. This paper also investigates a novel approach to SV classification and regression through the use of a principal component projection pursuit. Statistical indexes extracted from the reduced input space are used in a time series fashion for SV regression to predict the system health. The approach benefits from the reduced input space and from the small number of support vectors used to construct the classifier and predictor models, making it faster and robust. It is also immune to probabilistic assumptions and to the need for explicit models that describe the system behavior. A case study illustrates the use of support vector classification and regression. Case study results show that SVC correctly classified test points and minimized the number of false alarms and SVR correctly predicted function values for a predefined sinusoidal function. Together with excellent generalization ability, the proposed algorithm can be used in real time, making it a strong candidate for onboard, autonomous, system health monitoring, management and prediction.


The objective of this study was to determine the metabolic fate and disposition of the antitumor camptothecine derivative irinotecan (CPT-11). Ten patients with histological proof of malignant solid tumor received 200 mg/m2 CPT-11 as a 90-min i.v. infusion, followed by a 1.5-h i.v. infusion of cisplatin (60 or 80 mg/m2). Plasma, urine, and feces were collected for 56 h and analyzed by a specific reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatographic assay for the parent drug and all four metabolites positively identified to date: SN-38; its beta-glucuronide conjugate, SN-38 beta-glucoronide (SN-38G); 7-ethyl-10-[4-N-(5-aminopentanoic acid)-1-piperidino]-carbonyloxycamptothecine (APC); and 7-ethyl-10-[4-N-(1-piperidino)-1-amino]-carbonyloxycamptothecine (NPC). A three-exponential decline was observed in plasma for all compounds, with a clear predominance of the parent drug [25.6+/-5.71 microM x h (CPT-11) versus 15.8+/-3.51 microM x h (total metabolites)]. Total urinary excretion was 28.1+/-10.6% of the dose, with unchanged CPT-11 and SN-38G as the main excretion products. Whereas renal clearance of SN-38 was only a minor route of drug elimination, fecal concentrations of this compound were unexpectedly high (on average, 2.45% of the dose), suggestive of intestinal hydrolysis of SN-38G by bacterial beta-glucuronidase. CPT-11 and the other metabolites could also be identified from fecal extracts, with a very minor contribution overall of the cytochrome P-450-mediated compounds 7-ethyl-10-[4-N-(1-piperidino)-1-amino]-carbonyloxycamptothecine and 7-ethyl-10-[4-N-(5-aminopentanoic acid)-1-piperidino]-carbonyloxycamptothecine. Surprisingly, fecal excretion accounted for only 24.4+/-13.3% of the dose, leading to a total excretion of approximately 52%. These data indicate that half of the dose in urine and feces may constitute some further unknown nonextractable or nonfluorescent metabolites. The findings from this study should be of importance as a guide to further therapeutic evaluation of this drug.


Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) inhibit cyclooxygenase activity and hence PG production. However, the ability of NSAIDs to ameliorate pain and tenderness does not prevent disease progression in rheumatoid arthritis, a disease whose pathogenesis is linked to the presence of proinflammatory cytokines, such as TNF-α. To understand this observation, we have examined the effect of NSAIDs on the production of clinically validated proinflammatory cytokines. We show that a variety of NSAIDs superinduce production of TNF from human peripheral blood monocytes and rheumatoid synovial membrane cultures. A randomized, double-blinded, crossover, placebo-controlled trial in healthy human volunteers also revealed that the NSAID drug celecoxib increased LPS-induced TNF production in whole blood. NSAID-mediated increases in TNF are reversed by either the addition of exogenous PGE2 or by a PGE2 EP2 receptor agonist, revealing that PGE2 signaling via its EP2 receptor provides a valuable mechanism for controlling excess TNF production. Thus, by reducing the level of PGE2, NSAIDs can increase TNF production and may exacerbate the proinflammatory environment both within the rheumatoid arthritis joint and the systemic environment.


The paper proposes a general model that will encompass trade and social benefits of a common language, a preference for a variety of languages, the fundamental role of translators, an emo-tional attachment to maternal language, and the threat that globalization poses to the vast ma-jority of languages. With respect to people's emotional attachment, the model considers minor-ities to suffer losses from the subordinate status of their language. In addition, the model treats the threat to minority language as coming from the failure of the parents in the minority to transmit their maternal language (durably) to their children. Some familiar results occur. In particular, we encounter the usual social inefficiencies of decentralized solutions to language learning when the sole benefits of the learning are communicative benefits (though translation intervenes). However, these social inefficiencies assume a totally different air when the con-sumer gains of variety are brought in. One fundamental aim of the paper is to bring together contributions to the economics of language from labor economics, network externalities and international trade that are typically treated separately.


A distinction between error and conventionalized innovation is essential to understanding if and how New Varieties of English develop new conventions. This chapter proposes two criteria, grammatical stability and acceptability, to identify conventionalized innovations. It draws on the distinction drawn by Croft (2000) between the narrow process of creating new forms (innovation in the narrow sense) and the subsequent diffusion thereof, which are characterized as individual/psycholinguistic and social respectively. Three features from African Englishes are examined: the so-called extension of the progressive aspect to stative verbs and the use of "can be able to" in Black South African English, as well as the complementation of "enable" with bare infinitive clauses in East African English. The analyses indicate that while these features may have originated as errors due to analogy or overextension of existing patterns, which may also happen in the process of acquiring English as a foreign Language, the context of New Varieties of English is such that stabilization and conventionalization of these innovations may occur. Genuine new linguistic conventions emerge from forms that may have started out as errors.


Background The control of vector borne arboviral diseases such as Dengue is mainly achieved by reducing human-vector contact and controlling the vectors through source reduction and environmental management. These measures are constrained by labour intensity, insecticide resistance and pro-active community participation. The current study intended to develop and test an ivermectin-based attractive-targeted sugar bait (ATSB) against Aedes aegypti. Methods The 48hour lethal concentration (LC90) of ivermectin against Ae. aegypti was determined through serial dilution experiment where five 30cm x 30cm x 30cm cages were set; into each, a 10% sugar solution treated with ivermectin were introduced. 40 Ae. aegypti were released into each cage and observed for mortality after 4, 8, 24 and 48 hours. The ivermectin-based ATSB was evaluated in a semi field system where ATSB and attractive sugar bait (ASB) were deployed into each compartment of the semi field and 100 female Ae. aegypti were released every day and recaptured the next day through human land catch and Bio-gent sentinel trap. The developed and semi-field tested ATSB was further tested in the field by deploying them in garages. Results The ivermectin 48hr LC90 of male and female Ae. aegypti was found to be 0.03% w/v. In the semi field system, the ATSB significantly reduced a free-flying population of Ae. aegypti within 24 hours (incidence rate ratio (IRR) = 0.62; [95% confidence interval (95%CI); 0.54-0.70] and p-value < 0.001). However, in the field, the ATSBs required the addition of yeast as a carbon dioxide source to efficiently attract Ae. aegypti mosquitoes to feed. Conclusion Ivermectin is an active ingredient that can be used in an ATSB for Ae. aegypti depopulation. However, further research is needed to improve the developed and tested ATSB to compete with natural sources of sugar in a natural environment.


The standard chemical potentials μs of aqueous solutes over a wide range of temperatures and pressures are needed to calculate phase and chemical equilibria in hydrothermal systems. The standard derivative thermodynamic properties of solutes such as enthalpies, heat capacities and volumes can be integrated to calculate μs at super-ambient conditions. These derivative properties can be obtained by extrapolation to infinite dilution of calorimetric and volumetric data for aqueous solutions measured as a function of concentration at various temperatures and pressures. A large amount of new experimental results has been reported over the past two decades, which allowed improvement of predictions based on equations of Helgeson, Kirkham and Flowers, among others. Several new thermodynamic models for the standard thermodynamic properties have been proposed during this period. This paper focuses on non-electrolyte solutes and provides an overview of the recent sources of experimental data. We also compare the ability of several thermodynamic models to correlate and predict μs.

This paper was presented at «Fluid/minerals Interactions in the Crust», a symposium in honour of Martine Lagache, Paris, October 1999


This essay draws parallels between the movement for justice in Palestine and the South African experience during the anti-apartheid struggle, engaging critically with supporters and practitioners of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. Notwithstanding their very different contexts, the author argues that in the South African case, the decision to broaden the struggle to all opponents of apartheid, thereby transcending the racialism normalized by the very structure of the state, enabled the movement to gain the momentum necessary to bring down the apartheid regime. Neither armed resistance nor boycott alone was sufficient to win the battle without the added component of mass-based direct action. The essay challenges the activists of the contemporary Palestinian movement to redefine their strategy and create their own South African moment. The text is based on the author9s remarks as discussant at a talk by BDS cofounder Omar Barghouti, held at Columbia University on 2 December 2014.


This Request for Comments records a grant by IBM Corporation to permit
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Background: The treatment of COVID-19 patients with heparin is not always effective in preventing thrombotic complications, but can also be associated with bleeding complications, suggesting a balanced approach to anticoagulation is needed. A prior pilot study supported that thromboelastography and conventional coagulation tests could predict hemorrhage in COVID-19 in patients treated with unfractionated heparin or enoxaparin, but did not evaluate the risk of thrombosis. Methods: This single-center, retrospective study included 79 severely ill COVID-19 patients anticoagulated with intermediate or therapeutic dose unfractionated heparin. Two stepwise logistic regression models were performed with bleeding or thrombosis as the dependent variable, and thromboelastography parameters and conventional coagulation tests as the independent variables. Results: Among all 79 patients, 12 (15.2%) had bleeding events, and 20 (25.3%) had thrombosis. Multivariate logistic regression analysis identified a prediction model for bleeding (adjusted R2 = 0.787, p < 0.001) comprised of increased reaction time (p = 0.016), decreased fibrinogen (p = 0.006), decreased D-dimer (p = 0.063), and increased activated partial thromboplastin time (p = 0.084). Multivariate analysis of thrombosis identified a weak prediction model (adjusted R2 = 0.348, p < 0.001) comprised of increased D-dimer (p < 0.001), decreased reaction time (p = 0.002), increased maximum amplitude (p < 0.001), and decreased alpha angle (p = 0.014). Adjunctive thromboelastography decreased the use of packed red cells (p = 0.031) and fresh frozen plasma (p < 0.001). Conclusions: Significantly, this study demonstrates the need for a precision-based titration strategy of anticoagulation for hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Since severely ill COVID-19 patients may switch between thrombotic or hemorrhagic phenotypes or express both simultaneously, institutions may reduce these complications by developing their own titration strategy using daily conventional coagulation tests with adjunctive thromboelastography.


Problem Although the Bible clearly calls parents to train their children in the faith and pass on faith to the next generation (Deut 6:4-9; Eph 6:4), few parents at the Philadelphia Seventh-day Adventist Church seem to be involved actively in their children's spiritual development. As a result, the way God designed the family to function is being inadvertently abandoned. This apparent lack of faith and values transmission has resulted in a very high attrition rate among our youth, who are usually disengaged by age 15 and leave the church by age 25. This perceived crisis over the dropout rate has led the church to develop several programs that focus on the function and role of the church in the life of the youth. What appears to be missing, however, is the function and role of the church in training parents to be primary disciplers of their children. Method A survey, entitled The Family Discipleship Perceptions and Practices Survey, was administered to assess the perceptions and practices of parents and to help me decide on the best approach in providing training and support for parents as they seek to pass on the legacy of Christian faith and values to the next generation. I then presented a four-part sermon series on family discipleship in order to teach and inspire parents to embrace their responsibility as primary disciplers of their children. I also presented a seven-part series of seminars entitled "Confident Parenting" over a seven-week period in preparation for the launching and implementation of the Confident Parenting initiative. Finally, I worked with the Family Ministries Department of the Church to develop a Parent Coaching Ministry to train and equip experienced and committed laity to support and encourage other parents through various stages of Christian family life. Results The presupposition I had going into this project was that the parents at Philadelphia Seventh-day Adventist Church were unaware of their role as spiritual leaders of their children and instead, depended on professional ministers to be the primary faith trainers in their children's lives. The study, however, revealed that parents did not view professional ministers at church as the people primarily responsible for their children's spiritual development. In a radical reversal of my earlier assumptions, the overwhelming majority of parents identified themselves as the persons primarily responsible for the spiritual development and discipleship of their children. In my role as pastor of the church, I had often urged parental involvement in children's spiritual development. I had lamented and even reprimanded the lack of commitment to family discipleship. Yet I had never clearly shown parents how to engage personally in discipling their children—or even outlined exactly what I expected them to do. A deeper interaction with the parents during our parenting small group revealed that what they needed was not lectures and appeals from the pulpit about family discipleship practices, but for the church to encourage and equip them consistently to engage intentionally in their children's spiritual growth. This discovery has led us to realign the efforts of the church to empower parents to engage effectively in family discipleship, rather than usurping the role of the parents as primary disciplers. This has resulted in the formation of three family discipleship small groups and a ministry that consistently trains volunteers as family discipleship mentors. Conclusion This study has confirmed what I had initially suspected from observation—that very few parents were consistently engaging in an intentional process of discipleship with their children. This lack of engagement, however, was not because parents were unaware of their role as primary disciplers of their children, but because they were either too busy or ill-equipped to engage consistently and effectively in discipling their children. A careful study of the data collected revealed that lack of time and lack of training accounted for 90% of the parents who had disengaged from their children's spiritual development. In summary, parents are too busy and the church is doing very little to equip or encourage them consistently to perform household discipleship.


Abstract. The thermal structure of the mid-Piacenzian ocean is obtained by combining the Pliocene Research, Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping Project (PRISM3) multiproxy sea-surface temperature (SST) reconstruction with bottom water temperature estimates from 27 locations produced using Mg/Ca paleothermometry based upon the ostracod genus Krithe. Deep water temperature estimates are skewed toward the Atlantic Basin (63% of the locations) and represent depths from 1000 m to 4500 m. This reconstruction, meant to serve as a validation data set as well as an initialization for coupled numerical climate models, assumes a Pliocene water mass framework similar to that which exists today, with several important modifications. The area of formation of present day North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) was expanded and extended further north toward the Arctic Ocean during the mid-Piacenzian relative to today. This, combined with a deeper Greenland-Scotland Ridge, allowed a greater volume of warmer NADW to enter the Atlantic Ocean. In the Southern Ocean, the Polar Front Zone was expanded relative to present day, but shifted closer to the Antarctic continent. This, combined with at least seasonal reduction in sea ice extent, resulted in decreased Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) production (relative to present day) as well as possible changes in the depth of intermediate waters. The reconstructed mid-Piacenzian three-dimensional ocean was warmer overall than today, and the hypothesized aerial extent of water masses appears to fit the limited stable isotopic data available for this time period.


We have used a neuraminidase-deficient influenza virus, NWS-Mvi, which was selected by supplying bacterial neuraminidase in the medium (C. Liu and G. M. Air, Virology 194:403-407, 1993), to define the role of neuraminidase in influenza virus replication. Electron microscopy showed that virions of the NWS-Mvi mutant assembled normally and formed large aggregates associated with cell surfaces. The NWS-Mvi virus grown in the absence of neuraminidase was able to carry out a second round of replication in MDCK cells without added neuraminidase, indicating that the virus particles contained in these aggregates were infectious. Aggregates of virus were also found in cytoplasmic vacuoles. When virus-infected cells were incubated in the presence of ferritin, such aggregates were found to be labeled with ferritin, indicating that they are derived from uptake at the cell surface. When the neuraminidase-deficient virus was administered intranasally to C57BL/6 mice, low titers of virus were recovered from the lungs and major histocompatibility complex class I-restricted cytotoxic T cells were generated: evidence that cells were infected in vivo. In C57BL/6 nu/nu mice, the low level of virus persisted for at least 28 days but never increased. These results suggest that neuraminidase is not required for influenza virus entry, replication, or assembly in cell culture or in mice.


Addiction to alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs is one of the major public health issues of our time. It accounts for one of every five deaths in the United States and costs approximately one-half trillion dollars per year in health care expenditures and lost productivity. Its human costs are untold and perhaps uncountable. Addiction and Art puts a human face on addiction through the creative work of individuals who have been touched by it. The art included here presents unique stories about addiction. Many pieces are stark representations of life on the edge. Others are disturbing contemplations of life, meaning, and death. Some even reflect the allure of addiction and a fondness for substance abuse. A panel of addiction scientists, artists, and professionals from the art world selected the 61 pieces included here from more than 1,000 submissions. Accompanied by a written statement from the artist, each creation is emblematic of the destructive power of addiction and the regenerative power of recovery. Stunning and occasionally unsettling, this unique portfolio reveals addiction art as a powerful complement to addiction science.


Distributed enterprise search as a special case of Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR) is characterized by the need to query multiple repositories in enterprise environments. However, in DIR research there is a lack of publicly available real-world datasets for evaluation purposes. As a result, there is a gap between insights gained from simulated environments and real-world investigations on distributed enterprise search. In this paper, we outline three fundamental issues based on our investigations of a large real-world distributed enterprise search system. We found that (1) the utilization of security features in enterprise repositories, (2) the adaptation of resource description and resource selection for enterprise model, and (3) repository grouping are fundamental real-world issues. We hypothesize that a better understanding of these issues will contribute to improve the distributed enterprise search and better support complex search tasks in enterprise environments. Based on our experience gained from a real-world system, we also outline needed steps to cope with these issues.


In the past 2 decades, as the resolution of computed tomography (CT) scans has grown sharper, paleontologists have increasingly trained the technique on long-dead animals, gaining an inside view of rich anatomical detail, including everything from bony canals that once held nerves to the internal networks of dinosaur noses. The technique doesn9t work on all samples, and the images still require a trained eye to interpret. But CT scanning has contributed to a number of high-profile discoveries.


The linkage between political right-wing orientation and climate change denial is extensively studied. However, previous research has almost exclusively focused on the mainstream right, which differs from the far right (radical and extreme) in some important domains. Thus, we investigated correlates of climate change denial among supporters of a radical right-wing party (Sweden Democrats, N = 2216), a mainstream right-wing party (the Conservative Party, Moderaterna, N = 634), and a mainstream center-left party (Social Democrats, N = 548) in Sweden. Across the analyses, distrust of public service media (Swedish Television, SVT), socioeconomic right-wing attitudes, and antifeminist attitudes outperformed the effects of anti-immigration attitudes and political distrust in explaining climate change denial, perhaps because of a lesser distinguishing capability of the latter mentioned variables. For example, virtually all Sweden Democrat supporters oppose immigration. Furthermore, the effects of party support, conservative ideologies, and belief in conspiracies were relatively weak, and vanished or substantially weakened in the full models. Our results suggest that socioeconomic attitudes (characteristic for the mainstream right) and exclusionary sociocultural attitudes and institutional distrust (characteristic for the contemporary European radical right) are important predictors of climate change denial, and more important than party support per se.


This essay is a response to Prof. Victor Fleischer's analysis of the MasterCard IPO as part of a symposium on the topic hosted by the Harvard Negotiation Law Review. In his article, Prof. Fleischer contends that the structure of the MasterCard IPO -- in particular, for purposes of this essay, the decision to create a charitable foundation to hold a large block of MasterCard stock -- suggests that branding and antitrust concerns, rather than economics, were at the forefront. This essay responds to Prof. Fleischer's assessment of the branding implications of the MasterCard IPO by considering, first, questions of audience. A corporation using its IPO structure to communicate something about the brand to the broader consumer market is not likely to be speaking to that market directly, given the presumably small overlap between consumers and IPO participants. In fact, I contend that the audience is in fact a third group through which much of the interpretive work is likely to occur and which will help intermediate this message: financial newspapers, brokers, and the like. If this is the case, then the factual disconnect between the branding message and the realities of implementation that concerns Prof. Fleischer -- i.e., whether MasterCard is in fact a charitable, public-minded organization -- becomes less important: the messenger creates the message. And because such branding intermediaries have a significant role to play in the creation of the brand, recognizing their importance -- in particular, their ability to disrupt the very brand message they are being asked to help create -- calls into question more fundamental trademark doctrines that depend, in part, on a stable brand meaning.


Objective—To assess the prevalence and significance of enteroviral genome within myocardial biopsy specimens taken from patients with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy and from controls. Design—Prospective evaluation of myocardial tissue for the presence of an enteroviral genome by the polymerase chain reaction. Setting—A tertiary referral centre for patients with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy. Patients—Tissue for the study came from 50 consecutive patients with dilated cardiomyopathy, 41 with other forms of heart disease and 34 from coroners' necropsy cases. Results—Enteroviral genome was detected in 6/50 (12%) patients with dilated cardiomyopathy and 13/75 (17%) of the controls (not significant). No differences were seen between dilated cardiomyopathy patients with or without myocardial enteroviral genome in respect of age; duration of symptoms; proportion of patients with a premorbid acute viral illness, excess alcohol consumption, or hypertension; New York Heart Association functional class; measures of left ventricular function; or endomyocardial histology. Within the control group enteroviral genome was detected in 3/15 (20%) patients with ischaemic heart disease, 2/19 (10·5%) with valvar heart disease, 1/5 (20%) with specific heart muscle disease, 0/2 (0%) with congenital heart disease, and 7/34 (20·6%) cases of sudden death. During 2–52 month follow up (mean 22) 15/44 (34%) patients without myocardial enteroviral genome and 2/6 (33%) with myocardial enteroviral genome died suddenly or required orthotopic heart transplantation for progressive heart failure. Conclusions—These findings do not support the hypothesis that persistent enteroviral infection is of pathogenic or prognostic importance in dilated cardiomyopathy but they are consistent with enterovirus being a common environmental pathogen.


Helminths are an important component of biodiversity with over 24,000 species parasitising wild birds globally, with this figure on the rise given the growing interest in wildlife parasitology. The present study aimed to establish an updated baseline of the helminthological surveys on wild birds from Chile. Available publications were reviewed to build a parasite-host association checklist and also to discuss the state of knowledge regarding these parasites. A total of 92 publications were found between the years 1892 and 2019. Regarding helminth parasites, 174 taxa belonging to 3 phyla and 37 families were recorded, 114 taxa were identified at species level, with the rest remaining incompletely described. Also, 4 taxa corresponded to new genera and 16 to new at species for science. The most reported parasites were platyhelminthes (53.9%) followed by nematodes (36.2%) and acanthocephalans (9.2%). Sixty-five avian species from 19 orders have been recorded as hosts, with most of them having been studied only once (64.6%). Out of these, the order Charadriiformes had the highest number of publications (n=23). In the case of the avian species present in the country, 14.2% of native, 40% of endemic and 22.2% of exotic species have been recorded hosting helminths. Regarding heteroxenous parasites, only 2 species have had their life cycles elucidated. Among the methodologies used for parasitic identification, 48.9% of the studies used morphological tools, 5.4% used molecular tools and 4.3% used both tools. For that reason, there are evident gaps in the data concerning the hosts sampled, methodologies and issues related to the biology of parasites such as life cycles, among others. In this sense, the need for specialists and cooperative research becomes indispensable to improve our understanding of helminths.


Studies have shown that media outlets such as TV, social media and newspapers portray African Americans with respect to crime and social issues when in comparison their White counterparts are generally portrayed with respect to politics. Further with respect to the United Kingdom Muslim people were portrayed more negatively post 9/11. The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the representations of Aboriginal people in The West Australian newspaper from 1966 - 2015. The analysis will address three areas: First if The West Australian has represented Aboriginal people negatively. Second if these representations occurred as a result old-fashioned racism and third has the representations of Aboriginal people shifted, over time, to new racism. A qualitative thematic analysis was used to gather codes from within The West Australian. The results from the qualitative thematic analysis identified six major themes; separation within society, negative representation of Aboriginal people, representation of past and culture of Aboriginal people, negative representation of Aboriginal youths, Aboriginal peoples issues are their problem and government mistreatment and failure of Aboriginal people. The themes support previous research on both old-fashioned and new racism. What was different from previous research was that shift towards new racism in The West Australian was from 1980-1990 when, in comparison, the same shift in America happened in the 1960s. When related to Criminology three theories were used to explain Aboriginal over-representation within the Criminal Justice System. These three theories; Strain theory, Labelling theory and Differential Association theory, explain that social strains in conjunction with labelling and negative peer groups create and fuel anti-social and criminal behaviour.


We propose a scalable nonparametric Bayesian regression model based on a mixture of Gaussian process (GP) experts and the inducing points formalism underpinning sparse GP approximations. Each expert is augmented with a set of inducing points, and the allocation of data points to experts is defined probabilistically based on their proximity to the experts. This allocation mechanism enables a fast variational inference procedure for learning of the inducing inputs and hyperparameters of the experts. When using K experts, our method can run K2 times faster and use K2 times less memory than popular sparse methods such as the FITC approximation. Furthermore, it is easy to parallelize and handles nonstationarity straightforwardly. Our experiments show that on medium-sized datasets (of around 104 training points) it trains up to 5 times faster than FITC while achieving comparable accuracy. On a large dataset of 105 training points, our method significantly outperforms six competitive baselines while requiring only a few hours of training.


Background: Diabetes mellitus is global metabolic disease that increases continuously. It is usually divided into two main categories; type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus.
Aim: The aim of study to evaluate the physiological response of cells in STZ and STZ/HFD animal models for both types of diabetes.
Main methods: Twenty-four male Wistar rats were divided into 4 groups (6 rats /group): control for T1DM, diabetic type 1, control for T2DM and diabetic type 2. The diseases induced by single dose of streptozotocin (60 mg/kg, i.p) T1DM and HFD for 4 weeks previously the injection with streptozotocin (30 mg/kg, i.p) for T2DM.
Results: Type 1 diabetic group groups showed higher defect in the body weight, hotplate period, insulin, AST, ALT, MDA and GSH, while type 2 diabetic group showed higher defect in G6PD and GGT.
Conclusion: The two models of diabetes revealed that the cells in T1DM prefer to use glycolysis pathway, while the cells in T2DM prefer pentose pathway, which might be relevant in the real human diabetes mellitus.


Private security companies' growing participation in U.S. and international military missions has raised concern about whether the private security industry is subject to sufficient controls. Industry self-regulation is often proposed as part of a multilayered framework of regulations to govern PSCs. But what can self-regulation contribute to regulation of the private security industry? This matters because privatization in the security realm has moved beyond understandings of the proper breakdown of public and private functions concerning the use of force. This article assesses what self-regulation can contribute to the control of this industry and whether the private security industry lends itself to effective self-regulation. It concludes that the private security industry does not exhibit the capacity to adopt and implement effective self-regulation on its own. If self-regulation is to complement state and international regulation, participation in the design and oversight of self-regulation must be b...


Abstract : The magnetic pulse compression (MPC) circuit uses saturable core inductors and capacitors to compress the width of a pulse. This substantially increases the peak power of the initially applied pulse. The saturable inductor exhibits a hysteresis curve behavior. One particular problem with these MPC circuits is timing variances in the pulse rate of the system. This work models the unique characteristics and signatures of the timing variations of magnetic switches and pulse compressors. The hysteresis curve of the saturable inductor was created by using a nonlinear inductor and a nonlinear resistor in parallel as a substitute for saturable inductors. The circuit was built in MATLAB and simulations were run to determine the effectiveness of the pulse compression as well as the timing delays. A signature resembling a decaying exponential was then able to be recorded from the simulations. This shape was caused by the hysteresis curve not resetting to the initial state on the B-H plane after the first pulse is applied and it achieving a steady state at some smaller B-H curve after several pulses.


Recent studies have shown that mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) can have long-term neurological consequences and may cause permanent damage to the brain [1,2]. Given estimates that millions of these injuries occur each year [3], this knowledge has created a demand for countermeasures to prevent mTBI. In order to create countermeasures, the biomechanical inputs leading to mTBI, which are still a matter of debate, must be better understood in both children and adults.Copyright © 2013 by ASME


Electrophysiological studies with atrial extrastimulus technique suggested the presence of dual atrioventricular (A-V) nodal pathways in a patient with hypothyroidism, as evidenced by a sudden increase of H1-H2 intervals at critical A1-A2 coupling intervals. Following the atrial extrastimulus (A2), a third impulse (A3) occurred spontaneously. During slow pathway conduction of A2, and A3, appearing at a critically timed interval allowed fast pathway conduction, resulting in an earlier than expected QRS (a form of supernormal conduction). This demonstration of fast pathway conduction during slow pathway conduction adds strong evidence for the existence of dual A-V nodal pathways.


An Object Oriented Bayesian Network for recognition of maneuver in highway traffic has demonstrated an acceptably high recognition performance on a prototype car with a Linux PC having an i7 processor. This paper is focusing on keeping the high recognition performance of the original OOBN, while evaluating alternative modelling techniques and their impact on the memory and time requirements of an ECUprocessor for automotive applications. New challenges are faced, when the prediction horizon is to be further extended.


One argument for copyright extension is that people are more willing to invest in activities that can gain intellectual property protection. Yet, every day, copyright protection keeps libraries from preserving or distributing works. This article looks at some historical examples to explore whether protection makes it more or less likely that someone will undertake the effort and expense to preserve intellectual property.


The design of the study is to develop monoclonal antibodies against Cry1Ac/Ab protein for designing os sandwich ELISA(hybridoma technology). Hybridoma technology was invented by Cesar Milstein and Georges J.F Kohler in the year 1975 and is an unique method used to produce identical antibodies in maximum quantities. Monoclonal antibodies were developed by immunization of Balb/C mice with Cry1Ac/Ab Protein. Titer values of mice tail bleeds were checked and the best mice with higher titer value was used for fusion. Immunized mice spleen cells were fused with Myeloma cells (SP2-O), using polyethylene glycol (PEG) and the fused cells were incubated with HAT medium for 12 days and initially 400 positive hybridoma clones were obtained, of which 13 potential clones were selected using indirect ELISA against Cry1Ac/Ab recombinant antigen. Cross reactivity was ruled out using indriet ELSA against cry proteins such as Cry2A, Cry1F and CP4EPSPS using. Cloning was carried out twice for all 13 clones by limiting dilution factor and pure single clones were selected. The class IgG/IgM/IgA and sub classes IgG1, IgG2, IgG3 antibodies are determined by isotyping. Determination of class and subclass of an antibody is very important for selecting proper purification methods. Commercially available rapid isotyping kits were used for isotyping which provides the information of 1) IgG, IgM, IgA, IgG2a, IgG2b or IgG3 2) Light chain identification as either kappa or lambda. All pure clones were preserved in Liquid Nitrogen for future use to develop immunological kits for detection of Cry1Ac/Ab present in the plant tissue.


This book is an invaluable new reference source and critical review of Arab women writers from the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth.Arab women's writing in the modern age began with A'isha al-Taymuriya, Warda al-Yaziji, Zaynab Fawwaz, and other nineteenth-century pioneers in Egypt and the Levant. This unique study - first published in Arabic in 2004 - looks at the work of those pioneers and then traces the development of Arab women's literature through the end of the twentieth century, and also includes a meticulously researched, comprehensive bibliography of writing by Arab women. In the first section, in nine essays that cover the Arab Middle East from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Yemen, critics and writers from the Arab world examine the origin and evolution of women's writing in each country in the region, addressing fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiographical writing.The second part of the volume contains bibliographical entries for over 1,200 Arab women writers from the last third of the nineteenth century through 1999. Each entry contains a short biography and a bibliography of each author's published works. This section also includes Arab women's writing in French and English, as well as a bibliography of works translated into English.With its broad scope and extensive research, this book is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in Arabic literature, women's studies, or comparative literature.


Field‐based palaeoflood event reconstruction has the potential to contribute to the development of our understanding of long‐term landscape evolution. However, the reconstruction of past flow event histories (magnitude and frequency) over long‐term (Quaternary) timescales is fraught with difficulties. Here we make a preliminary exploration of some of the practicalities of flood reconstruction from fluvial terrace archives using commonly available sedimentological and geomorphological observations from a field perspective. We utilize Manning and palaeostage indicators to reconstruct historic events that can be used as benchmarks for a lesser used competence based approach, which is applied to coarse‐grained strath terrace deposits. We evaluate the results against gauged records for extreme and catastrophic events that affected the same region in 1973 and 2012. The findings suggest that the competence approach is most effectively applied to terrace deposits if the channel geometry is taken into account when sampling both in cross‐section and in longitudinal section and calibrated against the sedimentology for palaeo‐flow depth. Problems can arise where constrictive channel geometries allow boulder jams to develop, acting as sediment traps for the coarsest material and leading to downstream 'boulder starvation'. Useful sites to target for palaeoflood reconstruction, therefore, would be upstream of such constrictive reaches where the coarsest transportable bedload has been effectively trapped. Sites to avoid would be downflow, where the deposited material would poorly represent palaeoflood competence. Underestimation from maximum boulder preservation and limited section exposure issues would appear to outweigh possible overestimation concerns related to fluid density and unsteady flow characteristics such as instantaneous acceleration forces. Flood data derived from river terrace deposits suggests that basal terrace geometries and coarse boulder lags common to many terrace sequences are likely the result of extreme flow events which are subsequently filled by lesser magnitude flood events, in this environmental setting. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Policy makers in developing countries need to assess how public health programmes function across both public and private sectors. We propose an evaluation framework to assist in simultaneously tracking performance on efficiency, quality and access by the poor in family planning services. We apply this framework to field data from family planning programmes in Ethiopia and Pakistan, comparing (1) independent private sector providers; (2) social franchises of private providers; (3) non-government organization (NGO) providers; and (4) government providers on these three factors. Franchised private clinics have higher quality than non-franchised private clinics in both countries. In Pakistan, the costs per client and the proportion of poorest clients showed no differences between franchised and non-franchised private clinics, whereas in Ethiopia, franchised clinics had higher costs and fewer clients from the poorest quintile. Our results highlight that there are trade-offs between access, cost and quality of care that must be balanced as competing priorities. The relative programme performance of various service arrangements on each metric will be context specific.


Networking together hundreds or thousands of cheap sensor nodes allows users to accurately monitor a remote environment by intelligently combining the data from the individual nodes. As sensor nodes are typically battery operated, it is important to efficiently use the limited energy of the nodes to extend the lifetime of the wireless sensor network (WSN). One of the fundamental issues in WSNs is the coverage problem. In this paper, the border coverage problem in WSNs is rigorously analyzed. Most existing results related to the coverage problem in wireless sensor networks focused on planar networks; however, three dimensional (3D) modeling of the sensor network would reflect more accurately real-life situations. Unlike previous works in this area, we provide distributed algorithms that allow the selection and activation of an optimal border cover for both 2D and 3D regions of interest. We also provide self-healing algorithms as an optimization to our border coverage algorithms which allow the sensor network to adaptively reconfigure and repair itself in order to improve its own performance. Border coverage is crucial for optimizing sensor placement for intrusion detection and a number of other practical applications.


In recent years, we have witnessed an increase in the capabilities of smartphones. Not only are these portable communication devices becoming increasingly powerful, they are equipped with a growing number of sensors that allow them to measure the properties of the world around them. Applications running on these smartphones can benefit from these sensors if developers choose to make them context-aware. However, applications that are built to operate in a wide variety of situations have to be able to cope with and respond to any combination of measured context factors. Anticipation of these different contexts at design time is challenging. For certain domains the requirement for the application to behave exactly as anticipated at design time is key. One such domain is that of well-being. Problems predicting the run-time context may cause the application to behave in other ways than intended. Current research efforts primarily focus on adding features to traditional software development methods to deal with the complexity of the domain of context-awareness. They aim to define a full set of requirements and design an application that is to satisfy these requirements. Furthermore, there are research directions aiming to solve the technological problems of context-awareness without dealing with the user-centric elements needed for well-being systems. We see the field of well-being as consisting of variables and relations between them. To ease the documentation of the variables that the context relevant to the well-being application is made up of, we have designed a domain specific modeling language. In addition to variables, the models created in this language capture variable properties, such as their dimension and their normal range, and causal relations between them, modeling what happens to variable values if one variable in the context is increased or decreased. The modeling language is called the Dynamic Well-being Domain Model language and was developed to be user centric, allowing developers to model the objective well-being context of the user. Although it was designed with the well-being domain in mind, it can also be used in other domains where context variables play an important role. The contributions of this dissertation are threefold. Firstly, we present a reference model for the well-being domain, relating physical and mental well-being. This model was validated by experts from both fields. We discuss how this model was created. Secondly, we describe a model-driven process for the creation of context-aware well-being systems. This process uses models of the well-being context as an input, and is partially automated using model transformations. Finally, we describe a structured analysis method that can be used to predict the behavior of context-aware systems based on their domain models. This prediction can be made at design time, allowing designers to evaluate the utility of the application based on the model, and preventing run-time problems. This method was validated by analyzing three context-aware well-being applications. We find that the Dynamic Well-being Domain Model language can be understood by domain and technology experts alike. Its usage in a model-driven development process was deemed useful, and the ability to reason over future contexts was found to be both powerful and reliable for the cases used in the validation.


In this dissertation, I explored how residence life professionals are teaching social justice. Using critically informed qualitative methods, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 student affairs professionals who are responsible for ongoing social justice-oriented initiatives in residence life. I also analyzed documents associated with these initiatives. Initiatives included living and learning communities, resident advisor courses, workshops for residents, and peer education programs. I found that personal experiences, professional preparation and development, and academic resources informed the design of these initiatives; while institutional factors, stakeholders, and human resources influenced design. The seven key behaviors for delivering these initiatives were largely consistent with critical pedagogy, even as participants did not systematically draw upon this theory, or specific other theories. While there is much to praise about the work being done, there is a need to enhance training for professional staff facilitators, incorporate assessment of the impact these initiatives are having, and reconceive the competency and value of inclusion.


Theoretical considerations are presented on characteristics of the optical-alignment technique using dual gratings. The general formulation of the diffraction pattern is derived for superimposition of dual amplitude–phase gratings, as functions of aperture ratios for gratings and separation gaps between dual gratings. Numerical analyses reveal characteristics for precise positioning control or alignment technique, which utilize the detection of the minimum value of the first-order diffraction beam or the detection of the zero cross point of the difference in intensities between +1- and −1-order diffraction light for dual gratings. Alignment errors due to variations in an incident light angle, displacement in detector position, and fabrication errors for the gratings are also discussed.


Dental fillings represent an established procedure to treat tooth decay. The present paper provides a cost comparison of dental filling procedures across nine European countries. More specifically, the paper aims to estimate the costs and prices (i.e. reimbursement fees) of a single dental filling procedure in an approximately 12-year-old child with a toothache in a lower molar who presents at a dental practice, as described in a case vignette. Both amalgam and composite fillings were examined. Total costs were determined by identifying resource use and unit costs for the following cost components: diagnostic procedures, labour, materials, drugs, and overheads. Altogether, 49 practices provided data for the cost calculations. Mean total costs per country varied considerably, ranging from 8 euros to 156 euros. Labour costs were the most important cost driver in all practices, comprising 58% of total costs. Overhead costs were the second-most important cost component in the majority of countries. Actual cost differences across practices within countries were relatively small. Cost variations between countries were primarily due to differences in unit costs, especially for labour and overheads, and only to a lesser extent to differences in resource use. Finally, cost estimates for a single dental filling procedure based on reimbursement fees led to an underestimation of the total costs by approximately 50%.


Supercell thunderstorms, and the tornadoes they spawn, are considered. Consistency with the current research trends within the disciplines of meteorology and geophysics is neglected in the pursuit of a mechanistic model that can more accurately describe the distinctive characteristics of tornadic supercells. Specifically, the common assumption that electromagnetism is too weak to influence the behavior of a supercell is challenged. The charge separation process in the storm creates electric fields that exert a force more powerful than gravity on charged particles, which then exert aerodynamic forces on the surrounding air, thereby modulating the flow fields. Charged gases also have lower viscosities, and therefore flow faster in pressure gradients. Furthermore, charged gases are less prone to turbulence, with dramatic effects on the net velocities. Studying supercells as charged gases might enable solutions to many otherwise intractable problems. Most significantly, a mechanistic model of the tornadic flow field is presented. While a tornado occurs within the influence of a low pressure aloft, and is typically thought to be a simple suction vortex, its defining characteristics are that the lowest pressure, tightest radius, and fastest wind speeds occur at the ground, farthest from the low pressure aloft, and where the friction is the greatest. This proves that the primary energy conversion occurs at the ground, and that the low pressure aloft is merely absorbing the exhaust from that conversion. In conventional meteorology, the only energy available for conversion near the ground is latent heat stored in water vapor, but the release of latent heat continues through the entire height of the tornado (and beyond), and therefore cannot be concentrated just at the base of the vortex. The only other force present is electromagnetism. Previous research showed that ohmic heating from the flow of an electric current through the tornado is more powerful than latent heating, but similarly, this energy is thermalized through the entire height of the vortex, leaving the extreme low pressure near the ground unexplained. The sustained current inside the tornado was confirmed by various methods to be greater than 100 amps. Inexplicably, evidence of such a current going into the ground has never been found. The possibility not considered by previous research is that the current terminates in the air itself, meaning that the tornadic inflow is charged. If so, it induces an opposite charge in the ground, and is attracted to that charge. As the air flows along the ground, skin friction generates heat. Once the air enters the vortex, the electric current neutralizes the charge, releasing the air from its attraction to the ground, and thus releasing the accumulated thermal potential. This means that the unexplained power expended by the tornado on the ground answers its own question, as the frictional heat so generated is the only energy that could cause a robust updraft so close to the ground, while the charge neutralization is the critical conversion. The energy budget of the entire tornado can then be reconciled as the sum of frictional heating at the ground, latent and ohmic heating inside the vortex, and the low pressure aloft. An extensive review of the data is made, without finding reason to abandon this model. The implications are then considered.


In Mexico, human rights education and training programs are becoming one of the most recurrent outcomes in official settlements related to institutional violations and abuses of human rights. Despite their predominant role in addressing human rights violations, there is little systematic information on how these programs are conducted in practice. To fill the gap, this article presents a cross-case analysis of three qualitative studies that explore practitioners' professional knowledge and practices in implementing human rights education programs in Mexico. Each individual case examines some of the challenges practitioners face in the implementation of these programs, the institutional influence on their work, and the role of their own experiences in human rights practices.


Rationale, aims and objectives Many clinical guidelines for cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention contain risk estimation charts/calculators. These have shown a tendency to overestimate risk, which indicates that there might be theoretical flaws in the algorithms. Total cholesterol is a frequently used variable in the risk estimates. Some studies indicate that the predictive properties of cholesterol might not be as straightforward as widely assumed. Our aim was to document the strength and validity of total cholesterol as a risk factor for mortality in a well-defined, general Norwegian population without known CVD at baseline. Methods We assessed the association of total serum cholesterol with total mortality, as well as mortality from CVD and ischaemic heart disease (IHD), using Cox proportional hazard models. The study population comprises 52 087 Norwegians, aged 20–74, who participated in the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT 2, 1995–1997) and were followed-up on cause-specific mortality for 10 years (510 297 person-years in total). Results Among women, cholesterol had an inverse association with all-cause mortality [hazard ratio (HR): 0.94; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.89–0.99 per 1.0 mmol L−1 increase] as well as CVD mortality (HR: 0.97; 95% CI: 0.88–1.07). The association with IHD mortality (HR: 1.07; 95% CI: 0.92–1.24) was not linear but seemed to follow a 'U-shaped' curve, with the highest mortality <5.0 and ≥7.0 mmol L−1. Among men, the association of cholesterol with mortality from CVD (HR: 1.06; 95% CI: 0.98–1.15) and in total (HR: 0.98; 95% CI: 0.93–1.03) followed a 'U-shaped' pattern. Conclusion Our study provides an updated epidemiological indication of possible errors in the CVD risk algorithms of many clinical guidelines. If our findings are generalizable, clinical and public health recommendations regarding the 'dangers' of cholesterol should be revised. This is especially true for women, for whom moderately elevated cholesterol (by current standards) may prove to be not only harmless but even beneficial.