It has been observed that ECCS-related sway provisions for the stability of low-rise structure can be erratic. In some cases the structure designed in accordance with these rules has to rely on sundry composite actions or strain hardening to reach the rigid-plastic collapse load, in other instances overly conservative solutions may be adopted if the rules are not immediately satisfied. The presented investigation show that the recently developed rational multi-curve interaction approach 17 gives a much better correlation with rigorous solutions without adding unduly to the workload of the design engineer.


A long tradition in macro-finance studies the joint dynamics of aggregate stock returns and dividends using vector autoregressions (VARs), imposing the cross-equation restrictions implied by the Campbell-Shiller (CS) identity to sharpen inference. We take a Bayesian perspective and develop methods to draw from any posterior distribution of a VAR that encodes a priori skepticism about large amounts of return predictability while imposing the CS restrictions. In doing so, we show how a common empirical practice of omitting dividend growth from the system amounts to imposing the extra restriction that dividend growth is not persistent. We highlight that persistence in dividend growth induces a previously overlooked channel for return predictability, which we label ``dividend momentum.'' Compared to estimation based on OLS, our restricted informative prior leads to a much more moderate, but still significant, degree of return predictability, with forecasts that are helpful out-of-sample and realistic asset allocation prescriptions with Sharpe ratios that out-perform common benchmarks.


Oxidative stress is being recognized as a key factor in the progression of chronic liver disease (CLD), especially non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Many NAFLD treatment guidelines recommend the use of antioxidants, especially vitamin E. Many prospective studies have described the beneficial effects of such agents for the clinical course of NAFLD. However, as these studies are usually short-term evaluations, lasting only a few years, whether or not antioxidants continue to exert favorable long-term effects, including in cases of concomitant hepatocellular carcinoma, remains unclear. Antioxidants are generally believed to be beneficial for human health and are often commercially available as health-food products. Patients with lifestyle-related diseases often use such products to try to be healthier without practicing lifestyle intervention. However, under some experimental NAFLD conditions, antioxidants have been shown to encourage the progression of hepatocellular carcinoma, as oxidative stress is toxic for cancer cells, just as for normal cells. In this review, we will highlight the paradoxical effects of antioxidants against NAFLD and related hepatocellular carcinoma.


Eigenanalysis of power systems is frequently used to study the effect and tune the response of existing controllers, or to guide the design of new controllers. However, recent developments in the area lead to the necessity of studying larger power system models, resulting from the interconnection of transmission networks or the joint consideration of transmission and distribution networks. Moreover, these models include new types of controls, mainly based on power electronic interfaces, which are expected to provide significant support in the future. The consequence is that the size and complexity of these models challenge the computational efficiency of existing eigenanalysis methods. In this paper, a procedure is proposed that uses domain decomposition and parallel computing methods, to accelerate the computation of eigenvalues in a selected region of the complex plane with iterative eigenanalysis methods. The proposed algorithm is validated on a small transmission system and its performance is assessed on a large-scale, combined transmission and distribution system.


The hegemonic meaning of depression as a universal mental illness embodied by an individualized subject is propped up by psychiatry's clinical gaze. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism turns to the work of contemporary filmmakers who express a shared concern for mental health under global capitalism to explore how else depression can be perceived. In taking their critical visions as intercessors for thought, Adam Szymanski proposes a thoroughly relational understanding of depression attentive to eventful, collective and contingent qualities of subjectivity. What emerges is a melancholy aesthetics attuned to the existential contours and political stakes of health.
 Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism adventurously builds affinities across the lines of national, linguistic and cultural difference. The films of Angela Schanelec, Kelly Reichardt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kanakan Balintagos are grouped together for the first time, constituting a polystylistic common front of artist-physicians who live, work, and create on the belief that life can be more liveable.


A completely new feeding pattern has been found among caterpillars native to Hawaii: certain geometrid larvae (commonly called "inchworms") consume no leaves or other plant matter. Instead, they perch inconspicuously along leaf edges and stems to seize insects that touch their posterior body section. By bending the front of their body back- wards in a very rapid strike, the caterpillars opportunistically capture their prey with elonga- ted, spiny legs and 900 larvae and eggs of these moths have been collected from native forests of alf the main islands and reared in the laboratory. All are species of Eupithecia, a world- wide group of over 1000 members that had been reported to feed only on plant mattersuch as flowers, leaves or seeds. At least 6 of Hawaii's described Eupithecia species are rapto- rially carnivorous, only 2 are known to feed predominantly on plant material, especially Metrosideros flowers. A diet including protien-rich flower pollen and a defensive behavior of snapping may have preadapted Hawaii's ancestral Eupithecia for a shift to predation. Severe barriers to dispersal of mantids and other continental insect predators into Hawaii resulted in an environment favoring behavioral and consequent morphological adaptations that pro- duced these singular insects, which can be commonly called the "grappling inchworms". Most damage to native biota and habitat is due to imported species or "biological pollution", and has caused a serious need for protective management.


Learning-based approaches often outperform hand-coded algorithmic solutions for many problems in robotics. However, learning long-horizon tasks on real robot hardware can be intractable, and transferring a learned policy from simulation to reality is still extremely challenging. We present a novel approach to model-free reinforcement learning that can leverage existing sub-optimal solutions as an algorithmic prior during training and deployment. During training, our gated fusion approach enables the prior to guide the initial stages of exploration, increasing sample-efficiency and enabling learning from sparse long-horizon reward signals. Importantly, the policy can learn to improve beyond the performance of the sub-optimal prior since the prior's influence is annealed gradually. During deployment, the policy's uncertainty provides a reliable strategy for transferring a simulation-trained policy to the real world by falling back to the prior controller in uncertain states. We show the efficacy of our Multiplicative Controller Fusion approach on the task of robot navigation and demonstrate safe transfer from simulation to the real world without any fine-tuning. The code for this project is made publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/mcf-nav/home


INVESTIGATION OF ADDITIVES FOR USE IN ELECTROLESS PLATING SOLUTIONS FOR FABRICATION OF NANOWIRES Elliott J. Bird Department of Chemical Engineering Master of Science This study focused on improvement of electroless plating methods by use of particular bath additives. The techniques developed here can enable us to plate very thin layers selectively on a nonconductive substrate and thus create metallized features on a nanoscale. Through the development of such bottom-up techniques this work contributes a key technology to achieving self-assembled nanocircuits. The use of additives in an electroless plating environment can modify the barriers to nucleation (or seeding) and growth. Two additives, namely 3-mercapto-1propanesulfonic Acid (MPS) and 1,3-propanedisulfonic acid (PDS), notably increased the selectivity of electroless metallization on chemically modified surfaces, which can be used to create patterned structures. More specifically, the additives increased the growth rate of metal on an aminosilane-coated surface relative to an uncoated surface. This work includes an examination of metal layer thickness and conductivity in addition to selectivity. The layer thickness was determined through the use of atomic force microscopy on surfaces that exhibited conductivity. The conductivity of the surface metal was determined through a measurement on a four-point probe measurement. In this series of experiments, the disulfonate-containing additive PDS provided the highest nucleation density, highest conductivity and the best selectivity ratio. The palladium metal deposit on the PDS-treated surface was nearly uniform in height and its conductivity approached the bulk conductivity of palladium with a metal height of less than 30 nm. MPS-treated surfaces also provided increased nucleation density when used during the seeding step, but the resulting conductivity was less than that of the PDS-treated samples. We recommend the use of PDS as an effective electroless plating additive for use in palladium electroless plating processes.


When verifying a concurrent program, it is usual to assume that memory is sequentially consistent. However, most modern multiprocessors depend on store buffering for efficiency, and provide native sequential consistency only at a substantial performance penalty. To regain sequential consistency, a programmer has to follow an appropriate programming discipline. However, na\"ive disciplines, such as protecting all shared accesses with locks, are not flexible enough for building high-performance multiprocessor software.
We present a new discipline for concurrent programming under TSO (total store order, with store buffer forwarding). It does not depend on concurrency primitives, such as locks. Instead, threads use ghost operations to acquire and release ownership of memory addresses. A thread can write to an address only if no other thread owns it, and can read from an address only if it owns it or it is shared and the thread has flushed its store buffer since it last wrote to an address it did not own. This discipline covers both coarse-grained concurrency (where data is protected by locks) as well as fine-grained concurrency (where atomic operations race to memory).
We formalize this discipline in Isabelle/HOL, and prove that if every execution of a program in a system without store buffers follows the discipline, then every execution of the program with store buffers is sequentially consistent. Thus, we can show sequential consistency under TSO by ordinary assertional reasoning about the program, without having to consider store buffers at all.


The first edition of Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy is one of the most successful Brookings titles of all time. This thoroughly revised version updates that classic analysis of the role played by the federal bureaucracy --civilian career officials, political appointees, and military officers --and Congress in formulating U.S. national security policy, illustrating how policy decisions are actually made. Government agencies, departments, and individuals all have certain interests to preserve and promote. Those priorities, and the conflicts they sometimes spark, heavily influence the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. A decision that looks like an orchestrated attempt to influence another country may in fact represent a shaky compromise between rival elements within the U.S. government. The authors provide numerous examples of bureaucratic maneuvering and reveal how they have influenced our international relations. The revised edition includes new examples of bureaucratic politics from the past three decades, from Jimmy Carter's view of the State Department to conflicts between George W. Bush and the bureaucracy regarding Iraq. The second edition also includes a new analysis of Congress's role in the politics of foreign policymaking.


The paper investigates techniques for the detection and modeling of groups of people in a mobile community also interacting in the real world. In this scenario, the concept of contextual manifestations or instantiations of existing social groups is of special significance. In view of detecting and modeling of groups and their instantiations, several examples for classes of data (location- and velocity-data, natural language interest phrases and text-based communication-data) in the information spaces of mobile communities are investigated. Similarity measures between people are constructed and verified by empiric means or through stochastic simulation. On this basis, special clustering approaches for the detection and modeling of groups are developed and tested. The paper concludes with a discussion on possible applications for the methods which have been developed.


Network slicing is one of the key enablers to provide the required flexibility and to realize the service-oriented vision toward fifth generation (5G) mobile networks. In that sense, virtualization, softwarization, and disaggregation are core concepts to accommodate the requirements of an end-to-end (E2E) service to be either isolated, shared, or customized. They lay the foundation for a multi-service and multi-tenant architecture, and are realized by applying the principles of software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), and cloud computing to the mobile networks. Research on these principles requires agile and flexible platforms that offer a wide range of real-world experimentations over different domains to open up innovations in 5G. To this end, we present Mosaic5G, a community-led consortium for sharing platforms, providing a number of software components, namely FlexRAN, LL-MEC, JOX and Store, spanning application, management, control and user plane on top of OpenAirInterface (OAI) platform. Finally, we show several use cases of Mosaic5G corresponding to widely-mentioned 5G research directions.


The creation of fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) in optical fibers by laser irradiation causes the formation of defects in the modified glass. We have used confocal fluorescence spectroscopy to identify the location and types of defects formed after writing FBGs with the femtosecond laser phase mask technique. Our results show that non-bridging oxygen hole centers (NBOHCs) and self-trapped excitons (Eδ') are formed throughout all-silica core Sumitomo Z-fiber. Similar defects are observed for Ge-doped silica fiber, Corning SMF-28, but in this case the relative concentrations of NBOHC and Eδ' vary from the core to the cladding. In both fibers, hydrogen loading prior to irradiation appears to passivate the defects except in the Ge-doped core where the NBOHC defects persist.


OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to compare the relative movements between adjacent vertebrae that were accompanied by a cavitation sound to those relative movements wherein no cavitation sound was recorded, during spinal manipulative treatments (SMTs) to T12 of an unembalmed human cadaver.

SETTING
The experiment was conducted in the gross anatomy laboratory at the University of Calgary.

SUBJECTS
One 77-yr-old male cadaver was used.

INTERVENTIONS
High speed cinematography and embedded bone pin markers were used to record the movements of T10, T11, and T12, during the manipulations. A pressure pad was used to measure the posterior-to-anterior (p-to-a) forces exerted by the clinician onto the cadaver. Two uniaxial accelerometers were used to record the p-to-a accelerations of T11 and T12. The clinician delivered five p-to-a thrusts to the right transverse process of T12. P-to-a forces, p-to-a accelerations, and relative (between T10 and T11, and, T11 and T12) p-to-a translations, lateral translations, and axial rotations, were calculated for each thrust.

MAIN RESULTS
A cavitation sound was recorded by the T12 accelerometer during the fourth manipulation. The p-to-a force parameters of the fourth trial were not different from those of the other trials. However, the relative lateral translations between the adjacent vertebrae were substantially greater during the fourth manipulation, compared to the other trials.

CONCLUSIONS
The characteristics of the relative lateral translations between adjacent vertebrae suggest that the cavitation sound recorded during the fourth manipulation may have been associated with greater laterally applied forces than those during the other manipulations to T12, wherein no cavitation was recorded.


Background The Internet offers consumers unparalleled opportunities to acquire health information. The emergence of the Internet, rather than more-traditional sources, for obtaining health information is worthy of ongoing surveillance, including identification of the factors associated with using the Internet for this purpose. Objectives To measure the prevalence of Internet use as a mechanism for obtaining health information in the United States; to compare such Internet use with newspapers or magazines, radio, and television; and to identify sociodemographic factors associated with using the Internet for acquiring health information. Methods Data were acquired from the Second Osteopathic Survey of Health Care in America (OSTEOSURV-II), a national telephone survey using random-digit dialing within the United States during 2000. The target population consisted of adult, noninstitutionalized, household members. As part of the survey, data were collected on: facility with the Internet, sources of health information, and sociodemographic characteristics. Multivariate analysis was used to identify factors associated with acquiring health information on the Internet. Results A total of 499 (64% response rate) respondents participated in the survey. With the exception of an overrepresentation of women (66%), respondents were generally similar to national referents. Fifty percent of respondents either strongly agreed or agreed that they felt comfortable using the Internet as a health information resource. The prevalence rates of using the health information sources were: newspapers or magazines, 69%; radio, 30%; television, 56%; and the Internet, 32%. After adjusting for potential confounders, older respondents were more likely than younger respondents to use newspapers or magazines and television to acquire health information, but less likely to use the Internet. Higher education was associated with greater use of newspapers or magazines and the Internet as health information sources. Internet use was lower in rural than urban or suburban areas. Conclusions The Internet has already surpassed radio as a source of health information but still lags substantially behind print media and television. Significant barriers to acquiring health information on the Internet remain among persons 60 years of age or older, those with 12 or fewer years of education, and those residing in rural areas. Stronger efforts are needed to ensure access to and facility with the Internet among all segments of the population. This includes user-friendly access for older persons with visual or other functional impairments, providing low-literacy Web sites, and expanding Internet infrastructure to reach all areas of the United States.


Purpose: To identify a predictive molecular "signature" for sensitivity to retinoic acid in pancreatic cancer. Experimental Design: Fourteen patient-derived, low-passage pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) lines with varied expression of fatty acid–binding protein 5 (FABP5) and cellular retinoic acid–binding protein 2 (CRABP2) were used to evaluate the response to all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA). Cell proliferation, apoptosis, and migration/invasion assays were used to measure the in vitro response. Tumor growth was monitored in subcutaneous xenografts in athymic nude mice for 4 weeks. Results: Response to ATRA was observed to be dependent upon differential expression of FABP5 versus CRABP2. Thus, elevated FABP5 expression was associated with minimal cytotoxicity and tumor growth inhibition and a paradoxical increase in migration and invasion. Conversely, CRABP2 expression in the absence of FABP5 was associated with significant tumor growth inhibition with ATRA, even in gemcitabine-resistant tumors. The ATRA-resistant phenotype of FABP5highCRABP2null cells could be circumvented by ectopic expression of CRABP2. Alternatively, reexpression of endogenous CRABP2 could be enabled in FABP5highCRABP2null PDAC lines by exposure to decitabine and trichostatin A, thereby relieving epigenetic silencing of the CRABP2 gene promoter. Immunohistochemical staining for FABP5 in archival human tissue microarrays identifies a subset of cases (13 of 63, ∼20%) which are negative for FABP5 expression and might be candidates for ATRA therapy. Conclusions: The widely used agent ATRA deserves a "second look" in PDAC, but needs to be targeted to patient subsets with biopsy-proven FABP5-negative tumors, or be combined with a chromatin-modifying agent to reexpress endogenous CRABP2. Clin Cancer Res; 18(1); 280–9. ©2011 AACR.


Abstract There is growing recognition in Australia and in other countries that some people face complex challenges and multiple disadvantages in their everyday lives, and that their needs for safety, health, clothing, food, shelter, and emotional wellbeing form interacting webs of need. However, it is often this very group who may be excluded from services and other opportunities. A qualitative study was carried out with 80 families living on income support in two regions in Australia. The study explored how parents defined their families' needs, their current levels of formal support, and their experiences of navigating multiple service systems and networks. Parents identified a range of issues that they viewed as adversely impacting on their health and wellbeing. They also described barriers to accessing services and the features of helpful service experiences. Families provided important information as to how those with the greatest need can be effectively assisted to access needed resources and services. Program design and individual service provision need to be based on principles of responsive, respectful service, and collaboration. Locating skilled workers in nonstigmatising settings such as schools has great potential for making services accessible and linking people with what they need.


Does the current development reform agenda, especially the one operationalized by the World Bank, is Ideological? If so, does it matter? These are the two questions that animate this article. In answering both questions in the affirmative, the article first demonstrates how the current development reform agenda is Ideological. It then discusses why and how it matters that the development reform agenda is Ideological. First, the article argues that Ideological rendering of the development reform agenda effectively weakens the ability of Third World countries to articulate their economic and foreign policies in ways that would benefit their citizenry the most. Second, since the World Bank, as the other international financial institutions (IFIs) which are the key players in the development reform agenda are international organizations which are meant to reflect the collective will of their members, the charge of Ideological bias should be taken more seriously than it has been in the past. Third, the Ideology of reform and development enables the construction of a discourse which obfuscates the real causes of poverty and "underdevelopment" and therefore undermines the efforts to find real solutions to world poverty. Fourth, and related, the Ideological development discourse thus produced facilitates the building of stable alliances between national political and economic elites in Third World countries, IFIs, and multinational corporations. These alliances are sometimes at odds with one another but, overall, they operate to stabilize the international economic system as presently configured by containing any major threat of major rapture. These alliances therefore ensure the continued underdevelopment of the Third World and undermine the very goal of development for which these IFIs were formed.


Introduction: Patients who are diagnosed with unstable angina (UA) or non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (non-STEMI) are at risk for repeated acute cardiac episodes resulting in emergent rehospitalization. American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology practice guidelines recommend use of risk stratification prior to hospital discharge; however, the importance of identifying patients' social support for follow-up planning is not emphasized. Hypothesis: UA and non-STEMI patients who live with significant others are less likely to return to the Emergency Department (ED) for acute cardiac-related events within one year. Methods: Secondary analysis was conducted of data from a prospective clinical trial (IMMEDIATE AIM Study, RO1HL69753), in which patients presenting to the ED with chest pain were enrolled and followed for one year. A total of 166 patients with UA or non-STEMI and 1-year outcome data were included in the present analysis. Hazard over time analyses were performed to assess whether living with a significant other was associated with cardiac-related ED readmission during the follow-up period. Significant other was defined as spouse, partner, child, or other care provider. Results: Multivariate Cox Regression analyses controlling for gender, race, discharge diagnosis, and Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) risk score revealed that patients who lived with a significant other were less likely to return to the ED for an acute cardiac event within one follow-up year. Living with a significant other was a significant independent contributor to the statistical model (hazard ratio =.47, 95% confidence interval .29 - .75, p=.002). Overall sensitivity and specificity of the model was 73% (C-statistic=.73). Conclusions: In patients with UA or non-STEMI, living without a significant other confers a 2 times greater relative risk of ED cardiac-related readmittance compared with patients who live with a significant other. Prospective clinical trials are needed to identify what the beneficial "active ingredients" are in living with a significant other and to develop interventions to reduce risk for patients who do not have a significant other living arrangement.


The Heart of the Matter invites therapists from all disciplines to consider the use of music and art in their work with families. It introduces systemic music and art ideas, giving clinical examples from practice, and a rationale for using each technique. Conversations with therapists who have explored and incorporated the techniques into their work are shared, and include both personal and professional responses to incorporating new methods in practice. Through a back drop of exploration into what creativity is, the history of the arts in therapy, and consideration of what happens when we use words, the case for music and art to be part of practice with families is presented. This book is more than a handbook of techniques; it explores who we are as therapists, our challenges and our resourcefulness, as we operate in multiple systems to bring about positive change


Since the last IAEA Conference JET has been in operation for one year with a programmatic focus on the qualification of ITER operating scenarios, the consolidation of ITER design choices and preparation for plasma operation with the ITER-like wall presently being installed in JET. Good progress has been achieved, including stationary ELMy H-mode operation at 4.5 MA. The high confinement hybrid scenario has been extended to high triangularity, lower ρ* and to pulse lengths comparable to the resistive time. The steady-state scenario has also been extended to lower ρ* and ν* and optimized to simultaneously achieve, under stationary conditions, ITER-like values of all other relevant normalized parameters. A dedicated helium campaign has allowed key aspects of plasma control and H-mode operation for the ITER non-activated phase to be evaluated. Effective sawtooth control by fast ions has been demonstrated with 3He minority ICRH, a scenario with negligible minority current drive. Edge localized mode (ELM) control studies using external n = 1 and n = 2 perturbation fields have found a resonance effect in ELM frequency for specific q95 values. Complete ELM suppression has, however, not been observed, even with an edge Chirikov parameter larger than 1. Pellet ELM pacing has been demonstrated and the minimum pellet size needed to trigger an ELM has been estimated. For both natural and mitigated ELMs a broadening of the divertor ELM-wetted area with increasing ELM size has been found. In disruption studies with massive gas injection up to 50% of the thermal energy could be radiated before, and 20% during, the thermal quench. Halo currents could be reduced by 60% and, using argon/deuterium and neon/deuterium gas mixtures, runaway electron generation could be avoided. Most objectives of the ITER-like ICRH antenna have been demonstrated; matching with closely packed straps, ELM resilience, scattering matrix arc detection and operation at high power density (6.2 MW m−2) and antenna strap voltages (42 kV). Coupling measurements are in very good agreement with TOPICA modelling.


Various organizations increasingly adopt open source software, both on desktop PCs and servers. Since the first movements in open source in the 1960's its growth has lead to new approaches in software development, licensing, and distribution, as well as in software vendors' business models. The literature includes very interesting studies regarding prospective benefits, business models and case studies. However, the adoption of open source in large, global companies and its relationship with factors such as profitability, revenues and industry sector has not yet been researched. This study aims to answer these questions based on data we collected from Fortune 1000 companies and provides a method that can be applied in similar contexts.


The manipulation of credit in the conduct of monetary policy is receiving increasing attention in regards to the impact it exerts on asset prices and accompanied volatility. Several authors have claimed that relaxed monetary conditions can induce asset bubbles thereby distorting investment decisions on the part of economic actors, be they corporate managers or, investors. This paper explores the impact of the cost of credit on stock return dynamics in the United Kingdom. More specifically it tests the hypothesis that cheap credit (loose monetary conditions) makes it easier for investors to follow trend chasing strategies, or equivalently positive feedback trading. Such strategies can lead to runaway prices or, devastating crashes. The model employed is based on the assumption that investors are not homogeneous in the sense that some of them follow expected utility maximizing behavior, whereas others follow positive feedback trading strategies. The evidence from the U.K. market suggests that there is positive feedback trading linked to the cost of credit. Specifically, the lowering of the cost of credit in the pursuit of easy monetary policies leads to positive feedback trading and possibly to unsustainable price bubbles.


In this work we consider the task of relaxing the i.i.d. assumption in pattern recognition (or classification), aiming to make existing learning algorithms applicable to a wider range of tasks. Pattern recognition is guessing a discrete label of some object based on a set of given examples (pairs of objects and labels). We consider the case of deterministically defined labels. Traditionally, this task is studied under the assumption that examples are independent and identically distributed. However, it turns out that many results of pattern recognition theory carry over a weaker assumption. Namely, under the assumption of conditional independence and identical distribution of objects, while the only assumption on the distribution of labels is that the rate of occurrence of each label should be above some positive threshold.

We find a broad class of learning algorithms for which estimations of the probability of the classification error achieved under the classical i.i.d. assumption can be generalized to the similar estimates for case of conditionally i.i.d. examples.


Abstract. Thermal expansion of seawater has been one of the most important contributors to global sea level rise (SLR) over the past 100 years. Yet, observational estimates of this volumetric response of the world's oceans to temperature changes are sparse and mostly limited to the ocean's upper 700 m. Furthermore, only a part of the available climate model data is sufficiently diagnosed to complete our quantitative understanding of thermosteric SLR (thSLR). Here, we extend the available set of thSLR diagnostics from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), analyze those model results in order to complement upper-ocean observations and enable the development of surrogate techniques to project thSLR using vertical temperature profile and ocean heat uptake time series. Specifically, based on CMIP5 temperature and salinity data, we provide a compilation of thermal expansion time series that comprise 30 % more simulations than currently published within CMIP5. We find that 21st century thSLR estimates derived solely based on observational estimates from the upper 700 m (2000 m) would have to be multiplied by a factor of 1.39 (1.17) with 90 % uncertainty ranges of 1.24 to 1.58 (1.05 to 1.31) in order to account for thSLR contributions from deeper levels. Half (50 %) of the multi-model total expansion originates from depths below 490 ± 90 m, with the range indicating scenario-to-scenario variations. To support the development of surrogate methods to project thermal expansion, we calibrate two simplified parameterizations against CMIP5 estimates of thSLR: one parameterization is suitable for scenarios where hemispheric ocean temperature profiles are available, the other, where only the total ocean heat uptake is known (goodness of fit: ±5 and ±9 %, respectively).


The environmental effects of freight transportation are closely linked to growth in industrial scale. Focusing on firm or industrial sector activity allows for a clearer understanding of the dynamics underlying this phenomenon. Using a supply chain as the analytical unit, emissions associated with freight are estimated for one corporate supply chain in the North American automobile industry. Examining freight emissions in the context of growth in industrial scale shows that, notwithstanding improvements in regulation, scale effects easily outweigh efficiency gains, arising from technology and regulation. Efforts to address climate change and air pollution through measures focusing on efficiency gains targeting emissions per unit transported will not be successful in reducing overall emissions and the industrial footprint. This reinforces the need to address the three distinct economic problems of efficiency, allocation and scale when moving towards a more ecological economy.


Illustrated with pioneering maps and country analyses by a network of researchers from across the Mediterranean, this book takes a territorial approach as a way toward a shared vision for a truly integrated Euro-Mediterranean region. At a time when the region is undergoing rapid change, the main goal of the book is to challenge misconceptions with common geographic data, on issues such as transport, energy, agriculture and water. The book suggests avenues for Europe to regain a part of the influence it has lost on its Mediterranean neighbourhood and policies common to Europe and its southern neighbours.

The wide range of geographic country analyses, from Morocco to Turkey and including the occupied Palestinian territory and Jordan, are complemented with new maps at the scale of the wider Euro-Mediterranean region. The contributions contend that cross-border cooperation, common transport networks and shared environmental management can foster partnership when diplomatic relations are stalling. The Gibraltar case study shows that while competition is rising between the two sides of the Strait their potential complementarity is also very high. The book calls for a Euro-Mediterranean local data collaborative platform to drive a common 'Neighbourhoods Territorial Agenda' for North–South shared vision and action.

This timely and enlightening book is essential reading for those studying regional, European, Mediterranean and Arab world issues. It will appeal to policy makers and actors involved in cross-border cooperation, territorial development, environment, cultural knowledge and networking.


Parsing spoken input introduces serious problems not present in parsing typed natural language. In particular, indeterminacies and inaccuracies of acoustic recognition must be handled in an integral manner. Many techniques for parsing typed natural language do not adapt well to these extra demands. This paper describes an extension of semantic caseframe parsing to restricted-domain spoken input. The semantic caseframe grammar representation is the same as that used for earlier work on robust parsing of typed input. Due to the uncertainty inherent in speech recognition, the caseframe grammar is applied in a quite different way, emphasizing island growing from caseframe headers. This radical change in application is possible due to the high degree of abstraction in the caseframe representation. The approach presented was tested successfully in a preliminary implementation.


In this article we explore the possibilities of producing, sharing and consuming self-produced media in cafes. We developed a concept for a newsarticle which is produced with very simple and intuitive tools such as pen, article and scissors. The Newsarticle is entirely produced and printed in a cafe by its visitors. We connect the concept to the punk fanzine movement of the late 70s and 80s when the upcoming photocopier and the simplicity of the tools lead to a large amount of DIY (do it yourself) fan magazines so called "fanzines".


This Capstone paper analyzes the City of Manchester, New Hampshire's policy and community impacts when their Towing Snow Emergency procedures are implemented. While the public expects their city streets and sidewalks to be cleared of snow during and following snow storms, the process to do so in the city streets requires vehicles to be re-located from parking on the street. This process requires privately owned vehicles to be ticketed or towed during the worst of weather during the winter. Although the city administration has attempted to avoid having to tow vehicles as the report shows, there is still a historical and current number of vehicles towed during each declared Snow Emergency which is comparatively high to other New Hampshire cities and towns. This Capstone project discovers 'who' is being towed from 'where' and the various reasons 'why' they do not know about declared Snow Emergencies. The paper makes a 'recommendation' based on four 'conclusions' given at the end of the paper from the study. The paper's recommendation is that the Mayor and Board of Aldermen appoint a special study committee to develop mitigating procedures and policies to reduce the number of vehicles towed and the subsequent negative impact on the community.


Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest, both among international lawyers and international relations scholars, in the legitimacy of international institutions. The issue of international legitimacy raises many important questions. Conceptually, what do we mean by "legitimacy" and what is its relation to other concepts such as legality, authority, obedience, power, self-interest, morality and justice? Normatively, what standards should we use to assess the legitimacy of international institutions? Descriptively, what standards do different actors (government officials, international bureaucrats, civil society groups, and business) actually use in assessing the legitimacy of international institutions? Finally, causally, what factors explain the creation of institutions with normative legitimacy, wha factors explain why institutions are accepted as legitimate, and how much practical difference do beliefs about legitimacy make -- for example, for the effectiveness and stability of an institution? This paper surveys the international law and international relations literatures on these issues. Despite many areas of convergence between the IL and IR literatures on legitimacy, there are also important differences. International relations scholars focus on the legitimacy of international institutions rather than of international law. Although many international lawyers share this institutional orientation, some have attempted to develop a more specific theory of legal legitimacy, based on internal qualities of the legal system (for example, whether rules are clear, prospective, and public, and whether they were adopted in conformity with the legal system's secondary rules about norm creation), rather than on the political process by which the rules were produced or their substantive outcomes. This concern with what Lon Fuller called "the internal morality of the law," has no counterpart among political scientists, who have shown little interest in the legitimacy of international law as such.


We present a decision-making experiment, conducted in the field, that explores the extent to which learning in a bandit game predicts technology choice on the farm. We find evidence of heterogeneity of learning in the bandit game, including overweighting of winning draws and Bayesian updating. Our results suggest that learners who overweight recent draws are more likely to have adopted new farm crops within the previous year.


In the years 1970-1977 eutrophication models have been developed and applied for about 15 shallow Danish lakes. The structure of these models are discussed. An example of the calibration of the model on data from Lake Gyrstinge in the Susa catchment area is shown, and the use of the model for calculating ecological consequences of changed hydraulic retention times is demonstrated. The dynamic eutrophication model is compared to the Dillon-Rigler version of the input-output model. Limitations of both types of models are discussed.


Background : Lack of job commitment can have adverse effects on the organization. Psychosocial factors are factors affecting employees' work and job commitment.  Objectives : Aim of this study is relationship between psychosocial factors at work and job commitment in employees of Kerman medical science university in 2014. Design : This study used descriptive correlational and cross-sectional methods. The population of all central office staff Kerman University of Medical Sciences, 400, and sample size using Cochran formula, 147 were selected. Two questionnaires were used in this study: psychosocial factors of work questionnaire with validity 0/95 and reliability 0/72, and job commitment questionnaire with 0/ 93 Validity and Reliability 0/93 s was estimated. For data analysis, the Pearson and Spearman correlation and regression testing through software SPSS edition 22 was used. Results :The findings showed that there is not any relationship between psychosocial fact and all dimensions with job commitment in Kerman University of Medical Sciences. C onclusion s : In this case that psychosocial factors have no relationship with  commitment, it can be argued that moderated factors such as individual attitudes, organizational structure, culture, the university, the workload, so the results have been impressive is that these factors are not controlled. Keywords : psychosocial factors at work, commitment, job commitment


We find ourselves on the cusp of a revolution in the transportation industry, with an expectation for the impending widespread adoption of self-driving capabilities, promising faster and more efficient deliveries, more comfort and better bottom lines. Critical to achieving this vision, however, is large scale deployment of vehicles with self-driving capabilities, or cyber-physical systems (CPSs), into roadways and airways already teeming with other humanand computer-controlled vehicles. This deployment cannot, and indeed should not be acceptable until the safety of the controllers in charge of new CPSs is credibly proven. Already several incidents, some fatal, cast a shadow of doubt onto the public's belief about whether heterogeneously controlled systems can safely function within the same environments. While significant progress has been made in formally verifying the safety of CPS models, we argue that current models often do not accurately represent real systems because of an implicit assumption of perfect knowledge of the real-world. In reality, sensor noise and incomplete or even counterfactual beliefs create ample possibilities for controller decisions that lead to safety violations. We claim that the notion of belief can capture the real life phenomena of noisy observations and faulty human intuition, leading to appropriately informed decisions. A failure to take belief into account results in a critical gap between theoretical and practical safety of CPSs. One such example, and inspiration for this thesis, is the crash of Air France Flight 447, in which the interaction between beliefs, control and physics led an aircraft with no actuator malfunctions from safety to tragedy in under four minutes. We propose to address this safety-critical intersection by developing the technical underpinnings of a change towards belief-triggered controllers, where decisions are grounded in imperfect perceptions of the real world rather than the real world itself. In this proposal, we develop a logic whose semantics are capable of adequately capturing the interleaved changes of both belief and world-state that characterize real-world CPSs: a logic for changing beliefs in a changing world. We prove the soundness of a sequent calculus which captures the fundamental behaviors of doxastic change within the context of CPSs, and propose to generalize it to augment its applicability to more complex scenarios. We further propose to conduct case studies of small scenarios exhibiting safetyviolation symptoms similar to those of AF-447, or fragments of the AF-447 incident itself. The expected outcome of such case studies are formal safety proofs of revised belief-triggered controllers, built from state-triggered controllers whose flaws that led to safety violations on display in real scenarios. These revisions highlight safetycritical changes that can be adopted by legislative, regulation and training authorities to create better policies leading to a safer world. Ultimately, this thesis proposal argues for the necessity of a paradigm shift in which belief becomes a first-class citizen of CPS design, verification and legislation processes, and provides the first technical steps on that long road.


Investigations into probabilistic graphical models for decision making have predominantly centered on influence diagrams (IDs) and decision circuits (DCs) for representation and computation of decision rules that maximize expected utility. Since IDs are typically handcrafted and DCs are compiled from IDs, in this paper we propose an approach to learn the structure and parameters of decision-making problems directly from data. We present a new representation called sum-product-max network (SPMN) that generalizes a sum-product network (SPN) to the class of decision-making problems and whose solution, analogous to DCs, scales linearly in the size of the network. We show that SPMNs may be reduced to DCs linearly and present a first method for learning SPMNs from data. This approach is significant because it facilitates a novel paradigm of tractable decision making driven by data.


A simple physical insight into the origin of the magnetic moment anomaly of electron is presented. This approach is based on the assumption that the electromagnetic mass of the electron due to the electric field generated by electron charge in the exterior of the sphere of radius half of the Compton wavelength of the electron, does not contribute to the magnetic moment of the electron. This explanation is compatible with the well-known quantum electrodynamics approach. A formula is derived, which is similar to that obtained by quantum electrodynamics calculus of one loop contribution to anomalous part of the magnetic moment.


In the past decade we have witnessed remarkable advances associated with the frequency stabilization of the comb present in the output of a mode-locked femtosecond laser. While proving itself to be fantastically successful in its role as the "gears" of optical atomic clocks, the optical frequency comb has further evolved into a valuable tool for a wide range of applications, including ultraviolet and infrared spectroscopy, frequency synthesis, optical and microwave waveform generation, astronomical spectrograph calibration, and attosecond pulse generation, to name a few. In this review, I will trace several of these developments while attempting to offer perspective on the challenges and opportunities for frequency combs that might lie ahead in the next decade.


Background: The U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program provides workers who have lost their jobs due to increased trade with income support and training, job search, and relocation benefits. This paper uses the most recent data collected by the Department of Labor on TAA beneficiaries to provide one of the first evaluations of the effectiveness of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program. Using propensity score matching techniques, we find that the TAA program is of dubious value in terms of helping displaced workers find new, well-paying employment opportunities.


ABSTRACT The authors present their studies in composing elementary wavefunctions of a hydrogen-like atom and identify several relationships between physical phenomena and musical composition that helped guide the process. The hydrogen-like atom accurately captures some of the fundamental quantum mechanical phenomena of nature and supplies the composer with a set of well-defined mathematical constraints that can create a wide variety of complex spatiotemporal patterns. The authors explore the visual appearance of time-dependent combinations of two and three eigenfunctions of an electron with spin in a hydrogen-like atom, highlighting the resulting symmetries and symmetry changes.


Genetic and epigenetic events within a cell which promote a block in normal development or differentiation coupled with unregulated proliferation are hallmarks of neoplastic transformation. Differentiation therapy involves the use of agents with the ability to induce differentiation in cells that have lost this ability, i.e. cancer cells. The promise of differentiation-based therapy as a viable treatment modality is perhaps best characterized by the addition of retinoids in the treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APML) revolutionizing the management of APML and dramatically improving survival. However, interest and application of differentiation-based therapy for the treatment of solid malignancies have lagged due to deficiencies in our understanding of differentiation pathways in solid malignancies. Over the past decade, a differentiation-based developmental model for solid tumors has emerged providing insights into the biology of various solid tumors as well as identification of targetable pathways capable of re-activating blocked terminal differentiation programs. Furthermore, a variety of agents including retinoids, histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACI), PPARγ agonists, and others, currently in use for a variety of malignancies, have been shown to induce differentiation in solid tumors. Herein we discuss the relevancy of differentiation-based therapies in solid tumors, using soft tissue sarcomas (STS) as a biologic and clinical model, and review the preclinical data to support its role as a promising modality of therapy for the treatment of solid tumors.


Abstract—Mobile operators deal with increasing in the data traffic as a critical issue. As a result, a vital responsibility of the operators is to deal with such a trend in order to create added values. This paper addresses a bundling method in a Canvas business model in a WiFi Data Offloading (WDO) strategy by which some elements of the model may be affected. In the proposed method, it is supposed to sell a number of data packages for subscribers in which there are some packages with a free given volume of data-offloaded WiFi complimentary. The paper on hands analyses this method in the views of attractiveness and profitability. The results demonstrate that the quality of implementation of the WDO strongly affects the final result and helps the decision maker to make the best one.


Coupled transport of multicomponent solutes in globally continuous systems is considered in the framework of the Generalized Taylor dispersion theory. Coupling between transports of n different species at the local (or micro-) scale, is considered to result from first-order irreversible surface reactions occurring on the local space boundaries, or from the off-diagonal terms of the solute diffusivity matrices. General expressions are obtained for the global effective (long-time) solute dispersion matrix cofficients : mean global scalar reactivity, velocity vector and dispersivity dyadic. The effect of surface chemical reactions is to partition the matter between different solute constituents. This is manifested in a coupling of the global transport coefficients, which may be mathematically removed by a linear (canonic) transformation applied to the effective global transport equation. This type of coupling does not exist for inert solutes. The second type of the global coupling is represented by the off-diagonal terms of the global velocity and dispersivity matrices. It exists for both reactive and inert solutes. This coupling stems from the convective dispersion process (dependence of the global velocity vector on the local space coordinate). Is shown to be irremovable from the global transport equation by any linear transformation via the solute partition matrix. In the canonic form of the global equation the irremovable coupling is manifested by the traceless parts of the global solute velocity matrix and the global solute dispersivity. The solution scheme is illustrated by calculating the mean global diffusivity of a solute consisting of two components, transport of which is coupled at the microscale via the molecular diffusivity matrix. At the macroscale the coupling is shown to be represented by negative off-diagonal terms of the global diffusivity matrix.


Widespread applications of ZnO nanoparticles (NP) in sun-blocking cosmetic products have raised safety concerns related to their potential transdermal penetration and resultant cytotoxicity. Nonlinear optical microscopy provides means for high-contrast imaging of ZnO NPs lending in vitro and in vivo assessment of the nanoparticle uptake in skin, provided their nonlinear optical properties are characterized. We report on this characterization using ZnO NP commercial product, Zinclear, mean-sized 21 nm. Two-photon action cross-section of this bandgap material (Ebg = 3.37 eV, λbg = 370 nm) measured by two techniques yielded consistent results of ηZnOσZnO(2ph) = 6.2 ± 0.8 μGM at 795 nm, and 32 ± 6 μGM at 770 nm per unit ZnO crystal cell, with the quantum efficiency of ηZnO = (0.9 ± 0.2) %. In order to demonstrate the quantitative imaging, nonlinear optical microscopy images of the excised human skin topically treated with Zinclear were acquired and processed using σZnO(2ph) and ηZnOvalues yielding nanoparticle concentration map in skin. Accumulations of Zinclear ZnO nanoparticles were detected only on the skin surface and in skin folds reaching concentrations of 800 NPs per μm3.


INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: Robot assisted retroperitoneal lymph node dissection (RARPLND) for testicular cancer is emerging as a minimally invasive approach to residual retroperitoneal mass following chemotherapy. This operation is associated with high operative risk due to the intimate involvement of these masses to the great vessels. In particular, dissection superior to the renal vessels can be associated with a higher risk of injury to the thoracic duct and arterial supply to the intestines. Although template dissection robotically has been demonstrated to be feasible and safe, resection of masses outside of a standard template can be difficult due to accessibility and exposure. This unique video demonstrates dissection of retrocrural masses superior to the standard template RARPLND. METHODS: A 37 year old male with a history of metastatic testicular cancer underwent salvage RARPLD for residual retrocrural masses. This complex patient had previously undergone open RPLND at an outside center followed by chemotherapy after initial diagnosis. Subsequently he underwent thoracotomy with mediastinal lymph node dissection with T4/5 laminectomy and vertebral fixation and finally a sternotomy for further mediastinal lymph node dissection. The retrocrural masses were his only remaining disease. This was done with a transabdominal approach and the patient positioned in a left side up modified flank position. This video demonstrates retrocrural dissection posterior to the aorta with division of the crus of the diaphragm. RESULTS: The operation was conducted successfully with no immediate surgical complications. Key structures include the superior mesenteric and celiac arteries were identified and preserved. The left crus of the diaphragm was split in order to expose the retrocrual mass. The second retrocrural mass behind the right crus of the diaphragm was able to be dissected from behind the aorta without repositioning the patient. Total operative time was 4 hours with an estimated blood loss of 25mL. There was no need to reposition the patient and they were discharged the same day of surgery. Pathology confirmed mature teratoma with clear surgical margins. CONCLUSIONS: This video demonstrated feasibility of robot assisted dissection of bilateral retrocrural residual mass with demonstration of important suprarenal anatomical structures. Source of Funding: None


The underground market in people, termed human trafficking, functions by the benign rules of supply and demand--which makes this market particularly grotesque because the commodity is human life and the exchange results in modern-day slavery. By describing trafficking in persons (TIP), the relationship between trafficking and prostitution, and US efforts to end this burgeoning phenomenon, I hope to convey the urgency of the new abolition movement and the limits of the market metaphor in suggesting an appropriate response to global slavery. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year--approximately two-thirds are ensnared in sexual slavery, according to US Government estimates. This number does not begin to include millions more captured in labor and sexual exploitation within their own countries. By definition, human trafficking involves force, fraud, or coercion--legally sanitized words that cover intimidation, kidnapping, beatings, rape, deceit, abandonment, and murder. Victims describe mind-numbing varieties of torture, psychological abuse, and physical deprivation that are at the heart of the trafficking experience. Portraits of Exploitation Those numbers should not obscure the tragedy to each individual. The following are confirmed examples of typical victims, although names have been changed: At 15 Shadir accepted a job that promised good clothes and an education. It proved to be a case of false advertising--a typical ploy of traffickers--for the job actually took him to a rural village in India where he was forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day producing hand-woven carpets. His only payment was two helpings a day of lentils and rice. When Shadir was unable to work, he was severely beaten. Twenty-something Sorina was promised a restaurant job. So she left home, in Belarus, and was flown to a foreign capital where criminals locked her in an apartment and raped her. Not allowing her out of the apartment, they used her as a prostitute. She became so desperate that she jumped from the bathroom window. Still alive, on the sidewalk below, the sex buyers ran down to the street and watched her die. Neary grew up in Cambodia. At 17 her sister arranged for her to be married to a man who, for US$300, sold her to a brothel owner. For five years, Neary was used by up to seven men a day until she contracted HIV and was discarded because she became too sick to make money for the brothel. Neary died of AIDS at 23. Silvia, a single mother living in Sri Lanka, answered an ad for a housekeeping job in Lebanon. Once at the job agency, however. Silvia was put in a line with other female job applicants to be inspected by potential buyers. She was purchased and taken to a fourth-floor condo where she was used as a domestic servant 20 hours a day. Forced to rummage through garbage for her food, treated as a prisoner, and beaten daily, Silvia escaped by jumping from a window. She is now permanently paralyzed. New Forms of Slavery These stories are typical of human trafficking worldwide. Several common themes emerge from these cases. Each victim is manipulated through the threat of violence or its use; each is a displaced person, in foreign circumstances that increase his or her dependence on the slaveholder; each represents a profitable input in an underground market but is also considered, paradoxically, a highly expendable input; and each is, practically, surviving in a reality that evades the intervention of law. As Dr. Kevin Bales writes in Disposable People, the new slavery "is not about owning people in the traditional sense of the old slavery, but about controlling them completely. People become completely disposable tools for making money." The slave victims I have met and the accounts anti-slavery advocates and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) submit to the US State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons confirm these common aspects of human trafficking. …


Received: September 2013, Accepted: January 2013 Background: Noise pollution and workers' noise exposure are common in industrial factories in Iran. In order to reduce this noise pollution, evaluation and investigation of noise emission are both necessary. In this study, different noise mapping methodsare used for determining the distribution of noise. Materials and Methods: In the present study, for preparing a noise map in a hall of an industrial factory, sampling was carried out in 6×6 m grid. After data normalization the variogram was developed. For interpolation of mentioned parameter, kriging and Inverse Distance Weighting methods were used. The best model for interpolation was selected by cross validation and error evaluation methods, such as Route Mean Square Error(RMSE). Results: The results showed that kriging method is better than other methods for prediction of noise property. The noise map was prepared, using the best interpolation method in Geographical Information System environment. Conclusion: Workers in this industrial hall were exposed to noise which is mainly induced by noisy machines. Noise maps which were produced in this study showed the distribution of noise and, also revealed that workers suffer from serious noise pollution.


From a socio-political point of view, the results of the Israeli 2015 elections reflect an ongoing stagnation that is described in detail in this research. This stagnation is often explained by theories of social collective identities. However, none of the theories examines how group identities are created. Consequently, this study explains how different forms of national ethos shape political identities and interweave with them. Relying on a wide set of data from the National Resilience Survey launched by the National Security Studies Center at Haifa University, this research examines the way Israeli political parties differ according to voters' attitudes on matters of national ethos. The findings show how opposing parties correspond with the two distinct forms of national ethos. However, the data also reveals that the ethos clash is not necessarily a dichotomy, but rather a continuum where various parties are located along a spectrum between the poles.


ABSTRACT Although ankle arthrodesis is the reference standard for end‐stage ankle arthritis, loss of mobility and adjacent joint arthritis are consequences that alternatives to arthrodesis attempt to avoid. The purpose of the present study was to report the clinical results of interpositional arthroplasty using acellular dermal matrix in 4 patients (age 32 to 42 years) for the treatment of advanced ankle osteoarthritis. The primary findings included relief of pain, with improvement in tibiotalar joint range of motion from a mean of 16.5° (range 0° to 24°) preoperatively to a mean of 31° (range 25° to 40°) postoperatively. All 4 patients underwent open arthrotomy of the anterior and posterior tibiotalar capsule with plafond exostectomy and debridement of all deleterious tissue within the ankle capsule. The articular surface of the talar dome was denuded down to smooth subchondral bone, and microfracture was performed. Autologous calcaneal bone marrow aspirate was applied, and talar resurfacing was achieved using an acellular dermal matrix. Knotless anchors placed medially and laterally within the anterior and posterior dome were used to affix the dermal matrix. The follow‐up period ranged from 12 to 18 (mean 14) months. The mean pre‐ and 12‐month postoperative Association of Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society hindfoot‐ankle scale scores were 35 and 88.5, respectively. These outcomes suggest that interpositional tibiotalar arthroplasty using an acellular dermal matrix is successful in improving function and range of motion and decreasing pain. As an alternative to tibiotalar arthrodesis, interpositional tibiotalar arthroplasty might be the procedure of choice for young patients with end‐stage ankle arthritis. Longer follow‐up periods, histologic testing, and arthroscopic evaluations would be advantageous to further assess the durability of this procedure. &NA; Level of Clinical Evidence: 4


Between 1625 and 1640, a distinctive cultural awareness of censorship emerged, which ultimately led the Long Parliament to impose drastic changes in press control. The culture of censorship addressed in this study helps to explain the divergent historical interpretations of Caroline censorship as either draconian or benign. Such contradictions transpire because the Caroline regime and its critics employed similar rhetorical strategies that depended on the language of orthodoxy, order, tradition, and law, but to achieve different ends. Building on her two previous studies on press censorship in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Cyndia Clegg scrutinizes all aspects of Caroline print culture: book production in London, the universities, and on the Continent; licensing and authorization practices in both the Stationers' Company and among the ecclesiastical licensers; cases before the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber and the Stationers' Company's Court of Assistants; and trade regulation.


In a context of neo-liberalism, individual responsibility for risk and the protection of individuals from risk has led to risk management and assessment becoming central to the practice of social work. Social workers' involvement with older people tends to occur in crisis situations, with the result that stereotypical understandings of the vulnerability of older people may be reinforced. Drawing on data from interviews and diaries, the article presents a temporal analysis of the ways in which perceptions of risk are presented by older people themselves and the people close to them. It reveals how older people link risk to family, health and social relations, and how they account for their continuing survival. In interviews, older people present their lives as well ordered and organised. By contrast, diaries that detail their everyday activities offer evidence of a more active engagement in risk avoidance, suggesting that living with everyday risk is a salient feature of late life. Integrating these two temporal framings, we argue for a more processual understanding of risk in later life and how it is evaluated and experienced by older people.


President Barack Obama's first trip abroad in his second term took him to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, where he despondently admitted to those waiting for words of encouragement, "It is a hard slog to work through all of these issues." Contrast this gloomy assessment with Obama's optimism on the second day of his first term, when he appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special envoy for Middle East peace, boldly asserting that his administration would "actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians." How is it that Obama's active and aggressive search for progress has become mired in the status quo? Writer and political analyst Josh Ruebner charts Obama's journey from optimism to frustration in the first hard-hitting investigation into why the president failed to make any progress on this critical issue, and how his unwillingness to challenge the Israel lobby has shattered hopes for peace. Written in a clear and accessible style by the advocacy director of a national peace organization and former Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service, "Shattered Hopes" offers an informed history of the Obama administration's policies and maps out a true path forward for the United States to help achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.


The video part of A VS has been finalized, in order to enhance coding performance. AVS video standard adopts some new features for motion estimation, such as variable block size search, multiple reference frames, and motion vector prediction. However, the better performance comes at the price of high computational complexity, data dependence and memory access requirement. These new features also make the hardware implementation more difficult, especially for real-time applications. In this paper, we firstly propose an integer motion estimation algorithm from hardware-oriented viewpoint. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has almost the same performance as the reference software of AVS in SDTV applications. Then the corresponding VLSI architecture is presented. The VLSI architecture has been described in Verilog HDL and synthesized using 0.18 mum Artisan CMOS cells library. The circuit totally costs about 400 K equivalent logic gates. At 108 MHz working frequency, the circuit can meet the real-time requirement for SDTV (720times576, 25 fps) applications, with the search area of 192times192. The co-design obtains better tradeoff between performance and gate-count


Eight wood samples representing six species in two genera of Scytopetalaceae are examined with respect to qualitative and quantitative features. Rhaptopetalum differs from Scytopetalum by having scaJariform perforation plates, fiber-tracheids, longer vessel clements, and a series offeatures probably related to the understory status of Rhaptopetalum is compared to the emergent nature of Scytopetalum. Features ofScytopetalaceae relevant to relationships of the family include (I) scaJariform perforation plates; (2) alternate medium-sized intervascular pits; (3) scalariform vessel-parenchyma pitting; (4) ditfuse-in-aggregates and scanty vasicentric axial parenchyma; (5)axial parenchyma strands subdivided in places into chains of chambered crystals; and (6) rays that are high, wide, heterogeneous, and with erect cells comprising uniseriate rays. These features are compared for a number of families alleged by recent phylogenists to be related to Scytopetalaceae. Scytopetalaceae appears best placed in Theales, nearest to such families as Caryocaraceae, Lecythidaceae, Ochnaceae, Quiinaceae, and Theaceae, although Rosales (e.g., Cunoniaceae) must be cited also on account ofnumerous resemblances in wood anatomy.


Objectives of the long-term financial decisionsThe main goal of the article is to characterise different types of financial decisions taken by companies, with special insight into long-term financial decisions. The article presents main theories of financial decisions, goals of financial management and types of decisions in financial management field. The main measures of the effectiveness of financial decisions are the cost of capital and the degree of leverage. The rate of return on invested capital must be higher than the cost of capital provided. Maximizing business value is the overriding long term goal of the decisions taken by its owners. Decisions made in companies are reviewed by the capital market. We can state that effectiveness of financial capital decisions depends on the efficiency of investment decisions, and vice versa. A basic condition for making rational decisions is a conduct in accordance with the objective function. Therefore, the new economic approach primarily aims to maximize the wealth of the owners, which means the company achieves the optimal level in particular circumstances.


We analyze the effects of euro area monetary policy on three Central and Eastern European non-euro area EU countries: the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. We employ an open economy version of the factor-augmented vector autoregression model (FAVAR) to estimate the cross-border effects of a contractionary monetary policy of the ECB. We find significant and sizeable effects of euro area monetary policy in these small and highly open economies, with economic activity variables being primarily affected through the impact of increased interest rates and reduced foreign demand – thus leading to a contraction of GDP – and exchange rate effects being important for price reactions.


Almost fifty years ago, Grant Gilmore, the co-reporter for Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, recognized the difficulties that intangible assets pose for commercial law, noting that if you can see it, count, weigh and measure it, it exists; if you can't, it doesn't. The original drafters of Article 9 were concerned primarily about facilitating secured transactions in intangible payment rights. Today, the difficulties that Gilmore identified are multiplied by the proliferation of electronic assets, such as Internet domain names and assets in virtual worlds such as Second Life. Although Article 9 of the UCC was revised fairly recently, one area in which it does not adequately cover electronic assets is in its enforcement provisions. The enforcement provisions in Article 9 are based on a false distinction, a distinction based on the tangibility or intangibility of the asset in question. While courts can modernize commercial law through their decisions, courts faced with emerging electronic assets tend to cling to the same false distinction, viewing tangible property as the property paradigm and viewing many intangible assets as either new forms of intellectual property, or worse, as not property at all. This paper explores the problems caused by commercial law's fealty, in the creditors' remedies area, to the notion of tangibility, and suggests that courts and other lawmaking bodies look to general property principles in fashioning rules to govern electronic assets. The article analyzes recent judicial decisions and legislative enactments dealing with electronic assets and identifies some common mistakes that lawmaking institutions make in dealing with these new types of assets. The article concludes by analyzing some older decisions in which courts were forced to refine the concept of possession to account for new types of assets and suggests that courts dealing with electronic assets look to these, and not necessarily to other cases dealing with intangibles, in fashioning rules to govern electronic assets.


Organoids are powerful biomimetic tissue models. Despite their increasing popularity, no existing methods are suitable for cell-type specific analysis of post-translational modification (PTM) signalling networks in organoids. Here we report a multivariate mass cytometry (MC) protocol for single-cell analysis of cell-type specific PTM signalling in organoid monocultures and organoids co-cultured with stromal and immune cells. Thiol-reactive Organoid Barcoding in situ (TOBis) was developed to facilitate high-throughput comparison of signalling networks between organoid cultures. Taken together, our protocol enables high-throughput multivariate PTM signalling analysis of healthy and cancerous organoids at the single-cell level.


A "futile cycle" of transcription allows a pathogenic organism to rapidly respond to conditions favoring sexual reproduction. In some regions of Africa, a leading cause of death from infection is a yeastlike human pathogen called Cryptococcus neoformans. Its virulence is linked to the mating cycle and production of infectious spores. The organism spends the great majority of its time in the asexual state, but one of the stimuli that can lead to mating is contact with pigeon guano, which leads to increased production of the mating pheromone MFα. The protein Vad1 (for virulence-associated DEAD box protein—D-E-A-D being the single-letter code of Asp-Glu-Ala-Asp) regulates virulence in C. neoformans and has sequence similarity to a family of proteins (those related to RCK/p54, an RNA helicase) that recruit mRNAs to P-bodies, where they are degraded. Park et al. screened C. neoformans for mRNAs that immunoprecipitated with Vad1 to identify its possible targets and found that one of the most highly enriched mRNAs encoded MFα1. Further analysis showed that abundance of MFα1 mRNA increased in cells lacking Vad1 and decreased in cells overexpressing Vad1. Thus, the authors estimated that during the normal asexual cycle, the yeast cells produced 17 times more transcripts for mating pheromone than were actually kept in the cell, only to have them rapidly degraded. Such a "futile cycle" provides a mechanism for rapid response to a stimulus. The authors suspected that, as in muscle metabolism (where futile cycles of phosphorylation and dephosphorylation of fructose 6-phosphate allow small changes in rates of phosphorylation and dephosphorylation to rapidly produce fructose 1,6-bisphosphate for gluconeogenesis during muscle contraction), the futile cycle in yeast mRNA production might allow rapid accumulation of transcripts when conditions favor mating. Indeed, for a nonmotile organism subject to breezes or ripples that can immediately disrupt a mating encounter, prompt response to opportunity may be critical. Consistent with this interpretation, constitutively increased expression of Vad1 in yeast induced to mate by incubation in medium supplemented with pigeon guano still allowed mating, but the process was delayed by about 10 hours. Y.-D. Park, J. Panepinto, S. Shin, P. Larsen, S. Giles, P. R. Williamson, Mating pheromone in Cryptococcus neoformans is regulated by a transcriptional/degradative "futile" cycle. J. Biol. Chem. 285, 34746–34756 (2010). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Previously we have shown that the presence of 3-nitrotyrosine within a peptide sequence severely depletes the peptide backbone fragments typically observed following electron capture dissociation (ECD) mass spectrometry. Instead, ECD of nitrated peptides is characterised by abundant losses of small neutrals (hydroxyl radicals, water and ammonia). Here, we investigate the origin of ammonia loss by comparing the ECD behaviour of lysineand arginine-containing nitrated peptides, and their N-acetylated counterparts, and nitrated peptides containing no basic amino acid residues. The results reveal that ammonia loss derives from the N-terminus of the peptides, however, the key finding of this work is the insight provided into the hierarchy of various proposed ECD mechanisms: the Utah-Washington mechanism, the electron predator mechanism and the Oslo mechanism.


EuroAmerican land use and its legacies have transformed forest structure and composition across the United States (US). More accurate reconstructions of historical states are critical to understanding the processes governing past, current, and future forest dynamics. Gridded (8×8km) estimates of pre-settlement (1800s) forests from the upper Midwestern US (Minnesota, Wisconsin, and most of Michigan) using 19th Century Public Land Survey (PLS) records provide relative composition, biomass, stem density, and basal area for 26 tree genera. This mapping is more robust than past efforts, using spatially varying correction factors to accommodate sampling design, azimuthal censoring, and biases in tree selection. We compare pre-settlement to modern forests using Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data, with respect to structural changes and the prevalence of lost forests, pre-settlement forests with no current analogue, and novel forests, modern forests with no past analogs. Differences between PLSS and FIA forests are spatially structured as a result of differences in the underlying ecology and land use impacts in the Upper Midwestern United States. Modern biomass is higher than pre-settlement biomass in the northwest (Minnesota and northeastern Wisconsin, including regions that were historically open savanna), and lower in the east (eastern Wisconsin and Michigan), due to shifts in species composition and, presumably, average stand age. Modern forests are more homogeneous, and ecotonal gradients are more diffuse today than in the past. Novel forest assemblages represent 29% of all FIA cells, while 25% of pre-settlement forests no longer exist in a modern context. Lost forests are centered around the forests of the Tension Zone, particularly in hemlock dominated forests of north-central Wisconsin, and in oak-elm-basswood forests along the forest-prairie boundary in south central Minnesota and eastern Wisconsin. Novel FIA forest assemblages are distributed evenly across the region, but novelty shows a strong relationship to spatial distance from remnant forests in the upper Midwest, with novelty predicted at between 20 to 60km from remnants, depending on historical forest type. The spatial relationships between remnant and novel forests, shifts in ecotone structure and the loss of historic forest types point to significant challenges to land managers if landscape restoration is a priority in the region. The spatial signals of novelty and ecological change also point to potential challenges in using modern spatial distributions of species and communities and their relationship to underlying geophysical and climatic attributes in understanding potential responses to changing climate. The signal of human settlement on modern forests is broad, spatially varying and acts to homogenize modern forests relative to their historic counterparts, with significant implications for future management.


Ice exhibits either ductile or brittle behavior, depending upon the conditions under which it is loaded. Glaciers, for instance, are loaded by gravity, under deviatoric stresses of ~0.1 MPa or lower. At temperatures of interest, they flow through dislocation creep at strain rates of the order of 10−9 s−1 or lower (Patterson 1994). Sheets of sea ice—another terrestrially important ice feature—are loaded predominantly by wind, under global compressive stresses similar in magnitude to the shear stresses within glaciers (Richter-Menge and Elder 1998). These bodies deform through a combination of creep and fracture, the latter process manifested by oriented leads or open cracks and by compressive shear faults which often form as conjugate sets that traverse a large fraction of the Arctic Basin (Kwok 1999; Schulson 2002). The cold, icy crust of Europa, an extraterrestrial feature which may shield an ocean beneath within which a form of life may exist or may once have existed (Reynolds et al. 1987; Hoppa et al. 1999; Pappalardo et al. 1999; Greenberg et al. 2000; Kargel et al. 2000), is loaded by the motion of diurnal tides and by non-synchronous rotation (Greenberg and Weidenschilling 1984). The crust deforms in a brittle manner, as evident from the networks of cracks that lace through it (Greeley et al. 2000).

Of the two kinds of ice deformation, creep is probably the better known by readers of the geological and geophysical literature, and is certainly the more fully explored and better understood. The interested reader may wish to consult a number of excellent reviews of the subject (e.g., see Duval et al. 1983; Weertman 1983; Durham and Stern 2001). Fracture, in comparison, has only recently been systematically examined. The motivation with respect to terrestrial mechanics (Schulson 2001) comes largely …


The study of teachers' beliefs forms part of the process of understanding how teachers conceptualize their work which in turn is important to the understanding of teachers' practices and their decisions in the classroom. A growing body of research argues that teachers' beliefs should be studied within a framework that is aware of the influence of culture. These studies also argue that teachers' beliefs and practices cannot be examined out of context. This shows that the relationship between teachers' beliefs and their practices is complex and context dependent. Some researchers have found consistencies between teachers' beliefs and their practices whilst others have found inconsistencies. The purpose of this paper is to present an argument about the relationship of teachers' beliefs and practices and to find out frameworks of understanding the consistency and inconsistency of this relationship. In this paper, I explore the nature of teachers' beliefs. Then, I discuss how teachers' beliefs have been formed. Also, I will argue the relationship between knowledge and beliefs. Researchers' key vision of the relationship between beliefs and knowledge was that "whether knowledge directs beliefs or beliefs leads to knowledge. I will argue that the relationship among beliefs, knowledge and practices are intertwined. Then, I present sociocultural perspectives to explain the consistency and inconsistency between teachers' beliefs and practices. I will follow these perspectives by presenting sources of forming teacher's beliefs which will lead to a discussion about potentials of changing teachers' beliefs.


This paper studies the risk of "fire sales" in the tri-party repo market, a large and important market where securities dealers find short-term funding for a substantial portion of their own and their clients' assets. We distinguish between fire sales of assets by a dealer who, facing a run that could lead to default, sells securities to generate liquidity, and fire sales of assets by repo investors after a dealer's default has occurred. While fire sales do cause damage no matter how they arise, the tools available to lessen the harm from the two types of fire sales are different. We find that limited tools are available to mitigate the risk of pre-default fire sales and that no established tools currently exist to mitigate the risk of post-default sales.


Intracellular growth of Listeria monocytogenes begins after lysis of the primary vacuole formed upon bacterial entry into a host cell. Listeriolysin O (LLO), a pore-forming hemolysin encoded by hly, is essential for vacuolar lysis in most cell types. However, in human epithelial cells, LLO- mutants are capable of growth, suggesting that gene products other than LLO are capable of mediating escape from a vacuole. In this study, we investigated the role of other bacterial gene products in lysis of the primary vacuole in the human epithelial cell line Henle 407. Double internal in-frame deletion mutants were constructed by introducing a mutated hly allele into strains harboring deletions in either of the phospholipase C (PLC)-encoding genes or a metalloprotease-encoding gene. Bacterial escape from the primary vacuole, intracellular growth, and cell-to-cell spread were evaluated in Henle 407 cells. The results indicated that, in the absence of LLO, the broad-range PLC and the metalloprotease were both required for lysis of the primary vacuole in Henle 407 cells. Although phosphatidylinositol-specific PLC was not required, the efficiency of escape was reduced in an LLO phosphatidylinositol-specific PLC double mutant. These observations suggest that the relative importance of LLO, the phospholipases, and the metalloprotease may vary in different cell types or in cells from different species. In addition, these studies provide insight into the mechanisms of action of virulence determinants involved in the lysis of vacuolar membranes.


INDICATIONS AND USAGE SEROQUEL is indicated for the treatment of schizophrenia. The efficacy of SEROQUEL in schizophrenia was established in short-term (6week) controlled trials of schizophrenic inpatiente (See CUNICA1 PHARMACOLOGY). The effectiveness of SEROQUEL in long-term use, that is, for more than 6 weeks, has not been systematically evaluated in controlled trials. Therefore, the physician who elects to use SEROQUEL for extended periods should periodically re-evaluate the long-term usefulness of the drug for the individual patient CONTRAINDICATIONS SEROQUEL is contraindicated in individuals with a known hypersensitivity to this medication or any of its ingredients. WARNINGS Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome: (NMS) A potentially fatal symptom complex sometimes referred to as Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome (NMS) has been reported in association with administration of antipsychotic drugs. Two possible cases of NMS (2/2387 (0.1%)] have been reported in clinical trials with SEROQUEL. Clinical manifestations of NMS ate hyperpyrexia. muscle rigidity, altered mental status, and evidence of autonomic instability (irregular pulse or blood pressure, tachycardia, diaphoresis, and cardiac dysrhythmia). Additional signs may include elevated creatine phosphokinase, myoglobinuria (rhabdomyolysis) and acute renal failure. The diagnostic evaluation of patients with this syndrome is complicated. In arriving at a diagnosis, it is important to exclude cases where the clinical presentation includes both serious medical illness (e.g.. pneumonia, systemic infection, etc.) and untreated or inadequately treated exirapyramidal signs and symptoms (EPS). Other important considerations in the differential diagnosis include central anticholinergic toxicity, heat stroke, drug fever and primary central nervous system (CNS) pathology. The management of NMS should include: 1) immediate discontinuation of antipsychotic drugs and other drugs not essential to concurrent therapy; 2) intensive symptomatic treatment and medical monitoring; and 3) treatment of any concomitant serious medical problems lor which specific treatments are available. There is no general agreement aoou! specific pharmacological treatment regimens for NMS. II a patient requires antipsychotic drug treatment after recovery from NMS, the potential reintroduction of drug therapy should be carefully considered. The patient should be carefully monitored since recurrences of NMS have been reported. Tardlve Dyskinesla: A syndrome of potentially irreversible, involuntary, dyskinetic movements may develop in patients treated with antipsychotic drugs. Although the prevalence of the syndrome appears to be highest among the elderly, especially elderly women, it is impossible to rely upon prevalence estimates to predict, at the inception of antipsychotic treatment, whicti patients are likely to develop the syndrome, Whettier antipsychotic drug products differ in their potential to cause tardive dyskinesia is unknown. The risk of developing tardive dyskinesia and the likelihood that it will become irreversible are believed to increase as the duration of treatment and the total cumulative dose of antipsychotic drugs administered to the patient increase. However, the syndrome can develop, although much less commonly, after relatively tiriel treatment periods at low doses. There is no known treatment for astiblished cases of tardive dyskinesia, although the syndrome may remit, partially or completely, if antipsychotic treatment is withdrawn. Antipsychotic treatment, itself, however, may suppress (or partially suppress) the signs and symptoms of the syndrome and thereby may possibly mask the underlying process. The effect that symptomatic suppression has upon the long-term course of the syndrome is unknown. Given these considerations, SEROOUEL should be prescribed in a manner that is most likely to minimize the occurrence of tardive dyskinesia. Chronic antipsychotic treatment should generally be reserved for patients who appear to suffer from a chronic illness that (11 is known 10 respond Jo antipsychotic drugs, and (2) for whom alternative, equally effective, but potentially less harmful treatments are not available or appropriate. In patients who do require chronic treatment, the smallest dose and the shortest duration of treatment producing a satisfactory clinical response should be sought. The need lor continued trealmem should be reassessed periodically. II signs and symptoms ol tardive dyskinesia appear in a patient on SEROQUEL, drug discontinuation should be considered. However, some patients may require treatment with SEROQUEL despite the presence of the syndrome. PRECAUTIONS: General


An experimental study to define a practical methodology mat will serve to assess the burning of crude oils on a water sub-layer by means of a bench scale procedure is presented, A modified ASTM-E1321 (LIFT) is combined with flash point measurements to extract fuel properties by means of an existing theoretical formulation. The fuel and water layers are treated as a thermally thick material with combined properties to be able to obtain an analytical solution for an ignition delay time and a flame spread velocity. The experimental results are then correlated to the theoretical formulation to obtain the "fire properties" described in the ASTM-E1321 standard. Five different parameters have been identified that describe the capability of a liquid fuel to sustain a flame: the critical heat flux for ignition, qo.ig, an ignition temperature, Tig, the heat contribution of the flame, φ, a thermal efficiency, a/hT and the thermal inertia, √kρc/a. The methodology is used to evaluate the effect of weathering on the flammability of Alaska North Slope (ANS) and Cook Inlet crude oils. The critical heat flux for ignition was found to be a strong function of the weathering level and a weak function of the fuel layer thickness. The ignition temperature depends on both the weathering level and the fuel layer thickness. Thermal efficiency, heat contribution from the flame and thermal inertia remained invariant with die weathering level and fuel layer thickness.


A secret among staff at nursing homes is that they are often ambivalent about old residents spending more time in watching TV as it is a common cultural perception that it makes the viewer passive. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of reflecting on the TV viewing habits that old people bring with them when they move into geriatric care. The findings are based on a study involving qualitative interviews and observations in two nursing home settings – urban and rural – of 20 persons between 82 and 100 years of age. The results confirm that TV viewing is far from a passive activity. Instead, it contributes to structuring daily life, to satisfying old peoples' needs for reflection and contemplation and to remain socially integrated. As such, TV viewing makes a significant contribution to their capacity to cope with disengagement in old age and can be used as a way of promoting communication and well-being in geriatric care.


To design a high reliability multilevel grid-connected inverter, a high performance simulation methodology based on Saber is proposed. The simulation methodology with optimized simulation speed can simulate the factors that have significant impacts on the stability and performance of the control system, such as digital delay, dead band, and the quantization error. The control algorithm in the simulation methodology is implemented using the C language, which facilitates the future porting to an actual system since most actual digital controllers are programmed in the C language. The modeling of the control system is focused mainly on diode-clamped three-level grid-connected inverters, and simulations for other topologies can be easily built based on this simulation. An example of designing a proportional-resonant (PR) controller with the aid of the simulation is introduced. The integer scaling effect in fixed-point digital signal processors (DSPs) on the control system is demonstrated and the performance of the controller is validated through experiments.