A developmental ecological model was used to identify child attributes, father characteristics, and familial factors associated with multidimensional father involvement with preschool children enrolled in Head Start. The relations between father involvement and children's school readiness were also investigated. Eighty-five African American fathers and father figures were surveyed about their involvement in child care, home-based educational and school-based educational activities. Children's school readiness competencies were evaluated via teacher report or direct assessment. Father involvement in child care and home-based educational activities were predicted by different contextual factors and child attributes. Fathers were more involved in child care activities when they lived in a child's home and when a child was highly emotional. Fathers who perceived the existence of a strong parenting alliance reported more involvement in home-based educational activities. Father involvement in child care and home-based educational activities was associated with higher levels of children's emotion regulation. Findings are consistent with a contextual, multidimensional perspective of African American fathering and hold policy implications for fatherhood initiatives in the early childhood education field. Efforts to increase father involvement may be most effective when addressing the multitude of influences on fathering behavior and focusing on father-child activities that occur outside of the preschool setting.


PURPOSE
It has been stated that midfacial recession is common following immediate implant treatment (IIT). The objective of this systematic review was to assess the frequency of advanced recession (>1 mm) following single IIT.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
An electronic search in Pubmed, Web of Science and the Cochrane Oral Health Group Specialized Trials Register database was performed using a search algorithm. Reference lists of relevant articles were also scrutinized to identify prospective studies on ≥10 implants installed in patients with an intact buccal bone wall and followed for ≥12 months. Study eligibility and quality were independently assessed by two investigators. Primary outcome variables were advanced inter-proximal and midfacial recession defined as soft tissue loss surpassing 1 mm between the pre- or postoperative status and the final re-assessment.

RESULTS
Thirteen of 171 papers were selected. Inter-examiner agreement on eligibility (κ = 0.879; p < 0.001) and quality (κ = 0.788; p < 0.001) was high. Advanced inter-proximal recession was described in 0-27% of the cases. However, these data were only based on two studies. Mean inter-proximal recession was frequently reported (11/13) and was <1 mm in all studies suggesting limited risk for advanced inter-proximal recession. Advanced midfacial recession was described in 0-64% of the cases. Again, few papers provided such information (4/13). Only one of these studies demonstrated high risk for advanced midfacial recession (>10%). This could be attributed to the fact that implants had not been restored with an immediate implant crown, which seems of pivotal importance given the results of a randomized controlled trial reporting on the preserving effect of immediate provisionalization on midfacial mucosa level. There is limited evidence to support an increased risk for midfacial recession following flap surgery and in patients with a thin-scalloped gingival biotype. The impact of implant-specific parameters on inter-proximal and midfacial soft tissue level seems conflicting.

CONCLUSIONS
Soft tissue recession may be expected following IIT and multiple factors seem to contribute to the phenomenon. Taking into account the paucity of papers, patients with an intact buccal bone wall and thick gingival biotype, treated by means of flapless surgery and an immediate implant crown may demonstrate limited risk for advanced midfacial recession (<10%). Proper risk assessment addressing diagnostic, surgical and restorative aspects is mandatory to avoid compromised outcome of IIT.


Salmonella serovars are responsible for a variety of acute and chronic diseases in poultry. Leuconostoc mesenteroides probiotic can exert antimicrobial activity by producing diverse fermentative metabolites with bactericidal or bacteriostatic activities such as lactic and acetic acids, fatty acids, hydrogen peroxide or diacetyl and antimicrobial proteins such as bacteriocins and peptidoglycan hydrolase enzymes. This trial aimed at adding novel therapy against virulent and multidrug resistance avian salmonellosis. The incidence of salmonellae in this study was 20% with high recovery rate from liver followed by yolk sac and the most common serovars were Salmonella Kentukey, Salmonella Infantis and Salmonella Enteritidis whose antibiogram showed high resistance to ampicillin, nalidexic acid, sulphamethoxasole + trimethoprim and tetracyclines. Selected virulent and multidrug resistant Salmonella serovars were exposed to probiotic mixture consisting of L. mesenteroides and zinc nanoparticles in different concentration to detect the antibacterial effect against different Salmonella serovars as novel therapy for avian salmonellosis. This study revealed that green synthesis of zinc nanoparticles by using L. mesenteroides biodegradation 100 nm in size and 10 µg/ml in concentration has potent inhibitory effect against broad range of Salmonella serovars but its salmonicidal effect occurred only at 2000 µg/ml.

 Key words: Broilers chicken, Salmonella, Leuconostoc mesenteroides, zinc nanoparticles.


This paper focused on the role of the low-income urban dwellers in attempting to solve their ever increasing and complicated housing problem which is a bye product of the enabling concept. Hence, this study was carried out with the main aim of determining the housing type and construction method suitable for the low-income urban dwellers in Bayelsa State Nigeria. This will help to reduce the growth of urban sprawl in the city and reduce the housing deficit for the urban poor. The study employed mixed method approach of qualitative and quantitative with the former taken most of the study. Data were collected by in-depth interview, observation, and questionnaire administration using data presentation instruments (sketches and photographs) to enhance the data presentation. Content analysis was used to analysis the qualitative data, while the quantitative data collected was analysed with both descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings revealed that the housing type suitable for the low-income is the non-conventional indigenous housing and development method of incremental housing construction. The recommendations included the adoption of incremental housing construction option, use of local construction methods, improved housing financing, provision of basic services and land availability by government. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sace.19.2.17349


With the rapid evolution of social media, fake news has become a significant social problem, which cannot be addressed in a timely manner using manual investigation. This has motivated numerous studies on automating fake news detection. Most studies explore supervised training models with different modalities (e.g., text, images, and propagation networks) of news records to identify fake news. However, the performance of such techniques generally drops if news records are coming from different domains (e.g., politics, entertainment), especially for domains that are unseen or rarely-seen during training. As motivation, we empirically show that news records from different domains have significantly different word usage and propagation patterns. Furthermore, due to the sheer volume of unlabelled news records, it is challenging to select news records for manual labelling so that the domain-coverage of the labelled dataset is maximised. Hence, this work: (1) proposes a novel framework that jointly preserves domain-specific and cross-domain knowledge in news records to detect fake news from different domains; and (2) introduces an unsupervised technique to select a set of unlabelled informative news records for manual labelling, which can be ultimately used to train a fake news detection model that performs well for many domains while minimizing the labelling cost. Our experiments show that the integration of the proposed fake news model and the selective annotation approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for cross-domain news datasets, while yielding notable improvements for rarely-appearing domains in news datasets.


Chromosome polymorphism in Bulgarian populations of the striped fi eld mouse (Apodemus agrarius Pallas, 1771) has been described. The diploid chromosome number is 2n=48 (NFa = 54). In the karyotype of 3 specimens from the Iskar region, the presence of an additional B chromosome has been established for the fi rst time. The autosomes are 19 acrocentric pairs, continuously decreasing in size, and 4 pairs of be-armed chromosomes, barely distinguishable by size and location of the centromere. Specimens with 3 pairs of metacentric chromosomes were fi rstly described in Bulgaria for the regions of Iskar and Omurtag. The localization of heterochromatin in the centromeric regions of the chromosomes, blocks of heterochromatin of different sizes, as well as intercalated bands, distinguishable in weakly spiraled chromosomes are found. Telomeric heterochromatin is present in the largest autosomal pair and in two of the middle–sized autosomal pairs. The largest and smallest pairs of be-armed chromosomes do not have centromeric heterochromatin, whereas all the other autosomal pairs do. The presence of a NOR in 6 chromosomal pairs is established. Two of the pairs exhibited pericentromeric NORs, whereas the other 4 displayed telomeric NORs. The karyotype analysis illustrates the chromosome and genome polymorphism of A. agrarius in Bulgarian populations.


Descriptions are given of four species of Oreoscolex recently transferred to this genus from Notoscolex. All are shown to have the eight setae per segment and multiple caudal nephrostomes diagnostic of the genus. A key to the five species of Oreoscolex in New South Wales, including the type-species O. imparicystis, is given. Occurrence of a further eight species in Tasmania strongly suggests that the genus will also be found in intervening Victoria.


In this paper, we analyze the performance of Motion JPEG2000 for wireless applications. This new standard is based on intra-frame wavelet coding. Motion JPEG2000 is offering a number of very compelling advantages when compared to state-of-the-art MPEG-4 video coding. Wavelet coding achieves very high coding efficiency. Furthermore, because frames are intra coded, it is very error-resilient. Finally, Motion JPEG2000 requires low complexity, supports very efficient scalability, and introduces minimal coding delay. In this paper, we propose an analysis of the performance of Motion JPEG2000 and a comparison with MPEG-4 in terms of coding efficiency, error resilience and complexity. We present experimental results which show that Motion JPEG2000 outperforms MPEG-4 for wireless applications.


In general, the daily logarithmic returns of individual stocks are not normally distributed. This poses a challenge when trying to compute the most accurate option prices. This thesis investigates three different models for option pricing, The Black Scholes Model (1973), the Merton Jump-Diffusion Model (1975) and the Kou Double-Exponential Jump-Diffusion Model (2002). The jump-diffusion models do not make the same assumption as the Black Scholes model regarding the behavior of the underlying assets' returns; the assumption of normally distributed logarithmic returns. This could make the models more able to produce accurate results. Both the Merton Jump-Diffusion Model and the Kou Double-Exponential JumpDiffusion Model shows promising results, especially when looking at how they are able to reproduce the leptokurtic feature and to some extent the "volatility smile". However, because the observed implied volatility surface is skewed and tends to flatten out for longer maturities, the two models abilities to produce accurate results are reduced. And while visual study reveals some difference between the models, the results are not significant.


Taenia solium cysticercosis infects pigs and humans. Because antiparasitic treatment for human cysticercosis has sub-optimal efficacy, alternative regimes are needed. Seven antiparasitic regimens were tested in 42 naturally infected pigs with cysticercosis, and compared with prednisone alone (n = 6) or no treatment (n = 6). The numbers of viable cysts in muscles and in the brain were examined after necropsy and were significantly decreased in pigs receiving combined albendazole plus praziquantel, albendazole alone, or oxfendazole. Pigs receiving praziquantel alone and nitazoxanide had numerous surviving cysts. Control (untreated) pigs and prednisone-treated pigs had many more viable cysts, suggesting no effect. Combined albendazole plus praziquantel, and oxfendazole, showed a strong cysticidal effect and provide suitable alternative treatments to be further explored for their use for treatment of human neurocysticercosis.


In this paper we investigate the problem of optimising the speed of a vehicle over a fixed path for minimum time traversal. We utilise a change of variables that has been known since the 1980s, although the resulting convexity of the problem was not noted until recently. The contributions of this paper are three fold. First, we extend the convexification of the problem to a more general framework. Second, we identify a wide range of vehicle models and constraints which can be included in this expanded framework. Third, we develop and implement an algorithm that allows these problems to be solved in real time, on embedded systems, with a high degree of accuracy.


Abstract This research examines cross‐party patterns of affective perception of the concepts of 'left' and 'right' by candidates in the 2007 Irish general election. This is done using original data collected in the 2007 Irish module of the Comparative Candidate Studies Project. The authors code candidates' responses to an open‐ended question which asks them to describe what the terms 'left' and 'right' mean to them in contemporary politics as indicating either antipathy, neutrality or sympathy. They present a replicable methodology for measurement of this variable. They then analyse the cross‐party distribution of affective responses in the Irish system in the light of party positioning on the left–right dimension.


According to The Zombie Survival Guide , "extensive research has yet to find an isolated example of Solanum [the virus which causes its victims to become zombies] in nature. Water, air, and soil in all ecosystems, from all parts of the world, have turned up negative, as have their accompanying flora and fauna" ( ZSG 2-3). There is no evidence, then, that Nature was directly responsible for "the creatures that almost caused our extinction" ( World War Z 1). Nevertheless, apart from the facile assertion that everything that happens in the material world may be subsumed beneath the umbrella term 'nature', even a cursory meditation on the significance of the Zombie War cannot fail to point an accusatory finger at the Earth, at Gaia, at Pacha Mama, however you wish to name her. The massive decline in human population, as well as the inevitable concomitant drop in consumption as the fabric of society collapsed, can only have brought relief to an endangered global ecosystem. But perhaps of greatest interest is the metaphorical significance of the zombies. They have an uncanny "ability to hunt, fight, and feed in total darkness" ( ZSG 7). Their intelligence "ranks somewhere beneath that of an insect" ( ZSG 14), they have "no language skills" ( ZSG 16), while it is "instinct brought on by Solanum [which] drives the undead to kill and devour" ( ZSG 18). These are the attributes — both strengths and weaknesses — that humanity habitually bestows on the natural world. This article will explore Max Brooks's zombie fictions as ecocritical allegories of retaliatory Nature.


Arguments defending the poor attention given to those with disabilities in regard to equal opportunities for transportation options tend to center on the high cost of providing or improving facilities. This paper examines the current quality of service on a variety of modes and mode ancillaries, such as stations and stops, as determined by individuals with disabilities. That section is followed by an examination of the measures to improve the quality of service that those with disabilities require. The evaluations are done with four types of disability groups; although the samples of individuals involved are small, the findings are incisive and clear. The improvement measures discussed fall into two categories: those that are costly and those that are more a matter of consideration being given by transportation operators. For example, timetables could be located at a lower level at bus stops to facilitate wheelchair users and stops could be announced as buses approach them. It would appear that in many cases low-cost solutions could be considered marginal changes to work practices or decision making, but the impact they could have on quality of service indicators for those with disabilities, such as accessibility, would be considerable.


The importance of criminal proceedings against traffickers in the fight against human trafficking is clear. However, this paper illustrates that investigations, prosecutions and trials are often extremely long with mixed influences on the victims themselves. The study draws on fieldwork conducted in five European countries: Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Serbia and the Netherlands. A total of 40 interviews were conducted—with 7 trafficked persons and 33 service providers who are in direct contact with victims. Based on these interviews, some general themes were identified for analysis: (1) length of the criminal justice process, (2) secondary victimisation, (3) need for specialist training and interviewing skills for all individuals in contact with trafficked persons, (4) information and trust, (5) protection from intimidation, (6) not just conviction but financial compensation, and finally, (7) the label 'victim' and the wish to testify. Each theme is discussed in detail.


In 2006 Mexico's then-president Felipe Calderón declared war on drug trafficking. The human toll was devastating with the loss of over 95,000 lives and the forced disappearance of more than 27,000 people. In addition, two percent of the Mexican population was displaced with families forced to flee their homes in the face of criminal violence. This article offers an explanation of how death, forced disappearances, persecution and exile are in essence the specific effects of governmentalization of the Mexican state. This governmentalization includes the shared use, by criminals and authorities, of techniques for dominating the population and controlling the conduct of citizens through the practices of death, that is, by employing the politics of death (necropolitics). The article goes on to discuss how the objectives, rationality and governmentalization of the State serve to dislocate human rights discourse in such a way that its truth politics excludes people suffering serious human rights violations, such as Mexican asylum seekers. This is accompanied by a new mode of subjectivity produced by Mexico's politics of death – the Endriago subject – which operates as a hybrid perpetrator of human rights violations.


Nutrition: What Every Parent Needs to Know, 2nd Edition, gives parents all the information and strategies they need to meet the dietary needs of children from birth through adolescence, as well as the facts about standards of weight and height; eating disorders and special dietary needs, alternative diets and supplements; allergies; dealing with outside influences such as grandparents, neighbors, and television; and concerns over food safety. This new second edition provides updated growth charts and the new USDA MyPlate model for healthy eating, as well as updated information on topics such as: BPA, Breastfeeding, Constipation, Fish, mercury, Omega-3 fatty acids, Hiding foods, Obesity, Organic Foods, Physical activity, Picky eaters, Sodium, Vitamins, and much more.


Handbooks of the history of economic thought typically assume a strict fault line between scholastic economics and mercantilism. Historically, the distinction between the two streams of thought was less evident—especially when it came to the style of argumentation, in which there is much continuity between the scholastic doctors and early mercantilists. However, although the latter did not employ the scholastic method, both traditions frequently called upon classical authorities to strengthen their arguments. What is striking is the high regard for Aristotle among the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century English mercantilists. By way of illustration, this article reviews the surprising role of Aristotelian ideas, primarily from the Metaphysics and Physics, within the debate between Gerard Malynes and Edward Misselden on England's economics crisis.


Simple Summary Commercial free-range production has become a significant sector of the fresh egg market due to legislation banning conventional cages and consumer preference for products perceived as welfare friendly, as access to outdoor range can lead to welfare benefits such as greater freedom of movement and enhanced behavioural opportunities. This study investigated dispersal patterns, feather condition and activity of laying hens in three distinct zones of the range area; the apron area near shed; enriched zone 10–50 m from shed; and outer range beyond 50 m, in six flocks of laying hens under commercial free-range conditions varying in size between 4000 and 24,000 hens. Each flock was visited for four days to record number of hens in each zone, their behaviour, feather condition and nearest neighbour distances (NND), as well as record temperature and relative humidity during the visit. Temperature and relative humidity varied across the study period in line with seasonal variations and influenced the use of range with fewer hens out of shed as temperature fell or relative humidity rose. On average, 12.5% of the hens were observed on the range and most of these hens were recorded in the apron zone as hen density decreased rapidly with increasing distance from the shed. Larger flocks appeared to have a lower proportion of hens on range. The hens used the range more in the early morning followed by a progressive decrease through to early afternoon. The NND was greatest in the outer range and decreased towards the shed. Feather condition was generally good and hens observed in the outer range had the best overall feather condition. Standing, pecking, walking and foraging were the most commonly recorded behaviours and of these, standing occurred most in the apron whereas walking and foraging behaviours were recorded most in the outer range. This study supported the findings of previous studies that reported few hens in the range and greater use of areas closer to the shed in free-range flocks. This study suggests that hens in the outer range engaged more in walking and foraging activities and showed signs of better welfare than those closer to the shed. Abstract In this study, the range use and behaviour of laying hens in commercial free-range flocks was explored. Six flocks were each visited on four separate days and data collected from their outdoor area (divided into zones based on distance from shed and available resources). These were: apron (0–10 m from shed normally without cover or other enrichments); enriched belt (10–50 m from shed where resources such as manmade cover, saplings and dust baths were provided); and outer range (beyond 50 m from shed with no cover and mainly grass pasture). Data collection consisted of counting the number of hens in each zone and recording behaviour, feather condition and nearest neighbour distance (NND) of 20 birds per zone on each visit day. In addition, we used techniques derived from ecological surveys to establish four transects perpendicular to the shed, running through the apron, enriched belt and outer range. Number of hens in each 10 m × 10 m quadrat was recorded four times per day as was the temperature and relative humidity of the outer range. On average, 12.5% of hens were found outside. Of these, 5.4% were found in the apron; 4.3% in the enriched zone; and 2.8% were in the outer range. This pattern was supported by data from quadrats, where the density of hens sharply dropped with increasing distance from shed. Consequently, NND was greatest in the outer range, least in the apron and intermediate in the enriched belt. Hens sampled in outer range and enriched belts had better feather condition than those from the apron. Standing, ground pecking, walking and foraging were the most commonly recorded activities with standing and pecking most likely to occur in the apron, and walking and foraging more common in the outer range. Use of the outer range declined with lower temperatures and increasing relative humidity, though use of apron and enriched belt was not affected by variation in these measures. These data support previous findings that outer range areas tend to be under-utilized in commercial free-range flocks and suggest positive relationships between range use, feather condition and increased behavioural opportunities and decline in the use of range in cold and/or damp conditions.


It can be difficult to understand physical measurements (e.g., 28 lb, 600 gallons) that appear in news stories, data reports, and other documents. We develop tools that automatically re-express unfamiliar measurements using the measurements of familiar objects. Our work makes three contributions: (1) we identify effectiveness criteria for objects used in concrete measurement re-expressions; (2) we operationalize these criteria in a scalable method for mining a large dataset of concrete familiar objects with their physical dimensions from Amazon and Wikipedia; and (3) we develop automated concrete re-expression tools that implement three common re-expression strategies (adding familiar context, reunitization and proportional analogy) as energy minimization algorithms. Crowdsourced evaluations of our tools indicate that people find news articles with re-expressions more helpful and re- expressions help them to better estimate new measurements.


Diorite and associated breccia form scattered outcrops on the Marble Hall Fragment, in the vicinity of the town of Marble Hall, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. The diorite (2055.6 ± 3.1 Ma) intruded as sub-horizontal sills in highly deformed and metamorphosed supracrustal rocks of the Transvaal Supergroup. The breccia, which ranges from polymictic to monomictic, consists of angular to sub-rounded fragments of meta-dolomite, chert and adinole, as well as intensely scapolitized Marble Hall diorite and Bushveld B1-type sill rock. Predominantly sodic pargasite constitutes the breccia-fill of the monomictic breccia and represents the fractionated liquid of transitional basalt that crystallized approximately 20% amphibole and 40% plagioclase (An40). The breccia-fill of the polymictic breccia comprises ferroactinolite-albite rock, with minor diopside, calcite, sphene, scapolite, grossular garnet, chalcopyrite and pyrrhotite. Cryptocrystalline silica or calcite is less common as the matrix of the polymicitc breccia. 40Ar/39Ar step-heating analyses on the sodic pargasite yields a plateau age of 2062 ± 8 Ma (55.4% 39Ar; MSWD = 0.28). The bulk of the evidence suggests that the emplacement of the Marble Hall diorite and breccia formation overlap with the B1 sill emplacement. The former rocks may be marginally younger than the Lower Zone of the Bushveld Complex.


Dependability evaluation is playing an increasing role in system and software engineering together with performance evaluation. Performance benchmarks are widely used to evaluate system performance while dependability benchmarks are hardly emerging. A dependability benchmark for operating systems is intended to objectively characterize the operating system's behavior in the presence of faults, through dependability and performance-related measures, obtained by means of controlled experiments. This paper presents a dependability benchmark for general-purpose operating systems and its application to three versions of Windows operating system and four versions of Linux operating system. The benchmark measures are: operating system robustness (as regards possible erroneous inputs provided by the application software to the operating system via the application programming interface), operating system reaction and restart times in the presence of faults. The workload is JVM (Java Virtual Machine), a software layer, on top of the operating system allowing applications in Java language to be platform independent.


Although Evolutionary Computing has already expanded their realms into solving real life problems, there has been significantly less emphasis on their applications towards design of everyday aesthetic objects. Fashion accessories cannot be defined using a single objective fitness function but rather it requires a multi objective fitness function in order to solve this kind of problem. Prior research has used Genetic Algorithms to evolve the design. However, the typical Genetic Algorithm requires a genetic representation of the solution domain and a fitness function to evaluate the solution domain. Therefore, an Interactive Evolution Computing approach or other words as known as aesthetic selection in general is one of the methods of Evolutionary Computing that uses human evaluation. With the addition of multi-objective optimization, the challenge is which optimal decision is to be taken. By implementing a Pareto optimal solution method, the multi-objective approach will not be dominated by any other solution. In the experiments, the tuning parameters are based on the mutation rate and scale factor. Mutation rate had a low value if it was added to the gene, therefore enhancement of the shape mutation was more successful when being multiplied with the scale factor. The results of the experiment produced different shapes and many evolved shapes were successful in the optimization of their shapes. Subsequently, each successfully evolved object from the respective runs was chosen to be fabricated using 3D printing. The results from the human evaluation show that the rating of the physical object dropped compared with the nonphysical object in silico. The shape that was printed was not as smooth as how it appeared in the system. Therefore, the conclusion was that the user tended to give higher ratings to higher number of faces. However because of the low resolution of the available 3D printer, the object that was being printed was not as smooth as in silico. As the result, the human evaluated printed objects' ratings were not as high as the in silico evaluations.


A dominating set $D$ for a graph $G$ is a subset of $V(G)$ such that any vertex not in $D$ has at least one neighbor in $D$. The domination number $\gamma(G)$ is the size of a minimum dominating set in G. Vizing's conjecture from 1968 states that for the Cartesian product of graphs $G$ and $H$, $\gamma(G)\gamma(H) \leq \gamma(G \Box H)$, and Clark and Suen (2000) proved that $\gamma(G)\gamma(H) \leq 2 \gamma(G \Box H)$. In this paper, we modify the approach of Clark and Suen to prove a variety of similar bounds related to total and paired domination, and also extend these bounds to the $n$-Cartesian product of graphs $A^1$ through $A^n$.


In the present study heat and mass transfer in a Metal Organic Vapor Phase Epitaxy reactor AIX-200/4RF-S is addressed to better understand the epitaxial growth of gallium nitride (GaN). Existing knowledge about phenomena occurring in the Metal Organic Vapor Phase Epitaxial (MOVPE) process allows the production of high-quality nitride-based semiconductors. However, MOVPE process parameters can vary in certain ranges. The main goal of this study is the optimization of the process and improvement of the quality of crystal obtained. In order to investigate this subject a series of computer simulations have been performed. Numerical simulations of heat and mass transfer in the GaN epitaxial growth process have been performed to determine temperature distribution and velocity profile over the main growth area for various heating temperatures of reagents. Main heat transfer mechanisms during MOVPE process are convection and radiation. Reactor walls are made of quartz to obtain best temperature distribution over the growth area. The study exhibited that heat and mass distribution over the crystal growth area depends on heating temperature and mass flow rate of the inlet gases. Correlation of modeling results with the experiment will allow us to determine an optimal process temperature for obtaining crystals of the highest quality.


Introduction: Asthma is a chronic inflammatory airway disease characterised by
recurrent symptoms. The available treatment options for the disease to date are
concentrated on symptom control. Treatment responses to most anti-asthma
medications show wide variation among populations and individuals. There is
evidence that genetic variations can affect the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic
effects of medications, hence influencing treatment outcomes. The objective of this
research is to investigate the effect of some common genetic variations in enzymes
and proteins associated with the pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties of
anti-asthma medications.
Method: Observational studies were first carried out to examine plasma levels of
salbutamol enantiomers during disease exacerbation. Animal models were then
employed to study the distribution of salbutamol enantiomers into various tissues and
the role of the organic cation transport (OCT) system. The genetic determinants
(single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the SULT1A3 enzyme) on the
pharmacokinetics of salbutamol enantiomers were investigated with a controlled
clinical study. A retrospective study was employed to investigate the genetic
determinants (microsatellite in ALOX5 and SNPs in ALOX5, LTC4S, LTA4H and
cysLTR1) of treatment outcome (pharmacodynamics) with montelukast therapy. A
comparison study was designed to explore the relationship between genetic variations
(SNPs in activator protein-1 (AP-1) related genes) and refractory asthma, with the
intention to gain more understanding of the role of genetic variations in the
pathophysiology of airway inflammation.
Result: The studies revealed wide variability among individuals in both the
pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic parameters of anti-asthma medications. The
studies observed some relatively high levels (>20 ng/ml) and uneven presentation of
salbutamol enantiomers (R:S ratio of 0.43) among patients who presented at the
emergency department with disease exacerbation. Animal models indicated an
enantioselective uptake and disposition of salbutamol (R:S ratio > 2.9) in cardiac and
skeletal muscle, but the model was unable to demonstrate the role of OCT systems.
The study did not find significant genetic influences in the pharmacokinetic
parameters of (R)- and (S)-salbutamol, mean difference (95%CI) in AUC (0-4h) were
-1.1 (-38 - 36) and -5.8 (-97 - 88) respectively. There was also no significant
relationship found between genetic determinants and the treatment response to
montelukast (p=0.12 for ALOX5 microsatellite, p>0.35 for all SNP determinants).
The study examined patients with refractory asthma and found no significant
differences in genetic determinants at AP-1 related genes (p>0.40) compared to
'regular' asthma.
Discussion: The results suggest that salbutamol enantiomer levels in the circulation
are widely variable between individuals. This work also suggests that there are no
overwhelming pharmacogenetic effects in the anti-asthma medications examined. The
sample size of the studies and the heterogeneous nature of genetic effects should be
taken into consideration in future asthma pharmacogenetic studies.


Spatial forecasting of volcanism and associated hazards in intraplate monogenetic volcanic fields is subject to large uncertainties in both data and models. We demonstrate a novel logistic regression method for mapping phreatomagmatic-magmatic eruption transition susceptibility using near-surface hydrologic, topographic, and geologic data. The method is illustrated on the Auckland volcanic field, the location of New Zealand's largest city, Auckland. Environmental factors examined for possible influence included the thickness of water-saturated and porous sediments, substrate type and geology, vent elevation, and distance from the nearest fault. By comparing these factors with the volumes and styles of past eruption sequences, a location-specific eruption sequence forecasting model was constructed, recognizing that larger and/or longer eruptions are more likely to exhaust vent-area sources of water. Estimating volcanic hazard susceptibility in this way allows more effective planning and improved preeruption preparedness between eruptions and during future volcanic crises.


Article history: Received: June 1, 2016 Received in revised format: November 16, 2016 Accepted: December 12, 2016 Available online: December 14, 2016 Nuclear logging is one of major areas of logging development. This paper presents an empirical investigation to bring the drilling and completion of wells from an ill-defined art to a refined science by using radioactive source to "look and measure" such as formation type, formation dip, porosity, fluid type and numerous other important factors. The initial nuclear logging tools records the radiation emitted by formation as they were crossed by boreholes. Gamma radiation is used in well logging as it is powerful enough to penetrate the formation and steel casing. The radioactive source is reusable so that after engineer finished the job the radioactive source is sent back to bunker. In this case inventory level of radioactive source is relatively high compared with monthly movement and the company must spend large amount of cost just for inventory. After calculating and averaging the monthly movement in 2014 and 2015, we detected a big possibility to cut the inventory level to reduce the inventory cost. © 2017 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


An intensifying and ever widening range of human activity occurs in the area south of the Antarctic Convergence. Amongst its various consequences it is reasonable to see increasing environmental pressures. Whilst not all activity occurring here is subject to particular international legal instruments, most is. A cluster of Antarctic-specific instruments, comprising the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, 1972 Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals (CCAS), 1980 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Protocol), form what is termed 'the Antarctic Treaty System' (ATS) and address a large part of present activity. Whaling and harvesting of Southern blue-fin tuna are regulated under the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) through its International Whaling Commission (IWC), and the 1993 Convention for the Conservation of Southern Blue-fin Tuna (CCSBT) through its Commission respectively, legal instruments that are external to the Antarctic Treaty System. Other high seas activities in the region are subject to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Modern integrated environmental management approaches are largely confined to only two of these six instruments - CCAMLR and the Protocol. The obligation for prior Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), one of the major tools deployed in modern environmental management globally, is confined to the latter. EIA obligations in the Protocol are coupled with the advance notice obligations of Article VII.5.a of the Antarctic Treaty. Although EIA has been applied to national Antarctic programmes and tourism activities, as a matter of state practice this has (drawing on a number of considerations) generally excluded EIA application to any whaling or fishing activities (although there are exceptions in relation to one state). States active in the region, whatever their positions on whaling and the modalities of other marine harvesting, have generally resisted calls to broaden the range of activities subject to EIA. This paper documents the basis for EIA within the Antarctic Treaty System, examines the arguments that have been used to deny its applicability to the wider range of Antarctic activities, enquires into the exceptions, considers the place of EIA in the context of the declaratory positions of Antarctic-active states in relation to ecosystem maintenance and environmental and other use values, and suggests mechanisms whereby some broadening of EIA coverage might be achieved if the political will existed.


The attitude dynamics model for a spacecraft with a variable speed control moment gyroscope (VSCMG) is derived using the principles of variational mechanics. The resulting dynamics model is obtained in the framework of geometric mechanics, relaxing some of the assumptions made in prior literature on control moment gyroscopes (CMGs). These assumptions include symmetry of the rotor and gimbal structure, and no offset between the centers of mass of the gimbal and the rotor. The dynamics equations show the complex nonlinear coupling between the internal degrees-of-freedom associated with the VSCMG and the spacecraft base body's rotational degrees-of-freedom. This dynamics model is then further generalized to include the effects of multiple VSCMGs placed in the spacecraft base body, and sufficient conditions for nonsingular VSCMG configurations are obtained. General ideas on control of the angular momentum of the spacecraft using changes in the momentum variables of a finite number of VSCMGs are provided. A control scheme using a finite number of VSCMGs for attitude stabilization maneuvers in the absence of external torques and when the total angular momentum of the spacecraft is zero is presented. The dynamics model of the spacecraft with a finite number of VSCMGs is then simplified under the assumptions that there is no offset between the centers of mass of the rotor and gimbal, and the rotor is axisymmetric. As an example, the case of three VSCMGs with axisymmetric rotors, placed in a tetrahedron configuration inside the spacecraft, is considered. The control scheme is then numerically implemented using a geometric variational integrator (GVI). Numerical simulation results with zero and nonzero rotor offset between centers of mass of gimbal and rotor are presented.


Qualitative research has extended the boundaries of legitimate knowledge by including the insights of 'subjects', valuing the voices of groups that have been excluded from telling their stories, seeing the complex ways researchers may be positioned in relation to other research participants, and becoming more diverse in their views of validity and reliability. Gitlin argues that these extensions have been a powerful force in furthering a politics of inclusivity within the knowledge production process. While this politic is argued to be important and critical in the development of qualitative methodologies, Gitlin claims it is time to look at what might lie on the other side of a politics of inclusivity. He does so by using an emergent form of inquiry he calls educational poetics. Moving to the borderlands between the educational and aesthetic communities, this political humanist form of inquiry is centered on having commonsense become an object on inquiry with the purpose to fostering relations of freedom.


A business exit is an important stage in entrepreneurship activities. This stage is an
integral part of the entrepreneurial process because it is through this stage that
entrepreneurs leave the business they own and remove themselves from the ownership
and decision structure of their business (DeTienne 2010). Understanding business exits is
important because it provides a foundation from which entrepreneurs can begin in order
to maximise the value of their investment (Petty 1997). Further, it can explain the overall
picture of the entrepreneurship activities by providing knowledge of various processes,
behaviours and trigger factors that may be involved.
Based on an extensive literature review and the collection of empirical evidence, this
study investigates the extent to which a Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) owner's
human capital, entrepreneurial orientation (EO), firm performance and psychological
ownership are related to one's contemplation to exit his or her business. In addition, this
current study of business exit explores whether these factors influence an individual's
intention to exit the business through a process of contemplation. Much of the literature
on business exits have highlighted this phenomenon from the perspective of exit planning
and timing, types of exit strategies or options, and behavioural aspects of business exits
through intentions. However, no studies to date have highlighted or explicitly discussed
what factors may trigger the contemplation of an SME owner to exit his or her business.
Although previous studies have highlighted that certain factors could influence an
owner's intention to exit (DeTienne & Cardon 2010; Leroy et al. 2007), these studies
have not explicitly examined whether there is a prior stage of an exit intention. It is
important that the contemplation of business owners to exit their business be examined
because business exits can be problematic for some entrepreneurs in understanding the
effort and time that they have provided to the business. Further, it is also important to
investigate whether an owner's contemplation to exit influences one's intention to exit
the business since no studies to date have provided a justification to this behavioural
aspect. Therefore, in order to expand the perspective of the business exit literature, this
study investigates the exit contemplation of SME owners in an Indonesian context.


Digital in-line holography and plenoptic photography are two techniques for single-shot, volumetric measurement of 3D particle fields. Here we present a preliminary comparison of the two methods by applying plenoptic imaging to experimental configurations that have been previously investigated with digital in-line holography. These experiments include the tracking of secondary droplets from the impact of a water drop on a thin film of water and tracking of pellets from a shotgun. Both plenoptic imaging and digital in-line holography successfully quantify the 3D nature of these particle fields. This includes measurement of the 3D particle position, individual particle sizes, and three-component velocity vectors. For the initial processing methods presented here, both techniques give out-of-plane positional accuracy of approximately 1-2 particle diameters. For a fixed image sensor, digital holography achieves higher effective in-plane spatial resolutions. However, collimated and coherent illumination makes holography susceptible to image distortion through index of refraction gradients, as demonstrated in the shotgun experiments. On the other hand, plenotpic imaging allows for a simpler experimental configuration. Furthermore, due to the use of diffuse, white-light illumination, plenoptic imaging is less susceptible to image distortion in the shotgun experiments. Additional work is needed to better quantify sources of uncertainty, particularly inmore » the plenoptic experiments, as well as develop data processing methodologies optimized for the plenoptic measurement.« less


A total of 217 bacterial isolates were isolated by an enrichment procedure from
Malaysian soils which had been treated and non-treated with acrylamide. From
the preliminary screening using MTT (3-[4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl]-,5-
diphenyltetrazoliumbromide) assay, 10 bacterial isolates were found to be
capable of utilizing acrylamide as a nitrogen source. Formation of the blue
colour of formazan and high absorbance were the criteria in the selection of
bacteria. These ten isolates were labeled as Isolate 5, 9, 10, 15, 30, 45, 60, 110,
115 and 145. The isolates were subjected to secondary screening using MTT
assay, Direct Plate Count and High Perfomance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC).
From the results obtained, five bacterial isolates, Isolate 9, 10, 15,30 and 60 gave
the highest colony count in CFUI mL and absorbance reading from the MlT
assay. These five bacterial isolates were then selected for further of examined for
their ability to degrade acrylamide by HPLC. Isolate 30 showed the best
degradation of acrylamide with 99.84% degradation after 48 hours incubation in enrichment culture with acrylamide as a substrate at a final concentration of 100
m a . Isolate 60 showed the second highest degradation of acrylamide at
70.53%, followed by Isolate 10 at 50.8% degradation and isolates 15 and 9 at
16.24% and 14.58% respectively. Control without bacteria accounted only 0.16%
acrylamide degradation.
Isolate 30 was selected for optimization of growth media with six different
parameters. These parameters were temperature, pH, different types of carbon
sources, different concentrations of carbon source, different amides as the
substrate and effect of different concentrations of selected amide substrate. From
the results obtained, Isolate 30 showed an optimum growth temperature at 27 " C.
Its highest colony count loglo cfulml was directly proportional to the growth of
bacteria. This isolate showed the highest growth at pH 7.5 where this type of
bacteria grew well near neutrality and slightly alkaline media. For the carbon
sources optimization, glucose was selected due to the high colony count. Isolate
30 was found to grow best at the glucose concentration of 1%. Among the amide
substrates, acrylamide was found to be the best sole nitrogen source which can
support bacterial growth in enrichment cultures and the bacteria showed the
highest colony count when 400 mg/L acrylamide was provided.
From the macroscopic and microscopic observations of Isolate 30, the bacteria
was gram-negative rod, might become differentiated into a convex, pigmented
and relatively opaque centre and an effuse, colourless, almost transparent
periphery with an irregular crenated edge. Biochemical tests using Microbact 24E (12A + 12B) showed that the Isolate 30, which had been isolated from Tanjung
Karang, Selangor gave 99.83% similarity to Serratia marcescens.
Amidase (EC 184.108.40.206) produced by Serratia marcescens strain 30 was partially
purified and characterized. The purification procedure used, including ionexchange
chromatography, M O ~ O - Qs~tro ng-anion exchanger, ultrafiltration and
gel filtration, yielded a partially purified amidase fraction having an overall
purification factor of 13.83 fold and a yield of 48.33%. Indophenol blue method
was used for the amidase assay and arnidase characterization studies was done to
determine the K, and Vmax value, the effect of temperature and pH on amidase
activity and the effect of heavy metals on amidase activity. K, values for
acrylamide were determined by incubating amidase at 50" C with various
concentrations of acrylamide (0.25 to 2 0 M ) in phosphate buffer (50mh4; pH
7.5). By using non-linear regression analysis, the Km and Vmax values were
0.9376mM acrylamide and 60.92 pmol ammonia disappearecUmin respectively.
The amidase exhibited maximal activity at 50" C and pH value at 7.5. The result
of effects of heavy metals on amidase activity showed that AgN03 and CuC12
inhibited amidase activity while HB03 enhanced amidase activity. The enzyme is
a monomer with an apparent molecular weight of 1 1 1 kDa.


Spatial cognition and memory are critical cognitive skills underlying foraging behaviors for all primates. While the emergence of these skills has been the focus of much research on human children, little is known about ontogenetic patterns shaping spatial cognition in other species. Comparative developmental studies of nonhuman apes can illuminate which aspects of human spatial development are shared with other primates, versus which aspects are unique to our lineage. Here we present three studies examining spatial memory development in our closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (P. paniscus). We first compared memory in a naturalistic foraging task where apes had to recall the location of resources hidden in a large outdoor enclosure with a variety of landmarks (Studies 1 and 2). We then compared older apes using a matched memory choice paradigm (Study 3). We found that chimpanzees exhibited more accurate spatial memory than bonobos across contexts, supporting predictions from these species' different feeding ecologies. Furthermore, chimpanzees - but not bonobos - showed developmental improvements in spatial memory, indicating that bonobos exhibit cognitive paedomorphism (delays in developmental timing) in their spatial abilities relative to chimpanzees. Together, these results indicate that the development of spatial memory may differ even between closely related species. Moreover, changes in the spatial domain can emerge during nonhuman ape ontogeny, much like some changes seen in human children.


Pin1 is a peptidyl-prolyl cis-trans isomerase (PPIase) that isomerizes phosphoserine or phosphothreonine residues that are located adjacent to proline residues on proteins, thereby affecting protein catalytic activity or protein-protein interactions. Now, a new function has been identified: Pin1 regulates the turnover of the transcriptional activator β-catenin in cells. Because Pin1 is often overexpressed in cancerous tissue, Ryo et al. used differential display screening to identify genes whose expression is increased by cells overexpressing Pin1 from a plasmid vector. Pin1 increased the expression of several β-catenin-dependent genes. The amount of β-catenin in cells is normally regulated by interactions with the adenomatous polyposis coli protein (APC), which shuttles β-catenin out of the nucleus and targets β-catenin for degradation; APC mutations that prevent the regulation of β-catenin, however, often lead to cancer. The authors found that overexpression of Pin1 led to increased amounts of cellular β-catenin through a mechanism that decreased the turnover of β-catenin. Conversely, in Pin1-deficient mice, amounts of β-catenin were greatly decreased in cells. The binding site of Pin1 on β-catenin was mapped to phosphoSer246, located in a phosphoSer-Pro motif. By binding to this site, Pin1 specifically inhibited APC from binding to β-catenin, suggesting a mechanism by which β-catenin is spared from degradation. Additionally, in the presence of Pin1, β-catenin localizes to the nucleus and presumably transactivates gene expression. Thus, the data suggest a mechanism whereby Pin1 overexpression might lead to increased β-catenin-dependent gene expression resulting in tumorigenesis. A. Ryo, M. Nakamura, G. Wulf, Y.-C. Liou, K. P. Lu, Pin1 regulates turnover and subcellular localization of β-catenin by inhibiting its interaction with APC. Nature Cell Biol. 3, 793-801 (2001). [Online Journal]


We are five early childhood researchers, from across Canada, thrown together amongst a series of alarming discourses, where developmental, economic, and neuroscientific rationales for ECEC drown out alternative theoretical perspectives, as well as personal experience, values, subjective knowledges, and the fierce passion we feel for our work. In the midst of this "throwntogethness" (Massey, 2005), how do we bring our situated knowings and desires to these discursive material relational mashups? How do we engage with the throwntogetherness that is the Canadian ECEC field as we knit together alternative ways of being, doing, and acting, figuring out what resonates in localized situations (Osgood, 2006)? To begin to answer these questions, we think with feminist theory (Bezanson; 2018; Langford et al., 2016; Prentice, 2009); the politics of the event of place, (Massey, 2005) and relational and spatial networked discursive entanglements (Massey, 2005; Nichols et al., 2012; Ingold, 1995; Haraway, 2016) as we untangle three vignettes related to advocating for a competent universal public ECEC system; writing postdevelopmental curriculum frameworks; and weaving productive relationships between university researchers and early childhood practitioners. These vignettes illuminate our struggles to "stay with the trouble," as Haraway (2016) suggests, stubbornly hanging on to the hope of producing new terms of belonging (Burns & Lundh, 2011) as a form of resistance, allowing us to open up spaces to imagine, tell alternative stories (Moss, 2014), and create real change within our local contexts.


Abstract This article discusses different forms of comparisons in development studies and some of the justifications that are used for making them. The main questions I discuss are the following: First, how are comparisons used in development studies? Second, how should comparisons be carried out? I distinguish between two main forms of comparisons. First; there are what I call asymmetrical comparisons, where one compares a case to an exemplar or model. In development studies, this form of comparison usually takes the form of comparing a given phenomenon in the West with instances of the same phenomenon in countries outside the West (the state, the economy, the family structure, etc.). The aim of the comparison is to understand the non-Western case, while the Western case is used as a means to reach such understanding. Second, there are what I call symmetrical comparisons, where the cases compared are given equal treatment, and where the aim of the comparison is to reach a better understanding of all the cases included in the study. The article discusses three different forms of symmetrical comparisons: comparisons-as-quasi-experiments, interpretive comparisons and comparative historical analysis, and concludes that symmetrical comparisons based on comparative historical analysis are the best approach to comparative studies.


BackgroundChemotherapy administration and supportive management for solid tumors is intended to take place in the ambulatory setting, but little is known about why some patients experience treatment-related adverse events so severe as to require acute inpatient care. ObjectiveThe aim of the study was to identify predictors of initial and repeated unplanned hospitalizations and potential financial impact among Medicare patients with early-stage (Stages I–III) colorectal cancer receiving outpatient chemotherapy. MethodsAdvanced statistical modeling was used to analyze a cohort of patients (N = 1,485) from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)-Medicare database diagnosed from 2003 to 2007 with colorectal cancer as their first primary malignancy. Patients were of ages 66 and older at diagnosis, had uninterrupted Medicare Parts A and B coverage with no health maintenance organization component, and received chemotherapy at least one time. ResultsFemale gender, younger age, multiple comorbidities, rural geography, higher high school completion rates, and lower median income per census tract were significant predictors of the likelihood of initial unplanned hospitalizations. Non-White race, receipt of radiation therapy, rural geography, and higher weighted comorbidity scores were factors associated with the number of hospitalizations experienced. The total Medicare charges calculated for these admissions was $38,976,171, with the median charge per admission at $20,412. DiscussionDemographic and clinical factors that form the foundation of work toward development of a risk factor profile for unplanned hospitalization were identified. Further work is needed to incorporate additional clinical data to create a clinically applicable model.


This article examines the "turn to lifestyle" in the longstanding genres of how-to and domestic advice programming, which began in 1994 with the launch of Home & Garden Television (HGTV) and the Food Network. It frames lifestyle's spread across the growing cable television system in the late 1990s and 2000s as the result of industrial conditions that favored the growth and consolidation of cable networks, as well as growing cultural interest in "lifestyle" as a consumerist form of identity. In this context, a turn to lifestyle in programming offered the new networks HGTV and Food Network a way to broaden the appeal of their programs in an increasingly competitive niche cable environment, as well as to secure upscale audiences for advertisers. The article examines a range of HGTV and Food Network programs that utilized lifestyle's logic, including Emeril Live!, Paula's Home Cooking, Barefoot Contessa, Divine Design with Candice Olson, Design on a Dime , and Small Space, Big Style . In such programs, lifestyle became codified in a set of televisual logics that departed from those found on how-to programs: they articulated middle-class fantasies of ordinariness, had an attenuated focus on instruction in favor of the more diffuse and aspirational concept of "inspiration," and posited small-scale domestic gatherings as the ideal mode of social engagement in a period of diminishing wealth and income security.


During the Industrial Revolution technological progress and innovation became the main drivers of economic growth. But why was Britain the technological leader? We argue that one hitherto little recognized British advantage was the supply of highly skilled, mechanically able craftsmen who were able to adapt, implement, improve, and tweak new technologies and who provided the micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative. Using a sample of 759 of these mechanics and engineers, we study the incentives and institutions that facilitated the high rate of inventive activity during the Industrial Revolution. First, apprenticeship was the dominant form of skill formation. Formal education played only a minor role. Second, many skilled workmen relied on secrecy and first-mover advantages to reap the benefits of their innovations. Over 40 percent of the sample here never took out a patent. Third, skilled workmen in Britain often published their work and engaged in debates over contemporary technological and social questions. In short, they were affected by the Enlightenment culture. Finally, patterns differ for the textile sector; therefore, any inferences from textiles about the whole economy are likely to be misleading.


The family house is a distinct and recurrent context for child protagonists in picturebooks by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus. Based on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, which denotes the unity of time and space in a literary work, this article explores how concepts of time and space are depicted in three picturebooks by Dahle and Nyhus that are set within the family house context. The books were all published around the year 2000. Following Bakhtin's understanding that the literary chronotope emerges from real historical time and space, the article illustrates how the family house chronotope in the work of Dahle and Nyhus sheds light on the condition of being a child at the turn of the century. Furthermore, it is suggested that what I will term the Dahle and Nyhus' family house chronotope frames and enables both a vulnerable and strong child, thus reflecting an understanding of childhood in a Scandinavian postmodern context around the year 2000. Keywords:  picturebooks; chronotope; children's spaces; Mikhail Bakhtin; Scandinavian childhood; childhood studies (Published: 13 April 2016) Citation:  Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics, Vol. 7, 2016  http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/blft.v7.26040


Events containing one or more top quarks produced with additional prompt leptons are used to search for new physics within the framework of an effective field theory (EFT). The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 41.5 fb−1 of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13TeV at the LHC, collected by the CMS experiment in 2017. The selected events are required to have either two leptons with the same charge or more than two leptons; jets, including identified bottom quark jets, are also required, and the selected events are divided into categories based on the multiplicities of these objects. Sixteen dimension-six operators that can affect processes involving top quarks produced with additional charged leptons are considered in this analysis. Constructed to target EFT effects directly, the analysis applies a novel approach in which the observed yields are parameterized in terms of the Wilson coefficients (WCs) of the EFT operators. A simultaneous fit of the 16 WCs to the data is performed and two standard deviation confidence intervals for the WCs are extracted; the standard model expectations for the WC values are within these intervals for all of the WCs probed.


Mandarin fruit sugar content can be increased when subjecting the satsuma mandarin tree
(Citrus unshiu MARC. var. satsuma) to moderate water stress by mulching during the period of active
sugar accumulation, thereby fruit quality improvement can be realized. In the frame of the precision
agriculture production system, a non-destructive measuring method development became necessary
based on remote sensing, field spectroscopy and image analysis, to be able to measure the degree
of water stress. Large amount of visual information have been recorded at ground level, in near
infrared, red and green channels by a false color digital camcorder designed specially for remote
sensing applications. A method have been found to be able to calculate the absolute reflection of mandarin leaf surface by comparing leaf reflectance with known reference target reflectance, thereby
established the basis of further studies in this topic. Leaf absolute reflection can be measured
reliably, under variable natural illumination at field conditions. Functional correlation can be searched
between visual information and leaf water potential measured by PMS pressure chamber.


Objective The Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies (SMART) Platforms project seeks to develop a health information technology platform with substitutable applications (apps) constructed around core services. The authors believe this is a promising approach to driving down healthcare costs, supporting standards evolution, accommodating differences in care workflow, fostering competition in the market, and accelerating innovation. Materials and methods The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program, funds the project. The SMART team has focused on enabling the property of substitutability through an app programming interface leveraging web standards, presenting predictable data payloads, and abstracting away many details of enterprise health information technology systems. Containers—health information technology systems, such as electronic health records (EHR), personally controlled health records, and health information exchanges that use the SMART app programming interface or a portion of it—marshal data sources and present data simply, reliably, and consistently to apps. Results The SMART team has completed the first phase of the project (a) defining an app programming interface, (b) developing containers, and (c) producing a set of charter apps that showcase the system capabilities. A focal point of this phase was the SMART Apps Challenge, publicized by the White House, using http://www.challenge.gov website, and generating 15 app submissions with diverse functionality. Conclusion Key strategic decisions must be made about the most effective market for further disseminating SMART: existing market-leading EHR vendors, new entrants into the EHR market, or other stakeholders such as health information exchanges.


Regulatory studies in economics and political science have debated the efficiency and wealth re-distributive potentials of regulations. While Stigler and the Chicago School of economics have focused on the market (informational) efficiency implications of a regulation, political scientists traditionally highlight the wealth re-distributive potentials of a regulation. Unbeknown to many political economists, accounting studies have made significant contributions in terms of documenting the wealth re-distributive potentials of financial accounting standards (e.g., Watts and Zimmerman 1986; Feroz 1987; Ball and Smith 1992; Feroz and Hagerman 1990; and Brown and Feroz 1992). While the focus of these studies have been limited to the immediate claimants to the resources of an entity (managers, shareholders, and bondholders), their potentials for being applied to wider stakeholders such as the citizens and taxpayers is unlimited. Political economists can benefit from these models in their attempts to demonstrate the wealth re-distributive potentials of other regulations.Apart from the issue of allocative efficiency of a regulation which is frequently a black box, there is also the issue of production efficiency implications of a regulation which has not been addressed adequately either in mainstream economics or elsewhere in social science. Accounting (particularly, managerial) data can provide a fertile basis for measuring the production efficiency implications of a regulation (e.g, Feroz, Raab, and Haag 2001; Raab and Feroz 2007; and Feroz, Raab, Ulleberg and Alsharif 2008). Interestingly, this provides another effective way of testing the theories of regulation - a favorite pastime for generations of political economists.


This thesis explores innovation in the public sector at a sectoral-level as there is a perceived need for a more comprehensive public innovation approach – both theoretical and practical – in which the focus is shifted from individual innovations at an organizational level towards innovations at an aggregated level, i.e. system innovation. The purpose is to review the new Norwegian innovation policy for the public sector and subsequently discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the policy. In order to do this, an analytical framework is assembled and applied through a textual analysis of three selected policy documents which constitute the new innovation policy. The analytical framework combines the multi-level perspective from innovation studies with transition management and concepts from the literature on public sector innovation. The key point of the framework is the notion of how co-evolving developments at different levels of aggregation cause societal change. Thus, if one wants to manage system changes in desired directions, this should be done at all of the analytical levels and in the interactions between them. The analysis of the three policy documents shows that there are developments at all of the three analytical levels from a multi-level perspective, which in turn may imply system changes. The operational part of the policy, however, has a slight bias towards facilitating structures on the expense of measures aimed directly at system innovation. The current design of the policy gives the municipalities the role as innovators whereas the national level is given the role merely as a facilitator. As the policy mainly focuses on facilitating innovations at a local level, innovations at a system-level (i.e. the Norwegian public sector as a whole) are not sufficiently addressed in the policy. In turn, this may hamper one of the overall objectives of the policy which is to find solutions across the entire Norwegian public sector. The policy is also believed to have potential. One of the strengths that is pointed to is the promotion of networked governance throughout the policy. Among other things, this approach makes it possible to tap into resources throughout the public sector, as well as from outside the sector, as a wide range of actors (e.g. users or other social groups) is included in the innovation processes under this governance paradigm. Also, networked governance might represent the "next practice" which is called for in the policy.


It was inevitable that with all the changes occurring in the modern sport, there has come a change regarding the involvement of children and young people in high-level and competitive sport. This is a very "hot" emerging issue that has drawn attention, and has sensitized people in the area of sport from all over the world, raising their concerns about the negative effects of intensive training on children and young people. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the various issues emerging from the participation of young people in high-level sport as there are mixed feelings about such involvement in highly competitive high-level sport programs. It actually outlines the basic problems in relation to this issue, suggests points and raises issues upon which discussion could focus. Such programs are widely supported on the one hand, and yet widely criticized on the other. Scientists have identified a variety of serious potential dangers that can emerge, that could definitely lead to deviations from the "Ethics in Sport" and the "Fair play" concepts. It is a very big challenge for sport management that has to be exhaustively examined for the benefit of sport and for the generations to come.


This paper investigates whether rules on attribution of conduct under the Articles on State Responsibility (ASR) and the Articles on the Responsibility of International Organization (ARIO) can be purposefully used to assess and adjudicate issues of shared responsibility. Obviously, co-authorship of an internationally wrongful act (or multiple attribution) is only one of the many potential situations of shared responsibility in international law. Both the ASR and the ARIO clearly recognize the possibility that one wrongful act may determine the responsibility of a plurality of international subjects at the same time. They also contain a clear recognition that states may act jointly, and so may international organizations, or states and international organizations. The paper argues that, despite the many difficulties in reconciling the ASR and ARIO framework with concepts of shared responsibility, in principle there is no logical or legal reason why a given conduct cannot be attributable to one or more states and/or one or more international organizations at the same time. Indeed, multiple attribution is the default position whenever more two or more subjects of international law act together.


Magnesium is a desirable material for light-weight construction due to its low density and high strength-to-weight ratio. The disadvantage of low cold formability may be overcome for sheet production by combining casting and forming within horizontal twin-roll casting (TRC). During this process, the molten alloy is fed between two counter-rotating rolls water cooled from the inside. In this paper, numerical simulations using the commercial CFD software Star-CCM+ are presented. The code provides the model based on an incompressible, steady-state solver for laminar flow. To describe the solidification, an exponential increase in viscosity for decreasing temperature is employed in addition to the fraction-of-solid approach based on a linear equation for the release of latent heat. The counter-rotating rolls are exposed to a constant heat transfer coefficient and specify the characteristic velocity of the case. Using the full domain for the simulation of the TRC process provides asymmetric velocity profiles resulting in asymmetric temperature profiles and thus temperature differences between the two rolls. Symmetric results should not be enforced by using only half domain as the asymmetric profiles evoke recirculation zones differing in size which might influence the solidification rates.


This chapter's objective is to show that finance, marketing and innovation could be considered as factors of competitiveness. Owners of 30 cattle ranches were included in the state surveys, with each ranch having at least 1000 head of cattle. The study was quantitative and used a multiple linear regression model. The results were that the use of financial information, the profitability and funding are components of finance factor. The product and the process innovation are components of innovation factor and the market positioning, the knowledge of the competition and customer satisfaction are components of marketing factor, being the profitability, the market positioning, the customer satisfac tion, the product and the process innovation, relatively more important.


In this paper, we introduce Flashlight interaction, a new approach to light-based interaction between mobile phones and large screens by using the phone camera flashlight. Using a mobile phone as an interaction device with large screens has been explored in various projects. Mobile phones are enhanced with different sensors and provide opportunities to be used as an interaction device with other devices such as a large display. Our approach supports to set up a private-public display setting and provide simple means for interaction without a wireless connectivity. Our user study results indicate that the interaction is easy to perform and understand due to the direct mapping between the phone movement and the response on the screen.


Opportunistic communications have been recently proposed as a key strategy for offloading traffic from 3G/4G cellular networks, which is particularly beneficial in case of crowded areas where many users are interested in similar contents. To conserve energy, duty cycling schemes are typically applied, and therefore contacts between nodes may become intermittent and sporadic also in dense networks. It is thus of paramount importance to accurately tune the duty cycling policy in order to meet energy requirements without compromising the quality of communications. In this paper, building upon a model of duty cycling in opportunistic networks that we have validated in a previous work, we study how to optimise the value of the duty cycle in order to provide probabilistic guarantees on the delay experienced by messages. More specifically, for a broad range of end-to-end delay distributions, we provide closed-form approximated solutions for deriving the optimal duty cycle such that the probability that the delay is smaller than a target value z is greater than or equal to a configurable probability p.


The empowered intentional learner is a starting point towards a grounded theory in information literacy instruction. The authors engage this theory in a critical dialogue with instructional practice, in this instance a for-credit college freshman class built around information literacy concepts. Only through such reflection, where theory informs practice and practice informs theory, is it possible to develop a grounded theory where a less privileged role for the instruction librarian takes a back seat role to the control students should have over their own learning.


Highly pathogenic strains of avian influenza virus (AIV), which are influenza A viruses, cause severe disease in domestic poultry and humans. The objective of this study was to establish a fluorescent quantitative RT-PCR assay for detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (AIV) subtype H5N1. The H5 and N1 subtypespecific probe sets were developed based on avian influenza virus sequences detected in China. Two pairs of primers and two fluorescent probes were strictly designed and optimized in a reaction system. According to the amount of plasmid RNA extracted from H5N1 strains, the standard curve DWQBGWDWQBGW of fluorescent quantitative PCR was drawn and all of the specimens were then tested by means of Real-time PCR. The test of highly pathogenic AIV subtype H5N1 was identified to be specific and its sensitivity level was 102~103 copies/reaction. The standard curve was accomplished at 109~105 DNA copies/reaction. It took only three hours from viral RNA extraction through to completion of the test. The assay was easy to carry out and highly reproducible. In conclusion, fluorescent quantitative PCR, described here, provides a rapid, specific and sensitive method to detect not only the H5 but N1 genes as well.


US consumers eat a lot of beef. The nation's beef cattle production industry is a multi-faceted, complex supply chain which makes it an area rich for discussion about information practices, yet vulnerable to problems such as disease and terrorist attack. This research looks at cattle identification and traceability information resources that are accessible to beef cattle producers through two web channels: the state cooperative Extension website and the state Department of Agriculture website. This is a state by state content analysis of all fifty states to look at the topics, types, formats, quality, and interactivity of the available resources. By merging two information frameworks, one with theoretical attention to components of access to information and one with applied attention to government information valuation measures, the research demonstrates an analysis process that connects state cattle producer demographics for comparison with aspects of the available cattle identification and traceability information from that state. This includes visualizing the nation as a whole and comparing state-based similarities and differences, illuminating areas of strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in contextually congruent information for the producer and stakeholder populations.


Strains carrying ras2318S as their sole RAS gene fail to elicit a transient increase in cAMP levels following addition of glucose to starved cells but maintain normal steady‐state levels of cAMP under a variety of growth conditions. Such strains show extended delays in resuming growth following transition from a quiescent state to glucose‐containing growth media, either in emerging from stationary phase or following inoculation as spores onto fresh media. Otherwise, growth of such strains is indistinguishable from that of RAS2+ strains. ras2318S strains also exhibit a delay in glucose‐stimulated phosphorylation and turnover of fructose‐1,6‐bisphosphatase, a substrate of the cAMP‐dependent protein kinase A (PKA) and a key component of the gluconeogenic branch of the glycolytic pathway. Finally Tpkw strains, which fail to modulate PKA in response to fluctuations in cAMP levels, show the same growth delay phenotypes, as do ras2318S strains. These observations indicate that the glucose‐induced cAMP spike results in a transient activation of PKA, which is required for efficient transition of yeast cells from a quiescent state to resumption of rapid growth. This represents the first demonstration that yeast cells use the Ras pathway to transmit a signal to effect a biological change in response to an upstream stimulus.


Objective: In this paper, child welfare decision-making is critically assessed in relation to Beck's (1992) concept of 'risk society'. Three key decisions made by child welfare workers during the initial investigation are examined in order to illustrate how risk influences the type of investigative approach used, the determinations about child maltreatment, and the services provided to children and families and to link theory with policy and practice. Methods: The three exploratory studies all utilize secondary data from several cycles of the Ontario Incidence Study, which collects information directly from frontline child protection workers about incidence of reported maltreatment. Two studies utilize bivariate and multivariate analyses of maltreatment only investigations and risk only investigations respectively, to explore the profile of children and families investigated for various forms of maltreatment and for risk of future maltreatment where no maltreatment has been reported and to explore factors influencing worker decisions to substantiate maltreatment and risk. The third study utilized Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) analysis in addition to bivariate analyses to examine the decision about the type of response to use. Results: The results indicate that despite child welfare policies introduced over the past 10 years in attempts to balance the focus on risk, the overall rates of substantiated maltreatment and risk only investigations have not changed. The research also revealed that when controlling for multiple factors found in previous studies to influence substantiation decisions, the workers' perception of the future risk of maltreatment emerged as the strongest influence on their decision to substantiate maltreatment. Families investigated for future risk of maltreatment were found to be different in several important ways from families investigated for maltreatment and factors that influenced workers' decision to substantiate risk and maltreatment were also different. Children who were maltreated received fewer services from child welfare and were referred to outside services less frequently than children who had not been maltreated but were perceived to be at future risk of maltreatment. Only 10% of all investigations in Ontario were cases with significant protection concerns yet only 30% of these cases receive a traditional forensic investigation (most receive a customized response intended for less serious cases). Exposure to intimate partner violence was the factor which had the most significant influence on the workers' decision regarding the type of investigation but surprisingly severe physical harm and sexual abuse did not emerge as significant factors. Conclusion: Child protection practice and decision making is complex and risk discourses have had a significant impact on both. Despite policy changes introduced over the past ten years to mediate the negative impact of risk technologies on child welfare decision-making, several risks of risk emerged in the findings including directing attention away from helping children who have already been harmed to a focus on children who are at risk of future maltreatment; contributing to a focus on blaming parents instead of attending to social issues; and reduced opportunities for successful engagement of families. Differential response does not appear to have been successful in addressing the changing needs of families serviced by the Child Welfare system in Ontario. These studies suggest that differential response has not assisted in reducing the number of families subjected to a child welfare investigation nor has it resulted in a tighter more precise classification of reports ensuring that investigations are used when most required. Taken together these studies provide a compelling argument for Ontario to rethink the current approach to both child safety and child and family well-being.


Anthracycline cardiotoxicity has been of clinical concern for more than 3 decades. Many hundreds of papers have been written about this unusual form of toxic cardiomyopathy, and yet, we are still putting pieces of the puzzle together. Our cumulative knowledge helps us to predict the risk of cardiac damage with fair accuracy for most patients, but others demonstrate an unpredictable sensitivity to anthracyclines and suffer devastating consequences. Strategies to prevent anthracycline cardiotoxicity have been developed but are underutilized.


The following index, which incorporates all programs scheduled for the 1985 MLA convention, is designed to help attendees locate meetings by subject. Most of the headings chosen for the index are the obvious ones, reflecting traditional topics of general interest, and have, in many instances, been suggested by the program organizers. While some of the meetings have been crossreferenced, the number and complexity of programs have made it impossible to provide all cross-references. Convention attend ees are therefore advised to scan the entire index when attempting to locate a meeting.


Abstract Our study investigated two co-located learning disability services in Wales. The paper reports the views of professionals who were involved in planning the new services as well as of those who eventually worked in the services. Fourteen professionals from health, social care, voluntary service providers, and advocacy groups were interviewed over an 8-month period. The main focus of the investigation was on problems in establishing the co-located services, what the existing barriers to improved learning disabilities services are and how co-location may address these barriers. Respondents were positive about the dynamism that the service planning phase brought, but there was also a consensus that some aspects of multi-agency work across professional divides were outside the control of the new services. Overall, although there are clear benefits of co-location for professionals, co-locating services largely appear to be a missed opportunity on the way towards more integrated health and social care services in the learning disabilities sector. This raises questions about the usefulness of co-location as part of the integration policy agenda.


AutoCAD 2009 provides all the tools you need to create presentable, usable, printable, and sharable drawings, but its not always easy to figure out which hammer to pick up or which nail to bang on your first try. That's where AutoCAD 2009 For Dummies comes in. It gives you the clear, easy-to-follow guidance you need to take charge of this powerful drafting and design application first time and every time. People like you, who want to get the hang of AutoCAD quickly and without giving yourself a headache, have made previous editions of this book bestsellers! Heres a simple guide to creating complex technical drawings with this complicated program. Moving up from an earlier version? Look for the icons marking the cool new stuff! Youll discover how to: Get going quickly while building proper AutoCAD techniques Make the program work with you Draw and edit objects Zoom and pan for an accurate view Apply text, dimensions, and hatching to clarify your design intent Organize the objects you draw, including properties and files Share work with other CAD users in the office and over the Internet Upgrade smoothly from previous AutoCAD editions Complete with savvy tips on how to avoid AutoCAD errors, a concise list of the differences between AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, and juicy tidbits on how to make the time you spend in AutoCAD more enjoyable, AutoCAD 2009 For Dummies will make you an AutoCAD expert in no time!


Retrieving the full information carried by phase shift keyed (PSK) data streams requires a reference local oscillator (LO). If the receiver utilizes digital signal processing (DSP), a free-running LO can be used, although several benefits can be derived from generating an optical LO that is locked in frequency and phase to the original signal carrier (which is unfortunately suppressed in the PSK data modulation process). Here, we present a new concept of carrier recovery. Using nonlinear optics, we strip the data modulation and derive an error signal proportional to the phase/frequency difference between a free running intradyne LO and the data-stripped signal. After extracting this frequency difference (using slow electronics), we frequency shift the free running LO by this amount, effectively obtaining a homodyne LO. The carrier is recovered to a precision of better than ±0.5 Hz and the method is tested by performing homodyne detection of a 20 Gbaud binary PSK signal.


In this paper point gauge measurements are analyzed as part of a ground truth design to validate satellite retrieval algorithms at the field-of-view spatial level (typically about 20 km). Even in the ideal case the ground and satellite measurements are fundamentally different, since the gauge can sample continuously in time but at a discrete point, while a satellite samples an area average but a snapshot in time. The design consists of comparing a sequence of pairs of measurements taken from the ground and from space. Since real rain is patchy, that is, its probability distribution has large nonzero contributions at zero rain rate, the following ground truth designs are proposed. Design 1 uses all pairs. Design 2 uses the pairs only when the field-of-view satellite average has rain. Design 3 uses the pairs only when the gauge has rain. For the nonwhite noise random field having a mixed distribution, the authors evaluate each design theoretically by deriving the ensemble mean and the mean-square error of differences between the two systems. It is found that design 3 has serious disadvantage as a ground truth design due to its large design bias. It is also shown that there is a relationship between the mean-square error of design 1 and design 2. These results generalize those presented recently by Ha and North for the Bernoulli white noise random field. The strategy developed in this study is applied to a real rain rate field. For the Global Atmospheric Program (GARP) Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE) data, it is found that by combining 50 data pairs (containing rain) of the satellite to the ground site, the expected error can be reduced to about 10% of the standard deviation of the fluctuations of the system alone. For the less realistic case of a white noise random field, the number of data pairs is about 100. Hence, the use of more realistic fields means that only about half as many pairs are needed to detect a 10% bias.


The timing of the commencement of photosynthesis (P*) in spring is an important determinant of growing‐season length and thus of the productivity of boreal forests. Although controlled experiments have shed light on environmental mechanisms triggering release from photoinhibition after winter, quantitative research for trees growing naturally in the field is scarce. In this study, we investigated the environmental cues initiating the spring recovery of boreal coniferous forest ecosystems under field conditions. We used meteorological data and above‐canopy eddy covariance measurements of the net ecosystem CO2 exchange (NEE) from five field stations located in northern and southern Finland, northern and southern Sweden, and central Siberia. The within‐ and intersite variability for P* was large, 30–60 days. Of the different climate variables examined, air temperature emerged as the best predictor for P* in spring. We also found that 'soil thaw', defined as the time when near‐surface soil temperature rapidly increases above 0°C, is not a useful criterion for P*. In one case, photosynthesis commenced 1.5 months before soil temperatures increased significantly above 0°C. At most sites, we were able to determine a threshold for air‐temperature‐related variables, the exceeding of which was required for P*. A 5‐day running‐average temperature (T5) produced the best predictions, but a developmental‐stage model (S) utilizing a modified temperature sum concept also worked well. But for both T5 and S, the threshold values varied from site to site, perhaps reflecting genetic differences among the stands or climate‐induced differences in the physiological state of trees in late winter/early spring. Only at the warmest site, in southern Sweden, could we obtain no threshold values for T5 or S that could predict P* reliably. This suggests that although air temperature appears to be a good predictor for P* at high latitudes, there may be no unifying ecophysiological relationship applicable across the entire boreal zone.


In this paper, we introduce an instructional model for technology-enhanced learning in the framework of a design-oriented pedagogy. The model is based on the collaborative designing of learning objects representing real objects in nature and culture environments. Project-based learning, whole task approach, object-oriented learning, multiple perspectives and semantically rich objects constitute the framework for a collaborative design process to articulate, build and share knowledge constructed in a community of learners, teacher and experts with the support of social media and mobile technologies. The co-development process supported by socially shared tools will provide possibilities for working with knowledge objects related to the physical, conceptual or cultural artefacts, so that the constructed learning objects can serve as starting points for others to adapt, integrate and develop them further to represent the phenomenon in question. In the paper, the theoretical background of the pedagogy, the instructional model designed and the development of the model will be introduced. Four design experiments demonstrate the applicability of the model in different educational contexts.


Tariffs on agricultural products fell sharply in China both prior to, and as a consequence of, China's accession to the WTO. The paper examines the nature of agricultural trade reform in China since 1981, and finds that protection was quite strongly negative for most commodities, and particularly for exported goods, at the beginning of the reforms. Since then, the taxation of agriculture has declined sharply, with the abolition of production quotas and procurement pricing, and reductions in trade distortions for both imported and exported goods. Rural well-being has improved partly because of these reforms, and also because of strengthening of markets, public investment in infrastructure, research and development, health and education, and reductions in barriers to mobility of labor out of agriculture. Many challenges remain in improving rural incomes and reducing rural poverty.


Dual Y shift 30° six-phase motors are expected to be extensively applied in high-power yet energy-effective fields, and a harmonic-suppressing control strategy plays a vital role in extending their prominent features of low losses and ultra-quiet operation. Aiming at the suppression of harmonic voltages, this paper proposes a six-phase space vector pulse width modulation method based on an optimization model, namely OM-SVPWM. First, four adjacent large vectors are employed in each of 12 sectors on a fundamental sub-plane. Second, the optimization model is constructed to intelligently determine activation durations of the four vectors, where its objective function aims to minimize the synthesis result on a harmonic sub-plane, and its constraint condition is that the synthesis result on the fundamental sub-plane satisfies a reference vector. Finally, to meet the real-time requirement, optimum solutions are obtained by using general central path following algorithm (GCPFA). Simulation and experiment results prove that, the OM-SVPWM performs around 37% better than a state-of-the-art competitive SVPWM in terms of harmonics suppression, which promise the proposed OM-SVPWM conforms to the energy-effective direction in actual engineering applications.