INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: Macroplastique (MPQ) is a urethral bulking agent used in the treatment of stress urinary incontinence (SUI) in women with intrinsic sphincter deficiency (ISD). Ghoniem et al showed durability of MPQ success up to 2 years. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the safety and efficacy of MPQ in women with SUI due to ISD who completed a 3 year follow-up in this post market study. METHODS: This is a retrospective review of prospectively collected data of 276 subjects enrolled in a multicenter study between October 2008-August 2017. 70 subjects completed 3 years of follow up. Subjects were treated with up to two MPQ injections and followed at 3,12, 24, and 36 months. Stamey grade (0= continent, 1= incontinence with vigorous activity, 2= incontinence with minimal activity and 3= total incontinence) and I-QoL questionnaire divided into 3 subscales were assessed at baseline, 12, 24,and 36 months post injection. Patient Global Impression of Satisfaction (PGI-S) was assessed at 36 months. Success is defined as improvement to Stamey grade 0 or 1 at 36 months. Safety assessment is reported on serious and non-serious adverse events (AE). Two-sided binomial test was used to test the overall success rate, while linear mixed effect model with patient-level random effect was used to examine longitudinal trends over the 3-year study period. RESULTS: The majority of patients were white with mean age 63.3 years. At 36 months 21/70 (30%) of patients reported Stamey grade 0 and 28/70 (40%) had Stamey grade 1. Overall satisfaction was 68% at 36 months. 27/70 (38.5%) patients report they were very satisfied on PGI-S at 36 months. I-QoL scores and the subscales were significantly improved at 12, 24 and 36 months from baseline (p <0.0001) and remained stable. The composite success rate (QoL, PGI-S and Stamey grade improvement) was 51.4%. Transient dysuria 3.2%, hematuria 6%, pain at the injection site 1.6% and urinary tract infection 2% were the most common AE that occurred within the first 3 months post injection. No serious AE were reported. CONCLUSIONS: At 3 years, MPQ is safe and efficacious for the treatment of SUI secondary to ISD in women. The overall satisfaction is sustained from baseline to 3 years post injection. Source of Funding: Unrestricted grant from Cogentix


This study reviews the Shari'ah ruling on induced abortion via-a-vis the awareness of the Muslim women of the rules. All the four notable schools of Islamic law unanimously agree that induced abortion is ab initio forbidden in Shari'ah except in the situation of a threat to maternal health. Nevertheless, there appears to be a minor divergence of opinions on the stages of the pregnancy when abortion is impermissible. There is also unanimous opinion that induced abortion attracts the penalty of expiation by the emancipation of a female or male slave, or five camels, or the payment of the value and cost to the parent. The study adopts a combined method of  Shari'ah legal approach and empirical approach which includes the use of survey and questionnaire for the collection of data and the use of frequency for the analysis. The  finding shows that although, the majority of Muslims women are aware that Islam discourages induced abortion, they lack awareness of the Shari'ah rule on its penalty. Keywords: Abortion, Shari'ah-Rules, Awareness of Muslim Woman


This chapter examines Article 8 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Unlike most other provisions in the CRPD, there is no mainstreamed equality approach in Article 8. While most CRPD provisions set forth a general duty upon states parties to ensure that persons with disabilities enjoy their human rights on equality of basis with others, Article 8 seems to include a series of obligations which are not necessarily associated with the equality standard. Thus, at first glance, the article might appear as a rather 'decorative' provision among many other relevant rights recognition statements. However, a closer look at the rationale and legal implication lets us understand the importance of this provision in building the groundwork for the paradigm shift. Without social awareness among the list of purposes underlying the CRPD, most of its provisions might end up wholly moot.


Lifeguards play an important role in the security and safety of those they are hired to protect. A performance issue may arise if they succumb to circumstances that cause them to become physically or psychologically compromised. Dehydration is one issue that can result in decreased levels of workplace performance and pose personal health risks. Certified lifeguards 15 years old and older were tested for urine specific gravity (USG) to determine their place within the dehydration spec- trum. Participants (N = 55) were recruited from seven test sites offering a variety of designs (indoor/outdoor, traditional/waterpark) and classifications (private, semipublic, public). Testing involved the collection of a urine specimen from participants and immediate recording of specific gravity using a reagent test strip by researchers. A brief survey to collect demographic information from subjects was also administered. The majority of participants were found to reside along the dehydration spectrum (USG ≥ 1.015), several showing results toward the severe end of the scale. The sample provided adequate demographic variability among males and females and facility classification types. No statistically significant differences were found between the demographic variables and USG scores of subjects. Since the majority of lifeguards in the sample showed some level of dehydration, this indicated a need for more information concerning lifeguards and dehydration. Despite the lack of statistically significant differences among the demographic factors within this sample, future studies should incorporate other behavioral factors and dehydration testing methods to investigate the mechanisms for preventing dehydration as well as its impact on lifeguarding performance.


A comprehensive evaluation of energy balance closure is performed across 22 sites and 50 site-years in FLUXNET, a network of eddy covariance sites measuring long-term carbon and energy fluxes in contrasting ecosystems and climates. Energy balance closure was evaluated by statistical regression of turbulent energy fluxes (sensible and latent heat (LE)) against available energy (net radiation, less the energy stored) and by solving for the energy balance ratio, the ratio of turbulent energy fluxes to available energy. These methods indicate a general lack of closure at most sites, with a mean imbalance in the order of 20%. The imbalance was prevalent in all measured vegetation types and in climates ranging from Mediterranean to temperate and arctic. There were no clear differences between sites using open and closed path infrared gas analyzers. At a majority of sites closure improved with turbulent intensity (friction velocity), but lack of total closure was still prevalent under most conditions. The imbalance was greatest during nocturnal periods. The results suggest that estimates of the scalar turbulent fluxes of sensible and LE are underestimated and/or that available energy is overestimated. The implications on interpreting long-term CO2 fluxes at FLUXNET sites depends on whether the imbalance results primarily from general errors associated ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-510-642-2874; fax: +1-510-643-5098. E-mail address: firstname.lastname@example.com (D. Baldocchi). 0168-1923/02/$ – see front matter. Published by Elsevier Science B.V. PII: S0168-1923(02)00109-0 224 K. Wilson et al. / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 113 (2002) 223–243 with the eddy covariance technique or from errors in calculating the available energy terms. Although it was not entirely possible to critically evaluate all the possible sources of the imbalance, circumstantial evidence suggested a link between the imbalance and CO 2 fluxes. For a given value of photosynthetically active radiation, the magnitude of CO 2 uptake was less when the energy imbalance was greater. Similarly, respiration (estimated by nocturnal CO 2 release to the atmosphere) was significantly less when the energy imbalance was greater. Published by Elsevier Science B.V.


Loss-of-function by means of RNA interference in cultured human cells enables rapid pathway dissection on a genome-scale. Improved siRNA design and key validation protocols are required to eliminate falsely identified phenotypes resulting from potential off-target consequences. Here, we demonstrate a validation strategy involving several steps for verifying cell death phenotypes revealed during loss-of-function screening. First, from a set of 45 novel human genes we identified gene candidates that, when silenced, induce apoptosis in cultured HeLa cells. For those candidates, we performed more extensive validation with multiple effective siRNAs. In addition, we designed rescue experiments involving candidate genes delivered exogenously and containing silent mutations in the siRNA target regions. Rescue of the observed knockdown phenotype demonstrated an original and more stringent validation of the siRNA's selectivity and the phenotype specificity for the target gene. As a result, our data reveals an anti-apoptotic function for novel human breast adenocarcinoma marker BC-2, adding new depth to BC-2′s description as a putative tumor marker involved in cancer related pathways.


In terms of overcoming the global downturn, innovative business strategy has three major dimensions namely, 'Innovative Promotional Practices', 'Social and Organizational welfare', and 'Ethical behavior'. Fortunately most strategic dimensions in business and management are measurable so as to facilitate development ratings in order to compare and highlight the different levels of overcoming the global downturn. My research paper on the role of innovative business strategy in overcoming the recession and succeeding in the postrecessionary period basically focus on the different categorical elements of business strategies and its direct or indirect impact on the medium and small scale organizations. For the better understanding of the term 'INNOVATION' I have carried out a letter by letter scrutinization of this golden term. It goes like this: I-Ideas N-New Plan or Design N-Noticeable changes O-Optimum change valuation V-Variety A-Adaptation to the New Environment/New Business T-Thought Process for Planned Changes I-Ideological Developments in Business O-Optimization of the changes N-Numero Uno (How Innovation helps in Securing the topmost position). In order to understand the impact of innovative business strategies n combating the downturn I have formulated four important and innovative strategies. These strategies are: 1. HBS Strategy (Holistic Business Strategy). 2. PBS Strategy (Polymorphic Business Strategy). 3. GBS Strategy (Green Business Strategy). 4. CCBS Strategy. (Country-club Business Strategy). By following these innovative strategies an enterprise can reach the zeniths of success and successfully combat the global downturn.


This study produces a technical and economic analysis of a farmfed biogas plant that utilizes cow manure to produce electricity and heat via combined heat and power unit. The electricity generated is directly injected into the grid while heat is used within the biogas plant. The biogas system design was done depending on number of cows in the farm, which denotes the amount of manure available as feedstock. The economic performance of the proposed biogas plant was evaluated using various economic indicators. The levelized cost of electricity and the avoided greenhouse gas emissions were calculated too. The preliminary design and economic feasibility results proved the profitability of the manure-based biogas systems on wide range of farm sizes. The net present values of a 100-cow, 500-cow, 1,000-cow, 1,500-cow and 2,000-cow farms were all positive. The internal rate of return values were 11%, 12%, 13%, 16% and 17%, respectively, and the levelized cost of electricity values were 0.071, 0.069, 0.064, 0.055 and 0.055 JOD/kWh, respectively. The study also produced a design for a centralized anaerobic digestion plant depending on Jordan resources. The government role in promoting biogas-based electricity was discussed too.


A process evaluation was applied to the development and implementation of a receptive music therapy tool, with a view to promoting evidence-based practice via clear linkage from theory to practice. This music tool was required for a research project in the noisy emergency department (ED) of a large urban hospital. The process evaluation focuses on questions about the suitability, planning, application, and effectiveness of this tool used within the research project protocol. The music tool intervention was applied to fifteen selected patients who received a choice of four genre-based relaxation playlists (GRP) over a two-hour period via headphones and MP3 players. The process evaluation method utilised data sources including key informant interactive interviews, observational data, reflective practices, patient feedback and an independent music review. Responses from patients (aged 23-91 years) indicated that most patients listened to multiple genres and most patients (n=14) indicated that the music made them feel better, thereby indicating suitability and effectiveness. Independent music reviewers confirmed that the music playlists contained relaxing musical elements, based on established music therapy criteria. This project was innovative in clearly documenting a music tool development process (GRP) and in turn applying a process evaluation to systematically review both the development and implementation of the tool. In doing so, linkage from theory to practice was established, contributing to understandings about music for relaxation in healthcare. (author abstract)


Existing 3D-aware image synthesis approaches mainly focus on generating a single canonical object and show limited capacity in composing a complex scene containing a variety of objects. This work presents DisCoScene: a 3D-aware generative model for high-quality and controllable scene synthesis. The key ingredient of our method is a very abstract object-level representation (i.e., 3D bounding boxes without semantic annotation) as the scene layout prior, which is simple to obtain, general to describe various scene contents, and yet informative to disentangle objects and background. Moreover, it serves as an intuitive user control for scene editing. Based on such a prior, the proposed model spatially disentangles the whole scene into object-centric generative radiance fields by learning on only 2D images with the global-local discrimination. Our model obtains the generation fidelity and editing flexibility of individual objects while being able to efficiently compose objects and the background into a complete scene. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on many scene datasets, including the challenging Waymo outdoor dataset. Project page can be found here.


The representations of the articulators involved in human speech production are organized somatotopically in primary motor cortex. The neural representation of the larynx, however, remains debated. Both a dorsal and a ventral larynx representation have been previously described. It is unknown, however, whether both representations are located in primary motor cortex. Here, we mapped the motor representations of the human larynx using fMRI and characterized the cortical microstructure underlying the activated regions. We isolated brain activity related to laryngeal activity during vocalization while controlling for breathing. We also mapped the articulators (the lips and tongue) and the hand area. We found two separate activations during vocalization – a dorsal and a ventral larynx representation. Structural and quantitative neuroimaging revealed that myelin content and cortical thickness underlying the dorsal, but not the ventral larynx representation, are similar to those of other primary motor representations. This finding confirms that the dorsal larynx representation is located in primary motor cortex and that the ventral one is not. We further speculate that the location of the ventral larynx representation is in premotor cortex, as seen in other primates. It remains unclear, however, whether and how these two representations differentially contribute to laryngeal motor control.


Integrating disaster resilience into education is a key factor for reducing the adverse impact of future disasters. This paper in this context presents the methodology of developing an innovative professional doctoral programme (DProf) that integrates professional and academic knowledge in the built environment to enhance societal resilience to disasters. The DProf programme addresses the career needs of practicing professionals, particularly those in, or who aspire to, senior positions within the construction industry and caters for the researching professional. In developing the DProf programme, a detailed market needs analysis for built environment stakeholders to increase societal resilience to disasters was conducted capturing inter-disciplinary needs across a range of stakeholders and countries. A series of semi-structured interviews on current and emerging market needs with members of six built environment related stakeholders, namely, local and national governments; community; NGOs, INGOs and other international agencies; academia and research organisations; and private sector facilitated the aforementioned analysis. Qualitative data analysis techniques were employed in analysing the interview data. The findings of the interviews revealed the current and emerging needs and skills of the six stakeholders related to built environment professionals towards enhancing social, economic, technological, environmental and institutional dimensions of disaster resilience of societies. These findings were used to develop the appropriate learning outcomes and the content of taught and research components of the DProf programme.


The main contribution of this paper is an exact common subexpression elimination algorithm for the optimum sharing of partial terms in multiple constant multiplications (MCMs). We model this problem as a Boolean network that covers all possible partial terms that may be used to generate the set of coefficients in the MCM instance. We cast this problem into a 0-1 integer linear programming (ILP) by requiring that the single output of this network is asserted while minimizing the number of gates representing operations in the MCM implementation that evaluate to one. A satisfiability (SAT)-based 0-1 ILP solver is used to obtain the exact solution. We argue that for many real problems, the size of the problem is within the capabilities of current SAT solvers. Because performance is often a primary design parameter, we describe how this algorithm can be modified to target the minimum area solution under a user-specified delay constraint. Additionally, we propose an approximate algorithm based on the exact approach with extremely competitive results. We have applied these algorithms on the design of digital filters and present a comprehensive set of results that evaluate ours and existing approximation schemes against exact solutions under different number representations and using different SAT solvers.


Cogent objections to explaining mental phenomena solely in terms of the known components of the brain indicate that new ways of confronting the problem may be needed. The approach taken here is to consider whether physical processes could endow the brain with something unexpected, elusive to detection, and "mindful." This article presents two mechanisms that deserve scrutiny. One or the other may transform energy from the body's 310 K thermal background into a brainwide microcosm of localized, spinning quanta that are stable and immune to absorption—a highly versatile microcosm with perhaps 10 24–10 26 massless components. Logic suggests these energy structures exist and are the ultimate psychophysical nexus. Essentially, they are proposed to generate highly variable levels and states of supraphysical consciousness fields into the virtual emptiness of the brain region. (Recall that all matter is 99.99+% empty space.) These fields are attributed an inherently protean, manifold character and the ability to superimpose network-wide into a single ultracomplex field. When these and other postulates are then added to what is known about the brain's involvement in cognition, they provide a coherent framework for understanding the genesis of the conscious mind, its continuity as a relatively autonomous, higher-level system, its content and processes, and its ability to exert volitional controls. The basics of these proposals are testable in described ways. Are the conscious states we experience ultimately made up of complexes of fundamental elements? Is there, say, a mental analogue of the quark? — Colin McGinn (1993)


This essay uses the method of historiographical criticism to reexamine the frameworks used to research the relationship between apocalypse and violence. Its focus is the presentation of Anabaptist rule at Munster in the mid-1530s. New religions scholars and historians alike often cite this case as evidence of how millenarian prophecy can lead believers to violent actions. The essay demonstrates that this view is based largely on anti-Anabaptist and anti-sectarian propaganda that has its origins in the medieval and early modern eras. Partly because of the popularity of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), which translated older polemical interpretations of religious outsiders into a modern scholarly form, hostile assumptions about Anabaptist violence have found their way into academic debates today. The essay shows that the distorting effects of these kinds of assumptions are not limited at all to the case of Anabaptist Munster, but in fact shape unhelpfully the way scholars conceptualize more generally the relationship between dissenting "sects" and established "churches." "Thinking outside the cages" of polemically derived conceptualizations can form the basis for cross-disciplinary research on believers under siege.


PDS 70 is a unique system in which two protoplanets, PDS 70 b and c, have been discovered within the dust-depleted cavity of their disk, at ∼22 and 34 au, respectively, by direct imaging at infrared wavelengths. Subsequent detection of the planets in the Hα line indicates that they are still accreting material through circumplanetary disks. In this Letter, we present new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the dust continuum emission at 855 μm at high angular resolution (∼20 mas, 2.3 au) that aim to resolve the circumplanetary disks and constrain their dust masses. Our observations confirm the presence of a compact source of emission co-located with PDS 70 c, spatially separated from the circumstellar disk and less extended than ∼1.2 au in radius, a value close to the expected truncation radius of the circumplanetary disk at a third of the Hill radius. The emission around PDS 70 c has a peak intensity of ∼86 ± 16 μJy beam−1, which corresponds to a dust mass of ∼0.031 M ⊕ or ∼0.007 M ⊕, assuming that it is only constituted of 1 μm or 1 mm sized grains, respectively. We also detect extended, low surface brightness continuum emission within the cavity near PDS 70 b. We observe an optically thin inner disk within 18 au of the star with an emission that could result from small micron-sized grains transported from the outer disk through the orbits of b and c. In addition, we find that the outer disk resolves into a narrow and bright ring with a faint inner shoulder.


It is accepted that the treatment of fidelity rebates is one of the most controversial topics in European Union competition law. It remains an outstanding issue despite the clear position of the Court of Justice in both the Intel and Post Danmark II judgments to depart from the strict form-based approach and to endorse an approach based on an evaluation of the possible anticompetitive effects of fidelity rebates. In particular, it remains unclear whether a price-cost test should be deployed. The conditions when a price-cost test should be applied to fidelity rebates as opposed to alternative approaches is a central issue in recent US case law of fidelity rebates and associated scholarly debate. This article examines the academic debate in the US and compares the treatment of fidelity rebates on both sides of the Atlantic in an attempt to clarify under which circumstances a price-cost test should be used as a tool to determine the anticompetitive effects of fidelity rebates and how this clarification can be translated into concrete lessons for European case law. It reveals that the economic theory of raising rival's cost explains that the assessment of a strategy to exclude an as efficient competitor does not require a price-cost test.


We present a distributed system, Dott, for approximately solving the Trav-eling Salesman Problem (TSP) based on the Teamwork method. So-calledexperts and specialists work independently and in parallel for given time pe-riods. For TSP, specialists are tour construction algorithms and experts usemodified genetic algorithms in which after each application of a genetic operatorthe resulting tour is locally optimized before it is added to the population. Aftera given time period the work of each expert and specialist is judged by a referee.A new start population, including selected individuals from each expert and spe-cialist, is generated by the supervisor, based on the judgments of the referees.Our system is able to find better tours than each of the experts or specialistsworking alone. Also results comparable to those of single runs can be found muchfaster by a team.


Under the rapid development of electronics and computer science in the last years, cameras have become omnipresent nowadays, to such extent that almost everybody is able to carry one at all times embedded into their cellular phone. What makes cameras specially appealing for us is their ability to quickly capture a lot of information of the environment encoded in one image or video, allowing us to immortalize special moments inour life or share reliable visual information of the environment with other persons. However, while the task ofextracting the information from an image may by trivial for us, in the case of computers complex algorithmswith a high computational burden are required to transform a raw image into useful information. In this sense, the same rapid development in computer science that allowed the widespread of cameras has enabled also the possibility of real-time application of previously practically infeasible algorithms. Among the current fields of research in the computer vision community, this thesis is specially concerned in metric localisation and mapping algorithms. These algorithms are a key component in many practical applications such as robot navigation, augmented reality or reconstructing 3D models of the environment. The goal of this thesis  is to delve into visual localisation and mapping from vision, paying special attention to conventional and unconventional cameras which can be easily worn or handled by a human. In this thesis I contribute in the following aspects of the visual odometry and SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) pipeline: - Generalised Monocular SLAM for catadioptric central cameras - Resolution of the scale problem in monocular vision - Dense RGB-D odometry - Robust place recognition - Pose-graph optimisation


In this work, we investigate the effect of thermal treatment on CeO2 films fabricated by using atomic layer deposition (ALD) on titanium nitride (TiN) or on silicon (Si) substrates. In particular, we report on the structural, chemical and morphological properties of 25 nm thick ceria oxide with particular attention to the interface with the substrate. The annealing treatments have been performed in situ during the acquisition of X-Ray diffraction patterns to monitor the structural changes in the film. We find that ceria film is thermally stable up to annealing temperatures of 900 °C required for the complete crystallization. When ceria is deposited on TiN, the temperature has to be limited to 600 °C due to the thermal instability of the underlying TiN substrate with a broadening of the interface, while there are no changes detected inside the CeO2 films. As-deposited CeO2 films show a cubic fluorite polycrystalline structure with texturing. Further, after annealing at 900 °C an increase of grain dimensions and an enhanced preferential (200) orientation are evidenced. These findings are a strong indication that the texturing is an intrinsic property of the system more than a metastable condition due to the ALD deposition process. This result is interpreted in the light of the contributions of different energy components (surface energy and elastic modulus) which act dependently on the substrate properties, such as its nature and structure.


ABSTRACT Background: An extensive and international evidence base positions professional learning communities (PLCs) as an effective continued professional development (CPD) mechanism that can impact on teachers' practices and, in turn, students' learning. The landscape of teacher PLCs is continuously developing; notably through teachers' uses of social media. Yet, there is limited robust evidence identifying the characteristics of social media PLCs that impact on teachers' learning and practice. Purpose: This exploratory study examined the characteristics of a specific Twitter-based professional learning community – #pechat. The research questions were: (i) what is the nature of a Twitter-based professional learning community? and (ii) what characteristics of a Twitter-based professional learning community develop learning and practice? Methods: Data were generated from 901 tweets between 100 participants; and 18 in-depth semi-structured elicitation interviews with participants and moderators of the Twitter-based professional learning community. Data were analysed through a process of deliberation, and a relativist approach informed quality. Findings: Two themes are reported to explain the nature of the Twitter-based professional learning community and the different types of characteristics of #pechat that developed learning and practice. The first theme engagement shows how different participants of #pechat engaged with discussions and how moderators played a key role in facilitating discussions between participants. The second theme shared practices shows how discussions between participants of #pechat led to the development of new practices that some teachers were able to use to accomplish particular objectives in their physical education lessons. Conclusion: The analysis of the data provided evidence to suggest that #pechat is a PLC and is representative of an established group of practitioners. These characteristics should be considered in the design of future online professional development experiences. Facilitator or moderator training could support the development of social media based PLCs that subsequently and positively impact on teachers' practices.


This article provides a necessary complement to Bergkvist and Rossiter's (2007) article on single-item measures. The new study tests Rossiter's (2002) claim in his C-OAR-SE procedure for scale development that "one good item" (meaning the most content-valid item) must be chosen for the single-item measure. The study demonstrates, for measures of Attitude towards the Ad (A Ad ) and Attitude towards the Brand (A Brand ), that predictive validity differs according to which particular single item is chosen from typical sets of multiple items used to measure these constructs. Generally, there is only one suitable item for measuring these "doubly concrete" constructs, and this item can be identified a priori by expert judgment of item content in relation to the conceptual definition of the construct. The "one good item" recommendation can be extended to the measurement of first-order components of "abstract" constructs, because first-order components must be doubly concrete. The "one good item" recommendation therefore applies to the measurement of all constructs because all measures either are, or are aggregations of, single items.


PURPOSE
Infancy is a critical time for the prevention of obesity and establishment of healthy behaviors such as physical activity that help to control weight. A limited amount of research has examined if factors related to infant physical activity vary by infant weight status. Therefore, the purpose of this mixed methods triangulation study was to examine differences in motor development, the home environment, and infant-parent play behaviors as well as to explore how parents promote active play opportunities with normal weight infants (NWIs) and overweight infants (OWIs).

DESIGN AND METHODS
We used a mixed methods triangulated approach to combine quantitative and qualitative data strands to examine variables associated with active play in normal weight (n = 16) and overweight (n = 11) infants. Data were analyzed using a two-tailed Mann-Whitney U nonparametric test and a summative content analysis approach.

RESULTS
Although there were no differences in infants' motor development and parent play behaviors based on infant weight, several other differences were found. OWIs had less access to materials that stimulate locomotor movement. Further, parents of OWIs more often reported utilizing cognitive play strategies in comparison to parents of NWIs who more often reported using physical play strategies. Parents felt they were the greatest influence on their child's activity regardless of infant size. Importantly, all parents desired more specific guidelines on how to encourage active play and preferred this information was delivered by their healthcare provider.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS
To meet parents' desires and potentially improve infants' developmental outcomes through the establishment of healthy physical activity behaviors, pediatric nurses could provide more specific guidance on providing active opportunities for infants.


Background National guidelines in most countries set screening intervals for diabetic retinopathy (DR) that are insufficiently informed by contemporary incidence rates. This has unspecified implications for interval disease risks (IDs) of referable DR, disparities in ID between groups or individuals, time spent in referable state before screening (sojourn time), and workload. We explored the effect of various screening schedules on these outcomes and developed an open-access interactive policy tool informed by contemporary DR incidence rates. Methods and findings Scottish Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Programme data from 1 January 2007 to 31 December 2016 were linked to diabetes registry data. This yielded 128,606 screening examinations in people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) and 1,384,360 examinations in people with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Among those with T1D, 47% of those without and 44% of those with referable DR were female, mean diabetes duration was 21 and 23 years, respectively, and mean age was 26 and 24 years, respectively. Among those with T2D, 44% of those without and 42% of those with referable DR were female, mean diabetes duration was 9 and 14 years, respectively, and mean age was 58 and 52 years, respectively. Individual probability of developing referable DR was estimated using a generalised linear model and was used to calculate the intervals needed to achieve various IDs across prior grade strata, or at the individual level, and the resultant workload and sojourn time. The current policy in Scotland—screening people with no or mild disease annually and moderate disease every 6 months—yielded large differences in ID by prior grade (13.2%, 3.6%, and 0.6% annually for moderate, mild, and no prior DR strata, respectively, in T1D) and diabetes type (2.4% in T1D and 0.6% in T2D overall). Maintaining these overall risks but equalising risk across prior grade strata would require extremely short intervals in those with moderate DR (1–2 months) and very long intervals in those with no prior DR (35–47 months), with little change in workload or average sojourn time. Changing to intervals of 12, 9, and 3 months in T1D and to 24, 9, and 3 months in T2D for no, mild, and moderate DR strata, respectively, would substantially reduce disparity in ID across strata and between diabetes types whilst reducing workload by 26% and increasing sojourn time by 2.3 months. Including clinical risk factor data gave a small but significant increment in prediction of referable DR beyond grade (increase in C-statistic of 0.013 in T1D and 0.016 in T2D, both p < 0.001). However, using this model to derive personalised intervals did not have substantial workload or sojourn time benefits over stratum-specific intervals. The main limitation is that the results are pertinent only to countries that share broadly similar rates of retinal disease and risk factor distributions to Scotland. Conclusions Changing current policies could reduce disparities in ID and achieve substantial reductions in workload within the range of IDs likely to be deemed acceptable. Our tool should facilitate more rational policy setting for screening.


Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems are composed of two elements: a toxic protein and an antitoxin which is either an RNA (type I and III) or a protein (type II). Type II systems are abundant in bacterial genomes in which they move via horizontal gene transfer. They are generally composed of two genes organized in an operon, encoding a toxin and a labile antitoxin. When carried by mobile genetic elements, these small modules contribute to their stability by a phenomenon denoted as addiction. Recently, we developed a bioinformatics procedure that, along with experimental validation, allowed the identification of nine novel toxin super-families. Here, considering that some toxin super-families exhibit dramatic sequence diversity but similar structure, bioinformatics tools were used to predict tertiary structures of novel toxins. Seven of the nine novel super-families did not show any structural homology with known toxins, indicating that combination of sequence similarity and three-dimensional structure prediction allows a consistent classification. Interestingly, the novel super-families are translation inhibitors similar to the majority of known toxins indicating that this activity might have been selected rather than more detrimental traits such as DNA-gyrase inhibitors, which are very toxic for cells.


During July 2009, a one-month measurement campaign was performed in the megacity of Paris. Amongst other measurement platforms, three stationary sites distributed over an area of 40 km in diameter in the greater Paris region enabled a detailed characterization of the aerosol particle and gas phase. Simulation results from the FLEXPART dispersion model were used to distinguish between different types of air masses sampled. It was found that the origin of air masses had a large influence on measured mass concentrations of the secondary species particulate sulphate, nitrate, ammonium, and oxygenated organic aerosol measured with the Aerodyne aerosol mass spectrometer in the submicron particle size range: particularly high concentrations of these species (about 4 µg m-3, 2 µg m-3, 2 µg m-3, and 7 µg m-3, respectively) were measured when aged material was advected from continental Europe, while for air masses originating from the Atlantic, much lower mass concentrations of these species were observed (about 1 µg m-3, 0.2 µg m-3, 0.4 µg m-3, and 1-3 µg m-3, respectively). For the primary emission tracers hydrocarbon-like organic aerosol, black carbon, and NOx it was found that apart from diurnal source strength variations and proximity to emission sources, local meteorology had the largest influence on measured concentrations, with higher wind speeds leading to larger dilution and therefore smaller measured concentrations. Also the shape of particle size distributions was affected by wind speed and air mass origin. Quasi-Lagrangian measurements performed under connected flow conditions between the three stationary sites were used to estimate the influence of the Paris emission plume onto its surroundings, which was found to be rather small. Rough estimates for the impact of the Paris emission plume on the suburban areas can be inferred from these measurements: Volume mixing ratios of 1-14 ppb of NOx, and upper limits for mass concentrations of about 1.5 µg m-3 of black carbon and of about 3 µg m-3 of hydrocarbon-like organic aerosol can be deduced which originate from both, local emissions and the overall Paris emission plume. The secondary aerosol particle phase species were found to be not significantly influenced by the Paris megacity, indicating their regional origin. The submicron aerosol mass concentrations of particulate sulphate, nitrate, and ammonium measured during time periods when air masses were advected from eastern central Europe were found to be similar to what has been found from other measurement campaigns in Paris and south-central France for this type of air mass origin, indicating that the results presented here are also more generally valid. © 2013 Author(s).


In times of unprecedented environmental crisis, which disrupt traditional ways of conducting research and force us to rethink our purpose in the humanities, creative practitioners have the imperative and skillset to make an essential contribution. This article is a multi-perspectival exploration of environmental communication, which draws from concepts in many fields including media communication and the environmental humanities, but is grounded in creative practice as research. It offers insights and examples gained through the author's direct participation in several types of environmental communication over ten years in different settings: from embedded production in alternative media to environmentally focused research projects that utilise creative and participatory action research methods. Environmental communication can include, but must also go beyond, 'messaging'; there is a need to recognise the intrinsic value of processes such as creativity, dialogue and participation, and to work for more intangible successes such as enhanced networks and civic participation. This article also counteracts the frustrating tendency in academic culture to generalise art and media forms as part of the same vague entity, either in service of impact and engagement or as too 'mysterious' to deconstruct'. This can reveal a limiting disconnect with creative processes, and lead to weak design – and poor understanding – of research projects with creative components. Furthermore, paying attention to the specific processes and characteristics of various art and media forms is an essential part of a general vigilance in foregrounding issues of power, voice, and language in practice. This is not an argument that all research should be practice-based. Ideally, environmental communication could be practiced in a mutually enriching intellectual circuit with more traditional research, but to achieve this we need better acts of translation between theory and practice.


BACKGROUND & AIMS
Tissue recruitment of dendritic cells (DCs) is essential for antigen presentation. This study aimed to examine cellular and molecular mechanisms for DC recruitment to the liver.

METHODS
Purified rat DCs were injected into circulation and their traffics were analyzed in normal and Kupffer cell-depleted rats by intravital confocal microscopy and immunohistology. Affinities of DCs to sinusoidal cells were examined by a cell-binding assay. DC precursor recruitment was induced by particulate injection.

RESULTS
Both DC precursors and DCs at the antigen-transporting stage could be recruited to the liver, and their majority initially showed a selective binding to Kupffer cells. In the Kupffer cell-depleted rats, DCs could neither be recruited to the liver nor adhere to sinusoidal walls. Pretreatment with varied monosaccharides showed that sugar residues consisting of N-acetylgalactosamine were necessary for this binding. The binding was calcium-dependent, implying the C-type lectin involvement. Furthermore, DCs could endocytose N-acetylgalactosamine polymers in a receptor-specific manner.

CONCLUSIONS
The DC-Kupffer cell binding through N-acetylgalactosamine-specific C-type lectin-like receptors is crucial for DC recruitment to the liver. Rat DCs at least partly possess receptors for endocytosis of galactosylated antigens. These DC receptors as well as Kupffer cell lectins are presumably responsible for this binding.


Foraging profitability can be strongly affected by the size structure of different prey, so that predator distributions are not a simple function of total prey biomass. For a bottom-feeding avian predator, the surf scoter Melanitta perspicillata, we assessed effects of prey size and other prey attributes on seasonal shifts in scoter use of 2 major foraging habitats in Puget Sound, Washington, USA. During early winter, many thousands of scoters fed at an unvegetated site where profitable prey appeared limited to mussels Mytilus trossulus of smaller sizes (2 to 30 mm) despite their much lower biomass relative to larger mussels and several other prey types. Accordingly, scoter numbers decreased at that site as small mussels declined over winter. During pre-migratory fattening in spring and feather molt in summer, >8000 surf scoters aggregated at a seagrass site where they fed mainly on epifaunal crustaceans (50 to 73%) and gastropods (12 to 27%). Body sizes of most crustacean prey had increased substantially since winter. Thus, prey size had opposite effects on the profitability of unvegetated habitats that provide mainly mussels (smaller items likely reduce shell processing costs) versus seagrass crustaceans (larger items are likely more visible and yield greater energy per prey item, although relative mobility of prey can alter their value). Total prey biomass, and prey distributions relative to water and sediment depths, ap peared less important than prey size to shifts in scoter diets and numbers. Our synthesis of past studies indicates that biomass and production of mussel beds are typically an order of magnitude greater than for entire assemblages of seagrass macroinvertebrates. However, because of seasonal shifts in prey size structure, seagrass sites can be an important complement to mussel beds when the narrow size fraction of mussels that are profitable to scoters declines.


Question-Answer forums (QAF) are significant platforms for disseminating informal information and play important role in problem solving and learning. Expert identification still has some limitations and link analysis methods do not consider community dimension. In this paper an authority analysis approach for identifying experts is proposed. This approach combines overlapping community detection (OCD) algorithms with ranking methods to compute the nodes' expertise level in QAFs. Firstly, graph resulting from a specific search query is computed and an OCD algorithm is applied on it. After identifying clusters of nodes, we change updating rules of original Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS) and PageRank to take the effect of intra cluster links and extra cluster connections. People whom are intra or overlapping to a community possess higher vision about context of the community than nodes which are outside. We experimented the proposed overlapping community-aware ranking algorithms and compared them with baseline approaches on online forums. Results indicate that OCD improves expert identification accuracy and relevancy.


The basic problem in any field survey is to delineate bodies of similar objects and to make sure that the boundaries between map units are accurate and meaningful. Remotely sensed data cannot replace on-site investigations in soil surveys because the same color patterns, reflectance values, etc., do not always relate to the same kind of soil, even in a local survey area. But remotely sensed data is an extremely valuable tool in extending on-site observations and in locating and extending the boundaries between many map units. Field scientists should have ready access to maps of various scales and origin to aid in locating and extrapolating the boundaries between map units. Any data such as black and white or color infrared photography, Landsat MSS data, or side-looking radar is never fully satisfactory in any area. Yet a combination of these data can supplement each other and give the field surveyor another view of the survey area. There is little need to justify the use of black and white high altitude photography, color infrared photography, or Landsat data in soil survey. All have been found useful under varying conditions. The future use of color infrared images and Landsat data in soil survey will depend primarily upon the ability to provide up-to-date data quickly and at low cost. The National Cooperative Soil Survey has 511 active progressive surveys underway in 1980. About 90 to 100 new surveys are scheduled to start each year for the next 5 years. The average area for each survey now being mapped is 800,000 acres and for new surveys about 700,000 acres. We have a potential for uSing color infrared photography or Landsat MSS data, or both, for about 70 million acres each year. An agreement has been reached by several U.S. Government Agencies to obtain high altitude photography on about onethird of the United States each year. Black and white 20 x 20 inch sheets and U.S. Government work not protected by U.S. copyright. color infrared contact prints will be available at a cost of about .002 cents per acre, or for about $1300 for black and white and $1650 for color infrared photography for a 700,000 acre county. New photography will be available every 3 years and the use of color infrared photography in soil surveys probably will increase considerably. The use of Landsat data in soil survey will depend upon ease of obtaining satisfactory maps, the cost of the m~ps, and overcoming the skepticism about the value of the data by many users. A question that we should examine is how refined do we want to make Landsat data. Soil surveyors are used to interpreting the variation in shading on aerial photography, but are not used to interpreting the symbolization and the square blocks of highly refined Landsat data. We need to examine the question of how we should present Landsat data to soil surveyors, the scales needed, and whether or not we need a cartographically correct map. Unless Landsat data can compete with the high quality color infrared and black and white photography in cost per acre, availability, and reduction in field time, its use will be severely limited. Raymond Daniels received his B.S. in 1950, M.S. in 1955 and his Ph.D. in 1957 from Iowa State College. Author of 61 technical publications in the fields of stratigraphy, geomorphology, and soil science. Active member of Soil Science Society of America. Geological Society of America, and American.Quaternary Association. Major interest is in the relations among stratigraphy, geomorphology, hydrology, and soils. Major thrust of work is to improve use of soil survey data and to serve as liaison between other agencies (SEA-AR, USGS, etc.) and Soil Conservation Service. From 1977-present he is the Director of Soil Survey Investigations, Soil Conservation Service. 1980 Machine Proc~ssing of Remot~1y S~n~d Doto Symposium


Emotion lexica are commonly used resources to combat data poverty in automatic emotion detection. However, methodological issues emerge when employing them: lexica are often not very extensive, and the way they are constructed can vary widely -- from lab conditions to crowdsourced approaches and distant supervision. Furthermore, both categorical frameworks and dimensional frameworks coexist, in which theorists provide many different sets of categorical labels or dimensional axes. The heterogenous nature of the resulting emotion detection resources results in a need for a unified approach to utilising them. This paper contributes to the field of emotion analysis in NLP by a) presenting the first study to unify existing emotion detection resources automatically and thus learn more about the relationships between them; b) exploring the use of existing lexica for the above-mentioned task; c) presenting an approach to automatically combining emotion lexica, namely by a multi-view variational auto-encoder (VAE), which facilitates the mapping of datasets into a joint emotion label space. We test the utility of joint emotion lexica by using them as additional features in state-of-the art emotion detection models. Our overall findings are that emotion lexica can offer complementary information to even extremely large pre-trained models such as BERT. The performance of our models is comparable to state-of-the art models that are specifically engineered for certain datasets, and even outperform the state-of-the art on four datasets.


This research was aimed to study the energy potential of quicklime stone chemoreaction for the application to drying process of red chilli seeds. The experiment demonstrated that chemoreaction energy released from water reaction with CaO containing lime stone could be used for drying process of chilli seeds at ambient temperature to a very low moisture, varying of 2.5 - 3.7 % wb. The chemoreaction energy released from reaction between lime stone and plane water was 1.06 kJ/g lime stone. At excessive water condition particle sizes of lime stone did not affect chemoreaction energy, but smaller size particles enhanced the energy release from the reaction. Using three particle sizes of lime stone the energy efficiency for drying of red chilli seeds ranged 54.0 - 64.0 % and for plane water evaporation ranged 57.4 - 71.6 %. The energy effectiveness for chilli seeds drying was 4.7 kJ/g water and for plane water evaporation was 4.1 kJ/g, implying the presence of bound water in the chilli seeds.


The main goals of this paper are to examine the existing models of participatory budgeting (PB), to match the various models to different constellations of contextual variables and to investigate the applicability of PB in the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). First, the article gives an overview of the different (Western) European PB models put forth in the existing literature (Porto Alegre adapted for Europe, proximity participation, consultation on public finance, multistakeholder participation, and community participatory budgeting) and outlines the main environmental variables (financial autonomy, political culture, the size, heterogeneity and prosperity of the local government (LG) units) that are likely to influence the applicability and feasibility of PB in different LGs. As a second step, the paper analyses the links between different PB models and the environmental variables: it examines under which conditions each of the PB models would be applicable and advisable. As a third step, the article discusses the applicability of different PB models in the new democracies in the CEE region. As the analysis shows, limited financial autonomy of the local governments and the prevailing political culture (combined with weak civil society) are likely to constitute the main challenges to implementing PB in CEE countries, especially if the implementation of the Porto Alegre model is considered. At the same time, PB could be used to encourage the development of participatory culture in the region and to foster genuine decentralisation.


We present a method for learning a low-dimensional representation which is shared across a set of multiple related tasks. The method builds upon the well-known 1-norm regularization problem using a new regularizer which controls the number of learned features common for all the tasks. We show that this problem is equivalent to a convex optimization problem and develop an iterative algorithm for solving it. The algorithm has a simple interpretation: it alternately performs a supervised and an unsupervised step, where in the latter step we learn commonacross-tasks representations and in the former step we learn task-specific functions using these representations. We report experiments on a simulated and a real data set which demonstrate that the proposed method dramatically improves the performance relative to learning each task independently. Our algorithm can also be used, as a special case, to simply select – not learn – a few common features across the tasks.


We consider the problem of fault detection in iterative logic arrays (ILA's). This problem has been studied by numerous researchers for many years. The results can be succinctly summarized by stating that one dimensional arrays can be effectively analyzed and significant results obtained while the problems associated with arrays of dimension two or greater appear to be intractable (i.e., NP-complete) for general arbitrary ILA's. However as is the case for many other switching theory problems, general case problems that are intractable, can be readily handled for the special cases defined by functions commonly encountered in practice. We show that arrays of dimension two or greater can be effectively tested for the case when the functions defined by the arrays have inverses. Many specific arithmetic functions satisfy this property. We also show that even for functions which do not satisfy this property, the functional approach simplifies testing problems considerably. >


This article maps out recent developments in the exegetical investigation of Jesus. It starts with a discussion of the Jesus book by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, in which 'canonical exegesis' is used to argue that Johannine Christology is also present in the other gospels and that this Christology actually goes back to Jesus. In this way, the book narrows the gap between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. The next section argues for maintaining the multiplicity of images of Jesus as a literary figure that is the fruit of relatively recent approaches: redaction criticism, narrative-semantic analysis and intertextuality. The final section contains a sketch of the current state of research on the historical Jesus and its relevance for Christology. The multiplicity in the literary and historical approaches poses challenges to the further development of Christology.


&NA; Potent opiate analgesics, administered either epidurally, intrathecally, or intravenously, are a common adjunct to pain control in the perioperative period. Little is known, however, of the effects of opiate agonists on cerebral blood flow (CBF) and metabolism. Current studies are complicated by the hypotensive effects of these compounds and their route of administration. To circumvent these difficulties we studied the effects of intraventricular and intracarotid morphine sulfate, in doses that do not affect arterial blood pressure, on regional CBF and total cerebral oxygen consumption (CMRO2) in pentobarbital‐anesthetized dogs. Five dogs received 0.04 mg/kg morphine via intracarotid injection. Five additional dogs received 0.2 mg/kg morphine via ventricular cisternal infusion over 5 min, and five control dogs received mock cerebrospinal fluid at the same infusion rate. CBF was measured using the radiolabeled microsphere technique. Intracarotid morphine decreased neurohypophyseal blood flow to 58% of control, but it did not alter blood flow to any other brain region, except caudate nucleus, or cause a change in CMRO2. Infusion of mock cerebrospinal fluid in the cerebral ventricles did not alter CBF or CMRO2. Ventricular‐cisternal perfusion of morphine caused a transient increase in CBF (24 ± 2 to 37 ± 6 mL min−1 100 kg−1) but had no effect on spinal cord blood flow or CMRO2. Neurohypophyseal blood flow, however, decreased to 40% of control levels (480 ± 76 to 176 ± 42 mL min−1 100 kg−1) after 2 min and gradually returned to control levels at 60 min. These data demonstrate that intracarotid and intraventricular morphine decreased blood flow to neurohypophysis, but only ventricular‐cisternal perfusion of morphine altered blood flow to other brain regions, with the exception of caudate nucleus. Our results suggest a role for opiates in the control of CBF independent of changes in CMRO2 when administered directly into the cerebrospinal fluid. This may have clinical implications when opiates are administered intrathecally or intravenously under conditions when the blood‐brain barrier is disrupted. Opiates may also play a role in regulation of neurohypophyseal blood flow.


textabstractIn 2008, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), in cooperation with the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), will issue a new proposal to change the current accounting regulation with respect to leasing to an alternative approach. This new lease-accounting approach, called the "asset and liability approach", capitalises all leases on the balance sheet. This contrasts with the current lease-accounting approach, called the "risk and reward approach", which discriminates between the recognition of financial leases on the balance sheet and the disclosure of operating leases off the balance sheet. As with the current risk and reward approach, also the asset and liability approach has many opponents. This study investigates: - what the impact on financial ratios might be when operating leases are capitalised on the balance sheet, - what company characteristics determines the choice for operating leases, and - whether financially-distressed companies use more operating leases than healthy companies. The results show that operating leases have become a major financing source, which is not only attributable to the accounting treatment of operating leases. However, the information on operating leases as required in the footnotes to the financial statements is not transparent, nor reliable. The current lease-accounting standards might be maintained but improved, and this could be an intermediate solution that is acceptable for the proponents of both lease-accounting approaches.


The study of politics and international relations is fundamentally about observing a complex world, trying to distil the crucial elements within it, labelling and providing qualities to those elements and then trying to draw generalizable lessons. That is the essence of our practice, in my view. Thus, a set of social practices and organisations that set out to shape narratives that are 'acceptable' or 'permissible' should be one of the central concerns of all those who seek to study politics or international relations. It is my view that not only are intelligence agencies and practices the so-called missing dimension in international relations, but they are the founding elements and sticky glue that binds states together. Within international history intelligencers provide a partially hidden but parallel account of diplomacy and diplomatic interplay that would cause a radical rehistoricisation of all that we understand to be the received wisdom of international relations. (... continues)


In the second chapter, the notion of a social secret sharing (SSS ) scheme is introduced in which shares are allocated based on a player's reputation and the way she interacts with other parties. In other words, this scheme renews shares at each cycle without changing the secret, and it allows the trusted parties to gain more authority. Our motivation is that, in real-world applications, components of a secure scheme have different levels of importance (i.e., the number of shares a player has) and reputation (i.e., cooperation with other parties). Therefore, a good construction should balance these two factors accordingly. In the third chapter, a novel socio-rational secret sharing (SRS ) scheme is introduced in which rational foresighted players have long-term interactions in a social context, i.e., players run secret sharing while founding and sustaining a public trust network. To motivate this, consider a repeated secret sharing game such as sealed-bid auctions. If we assume each party has a reputation value, we can then penalize (or reward) the players who are selfish (or unselfish) from game to game. This social reinforcement stimulates the players to be cooperative in the secret recovery phase. Unlike the existing protocols in the literature, the proposed solution is stable and it only has a single reconstruction round. In the fourth chapter, a comprehensive analysis of the existing dynamic secret sharing (DSS ) schemes is first provided. In a threshold scheme, the sensitivity of the secret and the number of players may fluctuate due to various reasons. Moreover, a common problem with almost all secret sharing schemes is that they are "one-time", meaning that the secret and shares are known to everyone after secret recovery. We therefore provide new techniques where the threshold and/or the secret can be changed multiple times to arbitrary values after the initialization. In addition, we introduce a new application of dynamic threshold schemes, named sequential secret sharing (SQS ), in which several secrets with increasing thresholds are shared among the players who have different levels of authority. In the fifth chapter, a cryptographic primitive, named multicomponent commitment scheme (MCS ) is proposed where we have multiple committers and verifiers. This new scheme is used to construct different sealed-bid auction protocols (SAP) where the auction outcomes are defined without revealing the losing bids. The main reason for constructing secure auctions is the fact that the values of the losing bids can be exploited in future auctions and negotiations if they are not kept private. In our auctioneer-free protocols, bidders first commit to their bids before the auction starts. They then apply a decreasing price mechanism to define the winner and selling price in an unconditionally secure setting.


Background/Aims: Osteoporosis-pseudoglioma (OPPG) syndrome is a rare disorder characterized by congenital or infancy-onset visual loss and severe juvenile osteoporosis. OPPG is caused by homozygous mutations in the low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 5 (LRP5) gene. We present three novel homozygous LRP5 mutations found in 3 unrelated Turkish children with consanguineous parents, along with clinical phenotypes and response to treatment with bisphosphonates (bisP). Methods/Results: The LRP5 gene was analyzed by direct sequencing after PCR amplification. Mutation screening for LRP5 revealed homozygous nonsense R1002X mutation in the first patient and homozygous missense mutations V336M and G507S in the second and third patient, respectively. The parents were heterozygous for these mutations. The patients' eye symptoms began during the first months of life but the OPPG diagnoses were made based on skeletal deformities and osteopenia after 4 years of age. The patients' bone mineral density Z scores were very low and consistent with osteopenia. All patients were treated with bisP for 3.5–7 years. Conclusion: We report three novel LRP5 mutations in 3 Turkish patients with OPPG. We show that the response of bisP therapy has improved the lumbar spinal bone mineral density Z scores and the patients' quality of life as the bone pains decreased.


This article gives an overview of TPBEDAMN, a large covert operation the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carried out in Iran for several years in the early 1950s. TPBEDAMN was a psychological warfare operation intended to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union and its Iranian ally, the Communist Tudeh Party, through covert propaganda and political action activities. When U.S. officials decided in early 1953 to overthrow Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, they relied heavily on TPBEDAMN's large network of Iranian agents and subagents to plan and implement a coup d'état. The overview of TPBEDAMN presented here helps to clarify both the nature of the organizational apparatus the CIA used against Mosaddeq and the broader context within which the coup occurred, especially the intense Cold War climate that prevailed and the prevalence of psychological warfare in this era.


The popularity of bioacoustics for threatened species monitoring has surged. Large volumes of acoustic data can be collected autonomously and remotely with minimal human effort. The approach is commonly used to detect cryptic species and, more recently, to estimate abundance or density. However, the potential for conservation‐relevant information to be derived from acoustic signatures associated with particular behavior is less well‐exploited. Animal vocal behavior can reveal important information about critical life history events. In this study, we argue that the overlap of the disciplines of bioacoustics, vocal communication, and conservation behavior—thus, "acoustic conservation behavior"—has much to offer threatened species monitoring. In particular, vocalizations can serve as indicators of behavioral states and contexts that provide insight into populations as it relates to their conservation. We explore the information available from monitoring species' vocalizations that relate to reproduction and recruitment, alarm and defense, and social behavior, and how this information could translate into potential conservation benefits. While there are still challenges to processing acoustic data, we conclude that acoustic conservation behavior may improve threatened species monitoring where vocalizations reveal behaviors that are informative for management and decision‐making.


BackgroundKidney involvement in COVID-19 may manifest as acute kidney injury (AKI). This study aimed to analyze and compare AKIs in different stages of COVID-19.Methods1056 hospitalized COVID-19 patients were retrospectively evaluated and 383 of them met the inclusion criteria. Eighty-nine patients who developed AKI, but didn't have prior kidney diseases were involved in the final analysis. Patients were classified into three groups, those who had AKI on admission, those who developed AKI in the first week and those who developed AKI starting from the 7th day. Electrolytes, acid-base status and changes in the inflammatory markers were compared. ResultsAKIs that were seen on hospital admission day were generally transient. Patients who developed AKI after the 7th day had higher peak CRP and D-dimer levels and lower nadir lymphocyte counts (p=0.000, 0.004 and 0.003 respectively). AKI that developed later was more related to immunologic response and had significantly higher mortality, reaching as high as 44% for those who developed AKI after 7th day. Hematuria and proteinuria (p=0.001; OR: 2.4; 95% CI: 1.4 – 3.8 and p=0.015; OR: 4.34; 95% CI: 1.3 – 14.3 respectively) were more common in patients who died. Hypernatremia (p=0.000, OR: 6.5; 95% CI:3.0 – 13.9) and hyperchloremia (p=0,002, OR:3,8; 95%CI: 1,7 – 8,4) were also observed more often in patients who died.ConclusionsAKI in COVID-19 is not of one kind. When developed, AKI should be evaluated in conjunction with the disease stage and possible etiologies. AKI that develops later has worse prognosis and is more related to electrolyte abnormalities.


This book is a full survey of the philosophy of tragedy from antiquity to the present. From Aristotle to Žižek the focal question has been: why, in spite of its distressing content, do we value tragic drama? What is the nature of the 'tragic effect'? Some philosophers point to a certain kind of pleasure that results from tragedy. Others, while not excluding pleasure, emphasize the knowledge we gain from tragedy - of psychology, ethics, freedom or immortality. Through a critical engagement with these and other philosophers, the book concludes by suggesting an answer to the question of what it is that constitutes tragedy 'in its highest vocation'. This book will be of equal interest to students of philosophy and of literature.


This paper examines how economic and political factors have influenced mineral extraction, governance and development in Peru since the late 19th century. It argues that the legacies of the past have weighed heavily in contemporary mining governance, but also points to moments in which shifting political alliances and agency aimed to alter past legacies and introduce positive institutional change. The authors identify three historical periods characterised by relatively stable arrangements for the distribution of power, each with implications for state-building and extractive governance. For the most recent period (post-2000), they discuss how the response of democratic governments to socio-environmental conflict has included the creation of institutions to redistribute mining rents, regulate environmental impacts and promote indigenous participation. However, they argue that political instability and fragmentation have inhibited the effectiveness and legitimacy of these institutions and of longer-term policymaking in general, which in turn helps explain Peru's persistent reliance on natural resource extraction and the challenges to more inclusive and sustainable development.


A new optimization technique, stochastic parallel-gradient descent, is applied for high-resolution adaptive wave-front correction. A performance criterion for parallel-perturbation-based algorithms is introduced and applied to optimize adaptive system architecture. We present numerical simulation results for an adaptive imaging system based on the stochastic parallel-perturbation technique, along with experimental results obtained for a white-light adaptive imaging system with 37 control channels. An adaptive system with a self-organized (adaptive) control channel hierarchy is introduced and analyzed.


Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) exhibit strong potential for various applications in bioelectronics, especially as miniaturized, point‐of‐care biosensors, because of their efficient transducing ability. To date, however, the majority of reported OECTs have relied on p‐type (hole transporting) polymer mixed conductors, due to the limited number of n‐type (electron transporting) materials suitable for operation in aqueous electrolytes, and the low performance of those which exist. It is shown that a simple solvent‐engineering approach boosts the performance of OECTs comprising an n‐type, naphthalenediimide‐based copolymer in the channel. The addition of acetone, a rather bad solvent for the copolymer, in the chloroform‐based polymer solution leads to a three‐fold increase in OECT transconductance, as a result of the simultaneous increase in volumetric capacitance and electron mobility in the channel. The enhanced electrochemical activity of the polymer film allows high‐performance glucose sensors with a detection limit of 10 × 10−6 m of glucose and a dynamic range of more than eight orders of magnitude. The approach proposed introduces a new tool for concurrently improving the conduction of ionic and electronic charge carriers in polymer mixed conductors, which can be utilized for a number of bioelectronic applications relying on efficient OECT operation.


A comparison is made between theoretical and experimental results for cooperative scattering between two spheres. The overall agreement between theory and experiment is quite good. Also, a large side-scattering resonance that was measured to be 44 times larger than that which is due to a single sphere was calculated actually to be 47.6 times larger.


Siamese fighting fish, Betta splendens Regan
mortalities in Thailand are usually associated with
mycobacteriosis. The present study was undertaken to
isolate and characterise mycobacteria from Siamese fighting
fish, examine their sensitivity to selected antibiotics and
to test the efficacy of kanamycin sulphate as a
chemotherapeutic agent against mycobacteria.
Histopathological studies on the Siamese fighting fish,
experimentally and naturally infected with mycobacteria,
were also conducted.Ten acid-fast, rapidly growing, photochromogenic
strains of mycobacteria were isolated from apparently
healthy fish and fish showing gross lesions of
mycobacteriosis. Prevalence of mycobacteria in farm reared Siamese fighting fish ranged from 0-8%. Primary isolation
of mycobacteria were successful on Ogawa egg medium and
Lowenstein Jensen medium. The isolates grew within 5-7
days at 28°C on Ogawa egg medium and showed a temperature
preference of 15- 17 °C. No growth was observed at 42°C.
Optimum incubation temperature was 30°C. They were
considered as mesophyllic forms. The organism produced
mycolic acid which melted between 50.5-7 0°C. On the basis
of their biochemical and physiological properties and the
percentage guanine plus cytosine, the pathogen was
confirmed as Mycobacterium sp. and was analogous to " M .
piscicida " with similarity of 94% , but differed from the
reference strains M. chelonae sub sp. chelonae , M .
fortuitum , M . marinum , M . parafortuitum and M . vaccae by
many characteristics. An antibiotic sensitivity test was conducted using
seventeen antimicrobial agents against ten mycobacteria
strains isolated from Siamese fighting fish. Kanamycin at
30 ug was the most effective antibiotic against
mycobacteria. MIC and MBC values of kanamycin sulphate
were 6 .25-12.50 and 12.5-25.0 ppm, respectively. However,
treatment of mycobacteriosis with kanamycin, in vivo , was
unsuccessful.


Although stories in games have become more sophisticated over time, their use of nonlinear techniques has not yet become as prevalent as in traditional media like novels and films. Writers have largely excluded nonlinear techniques from their toolbox, possibly because of fears of introducing inconsistencies when player actions alter past events. However, as we show through a survey of common nonlinear techniques seen in television, novels, and film, games can and have avoided these inconsistencies while maintaining gameplay agency. Many players prefer a high quality static story incorporated into strong gameplay, making the insight from this discussion immediately useful in designing nonlinear game stories. We also discuss some ways in which nonlinear techniques can offer both gameplay and story agency, hopefully bringing the quality of game stories one step closer to their traditional counterparts.


BACKGROUND
Emerging research shows that the composition of movement behaviors throughout the day (physical activities, sedentary behaviors, sleep) is related to indicators of health, suggesting previous research that isolated single movement behaviors maybe incomplete, misleading, and/or unnecessarily constrained.

METHODS
This brief report summarizes evidence to support a 24-hour movement behavior paradigm and efforts to date by a variety of jurisdictions to consult, develop, release, promote, and study 24-hour movement guidelines. It also introduces and summarizes the accompanying series of articles related specifically to 24-hour movement guidelines for the early years.

RESULTS
Using robust and transparent processes, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the World Health Organization have developed and released 24-hour movement guidelines for the early years: an integration of physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep. Other countries are exploring a similar approach and related research is expanding rapidly. Articles related to guideline development in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, and by the World Health Organization are a part of this special series.

CONCLUSIONS
A new paradigm employing 24-hour movement guidelines for the early years that combines recommendations for movement behaviors across the whole day is gaining momentum across the globe.


Recent evidence shows that most of Patagonian glaciers are receding rapidly. Due to the lack of in-situ long-term meteorological observations, the understanding of how glaciers are responding to changes in climate over this region is extremely limited and high uncertainties exist in the glacier surface mass balance model parameterizations. This precludes a robust assessment of glacier response to current and projected climate change. An issue of central concern is the accurate estimation of precipitation phase. In this work, we have assessed spatial and temporal patterns in snow accumulation in both the North Patagonia Icefield (NPI) and South Patagonia Icefield (SPI). We used a regional climate model, RegCM4.6 and four Phase Partitioning Methods (PPM) and short-term snow accumulation observations using ultrasonic depth gauges (UDG). Snow accumulation shows that rates are higher on the west side relative to the east side for both Icefields. The values depend on the PPM used and reach a mean difference of 1,500 mm w.e. with some areas reaching differences higher than 3,500 mm w.e. These differences could lead to divergent mass balance estimations, depending on the scheme used to define the snow accumulation. Good agreement is found in comparing UDG observations with modeled data on the plateau area of the SPI during a short time period, however, there are important differences between rates of snow accumulation determined in this work and previous estimations using ice core data at annual scale. Significant positive trends are mainly present in the autumn season on the west side of the SPI, while on the east side, significant negative trends in autumn were observed. Overall, for the rest of the area and during other seasons, no significant changes can be determined. In addition, glaciers with positive and stable elevation and frontal changes determined by previous works, are related to areas where snow accumulation has increased during the period 2000-2015. This suggests that increases in snow accumulation are attenuating the response of some Patagonian glaciers to warming in a regional context of overall glacier retreat.


BACKGROUND
Caucasian women have a higher incidence of breast cancer compared to African American women; however, African American women are more likely to die from the disease than their Caucasian counterparts. Many efforts have been made to address this disparity, but it still exists. Data have shown factors contributing to this disparity, such as inequalities in health status, environment, access and use of care, socioeconomic status, knowledge, and cultural beliefs. Train-the-trainer programs have been widely used to address breast cancer disparities.

OBJECTIVES
The aims of this article are to (a) identify and describe breast cancer disparities in an urban setting, (b) describe the Sisters Saving Lives program as an evidence-based intervention to address breast cancer disparities, (c) describe how self-efficacy theory was used to guide and evaluate the development of this pilot project, (d) identify key stakeholders involved, and (e) summarize outcomes observed.

METHODS
Self-efficacy theory served as a guide to the development of the train-the-trainer program to help address breast cancer disparities among African American women residing in Chicago.

FINDINGS
Training African American breast cancer survivors to deliver a culturally competent message on breast health education to African American women who do not have a breast cancer diagnosis raised awareness of the disease and potentially can address breast cancer disparities among African American women residing in Chicago.


Historically, biological control utilizes predatory species and pathogenic microorganisms to reduce the population of mosquitoes as disease vectors. This is particularly important for the control of mosquito-borne arboviruses, which normally do not have specific antiviral therapies available. Although development of resistance is likely, the advantages of biological control are that the resources used are typically biodegradable and ecologically friendly. Over the past decade, the advancement of molecular biology has enabled optimization by the manipulation of genetic materials associated with biological control agents. Two significant advancements are the discovery of cytoplasmic incompatibility induced by Wolbachia bacteria, which has enhanced replacement programs, and the introduction of dominant lethal genes into local mosquito populations through the release of genetically modified mosquitoes. As various arboviruses continue to be significant public health threats, biological control strategies have evolved to be more diverse and become critical tools to reduce the disease burden of arboviruses.


Innovative changes are afoot in the world of evidence synthesis. These changes are being prompted by a raft of challenges in the production and discovery of evidence. Health librarians have a key role to play in ensuring the integrity of systematic reviews by developing, testing, and validating rigorous search strategies for these reviews. As Cochrane is the world's largest producer of systematic reviews, health information professionals need to stay abreast of the significant changes unfolding there. Steve McDonald, co‐director of the Australasian Cochrane Centre, spoke at the 12th Health Libraries Inc. conference to address the rapidly shifting state of play in the evidence ecosystem.


This article charts a research project on higher education and poverty reduction chronologically, mapping the process of thinking through and generating an Index of public-good professional education based on literatures; empirical data from actors-lecturers, students, alumni, professional bodies and NGOs; and participatory dialogue. Amartya Sen's capabilities structured the project theoretically, in particular underpinning the original formulation of 'professional capabilities' to redefine what counts as being professional. The article further addresses what later emerged as the importance of a broader focus on human development as structuring change and quality in professional education and universities. At the heart of the article's argument is that professional education in South African universities is one area which shapes the relationship between the integrity of professional life and the health of civic cultures, and where an 'other-regarding' social consciousness might be fostered through educational arrangements and policy, even in the face of history and social constraints. The Index is presented as an invitation to focus further debate not only in South Africa but globally about higher education, the public good and poverty reduction.


Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) affects 10-20% of the population and is associated with substantial functional deficits. We identified 42 loci for self-reported EDS in GWAS of 452,071 individuals from the UK Biobank, with enrichment for genes expressed in brain tissues and in neuronal transmission pathways. We confirmed the aggregate effect of a genetic risk score of 42 SNPs on EDS in independent Scandinavian cohorts and on other sleep disorders (restless leg syndrome, insomnia) and sleep traits (duration, chronotype, accelerometer-derived sleep efficiency and daytime naps or inactivity). Strong genetic correlations were also seen with obesity, coronary heart disease, psychiatric diseases, cognitive traits and reproductive ageing. EDS variants clustered into two predominant composite phenotypes - sleep propensity and sleep fragmentation - with the former showing stronger evidence for enriched expression in central nervous system tissues, suggesting two unique mechanistic pathways. Mendelian randomization analysis indicated that higher BMI is causally associated with EDS risk, but EDS does not appear to causally influence BMI.


The diverse cropping system of eastern Virginia's coastal plain offers limited opportunity to establish winter annual cover crops (WCC) for nitrogen (N) scavenging. The winter fallow niche after double-crop or full-season soybean (Glycine max L. Merr.) encompasses the majority of acres left fallow. Our objective was to evaluate interseeded WCC N scavenging performance following soybean and N supplying capacity to subsequent corn (Zea mays L.). Field studies were conducted at four different locations in each of the two study years. The experimental design was split plot with cereal rye, hairy vetch, and RV mix WCC as main plots and ten fertilizer nitrogen (FN) rates in a factorial arrangement (0 and 45 kg FN ha as starter; and 0, 45, 90, 135, and 180 kg FN ha at sidedress) to corn as subplots. The highest N uptake for cereal rye at winter dormancy was 18 kg N ha, but the average was 6-7 kg N ha. At WCC termination average N uptake for cereal rye was 35 and 40 kg N ha in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Average biomass dry matter (DM) at WCC termination for cereal rye, cereal rye + hairy vetch mix (RV mix), and hairy vetch was 2356, 2000, and 1864 kg ha in 2013; and 2055, 2701, and 692 kg ha in 2014, respectively. Average cereal rye N uptake was 35 kg N ha in 2013 and 40 kg N ha in 2014. Significant differences for residual soil nitrogen were most apparent for soil nitrate (NO3-N) at lower depths (15-30 and 30-60 cm) during WCC termination and in the upper 0-15 cm during corn growth stage (GS) V4 of both years. Corn grain yield plateau following hairy vetch WCC was 0.7 and 0.6 Mg ha higher than when following cereal rye WCC at zero and 45 kg ha starter FN, respectively. Average agronomic optimum FN rates (AONR) were 26 and 9 kg ha lower following hairy vetch than cereal rye WCC at zero and 45 kg ha starter FN, respectively. Estimated hairy vetch FN reductions by FN replacement and AONR difference methods were 48 and 18 kg FN ha in plots receiving zero starter FN; and 58 and -43 kg FN ha in plots receiving 45 kg ha starter FN. In-season soil N tests did not offer adequate information in order to predict sidedress FN reductions. These findings suggest that cereal rye and RV mix have the potential to scavenge and conserve residual soil N and hairy vetch is more than capable to supply PAN to subsequent corn when interseeded into soybean.


In recent years, black neoconservatism has captured the national imagination. Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court. Stephen Carter's opinions on topics ranging from religion to the confirmation process are widely quoted. The New Republic has written that black neoconservative Thomas Sowell was having a greater influence on the discussion of matters of race and ethnicity than any other writer of the past ten years. In this compelling and vividly argued book, Ronald Roberts reveals how this attention has turned an eccentricity into a movement. Black neoconservatives, Roberts believes, have no real constituency but, as was the case with Clarence Thomas, are held up and proclaim themselves as simply and ruthlessly honest, as above mere self-interest and crude political loyalties. They profess a concern for those they criticize, claiming to possess an objective truth which sets them apart from their critics in the establishment Left. They claim to be outsiders even while sustained by the culture's most powerful institutions. As they level attacks at the activist organizations they perceive as moribund, every significant argument they advance rests on fervent mantras of harsh truths and simple realities. Enlisting the ideal of impartiality as a partisan weapon, this Tough Love Crowd has elevated the familiar wisdom of Spare the rod and spoil the child to the arena of national politics. Turning to their own writings and proclamations, Roberts here serves up a devastating critique of such figures as Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter, and V. S. Naipaul (Tough Love International). Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd marks the emergence of a provocative and powerful voice on our cultural and political landscape, a voice which holds those who subscribe to this polemically powerful ideology accountable for their opinions and actions.


The growth rate response of bacterial communities to the potential increase of dissolved organic matter (DOM) produced by the copepod Acartia tonsa was assessed in experiments conducted in three stations representing three contrasting aquatic environments (coastal embayment, shelf and ocean). Bacterial assemblages were inoculated in filtered seawater where A. tonsa had previously grazed. Utilization of DOM over time was evaluated after the addition of bacterial inoculums as the biomass changes in both 'control' and 'copepod' treatments. In the embayment and ocean a high bacterial growth was observed in the treatments with seawater where copepod were feeding. Additional field measurements of bacterial, primary production and zooplankton biomass support the idea that bacterial communities living in oceanic environments can be efficient to utilize the newly available substrate. Copepods play a key role not only as conveyors of carbon up through the classical food-web, but also generated significant amounts of bacterial substrate in the microbial loop food-web.


Through increased cooperation transatlantic policy networks have been able to sharpen the tools used to combat the laundering of funds used for illicit ends including terrorism finance. After the attacks on 11 September 2001, rules were adopted on both sides of the Atlantic to restrict the flow of funds for terrorist purposes. This article captures some of the recent trends in cooperation between the European Union (EU) and the USA in addressing the issue of money laundering for terrorism finance. It goes further to assess how the EU engages with the financial action task force whose mandate was modified after 11 September 2001 to also cater for money that is laundered to fund terrorist activities.


In this paper we present an integrated approach to derive reservoir parameters from core and well-log data in clay–sand mixtures. This method is based on matching core and log data, and the linear and non-linear regressions are then used to build respective relationships between core and log data to determine formation parameters such as porosity, shale volume, clay content, permeability and fluid saturation. This information is then fed into a velocity prediction model to estimate seismic parameters such as elastic moduli, shear wave velocity and anisotropy coefficients. Finally, we test the method on real data from the North Sea and show that reservoir parameters can be accurately predicted.


separating eight different experiences and behaviours relating to simultanagnostic vision, and looking at understanding the impact of their varying levels


Although network analysis has drawn considerable attention as a promising tool for disease ecology, empirical research has been hindered by limitations in detecting the occurrence of pathogen transmission (who transmitted to whom) within social networks. Using a novel approach, we utilize the genetics of a diverse microbe, Escherichia coli, to infer where direct or indirect transmission has occurred and use these data to construct transmission networks for a wild giraffe population (Giraffe camelopardalis). Individuals were considered to be a part of the same transmission chain and were interlinked in the transmission network if they shared genetic subtypes of E. coli. By using microbial genetics to quantify who transmits to whom independently from the behavioural data on who is in contact with whom, we were able to directly investigate how the structure of contact networks influences the structure of the transmission network. To distinguish between the effects of social and environmental contact on transmission dynamics, the transmission network was compared with two separate contact networks defined from the behavioural data: a social network based on association patterns, and a spatial network based on patterns of home-range overlap among individuals. We found that links in the transmission network were more likely to occur between individuals that were strongly linked in the social network. Furthermore, individuals that had more numerous connections or that occupied 'bottleneck' positions in the social network tended to occupy similar positions in the transmission network. No similar correlations were observed between the spatial and transmission networks. This indicates that an individual's social network position is predictive of transmission network position, which has implications for identifying individuals that function as super-spreaders or transmission bottlenecks in the population. These results emphasize the importance of association patterns in understanding transmission dynamics, even for environmentally transmitted microbes like E. coli. This study is the first to use microbial genetics to construct and analyse transmission networks in a wildlife population and highlights the potential utility of an approach integrating microbial genetics with network analysis.


We demonstrate an x-ray laser at a wavelength of 13.9 nm with a beam divergence of 0.2 mrad, which is 1.8 times the diffraction limit. The x-ray laser is generated with two gain media; the seed x-ray pulse from the first medium is amplified in the second medium. The effect of refraction on x-ray propagation is reduced by spatially and temporally controlling the injection of the seed x-ray to the second medium.