The joyous advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994 brought real promise of an improvement in the life chances for millions of marginalised South Africans. There was reason for many citizens to have great faith in the new order after decades of sustained struggle. Effective state intervention and the spatial reorganisation of society seemed a realistic prospect in a country blessed with abundant natural resources and an established industrial base. The power of the state to affect change at the grassroots level was however soon compromised by the substitution of the populist Reconstruction and Development Programme with the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR) by mid 1996. South Africa was now part of the international community and the new government's gaze was directed away from its popular support base. The radical and risky policy shift was influenced by demands of an international investor community and by the dictates of international donor organisations. Announcement of the policy shift was a low profile affair and few citizens had any real comprehension of the impact the shift would have on the capacity of the new ANC government to deliver on its electoral promises.

Change in the macro economic policy reverberated within the lower tiers of government and in local authorities. Urban development policy was repeatedly rewritten; first in response to the dictates of the socialist RDP in 1994, and again in response to a neo-liberal GEAR in 1996. In 2000 the fragmented urban management system of appointed officials was replaced by an elected metropolitan government system. This initiated a third, profound shift in the policy context as each metropolitan government sought to formulate its own, context-specific policies. The most recent shift is significant since it has resulted in massive organisational upheaval and restructuring. However, it has opened new laboratories, which generates new opportunities for more responsive and accountable policy-making and planning. These new opportunities emerge against a backdrop in which the comedy of policy shifts that have occurred during the past nine years have resulted in little action and a growing crisis on the ground.

Despite the policy shifts, corridor development has remained a constant feature of post apartheid urban development frameworks. Initially it made sense as a mechanism to physically integrate fragmented cities. It fitted a populist agenda, had political currency and was an easy sell. After the adoption of neo-liberal strategies it would receive another label; that of an accessible armature for private investment. Importantly, the latest policy shift in 2000 offered an opportunity to consider the city in a holistic and integrated fashion. This represents the belated death of the Apartheid City, which was characterised by fragmented, sub-regional councils linked to racially defined urban enclaves. New metropolitan governments arguably have greater capacity to facilitate and co-ordinate action in the extended corridor zone than has ever been possible.
Effective implementation of a regional capital web of minimal public investment now becomes a distinct possibility.

The recent adoption of a metropolitan government system and the associated strategic urban management approach offers an opportunity for reflection and for the construction of an informed vision of the role of urban design in corridor development. Whilst the corridor concept has survived, its purpose has become confused. While not discarding the corridor idea, many proposals that originated during the early post apartheid years are being questioned by new metropolitan governments. The new crisis is largely the result of the private sector having shown reluctance to invest in marginal zones of the city. Since corridors were originally conceived as devices which aim to link marginal zones to the core of opportunity, their capacity to facilitate change is limited by the sustained lack of market interest.

While the market remains reluctant to invest in the areas of greatest need in corridors, requirements for improved mobility and access amongst the urban poor have escalated dramatically as millions of migrants from the rural hinterland and the African sub-continent flock to the urban peripheries. Migrants squat on the verges of highways or crowd into the backyards of apartheid-era townships. They are effectively constructing their own informal corridors along lines of access. This dynamic adds to the emerging crisis associated with an uninterested private sector.

This thesis responds to the crisis from an urban design perspective. It evaluates the actions of urban designers in the corridor context during the past decade, and tests the perceptions of ordinary citizens who are affected by corridor development. While doing this it questions the predominance of generic approaches to corridor development and draws on insights gained from international fieldwork in Malaysia, Australia and Peru. Finally, it presents a strategic approach that indicates ways in which urban design may realise its potential to become an enabling discipline in the participatory development of the post apartheid integration corridor.


Objective To document trends in invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) in a central hospital in Malawi during the period of national scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART) and cotrimoxazole prophylaxis. Methods Between 1 January 2000 and 31 December 2009 almost 100,000 blood cultures and 40,000 cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) cultures were obtained from adults and children admitted to the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Blantyre, Malawi with suspected severe bacterial infection. Results 4,445 pneumococcal isolates were obtained over the 10 year period. 1,837 were from children: 885 (19.9%) from blood and 952 (21.4%) from CSF. 2,608 were from adults: 1,813 (40.8%) from blood and 795 (17.9%) from CSF. At the start of the surveillance period cotrimoxazole resistance was 73.8% and at the end was 92.6%. Multidrug resistance (MDR) was present in almost one third of isolates and was constant over time. Free ART was introduced in Malawi in 2004. From 2005 onwards there was a decline in invasive pneumococcal infections with a negative correlation between ART scale-up and the decline in IPD (Pearson's correlation r = −0.91; p<0.001). Conclusion During 2004–2009, national ART scale-up in Malawi was associated with a downward trend in IPD at QECH. The introduction of cotrimoxazole prophylaxis in HIV-infected groups has not coincided with a further increase in pneumococcal cotrimoxazole or multidrug resistance. These data highlight the importance of surveillance for high disease burden infections such as IPD in the region, which will be vital for monitoring pneumococcal conjugate vaccine introduction into national immunisation programmes.


The investigation of long-tern economic growth and structural change in an economic systems constitutes an issue with a long tradition in economics. The aim of this paper is to analyse, from an econometric point of view, the Italian manufacturing system during the XX century. In particular, using a quite large dataset based on Industrial Census, we deal with the following aspects: (i) the role of structural changes, (ii) the role of convergence and/or persistence of growth rates, and finally, (iii) the impact of measures of specialization and of variety on economic growth. The main findings seem to support an idiosyncratic view of the Italian industrial development with respect to the well-established literature on the topic. In particular, two points emerge: the stability of the model of production specialization along the period considered, and the role of variety of industrial environment as one of the leading factors in spurring coal industrial growth.


AIMS
To build an understanding of the patient's experience and from this identify recurring themes that could form part of an item pool for further testing of persistent dentoalveolar pain disorder (PDAP).

METHODS
Proven cases of PDAP were identified from a clinical database, and a purposive maximum variation sample was drawn. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the sample by a single trained interviewer. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data collection and analysis occurred until data saturation (n = 20), with no new themes emerging. Analysis of the data was an iterative and inductive process broadly following the principles of the constant comparative method.

RESULTS
Recurrent themes emerging from the data were: difficulty in responding to history taking; duration and magnitude of pain; complex and confounding descriptors; common exacerbating factor; well-localized pain; deep pain; pressurized or pressure feeling.

CONCLUSION
Several common experiences that can be considered items were identified in the data. These items will add to the limited pre-existing item pool in the literature and allow testing of this item pool to determine those items best suited to form an adjunctive self-report diagnostic instrument for PDAP.


UNLABELLED
Carbon-11-thymidine labeled in the ring-2 position was used with PET to image tumor and tissue proliferation. Since thymidine is rapidly degraded in the body, one must consider the generation of metabolites to fully interpret the PET data.

METHODS
We have measured the blood time-activity curves of thymidine and its metabolites in arterial blood samples. Blood was processed to obtain three input curves, including the total activity, the activity with CO2 removed and the fraction of CO2-free activity in intact thymidine (% Tdr).

RESULTS
We found that CO2 reached a plateau of 65% (+/- 12%) of total blood activity by 11 min after injection. When a 1-min infusion of labeled thymidine is used, the time to 50% degradation to thymine and metabolites other than CO2 (measured in acidified samples by HPLC) was 2.9 +/- 0.6 min. We fit the results of the blood metabolism with a compartmental model. We found that we could accurately determine the % Tdr curve with as few as three measured points with an root mean square (RMS) error of 2% in the integrated curve, compared to the curve using all blood samples (mean of seven samples per patient). The integral of thymidine blood activity serves as the input to thymidine models, so similar errors could be expected in calculations of DNA synthetic rates. We found that the determination of CO2 could be accomplished with as few as five samples, with an RMS error of 4% in plateau %CO2 value.

CONCLUSION
While it is essential to take metabolites into account when interpreting results obtained with 11C-thymidine, the reproducibility of these degradation curves may allow the use of a limited number of samples to measure the catabolic products of thymidine. These data from the blood, along with tissue kinetic models, are needed to calculate DNA synthetic rates.


Transient support using a hybrid artificial liver (HAL) device is a promising treatment for the patients with acute liver failure. Primary human hepatocytes are an ideal source for HAL therapy; however, the number of human livers available for hepatocyte isolation is limited by competition for use in whole organ transplantation. To overcome this problem, we previously established a highly differentiated human fetal hepatocyte cell line OUMS-29. Considering the potential risk when using these genetically engineered cells in humans, additional safeguards should be added to make the cells more clinically useful. In this work, the herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (HSVtk) gene was retrovirally introduced into OUMS-29 cells. One of the HSVtk-expressed clones, OUMS-29/thymidine kinase (TK), grew in chemically defined serum free medium and expressed the genes of albumin, asialoglycoprotein receptor, glutamine synthetase, glutathione-S-transferase &pgr;, and blood coagulation factor X. In vitro sensitivity of the cells to ganciclovir was evaluated. Intrasplenic transplantation of 50×106 OUMS-29/TK cells prolonged the survival of 90% hepatectomized rats compared with medium injection alone (control). In the present study, we have established highly differentiated immortalized human hepatocytes with tight regulation. The cells may be clinically useful for HAL treatment.


In complex software projects, managing the development process can be as critical to success as writing the code itself. A project may involve dozens of developers, managers, architects, testers, and customers, hundreds of builds, and thousands of opportunities to get off-track. To keep tabs on the people, tasks, and components of a medium- to large-scale project, most teams use a development system that allows for easy monitoring, follow-up, and accountability. Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 (TFS), the server component of Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), provides a powerful collaborative platform for software-development teams. The product offers an integrated toolset for tracking work items, creating test cases, managing source code, generating builds, constructing database schemas, and so on. Because in software development one size does not fit all, TFS provides process customization, project management, and reporting capabilities to build solutions around your requirements. Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action is a hands-on guide to Team Foundation Server 2008. Written for developers with a good handle on TFS basics, this book shows you how to solve real-life problems. It's not a repetition of Microsoft's product documentation. Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action is a practitioner's handbook for how to work with TFS under common constraints. This book walks you through real-life software engineering problems based on hundreds of hours of TFS experience. You'll benefit from expert author Jamil Azher's extensive interactions with members of Microsoft's TFS team and MVPs, survey feedback from the author's blog, and interviews with organizations and user groups using TFS. Instead of just offering a high-level overview, the book provides detailed solutions for solving common-and not-so-common-problems using TFS. It discusses the strengths as well as weaknesses of TFS, and suggests appropriate problem resolution steps, workarounds, or custom solutions.


We have performed experiments on current-induced domain-wall motion (CIDWM) in the case of the domain walls (DW) trapped within the nanoscale constrictions in patterned NiFe structures. Direct observation of current-induced magnetization reversal was achieved and critical current densities jc were measured in the presence of easy-axis magnetic fields. The direction of CIDWM was found to be along the direction of the electron motion in absence of an applied magnetic field and in the direction of the field when in the presence of even relatively weak fields. Data for the field dependence of jc for both uniform and fast rising pulses suggest that the current, regardless of polarity, assists in the depinning of the DW. Only for the dc case does the data strongly reveal the influence of the electron pressure in promoting or hindering DW motion.


Legal scholars have been encouraged to examine alternative remedies for defamation in response to an increasing criticism of monetary damages. Various types of non-pecuniary relief (such as retraction, right of reply, publication of court decisions or declaratory judgement) have been made the subject of elaborate studies. The role of court-ordered apologies as a non-pecuniary defamation remedy has been scarcely discussed in academic literature. The work that has been done focuses either on the remedial role of apologies in East Asian jurisdictions or on apologies as a civil legal remedy aimed at emotional recovery for specific kinds of harm (such as personal injury, invasions of privacy or violations of equal opportunity legislation). These studies, which mostly go beyond the scope of defamation law, pay very little attention to the Western legal tradition. The Anglo-American and continental-European legal culture are considered non-apologetic traditions, which are clearly unfamiliar with the remedy of imposing apologies. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this article shows that court-ordered apologies are available as a defamation remedy in a non-negligible part of the Western legal tradition. This is demonstrated through a profound comparative legal analysis of continental legal systems (Western, Central as well as Eastern European jurisdictions), a mixed legal system (South-Africa) and common law systems. Simultaneously, this article allows us to gain a better understanding of why this remedy is still applied in some jurisdictions and why it has disappeared in others. The article proceeds on the premise that a case can be made for court-ordered apologies as a defamation remedy in the Western legal tradition, and accordingly, it is argued that they are worth considering in jurisdictions which do not make use (anymore) of this legal tool. First, in operating a symbolic reversal of the original defamatory assertion, court-ordered apologies are more likely to produce a shaming effect than other remedies. Second, it is possible to attribute an educative function to court-ordered apologies, allowing courts to educate members of the community about what constitutes unlawful and injurious statements. When examining the implementation of court-ordered apologies as defamation remedy, a civil-common law divide comes to the fore. Whereas apologies can be introduced in continental legal systems as a form of reparation, it is harder to import them into Anglo-American legal systems. The same goes for the reconciliation of this type of relief with freedom of expression, which is simpler to attain under the balancing test of the European Court of Human Right than in some common law systems.


Aim: We performed a systematic review of the literature by means of a meta-analysis to evaluate the influence of the aldosterone synthase gene (CYP11B2) C-344T polymorphism on left ventricular mass (LVM) and related phenotypes. Design: From 485 reports, we included 14 studies about the association between the C-344T variant and left ventricular mass and left ventricular structure-related phenotypes, from which information about number of subjects in each category, outcomes data and genotyping performed with a validated molecular method could be extracted. Fixed and random effect models were used to pool data from individual studies, and the results in the abstract show the extreme genotype comparison, homozygous TT vs homozygous CC. Results: From a total of 2157 subjects, we found no significant association between LVM and the C-344T variant (D: 0.049, 95% CI: 0.091 to 0.179, p = 0.462). Similarly, no significant association was found for interventricular septal-wall thickness (D: 0.027, 95% CI: −0.090 to 0.143, p = 0.654, n: 2105). However, homozygous TT hypertensive subjects had increased LVM (D: 0.251, 95% CI: 0.020 to 0.481, p = 0.04, n: 332). Lastly, in 10 homogeneous studies posterior wall thickness (PWT) was lower in homozygous CC individuals (D: 0.142, 95% CI: 0.016 to 0.268, p = 0.028, n = 1994). Conclusion: Independently of hypertension, homozygous individuals for the –344T allele may have 2.4% higher PWT compared to homozygous subjects for the C-344 allele. Besides, homozygous hypertensive TT subjects show a 6.9% increase in LVM compared to CC homozygous subjects.


The purpose of this research was to study how performance has influenced the Mormon people in contemporary times and throughout history. This study examines various influential moments in the history of the LDS church that had an impact in shaping this group of people culturally. The thesis as a whole studies how the relationship with the media within the religion has become an ambivalent one. The first chapter of the thesis contextualizes the history of the church in order to analyze how performance has played a role in contemporary culture. The second chapter examines specific performances in contemporary Mormon culture. The performances analyzed include the "I am a Mormon" campaign that has been the most recent missionary effort to come from the Mormon Church. The third chapter compares these seminal moments in history and contemporary Mormon culture to analyze the differences between the use of the media in the Mormon Church and other Christian religions. Throughout the thesis the idea of identity and ambivalence are further defined in relation to the church.


As traffic demands are continuously increasing, core networks must be able to react almost instantaneously to any single, even multiple, failure(s) in order to prevent huge data losses. Even though the probability of simultaneous multiple failures is very small, the time needed to repair a single failure ranges from several hours (for landline fibers) to several weeks (for submarine fibers). During this period, the network is vulnerable to any new failure that may occur in the network. Therefore, designing survivable WDM networks against multiple failures requires efficient and accurate detection and localization mechanisms. In this paper, we extend the monitoring trail concept in order to detect and unambiguously localize any single- and double- link failure in the network. Compared to our previously proposed MEMOTA algorithm, the improved MEMOTA++ algorithm benefits from an improved trail reconfiguration algorithm in order to reduce its execution time. Numerical simulations have been carried out using the Deutsche Telekom and the Geant-2 European networks. We show that a monitoring solution able to localize any double-link failure in the Deutsche Telekom network is 122% more expensive than the one able to localize any single-link failure, but remains 10.9% more economical than the traditional link-based monitoring solution.


This review focuses on rare-earth carbonate materials of nano- and micro-size. It discusses in depth the different types of rare-earth carbonate compounds, diverse synthetic approaches and possibilities for chemical tuning of the size, shape and morphology. The interesting luminescence properties of lanthanide doped rare-earth carbonates and their potential applications for example as efficient white light sources and biolabels are reviewed. Additionally the use of these materials as precursors for the synthesis of nano-/micro-sized oxides, and their application as sacrificial templates for morphology-controlled synthesis of other materials such as YVO4, LaF3, NaYF4 and others is overviewed.


Several studies have been done worldwide to examine issues related to providing
feedback on student writing in different second language classrooms (e.g. Hyland and
Hyland, 2006). Various types of feedback can be implemented, such as teacher
feedback (e.g. Hamid, 2007; Ferris and Hedgcock, 2005), peer/group feedback (e.g.
Bartels, 2003; Saito and Fujita, 2004; Hyland and Hyland, 2006; Yang et al, 2006;
Villamil and De Guerrero, 2006) and self-feedback (Makino, 1993; Ferris, 2002).
However, it could be inappropriate or at least questionable to use the same type of
Written Feedback (WF) in dissimilar pedagogic and contextual settings. For this
reason, mixed methods research (mixed research) was carried out to compare staff and
students' perspectives, attitudes, experiences and understanding of issues related to WF
in three English as a Foreign Language (EFL) secondary schools in Syria. In particular,
this research set out to discover what type of feedback on student writing dominates in
the EFL Syrian secondary classroom, the reasons behind such dominance and how
these students and staff view implementing types of feedback other than that/those
dominant in that classroom.
To reach this goal, six types of triangulation were utilised to enhance the validity and
reliability of the research outcomes: data source, methodological, respondent, space,
analysis and methodology triangulation. This research concludes that teacher feedback
(TF) has precedence among other types of WF in the Syrian context and this can be
attributed to four main factors that are related to: teachers, students, the current
educational system and the social system prevailing at the time of the research.
xm


This paper describes the design and implementation of an impedance cross correlation
flow meter which can be used in solids-water pipe flows to measure the local solids volume fraction distribution and the local solids velocity distribution.
The system is composed of two arrays of electrodes, separated by an axial distance of
50 mm and each array contains eights electrodes mounted over the internal circumference of the pipe carrying the flow. Furthermore every electrode in each array can be selected to be either "excitation", "measurement" or "earth".
Changing the electrode configuration leads to a change in the electric field, and hence in
the region of the flow cross section which is interrogated. The local flow velocity in the
interrogated region is obtained by cross correlation between the two electrode arrays.
Additionally, the local solids volume fraction can be obtained from the mean mixture
conductivity in the region under interrogation.
The system is being integrated with a microcontroller to measure the velocity distribution of the solids and the volume fraction distribution of the solids in order to create a portable flow meter capable of measuring the multi-phase flow parameters without the need of a PC to control it. Integration of the product of the local solids volume fraction and the local solids velocity in the flow cross section enables the solids volumetric flow rate to be determined.


1-Octadecene is a widely used solvent for high-temperature nanocrystal synthesis (120-320 °C). Here, we show that 1-octadecene spontaneously polymerizes under these conditions, and the resulting poly(1-octadecene) has a comparable solubility and size to nanocrystals stabilized by hydrophobic ligands. Typical purification procedures (precipitation/redispersion cycles or size exclusion chromatography) fail to separate the poly(1-octadecene) impurity from the nanocrystal product. To avoid formation of poly(1-octadecene), we replace 1-octadecene with saturated, aliphatic solvents. Alternatively, the nanocrystals' native ligands are exchanged for polar ligands, leading to significant solubility differences between nanocrystals and poly(1-octadecene), therefore allowing isolation of pure nanocrystals, free from polymer impurities. These results will help design superior syntheses and improve nanocrystal purity, an important factor in many applications.


We consider an admission control problem and adaptive resource allocation for running mobile applications on a cloudlet. We formulate an optimization problem for dynamic resource sharing of mobile users in mobile cloud computing (MCC) hotspot with a cloudlet as a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). SMDP is transformed into a linear programming (LP) model and it is solved to obtain an optimal solution. In the optimization model, the quality of service (QoS) for different classes of mobile user is taken into account under resource constraints (i.e., bandwidth and server). The numerical results are presented to illustrate that the proposed admission control scheme can achieve a desirable performance and improve throughput of an MCC hotspot significantly.


Electrode materials for Li-ion batteries should combine electronic and ionic conductivity, structural integrity, and safe operation over thousands of lithium insertion and removal cycles. The quest for higher energy density calls for better understanding of the redox processes, charge and mass transfer occurring upon battery operation. A number of techniques have been used to characterize long-range and local structure, electronic and ionic transport in bulk of active materials and at interfaces, with an ongoing move toward in situ techniques determining the changes as they happen. This paper reviews several representative examples of using magnetic properties toward understanding of Li-ion battery materials with a notion to highlight the intimate connection between the magnetism, electronic and atomic structure of solids, and to demonstrate how this connection has been used to reveal the fine electronic and atomic details related to the electrochemical performance of the battery materials.


ABSTRACT This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of 'refugee comics' entitled 'A Perilous Journey', which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or 'counter-geographies', as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter-geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities.


We examine the empirical determinants of student achievement in higher education, focusing our attention on its small-group teaching component (classes or seminars) and on the role of attendance, number of students per class, peers, and tutors. The empirical analysis is based on longitudinal administrative data from a major undergraduate program where students are allocated to class groups in a systematic way, but one which is plausibly uncorrelated with ability. Although, in simple specifications, we find positive returns to attendance and sizeable differences in the effectiveness of teaching assistants, most effects are not significant in specifications that include student fixed effects. We conclude that unobserved heterogeneity amongst students, even in an institution that imposes rigorous admission criteria and so has little observable heterogeneity, is apparently much more important than observable variation in inputs in explaining student outcomes.


Assertions are a familiar and widely used bug detection technique. Traditional assertion checking, however, is performed synchronously, imposing its full cost on the runtime of the program. As a result, many useful kinds of checks, such as data structure invariants and heap analyses, are impractical because they lead to extreme slowdowns. We present a solution that decouples assertion evaluation from program execution: assertions are checked asynchronously by separate checking threads while the program continues to execute. Our technique guarantees that asynchronous evaluation always produces the same result as synchronous evaluation, even if the program concurrently modifies the program state. The checking threads evaluate each assertion on a consistent snapshot of the program state as it existed at the moment the assertion started.
 We implemented our technique in a system called Strobe, which supports asynchronous assertion checking in both single-and multi-threaded Java applications. Strobe runs inside the Java virtual machine and uses copy-on-write to construct snapshots incrementally, on-the-fly. Our system includes all necessary synchronization to support multiple concurrent checking threads, and to prevent data races with the main program threads. We find that asynchronous checking significantly outperforms synchronous checking, incurring tolerable overheads -- in the range of 10% to 50% over no checking at all -- even for heavy-weight assertions that would otherwise result in crushing slowdowns.


Application of hydrogels in tissue engineering and innovative strategies such as organ printing, which is based on layered 3D deposition of cell-laden hydrogels, requires design of novel hydrogel matrices. Hydrogel demands for 3D printing include: 1) preservation of the printed shape after the deposition; 2) maintaining cell viability and cell function and 3) easy handling of the printed construct. In this study we analyze the applicability of a novel, photosensitive hydrogel (Lutrol) for printing of 3D structured bone grafts. We benefit from the fast temperature-responsive gelation ability of thermosensitive Lutrol-F127, ensuring organized 3D extrusion, and the additional stability provided by covalent photocrosslinking allows handling of the printed scaffolds. We studied the cytotoxicity of the hydrogel and osteogenic differentiation of embedded osteogenic progenitor cells. After photopolymerization of the modified Lutrol hydrogel, cells remain viable for up to three weeks and retain the ability to differentiate. Encapsulation of cells does not compromise the mechanical properties of the formed gels and multilayered porous Lutrol structures were successfully printed.


Background Increasing the price of tobacco products has the potential to reduce tobacco consumption. As other forms of promotion have been increasingly restricted over time, tobacco manufacturers have relied more on trade discounts. Minimum price laws that prevented the use of manufacturer promotions were once common; however in most US jurisdictions these discounts are now legally protected. Methods We collected tobacco industry documents, state legislation and court cases between 1987 and 2016 to review tobacco manufacturer strategies to change minimum price laws in the USA. Results Beginning in 2000, tobacco manufacturers lobbied to amend minimum price legislation after state regulators indicated that manufacturer promotions were illegal under existing laws. Companies viewed changing these laws as critical to maintaining tobacco sales, and after the initiation of an industry lobbying campaign, at least 20 states changed the way they calculated tobacco prices. Conclusions Modifying existing minimum price laws so that manufacturer discounts are no longer protected, and implementing new minimum price policies with comparable scope, would likely increase prices and reduce tobacco use.


After students drop out of school, their alcohol use may vary according to the reason for dropping out. In this paper, out of school youth (OSY) are those between 13–20 years old, have not completed their schooling, and have not enrolled in secondary or high school for the current academic year. OSY are at heightened risk of alcohol use. This study examined the relationship between reasons for leaving school and alcohol use, taking into account gender differences. Survey data from 4222 OSY (mean age = 17.4 years, SD = 1.9; males = 59.4%) were analysed using ordinal regression. Leaving school for "not having enough money to pay for school fees" was associated with more alcohol consumption, among females living specifically in rural areas of Gauteng. However, in urban areas of Kwazulu Natal and Mpumalanga, females who left school for the same reason as their rural counterparts were less likely to consume alcohol in the past month. Males were more likely to consume higher levels of alcohol if they reported leaving school due to making someone pregnant, but only when they resided in peri-urban areas. Understanding the relationship between reasons for leaving school and alcohol use may give us insight into the profile of school dropouts at risk for alcohol use. This information is useful for intervention development across the school, home and community.


ABSTRACT This paper examines the making of urban sustainable food provisioning through the case of Barcelona. Barcelona is seeking to develop a more sustainable food system. It aims to green its municipal food markets by reducing the distances from which the food is sourced from. This has been labelled by the city of Barcelona as "proximity food". We shed light on how, and to what extent, proximity food contributes to making the city more sustainable. To frame our analysis, we employ concepts from networks and flows as developed in sociology by Manuel Castells. We examine the provisioning processes that proximity food goes through before they enter retail markets. This includes an analysis of connections with urban energy and water flows. This so-called water, energy and food Urban Nexus, which we argue to be a key factor in the greening of urban food systems. This means that sustainability of food is not just determined by physical distances between its provisioning processes per se but by the specific ways in which food flows relate to connections (both physical and social) with energy and water.


OBJECTIVE
The aim of the present study was to evaluate the time-dependent histopathologic changes in both ovaries and to determine the time-dependent levels of plasma interleukin 6 (IL-6) after unilateral ovarian torsion.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
An experimental animal study included 48 female Sprague-Dawley rats which were distributed to six groups: control group (Group 1), sham-operated control group (Group 2), and four unilateral ovarian torsion groups with torsion duration of three, six, 12, and 24 hours (Group 3, 4, 5, and 6, respectively). Histopathologic criteria (follicular degeneration, vascular congestion, hemorrhage, inflammatory cell infiltration, and total tissue damage score) were evaluated in both ovaries, and plasma IL-6 levels were measured.

RESULTS
At 24 hours after torsion began, mean total tissue damage score was similar between ovaries that had torsion and contralateral ovaries. Mean plasma IL-6 level did not change during the 24 hours after torsion began (p = 0.584).

CONCLUSIONS
In addition to ovaries that had torsion, histopathologic abnormalities also occurred in contralateral ovaries. These results suggest that contralateral ovaries are not quiescent after unilateral ovarian torsion. Plasma IL-6 levels did not change significantly during the 24 hours after ovarian torsion began, resulting in a limitation of its diagnostic use in the early course of the disease.


Recession of high‐mountain glaciers in response to climatic change frequently results in the development of moraine‐dammed glacial lakes. Moraine dam failure is often accompanied by the release of large volumes of water and sediment, termed a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF). Chukhung Glacier is a small (~3 km2) receding valley glacier in Mt. Everest (Sagarmatha) National Park, Nepal. Unlike many Himalayan glaciers, which possess a thick mantle of supraglacial debris, its surface is relatively clean. The glacier terminus has receded 1.3 km from its maximum Holocene position, and in doing so provided the space for an ice‐contact moraine‐dammed lake to develop. The lake had a maximum volume of 5.5 × 105 m3 and drained as a result of breaching of the terminal moraine. An estimated 1.3 × 105 m3 of material was removed from the terminal moraine during breach development. Numerical dam‐breach modelling, implemented within a Generalised Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation (GLUE) framework, was used to investigate a range of moraine‐dam failure scenarios. Reconstructed outflow peak discharges, including failure via overtopping and piping mechanisms, are in the range 146–2200 m3 s‐1. Results from two‐dimensional hydrodynamic GLOF modelling indicate that maximum local flow depths may have exceeded 9 m, with maximum flow velocities exceeding 20 m s‐1 within 700 m of the breach. The floodwaters mobilised a significant amount of material, sourced mostly from the expanding breach, forming a 300 m long and 100 m wide debris fan originating at the breach exit. moraine‐dam. These results also suggest that inundation of the entire floodplain may have been achieved within ten minutes of initial breach development, suggesting that debris fan development was rapid. We discuss the key glaciological and geomorphological factors that have determined the evolution of a hazardous moraine‐dammed lake complex and the subsequent generation of a GLOF and its geomorphological impact. © 2014 The Authors. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.


Case-based planning (CBP) systems, like other case-based reasoning systems, can take advantage of previous planning experience by reusing stored cases (plans) in similar situations in the future. Advantages of CBP include speedup over planning from scratch and the ability to function with limited causal domain knowledge. "Traditional" CBP systems with the latter advantage typically cannot produce plans from scratch because they lack the more powerful adaptation mechanisms of generative planning systems. These "reuse-only" CBP systems rely on retrieving a plan from the casebase that is close to a solution plan. This requires large casebases with good coverage of the problem space and the ability to encode and match cases at fine levels of detail.
Many such CBP systems, however, have fallen short of these requirements. They support only small, pre-indexed casebases. Pre-indexing constrains retrieval, as does the use of less expressive feature-based case representation schemes. The encoding and matching of detailed structural relationships in cases is not possible in such systems. These systems often adapt a single plan to the target problem using methods that are ad hoc or heuristic.
CAPER is a novel, domain-independent, case-based planning system with improvements over traditional reuse-only CBP systems from its use of techniques that exploit a high-performance parallel memory of cases. CAPER takes a memory-intensive approach by making frequent use of memory during all phases of planning and by using large casebases, which can be automatically seeded. Because the parallel retrieval mechanisms scale to real-world sized casebases of thousands of plans, memory does not have to be pre-indexed and thus retrieval is more flexible. Detailed queries can be used to match cases, which are stored using an expressive, graph-structured case representation scheme.
Plan adaptation in CAPER borrows techniques from generative planning, such as the use of plan validations, which capture dependencies in a plan, and plan composition. These techniques are incorporated into a reuse-only CBP framework for a more principled approach to adaptation than in many reuse-only CBP systems. CAPER can also use its flexible retrieval mechanisms and case representations to retrieve patch or substitute plans from memory.


It is hard to escape the phenomenal reach of contemporary pop artists. Their songs are cycled across commercial radio stations, their music videos occupy our screens and we can mostly likely see the artist perform live in our nearest city. This thesis examines two of contemporary pop music's most well-known and successful artists, Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, in terms of their selfpresentation, media representation and audience engagement. Billboard rated Cyrus and Swift in the top 10 artists of 2014 (Billboard 2014). Swift's most recent album, 1989 (2014), "topped iTunes sales charts in over 95 countries on its release and has sold over 8.6 million copies worldwide to date" (IFPI 2015). Cyrus' total album sales stand at 15.9 million, including her work as "Hannah Montana" (Caulfield 2014). This thesis analyses the artists as postfeminist celebrity musicians who present many contradictions in their identities via the assorted channels through which their persona is expressed. Both musicians display the notion of 'slippage' (Genz and Brabon 2009) in relation to their persona, behaviour and creative content; their identities constantly shift and change. I introduce the notion of the postfeminist celebrity musician as a figure that identifies as a feminist, however displays certain behaviours that contest traditional feminist ideals. This thesis analyses Cyrus and Swift as postfeminist celebrity musicians in three main ways. Firstly, a selection of the artists' music videos released between 2009 and 2015 are examined with regards to the artists' choices concerning their image, lyrics and themes of the songs. This thesis also explores the key transitions and various stages of both artists' creative careers. Secondly, the mediated identities of Cyrus and Swift are considered through an analysis of selected magazine feature articles published between 2013 and 2015. The feature articles gauge the artists' presentation in popular print media texts as public feminists and celebrities. Lastly, this thesis investigates audience responses to Cyrus and Swift through an analysis of selected parody videos. Overall, this thesis argues that single representations of identity cannot accurately convey the complete character of the postfeminist celebrity. Cyrus and Swift exemplify postfeminist celebrity musicians as complex and often contradicting individuals.


The Supreme Court frequently relies on state law when interpreting the U.S. Constitution. What is less understood is the degree and manner in which the Supreme Court and other federal courts look to local law. Although it has gone largely unnoticed, there is a robust practice of acknowledging and accounting for local law in the course of constitutional interpretation. Local evidence may inform the decision whether to recognize a constitutional right, it may inform the interpretation of the right, and it may inform the remedies for a constitutional violation. For example, the Supreme Court has examined local enforcement patterns to decide whether a constitutional right is violated in death penalty jurisprudence. In substantive due process rulings, a lack of local enforcement has provided support for recognizing constitutional rights. Judges seek to minimize remedies for constitutional violations that might disrupt local law and practice. As is done with respect to states, judges consider whether local practices are outlying or common. Judges also look to local law and practice to inform the development of constitutional norms. This Article analyzes and defends reliance on local law and practice in constitutional interpretation not to advocate localism or deference to local practice, but as evidence in constitutional interpretation. Using local evidence in constitutional law is particularly important at a time in which empirical research on local-level data is providing information that can better inform constitutional law.


The last hour of betting for the wagering market in the National Football League (NFL) was examined. In a sample of offshore sportsbooks, nearly a quarter of all bets on NFL games occured in the last hour before kickoff. Bets were shown not to be balanced between each side of the betting proposition. When the betting percentage on the favorite increases in the last hour of betting, there is a simple strategy that has shown to earn statistically significant profits: betting against the public by wagering on the underdog. Unlike horse racing, in which informed bettors are assumed to wager late (near post time), money wagered near the kickoff of NFL action does not appear to be the actions of informed agents, but rather they are recreational bettors behaving simply as consumers.


Get up and running with the basic techniques of web scraping using PHP Overview Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results Build a re-usable scraping class to expand on for future projects Scrape, parse, and save data from any website with ease Build a solid foundation for future web scraping topics In Detail With the proliferation of the web, there has never been a larger body of data freely available for common use. Harvesting and processing this data can be a time consuming task if done manually. However, web scraping can provide the tools and framework to accomplish this with the click of a button. It's no wonder, then, that web scraping is a desirable weapon in any programmer's arsenal. Instant Web Scraping With PHP How-to uses practical examples and step-by-step instructions to guide you through the basic techniques required for web scraping with PHP. This will provide the knowledge and foundation upon which to build web scraping applications for a wide variety of situations such as data monitoring, research, data integration relevant to today's online data-driven economy. On setting up a suitable PHP development environment, you will quickly move to building web scraping applications. Beginning with a simple task of retrieving a single web page, you will then gradually build on this by learning various techniques for identifying specific data, crawling through numerous web pages to retrieve large volumes of data, and processing then saving it for future use. You will learn how to submit login forms for accessing password protected areas, along with downloading images, documents, and emails. Learning to schedule the execution of scrapers achieves the goal of complete automation, and the final introduction of basic object-oriented programming (OOP) in the development of a scraping class provides the template for future projects. Armed with the skills learned in the book, you will be set to embark on a wide variety of web scraping projects. What you will learn from this book Scrape and parse data from web pages using a number of different techniques Create custom scraping functions Download and save images and documents Retrieve and scrape data from emails Save scraped data into a MySQL database Submit login and file upload forms Use regular expressions for pattern matching Process and validate scraped data Crawl and scrape multiple pages of a website Approach Filled with practical, step-by-step instructions and clear explanations for the most important and useful tasks. Short, concise recipes to learn a variety of useful web scraping techniques using PHP. Who this book is written for This book is aimed at those new to web scraping, with little or no previous programming experience. Basic knowledge of HTML and the Web is useful, but not necessary.


Previous analysis of Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) signals collected by ESA's Envisat has demonstrated a very valuable source of high‐resolution information, namely, the line‐of‐sight velocity of the moving ocean surface. This velocity is estimated from a Doppler frequency shift, consistently extracted within the ASAR scenes. The Doppler shift results from the combined action of near surface wind on shorter waves, longer wave motion, wave breaking and surface current. Both kinematic and dynamic properties of the moving ocean surface roughness can therefore be derived from the ASAR observations. The observations are compared to simulations using a radar imaging model extended to include a Doppler shift module. The results are promising. Comparisons to coincident altimetry data suggest that regular account of this combined information would advance the use of SAR in quantitative studies of ocean currents.


Introduction: Hyperthermic mitomycin (HM) is a novel treatment modality for selected patients with high-risk non-muscle invasive bladder cancer (NMIBC). We sought to determine predictors of response to this therapy. Patients and Methods: A longitudinal, cohort study of 97 patients with high-risk NMIBC treated with ≥4 HM instillations on a prophylactic schedule was conducted. The primary outcome was time-to-progression survival; secondary outcomes were overall survival, cancer-specific survival, and adverse events. Descriptive statistics, Kaplan-Meier survival analyses, Cox proportional hazards modelling, and univariate and multivariable regression were performed. Results: The presence of initial complete response (CR; no evidence of disease at first check video-cystoscopy and urine cytology) post-HM treatment was an independent predictor of good response to HM. Female patients and those without carcinoma in situ (CIS) also appeared to respond better to the intervention. The overall bladder preservation rate at a median of 27 months was 81.4%; 17/97 (17.5%) patients died during the course of the study. Conclusions: High-risk NMIBC patients can be safely treated with HM and have good oncological outcome. However, those without an initial CR have a poor prognosis and should be counselled towards adopting other treatment methodologies such as cystectomy. Female gender and lack of CIS may be good prognostic indicators for response to HM.


In this thesis, we investigate the admissible rules of intermediate logics. On the one hand, one can characterize the admissibility of rules in certain logic, and on the other hand, one can characterize logics through their admissible rules. We take both approaches, and reach new results in both directions.

The first approach can be subdivided into several, more specific questions. First, we investigate the semantics of admissible rules. We show that exact models provide sound and complete semantics for the admissible rules of intermediate logics with the finite model property. Moreover, we give a correspondence between constraints imposed upon order-defined models and the validity of certain rules in said models, including the disjunction property, a weakening thereof, and several variants of the Visser rules. In closing, we prove that finite models can not provide sound and complete semantics for logics of width greater than two that admit one particular variant of the Visser rules. This result encompasses IPC and the logics of bounded branching.

Second, we investigate the decidability of the admissible rules of IPC. The novelty here does not lie in the answer, which has been known since the eighties, but in the presentation of the proof. We proceed semantically, introducing a generalization of exact models. Moreover, we effectively characterize projective formulae in the logics of bounded branching and IPC as being those formulae that are closed under the so-called de Jongh rules.

Third, we provide a basis for the admissible rules of the logics of bounded branching and the logics of height at most two. In the former logics, the proof proceeds via the above-mentioned characterization of projective formulae. In the latter logics, the proof proceeds via the observation that the totality of formulae on a finite number of variables is finite. Both of the proofs are effective in nature, and both spring from the observation that projectivity can be expressed by means of the closure under certain rules.

The second approach is studied in two forms. First, we investigate the unification type of the intermediate logics mentioned above. We show how the information about their admissible rules allows one to prove their unification type to be finitary. We discuss the notion of an admissible approximation, which can roughly be interpreted as the left-adjoint to the inclusion of derivability into admissibility. The logics at hand all enjoy such admissible approximations that are disjunctions of projective formulae.

Second, we characterize IPC and each of the logics of bounded branching as being the greatest intermediate logic that admits a particular version of the Visser rules. Analogously, Medvedev's logic is described as the greatest intermediate logic above Kreisel-Putnam logic that enjoys the disjunction property. The key observation lies in translating the existence of a counter model into a syntactic statement. In this translation, we make essential use of our previously obtained knowledge on the admissible rules of the logics at hand. Moreover, our method allows us to construct refutation systems for all logics mentioned in this paragraph.


The Tianshan orogen is divided into the Northern, Central and Southern Tianshan tectonic zones by the northern and southern sutures on both sides of the Central Tianshan Tectonic Zone. The eastern segment of the Central Tianshan Tectonic Zone is characterized by the presence of numerous Precambrian metamorphic blocks and is unconformably overlain by Ordovician–Silurian and late Palaeozoic strata. The Precambrian Kumishi and Pargantag metamorphic blocks are the largest older blocks in the eastern segment of the Central Tianshan Tectonic Zone, consisting mainly of metamorphic granitoids and sedimentary rocks in greenschist to amphibolite facies. There are two major lithological assemblages of the metamorphic granitoids: (1) quartz dioritic gneisses, and (2) granodioritic–monzogranitic gneisses with a minor amount of tonalitic and syenogranitic gneisses in both the Kumishi and Pargantag blocks. The quartz dioritic gneisses are characterized by low Sr/Ce (<5.3) and Sr/Y (<28), relatively high Mg no. (51.0–57.0), K2O (2.65–4.04 wt %) contents and εNd(t) values (−2.37–5.84), and negative Nb and Zr–Hf anomalies, as well as relatively flat chondrite-normalized REE patterns with slightly negative Eu anomalies, suggesting that the quartz dioritic gneisses were derived from partial melting of a depleted mantle source enriched by fluids and sedimentary melts from the subducted slab. However, most of granitic gneiss samples display high K2O contents, low Al2O3/(FeO* + MgO + TiO2) values, and relatively flat chondrite-normalized REE patterns with intensively negative Eu anomalies. Integrated low εNd(t) values and older TDM model ages suggest that crustal materials played a significant role in the petrogenesis of these granitoid gneisses and that they were mainly derived from the partial melting of calc-alkaline mafic to intermediate rocks in the crust. Also, variations in geochemical features between the Kumishi–Gangou and Pargantag regions, such as Zr and Hf, may reflect geographic variability in the development of coeval granitic magmas. Tectonic discrimination for granitoid, using trace elements, together with Nd isotopic data, demonstrates that these granitoid gneisses in the eastern segment of the Central Tianshan Tectonic Zone formed in a continental margin arc during late Mesoproterozoic times.


The effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems, for instance on-line learning systems, can be improved when the learner's emotions are taken into account. A necessary condition for this is how the system recognizes the learner's current emotional state. Traditional methods for doing this are based on measuring physical parameters, most typically the facial expression or muscle tension; however, they are neither comfortable for the user nor useful in a distributed environment such as the Internet. Furthermore, filling out a long questionnaire is a time-consuming task. In contrast, we present an extremely simple method that can be used instead, the Emotion Recognition Agent (ERA), which exploits the natural relation between emotions and colors. We have performed experiments demonstrating both the simplicity and the accuracy of our ERA method which employs machine learning techniques for determining a user's emotion given colors sequence.


This paper examines the role of environmental change as a driver of migration, a central concern of areas of inquiry ranging from the Human Dimensions of Global Change research to population geography and development studies. Although much of the literature on the role of the environment in migration reflects a general awareness that environmental factors are but one of a suite of influences shaping migration decisionmaking, a framework within which to place social, economic, and environmental issues with regard to particular migration decisions is absent from this literature. Drawing upon recent contributions to the literature on migration, and political ecological concerns for access to and control over resources, in this paper I present a framework for placing such issues founded on a Foucauldian conceptualization of power. This framework treats environment, economy, and society as both products of and productive of social differentiation, instrumental modes of power, and resistance. These forms shape actors' understanding and negotiation of their social, economic, and environmental contexts, and therefore their migration decisionmaking. I illustrate the application of this framework through the example of three villages in Ghana's Central Region, where rural environmental and economic changes appear to have driven a complex pattern of out-migration over the past thirty-five years. This migration shows the ways in which environmental change becomes inseparable from local perceptions of economy and local politics through local manifestations of power.


OBJECTIVE
The aim of this comprehensive paper is to acquaint the readers with evaluation of the retinal images using the arteficial intelligence (AI). Main focus of the paper is diabetic retinophaty (DR) screening. The basic principles of the artificial intelligence and algorithms that are already used in clinical practice or are shortly before approval will be described.

METHODOLOGY
Describing the basic characteristics and mechanisms of different approaches to the use of AI and subsequently literary minireview clarifying the current state of knowledge in the area.

RESULTS
Modern systems for screening diabetic retinopathy using deep neural networks achieve a sensitivity and specificity of over 80 % in most published studies. The results of specific studies vary depending on the definition of the gold standard, number of images tested and on the evaluated parameters.

CONCLUSION
Evaluation of images using AI will speed up and streamline the diagnosis of DR. The use of AI will allow to keep the quality of the eye care at least on the same level despite the raising number of the patients with diabetes.


Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series have the potential to delineate vegetation phenology change. For a mixed pixel, time-series fluctuations representing phenological change in a year indicate percentage cover changes. In this study, noise in the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) NDVI time series was removed by a Savitzky–Golay filter and wavelet filter. Principal component analysis was conducted to generate new variables characterizing the variations of percentage cover. The results show that the first principal component (PC1) is not sensitive to filters and that PC1 and percentage forestland cover are significantly correlated, with a coefficient of determination (R 2) greater than 0.55, while PC1 and percentage cropland cover are uncorrelated, with R 2 < 0.01. This study also indicates that MODIS percentage forestland cover can be roughly estimated by multi-temporal NDVI data in cloud-prone areas and that the spatial features of mixed pixels can be characterized by temporal phenological features.


Here WHO attempts no less than to rank the vastly different health systems of 191 nations on two one-dimensional measures of performance: (a) ''level of health,'' represented by disability-adjusted life expectancy (DALE) and (b) an ''index of overall health system performance''. The latter is calculated as a weighted average of scores on five distinct dimensions: (1) the country's DALE, (2) the ''distribution of health'' (based on child mortality distributions within countries), (3) the health system's ''responsiveness'' to what people seek from it in terms of ''prompt attention, dignity, autonomy, confidentiality,'' and so on, (4) an index of the distribution of that ''responsiveness'' among socioeconomic classes, and (5) the degree of ''fairness'' with which the health system is financed. The weights for these five measures going into the ''overall health system performance index'' were culled from a survey of 1006 experts from 125 countries, about half of them on the staff of WHO. The final rankings of countries on both of the two performance measures are not based on the actual values achieved by the nation, but on the ratios of the achieved values to the values that ought to have been achieved, given the country's educational attainment and spending on health care. The denominator in this ratio was derived from an empirically estimated mathematical relationship that predicts, for any combination of national health spending and national educational attainment, the level of performance that would have been achieved by an efficiently run health system. Because the ultimate rankings emerging from this study are the products of a whole series of inherently subjective analytic judgements on the specific measures of systems performance, on the weights to be attached to each measure and on the model used to compare actual with ideal performance, it is fair to query whether, on balance, so precarious an undertaking does more good than harm. Before addressing that question in regard to the WHO report, it is well to keep in mind that the decision-makers in the socalled ''real world'' do prefer to have complex phenomena collapsed into one-dimensional indexes. Even professors at top universities despair of multi-line academic transcripts and prefer to see a student's entire and often varied academic career collapsed into the single, highly dubious measure of the grade point average. Gross domestic product (GDP) is a similarly crude, flawed, onedimensional indicator for national economic performance, as is quarterly earnings per share for a giant corporation. All of these simple measures are the products of whole hosts of precarious assumptions. Yet they are widely used, on the assumption that doing so does more good than harm. Can that assumption be made for the WHO report as well? The chief virtue of the WHO report lies in the challenges it poses for its critics within the health services research community. Could these critics have done better? If so, precisely how? Or can these critics argue that quantitative assessments of this sort are never worth undertaking? In other words, are we stuck in a rut that allows physicians or politicians in every country to proclaim that theirs is ''the best health system in the world'' without being challenged by data? If that be the verdict of the research community, it would be good to have it flushed out into the open, and on paper. On the other hand, there is reason to wonder whether more good than harm will have been done by the fanfare with which this report was injected into the public media and thence into the world of policy-making. Two requirements should have been met before the report was ready for a major media campaign. First, the WHO research team should have been sure that their estimates are robust. Can they, in good conscience, make that claim? An artificially high ranking, for example, could take the wind out of the sails of desirable health-reform efforts. Similarly, an artificially low ranking could assign a bad grade to past reform efforts that were actually commendable. Rumour in the health services research community has it that France's no.1 rank was driven in part by a flawed measure of national educational attainment. Under the methodology used by WHO, the more the level of educational attainment or of health spending is underestimated for a country, the higher will be the ratio of actual to ideal performance for that country and the higher will be the nation's ranking. Second, if the report is addressed to policy-makers, one must judge it poorly written. To be sure, it has a number of fascinating, if chatty, chapters; but these are only loosely connected to the actual work underlying this study. To see what was actually done, one must plough through the cryptic commentary that accompanies the tables in the Annex or dig up and read sundry sources cited in the references. Few policymakers and even fewer journalists will go to that trouble. To be useful as a policy analysis, the report ought to have started with the crisp executive summary that is now de rigueur among policy analysts, certainly in the United States. That summary would have presented the main conclusions emerging from the study and described, in layman's terms, the methodology that was used to reach these conclusions. Most important of all, the executive summary should have contained the many caveats that must, in good conscience, accompany ambitious analyses of this sort. n


Thymectomy in a patient with thymoma-related myasthenia Gravis and recent recovery from adult respiratory distress syndrome Voulioti E, Ampatzidou F, Koutsogiannidis Ch P, Karaiskos T, Dimaki A, Asteri Th Thymoma is one of the most common tumors of the anterior mediastinum in adults, arising from thymic epithelial cells. Complete surgical resection is the treatment of choice in myasthenic patients with thymoma. A 41 year-old male, with myasthenia gravis and thymoma was scheduled for thymectomy. Ten months ago, he developed pneumonia. He had a history of pneumonia (10 months ago) complicated by severe adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), managed successfully with a short-term support with extracorporeal membrane lung assist device NovaLung. Long-term impairments in lung volume and diffusion capacity have been reported in adult respiratory distress syndrome survivors. Total intravenous anesthesia technique and especially muscle relaxants infusion require special attention in this group of patients. Our management strategies in this case included careful assessment of respiratory function, avoidance of premedication, use of short-acting anesthetic agents (propofol, remifentanil), use of suggamadex for reversal of rocuronium-induced neuromuscular block, and intraoperative monitoring with a train-of-four monitor and monitoring in an intensive care unit for 24 hours after surgery.


The political use of terror has always been with us, whether in the murderous seizing of power by the ancients, through the outlawed campaigns of guerrillas, or via the state sanctioned terror of war. From Homer to Al Qaeda, terrorism has flourished in one form or another, bloodily shaping our history. Andrew Sinclair's unique book brilliantly explores the methods and thinking behind terrorism and shows how the nature of terror has not changed since the days of the Assassins and the Mongol hordes. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, "An Anatomy of Terror" dissects the uses of atrocity from the Roman destruction of Carthage to the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center. Bold, incisive and compelling, "An Anatomy Of Terror" is an essential history for our times.


Luke Short perfected his skills as a gambler in locations that included Leadville, Tombstone, Dodge City, and Fort Worth. In 1883, in what became known as the "Dodge City War," he banded together with Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and others to protect his ownership interests in the Long Branch Saloon—an event commemorated by the famous "Dodge City Peace Commission" photograph.
During his lifetime, Luke Short became one of the best known sporting men in the United States, and one of the wealthiest. The irony is that Luke Short is best remembered for being the winning gunfighter in two of the most celebrated showdowns in Old West history: the shootout with Charlie Storms in Tombstone, Arizona, and the showdown against Jim Courtright in Fort Worth, Texas. He would have hated that.
The contents include: -The cowboy by birth -- Tall tales and short facts -- The gambler by choice -- Get out of Dodge! -- A plain statement & shots from Short -- The Dodge City peace commission -- The White Elephant in Panther City -- Sporting men of Fort Worth -- Dead man in a shooting gallery -- Mrs. Luke Short -- The war on the gambling fraternity -- State of Texas vs. Luke Short -- The sport of kings and a palace royal -- The main event -- Luke Short -- prize fight promoter -- The last gunfight -- Chicago -- Game over.


It is now widely recognized that regulatory failures contributed to the onset of the global financial crisis. Redressing such failures has, thus, been a key policy priority in the post-crisis reform agenda at both the domestic and international levels. This special issue investigates the process of post-crisis financial regulatory reform in a number of crucial issue areas, including the rules and arrangements that govern financial supervision, offshore financial centers and shadow banking, the financial industry's involvement in global regulatory processes, and macroeconomic modeling. In so doing, the main purpose of this special issue is to shed light on an often understudied aspect in regulation literature: the variation in the dynamics of regulatory change. Contributors examine the different dynamics of regulatory change observed post-crisis and explain variations by accounting for the interaction between institutional factors, on the one hand, and the activity of change agents and veto players involved in the regulatory reform process, on the other.


Tissue barrier dysfunction is a poorly defined feature hypothesized to drive chronic human inflammatory disease1,2. The epithelium of the upper respiratory tract represents one such barrier, responsible for separating inhaled agents, such as pathogens and allergens, from the underlying submucosa. Specialized epithelial subsets—including secretory, glandular, and ciliated cells—differentiate from basal progenitors to collectively realize this role3-5. Allergic inflammation in the upper airway barrier can develop from persistent activation of Type 2 immunity (T2I), resulting in the disease spectrum known as chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS), ranging from rhinitis to severe nasal polyps6-8. Whether recently identified epithelial progenitor subsets, and their differentiation trajectory, contribute to the clinical presentation and barrier dysfunction in T2I-mediated disease in humans remains unexplored3,9,10. Profiling twelve primary human samples spanning the range of clinical severity with the Seq-Well platform11 for massively-parallel single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq), we report the first single-cell transcriptomes for human respiratory epithelial cell subsets, immune cells, and parenchymal cells (18,036 total cells) from a T2I inflammatory disease, and map key mediators. We find striking differences between non-polyp and polyp tissues within the epithelial compartments of human T2I cellular ecosystems. More specifically, across 10,383 epithelial cells, we identify a global reduction in epithelial diversity in polyps characterized by basal cell hyperplasia, a concomitant decrease in glandular and ciliated cells, and phenotypic shifts in secretory cell function. We validate these findings through flow cytometry, histology, and bulk tissue RNA-seq of an independent cohort. Furthermore, we detect an aberrant basal progenitor differentiation trajectory in polyps, and uncover cell-intrinsic and extrinsic factors that may lock polyp basal cells into an uncommitted state. Overall, our data define severe T2I barrier dysfunction as a reduction in epithelial diversity, characterized by profound functional shifts stemming from basal cell defects, and nominate a cellular mechanism for the persistence and chronicity of severe human respiratory disease.


This chapter compares the recapitalizations of the Japanese banking sector in the 1990s with those in the ongoing European debt crisis. The analysis points to four main policy implications. First, recapitalizing banks by insuring or purchasing troubled assets alone is not likely to solve the problem of banks' weak capitalization, as this measure is not able to adjust the extent of the recapitalization to the banks' specific needs. Second, the amount of the recapitalization should be based on actual capital shortages and not risk-weighted assets to avoid banks decreasing their loan supply. Third, banks should face restrictions regarding the amount of dividends they are allowed to pay out. Finally, banks must be induced to clean up their balance sheets and reduce the amount of bad (non-performing) loans to rebuild confidence in the European banking system.


Behavior that solves a problem is distinguished by the fact that it changes another part of the solver's behavior and is strengthened when it does so. Problem solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli. Verbal responses produce especially useful stimuli, because they affect other people. As a culture formulates maxims, laws, grammar, and science, its members behave more effectively without direct or prolonged contact with the contingencies thus formulated. The culture solves problems for its members, and does so by transmitting the verbal discriminative stimuli called rules. Induction, deduction, and the construction of models are ways of producing rules. Behavior that solves a problem may result from direct shaping by contingencies or from rules constructed either by the problem solver or by others. Because different controlling variables are involved, contingencyshaped behavior is never exactly like rule-governed behavior. The distinction must take account of (1) a system which establishes certain contingencies of reinforcement, such as some part of the natural environment, a piece of equipment, or a verbal community; (2) the behavior shaped and maintained by these contingencies; (3) rules, derived from the contingencies, which specify discriminative stimuli, responses, and consequences, and (4) the behavior occasioned by the rules.


Aerial robots provide valuable support in several high-risk scenarios thanks to their capability to quickly fly to locations dangerous or even inaccessible to humans. In order to fully benefit from these features, aerial robots should be easy to transport and rapid to deploy. With this aim, this paper focuses on the development of a novel pocket sized quadrotor with foldable arms. The quadrotor can be packaged for transportation by folding its arms around the main frame. Before flight, the quadrotor's arms self-deploy in 0.3 seconds thanks to the torque generated by the propellers. The paper describes the design strategies used for developing lightweight, stiff and self-deployable foldable arms for miniature quadrotors. The arms are manufactured according to an origami technique with a foldable multi-layer material. A prototype of the quadrotor is presented as a proof of concept and performance of the system is assessed.


The Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPACT) increased competition in the electric generating sector by creating new entities that can generate and sell electricity at wholesale without being regulated as utilities under PUHCA. PURPA began to shift more regulatory responsibilities to the federal government, and EPACT continued that shift away from the states by creating new options for utilities and regulators to meet electricity demand.


Space imageries with their low costs and availability for every one, provide a good opportunity for topographic mapping of unmapped or poorly mapped areas around the world particularly in the developing countries. The French SPOT Imaging system is the first space orbiting satellite with stereoscopic capability. Panchromatic stereoscopic pairs with variable base to height ratios are available and can be arranged for any part on the earth's surface. In this investigation, three dimensional coordinates are extracted from SPOT stereoscopic images using two analytical photogrammetric methods. In the first method, a stereoscopic model is formed by using the analytical relative orientation technique. Three dimensional model coordinates, then, were fitted into ground coordinates using a number of mathematical models of coordinates transformation. The second method used is the space intersection, where three dimensional ground coordinates of the intersection point of each two similar rays are computed. This procedure, normally, follows the application of the space resection, where the exterior orientation elements for the two stereoscopic images have to be determined. To assess the accuracy of the extracted three dimensional coordinates, residuals and their root mean square values in a number of check points were computed and analyzed.


Abstract. This study examined the impacts of aircraft emissions during the landing and takeoff cycle on PM2.5 concentrations during the months of June and July 2002 at the Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Primary and secondary pollutants were modeled using the Advanced Modeling System for Transport, Emissions, Reactions, and Deposition of Atmospheric Matter (AMSTERDAM). AMSTERDAM is a modified version of the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model that incorporates a plume-in-grid process to simulate emissions sources of interest at a finer scale than can be achieved using CMAQ's model grid. Three fundamental issues were investigated: the effects of aircraft on PM2.5 concentrations throughout northern Georgia, the differences resulting from use of AMSTERDAM's plume-in-grid process rather than a traditional CMAQ simulation, and the concentrations observed in aircraft plumes at subgrid scales. Comparison of model results with an air quality monitor located in the vicinity of the airport found that normalized mean bias ranges from −77.5% to 6.2% and normalized mean error ranges from 40.4% to 77.5%, varying by species. Aircraft influence average PM2.5 concentrations by up to 0.232 μg m−3 near the airport and by 0.001–0.007 μg m−3 throughout the Atlanta metro area. The plume-in-grid process increases concentrations of secondary PM pollutants by 0.005–0.020 μg m−3 (compared to the traditional grid-based treatment) but reduces the concentration of non-reactive primary PM pollutants by up to 0.010 μg m−3, with changes concentrated near the airport. Examination of subgrid-scale results indicates that median aircraft contribution to grid cells is higher than median puff concentration in the airport's grid cell and outside of a 20 km × 20 km square area centered on the airport, while in a 12 km × 12 km square ring centered on the airport, puffs have median concentrations over an order of magnitude higher than aircraft contribution to the grid cells. Maximum puff impacts are seen within the 12 km × 12 km ring, not in the airport's own grid cell, while maximum grid cell impacts occur within the airport's grid cell. Twenty-one (21)% of all aircraft-related puffs from the Atlanta airport have at least 0.1 μg m−3 PM2.5 concentrations. Near the airport, median daily puff concentrations vary between 0.017 and 0.134 μg m−3 (0.05 and 0.35 μg m−3 at ground level), while maximum daily puff concentrations vary between 6.1 and 42.1 μg m−3 (7.5 and 42.1 μg m−3 at ground level) during the 2-month period. In contrast, median daily aircraft contribution to grid concentrations varies between 0.015 and 0.091 μg m−3 (0.09 and 0.40 μg m−3 at ground level), while the maximum varies between 0.75 and 2.55 μg m−3 (0.75 and 2.0 μg m−3 at ground level). Future researchers may consider using a plume-in-grid process, such as the one used here, to understand the impacts of aircraft emissions at other airports, for proposed future airports, for airport expansion projects under various future scenarios, and for other national-scale studies specifically when the maximum impacts at fine scales are of interest.


Emotions are an essential part of human social interactions. By integrating an automatic affect recognizer into an artificial system, the system can detect humans' emotions and provide personal responses. We aim to build a prompting system that uses a virtual human with emotional interaction capabilities to help persons with a cognitive disability to complete daily activities independently. In this thesis, we work on automatic affect recognition and compare three different types of feature descriptors with support vector machine regression (SVR) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) to predict users' emotions in three-dimensional space. We demonstrate the feasibility of further building artificial systems that track users' real-time emotions through BayesACT simulations, a probabilistic and decision-theoretic generalization of Affect Control Theory that learns users' fundamental sentiments during interactions. We would like to understand given virtual humans with distinct emotion characteristics, how and to what extent the user's emotions are affected. In the end, we integrate the affect recognition module into an iterated prisoner's dilemma game, in which a user can play the game against a virtual human. We let a number of participants play the game and test if different facial expressions change the virtual human's strategies during the game.


Abstract Radiations are commonly believed to be linked to the evolutionary appearance of a novel morphology or ecology. Previous studies have demonstrated a close relationship between the evolutionary appearance of algal photosymbiosis in planktonic foraminifera and evolutionary diversification of Paleogene photosymbiotic clades. For example, the evolution of photosymbiosis was synchronous with the abrupt evolution of four major groups of Paleogene planktonic foraminifera including two clades within the genus Morozovella, as well as the genera Acarinina and Igorina. Our new isotopic and biogeographic data suggest that the acarininids evolved from a photosymbiotic ancestor (which we identify as Praemurica inconstans or early representatives of Praemurica uncinata), but also demonstrate that photosymbiosis did not trigger an immediate species-level radiation in this group. Instead, the acarininids remained a low-diversity taxon restricted to high latitudes for nearly 1.8 million years before radiating ecologically and taxonomically. The eventual radiation of the acarininids is tied to an expansion of their geographic range into the mid and low latitudes. Biogeographic analyses of modern plankton suggest that high-latitude environments may be less conducive to establishing radiations simply because there are fewer niches available to be filled than there are in the tropics. Accordingly, the acarininids may have initially failed to diversify because they started off in environments that presented few opportunities to sustain a large radiation. The high-latitude origin of the acarininids continued to retard their overall diversification until they were able to develop strategies that allowed them to expand into tropical environments and fully exploit their photosymbiotic ecology.


By 3 different approaches we demonstrate the ability of filter feeding ciliates (Euplotes spp. and Uronema marinum) to enhance interstitial solute transports. By a simple diffusion analogy we quantify the effect as a function of cell densities. Ciliate densities often encountered in biofilms, microbial mats or estuarine sediments may enhance the transport coefficients of biogeochemical important solutes like, for instance, O 2 by a factor of 1.1 to 10 above the diffusive coefficient. In less productive environments coastal or shelf sedimentsl ciliate densities are usually too low to cause any significant effect on the diffusive mediated solute transport, at least in the case of small fast-diffusing molecules such as O 2 .


A striking but largely unnoticed feature of the controversy spurred by George W. Bush's aggressive use of signing statements is that Republicans, with only a brief interruption, controlled both houses of Congress from 2000 until 2006.1 The question of why a Republican President would use signing statements to slap down a Republican Congress did not meaningfully register in either a July 2006 American Bar Association (ABA) Task Force Report, a series of Boston Globe articles that won the Pulitzer Prize, or congressional hearings held by Republicans in June 2006 and Democrats in January 2007. 2 The subject of this controversy, instead, has been whether the President has a legal duty to enforce laws he thinks are unconstitutional and, relatedly, whether the President is improperly expanding his power by "quietly claim[ing] the authority to disobey more than [800] laws enacted since he took office."3 I do not doubt the appropriateness of journalists, academics, and lawmakers focusing their energies on the related questions of whether Presidents can disobey laws they sign and, even if they can, whether President Bush is nevertheless going too far in pushing his vision of presidential power. Those questions should be front and center in this conversation. At the same time, I think the question of how the President's use of signing statements might differ in periods of unified and divided government is worth examining.4 In this Essay, I will focus on the use of signing statements to advance the President' s policy agenda. My central claim is that Presidents have far stronger incentives to use signing statements to advance their agendas in periods of divided government. I am not arguing, however, that our system of checks and balances would be improved by increasing the use of signing statements during periods of divided government. Even though I will call attention to ways in which Presidents have advanced their political agendas through unilateral action, I do not take a position on the larger question of whether Presidents have too much or too Utile power vis-a-vis Congress.5 My argument is straightforward: when the President and Congress are of the same party, Presidents can advance their policy agendas by working informally with Congress and federal agencies. In periods of divided government, Presidents have less control of agency heads and less influence in Congress. Pre-enforcement directives - like signing statements - can be used to constrain agency discretion, signal Congress about presidential priorities, and - like other forms of unilateral presidential action - shift the burden to those who disapprove of presidential policies to override instructions to agency heads. The fact that Presidents should make greater use of policy-based signing statements in periods of divided government does not mean that Presidents, in fact, have used signing statements for this purpose. Unlike executive orders, signing statements do not have much of a historical pedigree. Before Ronald Reagan sought to centralize presidential power through a host of 1 980s reforms, Presidents hardly ever attached a signing statement to legislation.6 More than that, even though Reagan's legal team saw signing statements as a useful mechanism for centralizing executive branch policy priorities,7 Reagan made only sporadic use of pre-enforcement signing statements. In short, because no President has systematically used signing statements to advance his policy agenda, there is little hard evidence to assess differences between policy-based signing statements in periods of unified and divided government. In explaining why Presidents should see policy-driven signing statements as a useful mechanism to advance their agendas in periods of divided government, this Essay will proceed in two parts. Part I will detail why Presidents have incentives to pursue their policy agendas through unilateral action. Executive orders, unilateral presidential war-making, and structural initiatives that allow Presidents to centralize and coordinate agency policymaking are well documented examples of this phenomenon. …


Opuntia spp. flowers have been traditionally used for medical purposes, mostly because of their diversity in bioactive molecules with health promoting properties. The proximate, mineral and volatile compound profiles, together with the cytotoxic and antimicrobial properties were characterized in O. microdasys flowers at different maturity stages, revealing several statistically significant differences. O. microdasys stood out mainly for its high contents of dietary fiber, potassium and camphor, and its high activities against HCT15 cells, Staphylococcus aureus, Aspergillus versicolor and Penicillium funiculosum. The vegetative stage showed the highest cytotoxic and antifungal activities, whilst the full flowering stage was particularly active against bacterial species. The complete dataset has been classified by principal component analysis, achieving clearly identifiable groups for each flowering stage, elucidating also the most distinctive features, and comprehensively profiling each of the assayed stages. The results might be useful to define the best flowering stage considering practical application purposes.


Hygiene plays a key role in tipping the balance towards reduction of diarrhoeal and other infectious diseases. Yet it has often been overlooked, positioned as a "supporting rider" of water supply and sanitation services, or narrowly understood as handwashing. By focusing on handwashing infrastructure as proposed for the monitoring of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, development actors might miss the opportunity of capturing hygiene practices that are socially embedded and can act as a catalyst for change and risk reduction. We develop this argument by presenting an in-depth examination of hygiene practices in a low-income neighbourhood of Lilongwe, Malawi. Despite the high poverty levels and the constant water shortages in the area, a number of water-intensive hygiene practices are consistently carried out, proving that hygiene is central to residents' everyday lives. Development projects should start by identifying these practices and by reflecting on the extent that these already work or can be made to work for reducing health-related risks.


Seed banks are a common characteristics to many plant species, which allow storage of genetic diversity in the soil as dormant seeds for various periods of time. We investigate an above-ground population following a Fisher-Wright model with selection coupled with a deterministic seed bank assuming the length of the seed bank is kept constant and the number of seeds is large. To assess the combined impact of seed banks and selection on genetic diversity, we derive a general diffusion model. We compute the equilibrium solution of the site-frequency spectrum and derive the times to fixation of an allele with and without selection. Finally, it is demonstrated that seed banks enhance the effect of selection onto the site-frequency spectrum while slowing down the time until the mutation-selection equilibrium is reached.


Osprey's Campaign title for one of the most important naval battles in the history of World War II (1939-1945), Midway, which was fought barely six months after the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The badly damaged USS Yorktown was repaired in just 48 hours and with Enterprise and Hornet set out to meet the Japanese. In a battle marked by great heroism on both sides the United States dealt a devastating blow to the Imperial Japanese Fleet sinking four of her most powerful carriers. In this superbly illustrated volume Mark Healy tells the whole story; espionage, daring, luck and extreme heroism. A fascinating read supplemented by genuine photographs of the battle in progress.


The governance of major metropolitan areas is often associated with a "fragmented" and "uncoordinated" multi-government apparatus, frequently sculpted from years of particularistic ad hoc administrative reforms. This image of dysfunctional structure gains high salience when the metropolitan context is accentuated by complexity and fluidity, especially where intense paradoxical forces of economic development and ecological sustainability are present. The most visible "solutions" for such a state often come from bureaucrats seeking to "streamline" government according to norms of standardization and hierarchy. But, calls for reform may also come from scholars of polycentric government, who see the problem as a misalignment of administrative structure with the metropolitan context. This article adopts the latter, less-appreciated perspective that argues such dysfunctions in a metropolitan multi-government network are essentially problems of adaptive organizational design. Different than the bureaucratic model, treatises on new public management or group-behavior theory, it emphasizes the contextual nature of public administration by employing the holistic framework of "organizational systems." It illustrates the logic by introducing a toolbox for multi-government design that speaks to the adaptive qualities of government networks in whole metropolitan areas. Its purpose is to reinvigorate this holistic approach in thinking about the way we look at multi-government networks in major metropolitan areas.