The fired-clay ceramic of EBA (Early Bronze Age) Canaanite pottery is mineralogically and chemically analyzed by using FT-IR spectroscopy and LA-ICP-MS. Spectral analysis by second-derivative and curve-fitting techniques is applied to the FT-IR spectra in order to improve the identification of the compositional phases. In the firing of ceramics at temperatures no higher than 950 °C, the initial clay of the raw material is transformed into fired-clay, which is then defined as meta-clay. The meta-clay is characterized by a pseudo-amorphous, short-range ordered structure. The clay minerals kaolinite, smectite (montmorillonite) and illite are thermally transformed into metakaolinite, meta-smectite and meta-illite, respectively. In the present study, the fired-clay ceramic is analyzed in two specific classes of EBA Canaanite pottery: Metallic Ware (a group of ceramic) and holemouth cooking pots. The FT-IR spectroscopy and LA-ICP-MS results demonstrate that the major constituent of Metallic Ware is metakaolinite with quartz, indicating that kaolinitic raw material containing quartz was utilized for their manufacture. On the other hand, the major constituent of holemouth cooking pots is meta-smectite, indicating that smectitic raw material was used. An observation of both meta-clays in parts of the ceramics indicates that raw material consisting of a mixture of kaolinite and smectite was employed. The kaolinitic raw material was utilized for the manufacture of high-quality Metallic Ware because it does not swell or shrink upon wetting and drying, and can be fired to high temperatures to form impermeable, thin-walled durable vessels. However, for the manufacture of cooking pots a raw material that is stable in cooking directly over fire was required, and for this purpose smectitic raw material was utilized.


This chapter talks about competence and transformation in their bacterial senses (competence to take up DNA, genetic transformation by recombination with this DNA) and also about the skills and sudden changes at the heart of a research career. Thus, one of the three histories is the author's own—how he came to work on DNA uptake, why he thinks it is so important. Another is the history of research into competence and transformation--what has been learned and where it has led. The third is the evolutionary history of the phenomena themselves--when and how the ability to actively take up DNA evolved, how often it leads to genetic transformation, and what this has contributed to bacterial evolution. The author knew from introductory biology that the first evidence DNA carried genetic information was the ability of Streptococcus pneumoniae to change its genes by taking up DNA from its surroundings. Since then a number of bacteria had been shown to take up fragments of chromosomal DNA and recombine them into their chromosomes, although only a few (the gram-positive S. pneumoniae and Bacillus subtilis and the gram-negative Haemophilus influenzae) had been studied in any detail. The author's tests, using agents that produced single-strand or double-strand damage, showed that DNA damage did not induce competence in either H. influenzae or B. subtilis. Proponents of the transformation function for competence argue that the sequence bias of the uptake machinery is an adaptation for transformation.


Recent pervasive systems are designed to be context-aware so that they are able to adapt to continual changes of their environments. Rule-based adaptation, which is commonly adopted by these applications, introduces new challenges in software design and verification. Recent research results have identified some faulty or unwanted adaptations caused by factors such as asynchronous context updating, and missing or faulty context reading. In addition, adaptation rules based on simple event models and propositional logic are not expressive enough to address these factors and to satisfy users' expectation in the design. We tackle these challenges at design stage by introducing sequential event patterns in adaptation rules to eliminate faulty and unwanted adaptations with features provided in the event pattern query language. We illustrate our approach using the recent published examples of adaptive applications, and show that it is promising on designing more reliable context-aware adaptive applications.


The design of efficient wireless fronthaul connections for future heterogeneous networks incorporating emerging paradigms such as cloud radio access network has become a challenging task that requires the most effective utilisation of fronthaul network resources. In this paper, we propose to use distributed compression to reduce the fronthaul traffic in uplink Coordinated Multi‐Point for cloud radio access network. Unlike the conventional approach where each coordinating point quantises and forwards its own observation to the processing centre, these observations are compressed before forwarding. At the processing centre, the decompression of the observations and the decoding of the user message are conducted in a successive manner. The essence of this approach is the optimisation of the distributed compression using an iterative algorithm to achieve maximal user rate with a given fronthaul rate. In other words, for a target user rate the generated fronthaul traffic is minimised. Moreover, joint decompression and decoding is studied and an iterative optimisation algorithm is devised accordingly. Finally, the analysis is extended to multi‐user case and our results reveal that, in both dense and ultra‐dense urban deployment scenarios, the usage of distributed compression can efficiently reduce the required fronthaul rate and a further reduction is obtained with joint operation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Electronic government has a history of repeating projects that previously proved difficult to implement. One possible reason for this is that we do not learn enough from past experiences. Lessons are not widely shared and we do not always get the "full story". Only a narrow group have the ability to understand and access research findings. The use of a storytelling approach could make electronic government research more comprehensible, and accessible. It could also be used as an analytical tool to bridge theory and practice. However, storytelling approaches are currently not used within this research field. In this paper, I present an analysis of the value of using storytelling to show how including multiple voices, examining myths, and writing stories could play an important role in dealing with electronic government challenges.


A total of 250 samples—including fruits, fruit juices, and baby foods (50 samples each), vegetables (70 samples), and cereals (30 samples)—were collected from Lucknow, India, and analyzed for the presence of imidacloprid residues. The QuEChERS (quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged, and safe) method of extraction coupled with high‐performance liquid chromatographic analysis were carried out, and imidacloprid residues were qualitatively confirmed by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry. Imidacloprid was not detected in samples of fruit juices and baby foods. It was, however, detected in 38 samples of fruits, vegetables, and cereals, which is about 15.20% of the total samples. Of samples of fruits, 22% showed the presence of imidacloprid, and 2% of samples showed residues above the maximal residue limit. Although imidacloprid was detected in 24% of vegetable samples, only 5.71% showed the presence of imidacloprid above the maximal residue limit. However, 33% of cereal samples showed the presence of imidacloprid, and about 3% of samples were above the maximal residue limit. The calculated estimated daily intake ranged between 0.004 and 0.131 µg/kg body weight, and the hazard indices ranged from 0.007 to 0.218 for these food commodities. It is therefore indicated that lifetime consumption of vegetables, fruits, fruit juices, baby foods, wheat, rice, and pulses may not pose a health hazard for the population of Lucknow because the hazard indices for imidacloprid residues were below one. Environ. Toxicol. Chem. 2013;32:723–727. © 2012 SETAC


The imbalances in bargaining power between the contracting parties in the food supply chain have drawn much attention, also from policy makers. The European Commission is committed to facilitate the restructuring of the sector by encouraging the creation of voluntary agricultural producer organisations. DG Agriculture and Rural Development has launched a large study, "Support for Farmers' Cooperatives", that will provide the background knowledge that will help farmers organise themselves in cooperatives as a tool to consolidate their market orientation and so generate a solid market income. In the framework of this study, this report provides the relevant knowledge from The Netherlands.


Unlike the case in other African countries, such as South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe, the Namibian Constitution does not require courts to exclude evidence obtained through human rights violations if the admission of that evidence would render the trial unfair or would be detrimental to the administration of justice. The only article in the Namibian Constitution dealing with the issue of evidence is article 12(1)(b), which provides that '[n]o persons shall be compelled to give testimony against themselves or their spouses, who shall include partners in a marriage by customary law, and no court shall admit in evidence against such persons' testimony which has been obtained from such persons in violation of article 8(2)(b) hereof'. However, Namibian courts have invoked the criteria (set out in the Constitutions of South Africa, Kenya and Zimbabwe) in determining whether or not to admit evidence obtained through human rights violations. This article deals with the jurisprudence emanating from Namibian courts dealing with evidence obtained through human rights violations, and highlights the challenges that courts have grappled with in dealing with such evidence. The issues discussed are the relevant provisions relating to the admission of evidence obtained through violating human rights; the tests courts have developed to decide whether or not to admit evidence obtained through human rights violations; the right to remain silent at the time of arrest; the accused's right not to incriminate himself at the trial; the right to consult a lawyer before making a statement; and evidence obtained through violating the rights to freedom from torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It is recommended that Namibia may have to amend its Constitution to provide, inter alia, for criteria to be used in deciding whether or not to admit evidence obtained through human rights violations.


We obtain analytical gravitational waveforms in the frequency-domain for precessing, quasi-circular compact binaries with small spins, applicable, for example, to binary neutron star inspirals. We begin by calculating an analytic solution to the precession equations, obtained by expanding in the dimensionless spin parameters and using multiple-scale analysis to separate timescales. We proceed by analytically computing the Fourier transform of time-domain waveform through the stationary phase approximation. We show that the latter is valid for systems with small spins. Finally, we show that these waveforms have a high overlap with numerical waveforms obtained through direct integration of the precession equations and discrete Fourier transformations. The resulting, analytic waveform family is ideal for detection and parameter estimation of gravitational waves emitted by inspiraling binary neutron stars with ground-based detectors.


Without a department of geography, Harvard University established the Center for Geographic Analysis CGA in 2006 to support research and teaching of all disciplines across the University with emerging geospatial technologies. In the past four and a half years, CGA built an institutional service infrastructure and unleashed an increasing demand on geographic analysis in many fields. CGA services range from helpdesk, project consultation, training, hardware/software administration, community building, to system development and methodology research. Services often start as an application of existing GIS technology, eventually contributing to the study of geographic information science in many ways. As a new generation of students and researchers growing up with Google Earth and the like, their demand for geospatial services will continue to push CGA into new territories.


Navigation is one of the major activities that people engage in when interacting with computers. When using traditional navigation solutions, such as the mouse, inherent limitations of human capabilities are the primary source of errors. However, the development of assistive technologies and ubiquitous computing have highlighted the importance of system- and context-based errors both of which differ in important ways from user-based errors. Traditional theories such as the speed and accuracy tradeoff and Fitts' Law may effectively explain user-based errors, but are insufficient when errors are caused by limitations of the underlying technologies or the context in which the interactions are occurring. To address this issue, a power and reliability model (PRM) was proposed, which expands on traditional theories to more effectively address all three types of errors. This model consists of two components: power and reliability. Power addresses the efficiency of a technique or application while reliability addresses the errors that occur during a task. The tradeoff between power and reliability, which is inherent when employing error-prone technologies such as speech recognition, has significant implications for system and interface design. To operationalize the concept of reliability, a metric is proposed that incorporates both the likelihood of command failures and the severity of the outcomes caused by those failures. This metric builds on the concept of entropy in information theory to provide a systematic solution that allows the reliability of various techniques and applications to be quantified, evaluated, and compared. Several studies were conducted to begin the validation of the PRM. One study involving ninety participants focused on the validation of the reliability metric. The results indicate that, compared to failure rates, reliability scores are more effective for describing both objective task completion times and subjective user satisfaction ratings. A case study involving 29 participants illustrated the tradeoff between power and reliability and demonstrated how the proposed model could be used to guide the design of more effective solutions. Interaction solutions developed based on design guidelines derived from the PRM resulted in lower command failure rates, less severe failure consequences, the development of more effective strategies, and more efficient interactions.


Declining populations in rural and regional areas have become a high political priority in Australia. Calls for measures to support rural communities have been prompted by substantial population declines in some country areas. In Europe and the USA, similar political pressures to halt population losses in rural and regional areas are also apparent; often as a component of the multifunctionality of agriculture. The question addressed in the present paper is whether or not the Australian tax-paying public would be willing to pay to avoid losses of people from rural and regional areas that may result from environmental protection measures. As an integral component of two recent non-market, environmental valuation exercises using Choice Modelling, the value of the benefits associated with the maintenance of rural populations has been estimated. The results demonstrate that a positive existence value is held primarily by urban dwellers for rural population levels.


This completely new edition of The Recruiting Officer contains a freshly-edited play text, with new annotations, in modern spelling. Tiffany Stern's comprehensive and engaging introduction discusses the author's career and gives a history of the play including its staging, critical interpretation, date and sources, putting it its context of the late Restoration and illuminating its theatrical vivacity. Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer is set in Shrewsbury in 1704 and describes what happens in a country town when the army come to stay. With cross-dressing and confusion in plenty, this is a comedy exploring the timeless themes of love and war. One of Farquhar's last two plays, The Recruiting Officer is both entertaining and touching. It has a light, humane touch and its original depiction of a real-life provincial town comically explores the impact that ongoing warfare had on its civilian society.


It is now many years since, in my rambles amongst the trap rocks of the Campsie Fells, I became acquainted with the peculiar masses of rock which form the subject of the present communication. In my paper "On the Geology of the Campsie District," I purposely omitted all reference to them, hoping to be able at some time to discover whether or not the rock belonged to the hill, and if so, to find its outcrop. Other duties, however, for a long time prevented me from continuing the investigation, though the subject frequently occurred to my memory; and since the discovery of beds of coal and other strata, with plants and fish-remains of Carboniferous age, intercalated with the traps of the Kilpatrick Hills, recorded in the Transactions of the Society,* the importance of finding evidence of interbedded strata at other points in the trap of the Lennox range of hills became the more apparent. The tract of hill-side on which I first discovered the rock in question, lies to the north-west of the village of Lennoxtown, below a lofty precipice of trap known as the "Black Craig." Underneath this precipice a long slope of the hill is covered with debris and large masses of rock that have fallen from the cliffs above. These strew the hill-side as far down as the road leading from Campsie to Fintry. If the hill be ascended from this point, a little to the east of the present march-dyke, until we come to the old This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract


We propose an ultrafast all-optical technique to control and beam the light emerging from a sub-wavelength slit in a planar gold film by exciting a transient grating in the area around the slit. A FDTD model is used to show how excitation of surface plasmon polaritons by the grating governs the beaming process. Both the grating and the beaming effect are shown to decay on a picosecond time-scale. An on-off contrast of 5 dB is obtained for the beaming, with a divergence angle of only 2.4 degrees.


For decades the marriage penalty tax (MPT) has been debated, reduced, increased, and muddled in the US tax system. The issue is important to individual taxpayers, as well as to policy-makers, academic researchers, and society overall. Research shows that the MPT has a negative impact on marital stability, resulting in particularly deleterious effects on women and children, as single females, especially single-parent females, are more likely to be in poverty. Consequently, the MPT is a gender issue in that women are more negatively affected by it than men are, but to varying degrees all members of society are negatively affected, women, men, and children. The purpose of this study is to review how the MPT was affected by the new tax law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and briefly review the history of the MPT and its impact on individuals and society. While the MPT was greatly reduced by the 2017 Act, notably regarding tax rates, the MPT, as connected to the earned income tax credit, continues to have a major detrimental impact on low to moderate income couples, discouraging marriage and having a particularly negative effect on their children.


Semantic Web encourages digital libraries, including open access journals, to collect, link and share their data across the Web in order to ease its processing by machines and humans to get better queries and results. Linked Data technologies enable connecting related data across the Web using the principles and recommendations set out by Tim Berners-Lee in 2006. Several universities develop knowledge through scholarship and research with open access policies for the generated knowledge, using several ways to disseminate information. Open access journals collect, preserve and publish scientific information in digital form related to a particular academic discipline in a peer review process having a big potential for exchanging and spreading their data linked to external resources using Linked Data technologies. Linked Data can increase those benefits with better queries about the resources and their relationships. This paper reports a process for publishing scientific data on the Web using Linked Data technologies. Furthermore, methodological guidelines are presented with related activities. The proposed process was applied extracting data from a university Open Journal System and publishing in a SPARQL endpoint using the open source edition of OpenLink Virtuoso. In this process, the use of open standards facilitates the creation, development and exploitation of knowledge.


Bacterial wilt caused by Ralstonia solanacearum leads to death of infected suckers and reduces the yield of commercially important banana varieties like Lakatan. Among the many varieties of banana, no germplasm with bacterial wilt resistance has been identified yet (Tripathi et al 2004).
Mutation induction in plants to develop disease resistance genes using physical or chemical mutagens has been used as alternative to harmful pesticides. To induce mutation for the possible development of resistance to bacterial wilt, shoot tips of Stage 2 in vitro-grown Lakatan plantlets were exposed to 0.1% and 0.2% ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) for 12 and 24h. Treated and untreated explants were cultured in-vitro to regenerate plantlets.
Shoots emerged two days after in vitro inoculation of explants treated with – 0.1% EMS for 12h. Significantly longer shoots also developed from the cultures compared to the untreated explants. The other explants exposed to other treatments had shoot emergence one to three days later. Falcate, curled, irregularly-shaped, and yellowish leaves and pseudostems also developed in EMS-treated cultures.
Untreated plantlets exhibited at least one bacterial wilt symptom such as leaf spots, necrosis at pseudostem base, and death six days from the introduction of Ralstonia solanacearum in vitro. Plantlets from explants exposed to 0.1% EMS for 12h did not exhibit disease symptoms even after ten days of exposure to the pathogen and had 100% survival. Seventy one percent of plantlets from explants exposed to 0.1% EMS for 24h and 55% from explants treated with 0.2% EMS for 24h also survived without infection. The surviving plantlets need to be studied further for their ex vitro responses to the pathogen and determine possible genetic changes due to the chemical mutagen treatment.


ABSTRACT The inherent uncertainty of geospatial data has engendered a critical research agenda addressing all facets of uncertainty visualization due to the communicative efficiency of graphical representation. To organize this broad research area, we have reviewed literature on geospatial uncertainty visualization and systematically and iteratively classified research in this field. Upon creating a classification, we developed several visual summaries over time, refining the classification and subsequent graphic as new relevant topics emerged. This visual summary extends current existing approaches to taxonomies by allowing users a quick visual overview of relevant topics in a research area at a glance. For each research paper on uncertainty visualization, this classification can be used to visually represent which domains are covered. In order to ensure that the visual summary approach and the corresponding domains developed in this article can be used reliably, we performed an inter-rater agreement task. The high agreement reveals that the domains in the classification that were identified are intuitive and can lead to objective, reproducible classifications (visual summaries) of research papers. In future research, we plan to refine the visual classification/summary approach by providing guided classification via a web interface to visually classify the entire body of literature on geospatial uncertainty visualization and visually explore any trends in research topics, how they have changed over the years, and identify sparser topics that still need to be addressed.


Background: Seedling recruitment following fire is an infrequent yet critical demographic transition for woody plants in Mediterranean ecosystems. Aims: Here we examine whether post-fire seedling recruitment of three widespread Californian chaparral shrubs is affected by local adaptation within an edaphically and topographically complex landscape. Methods: We reciprocally transplanted 6-month-old seedlings of Adenostema fasciculatum, Ceanothus cuneatus and Eriodictyon californicum to serpentine and sandstone soils, and cool northerly and warm southerly slopes. Results: At the age of 2 years, none of the species manifested higher survival or growth on 'home' compared with 'away' soils or slopes, indicating an absence of local adaptation with respect to seedling recruitment in these environments. Seedlings of all species manifested lower survival and relative growth on serpentine soils regardless of seedling source, as well as a variety of other destination and source effects. Conclusions: The ability of these three species to recruit in new environments, such as in restoration settings or in response to shifting climates, is unlikely to be impeded by a need for seeds from sources that closely match their edaphic or topographic destination.


Trader performance is currently measured against various benchmarks without consideration for the volatility of trading results. The author introduces trader alpha frontier (TAF) as a way to measure trader performance against the risks taken by the trader. This article formulates how to carve out trader alpha from overall portfolio returns. It also explores trader performance attribution by delineating between the main components of trader alpha and suggesting benchmarks to measure each component. As a result, the author unveils a new benchmark, called execution-weighted price (EWP). It is tough to reach TAF, but it is worth the effort since it aligns the mutual objective of a portfolio manager and a trader to maximize overall portfolio performance.


Abstract This study focused on the occurrence of xylophagous beetles and nematodes in the different parts of Pinus sylvestris L. trees of different health condition in the pure stands in Zhytomyr region (Central Polissya). Stem fragments with thin, thick and transitional bark, branches and twigs were examined in each of 12 model trees. Xylophagous beetles were identified by adults or by galleries. Nematodes were isolated from wood samples in the laboratory using the Baermann method and identified by morphometric characteristics. Among 10 species of xylophagous beetles, Ips acuminatus (frequency 16.7%; dominance 17.9%) and I. sexdentatus (frequency 11.1%, dominance 54.6%) dominated, which prefer the fragments with thin and thick bark respectively. No xylophagous beetle was found in the healthy and slightly weakened trees. Among 15 nematode species, 40% were saproxylic, 33.3% entomophilic, 13.3% phytophagous, and by 6.7% predators and species associated with fungi. An entomophilic nematodes Cryptaphelenchus macrogaster f. acuminati was common in all parts of stem and branches (frequency of occurrence 25–33.3%). An entomophilic nematodes Parasitorhabditis acuminati and a predator Fuchsia buetschlii acuminati had the highest frequency of occurrence (41.7%) under the thin bark and in the branches. The frequency of these species in colonized with xylophagous insects stem fragments with thin bark was significantly higher than in respective not colonized fragments.


Background and purposes: Citicoline, also known as CDP-choline (cytidine-5-diphosphocholine), is a naturally-occurring endogenous nucleoside, which is one of the neuroprotective drugs that have been used as a therapy in stroke patients. However, the mechanisms through which it acts are not fully understood. In terms of analysis of the signalling mechanisms associated with citicoline-induced protection, it has been previously shown that citicoline may protect the ischemic neurons by suppressing caspase apoptotic pathway activation. Moreover, preliminary in vitro studies have shown that citicoline induces angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels from pre-existing capillaries). However, the possible beneficial effects of citicoline treatment on revascularization and angiogenesis after stroke have not been fully examined. The present study was designed to investigate the key signalling mechanisms through which citicoline modulates apoptosis and angiogenesis-associated with stroke recovery.
Methods: An analysis of citicoline signalling pathway was studied from phospho-protein screening array done by Kinexus. In vitro angiogenesis assays: migration, proliferation and differentiation into tube-like structures in Matrigel™ ™ assays, have been used in human brain microvessel endothelial cells (hCMEC/D3). Western blotting was performed on protein extraction from hCMEC/D3 stimulated with citicoline. Analysis of apoptosis by flow-cytometry in hCMEC/D3. A hypoxia induced apoptosis assay was performed by seeding hCMEC/D3 on to glass coverslips in serum poor medium. Quantification of apoptotic cells were carried out under fluorescence microscopy using a combination of propidium iodide and DAPI stain solution. Apoptotic pathways in hCMEC/D3 stimulated with citicoline were examined by indirect immunofluorescence and real time PCR. Pharmacological inhibitor of Her2 (GW2974) was used to investigate the angiogenic signalling pathway by western blotting and Matrigel™ assay in hCMEC/D3 in the presence or absence of citicoline.
Results: Kinexus results showed an over-expression of ASK-1, HER2, IRS-1 and Jun and inhibition of Hsp27, Integrin alpha4, MEK1 (MAP2K1) and Histone H2B Ser14 proteins. Citicoline induced EC migration and differentiation in poly-l-lysine and Matrigel™ . Using microarray screening, the Histone H2B (Ser14) appeared to be the main phosphor-protein expression blocked by citicoline in hCMEC/D3, and the expression of tyrosine-protein kinase erbB-2 receptor (Her2) appeared to be induced by citicoline in hCMEC/D3. Treatment with the Her2 inhibitor (GW2974) totally blocked citicoline induced endothelial tube formation in EC, whereas treatment with GW2974 in combination with FGF-2 did not affect FGF-2 induced endothelial tube formation. In cultured hCMEC/D3 treatment with GW2974 inhibited citicoline induced phosphor-Erk expression, whereas treatment with GW2974 in combination with FGF-2 did not affect FGF-2 induced phosphor-Erk expression. However, Citicoline had no mitogenic effects on hCMEC/D3. Phspho-Caspase-3 and phosphor-H2B (Ser14) expression were inhibited by citicoline in hCMEC/D3 whereas the expression of phosphor-Her2 and phosphor-Erk expression were increased. Moreover, citicoline treatment showed a decrease in number of apoptotic cells (positive PI staining) in hypoxia induced apoptosis compared to untreated cells. In cell migration assay, treatment with citicoline significantly increased cells migration in hCMEC/D3 compared to untreated cells on hypoxia conditions. Detection of apoptotic cells by flow cytometry showed inconclusive results in both treated and untreated hCMEC/D3. Results from indirect immunofluorescence showed a significant increase in active Caspase-3 and H2B (Ser14) expression in citicoline treated cells in comparison with untreated cells in hypoxia conditions. Results from PCR showed inhibition of pro-apoptotic genes including BNIP3, BNIP3L, caspase 4, caspase 8, caspase 9, CIDEB, DFFA, LTBR, TP53BP2, TRADD, and TRAF3 with citicoline treatment. They also show an over-expression of a number of anti-apoptotic genes including NAIP, NOD1, TNFRSF25, and TP53.
Conclusions: A screening of phosphor-protein expression revealed that citicoline specifically over-expressed Her2 which demonstrated that citicoline plays a key role in Her2 induced angiogenesis. Blocking of Her2 pathway inhibited the formation of tube-like structures in citicoline treated cells and therefore citicoline induces angiogenesis through Her2 pathway, and that is important in terms of understanding the molecular pathway in which citicoline acts as a pro-angiogenic molecule in tissue remodelling after stroke. Citicoline decreased active caspase-3 and H2B (Ser14) expression, and positive PI staining which demonstrates a protective effect of citicoline against endothelial cells apoptosis. Citicoline also improved cell surivial by decreasing the expression ofBNIP3, BNIP3L, caspase 4, caspase 8, caspase 9, CIDEB, DFFA, LTBR, TP53BP2, TRADD, and TRAF3 genes and inducing the expression ofNAIP, NOD1, TNFRSF25, and TP53. Citicoline treatment significantly promotes wound healing in stroke mimicking conditions (hypoxia). Thus, the therapeutic properties of citicoline has the potential to promote vessel formation whilst reducing the risk cell death from hypoxic stress following ischemic stroke.


Cyclin dependent kinases (cdks) regulate cell cycle progression and transcription. We report here that the transcriptional co-activator PCAF directly interacts with cdk2. This interaction is mainly produced during S and G2/M phases of the cell cycle. As a consequence of this association, PCAF inhibits the activity of cyclin/cdk2 complexes. This effect is specific for cdk2 because PCAF does not inhibit either cyclin D3/cdk6 or cyclin B/cdk1 activities. The inhibition is neither competitive with ATP, nor with the substrate histone H1 suggesting that somehow PCAF disturbs cyclin/cdk2 complexes. We also demonstrate that overexpression of PCAF in the cells inhibits cdk2 activity and arrests cell cycle progression at S and G2/M. This blockade is dependent on cdk2 because it is rescued by the simultaneous overexpression of this kinase. Moreover, we also observed that PCAF acetylates cdk2 at lysine 33. As this lysine is essential for the interaction with ATP, acetylation of this residue inhibits cdk2 activity. Thus, we report here that PCAF inhibits cyclin/cdk2 activity by two different mechanisms: (i) by somehow affecting cyclin/cdk2 interaction and (ii) by acetylating K33 at the catalytic pocket of cdk2. These findings identify a previously unknown mechanism that regulates cdk2 activity.


Of the estimated 4.9 million African captives disembarked in Brazil, 70 % were shipped from Central Africa, 24 % from West Africa, and the remaining 6 % from the East Coast of the continent. Despite their diverse political and cultural backgrounds, Africans were classified by slavers with a discrete number of generic categories often referred to as "nations." The enslaved appropriation of such external labels, like Mina and Angola—distinguishing Western and Central Africans respectively—resulted in the formation of new collective identities. The novel ways of colonial belonging and behavior shaped and expressed themselves as distinct forms of Afro-Brazilian culture when organized around social institutions such as Catholic lay brotherhoods or other African-inspired associative dynamics. Religious practice, including music, language, bodily performance, cooking and dress, became a privileged domain for African cultural production, subsequently irradiating into other secular manifestations. The colonial calundu, concerned with healing and oracular functionalities, greatly influenced by the Bantu-speaking people, coexisted and intermingled with the more ecclesiastical West-African traditions of initiatory ritual dedicated to the worship of multiple deities. Despite common elements of celebration, healing and mediumship, Afro-Brazilian religious pluralism was historically marked by an extraordinary eclecticism. Different local interactions with the hegemonic Iberian Catholicism, Amerindian healing practices and French Spiritism, together with the circulation of people and ideas between Africa and Brazil after the end of the Atlantic slave trade, led to a wide range of regional variation. This heterogeneous Afro-Brazilian religious field, prone to continuous discrimination and selective tolerance by the authorities, is stressed by a discursive contrast between the alleged traditional pure African forms and the mixed syncretic Brazilian ones, all claiming their share of legitimacy and ritual efficiency.


Decisions about which older buildings, structures, and places should be conserved are fundamental to the practice of architectural conservation. Conservation professionals use the interrelated concepts of integrity, authenticity, and historical value to determine which historic places are worthy of importance. Traditionally, these concepts are predicated on preserving the object rather than conserving the meanings and values associated with the object. In other words, the goal is to benefit the object and not the people who value the object. This method, which has roots in antiquated nineteenth-century Western scientific traditions, deprecates the importance of people, processes, and meanings in how places are valued and conserved. Thus, conservation professionals produce "objective" meanings for other conservators, but not for everyday people. The net result is a failure to understand how local populations actually value their historic places. A recent movement in architectural conservation is to emphasize the role of contemporary social, cultural, and personal meanings in valuing historic places and the processes in which places develop these values over time. This pluralistic perspective recognizes that different populations and cultures will have diverse ways of valuing historic places. Ultimately, for places such as Iraq, we have very little, if any, data to support conservation decisions that understand and respect local cultures and tradition. The danger is in applying traditional, Western, concepts that still dominate the conservation profession to nonWestern contexts. There is a tremendous learning opportunity to engage in the cross-pollination of ideas from the perspectives of the Western and Eastern traditions and to learn how the citizens of Iraq value their cultural heritage. This information, once gathered, can then inform how to best approach the conservation of Iraqi urban centers. 1 Author contact: firstname.lastname@example.com Valuing Historic Places J. C. Wells


About 8% of crystal structures contain more than one independent molecule or formula unit; the number being denoted by the parameter Z′. To most chemists and crystallographers such structures are nothing but a pain in the scientific rear! The crystallographer has to waste valuable data collection and computing power determining the structure of two or more often almost identical molecules, while the chemist writing a paper has to go to the trouble of making sure that "the second independent molecule does not differ significantly from the first". With the advent of modern data collection and computational hardware these irritations have been to some extent ameliorated. Moreover, to a slowly growing body of 'crystal chemists' the interactions between crystallographically independent molecules represent a rich hunting ground for understanding solid state packing. Why should such structures form when nine times out of ten, crystallographic symmetry results in perfectly decent packing arrangements? Most importantly, can we learn something about the phase behaviour and materials properties of solids by understanding these special cases, perhaps with a view to using them in a predictive fashion? This survey sets out to collate existing data and interpretations on structures with high Z′ values as well as to highlight some interesting case studies and make some suggestions about future directions.


Background: Chronic wounds continue to be a challenging problem and causing considerable healthcare burden globally especially to the developing countries. This study examines how patients with chronic wounds acquired them, site of the body commonly located, various bacterial isolates present, type of antibiotic usage, and their susceptibility pattern to commonly prescribed antibiotics. Methods: Two hundred and sixty (260) wound swab samples were collected from chronic wound patients attending the St. Patrick Hospital and the Nkenkenso Government Hospitals from December 2016 to June 2017. Bacterial isolates were tested against six commonly prescribed antibiotics identified in this study. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing of the clinical isolates was done according to CLSI guidelines. Results: A total of 211 (81.2%) isolates were recovered from the 260 samples. Staphylococcus aureus (30.8%) was the most predominate, followed by Pseudomonas spp. (24.9%). Majority of the patients (87.31%) with chronic wounds received antibiotics metronidazole and cefuroxime which was the most common (21.74%) antibiotics prescribed. More than 50% of the isolate were resistant to flucloxacillin and amoxicillin, whilst most of the isolates were susceptible to ciprofloxacin and clindamycin. Conclusion: The study observed that inflammation was the major cause of chronic wounds and that, most wounds were located on the lower extremity part of the body. The frequency of drug administration in the management of chronic wounds was 87.31%. The commonly prescribed monotherapy antibiotics were flucloxacillin and ciprofloxacin whilst metronidazole and cefuroxime were mostly prescribed together with most isolates resistant to flucloxacillin and amoxicillin.


Previous research has suggested that offspring sex ratio may be influenced by the actions of prenatal sex steroids, principally androgens. The relative length of the second (index finger) to the fourth digit (ring finger) has been reported to be a proxy to prenatal testosterone levels. This trait is sexually dimorphic, such that males display a significantly lower 2D:4D ratio (indicating higher testosterone exposure), and this dimorphism appears robust across different populations. We suggest that digit ratio (2D:4D) may form a useful marker to help explain variation in sex ratio and sociosexuality.


The acquisition and teaching of mood and, in particular, Spanish subjunctive has traditionally received quite a lot of attention within the field of teaching and learning Spanish as a second or foreign language, both from a theoretical and a didactical point of view. Several reasons can explain the interest of specialists and practitioners on this topic: first of all, there are still ongoing debates amongst grammarians on certain issues affecting the subjunctive and these disagreements usually have an impact on how teachers present a concept to their students; secondly, modality is not expressed through verbal inflexion in all languages and a variety of linguistic factors related to syntax, semantics and discourse-pragmatics seem to intervene in mood selection in Spanish (cf. NGLE, 2009: 1866), which means "when learners begin to acquire the subjunctive and make target-language mood selection, they need to have developed abilities to process complex syntax with some facility in Spanish" (Collentine, 2013: 271-272). Having to understand concepts usch as subordination can represent a problem for those learners who don't have a linguistic background and are studying the language for purposes which differ from becoming a grammarian, a philologist or a teacher of Spanish.


Studies are currently being performed to determine the effects of bisphosphonate treatments on the structure and density of bone tissue. One of the pathways for gaining a better understanding of the effects of this and other treatments involves creating a computer simulation. Theory suggests that bone tissue structure and density are directly related to the manner in which the tissue is loaded. Remodeling is the process in which bone tissue is resorbed in areas of low stress distributions, and generated in areas of high stress distributions. Previous studies have utilized numerical methods and finite element methods to predict bone structure as a result of stress distributions within the tissues. The Finite Element method was chosen for this study. This study was done on a canine (beagle) rib. The goal of this study was to develop an FEA model of the rib that would be used in conjunction with a bone remodeling algorithm, to model the behavior of the bone tissue. Appropriate boundary conditions, loads, and loading cycles were determined from literature, and applied. Respiration was assumed as the dominating activity; therefore the muscles involved in respiration were the primary source of the rib loading. The model also included an integrated UMAT sub-routine, which utilized data from the FEA model to iterate bone tissue densities and structures. The model closely predicted the porosities of the bone tissue, when compared to actual tissue samples, as well as what literature describes.


An oncogenic fusion protein promotes lymphomagenesis by activating a noncanonical signaling pathway. Mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma, a type of B cell lymphoma, is associated with chronic inflammation. Many patients are successfully treated with antibiotics; however, patients whose lymphomas express the API2-MALT1 fusion oncoprotein as a result of a chromosomal translocation are resistant to this therapy. API2-MALT1–driven lymphomagenesis is associated with deregulated canonical nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) signaling; however, Rosebeck et al. now demonstrate that noncanonical NF-κB signaling may also play a role. API2-MALT1, but not wild-type MALT1, cleaved the noncanonical NF-κB signaling intermediate, NF-κB–inducing kinase (NIK), driving constitutive noncanonical NF-κB signaling. API2-MALT1–expressing cells exhibited great resistance to apoptosis and enhanced integrin-mediated adhesion, both of which were NIK-dependent. Tumor samples from patients with API2-MALT1–expressing tumors expressed higher levels of noncanonical NF-κB genes compared with API2-MALT1–negative tumors. Thus, both canonical and noncanonical NF-κB signaling are likely to contribute to MALT lymphomagenesis. S. Rosebeck, L. Madden, X. Jin, S. Gu, I. J. Apel, A. Appert, R. A. Hamoudi, H. Noels, X. Sagaert, P. Van Loo, M. Baens, M.-Q. Du, P. C. Lucas, L. M. McAllister-Lucas, Cleavage of NIK by the API2-MALT1 fusion oncoprotein leads to noncanonical NF-κB activation. Science 331, 468–472 (2011). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Whether fair value accounting should be used in financial reporting has been the subject of debate for many years. A key dimension to this debate is whether fair value earnings can provide information to financial statement users that is helpful in making their economic decisions. A criticism of fair value accounting is the contention that fair value earnings simply reflects "shocks" to value, and thus cannot be used to assess firm value. We show how fair value earnings can be disaggregated into components that can be used to assess firm value, as well as components that provide information about various types to shocks to value, e.g., effects of changes in expected cash flows.


Prostate cancer is the second most commonly diagnosed cancer among North American men and the second leading cause of death in those aged 65 and over. The US Cancer Society recommends testing those over 50 years of age who are expected to live at least for 10 years, even though the ability of early detection to decrease prostate cancer mortality has not been demonstrated. A controversy exists about the appropriateness of screening because of the considerable economic and social burden of diagnosing and treating prostate cancer, coupled with the projected large increase in the number of new cases as the population ages. This very important public health issue could be addressed at low cost by total-body low-dose irradiation therapy to stimulate the patient's own defences to prevent and control most cancers, including prostate cancer, with no symptomatic side effects.


Objective: To describe the use of peritoneal dialysis (PD) in the management of 5 dogs with acute renal failure (ARF) caused by leptospirosis.

Case Series Summary: All dogs were treated for leptospirosis with intravenous (IV) fluids and ampicillin prior to PD. Median age of dogs was 5 years (range 2–6 years). All dogs had positive titers for Leptospira bratislava. Median duration of PD was 4 days (range 3–16 days). PD resulted in a decrease in azotemia in all dogs. Median serum blood urea nitrogen at the start of PD was 192 mg/dL (range 140–235 mg/dL) and at the end of PD was 63 mg/dL (range 48–139 mg/dL). Median serum creatinine at the start of PD and the end was 12.8 mg/dL (range 7.7–16.9 mg/dL) and 3.4 mg/dL (range 1.4–11.1 mg/dL), respectively. Complications identified during PD included hypokalemia (n=3, 60%), hypoalbuminemia (n=2, 40%), hypomagnesemia (n=1, 20%), pelvic limb edema (n=2, 40%), central nervous system signs (n=2, 40%), dialysate retention (n=1, 20%), and leakage from the catheter site (n=1, 20%). Peritonitis was not identified in any of the dogs. Four dogs (80%) survived to discharge from the hospital. PD was effective for management of uremia in dogs with ARF caused by leptospirosis.


[1] Emissions from forest fires in Alaska and the Yukon Territory were observed at Chebogue Point, Nova Scotia (43.7N, 66.1W), between 11 and 13 July 2004. Smoke aerosols were first detected in the free troposphere by a Raman lidar and extended up to 8 km altitude. The plume was not evident at the surface until the second day, when increases in CO, acetonitrile (CH3CN), benzene, and aerosol mass concentrations were observed by in situ instrumentation. Enhancement ratios for each species relative to CO agreed with the range of values from other measurements of the same plume. The surface aerosols had an elevated black carbon fraction relative to both CO and organic matter, and the ratio of black to organic carbon was higher than what is typically observed in fresh smoke. The emissions were tracked back to Alaska and the Yukon Territory using aerosol optical depth measurements from the Aqua MODIS satellite instrument, and the transport was reconstructed using the GEOS-Chem and FLEXPART atmospheric models. The analysis suggests that aerosols were injected into the atmosphere in proportion to CO and that aerosol removal processes were weak during the 7 to 9 day transit time in the free troposphere. Transport of the tracers to the ground was strongly connected to synoptic-scale features in the surface meteorology.


This essay, part of a symposium honoring the work of the legal historian Lawrence M. Friedman, examines a basic issue that has never received much treatment in the history and understanding of American constitutional government: in the years following the ratification of the federal Constitution and the state constitutions, how was a constitutional culture created? Constitutional culture includes such things as the disposition of regular citizens to recognize and accept that they are governed by a written document, one that creates institutions of government and sets limits on what the government may do; the accepted belief that the governing charter is created by the citizenry; the knowledge that the charter is not timeless, but rather that the citizens may change it or revoke it under certain circumstances; and the understanding that until the charter is changed we are bound by it and required to go along with its ultimate results even though we are free to disagree with them. Constitutional culture also includes the understanding that a constitution unifies a population beyond those in one's immediate sphere of acquaintance such that other people in other places are likewise governed by this written document and that, whatever our other differences, this is something we have in common. Constitutional historians and theorists have never provided a very satisfying account of how it was that after the drafting and ratification of the federal and state constitutions, the population at large came to understand what these constitutions meant, accepted them as law, and went along with the arrangements that had been put in place and the consequences that followed. The failure to appreciate the creation of a constitutional culture is a serious oversight. The ratifying generation, the very Americans who put in place these written charters, understood that it was not enough simply to write and adopt a constitution: if a constitution was going to last and thrive, it was crucial to have in place a constitutional culture - otherwise, the principles and institutions of constitutional government would be little more than words on paper. The particular piece of the story this essay presents is how civic associations emerged in the early decades of the Republic as an important, perhaps the most important, mechanism for creating the American constitutional culture. During these early decades, civic associations were a powerful means for instilling in ordinary people the values and habits of constitutional government. Civic associations were also a nationalizing, unifying force, bringing together Americans from disparate states into a shared, common constitutional experience. Perhaps more than anywhere else, it was in civic associations that ordinary Americans, the people who were neither delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia nor the draftsmen of state constitutions, learned the principles of constitutional government, developed and nurtured republican values, and came to understand themselves as American citizens who shared interests and a destiny with the inhabitants of distant towns and other states. In this sense, civic associations helped to make work the constitutions that were ratified in the early years of American independence. Civic associations created and embodied the constitutional culture that contributed in significant and lasting ways to the success of constitutional government. The essay explores these developments by focusing on a representative case study: the town of Utica, New York. The essay also considers some implications for modern theories of constitutional government.


The Effects of Mismatches and Probe Tethering Configurations, on the Stability of DNA Duplexes on Surfaces Kyle Pratt Department of Chemical Engineering BYU Master of Science DNA microarrays are chip-based, analysis tools which can perform hundreds of thousands of parallel assays to determine the identity of genes or gene expression levels present in a sample. They have been identified as a key technology in genomic sciences and emergent medical techniques; however, despite their abundant use in research laboratories, microarrays have not been used in the clinical setting to the fullest potential due to the difficulty of obtaining reproducible results. Microarrays work on the principle of DNA hybridization, and can only be as accurate as this process is robust. Fundamental, molecular-level understanding of hybridization on surfaces is needed to further refine these devices. This work shows how orientation of DNA probes with respect to the surface affects the thermodynamics and stability of hybridization. Ideal surface hybridization (a DNA duplex bound to the surface on one end) is compared to more realistic conditions such as interaction between DNA and the surface in multiple locations. This research also describes the effect of mismatch location and number of mismatches on a single target strand. The results clarify key details of the biophysics involved in microarray performance and this knowledge can be used to improve nextgeneration devices. The disparity between surface and bulk hybridization behavior is examined here in molecular level detail that is not currently possible with experimental techniques.


Abstract The determination of kaolinite order-disorder by X-ray diffraction is problematic due to overlapping peaks from associated kaolin minerals and X-ray amorphous phases. This paper presents a new index (Aparicio-Galán-Ferrell index - AGFI), measured on 02l and 11l reflections after decomposing individual peaks in the complex diffraction band in an effort to reduce interferences. The new index was tested with three kaolins, of varying structural order, and their admixtures containing different percentages of quartz, feldspar, illite, smectite, chlorite, halloysite and Fe hydroxides and silica gels. The AGFI is highly correlated with the percentage of low-defect kaolinite and the Hinckley Index. It is not as prone to interference by associated minerals and X-ray amorphous phases as other indices. The AGFI can be used to determine kaolinite order-disorder in a wide variety of kaolins and kaolinitic rocks; the only prerequisite is that the kaolinite content should be >10 wt.% in order for the results to be reproducible.


Access to credit and effective storage for grain are two issues affecting small-scale farmers in Burkina Faso. Warrantage , a French word commonly used in West Africa, describes the inventory credit system (normally called the warehouse receipt system, or WRS, in English). This means granting credit with grain as collateral in secure warehouses where a third independent party holds the collateral on behalf of both the creditor and the debtor. In Burkina Faso, farmers' organizations have used 'smallholder' warrantage for several years. In this storage system, farmers keep part of their harvest in their own stores secured by two locks. One key is held by the farmers, while the second is held by the microfinance institution, with no third party involved. Warrantage allows both access to credit for income-generating activities and adequate grain storage, thereby contributing to the better preservation of crops, as well as better household management of food and money. Warrantage is more popular in the southern and south-west areas of the country, where there is a surplus production of grain, while in areas further north (where crops are scarce), pilot schemes are only just emerging. This report describes how warrantage operates and provides an analysis of its economic viability in the Centre-Nord region of Burkina Faso. Please note: This report is only available in French.


The ozone variability observed by tropospheric ozone lidars during the ESCOMPTE campaign is analyzed by means of a hybrid-Lagrangian modeling study. Transport processes responsible for the formation of ozone-rich layers are identified using a semi-Lagrangian analysis of mesoscale simulations to identify the planetary boundary layer (PBL) footprint in the free troposphere. High ozone concentrations are related to polluted air masses exported from the Iberian PBL. The chemical composition of air masses coming from the PBL and transported in the free troposphere is evaluated using a Lagrangian chemistry model. The initial concentrations are provided by a model of chemistry and transport. Different scenarios are tested for the initial conditions and for the impact of mixing with background air in order to perform a quantitative comparison with the lidar observations. For this meteorological situation, the characteristic mixing time is of the order of 2 to 5 days depending on the initial conditions. Ozone is produced in the free troposphere within most air masses exported from the Iberian PBL at an average rate of 0.2 ppbv h -1 , with a maximum ozone production of 0.4 ppbv h -1 . Transport processes from the PBL are responsible for an increase of 13.3 ppbv of ozone concentrations in the free troposphere compared to background levels; about 45% of this increase is attributed to in situ production during the transport rather than direct export of ozone.


Artificial Handwriting Recognition (AHR) systems are currently developed in a largely ad hoc fashion. The central premise of this work is the need to return to first principles and identify an underlying rationale for the representations used in handwriting recognition. An interdisciplinary approach is advocated that combines the perspectives of cognitive science and pattern recognition engineering.

Existing surveys of handwriting recognition are reviewed and an information-space analogy is presented to model how features encode evidence. Handwriting recognition is treated as an example of a simple visual task that uses a limited set of our visual abilities based on the observations that i) biological systems provide an example of a successful handwriting recognition system, and ii) vision is a prerequisite of recognition. A set of six feature types for which there is empirical evidence of their detection in early visual rocessing is identified and a layered framework for handwriting recognition is proposed that unifies the perspectives of cognitive science and engineering. The outer layers of the framework relate to the capture of raw sensory data and feature extraction. The inner layers concern the derivation and comparison of structural descriptions of handwriting.

The implementation of an online AHR system developed in the context of the framework is reported. The implementation uses a fuzzy graph-based approach is used to represent structural descriptions of characters. Simple directed graphs for characters are compared by searching for subgraph isomorphisms between input characters and know prototypes.

Trials are reported for a test set of 1000 digits drawn from 100 different subjects using a KNearest
 Neighbour approach (KNN) approach to classification. For K=3, the mean recognition
accuracy is 68.3% and for K=5 it is 70.7%. Linear features were found to be the most significant.

The work concludes that the current understanding of visual cognition is incomplete but does
provide a basis for the development of artificial handwriting recognition systems although their
performance is currently less than that of existing engineered systems.


This article reviews the most recent and relevant evidence on key domestic policy interventions that are effective in reducing income inequality in developing countries, the benefits they generate, the choices that need to be made regarding their design and implementation, and the trade-offs that are associated with them. It focuses on a few policy areas in which there is a sufficient body of rigorous evidence to draw useful lessons with confidence: early childhood development, including breastfeeding; universal health care; good-quality education; conditional cash transfers; Investments in rural infrastructure; and taxation. The review concludes that there are many pathways to reducing inequality, from narrowing gaps in income generation opportunities to narrowing the potential for inequalities in human capital development before the inequalities emerge, smoothing consumption among the most deprived, and Redistribution in favor of the poor. Many interventions are simultaneously associated with equalizing outcomes, improved competition, and economic efficiency. Good interventions combining equality promotion and efficiency are possible in all settings and at different times; this includes interventions disproportionately benefiting the poorest in low-income countries during periods of crisis. Despite the significant increase in knowledge about equality interventions, the article makes a strong call for more microeconomic data and better—more precise—analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions.


Sufficient exposure to everyday conversation is crucial for language learners to become fluent; however, such exposure can be difficult for learners in small language communities with few active speakers. For the Tlingit (Alaska/Canada) language community we are producing videos of spontaneous conversations with time-aligned bilingual texts with the aim that these recordings fill some of the learners' needs for exposure to real language. Today Tlingit has approximately 200 birth speakers. The mortality rate over the past two years is 13%. This project serves as a case study in small language documentation, conservation, and revitalization. In this session we describe the collaborative processes by which we video spontaneous conversations, create time-aligned bilingual annotations, and produce accessible language learning materials. We discuss how this collaboration creates new opportunities for language use and for weaving the generations together in language transfer. The core team for our NSF-funded project includes university administrators, professors, researchers, and students. We collaborate with local and regional school district administrators, teachers and students, with tribal administrations and with individual language community members. Since Tlingit ancestral territory includes both US and Canadian lands, our project includes Tlingit speakers and learners on both sides of the border. Working with people: We discuss adapting the project design to meet the needs of students and speakers, finding fluent speakers willing to record, and making the recordings. We describe transcription/translation sessions between fluent speakers and learners. These sessions, focused on specific items of language, give the learner and speaker opportunities to transfer language directly from one person to another. With the goal of doing their work IN the target language, the pair develops a Tlingit phrase repertoire to use during their work. Language learning takes place during recording sessions, translation/transcription sessions, and with the language community use of the end-products of the recordings. Working with technology: We describe workflow; capturing conversations on DVcam formatted video-recordings, computer processing in iMovie, reformatting as .mov and .wav., ELAN and PRAAT as aids for bilingual annotation and acoustic phonetic or morpho-syntactic analyses, production of interlinear texts and subtitled QuickTime videos for language learning, making materials available on the Web, and archiving. We discuss challenges and solutions in tracking the media as it migrates from one format to another and one person to another as well as the challenges of training dispersed team members in the many details of several software programs.


ABSTRACT What role do companion animals play in the dating lives of single adults? As dogs and cats are increasingly viewed as family members, a person's pets may wield significant influence in partner choice. Here, we provide descriptive quantitative data on the role pets play in mate appraisal and mate selection; we also test two hypotheses regarding the role of pets in single Americans' dating lives. We hypothesized that single women will place more value on a how a potential mate interacts with their pet, than will single men. We also hypothesized that dogs will serve more prominent roles as "social tools" in the dating arena than cats, given that dogs are more social and dogs require more constant care. Thus, dogs may be a better measure of a potential mate's caregiving capacity. Data were obtained from a 2014 survey sent to a random selection of people in the US registered on the online dating site Match.com who had indicated pet information in their dating profiles. A sample of 1,210 individuals responded, 61% of whom were women. Dogs and cats were the most common pets for both sexes. In support of our first hypothesis, on eight of 11 dependent variables (such as whether one has ever been attracted to someone because of a pet), women were more discriminating of a potential partner's associations with pets than were men. Consistent with our second hypothesis, dogs served more commonly as social barometers in the dating arena than cats did, with respect to nine of 11 dependent variables (such as whether one would date someone because of a pet). We discuss the findings with respect to changing family profiles, including lower fertility and expanded roles of companion animals as extended kin. We conclude with the limitations of this study and suggestions for future research.


This study explores the use and usefulness of digital lectures as a resource to augment conventional face-to-face lectures for students in an undergraduate business course. Twelve digital lectures were provided to students enrolled in a third year finance unit of study. The digital lectures were prepared at the desktop using proprietary software to record on-screen activity (including lecture slides, real-time annotations and demonstrations) and voice-over narration. Each lecture was made available online and on CD concurrently with the face-to-face lecture (attendance at which was voluntary). Twelve principles of multimedia design (Mayer 2009), based on dual-coding theory (Paivio 2006) and a model of the working memory (Baddeley 1992; Baddeley 1999), influenced the design of the digital lectures. A framework was developed to explain the potential learning benefit for students from using digital lectures. It highlighted issues of access, control and learning as being important. A voluntary survey was independently conducted after the semester finished to establish how students used the digital lectures and whether they found this resource aided their learning. Forty students from a class of 52 completed the survey. Students reported using the digital lectures to supplement rather than replace the face-to-face lectures. Of the twelve lectures in the unit, students reported attending nine face-to-face lectures and viewing nine digital lectures, on average. A range of positive statements about the value of digital lectures to aid student learning recorded very high mean levels of agreement. In these student responses, all three characteristics of access, control and learning emerged to explain why students used the digital lectures consistently and regarded them as a valuable resource. The high value placed by students on these digital lectures is subsequently confirmed by anonymous student unit evaluation information collected by the university.


of this research is to design an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool to assist the learning process of caretakers of special need children in Sweden. The research is based on long-term observations and in depth interviews with key experts, with the aim of developing a tool which should assist the intercommunicati on between caretakers, creating optimized action plans in a work integrated environment. Enhancing the learning processes of the caretakers' methods and knowledge of each other's work processes through knowledge bridging between all caretakers involved and hence have a direct influence on the child's development.


Introduction: Salmonella typhi is the major serotype of Salmonella accountable for enteric fever. Emergence of antimicrobial resistance limits the available treatment options for enteric fever and is one of the foremost contributors to the increase in morbidity and mortality rates.
Materials and Methods: This was cross-sectional study conducted at Dow University of Health Sciences over a period of 6 years, between January 2010 to December 2016. Blood samples were collected and incubated in Bact/Alert automated system (bio-Merieux). The isolates were identified and characterized by standard and specific methods. Antibiotic susceptibility of all isolates was assessed by the Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion method according to the guidelines of Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI).
Results: During the period of 2010 to 2013, the highest frequency of S. typhi was observed in pediatric age group and males. Ampicillin (57.1%), Trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole (60.1%), and Chloramphenicol (57.1%) showed highest resistance.  From 2014 to 2016, the incidence of infection was greatest in children and females. Ciprofloxacin (7.6%), Ampicillin (54.7%), Trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole (60.1%), and Azithromycin (4.6%) were observed to have increasing pattern of resistance.
Conclusion: Our study showed emergence of multi drug resistant isolates of S. typhi. Therefore, Antibiotic steward ship program, vaccination and local surveillance are highly recommended to control the spread of multi drug resistance among isolates of S. typhi.


In novel, low-speed sedimentation assays, highly purified, sonicated Dictyostelium discoideum plasma membrane fragments bind to F-actin beads (fluorescein-labeled F-actin on antifluorescein IgG-Sephacryl S- 1000 beads). Binding was found to be (a) specific, since beads containing bound fluorescein-labeled ovalbumin or beads without bound fluorescein-labeled protein do not bind membranes, (b) saturable at approximately 0.6 microgram of membrane protein per microgram of bead- bound F-actin, (c) rapid with a t1/2 of 4-20 min, and (d) apparently of reasonable affinity since the off rate is too slow to be measured by present techniques. Using low-speed sedimentation assays, we found that sonicated plasma membrane fragments, after extraction with chaotropes, still bind F-actin beads. Heat-denatured membranes, proteolyzed membranes, and D. discoideum lipid vesicles did not bind F-actin beads. These results indicate that integral membrane proteins are responsible for the binding between sonicated membrane fragments and F-actin on beads. This finding agrees with the previous observation that integral proteins mediate interactions between D. discoideum plasma membranes and F-actin in solution (Luna, E.J., V. M. Fowler, J. Swanson, D. Branton, and D. L. Taylor, 1981, J. Cell Biol., 88:396-409). We conclude that low-speed sedimentation assays using F-actin beads are a reliable method for monitoring the associations between F-actin and membranes. Since these assays are relatively quantitative and require only micrograms of membranes and F-actin, they are a significant improvement over other existing techniques for exploring the biochemical details of F-actin-membrane interactions. Using F-actin beads as an affinity column for actin-binding proteins, we show that at least 12 integral polypeptides in D. discoideum plasma membranes bind to F-actin directly or indirectly. At least four of these polypeptides appear to span the membrane and are thus candidates for direct transmembrane links between the cytoskeleton and the cell surface.


Environmental scientists need to make predictions that are increasingly cross-disciplinary, bringing together observations and models in both physical and biological systems, and visualising the results. Observations can be from multiple platforms, and there are often many competing models that could be used. At the same time, catchment managers and policy makers face a challenging future trying to ensure a wide range of ecosystem and hydrological services are delivered from increasingly constrained budgets whilst complying with a range of regulation requirements. There is also a greater requirement for transparency and access to data and making regulatory decision making processes visible to the public. The Environmental Virtual Observatory Pilot project (EVOp) is a new initiative from the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) designed to explore new tools and approaches to support these challenges. The long term vision of the Environmental Virtual Observatory is to: - Make environmental data more visible and accessible to a wide range of scientists and potential users including for public good applications; - Provide tools to facilitate the integrated analysis of data to give greater access to added knowledge and expert analysis and to visualisation of the results; - Develop new, added-value knowledge from public and private sector data assets to help tackle environmental challenges. The EVO will exploit cloud computing to give a shared working space for data, models and analysis tools; in this two year pilot project we will develop five local and national exemplars to demonstrate and test the opportunities and constraints from such an approach. The question-based exemplars being developed are focused on (i) management options for flooding and diffuse pollution at local and national scales, (ii) approaches for transferring hydrological models for both flooding and drought from data rich to data poor areas and (iii) defining the uncertainty bounds of current climate change predictions on change in soil carbon at a global scale. By developing exemplars focussed on some major environmental questions at a local, national and global scale we are able to directly test issues such as data assimilation, adapting and linking models to work in a cloud environment, and portal design for a wide range of end-users. New international standards for model exchange and exchange of analysis tools are desirable to supplement the emerging data exchange standards, and the EVOp will make a contribution here. A working prototype portal will be delivered in December 2012 that examines these issues, for a possible next phase.


Persuasive essay writing is a powerful pedagogical tool for teaching argumentation skills. So far, the provision of feedback about argumentation has been considered a manual task since automated writing evaluation systems are not yet capable of analyzing written arguments. Computational argumentation, a recent research field in natural language processing, has the potential to bridge this gap and to enable novel argumentative writing support systems that automatically provide feedback about the merits and defects of written arguments.
The automatic analysis of natural language arguments is, however, subject to several challenges. First of all, creating annotated corpora is a major impediment for novel tasks in natural language processing. At the beginning of this research, it has been mostly unknown whether humans agree on the identification of argumentation structures and the assessment of arguments in persuasive essays. Second, the automatic identification of argumentation structures involves several interdependent and challenging subtasks. Therefore, considering each task independently is not sufficient for identifying consistent argumentation structures. Third, ordinary arguments are rarely based on logical inference rules and are hardly ever in a standardized form which poses additional challenges to human annotators and computational methods.
To approach these challenges, we start by investigating existing argumentation theories and compare their suitability for argumentative writing support. We derive an annotation scheme that models arguments as tree structures. For the first time, we investigate whether human annotators agree on the identification of argumentation structures in persuasive essays. We show that human annotators can reliably apply our annotation scheme to persuasive essays with substantial agreement. As a result of this annotation study, we introduce a unique corpus annotated with fine-grained argumentation structures at the discourse-level. Moreover, we pre- sent a novel end-to-end approach for parsing argumentation structures. We identify the boundaries of argument components using sequence labeling at the token level and propose a novel joint model that globally optimizes argument component types and argumentative relations for identifying consistent argumentation structures. We show that our model considerably improves the performance of local base classifiers and significantly outperforms challenging heuristic baselines.
In addition, we introduce two approaches for assessing the quality of natural language arguments. First, we introduce an approach for identifying myside biases which is a well-known tendency to ignore opposing arguments when formulating arguments. Our experimental results show that myside biases can be recognized with promising accuracy using a combination of lexical features, syntactic features and features based on adversative transitional phrases. Second, we investigate for the first time the characteristics of insufficiently supported arguments. We show that insufficiently supported arguments frequently exhibit specific lexical indicators. Moreover, our experimental results indicate that convolutional neural networks significantly outperform several challenging baselines.


Concentration of pollutants namely Ozone (O3) and its precursors Carbon monoxide (CO) and Nitrogen oxide (NOX) over urban agglomeration Delhi, remain high during favourable meteorological conditions. A regional chemical transport model (CTM) Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF/Chem) model coupled with chemistry has been used to simulate concentration of O3 and its precursors over Delhi during June 2012 and June 2013 respectively. In 2013, unusually high levels of O3 and NO2 were observed during late evening hours. This study investigates the causes and the temporal dynamics of ozone pollution. The simulations show a trend of underestimating maximum and overestimation for minimum ozone concentrations. Hourly O3 exhibits an overall correlation of 0.51 with the observed values. Daily O3 maxima are overestimated by about 26% in 2012. In 2013, a correlation of 0.47 was found between hourly observed and simulated values of O3 with an underestimation of 42% in peak values. Hourly nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is underestimated within a range of 18% to 28% and 31% to 67% with an overall correlation of 0.60 and 0.31 during 2012 and 2013 respectively. Back trajectory simulations performed using Hybrid single particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) model further support the claim that the long-range transport of dust, gaseous and anthropogenic pollutants from the surrounding region affect the concentration level of pollutants in the innermost domain.


Background Hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) is one of the most popular drugs for the treatment of hypertension and heart failure. Most of its side effects are harmless and predictable, but some studies report a few life-threatening reactions to this drug, one of the most dangerous being acute pulmonary oedema. Case Report A 73-year-old woman was admitted to the Emergency Department with acute respiratory failure due to pulmonary oedema. Her past medical history included long-lasting hypertension with permanent atrial fibrillation and mitral stenosis. Her blood pressure control had been suboptimal, so her cardiologist had changed amlodipine to combination therapy with ramipril and HCTZ. However, 20 min after taking the new drug, the patient experienced fever, vomiting and diarrhoea immediately followed by acute onset of dyspnoea. Conclusion Since HCTZ is one of the most popular drugs for hypertension treatment and millions of patients take it every day, it is important to keep in mind both the common adverse reactions as well as the dangerous, although rare, ones. LEARNING POINTS Pulmonary oedema is a very unusual adverse reaction to hydrochlorothiazide, and a rare presentation of a common condition. Pulmonary oedema is not always due to heart problems. It is important to keep in mind that hypersensitivity reactions may have many different presentations.


Surgical therapy, which accurate staging and pathological diagnosis relay on, is still irreplaceable in the treatment strategy of lung cancer, especially for the early stage non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) (1). Besides resection of tumors, many prognostic factors, including nodal status, histology, and tumor size, can be provided through surgical procedure. Nodal status, as one of the most important factors in the staging definition and adjuvant chemotherapy selection, has always been playing a significant role in the heath care of lung cancer patients (2). However, differing from gastrointestinal and breast cancer, the recommendation of lymph node (LN) dissection or examinations from NCCN is in the qualitative level and the studies focus on the examined lymph nodes (ELNs) is still insufficient in lung cancer (1,3,4). Thus, Liang et al. investigated the effect of ELNs in the staging and prognosis of NSCLC in a real-world retrospective analysis, which tried to provide a reliable evidence of LN management in the quantitative level for NSCLC patients (5).


Gender issues are enjoying a renaissance within the international development community, with notable momentum around the threats to women posed by conflict and violence. How to promote the role of women in peace and security, and how to address violence against women and girls, are now two of the top priorities for the international community. The challenge gender advocates face is to transform international commitments into real gains for women at national level. This briefing draws on recent ODI research and evaluation (Domingo et al., 2012; 2013; 2014) to review opportunities to promote women's political participation and leadership in transitional and post-conflict settings, assess current international efforts to do so, and provide recommendations for policy and programming in this area. May 2014


Digital protection relays provide comprehensive fault reporting data for the analysis of power system faults and relay operations. Meanwhile the share of digital in the total relay population has reached a substantial figure. Thus the utilities can gather valuable information from relays throughout their grid. After a fault the operating personnel wants to obtain a most precise fault location to narrow the search for possible damage on the line and to cut the down time. An easy-to-use software system for relay fault records can provide the desired precision to the utility personnel. The system is open to fault records of any relay, which is accomplished via the Comtrade data format. Especially a new approach is included for fault location. This also covers transmission lines which consist of several segments of different properties like a cable continued with an overhead line. Furthermore it may also handle the typical asymmetry of untransposed overhead lines. By a special algorithm the load condition, the fault resistance and the zero-sequence impedance component and the mutual coupling, which all caused fault location tolerances in the past, can be effectively excluded such arriving at excellent precision.


Several sustainable liquid fuel alternatives are needed for different compression ignition (CI) engine applications. In the present study, five different fuel blends were investigated. Rapeseed methyl ester (RME) was used as the basic renewable fuel, and it was blended with low-sulfur light fuel oil (LFO), kerosene, marine gas oil (MGO), and naphtha. Of these fuels, MGO is a circulation economy fuel, manufactured from used lubricants. Naphtha is renewable as it is a by-product of renewable diesel production process using tall oil as feedstock. In addition to RME, naphtha was also blended with LFO. The aim of the current study was to determine the most important properties of the five fuel blends in order to gather fundamental knowledge about their suitability for medium-speed CI engines. The share of renewables within these five blends varied from 20 to 100 vol.%. The properties that were investigated and compared were the cetane number, distillation, density, viscosity, cold properties, and lubricity. According to the results, all the studied blends may be operable in medium-speed engines. Blending of new, renewable fuels with more conventional ones will help ease the technical transitional period as long as the availability of renewable fuels is limited.


Abstract Schoenfeld, BJ, Pope, ZK, Benik, FM, Hester, GM, Sellers, J, Nooner, JL, Schnaiter, JA, Bond-Williams, KE, Carter, AS, Ross, CL, Just, BL, Henselmans, M, and Krieger, JW. Longer interset rest periods enhance muscle strength and hypertrophy in resistance-trained men. J Strength Cond Res 30(7): 1805–1812, 2016—The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of short rest intervals normally associated with hypertrophy-type training versus long rest intervals traditionally used in strength-type training on muscular adaptations in a cohort of young, experienced lifters. Twenty-one young resistance-trained men were randomly assigned to either a group that performed a resistance training (RT) program with 1-minute rest intervals (SHORT) or a group that employed 3-minute rest intervals (LONG). All other RT variables were held constant. The study period lasted 8 weeks with subjects performing 3 total body workouts a week comprised 3 sets of 8–12 repetition maximum (RM) of 7 different exercises per session. Testing was performed prestudy and poststudy for muscle strength (1RM bench press and back squat), muscle endurance (50% 1RM bench press to failure), and muscle thickness of the elbow flexors, triceps brachii, and quadriceps femoris by ultrasound imaging. Maximal strength was significantly greater for both 1RM squat and bench press for LONG compared to SHORT. Muscle thickness was significantly greater for LONG compared to SHORT in the anterior thigh, and a trend for greater increases was noted in the triceps brachii (p = 0.06) as well. Both groups saw significant increases in local upper body muscle endurance with no significant differences noted between groups. This study provides evidence that longer rest periods promote greater increases in muscle strength and hypertrophy in young resistance-trained men.


Abstract There is a growing tendency in cities around the world to invest in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in an attempt to improve the capacity and quality of public transport services. The appeal of BRTs is based on their ability to combine the service level of rail transit systems with the flexibility of buses at relatively lower investment costs, and this was the motivation behind the opening of such a system in the Turkish city of Istanbul in 2007. This system has attracted mixed opinions as to its performance, as while passenger ridership figures are extremely high, proving the effectiveness of the system, there is an argument that the corridor should have been developed with rail technology, and that the BRT is failing to meet the demand. The paper presents a comprehensive analysis of this system, assessing its planning and performance through a comparative analysis of a number of BRTs in the world and Istanbul's metro and tram systems. The analysis confirms the success of the system in terms of passenger statistics, but also highlights a number of problems in certain planning decisions that should be addressed, thus taking the discussion beyond a simplified comparison of bus and rail technologies.


Over the last couple of decades there has been an international push around the assessment of the wider societal impact of research. Kate Williams and Jonathan Grant document the evolution of research impact assessment in the UK and Australia, and how policies in the two countries have been seemingly interdependent, a back-and-forth process developed through international learning. Continued political commitment to impact assessment is likely in both countries, with debate centred around reducing the costs and burden through the use of impact metrics.


Under the current climate there is significant spatial variation in the yield and water-use of bioenergy crops such as poplar short rotation coppice (SRC). Marked changes in patterns of precipitation and temperature are predicted globally as a result of anthropogenic climate change. This is likely to significantly impact on the yield and transpiration of poplar SRC. The response of poplar SRC to future climate change is unknown and represents a significant knowledge gap in the path to a sustainable future. This thesis used a land-surface scheme, JULES, to investigate the response of poplar SRC yield and transpiration to the interaction between changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration and changes in climate. Empirical work generated poplar SRC specific parameter values for use JULES. It was found that Vmax, a key model photosynthetic parameter, was significantly lower when estimated under the assumption of infinite leaf internal conductance to CO2. This invalidated the assumption that internal CO2 transfer has a negligible impact on the drawdown of CO2 from ci to cc. The photosynthesis model in JULES is based on this assumption; however, inclusion of this additional CO2 transfer pathway in the model did not impact on the accuracy of the simulated carbon assimilation, because the value of Vmax used in the model compensated for the presence/absence of this pathway. It was concluded that, given the model's high sensitivity to Vmax, it is essential to calibrate the model with a parameter value estimated under assumptions appropriate for the model. Further modification, calibration and validation enabled JULES to simulate the dynamic growth and water-use of poplar under a managed SRC cycle, which is a novel application for the model. Changes in climate were simulated using an ensemble of GCM anomalies and atmospheric CO2 concentration was simulated using the SRES A1B emissions scenario. Results of this work highlighted the influence of climate in modifying the yield and transpiration responses to elevated concentrations of atmospheric CO2. Additionally, for a future climate scenario, these simulations indicated higher yields but also higher water-use of poplar SRC, although the magnitude and direction of response was highly spatially variable.


Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" has been noted to bear the influence of and even echo W. B. Yeats, especially "Lapis Luzuli," and, secondarily via this poem, Shakespeare's King Lear. One scholar notes its "Yeatsian overtones" (Fraser 51); another judges Thomas's villanelle to have "much of the concentrated fury of expression which the poetry of the older Yeats contained, but ... more tenderness and sympathy" (Stanford 117), and goes on to say., citing "Lapis Lazuli," that "Yeats described the poet as one who knows that `Hamlet and Lear are gay'" (118). William York Tindall cites not only "Lapis Lazuli" but also Yeats's "The Choice" as sources (204). Another scholar seems to skip over Yeats entirely (though his own phrasing echoes line 1 of "Lapis Lazuli"), seeing the "Grave men/blind" tercet (which contains the injunction to "be gay") as "perhaps invok[ing] the Miltonic" (Tindall also mentions Milton 205) and the effect of the phrase "be gay" as "rather hysterical sentimentality" (Holbrook, Dissociation 53); of the earlier "Wise men/lightning" verse, however, he says "The images are merely there, histrionically, to bring in the phrase `forked no lightning' to give a Lear-like grandeur to the dirge" (52). I would like to propose that "Do not go gentle into that good night" bears a much stronger and more direct connection to Shakespeare's play than is suggested by references to Yeats or to "Lear-like grandeur." I would like to propose that the attitudes towards death--or, more precisely, the attitudes towards how one lives in the face of impending death--that Thomas explores in this poem--the implied attitude his speaker attributes to his direct audience, and the one he urges be adopted in its place--are similarly explored in King Lear and dramatized in the characters of Gloucester and Lear. I also propose that the voice we hear in "Do not go gentle" may not be a directly lyric speaker but an obliquely drawn persona, that of Gloucester's son Edgar. Further, when read in the shadow cast by King Lear, the tone of Thomas's poem grows dark indeed. "Do not go gentle into that good night" is addressed to Thomas's father, David John, known as D. J. According to biographer Paul Ferris, D.J. was "an unhappy man ... a man with regrets" (27); born with brains and literary talent, his ambition was to be a man of letters, but he was never able to advance beyond being "a sardonic provincial schoolmaster" in South Wales, feared for his sharp tongue (26-33). After his first serious illness, though--cancer in 1933--"A mellowing is said to have been noticeable soon after; his sarcasm was not so sharp; he was a changed man" (104). As he grew more chronically ill in the 40's, mostly from heart disease and with one of the complications being trouble with his sight, the mellowing intensified: As Ferris puts it, "It must have been [D. J.'s] backbone of angry dignity that his son grieved to see breaking long after, when he wrote `Do not go gentle into that good night'" (27), and the poem is "an exhortation to his father, a plea for him to die with anger, not humility" (259). The poem was first published in November, 1951, in Princess Caetani's Botteghe Oscure, on consecutive pages with "Lament," a dramatic monologue spoken by an old man on his deathbed who recalls his rollicking youth and middle-age spent in the pursuit (and capture) of wine, women, and song, but who has married at last in order to obtain a caretaker, and must suffer pious comforting in his final, helpless days. (Bibliographic evidence suggests the two were also composed, or at least finalized, more or less simultaneously; Kidder 188.) In the letter to Caetani that contained "Do not go gentle," Thomas remarked that "this little one might well be printed with ["Lament"] as a contrast" (qtd. in Kidder 188). As Ferris suggests, it would be difficult to over-estimate D. J.'s influence on his son: ". . . the pattern of [Dylan's] life was in some measure a response to D. …


We all seem to think that we do the acts we do because we consciously choose to do them. This commonsense view is thrown into dispute by Benjamin Libet's eyebrow-raising experiments, which seem to suggest that conscious will occurs not before but after the start of brain activity that produces physical action. Libet's striking results are often claimed to undermine traditional views of free will and moral responsibility and to have practical implications for criminal justice. His work has also stimulated a flurry of further fascinating scientific research-including findings in psychology by Dan Wegner and in neuroscience by John-Dylan Haynes-that raises novel questions about whether conscious will plays any causal role in action. Critics respond that both commonsense views of action and traditional theories of moral and legal responsibility, as well as free will, can survive the scientific onslaught of Libet and his progeny. To further this lively debate, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Lynn Nadel have brought together prominent experts in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and law to discuss whether our conscious choices really cause our actions, and what the answers to that question mean for how we view ourselves and how we should treat each other.


In Liquid Ecclesiology Pete Ward explores the theological contours of the turn to ethnography in the study of the Christian Church. There is an extended qualitative empirical case study examining the communicative practices of the contemporary evangelical Church.