Water is recognized as a contaminant in lubricating oils. Recently, interfacial materials with special wettability have been broadly developed for oil-water separation. However, solving lubricating oil failure caused by water remains a challenge. Here, a robust superhydrophobic membrane is presented to effectively remove water in lubricating oils to recover their lubricating capability. Compared to pure lubricating oils without or with an additive, lubricating oils collected from their emulsions using the superhydrophobic membrane have an equivalent friction coefficient and wear volume, which are much lower than that of lubricating oils contaminated by water. Water in lubricating oils accelerates the oxidation of metallic substrates and wear corrosion. Moreover, the metallic ions dissolved in water-containing lubricating oils induce the catalytic dehydrogenation of lubricating oils, leading to the deposition of a good deal of carbon-based wear debris. Importantly, the prepared membrane shows steady performance in regard to extreme water repellency, high-efficiency purification of lubricating oils, and low wear volume even after harsh mechanical damage. Robust interfacial materials have potential advantages in practically solving lubricating oil failure caused by water.


: We study the large observed changes in labor supply by married women in the United States over the post-World War II period, a period that saw little change in the labor supply by single women. We investigate the effects of changes in the gender wage gap, the quantitative impact of technological improvements in the production of nonmarket goods, and the potential inferiority of nonmarket goods in explaining the dramatic change in labor supply. We find that small decreases in the gender wage gap can simultaneously explain the significant increases in the average hours worked by married women and the relative constancy in the hours worked by single women and by single and married men. We also find that the impact of technological improvements in the household on married female hours and on the relative wage of females to males is too small for realistic values. Some specifications of the inferiority of home goods match the hours patterns, but they have counterfactual predictions for wages and expenditure patterns.


Computer Science has historically been strong on data structures and weak on inference from data, whereas Statistics has historically been weak on data structures and strong on inference from data. One way to draw on the strengths of both disciplines is to develop "inferential methods for data structures"; i.e., methods that update probability distributions on recursively-defined objects such as trees, graphs, grammars and function calls. This is the world of "nonparametric Bayes," where prior and posterior distributions are allowed to be general stochastic processes. Both statistical and computational considerations lead one to certain classes of stochastic processes, and these tend to have interesting connections to combinatorics. I will give some examples of how this blend of ideas leads to useful models in some applied problem domains, including natural language parsing, computational vision, statistical genetics and protein structural modeling.


A grand challenge in reinforcement learning is intelligent exploration, especially when rewards are sparse or deceptive. Two Atari games serve as benchmarks for such hard-exploration domains: Montezuma's Revenge and Pitfall. On both games, current RL algorithms perform poorly, even those with intrinsic motivation, which is the dominant method to improve performance on hard-exploration domains. To address this shortfall, we introduce a new algorithm called Go-Explore. It exploits the following principles: (1) remember previously visited states, (2) first return to a promising state (without exploration), then explore from it, and (3) solve simulated environments through any available means (including by introducing determinism), then robustify via imitation learning. The combined effect of these principles is a dramatic performance improvement on hard-exploration problems. On Montezuma's Revenge, Go-Explore scores a mean of over 43k points, almost 4 times the previous state of the art. Go-Explore can also harness human-provided domain knowledge and, when augmented with it, scores a mean of over 650k points on Montezuma's Revenge. Its max performance of nearly 18 million surpasses the human world record, meeting even the strictest definition of "superhuman" performance. On Pitfall, Go-Explore with domain knowledge is the first algorithm to score above zero. Its mean score of almost 60k points exceeds expert human performance. Because Go-Explore produces high-performing demonstrations automatically and cheaply, it also outperforms imitation learning work where humans provide solution demonstrations. Go-Explore opens up many new research directions into improving it and weaving its insights into current RL algorithms. It may also enable progress on previously unsolvable hard-exploration problems in many domains, especially those that harness a simulator during training (e.g. robotics).


Intestinal Cl− secretion is stimulated by cyclic AMP (cAMP) and intracellular calcium ([Ca2+]i). Recent studies show that protein kinase A (PKA) and the exchange protein directly activated by cAMP (Epac) are downstream targets of cAMP. Therefore, we tested whether both PKA and Epac are involved in forskolin (FSK)/cAMP-stimulated Cl− secretion. Human intestinal T84 cells and mouse small intestine were used for short circuit current (Isc) measurement in response to agonist-stimulated Cl− secretion. FSK-stimulated Cl− secretion was completely inhibited by the additive effects of the PKA inhibitor, H89 (1 µM), and the [Ca2+]i chelator, 1,2-bis-(o-aminophenoxy)-ethane-N,N,N',N'-tetraacetic acid, tetraacetoxymethyl ester (BAPTA-AM; 25 µM). Both FSK and the Epac activator 8-pCPT-2'-O-Me-cAMP (50 µM) elevated [Ca2+]i, activated Ras-related protein 2, and induced Cl− secretion in intact or basolateral membrane–permeabilized T84 cells and mouse ileal sheets. The effects of 8-pCPT-2'-O-Me-cAMP were completely abolished by BAPTA-AM, but not by H89. In contrast, T84 cells with silenced Epac1 had a reduced Isc response to FSK, and this response was completely inhibited by H89, but not by the phospholipase C inhibitor U73122 or BAPTA-AM. The stimulatory effect of 8-pCPT-2'-O-Me-cAMP on Cl− secretion was not abolished by cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance (CFTR) inhibitor 172 or glibenclamide, suggesting that CFTR channels are not involved. This was confirmed by lack of effect of 8-pCPT-2'-O-Me-cAMP on whole cell patch clamp recordings of CFTR currents in Chinese hamster ovary cells transiently expressing the human CFTR channel. Furthermore, biophysical characterization of the Epac1-dependent Cl− conductance of T84 cells mounted in Ussing chambers suggested that this conductance was hyperpolarization activated, inwardly rectifying, and displayed a Cl−>Br−>I− permeability sequence. These results led us to conclude that the Epac-Rap-PLC-[Ca2+]i signaling pathway is involved in cAMP-stimulated Cl− secretion, which is carried by a novel, previously undescribed Cl− channel.


Mammals use chemical signals for individual and kin recognition, to establish social hierarchies, mark territories and choose mates. The nocturnal and social lifestyle of bats suggests that, besides acoustic signals, they also use scent to communicate. We investigated in the communally breeding Bechstein's bat, Myotis bechsteinii, whether secretions of the facial interaural gland contain information that can be used for individual and colony recognition. Since female Bechstein's bats live in closed societies and show cooperative behaviour, we predicted they would recognize colony members. We analysed interaural gland secretions, which we repeatedly sampled from 85 females belonging to four free-ranging colonies. Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry profiles were individually specific and differed between colonies. Comparing odour profiles between colonies we found a relation between chemical similarity and the mitochondrial haplotype of colony members. Within colonies there was no correlation between mass spectrometer profile similarity and genetic relatedness. Our results suggest that female Bechstein's bats may use interaural gland secretions for individual and colony recognition but not to infer kinship directly.


In recent years, immunocastration, a vaccination against gonadotropin releasing hormone, has been proposed as an alternative to surgical castration of intact male pigs without anaesthesia. However, the effects of immunocastration on metabolic changes, nutritional requirements and growth potential have not been quantified. Thus in the present thesis, the meta-analytical approach was used to quantitatively synthesize the effects of immunocastration and four studies were conducted to evaluate the effects of quantitative and qualitative feed restriction on growth performance, heat production and energy metabolism, carcass and meat quality. Results show that boar taint compounds are dramatically reduced in immunocastrates, still they remain slightly higher than in surgical castrates. Immunocastrates are less feed efficient, fatter but grow more rapidly and may have better meat quality than entire males. Compared to surgical castrates, immunocastrates have superior performance with no difference in meat quality. It is more economical to fatten immunocastrates than surgical castrates, but production costs and carcass quality are less favourable than in entire males because of the huge increase in voluntary feed intake during the weeks preceding slaughter. Applying quantitative feed restriction after active immunization did not significantly affect growth performance or carcass composition; however, restrictively fed immunocastrates were closer to entire males, whereas ad libitum fed immunocastrates were closer to surgical castrates. Meat quality is also unchanged by the restriction. However, higher incidence of carcass lesions in restricted immunocastrates together with higher plasma cortisol level indicates more aggression prior to slaughter and can be considered as a negative aspect of the quantitative restriction. Total heat production, assumed to be the major factor contributing to the differences in feed efficiency of pigs, is changed after the immunocastration. Additional energy retained due to higher feed intake is directed towards lipid deposition. Increased fatness of immunocastrates is a result of increased daily lipid deposition caused by higher energy intake, lower fasting heat production and improved energy retention. Hence, dietary energy intake should be limited after immunocastration. Moreover, according to the results of the nitrogen balance study, dietary crude protein content could also be decreased. By reducing net energy concentration of the diet up to 10 % using higher fibre content, similar energy efficiency (gain to net energy intake ratio) may be achieved, with an advantage in terms of reduced lipid deposition, and no effect on growth rate after effective immunization. This is particularly important when immunocastrated pigs are fattened to higher body weights, i.e. when longer delays between full immunization and slaughter are practiced.


Chielectric spectroscopy, which is frequency-domain electric-field-induced second-harmonic generation, was developed to study the nonlinear optical response near the glass-transition temperature on short time scales. These measurements, along with time-domain second-harmonic generation and time- and frequency-domain dielectric measurements, were used to characterize the decay of poling-induced electro-optic properties of guest–host and side-chain methacrylate polymers that have glass-transition temperatures in the range 90< Tg<125 °C. Time- and frequency-dependent data were fitted with a three-level model. The temperature dependences of the time constants from the polymeric systems were then compared, and a scaling model for predicting useful lifetimes of poled electro-optic media is discussed.


In this paper we highlight the need to attend to the structuring power of knowledge production in geoengineering research, because of the way that problem definitions are shaped by disciplinary ways of thinking and describing the world. We also draw attention to a number of problematic assumptions about how interdisciplinary research should be approached and organised in this area. We first look at the logic of 'subordination', in which certain disciplines are given the task of problem definition and others—typically the social sciences—are allocated the task of filling in gaps within that given frame. We then examine the more fundamental 'integrative imaginary' which, we argue, mistakenly assumes that disciplines can be combined in a straightforward way to reveal different aspects of the same underlying world. We conclude by proposing a more reflexive imaginary for interdisciplinarity, one that challenges the idea of integration and subordination, that promotes and benefits from the multiplicity and heterogeneity of ways of seeing that different disciplines offer, and that can thereby contribute to greater 'epistemological responsibility' in geoengineering research. Keywords: geoengineering, climate, integrated assessment, transparency, interdisciplinarity, knowledge, science, reflexivity


Advances in rapid prototyping and machining have resulted in reduced lead times for injection moulding tooling. Comparisons between aluminium and stereolithography (SL) tools are made with regard to the ejection forces required to push mouldings from the tools, heat transfer through the tools and the surface roughness of the tools. The results show that ejection forces for both types of tools are increased when a longer cooling time prior to ejection is used. The ejection forces required from a rough aluminium tool are considerably higher than those from a smooth aluminium tool. SL tools do not appear to be subjected to any smoothing as a result of moulding polypropylene parts. The rubber like nature of the tool's surface is as a direct consequence of the low glass transition temperature and low thermal conductivity of the tool material. Further potential benefits of the low thermal properties of the tool are discussed.


Disk schedulers in operating systems are generally work-conserving; they schedule a request immediately after the previous request has finished. Such schedulers need multiple outstanding requests to make good decisions. Unfortunately, many applications issue synchronous, almost-continuous streams of read requests. This forces the scheduler into making decisions too early, falsely assuming that the process has become momentarily idle. This phenomenon of deceptive idleness causes significant degradation in performance and quality of service objectives on current systems. We solve deceptive idleness by designing and implementing a transparent, non-work-conserving scheduling framework for various scheduling policies. We evaluate this solution on microbenchmarks and real workloads, and observe large benefits. The Apache webserver delivers 56% and 16% more throughput for two configurations. The Andrew Benchmark runs faster by 8% (54% for the read-intensive phase). Variants of the TPC-B database benchmark exhibit improvements between 4% and 60%. Proportional-share schedulers become empowered to efficiently deliver application-desired proportions.


A new type of imaging microlens, primarily for use with solid-state image-capture systems such as a charge coupled device (CCD) or metal oxide semiconductor array sensors, is described. The design, having less aberration than conventional lenses of similar specification, is particularly advantageous in wide-angle, low-light applications. The lens type is substantially simpler than any existing design. A particular example, a fixed focus f/3.5 lens with a 90° field of view and a depth of field from 2 cm to infinity, is detailed. The lens can be directly bonded to a solid-state array detector and requires no other mechanical support. The lens can be designed and manufactured at low cost and has current applications in surveillance and microscopy.


This article discusses previously unnoticed empirical effects of the operation Attract/Move F. Certain illicit cases of so-called remnant movement are accounted for if the primitive operation inducing move-ment is feature movement and all category movement is feature-driven, as is claimed by the Attract/Move F hypothesis. Since the relevant cases of illicit remnant movement remain unaccounted for under the traditional Move a hypothesis, which claims that the primitive opera-tion is category movement, the present discussion lends new empirical support to the feature-driven view of movement.


Operationally Responsive Space (ORS)12 has become the mantra for the next generation spacecraft that will support the warfighter. ORS missions require an extension of the current, traditional approach for fine-tuned, high cost, high accuracy attitude determination and control system (ADCS) software to create an ADCS system that can be developed much faster and less expensively. To achieve this faster, cheaper, and thus, better product, new technologies must be employed. These technologies show the promise of being disruptive, but enabling for ORS and very low-cost systems while potentially reducing cost and schedule for a broad range of systems. The introduction of Plug-and-Play (PnP) technologies to facilitate rapid integration may be effective in developing an ADCS that can be developed faster and at lower cost than current, traditional methods allow. However, this rapid integration and reduced non-recurring cost comes with an additional initial non-recurring engineering cost for implementing PnP. The goal is to demonstrate the potential of PnP ADCS by showing the improvements in performance, cost, and schedule, when the PnP ADCS software is demonstrated and tested. Additionally, the implementation of a Direct Model Reference Adaptive Controller (DMRAC) as the core for the ADCS software shows promise as an efficient method of providing stable, accurate control without requiring the extensive analysis, evaluation and gain tailoring that is typically required of more traditional controllers. Microcosm, with partner HRP Systems and graduate student Seth Harvey, have created prototype flight software that facilitates rapid integration through the implementation of PnP concepts while providing control performance suitable for many ORS missions, through the use of adaptive control algorithms. This paper will describe the software architecture, software implementation, adaptive control approach, and early evaluation results that are associated with the sponsored development of this PnP ADCS software.


Purpose. The purpose of this review is to examine (1) the influence of self-efficacy on rehabilitation outcomes post-stroke, and (2) the evidence to support self-management interventions based on self-efficacy principals for stroke survivors. Method. Medline, Embase, Psychlit, Web of Science, AMED and Cochrane Databases for systematic reviews databases were searched for relevant articles in English between 2000 and ending in July 2009. Articles included (1) primary research testing relationships between self-efficacy and rehabilitation outcomes including the measuring impairment and activity or participation in a stroke population, and (2) research testing efficacy and effectiveness of self-management interventions designed specifically for a stoke population in which the principle theoretical framework is self-efficacy or a similar control cognition. Methodological quality appraisal and data extraction was carried out by two reviewers. Results. Of the 104 articles that were identified by the search, 22 met the criteria to be included in the review. There is evidence that self-efficacy is an important variable associated with various outcomes post-stroke. These outcomes include quality of life or perceived health status, depression, ADL and, to a certain extent, physical functioning. Further empirical evidence is needed to extend these findings, and to determine whether self-efficacy has additional predictive value over and beyond the objective measures of impairment. There is also emerging evidence of benefits to be gained from programmes that target self-management based on self-efficacy principles; however, the optimal format of delivering these interventions for stroke survivors is not clear. Conclusions. There is a need for researchers, to work together with other stakeholders to develop and test interventions that can support self-management skills and confidence to make continued progress after stroke. This could help to reduce some of the negative consequences of stroke such as reduced quality of life and social isolation.


Antonio Gramsci's point that battles are won and lost on the terrain of ideology is a much earlier and more complex explanation of the mediations between objective economic and social conditions and politics. It accounts generally for the fact that the continuation of contradiction—as must ever be the case under capitalism—and the worsening conditions for the majority of the world's population do not mean the emergence of a political opposition to capitalism. Put simply, the great traditional workforces cannot strike at capitalism in its new heart. On the other hand, the two percent might be able to do so if it was not disaggregated because of its dispersal in new workforces that have no central workplaces or sufficient shared experience to overcome cultural differences, which divide rather than unite—if it did not live the new space-time relation. This labour mobility undoes class formation, even among those who do not share in the benefits of globalisation but dream of doing so. It remains to be seen whether the new nationalism and its closed borders, which keep such migrants at home with their contradictions, will foster conditions for the constitution of new collective working-class consciousness. Global capitalism fixes class relations in an impure state—a pure duality of capitalists and proletariat never develops anywhere. This means that any socialist transformation requires the building of a cross-class alliance of majorities on national-popular bases, rather than class. Therefore, that hegemony, which permits new ideas to become social forces, has to win out over the old hegemony in an organisational "war of position."


The near universally accepted theory that the brain processes information persists in current neural network theory where there is "subsymbolic" computation (Smolensky, 1988) on distributed representations. This theory of brain information processing may suffice for simplifying models simulated in silicon but not for living neural nets where there is ongoing chemical tuning of the input/output transfer function at the nodes, connection weights, network parameters, and connectivity. Here the brain continually changes itself as it intersects with information from the outside. An alternative theory to information processing is developed in which the brain permits and supports "participation" of self and other as constraints on the dynamically evolving, self-organizing whole. The noncomputational process of "differing and deferring" in nonlinear dynamic neural systems is contrasted with Black's (1991) account of molecular information processing. State hyperspace for the noncomputational process of nonlinear dynamical systems, unlike classical systems, has a fractal dimension. The noncomputational model is supported by suggestive evidence for fractal properties of the brain.


We develop an investment and financing model in which two identical firms compete for first-mover advantage in an opportunity to invest. We investigate the interactions between preemptive competition and a financing constraint. We show that a medium-intensity financing constraint can play a positive role in mitigating the preemptive competition and improving firm value in equilibrium. This positive effect is in sharp contrast with the conventional negative effects of the financing constraint. The positive effect is strong, especially for IT venture businesses because of the following characteristics: severe preemptive competition, a lack of internal funds, high uncertainty regarding future project value, and high bankruptcy costs.


Research activities ongoing in the Advanced Reactor Design and Fuel Cycle Analysis Group of UC Berkley will be reviewed. The group research thrust is to improve the sustainability of nuclear energy by increasing the utilization of the uranium and thorium fuel resources, and by minimizing the amount and toxicity of the high level waste, along with improving the economics, safety, and proliferation resistance of nuclear energy. Four innovative design approaches will be briefly described: (1) achieving sustainability using thorium fueled reduced moderation boiling water reactors (RBWR); (2) neutron efficient seed-and-blanket sodium cooled fast reactor cores that benefit from the breed-and-burn (once-through) mode of operation using existing technology and enable new promising fuel cycle options; (3) 3-D fuel shuffling in large breed-and-burn fast reactor cores for doubling their fuel utilization and reducing the radiation damage to the fuel cladding; and (4) an engineered autonomous reactivity control system for improved safety and economics of fast reactors. The presentation will focus on describing the unique features of these concepts and explaining the fundamentals behind the performance improvements they offer.


In this section, we discuss additional ways in which people influence others. The topics of conformity, social influence, obedience, and group processes demonstrate the power of the social situation to change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We begin this section with a discussion of a famous social psychology experiment that demonstrated how susceptible humans are to outside social pressures.


This study was produced for the "Study of Instruments and Tools to anticipate the effects of industrial change on employment, trades and vocational qualifications" and for DG V (Employment) of the European Commission in the late 1994. It started when the previous Portuguese government was still ruling, the main policies were defined, and the available instruments were not used in a minimum extend. The new Government, issued from the 1995 elections, proposed "employment" as a major objective with horizontal responsibility. That's also why there is now a Ministry for Qualifications and Employment, and another one for Solidarity and Social Affairs, not one for Employment and Social Affairs as the previous Government had. But more than that, this objective is considered to need a coordinated and consistent action that involves external affairs, industrial and regional policies, and the policies on education, training and employment, among others. The promotion of the "quality of employment" is being recently done at the working conditions, remuneration, social protection, occupational promotion levels, and the equality of opportunities towards employment and vocational training levels, and finally, the levels of qualification of human resources for a better labour market, education policy and training policy developments. In Portugal, the influence of the industrial change is produced in a top-down way; with (in some cases) an ex post analysis process to formulated training needs. This means that the industrial change impact is produced (normally, unexpectedly), and afterwards the responsible at the company level tries to know which training needs should be formulated in order those effects could be the smoother possible. The training needs at the company level is not based on anticipatory studies, neither is done any long term forecast on qualification, or even employment level.


Social and physical pain share common overlap at linguistic, behavioral, and neural levels. Prior research has shown that acetaminophen—an analgesic medication that acts indirectly through cannabinoid 1 receptors—reduces the social pain associated with exclusion. Yet, no work has examined if other drugs that act on similar receptors, such as marijuana, also reduce social pain. Across four methodologically diverse samples, marijuana use consistently buffered people from the negative consequences associated with loneliness and social exclusion. These effects were replicated using cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental designs. These findings offer novel evidence supporting common overlap between social and physical pain processes.


We demonstrate that a certain dimensional family of symmetric singly-periodic minimal surface with Scherk-type ends exists in the neighborhood of a given example if a set of holomorphic quadratic differentials is independent. Our approach extends the work of Traizet, who has previously shown the existence of a family of such minimal surfaces in the neighborhood of a degenerate example consisting of a number of intersecting planes. Whereas in Traizet's construction the underlying conformal structure was a union of Riemann spheres, we treat the case where the underlying conformal structure is a Riemann surface of higher genus. In our approach, admissible surfaces are identified with Weierstrass data satisfying certain constraints. Using the bilinear relations and the Rauch variational formula, we are able to find holomorphic quadratic differentials which represent differentials of the constraints, and whose independence, by an implicit function theorem argument, implies the existence of the desired surface family in a neighborhood of the original. We restrict our attention to tori and develop machinery for investigating the quadratic differentials numerically using interval arithmetic to obtain provable bounds on their residue structure. The developed tools are finally applied to an example surface in Karcher's one-dimensional toroidal saddle tower family, which is shown to exist in a larger three-dimensional family.


We studied diel vertical migration (DVM) of a variety of zooplanktonic taxa. Our results fit the predictions of the predator avoidance hypothesis, with larger taxa performing normal migrations to avoid fish predation and smaller taxa performing reversed migrations, probably to avoid predation by Chaoborus. Cladocerans and adults of copepods displayed normal DVM, whereas cyclopoid copepodites did not migrate. Five rotifer taxa migrated in a normal pattern whereas four taxa migrated in a reverse pattern. Our results suggest that during the day microcrustaceans moved close to the bottom, while rotifers showed narrower migration amplitudes. Larvae of the invertebrate predator Chaoborus displayed strong normal DVM, and appeared to synchronize its life cycle with the lunar cycle, with mass emergence of adults around New Moon.


In the history of economic thoughts the problem of a "just" tax rate structure has played an important role. The paper reconsiders the discussions of the last two centuries and sheds additional light on the concrete tax schedules using the more recent methods of tax theory. Even if the substitution effects which play an important role in the theory of optimal taxation are neglected, the slope in the diminishing marginal utility of income causes tax rate structures reaching from accelerated progression to delayed regression. Interestingly the principle of equal relative sacrifice combined with a Bernoulli utility function yields a delayed progression, which is connected with a negative income tax.


Comparative Plant Virology provides a complete overview of our current knowledge of plant viruses, including background information on plant viruses and up-to-date aspects of virus biology and control. It deals mainly with concepts rather than detail. The focus will be on plant viruses but due to the changing environment of how virology is taught, comparisons will be drawn with viruses of other kingdomes, animals, fungi and bacteria. It has been written for students of plant virology, plant pathology, virology and microbiology who have no previous knowledge of plant viruses or of virology in general. * Boxes highlight important information such as virus definition and taxonomy * Includes profiles of 32 plant viruses that feature extensively in the text * Companion website providing image bank * Full color throughout


CONFLICTS BASED ON RACE/ETHNICITY AMONG LATINA/O STUDENTS IN SCHOOLS Michael J. Martinez, M.A. Marquette University, 2017 Conflicts based on race/ethnicity continue to occur today in a wide range of settings. Of particular interest are racial/ethnic conflicts that occur in schools due to the impact they can have on students' emotional well-being, academic achievement and the overall and racial school climate. Evidence exists that indicates the occurrence of racial/ethnic conflicts in schools but little attention has been specifically given to withingroup or intra-racial/ethnic conflicts. Latina/o students are particularly fitting for such an examination given the clear within group diversity that exists within the population. This study sought to gain a better understanding of conflicts based on race/ethnicity among Latina/o students. Specific exploration was made regarding the sources of the conflict, participants' reactions to them and outcomes. Nine self-identified Latina/o high school students from a large city in California were interviewed regarding their experienced conflicts based on race/ethnicity. Data were analyzed using Consensual Qualitative Research methodology (Hill, Thompson & Williams, 1997). Participants reported conflicts took several forms including verbal, social exclusion and physical. Primary reasons for conflicts included a denial or rejection of participants' Latina/o identity and differences in values between participants and their peers. Participants reported numerous adverse consequences including experiencing difficult emotions and feeling a need to prove their Latina/o identity or apologize for not being Latina/o enough. Notably, participants also demonstrated perseverance in the face of these conflicts, making positive personal changes, most evident in their report of continued academic success. Overwhelmingly, participants chose not to involve school staff in the conflict incidents. Limitations, practical implications and future research are also discussed.


The thesis examines the system of occupational health and safety in France. It analyses the use of expert manpower in the field with a view to establishing the possibility of a profession in health and safety. An input-output model is developed to bring together the necessary elements of prevention of accidents and occupational diseases. The role of institutions concerned with health and safety is analysed with reference to this model. The research establishes the need for a health and safety specialist role. The recognition and status of this role are found to be subject to other criteria including the acceptance by institutions of such a specialist role. The model is also used to define the role of this specialist as expected by the various institutions intervening in the field.


Background: Type 2 (T2) diabetes and diabetic nephropathy (DN) are risk factors for multiple vascular and cancerous outcomes. The competing nature of these outcomes mean that the use of standard survival analysis techniques can result in bias and overestimation of the risk; particularly in cases where follow-up is long or the competing outcome is common. I reviewed the literature to determine whether authors account for competing risks (CRs) in reporting time-to-event risk measures of outcomes in individuals with T2-DN.
Methods: Medline, EMBASE and CINAHL databases were searched for trial and cohort studies reporting occurrences of vascular or neoplasm events in T2 diabetic nephropathic populations. Articles were excluded if median follow-up was <5yrs or <1,000 subjects with T2-DN were present at baseline. Articles published <1980 or not available in English were also excluded from the analysis.
Results: From 3,886 abstracts identified, 179 studies were eligible for full-text review. Of 16 papers currently identified for data extraction: only 1 implemented a true CRs model, 14 used single outcome models or composite end-points and 1 study provided only general incidence statistics. More results will be available.
Conclusions: Preliminary results suggest most studies fail to account for CRs in their analyses. The use of both composite end points and serial single-outcome models can produce bias through either assuming the same hazard for several outcomes or failing to accurately define the population at risk, respectively. Simulation work is currently underway to explore these biases and their potential effect on the risk measures generated.


Russian economy has experienced many changes since the economic reform started in the beginning of the 90-s. The price liberalisation launched in 1992 diminished the role of central planning in the allocation of inputs and outputs in favour of the role of market prices. The reform of the agricultural sector has resulted in a widely spread privatisation. Markets were liberalised relatively fast; at least those for commodities and services as well as the labour market. This meant the planning system was largely dismantled, state procurement abolished and production and consumption decisions were to be guided by the market. Also government intervention via subsidies or other instruments were greatly reduced. Low production and financial performance of agricultural enterprises have expressed in production decline (over 40% between 1991-1998) and a large proportion (84,4% in 1998 and 60% in 1999) of the unprofitable agricultural enterprises (Goskomstat, 2000). The restructuring process in the country created uncertainties for farmers and resulted in fragmentation of farms or farm ownership. Compounding the problem was the shortage of technical and business management skills for successful private farming that had been absent under the previous system. Previous linkages between farms and the up- and downstream industries broke down. The whole set of problems was worsened by the lack of agricultural finance and credit (Trzeciak-Duval, 1999). A lack of finance is caused by internal and external reasons. The farms are lacking its own revenue due to high production costs and price disparity between agricultural and other sectors of economy. Yet the possibilities to obtain the credit sources are rather limited due to farm's inefficiency, low profitability so they cannot meet the high bank requirements. Agricultural production declines for various reasons and results in several outcomes. One of the outcomes of the production decline is sharp reduction in food consumption. This paper presents the description of the current situation in the producer and consumer side and points their interrelations. The major problems of the Russian agro-food sector are listed. Also the key subjects of the Agenda for agricultural development of Russia in 2001-2010 in respect to production and consumption strategies, information service are presented. We describe the objectives and existing strategies of the Federal Training Centre located in Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy as an example of promoting the information service in agriculture, which in our view serves the solutions to overcome the production difficulties. The paper finalises with conclusions and discussion.


Introduction: Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has been plagued by pathogen and its ensuing disease process and to overcome the outcome of the disease, various medical therapies have been formulated over the time. With the evident of medical therapies various side effects of the drugs used have come up and to overcome those side effects complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has evolved.
Aim: The goal of this study is to examine the relationship between the disease condition and the usage of the CAM therapy among the general population.
Materials and Method: The CAM encompassed number of therapies so, the survey instrument is a self modified designs questionnaire based on previous studies carried out in the literature. Questionnaire will be filled by the patients visiting a dental school with any dental problem. First part of survey instrument incorporates questions regarding demographic characteristics. While the second part of survey consisted of 17 medical /dental conditions for which the patient visited a dental college and have approached for the management of these diseases.
Results: More than half respondents were females(53.8%)with the common age group of 61-80 year old. The most frequent oral health problem was tooth ache (70.3%), followed by other problems and most frequently used CAM therapy was herbals.
Conclusion: A large proportion of dental patients reported use of CAM- therapies .Gender and the age group was significant factor. A more refined instrument should be used for the future studies for understanding how CAM usage is associated with dental problems.

Keywords: Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), Dental school clinic, Dental problems, Self-medication, Prevalence


In this paper, a system consisting of acid-washed zero-valent iron (ZVI), ferrous ion (Fe2+), and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) was employed for the removal of nitrate (NO3-) from water, and the reaction mechanism for this is discussed. The effects of acid-washed ZVI, Fe2+, H2O2, and initial NO3- concentration on nitrate removal were investigated. Acid-washed ZVI before and after reaction with nitrate were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Results reveal that the combined system can enhance the corrosion of ZVI and facilitate aqueous nitrate reduction. The products of nitrate reduction are mainly ammonium, with some N2. The ZVI particles after reaction may have a core of ZVI with an oxidation layer mainly consisting of Fe3O4.


In the era of massive urbanization and suburbanization the urban fringe is no longer the clear line separating urban and rural or natural landscapes, but often the continuous fragmented mix of rural and urban features. These territories of rural-urban interface - rurban landscapes - become the everyday living and working environment of the increasing numbers of people around the world including Lithuania. Those, who have a possibility to choose to live in rurban areas usually expect the combination of benefits of life in the city and in the countryside. However, what they more often get is ether visual chaos or suburban uniformity. This encourages looking at the aesthetics of rurban landscapes more carefully. Thus in this research we raise and try to answer the following questions: what makes particular landscapes acceptable and attractive to us and how this can be applied to rurban landscapes?; how rurban landscape aesthetics could be regulated or modeled? In the first part of our research we have discussed the excising landscape aesthetics theories and analyzed whether and how they can be applicable to rurban landscapes. In the second part of the research we have tried to answer the question of rurban landscape assessment and modeling integrating the approaches by W. Nohl, A. Ode et al. and M. Tveit et al. and Lithuanian experience of landscape aesthetic assessment and rurban landscape peculiarities. The research allowed formulating the conclusions regarding the importance of aesthetics in our everyday living landscapes including the dynamic and complex rurban landscapes. It has demonstrated that the entire spectrum of landscape aesthetics theories can be successfully applied to these particular landscapes and suggest important criteria for their aesthetic assessment. These findings suggested our approach towards developing the image of rurban landscapes presented in this research integrating the aesthetic perceptual categories under sustainable landscape conditions by W. Nohl and the system of visual landscape characterization concepts by Ode et al. and M. Tveit et al. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sace.7.2.6731


Two new sulfur-containing pyrimidine nucleotides have been isolated from hydrolyzates of Escherichia coli transfer RNA. The structures, 2-thiocytosine and 5-methylaminomethyl-2-thiouracil, have been assigned to the bases as a result of study of ultraviolet and mass spectra. An acid-degradation product, S-methylamino-methyluracil, has been synthesized and is identical to that derived from the natural product.


Hepatitis C is an emerging theme of contemporary public health discourses related to illicit drug injection practices. Such discourses differentiate injecting from non-injecting users in an actuarial risk logic, targeting drug-injecting users as a population in need of support in the management of risks attributed to their practices. Public health strategies suppose, among other things, that injecting drug users adopt a homogeneous vision of hepatitis C, and of its risk, that is compatible with the reality produced by biomedicine. The majority of studies conducted on hepatitis-related risks in the context of harm reduction strategies are interested in socio-demographic factors to understand the behavioural variations within this targeted population. The meaning given to the virus and to its risk has remained marginal and the diversity of areas of construction of meaning tends to be ignored in the academic literature. Attention to this diversity indicates a complex tissue of social and communicational relations and the contingency of the symbolic instruments that people manipulate in their relation with their body and towards others; a complex tissue in which the reality of biomedicine is one among many alternative realities.


This thesis begins with a re-reading of selected texts by Caribbean writers, specifically, Joan Anim-Addo, Olive Senior and Merle Collins and in so doing argues that literary fiction can and does function as a 'creolised archive'. I argue that a historic marginalisation, which has barred Caribbean scholars from entering 'formal' archival spaces, has created an alternative discourse. Consequently, Caribbean writers have chosen the imagined landscapes of literature, a new archival space for the Caribbean, within which to document and preserve Caribbean cultural traditions. If as I suggest, fiction allows for the safeguarding of traditions, how then should we read Caribbean literature? The combination of a physical and a virtual archive questions the literary and linguistic interface that such a mingling entails in a preservation of Caribbean culture. I argue for an appreciation of orality as performance, primary and technologised, as well as the reading of texts as 'creolised archive'.

Drawing on interlinked theoretical works including that of Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant and Antoinette Burton, I attempt to establish the performativity of the 'creolised archive' in twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean literature, defined as oral in this research. I suggest that the 'creolised archive' has a plurality of sources/resources enabling the preservation of aspects of Creole culture. I begin by exploring the literary representation and imagining of black female subjectivity to highlight a reading of the black female body as archive. The selected short stories provide a starting point from which the history and construction of the Creole voice is explored to determine the representation and preservation of Caribbean Creoles archived within the literary text. In considering the World Wide Web as archive, I examine how the World Wide Web might most effectively serve as an interactive archive for Caribbean oral literature. Additionally, I interrogate how the Web might be seen and experienced as a literary interface – a creolised archive – enabling Caribbean Creole languages and literature to be represented.


Labor unions and federations, particularly the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), devote significant resources to litigating before the Supreme Court. This Supreme Court litigation frequently takes place in cases that reach far beyond labor law, meaning that unions help to shape the law governing many aspects of American society. Virtually no legal scholarship considers the role that unions play in these cases, and consequently there has been no systemic attention to the positions that unions take before the Supreme Court. Yet, unions' litigation positions, especially before the Supreme Court, yield useful information about union strategies and priorities. The labor movement frequently participates in litigation regarding the constitutionality of campaign finance law. Unions' litigation in this area is particularly important because the structure of campaign finance law plays a role in determining who is elected to office; in other words, legal developments in this area have far-reaching effects on substantive law and policy. This Essay lays the groundwork for future analysis of the important relationship between unions and campaign finance litigation. To that end, it describes how the labor movement has sought to shape campaign finance law through litigation, analyzing the contours of union positions in Supreme Court campaign finance cases as well as the outcomes of those cases. It also briefly discusses how the labor movement has adapted to modern campaign finance law, particularly after Citizens United v. FEC.


The aim of this study was to investigate, within a social comparison framework, the causal relationship between adolescents' use of sexually explicit Internet material (SEIM) and their sexual satisfaction. In addition, we tested which adolescents were most susceptible to a potential influence of SEIM on sexual satisfaction. Between May 2006 and May 2007, we conducted a three-wave panel survey among 1,052 Dutch adolescents aged 13–20. Structural equation modeling revealed that exposure to SEIM consistently reduced adolescents' sexual satisfaction. Lower sexual satisfaction (in Wave 2) also increased the use of SEIM (in Wave 3). Moderator analyses showed that the negative effect of SEIM on sexual satisfaction was stronger for adolescents who had no or limited sexual experience as well as for adolescents who perceived the majority of their peers to be sexually inexperienced. The effect of exposure to SEIM on sexual satisfaction did not differ among male and female adolescents.


Research in the area of warehouse design is characterized by a myriad of analytical models that address one, typically small and isolated, area of the warehouse. These models, although important in gaining insight into one question of warehouse design, are of limited value when one considers the larger question of overall warehouse design. Thus, research in the area of overall warehouse design typically consists of procedure-driven processes based on qualitative factors and not the quantifiable results of analytical models. In contrast, practitioners have significant empirical data related to how a design alternative performs in an industry, a company, or a particular warehouse. However, because practitioners lack a means for comparing the performance of competing alternatives over multiple facilities, they may adopt a sub-optimal design for a given facility. A valuable tool for depicting a design is the functional flow network, where nodes represent the functional areas in the warehouse and arcs connecting the nodes define the product flow between functional areas. We propose a design methodology that employs the use of functional flow networks, as well as analytical models and empirical data for quantifying design performance. First, we develop a complete set of analytical models for a manual, case-picking warehouse, and we use the models to investigate the optimal warehouse shape. Next, we implement the design methodology using the analytical models. We then parameterize the analytical models to create lookup tables to demonstrate the design methodology using empirical data. We use an example to show that the two methods lead to the same solutions, thus providing a proof-of-concept for using empirical data to design a warehouse. Finally, we present a preliminary search heuristic for designing a manual, case-picking warehouse. The search heuristic is based on warehouse operating characteristics and provides an initial design that can be further analyzed and optimized. We believe that our design methodology provides two key features that are typically missing from existing overall warehouse design methodologies: comparing design alternatives through quantifiable output from analytical models and empirical observations, and therefore, considering a broad range of design alternatives.


This case explores company strategy, business-government relations, and collective action challenges associated with international and domestic lobbying regarding regulation of the chemical industry. In the fall of 2006, a five-year legislative process for a major new law regulating chemicals in the European Union appeared to be nearing its conclusion. REACH, the Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals would create a new European Chemicals Agency, require companies to submit testing data on existing and new compounds, and restrict the manufacture of hazardous substances. Andrew Liveris, CEO of the Dow Chemical Company, has to decide whether the company should engage in direct discussions with the European Parliament and Commission, with the implication that the company can influence the regulations but also would have to support the final outcome. The case summarizes Dow's history, competitive dynamics in the sector, and regulation of the chemical industry before describing the REACH legislative process and various approaches to lobbying used by chemical companies, trade groups, and environmental NGOs.


A double-pass imaging polarimeter has been used to compute the central corneal birefringence axis and retardation in a group of 22 eyes of different ages. Sets of four retinal images corresponding to independent polarisation states in the analyser unit were recorded. From the intensities at the image central area the corneal polarimetric parameters were computed using the Stokes–Mueller formalism. Although the (slow) axis of the central cornea presented individual differences, it was mostly lying along the nasal-downward direction. Corneal retardation also presented a broad distribution. Neither the axis nor the retardation was correlated with age. There was a significant correlation between age and the intensity at the central area of the images. This technique might be a useful tool when combined with clinical instruments oriented to glaucoma detection, which include corneal compensation for polarimetric retinal imaging.


Clostridium difficile causes neonatal enteritis in piglets; strains of PCR ribotype 078 are most commonly identified. We investigated C. difficile prevalence in piglets in Australia and isolated a novel strain with a unique pathogenicity locus. In a mouse infection model, this strain produced more weight loss than did a ribotype 078 strain.


Previous findings from experimental and non-experimental studies have demonstrated that teachers differ in their effectiveness. In addition, evidence from non-experimental studies has indicated that teacher effects can last up to five years. This study used high-quality data from a four-year randomized experiment in which teachers and students were randomly assigned to classes to examine whether teacher effects on student achievement persist over time. Teacher effects are defined as teacher specific residuals adjusted for student and treatment effects. Findings indicate that the teacher effects are cumulative and observed not only in the current or the following grade, but they endure up to three years in early elementary grades. The findings also suggest that teacher effects are important and their additive effects on student achievement are as large as the additive effects of small classes. Finally, teacher effects are larger in reading than in mathematics.


Accurate models play important roles in capturing the salient characteristics of the network traffic, analyzing and simulating for the network dynamic, and improving the predictive ability for system dynamics. In this study, the ensemble of the flexible neural tree (FNT) and system models expressed by the ordinary differential equations (ODEs) is proposed to further improve the accuracy of time series forecasting. Firstly, the additive tree model is introduced to represent more precisely ODEs for the network dynamics. Secondly, the structures and parameters of FNT and the additive tree model are optimized based on the Genetic Programming (GP) and the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO). Finally, the expected level of performance is verified by using the proposed method, which provides a reliable forecast model for small-time scale network traffic. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method is able to estimate the small-time scale network traffic measurement data with decent accuracy.


'Calcots', the floral stems of second-year onion resprouts of the 'Ceba Blanca Tardana de Lleida' landrace, have a growing market. Different constraints have prevented the inclusion of sensory attributes in 'calcot' breeding programs. Thus, we aimed to: (i) elaborate a sensory ideotype representing consumers' preferences for 'calcots', (ii) design an easy protocol for preparing samples and training a sensory panel to evaluate them, and (iii) describe the sensory attributes of 'calcots' derived from the main Spanish landraces of onion to point out possible strategies for breeding for sensory quality. A selected group of consumers determined that the sensory ideotype of 'calcots' should have high sweetness, low fiber perception, and no off flavors. Samples of 50 'calcots' from a single accession, roasted in the oven at 270°C for 18 min, stripped of their two external leaves, cut off at a height of 20 cm, and pureed, proved adequate for sensory panel evaluation even after being frozen and defrosted. A panel was trained until it was good at distinguishing between accessions (when neither the panelist effect nor the interaction panelist × accession was significant). This trained panel found many significant differences in sensory traits among the 'calcots' from Spanish landraces of onion. Although, none of these landraces was as close to the ideotype as the 'Ceba Blanca Tardana de Lleida' landrace traditionally used for 'calcots', crosses with some of these varieties would probably lead to heterotic base populations for breeding. The genotypic correlations found suggested that agromorphologic and sensory advances are compatible, so the information given should promote the inclusion of sensory quality as a new breeding objective. Key words : Ideotype, 'Calcot', onion, sensory attributes, genetic variability, sample preparation, spanish landraces, panel training.


Indian cities are living on borrowed time. Their critical infrastructure for essentials like water is creaking and inadequate. City managers are running out of practical solutions and are loosing lives to water borne disease. Thus every little of treated water becomes gold. In this context behavioral Economics provides a low cost alternative solution to save the blue gold. In this paper, we are highlighting how nudges can be implemented in the Indian cities through school children and adults for water conservation to bridge the intention and action gap. This Nudge intervention resulted in average monthly energy savings of 23.61 kwh, and 10.3 percent water saving equivalent to 9689 liters reduction in water consumption in the school children residents and apartments were approached directly were resulted of 5.02 percent equivalent to 504.68 litres. Hence the Behavioural Nudges particularly through children can provide policy makers an inexpensive and effective intervention to address the urban water conservation challenge.


How do we get from the polis to the police? Or from Odysseus' sirens to an ambulance's? The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome has been imitated, resisted, misunderstood, and reworked by every culture that followed. In this volume, some five hundred articles by a wide range of scholars investigate the afterlife of this rich heritage in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, and science. Arranged alphabetically from Academy to Zoology, the essays - designed and written to serve scholars, students, and the general reader alike - show how the Classical tradition has shaped human endeavors from art to government, mathematics to medicine, drama to urban planning, legal theory to popular culture. At once authoritative and accessible, learned and entertaining, comprehensive and surprising, and accompanied by an extensive selection of illustrations, this guide illuminates the vitality of the Classical tradition that still surrounds us today.


We have isolated a number of mutants of Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family, that have defects in flower development and morphogenesis. Of these, five mutants have been extensively characterized. Two mutants (Fl-40, Fl- 48) lacking petals show homeotic conversion of sepals to carpels. One mutant (Fl-54) displays highly variable phenotypes, including several types of homeotic variations, loss or distorted positions of the floral organs as well as abnormal structures on the inflorescence. Two other mutants (Fl-82, Fl-89) show aberrant structures in the pistils. Genetic analyses have revealed that these mutations are single and recessive, except for one mutant whose mutational loci still remain to be determined. These mutants may prove useful for the analysis of the genetic control of flower development and morphogenesis in the higher plant.


"Myth, Reality, and Reform: Higher Education Policy in Latin America" analyzes Latin American higher education in terms of four major functions: academic leadership, professional development, technological training and development, and general higher education. Overall, the authors make the case that Latin America's modernization and integration into the global economy and society depends on higher education. They propose to consolidate the strengths of higher education systems while fundamentally reforming their weaker features, and they make policy proposals on finance, governance and quality control.


Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that output pixel-level brightness changes instead of standard intensity frames. They offer significant advantages over standard cameras, namely a very high dynamic range, no motion blur, and a latency in the order of microseconds. However, because the output is composed of a sequence of asynchronous events rather than actual intensity images, traditional vision algorithms cannot be applied, so that a paradigm shift is needed. We introduce the problem of Event-based Multi-View Stereo (EMVS) for event cameras and propose a solution to it. Unlike traditional MVS methods, which address the problem of estimating dense 3D structure from a set of known viewpoints, EMVS estimates semi-dense 3D structure from an event camera with known trajectory. Our EMVS solution elegantly exploits two inherent properties of an event camera: (i) its ability to respond to scene edges—which naturally provide semidense geometric information without any pre-processing operation—and (ii) the fact that it provides continuous measurements as the sensor moves. Despite its simplicity (it can be implemented in a few lines of code), our algorithm is able to produce accurate, semidense depth maps. We successfully validate our method on both synthetic and real data. Our method is computationally very efficient and runs in real-time on a CPU.


Studies on the distribution of microbial sulfate reduction, and its impact on the global carbon and sulfur cycle, have mostly been conducted in shallow and deep-marine sediments. Little is therefore known about the ecological impact that sulfate reducing bacteria have on element cycling in ecosystems that is associated with the nutrient rich hydrothermal sediments. The chemical disequilibrium created by the mixing of hydrothermal fluids and seawater, nourish a diversity of primary producers that provide nutrients for the anaerobic heterotrophic community. Diffuse venting areas, such as the barite field on the eastern flank of the hydrothermal mound at Loki`s Castle, are promising target sites for exploring the impact of biogenic processes as temperatures are within the biological window. This study aims to characterize the distribution of sulfate reducing bacteria at this diffuse venting area by integrating direct measurement of sulfate reduction rates with geochemical analyses of pore fluids and microbiological methods. The spatial distribution of the fluid compositions and flow patterns seems to determine the distribution of the metabolically functional groups in the barite field, and functions as a geochemical constraint on the chemoautotrophic primary production. Hence, the divergent fluid pattern and energy supply determines the organic carbon production, which in turn determines the distribution of the heterotrophic community. This is reflected in the distribution of sulfate reduction, where sulfate reduction rates varied between 6-132 pmol/cm d in substrate-poor parts of the mound to 110 nmol/cm d in substrate-rich sediments. Sulfate reduction rate were also measured in a barite chimney, which was associated with effluent that was characterized by elevated concentrations of methane and H2. The geochemical measurements show a high correlation between the hydrothermal fluid signature, organic carbon production and the distribution of the mesophilic heterotrophic sulfate reducing bacteria. The diffuse venting area displays temperatures that vary between 7.8 °C in the sediments with low activity, to ~20 °C in the chimney effluent. This provides habitable conditions for mesophilic and psychrotolerant members of Desulfobacterales, Desulfarculales and Desulfuromonadales order, which were all affiliated with the Deltaproteobacteria phylum. One psychrophilic sulfate reducing bacteria, Desulfofaba gelida, was detected in sediments that were associated with the lowest rates. The variable CH4 and H2 concentration between areas with high flow rate and low flow rate give strong indications for an additional deep sub-surface sulfate reduction zone, where anaerobic oxidation of methane coupled with sulfate reducing bacteria are an important sulfate sink, in addition to H2 consumption by chemoautotrophic sulfate reducers and/or methanogens at more elevated temperatures.


This paper investigates problems of image style, aesthetics, and quality estimation, which require fine-grained details from high-resolution images, utilizing deep neural network training approach. Existing deep convolutional neural networks mostly extracted one patch such as a down-sized crop from each image as a training example. However, one patch may not always well represent the entire image, which may cause ambiguity during training. We propose a deep multi-patch aggregation network training approach, which allows us to train models using multiple patches generated from one image. We achieve this by constructing multiple, shared columns in the neural network and feeding multiple patches to each of the columns. More importantly, we propose two novel network layers (statistics and sorting) to support aggregation of those patches. The proposed deep multi-patch aggregation network integrates shared feature learning and aggregation function learning into a unified framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the deep multi-patch aggregation network on the three problems, i.e., image style recognition, aesthetic quality categorization, and image quality estimation. Our models trained using the proposed networks significantly outperformed the state of the art in all three applications.


The mass customisation manufacturing (MCM) paradigm has created a problem in manufacturing control implementation, as each individual customer has the potential to disrupt the operations of production. The aim of this study was to characterise the manufacturing effects of customers' decisions in product configuration, in order to research steady state control requirements and work-in-process distributions for effective MCM operations. A research method involving both analytic and empirical reasoning was used in characterising the distributed control environment of manufacturing systems involved in MCM. Sequences of job arrivals into each manufacturing system, due to customers' decisions in product configuration, were analysed as Bernoulli processes. A customer model based on this analysis captured the correlation in product configuration decisions over time. Closed form analytic models were developed from first principles, which described the steady state behaviour of flow controlled manufacturing systems under generalised clearing policy and uncorrelated job arrival sequences. Empirical analysis of data sets achieved through discrete event simulation was used in adjusting the models to account for more complex cases involving multiple job types and varying correlation. Characteristic response surfaces were shown to exist over the domains of manufacturing system load and job arrival sequence correlation. A novel manufacturing flow control method, termed biased minimum feedback (BMF) was developed. BMF was shown to posses the capability to distribute work-in-process within the entire manufacturing facility through work-in-process regulation at each manufacturing system, so as to increase the performance of downstream assembly stations fed from parallel upstream processing stations. A case study in the production of a configurable product was used in presenting an application for the models and methods developed during this research. The models were shown to be useful in predicting steady state control requirements to increase manufacturing performance.


Change in cellular glucose metabolism is considered to be a biochemical             hallmark in cancer cells. The mitochondrion is the key organelle in which glucose             metabolism occurs. However, whether DNA methylation at the displacement loop (D-loop)             region of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has an effect on the expression of the rate-limiting             enzyme, and, therefore, on oxidative phosphorylation in colorectal cancer remains             to be determined. Quantitative change in ND2 (a subunit of NADH) and the methylation             status of the D-loop were observed during the initiation and progression of colorectal             cancer. Furthermore, the possible correlations with clinicopathological stage             were also investigated. Tumor and corresponding non-cancerous tissues were surgically             resected from 44 colorectal cancer patients between 2008 and 2009. Cox IV expression             was quantified in all of the specimens, and the ND2 expression was calculated.             Quantitative changes in ND2 expression exhibited a significant increase. The average             relative ratios of ND2 content were 1.67±0.44 in the tumor tissues and 0.89±0.44             in the corresponding non-cancerous tissues (p<0.01). In addition, the D-loop             of most corresponding non-cancerous tissues was methylated and the percentage             was 79.5%, while this percentage was much smaller in the tumor tissues (11.4%).             Following correlation with clinicopathological data, changes in the ND2 expression             in the colorectal cancer exhibited a significant association with clinicopathological             stage. This increase was significant as early as in stage Ⅰ. Furthermore, the             ratios of unmethylated D-loop cases were increased in both tumor and corresponding             non-cancerous tissues, and the ND2 expression was also increased from stages Ⅰ             to Ⅳ. Our results indicate that demethylation of the D-loop plays a key role in             regulating ND2 expression during the initiation and/or progression of colorectal             cancer.


In our current educational system, student progress to a new topic is based on time, not on learning. If it is Monday, we move on to the next topic, in spite of some students not having attained the standards just taught. This system is sorting-focused (which was appropriate for the Industrial Age when manual labor was predominant), not learning-focused (which is needed for the Information Age when knowledge work is predominant. A learning-focused system would not allow a student to move on until she or he succeeded in attaining the current standard. And it would require each student to move on as soon as he or she succeeded in attaining the current standard. This requires a completely different paradigm of education, one that is customized to meet each student's needs and potential. This requires a different role for teachers, students, and, yes, technology.


In response to energy security concerns, alternative energy programs such as biomass energy systems are being developed to provide energy in the 21st century. For the biomass industry to expand, a variety of feedstocks will need to be utilized. Large scale production of bioenergy crops could have significant impacts on the United States agricultural sector in terms of quantities, prices and production location of traditional crops as well as farm income. Though a number of scenarios were examined to study the impact of bioenergy crop production on the agricultural sector, two cropland scenarios are presented in this report. Under the wildlife management scenario, the analysis indicates that, at $30/dry ton (dt) for switchgrass, $31.74/dt for willow and $32.90 for poplar, an estimated 19.4 million acres of cropland (8.2 million from CRP) could be used to produce 96 million dry tons of bioenergy crops annually at a profit greater than the profit created by existing uses for the land. In this scenario, traditional crop prices increase from 3 percent to 9 percent (depending on crop) and net farm income increases by $2.8 billion annually. At $40/dt of switchgrass, $42.32/dt for willow and $43.87/dt for poplar and assuming the production management scenario, an estimated 41.9 million acres (12.9 million from CRP) could be used to produce 188 million dry tons of biomass annually. Under this scenario, traditional crop prices increase by 8 to 14 percent and net farm income increases by $6 billion annually.


The history of Colombian national parks started in 1948 with the establishment of a reserve for scientific research, which stood alone until the 1960s, when various state agencies created a few parks with quite different goals in mind, including preserving imposing landscapes and conserving water. This rather casual development changed after the growing international concern for the environment led to the creation of an environmental agency in 1968 and the enactment of an environmental code in 1974, which served as institutional platform for the planned expansion of a system of national parks based largely on ecological criteria.
 Chronically underfunded and understaffed, the Office of National Parks has confronted its weakness by establishing parks which confer legal protection on areas whose natural attributes were deemed valuable. Such a strategy has led to confrontations with local populations living in and around parks, whose rights to resource use have been hampered. The office's incapacity to properly enforce rules and its attempts to work with rural communities, especially indigenous groups, have to some extent mitigated such tensions. It has further sought to enlist the support of the middle classes and been forced to deal with illegal armed groups on the left and the right, as well as the national army, vying for territorial control. Although parks have not fulfilled their ideal, they have fostered the notion that the nation has a natural patrimony and have contributed decisively to its conservation.


There are several disasters every year that affect millions of people and trigger the need for relief items such as food, blankets, or tents. Humanitarian logistics networks organize the flow of relief items from various suppliers to the people in need. In the scientific literature, various OR models have been proposed for setting-up and running humanitarian logistics networks. Their practical application, however, is challenging because humanitarian organizations lack the necessary resources and often have not been included in the model development process.
In this thesis, the concept of an online OR toolkit for humanitarian logistics is proposed. Such a toolkit should enable practitioners in the field of humanitarian logistics to tap the full potential of the published OR models.
Two major steps were necessary to develop the structure of the toolkit. In the first step, characteristics of disaster management and humanitarian logistics were identified. In the second step, available OR models for humanitarian logistics were analyzed. The resulting structure divides models into those for tasks in the disaster preparedness phase and those for the disaster response phase. Subsequently, models are assigned to the specific task they are meant to support, e.g. specifying the locations and relief item stocks of temporary warehouses. Then, the available models for a specific task are grouped by the OR methodology they are based on. Finally, each model is described by its mathematical formulation, by a translation of the mathematical formulation into a suitable program code, and by the problem that is captured in the mathematical formulation. A problem structuring scheme is used to analyze consistently the problems that are captured in OR models for humanitarian logistics.
The proposed structure of the toolkit is exemplarily filled with nine published mathematical programs. Three of them support the specification of stationary warehouses; three support the specification of local distribution centers; and the others support the specification of transportation activities. Thereby, the cornerstones of any humanitarian logistics network can be laid with the present state of the toolkit's content: stationary warehouses as sources of relief items, local distribution centers as the sinks of relief items, and transportation activities to realize the flow of relief items in between. It is shown that the proposed problem structuring scheme can characterize different types of mathematical programs in a consistent way. Furthermore, it is indicated how the proposed structure of the toolkit can support practitioners in finding, adapting, implementing, building databases for, and combining available OR models for humanitarian logistics as well as supporting academics in identifying open research questions.


The Inria Rennes Bretagne Atlantique Centre is one of Inria's eight centres and has more than thirty research teams. The Inria Center is a major and recognized player in the field of digital sciences. It is at the heart of a rich R&D and innovation ecosystem: highly innovative PMEs, large industrial groups, competitiveness clusters, research and higher education players, laboratories of excellence, technological research institute, etc.


The paper presents a detailed evaluation of the behavior and strength characteristics of the stub-girder floor system. This is a composite girder and beam structure that integrates the electrical and mechanical service systems with a minimum of structural disruption. Emphasis is placed on the performance of the stub-girders themselves, but it is understood that in the overall design, it is also important to consider the influence of the floor beams and the slab, in addition to the interaction of all components with the structural framework. Following a description of the stub-girder and its individual components, including the common connections that are used for the girder in a frame, the paper outlines the modeling techniques that can be used for the structural analysis of the girder. The final sections of the paper outline the design procedures that are in common use today, and some of the considerations that must be made by the designer with regard to construction methods.


This paper presents a new unified theory of orbits homoclinic to resonance bands in a class of near-integrable dissipative systems. It describes three sets of conditions, each of which implies the existence of homoclinic or heteroclinic orbits that connect equilibria or periodic orbits in a resonance band. These homoclinic and heteroclinic orbits are born under a given small dissipative perturbation out of a family of heteroclinic orbits that connect pairs of points on a circle of equilibria in the phase space of the nearby integrable system. The result is a constructive method that may be used to ascertain the existence of orbits homoclinic to objects in a resonance band, as well as to determine their precise shape, asymptotic behavior, and bifurcations in a given example. The method is a combination of the Melnikov method and geometric singular perturbation theory for ordinary differential equations.


Combine Python with the open format of ODF files to manipulate fine details. My wife is a writer, which today means she uses a word processing program. It's a sophisticated, powerful program—OpenOffice.org Writer—but occasionally it won't do something that she wants it to do. In this article, we take a look at the structure of OpenDocument Format (ODF) files and see how Python, with its XML libraries, can help. Figure 1 shows an example. Figure 1. Converting Quotation Marks It's not hard to convert quotation marks on a few paragraphs by hand—or even on a few pages, if I'm doing it only once. But having to repeat such manual operations on subsequent revisions becomes tedious, especially on a longer document, such as a poetry collection or novel. (We might have to repeat these operations after importing plain text from an e-mail message, for example.) Fortunately, ODF is open, so we should be able to manipulate the file contents outside the word processing program. Let's see if we can do that manually, just to make sure we know what we're doing. Once we can do that, we'll create a script to do some more ambitious things with the document. Cracking the OpenDocument Format—A Simple Example I read somewhere that an ODF file is a zip archive of XML files. So, let's see if it really is one—and if so, what's inside: Garrick, shrink below. % unzip -l ex1.odt Archive: ex1.odt Length Date Time Name ----------------39 11-15-06 01:55 mimetype 0 11-15-06 01:55 Configurations2/statusbar/ 0 11-15-06 01:55 Configurations2/accelerator/current.xml 0 11-15-06 01:55 Configurations2/floater/ 0 11-15-06 01:55 Configurations2/popupmenu/ 0 11-15-06 01:55 Configurations2/progressbar/ 0 11-15-06 01:55 Configurations2/menubar/ 0 11-15-06 01:55 Configurations2/toolbar/ 0 11-15-06 01:55 Configurations2/images/Bitmaps/ 0 11-15-06 01:55 Pictures/ 2872 11-15-06 01:55 content.xml 9786 11-15-06 01:55 styles.xml 1109 11-15-06 01:55 meta.xml 878 11-15-06 01:55 Thumbnails/thumbnail.png 6611 11-15-06 01:55 settings.xml 2037 11-15-06 01:55 META-INF/manifest.xml -------------23332 16 files % Good news—it is a zip archive. So, the plan is this: unpack it, modify a file (or files) and pack everything back up again. We'll pack up files in the same order, just in case it matters. So, we need to save the file list. The listing from running unzip has that file list, along with some other stuff. Let's select only the lines that have filenames (in this case, the lines with a : followed by digits) and print only the filenames. A single command to sed does that: % unzip -l ex1.odt | sed -n '/:[0-9][0-9]/s|^.*:.. *||p' mimetype Configurations2/statusbar/ Configurations2/accelerator/current.xml Configurations2/floater/ Configurations2/popupmenu/ Configurations2/progressbar/ Configurations2/menubar/ Configurations2/toolbar/ Configurations2/images/Bitmaps/ Pictures/ content.xml styles.xml OpenOffice.org ODF, Python and XML http://0-delivery.acm.org.innopac.lib.ryerson.ca/10.1145/1250000/12... 2 of 10 8/27/2007 8:13 PM meta.xml Thumbnails/thumbnail.png settings.xml META-INF/manifest.xml % Looks good. Let's save the list in a shell variable—we'll use F (for files): % F=$(unzip -l ex1.odt | sed -n '/:[0-9][0-9]/s|^.*:.. *||p') With that settled, the next question is, which file to modify? To find out, let's find the file or files containing the word quotes, which appeared in the document. We'll unpack ex1.odt into an empty directory and ask grep, remembering to check files in subdirectories as well: % cd TMP % unzip -q ~/oo/ex1.odt % find . -type f | xargs grep -l quote ./content.xml % Okay, content.xml is it. Text editors provide one way to manipulate content.xml, so let's give that a try. The relevant part looked like Figure 2 in Emacs. Figure 2. Editing XML in Emacs The two occurrences of " (partially highlighted in Figure 2) represent the straight quotation marks. I changed the straight quotes to the appropriate curly or smart quotes (found on either side of the word nice), as shown in Figure 3. The changed areas are, again, partially highlighted. Figure 3. Edited XML with Smart Quotes With that done, let's zip the files (the list saved in $F) to create ex2.odt, and see what OpenOffice.org Writer thinks about it: % zip -q ~/oo/ex2.odt $F % oowriter ~/oo/ex2.odt Figure 4. Writer Recognizes the New Quotes It worked (Figure 4)! The formerly straight quotes around the word straight are now curly quotes, and they're even curled in the right direction. So, to review what we've done so far: Created a list of the files in ex1.odt (saving it in $F). Unpacked ex1.odt. Made a simple change, manually, in content.xml. OpenOffice.org ODF, Python and XML http://0-delivery.acm.org.innopac.lib.ryerson.ca/10.1145/1250000/12... 3 of 10 8/27/2007 8:13 PM Created ex2.odt (using $F). Validated ex2.odt using OpenOffice.org Writer.


The thesis comprises four independent research papers and a summary that focus on two related dimensions. The first dimension focuses on the understanding of the production of health. Particularly, the question is asked whether community's stock of social capital influence individual's health. The second dimension focuses on an attempt to understand the causes of socioeconomic health inequality (SHI). The research questions are asked whether individual and contextual area factors explain SHI, how SHI change over time and whether population aging may impact on SHI.

The first paper of the thesis critically reviews the notion of social capital and systematically reviews empirical literature on the association between social capital and health across countries. The study also explores some analytical and interpretational issues that may be pertinent when assessing health impact of contextual or area-level social capital. The paper concludes that there is a robust association between social capital and health at the individual-level with respect to the degree of egalitarianism within a country. Area-level social capital may be less salient when used to explain health differences across places in egalitarian countries.

The second paper tests whether individual health status is related to area-level social capital, controlling for personal characteristics. The analysis is based on unbalanced panel data from Statistic Sweden's Survey of Living Conditions (the ULF survey) and a 3-level multilevel regression analysis, where level-1 consists of a total of 31,585 observations of 24,419 individuals at level-2 nested within 275 Swedish municipalities at level-3. The results show that the health status increases significantly with area-level social capital; however, almost all variation in health status exists across individuals.

The third paper explores a conceptual model whereby the study suggests mechanisms by which community social capital (CSC) may act as an aggregate factor that may increase the efficiency of the long-run production function of an individual with respect to health production. The study explores the effects of CSC externalities on individual all-cause and cause-specific mortality risks. Two municipality-level variables? election participation rate and crime rate- are used to be a proxy for CSC. The study uses pooled ULF survey data from the annual interviews conducted in 1980-1997 for all the subjects aged 20-84 years who were followed up for 4-21 years. Using the extended Cox model (considering both flexible baseline hazard and time varying covariates), the study estimates the effects of CSC externalities controlling for the initial health status and a number of individual characteristics. The results indicate that CSC influence individual risk from all-cause mortality only for the males but not for females. The impacts are higher for the elderly males than for the entire population. A higher CSC decrease the mortality risk from cancer for the elderly males and may also have exerted protective effects for cardiovascular mortality and deaths due to ?suicide? or ?other external causes?.

The fourth paper attempts to explain how population aging affects socioeconomic health inequality (SHI) and how SHI changes over time. Using a Swedish long panel data of 3,310 individuals and concentration index (CI) as a measure of SHI, the changes in SHI over time have been estimated. The CIs for health-related quality of life (HRQoL) scores are calculated and decomposed on its sources based on an estimation of the determinants of health using a panel data fixed-effect model. Results show that CIs increase over time when individuals are ranked by current income and demonstrates that one of the channels behind this upward trend in CIs is the fact that retired people dropped in relative income ranking as the cohorts aged. This trend in standardized indices is found to remain stable when people are instead ranked according to lifetime (mean) income.

List of Papers

The thesis is based on the following original papers

I. Islam M. K., Merlo J., Kawachi I., Lindstrom M., Gerdtham U-G (2006). Social capital and health: Does egalitarianism matter? A literature review, International Journal for Equity in Health, 5 (3).

II. Islam M. K., Merlo J., Kawachi I., Lindstrom M., Burstrom K., Gerdtham U-G. (2006). Does it really matter where you live? A panel data multilevel analysis of Swedish municipality level social capital on individual health-related quality of life, Health Economics Policy and Law, 1(3): 209-235.

III. Islam M. K., Gerdtham U-G., Gullberg B., Lindstrom M., Merlo J. (2007). Social capital externalities and mortality in Sweden. Accepted for publication in Economics and Human Biology.

IV. Islam M. K., Gerdtham U-G., Cleark, P., Burstrom K. (2006). Does socioeconomic health inequality change as the population ages? Evidence from Swedish panel data. Manuscript submitted for publication.


This study was carried out with the firm belief that everyone is born creative, has the
capacity to be creative and can be induced to become more creative. Children at tender
years show that they are creative until they entered school. The education process and our
adult experience have taught us the "habit" of uncreative thinking. Infact, fun and humour
have always been perceived as the opposite of work.
As such this study tries to uncover the positive effect of humour, specifically how it
influences creative thinking. With this in mind, the research is carried out using the
nonequivalent control group design where 2 classrooms were selected intact and the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking: Figural Fonn (TTCT) was administered. The score
is believed to be an indication of the subject's creative thinking ability.
Results of the analysis of data and the interpretations made are based on the t-test
analysis. The findings show that (1) humour significantly influences creative thinking, that
there is a significant difference between the experimental and control groups;
(2),the control group exhibits high post test score on creative thinking, significant even at
alpha 0.01, possibly due to the subject's familiarity with the pre-test; and (3) the experiment
group, however, showed a higher mean score in their creative thinking.
In conclusion, this study indicates that humour significantly influences creative
thinking. Having a good laugh and sharing a few jokes does make a difference in their
creative thinking, hence making them more creative.


Wave-propagation equations, including effectively the second derivative in time under the condition of a small difference between the group and phase velocities and the first derivative in position /spl xi/ in the group velocity coordinate, are derived based on the slowly evolving wave approximation. These can describe ultrabroadband optical pulse propagation with not only self-phase modulation (SPM), but also induced-phase modulation (IPM) in the monocycle regime in a fiber. It is shown that linear dispersion effects can be rigorously included in the numerical calculations. Calculations including SPM in a single-mode fused-silica fiber with the Raman effect are performed and compared with experimental results. Also, calculations including IPM in the fused-silica fiber are compared with experimental results. The effects of each term in the calculations on spectra are analyzed and it is shown that inclusion of the Raman effect and the dispersion of the effective core area is important for obtaining better agreement with experiments. It is shown that inclusion of more than third-order dispersion terms is necessary for calculations of monocycle pulse propagation.


Mass balance studies conducted in the 1970s in Great Sippewissett Salt Marsh, New England, showed that fertilized plots intercepted 60 to 80% of the nitrogen (N) applied at several treatment levels every year from April to October, where interception mechanisms include plant uptake, denitrification and burial. These results pointed out that salt marshes are able to intercept land-derived N that could otherwise cause eutrophication in coastal waters. To determine the long-term N interception capacity of salt marshes and to assess the effect of different levels of N input, we measured nitrogenous materials in tidal water entering and leaving Great Sippewissett experimental plots in the 2007 growing season. Our results, from sampling over both full tidal cycles and more inten- sively sampled ebb tides, indicate high interception of externally added N. Tidal export of dissolved inorganic N (DIN) was small, although it increased with tide height and at high N input rates. NH4 + export was gen- erally 2 to 3 times NO3 - export, except at the highest N addition, where DIN export was evenly partitioned between NO3 - and NH4 + . Exports of dissolved organic N were not enhanced by N addition. Overall, export of added N was very small, <7% for all treatments, which is less than earlier estimates. Apparent enhanced tidal export of N from N-amended plots ceased when N additions ended in the fall. Nitrogen cycling within the vegetated marsh appears to limit N export, such that interception of added N remains high even after over 3 decades of external N inputs.


Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have the potential to treat a wide range of diseases. They possess the ability to bind target molecules in a highly specific and effective manner. Recently, great technological advances have been made to enhance the therapeutic effects of these drugs, making treatment cheaper, easier, and more effective while allowing companies to profit significantly. As a Contract Manufacturing Organization (CMO) for these products, we offer the newest technology and many flexible options for producing these proteins. Our facility is designed to produce protein products in Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells, followed by modification and purification steps. We present the option to cleave smaller antigen binding fragments (Fab) from the mAb product, removing the crystallizable fragment (Fc) which can interfere with the binding specificity of the drug. We also offer the option for polyethylene glycosylation (PEGylation), which has been shown to improve the effectiveness of these drugs. The attachment of a polyethylene glycol (PEG) molecule to the protein enhances its circulation time in the human body so that less frequent doses are needed. To demonstrate the capabilities of this flexible facility, we have modeled the production of an innovative PEGylated anti-TNF-α mAb. Celltech and Pfizer currently have similar products in Phase III clinical trials; and UCB Incorporated's Cimzia® recently received FDA approval for the first humanized PEGylated antiTNF-α Fab' therapeutic protein. Many nonPEGylated TNF-α inhibitor mAbs are currently on the market to treat pathologies including rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease. PEGylated products have a clear advantage over these drugs. Our facility can produce up to 55 batches of protein product a year for a maximum yield of 993 kg. For economic analysis of this product, sales from the first year of Cimzia® were considered since this product is almost identical to the one being modeled. Producing at 75% of the total design capacity, this facility has a NPV of $1,319,592,100, an IRR of 33.51% and an ROI of 53.0%. This level of production would leave a significant amount of time remaining for other products to be manufactured as well. The additional products that the facility will produce will be mAbs of all forms (i.e. cleaved, uncleaved, PEGylated, non-PEGylated) that are protected under IP for small biotech firms that do not have the capital to build such facilities. Currently, small biotech firms are producing 81 mAbs and are looking to license production for their Phase III molecules. Clearly, this will become a very profitable CMO as we would be able to capture much of this demand. A major threat looming over the mAb market, however, is the production of small molecular inhibitors, which are currently in Phase I and Phase II clinical trials. Such molecules may be able to capture the full market since they would not only have significant delivery advantages over TNF-α inhibitors, which require injection, but also might have an enhanced side effect profile compared with biologics. Disciplines Chemical Engineering This working paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cbe_sdr/3 Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering 459 University of Pennsylvania Spring 2009 Ryan J. Dunn Kevin Hsu Melanie Hullings Maria Lobikin Project Advisor: Dr. Matthew J. Lazzara Project Recommendation: Dr. Tiffany D. Rau Flexible Manufacturing Facility for Biopharmaceuticals