The usefulness of endoscopy in marginal ulcer bleeding has rarely been studied, and the optimal method for preventing rebleeding is unclear. Here we assessed the efficacy of endoscopy in marginal ulcer bleeding and examined the efficacy of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) in the prevention of rebleeding. A total of 28 patients with marginal ulcer bleeding (21 men, 7 women; median age 58.5 years) were treated by endoscopy. We analyzed the clinical characteristics, results of endoscopic therapy, characteristics of rebleeding patients, and relation between the use of PPIs and the duration of rebleeding. Sixteen patients had active bleeding. Initial hemostasis was achieved in all patients. There were no procedure-related adverse events. Rebleeding occurred in one patient within the first month and in 7 patients thereafter. There was a significant difference in the rebleeding rate between the patients who received a PPI and those who did not. In a multivariate analysis, the non-use of PPIs was a risk factor for rebleeding (hazard ratio, 6.22). Therapeutic endoscopy is effective in achieving hemostasis from marginal ulcer bleeding. PPIs may prevent rebleeding from marginal ulcers.


We consider the effect of introducing a curriculum of targets when training Boolean models on supervised Multi Label Classification (MLC) problems. In particular, we consider how to order targets in the absence of prior knowledge, and how such a curriculum may be enforced when using meta-heuristics to train discrete non-linear models.
We show that hierarchical dependencies between targets can be exploited by enforcing an appropriate curriculum using hierarchical loss functions. On several multi output circuit-inference problems with known target difficulties, Feedforward Boolean Networks (FBNs) trained with such a loss function achieve significantly lower out-of-sample error, up to $10\%$ in some cases. This improvement increases as the loss places more emphasis on target order and is strongly correlated with an easy-to-hard curricula. We also demonstrate the same improvements on three real-world models and two Gene Regulatory Network (GRN) inference problems.
We posit a simple a-priori method for identifying an appropriate target order and estimating the strength of target relationships in Boolean MLCs. These methods use intrinsic dimension as a proxy for target difficulty, which is estimated using optimal solutions to a combinatorial optimisation problem known as the Minimum-Feature-Set (minFS) problem. We also demonstrate that the same generalisation gains can be achieved without providing any knowledge of target difficulty.


Digital signature schemes are a foundational cryptographic building block in certification and the projection of trust. Based on a signature scheme on committed graphs, we propose a toolkit of certification and proof methods to sign committed topology graphs and to prove properties of their certificates in zero-knowledge. This toolkit allows an issuer, such as an auditor, to sign the topology representation of an infrastructure. The prover, such as an infrastructure provider, can then convince a verifier of topology properties, such as partitions, connectivity or isolation, without disclosing the structure of the topology itself. By that, we can achieve the certification of the structure of critical systems, such as infrastructure clouds or outsourced systems, while still maintaining confidentiality. We offer zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge for a general specification language of security goals for virtualized infrastructures, such that high-level security goals can be proven over the topology certificate. Our method builds upon the Camenisch-Lysyanskaya signature scheme, is based on honest-verifier proofs and the strong RSA assumption.


The quark-gluon plasma is a new phase of matter and is the focus of much research in particle physics today. One of the main purposes of the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is to create quark-gluon plasma by colliding lead nuclei at high energies. The plasma can only exist for extremely short amounts of time, so our only method of investigating it is to analyze the particles it produces. This is one of the goals of A Large Ion Collider Experiment(ALICE) and the construction of the ALICE detectors at the LHC. Of particular importance are so-called resonance particles. Like the quark-gluon plasma, these particles only live for very short amounts of time before decaying. Therefore, they can be created and even re-created while the plasma exists. For this reason, they are extremely important to our analysis of the quark-gluon plasma. However, since they are so short-lived, we cannot directly see these resonance particles either. Rather, we look at the longer-lived particles which they decay into. We determine facts about the resonances from the information we have about their decay products. However, identifying these decay products can be difficult as well, especially in highenergy experiments such as those in ALICE. It is often the case that we think that a particle is a pion, for instance, when indeed it was a proton. This is called a misidentification. By misidentifying decay products, we then misidentify the particle from which those products decayed. To account for this phenomenon, we simulate particle misidentification. The simulation gives us expectations for the shape of distributions of misidentified particles. Knowing the shape, we can then attempt to locate these distributions in experimental data and subtract them out to produce a cleaner distribution of our resonance particle. In this paper, we analyze the invariant mass distribution of the ∆ resonance. We look at four other particles which can by misidentified as the ∆ and analyze their misidentified invariant mass distributions. We then investigate the dependence of these distributions upon the particle's momentum. The analysis gives us information about when it is possible to find a misidentified particle's distribution inside an experimental distribution of the ∆ mass and what shape we should expect the misidentified distribution to take. This analysis will be useful for further studies of the ∆ in high-energy collisions.


OBJECTIVE
To explore perceptions of the impact of erectile dysfunction on men who had undergone definitive treatment for early nonmetastatic prostate cancer.

DESIGN
Seven focus groups of men with early prostate cancer. The groups were semistructured to explore men's experiences and quality-of-life concerns associated with prostate cancer and its treatment.

SETTING
A staff model health maintenance organization, and a Veterans Affairs medical center.

PATIENTS
Forty-eight men who had been treated for early prostate cancer 12 to 24 months previously.

RESULTS
Men confirmed the substantial effect of sexual dysfunction on the quality of their lives. Four domains of quality of life related to men's sexuality were identified: 1) the qualities of sexual intimacy; 2) everyday interactions with women; 3) sexual imagining and fantasy life; and 4) men's perceptions of their masculinity. Erectile problems were found to affect men in both their intimate and nonintimate lives, including how they saw themselves as sexual beings.

CONCLUSIONS
Erectile dysfunction, the most common side effect of treatment for early prostate cancer, has far-reaching effects upon men's lives. Assessment of quality of life related to sexual dysfunction should address these broad impacts of erectile function on men's lives. Physicians should consider these effects when advising men regarding treatment options. Physicians caring for patients who have undergone treatment should address these psychosocial issues when counseling men with erectile dysfunction.


In this thesis we bring discrete differential geometry to bear on model reduction, both in the context of data analysis and numerical simulation of physical phenomena. First, we present a novel controllable as-isometric-as-possible embedding method for low- and high-dimensional geometric datasets through sparse matrix eigenanalysis. This approach is equally suitable for performing nonlinear dimensionality reduction on big data and nonlinear shape editing of 3D meshes and pointsets. At the core of our approach is the construction of a "multi-Laplacian" quadratic form that is assembled from local operators whose kernels only contain locally affine functions. Minimizing this quadratic form produces an embedding that best preserves all relative coordinates of points within their local neighborhoods. We demonstrate the improvements that our approach brings over existing nonlinear local manifold learning methods on a number of datasets, and formulate the first eigen-based as-rigid-as-possible shape deformation technique by applying our affine-kernel embedding approach to 3D data augmented with user-imposed constraints on select vertices. Second, we introduce a new global manifold learning approach based on metric connection for generating a quasi-isometric, low-dimensional mapping from a sparse and irregular sampling of an arbitrary low-dimensional manifold embedded in a high-dimensional space. Our geometric procedure computes a low-dimensional embedding that best preserves all pairwise geodesic distances over the input pointset similarly to one of the staples of manifold learning, the Isomap algorithm, and exhibits the same strong resilience to noise. While Isomap relies on Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to approximate geodesic distances over the input pointset, we instead propose to compute them through "parallel transport unfolding," a discrete form of Cartan's development, to offer robustness to poor sampling and arbitrary topology. Our novel approach to evaluating geodesic distances using discrete differential geometry results in a markedly improved robustness to irregularities and sampling voids. In particular, it does not suffer from Isomap's limitation to geodesically convex sampled domains. Moreover, it involves only simple linear algebra, significantly improves the accuracy of all pairwise geodesic distance approximations, and has the same computational complexity as Isomap. We also show that our connection-based distance estimation can be used for faster variants of Isomap such as Landmark-Isomap. Finally, we introduce an operator-adapted multiresolution analysis for finite-element differential forms. From a given continuous, linear, bijective, and self-adjoint positive-definite operator L, a hierarchy of basis functions and associated wavelets for discrete differential forms is constructed in a fine-to-coarse fashion and in quasilinear time. The resulting wavelets are L-orthogonal across all scales, and can be used to obtain a Galerkin discretization of the operator with a block diagonal stiffness matrix composed of uniformly well-conditioned and sparse blocks. Because our approach applies to arbitrary differential p-forms, we can derive both scalar-valued and vector-valued wavelets that block diagonalize a prescribed operator. Our construction applies to various types of computational grids, offers arbitrary smoothness orders of basis functions and wavelets, and can accommodate linear differential constraints such as divergence-freeness. We also demonstrate the benefits of the operator-adapted multiresolution decomposition for coarse-graining and model reduction of linear and nonlinear partial differential equations. We conclude with a short discussion on how future work in geometric model reduction may impact other related topics such as semi-supervised learning.


he human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has disproportionately affected the gay community and victims of hemophilia, a rare bleeding disorder. For more than a decade in the 1960s, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) turned the other cheek on drug regulation and allowed pharmaceutical industries to control manufacturing processes. This approach led to violations of safety standards, as pharmaceutical companies became increasingly concerned with enormous profits and less about oversight. When AIDS emerged in the 1980s, over 10,000 people with hemophilia were infected with HIV and hepatitis after receiving FDA-approved medical treatment. This hemophilia treatment contained factor of active ingredients made from large pools of plasma of up to 60,000 donations, but only one HIV-infected donation was all it took to contaminate the entire supply.
Bad Blood: A Cautionary Tale is a documentary highlighting the tragic historical facts of HIV detection in the U.S. blood supply and the aftermath of societal demands to correct the situation. The film portrays survivors and their family members showing that effects of deregulation are still felt by innocent members of our society. Furthermore, it exposes evidence that pharmaceutical companies and government regulators were aware of the viral contamination and were slow to respond to emergency warnings from the Center for Disease Control. The cautionary tale presents two bioethical issues: government's awareness of contaminated blood donations and the pharmaceutical industry's concern for prioritizing profit over safety. When the government chose to deregulate the pharmaceutical companies, it handed out thousands of death certificates. The film reveals the early years of blood processing as unsanitary, by depicting improper screening during donations from the homeless and sick. To make matters worse, the government and medical professionals were already aware hepatitis contaminated the factor. However, they continuously ignored it, believing the viral infections were mostly harmless and the societal benefit greatly outweighed the minimal risk. Once these wrongdoings came to light, many companies responded by shipping the contaminated products out of the country, to continue making profits.
Although, we hope that with today's standards government regulators do not repeat such oversight mistakes, many pharmaceutical companies are private enterprises. And thus, it is up to us, to push pharmaceutical manufacturers to listen to consumers and implement extensive safety measures when screening plasma products. Although, there haven't been any known cases of transmitted HIV or hepatitis for at least 20 years, fear of recurrence is well founded. The four personal stories at the center of the film are what really capture the viewer. Each character's struggle is depicted as a heartfelt journey described through interviews, narration, photographs, media coverage, and animations. You can feel the pain behind the idea of being infected with a deadly ailment by the very people you seek for help.


[1] Dilatational source deformations associated with two unusual M 3+ earthquakes in the area of the 2004–2008 Yellowstone, WY, accelerated uplift episode were identified through detailed analysis of moment tensor inversions. Pressurized hydrothermal fluids are suggested to be associated with the dilatational source processes of these unusual earthquakes, which is consistent with the mechanism of the GPS-InSAR derived deformation signal of the uplift modeled as intrusion of a near horizontal magmatic sill at ∼10 km depth beneath the Yellowstone caldera. One unusual earthquake, the 5 November 2007 Mw 3.3 earthquake, occurred in a volume of expected crustal expansion above the inflating magmatic sill. A notable 60% isotropic expansion component was determined for this earthquake with a 3.2 cm opening across an area of 0.12 km2. We propose that the inflation of the magmatic sill activates a high-pressurized fluid migration upward which in turn triggers dilatational deformation inducing this earthquake. Another dilatational deformation earthquake, the 9 January 2008 Mw 3.8 earthquake, occurred on the northern rim of the caldera. The moment tensor solution for this earthquake shows that the source mechanism had a 30% of the energy associated with tensile dislocation corresponding to a 3.3 cm opening crack over an area of 0.58 km2. We suggest that stress changes produced by a collocated Mw 3.4 earthquake may have increased the fracture permeability promoting fluid migration and thus encouraging the dilatational dislocation. These dilatational source earthquakes are the first non–double couple earthquakes to be documented unambiguously in the 35 year recording period of the Yellowstone seismic network.


'May God forgive us for our sorry deeds and for our glorious intentions'. Who were the men governing the Empire in the nineteenth century? How were they chosen and controlled? Were they sane or mad? And why did they do it? From Fiji to the Falkland Islands, from Malaysia to Australia and South Africa, from Lagos to Ottawa, ordinary British men and women, with no training, were dispatched to strange places, among strange people and faced unimaginable conditions. Some started wars. Others fought disease, injustice and slavery. Many died or went mad. "Running the Show", drawing on vast unpublished sources, reveals the day-today lives, griefs and triumphs of governors at the height of the British Empire as they struggled to make sense of their charges and, frequently, themselves.


Migratory animals may play an important role in connecting disparate ecosystems, including the introduction of various pathogens. The incidence of these pathogens may vary over time and space, such that events along the entire migratory flyway are likely to be important in the interaction between pathogens and their migratory hosts. On this premise, the annual cycle of a naturally occurring host-pathogen system was reconstructed by examining infection with and antibodies to avian influenza virus along the flyway of a long-distance Arctic migrant, the Svalbard-breeding pink-footed goose Anser brachyrhynchus. A highly-localized transmission period was identified in winter, in contrast to the north–south decline expected from dabbling ducks, indicating the dynamics of infection may differ among host species. In spring, 63% (95% CI: 57.1, 68.9) of adults had detectable antibodies to the nucleoprotein of avian influenza virus, compared to just 15% (95% CI: 8.7, 23.4) of juveniles, suggesting inter-annual antibody maintenance. Nevertheless, adult seroprevalence declined by approximately 30% from spring to late summer, indicating significant seroreversion in the population. Integrating these findings in an epidemiological model, detectable antibodies to nucleoprotein were estimated to persist for just 343 days (95% CI: 221, 607); considerably shorter than for other wildlife diseases in long-lived bird species. The investigation of wildlife diseases in migratory populations is an inherently complex task, yet, by integrating disease incidence and seroprevalence along a migratory flyway, our findings suggest that the ecological interactions and life history of the host, as well as the life-history of the pathogen, can influence the dynamics of infection and host immune response.


Ethnic and cultural diversity is an increasing reality in the US workplace. The current study highlights the importance of acknowledging the culturally heterogeneous nature of ethnic groups, and the need to focus on social identity characteristics such as cultural values when assessing group differences. We demonstrate that cultural values (i.e., individualism) contribute to employees' experiences of work-family conflict beyond the effects of ethnicity. Specifically, we introduce a model informed by social identity theory that explains why acculturation is related to work-family conflict. The model was tested with a sample of 309 employed Caucasian and Hispanic Americans. An empirical test of our model provides evidence that individualism mediates the relationship between language- and social-based acculturation and work-family conflict, even when controlling for ethnicity. Additionally, alternative models further reveal that the effects of acculturation and individualism contribute to work interfering with family. As an implication of the current study, we suggest that researchers and organizational managers should consider the cultural values of their diverse workforce when implementing policies that affect conflict between work and family.


In this paper, the problem of estimating the Direction Of Arrival (DOA) is presented. DOA based on Eigen Vector Decomposition (EVD) shows that the computational complexities are costly and high so that eigen structure algorithms suffer for limited application in real time signal processing environment, to reduce the computational complexities, a new approach base Lanczos algorithm is proposed instead of using Eigen Vector Decomposition. Since the Minimum-Norm Method (MNM) based on EVD is considered as one of the best techniques for DOA, Therefore, one of the efforts in this paper is directed to investigate the performance of Minimum-Norm Method (MNM) and compare it with Proposed Method (PM), so different computer simulation programs were used to do this job. The simulation results done by assist of (Matlab ver.7), shows that the proposed method can outperform better results to make the proposed method better suitable for radar, sonar, and passive detection application.


The United Kingdom looks increasingly likely to become the first country in the world to allow the creation of babies from two women and a man after the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) today revealed the results of its government commissioned public consultation on mitochondrial transfer and its analysis of the safety and efficacy issues.

Last year ministers asked the HFEA to conduct a public consultation on attitudes to the use of a three person technique of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) that could prevent debilitating and fatal "mitochondrial" diseases being passed from mother to child. The consultation found public support for use of the technique.1

The government also asked the HFEA to conduct a scientific assessment to review the safety and efficacy of mitochondrial replacement and to consider the practical implications of allowing the use of the technique. It found no evidence indicating that the techniques were unsafe.2

Mitochondrial diseases affect the organs that need the most energy, such as the heart, muscles, and brain. An estimated 12 000 people in the UK have a mitochondrial disease, and about 100 babies are born each year with a severe form of the diseases, many of …


I study the security design problem of a firm when investors rather than managers have private information about the firm. I find that it is often optimal to issue information-sensitive securities like equity. The "folklore proposition of debt" from traditional signalling models only goes through if the firm can vary the face value of debt with investor demand. When the firm has several assets, debt backed by a pool of assets is optimal when the degree of competition among investors is low, while equity backed by individual assets can be optimal when competition is high.


Trade and investment have been the main drivers of economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and in the member countries of the Pacific Alliance (Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru) in particular, which are the focus of this study. The results of the trade policy reforms made by these four countries are impressive. Exports have increased considerably and a path toward diversification has been forged. Liberalization and foreign investment facilitation efforts also posted outstanding results. To better understand the member countries of the Pacific Alliance, it is necessary to examine their trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) openness, which contributed to average year-on-year growth of 6.3% in gross domestic product (GDP) over the last two-plus decades (1990-2013) compared to the rest of LAC, which posted an average of 5.3%.
The member countries of the Pacific Alliance have posted better economic fundamentals and performance than 20 years ago and this put them in good stead to benefit from the various trade agreements that they have signed with many other countries in the world, including Korea. Three of the four countries of the Pacific Alliance (Chile, Colombia and Peru) have free trade agreements (FTAs) with Korea, the only such agreements that Korea has signed with LAC countries. Mexico does not have an FTA with Korea but is the main importer of its products in the Latin American region. Therefore, Mexico represents the missing link to complete Korea's set of FTAs with the member countries of the Pacific Alliance.


One way of measuring the deprivation or poverty of persons is to use money based measures: a person is regarded as 'poor' if his/her income (or expenditure) falls below a poverty line value. Such an approach–usually termed 'poverty analysis'–has spawned a large literature embodying several sophisticated measures of poverty. The downside to this is that low income or expenditure may not be very good indicators of deprivation. Another way, usually termed 'deprivation analysis', is to define an index whose value, for each person, is the number (or proportion) of items, from a prescribed list, that he/she possesses: persons are then regarded as 'deprived' if their index value is below some threshold value. This offers an alternative method of identifying deprived persons. The downside of deprivation analysis is that it measures deprivation exclusively in terms of the proportion of deprived persons in the total number of persons. The purpose of this paper is to bridge the gap between poverty and deprivation analysis by constructing a wider set of deprivation measures and showing, with data for Northern Ireland, how they might be applied.


Objective: To assess the usefulness of transcranial Doppler CO2 reactivity (CO2R) for prediction of ipsilateral ischemic stroke in carotid artery stenosis and occlusion with a meta-analysis of prospective studies based on individual patient data. Methods: We searched Medline, Biosis Previews, Science Citation Index, The Cochrane Library, and EMBASE for studies in which patients with severe carotid artery stenosis or occlusion underwent Doppler CO2R testing (inhalation of CO2 or breath-holding) and were prospectively followed for ipsilateral ischemic stroke. Individual data from 754 patients from 9 studies were included. We used percentage cerebral blood flow velocity increase (pCi) during hypercapnia as the primary CO2R measure, and defined impaired reactivity as pCi <20% increase. Results: In a multiple regression model, impaired CO2R was independently associated with an increased risk of ipsilateral ischemic stroke (hazard ratio [HR] 3.69; confidence interval [CI] 2.01, 6.77; p < 0.0001). Risk prediction was similar for recently symptomatic vs asymptomatic patients. Using continuous values of pCi, a significant association between decreasing pCi and increasing risk of ipsilateral stroke was found: HR of 1.64 (95% CI 1.33, 2.02; p < 0.0001) per 10% decrease in pCi. For patients with asymptomatic internal carotid artery stenosis only (n = 330), a comparable stroke risk prediction was found: increasing HR 1.95 (95% CI 1.26, 3.04; p = 0.003) per 10% decrease in pCi. Conclusions: This analysis supports the usefulness of CO2R in risk prediction for patients with severe carotid artery stenosis or occlusion, both in recently symptomatic and asymptomatic patients. Further studies should evaluate whether treatment strategies in asymptomatic patients based on CO2R could improve patient outcomes.


Three (3) numbers of fully instrumented with global strain gauges and extensometer test Spun piles, namely PILE-A, PILE-B and PILE-C were installed using 25Ton hydraulic hammer along the coastal area which represent various subsoil conditions based on soil investigations. The static load test on instrumented piles provide more information on pile behaviour when loaded such as shaft resistance at different layer and end bearing, elastic shortening, toe movement, development of shaft and base resistance during pile displacement. This information leads to a correlation between SPT-N value and ultimate shaft and end bearing resistance. Therefore an attempt was made on this study to analyze the load test results of these instrumented spun piles to develop the correlation for subsoil at coastal area. It is assessed that the ultimate shaft friction values in the upper soft clays generally range from about 12 kPa to 20 kPa. Ultimate Shaft friction values for lower lying materials below soft clays with SPT N values from about 4 to 50 (blows/300mm) range of 2N kPa and a limiting shaft friction value of about 150 kPa. The ultimate end bearing values correlate to about 80N to 120 N kPa. Spun piles need to be closely observed during installation using hydraulic impact hammer to avoid any damages on pile and at pile joints. All the piles are fully monitored during installation using PDA analyzer and the results assessed to verify the installation technique. The assessment shows that all 3 piles were successfully installed without integrity problems. A theoretical drivability study also carried out using GRLWEAP software to provide drivability assessment and compared with actual drivability of the piles. Results from GRLWEAP is very much similar to data occurred during pile installation and confirms the drivability of spun piles at this coastal area without integrity problem. The GRLWEAP software offers variety of model and analysis option which lead to proper selection of equipments at site.


Around 5,000 business and management titles are published every year, and increasingly, their preferred mode of presentation is centred on the creation and marketing of buzzwords and fads. This book argues that these management fads and buzzwords deflect critical inquiry and limit useful action because they present a 'ready made' view of the world, which rejects the benefits of theoretical analysis and reflection. Topics covered include: * the 'guru industry' * 'excellence' * business process re-engineering * empowerment * culture * knowledge work * globalization. 'Unpacking' the 'guru industry' and analyzing the fads and buzzwords, this book provides a 'critical-practical' analysis, designed to allow readers to locate, understand and critique management fashion.


This study evaluated the factor structure of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) with a diverse sample of 1,248 European American, Latino, Armenian, and Iranian adolescents. Adolescents completed the 10-item RSES during school as part of a larger study on parental influences and academic outcomes. Findings suggested that method effects in the RSES are more strongly associated with negatively worded items across three diverse groups but also more pronounced among ethnic minority adolescents. Findings also suggested that accounting for method effects is necessary to avoid biased conclusions regarding cultural differences in self-esteem and how predictors are related to the RSES. Moreover, the two RSES factors (positive self-esteem and negative self-esteem) were differentially predicted by parenting behaviors and academic motivation. Substantive and methodological implications of these findings for cross-cultural research on adolescent self-esteem are discussed.


This paper analyzes the civil responsibility of air transport carriers in accordance with the "Unification Convention Rules for International Air Transportation". The matter of civil responsibility is a complicated and conflicting theme for analysis due to the difficulty even greater to the additional problem of having to define responsibilities when a disaster of great proportions takes place. Contrary to other modes of transportation, in the case of air transport there is rarely partial damage (when an accident occurs), therefore it is important to remember that in an aeronautical accident, the damages (or sinister) are not partial, they are total. On the other hand, should be considered that the airline industry is global, in which parts of a whole can come from distant countries involving partners from different countries with different realities and legal liability. The existence of joint responsibility of partners involved in the airline industry is what is meant to identify with this article.


What Is the Third Estate? was the most influential pamphlet of 1789. It did much to set the French Revolution on a radically democratic course. It also launched its author, the Abbe Sieyes, on a remarkable political career that spanned the entire revolutionary decade. Sieyes both opened the revolution by authoring the National Assembly's declaration of sovereignty in June of 1789 and closed it in 1799 by engineering Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'etat.

This book studies the powerful rhetoric of the great pamphlet and the brilliant but enigmatic thought of its author. William H. Sewell's insightful analysis reveals the fundamental role played by the new discourse of political economy in Sieyes's thought and uncovers the strategies by which this gifted rhetorician gained the assent of his intended readers—educated and prosperous bourgeois who felt excluded by the nobility in the hierarchical social order of the old regime. He also probes the contradictions and incoherencies of the pamphlet's highly polished text to reveal fissures that reach to the core of Sieyes's thought—and to the core of the revolutionary project itself.

Combining techniques of intellectual history and literary analysis with a deep understanding of French social and political history, Sewell not only fashions an illuminating portrait of a crucial political document, but outlines a fresh perspective on the history of revolutionary political culture.


We present a lock-free implementation of a dynamically sized double-ended queue (deque) that is based on the double compare-and-swap (DCAS) instruction. This implementation improves over the best previous one by allowing storage to be allocated and freed in bulk when the size of the deque changes significantly, and to avoid invocation of the storage allocator at all while the size remains relatively stable. We achieved this implementation in two steps by first solving the easier problem of implementing the deque for a garbage-collected environment, and then applying the Lock-Free Reference Counting methodology we recently proposed in order to achieve a version independent of garbage collection.


Background. Perceived control is a personality characteristic that contributes psychological adjustment. It was derived from various theories, so that definitions of perceived control were ambiguous meaning. Disclosing concept of perceived control is required. Objective. The analysis aims to identify definition and use of perceived control, examine the basic attributes of perceived control, and the measurements of perceived control. Method. Databases searched for electronic journals and books that were published from 1994 to 2010 were analyzed. Result. Perceived control is personal belief that refers to controllability on behalf of one's self and ability to control threats or events. The use of perceived control includes maternal, pediatric, medical, surgical, psychiatric, community nursing, and pain management. Perceived control was composed of two dimensions: belief about controllability and belief about ability to control to threats. Conclusion. Instrument of Anxiety Control Questionnaire most closely corresponds to two dimensions: belief about controllability and ability to control. Defining attributes and dimensions of perceived control are useful for developing tool. Keywords: perceived control, controllability, ability to control, and agency


Abstract The two major energy challenges for the United States are to replace crude oil in our transportation system and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A multilayer strategy to replace oil using nuclear energy and various carbon sources (fossil fuels, biomass, or air) is described that (a) allows the continued use of liquid fuels (ethanol, gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel) in the transport sector, (b) does not require major changes in lifestyle by the consumer, and (c) ultimately eliminates carbon dioxide emissions from the transport sector. Nuclear energy is used to provide electricity, heat, and ultimately hydrogen, with the hydrogen produced by either electrolysis or more advanced thermochemical production methods. In the near term, nuclear energy can provide low-temperature heat (steam) for ethanol production and electricity for transportation. Midterm options include low-temperature heat and limited quantities of hydrogen for processing cellulosic biomass into liquid fuels (ethanol and lignin-derived hydrocarbons) and providing high-temperature heat for (a) traditional refining and (b) underground oil production and refining. In the longer term, biomass becomes the feedstock for liquid-fuels production, with nuclear energy providing heat and large quantities of hydrogen for complete biomass conversion to hydrocarbon fuels. Nuclear energy could be used to provide over half the total energy required by the transportation system, and the use of oil in the transport sector could potentially be eliminated within several decades.


Since terrorism is now perceived as a primary and pervasive threat to state security, many states have adopted broad legal definitions of 'terrorism' and, upon that basis, have enacted correspondingly expansive policing powers and criminal offences. As a dramatic instance of how these approaches, which affect major Western jurisdictions such as the US and UK, this paper will focus on the paradigm case of David Miranda. In August 2013, Miranda was transporting computer materials (including files from security agencies) supplied by Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the US National Security Agency, to journalist Glenn Greenwald to assist ongoing disclosures in The Guardian and other publications. The materials were seized during an examination and detention of Miranda while he was transiting through Heathrow Airport. The journalists viewed their mission as one of ethical disclosure in the public interest of a vast web of governmental surveillance programmes. However, the UK Security Service (MI5) contended that Miranda was concerned in 'terrorism' (as defined in the UK Terrorism Act 2000, section 1) because his mission sought to influence the government by promoting a political or ideological cause. The allegation was that disclosure of the data to a hostile state (Russia) or to terrorists might imperil the identities of secret agents or the methods used for electronic surveillance of terrorists. Thus, the material fell into the realms of terrorism. On these grounds, Miranda was held under special detention powers relating to counter-terrorism at borders, and the materials were seized. Similar arguments were then used to persuade the editor of The Guardian to destroy other materials held in the newspaper offices. In a subsequent court review, Miranda v Secretary of State for the Home Department, the meaning of who is a 'terrorist' and whether the journalistic activity being pursued by Miranda, Greenwald and others should be excluded from that depiction was explored. This paper seeks to reflect upon the complex linkages between journalistic activities and the label of 'terrorism' which is becoming a primary threat to investigative journalism in the contemporary world. It will require reflection upon the conceptual nature of terrorism and journalism in a setting of ethics, public policy and law.


Aflatoxins are toxic by-products of fungi contaminating maize and other crops; they can be carried over into milk, meat and eggs when livestock eat aflatoxin-contaminated feed or fodder. People who consume such animal products are exposed to the toxins. To assess the aflatoxin contamination status in marketed raw milk and associated risk factors in peri-urban Nairobi, we conducted a census of raw milk retailers in Dagoretti Division, Nairobi, Kenya. Structured questionnaires were filled in by face-to-face interviews with all retailers who agreed to participate in this study. Small portions of milk were purchased from each respondent and tested for aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) using competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (cELISA) tests. Geographic coordinates of each eligible retailer were recorded. A total of 350 milk retailers were visited and 344 were plotted on a map. Of these, 250 retailers answered the questionnaire and a milk sample from each of 200 retailers underwent cELISA analysis for AFM1. Four types of businesses were found: kiosks (71%), dairy shops (21%), street or mobile vendors (3%) and grocery stands (1%); for 4% the business type was not identified. Milk was mainly sourced directly from dairy farms (59%) or from intermediate distributors (35%). Most retailers sold less than 20 litres per day of raw milk. The mean daily milk consumption of the milk retailers' households was 940 ml for adults and 729 ml for children. Although 58% of retailers had heard about aflatoxins and the majority of them agreed that aflatoxins could be present in milk, only 29% believed that "milk safety cannot be solely judged by sight or taste" and only 6% that "milk is not completely safe even after boiling". The cELISA test found the mean concentration of AFM1 was 128.7 parts per trillion (ppt) (median=49.9; 95% confidence interval=3.0–822.8) with a maximum of 1675 ppt. Overall, 55% of samples exceeded the European Union maximum level of 50 ppt and 6% exceeded the recommended maximum level of the United States Food and Drug Administration of 500 ppt. Compared to milk from street vendors, a significantly higher amount of AFM1 was detected in milk from kiosks and dairy shops, especially when the milk was sourced from farms without an intermediate distributor. Our findings indicate the need to better understand and manage aflatoxin in milk in Nairobi. Keywords: Aflatoxin M1, Kenya, milk, dairy value chain, milk retailers, Dagoretti, mycotoxin, informal milk marketing


Preeclampsia is a multi-system pregnancy syndrome characterized by the sudden onset of hypertension, escalated proteinuria and in some cases oedema usually after 20 weeks of gestation. Preeclampsia is further categorized as a two stage disorder namely; early and late onset.
This study was aimed at developing a rat model that will mimic the classic clinical symptoms in preeclampsia through chronic administration of Nitro–L-Arginine Methyl Ester (L-NAME), and investigated whether Sildenafil Citrate (ViagraTM) (SC) aided in alleviating these symptoms.
One hundred and twenty adult nulliparous pregnant female Sprague Dawley rats were used for the study. These were divided into five groups; the pregnant control, early and late onset and respective ViagraTM treated animals. On gestational day 12 and 19 as well as after delivery, physiological parameters such as blood pressure, proteinuria, urine volume, foetal body weight and number of live pups were taken. Post sacrifice and tissue harvesting, various histological, biochemical and gene expression analyses were done. The identification of probable early and late onset biomarkers to characterize preeclampsia was investigated (Ethics number: 047/12/Animal).
We found that the administration of L-NAME during the pregnancy created a preeclamptic like syndrome. SC treated rats showed improved foetal and maternal parameters compared to their respective preeclamptic group. The results of this study support angiogenic, antiangiogenic and inflammatory markers as possible biomarkers for preeclampsia.
Further studies using our model and in vitro studies, can help to clarify key questions; such as when exactly does remodelling of the spiral arteries occur, as well as the early detection of this disorder. This study which focuses on the optimisation of an animal model is of great interest to clinicians who do not have a biomarker for the early onset of preeclampsia.


Nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) and return-to-zero (RZ) signal formats are experimentally and numerically compared for single-channel long-distance transmission in an in-line amplifier system with dispersion management providing average zero dispersion and local nonzero dispersion at an interval equal to the in-line amplifier spacing. Among a 20-ps RZ signal, a 40-ps RZ signal, and an NRZ signal transmitted in 10 Gb/s straight-line experiments, the last signal achieves the longest transmission distance of 6000 km while the others are limited to 4400 km. Numerical simulations explain these results well and show that, along with linear amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) accumulation, signal waveform distortion due to the combined effect of higher order group-velocity dispersion (GVD) and self-phase modulation (SPM) dominates the performance. Nonlinear optical noise enhancement is not obvious because of the fiber dispersion arrangement. Signals with large pulse widths are less affected by the combined effect, while small-width signals yield superior initial signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as determined by optical noise. A detailed simulation indicates that a pulse width of about 60 ps is optimum for long distance transmission under the fiber dispersion arranged in this paper.


Restriction enzyme-mediated integration (REMI) mutagenesis was used to tag genes required for pathogenicity of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. melonis. Of the 1,129 REMI transformants tested, 13 showed reduced pathogenicity on susceptible melon cultivars. One of the mutants, FMMP95-1, was an arginine auxotroph. Structural analysis of the tagged site in FMMP95-1 identified a gene, designated ARG1, which possibly encodes argininosuccinate lyase, catalyzing the last step for arginine biosynthesis. Complementation of FMMP95-1 with the ARG1 gene caused a recovery in pathogenicity, indicating that arginine auxotrophic mutation causes reduced pathogenicity in this pathogen.


School rules and regulations are mechanisms designed to control, regulate and manage students' behaviour in schools in order to create conducive learning environment. The purpose of this study was toestablish commonly violated rules and regulation and aspects of the rules that promote their violation in public secondary schools in Butere Sub-County, Kenya. The study was informed by two specific objectives; to identify school rules and regulations that are frequently violated andestablish the reasons for violation. Study population comprised 3290 students and 319 teachers all from 28 public secondary schools. Descriptive survey research design was used. Stratified sampling was used to categorize the schools into girls' boarding, boys' boarding, girls' day, boys' day and mixed day schools. Purposive sampling was used to select 8 deputy principals and 32 teachers. Simple random sampling was used at school level to select 40 students per school in the 8 selected secondary schools. Based on this criterion a sample size of 360 respondents was accessible for data collection on students' aggressive behaviour. Validity and reliability of instruments were established by experts in the department of education psychology of Maasai Mara University. A pilot study was carried out in four schools different from those where actual study was done. Questionnaires and interview schedules were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data on students' aggressive behaviour. Data generated by questionnaires and interview schedules were analyzed by descriptive statistics using frequency distribution and variable percentages. The findings were presented in graphs and Tables. The findings of the study revealed that students violated school rules and regulations that guard their behaviour and emotions by engaging in aggressive and violent activities such as theft, fighting, quarreling and destruction of school property. The study indicated that age is determinant in students' aggressive behaviour evidenced by high violations in form 2 and 3 where students are at prime adolescent stage. This is because some school rules and regulations are not clear to the students while others are rigid. This is because students are not involved at formulation stage which makes them to easily violate these rules and regulations. The study equally revealed that disciplinary measures conditioned students to behave in a certain manner without molding their character given the high number of repeated mistakes after punishment. The study recommends that school rules and regulations be reviewed to accommodate age challenges, disciplinary measures such as suspension and replacement of stolen items be repealed and that students be involved at formulation level. The findings of the study inform policy makers about the influence of school rules and regulations on students' aggressive behaviour and the need to restructure them to make them appealing as control and management tools.


When universities administer examinations, they do so dramaturgically. That is, they use spaces, props, equipment, and bodies to convey specific messages (that examinations are important, serious, formal affairs which reflect the larger societal values of universalism and individualism) to students. Drama and dramaturgy require both actors and an audience; the interaction consists of the effect that the one has on the other, that the other has on the one and both of these. The focus of this paper is on the interaction between the message and students' response to it, that is, the students' definition of the situation. In particular, emphasis is upon the notion that the dramaturgical messages given by the university will be interpreted largely as they were intended to be, that in some cases the effect of the message is dysfunctional, either because it is misinterpreted or because it is challenged.


Asking the question 'What does beauty have to do with justice?', I am concerned with women's encounter, experience and expression of the Divine through their creativity, as well as the theological significance of women's aesthetic expression and creativity in the contexts of their lives. As a potent, authentic locus of women's spirituality, theology, and revelation of God, the aesthetic has critical implications for doing theology with women in South Africa. This thesis addresses concerns of full life for women in South Africa, and the Beauty of the Divine, as it is encountered and revealed through their creativity. Against the backdrop of multiple life-denying structures and circumstances, and in light of liberating theologies for women, I discuss the power of Divine creative energy to promote full life for women in South Africa, as it is unleashed through their human creativity. Stories of women artists and crafters from different socio-economic contexts are analysed from theological, spiritual, psychological and ethical perspectives. The creative process and work are seen to bear significant fruit in their lives, with personal, spiritual, practical, communal, social and ethical implications for themselves and others. Their creativity is then discussed in terms of the aesthetic in theology as a whole, an area called theological aesthetics. This includes ontological considerations of the Beauty of God, the encounter with beauty and its effects on the person who beholds it. Art is seen as a theological source as it reveals insights about being. I engage with key scholars such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, John W. de Gruchy, Michelle Gonzalez, Matthew Fox, and Susan A. Ross. Works of aesthetic scholars such as Elaine Scarry and Paul Crowther inform the deepening of my analysis, as do psychologists Anton Ehrenzweig, Rollo May and Graham Lindegger, and art historian Juliette Leeb-du Toit. Liberating theologies for women is a central nerve of my analysis and the works of scholars such as Mercy Oduyoye, Musimbi Kanyoro, Susan Rakoczy, Isabel Phiri and Sarojini Nadar have been invaluable. Among my conclusions is the prioritization of the aesthetic to the theological task in South Africa. Beauty is the 'why' of 'why the good must be carried out', and aesthetic expression is an interlocutor of women's marginalized voices. At the same time, this research indicates that concerns, voices, and insights of women and feminist thinking have been marginal in the discourse on theological aesthetics. The thesis formulates a feminist theological aesthetics rooted in women's creativity in South Africa, in response to a gap in both theological and aesthetic discourse in this country. A new dimension is introduced that contributes to the ongoing debate in the field of theological aesthetics. The thesis connects concerns of full life for women in South Africa with Beauty's embodied presence, seen through women's personal and spiritual growth, moral agency and confidence, self-care and dignity, healing and economic well-being, community and interrelatedness, life-affirming drive and vision, and the consequent effects on others as well the social order. I argue that Beauty has everything to do with justice.


Organizational research provides evidence that men and women differ in the structure of their personal networks as well as in the rewards attained from their personal networks (Ibarra 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997. The potential confound in past research between structural constraints and personal preferences has made it difficult to explain why men and women's networks are different regarding gender, status and relationship type. In this dissertation, I explain gender-based differences in networks through a framework of network preferences when seeking career-related advice with specific focus on three key variables: gender-based homophily, status, and relationship type. In Study 1 and Study 2, I test the effect of status alone and then the interaction between status and gender-based homophily to determine who men and women are most likely to approach when seeking career-related advice. I find that both men and women prefer higher-status others more than equal-status others when seeking career-related advice. I also find widespread gender-based homophily for women but limited gender-based homophily for men. In Study 3, given that individuals prefer seeking advice from higher status others as found in the prior studies, I only examine situations where there is a higher status advice-giver while further examining gender homophily and also building in the consideration of two relationship types, instrumental and multiplex, to understand their influence on men's and women's network preferences. I find that both men and women most prefer seeking advice from same-sex multiplex ties. However, because same-sex multiplex ties are not always available in organizations, I also examine their "next" preferences which reveal divergent findings between men and women. Women's next preference is a male with a multiplex tie, whereas men's next preference is either a male with an instrumental tie or a female with a multiplex tie, and for both men and women, instrumental ties with women are low on the preference hierarchy. This dissertation contributes to research on personal networks because it highlights the complex psychology that drive network preferences regarding gender-based homophily, status and relationship type. It also offers methodological contributions in that all the studies utilized an experimental design where organizational composition constraints were eliminated and key variables were manipulated to establish causality. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Management First Advisor Nancy Rothbard This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/144


If a host is located behind a NAT, then in certain situations it can
be impossible for that host to communicate directly with other hosts
(peers). In these situations, it is necessary for the host to use the
services of an intermediate node that acts as a communication relay.
This specification defines a protocol, called TURN (Traversal Using
Relays around NAT), that allows the host to control the operation of
the relay and to exchange packets with its peers using the relay. TURN
differs from some other relay control protocols in that it allows a
client to communicate with multiple peers using a single relay
address. [STANDARDS-TRACK]


Marginal-marine deposits are typically excellent hydrocarbon reservoirs around the world. Certain depositional environments may provide natural, selective, physical processes that produce better reservoir rocks than others depending on associated energy, hydraulic regime, etc. With this paper we present new detailed sedimentological, petrographic, and grain-size data of ancient flood-tidal-delta deposits that provide means to characterize this environment in the ancient as well as to determine reservoir characteristics. In this study, we compare grain size, grain and cement composition, and the ratio of pore space to cement from thin sections between tidal, shoreface, and flood-tidal-delta facies of the Sego Sandstone in northwest Colorado. The intent of this comparison is to provide an evaluation of different physical processes and the degree of diagenesis related to different environments to better understand the relative controls on reservoir characteristics. We find that flood-tidal-deltas show a statistically larger average grain size than either shoreface or other tidal facies. Also, flood-tidal-deltas have a smaller ratio of pore-space to cement. Shoreface facies have a larger ratio of pore space to cement overall than that of flood-tidal-delta or other tidal facies. We propose that this may be due to chemistry and higher weathering rates in the backbay environment in contrast to the shoreface environment, where higher mechanical reworking may lead to selective removal of chemically unstable minerals. To test this hypothesis, we conducted statistical analyses of these petrophysical and grain size characteristics. Our results show that flood-tidal-deltas are characterized by clean upper-fine-grained cross-bedded sandstone that is well sorted and subrounded to rounded with a majority of landward paleocurrent directions and a presence of tidal bundles, mud drapes, and reactivation surfaces.


An instability involving the resonant interaction of a Rossby wave and a Kelvin wave has been proposed to drive equatorial superrotation in planetary atmospheres with a substantially smaller radius or a smaller rotation rate than Earth, that is, with a large thermal Rossby number. To pursue this idea, this paper investigates the equilibration mechanism of Kelvin–Rossby instability by simulating the unforced initial-value problem in a shallow-water model and in a multilevel primitive equation model. Although the instability produces equatorward momentum fluxes in both models, only the multilevel model is found to superrotate. It is argued that the shortcoming of the shallow-water model is due to its difficulty in representing Kelvin wave breaking and dissipation, which is crucial for accelerating the flow in the tropics. In the absence of dissipation, the zonal momentum fluxed into the tropics is contained in the eddy contribution to the mass-weighted zonal wind rather than the zonal-mean zonal flow itself. In the shallow-water model, the zonal-mean zonal flow is only changed by the eddy potential vorticity flux, which is very small in our flow in the tropics and can only decelerate the flow in the absence of external vorticity stirring.


The first edition of this book and is regarded as a classic in its field. Now, in an expanded and updated version of The Art of Service's book, the authors once again present a step-by-step guide to Platform Management. Platform-as-a-service is the rising new star of cloud computing. As such, there is still quite a bit of confusion around what it is and what it is not. Because it was a by-product of the drive to software-as-a-service solutions, the line between SaaS and PaaS solutions are still extremely blurred. The fact that the term "platform" is used in general terms quite often doesn't help the problem. Platform Management is one of the fastest growing segments of the information technology (IT) industry because it provides a more cost-effective alternative for enterprises to achieve their business objectives than traditional packaged applications. This book covers just about every aspect of Platform Management, from high-level overviews of the different technologies that might be appropriate for upper management, to a very nice series of "hands on" chapters that walk you through experimenting with several of the Platform Management options. Whether you need a quick primer on Platform Management so you can talk shop with those with more detailed knowledge, or want to get a sense of the benefits of the different technologies and how they fit into the big picture of the data center, this book is an invaluable resource. It gives you the vocabulary and understanding of how all the pieces fit together than websites and technical manuals often miss. All of the major Platform Management technologies are discussed, along with the various drivers for implementing Platform Management, and how to manage migrating to a Platform Management environment. This book delivers precisely what CEOs, CIOs, IT managers, and technologists need to know.


Mining association rules is an important technique for discovering meaningful patterns in transaction databases. Many different measures of interestingness have been proposed for association rules. However, these measures fail to take the probabilistic properties of the mined data into account. We start this paper with presenting a simple probabilistic framework for transaction data which can be used to simulate transaction data when no associations are present. We use such data and a real-world database from a grocery outlet to explore the behavior of confidence and lift, two popular interest measures used for rule mining. The results show that confidence is systematically influenced by the frequency of the items in the left hand side of rules and that lift performs poorly to filter random noise in transaction data. Based on the probabilistic framework we develop two new interest measures, hyper-lift and hyper-confidence, which can be used to filter or order mined association rules. The new measures show significantly better performance than lift for applications where spurious rules are problematic.


To guide the selection of gas phase filtration media in the air cleaning devices, it is important to understand and estimate the media performance under usage concentrations. Filters for improving indoor air quality are typically subject to low volatile organic compounds (VOCs) concentration levels (e.g., ∼50 ppb), while the current standard tests per ASHRAE 145.1 (ANSI/ASHRAE 2008). are performed at relatively high challenge concentrations (∼1–100 ppm level). The primary objective of this study was to determine if media that perform well at the high concentration test condition would also perform well under the low concentration. The secondary objective was to investigate if and how existing models of filtration by media bed can be applied to extrapolate the results from the high concentration tests to the low concentration condition. Experiments and simulations were carried out at both high concentrations (100 ppm for toluene and 1 ppm for formaldehyde) and low concentrations (0.05 ppm for toluene and formaldehyde) for six selected filtration media. The results show that (1) the high concentration test data were able to differentiate the relative performance among the media at the low concentration properly, confirming the validity of using ASHRAE 145.1 (ANSI/ASHRAE 2008) for relative performance comparison; (2) significant initial breakthrough observed at high concentration tests of large pellet media was not present at the low concentration tests, indicating the dependency of the adsorption capability of the sorbent media on the concentration level as well as the possible "by-pass" effects (i.e., not all the VOC molecules in the air stream had the same chance to contact with the sorbent media); and (3) existing models need to be improved by incorporating the concentration dependency of the partition coefficient and the by-pass effect in order to predict the breakthrough curve at low concentrations properly. Such an improved model was proposed, evaluated with the measured data, and was found to be promising for physical sorbent, but requires further development for chemical, catalytic sorbent and large pellet sorbent. The study provides previously unavailable experimental data and new insight into the behavior of the filtration media for volatile organic compounds as well as evidence in support of the application of ASHRAE Standard 145.1 (ANSI/ASHRAE 2008) for media performance evaluation.


A cut vertex is defined as a network node whose removal increases the number of network components. Failure of a cut vertex disconnects a network component and downgrades the network performance. Overlay networks are resilient to the failure of random nodes, but cut vertices that have been observed in real-world overlay traces make the network very vulnerable to well-constructed and targeted attacks. Traditional methods of detecting cut vertices are centralized and are very difficult, if not impossible, to be applied to large-scale and highly dynamic overlay networks. We aim to provide a practical solution by proposing a distributed mechanism that detects the cut vertices and neutralizes them to noncut vertices before they fail. The proposed mechanism not only minimizes the possibility of network decomposition on the cut vertex failure but also offloads the traffic that is handled by the cut vertices. We prove that our proposed method can correctly identify the cut vertices. We evaluate the performance of our design through trace-driven simulations. The results show that our method can successfully locate all cut vertices in the network and greatly offload the traffic processed by cut vertices.


It is often helpful to compute the intrinsic volumes of a set of which only a pixel image is observed. A computational efficient approach, which is suggested by several authors and used in practice, is to approximate the intrinsic volumes by a linear functional of the pixel configuration histogram. Here we want to examine, whether there is an optimal way of choosing this linear functional, where we will use a quite natural optimality criterion that has already been applied successfully for the estimation of the surface area. We will see that for intrinsic volumes other than volume or surface area this optimality criterion cannot be used, since estimators which ignore the data and return constant values are optimal w.r.t. this criterion. This shows that one has to be very careful, when intrinsic volumes are approximated by a linear functional of the pixel configuration histogram.


Third Edition: Thoroughly Updated and Expanded, with Extensive New Coverage! In just 24 sessions of one hour or less, youll master the entire SAP project lifecycle, from planning through implementation and system administration through day-to-day operations. Using this books straightforward, step-by-step approach, youll gain a strong real-world foundation in both the technology and business essentials of todays SAP products and applicationsfrom the ground up. Step-by-step instructions walk you through the most common questions, issues, and tasks youll encounter with SAP. Case study-based exercises help you build and test your knowledge. By the Way notes present interesting pieces of information. Did You Know? tips offer advice or teach an easier way. Watch Out! cautions warn about potential problems. Learn how to Understand SAPs newest products for enterprises and small-to-midsize businesses, and choose the right solutions for your company Discover how SAP integrates with Web services and service-oriented architecture Develop an efficient roadmap for deploying SAP in your environment Plan your SAP implementation from business, functional, technical, and project management perspectives Leverage NetWeaver 7.0 features to streamline development and integration, and reduce cost Walk through a step-by-step SAP technical installation Master basic SAP system administration and operations Perform essential tasks such as logon, session management, and printing Build SAP queries and reports Prepare for SAP upgrades and enhancements Develop your own personal career as an SAP professional Register your book at informit.com/title/9780137142842 for convenient access to updates and corrections as they become available.


In 1904 two Teiid lizards from Surinam were described by VAN LIDTH DE JEUDE who named them: Arthrosaura versteegii and Prionodactylus kockii. Of the latter species I (1928) was able to show that it did not belong to the genus Prionodactylus but that it was also an Arthrosaura and that A. dorsistriata L. MϋLLER (1923, p. 147) was a synonym of it. The status of the different Arthrosaura-species is again discussed by Ch, E. and M. D. BURT (1931, p. 312—313) in a very interesting study on the South-American lizards in the American Museum of Natural History. At the same time these authors describe a new species, Arthrosaura tatei, from Venezuela, so that they refer four species (reticulata, versteegii, kockii, tatei) to this genus. Dealing with the two species described by VAN LITH DE JEUDE (1904, p. 89, 91) the authors write on p. 313: "It is possible that future study will show A. kockii to be a synonym of this co-extensively distributed A. versteegii" and: "It appears that three of the species of Arthrosaura (versteegii, kockii, and reticulata) are practically synonymous in details of scutellation and proportion, although future work may prove this to be untrue." On p. 312 the probable identity of Pantodactylus concolor Tschudi (1847, p. 48) is discussed: "The description of Pantodactylus concolor Tschudi (1847) from Northern Brazil is very inadequate, but in every point that is given its characters agree with those of the more recently described Arthrosaura versteegii of Van Lidth de Jeude (1904)" and on p. 313: "In view of these data and the geographical locality of the forms concerned, it appears that the two species may be identical". These statements made it worth while to re-examine the types of


The aim of this paper is to estimate the effect of research externalities across space, in generating innovation. We do so by using R&D and patent data for eighty-six European Regions in the 1977-1995 period. We find that spillovers exist for regions within a distance of 300 Km from each other. The estimates are robust to simultaneity, omitted variable bias, different specifications of distance functions, country and border effects. The size of these spillovers is small, though. Doubling R&D spending in a region would increase the output of new ideas in other regions within 300 Km only by 2-3%, while it would increase the innovation of the region itself by 80-90%. Given the small size and the limited range of diffusion, we interpret these externalities as the result of local diffusion of non-codified knowledge, embodied in people and spreading via personal contacts. This interpretation is reinforced by the finding that the spillovers are somewhat weaker across national borders.


We propose a face reconstruction technique that produces models that not only look good when texture mapped, but are also metrically accurate. Our method is designed to work with short uncalibrated video or movie sequences, even when the lighting is poor resulting in specularities and shadows that complicate the algorithm's task. Our approach relies on optimizing the shape parameters of a sophisticated PCA based model given pairwise image correspondences as input. All that is required is enough relative motion between camera and subject so that we can derive structure from motion. By matching the results against laser scanning data, we will show that its precision is excellent and can be predicted as a junction of the number and quality of the correspondences. This is important if one wishes to obtain the appropriate compromise between processing speed and quality of the results. Furthermore, our method is in fact not specific to faces and could equally be applied to any shape for which a shape model controlled with relatively small number of parameters exists.


We introduce Dynamic Bandit Algorithm (DBA), a practical solution to improve the shortcoming of the pervasively employed reinforcement learning algorithm called Multi-Arm Bandit, aka Bandit. Bandit makes real-time decisions based on the prior observations. However, Bandit is heavily biased to the priors that it cannot quickly adapt itself to a trend that is interchanging. As a result, Bandit cannot, quickly enough, make profitable decisions when the trend is changing. Unlike Bandit, DBA focuses on quickly adapting itself to detect these trends early enough. Furthermore, DBA remains as almost as light as Bandit in terms of computations. Therefore, DBA can be easily deployed in production as a light process similar to The Bandit. We demonstrate how critical and beneficial is the main focus of DBA, i.e. the ability to quickly finding the most profitable option in real-time, over its stateof-the-art competitors. Our experiments are augmented with a visualization mechanism that explains the profitability of the decisions made by each algorithm in each step by animations. Finally we observe that DBA can substantially outperform the original Bandit by close to 3 times for a set Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in a case of having 3 arms.


Morphing airfoils present an effective approach to managing the different requirements in each segment of a mission profile (e.g., takeoff/landing, cruise, and active maneuvering). In this work, an approach to morphing airfoil design that couples aerodynamic performance and internal structural configuration is detailed. The internal structural topology is formulated using a Lindenmayer System (L-System) coupled with a graph-based interpreter known as Spatial Interpretation for Development of Reconfigurable Structures (SPIDRS). The L-System encodes design variables that are interpreted via SPIDRS graphical operations and governs the development of the internal configuration (composed of elastic structural members and actuators). The global optimization uses a weakly coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) scheme for a first-order estimation of the aeroelastic loads that are critical for airfoil aerodynamic performance and structural integrity. Each airfoil is evaluated in two states: a standard non-actuated state to determine performance in standard operating conditions (e.g., cruise) and a high lift state, where internal shape memory alloy actuators are deformed to create a high lift configuration for the airfoil (e.g., takeoff/landing). Evaluating the aerodynamic performance of airfoils in these two states results in a series of potential solutions that best manage the tradeoff between aerodynamic metrics for both evaluated cases.


Cell division in budding yeast depends on the formation of a filamentous collar containing septin proteins. This collar forms at the base of the bud, marking the place in the membrane between the mother cell and the emerging bud that constricts during cytokinesis, ultimately forming two cells when mitosis is complete. New evidence now indicates that protein complexes formed with septins are critical in coordinating morphogenesis with cell division and proper tracking of temporal progression through the cell cycle. Sakchaisri et al. show that yeast cells use the status of multiple phosphorylation sites on the protein kinase Swe1 to keep track of cell cycle progression and assembly of the necessary complexes organized at the bud neck. Genetic analysis and use of a designed form of protein kinase Cla4 sensitive to a specific inhibitor showed that the Cla4 protein contributes to phosphorylation of Swe1 during S phase of the cell cycle. Mutants with weakly functioning alleles of another protein kinase, Cdc5, lacked further phosphorylation of Swe1 that normally occurs right before entry into mitosis. Thus, accumulation of highly phosphorylated Swe1 provides the cell with an indicator that the cycle is progressing properly and that the necessary components are assembled in septin complexes. These phosphorylation events tag Swe1 for ubiquitin-dependent degradation, which in turn relieves Swe1's inhibitory phosphorylation of the critical cyclin-dependent kinase (Cdc28) that controls initiation of mitosis. K. Sakchaisri, S. Asano, L.-R. Yu, M. J. Shulewitz, C. J. Park, J.-E. Park, Y.-W. Cho, T. D. Veenstra, J. Thorner, K. S. Lee, Coupling morphogenesis to mitotic entry. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101, 4124-4129 (2004). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Introduction Non-clear cell renal cell carcinoma (nccRCC) and sarcomatoid renal cell carcinoma (sRCC) are underrepresented in clinical trials. Treatment approaches are frequently extrapolated from data of clear cell renal cell carcinoma, in which pazopanib is non-inferior to sunitinib. We aim to compare the effectiveness of first-line sunitinib and pazopanib for nccRCC and sRCC. Methods We evaluated a retrospective cohort of patients with metastatic nccRCC and sRCC treated with first-line sunitinib or pazopanib at an academic cancer centre. Overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS) and response rate were measured. Kaplan–Meier and log-rank analyses were used for time-to-event data. Cox regression was used for prognostic factors. Results Fifty-three patients were included; 16 (30.1%) treated with sunitinib and 37 (69.9%) with pazopanib. Forty-six (86.8%) patients had nccRCC and 7 (13.2%) had sRCC. The majority had intermediate or poor International Metastatic Renal-Cell Carcinoma Database Consortium risk (93%). Median PFS was 6.6 months with sunitinib and 4.9 months with pazopanib (HR 1.75; P = 0.078). Treatment with pazopanib was associated with inferior OS in comparison with sunitinib (median OS: 30.4 months versus 8.7 months; HR 2.71, 95% CI 1.31–5.58, P = 0.007). These results were confirmed in subgroup analysis of patients with papillary, chromophobe and MiT family translocation histologies (median OS: 38.7 months versus 14.7 months; HR 3.16, 95% CI 1.20–8.29, P = 0.019). Unclassified and sarcomatoid histologies had inferior OS (median: 6.9 and 1.1 months, respectively) regardless of the treatment used. Conclusion In this patient cohort, pazopanib was associated with inferior OS in comparison with sunitinib for metastatic nccRCC. Larger trials are ideally warranted to confirm these results.


Background: Prostatomegaly is common in men past fifth decade of life and has been the most common cause of symptoms associated with lower urinary tract obstruction. The emergence of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) has come to rescue of clinicians at screening the prostate cancer by its raised value in serum. The further research over the PSA brought out few new indices which are sensitive in screening and suggesting prostate cancer such as the ratio between free and bound PSA, PSA density (PSAD), and PSA velocity. Objectives: The objective of this study is (1) to study serum PSA level and PSAD at the differentiation of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia, and prostatic carcinoma (PCa) established at prostatic tissue diagnoses, (2) evaluation of the significance of total prostate-specific antigen (TPSA) level in the intermediate range of 4–10 ng/ml at assessment of benign versus malignant prostatomegaly at tissue diagnoses, and (3) to draw cutoff values of PSAD (0.15 vs. 0.18 ng/ml/cc) in suggesting benign versus malignant prostatomegaly at tissue diagnoses. Materials and Methods: Digital rectal examination was carried out in suspected clinical cases of prostatomegaly. One hundred and eight cases of prostatomegaly have undergone TPSA estimation prospectively by Vidas TPSA kit. PSAD was calculated as the ratio between TPSA and the volume of the prostate. The sample received for histopathological diagnoses were either sextant biopsy (25 specimens), transurethral resection of prostate (68 specimens), and prostatectomy (15 specimens). Results: TPSA was performed in total 108 patients of prostatomegaly, of which 35 (40.22%) cases had TPSA in the range of ≤4 ng/ml, 37 (34.25%) cases had TPSA in the range of 4.01–10 ng/ml, and 36 (33.33%) cases had TPSA in the range of >10 ng/ml. The mean PSAD cutoff of <0.18 ng/ml/cc had revealed 79 (90.80%) cases of BPH. The mean PSAD cutoff of ≥0.18 ng/ml/cc had revealed 8 (9.1%) cases of BPH, 19 (100%) cases of PCa and 2 (100%) cases of prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN). Final tissue diagnoses in total 108 cases were as follows: BPH – 87 (80.55%) cases, PIN – 2 (1.85%) cases, and prostatic adenocarcinoma – 19 (17.59%) cases. Conclusion: The TPSA value over 10 ng/ml and mean PSAD value over 0.15 or over 0.18 ng/ml/cc can be used as criteria for prostatic biopsy. The mean PSAD cutoff of over 0.18 ng/ml/cc works superiorly for the diagnoses of malignant prostatomegaly, selection of the cases for the prostatic biopsy and medical or surgical management of prostatomegaly.


The photo-response non-uniformity (PRNU) is a distinctive image sensor characteristic, and an imaging device inadvertently introduces its sensor's PRNU into all media it captures. Therefore, the PRNU can be regarded as a camera fingerprint and used for source attribution. The imaging pipeline in a camera, however, involves various processing steps that are detrimental to PRNU estimation. In the context of photographic images, these challenges are successfully addressed and the method for estimating a sensor's PRNU pattern is well established. However, various additional challenges related to generation of videos remain largely untackled. With this perspective, this work introduces methods to mitigate disruptive effects of widely deployed H.264 and H.265 video compression standards on PRNU estimation. Our approach involves an intervention in the decoding process to eliminate a filtering procedure applied at the decoder to reduce blockiness. It also utilizes decoding parameters to develop a weighting scheme and adjust the contribution of video frames at the macroblock level to PRNU estimation process. Results obtained on videos captured by 28 cameras show that our approach increases the PRNU matching metric up to more than five times over the conventional estimation method tailored for photos. Tests on a public dataset also verify that the proposed method improves the attribution performance by increasing the accuracy and allowing the use of smaller length videos to perform attribution.


The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) defines a new vision of the Grid based on the use of Web Services (Grid Services). The standard interfaces, behaviors and schemes that are consistent with the OGSA specification are defined by the Open Grid Service Infrastructure (OGSI). Grid Services, as an extension of the Web Services, run on top of rich execution frameworks that make them accessible and interoperable with other applications. Two examples of these frameworks are Sun's J2EE platform and Microsoft's .NET. The Globus Project implements the OGSI Specification for the J2EE framework in the Globus Toolkit. As any J2EE application, the performance of the Globus Toolkit is constrained by the performance obtained by the J2EE execution stack This performance can be influenced by many points of the execution stack: operating system, JVM, middleware or the same grid service, without forgetting the processing overheads related to the parsing of the communication protocols. In the scope of this chapter, all this levels together will be referred to as the grid middleware. In order to avoid the grid middleware to become a performance bottleneck for a distributed grid-enabled application, grid nodes have to be tuned for an efficient execution of I/O intensive applications because they can receive a high volume of requests every second and have to deal with a big amount of invocations, message parsing operations and a continuous task of marshaling and unmarshalling service parameters. All the parameters of the system affecting these operations have to be tuned according with the expected system load intensity. A Grid node is connected to to other nodes through a network connection which is also a decisive factor to obtain a high performance for a grid application. If the inter-node data transmission time overlaps completely the processing time for a computational task, the benefits of the grid architecture will be lost. Additionally, in many situations the content exchanged between grid nodes can be considered confidential and should be protected from curious sights. But the cost of data encryption/decryption can be an important performance weak that must be taken into account. In this chapter we will study the process of receiving and executing a Grid job from the perspective of the underlying levels existing below the Grid application. We will analyze the different performance parameters that can influence in the performance of the Grid middleware and will show the general schema of tasks involved in the service of an execution request.


The ocean is one of Earth's most valuable natural resources. From regulating the climate to providing a source of food, the ocean has an interrelated economic, ecological and social importance. The economic, environmental and cultural history of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) are all intrinsically linked to the Atlantic Ocean and its resources. Protection of the coastal and ocean environments was not only important to the province's past but is also widely recognized as vitally important for the future of the province. In June of 2011 the provincial Government of Newfoundland and Labrador introduced a Coastal and Ocean Management Strategy and Policy Framework (Government of NL, 2011a). The framework is designed to recognize the diversity of various stakeholders who rely on healthy coastal and ocean areas and to work together to provide long-term sustainable use of resources. One of the goals of the policy framework is to guide the coordination of provincial coastal and ocean policy in relation to priority issues identified for the province, with increased collaboration between governments, stakeholders, and communities (Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture, 2010). This research paper asks the question: how might the province's new coastal and oceans management strategy and policy framework be used to address major coastal and oceans problems? To answer this question, the paper applies the policy framework to an emerging crisis in one of the province's most important fisheries – the northern shrimp fisheries.
Despite fundamental social-ecological transformations in recent decades, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador continues to rely heavily on the ocean for the fishery resources it provides. Following the collapse of the cod fishery in 1992, and the subsequent moratoria on cod and other groundfish fisheries that put tens of thousands of people in the province out of work, many harvesters and processors in coastal communities in the province turned to increasingly lucrative and abundant crab and shrimp as a new means of income and industry (Foley et al. 2013). However, due to a number of reasons, including an increase in cod numbers and rising ocean temperatures, northern shrimp stocks are in decline (Lilly et al, 2000). This decline led the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), the federal agency responsible for fish allocations, to make cut backs on the shrimp quota in recent years. These quota reductions are impacting the inshore fishery, which supports the shore based and community-based processing plants where workers produce cooked and peeled shrimp, much more negatively than the offshore fishery, which produces frozen shell on shrimp onboard offshore vessels for sale into global markets (Keenan and Carruthers, 2015). The allocation of higher quota reductions in the inshore sector than the offshore sector in ocean areas close to the province has led to intense and highly
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politicized disagreements and distraught feelings from local rural communities that depend on the fishery for their livelihoods.
The purpose of this research paper is to apply the province's Coastal and Ocean Management Strategy and Policy Framework to the province's northern shrimp fishery. The paper uses the framework as an analytical approach to explore potential ways to practically address and overcome the multi-faceted social, environmental, and political issues the province's northern shrimp fishery, particularly the inshore sector, is currently facing. The policy framework is designed to address specific coastal and ocean issues, some of which can be related to the shrimp fishery. The issues are divided into six objectives: Healthy Marine Environments, Social, Cultural, and Economic Sustainability, Coastal Land Use, Competing Needs and Interests, Coastal and Marine Infrastructure, and Climate Change.
This paper begins by examining the Coastal and Ocean Management Strategy that the province has developed to protect the ocean and coastline. This includes analyzing the goals, principles, tools, and departments involved in the strategy. Following this, the paper introduces the history and current issues facing the shrimp fishery in the province, specifically focusing on the decline in the resource and recent allocation changes and controversies. The policy framework is then applied to key issues in the fishery using some of the strategy objectives outlined above. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a better understanding of how the NL Coastal and Ocean Management Strategy and Policy Framework can be potentially applied to coastal management challenges, such as at the shrimp fishery, to promote solutions.


In this paper, we address an adaptive beamforming application in realistic acoustic conditions. After the position of a speaker is estimated by a speaker tracking system, we construct a subband-domain beamformer in generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) configuration. In contrast to conventional practice, we then optimize the active weight vectors of the GSC so as to obtain an output signal with maximum negentropy (MN). This implies the beamformer output should be as non-Gaussian as possible. For calculating negentropy, we consider the Gamma and the generalized Gaussian (GG) pdfs. After MN beamforming, Zelinski post-filtering is performed to further enhance the speech by removing residual noise. Our beamforming algorithm can suppress noise and reverberation without the signal cancellation problems encountered in the conventional adaptive beamforming algorithms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed technique through a series of far-field automatic speech recognition experiments on the Multi-Channel Wall Street Journal Audio Visual Corpus (MC-WSJ-AV). On the MC-WSJ-AV evaluation data, the delay-and-sum beamformer with post-filtering achieved a word error rate (WER) of 16.5%. MN beamforming with the Gamma pdf achieved a 15.8% WER, which was further reduced to 13.2% with the GG pdf, whereas the simple delay-and-sum beamformer provided a WER of 17.8%.


Mycobacteriophage (phage) are viruses that infect bacteria of the genus Mycobacterium, including pathogenic M. tuberculosis and non-pathogenic M. smegmatis. Temperate phages are capable of undergoing both lytic and lysogenic infection. In lytic infections, phage lyse the host cell after replication. In lysogenic infection, the phage integrates its genome into the host genome (prophage) and replicates with the host. All pathogenic strains of Mycobacterium carry prophage that potentially contribute to host virulence and fitness. Formation and maintenance of these prophage is not well understood, particularly for cluster E phage. This project characterizes gene product (gp) 53, a potential Cro-like protein, in cluster E mycobacteriophage Ukulele. Cro-like proteins promote lytic gene expression while repressing lysogenic gene expression. To confirm gp53's function as a Cro-like protein, strains of M. smegmatis overexpressing Ukulele gp53 are being constructed. The impact of gp53 expression on Ukulele infection will be tested on these strains and compared to wildtype.


OBJECTIVE
The purposes of this study were to present an endometrial cancer case with a first sign of bone metastasis, and to reveal factors affecting survival and the appropriate treatment methods for bone metastases.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
A total of 101 case reports that presented with bone metastasis of endometrial cancer were reviewed in this study.

RESULTS
Survival time in the patients without surgical treatment for bone metastasis was found to be 12 months (95% CI = 5.89 - 18.10) and 42 months in patients who underwent surgical treatment in addition to one or more of chemo-radio-hormonotherapies (95% CI = 16.58 - 67.41) (p = .006). Histological type of cancer, extra-osseous metastasis, and lack of surgery were the factors significantly affecting survival (p = 0.012, p = 0.002, and p = 0.038, respectively).

CONCLUSION
Histological type and the presence of extra-osseous involvement are important prognostic markers in endometrial cancer patients with bone metastasis. It may be appropriate to implement combination therapies including surgery in the treatment of bone metastases.


In 1995 and 1996 six film or television adaptations of Jane Austen's novels were produced-an unprecedented number. More amazing, all were critical and/or box office successes. What accounts for this explosion of interest? Much of the appeal of these films lies in our nostalgic desire at the end of the millennium for an age of greater politeness and sexual reticence. Austen's ridicule of deceit and pretentiousness also appeals to our fin de siecle sensibilities. The novels were changed, however, to enhance their appeal to a wide popular audience, and the revisions reveal much about our own culture and its values. These recent productions espouse explicitly twentieth-century feminist notions and reshape the Austenian hero to make him conform to modern expectations. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield present fourteen essays examining the phenomenon of Jane Austen as cultural icon, providing thoughtful and sympathetic insights on the films through a variety of critical approaches. The contributors debate whether these productions enhance or undercut the subtle feminism that Austen promoted in her novels. From Persuasion to Pride and Prejudice , from the three Emmas (including Clueless ) to Sense and Sensibility , these films succeed because they flatter our intelligence and education. And they have as much to tell us about ourselves as they do about the world of Jane Austen. This second edition includes a new chapter on the recent film version of Mansfield Park .


We examined the influence of chronic cocaine exposure, in an unlimited access self-administration paradigm, on density of the dopamine transporter (3H-WIN 35,428 and 3H-GBR 12,935 binding) and concentration of monoamine (dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline and metabolites) neurotransmitters in rat brain. In normal rodent striatum 3H-WIN 35,428 and 3H-GBR 12,935 binding to the dopamine transporter, although generally similar, showed different subregional rostrocaudal and mediolateral gradients, suggesting that the two ligands might bind to different subtypes or states of the dopamine transporter. Following chronic, unlimited access cocaine self-administration, binding of 3H- WIN 35,428 was significantly elevated in whole nucleus accumbens (+69%, p < 0.001) and striatum (+65%, p < 0.001) on the last day of cocaine exposure ("on-cocaine group"); whereas in the 3 week withdrawn animals ("cocaine-withdrawn group"), levels were either normal (striatum) or reduced (-30%, p < 0.05, nucleus accumbens). Although similar changes in 3H-GBR 12,935 binding were observed, this dopamine transporter ligand showed a smaller and highly subregionally dependent increase in binding in striatal subdivision of the on-cocaine group, but a more marked binding reduction in the cocaine-withdrawn animals. As compared with the controls, mean dopamine levels were reduced in striatum (-15%, p < 0.05) of the on-cocaine group and in nucleus accumbens (-40%, p < 0.05) of the cocaine-withdrawn group. These data provide additional support to the hypothesis that some of the long-term effects of cocaine exposure (drug craving, depression) could be consequent to reduced nucleus accumbens dopamine function. Our data also suggest that dopamine transporter concentration, and perhaps function, might undergo up- or downregulation, either as a direct effect of cocaine, or indirectly as part of a homeostatic response to altered synaptic dopamine levels, and therefore might participate in the neuronal events underlying cocaine-induced behavioral changes.


With AFM related techniques we investigated the specific interaction between avidin and biotin. The contact rupture force (adhesion) between avidin functionalized tips and biotin, which was covalently linked to agarose beads, was measured and characterized. A comprehensive study of the physical properties of the receptor-functionalized tips and the biotin-labeled agarose bead was carried out. The functional stability of the avidin coated tip persisted for several hundred force scan measurements. The strength of the interaction between the tip and the bead was found to depend on the force applied by the AFM tip on the polymer beads. By regulating the contact via indentation, the interaction can vary from one to as much as 100 biotin-avidin pairs. When surface interaction is minimized, quantized interaction between avidin and biotin was observed. This approach induces minimal stress on the interacting molecules.