Human protein kinase CK2 (formerly known as casein kinase 2) is a ubiquitous and highly conserved Ser/Thr kinase which is composed of a central dimer of two noncatalytic subunits CK2beta and two catalytic subunits CK2alpha. CK2 is important in cell proliferation and apoptosis and this is the reason why an elevated CK2 expression contributes cancer.
In human, two paralog isoforms of the catalytic subunit (called CK2alpha and CK2alpha') exist, which differ in their C-terminal regions and show a different expression profile. While the CK2alpha isoform is well characterized in vitro and in vivo, little is known about the biochemical and structural properties of the CK2alpha' isoform. To overcome this limited knowledge, a full length mutant of human CK2alpha' was used. This study shows that the CK2alpha' mutant is well soluble and catalytically active, with an affinity 12 times lower and less driven by enthalpy to CK2beta than that of CK2alpha to CK2beta.
To detect structural differences and conspicuous features between the isoforms, crystal structures of CK2alpha' and CK2alpha with two potent ATP-competitive inhibitors 3-(4,5,6,7-tetrabromo-1H-benzotriazol-1-yl)propan-1-ol (MB002) and 4-(6,8-Dichloro-3-hydroxy-4-oxo-4H-chromen-2-yl)-benzoicacid (FLC21) were solved. The present work shows for each of the CK2alpha isoforms one crystal structure in complex with MB002 and two in complex with FLC21.
The results indicate a constantly open beta4/beta5 loop at the CK2alpha/CK2beta binding site of CK2alpha', in contrast to a dynamic beta4/beta5 loop in CK2alpha, which can adopt two distinct conformations, an open and a closed one. The constantly open beta4/beta5 loop of CK2alpha' is fixed by an additional parallel beta-strand at the N-terminal side of the beta4/beta5 loop, which is absent in the most structures of CK2alpha. Further a tryptophan residue fills a conserved hydrophobic pocket to a lower position in CK2alpha' than in CK2alpha.
Moreover the interdomain hinge shows in all structures of CK2alpha' an open and fully functional conformation while monomeric CK2alpha adopts also a closed and unproductive conformation.
Besides this study shows a disagreement of CK2alpha and CK2alpha' to the spine concept of active protein kinases, which postulates two fully constructed stacks of hydrophobic residues called catalytic and regulatory spine. CK2alpha' posses with the open interdomain hinge exclusivly an incomplete catalytic spine, but CK2alpha exhibits an incomplete catalytic spine as well as a complete catalytic spine, addicted to the conformation of the interdomain hinge. After all the CK2alpha isoforms appear enzymatic activity with an incomplete catalytic spine, based on the hypothesis that the open interdomain hinge represents the active conformation.
The binding mode of the ATP-competitive inhbitor FLC21 is identical in both CK2alpha isoforms and stabilizes in each case the open interdomain hinge conformation, however MB002 does not influence the hinge region and binds in two different manners, depending on whether the interdomain hinge exists in the open or in the closed conformation. In addition FLC21 stabilizes CK2alpha and CK2alpha' in an inactive conformation which were found only in one CK2alpha structure so far. The inactivation is a result of a collapsed ATP-binding loop so that Arg47 (respectively Arg48 in CK2alpha') occupies the ribose region of the ATP site and blocks the entrance of the ATP-binding pocket.


How Africans access – or 'own' – their landholdings is a matter of profound importance for the continent's future. It touches on social welfare as well as prospects for economic development. This policy briefing provides an overview of the land question, drawing heavily on the Country Review Reports (CRRs) of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). It argues that weak property rights are a major problem for Africa, but cautions against an assumption that full titling is an immediate solution. Rather, drawing on existing informal rights regimes in Africa – and gradually building formalised systems on this basis – offers a more promising avenue for creating effective and durable systems of property rights aligned with the continent's realities.


In the last 10–15 years in some German drinking water reservoirs an increase in the NOM (natural organic matter) content has occurred. The impact of such a change on the drinking water quality was almost unknown. A research project was carried out at several drinking water reservoirs and water works concerning the change in the NOM quality and the nutrient situation. The results indicate that the NOM increase in the reservoir is predominately caused by an increasing input of high and intermediate molecular weight humic substances from the catchment area into the reservoir. The fractions of the polysaccharides and the high molecular weight humic substances are significantly reduced in the treatment process. In contrast, the elimination rate for the substances with an intermediate and low molecular weight was low. Due to the low elimination rate particularly of the intermediate humic fraction, the NOM content of the treated water increased with the change in the raw water. Furthermore, the BDOC of the treated water increased with the NOM content. For the AOC of the treated water no relationship was found with the NOM content. However, the change of this parameter was affected by the snowmelt and the circulation in the reservoir.


A little bunny keeps runningaway from his mother in an imaginative and imaginary game of verbal hide-and-seek; children will be profoundly comforted by this lovingly steadfast mother who finds her child every time.The Runaway Bunny, first published in 1942 and never out of print, has indeed become a classic. Generations of readers have fallen in love with the gentle magic of its reassuring words and loving pictures.


When it comes to babies, things are expensive and companies are always looking to develop the most cutting edge products. Parents are constantly concerned with getting the best products in the market and doing everything right so that their child is safe and sound. But the question is how parents determine which products are the best and which ones are simply claiming to be the best. Are they simply guessing or are they looking carefully at all the facts? Parents look at product websites, consumer product review websites, consumer reports, blogs, and get word of mouth referrals to try to figure out which product is going to be the best for them. Parents do this not only because they are extremely concerned about the safety of their child but also since most first time parents generally have no idea what the differences are between products. So these first time parents are going to be easy influenced by whichever medium they are getting their information from. This could be highly logical and fact based information that is indisputable and does not vary depending on the customer. This information could be such things as how durable a product is or what safety rating the product has received. Or this information could be highly emotion oriented with a lot of emphasis placed on aspects that can vary from customer to customer. For example, the information could be about how soft/ hard the product feels or how the style can match a modern home decor. The question now is whether or not customers when choosing baby products are more influenced by products that are logic and fact centered or are they more influenced by emotion oriented aspects. Degree Type Open Access Senior Honors Thesis Department Marketing


In this paper, the authors explore the pedagogical call as an articulated or unarticulated appeal from children in classroom settings and the many facets of pedagogical responsivity as they in vignettes stemming from a research project, funded nation-wide in Austria. While instruction can be planned, the pedagogical call can be understood as an appeal that occurs in medias res, in the midst of an event in the pedagogical situation, and can at best be anticipated. This dilemma of planning for the unplannable is constitutive of the pedagogical relation and addressed in the discourse regarding pedagogical tact in both North America and Europe. In seeking to gain insight into educational processes and learning through the lived experiences of 5th-grade students in Austria's "New Middle School" reform pilot, researchers were faced with a similar dilemma: How to capture the experiences of others, of children at school in medias res? The authors therefore provide background to their vignette research as a framework for their readings oriented to the pedagogical call as they arise in two vignettes. While articulated calls, and articulated responses, tend to be more straightforward, the authors address the difficulty of recognizing an unarticulated call of which the student is unaware, as well as recognizing no response as a response on the part of the teacher. Refraining from judgment as to the pedagogical quality of the teachers' actions, the authors conclude by addressing two critical aspects of the discourse on pedagogical tact driven by the principle of individuality: the underlying assumption that the other can be understood and the inherent concept of the pedagogical situation as one-to-one contact, the former ignoring the inaccessibility of the other and the latter neglecting the institutional laws that govern school reality.


This article visits the origins of much of the current cultural expectations around the role of open government data. Beginning with the United States' Freedom of Information Act, the article then traces the influence of U.S. electronic government records legislation and norms that developed during the eighties and nineties. In particular, the concept of "value-added" from the financial sector reconfigured government records as "raw data" that could be enhanced and made operable through software interfaces. The Reagan administration and commercial vendors viewed "value-added" software as a proprietary venture that used strict licenses and copyright to wrench profit from government records while closing them off to wide public access. Open data, in contrast, reconciles government transparency with private sector expansion through open licenses and formats. In the rhetoric of open data, the monitory struggles against monopolistic electronic information technologies that took place in the eighties today align with the free market values of innovation and entrepreneurship touted by Silicon Valley.


The architecture, environment and construction industry is facing, on the one hand, ambitious environmental regulations for low carbon and net zero energy buildings, and on the other hand, the emergence of new techniques such as parametric assessment and cloud computing. As a result, there is a dramatic increase of performance analysis and collected data during the building design phase. However, previous research highlighted major weaknesses of current building performance simulation -BPS- software regarding its ability to represent and explore input and output data, to interact with it, and to extract valuable data patterns and analyses. Therefore, this research aims to identify suitable visualization techniques that might increase the usability and the knowledge extracted from building simulation dataset. To that end, an interdisciplinary approach has been set up. First, a literature review allowed to characterize the specificities of BPS dataset, namely their heterogeneous nature -discrete, ordinal, categorical, and continuous-, their different correlation levels and their medium size. Second, key tasks that should be performed by BPS tools to support the design process are identified: exploration, solutions generation and evaluation. Then, two data visualization techniques that accept the BPS dataset specificities and that enable to perform these key tasks were selected within the information visualization research field: Decision Tree and Parallel Coordinates. Third, these techniques were applied to an extensive BPS dataset, generated from a series of parametric building simulations based on a high-performance building to be, called the smart living building. Finally, a qualitative comparison between the selected visualization techniques was conducted so as to reveal their strengths and weaknesses. This comparison highlights Parallel Coordinates as the most promising approach.


INTRODUCTION Many scholars and practitioners argue that there is a growing need for public administrators at the local government level to engage the citizenry they serve and to increase citizens' participation in their own governance (1). Within the context of this argument is a call for new, innovative ways to increase citizen participation. New approaches are necessary because it is argued that the current strategies are inadequate. Often, these strategies do not truly engage the citizenry or they are perceived to be unfair or frustrating (e.g., DeLeon & DeLeon, 2002). The challenge is avoiding the cited deficiencies of contemporary strategies while at the same time finding an approach that meets scholars' and practitioners' requirements for successful citizen engagement found in the current literature. Denhardt and Denhardt (2003) have suggested that there is a new movement (2) occurring in public administration in the United States today. They call this movement the New Public Service (NPS) (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2003). The NPS focuses on serving citizens, delivering democracy, continually striving to meet the public interest, fostering democratic ideals, renewing civic engagement, and ultimately creating a better life for people living in the polis (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2003). The Denhardts (2003) argue that this movement "is now being manifest in the way we interact with political leaders, in the way we engage with citizens, and in the way we bring about positive changes in our organizations and communities" (p. 4). Although it is not an unprecedented idea, the NPS has marked a recent resurgence in scholarship directed toward normative values that center on the role of the public administrator, his or her relationship with the citizens he or she serves, and actively engaging the citizenry in authentic discourse and participation (3) (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2003). The Denhardts (2003), in the context of the NPS, have called for an "affirmation of the soul" of public administration (p. 4). They want administrators to seek out ways to serve citizens while at the same time promoting the common good; consequently, improving the quality of life for all (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2003). Endeavoring to answer this call, the purpose of this research is to determine if public administrators at the local level can use Appreciative Inquiry (Ai) to increase citizen participation to enhance local government by exploring the feasibility of such an approach. The value of this research is that it will assist practitioners by educating them to the potential benefits or detriments of using an Ai approach to increase citizen participation and offering the approach as a tool to assist them in local governance in general. This study addresses a gap in the local government practitioner literature. The main question addressed by this article is as follows. In what way, if any, can Appreciative Inquiry be useful in increasing citizen participation at the local government level to improve local government? In short, this question explores whether Ai is feasible for public administrators at the local level regarding increasing citizen participation. This article first explores the citizen participation and Ai literatures. Second, it discusses the research strategy and design employed herein. Third, this paper reports ten themes identified from the data. Fourth, this article offers some findings for consideration. CITIZEN PARTICIPATION There are a multitude of techniques being used to increase citizen participation at the local government level. These various strategies include normative theories of public participation that focus on issues of competence and fairness (Webler & Tuler, 2000), citizen advisory councils, citizen panels, public surveys (e.g., Crosby, Kelly, & Schaefer, 1986; Kathlene & Martin, 1991; King, Feltey, & Susel, 1998; Parsons, 1990), and public forums (Farrell, 2000) as well as citizen juries (Hendriks, 2002). …


Content-dense news report important factual information about an event in direct, succinct manner. Information seeking applications such as information extraction, question answering and summarization normally assume all text they deal with is content-dense. Here we empirically test this assumption on news articles from the business, U.S. international relations, sports and science journalism domains. Our findings clearly indicate that about half of the news texts in our study are in fact not content-dense and motivate the development of a supervised content-density detector. We heuristically label a large training corpus for the task and train a two-layer classifying model based on lexical and unlexicalized syntactic features. On manually annotated data, we compare the performance of domain-specific classifiers, trained on data only from a given news domain and a general classifier in which data from all four domains is pooled together. Our annotation and prediction experiments demonstrate that the concept of content density varies depending on the domain and that naive annotators provide judgement biased toward the stereotypical domain label. Domain-specific classifiers are more accurate for domains in which content-dense texts are typically fewer. Domain independent classifiers reproduce better naive crowdsourced judgements. Classification prediction is high across all conditions, around 80%.


Reducing bit error rate and improving performance of modern coherent optical communication system is a significant issue. As the distance travelled by the information signal increases, bit error rate will degrade. Support Vector Machines are the most up to date machine learning method for error correction in optical transmission systems. Wavelet transform has been a popular method to signals processing. In this study, the properties of most used Haar and Daubechies wavelets are implemented for signals correction. Our results show that the bit error rate can be improved by using classification based on wavelet transforms (WT) and support vector machine (SVM).


Within the scope of phenomenology and in order to understand architecture, the role of the technical system is as important as those of the purpose of the building or its form. Mass construction and skeletal construction relate to the architectural theory concepts stereotomy and tectonics respectively, which are suitable for describing the fundamental structural and constructive form of architecture. These two systems became established as man built his first shelters and, so far, represented opposite sides of the building industry's possibilities. The development of new construction techniques and the relationship between research and technology have a great impact on architecture, although new processing methods and materials may not necessarily cause genuine tectonic changes. The technical dimension of architecture is analysed in this work describing how technical elements are built from materials, and then organised in systems. First, the paper examines the division of technical systems in two categories (massive systems and skeletal systems); then it studies timber's modern production technologies and subsequently the paper critically analyses how these influence the architectural form. The paper concludes that a third archetypal technical system can be perceived with the assembly of surface elements, joining both the multifunctional aspect of the massive systems and the flexibility of the skeletal systems, this third category being fundamental in phenomenological terms.


Cyberspace is everywhere in todays world and has significant implications not only for global economic activity, but also for international politics and transnational social relations. This compilation addresses for the first time the cyberization of international relations - the growing dependence of actors in IR on the infrastructure and instruments of the internet, and the penetration of cyberspace into all fields of their activities. The volume approaches this topical issue in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary fashion, bringing together scholars from disciplines such as IR, security studies, ICT studies and philosophy as well as experts from everyday cyber-practice. In the first part, concepts and theories are presented to shed light on the relationship between cyberspace and international relations, discussing implications for the discipline and presenting fresh and innovative theoretical approaches. Contributions in the second part focus on specific empirical fields of activity (security, economy, diplomacy, cultural activity, transnational communication, critical infrastructure, cyber espionage, social media, and more) and address emerging challenges and prospects for international politics and relations.


Enhancing industrial sustainability by converting whey into alternative high value-added products is a scientific trend in food science and technology. However, without other ingredients, rennet, or sour, whey has an unappetizing flavor. This sensory challenge can be overcome by blending it with citrus flavor from orange juice. This study assessed a micro-filtered beverage from whey and orange juice without enzymatic treatment. Four formulations (27:10, 8.6:10, 2.4:10 and 1:10 v/v whey:juice ratio) were processed through a 1.4 μm microfiltration system with four different transmembrane pressures (1, 2, 3, and 4.15 bar) and then stored at 5 °C for 28 days. The micro-filtered beverage was analyzed for physicochemical, sensorial and microbial changes. It was possible overcome the technological challenges of orange juice microfiltration without enzymatic treatment with high transmembrane pressures. The whey:orange juice ratio was also decisive for permeation. A clear beverage with lower viscosity, turbidity, and protein levels was obtained, without altering mineral concentrations thus showing that the product has good capacity for hydration. The beverage presented good microbiological quality and remained stable for 28 days at 5 °C. Sensory evaluation data indicate that the beverage can be directed to young people and women, regardless of their physical activity. The combination of whey and orange juice can be explored industrially as a micro-filtered beverage, with satisfactory results of physicochemical, microbiological and sensory acceptance.


The number of adult cancer survivors in the United States has exceeded 13 million and continues to rise, yet care for these survivors continues to be poorly coordinated and their needs remain inadequately addressed. As one solution to this growing problem, the Institute of Medicine in 2006 recommended the delivery of a survivorship care plan (SCP) to each patient completing active treatment. The American College of Surgeons Commission on Cancer subsequently published its Program Standard 3.3, requiring accredited programs to implement treatment summaries and SCPs by 2015, to help improve communication, quality, and coordination of care for cancer survivors. As practices and cancer centers around the country have undertaken SCP implementation efforts, myriad barriers to their preparation and delivery have emerged, with time and human resource burden top among these, in addition to a lack of proven outcomes. Fortunately, a growing number of publications document practical and feasible delivery models, and an increasingly robust body of research on stakeholder preferences is available to focus SCP implementation efforts.


The wave of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) is bringing a new vision of the manufacturing industry. In manufacturing, one of the buzzwords of the moment is "Smart production". Smart production involves manufacturing equipment with many sensors that can generate and transmit large amounts of data. These data and information from manufacturing operations are however not shared in the organization. Therefore the organization is not using them to learn and improve their operations. To address this problem, the authors implemented in an Industry 4.0 laboratory an instance of an emerging technical standard specific for the manufacturing industry. Global manufacturing experts consider the Reference Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI4.0) as one of the corner stones for the implementation of Industry 4.0. The instantiation contributed to organizational learning in the laboratory by collecting and sharing up-to-date information concerning manufacturing equipment. This article discusses and generalizes the experience and outlines future research directions.


SLC26A6 (also known as putative anion transporter 1 [PAT1]) is a Cl–/HCO3– exchanger expressed at the luminal membrane of enterocytes where it facilitates intestinal Cl– and fluid absorption. Here, high-throughput screening of 50,000 synthetic small molecules in cells expressing PAT1 and a halide-sensing fluorescent protein identified several classes of inhibitors. The most potent compound, the pyrazolo-pyrido-pyrimidinone PAT1inh-B01, fully inhibited PAT1-mediated anion exchange (IC50 ~350 nM), without inhibition of the related intestinal transporter SLC26A3 (also known as DRA). In closed midjejunal loops in mice, PAT1inh-B01 inhibited fluid absorption by 50%, which increased to >90% when coadministered with DRA inhibitor DRAinh-A270. In ileal loops, PAT1inh-B01 blocked fluid absorption by >80%, whereas DRAinh-A270 was without effect. In colonic loops, PAT1inh-B01 was without effect, whereas DRAinh-A270 completely blocked fluid absorption. In a loperamide constipation model, coadministration of PAT1inh-B01 with DRAinh-A270 increased stool output compared with DRAinh-A270 alone. These results provide functional evidence for complementary and region-specific roles of PAT1 and DRA in intestinal fluid absorption, with PAT1 as the predominant anion exchanger in mouse ileum. We believe that PAT1inh-B01 is a novel tool to study intestinal ion and fluid transport and perhaps a drug candidate for small intestinal hyposecretory disorders such as cystic fibrosis–related meconium ileus and distal intestinal obstruction syndrome.


The Intersolar Commonwealth is in turmoil as the Living Dream's deadline for launching its Pilgrimage into the Void draws closer. Not only is the Ocisen Empire fleet fast approaching on a mission of genocide, but also an internecine war has broken out between the post-human factions over the destiny of humanity. Countering the various and increasingly desperate agents and factions is Paula Myo, a ruthlessly single-minded investigator, beset by foes from her distant past and colleagues of dubious allegiance...but she is fast losing a race against time. At the heart of all this is Edeard the Waterwalker, who once lived a long time ago deep inside the Void. He is the messiah of Living Dream, and visions of his life are shared by, and inspire billions of humans. It is his glorious, captivating story that is the driving force behind Living Dream's Pilgrimage, a force that is too strong to be thwarted. As Edeard nears his final victory the true nature of the Void is finally revealed.


In the long run laminated glass interlayers are sensitive to weather conditions. Several studies have been carried out that aim at understanding the consequences of moisture and solar radiation on adhesion to glass and on the mechanical response of the composite pane. In particular, solar radiation seems to produce the strongest effects on the bulk properties of PVB, modifying the coupling capability of laminated glass plates exposed to the direct sunlight. Such problem has been already studied by the authors via dynamic tests on small laminated glass specimens subjected to artificial UV light; however, due to the methodology of these mechanical tests, it was not possible to repeat the experiment on the same specimens subjected to different exposition times, and it was not possible to investigate the laws of accumulation of the consequences of weathering actions. In fact, solar radiation could produce different effects on the structure of material, but only superimposed consequences can be observed. In order to better understand the time progression of the phenomenon, creep tests were performed on laminated glass beams subjected to four-point bending; the specimens were tested in correspondence of definite time intervals of UV exposure. The total amount of time will be defined according to the observed variation of test results with respect to the total exposure. The effects of UV radiation are highlighted directly comparing the displacement history diagram and successively evaluated analyzing the mechanical parameters that describe the rheological behavior.


The article develops Sartre's remarks on the paradox of the actor in two ways. Firstly, it derives from them an 'existential ontology' of mimetic performance -- an 'onto-mimetology'. Secondly, it uses this reconstruction in order to put pressure on Sartre's analogy of the actor with bad faith. In grasping the problem of acting from a Sartrean perspective, I show that this analogy is not as clear cut as he assumes and that a crucial difference exists between the situation of the theatre and that of bad faith. To master the paradox of his own being I argue the actor's technique indeed utilizes the same 'nonpersuasiveness-of-belief ' thesis identified by Sartre as the condition of possibility for bad faith, yet in the actor's case it need not necessitate the condition of bad faith. In conclusion, I propose that through the notion of play, the actor sheds intriguing light on Sartre's notion of freedom.


Guanine-rich oligonucleotides are able to adopt secondary DNA structures, known as G-quadruplexes. Such G-rich sequences are found in human telomeres, promoter regions of oncogenes, 5′ untranslated regions (UTRs) of mRNAs and human intronic sequences. Studies have shown that small molecules can induce anti-cancer effect through stabilizing or promoting G-quadruplex formation. In order to design and develop a potent drug, structural details on the interaction between small molecules and G-quadruplexes are invaluable. In this study, we seek to understand the structural determinants involved in the interaction between G-quadruplexes and small molecules. NMR spectroscopy is employed to resolve the structures of two intramolecular G-quadruplexes bound to small molecules. These resolved complexes allow us to structurally design new potent drugs for their application in anti-cancer therapy.


A thin layer of a SU-8 submicrometer pattern produced by holographic lithography was directly used as the dry-etching mask in a chemically assisted ion-beam-etching system. With optimized etching parameters, etching selectivity of 7:1 was achieved together with a smooth vertical profile. As an application, a half-wavelength retardation plate for a 1.55-microm wavelength was produced and evaluated.


This thesis deals with the development, realisation and testing of an array of sensors for determining the state of a washing process. To combine the sensors in a single array, some techniques are used. First, the sensors which are integrated are chosen with respect to their fabrication materials and technique. By matching these, the sensors could be combined into a single multi-purpose structure. A reduction of the number of connecting wires is the result, and the single structure will measure all parameters at the same spot in the solution. In addition, together with sensors, also actuators are integrated. This enables the possibility of performing stimulus-response measurements. Such experiments are based on recording the response of solution components on an imposed local disturbance. Sometimes, such dynamic measurements give new information on the solution. Finally, the combination of sensor readings, together with the results of the stimulus-response measurements, yields a set of data which can be used for smart interpretation and decisions.
The final result is a system consisting of a small noble metal structure, applied on a carrier, with a size of only one square millimetre. By scheduling this structure in several operational modes, the following washing parameters can be measured: temperature, bleach activity, electrolyte conductivity, movement of the washing water and the temperature dependency of the electrolyte conductivity. The latter one can give information on the individual types of charged particles in the solution. Finally, some suggestions are given in order to implement washing parameters that are missing in the measurable set of variables.


Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are crucial to the ability of govern mental agencies and business to record, manage and analyze geographic data efficiently. They provide methods of analysis and simulation on geographic data that were previously infeasible using traditional hardcopy maps. Creation of realistic 3-D sceneries by overlaying satellite imagery over digital elevation models (DEM) was not possible using paper maps. Determination of suitable areas for construction that would have the fewest environmental impacts once required manual tracing of different map sets on mylar sheets; now it can be done in real time by GIS. Geographic information processing has significant space and time require ments. This thesis concentrates on techniques which can make existing GIS more efficient by considering these issues: Data Structure, Boolean Operations on Geographic Data, Concurrency Control. Geographic data span multiple dimensions and consist of geometric shapes such as points, lines, and areas, which cannot be efficiently handled using a traditional one-dimensional data structure. We therefore first survey spatial data structures for geographic data and then show how a spatial data structure called an R-tree can be used to augment the performance of many existing GIS. iii Boolean operations on geographic data are fundamental to the spatial anal ysis common in geographic data processing. They allow the user to analyze geographic data by using operators such as AND, OR, NOT on geographic ob jects. An example of a boolean operation query would be, "Find all regions that have low elevation AND soil type clay." Boolean operations require signif icant time to process. We present a generalized solution that could significantly improve the time performance of evaluating complex boolean operation queries. Concurrency control on spatial data structures for geographic data processing is becoming more critical as the size and resolution of geographic databases increase. We present algorithms to enable concurrent access to R-tree spatial data structures so that efficient sharing of geographic data can occur in a multi user GIS environment.


TRAF3 tamps down B cell responsiveness to IL-6 to prevent excessive generation of antibody-producing cells. TRAF3 restrains plasma cells Upon exposure to antigen, B cells differentiate to generate antibody-secreting cells called plasma cells. Multiple myeloma is an incurable malignancy characterized by the accumulation of abnormal numbers of plasma cells. Noting that mutations in the gene encoding the adaptor protein TRAF3 are associated with some cases of multiple myeloma, Lin et al. found that plasma cell numbers were increased in mice with a B cell–specific deficiency in TRAF3. Loss of TRAF3 in B cells resulted in increased responsiveness to the cytokine IL-6, which mediates the development and survival of plasma cells under normal conditions. In B cells from wild-type mice, TRAF3 associated with a phosphatase that targeted a transcription factor downstream of the IL-6 receptor, suggesting that TRAF3 limits the accumulation of plasma cells by inhibiting IL-6 signaling. Tumor necrosis factor receptor–associated factor 3 (TRAF3) is an adaptor protein that inhibits signaling by CD40 and by the receptor for B cell–activating factor (BAFF) and negatively regulates homeostatic B cell survival. Loss-of-function mutations in TRAF3 are associated with human B cell malignancies, in particular multiple myeloma. The cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) supports the differentiation and survival of normal and neoplastic plasma cells. We found that mice with a deficiency in TRAF3 specifically in B cells (B-Traf3−/− mice) had about twice as many plasma cells as did their littermate controls. TRAF3-deficient B cells had enhanced responsiveness to IL-6, and genetic loss of IL-6 in B-Traf3−/− mice restored their plasma cell numbers to normal. TRAF3 inhibited IL-6 receptor (IL-6R)–mediated signaling by facilitating the association of PTPN22 (a nonreceptor protein tyrosine phosphatase) with the kinase Janus-activated kinase 1 (Jak1), which in turn blocked phosphorylation of the transcription factor STAT3 (signal transducer and activator of transcription 3). Consistent with these results, the number of plasma cells in the PTPN22-deficient mice was increased compared to that in the wild-type mice. Our findings identify TRAF3 and PTPN22 as inhibitors of IL-6R signaling in B cells and reveal a previously uncharacterized role for TRAF3 in the regulation of plasma cell differentiation.


In the discourse on modern management, the concept of flexibility is often mentioned as a desirable characteristic of firms and employees. Flexible organizations exhibit an ability to change in response to market changes. It should be clear, however, that a range of possibilities exist between "rigid" organizations and truly flexible ones. This range is discussed. Further, a firm's ability to demonstrate flexibility depends to a large degree on the flexibility exhibited by its employees. Firms exhibiting different degrees of flexibility have different demands on the flexibility of their coworkers, which means that a matching between supply and demand exists. Employee flexibility has several dimensions, which are also discussed as well as some conditions for a flexible work‐ cum lifestyle. The starting point for the discussion is the assumption that neither the firms themselves nor the surrounding society are especially adapted to a lifestyle of flexible work. Some measures to alleviate these conditions are proposed.


Brachyspira pilosicoli is an intestinal spirochaete that colonizes the large intestine of a variety of species of birds and animals, including human beings. Colonization can lead to local inflammation and to diarrhoea in a condition known as "intestinal spirochaetosis". This infection has been described in many countries throughout the world. In the colonization process the bacterium must cross the thick mucus blanket overlaying the colonic epithelium. Characteristically, B. pilosicoli then attaches by one cell end to the underlying epithelium, forming a dense "false brush border". The mechanisms involved in moving through the mucus layer, attaching to enterocytes and inducing local cellular damage are poorly understood. The lack of in vitro models to study these events has been a major constraint to understanding the pathogenesis of B. pilosicoli infections.
The work described in this thesis deals with i) the development of an in vitro model of spirochaete attachment by using cells in suspension (erythrocytes) and cell monolayers (Caco-2), ii) the attraction of B. pilosicoli to mucin, and iii) the effects of norepinephrine exposure on expression of virulence traits by B. pilosicoli.
Attachment assays conducted with erythrocytes from different species at different ratios and time intervals identified one human isolate (WesB) that adhered to goose and chicken erythrocyte at a 1:1000 ratio. This same strain, and an isolate from a pig (95/1000) also attached to Caco-2 cells. Transmission and scanning electron microscopy confirmed that the attachment resembled the in vivo situation. Exposure of the Caco-2 cells to B. pilosicoli resulted in actin rearrangements, damaged cell junctions and apoptosis. Caco-2 cells that were colonized with B. pilosicoli also demonstrated a significant up-regulation of interleukin-1s (IL-1s) and IL-8 expression, helping to confirm that the spirochaetes were inducing pathological changes in the cultured cells. Treatment of the monolayers with B. pilosicoli sonicates caused significant up-regulation of IL-1s, TNF-α, and IL-6, but culture supernatants and non-pathogenic Brachyspira innocens did not altered cytokine expression. Hence Il-8 expression was specifically associated with exposure to live B. pilosicoli cells.
For mucin attraction, 15 B. pilosicoli strains isolated from humans, pigs, chickens and dogs, and a control strain of Brachyspira hyodysenteriae, were analysed for their ability to enter solutions of hog gastric mucin in an in vitro capillary tube assay. Attraction started in a 2 % mucin solution, and then increased with increasing concentrations to peak at around 6 - 8 % mucin. Attraction varied from strain to strain. B. pilosicoli strain 95/1000 and B. hyodysenteriae strain B204 also were attracted to viscous solutions of polyvinylpyrillodone (PVP), in a manner mirroring the response to mucin. This suggested that as well as chemotaxis to mucin components, "viscotaxis" is involved in the attraction to mucin.
Finally, exposure of B. pilosicoli to norepinephrine enhanced the attachment to Caco-2 cells, chemotactic response to mucin, and spirochaete growth. Taken together, these in vitro studies have shed new light onto the pathogenic processes that are involved in intestinal spirochaetosis caused by B. pilosicoli.


The current success of deep neural networks (DNNs) in an increasingly broad range of tasks involving artificial intelligence strongly depends on the quality and quantity of labeled training data. In general, the scarcity of labeled data, which is often observed in many natural language processing tasks, is one of the most important issues to be addressed. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is a promising approach to overcoming this issue by incorporating a large amount of unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel scalable method of SSL for text classification tasks. The unique property of our method, Mixture of Expert/Imitator Networks, is that imitator networks learn to "imitate" the estimated label distribution of the expert network over the unlabeled data, which potentially contributes a set of features for the classification. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves the performance of several types of baseline DNNs. We also demonstrate that our method has the more data, better performance property with promising scalability to the amount of unlabeled data.


This article examines the response of Bishop Alphaeus Hamilton Zulu to the racism that was prevalent in both the church and society when he was elected as the first African Bishop of the Anglican Church in South Africa. Clergy, especially bishops, are by virtue of their ecclesial positions expected to transcend racial prejudices, to embrace all members of their churches and to transform their churches to multi-racial ones. This means that they have to deal with racial stereotypes both within the church and society at large. This study is based on interviews with key leaders of the Anglican Church who knew and worked with Bishop Zulu, as well as an analysis of media releases and minutes of meetings that he was part of and some that were written about him. This article argues that Bishop Zulu played a pivotal role in the fight against racism, through his episcopal ministry which brought politics and religion into a creative tension, when he worked as bishop, speaker of the Legislative Assembly in Natal and key founder of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). It also argues that church leaders must hold politics and religion together for their ministry to bring transformation to both the church and society.


IT WAS FALL 1979. The Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati was gathering for its annual meeting. The top item on the agenda was the Iranian hostage crisis and how to handle the anti-Iranian fervor that was growing in the United States. Particular attention went to a young boy in Wilmington, Ohio a small, closely knit farming community that was proud of its Quaker college, considered a beacon of tolerance and intellectualism. The fifth-grade boy on the meeting's agenda had an American mother and an Iranian father working at the college. Being the lone child in town with an Iranian connection made him the only target of abuse in the entire school system. The first sign of trouble, a large rock, flew through his bedroom window, shattering glass on him and landing in the crib of his baby sister. By the end of the week, things were so bad that school administrators decided to dismiss the boy fifteen minutes early every day. This would enable him to run home and lock the door before the other children caught up with him and beat him up, as they had done from the beginning of the hostage crisis. That child was my son, Jason. Although he had always been a confident and popular boy, he was never again able to fit into the social scene of his school. He carried the stigma of being "Iran Man" until graduation, and as an adult, he feels little desire to see any of his school colleagues again. As an Anglo-American Muslim, I'm now facing the same fears as I listen to people on the radio call for revenge, on both a local and an international level. As evidence points to Islamic extremists as responsible for the attack, I'm also glad to hear commentators admonish the callers to differentiate between the terrorists and the rest of America's Muslim population. Students will have questions-not only about the terrorist attack on the United States, but also about Islamic beliefs and practices. Listed below are some questions that teachers are probably grappling with in the classroom, as well as some comments that may help answer those questions. Throughout the article, I've listed websites where teachers and students can find more extensive answers. At the end of the article are some classroom discussion questions and activities that relate to the questions. How do the world's Muslims feel about what happened? Is Islam really a religion of violence, as the media sometimes claims? It's become obvious that the terrorist acts were, indeed, the work of men who refer to themselves as "Muslims." I don't consider them Muslims, and the majority of the world's Muslims would agree. Our sentiments are exactly the same as those of Jews, Christians, and anyone else who is disgusted with this attack on innocent civilians. The attack does not represent Islam. The perpetrators, in their efforts to justify their actions, can pretend that it does, but no religious teaching in Islam justifies the killing of innocent bystanders. In fact, such killing is forbidden by the faith. So although these men may be touted by a small minority as "martyrs for Islam," the rest of the Islamic world has been quick to point out that their actions actually contradict the very teachings of the religion they profess to follow. The murder of innocent people is prohibited not only in the Islamic holy text, the Qur'an, but also in the Shari'a, or Islamic Law, which forbids the killing of innocent people, even within the context of a full-scale war. There is, however, a difference between how religion teaches us to behave and how we, as human beings around the world, fail to live up to that sacred standard. That's the real tragedy of recent events in New York, rural Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. Muslims around the world have condemned the attack. Even leaders who have traditionally been antagonistic toward the United States, such as Mu'ammar Qadhafi of Libya, have expressed sorrow over the loss of U.S. civilian lives. Large Islamic organizations in the United States have issued official condemnations and messages of condolence. …


Floods are one of the most common hazards in the world, affect ing people's lives and livelihoods. Flood hazard mapping and flood shelters suitability analysis are v ital elements in appropriate land use planning for flood-prone areas. This paper describes application of Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Info rmation Systems (GIS) in identifying flood hazard zones and flood shelters and are therefore important tools for planners and decision makers. The purpose of this article is to describe a simp le and efficient methodology to accurately delineate flood inundated areas, flood-hazard areas, and suitable areas for flood shelter to min imize flood impacts. Possible extent of flooding and suitable location flood shelter sites were modeled and mapped for Sindh Province in Pakistan, using the software ArcGIS model builder. The output was validated using inundation maps based on flood events that took place in 2010 in Pakistan. These were mapped using object-based image analysis (OBIA) imp lemented in eCognition software. The catastrophic flood of 2010 inundated a total area of 7579 km2, while the modeled result indicated the hazard area to be 6216 km2 out of 46138 km2. Discrepancies in modeled and mapped results are insignificant and acceptable considering the manual flood management interventions which are beyond the capability of models to represent. Thus, this method is robust enough to develop flood hazard zoning maps and map shelter sites for flood management.


Sacrifice is an act and a concept of considerable importance to contemporary conflict. However, interpretations of the role and nature of sacrifice vary historically, culturally, and situationally. This article discusses the various ways that sacrifice has been interpreted in the anthropological literature, including an analysis of forms of conflict, negotiation, and sacrifice pertaining to Bougainville. Profes sional conciliators and government emissaries negotiating a solution to the Bougainville conflict brought into play ideologies and processes they often claimed were based on an understanding of indigenous ways of resolving conflict. A critical assessment of this claim discusses the possible effects of the co-option of ritual and traditional means of negotiation and considers what is lost in translation.


Almost all important decisions in people's lives entail risky and delayed consequences. Regardless of whether we make choices involving health, wealth, love or education, almost every choice involves costs and benefits that are uncertain and materialize over time. Because risk and delay often arise simultaneously, theories of decision making should be capable of explaining how behavior under risk and over time interacts. There is, in fact, a growing body of evidence indicating important interactions between behaviorally revealed risk tolerance and patience. Risk taking behavior is delay dependent, and time discounting is risk dependent. Here we show that the inherent uncertainty of future events conjointly with people's proneness to weight probabilities nonlinearly generates a unifying framework for explaining time-dependent risk taking, risk-dependent time discounting, preferences for late resolution of uncertainty, and several other puzzling interaction effects between risk and time.


We propose a reduction for non-convex optimization that can (1) turn an stationary-point finding algorithm into an local-minimum finding one, and (2) replace the Hessian-vector product computations with only gradient computations. It works both in the stochastic and the deterministic settings, without hurting the algorithm's performance.
As applications, our reduction turns Natasha2 into a first-order method without hurting its performance. It also converts SGD, GD, SCSG, and SVRG into algorithms finding approximate local minima, outperforming some best known results.


The ICT revolution of the last decades impacted scientific communication as it has impacted many other forms of communications, changing the way in which articles are delivered and how they can be discovered. However, the impact of ICT on the research itself has been much more profound, introducing digital tools to the way in which researchers gather data, perform analyses, and exchange results. This brought new, digital forms of research output, and disseminating those calls for changes deeply impact the core format of the scientific article. In 2009, Elsevier introduced the "Article of the Future" project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions. First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories — such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly. We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results. The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?


Consumption of moist snuff and other smokeless tobacco products in the United States almost tripled from 1972 through 1991 (1). Long-term use of smokeless tobacco is associated with nicotine addiction and increased risk of oral cancer (2)--the incidence of which could increase if young persons who currently use smokeless tobacco continue to use these products frequently (1). To monitor trends in the prevalence of use of smokeless tobacco products, CDC's 1991 National Health Interview Survey-Health Promotion and Disease Prevention supplement (NHIS-HPDP) collected information on snuff and chewing tobacco use and smoking from a representative sample of the U.S. civilian, noninstitutionalized population aged > or = 18 years. This report summarizes findings from this survey.


Abstract. GeoBIM, the integration of 3D geoinformation (Geo) with building information models (BIM), is a subject of increasing attention in both domains. A well-known practical challenge for this integration is the mixed state of software support for open standards in each domain that would ease the integration. This is often known by practitioners but poorly documented. In order to solve this problem, we devised the GeoBIM benchmark, in which we compile the experiences of volunteering participants, who perform a guided study to test the software they are most familiar with against a few provided datasets structured in open standards. The aim of the tests is to improve the knowledge of the state of the art in the software support for GeoBIM open standards and to identify points for improvement. In this paper, we present the design of the benchmark, especially explaining and discussing the chosen data to be used with their connected issues to be tested, and some initial results.


The field of Intellectual Property has seen in the last decade the most significant changes since its birth following the invention of printing. On the one side, the technological revolution of the Internet and accompanied technologies brought about a process of commodification and propertization - a vast increase in informational goods and services that are protected by property rules (either by law or by other means such as technology, which itself is protected by law against circumvention). On the other side, variety of calls amounting to a social movement advocates a counter process that will halt and indeed reduce propriety regime. The Public Domain is a key feature of this movement, although, in the course of this debate the exact meaning of the Public Domain has also changed. Once it was referred to as including creations for which IP protection had expired. Then, it encompassed also creations on which statutory exceptions to IP, such as free use, are made active, and now it may refer to any resource for which legal rights to access and use for free are held broadly. The paper adopts the broad definition of the Public Domain, which is similar to Commons and questions the dichotomous division between IP and the Public Domain, proposing a more complex view of property rights, in general, and of intellectual property, in particular. Common view places Law and Economics on the pro-properization side of the debate. The paper argues that this is inaccurate and that the law and economic analysis is more complex than what is usually presented. More specifically it argues that on a positive level of analysis the ongoing commodification of information can be perceived as an inevitable phenomenon, based on the traditional analysis of Harold Demsetz, and that the accusations of the pro Public Domain camp against the course of legislative and judicial expansion of IP is itself an insight of law and economics. On the normative level of analysis the paper shows a more complex law and economics attitude in the context of this debate: first, economists generally favor free markets over government regulation, but in the context of intellectual property it is not clear whether creating or broadening intellectual property rights by law are on the side of free market or of government intervention. Second, within the prime normative goal of law and economics - maximizing the welfare of society - IP plays contradicting functions. Without intellectual property, incentives to create will be lacking and scientific progress would cease or significantly slow down, decreasing the welfare of society. However, most new inventions are based on older ones and thus full propertization of every idea and expression would slow down scientific and cultural progress. The paper, therefore, argues that in order to enhance society's welfare we do need a significant Public Domain. The paper pays special attention to the economics of the digital realm, which ought to change the parameters underlying the traditional economic rationale of intellectual property and thus of the Public Domain. One of the most important features in this context relates to the state of technology and its pace of change, traditionally taken as an exogenous variable within the law and economic analysis. The paper argues that the state of technology ought to be endogenized, transforming the equilibrium of traditional analysis and also affecting the analysis of traditional market failures such as high transaction cost, which may no longer play a crucial role in the choice of legal rules.


The Neuregulin is a member of the epidermal growth factors (EGF) family of receptor kinases, was originally identified as the product of the transforming gene derived from chemically induced rat neuroblastoms. A variety of different protein isoforms are produced from single Neuregulin gene. Four distinct vertebrate gene encode Neuregulin, prosaically named NRG1, NRG2, NRG3, and NRG4. Most of biological function related to NRG1 which are widely acting on brain and nervous plasticity, cardiac muscle development and also as mediator skeletal muscle metabolism. The expression of NRGs mRNA in different tissues (brain, cardiac and skeletal muscles and adipose tissue) has been observed, but its expression in nervous system element, particularly in brain is well documented. A change in serum NRG1 has been observed in patient with schizophrenia and also considered as a biomarker of cardiovascular fitness. In addition, NRG1 injection has shown to improve glucose tolerance test, increased serum leptin, weight gain prevention, and reduce food intake in NRG1-treated mince. The purpose of this short review paper was to see the responses of NRGs to different types of acute physical exercise or exercise training. In this regard, it seems exercise at different intensities should be a good candidate for future study in relation to NRGs response.


We quantify the stellar abundances of neutron-rich r-process nuclei in cosmological zoom-in simulations of a Milky Way-mass galaxy from the Feedback In Realistic Environments project. The galaxy is enriched with r-process elements by binary neutron star (NS) mergers and with
iron and other metals by supernovae. These calculations include key hydrodynamic mixing processes not present in standard semi-analytic chemical evolution models, such as galactic winds and hydrodynamic flows associated with structure formation. We explore a range of models for the rate and delay time of NS mergers, intended to roughly bracket the wide range of models consistent with current observational constraints. We show that NS mergers can
produce [r-process/Fe] abundance ratios and scatter that appear reasonably consistent with observational constraints. At low metallicity, [Fe/H] ≾ −2, we predict there is a wide range of stellar r-process abundance ratios, with both supersolar and subsolar abundances. Low metallicity stars or stars that are outliers in their r-process abundance ratios are, on average, formed at high redshift and located at large galactocentric radius. Because NS mergers are rare, our results are not fully converged with respect to resolution, particularly at low metallicity. However, the uncertain rate and delay time distribution of NS mergers introduce an uncertainty in the r-process abundances comparable to that due to finite numerical resolution. Overall, our results are consistent with NS mergers being the source of most of the r-process nuclei in the Universe.


A striking feature of 2 Peter 2,10b-22 is the author's multiple references to similarities and differences between humans and animals. This essay illuminates this aspect of 2 Peter 2,10b-22 by investigating comparison of humans to animals by writers older than, and (roughly) contemporary with, 2 Peter. Comparison of humans to animals is very common in the ancient world. Such comparison can be neutral, positive, or negative. 2 Peter's comparison of humans with animals is of this last kind. Although 2 Peter's negative comparison of humans to animals is generally similar to comparisons made by others, the specific ways 2 Peter compares them are unique.


In this paper, a new genre of spin-transfer torque (STT) MRAM is proposed, in which bidirectional writing is achieved using thermoelectrically controlled magnonic current as an alternative to conventional electric current. The device uses a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ), which is adjacent to a nonmagnetic metallic and a ferrite film. This film stack is heated or cooled by a Peltier element, which creates a bidirectional magnonic pulse in the ferrite film. Conversion of magnons to spin current occurs at the ferrite-metal interface, and the resulting STT is used to achieve fast ( ~ nanosecond) precessional switching of the ferromagnetic free layer in the MTJ. Compared to the electric-current-driven STT-MRAM with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA), thermoelectric STT-MRAM reduces the overall magnetization switching energy by more than 40% for nanosecond switching, combined with a write error rate (WER) of less than 10-9 and a lifetime of ten years or higher. The combination of higher thermal activation energy, subnanosecond read/write speed, improved tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR), and tunnel barrier reliability make thermoelectric STT-MRAM a promising choice for future nonvolatile memory applications.


This project examines trends in power dynamics in contemporary retellings of children's fairy tales in regard to gender and sexuality. It opens with a brief history of the fairy tale genre and the foundation of the Western fairy tale canon. I will primarily analyze The Walt Disney Company's recent films, Brave, Frozen, The Princess and the Frog and Tangled as well as Emma Donoghue's short fiction collection, Kissing the Witch and several tales from the feminist anthology Don't Bet on the Prince, compiled by Jack Zipes. Though there will be intersections, and brief discussions, of race and social class, the focus will be shifting gender norms in fairy tale retellings.


In a little-known episode of the Cold War that challenges many common assumptions, North Korea forged extensive political, economic, military and cultural relations with the small South American-Caribbean coastal state of Guyana in the 1970s and 1980s. During this time, Guyana was ruled by an authoritarian socialist regime under Forbes Burbham, whose unorthodox conception of "socialism" was viewed skeptically by Communist countries other than North Korea. Burnham's program of "co-operative socialism," which envisaged a population strictly obedient to his own wishes as the supreme leader, was distinctly similar to the juche philosophy espoused by the long-time North Korean dictator, Kim Il-Sung. Burnham deeply admired North Korea's economic and military "achievements," attributing them to the strict obedience of the North Korean populace to the wishes of Kim Il-Sung. Burnham envisaged a similar role for himself in Guyana and attempted to import various North Korean approaches to socialist education and culture. Guyana came to resemble North Korea in some important respects, but it gradually moved away from this pattern after Burnham's death in 1985.


This article reports the findings the researchers obtained from a study of prominent civic education teachers in Hong Kong with regard to how they perceived national identification and the nurturing of national identification through civic education in Hong Kong schools. A qualitative method of data collection by in-depth semi-structured interviews was engaged. Original quotes are given whenever necessary so that readers can understand how the arguments in the article were derived and can arrive at their own conclusions. The teachers in general believed that national identity is ethnicity-based. But they agreed that national identity should coexist with other local and global civic identities. All of the teachers agreed that their schools worked assiduously in nurturing national identity. However, they also pointed out that a top-down compulsory national education programme, aimed at glorifying the nation, would not work in Hong Kong. Alternatively, students would accept civic education with a fair representation of the nation that allowed for critical judgment.


are trying to capitalize on the success of Las Vegas and Atlantic City in attracting tourists and new money through gaming. The current wave of public programing sentiment is due to increasing fiscal constraints at the state and local level, coupled with an increasing demand on government to provide services. The potential for windfall profits that increase jobs, tax revenues, real estate investments, and general economic and community enhancement makes gaming attractive. Concerns continue to center around morality and religious issues, compulsive gambling, and the impact of gaming on community life in general and the culture of the Native American Indian in particular.


We introduce a theoretical scheme to study defect energy levels and band alignments at semiconductor–oxide interfaces. The scheme relies on hybrid functionals to overcome the band gap underestimation typically achieved with semilocal density functionals. For atomically localized defects, the more accurate description achieved with hybrid functionals does not lead to significant shifts of the charge transition levels, provided these levels are referred to a common reference potential. This result effectively decouples the shifts of the band edges with respect to the defect levels. We also show that relative shifts of conduction and valence band edges as determined by exact nonlocal exchange lead to band offsets in excellent agreement with experimental values for several semiconductor–oxide interfaces. The proposed scheme is illustrated through a series of applications, including the dangling bond defects in silicon and germanium, the charge state of the O2 molecule during silicon oxidation, and the oxygen vacancy in Si–SiO2–HfO2 stacks.


This paper examines one specific question:  What support do students in Enabling Education need to learn the behaviours, knowledge and attitudes required to succeed in tertiary education, employment and life? Success appears in many guises. It can mean achieving officially desired outcomes such as retention, completion and employment. It can also mean achieving less measurable outcomes such as deep learning, wellbeing and active citizenship. The paper first introduces an overarching success framework before exploring how the widely used student engagement pedagogy can support learners to achieve both official and personal success outcomes. It then develops two specific constructs applicable to Enabling Education as found in student engagement: facilitated peer learning and active citizenship. Peer learning is here connected to tutor supported but peer facilitated mentoring; active citizenship to educational experiences in classrooms, institutions and workplaces that support flexibility, resilience, openness to change and diversity. The paper includes examples of how facilitated peer learning and active citizenship can build success in practice.


In this thesis impact loads against offshore pipelines are studied. Impact loads are often associated with accidents, such as an anchor hooking. A pipeline subjected to an anchor hooking may experience severe deformations and a complex stress and strain history. Local deformation will occur when the anchor hits the pipe. Then the pipe may be dragged along the sea bed until the anchor is released or the anchor chain snaps. Axial forces, which increase as the pipeline deflects, will drag the pipe back against its initial position. Fracture may occur in the area where the anchor hits. Experiments and numerical analyses are applied to investigate the problem. The experiments consisted of two tests, impact and stretching. Scaled pipes were first impacted in the pendulum accelerator at Department of Structural Engineering, NTNU, Trondheim.Stretching of the dented pipes was performed at Statoil's laboratory in Trondheim. Fracture occurred in all the pipes during the stretch tests. Material test specimens were taken from the pipe wall and tested in the laboratory at NTNU. A material model, including a constitutive relation and a fracture criterion, were calibrated for use in numerical analyses. Strain hardening and strain rate sensitivity was accounted for in the constitutive relation, and isotropic hardening was assumed.Notched test specimens were tested to capture the effect of stress triaxiality on the fracture strain. The pipes were modeled using Abaqus/Explicit and the experiments were recreated numerically.Both shell and volume element models were used. The global response in the experiments and the numerical simulations agreed very well. A mesh sensitivity study revealed that a large number of elements is required to accurately describe the plastic strains in the critical area. A study of the stress situation in the critical element indicated that isotropic hardening may underestimate the strains and that the cyclic hardening properties of the material should be further investigated.


Objective: The objective of this selective EBM review is to determine whether or not Phlogenzym (or ERC) effective in reducing moderate to severe osteoarthritis pain in adults. Study Design: Review of three randomized controlled trials in the English language from 2001 to 2006. Data Sources: Two double blind RCTs and one open RCT was found using Cochrane Library EBM Online Database, Ovid Medline, and PubMed Online. Outcomes Measured: Each of the three studies measured for pain at rest, pain with motion, and restricted function at baseline assessing efficacy using the Lequesne's Algofunctional Index, visual analog scales, and global judgment. The participants were assessed at baseline, during, and at the end of the study. Results: Two double blind RCTs and one open RCT were included in this review and it was found that phlogenzym did not benefit osteoarthritis symptom improvement. Adverse events were reported in the two double blind RCTs. Conclusions: The results of the three studies reviewed demonstrated that phlogenzym does have association with minimal osteoarthritis symptom reduction, but does not provide adequate statistical difference between the intervention and control.


Electrospinning process is a simple and widely used method for producing polymeric nanofibres. However, despite its popularity, significant challenges remain in controlling the fibre deposition due to the complex nature of electrospinning process. The process is renowned for its chaotic motion of fibre deposition, also known as the whipping instability. This instability is caused by electrostatic and fluid dynamics interactions of the charged jet and it is partly responsible for the thinning of the fibres into nanoscale diameters. Due to the instability, an electrospinning process typically deposits random orientated fibres in a circular deposition area. Furthermore, there is no control over the location where the fibres land on the collector electrode except that the fibres always travel through the shortest trajectory between the source and the collector electrodes. In this study, an alternative controlled deposition technique was proposed based on electric field manipulation (EFM). The main hypothesis of this study is that a consistent and repeatable method of controlled deposition can be achieved by using EFM. EFM was achieved by introducing a pair of charged auxiliary electrodes positioned adjacent and perpendicular to the fibre deposition direction. The applied voltage of either direct current (dc) or time-varying (ac) voltage at the auxiliary electrodes act as control to influence the spatial location and size of the deposition area. Samples were produced on black paper substrates and scanned into greyscale images. An image analysis technique was developed to measure the shift and size of the deposition area. A computer simulation was used to calculate the electric field strength and to simulate the behaviour of fibre response based on the trajectory of a charged particle. An image analysis based on greyscale intensity measurement was also developed to examine the uniformity of the deposition area. Finally, fibre characterisation was carried out to examine the fibre morphology, diameter, and orientation based on scanning electron micrographs.
The results from this study showed that EFM can provide a consistent and repeatable control of the deposition area. When the auxiliary electrodes were independently charged with two dc voltages, it was observed that the deposition area moved away from the most positive electrode. The magnitude of shift of the deposition area was found to increase linearly with voltage difference between the auxiliary electrodes. Furthermore, the aspect ratio of the deposition area (ratio of width over height) decreased linearly with base voltage i.e. lower of the two auxiliary electrode voltages. These two controls were found to act independently from each other and can be described as two separate controls i.e. voltage difference for spatial location and base voltage for aspect ratio of the deposition area. A similar response was observed in simulation i.e. the particle moved away from the most positive electrode. Simulation results also showed that the x-axis component of the electric field (Ex) was responsible for the shift in location and the reduction of aspect ratio of the deposition area. When the auxiliary electrodes were charged with two antiphase time-varying voltages, continuous scanning of the electrospinning jet was observed producing a wide electrospun fibre mat. It was first thought the smooth oscillation of a sine wave would produce a more uniform deposition pattern compared to a triangle wave, but the results showed otherwise. The inferior uniformity of the sine wave sample was found due to the variability of the jet scanning speed when compared to the constant speed achieved when using a triangle wave. It was also observed that the deposition pattern can be further improved by using two clipped triangle wave voltages. The results open up the possibility for further exploiting the control voltage to achieve the desired deposition pattern.
Two case studies were presented to demonstrate the applicability of the technique in real electrospinning applications. In the first case study, it was demonstrated that the continuous scanning of electrospinning jet was capable of eliminating the stripe deposition pattern which is commonly associated to a multi-spinneret electrospinning system. In the second case study, it was found that the alignment and distribution of aligned fibres in a gap electrospinning system can be improved by using the EFM technique. A new technique was also introduced to produce a multi-layer orientated fibre construct. These application examples showed that the EFM technique is ready for the production of engineered electrospun fibre constructs. This would extend the use of electrospun fibres to applications which is currently limited by geometrical constraints of the fibre constructs.


We report new results on the relatively novel task of automatic classification of blog author personality. Promisingly high classification accuracies have recently been reported for four important personality traits (Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness). But the blog corpus used in that work required careful preparation, and was consequently quite small (with less than a hundred authors; and less than half a million words). Here, we provide an initial report on the classification accuracies that can be achieved when classifiers conditioned on the small corpus are applied to a larger, automatically-acquired blog corpus, using lowergranularity personality data and substantially less manual preparation (with over a thousand bloggers, and approximately five million words). Predictably, results on the larger corpus are not as impressive as those on the smaller; nevertheless, they point the way forward for further work.


Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings. Eric C. Schneider. Princeton University Press, 1999. In the Bronx of the 1950s, gangs loomed large in the public consciousness. Especially in the consciousness of teenagers who were alternately terrified and enthralled by the sight of leather jacketed cadres who hung out on certain corners and who committed acts of mayhem on a nearly hourly basis..or so we fervently believed. Not a junior high school in New York was free of legend about the local hoods: the Red Wings in Italian Harlem, the Chaplains in Brooklyn, and in the Bronx, the truly ominous Fordham Baldies. The latter were famous for their haircuts, or more precisely, their lack of hair and hence their name. The Baldies ruled in the West Bronx and it was the Baldies, of course, who featured colorfully in Philip Kaufman's film The Wanderers (1979). In the East Bronx, the Baldies were matched in notoriety by the Golden Guineas, who prowled Morris Avenue and made Belmont safe for white (Italian) civilization. Scattered about, in occasional alliance but often in combat with the major gangs, were such loveable fraternities as the Pagans, the Imperial Lords, the Vampires, the Nordics, the Dragons, the Crowns, the Barons, and the Boca Chicas, each with their own ethnic, racial, neighborhood, and costuming requirements. Such was the mental landscape of Eisenhowerera New York City, and it is Eric Schneider's accomplishment that he has taken this compote of truth and legend, and turned a calm academic eye upon it. It turns out to be almost as scary as the legend. Schneider is a historian and an assistant dean at the University of Pennsylvania and a former New York kid, upper east side variety. He was no gang member but he seems to know the terrain pretty well and has certainly devoted considerable energy to probing the motives and methods of the New York street gang. In brief, it is Schneider's thesis that the gangs of New York in the SOs and 60s were responses to a rapidly changing and, for many, a declining economic situation. The ethnic neighborhoods faced dramatic alterations with the collapse of the old New York economy of semi and unskilled labor: in short, the old garment, printing, and light manufacturing economy that made New York hospitable to immigrants was evaporating in the 1950s. Combine that with the fervor for urban rebuilding, the surburbanization of white America, and the steady influx of Black and Latino immigrants to New York City, and there is a fine recipe for urban disorder. …


Abstract Nontarget risk assessment for transgenic crops should be case specific, depending on the plant, the transgene, and the intended release environment. We propose an ecological risk-assessment model that preserves the strengths and avoids the deficiencies of two other commonly used models, the ecotoxicology and nonindigenous-species models. In this model, locally occurring nontarget species are classified into groups according to their ecological function. Within each group, ecological criteria are used to select the species that are most likely to be affected by the transgenic crop. Initial experimental assessments are conducted in the laboratory and consist of two kinds of test: toxicity tests using purified transgene product, and whole-plant tests using intact transgenic plants. For nontarget natural enemy species, it will also be important to evaluate both direct bitrophic impacts and indirect tritrophic impacts.


Experience is one of the most valuable assets technicians and engineer have and may have been collected during many years and both from successful solutions as well as from very costly mistakes. Unfortunately industry rarely uses a systematic approach for experience reuse. This may be caused by the lack of efficient tools facilitating experience distribution and reuse. We propose a case-based approach and tool to facilitate experience reuse more systematically in industry. It is important that such a tool allows the technicians to give the problem case in a flexible way to increase acceptance and use. The proposed tool enables more structured handling of experience and is flexible and can be adapted to different situations and problems. The user is able to input text in a structured way and possibly in combination with other numeric or symbolic features. The system is able to identify and retrieve relevant similar experiences for reuse.


Transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have proven to be a powerful tool to identify genes associated with human diseases by aggregating cis-regulatory effects on gene expression. However, TWAS relies on building predictive models of gene expression, which are sensitive to the sample size and tissue on which they are trained. The Gene Tissue Expression Project has produced reference transcriptomes across 53 human tissues and cell types; however, the data is highly sparse, making it difficult to build polygenic models in relevant tissues for TWAS. Here, we propose fQTL, a multi-tissue, multivariate model for mapping expression quantitative trait loci and predicting gene expression. Our model decomposes eQTL effects into SNP-specific and tissue-specific components, pooling information across relevant tissues to effectively boost sample sizes. In simulation, we demonstrate that our multi-tissue approach outperforms single-tissue approaches in identifying causal eQTLs and tissues of action. Using our method, we fit polygenic models for 13,461 genes, characterized the tissue-specificity of the learned cis-eQTLs, and performed TWAS for Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia, identifying 107 and 382 associated genes, respectively.


A formidable and influential work, Language and Death sheds a highly original light on issues central to Continental philosophy, literary theory, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and speech-act theory. Focusing especially on the incompatible philosophical systems of Hegel and Heidegger within the space of negativity, Giorgio Agamben offers a rigorous reading of numerous philosophical and poetic works to examine how these issues have been traditionally explored. Agamben argues that the human being is not just "speaking" and "mortal" but irreducibly "social" and "ethical."Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy. He is the author of Means without End (2000), Stanzas (1993), and The Coming Community (1993), all published by the University of Minnesota Press. Karen E. Pinkus is professor of French and Italian at the University of Southern California. Michael Hardt is professor of literature and romance studies at Duke University.


For the Morpho Challenge 2009 we present an algorithm for unsupervised morphological analysis called Promodes 1 which is based on a probabilistic generative model. The model considers segment boundaries as hidden variables and includes probabilities for letter transitions within segments. Promodes purely concentrates on segmenting words whereas its labeling method is simplistic. Morpheme labels are the segments themselves. The algorithm can be employed in dierent degrees of supervision. For the challenge, however, we demonstrate three unsupervised versions. The first one uses a simple segmenting algorithm on a small subset of the data which is based on letter succession probabilities in substrings and then estimates the model parameters using a maximum likelihood approach. The second version estimates its parameters through expectation maximization. Independently of the parameter estimation, we utilized each model to decompose words from the original language data. A third method is a committee of unsupervised learners where each learner corresponds to the second version, however, with dierent initializations of the expectation maximization. The solution is then found by majority vote which decides whether to segment in a word position or not. In this paper, we describe the details of the probabilistic model, how parameters are estimated and how the most likely decomposition of an input word is found. We have tested Promodes on Arabic (vowelized and non-vowelized), English, Finnish, German and Turkish. All three methods achieved competitive results in the Morpho Challenge 2009.


In this paper, we report on experiments to measure large-scale Earth surface displacements, such as those caused by solid Earth tides, with centimeter-level accuracy using TerraSAR-X radar images. With two totally different approaches, corner reflectors and image correlation techniques, we show the clear interrelation between the radar range measurements and the projection of the solid Earth tide motion vector onto the radar line of sight. Pixel location accuracies of up to 2.6-cm standard deviation can be achieved after a single calibration. We further demonstrate that solid Earth tides and tropospheric water vapor variations are the largest sources of ranging error if not compensated for. Alternatively, tropospheric water vapor can be estimated with centimeter accuracy using our proposed technique of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image correlation and solid Earth motion compensation by the existing models. We also consider ionospheric delays which improve the results marginally in the X-band. Our results show the best ranging accuracies so far reported for spaceborne radar amplitude images and make TerraSAR-X-together with our simple compensation methodology-suitable for the imaging of centimeter-level Earth displacements. Absolute measurements of volcanoes or glaciers are possible without the use of ground equipment and without the use of SAR interferometry, thus avoiding the associated problems of phase ambiguity, phase unwrapping, and reference points.


In today's attention-driven news economy, rapid changes of topics and events go hand in hand with rapid changes of vocabulary and of language use. ASR systems aimed at transcribing contents pertaining to this fluid media landscape need to keep upto-date in a continuous and dynamic manner. Static models, potentially created a long time ago, are hopelessly outdated within a short period of time. The frequent changes in vocabulary and wording need to be reflected in the models employed for optimal performance of transcription if one does not want to risk falling behind. In this demonstration paper we present the audio processing capabilities of the SAIL LABS Media Mining Indexer, and the CAVA Framework allowing semi-automatic and periodic updates of the ASR vocabulary and language model from relevant and new data.


Volumetric Ultrasound (US) imaging is an emerging tech- nology for medical US applications. Typically, US imaging is 2D, where a number of vibrating elements, arranged in an array, are used to scan 2D cross-sections of the human body. In volumetric US a matrix probe of vibrating elements is used instead of the array, where conical volumes are reconstructed instead of 2D cross-sections. Today, cardiology and obstetrics are the most benefiting applications from 3D imaging, where better assessment of chamber volumes, and more expressive imaging are provided, respectively. 3D US allows the imaging of entire volumes using a single scan, unlike in 2D imaging, where multiple slices should be acquired precisely by a trained sonographer to be able to diagnose the entire structure. As a result, 3D US imaging speeds up the acquisition time, and eliminates the dependency on the presence of a trained operator during the scan. These characteristics make 3D US ideal for situations where the presence of a trained sonographer is an issue and the need to speed up the acquisition time is paramount, such as battlefields and rescue environments. How- ever, todays 3D systems [1] are bulky, expensive, and power hungry because the processing load of 3D US is orders of magnitude higher compared to conventional 2D imaging. For this reason, 3D systems are currently only available in well- equipped hospitals, and not in rural areas and underdeveloped regions where even electricity supply is an issue.


This paper studies the design of codes for distributed storage systems (DSS) that enable local repair in the event of node failure. This paper presents locally repairable codes based on low degree multivariate polynomials. Its code construction mechanism extends work on Noisy Interpolating Set by Dvir et al. [1]. The paper presents two classes of codes that allow node repair to be performed by contacting 2 and 3 surviving nodes respectively. It further shows that both classes are good in terms of their rate and minimum distance, and allow their rate to be bartered for greater flexibility in the repair process.


This paper presents a new partial-equilibrium, multi-market international model developed to analyze policies affecting peanut products markets. The model covers four goods (food-quality peanuts, crush-quality peanuts, peanut oil, and groundnut cake) in 13 countries/regions (Argentina, Canada, China, the EU-15, the Gambia, India, Malawi, Mexico, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, the United States, and Rest of World). Welfare is evaluated by looking at consumers' equivalent variation, quasi-profits in farming (peanut farming, livestock), quasi-profits in crushing, and taxpayers' revenues and outlays implied by distortions. We calibrate the model for three recent years (1999/2000, 2000/01, and 2001/02) on historical data. We illustrate the model's applicability with a peanut trade liberalization scenario. The impact of the reform scenario is measured in deviation from the historical baseline and by averaging the three estimates of annual impacts.


Tuberculosis accounts for nearly one third of world's population and is declared as the most widespread infectious disease prevalent in India than HIV/AIDS. According to a survey conducted, the World Health Organisation (WHO) global TB report has stated India as the country with the highest number of TB cases reported in 2014 with an estimation of 2.2 million cases. The reason being TB highly prevalent in India is the country's large population, lack of proper nutrition, compromised immune system and ignorance. Many reforms and policies are being undertaken by the government as well as the private sector health care providers to make India a TB free country. However the poorly unmonitored and unregulated private sector health care providers who are responsible for diagnosing and keeping records for half of the TB cases in India fail to report the accurate TB incidence. Ignorance and fear factor among the people has let the disease dominate the whole nation. In May 2012, centre declared TB as the notifiable disease with an immediate effect with an aim to bring about a positive change and improvement in collecting patient care information. It's high time to make India a TB free country and together we can achieve it.


The spectrum of soil moisture content at scales ranging from 1 hour to 8 years is analyzed for a site whose hydrologic balance is primarily governed by precipitation (p), and evapotranspiration (ET). The site is a uniformly planted loblolly pine stand situated in the southeastern United States and is characterized by a shallow rooting depth (RL) and a near‐impervious clay pan just below RL. In this setup, when ET linearly increases with increasing root zone soil moisture content (θ), an analytical model can be derived for the soil moisture content energy spectrum (Es(f), where f is frequency) that predicts the soil moisture "memory" (taken as the integral timescale) as β1−1 ≈ ηRL/ETmax, where ETmax is the maximum measured hourly ET and η is the soil porosity. The spectral model suggests that Es(f) decays at f−2−α at high f but almost white (i.e., f0) at low f, where α is the power law exponent of the rainfall spectrum at high f (α ≈ 0.75 for this site). The rapid Es(f) decay at high f makes the soil moisture variance highly imbalanced in the Fourier domain, thereby permitting much of the soil moisture variability to be described by a limited number of Fourier modes. For the 8‐year data collected here, 99.6% of the soil moisture variance could be described by less than 0.4% of its Fourier modes. A practical outcome of this energy imbalance in the frequency domain is that the diurnal cycle in ET can be ignored if β1−1 (estimated at 7.6 days from the model) is much larger than 12 hours. The model, however, underestimates the measured Es(f) at very low frequencies (f ≪ β1) and its memory, estimated from the data at 42 days. This underestimation is due to seasonality in ETmax and to a partial decoupling between ET and soil moisture at low frequencies.


International audience

 We provide bijections between the cluster variables (and clusters) in two families of cluster algebras which have received considerable attention. These cluster algebras are the ones associated with certain Grassmannians of k-planes, and those associated with certain spaces of decorated SLk-local systems in the disk in the work of Fock and Goncharov. When k is 3, this bijection can be described explicitly using the combinatorics of Kuperberg's basis of non-elliptic webs. Using our bijection and symmetries of these cluster algebras, we provide evidence for conjectures of Fomin and Pylyavskyy concerning cluster variables in Grassmannians of 3-planes. We also prove their conjecture that there are infinitely many indecomposable nonarborizable webs in the Grassmannian of 3-planes in 9-dimensional space.


Oncolytic viruses are multifunctional cancer agents with huge clinical potential, and recently the first Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) oncolytic virus has been approved as a licensed cancer treatment. Increasingly, it is becoming apparent that no one cancer treatment is likely to be a 'golden bullet' – a treatment that, on its own is enough to cure all cancers. The answer seems to lie in combination therapies; by combining more than one type of treatment the chances of success, in terms of patient survival, increase.
The aim of the project was to investigate the potential of HSV1716 in combination with other anti-cancer agents. As there is a vast array of current and potential cancer therapies, a high throughput screen using a range of cancer cell lines spanning a number of indications currently of clinical interest to Virttu Biologics was set up. This exploratory screen revealed a number of interesting results – synergies between HSV1716 and other drugs were seen across a number of different classes of drugs. This thesis first describes this 'fishing' exercise, then investigates the mechanism of action by which a subset of those drugs, highlighted as acting either synergistically or enhancing the amount of cell death in combination with HSV1716, are acting.
mTOR inhibitors (targeted agent), doxorubicin (a chemotherapeutic) and two receptor tyrosine kinases, Sorafenib and Sunitinib, were identified in the screen. Subsequent analysis of these combination revealed that, despite the differences between the classes of drugs, all worked to greatly reduce viral replication, indicating that mechanisms other than viral oncolysis are killing cancer cells.
The mechanism by which these cells were dying was investigated, HSV1716 in combination with mTOR inhibitors increased levels of intrinsic, mitochondrial driven apoptosis.
Much of the observed enhanced cell killing was seen at low level of HSV1716 infection – where only 1 in 10 cells was infected with virus. It was postulated that there is also some form of secreted signal that sensitises non infected cells to apoptosis. If this is the case these cells may be sensitised to the effect of drugs – and hence the levels of cell killing would be increased relative to the non viral sensitised cells. The experiments detailed in this thesis indicate that this is indeed the case: HSV1716 infected cells secrete a 'death signal' that can be exported to non-infected cells. This signal itself increases cell death in non-infected cells but may also sensitise cells to the effect of drugs.
Within the clinic, oncolytic viruses are effective agents at reducing tumour bulk by viral oncolysis and promote an anti-tumour immune response. The work presented in this thesis suggests that the virus may also induce infected cells to secret a factor that sensitises the surrounding cancer cells, generally resistant to apoptosis, to become more sensitive to apoptosis. These sensitised cells are then more susceptible to the effects of other anti-cancer agents.