Introduction Perioperative Ischaemic Evaluation-2 (POISE-2) is an international 2×2 factorial randomised controlled trial of low-dose aspirin versus placebo and low-dose clonidine versus placebo in patients who undergo non-cardiac surgery. Perioperative aspirin (and possibly clonidine) may reduce the risk of postoperative acute kidney injury (AKI). Methods and analysis After receipt of grant funding, serial postoperative serum creatinine measurements began to be recorded in consecutive patients enrolled at substudy participating centres. With respect to the study schedule, the last of over 6500 substudy patients from 82 centres in 21 countries were randomised in December 2013. The authors will use logistic regression to estimate the adjusted OR of AKI following surgery (compared with the preoperative serum creatinine value, a postoperative increase ≥26.5 μmol/L in the 2 days following surgery or an increase of ≥50% in the 7 days following surgery) comparing each intervention to placebo, and will report the adjusted relative risk reduction. Alternate definitions of AKI will also be considered, as will the outcome of AKI in subgroups defined by the presence of preoperative chronic kidney disease and preoperative chronic aspirin use. At the time of randomisation, a subpopulation agreed to a single measurement of serum creatinine between 3 and 12 months after surgery, and the authors will examine intervention effects on this outcome. Ethics and dissemination The authors were competitively awarded a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for this POISE-2 AKI substudy. Ethics approval was obtained for additional kidney data collection in consecutive patients enrolled at participating centres, which first began for patients enrolled after January 2011. In patients who provided consent, the remaining longer term serum creatinine data will be collected throughout 2014. The results of this study will be reported no later than 2015. Clinical Trial Registration Number NCT01082874.


Non-timber forest products (NTFP) are very important for people of Central African countries, however they are not adequately taken into account in economic calculation and forest management. The author reviews the current state of knowledge on NTFP, their socio-economic role, their modes of utilisation and related problems, and outlines suggestions to improve their management. There is an extreme diversity of NTFP, in relation to the high biodiversity and complexity of ecosystems in the wet tropical forests of Central Africa, hence the need to treat forest management in a holistic manner instead of considering the sole aspect of timber production. Local people have a deep understanding of NTFP, and their utilisation gives rise to a special social organisation and customary rights of access, often in conflict with formal laws. There are two threats to NTFP: overexploitation, due to their importance in household incomes, and destructive harvesting practices; and timber extraction, in view of the impact of current practices on the ecosystem, and outsiders' access to the forest. Silvicultural operations (thinnings) should be adapted in order to reduce their negative impact on NTFP. There is a need to take into account the interests of all actors, as well as requirements for ecosystem conservation by: (1) Taking NTFP into account in forest management, which implies better knowledge of the resource. NTFP management will aim at either their protection or improvement of their resources. and (2) Reducing impact of logging, through better localisation of resources and optimisation of forest road network, and low-impact techniques. Indirect impacts in connection with logging (e.g. poaching) should be curbed. Practices of logging companies and local populations should be reconciled in order to avoid conflicts.


The liver, as the major organ for iron storage and production of hepcidin, plays pivotal roles in maintaining mammalian iron homeostasis. A previous study showed that Quantitative Trait Loci (QTLs) on chromosome 7 (Chr7) and 16 (Chr16) may control hepatic non-heme iron overload in an F2 intercross derived from C57BL/6J (B6) and SWR/J (SWR) mice. In this study, we aimed to validate the existence of these loci and identify the genes responsible for the phenotypic variations by generating congenic mice carrying SWR chromosome segments expanding these QTLs (D7Mit68-D7Mit71 and D16Mit125-D16Mit185, respectively). We excluded involvement of Chr7 based on the lack of iron accumulation in congenic mice. In contrast, liver iron accumulation was observed in Chr16 congenic mice. Through use of a series of subcongenic murine lines the interval on Chr16 was further fine-mapped to a 0.8 Mb segment spanning 11 genes. We found that the mRNA expression pattern in the liver remained unchanged for all 11 genes tested. Most importantly, we detected 4 missense mutations in 3 candidate genes including Sidt1 (P172R), Spice1(R708S), Boc (Q1051R) and Boc (S450-insertion in B6 allele) in the liver of SWR homozygous congenic mice. To further delineate potential modifier gene(s), we reconstituted seven candidate genes, Sidt1, Boc, Zdhhc23, Gramd1c, Atp6v1a, Naa50 and Gtpbp8, in mouse liver through hydrodynamic transfection. However, we were unable to detect significant changes in liver iron levels upon reconstitution of these candidate genes. Taken together, our work provides strong genetic evidence of the existence of iron modifiers on Chr16. Moreover, we were able to delineate the phenotypically responsible region to a 0.8 Mb region containing 11 coding genes, 3 of which harbor missense mutations, using a series of congenic mice.


The natural dye pigment of blueberry was extracted from its peals using acetonitrile as solvent. This dye was used in a liquid electrolyte-free, natural dye-sensitized solid solar cell (NDSSSC). Natural dyes are inexpensive, non-toxic and are reliable and redily available sources of dyes. However, the typical problem associated with them is their instability towards iodide/tri-iodide electrolyte. This was addressed by introducing p-CuI as the hole-conductor in place of iodide/tri-iodide electrolyte. The hole conductor was applied on dyed nonporous TiO2 films from a solution containing a crystal growth inhibitor triethylammium thiocyanate (THT) using drop-casting method. I-V characteristics and impedance measurements were carried out to investigate the photovoltaic performance and further characterized by UV-Visible spectroscopy, FTIR spectroscopy and SEM.  to achieve a highest efficiency(ɳ) of 1.7% with a short circuit current density (Jsc) of 11 mA cm-2, open circuit voltage (Voc) of 0.30 V and fill factor (ff) of 51.8. These are the highest recorded values so far achieved for such solar cells. Stability measurements were carried out for a period of 30 days and promisingly showed a good stability over the liquid type natural dye sensitised solar.


Abstract Homology between the lacinia mobilis of peracarid crustaceans (Malacostraca) and movable appendages of the mandibular edge in other crustaceans, hexapods, and myriapods has been advocated in classical as well as recent phylogenetic studies, and in some cases this feature has been attributed major significance in arthropod systematics. A comparative SEM survey of the lacinia mobilis in Peracarida and its alleged homologues (prostheca of Hexapoda, internal tooth of Diplopoda, 'lacinia mobilis' of Symphyla and Remipedia) rejects the primary homology of these varied structures. The lacinia mobilis of Peracarida can be characterized precisely by asymmetry on the left and right mandibles, as a strong tooth-like structure on the left mandible which is oriented at a right angle to the remaining edge and as a stalked, spine-like structure on the right mandible. A fundamental difference to other Malacostraca is that the peracarid lacinia mobilis characterizes the adult mandibles. Supposed homologues of the peracarid lacinia mobilis are instead a modified pectinate lamella (Diplopoda, Chilognatha) or a movable appendage that is associated with the pars molaris rather than the pars incisivus (Symphyla), or an inner separation of the incisor process (Remipedia). The detailed structure of the prostheca in Campodeoida and Ephemeroptera weakens interpretations of its origin as a separation of the incisor process.


In crop plants, deficiency of an essential element may drastically reduce growth rate and yield. Research on the use of leaf spectral properties in the detection of crop mineral deficiency is needed. The objective of this study was to examine the effects of Fe, S, Mg, and Mn deficiency on reflectance (R), absorptance (A), and transmittance (T) spectra of barley (Hordeum valgare L.), wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), corn (Zea mays L.), and sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) leaves. Plants were grown in the greenhouse in nutrient solution. Chlorophyll (Chl), Fe, S, Mg, and Mn concentrations and spectral properties were determined on the youngest fully expanded leaf when deficiency symptoms were clearly manifested. In all species, mineral deficiency affected leaf concentration of the deficient element and also of other elements. Nutrient defidency reduced Chl concentration and A, and increased R and T. Iron deficiency severely affected all species, and corn was the species most sensitive to all deficiencies. Reflectance, A, and T spectra of leaves were correlated with leaf Chl concentration. Our results suggested that all nutritional deficiencies reduce leaf Chl concentration, and subsequently this reduction increases leaf R and T, decreases leaf A, and shortens the red-edge position, defined as the inflection point that occurs in the rapid transition between red and near-infrared. Modifications in leaf spectral properties were not characteristic of nutrient defidency, but were always observed in the same wavelengths.


Background: The aim of this study was to study the antitumor and immunomodulatory effects and its mechanism of the n-butyl alcohol extract of the ethanol extracts in Zanthoxylum avicennae (Lam.) DC. for the mice with liver cancer H22. Materials and Methods: To inoculate H22 tumor plant to the mice and establish three different animal models of liver cancer solid tumor ascitic tumor and immunodeficiency in mice H22 and then divide the mice into six groups: blank group, model group, positive group (cyclophosphamide or astragalus polysaccharide), drug dosages group of high, medium, and lower (1.28 g/kg, 0.64 g/kg, 0.32 g/kg). After 2 weeks of intragastric administration, the content of aspartate transaminase (AST), alanine transaminase (ALT), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and interleukin-2 (IL-2) in the blood serum of the mice with solid cancer and the level of superoxide dismutase (SOD), malondialdehyde (MDA), TNF-α, and IL-2 in the blood serum of the immunodeficiency mice were determined. At the same time, the indexes of liver, spleen, and thymus gland organs in solid tumor mice and immunodeficiency mice were determined, the life elongation rate of the mice with liver cancer H22 ascitic tumor was observed, and then the changing status of the tumor tissue by the method of HE dyeing was observed. Results: The contents of TNF-α and IL-2 in the serum of the high-dose group of the solid tumor model were obviously higher than the normal group, with very significant difference (P < 0.01) and very high tumor inhibition rate of 54.61%, and the contents of transaminase AST, ALT, and the tumor inflammatory factors such as TNF-α and IL-2 in the mice serum were obviously decreased, and the tumor weights were reduced greatly; the contents of MDA, TNF-α, and IL-2 in the serum of the mice of the immunodeficiency group were obviously decreased, with obvious increase of the SOD activity and the organ indexes of the liver, spleen, and thymus gland; the life extension rate of the mice in the high-dose group of the ascitic tumor model was obviously increased. Conclusion: The n-butyl alcohol extract of Z. avicennae improved the survival quality of the H22 tumor-bearing mice and enhanced their immune ability to exhibit very excellent antitumor activity through improving the inflammatory factors of the tumor-bearing mice. The mechanism may be that it had the function of antitumor just by improving the immune organs' quality of the tumor-bearing mice, and at the same time increased the secretion of the cell inflammatory factors such as TNF-α and IL-2 and thus strengthened the immunocompetence and improved the lipid peroxidation in the bodies of tumor-bearing mice.


The results of a meta‐analysis conducted on organic photovoltaics (OPV) lifetime data reported in the literature is presented through the compilation of an extensive OPV lifetime database based on a large number of articles, followed by analysis of the large body of data. We fully reveal the progress of reported OPV lifetimes. Furthermore, a generic lifetime marker has been defined, which helps with gauging and comparing the performance of different architectures and materials from the perspective of device stability. Based on the analysis, conclusions are drawn on the bottlenecks for stability of device configurations and packaging techniques, as well as the current level of OPV lifetimes reported under different aging conditions. The work is summarized by discussing the development of a tool for OPV lifetime prediction and the development of more stable technologies. An online platform is introduced that will aid the process of generating statistical data on OPV lifetimes and further refinement of the lifetime prediction tool.


Recent technology advances have profoundly changed the landscape of modern radiometry by enabling miniaturized, low-power, and low-noise radio-frequency receivers operating at frequencies near 200 GHz and beyond. These advances enable the practical use of receiver arrays to multiplex multiple broad frequency bands into many spectral channels. We use the term "hyperspectral microwave" to refer generically to microwave sounding systems with approximately 50 spectral channels or more. In this paper, we report on the design and analysis of the receiver subsystem (lensed antenna, RF front-end electronics, and IF processor module) for the Hyperspectral Microwave Atmospheric Sounder (HyMAS) comprising multiple receivers near the oxygen absorption line at 118.75 GHz and the water vapor absorption line at 183.31 GHz. The hyperspectral microwave receiver system will be integrated into a new scanhead compatible with the NASA GSFC Conical Scanning Microwave Imaging Radiometer/Compact Submillimeter-wave Imaging Radiometer (CoSMIR/CoSSIR) airborne instrument system to facilitate demonstration and performance characterization under funding from the NASA ESTO Advanced Component Technology program. Four identical radiometers will be used to cover 108-119 GHz, and two identical receivers will be used to cover 173-183 GHz. Subharmonic mixers will be driven by frequency-multiplied dielectric resonant oscillators, and single-sideband operation will be achieved by waveguide filtering of the lower sideband. A relatively high IF frequency is chosen to facilitate miniaturization of the IF processor module, which will be fabricated using Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) technology. Corrugated feed antennas with lenses are used to achieve a FWHM beamwidth of approximately 3.5 degrees. Two polarizations are measured by each feed to increase overall channel count, and multiple options will be considered during the design phase for the polarization diplexing approach. Broadband operation over a relatively high intermediate frequency range (18-29 GHz) is a technical challenge of the front-end receiver systems, and a receiver temperature of approximately 2000-3000K is expected over the receiver bandwidth. This performance, together with approximately 100-msec integration times typical of airborne operation, yields channel NEDTs of approximately 0.35K, which is adequate to demonstrate the hyperspectral microwave concept by comparing profile retrievals with high-fidelity ground truth available either by coincident overpasses of hyperspectral infrared sounders and/or in situ radiosonde/dropsonde measurements.


Abstract Graphoglyptids are a group of deep-sea trace fossils that exhibit ornate burrow geometries. Feeding patterns represented by these burrows have been interpreted as fodinichnial (mining), pascichnial (grazing), and/or agrichnial (farming). In this study, several different graphoglyptid trace fossils were analyzed quantitatively using fractal analysis to determine which of these three feeding modes is most appropriate as an interpretation. Graphoglyptid burrows lend themselves to fractal geometric analysis, because they commonly exhibit the essential fractal characteristics of scale invariance and self similarity. Fractal analysis is presented as a tool for analyzing geometric configurations by combining shape complexity and space usage into one number, the fractal dimension. Fractal dimensions of such graphoglyptid burrows as Paleodictyon and Spirorhaphe were compared with those of known fodinichnial burrows, such as Zoophycos, and pascichnial trails, such as Scolicia, all from Zumaia, Spain. Results indicate that the deposit-feeding burrows (fodinichnia and pascichnia) illustrate a high fractal dimension, as would be expected for a deposit-feeding–optimal foraging strategy. Graphoglyptids illustrate a consistently lower fractal dimension than the deposit-feeding burrows, thus providing evidence against the suggestion that they represent fodinichnial or pascichnial behaviors. This observation supports the hypothesis that graphoglyptids represent agrichnial activity rather than mining or grazing activities.


Abstract A large literature examines the addictive properties of such behaviors as smoking, drinking alcohol, gambling and eating. We argue that for some people addictive behavior may apply to a much more central aspect of economic life: working. Although workaholism raises some of the same health-related concerns as other addictions, compared to most of the more familiar addictions it is more likely to be a problem of higher-income individuals and is more likely to generate negative spillovers onto individuals around the workaholic. Using the Retirement History Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that high-income, highly educated people exhibit behavior that is consistent with workaholism with regard to retiring–they are more likely to postpone earlier plans for retirement. The theory and evidence suggest that the presence of workaholism calls for a more progressive income tax system than otherwise, although other more targeted policies may be part of optimal policy.


Antibodies specific for the idiotypes of B10 anti-(T,G)-A-L antibodies (anti-Id) induced in vivo (T,G)-A-L-primed lymphocytes to secrete anti- (T,G)-A-L antibodies in vitro in the absence of antigen. Responses to anti-Id were quantitatively and qualitatively similar to responses to antigen. Responses were specific in that: (a) only lymphocytes primed in vivo with (T,G)-A-L (but not other antigens or unprimed cells) were inducible; (b) only anti-Id (but not a variety of control antibodies) induced responses; and (c) only anti-(T,G)-A-L antibodies were secreted. Antigen-primed T lymphocytes mixed with unprimed B plus accessory cells also responded to anti-Id and the phenotype of the responding T cells was Lyt-1+, Lyt-2-. Supernatants obtained from antigen-primed T cells incubated for 3 d with anti-Id (but not when incubated with controls) provided help to unprimed B plus accessory cells in the presence of anti-Id, thus providing direct evidence for induction of T lymphocyte helper function by anti-Id. In contrast to responses to (T,G)-A-L, responses to anti-Id did not appear to be regulated by H-2-linked Ir genes. The system described is a powerful tool for delineation of the mechanisms whereby antiidiotype antibodies affect lymphocyte function.


Coral reef net ecosystem calcification (NEC) has decreased for many Caribbean reefs over recent decades primarily due to a combination of declining coral cover and changing benthic community composition. Chemistry-based approaches to calculate NEC utilize the drawdown of seawater total alkalinity (TA) combined with residence time to calculate an instantaneous measurement of NEC. Census-based approaches combine annual growth rates with benthic cover and reef structural complexity to estimate NEC occurring over annual timescales. Here, NEC was calculated for Hog Reef in Bermuda using both chemistry and census-based NEC techniques to compare the mass-balance generated by the two methods and identify the dominant biocalcifiers at Hog Reef. Our findings indicate close agreement between the annual 2011 census-based NEC 2.35±1.01 kg CaCO3•m-2•y-1 and the chemistry-based NEC 2.23±1.02 kg CaCO3•m-2•y-1 at Hog Reef. An additional record of Hog Reef TA data calculated from an autonomous CO2 mooring measuring pCO2 and modeled pHtotal every 3-hours highlights the dynamic temporal variability in coral reef NEC. This ability for chemistry-based NEC techniques to capture higher frequency variability in coral reef NEC allows the mechanisms driving NEC variability to be explored and tested. Just four coral species, Diploria labyrinthiformis, Pseudodiploria strigosa, Millepora alcicornis, and Orbicella franksi, were identified by the census-based NEC as contributing to 94±19% of the total calcium carbonate production at Hog Reef suggesting these species should be highlighted for conservation to preserve current calcium carbonate production rates at Hog Reef. As coral cover continues to decline globally, the agreement between these NEC estimates suggest that either method, but ideally both methods, may serve as a useful tool for coral reef managers and conservation scientists to monitor the maintenance of coral reef structure and ecosystem services.


OBJECTIVES
To confirm the association of a functional single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), C1858T (rs2476601), in the PTPN22 gene of British Caucasian rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients and to evaluate its influence on the RA phenotype.

METHODS
A total of 686 RA patients and 566 healthy volunteers, all of British Caucasian origin, were genotyped for C1858T polymorphism by PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism assay. Data were analysed using SPSS software and the chi 2 test as applicable.

RESULTS
The PTPN22 1858T risk allele was more prevalent in the RA patients (13.9%) compared with the healthy controls (10.3%) (P = 0.008, odds ratio 1.4, 95% confidence interval 1.09-1.79). The association of the T allele was restricted to those with rheumatoid factor (RF)-positive disease (n = 524, 76.4%) (P = 0.004, odds ratio 1.5, 95% confidence interval 1.1-1.9). We found no association between PTPN22 and the presence of the HLA-DRB1 shared epitope or clinical characteristics.

CONCLUSIONS
We confirmed the previously reported association of PTPN22 with RF-positive RA, which was independent from the HLA-DRB1 genotype.


Completely revised and expanded to reflect the rapidly changing sphere of information services, this comprehensive introduction to the management of libraries builds the basic skills good library managers must exercise. The authors offer an authoritative approach on the fundamental concepts of management while recognizing the diverse needs of different operating environments. This edition features two new chapters - Managing Diversity and Career Development - and is kept up to current by material housed on the Web. Drawing from examples of successful leadership techniques from a variety of services archives, information brokers, libraries, records managements and more, this book demonstrates the most effective ways to plan, delegate, make decisions, communicate, and lead a team. Equal emphasis is placed on personal, fiscal, and technological issues, as well as a look at what the future may hold for incoming managers. A practical, up-to-date introduction to library management, here is a text that will appeal to LIS educators, new and experienced libraries in management positions, students, and anyone wishing to acquire a sound knowledge of both the theory and practice of management within the changing information workforce.


This introductory chapter to the edited volume "Nudging Health: Health Law and Behavioral Economics" (I. Glenn Cohen, Holly Fernandez Lynch, Christopher T. Robertson, eds.) introduces the potential benefits, drawbacks, and possibilities for using the tools of behavioral economics - and particularly behavioral law and policy - to improve human health, exploring the policy alternatives to traditional "carrots and sticks" that may be utilized in the health sector. It also provides brief summaries of each chapter in the volume, along with a complete Table of Contents.From the book jacket: Behavioral nudges are everywhere: calorie counts on menus, automated text reminders to encourage medication adherence, a reminder bell when a driver's seatbelt isn't fastened. Designed to help people make better health choices, these reminders have become so commonplace that they often go unnoticed. In Nudging Health, forty-five experts in behavioral science and health policy from across academia, government, and private industry come together to explore whether and how these tools are effective in improving health outcomes.Behavioral science has swept the fields of economics and law through the study of nudges, cognitive biases, and decisional heuristics — but it has only recently begun to impact the conversation on health care. Nudging Health wrestles with some of the thorny philosophical issues, legal limits, and conceptual questions raised by behavioral science as applied to health law and policy. The volume frames the fundamental issues surrounding health nudges by addressing ethical questions. Does cost-sharing for health expenditures cause patients to make poor decisions? Is it right to make it difficult for people to opt out of having their organs harvested for donation when they die? Are behavioral nudges paternalistic? The contributors examine specific applications of behavioral science, including efforts to address health care costs, improve vaccination rates, and encourage better decision-making by physicians. They wrestle with questions regarding the doctor-patient relationship and defaults in healthcare while engaging with larger, timely questions of healthcare reform.Nudging Health is the first multi-voiced assessment of behavioral economics and health law to span such a wide array of issues — from the Affordable Care Act to prescription drugs.Foreword by Cass R. SunsteinContributors: David A. Asch, Jerry Avorn, Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, Alexander M. Capron, Niteesh K. Choudhry, I. Glenn Cohen, Sarah Conly, Gregory Curfman, Khaled El Emam, Barbara J. Evans, Nir Eyal, Andrea Freeman, Alan M. Garber, Jonathan Gingerich, Michael Hallsworth, Jim Hawkins, David Huffman, David A. Hyman, Julika Kaplan, Aaron S. Kesselheim, Nina A. Kohn, Russell Korobkin, Jeffrey T. Kullgren, Matthew J.B. Lawrence, George Loewenstein, Holly Fernandez Lynch, Ester Moher, Abigail R. Moncrieff, David Orentlicher, Manisha Padi, Christopher T. Robertson, Ameet Sarpatwari, Aditi P. Sen, Neel Shah, Zainab Shipchandler, Anna D. Sinaiko, Donna Spruijt-Metz, Thomas S. Ulen, Kristen Underhill, Kevin G. Volpp, Mark D. White, David V. Yokum, Jennifer L. Zamzow, Richard J. Zeckhauser


In the segregated South of the early twentieth century, unwritten rules guided every aspect of individual behavior, from how blacks and whites stood, sat, ate, drank, walked, and talked to whether they made eye contact with one another. Jennifer Ritterhouse asks how children learned this racial "etiquette," which was sustained by coercion and the threat of violence. More broadly, she asks how individuals developed racial self-consciousness. Parental instruction was an important factor - both white parents' reinforcement of a white supremacist worldview and black parents' oppositional lessons in respectability and race pride. Children also learned much from their interactions across race lines. The fact that black youths were often eager to stand up for themselves, despite the risks, suggests that the emotional underpinnings of the civil rights movement were in place long before the historical moment when change became possible. Meanwhile, a younger generation of whites continued to enforce traditional patterns of domination and deference in private, while also creating an increasingly elaborate system of segregation in public settings. Exploring relationships between public and private and between segregation, racial etiquette, and racial violence, "Growing Up Jim Crow" sheds new light on tradition and change in the South and the meanings of segregation within southern culture.


Recently, AutoRegressive (AR) models for the whole image generation empowered by transformers have achieved comparable or even better performance to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Unfortunately, directly applying such AR models to edit/change local image regions, may suffer from the problems of missing global information, slow inference speed, and information leakage of local guidance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel model -- image Local Autoregressive Transformer (iLAT), to better facilitate the locally guided image synthesis. Our iLAT learns the novel local discrete representations, by the newly proposed local autoregressive (LA) transformer of the attention mask and convolution mechanism. Thus iLAT can efficiently synthesize the local image regions by key guidance information. Our iLAT is evaluated on various locally guided image syntheses, such as pose-guided person image synthesis and face editing. Both the quantitative and qualitative results show the efficacy of our model.


Large-scale user contributed images with tags are easily available on photo sharing websites. However, the noisy or incomplete correspondence between the images and tags prohibits them from being leveraged for precise image retrieval and effective management. To tackle the problem of tag refinement, we propose a method of Ranking based Multi-correlation Tensor Factorization (RMTF), to jointly model the ternary relations among user, image, and tag, and further to precisely reconstruct the user-aware image-tag associations as a result. Since the user interest or background can be explored to eliminate the ambiguity of image tags, the proposed RMTF is believed to be superior to the traditional solutions, which only focus on the binary image-tag relations. During the model estimation, we employ a ranking based optimization scheme to interpret the tagging data, in which the pair-wise qualitative difference between positive and negative examples is used, instead of the point-wise 0/1 confidence. Specifically, the positive examples are directly decided by the observed user-image-tag interrelations, while the negative ones are collected with respect to the most semantically and contextually irrelevant tags. Extensive experiments on a benchmark Flickr dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution for tag refinement. We also show attractive performances on two potential applications as the by-products of the ternary relation analysis.


(Rec. 29 February 2004) Abstract: A tentative cardiological database was established using virtual instrumentation described in the first part of presented paper. Some additional not heart rate variability parameters were added. Three selected univariate statistical techniques were used for illustration diagnosis support techniques in discrimination between healthy and coronary heart disease people. Comparison of nonparametric MannWhitney test, receiver operating characteristic ROC analysis and univariate logistic regression results was performed. In all used methods long term heart rate variability indices were most useful in prediction of patient's status. The correctness of classification was between 55 to 79 percent with ROC technique and 68 to 78 percent with logistic regression. However high number of false negative FN cases excludes univariate techniques as reliable screening test.


Dramatic changes are being made to teacher education internationally and in the United States. Some of the alterations have been recognized as threatening university-based teacher preparation, for instance, the growth of alternate route programs. Many other phenomena that have an impact on teacher education have not been analyzed as such, including for-profit corporations' development of professional development services linked to raising students' standardized test scores and the entry of private, for-profit institutions into the market for higher education. The challenge to teacher education's commitment to social justice has been debated, but its relationship to the other alterations being made to public education has not been explored. Moreover, the common origins of these phenomena and their synergistic impact have been inadequately studied, as have the implications of this synergy for university-based teacher education in the near future.


The City of Johannesburg is facing the simultaneous challenges of an increased generation of solid waste in the City, unemployment and the running out of land to dispose the waste. Of the solid waste that is generated, 50% is recyclable while only 10% is recycled (SOER, 2003: 69). Solid waste recycling is mainly performed through private sector initiatives in the City of Johannesburg. Consequently, there is no proper co ordination with government initiatives. In order for South Africa to increase and sustain economic growth that would decrease unemployment, there should be a culture of entrepreneurship (Mass, G & Herrington M, 2006:7). Solid waste buy-back centres assist in addressing the challenges of dealing with the increased generation of solid waste and the scarcity of land for disposal. These centres also reduce the challenges of unemployment through promoting entrepreneurs to operate solid waste recycling businesses. Developed economies have managed to increase the rate of solid waste recycling to 60%. The problems associated with solid waste have been reduced by promoting recycling through a combination of legislation and setting-up of agencies to deal with solid waste recycling. South Africa has legislation and stated programmes to deal with solid waste recycling. Nevertheless, there has been complexity with implementing recycling. This is the result of a lack of co-ordination between the role-players involved in the value chain of solid waste recycling. In order for the City of Johannesburg to increase the recycling of solid waste from 10% to optimal rates of between 50% and 60%, there should be co-ordination of programmes amongst all the role players. In addition, there should also be skills provision to existing and potential entrepreneurs operating the solid waste buy-back centres. All spheres of government should promote solid waste recycling business to potential entrepreneurs and the public in order to recycle 40% of the recyclable solid waste that is not being recycled. The establishment of a solid waste buy-back centre in the City of Johannesburg is economically viable with some buy-back centre realising a net-profit of least R 5 000 and some more than R30 000 per month. In order for the solid waste buy-back centre to realise a net-profit of more than R30 000 per month, there must be more than 40 tons of recyclable solid waste received by the buy-back centre per month. This study has indicated that solid waste buy-back centres rely on the economies of scale. This means


Summary Embodied simulation, a basic functional mechanism of our brain, and its neural underpinnings are discussed and connected to intersubjectivity and the reception of human cultural artefacts, like visual arts and film. Embodied simulation provides a unified account of both non-verbal and verbal aspects of interpersonal relations that likely play an important role in shaping not only the self and his/her relation to others, but also shared cultural practices. Embodied simulation sheds new light on aesthetic experience and is proposed as a key element for the dialogue between neuroscience and the humanities within the biocultural paradigm.


This essay is a reflection piece. I identify key principles at the core of how PB functions and to discuss the scope of change we might expect to see generated by these institutions. I move beyond the idea that there is a specific model or set of "best practices" that define PB. Rather, it is most fruitful to conceptualize PB as a set of principles that can generate social change. The weaker the adherence to these principles, the less social change generated. The second purpose of the essay is to reflect on the impacts generated by PB. How do these institutions matter? My assumption is that ordinary citizens are more likely to be supportive of new democratic processes if they are able to clearly identify positive changes created by their participation in the new democratic institutions. Ordinary citizens are unlikely to continue to participate in new political institutions unless they perceive that these institutions produce tangible, positive changes in their lives. In this short reflection piece, I analyze how PB may affect democratic legitimacy, social well-being, and civil society.


The process of environmental impact assessment (EIA) brings together a broad raft of professional practitioners including environmental policy-makers, administrators, decision-makers, government agencies, planners, engineers, scientists, social scientists, and business and project managers as well as the public. From the diversity of these practitioners it can be anticipated that people from different backgrounds will have different expectations of how the process should function in practice. This paper presents the results of a follow-up survey of EIA practitioners in Western Australia. The purpose of the research was to examine the role of science in EIA based upon the experiences and expectations of EIA practitioners. Thirty-one EIA practitioners were interviewed. These were drawn from the Environmental Protection Authority (the peak body responsible for EIA in Western Australia) and its supporting administrative agency the Department of environmental Protection, other government decisionmaking authorities, environmental consultants and project managers and environmental officers. Interviewees were also selected to represent different industry sectors (ie. planning, industrial and resource development projects) as well as urban and remote settings. Interviewees were asked about the role of science in impact prediction, monitoring activities, mitigation and management, and EIA decision-making. The results indicate that practitioners have different expectations of the role of science in EIA according to the type of project and its location (ie. urban or remote) and the stage of the EIA process. Most participants indicated that the role of science currently is greatest during the earlier pre-decision stages of EIA and provide the basis for these activities (ie. baseline monitoring, impact prediction and mitigation design). Science input in the post-decision stages of was generally perceived to be of poorer quality. Science was seen to be less important during decision-making and ongoing project management. It is kept in balance with other factors such as socio-political and economic considerations. Despite these differences, overall, good science was seen to be a hallmark for effective EIA and a greater role for science in EIA was advocated, particularly for follow-up activities.


Two different optical techniques for surface tracking and linewidth measurement are evaluated. First, an evaluation is made of the performance of a double-focus polarization microscope, based on results from a computer model and from experimental measurements. The assessment shows that a phase curvature effect makes the operation of this configuration impractical as a surface tracking device and linewidth measurement system. An alternative arrangement of using a double aperture is evaluated. The phase curvature effect is reduced in this type of microscope. A practical optical arrangement to implement a double-aperture microscope is given.


The goals of this study were to promote restoration of forest ecosystems through fire hazard reduction treatments and to evaluate potential economic benefits of carbon credits to the Navajo Nation. We used the historic Navajo Nation's Continuous Forest Inventory data to calibrate the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) with growth increments and used the FVS to run simulations that encompass the next 50 years. We calculated C revenues using two carbon accounting approaches: (1) reduced buffer pool under the Climate Action Reserve protocol and (2) increased C stocks based on with-and-without analysis. We investigated nine C price scenarios, including constant- and rising-price trajectories; performed discounted cash flow analyses; and calculated net present worth (NPW). When timber was the only marketable output, using a real alternative rate of return (ARR) of 4%, the NPW of target basal area (BA) 40, 70, and 100 ft 2 /ac were $144.89, $267.98, and $308.57/ac, respectively. When both timber and C were marketable outputs, with a C price of $3/ton, the NPW of target BAs of 40, 70, and 100 ft 2 /ac were increased to $119.26, $256.83, and $306.31, respectively, under the first accounting approach, and were increased to $168.62, $57.29, and $184.09, respectively, under the second accounting approach. Our results indicate that C accounting method, C price, and landowner's ARR affect forest landowner's profitability in participating in the C market.


Astronomy EducationThe International Year of Astronomy 2009 has come and gone, and the Galileoscope project, one of the most ambitious parts of the global IYA campaign, was supposed to be wrapped up by now. The original goal was to put telescopes in the hands of the millions of people attending IYA events. But then the global financial crisis hit. The scientists on the team were forced to become instant entrepreneurs to keep the Galileoscope project alive. The ultimate aim of the IYA was "to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the universe." What better way to do that than give them their own telescopes?


Oxygen consumption (VO2) and carbon dioxide production (VCO2) are important to measure and analyze in exercise physiology and fitness testing. A respiratory gas collection mask (RGC) is required for measurement of VO2 and VCO2, but has been reported to cause respiratory symptoms and inhibit maximal performance in subjects. This study compared the performance of a graded maximal exercise text (GXT) while wearing a mask (MASK) and without wearing a mask (NO-MASK). Twelve adults performed the Bruce GXT under the two different conditions on two separate occasions in random order. Performance variables used in data analysis were time to exhaustion (TTE), peak heart rate (HRpeak), and rating of perceived exertion (RPE). Between MASK and NO-MASK, paired sample t-tests revealed significant differences in TTE (11.46 ± 1.45 v. 11.70 ± 1.62 min; p=0.017), but no differences in HRpeak (184.67 ± 12.88 v. 186.33 ± 11.59 beats·min-1; p=0.226) and RPE (8.25 ± 1.55 v. 8.42 ± 0.90; p=0.723). Because peak VO2 could not be measured during NO-MASK, predicted VO2, based on TTE, was calculated for both conditions. Post-hoc analysis revealed no significance between predicted VO2 for MASK versus NO-MASK (40.18 ± 6.06 v. 41.19 ± 6.74 ml·kg-1·min-1; p=0.017). Thus, while TTE was slightly longer while performing the GXT without a mask compared to with a mask, the impact this .24-min (14-s) difference had on predicted VO2max was not significant. From a practical standpoint, wearing a mask during a GXT does not hinder performance.


Public entities increasingly maintain that the First Amendment permits them to ensure that private speakers' views are not mistakenly attributed to the government. Consider, for example, Virginia's efforts to ban the Sons of Confederate Veterans' display of the Confederate flag logo on state-sponsored specialty license plates. Seeking to remain neutral in the ongoing debate over whether the Confederate flag is a symbol of "hate" or "heritage," Virginia argued that the state would be wrongly perceived as endorsing the flag if the logo appeared on a state-issued plate adorned by the identifier "VIRGINIA." The Fourth Circuit was unpersuaded, holding that the logo's exclusion violated the First Amendment. Such clashes between public and private entities' expressive claims raise a series of interesting questions. Do governmental entities have a legitimate interest in ensuring that they are not mistakenly understood as endorsing or delivering what are actually the views of private speakers? If so, what actions does the First Amendment permit them to take to protect that interest? As disputes involving these questions rise in number, courts increasingly search for guidance. Cases that appear to involve elements of both government and private speech are especially challenging given current constitutional doctrine that appears to demand a choice between one or the other. Too often, courts fail or refuse to acknowledge that government itself is speaking in a particular context, and thus has an interest in protecting the integrity of its own expression. Even those courts that acknowledge the legitimacy of government's interest in protecting its own expressive integrity too often muddy the waters by claiming to apply some sort of forum doctrine. The better framework is to understand these not as forum cases, but situations in which government itself is speaking - either on its own or jointly with a private speaker - and is thus free to protect the integrity of its own expression by protecting what is truly its own speech from being appropriated by others. For these reasons, we should think more carefully about the circumstances under which private speech may be mistakenly understood as that of the government. I suggest that government can persuade us that its efforts are not a pretext for squelching unpopular or inconvenient private speech by demonstrating that it is itself speaking and that it reasonably fears that, absent preventive action, its speech will be mistakenly perceived to endorse others' expression. Particularly helpful factors in assessing competing private and governmental claims to the same expression include the identity of the literal speaker, the reasons for governmental and private participation in the program at issue, the availability of alternative avenues for ventilating the private expression, and the effectiveness of government disclaimers or rebuttals.


The satisfaction of banking clients determines their loyalty and willingness to buy product of the commercial bank. Many of researches and knowledge of banking practices show that there is a big group of dissatisfied customers. The aim of this article was compare the overall level of satisfaction of Czech and Slovak banks' customers and quantify the most significant factors of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of these customers.Next aim was to define current trends of customers' satisfaction in relation with the financial performance and the competitiveness of commercial banks. The research about satisfaction of retail customers in Czech and Slovak Republic has been realized through the questionnaire survey. Our research has confirmed that between Czech and Slovak republic exist very similar trends in the area of an overall satisfaction and partial reasons of satisfaction, respectively dissatisfaction of banks' clients. The most significant reason of customers' satisfaction is the possibility to use e-banking in both countries. For Czech banking clients is this reason more important than for the Slovak one. The most significant reason of dissatisfaction of banks' clients is the price policy of banking products and services. The level of dissatisfied clients with this reason is approximately the same in both countries. Customers in both countries feel a low level of acceptance of their financial needs during the sales process. An interesting trend has been observed that satisfied clients use fewer amounts of banks and the value of cross-selling is lower than in the case of dissatisfied clients. A current situation on the Czech and Slovak banking market means, that banks have enough sales opportunities, if they are able to increase a customers' satisfaction.
 Purpose of the article: The aim of this article was to quantify and compare the overall satisfaction between Czech and Slovak banks'customers. Purpose of this article was to define the most important factors of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of banks'customers and current trends in the area of customers'satisfaction.
 Methodology/methods: The research of customers'satisfaction in Czech and Slovak Republic has been conducted through the questionnaire survey. Set scientific hypothesis has been verified by Pearson chi/square test statistics to determine dependencies in the Pivot table. Methods of descriptive statistics and the weighted average have been used.
 Scientific aim: Scientific aim was to quantify and compare the overall satisfaction and the most significant reasons of satisfaction and dissatisfaction of Czech and Slovak banks'clients. Next aim was to examine the impact of clients'satisfaction on the usage of banking products and banks and to determine the change of the approach of commercial during the crisis.
 Findings: The overall customers'satisfaction in Czech Republic and Slovakia is approximately on the same level. The most important reasons of customers'satisfaction are the possibility to use e-banking in both countries. This trend is more important for Czech banking customers than for Slovak one. The most important dissatisfaction of customers is the price policy of banking products and services. The level of dissatisfied clients with this factor is the same in both countries. Czech and Slovak clients intensively feel the fact that bank just want to sell them their product and earn money and they are not interested in real solution of their financial issue anymore. However, customers of commercial banks still think that banks'approach has been improved during the crisis.
Our research has found out that commercial banks offer their products with low intensity in both countries. Satisfaction of customers significantly determines the amount of used banks.
 Conclusions: A satisfaction of banks'customers represents a key parameter of financial performance and
competitive ability of a commercial bank. Despite this fact, there exist a big group of dissatisfied clients and many activities of the banks which are not sufficient at all. Our research has been conducted on the sample of representative respondents and has brought some interesting notices which are going to be as the topics of our next researches and are going to be examined more specifically. In the same time, some opportunities to increase the satisfaction of customers which are able to be done in a short period and at minimal cost, has been presented. The very important possibility to increase a customers'satisfaction is the growth of employees'satisfaction in the bank.


This trial was conducted to investigate the effects of supplementing saturated and unsaturated fat sources on serum metabolites and meat physiochemical parameters in the diets of broiler chickens. A total of 360 day-old male broiler chicks (Ross 308) were used in a completely randomized design with five treatments and six replicates of 14 chicks. The assay diets were developed by applying a basal diet with no supplemented fat and the addition of soybean oil (SO), lecithinized palm oil (LPO), a 50 : 50 mix of SO and LPO (ESL), and 75 : 25 mix of SO and LPO (HSL) ratios to the basal diet. The inclusion levels of experimental fats were 2% and 4% in the starter and growing periods, respectively. Blood samples were collected from broilers to evaluate serum biochemical metabolites on day 41. Thigh meat samples were provided and analysed after 1, 5 and 10 days' storage to evaluate lipid peroxidation at the end of the experiment. Fat and protein contents of thigh muscle and abdominal fat weight were measured and reported. Chickens fed LPO had greater serum triacylglycerol and very low density lipoprotein concentrations compared with those that received other dietary treatments ( P <0.05). The fat content of the meat was higher in birds supplemented with SO, LPO and ESL than control ( P <0.05). After 5 and 10 days of storage, the values of thiobarbituric acid reactive substance were lower in meat of broilers receiving LPO than SO and HSL ( P <0.05). In conclusion, LPO decreased lipid peroxidation during different storage periods compared with SO. Keywords: Blood parameters, broilers, fat type, meat physiochemical parameters


Michael Alexeev* Douglas Baird, Robert Gertner, & Randall Picker, Game Theory and the Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. xii + 330 pages. $45.00. On 18 January 1996 the Indiana University Law and Economics Lunch Bunch1 met to discuss the book Game Theory and the Law by Douglas Baird, Robert Gertner, and Randall Picker. Professor Dau-Schmidt wanted to review the book and, being rather a strong believer in social cooperation, thought a group effort would be a good idea. The rest of us, being eager to express our opinions, agreed. Dau-Schmidt: I want to read a section from the preface of the book that sets forth the purposes the authors had in mind, and then ask your responses. This book rests on the premise that game theory can offer insights to those who want to understand how laws affect the way people behave.... First we wanted to introduce the formal tools of modern game theory to a wide audience.... Second, and as important, we wanted to show how modern game theory allows us to sharpen our intuitions and provides us with new ways of looking at familiar problems. In short, we have tried to write a book that offers those interested in law a new way of thinking about legal rules, and a book that shows those interested in game theory a fertile and largely unexplored domain in which its tools have many applications. (P. xi). The book goes on to describe a variety of game-theoretic tools, including the normal form of a game, the extensive form of a game, modeling imperfect information, signaling, screening, reputation, repeated games, collective action problems, noncooperative bargaining, and bargaining and information problems; and then it applies these game-theoretic tools to a variety of legal problems, among them tort theory, contract law, antitrust law, bankruptcy law, employment law, and labor law. Have the authors succeeded in their purposes? Mike? Alexeev: To some extent they did, and to some extent they did not. My impression was that the book was written mostly for lawyers. I think that the authors succeeded in demonstrating the usefulness of game theory to people who do not have any previous exposure to game theory. The authors present a number of simple, but useful, applications to legal doctrine including tort law, antitrust, and labor and employment law. But the book does not really show a "fertile and largely unexplored domain" of applications to game theorists and economists. Most of the book's material comes from economics articles, and even the trial cases are mostly the cases that have already been discussed in the economics literature, so the book is much less useful for the economists or game theorists in particular. But I enjoyed reading it, and I think it will be useful for lawyers. Dau-Schmidt: Eric? Rasmusen: I agree that it may be most useful for people in law who would like to see applications of game theory to particular areas of law. A tort expert might want to read the chapter on torts for its descriptions and numerical examples demonstrating how particular game theory models can be applied to tort law. The book is weaker as a general reference for somebody who's in a hurry to find something. Although the index and glossary2 are good, the structure isn't convenient for reference. This isn't a mathematical book, but it is a dense one which requires careful reading.3 Stake: The authors are quite successful in showing how game theory can provide marvelous counterintuitive insights. But I'm not confident that my law students could slog through the material without some help. I found the book challenging to read, for two opposing reasons. There are portions that are overexplained, even for lawyers. On the other hand, there were places where the explanation seemed thin. For example, it was not immediately obvious to me where the authors got the two sides of the inequality on page 169. It turns out that the same formula was used for both sides, but one side had already been simplified. …


Summary
In this study, in order to evaluate the in vitro bioaccessibility of fresh and sun-dried figs, total antioxidant capacity (TAC), total proanthocyanidin content (TPA) and the major phenolic compounds were determined at different phases of simulated gastrointestinal (GI) tract digestion for Sarilop and Bursa siyahi fig varieties. Four major phenolic compounds (chlorogenic acid, rutin, cyanidin-3-glucoside (C3G) and cyanidin-3-rutinoside (C3R)) were investigated for GI tract digestion. The results of in vitro GI tract digestion revealed that the dialysed fraction (IN) represented 9–26% and 1–22% of the initial TAC of the whole-fresh yellow and purple figs, respectively. Moreover, in case of 2,2-azinobis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline)-6-sulphonic acid (ABTS), TPA and chlorogenic acid contents, drying caused an increase in the IN fraction of yellow figs (38, 140, 50%, respectively). The bioaccessibility of C3G and C3R were quite low for fresh figs (0–5% of the initial values), whereas for dried figs, anthocyanins were not detected at all in the IN fraction.


Recently, Francis, Nanda and Olsson (2008) proposed that earnings quality influence firms' disclosure decisions. We examine whether Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosure is related to earnings management and if the relationship is mitigated by political cost considerations or by the firm's ethical predisposition. We argue that the relationship between CSR reporting and earnings management is contextspecific and we consider one particular context, the political environment. We test our hypotheses by regressing earnings management on CSR disclosure while controlling for other factors that may affect the level of earnings management. We find a significant relationship between CSR reporting and earnings management, and more specifically, we find evidence of a negative (complementary) relationship in the oil and gas industry while we find evidence of a positive (substitutive) relationship in the food industry. The evidence supports the view that the relationship between CSR reporting and earnings management is affected by the political environment and not by ethical considerations.


A teenage girl kneels on the backseat of a car in short shorts, turning toward the camera with a look both innocent and wanton. A young man lounges shirtless, his top fly button open, gazing with lazy invitation through the frame. "What's the story in these ads?" I ask students. "Well, you know," they shrug, "sex sells." Frustrated at how this aphorism closes down discussion, I have begun to consider its status as a commonsense response to some advertising. Antonio Gramsci and others have written about how "commonsense" beliefs become naturalized, taken for granted as "the way things are," and thereby obscure their own ideological foundations. "Sex sells" precludes further analysis: "Well, what can you say? We all know that sex sells and that advertisers use sexualized images of women/men/ teens/whomever to market products." The common sense of "sex sells" masks the relationship between sexuality and commerce, discouraging analysis of the particular ways that sex is articulated to marketing and ignoring the limits placed on visible manifestations of sexuality in advertising and commercial media. To put this another way, when might sex not sell? What manifestations of sex are not commercially viable? How do some forms of sex preclude selling? Disciplines Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/113


Meyerson nevi occur whenever a rare focal and transitory eczematous eruption arises around melanocytic lesions. The same phenomenon has also been observed in non-melanocytic lesions as well. Herein we report the case of a 25 year old, male patient, who had noticed, two months before, the arising of a pruriginous and erithematous halo around two nevi localized on his abdomen. The lesions were found to be atypical on dermoscopic examination and he was submitted to surgical excision of both nevi. Histopathological examination revealed displastic compound melanocytic nevi, surrounded by intraepidermical vesicles and spongiosis. Present report suggests that Meyerson phenomenon does not seem to alter dermoscopic features of nevi.


Many practical tasks involve sampling sequentially without replacement (WoR) from a finite population of size $N$, in an attempt to estimate some parameter $\theta^\star$. Accurately quantifying uncertainty throughout this process is a nontrivial task, but is necessary because it often determines when we stop collecting samples and confidently report a result. We present a suite of tools for designing confidence sequences (CS) for $\theta^\star$. A CS is a sequence of confidence sets $(C_n)_{n=1}^N$, that shrink in size, and all contain $\theta^\star$ simultaneously with high probability. We first exploit a relationship between Bayesian posteriors and martingales to construct a (frequentist) CS for the parameters of a hypergeometric distribution. We then present Hoeffding- and empirical-Bernstein-type time-uniform CSs and fixed-time confidence intervals for sampling WoR which improve on previous bounds in the literature.


Microbial control of postharvest diseases has been extensively studied and appears to be a viable technology. Food safety must be ensured at each postharvest processing step, including handling, washing of raw materials, cleaning of utensils and pipelines, and packaging. Several commercial products are available for this purpose. The time is ripe for developing new techniques and technologies. The use of electrolyzed water (EW) is the product of a new concept developed in Japan, which is now gaining popularity in other countries. Little is known about the principle behind its sterilizing effect, but it has been shown to have significant bactericidal and virucidal and moderate fungicidal properties. Some studies have been carried out in Japan, China, and the USA on the pre- and postharvest application of EW in the field of food processing. EW may be produced using common salt and an apparatus connected to a power source. As the size of the machine is quite small, the water can be manufactured on-site. Studies have been carried out on the use of EW as a sanitizer for fruits, utensils, and cutting boards. It can also be used as a fungicide during postharvest processing of fruits and vegetables, and as a sanitizer for washing the carcasses of meat and poultry. It is cost-effective and environment-friendly. The use of EW is an emerging technology with considerable potential.


Abstract. In this study we introduce a new flow tube suitable for binary and ternary homogeneous nucleation studies. The production of sulfuric acid and water vapor mixture, the experimental setup and the method of sulfuric acid concentration determination are discussed in detail. Wall losses were estimated from the measured sulfuric acid concentration profiles along the flow tube and compared to a theoretical prediction. In this investigation the experimental evidence of new particle formation was observed at a concentration of 109 molecules cm−3 of sulfuric acid and the nucleation rates measured at three relative humidities (RH) 10, 30 and 50%, cover six orders of magnitude, from 10−3 to 103 particles cm−3. Particle free air was used as a carrier gas. Our initial results are compared to the theoretical prediction of binary homogeneous nucleation, to results obtained by other investigators, and to atmospheric nucleation.


This study examined the private sector participation in Education and the development of secondary schools education in Bayelsa State. Three research questions were posed and three hypotheses were formulated. The instrument adopted in this study to collect data from the respondents is a questionnaire titled "Private Sector Participation and Development of Schools Questionnaire (PSPPSQ) in Bayelsa State". The population of the study is 2,240 proprietors, teachers and ministry of Education officials comprising 22 private school proprietors, 1,660 teachers and 558 staff of the ministry of Education in Bayelsa State. The sample size of the study is 300 proprietors, teachers and ministry of Education Officials comprising 22 school proprietors, 228 teachers and 50 ministry of Education officials. The collected responses were duly analyzed using mean (x) and t-test statistical methods. Analysis of the data indicates that the three hypotheses formulated were accepted at a significant level of 0.05. This revealed that there are no significant differences between the perception of school proprietors and ministry officials on the hypotheses formulated. The finding of the study shows that proprietors are in school business to reduce illiteracy level of the state. However, ministry officials agree that profit is upper most for some school proprietors. It also indicates inadequacy in qualified teachers, equipment facilities etc. it is recommended that Government should subsidize the funding of education of the private sector. They should be encouraged to set up more quality secondary schools to meet the educational needs of the state. Government must also step up routine checks and inspection of private schools while unapproved schools should be closed down. Reference to this paper should be made as follows Okilo D.A. and Digha O.N (2013), Private Sector Participation and Development of Secondary Schools in Bayelsa State, Nigeria, J. of


In this study, a hybrid, energy efficient MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol has been developed for usage in dense WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) applications. In the designed hybrid MAC, favorable aspects of both CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access) and TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) techniques are considered. Consequently, a MAC protocol which is more energy efficient than both CSMA and TDMA-based MAC protocols is aimed. Therefore, with the combination of CSMA which responses to the events rapidly and TDMA which reduces the collisions and unnecessary channel listening, high system throughput and node energy efficiency are obtained.


Deep learning models are often successfully trained using gradient descent, despite the worst case hardness of the underlying non-convex optimization problem. The key question is then under what conditions can one prove that optimization will succeed. Here we provide a strong result of this kind. We consider a neural net with one hidden layer and a convolutional structure with no overlap, and a ReLU activation function. For this architecture we show that learning is NP-complete in the general case, but that when the input distribution is Gaussian, gradient descent converges to the global optimum in polynomial time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first global optimality guarantee of gradient descent on a convolutional neural network with ReLU activations.


Objectives/Goals The objective of my project is to determine how amplitude, weight, and length affect the period of motion of a pendulum. My hypotheses were as follows: 1) Higher amplitude would result in a longer time for the pendulum to return to the original point of release at the maximum amplitude. This would result in a longer period of motion. 2) The effect of greater weight would be longer period of motion. 3) Longer string length would mean more surface area in contact with air. This would increase air resistance and period of motion. Methods/Materials A wooden frame for the pendulum was constructed. A cup with pre-determined weight and length was hung on the pendulum frame and released from an amplitude. I timed how long it took the pendulum to swing back and forth three times to its original point of release at the maximum amplitude. The amount of time was divided by three to obtain the average period of motion for one swing. I repeated multiple trials of this process for various combinations of amplitudes, weights, and lengths. Results After I collected data and graphed the amplitude versus average period of motion, weight versus average period of motion, and length versus average period of motion, I compared the results. I prove that length has a positive effect on the period of motion of the pendulum. On the other hand, there is an insubstantially positive relationship between amplitude and period of motion. In addition, weight affects the period of motion insignificantly. Conclusions/Discussion My hypotheses were that higher amplitudes, greater weights, and longer lengths would result in longer periods of motion. Based on my thorough observations, the pendulum's period of motion is significantly dependent on the length of the string, supporting my hypothesis. However, the results reveal negligible relationship between weight and period of motion, and a slightly positive relationship between amplitude and period of motion, contradicting my hypotheses.


The food industry has high hopes for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and claims that they are a solution to global food problems. But are the benefits proven and what are the long-term risks? Are we just creating a new environmental problem for ourselves: genetic pollution? Dr Guy Poppy leads a team of entomologists researching on insect-resistant transgenic crop plants at IACR Rothamsted. In this editorial, he is hoping to present a balanced and factual view of the risks and advantages of this controversial subject.


Disordered eating in athletes has been frequently studied with a particular emphasis on aesthetic sports. Lately, competitive rowing has come into the focus. It has been supposed that in competitive rowers eating disturbances occur more frequently compared to non-competitive rowers. The aim of the present study therefore is to investigate eating disturbances and mental health related issues in competitive and non-competitive rowers. N = 45 lightweight (LWR), n = 31 heavyweight (HWR) and n = 37 non-competitive rowers (NCR) participated in an online based survey during the beginning of the on-season asking for eating behaviour (SCOFF, EDI-2) and mental health problems (PHQ). Results showed that competitive rowers reported more eating disturbances and risky attitudes/behaviour compared to non-competitive rowers. LWR showed higher Drive for thinness compared to HWR. The regression analysis revealed that Drive for thinness and Bulimia predict eating disorder symptoms in rowers. These results emphasize the presence of serious eating disturbances in competitive rowing.


Introduction: Education is a joint process, of teachers managing and arranging curriculum resources and of students acquiring the necessary understanding, sensibilities and skills. Evaluation is an integral part of this system. Examiners approach may affect student's performance during summative exam. For the benefit of students it is important to know the examiners views towards students. Objective: To analyze examiners views while evaluating student's performance during theory and practical examination. Material and Methods: After ethics approval a validated questionnaire based cross-sectional study was conducted at NKPSIMS & RC. Questionnaire was categorized into- (A) General questions, (B) Questions related to theory paper correction, (C) Questions regarding practical examination and viva. Questionnaire was given to teachers (n= 62) who were examiner for university examination in their respective subject. Statistical Analysis : Mean, Standard Deviation (SD) and percentage was derived for each item. Results: Teachers gave much importance to theory paper correction (Mean 7.40, SD 2.33) and practical examination & viva (Mean 8.61, SD1.51). They gave maximum importance to content of answer sheet (Mean 8.47 SD 1.89) and least importance to number of pages filled by student (Mean 5.13 SD 2.87). Most of teachers gave importance to knowledge of student (Mean 9.35, SD 1.08). Conclusion- In present study teachers had given much importance to content of answer sheet in theory paper correction and knowledge & competency during practical examination. Keywords: Summative examination, University examiner, Written examination, Practical examination.


Cognitively challenging training sessions during robot-assisted gait training after stroke were shown to be key requirements for the success of rehabilitation. Despite a broad variability of cognitive impairments amongst the stroke population, current rehabilitation environments do not adapt to the cognitive capabilities of the patient, as cognitive load cannot be objectively assessed in real-time. We provided healthy subjects and stroke patients with a virtual task during robot-assisted gait training, which allowed modulating cognitive load by adapting the difficulty level of the task. We quantified the cognitive load of stroke patients by using psychophysiological measurements and performance data. In open-loop experiments with healthy subjects and stroke patients, we obtained training data for a linear, adaptive classifier that estimated the current cognitive load of patients in real-time. We verified our classification results via questionnaires and obtained 88% correct classification in healthy subjects and 75% in patients. Using the pre-trained, adaptive classifier, we closed the cognitive control loop around healthy subjects and stroke patients by automatically adapting the difficulty level of the virtual task in real-time such that patients were neither cognitively overloaded nor under-challenged.


This technical note provides a thorough overview of real-estate investment trusts (REITs). Created to promote and facilitate widespread public ownership of commercial real estate, REITs are companies that own real-estate properties or mortgages and that operate within certain guidelines, allowing them to qualify for REIT status. Focusing primarily on equity REITs, the note covers a broad range of issues, including valuation and its many drivers, and also examines the advantages of REIT ownership versus property ownership. The note concludes with a discussion of the future of REITs.


Summary This case describes an unusual presentation of prosthetic valve endocarditis (PVE): an acute coronary syndrome. A 67-year-old male presented with cardiac sounding chest pain on a background of a short history of night sweats, weight loss and general malaise. Four months previously, he had undergone bio-prosthetic aortic valve replacement for severe aortic stenosis and single vessel bypass grafting of the obtuse marginal. Whilst having chest pain, his ECG showed infero-lateral ST depression. Early coronary angiography revealed a new right coronary artery (RCA) lesion that was not present prior to his cardiac surgery. Using multi-modality cardiac imaging, the diagnosis of PVE was made. An aortic root abscess was demonstrated that was causing external compression of the RCA. Learning points: PVE accounts for up to 20% of all cases of infective endocarditis. High clinical suspicion and early blood cultures before empirical antibiotics are key as the presentation of PVE can often be atypical. PVE rarely presents as an acute coronary syndrome. Potential mechanisms by which PVE may result in an ACS include coronary embolization, obstruction of coronary ostia by a large mobile vegetation and external coronary artery compression from an infective aneurysms/abscess. Repeat cardiac surgery is often required for high-risk PVE such as those caused by staphylococcal infection or severe prosthetic dysfunction.


We identified the amplified spontaneous emission-amplified spontaneous emission (ASE-ASE) beat noise from the semiconductor optical amplifier, which has been overlooked in previous studies, as a cause of severe system penalties when it was used to provide single-channel amplification in a dynamic central office environment through experimental studies. Our results pointed out that the ASE-ASE beat noise of the optical amplifier, other than its gain and noise figure, has to be considered to correctly predict its performance in these new applications.


A subject that biographers and critics once avoided altogether or approached only with great circumspection, Pater9s sexuality has become an explicit and even a major topic of recent Pater studies. The story of Pater9s erotic relationship in 1874 with an Oxford undergraduate, though apparently known to some of his contemporaries, has only recently been reconstructed and documented, the fullest account being that of Billie Inman. And Pater9s encoded sexuality has been made a central topic of critical discourse by Richard Dellamora, who has decoded several of Pater9s texts using the method of gender criticism. To the degree that the conclusions of these studies rely on demonstration, they raise questions that are of as much interest as the conclusions themselves. These questions concern the nature of the available evidence, the manner in which the evidence is interpreted, and the suppositions that render one interpretation more persuasive that another. The case of Pater also tests a terminological distinction favored by Dellamora and other gender critics. Because all-male institutions have traditionally discouraged overtly sexual relationships between men, gender criticism distinguishes "homosociality" from "homosexuality" in order to oppose them. For Patter, however, the "homosocial" and the "homosexual" form a continuum that recalls the erotic sensibility of the Greeks he admired. It is therefore difficult to describe Pater9s sexual temperament using such language. Probably the least unsatisfactory term would be "homoerotic." It is more inclusive than "homosexual," and as a verbal formation it has the advantage of being purely Greek.


Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis (data from the Enquete Nationale sur les Violences Envers les Femmes survey and in-depth ad hoc interviews), this article explores the relationship between women's fears for their safety, the experience of victimization, and women's mobility in public places -three phenomena rarely dealt with in combination. While relatively few women spontaneously say they are afraid to go out alone, study of their actual practices and the content of their discourse enables us to qualify this assessment. In fact, many women, married, living with a partner, or with little or no free time due to the sexual division of labor, do not have to deal with the question of going out alone at night. Moreover, analysis of the practices of women who go out alone at night suggests that doing so involves maintaining strong mental vigilance, a condition revealed in their many tactics for avoiding contact. Mental vigilance is particularly strong among women who have been victims of violence. Women's mobility does not seem hampered by having been assaulted or otherwise harassed in a public place. However, violence of any kind, even the most apparently harmless or inconsequential, limits women's freedom of movement in that it carries with it a threat felt over and beyond the moment it occurs, and increases what many women say is their fear of being alone in public space.


Systems Biology approaches aim to reconstruct gene regulatory networks from experimental data. Conversely, Synthetic Biology aims at using mathematical models to design novel biological 'circuits' (synthetic networks) in order to seed new functions inside the cell. These disciplines require quantitative mathematical models and reverse-engineering techniques.
A plethora of modelling strategies and reverse-engineering approaches has being proposed during the last years. Even if successful applications have being demonstrated, at present their usefulness and predictive ability cannot still be assessed and compared rigorously. There is the pressing and yet unsatisfied need for a 'benchmark': a perfectly known biological circuit that can be used to evaluate pro and cons of such techniques when applied at in vivo networks.
In order to address this aim, we constructed in the simplest eukaryotic organism, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a novel synthetic network for In-vivo Reverse-engineering and Modelling Assessment (IRMA). IRMA is composed of five well-studied genes that have been assembled to regulate each other in such a way to include a variety of regulatory interactions, thus capturing the behaviour of larger eukaryotic gene networks on a smaller scale. It was designed to be isolated from the cellular environment, and to respond to galactose by triggering transcription of its genes.
To demonstrate that IRMA is a unique resource to validate the System and Synthetic biology approaches, we analysed the transcriptional response of IRMA genes following two different perturbation strategies: by performing a single perturbation and measuring mRNA changes at different time points, or by performing multiple perturbations and collecting mRNA measurements at steady state. We used these data as a 'gold standard' to assess either the predictive ability of mathematical modelling based on differential equations and, to compare four well-established reverse engineering algorithms, NIR, TSNI, BANJO and ARACNE.
We thus showed the usefulness of IRMA as the first simplified model of eukaryotic gene networks built "ad hoc" to test the power of network modelling and reverse-engineering strategies.


Experience using UML for systems engineering on a complex system is described. The system was an experimental situation awareness system for small military units such as a hostage rescue mission. This experience provides insight into the use of processoriented and object-oriented models. Real projects that experiment with methodology are an important source of information that cannot be duplicated on a contrived problem. Most of the functional requirements in this system involved software but there was also unique hardware. Use case specifications were derived directly from a very high level specification from the customer without any intervening artifact. Subsystem interaction diagrams were developed from the use case specifications. The use of UML as a systems design tool had the advantage that it greatly facilitated the transition into software development. While this approach was largely successful, there were some cases when the object-oriented model did not fit the problem. In addition to their role in task automation, models provide a mental representation that helps us solve engineering problems. Objectoriented and process-oriented models provide two different representations. Because this project attempted to apply an object-oriented model so broadly, it was a de facto experiment in the use of such models. An examination of the cases where a process-oriented model fit better than an object-oriented model provides insight into the differences between these two views. The experience on this project supports idea that each view is a better cognitive fit to a different set of problems.


The objectives of the research are: (1) to determine the role of agricultural extension upon independent small holder farmers of palm oil, (2) to figure out the empowerment level the farmers, and (3) to analyze the influence of the extension's role upon the farmers' empowerment. The research was carried out in sub district of Bonai Darussalam Rokan Hulu district. 45 farmers were selected by using purposive sampling method and were interviewed as the respondents as well. Validity and reliability analysis have been done upon questionnaire. To answer the objective 1 and 2, analysis of Likert Scale Summated Rating (SLR) was utilized and in order to answer the objective 3, multiple regression analysis was used. The results shows: (1) The role of extension has shown quite significant role in the activities of  the farmers, which consist of the role of extension as education, the dissemination of information/innovation, facilitation, consultation, supervision, monitoring and evaluation; (2) the empowerment level of the farmers is well enough consisting of a non-human resource, productive economy, and institutional; (3) the role of extension that has significant influence upon the farmers empowerment is the role extension as evaluation, meanwhile the role of extension as a education, dissemination, facilitation, consultation, and supervision have no significant influence. Keywords: The role of extension, empowerment, independent small holder farmers of palm oil, oil palm


The author was a rapporteur for the session on "Flow Related Transport Phenomena: Water Quality" at the International Conference on Numerical Modelling of River, Channel and Overland Flow for Water Resources and Environmental Applications, organized by IAHR, WMO, IIASA, and the Czechoslovakian Committee of IAHR, and held in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, May 4-8, 1981.

The request to the rapporteur was to give an overview of the related subject. This formed the first part of the original report and is published here since it considers some typical features and an apparent gap in water quality modeling, and is therefore of more general interest. The papers reviewed are listed in the Appendix.


BACKGROUND
Preventive and therapeutic vaccine strategies aimed at controlling hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection should mimic the immune responses observed in patients who control or clear HCV, specifically T helper (Th) type 1 and CD8+ cell responses to multiple antigens, including nonstructural protein (NS) 3. Given the experience with human immunodeficiency virus, the best candidates for this are based on DNA prime, pox, or adenovirus boost regimens.

METHODS
In rhesus macaques, we compared NS3-expressing DNA prime and adenovirus boost strategy with 2 alternative priming approaches aimed at modifying Th1 and CD8+ responses: DNA adjuvanted with interleukin (IL)-2- and -12-encoding plasmids or Semliki Forest virus (SFV).

RESULTS
All prime-boost regimens elicited NS3-specific B and T cell responses in rhesus macaques, including CD8+ responses. SFV priming induced higher lymphoproliferation and longer Th1 memory responses. The use of IL-2- and IL-12-expressing vectors resulted in reduced Th2 and antibody responses, which led to increased Th1 skewing but not to an increase in the magnitude of the IFN- gamma and CD8+ responses.

CONCLUSIONS
All strategies induced Th1 cellular responses to HCV NS3, with fine modulations depending on the different priming approaches. When they are developed for more HCV antigens, these strategies could be beneficial in therapeutic vaccine approaches.


The aim of this study is to point out some characteristics of prescriptivism and their links to descriptivism. We first analyse the representation of how specialized vocabulary, scientific and technical words should be used, according to Biscarrat's dictionary (1835): we uncover a typology of terms presented in this dictionary which are simultaneously specialized and featuring a prescriptive mark. We then study this corpus of terms through institutional lexicography, including the contemporary period. It appears that in specialized fields, and over the centuries, lexicographers follow a kind of current agreement in their usage recommandations. One also notices that what may be considered as a separation between prescriptivism and descriptivism tends to disappear: there is a convergence between how one should and how one does write or talk. This analysis leads to the conclusion that prescriptive developments are part of descriptive activity. Understanding these prescriptive and descriptive movements should help us in improving new developments in language policy.


INTRODUCTION
Suicide is considered a public health priority. It is a complex phenomenon resulting from the interaction of several factors, which do not depend solely on individual conditions. This study analyzes the spatio-temporal evolution of suicide mortality between 1980 and 2015, identifying areas of high risk, and their variation, in the 278 municipalities of Continental Portugal.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Based on the number of self-inflicted injuries and deaths from suicide and the resident population, the spatio-temporal evolution of the suicide mortality rate was assessed via: i) a Poisson joinpoint regression model, and ii) spatio-temporal clustering methods.

RESULTS
The suicide mortality rate evolution showed statistically significant increases over three periods (1980 - 1984; 1999 - 2002 and 2006 - 2015) and two statistically significant periods of decrease (1984 - 1995 and 1995 - 1999). The spatio-temporal analysis identified five clusters of high suicide risk (relative risk >1) and four clusters of low suicide risk (relative risk < 1).

DISCUSSION
The periods when suicide mortality increases seem to overlap with times of economic and financial instability. The geographical pattern of suicide risk has changed: presently, the suicide rates from the municipalities in the Center and North are showing more similarity with those seen in the South, thus increasing the ruralization of the phenomenon of suicide.

CONCLUSION
Between 1980 and 2015 the spacio-temporal pattern of mortality from suicide has been changing and is a phenomenon that is currently experiencing a growing trend (since 2006) and is of higher risk in rural areas.


Brazil has undergone transformative change since the 1980s, from an authoritarian regime to a democratic society advancing on all fronts --political, social, economic, and diplomatic. In Starting Over, Albert Fishlow traces the evolution of this member of the BRICS group over the last twenty-five years and looks toward the future as the newly elected president, Dilma Rousseff, follows her very popular predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, or "Lula." The transformation of the country began with the founding of the Nova Republica and the Constitution of 1988, which established a strong executive and encased key social principles such as a citizen's right to education and health care. Then the Real Plan of 1994 --initiated under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso --set the stage for economic growth and a stable economy. There were setbacks, especially in the mid-1990s with the Mexican devaluation, Asian financial crisis, Russian default, and Argentine collapse, and, later, the U.S. recession. But changed economic policies in the late 1990s put Brazil on the right path to future economic growth, which resumed during the Lula years. With popular participation in the electoral process at an all-time high, politics has been profoundly altered in Brazil. Economic rules are now more permanent, and economic advance more regular. A healthier and longer life is now available to a broader swath of the population, and there is opportunity for social advancement. In addition, its foreign policy has greater consequence internally as well as externally. Dilma's two immediate predecessors --Cardoso and Lula --are tough acts to follow. Their influence has been profound, and Brazil is now a very different nation than it was in the 1980s. But she is working from their template to move the country forward. This insightful book clearly explains how and why the country has progressed to its current standing and what the future portends. Starting Over is essential reading for anyone trying to grasp what is happening in this dynamic nation.


SUMMARY Household surveys are one of the most commonly used tools for generating insight into rural communities. Despite their prevalence, few studies comprehensively evaluate the quality of data derived from farm household surveys. We critically evaluated a series of standard reported values and indicators that are captured in multiple farm household surveys, and then quantified their credibility, consistency and, thus, their reliability. Surprisingly, even variables which might be considered 'easy to estimate' had instances of non-credible observations. In addition, measurements of maize yields and land owned were found to be less reliable than other stationary variables. This lack of reliability has implications for monitoring food security status, poverty status and the land productivity of households. Despite this rather bleak picture, our analysis also shows that if the same farm households are followed over time, the sample sizes needed to detect substantial changes are in the order of hundreds of surveys, and not in the thousands. Our research highlights the value of targeted and systematised household surveys and the importance of ongoing efforts to improve data quality. Improvements must be based on the foundations of robust survey design, transparency of experimental design and effective training. The quality and usability of such data can be further enhanced by improving coordination between agencies, incorporating mixed modes of data collection and continuing systematic validation programmes.


Web 2.0 has provided organizations remarkable opportunities to improve productivity, gain competitive advantage, and increase participation by engaging a crowd to accomplish tasks at scale. However, establishing and integrating crowd-based systems into organizations is still an open question. The systems and the collaborative processes they enable appear diametrically in dissonance with the norms and culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing in traditional organizations. They require mechanisms for articulation of work, coordination, cooperation, and knowledge co-creation that are fundamentally different from those in current groupwork systems and processes. Building on two workshops hosted at ACM CSCW 2014, we will explore questions such as: How does the shift in organizational work from a closed system with known individuals, to an open and crowd model that requires engagement with an undefined network of people, affect how we conceptualize groupwork? What are the implications for the design of groupwork systems? What can the crowdsourcing research community learn from groupwork systems, or conversely what can groupwork researchers learn from crowdsourcing? How do cultures, motivations, ownership and representation fit into these systems? This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners in crowdsourcing, social computing, collaborative technologies, organizational science, and workplace research, to discuss the future of groupwork systems in the era of crowdwork with the goal of articulating an agenda for future research.


Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) are a group of clonal, stem cell derived hematopoietic malignancies driven by aberrant JAK/STAT signalling. Although they are genetically simple diseases, MPNs are phenotypically heterogeneous, reflecting underlying intra-tumoral heterogeneity driven by the interplay of genetic and non-genetic factors. As their evolution is determined by factors that enable certain cellular subsets to outcompete others, techniques that resolve cellular heterogeneity at the single-cell level are ideally placed to provide new insights into MPN biology. With these insights comes the potential to uncover new approaches to predict the clinical course and treat these cancers, ultimately improving outcomes for patients. MPNs present a particularly tractable model of cancer evolution, as most patients present in an early disease phase and only a small proportion progress to aggressive disease. Therefore, it is not surprising that many of the groundbreaking technological advances in single-cell omics have been pioneered by their application in MPNs. In this review article, we explore how single-cell approaches have provided transformative insights into MPN disease biology, that are broadly applicable across human cancers, and discuss how these studies might be swiftly translated into clinical pathways and may eventually underpin precision medicine.


This paper examines which factors can explain the allocation of aid by four regional development banks as well as three United Nations agencies. The results suggest the following: most donors examined also exhibit a bias apparent in bilateral aid allocation in favor of less populous countries. Some of them also share another bias of bilateral donors who give more aid to their former colonies. However, the three United Nations agencies contravene a third bias of bilateral aid allocation and provide more aid to countries geographically more distant from the centers of the Western world. While the regional development banks with the possible exception of the Inter-American one focus exclusively on economic need as measured by per capita income, the three United Nations agencies also take into account human development need in their aid allocation as measured by the Physical Quality of Life Index. Some tentative evidence is found that respect for political freedom is rewarded with higher aid receipts at the aggregate multilateral level and by the Inter-American Development Bank as well as perhaps, in a few estimations, two of the three United Nations agencies. Neither respect for personal integrity rights nor low levels of perceived corruption play any role in the allocation of aid by the donors looked at. In general, higher military expenditures and arms imports are not associated with higher aid receipts, with a few notable exceptions.