Traffic laws attempt to improve driving standards by defining as illegal those types of behaviour which are held to be unduly risky, such as drink-driving or driving too fast. These laws are only effective if they are obeyed, but drivers frequently violate traffic laws without being caught. The likelihood of an offender being caught depends on the level of enforcement of these laws by human policing and increasingly by automatic equipment such as speed cameras. This report presents the results of a review of the relevant technical literature that was undertaken by TRL on behalf of Transport for London (TfL) to investigate 'How Methods and Levels of Policing Affect Road Casualty Rates'. The main aims of the review were: (a) to evaluate the findings from existing literature in order to determine whether increasing the level of traffic policing is likely to reduce the number of casualties in road accidents and (b) to summarise the main pieces of work and draw conclusions, including any quantitative relationships between the level of enforcement and the numbers of accidents and casualties. Overall, the literature showed that increased enforcement can lead to significant improvements in road safety. However, determining the precise relationships between levels of policing and casualty rates is problematic on the basis of the available literature. Detailed results are presented along with a brief proposal for a future research project to investigate the influence of levels of traffic policing on accidents and casualty rates.


Synaptic plasticity (e.g., long-term potentiation [LTP]) is considered the cellular correlate of learning. Recent optogenetic studies on memory engram formation assign a critical role in learning to suprathreshold activation of neurons and their integration into active engrams (''engram cells''). Here we review evidence that ensemble integration may result from LTP but also from cell-autonomous changes in membrane excitability. We propose that synaptic plasticity determines synaptic connectivity maps, whereas intrinsic plasticity— possibly separated in time—amplifies neuronal responsiveness and acutely drives engram integration. Our proposal marks a move away from an exclusively synaptocentric toward a non-exclusive, neurocentric view of learning.


We contribute to the literature on well-being and comparisons by appealing to new Danish data dividing the country up into around 9000 small neighbourhoods. Administrative data provides us with the income of every person in each of these neighbourhoods. This income information is matched to demographic and economic satisfaction variables from eight years of Danish ECHP data. Panel regression analysis shows that, conditional on own household income, respondents report higher satisfaction levels when their neighbours are richer. However, the individuals are rank-sensitive: conditional on own income and neighbourhood median income, individuals are more satisfied as their percentile neighbourhood ranking improves. A ten percentage point rise in rank (i.e. from 40 to 20 position in a 200-household cell) is worth 0.11 on a one to six scale, which is a large marginal effect in satisfaction terms.


Learning with neural networks relies on the complexity of the representable functions, but more importantly, the particular assignment of typical parameters to functions of different complexity. Taking the number of activation regions as a complexity measure, recent works have shown that the practical complexity of deep ReLU networks is often far from the theoretical maximum. In this work, we show that this phenomenon also occurs in networks with maxout (multi-argument) activation functions and when considering the decision boundaries in classification tasks. We also show that the parameter space has a multitude of full-dimensional regions with widely different complexity, and obtain nontrivial lower bounds on the expected complexity. Finally, we investigate different parameter initialization procedures and show that they can increase the speed of convergence in training.


In this chapter, I turn to a historical accounting of the development of Commission procedures and powers, and to the changing background conditions in which state aid controls existed. I focus on those developments which bear most strongly on the Commission's ability to exercise effective control. The exposition will be partly chronological and partly thematic. First, I will examine the first major application of state aid rules, export aid for intra-Community trade. Second, I will turn to early Commission efforts in the area of regional aid, in which the system of differentiated aid maxima for different regions of the Community were created and expanded. Third, I will consider the impact that the addition of new, poorer member states has had on state aid policy. Fourth, I consider Commission efforts in two important sectors, textiles and automobiles. Fifth, I analyze the introduction and development of the most important horizontal framework, that for research and development. Sixth, the focus shifts to the question of efforts to evade legal history of state aid rules and their application. In particular, this will focus on Commission initiatives such as the Transparency Directive and the rules on cumulation of aids, and especially on the use of repayment orders beginning in the mid-1980s. Seventh, I consider the crucial cases defining the powers of the Commission (in particular, Philip Morris) and the rights of third parties. Finally, I analyze in detail the political underpinnings of reinforced state aid control beginning in the mid-1980s.


Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We study episodic Markov decision processes with rich observations generated from a small number of latent states. We present a general algorithmic framework that is built upon two components: an unsupervised learning algorithm and a no-regret tabular RL algorithm. Theoretically, we prove that as long as the unsupervised learning algorithm enjoys a polynomial sample complexity guarantee, we can find a near-optimal policy with sample complexity polynomial in the number of latent states, which is significantly smaller than the number of observations. Empirically, we instantiate our framework on a class of hard exploration problems to demonstrate the practicality of our theory.


A philosophical debate between particle physicists and solid state physicists roiled as these subdisciplines competed for financial support, social approbation, and intellectual prestige through the second half of the twentieth century. Their disagreement hinged on the nature of fundamental research. The particle physics community adopted a reductionist approach, arguing that the fundamental physical laws were those governing the smallest constituents of matter and energy. Partly in response to this position, solid state physicists developed a range of more permissive perspectives on what type of physics could be fundamental, all of which stressed the importance of higher-level characteristics, maintaining that investigations at many levels of complexity might yield fundamental insight. This paper traces the dispute over fundamentality, which grew both from the specific problems physicists encountered while building their professional infrastructure, and from the demands of funding their research in Cold War America. Through an exploration of how physicists developed philosophical positions within institutional contexts and deployed those positions in their rhetoric, I argue first that professional pressures both motivated and exerted influence over the construction of such views, second that philosophical views had a reciprocal guiding effect on the institutional and professional development of Cold War physics, and third that these views were further bent, blunted, and reshaped when deployed in high-stakes rhetorical discourse. The case studies through which this story unfolds indicate that further attention to such philosophical commitments is warranted when examining the historical development of scientific institutions, communities, and hierarchies.


The formation of
the cracks in concrete materials can shorten the service life of the structure
by exposing the steel rebar to the aggressive substances from the external
environment. Self-healing concrete can eliminate the crack automatically, which
has the potential to replace manual rehabilitation and repairing work. This
thesis intends to develop a self-healing fiber-reinforced cementitious
composite by the use of internal curing agents, such as lightweight aggregate,
zeolite and superabsorbent polymer (SAP). This study has evaluated the crack
width control ability of three different types of fiber, polyvinyl alcohol
fiber (PVA), Masterfiber Mac Matrix and Strux 90/40 fiber. Mechanical
performance and flexural stress-strain behavior of the fiber-reinforced
cementitious composite were tested and compared. In order to investigate the
feasibility of using internal curing aggregate to enhance autogenous healing
performance, two types of porous aggregates, zeolite and lightweight aggregate
(LWA), were used as internal curing agents to provide water for the autogenous
healing. The pore structure of the zeolite and lightweight aggregate was examined
by the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Two replacement ratios of sand with
internal curing aggregates were designed and the healing efficiency was
evaluated by the resonant frequency measurement and the optical microscopic
observation. To further understand the influence of the internal curing on the
designed material, water retention behavior of the bulk sample and the internal
curing aggregates was evaluated. Moreover,
to study the self-sealing effect of the superabsorbent polymer (SAP), the
robustness of the SAP under various environmental conditions was first evaluated.
The influence of the superplasticizer, hydration accelerator and fly ash on the
absorption behavior of the SAP was investigated by the filtration test and void
size analysis. Afterward, the self-sealing performance of the SAP in cement
paste was evaluated by a water flow test.

The evaluation
of three types of fiber indicated that the use of PVA fiber could produce a
cementitious composite with stronger mechanical strength and crack width
control ability. The result of the autogenous healing evaluation showed that
the incorporation of the internal curing aggregates increased the self-healing
recovery ratio from 12.6% to over 18%. The internal curing aggregate could
absorb and store water during the wet curing and release it when the external
water supply is unavailable. The comparison between the two types of internal
curing aggregates indicated that finer pores in the internal curing aggregate
can lead to a slower water release rate that is capable of continuously supplying
water for the autogenous healing. In addition, the SAP was proved to be robust
when various content of the additives and fly ash were used. And the
self-sealing effect of the SAP is found to be effective in regaining the water
tightness of cement paste. The result of this thesis can assist in the design
of the fiber-reinforced cementitious composite with self-healing performance in
civil engineering.


The article gives general characterisation of the ways in which these organizations use modern communication technologies. Currently, every major terrorist organisation maintain robust media wings, which focus on producing videos, publishing magazines and sharing them with the public via the Web. The empirical system of reference is based on the activity of al-Qaeda, her franchise AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and ISIS (the so-called Islamic State). While analysing the media of terrorist organisations, the Lasswell model was applied. This formula is a standard research procedure used for investigating acts of communication by answering the questions: who, says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?. The author also present typology of videos produced by jihadist organisations, characterised the most important and active media actions of terrorist organisations and a typology of recipients of such messages. The article presents a number of reasons why the Internet has become such an important tool for terrorists


Most conventional sentence similarity methods only focus on similar parts of two input sentences, and simply ignore the dissimilar parts, which usually give us some clues and semantic meanings about the sentences. In this work, we propose a model to take into account both the similarities and dissimilarities by decomposing and composing lexical semantics over sentences. The model represents each word as a vector, and calculates a semantic matching vector for each word based on all words in the other sentence. Then, each word vector is decomposed into a similar component and a dissimilar component based on the semantic matching vector. After this, a two-channel CNN model is employed to capture features by composing the similar and dissimilar components. Finally, a similarity score is estimated over the composed feature vectors. Experimental results show that our model gets the state-of-the-art performance on the answer sentence selection task, and achieves a comparable result on the paraphrase identification task.


The DEBRIS software predicts the trajectories of debris particles shed by a space-shuttle launch vehicle during ascent, to aid in assessing potential harm to the space-shuttle orbiter and crew. The user specifies the location of release and other initial conditions for a debris particle. DEBRIS tracks the particle within an overset grid system by means of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of the local flow field and a ballistic simulation that takes account of the mass of the particle and its aerodynamic properties in the flow field. The computed particle trajectory is stored in a file to be post-processed by other software for viewing and analyzing the trajectory. DEBRIS supplants a prior debris tracking code that took .15 minutes to calculate a single particle trajectory: DEBRIS can calculate 1,000 trajectories in .20 seconds on a desktop computer. Other improvements over the prior code include adaptive time-stepping to ensure accuracy, forcing at least one step per grid cell to ensure resolution of all CFD-resolved flow features, ability to simulate rebound of debris from surfaces, extensive error checking, a builtin suite of test cases, and dynamic allocation of memory.


Purpose. The primary objective of this paper is to discuss pharmaceutical care of the oncology patient in the context of recent recommendations made by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and recent changes in Health Care Reform. Data Sources. We reviewed the literature through a MEDLINE search from 1985 to 1995. We searched the following terms: pharmaceutical care, cancer, patient, and pharmacist. We restricted the search to the English language. We also have incor porated several of our practice guidelines as examples of tools that can be used in the implementation of pharmaceutical care. We also focused on areas that the JCAHO guidelines specify as important pharma ceutical care issues in the cancer patient. Data Extraction. Within the framework of drug prescribing, drug administration, drug monitoring, and patient education, we have provided interven tions that may potentially improve outcomes in can cer patients. Data Synthesis. The advent of managed care will require that the pharmacist be more involved in the care and management of the cancer patient. This activity will necessitate that the pharmacist document the impact of interventions on patient outcomes. Although tumor response and survival are classic outcomes that are assessed in the cancer patient, other outcome indicators may be used to evaluate interventions made by the pharmacist. Conclusions. This review offers strategies for implementing pharmaceutical care in the cancer pa tient. Because we did not present study results on patient outcomes, it is unknown which of these proposed pharmacist interventions are important fac tors in the implementation of pharmaceutical care in this patient population. Although pharmaceutical care is the new paradigm in pharmacy practice, we must perform prospective studies to determine its value to the cancer community.


We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same product recommendation repeatedly) or infeasible (e.g. compute job scheduling on machines). We show that with prior knowledge of the rewards and delays of all the arms, the problem of optimizing cumulative reward does not admit any pseudo-polynomial time algorithm (in the number of arms) unless randomized exponential time hypothesis is false, by mapping to the PINWHEEL scheduling problem. Subsequently, we show that a simple greedy algorithm that plays the available arm with the highest reward is asymptotically $(1-1/e)$ optimal. When the rewards are unknown, we design a UCB based algorithm which is shown to have $c \log T + o(\log T)$ cumulative regret against the greedy algorithm, leveraging the free exploration of arms due to the unavailability. Finally, when all the delays are equal the problem reduces to Combinatorial Semi-bandits providing us with a lower bound of $c' \log T+ \omega(\log T)$.


While examining two copies of Stow's 1561 Chaucer edition (1) at the Garrett Library Collection of the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University, I discovered that each of them contained a manuscript transcription of the verses on Chaucer's tomb, the marble structure Nicholas Brigham paid to erect at Westminster in 1556. Though one transcription is far more complete than the other, both appear to have been written in early-modern hands and both are located in places suggesting that their writers considered the epitaphs the "termini" of Chaucer's works. In the first one, a single quatrain from the epitaph is traced in now-faint brownish ink with red capitals on the verso of folio 378, the colophon leaf, just below its sarcophagus-like printer's ornament. (2) The other, copied in black ink, stands just below the printer's title announcing "Thus endeth the workes of Geffray Chaucer" and before the beginning of Lydgate's works (fol. 355v). (3) The occurrence of the same kind of annotation in two different hands in two copies of the same Chaucer edition seemed astonishing and suggestive. In 1999, Joseph Dane and Alexandra Gillespie reported finding two more tomb-verse transcriptions at the Huntington Library and at the Harry Ransom Center. (4) Dane's Huntington discovery was a complete version of the tomb verses on the title page of a 1550 reprint of the Thynne edition, located be neath another sarcophagus-like printer's ornament. Gillespie's Ransom Center discovery in a copy of the 1561 Stow Chaucer has a similarly complete version on the colophon leaf below the printer's device, exactly where I found the first copy in the Garrett collection. Because the texts of all four inscriptions differ from each other and from surviving printed transcriptions, they do not seem to have been copied from the same source or to be the work of even modestly skilled scribes. (5) Nor are these four the only annotations of their type in early Chaucer editions. A few months after finding the Garrett Library transcriptions, I found another in a 1532 Thynne edition at the Folger Shakespeare Library. That annotation had already been reported the previous year by Alison Wiggins, who also found two additional epitaphs inscribed in other Folger copies of the 1532 and 1561 editions. (6) Based on the Wiggins survey of fifty-two Renaissance copies of Chaucer's collected works in England and America and on copies examined by Dane, by Gillespie, and by me, these seven epitaph transcriptions appear to be the only kind of extended annotation that occurs so frequently. If the manuscript epitaphs have been found in an eighth of these fifty-six Renaissance Chaucers, it seems likely that we would find more now that we know what we are looking for. This article advances a hypothetical explanation for the social behaviors which may have produced these annotations and reexamines the publishing history of Chaucer's collected works in light of that hypothesis. This leads to new potential explanations for the destruction of the carved verses on the tomb itself and to another possible connection between the tomb and the collected works of Edmund Spenser, whose interest in associating himself with Chaucer is well established. I also request readers' assistance in seeking further examples of the tomb-verse transcriptions in Chaucer editions published between 1532 and 1598. In brief, I believe these annotations may represent early-modern English readers' participation in the construction of Chaucer's poetic fame by means of behaviors that resemble the social practices of cult worship of the saints. Those behaviors included pilgrimage, profound meditation upon relics of the dead, taking away representative artifacts from ceremonial sites, especially tombs, and study of the saints' words and deeds, both those authorized by the Church and apocrypha circulated in collections such as Jacobus de Voraigne's Legenda aurea. (7) By the eighteenth century, all four of those cult-like behaviors had become a commonly accepted part of English secular literary culture, with the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey as its focal point. …


Collaborative learning has successfully applied knowledge transfer to guide a pool of small student networks towards robust local minima. However, previous approaches typically struggle with drastically aggravated student homogenization when the number of students rises. In this paper, we propose Collaborative Group Learning, an efficient framework that aims to diversify the feature representation and conduct an effective regularization. Intuitively, similar to the human group study mechanism, we induce students to learn and exchange different parts of course knowledge as collaborative groups. First, each student is established by randomly routing on a modular neural network, which facilitates flexible knowledge communication between students due to random levels of representation sharing and branching. Second, to resist the student homogenization, students first compose diverse feature sets by exploiting the inductive bias from sub-sets of training data, and then aggregate and distill different complementary knowledge by imitating a random sub-group of students at each time step. Overall, the above mechanisms are beneficial for maximizing the student population to further improve the model generalization without sacrificing computational efficiency. Empirical evaluations on both image and text tasks indicate that our method significantly outperforms various state-of-the-art collaborative approaches whilst enhancing computational efficiency.


Introduction. The study aimed to investigate the Rapid Disability Rating Scale-2 (RDRS-2) in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Test retest reliability, internal consistency, data of discriminant validity of the scale, correlations with other functional and cognitive measures were analyzed. Material and methods. 451 subjects were assessed: 254 healthy controls, 86 with cognitive impairment but no dementia (CIND) and 111 subjects diagnosed of AD. Total and subscales scores of the RDRS-2 were obtained. The total score is the sum of three subscales: activities of daily living, disability, and special problems. To establish its correlation with other functional scales and cognitive instruments, the following tools were applied: Blessed Dementia Rating Scale (BDRS), Interview for the Deterioration of Daily Living in Dementia (IDDD), Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive (ADAS-Cog) and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Statistical analysis: lineal multivariate regression analysis. Cross-validation. ROC curves. Intraclass coefficient. Cronbach's alpha and Pearson's Correlation coefficient. Results. RDRS-2 scores by group were the following (mean and SD): Controls (18.95; 1.64), CIND (20.61; 2.88), and AD (28.96; 9.07). Results from regression analysis demonstrated absence of influence of sociocultural variables such as age and education in RDRS-2 scores. Correlations with other instruments were as following: BDRS, r= 0.820; IDDD, r= 0.882; ADAS-Cog, r= 0.762, and MMSE, r = -0.742. Intraclass coefficient was 0.86 and Cronbach's alpha was 0.91. For the RDRS-2 the best cutoff score was 21 (82.88 % sensitivity and 88.8% specificity). Area under the ROC curve was 0.92. Conclusions. The Spanish adaptation of the RDRS-2 is free of sociocultural influence, and shows very adequate data on internal consistency and stability. Although not specifically designed for its use in AD it correlates highly and significantly with other functional scales as well as with the degree of cognitive impairment in AD.


The pollution reduction opportunities of a drainage basin, located in Barcelona (Spain), were analysed as a case study in order to assess strategies for optimised management of sewerage networks in the Mediterranean region. The analysis results show that the introduction of a large storm tank against combined sewer overflow significantly reduces the negative impacts associated with discharges during rainy weather. The total annual mass into the receiving waters is reduced by 45%, measured in terms of suspended solid and chemical oxygen demand. The performance of large storm tanks can be optimised taking advantage of the natural sedimentation of the retained rainwater. At optimum stratification conditions, the annual regulation capability can be increased by 15% compared to the traditional operating conditions. Apparently, the environmental impacts associated with the materials used in the construction of the tank will also be reduced per unit volume of regulated water with the increasing annual regulation capacity.


This paper aims to improve the understanding of migration-development links by comparing the evaluation of Mexico-US and Morocco-EU migration over the twentieth century. Despite significant differences, Mexico and Morocco share a common geopolitical location on the global South-North migration frontier as well as their position as prime source countries of predominantly low-skilled migrants into the US and EU. The analysis highlights the large extent to which Mexican and Moroccan migration is determined by political-economic transformations in the US and EU. Persistent economic gaps and migrant networks partly explain why, instead of decreasing migration, the recruitment freezes in Mexico (1964) and Morocco (1973) have contributed to increased reliance on family and irregular migration and a diversification of migration origins and destinations. Simultaneously, policy-driven changes in labour market structure caused an increased demand for casual and informal labour in the service sector, agriculture and construction. In light of this evidence, it would be naive to expect the 2008 financial crisis to cause a fundamental shift in migration trends because political-economic conditions fuelling migration have remained unaltered. Similarly, in spite of the considerable contributions of Mexican and Moroccan remittances to the improvement of income and living standards in origin areas, it is unrealistic to assume that migration and remittances alone can overcome generically unfavourable development conditions. Therefore, improving general development conditions through structural political and economic reform seem the most viable policy to increase the development potential of migration. If such reform does occur, Morocco and, particularly, Mexico may transform into immigration countries in the medium to long term.


big data is a hot business topic today. In business organizations, customer-relationship management (CRM) is an important pillar to achieve competitive advantages. Big data refers to practices of integrating big data into an organizational CRM process to achieve the objectives of improving and sustaining customer service. The alternative goal of big data is to combine internal CRM data with customer behavior and buying patterns from the environment external to the organization. Several tools exist that can integrate big data with other CRM data to improve customer analysis and understand buying behavior and patterns. This paper reports research evaluating the role of big-data technology in enhancing the effective use of CRM. Research proves that data's predictive model is enhanced by analyzing customer buying patterns. Issues and challenges related to the implementation of big data are discussed and benefits of appropriate implementation of big-data technologies are highlighted. The research further demonstrates some tangible benefits of implementing big-data technologies in CRM.


In this paper we investigate how cognitive ability and character skills influence behavior, success and the evolution of play towards Nash equilibrium in repeated strategic interactions. We study behavior in a p-beauty contest experiment and find striking differences according to cognitive ability: more cognitively able subjects choose numbers closer to equilibrium, converge more frequently to equilibrium play and earn more even as behavior approaches the equilibrium prediction. To understand better how subjects with different cognitive abilities learn differently, we estimate a structural model of learning based on level-k reasoning. We find a systematic positive relationship between cognitive ability and levels; furthermore, the average level of more cognitively able subjects responds positively to the cognitive ability of their opponents, while the average level of less cognitively able subjects does not respond. Finally, we compare the influence of cognitive ability to that of character skills, and find that both cognition and personality affect behavior and learning. More agreeable and emotionally stable subjects perform better and learn faster, although the effect of cognitive ability on behavior is stronger than that of character skills.


Recently, P2PTV has started up-and-coming as a prospective alternate to the well known client-server applications such as IPTV, Video on demand and real time TV services; because it overcomes fundamental client-server issues and introduces some new features that help improving performance. The success of such P2PTV platforms has lead to several commercial applications showing good performance in terms of quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). Both types of services (i.e., live TV and Video-On-Demand) have been provided by most of the P2PTV systems. Examples of such applications include Zattoo, Joost, Sopcast, and PPlive. However, P2P native support gives to these applications extra scalability, resilience, and the ability to harness computational resources. However, since end users offer their bandwidth, storage and memory to participate on the P2P networking, therefore, peers will be loaded as they contributing for many peers. Therefore, load evenly distribution is needed to be considered. So, in this paper, we are surveying most of the well know P2PTV applications in terms of the load distribution and balancing between computing and network resources. According to the findings, we propose different techniques to maintain load balancing between the end users. The proposed approach has been assessed using ns 2 simulator. Initial results show that the proposed technique is effective on distributing the load evenly.


The Drosophila EGF receptor (DER) is activated by secreted Spitz to induce different cell fates in the ventral ectoderm. Processing of the precursor transmembrane Spitz to generate the secreted form was shown to be the limiting event, but the cells in which processing takes place and the mechanism that may generate a gradient of secreted Spitz in the ectoderm were not known. The ectodermal defects in single minded (sim) mutant embryos, in which the midline fails to develop, suggested that the midline cells contribute to patterning of the ventral ectoderm. This work shows that the midline provides the site for Spitz expression and processing. The Rhomboid and Star proteins are also expressed and required in the midline. The ectodermal defects of spitz, rho or Star mutant embryos could be rescued by inducing the expression of the respective normal genes only in the midline cells. Rho and Star thus function non-autonomously, and may be required for the production or processing of the Spitz precursor. Secreted Spitz is the only sim-dependent contribution of the midline to patterning the ectoderm, since the ventral defects observed in sim mutant embryos can be overcome by expression of secreted Spitz in the ectoderm. While ectopic expression of secreted Spitz in the ectoderm or mesoderm gave rise to ventralization of the embryo, increased expression of secreted Spitz in the midline did not lead to alterations in ectoderm patterning. A mechanism for adjustment to variable levels of secreted Spitz emanating from the midline may be provided by Argos, which forms an inhibitory feedback loop for DER activation. The production of secreted Spitz in the midline, may provide a stable source for graded DER activation in the ventral ectoderm.


The meteorological stations in Iceland are rather few compared to the size of the country, and their service time is short compared to other developed countries. Investigations of individual 24-hour station PMP values computed by the Hershfield and NERC methods show trends that are important for the application of PMP values in engineering design. The results fall into two series, one with high PMP values and the other with lower values. The low values originate from station groups situated in areas with mildly sloping terrain and here the results compare fully with what should be expected from experience from other countries. The other series shows results that do not compare as well with previously published results. Their general characteristics is that PMP values calculated hy the Hershfield method are of the order 80% higher than the corresponding results obtained by the NERC method. The results of this high series do not check against results obtained from meteorological models. It is noteworthy, that all the stations of the low series belong to station groups where the terrain is gently sloping, i.e . average terrain slopes less than 1.4%, while in the high series all the stations belong to station groups where the terrain slopes steeply from a highland plateau down to sea level. It is concluded that the generalized estimates of PMP values needed in engineering design could be obtained.


In this paper, we review the evidence base for social mixing in neighbourhoods, which is used as a strategy to tackle assumed negative neighbourhood effects. We discuss in detail the theoretical links between neighbourhood characteristics, and outcomes of individuals living in concentrations of poverty. Through this we identify the theoretical case for promoting socially mixed communities. We then review the empirical evidence base, focusing on outcomes of the American poverty deconcentration initiatives including the Moving to Opportunity and HOPE VI programs. We identify that the evidence from these programs is at best inconclusive. Turning to the European experience we identify problems associated with using observational data to assess individual outcomes in relation to their neighbourhood context. We conclude by suggesting that the evidence base for social mixing is far from robust, and that many of the current empirical papers suffer from serious analytical shortcomings. Ultimately, the process of creating more socially mixed neighbourhoods is unlikely to create more opportunities in life for the original residents. Socially mixing neighbourhoods through tenure mixing will only change the population composition of neighbourhoods, increasing average incomes because more affluent (and employed) residents will move into the owner occupied housing replacing social housing.


Largely motivated by the proliferation of content-centric applications in the Internet, information-centric networking has attracted the attention of the research community. By tailoring network operations around named information objects instead of end hosts, ICN yields a series of desirable features such as the spatiotemporal decoupling of communicating entities and the support of in-network caching. In this article, we advocate the introduction of such ICN features in a new, rapidly transforming communication domain: the smart grid. With the rapid introduction of multiple new actors, such as distributed (renewable) energy resources and electric vehicles, smart grids present a new networking landscape where a diverse set of multi-party machine-to-machine applications are required to enhance the observability of the power grid, often in real time and on top of a diverse set of communication infrastructures. Presenting a generic architectural framework, we show how ICN can address the emerging smart grid communication challenges. Based on real power grid topologies from a power distribution network in the Netherlands, we further employ simulations to both demonstrate the feasibility of an ICN solution for the support of real-time smart grid applications and further quantify the performance benefits brought by ICN against the current host-centric paradigm. Specifically, we show how ICN can support real-time state estimation in the medium voltage power grid, where high volumes of synchrophasor measurement data from distributed vantage points must be delivered within a very stringent end-to-end delay constraint, while swiftly overcoming potential power grid component failures.


By using a modified biotin-streptavidin capturing method, a total of 20 polymorphic microsatellite markers were developed from Moringa oleifera Lam. (Moringaceae), a useful multipurpose tree. Twenty-four domesticated individuals, with germplasms of India and Myanmar, were used to screen polymorphism of these 20 microsatellite markers. The number of alleles per locus ranged from two to six. The expected and observed heterozygosity varied from 0.3608 to 0.7606 and from 0.0000 to 0.8750, respectively. Seven loci were significantly deviated from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The availability of these microsatellite primers would provide a powerful tool for aspects of detailed population genetic studies of M. oleifera.


This paper explores several paths by which the extended cognition (EC) thesis may overcome the coupling-constitution fallacy. In so doing, I address a couple of shortcomings in the contemporary literature. First, on the dimension of first-wave EC, I argue that constitutive arguments based on functional parity suffer from either a threat of cognitive bloat or an impasse with respect to determining the correct level of grain in the attribution of causal-functional roles. Second, on the dimension of second-wave EC, I argue that especially the complementarity approach suffers from a similar sort of dilemma as first-wave EC: an inability to justify just what entails the ontological claim of EC over the scaffolding claim of weaker approaches in cognitive science. In this paper I show that two much more promising explanations by which to ground the ontological claim of EC are available, both starting from an exploration of the coordination dynamics between environmental resources and neural resources. On the one hand, I argue that second-wave EC based on cognitive integration, with its focus on bodily manipulations constrained by cognitive norms, is capable of resolving the coupling-constitution fallacy. On the other hand, I argue that the framework of cognitive integration can be supplemented by philosophical accounts of mechanistic explanation, because such accounts enable us to explain the emergence of higher-level cognitive properties due to a system's organization-dependent structure.


Ten years ago, in the case of M and M, the High Court of Australia handed down what is still the definitive judgment in the area of child sexual abuse allegations in family court proceedings. The Court's approach in that case gave much cause for hope that the protection of children would be the major focus of parenting disputes where such allegations had been made. The High Court held, inter alia, that:

1. it was not the family court's role to determine whether or not child sexual abuse had actually occurred (as would be the case in a criminal trial); however,

2. a court was not to grant custody or contact to a parent if that custody or contact would expose the child to an unacceptable risk of sexual abuse.

The Full Family Court of Australia later added that if there is a positive finding of abuse, only in the most extraordinary cases would contact with the perpetrator of the abuse not be seen as exposing the child to an unacceptable risk of abuse. It was also held that if there is a finding of an unacceptable risk of abuse occurring, supervised contact may still provide an unacceptable risk of disturbance, whether physical, emotional or psychological, to a child who is compulsorily brought into contact with a parent who has sexually abused him or her or, who the child believes to have sexually abused him or her, and the court has the obligation to protect children from such harm.


The gripping first-hand story of the disaster that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick and is the basis for a major new feature film, In the Heart of the Sea. In 1820, the Nantucket whaleship Essex was sailing in the South Pacific when it was rammed by an angry sperm whale. The ship sank, leaving twenty crew members floating in three small boats for ninety days. By taking drastic measures, eight men survived to reveal their astonishing tale. This authoritative edition brings together the harrowing tales of the survivors, including Owen Chase's 'Narrative of the Wreck of Whaleship Essex' and an account by Thomas Nickerson, the 15-year old cabin boy who was steering the ship when the whale attacked. Thomas Nickerson and Owen Chase were two of the eight surviving crew members of the Ship Essex. Thomas Philbrick is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburg and has edited critical editions of the works of Joshua Slocum and Henry Dana Jr. Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of In the Heart of the Sea and director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies. He is also a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association.


Abstract This paper reports the occurrence of the freshwater brown alga Heribaudiella fluviatilis (Areschoug) Svedelius in four new localities in southeastern Europe, as well as the first records for Croatia. Additionally, we report here a new type of substrate for H. fluviatilis, on stones in karstic rivers characterized by tufa formations. Despite a generally low number of findings, this and previous studies indicate that the species is not as rare as generally perceived; rather, it is overlooked, under-collected and therefore under-reported. The paper provides detailed diagnostic features of the thalli and habitats where the alga was found, with notes on corresponding vegetation, physical conditions and water chemistry. Additionally, along with the new records of the red alga Hildenbrandia rivularis (Liebmann) J. Agardh in Croatia, the associations of Heribaudiella-Hildenbrandia are reported for streams of Black Sea and Adriatic basins.


A synthetic entrainment function is proposed for buoyant jets discharged at an arbitrary angle into otherwise quiescent ambient fluids. The entrainment function consists of two separate components, one representing entrainment of ambient fluids into the jet due to initial momentum, the other accounting for the effect of buoyancy, each with a constant entrainment coefficient. A numerical solution of the governing integral equations based on the conservation of mass, momentum, buoyancy and kinematic relations has been obtained using the proposed entrainment function. The solution is compared with experimental data and published numerical solutions based on other types of entrainment formulation. An improved overall agreement with the experimental data has been achieved. Graphical charts of representative solutions are presented.


Hippo signaling acts as a master regulatory pathway controlling growth, proliferation, and apoptosis and also ensures that variations in proliferation do not alter organ size. How the pathway coordinates restricting proliferation with organ size control remains a major unanswered question. Here we identify Rae1 as a highly-conserved target of the Hippo Pathway integrating proliferation and organ size. Genetic and biochemical studies in Drosophila cells and tissues and in mammalian cells indicate that Hippo signaling promotes Rae1 degradation downstream of Warts/Lats. In proliferating cells, Rae1 loss restricts cyclin B levels and organ size while Rae1 over-expression increases cyclin B levels and organ size, similar to Hippo Pathway over-activation or loss-of-function, respectively. Importantly, Rae1 regulation by the Hippo Pathway is crucial for its regulation of cyclin B and organ size; reducing Rae1 blocks cyclin B accumulation and suppresses overgrowth caused by Hippo Pathway loss. Surprisingly, in addition to suppressing overgrowth, reducing Rae1 also compromises survival of epithelial tissue overgrowing due to loss of Hippo signaling leading to a tissue "synthetic lethality" phenotype. Excitingly, Rae1 plays a highly conserved role to reduce the levels and activity of the Yki/YAP oncogene. Rae1 increases activation of the core kinases Hippo and Warts and plays a post-transcriptional role to increase the protein levels of the Merlin, Hippo, and Warts components of the pathway; therefore, in addition to Rae1 coordinating organ size regulation with proliferative control, we propose that Rae1 also acts in a feedback circuit to regulate pathway homeostasis.


Abstract. Summary. This research contributes to both theory and application. This is an important supplement to the research on the quality and uncertainty of spatial big data and it will help mobile phone data play a more effective application value in future research. In recent years, the rapid development of data acquisition means has led to the rapid accumulation of spatial data and generated spatial big data with geographic location information. However, the uncertainty in spatial big data leads to the quality problem of spatial big data, which is one of the main bottlenecks restricting the effective utilization of spatial big data. As an important part of spatial big data, it is necessary to study the quality and uncertainty of mobile phone data. In view of this, we delve into the key geographical environment factors that affect the positioning error of mobile phone data, extract error evaluation indexes and construct the spatial distribution model of positioning error with machine learning algorithms. To explore the distribution law of mobile phone data positioning error under different geographical scenarios. In addition, considering the high accuracy of personal travel GPS positioning, this study takes personal travel GPS positioning data as the comparative object of mobile phone data for analysis.


ABSTRACT People's knowledge about nature, their interest in nature, their nature experiences, and their values and emotions regarding nature are factors that promote people's positive views on environmental issues and sustainability. Knowing the variation and patterns in teachers' and student teachers' views is an essential step in considering the ways in which sustainability might be interpreted and enacted in schools and in teacher education. The aim of this study is to analyze student teachers' views on the importance of species and species identification in general and as a part of their professional development regarding their understanding of biodiversity and sustainability. A total of 426 student teachers in Finland, Norway, and Sweden answered a questionnaire consisting of fixed and open-ended questions. Mixed methods were used: t test and analysis of variance for quantitative data and inductive and deductive, model-based content analysis for qualitative data. According to the majority of student teachers (85%), both species identification and biodiversity are important for sustainability; species identification in general was important to 58% of them. Their statements about importance contained mostly ecological views (46%), followed by emotional (17%), educational (16%), and utilitarian (11%) views. The remainder of the student teachers' statements (10%) contained negativistic or indifferent views. The reasons for the low percentage of educational views are discussed. The implications of the results for teacher education worldwide are emphasized, especially the importance of those teaching methods that have the potential to increase student teachers' understanding of sustainability.


We propose two new instructions, swperm and sieve, that can be used to efficiently complete an arbitrary bit-level permutation of an n-bit word with or without repetitions. Permutations with repetitions are rearrangements of an ordered set in which elements may replace other elements in the set; such permutations are useful in cryptographic algorithms. On a four-way superscalar processor, we can complete an arbitrary 64-bit permutation with repetitions of 1-bit subwords in 11 instructions and only four cycles using the two proposed instructions. For subwords of size 4 bits or greater, we can perform an arbitrary permutation with repetitions of a 64-bit register in a single cycle using a single swperm instruction. This improves upon previous results by requiring fewer instructions to permute 4-bit or larger subwords packed in a 64-bit register and fewer execution cycles for 1-bit subwords on wide superscalar processors. We also demonstrate that we can accelerate the performance of the popular DES block cipher using the proposed instructions. We obtain a DES performance improvement of at least 55% in constrained embedded environments and an improvement of 71% on a four-way superscalar processor when applying DES as a cryptographic hash function.


Background: Risk taking behaviour refers to the tendency to engage in behaviours that have the potential to be harmful or dangerous, which has become a major concern and is rated as one of the public health issues that need special attention. The objective of the study was to compare the prevalence of risk taking behaviour and its associated factors among urban and rural adolescents. Methods: A comparative cross-sectional study was conducted among 306 adolescents by multistage sampling from two selected schools with involvement of their parents. Results: The prevalence of risk taking behaviours was 81.7% in the urban and 83.7% in the rural area (p = 0.650). Parental background factors such as parent's education level, marital status, health status, and income were unrelated with risk taking behaviour among adolescents. The multiple logistic regression test showed that being a male (AOR = 4.55, 95% CI = 2.28–9.07), inadequate number of bedrooms (AOR = 11.54, 95% CI = 1.48–89.75), and presence of family conflict (AOR = 3.64, 95% CI = 1.49–8.89) were the predictors among adolescents for risk taking behaviour in rural areas. Conclusion: The absence of a balanced healthy family and conducive environment would lead to a negative influence towards adolescent behaviour, which may affect both the individual and community.


ABSTRACT Using conservation tourism as a test case, this study explores the role high-end travel agents play in selling sustainable tourism. It examines a niche marketing activity in that process. The study focuses on agents' consideration of ethics as they act as information brokers between tourists and operators. Data were collected from interviews with agents and analysed using a deductive content analysis based on six overarching concepts and theories on ethical decision-making. The findings emphasize the implicit influence within conservation tourism of tourism's ethical dimensions, whilst identifying many constraints that prevent a full consideration and/or disclosure of ethical concerns in the sales process. Most importantly, agents made assumptions using a false consensus bias about clients' preferences for service over concerns for the environment, and were not prepared to discuss the more sensitive issues surrounding conservation with their clients. A number of recommendations are proposed regarding the need to unpack conservation information, overcome the false consensus bias, and agents' reluctance to discuss ethics in the sales process. Finally, the findings have broader implications for the development of sustainable tourism, which ultimately will depend on a dialogue of ethical concerns and values within the tourism supply chain between suppliers, brokers and tourists.


Marinov-Serafi mov, Pl., I. Golubinova, Sht. Kalinova, M. Yanev and A. Ilieva, 2017. Allelopathic activity of some parasitic weeds. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 23 (2): 219–226 Allelopathic activity of Cuscuta epithymum L. (CVCEY), Cuscuta campestris Yuncker (CVCCA), Phelipanche ramosa (L.) Pomel (ORARA), Phelipanche mutelii (Schultz) Reuter (ORARM) and Phelipanche spp. (PHESS) on germination and initial development of test plants of Lactuca sativa L. cultivar "Great Lakes" was studied under laboratory conditions. It was found, that water exracts of the researched parasitic weed species in concentrations 0.4, 0.8, 1.6, 3.2, 6.4 and 12.8% w/v have a relatively high inhibitory effect on the seed germination of the test plant. The inhibiting rate of parasitic weed species from family Convolvulaceae ranges from 6.24 to 100.0% and for the species of family Orobanchaceae from 42.1 tо 100.0%. Parasitic weed species from family Orobanchaceae [Ph. ramosa, Ph. mutelii and Phelipanche spp.] showed a considerably stronger allelopathic effect (GIaverage 17.9), as compared with the applied concentrations of water exracts of species from family Convolvulaceae [C. epithymum and C. campestris] (GIaverage 22.7).


This paper proposes an evolutionary framework to explore the dynamics of social interaction in an environment characterized by online networking and increasing pressure on time. The model shows how time pressure encourages the choice to develop social interactions also through online networking instead of relying exclusively on face to face encounters. Our findings suggest that the joint influence exerted by the reduction in leisure time and the new opportunities of participation offered by web-mediated communication may progressively lead a growing share of the population to adopt networking sites as an indispensable environment for the development of interpersonal relationships.


The City of Rancho Mirage, located in the center of Southern California's rapidly growing Palm Springs Valley, needed a bridge to provide elementary students with a safer route to school. Originally, the children were crossing a stream bed on a very narrow sidewalk located next to a very busy Highway 111. This was deemed unsafe and a bridge overpass was required to provide the students safe passage. "We needed a pedestrian bridge that could be manufactured and delivered fast, and after days of research, the Steadfast EXPRESS™ pedestrian bridge from Contech Engineered Solutions was our answer," stated Bruce B. Harry, Jr., Director of Public Works with the City of Rancho Mirage. The best solution for the City was a 80' x 8' Steadfast EXPRESS bridge with concrete decking. The pedestrian truss structure offered a number of advantages over other solutions including a quick turnaround time. This standardized truss system provided stamped drawings within three business days after receipt of an order and the bridge was ready for delivery in less than six weeks, significantly reducing construction time. As promised, the structure was delivered to the site in just six weeks and installed in just half a day. "The staff at Contech provided us with superior customer service, bridge drawings within three business days and delivered a quality pedestrian bridge six weeks later," added Bruce B. Harry, Jr. "Thank you for a job well done." This project was part of the "Safe Routes to School National Partnership" program which is dedicated to "creating safer streets, improving communities and promoting physical activity for children and their families." A ribbon cutting event was held in November 2011 and included a speech by the Mayor, in which he stated that the installation of this bridge would definitely provide the children with a safer route to school.


The purpose of this study was to compare the quality of care rating for long-term care facilities in rural versus urban Illinois locations. Using quality of care data available on medicare.gov, 774 Illinois long-term care facilities were compared to determine if a difference in quality of care existed based on rurality. Each facility was classified as either urban focused, large rural city/town (micropolitan) focused, small rural town focused, or isolated small rural town focused using the Rural Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes provided by the Rural Health Research Center. Frequencies, ANOVA, and Scheffe tests were used to analyze the data. Significant differences were found between urban focused and small rural town focused long-term care facilities and also between urban focused and isolated small rural town focused in regards to inspection ratings. Significant differences were also found for general quality ratings between urban focused and large rural city/town (micropolitan) focused, small rural town focused, and isolated small rural town focused long-term care facilities. Urban focused locations had a mean inspection average of 2.72 stars out of a possible five compared to small rural town focused facilities that had a mean rating of 3.21 stars, and isolated small rural ii town focused facilities that had a 3.33 star average. Results also showed that general quality ratings were high, an average of 3.81 stars, for urban focused facilities, compared to an average of 2.84 stars for micropolitan facilities, 2.82 stars for small rural town focused, and 3.03 for isolated small rural town focused. Findings from this study offer some initial evidence that while overall quality in Illinois long-term care facilities are not significantly different on the basis of rurality, there are significant differences in inspection ratings and general quality ratings that could be attributed to degrees of rurality.


Two new papers from researchers at the University of Arkansas predict the budgetary consequences of terminating the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP), a voucher program that funds over 7,100 Louisiana students to attend private schools. Using an economic model, the papers offer several different scenarios and then conclude that terminating the LSP would increase the costs statewide and do so in almost all districts in the state. The papers' findings are reasonable but do not make a fully convincing case that the state will incur extra expenditures without the LSP. There may be savings or additional expenditures, depending on several key parameters which have not been precisely estimated. Puzzlingly, the reports' findings of extra costs run counter to those of the state's Legislative Fiscal Office, but the reports do not mention this contrary evidence. In any case, the net fiscal effect of terminating the LSP is unlikely to be large; in the context of a $9 billion state expenditure, the change would likely be less than $10 million. Review of Squeezing the Public School DiStrictS: the FiScal eFFectS oF eliminating the louiSiana ScholarShiP Program and the FiScal eFFect oF eliminating the louiSiana ScholarShiP Program on State eDucation


The study was conducted to assess catch composition and economic analysis of monofilament and multifilament under-meshed gillnets (Ngongongo) from March to April 2018 at Likoma Island, Lake Malawi. Catch efficiency for targeted fish species in monofilament gillnets showed that catch per unit effort (CPUE) was three times higher than that of multifilament gillnets for Copadichromis spp. (402.2 Kg, 43.3%), Opsaridium microcephulus (315.47 Kg, 34.6%), Rhamphocromis spp. (26.2 Kg, 2.8%), Bagrus meridionalis (21.6 Kg, 2.3%), Oreochromis karongae (40.7 Kg, 4.4%), Bathyclarias spp. (23.2 Kg, 2.5%), Dimidiochromis kiwinge ( 14.4Kg, 1.6%) among others. Catches for Copadichromis spp. comprised of 43% for both gillnet material type combined indicating the importance of this species in gillnet fishery in the district. Monofilament gillnet caught the highest number of fish (7569) while multifilament gillnet caught the least (5427). Again monofilament gillnet has the highest weight of fish (692.87kg) while multifilament has the least (238.22kg). T-test analysis showed that the weight of fish caught by monofilament and multifilament gillnets were significantly different from one another (p=0.000).The profitability performance non-motorized monofilament and multifilament gillnets canoe fisheries in Lake Malawi (Likoma) recorded profit margins at the end of the first year of operation with the minimum Return on Investment (ROI) of 58.9% and 34.4% respectively. On the other hand, the motorised monofilament and multifilament Gillnets canoe fisheries recorded loss 51.1% and 74.4% ROI. The study results point out to recommend for management interventions be put in place to manage the Lake Malawi fishery by imposing restrictions on effort, gear type and mesh sizes and access to illegal material.


Magnetic Resonance Imaging provides a non-invasive means to study the neural correlates of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) - the most common form of preventable mental retardation worldwide. One approach aims to detect brain abnormalities through an assessment of volume and shape of two sub-cortical structures, the caudate nucleus and hippocampus. We present a method for automatically segmenting these structures from high-resolution MR images captured as part of an ongoing study into the neural correlates of FASD.

Our method incorporates an Active Shape Model, which is used to learn shape variation from manually segmented training data. A modified discrete Geometrically Deformable Model is used to generate point correspondence between training models. An ASM is then created from the landmark points. Experiments were conducted on the image search phase of ASM segmentation, in order to find the technique best suited to segmentation of the hippocampus and caudate nucleus. Various popular image search techniques were tested, including an edge detection method and a method based on grey profile Mahalanobis distance measurement. A novel heuristic image search method was also developed and tested. This heuristic method improves image segmentation by taking advantage of characteristics specific to the target data, such as a relatively homogeneous tissue colour in target structures.

Results show that ASMs that use the heuristic image search technique produce the most accurate segmentations. An ASM constructed using this technique will enable researchers to quickly, reliably, and automatically segment test data for use in the FASD study.


On most large scale and middle scale maps, relief is represented by contours and spot heights. In order to adapt the representation to the scale, the terrain is generalised either by smoothing or filtering the terrain model or by simplifying the contours. However this approach is not applicable to nautical chart construction where terrain features are selected according to their importance for navigation. This paper presents an approach for the consideration of feature attributes in the generalisation of a set of contours with respect to nautical chart constraints. Features are defined by sets of contours and a set of generalisation operators applied to features is presented. The definitions are introduced in a multi-agent system in order to perform automatic generalisation of a contour set. Results are discussed on a case study and directions for future work are presented.


In Ezekiel 1-20, the first of two volumes of commentary on the Scripture attributed to the third major Old Testament prophet, Moshe Greenberg uses accessible prose to explain Ezekiel's ecstatic, erratic, almost incomprehensible otherworldly visions and prophecies. One of this century's most respected biblical scholars, Greenberg translates the text, identifies the critical issues raised by the book, and offers an impressively balanced, thoroughly holistic interpretation of Ezekiel. Ezekiel 1-20 rigorously engages the biblical text with all the tools of historical critical analysis. Drawing upon the rich history of Jewish and Christian interpretation, Greenberg employs ancient and modern sources in his elucidation of this most difficult prophetic book. Only his second and final volume, Ezekiel 21-48, can complete the most authoritative commentary on Ezekiel.


Sustainable development is defined as the ability to ensure the fulfillment of the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The concept of sustainable urban development is crucial because at the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of the world's population live in urban areas. By using the concept of sustainable development and comparing the empirical facts about the reputation of the city of Bandung with other cities in Indonesia, this paper aims to a hypothesis stating that the realization of becoming a champion city of Bandung, as politically announced by its mayor, remains a tremendous challenge. Four critical issues need to be addressed, both by city government of Bandung as well as by its citizens, in order to promote sustainable urban development. These are, firstly, how to meet the considerable needs of the entire population of Bandung as the fight against poverty through employment and adequate public services. Secondly, how to establish a political system that guarantees the participation of the population Bandung effectively in the decision making process and ensure the application of greater democracy in both national and international levels. Thirdly, how to control the number of population and to promote lifestyle changes, both the manager and the people. Fourthly, how to build political will at encouraging all of them can be realized. At the end, this article concludes that the revitalization of publicness as central concept in sustainable development has now met its momentum, yet it needs the tireless efforts.


Abstract We developed a novel and simple method, using loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), for the detection and discrimination of Toxocara canis and Toxocara cati eggs. The new method employs 4 steps: (1) concentration of Toxocara eggs in a small amount of sand; (2) dissolution of the proteinaceous membrane of eggs and simultaneously separation of them from the sand using NaClO treatment; (3) extraction of DNA using NaOH treatment; and (4) detection of T. canis/T. cati DNA using a LAMP assay. All these steps are fast, easy to perform, and do not require expensive equipment or reagents. The novel method was tested both experimentally and in a field study. In the laboratory, we could reliably detect as few as 3 T. canis eggs in artificially contaminated sand, if the experiment was repeated twice. In the field trial, we were able to detect T. cati DNA from 4 natural sandpits having moderate to heavy contamination, although not in a single lightly contaminated sandpit. All of the examined sandpits were found to be contaminated with eggs of T. cati, but none appeared to contain T. canis. Our new method could extract DNA from T. canis and T. cati eggs directly from sand samples as well as detect and distinguish these 2 species in a few easy steps, with markedly reduced time and expense.


The paper addresses the conditions for the successful introduction of sustainable energy technology projects in different geographic, institutional and cultural contexts. Our aim is to identify contextual and process-related factors influencing the level of societal acceptance and techno-economic successfulness achieved in energy projects that aim to mitigate climate change (renewable energy, energy efficiency and advanced technologies). Our focus is on successfulness on the level of individual projects, but we also consider how 'lessons learned' in individual projects diffuse into the wider context of energy planning. In our conclusions, we identify key challenges for project managers and policy makers.


This contribution aims to provide a brief account of the remarkable recent findings and advances in heterogeneous catalyst design based on facet rich Pt(111) on carbon materials. Platinum(111) hexagonal nanocrystals are prepared using Tween 20 as a facet directing agent via a simple, efficient and scalable thermolytic reduction process in air. These highly dispersed Pt(111) nanocrystals on carbon act as single site catalytic systems and exhibit exceptional activity (yield and ee ∼99%) and recyclability for the asymmetric hydrogenation of α-ketoesters.


This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the use of the modal verbs will and would in six New Englishes (Fiji, Indian, Singapore, Trinidadian, Jamaican and Bahamian English), with British English considered for comparison; will/would in their future use are also compared to other markers of futurity. The database consists of conversations from the respective components of the International Corpus of English or comparable data. The results show that the use of will versus would tends to be more variable in all New Englishes than in British English but that there are differences between the New Englishes in the type and degree of variation . Thus, both general and variety-specific tendencies seem to be at work in our data. Keywords: New Englishes; International Corpus of English; will/would ; frequency; semantics


Advances in medical imaging technologies, particularly magnetic resonance imaging and multi-detector Computed Tomography (CT), have resulted in substantial increase in the size of datasets. In order to reduce the cost of storage and diagnostic analysis and transmission time without significant reduction in image quality, a state of the art image compression technique is required. We propose here a context based and regions of interest (ROI) based approach for the compression of 3D CT images and in particular vascular images, where a high spatial resolution and contrast sensitivity is required in specific areas. The methodology is developed based on the JPEG2000 standard to provide a variable level of compression in the (x,y) plane as well as in the z axis. The proposed lossy-to-lossless method compresses multiple ROIs depending on the degrees of clinical interest. High priority areas are assigned a higher precision (up to lossless compression) than other areas such as background. ROIs are annotated automatically. The method has been optimized and applied to the vascular images from CT angiography for peripheral arteries and compared with a standard medical image codec on 10 datasets regarding image quality and diagnostic performances. The average size of the compressed images can be reduced to 61, 60, 66, and 89 percent with respect to the lossless JP2K, Lossless JP3D, Lossless H.264, and original image respectively with no remarkable impairment for the diagnostic accuracy based on visual judgement of two radiologists.


By examining the relationship between the notaires, members of a significant French legal profession with deep roots in French history, and the state, Ezra Suleiman demonstrates that clientelism exists and may be more dangerous in a centralized state than in a decentralized one.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


The implementation of KBSM in Art subject had brought changes in teachers' role at classroom and national level. The propose of this study was to find out Art teachers' opinion towards their role in implementing the Art
curriculum in the classroom constraints faced by them. The research also aimed to reveal the relationship between teachers' background with their role in making the Art education at school and national level a success. This
qualitative research conducted at ten secondary schools in Kota Setar district of Kedah. This "cross - sectional" research was based on table invented by Krejcie And Morgan (1970) involving ten selected Art Panitia teachers.
Structured interview was used and fully conducted by researcher. Data gathered was analyzed by using percentage, frequency and horizontal table method. The research showed that the percentage of teacher's opinion
towards their role in classroom was high compared to national level. The teachers' opinion towards the role they were supposed to carry out was very high, followed by their intentional role and the actual role they did. Generally, teachers felt those factors such as principal attitude, student's interest towards
Art subject and others were the main constraints to them. Frequency showed teachers agreed that their role in making the curriculum a success was important. The horizontal table showed that male teachers who had more teaching experience, held 2 posts in school and had higher academic
qualifications were the active teachers who made Art education curriculum a success until national level.


Investigation of the incidence of peste des petits ruminants (PPR) disease in goats revealed seasonality in the natural occurrence of PPR disease in the environment. Tissue culture rinderpest vaccine was shown effective in protecting goats against the disease. The optimal time for vaccinating goats against PPR disease was when the least number of animals were incubating the disease. In the tropical humid zone, as in West Africa, the optimal time for vaccination against the PPR disease is from late November to middle of December.


This Report examines how the Chinese legal order can both limit and aid access to justice for victims of corporate human rights abuses. Although the Chinese legal system has established liability for corporations, in regard to the legal remedies available, claimants face a number of obstacles preventing them from obtaining fair, timely and effective adjudication of their claims. Case studies relating to mining, internet censorship and contaminated food products provide palpable illustrations of these obstacles, evidencing that the legal and political reforms in China are lagging behind the economic and market reforms. Judges lack independence to adjudicate, especially in politically sensitive cases, and the legal profession faces severe limitations. Class action and public interest litigation remain undeveloped, the availability of legal aid is limited, and the law concerning the piercing of the corporate veil has not yet been tested in a human rights case. These factors together make victims' search for justice a daunting task. The study concludes by offering recommendations to improve access to justice in China for victims of human rights abuse by corporations.


Bone beds have often been a focus for micropalaeontological study as the high concentration of fossil material allows vertebrate palaeontologists the returns normally experienced only by nannofossil workers and palynologists. It is not always straightforward to release the fossil material within bone beds and the extraction of microfossils from the upper Silurian Downton Bone Bed is particularly challenging. Outlined here is an integrated method for processing this bone bed using liquid paraffin and a microwave oven, and a comparison in terms of quality and quantity with material recovered using other techniques. This integrated method allows for the recovery of microvertebrates, such as thelodonts, and also internal moulds of ostracods, brachiopods and early plant material.


This article provides an account of the legal profession's growing openness to acknowledging and assessing the extent to which lawyers appearing in court sometimes provide something less than full representation, using the courts' response to this past fall's "robo-signing" scandal as an example. It relies primarily on the theoretical frame of institutional design principles, with a focus on the role of information in institutional design. It describes the judiciary's Twentieth Century dedication to the notion of a lawyer as the means to provide access to the courts, accompanied by a resistance to examining the level of representation lawyers provide, particularly in the indigent defense context. It then examines several trends that have emerged over the past decade: the Supreme Court's increasing embrace of professional practice standards to assess ineffective assistance of counsel claims, an ABA ethics opinion requiring indigent defense counsel to seek a reduction in their caseloads when they can no longer perform essential tasks, judicial openness to the use of engaged judging techniques in cases involving pro se litigants, and open acknowledgement of the limited scope representation provided by attorneys in private practice. Finally, it contemplates what would happen if, in all cases, the profession established a baseline set of attorney tasks and a route for attorneys to convey information about which tasks they will and will not perform.


By means of a surface-integral formalism we derive the integral equations for diffuse photon density waves with boundary conditions corresponding to a diffuse–diffuse interface with index mismatch and solve them numerically without any approximation. These numerical results are verified with Monte Carlo simulations for the planar interface case. Since the application of the boundary condition to index-mismatched media is difficult, an approximation that yields very accurate values is found. This approximation can be easily introduced into analytical models, and a study of its limit of validity is shown. We demonstrate with numerical results that the multiple-scattering contribution that is due to surface roughness can be neglected, even when index mismatch is present.


The basic training of music teachers does not usually contemplate inclusive resources intended to assist visually impaired students. Given the need for specific training, the purpose of this study was to collect together the perceptions of a group of 13 pre-primary, primary, and high school in-service music teachers, as regards a professional development course that addresses the inclusion of pupils with visual impairments. The teachers' perceptions about the resources provided, the procedures used and the impact of what was learned during the course were obtained by means of open questionnaires and a semi-structured interview. The findings highlight the acquisition of inclusive resources as a starting point for the teachers' sense of preparedness in the classroom and show the impact of active learning and direct contact with visually impaired students on the development of a positive attitude toward inclusion. Factors and lessons contributing to guiding the design of future professional development programs in the field of inclusive music education for visually impaired students were identified.


This study examined the effects of 2 wk of high-NaCl diet on kidney function and dynamic renal blood flow autoregulation (RBFA) in rats with adenine-induced chronic renal failure (ACRF). Male Sprague-Dawley rats received either chow containing adenine or were pair-fed an identical diet without adenine (controls). After 10 wk, rats were randomized to either remain on the same diet (0.6% NaCl) or to be switched to high 4% NaCl chow. Two weeks after randomization, renal clearance experiments were performed under isoflurane anesthesia and dynamic RBFA, baroreflex sensitivity (BRS), systolic arterial pressure variability (SAPV), and heart rate variability were assessed by spectral analytical techniques. Rats with ACRF showed marked reductions in glomerular filtration rate and renal blood flow (RBF), whereas mean arterial pressure and SAPV were significantly elevated. In addition, spontaneous BRS was reduced by ∼50% in ACRF animals. High-NaCl diet significantly increased transfer function fractional gain values between arterial pressure and RBF in the frequency range of the myogenic response (0.06-0.09 Hz) only in ACRF animals (0.3 ± 4.0 vs. -4.4 ± 3.8 dB; P < 0.05). Similarly, a high-NaCl diet significantly increased SAPV in the low-frequency range only in ACRF animals. To conclude, a 2-wk period of a high-NaCl diet in ACRF rats significantly impaired dynamic RBFA in the frequency range of the myogenic response and increased SAPV in the low-frequency range. These abnormalities may increase the susceptibility to hypertensive end-organ injury and progressive renal failure by facilitating pressure transmission to the microvasculature.


An energy-based crack-growth model was developed in this study to simulate the propagation of top-down cracking in asphalt pavements. A viscoelastic fracture mechanics approach, the generalized J-integral, was employed to model the crack growth of asphalt concrete. Laboratory fatigue crack propagation tests for three asphalt mixtures were performed at various load levels, frequencies, and temperatures. Disk-shaped specimens with a proper loading fixture and crack growth monitoring system were selected for the tests. It was observed from the tests that the crack-propagation model based on the generalized J-integral was independent of load levels and frequencies, while the traditional Paris law model based on stress intensity factor was dependent on loading frequencies. However, both models were unable to deal with the temperature dependence of the mixtures. The fatigue crack propagation model proposed in this study had a good agreement between experimental and predicted crack-growth lives, an indicator that the energy-based J-integral could be a better parameter to describe fatigue crack propagation of viscoelastic materials such as asphalt mixtures.


Procedure 5012 of Mil-Std-883, which describes requirements for the logic model, the assumed fault model and universe, fault classing, fault simulation and reporting of test results for digital microcircuits is described. The procedure provides a consistent means of measuring fault coverage regardless of the specific logic and fault simulator used. Procedure 5012 addresses complex, embedded structures such as random-access memories (RAMs), read-only memories (ROMs), and programmable logic arrays (PLAs) weighting gate-level and non-gate-level structures by transistor counts to arrive at overall fault coverage.<<ETX>>


Purpose: A survey has been carried out among Italian car makers, suppliers, and customers to identify the potential changes that the traditional Italian automotive supply chain would need for the introduction of electric vehicles. In addition, this study investigates the degree of importance that enterprises attribute to the electric vehicle market and their perceptions about the development of this market, also evaluating which types of electric vehicles and body styles are receiving the most relevant investment. Design/methodology/approach: An empirical investigation has been carried out to examine the above-mentioned aspects. Data have been collected through an on-line survey and analysed by a descriptive statistical analysis, confirmatory factors analysis, and cluster analyses. Findings: Market penetration of electric vehicles is mainly influenced by technological choices of car makers and battery manufacturers and by the ability to organize and manage the integrated actions of stakeholders, also including component suppliers, and manufacturers of vehicle management systems. Stakeholders have to exploit economies of scale, to make use and expand long-time competencies in electric engineering with automotive know-how, and to build up cooperation with experts in the new value chain to facilitate the required transfer of know-how. Alliances and joint ventures can provide manufacturers access to the know-how, technology, and production capacity of battery suppliers. Outsourcing, especially as regards research and development, will occur even more frequently in the near future. An agile supply chain should be adopted to manage a fluctuating market demand. Originality/value: This preliminary study contributes to provide an outlook of some of the most important changes that traditional Italian automotive supply chain would need to promote the introduction of electric vehicles and their critical components with an emphasis on production aspects.


Advertisers and big data mining experts alike are today are dealing with complex datasets of increasing variety (first and third party data), volume (events, impressions, clicks), and velocity (real time bidding). Creating predictive models to customize advertiser requirements and campaign analytics to show targeted ads to users who are most likely to convert has become increasingly challenging. Advertisers often group customers into a segment defined by a given set of demographic or behavioral attributes. Such segments are often very sparse. "Look-Alike Modeling" enables advertisers to enhance the target segment by using predictive models to expand the segment membership by assigning a probability score to users that did not explicitly belong to that segment based on the original segment definition. In this paper accompanied by the demo of a distributed platform, we describe a Look-Alike Modeling framework to expand segment membership using a novel high-dimensional distributed algorithm based on frequent pattern mining. We describe how the distributed algorithm is more efficient than traditional classification techniques that (a) require multiple passes over the dataset and (b) require both positive and negative class labels for training. Our solution is capable of concurrently and continuously processing thousands of segments and includes an efficient grouping operator and a distributed scoring algorithm for predicting multiple segment membership for a given (very large) set of users. This leverages the power of in-database analytics as compared to using standard data mining libraries and is currently deployed on a real-world highly scalable distributed columnar database that powers several hundred campaigns and processes look-alike models for large online display advertisers. The results from the study demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other comparable techniques for predicting and expanding segments.


Ageing accompanied by a decline in cognitive performance may be a result of the long-term effects of oxidative stress on neurologic processes. It has been shown that high-cholesterol contents in the blood and brain may lead to the deposition of the β-amyloid (Aβ) protein in the brain, which damages brain cells. The present study was designed to observe the effect of polyphenol-rich Oriental plums on cognitive function and cerebral neurodegeneration-related protein expression in mice that were fed a high-cholesterol diet for 5 months. The study consisted of four groups: the control (Ctrl) group, which was fed the American Institute of Nutrition (AIN)-93M diet; the high cholesterol (HC) group, which was fed the AIN-93M diet with 5% cholesterol; the high cholesterol + low Oriental plum (LOP) group, which was fed the AIN-93M diet with 5% cholesterol and 2% Oriental plum powder; and the high cholesterol + high Oriental plum (HOP) group, which was fed the AIN-93M diet with 5% cholesterol and 5% Oriental plum powder. Measurements of cognitive function were assessed using the Morris water maze, and the mRNA expression of cholesterol hydroxylase (Cyp46), Aβ and β-secretase 1 (BACE1) were analysed. The results showed that cholesterol concentrations in both the blood and the brain were significantly higher in the HC group than in the Ctrl and HOP groups at the end of the trial. The high-cholesterol diet per se produced significant cognitive deficits, which were accompanied by a significantly increased mRNA expression of Cyp46, BACE1, Aβ and 24-hydroxycholesterol in the brain cortex and hippocampus. However, all of these variables were non-significantly increased in the HOP group as compared to the Ctrl group. In conclusion, incorporating polyphenol-enriched Oriental plum into a high-cholesterol diet can ameliorate some of the symptoms of neurodegenerative conditions.


Blood flow in vasa recta capillaries of the exposed renal papilla of young antidiuretic rats (n = 18) was determined by an adaptation of the video-photometric technique of Intaglietta. The erythrocyte velocity and capillary diameter in vasa recta (« = 97) were measured at the same location by means of fluorescence video microscopy, with fluorescein-labeled bovine 7-globulin as a plasma marker. A factor relating erythrocyte velocity to mean cross-sectional blood velocity was determined in vitro to permit the calculation of single vasa recta blood flows from the measured indices, erythrocyte velocity and capillary diameter. Mean blood flow in descending vasa recta was 8.83 ± 0.96 (SE) nl/min, significantly greater than that in ascending vasa recta, 4.82 ± 0.34 nl/min. The total numbers of ascending and descending vasa recta at the base of the exposed papilla were also determined. Over 1500 vasa recta were identified as ascending vasa recta or descending vasa recta in electron micrographs of three papillas. At this level in the papilla (2 mm from the tip), there were four ascending vasa recta for each descending vas rectum. From the total numbers of ascending vasa recta and descending vas rectum, single vessel blood flows were converted to total blood flow. Total blood outflow in all ascending vasa recta, 11.3 μl/min, substantially exceeded total blood inflow in all descending vasa recta, 5.2 μmin. The difference between outflow and inflow (6.1 μ1/min) represents an estimate of water uptake by the papillary microcirculation, and is more than adequate to accommodate the known rate of water reabsorption from the collecting ducts of the exposed papilla.


In May 2010, New York philanthropist Emily Fisher Landau promised 370 works by more than 85 artists to the Whitney Museum of American Art. This handsome volume highlights each of the artists in the gift, including Carl Andre, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Ed Ruscha, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol, and other seminal figures. Much more than simply a record of the pledge, Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection showcases the best of the art made in the United States during the past five decades. Informative entries, written by the museum's curators and other scholars, cover all works in the gift and are accompanied by 125 stunning color plates. Also included are an essay on the nature of collecting by Donna De Salvo and a full-color checklist of the entire gift.


Depression in older people is under recognized and under treated in primary care. This is despite symptoms being similar across the lifespan and many older people with depression regularly seeing their general practitioner (GP). Problems specific to its management set it apart from depression in younger people, and include both disparities in the way older people and GPs perceive depression and a shared view that it is a normal part of aging, as well as barriers to the way older people talk about it and the help GPs provide. This evidence indicates a lack of understanding about the ways both groups perceive depression, and how their different situations, positions and needs may influence what they say and do and ways they respond to each other in consultations. The research aim is therefore to explore how older people's and GPs' different positions and situations influence the ways they perceive depression. Particular focus is on influences reported by older people over ways they talk about depression and influences reported by GPs over ways they respond. In doing this the study seeks practical solutions to help GPs identify depression in older people and provide them with appropriate help.

The methodology and methods of this study are informed by a recent version of grounded theory, Situational Analysis (Clarke, 2005), which is philosophically orientated between symbolic interactionism and social constructionism. Clarke (2005) builds on the work of Strauss and Corbin (1998), assuming a social constructionist approach to grounded theory to enable exploration of how people's views are formed and how this influences their actions. Theory can be generated and located within changing and multi-faceted contexts by considering the wider situations of both the researcher and the researched and looking at the data from multiple perspectives such as historical, geographical and biographical. Semi structured interviews were conducted with older people and GPs as the main form of data, with the researcher's (IG's) observations of interviews as contextual data.

Using this approach a theoretical model has been developed to explain how older people and GPs operate in consultations for depression, proposing how different types of older people and GPs are likely to respond to each other. The stories older people report telling about their depression and the ways GPs report responding show the "porous" and "flexible" (Clarke, 2005, p.111) positions they can take in consultations: the interview data suggests that older people can move between stages of understanding and accepting their depression, and GPs can move between styles of working and employ different combinations of skills in response to older people's stories. This element of change is key to the findings of this study and indicates the fluidity of their positions, where they change depending on what they perceive to be influences over them at the time.

This study highlights the importance of recognizing differences between ways older people and GPs operate in consultations and the different factors that influence ways they respond to each other. It suggests how GPs working in different styles might help older people based on the different ways they tell their stories, and a key message is that GPs who can adapt their skills to those needs are likely to be most successful in managing it. For example some older people may need GPs to help them make sense of their problems before they will accept treatment or therapy for depression and others may need GPs to take the lead on decisions when they are at rock bottom. The theoretical model suggests how GPs can quickly identify depression in older people and the stage of depression they are at by the stories they tell, and how they might adapt their skills in response to provide them with the most appropriate help. This is intended as a step towards understanding the reasons underlying what happens in consultations for depression in later life, and finding solutions for problems existing in its management.


Conversational agents interact with users via the most natural interface: human language. A prerequisite for their successful diffusion across use cases is user trust. Following extant research, it is reasonable to assume that increasing the human-likeness of conversational agents represents an effective trust-inducing design strategy. The present article challenges this assumption by considering an opposing theoretical perspective on the human-agent trust-relationship. Based on an extensive review of the two conflicting theoretical positions and related empirical findings, we posit that the agent substitution type (human-like vs. computer-like) represents a situational determinant on the trust-inducing effect of anthropomorphic design. We hypothesize that this is caused by user expectations and beliefs. A multi-method approach is proposed to validate our research model and to understand the cognitive processes triggered by anthropomorphic cues in varying situations. By explaining the identified theoretical contradiction and providing design suggestions, we derive meaningful insights for both researchers and practitioners.


Ageing is an independent risk factor of cardiovascular diseases which involves oxidative stress derived from a Nox2-containing NADPH oxidase. However, the mechanism of endothelial Nox2 activation in normal ageing process remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the therapeutic potential of targeting Nox2 in improving global metabolism and endothelial function at old age by using age-matched wild-type and Nox2 knockout mice at 3–4 months (young); 11–12 months (middle aged) and 21–22 months (ageing). Compared to young mice, middle-aged and ageing wild-type mice had significantly higher blood pressure, hyperglycaemia, hyperinsulinaemia. These were accompanied by oxidative stress in multiple organs including the lung, the liver, the heart and vessels. The vessel motor function was examined in an organ bath using aortas isolated from these mice. Endothelium-dependent vessel relaxation to acetylcholine was significantly impaired in aortas of wild-type ageing mice, and this was accompanied by increased expressions of Nox2 and markers of inflammation, activation of MAPK and Akt and decreased insulin receptor expression and function. However, these aging-associated disorders in the aortas were significantly reduced by knocking out Nox2 in mice. In response to high glucose plus high insulin challenge, coronary microvascular endothelial cells isolated from wild-type mice displayed significantly increased Nox2 expression, oxidative stress and cell senescence, e.g. increase p53 expression and β²–galactosidase activity. However, these responses were absent or significantly reduced in endothelial cells isolated from Nox2 knockout mice. In conclusion, metabolic disorders in particular hyperglycaemia and insulin resistance play an important role in mediating Nox2 activation and oxidative stress in multiple organs in ageing. Nox2 is involved in normal ageing process-associated vascular inflammation and oxidative damage of endothelial dysfunction.