Introduced parasites threaten native host species that lack effective defenses. Such parasites increase the risk of extinction, particularly in small host populations like those on islands. If some host species are tolerant to introduced parasites, this could amplify the risk of the parasite to vulnerable host species. Recently, the introduced parasitic nest fly Philornis downsi has been implicated in the decline of Darwin's finch populations in the Galápagos Islands. In some years, 100% of finch nests fail due to P. downsi; however, other common host species nesting near Darwin's finches, such as the endemic Galápagos mockingbird (Mimus parvulus), appear to be less affected by P. downsi. We compared effects of P. downsi on mockingbirds and medium ground finches (Geospiza fortis) on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos. We experimentally manipulated the abundance of P. downsi in nests of mockingbirds and finches to measure the direct effect of the parasite on the reproductive success of each species of host. We also compared immunological and behavioral responses by each species of host to the fly. Although nests of the two host species had similar parasite densities, flies decreased the fitness of finches but not mockingbirds. Neither host species had a significant antibody-mediated immune response to P. downsi. Moreover, finches showed no significant increase in begging, parental provisioning, or plasma glucose levels in response to the flies. In contrast, parasitized mockingbird nestlings begged more than nonparasitized mockingbird nestlings. Greater begging was correlated with increased parental provisioning behavior, which appeared to compensate for parasite damage. The results of our study suggest that finches are negatively affected by P. downsi because they do not have such behavioral mechanisms for energy compensation. In contrast, mockingbirds are capable of compensation, making them tolerant hosts, and a possible indirect threat to Darwin's finches.


There are two main issues which are currently under research in the localization field when mobile beacons (aka anchors or reference nodes) are used. The first issue represents a strategy to select the most efficient reference information from redundant data collected during the reconnaissance process. The second issue is a static path planning problem which represents an anchor placement approach. The latter will be the focus of this work. This paper explores a disaster scenario and considers an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that moves around buildings and localizes "survived" devices inside a building. This can help to detect victims and to accelerate the rescue process. For this, fast and accurate localization is essential. In this paper, we compare five trajectories in terms of localization precision and required time. A modified Joint Clustering method is being used for the selection of anchors from the list of redundant reference information. A multilateration algorithm from our previous work is being utilized to calculate positions of nodes. Consequently, simulations are presented with an appropriate signal propagation model for the considered disaster scenario.


This paper describes recent research activities and results in the area of photonic switching carried out within the framework of the EU-funded e-Photon/ONe+ network of excellence, Virtual Department on Optical Switching. Technology aspects of photonics in switching and, in particular, recent advances in wavelength conversion, ring resonators, and packet switching and processing subsystems are presented as the building blocks for the implementation of a high-performance router for the next-generation Internet.


The magneto-optical properties of quantum-dot (QD) and quantum-well (QW) coupled structures are investigated using magneto-photoluminescence (PL). The coupled system consists of a self-assembled non-magnetic CdSe quantum-dot layer and a 7-nm ZnCdMnSe dilutedmagnetic-semiconductor (DMS) quantum well (QW) layer. We have observed two well-separated PL peaks, one corresponding to emission from the CdSe QD layer and the other to the emission for ZnCdMnSe QW layer. The temperature dependence of the PL intensity clearly demonstrates the characteristics of zero- and two-dimensional structures for the CdSe QDs and the ZnCdMnSe QW, respectively. The significant PL energy shift and intensity variation observed for the DMS QW in a magnetic field can be understood based on the giant Zeeman splitting of the band edges of the DMSs. Furthermore, we have observed a type-II transition between the conduction band of the DMS QW and the valence band of non-DMS QD, which enables us to determine the band alignment of the coupled systems.


This paper provides a thorough analysis of the mainstream media representation of hackers, hacking, hacktivism, and cyberterrorism. The intensified U.S. debate on the security of cyberspace after September 11, 2001, has negatively influenced the movement of online political activism, which is now forced to defend itself against being labeled by the authorities as a form of cyberterrorism. However, these socially or politically progressive activities often remain unknown to the public, or if reported, they are presented in a negative light in the mass media.

In support of that claim, I analyze five major U.S. newspapers in a one–year period with 9–11 in the middle. I argue that certain online activities are appropriated for the goals of the political and corporate elite with the help of the mass media under their control to serve as pretext for interventions to preserve the status quo. Thus, the media portrayal of hacking becomes part of the elite's hegemony to form a popular consensus in a way that supports the elite's crusade under different pretexts to eradicate hacking, an activity that may potentially threaten the dominant order.


Waves is a multi-touch interface for VJing (the live performance of visual media). The system allows performers to interact with a range of visual media by manipulating spline curves on an interactive surface. Interaction is highly visible to the audience and as such the contribution of the performer may be understood. Furthermore, the spline curves provide metonymical interaction, and as such give the performer the ability to perceive and directly manipulate the underlying properties of visual media.


The concept of local accumulation time (LAT) was introduced by Berezhkovskii and co-workers to give a finite measure of the time required for the transient solution of a reaction-diffusion equation to approach the steady-state solution [A. M. Berezhkovskii, C. Sample, and S. Y. Shvartsman, Biophys. J. 99, L59 (2010); A. M. Berezhkovskii, C. Sample, and S. Y. Shvartsman, Phys. Rev. E 83, 051906 (2011)]. Such a measure is referred to as a critical time. Here, we show that LAT is, in fact, identical to the concept of mean action time (MAT) that was first introduced by McNabb [A. McNabb and G. C. Wake, IMA J. Appl. Math. 47, 193 (1991)]. Although McNabb's initial argument was motivated by considering the mean particle lifetime (MPLT) for a linear death process, he applied the ideas to study diffusion. We extend the work of these authors by deriving expressions for the MAT for a general one-dimensional linear advection-diffusion-reaction problem. Using a combination of continuum and discrete approaches, we show that MAT and MPLT are equivalent for certain uniform-to-uniform transitions; these results provide a practical interpretation for MAT by directly linking the stochastic microscopic processes to a meaningful macroscopic time scale. We find that for more general transitions, the equivalence between MAT and MPLT does not hold. Unlike other critical time definitions, we show that it is possible to evaluate the MAT without solving the underlying partial differential equation (pde). This makes MAT a simple and attractive quantity for practical situations. Finally, our work explores the accuracy of certain approximations derived using MAT, showing that useful approximations for nonlinear kinetic processes can be obtained, again without treating the governing pde directly.


Genetic variance components for avocado (Persea americana Mill.) traits were estimated to improve avocado breeding efficiency. The additive and nonadditive genetic variance components were calculated from the variances between and within crosses. In all nine traits examined, i. e. anise scent, fruit density, flowering intensity, fruit weight, harvest duration, inflorescence length, seed size, softening time, and tree size, a significant nonadditive genetic variance was detected. Additive genetic variance in all traits was lower and nonsignificant. The existence of major nonadditive variance was indicated also by narrow-sense and broad-sense heritability values estimated for each trait. Therefore, parental selection should not be based solely on cultivar performance. Crosses between parents of medium and perhaps even low performance should also be included in the breeding program.


Abstract Recent studies have taken advantage of newly available, large-scale, cross-linguistic data and new statistical techniques to look at the relationship between language structure and social structure. These 'nomothetic' approaches contrast with more traditional approaches and a tension is observed between proponents of each method. We review some nomothetic studies and point out some challenges that must be overcome. However, we argue that nomothetic approaches can contribute to our understanding of the links between social structure and language structure if they address these challenges and are taken as part of a body of mutually supporting evidence. Nomothetic studies are a powerful tool for generating hypotheses that can go on to be corroborated and tested with experimental and theoretical approaches. These studies are highlighting the effect of interaction on language.


: Vultures (Cathartidae and Accipitridae) play an important role in ecosystem balance by rapidly disposing animal carcasses and thus preventing the potential spread of pathogens. Blood chemistry values provide a means of assessing the health of wildlife and wild animal populations; however, there are significant differences in chemistries among species and when comparing captive and free-living New and Old World vultures. In 2007, we collected blood serum from 30 female and 14 male wild, healthy black vultures ( Coragyps atratus ) live-trapped by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services from a power substation in Lowndes County, Mississippi, USA. We analyzed the blood serum to provide serum chemistry base values for use in clinical pathology. The chemical analytes we measured included sodium, chloride, potassium, carbon dioxide, anion gap, glucose, creatinine, calcium, phosphorus, total protein, albumin, globulin, and aspartate aminotransferase. In general, blood chemistry values of black vultures were similar to those found in New and Old World vultures and raptor species. Average chemistry values for males were lower than females for sodium, chloride, creatinine, calcium, total protein, albumin, and globulin. The serum chemistry values we describe in this paper can be important indicators of avian health by gender for the black vulture. Our study provided important blood chemistry values from a large sample size, which is rarely available in free-ranging black vultures. These values could be used by scientists, veterinary pathologists, wildlife rehabilitation centers, and other researchers for baseline data for wild and free-ranging birds. Furthermore, the use of such parameters in assessing population health may enable conservationists to further research environmental conditions affecting species reproduction and survival.


ABSTRACT Infection with Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), a mosquito-borne flavivirus, may cause acute encephalitis in humans and induce severe cytopathic effects in various types of cultured cells. We observed that JEV replication rendered infected baby hamster kidney (BHK-21) cells sensitive to the translational inhibitor hygromycin B or α-sarcine, to which mock-infected cells were insensitive. However, little is known about whether any JEV nonstructural (NS) proteins contribute to virus-induced changes in membrane permeability. Using an inducibleEscherichia coli system, we investigated which parts of JEV NS1 to NS4 are capable of modifying membrane penetrability. We found that overexpression of NS2B-NS3, the JEV protease, permeabilized bacterial cells to hygromycin B whereas NS1 expression failed to do so. When expressed separately, NS2B alone, but not NS3, was sufficient to alter bacterial membrane permeability. Similarly, expression of NS4A or NS4B also rendered bacteria susceptible to hygromycin B inhibition. Examination of the effect of NS1 to NS4 expression on bacterial growth rate showed that NS2B exhibited the greatest inhibitory capability, followed by a modest repression from NS2A and NS4A, whereas NS1, NS3, and NS4B had only trivial influence with respect to the vector control. Furthermore, when cotransfected with a reporter gene luciferase or β-galactosidase, transient expression of NS2A, NS2B, and NS4B markedly reduced the reporter activity in BHK-21 cells. Together, our results suggest that upon JEV infection, these four small hydrophobic NS proteins have various modification effects on host cell membrane permeability, thereby contributing in part to virus-induced cytopathic effects in infected cells.


The essay that follows can be subtitled "Ignorance, Error and Oddity in our Discourse about Public Administration in the United States." It is in the form of an old-fashioned essay, with few footnotes. After all, Woodrow Wilson's famous essay contains only two footnotes, neither of which meets modern predilections. There are references here to Dwight Waldo, but my essay is not solely about him. I am, however, writing in the Waldo tradition, wedding historical emphasis with a critical view of what is going on in United States public administration. I am honoring Dwight Waldo by emulating his approach to public administration. We say that following another's model is the sincerest -- some might say the most devious -- form of flattery. All disciplines have embedded within them a certain amount of dissonance. Thanks to a lifetime of perseverance on the part of our honoree at this conference, we have much less dissonance in public administration than we might have had. Nevertheless, a number of disciplinary peculiarities have characterized our development, and I propose to remind you of some that have come to my attention through the years. There are a dozen or so in all. I will start with error, move to oddity, and end with ignorance. My first example of error relates inadvertently to Dwight Waldo, and it is one of the strangest. He bears no responsibility whatever for this error although he has told me that he knew about it. Perhaps a few of you remember that two books, both with "administrative state" in their titles, were published in 1948, one by Dwight Waldo and the other by the late Joseph Rosenfarb, a New York lawyer and labor relations specialist. That Rosenfarb's book, never widely read, is largely forgotten may be a consequence of the joint review of the two books by the distinguished Columbia University political scientist, Arthur Macmahon, in the summer 1948 issue of the Public administration Review. Incredibly, throughout his review, Macmahon cites Rosenfarb as Goldfarb! Not once does the reviewer or the editor of PAR, who commissioned the essay, identify Rosenfarb by his correct name. Equally peculiar is the lack of any correction or acknowledgment of error in succeeding issues of PAR. If not Wilson and Weber, who were the founders? Now for matters less intriguing but more important to the disciplines, let us turn to the founders of modern public administration in the United States. Max Weber and Woodrow Wilson are often listed or implied as founders. Yet many of our texts still fail to make clear that Weber's famous essay on bureaucracy was essentially unknown in the United States until its translation into English in the mid-1940s. As for Wilson, absolutely no one in mainstream social science referred to or quoted Wilson's essay between the time of its origin and the appearance of the first edition of Leonard White's public administration textbook in 1926. None of the other three textbooks in public administration published before World War 11 refer to Wilson at all. This implies that Wilson is important to public administration, but not as a founder of anything lasting. Actually, Dwight Waldo may be given primary credit for disinterring Wilson in his 1948 volume, The Administrative State, after absolving Wilson of much prior influence on our discipline. If not Wilson and Weber, who were the founders? Only one thing is clear: public administration was not simply the application of business methods to government in the late nineteenth century or any other period of our history. American business has been responsible for the development in administration, public and private, of finance and accounting, labor union relations, factory management in terms of mass production via Frederick Taylor, and, necessarily, salesmanship and marketing. Most other administrative concepts have come from government and gone into business. Woodrow Wilson was naive when he suggested in his famous essay of 1887 that government had much to learn from business. …


The collapse of the Enron Corporation and the revelation of accounting irregularities at Enron and other major corporations have led to a reexamination of the adequacy of accounting, auditing, and disclosure rules in the United States. Many policymakers and commentators have viewed corporate malfeasance as a widespread problem, but the accounting problems that beset Enron and other failed corporations do not appear to be systemic in this country. Thus, the main risk facing equity markets post-Enron has been one of too much political intervention in a market that was already working to right itself. Enron's senior management engaged in a systematic attempt to use various accounting and reporting techniques to mislead investors. That attempt was facilitated by the rules-based system that guides U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), which have conditioned people to look at whether financial statements comply with the rules. But compliance with the rules, important as it is, cannot and does not by itself guarantee bona fide economic results. Accounting statements may at best give an accurate representation of how a company has performed in the past, but they tell little about how a company will perform in the future and thus about how valuable a company is. For that, economists mostly use discounted cash flow analysis - that is, they estimate the value of a business by obtaining the present value of expected cash flows discounted at an appropriate rate. The difference between the backward-looking accounting mindset and the forward-looking investment or financial mindset helps explain why, while Enron executives were announcing increased earnings in 2001, Enron's stock price was falling sharply. Indeed, movements in Enron's stock price strongly suggest that investors saw through Enron's accounting machinations months before regulators initiated a formal inquiry into Enron's illegal operating and accounting practices. Unfortunately, the political focus has remained squarely on the measures and bodies that failed to do what they should have in the recent corporate scandals rather than on reinforcing the measures and groups that "processed" the available information in the most timely fashion - that is, the debt and equity markets. As a result, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and other political measures designed to restore confidence in U.S. corporations, will likely have the effect of harming investors by penalizing risk taking on the part of corporate management and increasing the quantity but not necessarily the quality of financial reports.


Ending the Revolution THE FUTURE OF IDEAS: THE FATE OF THE COMMONS IN A CONNECTED WORLD. By Lawrence Lessig.^ New York: Random House, 2001. Pp. x, 333. $30.00. COPYRIGHTS AND COPYWRONGS: THE RISE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND How IT THREATENS CREATIVITY. By Siva Vaidhyanathan.^^ New York: New York University Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 189. $27.95. I. Introduction Last fall, standing before a crowded hall of open-source programmers, Lawrence Lessig, fabled speaker of the intellectual property world, made a critical observation about the future of law and technology. "We are a house divided," he declared to the riveted audience. "You built an extraordinary platform of innovation and creativity.... My kind (lawyers) are working to shut it down."1 His remarks strike at the core of the problems surrounding the Internet and technology more generally. As the new millennium began, Americans stood in the midst of seemingly exploding prosperity, driven by an intellectual wealth of ideas for e-commerce, not to mention unprecedented numbers of venture capitalists endlessly willing to dote on the young, trendy dot-com crowd. Amid this confluence of money and ideas, everything seemed possible. Yet only six months into the year everything seemed to falter and, just as rapidly, collapse into oblivion. Nothing marked this breathtaking rise and fall as pointedly as the legal developments surrounding Napster. In 1999, Napster was the poster child of the Internet revolution - commanding millions of users, and countless downloads of digital music daily. After a dramatic series of events in 2000, district court judge Marilyn Hall Patel made a seminal equation between copyright theft, piracy, and the company's peer-to-peer architecture.2 Despite a brief respite as the Ninth Circuit IMAGE FORMULA9considered the case on appeal, the service eventually shut down, and has remained shut ever since. In a lengthy opinion, the Ninth Circuit echoed the bulk of Patel's proscriptions, save for a short (and largely toothless) section acknowledging the virtues and limitations of the company's peer-to-peer architecture.3 Although some have optimistically concluded that such legal events precipitate the end of piracy across the Internet, others see the Napster case-- and the company itself - as something more significant. To them, Napster is a symbol, draped with political overtones about the future of the relationship between innovation and law in a high-tech world. Although Napster still remains the most recognized brand name in music, some have concluded that it has also become a tragic emblem of a peer-to-peer world prematurely saddled with legal regulation and control. Indeed, the complications surrounding the peer-to-peer world symbolize the intensely fragile, and often rivalrous, relationship between law and digital technology. Although intellectual property has been standing quietly in the background since our nation's constitutional birth, no other field of law has been so recently rediscovered, and so hotly debated, among both lawyers and nonlawyers. Like the issue of civil rights in the 1960s, intellectual property today serves as a lens through which to examine our constitutional ideals against the rough terrains of reality (here, digital reality), and to explore the tensions between private and public ownership. From its inception, creativity and innovation have remained at the core of intellectual property. However, these core values are becoming as deeply politicized and idealistic as the values of freedom, equality, and liberty themselves. The irony - and the difficulty - is that each side's position has substantial merit. No one would disagree that the past five years have witnessed an explosion of ideas, inventions, and innovation. However, according to some, these developments have also threatened the very purpose of intellectual property, spawning an unprecedented expansion of costly and contentious litigation. …


The network processor incorporates a processor and a number of coprocessors that can be connected to the processor either Directly or using a shared bus This paper presents the proposal and development of a reconfigurable crossbar switch architecture for network processors. Its main purpose is to increase the performance, and flexibility for environments with multiprocessors and computer clusters. The results include VHDL simulation of Crossbar Switch and the use of it in a broadcast function implementation, found in message passing support middleware. This reconfigurable crossbar Switch used in Network Processor to connect the various circuits which are used to perform the various task. Keywords—Reconfigurable Crossbar switch (RCS), Network Processor, FPGA, modelsim.


In contrast to classical image analysis methods that employ "crisp" mathematics, fuzzy set techniques provide an elegant foundation and a set of rich methodologies for diverse image-processing tasks. However, a solid understanding of fuzzy processing requires a firm grasp of essential principles and background knowledge. Fuzzy Image Processing and Applications with MATLAB presents the integral science and essential mathematics behind this exciting and dynamic branch of image processing, which is becoming increasingly important to applications in areas such as remote sensing, medical imaging, and video surveillance, to name a few. Many texts cover the use of crisp sets, but this book stands apart by exploring the explosion of interest and significant growth in fuzzy set image processing. The distinguished authors clearly lay out theoretical concepts and applications of fuzzy set theory and their impact on areas such as enhancement, segmentation, filtering, edge detection, content-based image retrieval, pattern recognition, and clustering. They describe all components of fuzzy, detailing preprocessing, threshold detection, and match-based segmentation. Minimize Processing Errors Using Dynamic Fuzzy Set Theory This book serves as a primer on MATLAB and demonstrates how to implement it in fuzzy image processing methods. It illustrates how the code can be used to improve calculations that help prevent or deal with imprecisionwhether it is in the grey level of the image, geometry of an object, definition of an objects edges or boundaries, or in knowledge representation, object recognition, or image interpretation. The text addresses these considerations by applying fuzzy set theory to image thresholding, segmentation, edge detection, enhancement, clustering, color retrieval, clustering in pattern recognition, and other image processing operations. Highlighting key ideas, the authors present the experimental results of their own new fuzzy approaches and those suggested by different authors, offering data and insights that will be useful to teachers, scientists, and engineers, among others.


Dynamic textures are sequences of images showing temporal regularity; they can be found in videos representing smoke, flames, flowing water, or moving grass, for instance. Recently, one method based on linear dynamic system theory was proposed to synthesize dynamic textures. Textures are represented as the output of a linear dynamic system and synthesis is reduced to matrix multiplication operations. In this report, we study the problem of implementing this method using fixed-point arithmetic, as required in many portable devices, such as palms or mobile phones. This is done by jointly evaluating the effect of model coefficient quantization and of fixed-point precision arithmetic, which are both source of errors with respect to the floating-point implementation. Our analysis shows that using model coefficients quantized using less bit permits to obtain visual synthesis results comparable to the more expensive floating-point implementation, with the advantage of requiring far less buffer memory space and permitting to perform faster synthesis.


Essays on Decisions Involving Recurring Financial Events Stephen A. Atlas This dissertation explores what influences consumer financial decisions with consequences that recur over time, such as mortgages and recurring payment plans in contracts. This dissertation investigates two questions: (1) How do individual differences in intertemporal preferences influence how consumers think about recurring financial events? (2) How does the aggregation level used to describe the recurring financial consequences impact how consumers mentally represent the purchase? Taken together, this dissertation explores how consumers mentally represent recurring outcomes and express these preferences through choice. The first essay explores the relationship between individual differences in time preferences and decisions involving recurring payments in the domain of mortgage choices. It relates two components of an individual's time preference, a present bias (overvaluing immediate outcomes), and a personal discount rate (the exponential component of time preferences), to mortgage selection and the decision to strategically abandon a home worth less than its mortgage. Combining insights from an analytic model and a survey of 244 mortgaged households augmented by zip-code market house price data, this essay proposes that consumers with greater present bias and exponential discounting are more likely to choose mortgages that minimize upfront costs and be underwater. This model also suggests that present bias decreases the likelihood of walking away, but that higher discounting increases that likelihood, a result consistent with the data. Time preferences remain robust predictors with individual and market-level controls, and alternate model specifications. The second essay explores how the aggregation level of a recurring price (e.g. on a daily vs. a yearly basis) impacts how consumers mentally account for a contract's benefits. For example, if consumers are told the daily price of a car lease, they imagine the daily benefits of the car, and when they are told a monthly price they imagine their broader use of the car. This essay builds on the "pennies-a-day" model (Gourville 1998), which posits that narrowly framed recurring costs can increase a consumer's willingness to purchase by making the cost of a purchase seem trivial. The essay will present evidence that triviality is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for narrow framing to increase willingness to purchase and expand the domain of situations where such narrow framing increases purchase. Five web-based experiments suggest that scope insensitivity plays an important role in this effect since under recurring costs, consumers repeatedly "book" the most valued units, while under one-time costs consumers tend to experience less return to scale. Together, the two essays suggest that contracts involving recurring financial events are mentally represented differently from those with one-time financial events, and that content is then discounted based on intertemporal preferences.


Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," which equates the ultimate end of human life with happiness (eudaimonia), is thought by many readers to argue that this highest goal consists in the largest possible aggregate of intrinsic goods. Richard Kraut proposes instead that Aristotle identifies happiness with only one type of good: excellent activity of the rational soul. In defense of this reading, Kraut discusses Aristotle's attempt to organize all human goods into a single structure, so that each subordinate end is desirable for the sake of some higher goal.This book also emphasizes the philosopher's hierarchy of natural kinds, in which every type of creature achieves its good by imitating divine life. As Kraut argues, Aristotle's belief that thinking is the sole activity of the gods leads him to an intellectualist conception of the ethical virtues. Aristotle values these traits because, by subordinating emotion to reason, they enhance our ability to lead a life devoted to philosophy or politics.


This study aimed to explore attentional foci and their temporal patterns in expert skaters in real competition situations. Individual self-confrontation interviews were held with 8 expert figure skaters while they watched their videotaped program performed in official competitions. Qualitative data analysis revealed that skaters used a substantial number of foci, which were classified by content and characteristics. Event listing was used to display the patterns of foci over time, revealing that skaters used distinct processes to prepare for, perform, and evaluate different program elements. These results highlighted the great flexibility and variability of attentional focus, according to circumstantial factors.


Quantum weak measurements with states both pre- and post-selected offer a window into a hitherto neglected sector of quantum mechanics. A class of such systems involves time dependent evolution with transitions possible. In this paper we explore two very simple systems in this class. The first is a toy model representing the decay of an excited atom. The second is the tunneling of a particle through a barrier. The post-selection criteria are chosen as follows: at the final time, the atom remains in its initial excited state for the first example and the particle remains behind the barrier for the second. We then ask what weak values are predicted in the physical environment of the atom (to which no net energy has been transferred) and in the region beyond the barrier (to which the particle has not tunneled). Thus, just as the dog that didn't bark in Arthur Conan Doyle's story Silver Blaze gave Sherlock Holmes meaningful information about the dog's non-canine environment, here we probe whether the particle that has not decayed or has not tunneled can provide measurable information about physical changes in the environment. Previous work suggests that very large weak values might arise in these regions for long durations between pre- and post-selection times. Our calculations reveal some distinct differences between the two model systems.


Early in 1926, the agitation for higher minimum wages for unskilled workers once again flared up in the black community of Bloemfontein. This battle for higher wages, however, was bowed down by warring black factions that had an obvious negative effect on it. On the one hand, there were the supporters of the moderate local Native Advisory Board and on the other that of the radical national Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU). The city council and other employers were caught between these two poles. Through difficult and patient negotiations between the white and black role players, an acceptable interim minimum wage was determined, but not before the ICU withdrew from the negotiations and attempted to bring the settlement into disrepute. From the ranks of the considerably more moderate black circles, the adjustment achieved through negotiations instead of violent agitation was considered a big enough victory for the time being.


AIMS
Infusion of purified haptoglobin (Hp) functions as an effective hemoglobin (Hb) scavenging therapeutic in animal models of hemolysis to prevent cardiovascular and renal injury. Epidemiologic studies demonstrate the phenotype heterogeneity of human Hp proteins and suggest differing vascular protective potential imparted by the dimeric Hp1-1 and the polymeric Hp2-2.

RESULTS
In vitro experiments and in vivo studies in guinea pigs were performed to evaluate phenotype-specific differences in Hp therapeutics. We found no differences between the two phenotypes in Hb binding and intravascular compartmentalization of Hb in vivo. Both Hp1-1 and Hp2-2 attenuate Hb-induced blood pressure response and renal iron deposition. These findings were consistent with equal prevention of Hb endothelial translocation. The modulation of oxidative Hb reactions by the two Hp phenotypes was not found to be different. Both phenotypes stabilize the ferryl (Fe(4+)) Hb transition state, provide heme retention within the complex, and prevent Hb-driven low-density lipoprotein (LDL) peroxidation. Hb-mediated peroxidation of LDL resulted in endothelial toxicity, which was equally blocked by the addition of Hp1-1 and Hp2-2.

INNOVATION AND CONCLUSION
The present data do not provide support for the concept that phenotype-specific Hp therapeutics offer differential efficacy in mitigating acute Hb toxicity.


means that it is used for communication among people in the world. As an international language, it is necessary for us to learn it. But we know that studying English as a foreign
language is not easy. Therefore, the students should be taught English from elementary level. English skills are divided into four skills. They cannot be separated each other. So, in teaching and learning process the four skills must be taught integratedly. In the process, it is possible that many problems rise in every skill and need the attention to give the solution for it. But in this study the writer focuses on the problems of teaching and learning speaking skill. This study aims to know the teachers' and students' problems and to know the ways to cope their
problems in teaching and learning speaking subject in ESP program. This research used descriptive research to obtain the information related the problems of this study. The data were collected by conducting interview, questionnaire and observation. The population was the third semester of Law Faculty and the sample was cluster random sampling.
The sample was class C which consist of 37 students.
The result of this research showed that the students' linguistic problems were limited vocabulary, grammatical error, difficult in pronouncing the words, mother tongue used. Whereas, the non linguistic problems were limited reference, limited time in practicing English, less frequency in studying English, never had partner in practicing English, never had chance to speak English
with native speaker, simply shame and there is no habit in practicing English. In coping the problems there was no significant different ways, these were asking to friend or teacher, opening the dictionary, practicing with partners, reviewing the lesson at home, and trying to always be
active in speaking activities.


It is sad and telling that the press and public alike are unaware that Presidential wives since Abigail Adams have been wielding political influence. Edith Mayo, Director Smithsonian First Ladies Exhibit Being first lady requires a woman to act ... as a mixture of queen, club woman, and starlet. I Lewis L. Gould, presidential scholar The president's spouse has the potential to become an important component of the contemporary presidency. George Edwards and Stephen J. Wayne Presidential Leadership: Politics and Policy Making A Case for the Study of the First Lady She is widely considered to be one of the most powerful people in Washington, yet we know little about her responsibilities or her predecessors. Her name has routinely appeared atop the annual Gallup poll of America's most admired women in the world, but there exists little systematic study of what she has done to deserve this attention. It could be argued that she is the second most powerful person in the world, even though some scholars dismiss the effort to formalize a field of study of her as "trivial" or unworthy of serious academic attention. However, recent scholarship on the matter is beginning to reverse long-standing assumptions about her and is raising some provocative and important questions.(1) Yet, many of these questions remain largely unexamined yet alone answered. Indeed, she is the missing link in our study of the presidency and a strong case exists for formal study of the unknown institution" of the office of the president: the first lady.(2) Scholarship over the past decade on the first lady reveals that many White House wives have had considerable influence on their husband's careers, decisions, and policies.(3) Considering the social forces limiting a woman's involvement in politics and influence in society and the fact that women could not even vote until 1920, the political activism and influence of several pre-twentieth century first ladies is remarkable. In fact, a new view of an "activist political partner" is emerging as possibly the rule rather than the exception for the female occupants of the White House.(4) There appear to be several reasons for the recent interest. In addition to the books written during the late 1980s--which are both reflective of the new interest and serve to further interest in the subject--there were several high-profile conferences organized or chaired by important women such as Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan. For example, in April 1984 there was a meeting at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, dedicated to the exploration of the lives and roles of first ladies. The controversy that surrounded Nancy Reagan because of her expensive and extravagant lifestyle and perceived influence over, and control of, President Reagan caused the media, general public, and politicians to question the nature of the role and extent of influence of the first lady.(5) Another factor which piqued the interest in first ladies was the availability of primary source material for studying the first ladies. More presidential libraries opened their holdings of the first lady's papers and White House social files.(6) More recently, the open advisory role played by Hillary Rodham Clinton and the fact that she has an office in the West Wing of the White House have produced criticism and public debate over the "proper" role of the first lady. On one hand, the first lady is deserving of study simply because the institution has been a part of the presidency since the founding of the nation. Most presidents, after all, have been married and most of them have had their partner with them while serving in the White House. Only two bachelors were elected to the presidency: James Buchanan and Grover Cleveland, the latter marrying while in the White House. Only a few presidents have occupied the White House without their spouses. …


Very strong coefficients for spontaneous and piezoelectric polarizations have recently been predicted for III-V nitride semiconductors with natural wurtzite symmetry. Such polarizations influence significantly the mechanisms of radiative emissions in quantum-confinement heterostructures based on these materials. The photoluminescence decay time of excitons is used as a probe of internal electric fields in GaN-(Ga, Al)N quantum wells in various configurations of strain, well widths, and barrier widths. The measured decays are not only controlled by radiative lifetimes, which depend on the fields inside GaN wells but also on the nonradiative escape of carriers through Ga1 - xAlyN barriers, which depends on their widths and on the electric field in these layers. It is shown in particular that the magnitude of the held in the wells is not a simple function of the strain of these layers via the only piezoelectric effect, but rather the result of the interplay of spontaneous and piezoelectric polarizations in both well and barrier materials. [S0163-1829(99)02923-9].


With the emergence of wireless sensor networks, the issues of event recognition and processing have been partially shifted into the embedded domain. New processing capabilities on small devices allow for physically close event monitoring and fast filtering without having to set up a wired infrastructure beforehand. This opportunity for flexible deployments, local data storage and demand-driven event forwarding opens up new application areas for event-centric architectures. However, the convenience of localized event processing comes at a cost, such as sparse resources or medium contention when relying on wireless communication. Several parameters have to be evaluated to decide whether pushing the application logic into a sensor network is worthwhile, or whether a conventional server-centered deployment is to be preferred. In this paper, we discuss parameters influencing an architectural decision and their interdependencies, illustrate our contribution with the help of an example and provide a generic cost model for estimating this decision.


Abstract. Based on geospatial analysis model, this paper analyzes the relationship between the landscape patterns of source and sink in urban areas and atmospheric haze pollution. Firstly, the classification result and aerosol optical thickness (AOD) of Wuhan are divided into a number of square grids with the side length of 6 km, and the category level landscape indices (PLAND, PD, COHESION, LPI, FRAC_MN) and AOD of each grid are calculated. Then the source and sink landscapes of atmospheric haze pollution are selected based on the analysis of the correlation between landscape indices and AOD. Next, to make the following analysis more efficient, the indices selected before should be determined through the correlation coefficient between them. Finally, due to the spatial dependency and spatial heterogeneity of the data used in this paper, spatial autoregressive model and geo-weighted regression model are used to analyze atmospheric haze effect by source and sink landscape from the global and local level. The results show that the source landscape of atmospheric haze pollution is the building, and the sink landscapes are shrub and woodland. PLAND, PD and COHESION are suitable for describing the atmospheric haze effect by source and sink landscape. Comparing these models, the fitting effect of SLM, SEM and GWR is significantly better than that of OLS model. The SLM model is superior to the SEM model in this paper. Although the fitting effect of GWR model is more unsuited than that of SLM, the influence degree of influencing factors on atmospheric haze of different geography can be expressed clearer. Through the analysis results of these models, following conclusions can be summarized: Reducing the proportion of source landscape area and increasing the degree of fragmentation could cut down aerosol optical thickness; And distributing the source and sink landscape evenly and interspersedly could effectively reduce aerosol optical thickness which represents atmospheric haze pollution; For Wuhan City, the method of adjusting the built-up area slightly and planning the non-built-up areas reasonably can be taken to reduce atmospheric haze pollution.


During the late twentieth century, the US social safety net was transformed to incentivize work by providing generous wage subsidies for low-income workers and reducing federal assistance to able-bodied unemployed adults. Following the transformation and during the economic boom of the 1990s, welfare rolls and annual poverty rates plummeted, especially for children. Despite the economic boom, there were still many persistently poor children living with parents who did not work, and little is known about how the reforms impacted these children's finances. In this paper we compare rates of persistent child poverty before and after the welfare reforms and examine how federal assistance received by persistently poor children changed as a result of the reforms. We find that federal assistance to persistently poor children declined following the reforms, but with divergent results depending on parental employment. While persistently poor children with employed parents benefited from increased income via the Earned Income Tax Credit, those with chronically unemployed parents did not and also experienced substantial reductions in cash welfare and food stamps. These findings demonstrate how persistently poor children fared financially in the years following the reforms and suggest possible implications for the current period of high unemployment.


During the construction, installation and initial operation of the Evaporative
Cooling System for the ATLAS Inner Detector SCT Barrel Sub-detector, some
performance characteristics were observed to be inconsistent with the original design
specifications, therefore the assumptions made in the ATLAS Inner Detector
TDR were revisited. The main concern arose because of unexpected pressure
drops in the piping system from the end of the detector structure to the distribution
racks. The author of this theses made a series of measurements of these
pressure drops and the thermal behavior of SCT-Barrel cooling Stave. Tests were
performed on the installed detector in the pit, and using a specially assembled
full scale replica in the SR1 laboratory at CERN. This test setup has been used
to perform extensive tests of the cooling performance of the system including
measurements of pressure drops in different parts of system, studies of the thermal
profile along the stave pipe for different running conditions / parameters and
coolant flow measurements in the system. The pressure drops in the system and
the associated temperatures in the barrel cooling loops have been studied as a
function of the system variables, for example; input liquid pressure, vapour back
pressure, module power load and input liquid temperature. Measurements were
performed with 10, 11, 12, 13 barabs inlet liquid pressure in system, 1.2, 1.6, 2.0,
2.5, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 barabs vapour back pressure in system, and 0 W, 3 W, 6 W,
9 W, 10.5W power applied per silicon module. The measurements clearly show
that the cooling system can not achieve the design evaporation temperature of -25C in every part of the detector (SCT Barrel loops) in case of 13 barabs nominal inlet liquid pressure, 1.2 barabs minimum possible back pressure and 6W nominal
power per SCT Barrel silicon module and especially at the end of the ATLAS ID
operation period when modules will work on full power of 10.5 W. This will lead
to the problem of thermal run-away of the ATLAS SCT, especially near the end
of the operational period after significant radiation exposure has occurred. The
LHC luminosity profile, depletion voltage and leakage current values and the total
power dissipated from the modules were revised. Thermal runaway limits for the
ATLAS SCT sub-detector were also revised. Results show that coolants evaporation
temperature necessary for the sub-detector's safe operation over the full
lifetime (10 years) is -15C with a safety factor of 2. Laboratory measurements
clearly show that the cooling system can not achieve even this necessary evaporation
temperature of -15C. It is now impossible to make mechanical modifications
to the cooling system, for example; changing the diameter of the cooling pipes, or
the thermal performance of the in-system heat exchanger or reducing the vapour
back pressure. It was therefore decided to investigate changes to the cooling
fluid and to test mixtures of Hexafluoroethane (R116) C2F6 and Octafluoropropane(R218) C3F8 at differing ratios instead of just pure C3F8 coolant presently used.
For this purpose, a new "blending" machine was assembled in the SR1 laboratory,
with a new device an "on-line acoustic flow meter and fluorocarbon coolant
mixture analyzer" (Sonar Analyzer) attached to it. The Machines were connected
to the already existing laboratory test station and new extensive tests were performed
to investigate different proportion of C3F8/C2F6 blends to find the mixture
ratio which resulted in the best operational performance as measured by: the
temperature distribution, pressure drops and
flow parameters over the system,
to ensure best cooling performance of SCT Barrel cooling loops for long term
ATLAS SCT operation. Measurements were performed with different percentage
of C2F6 (1%, 2%, 3%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 25%) coolant in the C3F8/C2F6 mixture,
for different power (0 W, 3 W, 6 W, 9 W, 10.5W) applied to dummy modules on the SCT cooling stave, with 13 barabs inlet liquid pressure and for different vapour back pressures (1.2, 1.6, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 barabs) in the system.
Results prove that with 25% of C2F6 in the blend mixture, it is possible to
lower the evaporation temperature by ~10C in the case of nominal operation
parameters of the system. The ATLAS Inner Detector Evaporative Cooling System
can therefore reach the necessary evaporation temperature and therefore can
guarantee thermal stability of the SCT, even at the end of the operation period.


Objective Pictorial warnings on cigarette packs increase motivation to quit smoking. We sought to examine the potential mediating role of negative affect, message reactance (ie, an oppositional reaction to a message) and perceived risk in shaping quit intentions. Methods In 2014 and 2015, we randomly assigned 2149 adult US smokers to receive either pictorial warnings or text-only warnings applied to their cigarette packs for 4 weeks. Analyses used structural equation modelling with bootstrapped SEs to test our theorised mediational model. Findings Pictorial warnings increased negative affect, message reactance and quit intentions (all P<0.001), but not perceived risk (ie, perceived likelihood and severity of harms of smoking). Negative affect mediated the impact of pictorial warnings on quit intentions (mediated effect=0.16, P<0.001). Message reactance weakened the impact of pictorial warnings on quit intentions, although the effect was small (mediated effect=−0.04, P<0.001). Although pictorial warnings did not directly influence perceived risk, the model showed additional small mediation effects on quit intentions through negative affect and its positive association with perceived risk (mediated effect=0.02, P<0.001), as well as reactance and its negative association with perceived risk (mediated effect=−0.01, P<0.001). Conclusions Pictorial cigarette pack warnings increased quit intentions by increasing negative affect. Message reactance partially attenuated this increase in intentions. The opposing associations of negative affect and reactance on perceived risk may explain why pictorial warnings did not lead to observable changes in perceived risk.


Francis J. Bremer has spent his entire career broadening our understanding of America's colonial founders. Now, in this eminently readable collection of biographies, Bremer brings us a surprisingly varied and dynamic group of characters who continue to guide and influence America today. With its cast of magistrates, women, clergy, merchants, and Native Americans, First Founders underscores the breadth of early American experience and the profound transatlantic roots of our country's forebears. Bremer succeeds in bringing little-known figures out of the shadows, while allowing us to appreciate better known figures in an entirely new light. This is a truly fascinating look at the Puritans with keenly drawn portraits and the insight that only a lifetime of scholarship can achieve. It should become the standard introduction to the field. Written in the mold of Joseph Ellis's Founding Brothers and Gordon Wood's Revolutionary Characters, the book will appeal to general readers, students, and scholars alike.


Background and Aims: The caspases are unique proteases that mediate the host cell apoptosis during viral infection. In this study, we identified the caspase cleavage motifs of H5N1 and H9N2 influenza viruses isolated during 1998-2012. Materials and Methods: Amino acid sequences of the eleven proteins encoded by the viruses as the caspase substrates downloaded from NCBI. The caspase cleavage motifs predicted at the three scanning P4P1, P4P2', and P14P10'–trained support vector machine classifier. Results: Data showed that H5N1 and H9N2 viruses were represented the same cleavage motif pattern for some of the viral proteins substrates. The HA, NP, and NS1 of H9N2 viruses were found to possess additional cleavage motifs from 2005, when an outbreak wave of H5N1 viruses was expanded through Asia. Conclusion: Moreover, the cleavage motif of PB1-F2 protein was differing in both subtypes. The results indicated that the caspase activity of PB1-F2 protein may be involve in the viral


The shear-induced crystallization behavior of poly(butylene terephthalate) (PBT) has been investigated by in-situ small-angle X-ray scattering at temperatures of 198, 203, and 208 °C as well as by ex-situ atomic force microscopy. Increasing the shear rate and/or the shear strain enhances the crystallization kinetics. The acceleration of the crystallization saturates with increasing shear rate. A pronounced effect of the shear field on the Avrami exponent is observed at 198 °C but not at 203 and 208 °C, even though at the latter temperatures the relative reduction of the crystallization time induced by the shear is twice the value at 198 °C. Compared to some other polymers like isotactic polypropylene, the shear field leads only to a weak orientation of the PBT crystals. The Avrami exponent and the orientation induced by the shear field are interpreted on the basis of a microshish model. Microshish structures are due to the breaking up of shear-induced row nuclei at high temperatures. Finally, the shear field is found to lead to a decrease of the long period.


Revised edition of Regional Development and Planning: A ReaderSince 1964, when Regional Development and Planning: A Reader was first published, the book has become established as perhaps the most useful collection of source material in its field, and it has served as the basis of numerous courses in regional studies and economic development. Encouraged by this reception, its editors have prepared this revised edition, meant to replace the earlier work.The editors have searched the literature with care and selected those contributions that will give the student a firm understanding of the fundamentals and the recent developments of the subject, broadly defined.The first four parts of the book present readings on the concepts of space and development (broken down into sections on location and spatial structure, spatial systems in economic development, and growth in subnational regions), the role of cities in national development, issues in regional planning. Part V consists of a bibliographical essay detailing the progress of a decade in regional development planning.


This article presents a case study of a set of constructions containing the related way-nouns road, way, track and route, exemplified by (i) the farm road to the house, (ii) A senior Soviet official is on his way to the Iraqi capital, (iii) spies Burgess and Maclean escaped from Britain en route to Moscow, (iv) Queensland is on track to become the top bowling state in Australia. These distinct constructions are a case of layering (Hopper 1991). Constructions featuring lexical uses of way-nouns, illustrated by (i), coexist with strings containing way-nouns that have been reanalysed into units with new lexical or grammatical meanings, i.e. respectively composite predicates (ii), complex prepositions (iii) and aspectual markers (iv). We argue that these three constructions challenge the view of decategorialization as mere loss of the original categorial features. We also show on the basis of qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis that the structural variants display specialization in relation to the four way-nouns.


This paper investigates professional interpreting practice in the setting of speech pathology through a multifaceted analysis of the transcripts of three recorded sessions involving first-generation Italian-speaking immigrants to Australia and English-speaking healthcare professionals working in Melbourne. Applying Mishler's notion of "voice" to the context of interpreter-mediated communication and focusing on a selection of linguistic features — ranging from turn-taking and topic development to the interpreter's choice of footing, departures from the primary speakers' utterances, and use of prosodic resources — the discussion identifies the voice that interpreters, as third participants in the interaction, choose to adopt between the "voice of medicine" and the "voice of the lifeworld". The study is of a qualitative nature, although a general indication of the frequency of certain features is supplied, and interpreting conduct is described rather than prescribed. The reporting and interpretation of findings are, however, informed by and reflect issues of value revolving around the concept of "humane medical care".


Geological mapping of existing and redundant kaolin workings within the St Austell Granite has identified a suite of granitic rocks which show evidence of complex late-stage magmatic and hydrothermal processes. Coarse porphyritic biotite granites, like those which predominate in southwest England, occur much more widely than previously acknowledged, and are intruded by an apparently cogenetic suite of lithium-mica granites and tourmaline granites. The tourmaline granites characteristically exhibit very variable textures, with coarse quartz grains set within a fine grained, tourmaline-rich matrix. A highly evolved fine-grained tourmaline granite represents the most evolved of this suite. Topaz granites intrude the earlier granite varieties, and all are intruded by rhyolite porphyry dykes (elvans). Major and trace element chemical data suggest that the biotite granite–lithium-mica granite–tourmaline granite suite represents the product of crystallization of a granitic magma within which B (but not F) became progressively enriched until water saturation was achieved. Water exsolution effectively quenched any remaining granitic melt, resulting in the very variable textures shown by the tourmaline granites. The topaz granites are chemically distinct from their predecessors, showing marked enrichment in F, Li and P2O5 (but not B). Instead of being products of differentiation of biotite granite magma, the topaz granite melts may have been derived separately in a later episode of partial melting of the same source. Kaolinization is widespread throughout the western part of the St Austell Granite, and deposits worked at present tend to be located in granite varieties other than biotite granite. The geochemical parameters used to distinguish the primary granite types (particularly Nb v. Zr and Ga–Nb–Zr plots) are sufficiently robust to permit the parent granitic rock type to be identified for heavily kaolinized material.


The core region of the North American summer monsoon is examined using spatially averaged daily rainfall observations obtained from gauges, with the objective of improving understanding of its climatology and variability. At most grid points, composite and interannual variations of the onset and end of the wet season are well defined, although, among individual stations that make up a grid average, variability is large. The trigger for monsoon onset in southern and eastern Mexico appears to be related to a change in vertical velocity, while for northwestern Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico it is related to a reduction in stability, as indicated by a decrease in the lifted index. The wet-season rain rate is a combination of the wet-day rain rate, which decreases with distance from the coast, and the wet-day frequency, which is largest over the Sierra Madre Occidental. Thus the maximum total rate lies slightly to the west of the highest orography. As has been previously noted, onset is not always well correlated with total seasonal precipitation, so in these areas, variations of wet-day frequency and wet-day rain rate must be important. Correlations are small between the wet-day frequency and the wet-day rate, and the former is better correlated than the latter with the seasonal rain rate. Summer rainfall in central to southern Mexico exhibits moderate negative correlations with the leading pattern of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the equatorial Pacific, which projects strongly onto El Nino. The influence of equatorial SSTs on southern Mexico rainfall seems to operate mainly through variability of the wet-day frequency, rather than through variations of the wet-day rain rate.


This essay develops the concept of vulnerability in order to argue for a more responsive state and a more egalitarian society. Vulnerability is and should be understood to be universal and constant, inherent in the human condition. The vulnerability approach is an alternative to traditional equal protection analysis; it represents a post-identity inquiry in that it is not focused only on discrimination against defined groups, but concerned with privilege and favor conferred on limited segments of the population by the state and broader society through their institutions. As such, vulnerability analysis concentrates on the institutions and structures our society has and will establish to manage our common vulnerabilities. This approach has the potential to move us beyond the stifling confines of current discrimination-based models toward a more substantive vision of equality.


Objectives Substantial evidence implicates mast cells and their main constituent histamine in the pathogenesis of visceral hypersensitivity. We explored the specific contribution of histamine H4 (H4R) and H1 (H1R) receptors to visceral hypersensitivity in a postinflammatory rat model. Design Trinitrobenzenesulfonic acid (TNBS)-colitis was monitored individually by colonoscopy: first on day 3 to confirm the presence of colitis and then every 4 days, starting from day 10, to monitor convalescence and determine the exact timepoint of endoscopic healing in each rat. Experiments were performed 3 days after endoscopic resolution of colitis. Visceral sensitivity was assessed by quantifying visceromotor responses (VMRs) to colorectal distension. Colonic mast cell numbers, histamine release and H4R and H1R mRNA expression were quantified. JNJ7777120 (H4R antagonist) and/or levocetirizine (H1R antagonist) were administered 30 min prior to VMR assessment or histamine release assay. Results Postcolitis rats displayed a higher number of colonic mast cells, excessive histamine release and significantly enhanced VMRs. Heightened VMRs were dose-dependently reduced by JNJ7777120 and levocetirizine; combined administration of JNJ7777120 and levocetirizine potentiated the antinociceptive effect. In the colon, both H4R and H1R mRNA were present; in the dorsal root ganglia, only H1R mRNA was found. Only colonic H4R mRNA expression was increased in postcolitis rats. Excessive histamine release in postcolitis rats was attenuated by the highest dose of JNJ7777120. Conclusions H4R and H1R antagonists dose-dependently reduce and even normalise postinflammatory visceral hypersensitivity via different underlying mechanisms but with a synergistic effect. Both receptor subtypes represent promising targets for the treatment of postinflammatory visceral hypersensitivity.


High-precision teleseismic double-difference locations and focal mechanisms of aftershocks of the A.D. 2004 M w 9.2 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake illuminate an active imbricate fault system in the accretionary prism offshore northern Sumatra. They reveal repeated failure of a shallow northeast-dipping thrust fault above the megathrust, which we interpret to be the reactivation of a splay fault that rises from the megathrust at ∼55 km depth and cuts through the overriding Sunda plate. The projected intersection of the splay fault with the seafloor correlates with a recently active thrust fault seen in postseismic bathymetry data west of the Aceh basin. A spatiotemporal analysis of the streaky aftershock distribution indicates that ascending fluids released from the subducting oceanic crust along inherited seafloor fabric may control brittle fracture in the overriding plate. We speculate that if the splay fault was active coseismically, it may have led to amplified vertical uplift of the forearc ridge and contributed to generating the cataclysmic near-field tsunami that struck the northwest Sumatra coast following the 2004 rupture.


Following the completion and successful operation of the first phase of the Oceanside Sand Bypass, the next step in the development of the experiment has begun. The Phase I plant is not considered alone as a fully-functional harbor maintenance system. This first step has concentrated on establishing the basic pumping systems, placing the jet pumps, constructing the mobile pumping platform, configuring the discharge piping network, and constructing the shore booster station. In order to increase both the area maintained by the plant as well as improve the quantity of sand moved, two sea-bed fluidizers have been designed and installed in the Oceanside Harbor Entrance Channel to augment the fixed jet pumps. This paper summarizes the performance of the first phase of the experiment and describes the criteria used in the design of the fluidizer network. Construction is scheduled during the first part of 1991 and the installation and initial operation of the fluidizers shall be described in greater detail when this paper is presented.


Research on interlanguage pragmatics dealing with request modifiers in EFL contexts has largely ignored the multilingual context in which this language is learnt. Previous studies comparing the use of request modifiers by monolingual and bilingual learners of English point to differences in the number and type of modifiers employed (Safont-Jorda 2005a). However, as reported by Alcon-Soler (2009), the relationship between teachability and the effects of bilingualism needs to be further explored. On that account, the present study examines the effect of bilingualism and instruction in third language learners' use of request modifiers. Findings from our study seem to indicate that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in the number of internal and external modifiers employed both before and after having received instruction.


Aspectual classification maps verbs to a small set of primitive categories in order to reason about time. This classification is necessary for interpreting temporal modifiers and assessing temporal relationships, and is therefore a required component for many natural language applications. A verb's aspectual category can be predicted by co-occurrence frequencies between the verb and certain linguistic modifiers. These frequency measures, called linguistic indicators, are chosen by linguistic insights. However, linguistic indicators used in isolation are predictively incomplete, and are therefore insufficient when used individually. In this article, we compare three supervised machine learning methods for combining multiple linguistic indicators for aspectual classification: decision trees, genetic programming, and logistic regression. A set of 14 indicators are combined for classification according to two aspectual distinctions. This approach improves the classification performance for both distinctions, as evaluated over unrestricted sets of verbs occurring across two corpora. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the linguistic indicators and provides a much-needed full-scale method for automatic aspectual classification. Moreover, the models resulting from learning reveal several linguistic insights that are relevant to aspectual classification. We also compare supervised learning methods with an unsupervised method for this task.


Background: To date, there is no consensus regarding the best surgical approach (conser vative or radical) for craniofacial fibrous dysplasia. This study presented the experience of a single institution in the surgical treatment of craniofacial fibrous dysplasia. Method: This was a retrospective analysis of patients with craniofacial fibrous dysplasia who underwent surgery between 1997 and 2012. Surgical treatment was individualized according to patient age, the involved anatomical site (zones I-IV), aesthetic and/or functional impairment, and the preferences of the patients and surgical team. The surgical results were classified on the basis of the Whitaker system. Results: Ten, 1, 1, and 1 patients with zone I, zone II, zone I/II, and zone I/IV involvement, respectively, were included in the study. In total, conservative surgeries and 9 radical surgeries were performed for the treatment of primary bone tumors. There was 1 surgical complication, and 6 recurrences were identified during the postoperative follow-up period. The global average of surgical outcomes, according to the Whitaker scale, was 1.69 ± 0.94. Conclusions: According to the experience and surgi cal results presented in this study, the surgical approach for craniofacial fibrous dysplasia should be individualized.


STATE REPORTS Australian Capital Territory Background Until the 1980s the ACT Library Service was provided as a function of the National Library of Australia (NLA). In 1981 the responsibility for the service passed from the NLA to the Department of the Capital Territory. It was named the ACT Library Service soon after. The first branch library opened in Civic in 1961, with the first purpose built library at Dickson in 1969. Public library services in Canberra are provided by the ACT Library Service, through the City Services Group of the ACT Department of Urban Services. These services are provided through a network of eight branch libraries, including three major town centre libraries. Two libraries are joint use libraries operated in conjunction with the ACT Department of Education and Training. Services are also provided through the Mobile Library, Home Library Service and Disabilities Unit. The ACT Library Service provides lending and reference services for adults, children, young adults and other community groups. Collection development, technical and administrative support are provided under the coordination of specialised staff, through the Support Service Unit, based at Griffith. The ACT Library Service has an established branch library network, flexible opening hours and quality collections. The library network is supported by Book Plus, an integrated system. Recent developments Since 1 July 1995 further changes have occurred within the ACT Library Service. The library is managed within the Business and Information Services Branch which brings together the ACT Library Service, the ACT Assembly and Government Library, ACT Government Shopfronts, the Women's Information and Referral Centre and the Austolich electronic information kiosks. The ACT Reference Library will not proceed. However, the' Heritage Library component is to be retained. A review of the library was completed in May 1996. Significant issues * Implementation of further levels of IT particular CDRoms and online searching * Participation in the development of a community information network * Integration with other areas of the ACT government's information provision eg shopfronts * Exploring areas of common interest with other ACT government libraries * Examination of current staffing structure * Examination of current branch structure and hours of operation * The introduction of a purchaser/ provider network * The implementation of the library review recommendations * Funding available for the purchase of library materials in 1995/96 was $797,000 New South Wales Background From the time of the Library Act of 1939, New South Wales has a history of independent development of local public libraries. The Library Act provides for any local authority to voluntarily establish a free public library service for its residents, to report expenditure to the Library Council of New South Wales and, subject to review by the Library Council, receive funding according to a formula established in 1990. Since 1993, all residents of New South Wales have had access to a free library service provided by local authorities under the terms of the Library Act. Those residents living in the remote western region of the state, where there is no incorporated local authority, have access to a library service provided by mail by the Broken Hill Library Service. Each year, approximately $130 million is spent on local public library service in New South Wales including approximately $17 million from the state government in subsidies and grants. 177 local authorities provide 95 local library services with over 370 service points across the state. In country areas, most library services are provided by cooperating councils via regional library agreements. …


The poet-herdsmen of Vergil's Eclogues employ differing strategies for coping with acute loss, whether external (e.g. land dispossession) or internal (amatory rejection). The interplay of ideas latent in several of their songs is typically framed in terms of Epicurean concepts.


The active cavity radiometer (ACR)-type detector is used in the unshuttered mode of operation for the earth viewing radiometric channels of the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) nonscanner instruments. The offset, or bias, levels of ACR detectors may change over time unless specific curing techniques are used following fabrication. Previous applications of ACR detectors have primarily been in the solar measurement area using a narrow field-of-view design which allows redetermination of detector offset by viewing a shutter (known radiometric source) every few minutes. Because the offset changes in improperly cured detectors occur very slowly relative to the shutter operation cycle, there is no impact on radiometric measurements made in the shuttered mode of operation. In the unshuttered mode of operation, however, a small change in offset can have a significant impact on the measurement. This phenomenon is the result of the design, fabrication technique, and physical characteristics of the materials used in temperature sensing for this detector. Temperature sensitive resistance wire is wound around a cylindrical thermal impedance and serves as two legs of a bridge circuit in the standard ACR detector design. The winding of the resistance wire in tight loops around the cylinder induces strain in the wire and changes its molecular structure causing a change in its resistivity. During the curing process, the wire returns to its natural state. As this takes place, the bridge resistance values change causing the detector offset to change. If this curing process is not complete prior to ground calibration, certain calibration coefficients may be affected. The origin and physics of this phenomenon are discussed along with the techniques developed during the ERBE program to insure detector offset stability. Ground test and flight data from the ERBE program are presented, and alternate solutions to the problem are discussed.


This paper assesses household food security and identifies the factors affecting it in two mountainous districts of Nepal using census data from 2011/12. A binary logit model has been used because the dependent variable is dichotomous. In the study districts, farmland expansion was the major contributor to the increased production of major crops over the period 1974/75 to 2013/14. The yield growth of major crops, with the exception of potato and wheat, remained below the population growth in these districts. On average, households experienced no food shortages for about 9 months out of the year; cultivated land per household was 0.63 ha, of which around 29% was irrigated; 22% of the households were female headed; and 60% of the households worked in allied activities alongside agriculture. The results show that household food security was positively affected by the following variables: male-headed household, household members with both agricultural and allied occupation, age of the household head, percentage of irrigated area, number of livestock owned by the household, and owner operator. Household food security was negatively affected by the variables household size and time taken to reach the nearest market. Taplejung district's food security was better than that of the Bajura district. The findings imply that female-headed households need support in order to improve their food security. There is a need for on-farm value-added processing and off-farm employment opportunities, which could be provisioned by financial support and development of the required technical and managerial skills. Public investment should be increased in markets, roads and irrigation infrastructure development in rural areas. Moreover, improving access to land and its utilization based on comparative advantage could improve household food security. Keywords: Agriculture, Mountains, Food Security  Data of the article First received : 05 January 2017 | Last revision received : 10 September 2017 Accepted : 18 September 2017 | Published online : 16 October 2017 URN: nbn:de:hebis:34-2017082853340


It is well established that in masked priming, a target word (e.g., JUDGE) is primed more effectively by a transposed letter (TL) prime (e.g., jugde) than by an orthographic control prime (e.g., junpe). This is inconsistent with the slot coding schemes used in many models of visual word recognition. Several alternative coding schemes have been proposed in which special bigram detectors for frequently occurring nonadjacent letter combinations are developed as a product of perceptual learning. In order to examine this perceptual learning hypothesis, we asked whether bigram detectors are defined in terms of visuospatial coordinates. Japanese-English bilinguals who were equally familiar with horizontal and vertical text in Japanese demonstrated strong TL priming in both orientations when reading Japanese words, but, when reading English words, the evidence for vertical TL priming was not as strong. However, native English speakers showed a clear TL priming effect with vertically presented English words despite minimal exposure to vertical text, which is not consistent with a perceptual learning account. It is proposed instead that the initial letter array is transformed into an abstract ordinal code (first to last) regardless of orientation and that the speed with which this transformation is carried out depends on the familiarity of the script.


An overview of the present status of development of fusion nuclear technologies at Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute is presented. A tritium handling system for the ITER was designed, and the technology for each component of this system was demonstrated successfully. An ultraviolet laser with a wavelength of 193 nm was found quite effective for removing tritium from in-vessel components of D-T fusion reactors. Blanket technologies have been developed for the test blanket module of the ITER and for advanced blankets for DEMO reactors. This blanket is composed of ceramic Li2TiO3 breeder pebbles and neutron multiplier beryllium pebbles, whose diameter ranges from 0.2 to 2 mm, contained in a box structure made of a reduced-activation ferritic steel, F82H. Mechanical properties of F82H under a thermal neutron irradiation at up to 50 displacements per atom (dpa) were obtained in a temperature range from 200 to 500°C. Design of the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF) has been developed to obtain engineering data for candidate materials for DEMO reactors under a simulated fusion neutron irradiation up to 100 to 200 dpa, and basic development of the key technologies to construct the IFMIF is now under way as an International Energy Agency international collaboration.


An effective process architecture helps provide a high-level blueprint of the complexity underlying an enterprise, which is used by executive committees during key decision and change processes. As existing service standards focus on co-ordination, they fall short in describing the motivational structure depicted in such models. In order to progress towards standardization in this area of complexity, we discuss the ldquopracticalityrdquo of a process architecture, and present a set of 22 questions that can be used in the functional evaluation and construction of a process architecture. We use these questions to evaluate the current "state-of-the-art'' in business process architecture. We then apply the knowledge gathered during our evaluation and other work to develop the proposal for a general mapping framework that is capable of answering the set of queries we have proposed.


This research guide will aid you in finding scholarly print and online sources pertaining to allied health and medical topics.


We present a new mean-high-water curve for Hammock River marsh, Clinton, Connecticut, obtained by improving the age model for an existing record of relative marsh elevation based on foraminiferal analysis of a 1.8-m-long peat core. Unlike the earlier curve, the new curve confirms trend changes in mean-high-water rise during the past 1400 yr as noted for salt marshes 15 km farther west, suggesting a regional cause. These trend changes and century-scale mean-high-water variations in the Clinton record correlate positively with large-scale regional variations in sea-surface and summer-air temperature, indicating a link between sea level and the climate-ocean system. On the basis of the Clinton mean-high-water curve, we conclude that real sea level oscillated centimeters to decimeters on a century time scale over the past 1400 yr, was 25 ± 25 cm higher ca. a.d. 1050 (Medieval Warm Period) than ca. a.d. 1650 (Little Ice Age), and rose at a mean rate of ∼1 mmṁyr−1 over the past 350 yr; there was little or no rise during the cool 1800s.


In recent years, the use of fiber reinforced polymer composites has increased because of their unique features. They have been used widely in the aircraft and space industries, medical and sporting goods and automotive industries. Thanks to their beneficial and various advantages over traditional materials such as high strength, high rigidity, low weight, corrosion resistance, low maintenance cost, aesthetic appearance and easy demountable or moveable construction. In this paper, it is aimed to determine and compare the geometrically nonlinear static and dynamic analysis results of footbridges using steel and glass fiber reinforced polymer composite (GFRP) materials. For this purpose, Halgavor suspension footbridge is selected as numerical examples. The analyses are performed using three identical footbridges, first constructed from steel, second built only with GFRP material and third made of steel- GFRP material, under static and dynamic loadings using finite element method. In the finite element modeling and analyses, SAP2000 program is used. Geometric nonlinearities are taken into consideration in the analysis using P-Delta criterion. The numerical results have indicated that the responses of the three bridges are different and that the response values obtained for the GFRP composite bridge are quite less compared to the steel bridge. It is understood that GFRP material is more useful than the steel for the footbridges.


Environmental surveys yield three principal products: maps, a set of data tables, and a textual report. The relationships between these three elements, however, are often cumbersome to present, making full use of all the information in an integrated and systematic sense difficult. The published paper report is only a partial solution. Modern developments in computing, particularly in cartography, GIS, and hypertext, mean that it is increasingly possible to conceive of an easier and more interactive approach to the presentation of such survey results. Here, we present such an approach which links map and tabular datasets arising from a vegetation survey, allowing users ready access to a complex dataset using dynamic mapping techniques. Multimedia datasets equipped with software like this provide an exciting means of quick and easy visual data exploration and comparison. These techniques are gaining popularity across the sciences as scientists and decision-makers are presented with increasing amounts of diverse digital data. We believe that the software environment actively encourages users to make complex interrogations of the survey information, providing a new vehicle for the reader of an environmental survey report.


Abstract In this paper we report preliminary results of an integrated sedimentological and structural study of the Late Cretaceous-Early Tertiary facies exposed in the Lesser Himalaya. The Precambrian-Palaeozoic basement of the Indian plate was initially transgressed in Late Cretaceous times (after c. 100 Ma), with the deposition of shallow shelf carbonates, (50 m thick Singtali Formation). These are depositionally overlain by green ferruginous mudstones and thin limestones of the 150 m thick Palaeocene-Eocene (c. 65–40 Ma) Subathu Formation. During Late Eocene-Oligocene times (c. 40–30 Ma), clastic sediment input increased and red lenticular sandstones, thinner planar-bedded sandstones, mudstones and caliche of the 350 m thick Dagshai Formation were deposited. A semi-arid, meandering fluvial/floodplain setting is envisaged, with thick channelised and overbank sands. Palaeocurrent evidence indicates a general SE progradation. Our detailed field mapping shows that where the entire Subathu and Dagshai Formations are intercalated, this is the result of post-depositional tectonics, rather than primary intertonguing as described in some previous reports. The relative abundance of sandstones greatly increased in upper Dagshai times, continuing into the Early-Mid-Miocene (c. 30–10 Ma) when the 250 m thick Kasauli Formation was laid down. This formation is characterized by lenticular and planar-bedded grey sandstones, rich in plant material including occasional logs (but without caliche) interbedded with minor grey mudstones. A rapidly prograding, braided fluvial environment is proposed, with the petrography (e.g. presence of garnets) suggesting erosion and derivation from deeper levels of the Himalayan mountain belt to the north. The climate had by then changed from semi-arid to humid, possibly in response to the onset of the monsoon, initiated when the mountain belt had reached sufficient height to interfere with the jet-stream. During Late Miocene-Quaternary times (younger than c. 15 Ma), the Tertiary foreland basin was deformed and incorporated into three structural levels of a southward migrating thrust stack. At the lowest level, thick successions of the Tertiary Subathu, Dagshai and Kasauli Formations are structurally underlain by fluvial sediments (Siwalik Gp.) and overlain by the Krol Precambrian-Palaeozoic sedimentary nappe. At the intermediate structural level, Early Tertiary sediments unconformably overlie the stratigraphy within this nappe and comprise, often thin (<50 m), successions of mainly Subathu and Dagshai Formation sediments. The highest structural level sediments form small imbricates, highly dismembered units and melange (including evaporites) beneath the major metamorphic Jutogh Nappe. We interpret the Late Cretaceous-Palaeocene Singtali Formation as pre-collisional transgressive sediments related either to flexural downwarping of the Indian plate due to the obduction of the Spontang ophiolite onto the north Indian plate margin, or to extensional tectonics related to the detachment and drift of India from Gondwana and Neo-Tethyan subduction beneath Asia. This would have been coupled with the Late Cretaceous global eustatic sea-level high stand. The marine Subathu Formation is interpreted as having been deposited between initial and terminal India-Eurasia continental collision, with the overlying fluvial/floodplain Late Eocene-Oligocene Dagshai and Miocene Kasauli Formations as southward prograding foreland basin successions related to progressive stages of India-Eurasia continental collision.


Abstract A diverse assemblage of Australian Ediacaran (late Neoproterozoic) acritarchs from the Centralian Superbasin and Adelaide Rift Complex demonstrates a range of taphonomic degradation. Recognition of taphonomic variants is critical for taxonomic studies and biostratigraphic interpretation. Taphonomic features observed include compression features, folding and tearing of vesicle walls, pitting, perforation, abrasion, exfoliation, shrinking, twisting, splitting, curling, shredding, pyritization, particle entrapment, and thermal maturation effects. The physical and chemical structure of the vesicle wall is instrumental in determining the degree of taphonomic damage. Consistent associations allow identification of degradation series that incorporate previously described individual species and provide a framework for taxonomic revision. Taphonomic associations may also characterize taphofacies, providing an additional tool for basin analysis.


Previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses have evaluated the association of dairy consumption and the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, the findings were inconsistent. No quantitative analysis has specifically assessed the effect of yogurt intake on the incident risk of CVD. We searched the PubMed and the Embase databases from inception to 10 January 2017. A generic inverse-variance method was used to pool the fully-adjusted relative risks (RRs) and the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CIs) with a random-effects model. A generalized least squares trend estimation model was used to calculate the specific slopes in the dose-response analysis. The present systematic review and meta-analysis identified nine prospective cohort articles involving a total of 291,236 participants. Compared with the lowest category, highest category of yogurt consumption was not significantly related with the incident risk of CVD, and the RR (95% CI) was 1.01 (0.95, 1.08) with an evidence of significant heterogeneity (I2 = 52%). However, intake of ≥200 g/day yogurt was significantly associated with a lower risk of CVD in the subgroup analysis. There was a trend that a higher level of yogurt consumption was associated with a lower incident risk of CVD in the dose-response analysis. A daily dose of ≥200 g yogurt intake might be associated with a lower incident risk of CVD. Further cohort studies and randomized controlled trials are still demanded to establish and confirm the observed association in populations with different characteristics.


Have you mastered the essentials of your digital SLR camera and now want to learn how to use light as a tool to enhance your photographs? David Buschs Quick Snap Guide to Lighting provides a concise introduction to working with light and exposure, improving your photos with filters and reflectors, and transforming good lighting into great lighting, all in a simple-tobrowse book. This guide offers focused information that explains the purpose and function of each type of lighting, how to use it effectively to take compelling photos, and how to improve the lighting you find in a scene. Youll learn how to create and work with diffused light, tame daylight so your pictures dont look overexposed, the secret to multiple light sources, how to use light creatively, techniques for action shots, lighting for travel and architecture, and much more. Each topic and concept introduced is condensed into a two- to fourpage spread, illustrated with striking full-color photographs, and all the basics of light and lighting are presented. The book is designed so you can thumb through it and easily find exactly the chapter and information you are looking for. And a mini-glossary helps by defining unfamiliar terms as you go. Get ready to conquer the mysteries of light to take better and more beautiful photographs.


The evolution of the Lycian Foreland and Aksu basins are associated with the Africa-Eurasia convergence and collision of intervening continental blocks. Both basins developed around the Beydaglari, a Mesozoic carbonate platform, which constitutes the main component and western limb of the Isparta Angle. The Gombe Basin is an integral part of the Lycian Foreland Basin that comprises mainly Eocene to Late Miocene turbidites, onto which the allochthonous Lycian and Antalya nappes thrust over. The Aksu Basin, however, developed in the inner part of the Isparta Angle and is bounded by the Aksu Thrust in the east. During their evolution, these basins experienced significant bathymetric changes, possibly due to vertical motions and variations in the sediment supply. This study provides a detailed analysis of the paleobathymetric evolution of these basins. This conducted paleobathymetric study was based on the determination of the depositional depth by the abundance ratio of planktonic versus benthic foraminifera, which is the function of the water depth. The percentage of planktonic foraminifera relative to the total foraminifer population %P increases from shallow to deep water. However, some benthic foraminifera species are directly affected by the oxygen level of the bottom water, rather than by paleobathymetry, i.e. stress markers, and were discarded in the calculation. Additionally, the dissolution of the foraminifera has the potential for miscalculations, since planktonic foraminifera are more prone to dissolution than benthic ones. Nevertheless, the obtained quantitative results were verified and validated qualitatively by specific benthic depth markers that lived at specific depth ranges. Aksu Basin had a shallowing trend, and the sedimentation rate exceeded the subsidence in the middle of the section. Calculated depths for the Gombe Basin indicated depths around 1000 m, which was contrary to the high sedimentation rates indicated by the turbiditic facies of the basin infills.


In this study, we report a comprehensive assessment on the elastic and electronic properties of 792 possible MAX (Mn+1AXn) phases with n = 1–4 using ab initio methods. These crystals are then screened based on their elastic and thermodynamic stability resulting in a large database of 665 viable crystals. All the experimentally verified MAX phases passed the screening. Various correlations among and between them are fully explored. In particular, the key elements in the interdependence between the elastic properties together with mechanical parameter derived from them and the electronic structure are identified. Detailed analysis of various correlation plots shows that there is a clear correspondence between bulk modulus K and total bond order density (TBOD). Calculations show a marked difference between the carbides and nitrides. This database is also used to test the efficacy of data mining algorithms for materials genome. We further identified several thermodynamically stable new MAX phases with unusual mechanical parameters that have never been synthesized in the laboratory or theoretically investigated. The complete database on the elastic and electronic structure together with the mechanical parameters for these 665 MAX phases compounds are included in the Supplementary Materials and fully accessible.